Because we love our children. We work hard to pay for their upbringing and education and then, when we die, we hand to them what we have created with the sweat of our brow.
Speak for yourself. Many people believe that what is right and proper is to work hard to pay for your children's education and upbringing so that they will be able to support themselves by the sweat of their own brows, without having to rely on their parents providing for them.
My parents are, I am glad to say, still alive and healthy. But I want them to spend their remaining money on themselves. I don't want them to save a single penny of it for me to inherit; I would be ashamed to receive any significant inheritance. Their responsibility to me ended when I graduated from university and got a well-paid job, and it is now my responsibility to earn my own wealth, instead of expecting to benefit from an inheritance I never did a thing to deserve.
Coming between a parent and their children is something we - rightly - reject on an emotional level.
Do you mean "children" as in minors, or "children" as in offspring? Because I think you are trying to use the latter semantically but with the emotional force of the former, which is a clever but dishonest rhetorical trick.
I share your reaction to the prospect of taking away parents' wealth while they are still struggling to pay for their children's education. But the situation changes completely when those children cease to be dependents. Far fewer people have any objection to the concept that grown adults, who should be working to support children of their own, might be prevented from receiving wealth that they have not personally done a stroke of work to earn. Please be clearer in your statements as to what you are actually arguing.
If I had an ancestor who built a house and my family lived in it for six hundred years, would it be wrong for my family to continue to benefit from it after such a long time? so that the house should now be in the public domain?
The concept of a "public domain" is completely irrelevant to physical objects. Certainly I see no reason why people should be forbidden to build houses that look like your house. Equally, it is quite obvious that you have the right to keep other people from living in your house without your permission.
Now let's apply that to Shakespeare in an intellectually honest manner, by comparing like with like and physical objects with physical objects.
If a 16th-century ancestor of mine had bought a copy of a new Shakespeare play, then obviously he could have passed that on to his children, and it might have become my property, and my family could continue to own it and to benefit from hiring it out to exhibitions and the like forever. The fact that the play printed in it had long ago entered the public domain, the fact that anyone who merely wanted to read or perform the play could download the text from the internet and do whatever they liked, would in no way detract from the benefits I would gain from owning a copy. The fact that all Shakespeare's works are in the public domain has not caused 16th-century copies to lose a penny of their value!
And, guess what? It's just the same with 20th-century music. Do you seriously think that the market value of an original vinyl recording of an early Beatles song would be affected in the slightest by the audio of the recording in question entering the public domain?
Funny how your argument stops working as soon as you stop comparing apples and oranges, isn't it?
The important issue is if the British can still keep all their stolen artifacts.
We will, naturally, return them just as soon as Egypt produces the claim ticket we gave it when it deposited them in our museums for safe-keeping. It's hardly our fault if it's been lost. Sorry, Egypt - no ticket, no ancient artefacts. Can't go breaking the rules for any old ancient civilisation, it's more than my job's worth...
(Seriously, I'm not sure why you're singling out Britain here; many other countries have similar issues, with the USA in particular coming under heavy criticism recently over stolen artefacts in the Getty; and with the exception of a handful of controversial cases like the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles, Britain's record for returning cultural items that have been proven to have been stolen is not noticably worse than anyone else's.)
RISC OS had sub-pixel anti-aliasing of fonts back in 1990.
No, the technology in RISC OS was a totally different thing. That was subpixel positioning -- i.e. individual letters were not forced to line up with the nearest pixel, which improved font spacing at the expense of text clarity. However, the actual antialiasing still used only whole pixels - there was no improvement to apparent horizontal resolution. That wasn't limited to RISC OS; exactly the same technique was also used in various Adobe products at roughly the same time.
Subpixel rendering, in the sense of using partial pixels to increase the apparent horizontal resolution, was never featured in 1990s RISC OS. It was used briefly with the Apple II in the 1980s, then appears to have essentially died out until Microsoft rediscovered it.
How quickly they forget that ClearType, the method as Microsoft describes it, is a direct rip-off of the font smoothing technology Apple came up with for using Apple II's on (comparatively) lo-res colour television displays in the mid-1980's.
Hardly. Firstly, Apple's technology was not particularly used for font smoothing - it was merely a way of simulating a higher horizontal resolution monochrome display. Secondly, it was a dead-end technology: nobody else used it, even Apple ditched it after the Apple II, because nobody at Apple could see any use for it once computers were capable of displaying higher resolution images without resorting to subpixel hacks (and once the prevalence of multicolour displays meant that it was no longer easily possible to apply subpixel rendering to an entire screen).
Somehow, all the best "innovators" at Apple failed to realise that their old technology would be useful for making text more readable. Until Microsoft rediscovered it and invented a way to make it useful on modern computers, that is! (At which point Apple quietly copied the idea. You can bet that if they'd actually invented it themselves, they would have trumpeted it from the rooftops as an amazing innovation...)
Resurrecting a dead-end technology, applying it to a new field in a rather different context, and improving it to remove its major flaws (IIRC it was Microsoft that invented the use of a low-pass filter to reduce the ugly colour fringing that characterises naive implementations), most certainly does count as innovation in my book. The advance of technology has always consisted of taking something old and improving it to create something new. Why should that suddenly stop counting as innovation just because it's Microsoft doing it?
A trivial search on the net shows that the 'ClearType' is nothing more that a rehash of the same generic fonts available to all.
It would be nice if the link you included actually supported your claim in any way whatsoever. Unfortunately it doesn't.
The link you included is to a discussion of the (admittedly confusingly-named) Cleartype fonts, which are a set of original typefaces that will be shipped with Vista. The name comes from the fact that they were designed specifically to take advantage of Cleartype itself. Cleartype is Microsoft's widely imitated font rendering technology -- e.g. Apple ripped it off in OS X 10.2, most Linux desktops now use a very poor imitation of it, Adobe has their own ripoff, etc.
You will see people claim it's just a ripoff of a technique used on the Apple II, but that's like saying that the automobile is just a ripoff of horse-drawn wagons. It's a genuinely innovative improvement of a technology that everyone thought had been obsoleted by multi-colour high-resolution monitors, until Microsoft invented a way of using it on modern computers.
By the way, they aren't in any way a "rehash" of any sort of "generic" fonts - they are all original typefaces, created by some excellent professional type designers. (For an example of an actual rehash of a font that could actually be described as generic, see Helvetica Neue, bundled with OS X.)
I guess I am the only person that thinks Microsoft's perpetuation of "Proud Ignorance" is troubling.
I find it rather ironic that this was posted by someone who appears to be proud of his own ignorance.
Apple's market-share statistics do not support this claim. Outside the reality distortion field, we find that today's iPod listeners are in fact tomorrow's contented users of iTunes for Windows.
Steam could become the loser in all of this, if an independent, but similar product is available from a third party, instead of a competitor.
I'm not sure that's really a problem, though, except maybe for Valve. Steam going independent might make Steam win, but competition in the market would mean that I would win.
Which company creates the best product is irrelevant -- I've had good experiences with Steam, but if someone else can produce something better, something that encourages more innovation from independent developers while also providing better service for players, then I want that someone else to succeed. I don't want Steam to become a de-facto monopoly that no startup can challenge.
So you can have the most visually beautiful thing in the world but no gamer is going to buy it if it's not really a game (or has poor gameplay)
And yet DVDs still sell rather well, despite having no gameplay whatsoever and being entirely about sitting passively staring at a story unfold in front of you. Seems there are actually quite a lot of people who rather enjoy the combination of story and visuals, and aren't particularly fussed about getting to mash buttons or push crates. So why shouldn't there be room in the market for titles that are more interactive than movies but less demanding on the reflexes than games?
The difference is that the creation of an artistic work is a more long-term investment: you pick up garbage, you get paid for it, but if you create an artistic work there is no money to be seen until you have invested a huge amount in producing a complete work, banking on the hope that people will like it enough when you're done to support you while you work on the next one(s).
You seem to have a very distorted, rosy-eyed view of what art and copyright are about. I hold a number of copyrights for works I like to think of as artistic. In every case I knew in advance roughly how much money I would see and exactly when it would arrive; I invested relatively little in producing the complete works, and there was no element of chance involved because my clients were contractually obliged to pay me whether they liked the work or not. And for every starving artist slaving away in a garret on his Incredible Masterpiece, there are thousands upon thousands of hacks like me working to commission on small-scale projects. Projects where the work is so specific that our copyrights hardly benefit us because there's nobody but the client to sell to; projects where there are no royalties to be had. It hardly bothers me, for one. Why should I care? I do the work, I'm paid for it, just like anyone else.
Nor does this cease to apply in the realm of high art. Shakespeare was just a scriptwriter getting paid to produce plays for one troupe of actors; his works were widely pirated, but that didn't seem to cause him to starve or stop creating. What about paintings? Well, I don't think Michaelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel on the off-chance that someone would like it enough to buy it and install it in their palace, and I doubt his descendants got paid much in the way of royalties for it.
Sorry, I'm just not seeing any real connection between the creation of great works of art and the existence of posthumous copyright...
How is killing off someone's pet project that they've put a lot of effort into not evil???
By that measure, Superman is the most evil fictional character ever. He's always killing off people's pet projects that they've put a lot of effort into.
each of the 56100 dots on that piece of paper could be in 256 * 65536 = 16777216 states
Um, no. Each dot is going to be either cyan, magenta, yellow, or black. Laser and injket printers produce multicolour output by dithering, not by mixing inks, and the "dpi" rating of the printer refers to the dots used when dithering, not to the equivalent of screen pixels.
A wierd rule, bieng niether accurate nor sufficeint as a guide to spelling. I wish the people who came up with these rhymes would check thier facts more sceintifically.
The American version softens the point, making it pretty useless.
Cue someone trying to explain that the American version makes sense, honest, because it's sarcastic, see. This probably isn't true, but it makes people who use the illogical version feel better. (But really, does it have to be logical? Everyone knows what it means. It doesn't have to be logical to be meaningful.)
As for "is is", I used to think that was an Americanism, but I do hear it in Britain too, so it certainly isn't geographically limited. I believe Language Log has covered it a few times, which should contain some insights if anyone cares, but I can't be bothered to search their archives right now.
Of course there is also the possibility, that out of all towns where a party got one vote, there was one where the guy voting for himself accidentally pushed the wrong button, without noticing it. That actually seems more likely than a voting machine malfunction.
Which would raise a different question: how obvious was the feedback the machine gave to show him which option he'd selected? A voting machine that makes it easy to vote for someone you don't support is just as broken as a voting machine that accidentally adds correctly-cast votes to the wrong total.
When my grandmother goes out to take part in our democracy, I want to be sure that she's going to know that her vote went to the candidate she set out to vote for. Luckily, I live in Britain, where we still use hand-counted paper ballots, and that gives me confidence that she will be able to see with her own eyes exactly which box she's marked. Our paper ballots are simple, not multi-page nightmares with umpteen different votes to make, so there is no risk of confusion. There is, of course, a risk that due to human error (or human malignancy) the ballots might be miscounted... but because they are there as physical objects, they can be recounted easily. There is a paper trail. We are counting actual votes, not taking a machine's word for it.
No system is perfect, but I fail to see how replacing a simple system with a significantly more complex and expensive system that isn't actually any more reliable is an improvement.
In some way Sony is responsible. They could license units to other companies.
How would that help? I thought the reason there were so few PS3s was that there weren't enough parts for Sony to use, not that Sony didn't have enough people to assemble them. Licensing the design would surely only mean that there were several companies competing for the scarce supply of Blu-Ray drives, so instead of 80,000 Sony PS3s you'd have 80,000 PS3s with a variety of different brands.
How is intellectual property stopping any company from releasing a game console that competes with the PS3?
That depends on your definition of "compete". Clearly in one sense the XBox 360 and the Wii both compete with the PS3, and no IP law is going to affect that. However, I suspect the poster was thinking of competing with the PS3 in the PS3-game-playing market, rather than just the entertainment-console market.
In the context of trying to build a competing platform for people to play PS3 games on, I suspect that IP law probably would come into play. Sony likely has patents on key parts of the PS3 design that would make it illegal for anyone to try to build a clone; even if they don't, or even if it was possible to implement the design in a way that avoided infringing any patents, Sony could probably use copyright law to attack anyone attempting to reverse-engineer the PS3, and they could probably use trademark law to prevent competitors from claiming to be PS3-compatible.
It's happened twice, with Sony suing the makers of Playstation emulation software: Sony vs Connectix, Sony vs Bleem LLC. Note that Sony didn't actually have to win either case in court in order to achieve their goal of removing the competing products from the market -- they could afford simply to buy out the competition, or to litigate it into the ground.
Whether this situation is good or bad depends on your point of view: should governments give Sony a monopoly on running software for the system Sony invested a lot of money to design and manufacture, or should the free market permit anyone to sell products for running that software? Clearly the GP thinks there should be a level playing field, while I suspect you probably fall into the camp of those who think it is right and proper that Sony should be given the power to protect their investment.
Actually, in Zimbabwe, you'll now find people starving around the land that formerly was feeding the populace quite successfully. The Capitalist farmers were thrown off the land by the 'socialist' government who handed the land over to incompetent thugs who are incapable of operating an efficient farm.
While it's true that the land "reforms" in Zimbabwe have crippled the Zimbabwean economy and led to massive food shortages, I'm not convinced that has much to do with capitalism and socialism.
I may be misremembering things here, but my understanding is that the approach in Zimbabwe was to take the land from one set of private owners and give it to another set of private owners. It was an attempt to redistribute private wealth, not an attempt to nationalise agriculture or to take private wealth and make it public, and the ideology that motivated it was anti-colonialist ("African land should belong to ethnic Africans, and the whites can go back where they came from if they don't like it"), not economic.
Now that Gnucash is written in GTK2, however, I expect a Windows port?
There are some free-as-in-RMS alternatives that run fine in Windows.
I started out running GnuCash on Linux, but now that I spend most of my time in Windows I've switched to jGnash, a Java-based package that's based on the same principles. It's not as robust or feature-complete as GnuCash, but it does what I need, and it's far less of a pain than fiddling with X11.
Where Halo was a very good game (and worthy of its hype) was in a 16 player lan game. Certainly PC gamers had large lan-parties for years before Halo was released, but a lan party that size was quite difficult to set up and there were (always) tons of technical problems. To get a Halo lan game to work you just needed 4 people with a reasonable sized TV (hopefully over 27 inches), and 4 consoles (either owned or rented) a router and some cables. Um, it sounds like you're describing how to make a four-player Halo lan game work, so I'm not sure what that has to do with the difficulty of setting up a 16-player PC lan part. All you need for a four-player PC lan game is, uh, four PCs, a router, and some cables.
How easy was it to set up a 16-player Halo lan game? I'm guessing you need at least 4 large TVs, for a start.
Thief is a little borderline, yes. Not because it's a sneaking game, but because there are no firearms.
What do firearms have to do with it? You spend half your time in Thief shooting various kinds of things with various kinds of arrow. I'd say a first person game where you spend a lot of time shooting could fairly be described as a first-person shooter.
Besides, if a fire arrow isn't a firearm, I'd like to know what is.:P
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Because we love our children. We work hard to pay for their upbringing and education and then, when we die, we hand to them what we have created with the sweat of our brow.
Speak for yourself. Many people believe that what is right and proper is to work hard to pay for your children's education and upbringing so that they will be able to support themselves by the sweat of their own brows, without having to rely on their parents providing for them.
My parents are, I am glad to say, still alive and healthy. But I want them to spend their remaining money on themselves. I don't want them to save a single penny of it for me to inherit; I would be ashamed to receive any significant inheritance. Their responsibility to me ended when I graduated from university and got a well-paid job, and it is now my responsibility to earn my own wealth, instead of expecting to benefit from an inheritance I never did a thing to deserve.
Coming between a parent and their children is something we - rightly - reject on an emotional level.
Do you mean "children" as in minors, or "children" as in offspring? Because I think you are trying to use the latter semantically but with the emotional force of the former, which is a clever but dishonest rhetorical trick.
I share your reaction to the prospect of taking away parents' wealth while they are still struggling to pay for their children's education. But the situation changes completely when those children cease to be dependents. Far fewer people have any objection to the concept that grown adults, who should be working to support children of their own, might be prevented from receiving wealth that they have not personally done a stroke of work to earn. Please be clearer in your statements as to what you are actually arguing.
If I had an ancestor who built a house and my family lived in it for six hundred years, would it be wrong for my family to continue to benefit from it after such a long time? so that the house should now be in the public domain?
The concept of a "public domain" is completely irrelevant to physical objects. Certainly I see no reason why people should be forbidden to build houses that look like your house. Equally, it is quite obvious that you have the right to keep other people from living in your house without your permission.
Now let's apply that to Shakespeare in an intellectually honest manner, by comparing like with like and physical objects with physical objects.
If a 16th-century ancestor of mine had bought a copy of a new Shakespeare play, then obviously he could have passed that on to his children, and it might have become my property, and my family could continue to own it and to benefit from hiring it out to exhibitions and the like forever. The fact that the play printed in it had long ago entered the public domain, the fact that anyone who merely wanted to read or perform the play could download the text from the internet and do whatever they liked, would in no way detract from the benefits I would gain from owning a copy. The fact that all Shakespeare's works are in the public domain has not caused 16th-century copies to lose a penny of their value!
And, guess what? It's just the same with 20th-century music. Do you seriously think that the market value of an original vinyl recording of an early Beatles song would be affected in the slightest by the audio of the recording in question entering the public domain?
Funny how your argument stops working as soon as you stop comparing apples and oranges, isn't it?
Google has a near-monopoly on web searches
According to this, Google has about 45% of the market. Since when was less than half equivalent to "a near-monopoly"?
The important issue is if the British can still keep all their stolen artifacts.
We will, naturally, return them just as soon as Egypt produces the claim ticket we gave it when it deposited them in our museums for safe-keeping. It's hardly our fault if it's been lost. Sorry, Egypt - no ticket, no ancient artefacts. Can't go breaking the rules for any old ancient civilisation, it's more than my job's worth...
(Seriously, I'm not sure why you're singling out Britain here; many other countries have similar issues, with the USA in particular coming under heavy criticism recently over stolen artefacts in the Getty; and with the exception of a handful of controversial cases like the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles, Britain's record for returning cultural items that have been proven to have been stolen is not noticably worse than anyone else's.)
RISC OS had sub-pixel anti-aliasing of fonts back in 1990.
No, the technology in RISC OS was a totally different thing. That was subpixel positioning -- i.e. individual letters were not forced to line up with the nearest pixel, which improved font spacing at the expense of text clarity. However, the actual antialiasing still used only whole pixels - there was no improvement to apparent horizontal resolution. That wasn't limited to RISC OS; exactly the same technique was also used in various Adobe products at roughly the same time.
Subpixel rendering, in the sense of using partial pixels to increase the apparent horizontal resolution, was never featured in 1990s RISC OS. It was used briefly with the Apple II in the 1980s, then appears to have essentially died out until Microsoft rediscovered it.
How quickly they forget that ClearType, the method as Microsoft describes it, is a direct rip-off of the font smoothing technology Apple came up with for using Apple II's on (comparatively) lo-res colour television displays in the mid-1980's.
Hardly. Firstly, Apple's technology was not particularly used for font smoothing - it was merely a way of simulating a higher horizontal resolution monochrome display. Secondly, it was a dead-end technology: nobody else used it, even Apple ditched it after the Apple II, because nobody at Apple could see any use for it once computers were capable of displaying higher resolution images without resorting to subpixel hacks (and once the prevalence of multicolour displays meant that it was no longer easily possible to apply subpixel rendering to an entire screen).
Somehow, all the best "innovators" at Apple failed to realise that their old technology would be useful for making text more readable. Until Microsoft rediscovered it and invented a way to make it useful on modern computers, that is! (At which point Apple quietly copied the idea. You can bet that if they'd actually invented it themselves, they would have trumpeted it from the rooftops as an amazing innovation...)
Resurrecting a dead-end technology, applying it to a new field in a rather different context, and improving it to remove its major flaws (IIRC it was Microsoft that invented the use of a low-pass filter to reduce the ugly colour fringing that characterises naive implementations), most certainly does count as innovation in my book. The advance of technology has always consisted of taking something old and improving it to create something new. Why should that suddenly stop counting as innovation just because it's Microsoft doing it?
A trivial search on the net shows that the 'ClearType' is nothing more that a rehash of the same generic fonts available to all.
It would be nice if the link you included actually supported your claim in any way whatsoever. Unfortunately it doesn't.
The link you included is to a discussion of the (admittedly confusingly-named) Cleartype fonts, which are a set of original typefaces that will be shipped with Vista. The name comes from the fact that they were designed specifically to take advantage of Cleartype itself. Cleartype is Microsoft's widely imitated font rendering technology -- e.g. Apple ripped it off in OS X 10.2, most Linux desktops now use a very poor imitation of it, Adobe has their own ripoff, etc.
You will see people claim it's just a ripoff of a technique used on the Apple II, but that's like saying that the automobile is just a ripoff of horse-drawn wagons. It's a genuinely innovative improvement of a technology that everyone thought had been obsoleted by multi-colour high-resolution monitors, until Microsoft invented a way of using it on modern computers.
By the way, they aren't in any way a "rehash" of any sort of "generic" fonts - they are all original typefaces, created by some excellent professional type designers. (For an example of an actual rehash of a font that could actually be described as generic, see Helvetica Neue, bundled with OS X.)
I guess I am the only person that thinks Microsoft's perpetuation of "Proud Ignorance" is troubling.
I find it rather ironic that this was posted by someone who appears to be proud of his own ignorance.
Today's iPod listener are tomorrow's Mac owners.
Apple's market-share statistics do not support this claim. Outside the reality distortion field, we find that today's iPod listeners are in fact tomorrow's contented users of iTunes for Windows.
I'm not sure that's really a problem, though, except maybe for Valve. Steam going independent might make Steam win, but competition in the market would mean that I would win.
Which company creates the best product is irrelevant -- I've had good experiences with Steam, but if someone else can produce something better, something that encourages more innovation from independent developers while also providing better service for players, then I want that someone else to succeed. I don't want Steam to become a de-facto monopoly that no startup can challenge.
And yet DVDs still sell rather well, despite having no gameplay whatsoever and being entirely about sitting passively staring at a story unfold in front of you. Seems there are actually quite a lot of people who rather enjoy the combination of story and visuals, and aren't particularly fussed about getting to mash buttons or push crates. So why shouldn't there be room in the market for titles that are more interactive than movies but less demanding on the reflexes than games?
Nor does this cease to apply in the realm of high art. Shakespeare was just a scriptwriter getting paid to produce plays for one troupe of actors; his works were widely pirated, but that didn't seem to cause him to starve or stop creating. What about paintings? Well, I don't think Michaelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel on the off-chance that someone would like it enough to buy it and install it in their palace, and I doubt his descendants got paid much in the way of royalties for it.
Sorry, I'm just not seeing any real connection between the creation of great works of art and the existence of posthumous copyright...
If a builder applied his intellectual capacity to build you a set of stairs, do you owe him royalties every time you ascend or decend those stairs?
No, you don't. Nor do you owe an author a royalty every time you read a book.
Do you pay your auto mechanic a license fee every time you put your car into gear?
No, you don't. Nor do you pay musicians royalties every time you listen to a CD in your car.
Any more bad analogies where those came from?
How is killing off someone's pet project that they've put a lot of effort into not evil???
By that measure, Superman is the most evil fictional character ever. He's always killing off people's pet projects that they've put a lot of effort into.
each of the 56100 dots on that piece of paper could be in 256 * 65536 = 16777216 states
Um, no. Each dot is going to be either cyan, magenta, yellow, or black. Laser and injket printers produce multicolour output by dithering, not by mixing inks, and the "dpi" rating of the printer refers to the dots used when dithering, not to the equivalent of screen pixels.
i before e except after c
A wierd rule, bieng niether accurate nor sufficeint as a guide to spelling. I wish the people who came up with these rhymes would check thier facts more sceintifically.
The American version softens the point, making it pretty useless.
Cue someone trying to explain that the American version makes sense, honest, because it's sarcastic, see. This probably isn't true, but it makes people who use the illogical version feel better. (But really, does it have to be logical? Everyone knows what it means. It doesn't have to be logical to be meaningful.)
As for "is is", I used to think that was an Americanism, but I do hear it in Britain too, so it certainly isn't geographically limited. I believe Language Log has covered it a few times, which should contain some insights if anyone cares, but I can't be bothered to search their archives right now.
Of course there is also the possibility, that out of all towns where a party got one vote, there was one where the guy voting for himself accidentally pushed the wrong button, without noticing it. That actually seems more likely than a voting machine malfunction.
Which would raise a different question: how obvious was the feedback the machine gave to show him which option he'd selected? A voting machine that makes it easy to vote for someone you don't support is just as broken as a voting machine that accidentally adds correctly-cast votes to the wrong total.
When my grandmother goes out to take part in our democracy, I want to be sure that she's going to know that her vote went to the candidate she set out to vote for. Luckily, I live in Britain, where we still use hand-counted paper ballots, and that gives me confidence that she will be able to see with her own eyes exactly which box she's marked. Our paper ballots are simple, not multi-page nightmares with umpteen different votes to make, so there is no risk of confusion. There is, of course, a risk that due to human error (or human malignancy) the ballots might be miscounted... but because they are there as physical objects, they can be recounted easily. There is a paper trail. We are counting actual votes, not taking a machine's word for it.
No system is perfect, but I fail to see how replacing a simple system with a significantly more complex and expensive system that isn't actually any more reliable is an improvement.
In some way Sony is responsible. They could license units to other companies.
How would that help? I thought the reason there were so few PS3s was that there weren't enough parts for Sony to use, not that Sony didn't have enough people to assemble them. Licensing the design would surely only mean that there were several companies competing for the scarce supply of Blu-Ray drives, so instead of 80,000 Sony PS3s you'd have 80,000 PS3s with a variety of different brands.
Am I missing something here?
How is intellectual property stopping any company from releasing a game console that competes with the PS3?
That depends on your definition of "compete". Clearly in one sense the XBox 360 and the Wii both compete with the PS3, and no IP law is going to affect that. However, I suspect the poster was thinking of competing with the PS3 in the PS3-game-playing market, rather than just the entertainment-console market.
In the context of trying to build a competing platform for people to play PS3 games on, I suspect that IP law probably would come into play. Sony likely has patents on key parts of the PS3 design that would make it illegal for anyone to try to build a clone; even if they don't, or even if it was possible to implement the design in a way that avoided infringing any patents, Sony could probably use copyright law to attack anyone attempting to reverse-engineer the PS3, and they could probably use trademark law to prevent competitors from claiming to be PS3-compatible.
It's happened twice, with Sony suing the makers of Playstation emulation software: Sony vs Connectix, Sony vs Bleem LLC. Note that Sony didn't actually have to win either case in court in order to achieve their goal of removing the competing products from the market -- they could afford simply to buy out the competition, or to litigate it into the ground.
Whether this situation is good or bad depends on your point of view: should governments give Sony a monopoly on running software for the system Sony invested a lot of money to design and manufacture, or should the free market permit anyone to sell products for running that software? Clearly the GP thinks there should be a level playing field, while I suspect you probably fall into the camp of those who think it is right and proper that Sony should be given the power to protect their investment.
Actually, in Zimbabwe, you'll now find people starving around the land that formerly was feeding the populace quite successfully. The Capitalist farmers were thrown off the land by the 'socialist' government who handed the land over to incompetent thugs who are incapable of operating an efficient farm.
While it's true that the land "reforms" in Zimbabwe have crippled the Zimbabwean economy and led to massive food shortages, I'm not convinced that has much to do with capitalism and socialism.
I may be misremembering things here, but my understanding is that the approach in Zimbabwe was to take the land from one set of private owners and give it to another set of private owners. It was an attempt to redistribute private wealth, not an attempt to nationalise agriculture or to take private wealth and make it public, and the ideology that motivated it was anti-colonialist ("African land should belong to ethnic Africans, and the whites can go back where they came from if they don't like it"), not economic.
I like to fire up Emacs and just start producing, [...] not having to use some bloated solutions
Um...
Now that Gnucash is written in GTK2, however, I expect a Windows port?
There are some free-as-in-RMS alternatives that run fine in Windows.
I started out running GnuCash on Linux, but now that I spend most of my time in Windows I've switched to jGnash, a Java-based package that's based on the same principles. It's not as robust or feature-complete as GnuCash, but it does what I need, and it's far less of a pain than fiddling with X11.
didn't Xp allow you to install on 2 PC's (Desktop / Laptop).
No, it didn't.
"You may install, use, access, display and run one copy of the Software on a single computer" (emphasis mine).
Where Halo was a very good game (and worthy of its hype) was in a 16 player lan game. Certainly PC gamers had large lan-parties for years before Halo was released, but a lan party that size was quite difficult to set up and there were (always) tons of technical problems. To get a Halo lan game to work you just needed 4 people with a reasonable sized TV (hopefully over 27 inches), and 4 consoles (either owned or rented) a router and some cables.
Um, it sounds like you're describing how to make a four-player Halo lan game work, so I'm not sure what that has to do with the difficulty of setting up a 16-player PC lan part. All you need for a four-player PC lan game is, uh, four PCs, a router, and some cables.
How easy was it to set up a 16-player Halo lan game? I'm guessing you need at least 4 large TVs, for a start.
Thief is a little borderline, yes. Not because it's a sneaking game, but because there are no firearms.
:P
What do firearms have to do with it? You spend half your time in Thief shooting various kinds of things with various kinds of arrow. I'd say a first person game where you spend a lot of time shooting could fairly be described as a first-person shooter.
Besides, if a fire arrow isn't a firearm, I'd like to know what is.