"It seems to me that this type of problem is the very reason MS didn't want to pull out MP in the first place."
It's also a very good reason not to "integrate" it into the OS to begin with. If Microsoft is willing to risk "breaking" Windows by adding it, why not by removing it?
" quite possibly because there wasn't any other fighting games on the gamecube."
I think you misread. He didn't say "SoulCalibur II was the best-selling fighting ame on GCN" (which I'd wager would be wrong, since there's SSB:M), he said "The GameCube version is the best-selling version of SoulCalibur II." I've heard hear-say that the GCN verson outsold the PS2 and Xbox versions combined, but I don't know if that particular bit is true.
"Will Nintendo pull it's proverbial head out of it's backside and develop games that aren't amied at 12 year olds and start developing games that challenge the marketplace."
Some of us are more inclined to believe that it's the so-called "marketpalce" that has its head shoved up its collective ass. The majority can be wrong, you know.
Yes, but it's the same PBS that got in hot water in Congress when CTW introduced an HIV-positive Muppet in Africa. I fear for what the episodes on these "controversial subjects" will look like.
"Creating these hacks is really like taking the silverware and plates out of a restaurant when you know you are really paying just for the food."
No, it would be like eating the whole dish when the waiter specifically told you that, even though you paid for the whole dish, you're only allowed to eat half. DRM is attempting to impose control on something you no longer own, something you you were supposed to transfer ownership of at the point of sale.
"It's so hypocritical how slashdot really realy really hates GPL violators, but cheers something like this."
GPL only imposes restrictions on distribution. DRM imposes restrictions on use in the name of imposing on distribution.
"you know, those people who actually have LEGAL RIGHTS to the content"
The people who have those "LEGAL RIGHTS" are the consumers, the folks who paid money to get it. Once that money has been exchanged, the only thing the copyright holders can further impose on them is to prevent them from disseminating it further.
If I bought the file from you, I own the content. You just own the distribution rights.
"And it's their service and their content."
Again, not if I paid for them.
"Or is that just completely lost in the vacuum of "Information wants to be free"?"
How about a new maxim: Stuff I paid for wants to be mine.
"Um, no, you shouldn't. What the hell are you doing, blasting your DIMMs with gamma rays or something?"
First off, if I had a convenient source of gamma rays, I wouldn't be wasting time with a Windows install and instead would be working on a doomsday device.
Secondly, I'm talking about the Windows registry, that monsterousity that, though potty trained sine the days of Windows 1995, has yet to figure out the whole "toilet paper" concept.
"Driver wise a GENERIC kernel generally does better than XP in my experience,"
I haven't tried BSD, but the last time I tried Linux the boot DVD I burned couldn't find the "SCSI" card I have my (ATA) HDDs connected to, let alone the actual drives. At least with Windows I know where to get the proper "SCSI" drivers for the XP install (of course, booting off the target drive was then another problem).
First off, with reguards to slipstreaming, that would require me to actually be prepared for regular reinstalling instead of, say, waiting until I've reached the point where, without safe mode, I get BSODed immediatley after login.
"Also, if you have to routinely reinstall Windows, you're not as good at working with computers as you thought you were. "
Ah yes, the "blame the luser" mentality. It's nice to know that Linux and Microsoft both have at least one thing in common.
For the record:
Yes, I already use Firefox
Yes, I run a (third-party) firewall app, behind a hadware firewall
Yes, the antivirus had been up to date
Yes, I even ran a so-called spyware detector regularly
No, I did not use a user account with administrative privileges
Yes, I RTFM
As far as I can tell, the problem was caused by the video driver. Immediately after logging in, I'd get a BSOD. No error-specific message beyond some hex nubmers, just the generic "It's not our fault, it's the hardware's!" message absolving the operating system of any responsibility ("Change your BIOS settings!"). Of course, nothing went wrong when I booted in safe mode...
Things seem fine now, and I wouldn't be surprised if the problem was partly caused by the drivers from the old video card not uninstalling as cleanly as it should have.
Of course, that was just the straw the broke the camel's back this particular install. Every installation of any flavor of Windows I've used have developed bizarre idiosynchracies. Acrobat Reader hangs in my user account. I change to the admin account, wipe the install (yes, via the "Add/Remove Programs" bit in the Control Panel), install a newer version, make sure it works fine in the admin account, and change back to the user account, only to watch it hang again. Some more back-and-forth later, I confirm that, while it works just fine in the administrator account, in the user account it hangs (even though it worked just fine previously). I had been postponing going into regedit and erasing any and all mention of the word "Adobe" when the final problem cropped up.
Even in general I have problems with the way the registry handles things. I don't like to install applications through my administrator account unless I have to, but I've learned that applications installed via my user account cannot be cleanly uninstalled from the admin account; the admin account doesn't normally have the privileges to erase registry keys created by other users, despite their lowly status. Instead, the admin account has to go in to regedit and manually change the permissions on the keys before its able to get rid of them
That's the kind of mentality I'm sick of on my Windows machine. And don't get me started on all the games that can't effectively be played without administrative privileges, or any of the other appliations that are supposedly written for Windows XP (or 2000, for that matter) and yet, for some reason, don't seem to understand the concept of multiple user accounts...
"Also, just partition the damn hard disk if you can't boot off something larger than 137 gig."
I DID!!!!! I tried a 137 GB partition, I tried a 100 GB partition. Both times Windows told me it couldn't boot.
"However, it sounds like a bios problem to me...."
If it were the BIOS, it'd be a BIOS message telling me that it couldn't boot. It wasn't; I got a message telling me that Windows could not boot, which is interesting since, obviously, enough of Windows booted to give me the message telling me that boot information could not be found on the partition...
(Yes, this was after the BIOS told me that it successfully found boot information and was loading it.)
"What I mean is, for myself, I enjoy "building" computers."
So do I. But, speaking as someone who's still dealing with the fall-out of one of those annoyingly regular XP reinstalls, what I don't like is dealing with freakin' driver hell and incompaabilities. The default install of XP refuses to boot off of my >137 GB, and so I have to waste my time installing XP on my old ~11 GB disk, get SP2 installed, and then copy everything over. Aside from the fact that I shouldn't have to regularly reinstall everything due to a flakey registry to begin with, that seriously cuts down on the time I could otherwise spend trying to find XP drivers for some of my legacy hardware (e. g. LPT scanner).
(And, ultimatley, that's what's keeping me from going Linux as well. I know that getting the software up and runing on my machine will be just as bad if not worse than reinstalling XP. At least with XP there are drivers to be found.)
Putting this machine together in the beginning was kind of fun, but the God-awful maintenance costs that take away time that I'd rather spend enjoying a functional computer leave me with a net loss on my personal enjoyment scale. I'm disillusioned, I'm done, and my next machine will have the Apple logo on it.
So do you tune out that whole portion of the flight attendant's spiel where they tell you that FAA regulations prohibit you from using any equipment that can send or receive a signal while onboard the airplane?
"In France, it is more simple -- rights come from statute, only."
Unless you ignore the whole Declarations of the Rights of Man thing. The French go through constitutions every two weeks or so, and it's easier for them to just attach that particular piece of boilerplate instead of cut-and-paste all the time. It's only mentioned in the very first sentence of the (current) French Constitution, after all...
"you can't see the effects of Lousiana law as clearly as you could before."
Many people praticing law in Louisiana, who are painfully aware of living on "a civil law island in a common law sea" may disagree with you.
"So Civil Code countries don't have the concept of divine-enshrined or individual liberty."
Yeah, those godless commies!
They have no concept of "the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man," there isn't anything in French law stating that "the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights," there aren't any checks on the legislature, such as something saying "law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society," and there certainly isn't anything in French constitutional law saying that property is an "inalienable" right, let alone "sacred!"
"If the government chose to take it away (constitutional amendment), many would argue that that was illegal according to natural law."
Alternatively, there are no similar invokations of the Declaration of Indepence codified in the United States Constitution. The US Constitution only points to itself as the "supreme law of the land" and constitutional amendments can be ratified that violate the spirit or even the letter of the Declaration of Independence, and the only way to fix it would be another amendment repealing it, or 3/4 of the state legislatures getting together and writing a new federal constitution entirely.
I mean, have you seen the Eighteenth Amendment?
(I just ranted in defense of the French... I feel so dirty...)
First off, I am not a lawyer, but I pretended to be a politician in a former life.
"The basic idea of Civil Law (Napoleonic) is that the state is the source of all rights (Rousseau's theory)."
Napoleonic Code != constitution. Constitutions are the documents that decide where rights come from.
"Lousiana's laws and Quebec's are mitigated by the fact that they are not supreme"
Oh, for crying out... it's not supreme anywhere! Constitutions are supreme! Most of them even say so, flat-out in the documents themselves! Common law schemes are nothing more than a legal afterthought, a series of "Oh, by the way..." rules generally agreed upon unless something better and/or more specific (like, say, a freakin' statute!) comes along.
"US/Canada with Common Law are in the picture"
Not only do you not seem to have any grasp of the concept of common law schemes, you don't seem to have a grasp of the US Constitution itself. You will not find the phrase "common law" anywhere in the document. We live in a federal republic and it is up to the states to decide what schemes to set up and for the national government to respect their decisions and follow their lead, and it's the state constitutions and state statutes where you'll find mention of whether English Common Law or, in the case of Louisiana, the Napoleonic Code is used. I would assume the nature of the Canadian confederation is similar.
"the decline of States Rights implies that more and more for Louisiana."
Wait... you just used the phrase "states' rights" with a straight face after spouting the previous "Washington uber alles" bit? I think I need to lie down now...
Not that any of this really touches on the situation in Quebec, where arguably they are more at liberty than your typical US state is to govern itself without outside interference.
"AFP, being used to those rules, is used to using the courts to shut down insolent upstarts like Yahoo! and Google."
Courts make rulings on statutes! They don't say whether or not someone "violated X part of common law" (and not just because the entire concept of "violating" common law is absurd!), they decide on whether or not someone violated a law duly proposed, voted on, and enacted by the democraticly-elected legislature. Common law schemes only come into play to answer certain vague questions like "Was this really trespassing?" or "Is this really a contract?"
"Here are quotes:"
Here's my own quote, from the article you provided:
"Germans are watching the case closely to see if the standoff between C&A and a Düsseldorf district court yields any precedents that could weaken half-century-old laws...
We're not talking about Napoleonic Code here, we're talking about a German statute (unless, of course, your feared Napoleonic Code doens't date to before 1950, even though it's named after Napoleon). Your little francophobe rant has nothing to do with anything here. If you want to rant against the French, do us a favor and try to avoid the half-cocked conspiracy theories to base your "arguments" upon. You're giving us true political crackpots a bad name.
Slashdot Mirror
"There's nothing in it that differentiates it from other MMORPGS."
Other than the fact that it's the only big-name MMORPG that runs on Macs, you mean?
"It seems to me that this type of problem is the very reason MS didn't want to pull out MP in the first place."
It's also a very good reason not to "integrate" it into the OS to begin with. If Microsoft is willing to risk "breaking" Windows by adding it, why not by removing it?
"I've always wondered what a pointy-eared alien who has sex once every 7 years"
Dammit! If I were a vulcan than I'd be able to have sex in a few more months! Curse my round ears and red blood!
" quite possibly because there wasn't any other fighting games on the gamecube."
I think you misread. He didn't say "SoulCalibur II was the best-selling fighting ame on GCN" (which I'd wager would be wrong, since there's SSB:M), he said "The GameCube version is the best-selling version of SoulCalibur II." I've heard hear-say that the GCN verson outsold the PS2 and Xbox versions combined, but I don't know if that particular bit is true.
"Solar Plastic-Melting Ray."
But... polyethylene is organic!
"All it would mean would be that content would replace technology as the distinguishing factor between games."
That, or they abandon the concept of distinguishing between games entirely. Have you see what's come out of Hollywood lately?
Ultimatley, I'd say that's what the blogger is most afraid of.
"Now, here's the start of the movie ... I see snow!"
Is there a sad girl? We all know we can't have snow if there aren't sad girls involved.
"I hope not, unless you enjoy getting laughed at."
Playing video games isn't a sign of immaturity, but laughing at others in public is.
"Will Nintendo pull it's proverbial head out of it's backside and develop games that aren't amied at 12 year olds and start developing games that challenge the marketplace."
Some of us are more inclined to believe that it's the so-called "marketpalce" that has its head shoved up its collective ass. The majority can be wrong, you know.
Hrm, rouge... jolie rouge... jolly roger... He's a pirate!
"He said to remember three things if anything:
1 Use the metric system
(...)
He was complaining about internet porn affecting people's lives."
You heard it here first, folks! If you like pr0n, use USCS!
"It's PBS, or some form of public television,"
Yes, but it's the same PBS that got in hot water in Congress when CTW introduced an HIV-positive Muppet in Africa. I fear for what the episodes on these "controversial subjects" will look like.
"Creating these hacks is really like taking the silverware and plates out of a restaurant when you know you are really paying just for the food."
No, it would be like eating the whole dish when the waiter specifically told you that, even though you paid for the whole dish, you're only allowed to eat half. DRM is attempting to impose control on something you no longer own, something you you were supposed to transfer ownership of at the point of sale.
"It's so hypocritical how slashdot really realy really hates GPL violators, but cheers something like this."
GPL only imposes restrictions on distribution. DRM imposes restrictions on use in the name of imposing on distribution.
"you know, those people who actually have LEGAL RIGHTS to the content"
The people who have those "LEGAL RIGHTS" are the consumers, the folks who paid money to get it. Once that money has been exchanged, the only thing the copyright holders can further impose on them is to prevent them from disseminating it further.
If I bought the file from you, I own the content. You just own the distribution rights.
"And it's their service and their content."
Again, not if I paid for them.
"Or is that just completely lost in the vacuum of "Information wants to be free"?"
How about a new maxim: Stuff I paid for wants to be mine.
Yeah, that's almost as insulting as, say, spelling his name wrong, since that's not an easy name for most native Englsh-speakers to spell...
"Um, no, you shouldn't. What the hell are you doing, blasting your DIMMs with gamma rays or something?"
First off, if I had a convenient source of gamma rays, I wouldn't be wasting time with a Windows install and instead would be working on a doomsday device.
Secondly, I'm talking about the Windows registry, that monsterousity that, though potty trained sine the days of Windows 1995, has yet to figure out the whole "toilet paper" concept.
"Driver wise a GENERIC kernel generally does better than XP in my experience,"
I haven't tried BSD, but the last time I tried Linux the boot DVD I burned couldn't find the "SCSI" card I have my (ATA) HDDs connected to, let alone the actual drives. At least with Windows I know where to get the proper "SCSI" drivers for the XP install (of course, booting off the target drive was then another problem).
"Also, if you have to routinely reinstall Windows, you're not as good at working with computers as you thought you were. "
Ah yes, the "blame the luser" mentality. It's nice to know that Linux and Microsoft both have at least one thing in common.
For the record:
- Yes, I already use Firefox
- Yes, I run a (third-party) firewall app, behind a hadware firewall
- Yes, the antivirus had been up to date
- Yes, I even ran a so-called spyware detector regularly
- No, I did not use a user account with administrative privileges
- Yes, I RTFM
As far as I can tell, the problem was caused by the video driver. Immediately after logging in, I'd get a BSOD. No error-specific message beyond some hex nubmers, just the generic "It's not our fault, it's the hardware's!" message absolving the operating system of any responsibility ("Change your BIOS settings!"). Of course, nothing went wrong when I booted in safe mode...Things seem fine now, and I wouldn't be surprised if the problem was partly caused by the drivers from the old video card not uninstalling as cleanly as it should have.
Of course, that was just the straw the broke the camel's back this particular install. Every installation of any flavor of Windows I've used have developed bizarre idiosynchracies. Acrobat Reader hangs in my user account. I change to the admin account, wipe the install (yes, via the "Add/Remove Programs" bit in the Control Panel), install a newer version, make sure it works fine in the admin account, and change back to the user account, only to watch it hang again. Some more back-and-forth later, I confirm that, while it works just fine in the administrator account, in the user account it hangs (even though it worked just fine previously). I had been postponing going into regedit and erasing any and all mention of the word "Adobe" when the final problem cropped up.
Even in general I have problems with the way the registry handles things. I don't like to install applications through my administrator account unless I have to, but I've learned that applications installed via my user account cannot be cleanly uninstalled from the admin account; the admin account doesn't normally have the privileges to erase registry keys created by other users, despite their lowly status. Instead, the admin account has to go in to regedit and manually change the permissions on the keys before its able to get rid of them
That's the kind of mentality I'm sick of on my Windows machine. And don't get me started on all the games that can't effectively be played without administrative privileges, or any of the other appliations that are supposedly written for Windows XP (or 2000, for that matter) and yet, for some reason, don't seem to understand the concept of multiple user accounts...
"Also, just partition the damn hard disk if you can't boot off something larger than 137 gig."
I DID!!!!! I tried a 137 GB partition, I tried a 100 GB partition. Both times Windows told me it couldn't boot.
"However, it sounds like a bios problem to me...."
If it were the BIOS, it'd be a BIOS message telling me that it couldn't boot. It wasn't; I got a message telling me that Windows could not boot, which is interesting since, obviously, enough of Windows booted to give me the message telling me that boot information could not be found on the partition...
(Yes, this was after the BIOS told me that it successfully found boot information and was loading it.)
"What I mean is, for myself, I enjoy "building" computers."
So do I. But, speaking as someone who's still dealing with the fall-out of one of those annoyingly regular XP reinstalls, what I don't like is dealing with freakin' driver hell and incompaabilities. The default install of XP refuses to boot off of my >137 GB, and so I have to waste my time installing XP on my old ~11 GB disk, get SP2 installed, and then copy everything over. Aside from the fact that I shouldn't have to regularly reinstall everything due to a flakey registry to begin with, that seriously cuts down on the time I could otherwise spend trying to find XP drivers for some of my legacy hardware (e. g. LPT scanner).
(And, ultimatley, that's what's keeping me from going Linux as well. I know that getting the software up and runing on my machine will be just as bad if not worse than reinstalling XP. At least with XP there are drivers to be found.)
Putting this machine together in the beginning was kind of fun, but the God-awful maintenance costs that take away time that I'd rather spend enjoying a functional computer leave me with a net loss on my personal enjoyment scale. I'm disillusioned, I'm done, and my next machine will have the Apple logo on it.
So do you tune out that whole portion of the flight attendant's spiel where they tell you that FAA regulations prohibit you from using any equipment that can send or receive a signal while onboard the airplane?
You forgot:
3.5. Get anal-probed by federal agents on the ground for operating a transmitter and/or receiver aboard an airplane.
No no, Skynet will be born out of Bittorrent! Don't you remember anything about the end of T3:The Evils of P2P?
"In France, it is more simple -- rights come from statute, only."
Unless you ignore the whole Declarations of the Rights of Man thing. The French go through constitutions every two weeks or so, and it's easier for them to just attach that particular piece of boilerplate instead of cut-and-paste all the time. It's only mentioned in the very first sentence of the (current) French Constitution, after all...
"you can't see the effects of Lousiana law as clearly as you could before."
Many people praticing law in Louisiana, who are painfully aware of living on "a civil law island in a common law sea" may disagree with you.
"So Civil Code countries don't have the concept of divine-enshrined or individual liberty."
Yeah, those godless commies!
They have no concept of "the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man," there isn't anything in French law stating that "the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights," there aren't any checks on the legislature, such as something saying "law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society," and there certainly isn't anything in French constitutional law saying that property is an "inalienable" right, let alone "sacred!"
Oh, wait...
"If the government chose to take it away (constitutional amendment), many would argue that that was illegal according to natural law."
Alternatively, there are no similar invokations of the Declaration of Indepence codified in the United States Constitution. The US Constitution only points to itself as the "supreme law of the land" and constitutional amendments can be ratified that violate the spirit or even the letter of the Declaration of Independence, and the only way to fix it would be another amendment repealing it, or 3/4 of the state legislatures getting together and writing a new federal constitution entirely.
I mean, have you seen the Eighteenth Amendment?
(I just ranted in defense of the French... I feel so dirty...)
First off, I am not a lawyer, but I pretended to be a politician in a former life.
"The basic idea of Civil Law (Napoleonic) is that the state is the source of all rights (Rousseau's theory)."
Napoleonic Code != constitution. Constitutions are the documents that decide where rights come from.
"Lousiana's laws and Quebec's are mitigated by the fact that they are not supreme"
Oh, for crying out... it's not supreme anywhere! Constitutions are supreme! Most of them even say so, flat-out in the documents themselves! Common law schemes are nothing more than a legal afterthought, a series of "Oh, by the way..." rules generally agreed upon unless something better and/or more specific (like, say, a freakin' statute!) comes along.
"US/Canada with Common Law are in the picture"
Not only do you not seem to have any grasp of the concept of common law schemes, you don't seem to have a grasp of the US Constitution itself. You will not find the phrase "common law" anywhere in the document. We live in a federal republic and it is up to the states to decide what schemes to set up and for the national government to respect their decisions and follow their lead, and it's the state constitutions and state statutes where you'll find mention of whether English Common Law or, in the case of Louisiana, the Napoleonic Code is used. I would assume the nature of the Canadian confederation is similar.
"the decline of States Rights implies that more and more for Louisiana."
Wait... you just used the phrase "states' rights" with a straight face after spouting the previous "Washington uber alles" bit? I think I need to lie down now...
Not that any of this really touches on the situation in Quebec, where arguably they are more at liberty than your typical US state is to govern itself without outside interference.
"AFP, being used to those rules, is used to using the courts to shut down insolent upstarts like Yahoo! and Google."
Courts make rulings on statutes! They don't say whether or not someone "violated X part of common law" (and not just because the entire concept of "violating" common law is absurd!), they decide on whether or not someone violated a law duly proposed, voted on, and enacted by the democraticly-elected legislature. Common law schemes only come into play to answer certain vague questions like "Was this really trespassing?" or "Is this really a contract?"
"Here are quotes:"
Here's my own quote, from the article you provided:
"Germans are watching the case closely to see if the standoff between C&A and a Düsseldorf district court yields any precedents that could weaken half-century-old laws...
We're not talking about Napoleonic Code here, we're talking about a German statute (unless, of course, your feared Napoleonic Code doens't date to before 1950, even though it's named after Napoleon). Your little francophobe rant has nothing to do with anything here. If you want to rant against the French, do us a favor and try to avoid the half-cocked conspiracy theories to base your "arguments" upon. You're giving us true political crackpots a bad name.
Phineas Fogg would beg to differ. Start booking your plane tickets now. :)
Then it won't find any more signs of life when it goes along its test sample route of 50 km, as mentioned in the blurb.