Doesn't WoW fill this need? Putting DnD online would invite unfavorable comparisons to Blizzard's juggernaut.
An online DnD would be incomparable to WoW, in the apples-and-oranges sense. I mean a real online DnD, by the way -- that is, with a human GM running a campaign for a small party of players -- not just a WoW clone using a DnD setting and rules.
Or did your DnD campaigns really involve grinding for 60 levels, then raiding the same dungeon -- and killing the same villain! -- possibly hundreds of times, in order to collect a full set of epic gear?
If the first amendment gave you an unlimited right to repeat other people's speech without their permission, then the constitution would be self-contradictory, since it also explicitly gives Congress the power to create IP laws.
Therefore, either the constitution is fundamentally flawed, or -- more likely, perhaps? -- the first amendment does not automatically give you the right to exchange information that Congress has decided belongs to someone else. However much that information may want to be free.
While maglev is a really cool technology, it is not as brilliant in real life due to the high costs and the competition from airtravel
Things change. The Transrapid project in Germany might simply have been too early; it was scrapped because it had already cost so much that it was not politically viable to continue with it.
Now, take a close look at the current trends in the price of oil, and scan the news stories about airline share prices plummeting. Is air travel really going to stay so competitive in the long term? Only time will tell -- but if oil prices continue to rise, then the folks who had the guts to take a gamble on alternative transport solutions are going to make a killing.
And I seriously doubt piracy had anything to do with their crappy sales. Who would want to pirate a game that got 5 fps on their system?
It's not just performance, either. I tried the demo. It ran very nicely on my system and looked fantastic.
Unfortunately, it wasn't fun. Admiring the sunlight filtering through the leaves was very nice, but hardly exciting. Cutting down trees with a machine gun is fun for a few minutes at most. The AI was lacklustre, the plot derivative, the combat uninspired, the characters cliched, the interface clunky, and the level design nonexistent. I yawned through the demo, admired the quality of the game engine, and promptly deleted the whole thing and went back to Portal.
Just look at the drag&drop source of script.aculo.us. It's huge.
Is it? Are we supposed to take your word for that? Drag-and-drop sounds complicated to me -- how do I know that file isn't big simply because it does a lot?
Size is meaningless as a metric unless you tell us what scale you're using and how it's calibrated.
When someone says "I want to give you free money for no apparent reason," I see no reason for them to be so selfless and I am suspicious. When someone says "I want to do the dirty work of fixing your car in exchange for big bucks," I understand their motives and think it's safe to trust them.
Really? Personally I'm always highly suspicious of people who want to fix my car: I don't really understand how cars work, so they could claim to be doing essential work cheaply, and really be doing unnecessary work (or no work at all) and then ripping me off, and it would be hard for me to tell the difference. Why do you suppose they would do neither more nor less than the necessary work, and charge me a reasonable price, when they would benefit more (with zero risk of discovery) by behaving selfishly and either not doing the right work or charging an extortionate price?
That's why, before I take my car to be fixed, I'm sure to ask around people I know to get recommendations. These people then tell me which mechanics they trust and which they don't: in other words, they give me free advice for what you would presumably describe as "no apparent reason". And I trust them precisely because of this: because nobody is paying them to say anything, they have nothing to gain by lying.
Linux is just the kernel, GNU is the operating system.
Nope; the GNU operating system's kernel is the HURD. RMS and his disciples refer to the hybrid platform consisting of the Linux kernel and the GNU userland as "GNU/Linux".
But that's irrelevant: in the real world, language is defined by the way people actually use it, not by the way religious leaders decree it should be used -- and in real-world usage, Linux is the operating system and GNU is an esoteric collection of scary command-line utilities.
They don't want anyone to profit from the free version.
It would be entirely possible for someone to use a hypothetical GPL version to make a commercial game; they would have to distribute the full source code to the game engine, of course, but the artwork, soundtrack, gameplay, etc could all remain non-free, so the game as a whole would be commercially viable.
Of course, it's true that only a tiny minority of commercial developers would be interested in that kind of business model, so maybe the open-source game development community should get together and petition Havok to go the extra mile. Maybe they don't understand the protections the GPL would give them, or just hadn't thought of it. It can't hurt to ask, right?
Amazingly enough, if you make inflammatory comments, your protestations that you don't want to start a flame war sound a little hollow...
this is another example of GPL restricts as much as it protects freedom.
Everything restricts some "freedom" or another. It's just a question of which rights are considered more appropriate to protect. The standard example is killing: we have decided, as a society, to restrict your right to kill other people, in favour of protecting their right to life. That doesn't mean our society is not "free", even though it restricts what you're allowed to do.
In this instance, the clause you identify as "restrictive", I see as necessary to protect my freedom. If I download a piece of GPL-licensed software, I know that I have the right to use it in any situation, even commercially. To protect that, the license absolutely must prohibit the inclusion of anything like this Havok code that may not be used commercially, because allowing that restriction to be added to GPL'd software would instantly take away that guaranteed freedom to use GPL'd code commercially.
Some things are hard, and the best interface to do hard things is a hard one, this isn't just being elitist, I have nothing against joe blogs getting rid of red-eye or making a cool little jpeg logo, but that's now what GIMP is made for, so dont bitch when its not easy.
An interface that takes time to learn is one thing. I'm fine with that. I would much rather face a steep learning curve than have a bit of software that only takes an hour to master, but doesn't do anything useful.
The problem with GIMP is not so much that it's difficult to learn, as that it really, truly, has a bad interface for many purposes. And, no, I'm not talking about things like drawing a circle by selecting a circular region and then stroking it: that's weird if you're used to having a dedicated circle-drawing tool, but once you figure out the GIMP way it's just as quick and easy. I'm talking about fundamental limitations like only being able to operate on one layer at a time, that actually make hard things harder than they need to be, because something that would be quick, easy, and intuitive in Adobe Photoshop or Corel PhotoPaint can only be done in GIMP either by tedious repitition, or by writing your own plugin to automate the tedious repitition.
(Either that, or the documentation is such garbage that it makes possible things look impossible, which is exactly the opposite of what documentation should do.)
So he was an illegal immigrant working or researching openly in a university and living in the UK for 13 years? If so why did they only arrest him when he downloaded his research material?
Like most people here I haven't read TFA, so I'm only speculating, but presumably he entered the country perfectly legitimately on some kind of student visa, then remained in the country illegally after the visa expired, and nobody noticed until he came to the attention of the authorities for this other reason, at which point they ran some routine checks and realised what had happened.
You see the same sort of thing every day on a smaller scale with motoring offences: people generally get away with driving without a license, or without insurance, or without an MOT, until they get caught speeding or parking illegally. Just because this particular case happens to involve terrorism charges and immigration violations doesn't make it any less natural a course of events.
Too much co-incidence here I am afraid.
No, it's not a coincidence at all, but nor is it a conspiracy.
(FWIW, I happen to oppose the idea that it should be illegal to own "terrorist manuals" or visit "extremist websites" or anything else that smacks of thoughtcrime. But I also oppose kneejerk anti-government reactions.)
The very day that I read that Australia surrendered an Australian citizen to the US Authorities for breaking a US crime (that is not a crime in Australia), I started looking for a job elsewhere. A short few months later, I was (and still am) living in Germany.
Ah, yes, good old freedom-loving Germany. Try going to a fancy-dress party dressed as Hitler, and tell me (in a few years, when you get out of jail) how much you prefer their idea of freedom over that of Australia or the UK.
the idea of abolishing it (or intellectual property generally), as many Slashdot zealots favour, is generally viewed as an extreme and nonsensical position.
So, I would hope, is the idea of making it perpetual, with the punishment for infringement being lengthy imprisonment followed by utter ruin -- which is the view many entertainment-industry zealots favour.
People espouse extreme views because it's the only way their voices are likely to be heard, and because they find the views being held by their opponents so intolerable that they are compelled to move as far in the opposite direction as possible. Perhaps if the entertainment industry started to support sensible IP laws, you'd see Slashdotters also start moving towards the sane middle ground.
The central problem with copyright at the moment is, I would say, a technical one, ie how to protect IP and still take advantage of technological developments that make it easier to duplicate and transmit creative works etc.
The saner Slashdotters have been proposing a wide range of sensible solutions for a long time -- micropayments for region-free, DRM-free, P2P-backed downloads is what I currently favour, though there are plenty of competing proposals. (Some of the braver entertainment companies are finally getting round to testing these saner ideas, moves which have been cautiously welcomed on Slashdot.)
Meanwhile, the entertainment industry has spent most of the same time period flogging the legally-enforced-DRM horse. It's a little unfair to accuse Slashdot alone of zealotry...
The whole point of region coding is to stop people in certain markets copying and selling cheaply to other markets (for example it's often cheaper to import CDs from the US than buy directly from Amazon.co.uk),
Um, what? Please enlighten me -- where, exactly, does "copying" take place when I legally purchase an original, authentic DVD from abroad instead of waiting 6 months and then paying double for the local release?
Indeed, the people who actually engage in copying DVDs invariably remove the region coding at the same time. Region coding only affects people who are simply trying to play back legitimately purchased goods: it is completely irrelevant to anyone who is using illegal copies.
I'm an administrator now and the final straw was when I realized that work was piling up on me while I fiddled with my OS.
Someone who experiments with installing a non-standard OS on a computer connected to the live corporate network, in work hours, is not a good administrator. You wouldn't reject Windows because someone with no Windows experience or training failed to connect it to a corporate network -- however much experience they had with VMS and NetWare. So why do you hold Linux to so much higher a standard?
The way to use Linux in a company is to get Linux administration training first, after which you will know how to install drivers and how to connect it to a network. Amazingly enough, if you'd done it properly, you wouldn't have had such big problems! Instead, you chose to jump in blindly, and wound up wasting your time and your company's money. The outcome would have been the same whatever OS you'd been playing with -- even a new version of Windows. You should count yourself lucky you still have a job, and if you'd been fired it would certainly not have been the fault of Linux.
Because no computing platform is "intuitive" in any way, shape, or form.
Even OS X, much touted for its ease of use, regularly reduces the least computer-literate of my Mac-using friends almost to tears as she struggles to make it do what she wants. (Which is sometimes something as simple as deleting a file from the desktop -- yes, really!)
Windows, and standard desktop apps like Microsoft Office, are even less intuitive: people who've been using them regularly for over a decade still come to me with basic questions like "why can't I change the colour of this text" or "how do I add a line to this table". (Both those from the last week!)
Increasing Linux usage on the desktop is nothing to do with making it more "intuitive". Even if it were 100 times more intuitive than OS X, it would still not be intuitive enough. What is needed is readily-available human support, either professional like the guys at an Apple Store, or informal like the neighbourhood kid who knows all about Windows. Online forums don't cut it: people who aren't comfortable using computers certainly aren't happy getting support via the blasted things! We need there to be enough real live people out there, willing and able to provide personal support for Linux users. Only then will average people begin to consider Linux an acceptable option.
OS X only works out of the box if all you want is what comes in the box.
I personally want my OS to recognise all the keys on my keyboard. OS X doesn't. Windows doesn't. And Linux didn't, except that in the case of Linux I was easily able to fix that with a little xkb tweaking.
Maybe when I get old I'll be less insistent on having all my hardware working properly, but right now I'm more than willing to handle the odd Linux inconvenience in exchange for a computer that gives me what I want, the way I want it.
In my opinion Linux-based distros are lacking the commercial software like Photoshop.
Photoshop CS and Photoshop CS2 run almost perfectly in any Linux distribution that provides an up-to-date WINE. CS3 doesn't work yet, but how many of the people complaining about the lack of Photoshop are actually using CS3?
As far as Compiz goes, I had to apt-get the compiz config panel so I could tweak the hell out of my setup.
No, you had to install it. However, you didn't have to use apt-get in a CLI to do that; you could simply have gone to your Applications menu, clicked on "Add/Remove...", selected "All Open Source applications", searched for "compiz", and clicked on the first option in the list. 100% GUI.
A quick browse through TFA completely fails to inform me what the "Dragon" and "Hydra" in question actually are, other than that "Dragon" is something or other traditional and "Hydra" is some kind of ZOMG amazing new silver bullet.
Anyone who understands the buzzwords care to cut the crap and explain what this is actually all about?
Slashdot Mirror
Or did your DnD campaigns really involve grinding for 60 levels, then raiding the same dungeon -- and killing the same villain! -- possibly hundreds of times, in order to collect a full set of epic gear?
If the first amendment gave you an unlimited right to repeat other people's speech without their permission, then the constitution would be self-contradictory, since it also explicitly gives Congress the power to create IP laws.
Therefore, either the constitution is fundamentally flawed, or -- more likely, perhaps? -- the first amendment does not automatically give you the right to exchange information that Congress has decided belongs to someone else. However much that information may want to be free.
Now, take a close look at the current trends in the price of oil, and scan the news stories about airline share prices plummeting. Is air travel really going to stay so competitive in the long term? Only time will tell -- but if oil prices continue to rise, then the folks who had the guts to take a gamble on alternative transport solutions are going to make a killing.
Unfortunately, it wasn't fun. Admiring the sunlight filtering through the leaves was very nice, but hardly exciting. Cutting down trees with a machine gun is fun for a few minutes at most. The AI was lacklustre, the plot derivative, the combat uninspired, the characters cliched, the interface clunky, and the level design nonexistent. I yawned through the demo, admired the quality of the game engine, and promptly deleted the whole thing and went back to Portal.
Size is meaningless as a metric unless you tell us what scale you're using and how it's calibrated.
That's why, before I take my car to be fixed, I'm sure to ask around people I know to get recommendations. These people then tell me which mechanics they trust and which they don't: in other words, they give me free advice for what you would presumably describe as "no apparent reason". And I trust them precisely because of this: because nobody is paying them to say anything, they have nothing to gain by lying.
But that's irrelevant: in the real world, language is defined by the way people actually use it, not by the way religious leaders decree it should be used -- and in real-world usage, Linux is the operating system and GNU is an esoteric collection of scary command-line utilities.
They don't want anyone to profit from the free version.
It would be entirely possible for someone to use a hypothetical GPL version to make a commercial game; they would have to distribute the full source code to the game engine, of course, but the artwork, soundtrack, gameplay, etc could all remain non-free, so the game as a whole would be commercially viable.
Of course, it's true that only a tiny minority of commercial developers would be interested in that kind of business model, so maybe the open-source game development community should get together and petition Havok to go the extra mile. Maybe they don't understand the protections the GPL would give them, or just hadn't thought of it. It can't hurt to ask, right?
In this instance, the clause you identify as "restrictive", I see as necessary to protect my freedom. If I download a piece of GPL-licensed software, I know that I have the right to use it in any situation, even commercially. To protect that, the license absolutely must prohibit the inclusion of anything like this Havok code that may not be used commercially, because allowing that restriction to be added to GPL'd software would instantly take away that guaranteed freedom to use GPL'd code commercially.
Virtual Earth is, and always will be, Windows-only.
Google Earth (the application) is cross-platform, so it's likely their plugin will become available cross-platform in due course.
The problem with GIMP is not so much that it's difficult to learn, as that it really, truly, has a bad interface for many purposes. And, no, I'm not talking about things like drawing a circle by selecting a circular region and then stroking it: that's weird if you're used to having a dedicated circle-drawing tool, but once you figure out the GIMP way it's just as quick and easy. I'm talking about fundamental limitations like only being able to operate on one layer at a time, that actually make hard things harder than they need to be, because something that would be quick, easy, and intuitive in Adobe Photoshop or Corel PhotoPaint can only be done in GIMP either by tedious repitition, or by writing your own plugin to automate the tedious repitition.
(Either that, or the documentation is such garbage that it makes possible things look impossible, which is exactly the opposite of what documentation should do.)
Hence "second most well-known". As in, less well-known than YACC and its clones, but better-known than any of the other million parser generators.
I've no idea whether that's true, of course.
You see the same sort of thing every day on a smaller scale with motoring offences: people generally get away with driving without a license, or without insurance, or without an MOT, until they get caught speeding or parking illegally. Just because this particular case happens to involve terrorism charges and immigration violations doesn't make it any less natural a course of events.No, it's not a coincidence at all, but nor is it a conspiracy.
(FWIW, I happen to oppose the idea that it should be illegal to own "terrorist manuals" or visit "extremist websites" or anything else that smacks of thoughtcrime. But I also oppose kneejerk anti-government reactions.)
People espouse extreme views because it's the only way their voices are likely to be heard, and because they find the views being held by their opponents so intolerable that they are compelled to move as far in the opposite direction as possible. Perhaps if the entertainment industry started to support sensible IP laws, you'd see Slashdotters also start moving towards the sane middle ground.The saner Slashdotters have been proposing a wide range of sensible solutions for a long time -- micropayments for region-free, DRM-free, P2P-backed downloads is what I currently favour, though there are plenty of competing proposals. (Some of the braver entertainment companies are finally getting round to testing these saner ideas, moves which have been cautiously welcomed on Slashdot.)
Meanwhile, the entertainment industry has spent most of the same time period flogging the legally-enforced-DRM horse. It's a little unfair to accuse Slashdot alone of zealotry...
Indeed, the people who actually engage in copying DVDs invariably remove the region coding at the same time. Region coding only affects people who are simply trying to play back legitimately purchased goods: it is completely irrelevant to anyone who is using illegal copies.
The way to use Linux in a company is to get Linux administration training first, after which you will know how to install drivers and how to connect it to a network. Amazingly enough, if you'd done it properly, you wouldn't have had such big problems! Instead, you chose to jump in blindly, and wound up wasting your time and your company's money. The outcome would have been the same whatever OS you'd been playing with -- even a new version of Windows. You should count yourself lucky you still have a job, and if you'd been fired it would certainly not have been the fault of Linux.
Because no computing platform is "intuitive" in any way, shape, or form.
Even OS X, much touted for its ease of use, regularly reduces the least computer-literate of my Mac-using friends almost to tears as she struggles to make it do what she wants. (Which is sometimes something as simple as deleting a file from the desktop -- yes, really!)
Windows, and standard desktop apps like Microsoft Office, are even less intuitive: people who've been using them regularly for over a decade still come to me with basic questions like "why can't I change the colour of this text" or "how do I add a line to this table". (Both those from the last week!)
Increasing Linux usage on the desktop is nothing to do with making it more "intuitive". Even if it were 100 times more intuitive than OS X, it would still not be intuitive enough. What is needed is readily-available human support, either professional like the guys at an Apple Store, or informal like the neighbourhood kid who knows all about Windows. Online forums don't cut it: people who aren't comfortable using computers certainly aren't happy getting support via the blasted things! We need there to be enough real live people out there, willing and able to provide personal support for Linux users. Only then will average people begin to consider Linux an acceptable option.
OS X only works out of the box if all you want is what comes in the box.
I personally want my OS to recognise all the keys on my keyboard. OS X doesn't. Windows doesn't. And Linux didn't, except that in the case of Linux I was easily able to fix that with a little xkb tweaking.
Maybe when I get old I'll be less insistent on having all my hardware working properly, but right now I'm more than willing to handle the odd Linux inconvenience in exchange for a computer that gives me what I want, the way I want it.
A quick browse through TFA completely fails to inform me what the "Dragon" and "Hydra" in question actually are, other than that "Dragon" is something or other traditional and "Hydra" is some kind of ZOMG amazing new silver bullet.
Anyone who understands the buzzwords care to cut the crap and explain what this is actually all about?