Sadly, removing publishers would only help something like Good Old Games if you went back in time and removed them 10-15 years ago -- at which point in time, of course, they were essential because there was no way of getting games without physical media on store shelves.
This isn't the same thing, though - these are perfectly good chips that are crippled so that Intel doesn't have to manufacture chips at multiple price points.
Yes, like they have been doing for years. If demand for cheap chips exceeds demand for expensive chips, they cripple some expensive chips and sell them cheaply. This increases their profits and, by decreasing the complexity of the manufacturing process, also reduces the price of the expensive chips. It's a good thing.
The only new thing here is that they are now also providing a simple way for people who got one of the crippled chips to uncripple it. Which is also a good thing.
I was outraged when I saw the Slashdot headline too. Then I read TFA. Then I spent a few seconds thinking about the pros and cons of this. And suddenly I'm not outraged any more. I put it to Slashdot that this concept of "thinking" is a useful tool that ought to be applied more widely.
If I go out and buy a penknife, I don't expect to have to pay more money if I want to be able to use the built-in compass.
Not a great analogy. Can you try again only with more cars?
This isn't a case of you buying a Core i7 and Intel saying "by the way, we only gave you a Core i5, but you can have the full i7 you paid for if you give us another $50".
This is a case of you buying a Core i5 and Intel saying "here is exactly what you paid for, and by the way, if you ever decide you should have bought a Core i7 instead, we can magically teleport one into your computer for just $50".
If you want the pocket knife with a built-in compass, pay for the one that has a compass in it. If you deliberately buy a knife that says "KNIFE WITHOUT COMPASS (compass is available at extra cost)", you have no reason to complain when it turns out you have to pay extra to get a compass!
There's no bait-and-switch here. People are getting exactly what is advertised. Where's the problem?
You could spin it as beneficial to employees because [...] it keeps the salaries of "superstars" from inflating to artificial highs
Hurrah! Thank you, noble executives, for colluding to make sure that the people who work their pants off to make you rich will never themselves receive anything like as much compensation as you do! We are truly, truly grateful that our salaries are not inflated like yours are.
And yet by forcing society to permit hate groups like the KKK, you deprive everyone else of the democratic right to choose the laws that they are governed by.
The first item in the US bill of rights guarantees freedom of speech. What does the first item in our charter of rights do?
The US Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are words written on bits of paper. Fine words, no doubt, but still just words. They have no intrinsic power. All that matters is what the authorities actually do in practice.
Just ask the people of China; their constitution also "guarantees" them "freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration". But just you try standing in Tiananmen Square displaying a banner saying "I Believe In Falun Gong And Tibetan Independence", and see how long the authorities allow you to exercise those alleged rights.
Or, looking at it another way, a single language was used to enforce the control of a privileged minority who trampled the rights and freedoms of people across an entire continent.
The same thing happened with Arabic in the Ottoman Empire, with English in the British Empire, and with Mandarin in China. The Japanese also attempted it in China, Taiwan, and Korea in their brief imperial period.
Having a single language is only a good thing if you belong to the culture whose language it was originally. It is never a good sign for people whose cultures used to speak something different.
I hear all the time about how government protects people from corporations, and that's why we have to keep giving government more and more power.
Really? I am forced to conclude that you work in a psychiatric ward, or possibly as a comedian, because I can't think of any other contexts where you might constantly hear that kind of claim uttered.
The usual reasoning for why we give money to government is not that they protect us from corporations, but that they provide us with services that corporations wouldn't -- like roads that lead to unpopular destinations, police that protect the poor as well as the rich, and healthcare for the people that it wouldn't be profitable to treat. (Disclaimer: I am just stating the theory, not asserting that these things are provided in practice.)
As an aside, there are some areas where the government does in fact do a pretty good job of protecting us from corporations. For example, I kind of like the assurance that the roof over my head meets certain structural standards, and it's nice knowing the food on my plate is relatively unlikely to contain any additives that aren't plainly listed on the packaging.
Cell phones are for apps, or texting. I didn't realise anyone used them to talk any more, except for members of an evil secret society dedicated to inflicting pain on users of public transport.
Where is the evidence it is real? All I see is a Sun article claiming that "this highly implausible thing happened", with nothing at all to back it up.
Given the choice, I would trust Gizmodo over the Sun, which is a gutter tabloid aimed at people with an elementary-school reading age whose three main interests are (a) breasts, (b) breasts, and (c) getting angry about foreigners.
Although, i think intel could potentially survive without amd64
They'd be in trouble. They have strong competition from ARM derivatives in mobile and embedded markets, and the desktop and server markets are almost entirely x86_64 now. Nobody's interested in 32-bit servers, and IA64 is a niche platform whose fate was sealed when Microsoft stopped developing for it.
Libraries are now required to predict, in advance, which video games and other licensed media will be culturally significant in the future.
If they fail to buy a copy of a product while it is on store shelves, there is now no legal way for them to preserve it for posterity, since the people who did buy it are not allowed to transfer ownership.
Ah well, back to reading the works of authors like Shakespeare who were somehow inspired to expend massive effort on creating amazing intellectual works despite the lack of any effective copyright protection whatsoever. (Still waiting for you to explain that, copyright lobby...)
Also, how the hell did he manage to collect EUR600k for an alpha version of an indie game in 17 days? Maybe there is some funny business going on there after all.
It's come to a sad state if people in supposedly capitalist societies have started to think that there's something inherently suspicious about an individual successfully making money by selling something he made himself.
Yeah, but if you've got any sense, you run it in a sandboxed virtual machine, or as a dual-boot option that you only fire up for that one application, or on a separate heavily-firewalled computer that does not have direct access to the internet and is never used for anything else.
It remains that using a 2001 OS as your primary desktop environment in 2010 is at best naive, and at worst foolhardy.
In any case, the number of games that don't work in DosBox OR VirtualBox OR Windows 7 is vanishingly small.
The first amendment does not GRANT rights; it merely acknowledges that the right to free speech exists, and constrains the federal government (and by the 14th amendment, state governments) from violating the right.
This is exactly correct, and well stated.
Individuals, and corporations, can violate people's right to free speech
It's not clear that anyone but the government can violate it, since nobody but the government has the power to control speech beyond their own private property; if an individual or corporation tells you to be silent, all you have to do is move to someone else's property and you can carry on speaking to your heart's content. This is right and proper. The ability to control how your personal property is used is also a fundamental right, and no less important than free speech.
Besides, there's plenty of legal precedent establishing that the right to freedom of speech is not absolute even where government interference is concerned. How else could Congress have made laws that force you to pay compensation if you libel someone, or can cause you to face imprisonment if you reveal state secrets or make death threats towards the President? You won't find many legal experts who think those laws are unconstitutional, yet they are all designed to restrict certain forms of speech.
Economy tickets with a decent airline are significantly more expensive than budget airlines like Ryanair. They are totally different products aimed at totally different markets, and they appeal to different types of people. This is not a value judgement, it's simply a fact.
Sadly, if you're working in Java then you will frequently be forced to write the same 8 damn lines over 70 times, and there will be literally no way to avoid it unless you resort to automatic code generation, which is a fancy name for using a separate program to do the copying-and-pasting for you.
I remember people saying the same thing about CD-ROM games. The first ones sucked, and many people could not imagine the technology ever being used for anything worth playing.
Same for polygon-based games, actually. They looked awful, and everyone was like "what a useless gimmick, hand-drawn sprites look so much better, 2D will never die".
The naysayers have always been wrong, time after time after time. Why do you think this will be the one time they're right?
Blu-Ray DRM is broken. As of today you can make backups of any Blu-Ray disc you happen to own, or transcode them for viewing on any device you choose. You can even watch them on Linux!
That compares pretty favourably to anything else that's ever likely to appear. In particular, it is a million times better than the streaming-based world some people are predicting, in which the present day -- when you can get the movie you choose out of a box that you own and watch it without asking anyone's permission, paying them again, or sitting through any advertisements -- will seem like a mythical golden age.
The name contains a subtle hint as to what happens if you always update packages to the latest builds instead of performing careful testing of scheduled releases.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, removing publishers would only help something like Good Old Games if you went back in time and removed them 10-15 years ago -- at which point in time, of course, they were essential because there was no way of getting games without physical media on store shelves.
Yes, like they have been doing for years. If demand for cheap chips exceeds demand for expensive chips, they cripple some expensive chips and sell them cheaply. This increases their profits and, by decreasing the complexity of the manufacturing process, also reduces the price of the expensive chips. It's a good thing.
The only new thing here is that they are now also providing a simple way for people who got one of the crippled chips to uncripple it. Which is also a good thing.
I was outraged when I saw the Slashdot headline too. Then I read TFA. Then I spent a few seconds thinking about the pros and cons of this. And suddenly I'm not outraged any more. I put it to Slashdot that this concept of "thinking" is a useful tool that ought to be applied more widely.
Not a great analogy. Can you try again only with more cars?
This isn't a case of you buying a Core i7 and Intel saying "by the way, we only gave you a Core i5, but you can have the full i7 you paid for if you give us another $50".
This is a case of you buying a Core i5 and Intel saying "here is exactly what you paid for, and by the way, if you ever decide you should have bought a Core i7 instead, we can magically teleport one into your computer for just $50".
If you want the pocket knife with a built-in compass, pay for the one that has a compass in it. If you deliberately buy a knife that says "KNIFE WITHOUT COMPASS (compass is available at extra cost)", you have no reason to complain when it turns out you have to pay extra to get a compass!
There's no bait-and-switch here. People are getting exactly what is advertised. Where's the problem?
Hurrah! Thank you, noble executives, for colluding to make sure that the people who work their pants off to make you rich will never themselves receive anything like as much compensation as you do! We are truly, truly grateful that our salaries are not inflated like yours are.
And yet by forcing society to permit hate groups like the KKK, you deprive everyone else of the democratic right to choose the laws that they are governed by.
The US Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are words written on bits of paper. Fine words, no doubt, but still just words. They have no intrinsic power. All that matters is what the authorities actually do in practice.
Just ask the people of China; their constitution also "guarantees" them "freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration". But just you try standing in Tiananmen Square displaying a banner saying "I Believe In Falun Gong And Tibetan Independence", and see how long the authorities allow you to exercise those alleged rights.
Or, looking at it another way, a single language was used to enforce the control of a privileged minority who trampled the rights and freedoms of people across an entire continent.
The same thing happened with Arabic in the Ottoman Empire, with English in the British Empire, and with Mandarin in China. The Japanese also attempted it in China, Taiwan, and Korea in their brief imperial period.
Having a single language is only a good thing if you belong to the culture whose language it was originally. It is never a good sign for people whose cultures used to speak something different.
Calm down, these things take time. They have to identify all the dissidents before they can start rounding them up,
Really? I am forced to conclude that you work in a psychiatric ward, or possibly as a comedian, because I can't think of any other contexts where you might constantly hear that kind of claim uttered.
The usual reasoning for why we give money to government is not that they protect us from corporations, but that they provide us with services that corporations wouldn't -- like roads that lead to unpopular destinations, police that protect the poor as well as the rich, and healthcare for the people that it wouldn't be profitable to treat. (Disclaimer: I am just stating the theory, not asserting that these things are provided in practice.)
As an aside, there are some areas where the government does in fact do a pretty good job of protecting us from corporations. For example, I kind of like the assurance that the roof over my head meets certain structural standards, and it's nice knowing the food on my plate is relatively unlikely to contain any additives that aren't plainly listed on the packaging.
Cell phones are for apps, or texting. I didn't realise anyone used them to talk any more, except for members of an evil secret society dedicated to inflicting pain on users of public transport.
Where is the evidence it is real? All I see is a Sun article claiming that "this highly implausible thing happened", with nothing at all to back it up.
Given the choice, I would trust Gizmodo over the Sun, which is a gutter tabloid aimed at people with an elementary-school reading age whose three main interests are (a) breasts, (b) breasts, and (c) getting angry about foreigners.
They'd be in trouble. They have strong competition from ARM derivatives in mobile and embedded markets, and the desktop and server markets are almost entirely x86_64 now. Nobody's interested in 32-bit servers, and IA64 is a niche platform whose fate was sealed when Microsoft stopped developing for it.
Yes, truly religion is the root of all ignorance, and -- thanks to its staunch atheism -- Soviet Russia was a scientific paradise.
Oh, wait ...
Libraries are now required to predict, in advance, which video games and other licensed media will be culturally significant in the future.
If they fail to buy a copy of a product while it is on store shelves, there is now no legal way for them to preserve it for posterity, since the people who did buy it are not allowed to transfer ownership.
Ah well, back to reading the works of authors like Shakespeare who were somehow inspired to expend massive effort on creating amazing intellectual works despite the lack of any effective copyright protection whatsoever. (Still waiting for you to explain that, copyright lobby ...)
Were you asleep in 2002? Because that's when Blizzard abusing EULAs was news.
It's come to a sad state if people in supposedly capitalist societies have started to think that there's something inherently suspicious about an individual successfully making money by selling something he made himself.
Yeah, but if you've got any sense, you run it in a sandboxed virtual machine, or as a dual-boot option that you only fire up for that one application, or on a separate heavily-firewalled computer that does not have direct access to the internet and is never used for anything else.
It remains that using a 2001 OS as your primary desktop environment in 2010 is at best naive, and at worst foolhardy.
In any case, the number of games that don't work in DosBox OR VirtualBox OR Windows 7 is vanishingly small.
This is exactly correct, and well stated.
It's not clear that anyone but the government can violate it, since nobody but the government has the power to control speech beyond their own private property; if an individual or corporation tells you to be silent, all you have to do is move to someone else's property and you can carry on speaking to your heart's content. This is right and proper. The ability to control how your personal property is used is also a fundamental right, and no less important than free speech.
Besides, there's plenty of legal precedent establishing that the right to freedom of speech is not absolute even where government interference is concerned. How else could Congress have made laws that force you to pay compensation if you libel someone, or can cause you to face imprisonment if you reveal state secrets or make death threats towards the President? You won't find many legal experts who think those laws are unconstitutional, yet they are all designed to restrict certain forms of speech.
Economy tickets with a decent airline are significantly more expensive than budget airlines like Ryanair. They are totally different products aimed at totally different markets, and they appeal to different types of people. This is not a value judgement, it's simply a fact.
Sadly, if you're working in Java then you will frequently be forced to write the same 8 damn lines over 70 times, and there will be literally no way to avoid it unless you resort to automatic code generation, which is a fancy name for using a separate program to do the copying-and-pasting for you.
If the comments are out of date, then the code has been modified by someone who was too lazy to update the comments.
Such a lazy person is also unlikely to have made well-crafted changes that kept the code's intent clear.
Now you have unreadable code without comments. Please explain to me why this is a step forwards.
I remember people saying the same thing about CD-ROM games. The first ones sucked, and many people could not imagine the technology ever being used for anything worth playing.
Same for polygon-based games, actually. They looked awful, and everyone was like "what a useless gimmick, hand-drawn sprites look so much better, 2D will never die".
The naysayers have always been wrong, time after time after time. Why do you think this will be the one time they're right?
Blu-Ray DRM is broken. As of today you can make backups of any Blu-Ray disc you happen to own, or transcode them for viewing on any device you choose. You can even watch them on Linux!
That compares pretty favourably to anything else that's ever likely to appear. In particular, it is a million times better than the streaming-based world some people are predicting, in which the present day -- when you can get the movie you choose out of a box that you own and watch it without asking anyone's permission, paying them again, or sitting through any advertisements -- will seem like a mythical golden age.
Sounds like you want Debian Unstable.
The name contains a subtle hint as to what happens if you always update packages to the latest builds instead of performing careful testing of scheduled releases.
How exactly is this code "copyright 2010", if it was written in the 1980s?