And which of these will actually get any benefit from this? Not the public. None of the above either, who will be dead
Suppose you start a business. Suppose it becomes a successful business, and you become rich. Suppose now you die.
Should the state immediately confiscate your business, and distribute its value to the general public, so that your heirs don't benefit at all from your life's work?
Well, it's quite a reasonable suggestion, isn't it? I mean, it won't hurt you. You'll be dead. And why should your heirs get something they didn't work to produce? Surely having your business snatched out of their grieving hands will merely incentivise them to start their own businesses and benefit society even more?
Funnily enough, fewer people seem to think that a reasonable proposal than snatching artists' property at, or even before, their deaths.
I think he means, "What right do you have to complain you are not getting MORE then you put in".
If you don't get more than you put in, you don't eat. This is not generally considered a sensible move.
He might have meant "what right do you have to complain that you are not getting a LOT more than you put in". The thing there is that these companies are putting a lot into a lot of products, and with many of those products they get out a lot LESS than they put in. So if they don't make significant profits on their popular products, they still come out losing money.
It's pretty simple. If you want commercial products, you have to make it worth people's while to produce products on a commercial basis, and that means buying things for significantly more than they cost to make.
If you don't want commercial products, there are plenty of people giving their work away for free - though the fact that they need a day job to make ends meet means that they will never have the leisure to explore their full creative potential.
We all don't know everything on every topic yet we come in here spouting off like we're experts.
Oh, the irony. If only you'd stopped there, instead of carrying on spouting off like you're an expert on a topic you clearly know very little about.
If it's a sci-fi novel written by 1 author, don't lecture me about typesetters and editors. That's BS because it's a finite amount of effort and typesetting is now performed by printers and controlled by computers and probably was taken care of when the author wrote the book on his computer.
Nonsense. Fully automated typesetting produces very poor quality results. (Don't give me LaTeX. LaTeX produces poor quality results, and moreover makes it unnecessarily difficult to tweak things by hand. LaTeX is very good compared to crapware like MS Word.)
It is true to say that typesetting takes far less effort than it used to. It is utterly false to say that it is "taken care of when the author wrote the book on his computer"; the files authors produce are damn well not sent straight to the printers, they are completely taken apart by the publisher and typeset properly in a dedicated layout package. Note that this is done by the publisher, or often by a freelance typesetter, not by the printers (as you falsely claim).
And editors, seriously, there's a spellcheck on almost all computers
Leaving aside the point that spellchecking is not the editor's job, I'll point out that computerised spellchecking is utterly inadequate. It misses most common errors (there/their/they're, for example), and doesn't even attempt to spot problems with spacing, punctuation, etc. The difference between a book that was spellchecked by a computer and a book that was proofread by a competent professional is like night and day.
The editor's job, meanwhile, is to check facts and consistency. Amazingly enough, even sci-fi novels require this. Would you be impressed if an author stated on page 37 that a Cx'thwogh starship could only travel at 88% of lightspeed, but on page 104 the Cx'thwogh fleet reached Earth from Alpha Centauri in a year? No? That's why writing a novel is damn well not something that any sensible publisher leaves to a single author.
I'd like to see the numbers but I doubt that it's over a hundred bucks per editor to read a book and make some notes.
It's more than just "reading a book and making some notes". We're talking about a full-time job here, remember. I'm sure you can read an average-length novel in a matter of hours, but it takes more than a few hours to edit a book.
Hell, I'd doit for free just for the oportunity to read the books.
Yes, everybody thinks they could do it. Proofreading (which is what you're thinking of, not editing) is actually a very difficult, highly skilled job. Most amateurs are worse than useless, since they miss trivial errors while giving the book a wholly unmerited stamp of correctness.
Hey, why do airline pilots get paid so much? It can't be that difficult to sit in a chair and pull the flight yoke around. I used to be really good on Microsoft Flight Simulator, too. And planes have computers these days that do most of the hard stuff, right? Hell, I'll fly the plane for free, just for the opportunity to travel a bit!
A decent editor will also mark any misspellings they come across while looking for substantative errors. Saying that they don't indicates that you have little experience with editors or editing.
Well, that would have been a crushing reply... if he'd actually said that.
What he actually said was that "editors don't do spellchecking". Which is true. They may mark any typos they spot, but they don't deliberately set out to find typos. It's not what they're paid for. Finding misspellings and so forth is the job of a proofreader, not an editor. It requires a whole different skillset and a very different approach to the text.
This is really a bad list. . . . They totally ignore things like Independence Day
Yeah, that could be something to do with the bit at the top of the article where they said they were deliberately excluding all science fiction movies.
I don't want to do extra work because someone is misusing my copyright
Too bad. The vast majority of Internet content providers do want their sites indexed and cached by Google. Why should they have to do extra work, just to save you the minuscule effort of creating a tiny file to inform the world that you want your site to receive special and unusual treatment?
I run windows XP at work and it SUCKS! It crashes and also just stops working at least once a day.
I put it to you that it is not Windows that sucks, but rather your IT department.
I've never seen even Windows Me crash daily. Weekly, sure, but never daily. And whatever you think of XP, nobody in his right mind could possibly believe it to be less inherently stable than Windows Me...
Remember the old saying, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Yeah. It's about as true as that other fine old saying, "the moon is made of green cheese".
For example, consider the hypothetical case where a prominent politician is implicated in a child-porn ring, but never prosecuted due to lack of evidence. Do you think all the publicity he will get, as a suspected pedophile, is going to improve his chances of re-election? If there were no such thing as bad publicity, it would. Somehow I doubt it, though...
To my knowledge, the book is still banned in Britain.
May I suggest you attempt to verify your knowledge before making accusations like that? In fact, the book was never banned in Britain at all, AFAICT, and has certainly been openly sold in Britain ever since its first publication abroad.
What really happened is more complicated and somewhat less sinister.
Once the British government brought proceedings against Wright in Australia, in June 1986 two British newspapers picked up on the story and published some excerpts. The government therefore obtained a legal injunction forbidding those newspapers (and those two alone) from publishing any more excerpts. In 1987, when the book was published in the USA, a third newspaper attempted to publish excerpts, and another injunction was issued. The three injunctions were then challenged in the House of Lords (the British equivalent of taking the case to the Supreme Court), which initially confirmed them while the case was in progress; but ultimately in October 1988 the Law Lords ruled in favour of the newspapers and overturned all the injunctions.
Note that at no point was possession of the book itself banned in Britain; while it was not published in Britain at first, many copies were imported from the USA, and no attempts were ever made to prevent that or to prosecute any importers.
The "bans" were very specifically limited to publication of excerpts in three newspapers, and those bans lasted less than 2 years before they were overturned by due legal process. So while the government did indeed attempt to censor the book, we're not talking about an oppressive totalitarian regime that decrees what its citizens are allowed to think; we're merely talking about a government being duly diligent in its efforts to ensure national security.
And I seem to recall that even in the USA, with its consitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of speech, you can cause a national scandal by revealing the identity of a CIA field agent...
On a windows computer when you install something it has to have some way to get it's [sic] hooks into the OS. This might be as simple as notifying the OS of what extension/suffixes it can open or what services or filters it provides to other applications. This is done through the registry. And you need to be root to modify the registry. So you can't really install anything properly without giving your application the ability to write to the registry.
And since there's no selective privledges [sic] that would say "well I trust you to only modify this part of the registry and no where [sic] else nor any other file,["] you basically pull your pants down around your ankles, close your eyes and pray there is no unsolicited finger up the butt every time you install.
If you will forgive me for being blunt:
This is complete and utter nonsense. Not one word of it is remotely accurate. You don't know what you're talking about.
Some of that may have been true in antique versions of Windows, in much the same way that local security was absolutely dire in antique versions of MacOS. But it is nothing but lies where Windows NT, 2000, XP, and Vista are concerned: they all have very fine-grained privilege controls, and most certainly do not require Administrator privileges just to write application settings to the registry.
Linux is simmilar, [sic] since it propably [sic] wants to shove stuff in/bin and maybe overwrite somethings [sic] in/lib.
Are you trolling or something? Any Linux application that wants to touch the contents of/bin or/lib is abysmally poorly designed. Needless to say, I've never encountered such an application in 8 years of Linux use.
Please, please, please, in future restrict your comments to platforms you actually know something about. Making wild (and wildly inaccurate) guesses about how other platforms work serves only to make you look stupid.
Anytime a patent infringement lawsuit comes in they will examine the business of the one suing them to see which patents they can counter-sue on. Their goal is to counter sue for enough damages to exceed the original complaint.
Most companies in the computer industry know not to sue IBM because they hold so many patents that everyone is most likely infringing on. Occasionally some small company does attempt to sue them and IBM makes an example of them.
But surely the solution is simply to sell your offensive patents to a patent-trolling company? You know, the ones that don't make any products at all, but merely collect patents and sue people for doing productive things. Since such a company doesn't have any business even remotely related to the field in which it holds the patents, it is presumably unlikely to be infringing any patents held by the victim, and will thus be immune to countersuits.
Or am I missing something? (Maybe IBM holds the legendary patent on frivolous patent lawsuits?)
Our taxes are higher than in the USA, but we get more for our money. You don't need health insurance in Britain, and your kids can get a world-class education dirt cheap (universities are not allowed to charge more than about $5500 a year, and the government pays some or all of that for students from low-income families).
Which all kind of evens things out a little.
But none of this explains why technology is so much more expensive here. Canada has a similar socially-aware government, similar taxes, and similar public services, but Canadians aren't expected to wait 6 months longer than consumers in the USA or to pay 50% more for the products when they finally appear.
who cares how many copies a computer makes of something? What matters is human experience. Under my model, "piracy" (skip the word debates, please) is not the act of downloading something, it's the act of actually viewing/hearing it. If you download something and immediately delete it, it's not piracy.
Under the model the **AA use, on the other hand, piracy is neither downloading nor viewing, but uploading, i.e. distributing content to other people.
Guess what? If you download something on a P2P service, even if you delete it as soon as the download has finished, you have nonetheless been helping distribute it to all sorts of other people all over the world. Many of whom will view/hear it when they finish their own downloads.
Sorry, but "I didn't use it" isn't a defence for piracy, any more than "I'll put it back" is a defence if you're caught trying to shoplift -- in neither case has the victim of your illegal activity actually lost anything, but that doesn't make it all OK.
Zenimax trademarked the names "Shivering Isles" and "Knights of the Nine" in August. Both of those names could easily be names for expansion packs for Oblivion.
Highly unlikely. The trademarks for "Shivering Isles" and "Knights of the Nine" are for the field of "providing downloadable computer game programs offered via handheld computers, wireless telephones and mobile and wireless devices; providing online computer game programs offered via handheld computers, wireless telephones and mobile and wireless devices". So if they are anything to do with the Elder Scrolls universe, they will almost certainly be new Elder Scrolls Travels games.
But when the time comes that people are getting "disappeared" for criticizing the government, I'd rather that TOR existed than not.
"When"? Not "if"? What unfortunate country do you live in where you consider it a foregone conclusion that your government will inevitably turn into a totalitarian police state?
Forgive me if I harbour a naive belief that freedom and democracy might possibly be self-sustaining.
Go to http://www.budweiser.com/default.asp -- The first question you're asked is your birthday. If you're not 21 they send you a site for Anheuser-Busch theme parks instead of one about the beer.
But if you go to http://www.budweiser.co.uk/, the birthday checker only requires you to be 18. National laws don't really interact very well with an international internet.
(Why are honest under-21s not supposed even to read about beer, anyway? That's just plain silly. These birthday checks are one of the most pointless things ever invented.)
it's wound up being much easier to incorporate new technology (see: PS3 with blu-ray while PC games STILL sometimes don't ship on DVD by default) in consoles than in PC gaming.
PS3 with blu-ray? Where is this PS3 with blu-ray? Oh, that's right -- Sony just announced that it won't be released in my part of the world till March 2007, because they can't make enough blu-ray drives. Yeah, that's what I call "easy to incorporate new technology"...
BTW, why should PC games ship on DVD by default? Of the last five PC games I bought, one shipped on DVD by default, two shipped on CD because they were small enough to fit on a CD, and the other two didn't ship on any physical media at all because it was far more convenient just to download them straight from their creators.
Now there's one area where the PC market is miles ahead while the new generation of consoles is just beginning to think about catching up. IMO online delivery is a far more innovative advance than merely using a different kind of laser to cram more data onto yet another kind of optical disk. And more to the point, it's here now, and has been here on the PC for years now. Unlike Blu-Ray, which is here "Spring 2006... oops, Summer 2006... no, make that Winter 2006... uh, sorry guys, it's looking like Spring 2007 now..."
Slashdot Mirror
And which of these will actually get any benefit from this? Not the public. None of the above either, who will be dead
Suppose you start a business. Suppose it becomes a successful business, and you become rich. Suppose now you die.
Should the state immediately confiscate your business, and distribute its value to the general public, so that your heirs don't benefit at all from your life's work?
Well, it's quite a reasonable suggestion, isn't it? I mean, it won't hurt you. You'll be dead. And why should your heirs get something they didn't work to produce? Surely having your business snatched out of their grieving hands will merely incentivise them to start their own businesses and benefit society even more?
Funnily enough, fewer people seem to think that a reasonable proposal than snatching artists' property at, or even before, their deaths.
I think he means, "What right do you have to complain you are not getting MORE then you put in".
If you don't get more than you put in, you don't eat. This is not generally considered a sensible move.
He might have meant "what right do you have to complain that you are not getting a LOT more than you put in". The thing there is that these companies are putting a lot into a lot of products, and with many of those products they get out a lot LESS than they put in. So if they don't make significant profits on their popular products, they still come out losing money.
It's pretty simple. If you want commercial products, you have to make it worth people's while to produce products on a commercial basis, and that means buying things for significantly more than they cost to make.
If you don't want commercial products, there are plenty of people giving their work away for free - though the fact that they need a day job to make ends meet means that they will never have the leisure to explore their full creative potential.
And as such is the only cost you need cover, so what gives you the right to charge $29.95 per copy?
If the initial cost of production was $1m and you only expect to sell around 34,000 copies, how can you justify charging less than $29.95 per copy?
We all don't know everything on every topic yet we come in here spouting off like we're experts.
Oh, the irony. If only you'd stopped there, instead of carrying on spouting off like you're an expert on a topic you clearly know very little about.
If it's a sci-fi novel written by 1 author, don't lecture me about typesetters and editors. That's BS because it's a finite amount of effort and typesetting is now performed by printers and controlled by computers and probably was taken care of when the author wrote the book on his computer.
Nonsense. Fully automated typesetting produces very poor quality results. (Don't give me LaTeX. LaTeX produces poor quality results, and moreover makes it unnecessarily difficult to tweak things by hand. LaTeX is very good compared to crapware like MS Word.)
It is true to say that typesetting takes far less effort than it used to. It is utterly false to say that it is "taken care of when the author wrote the book on his computer"; the files authors produce are damn well not sent straight to the printers, they are completely taken apart by the publisher and typeset properly in a dedicated layout package. Note that this is done by the publisher, or often by a freelance typesetter, not by the printers (as you falsely claim).
And editors, seriously, there's a spellcheck on almost all computers
Leaving aside the point that spellchecking is not the editor's job, I'll point out that computerised spellchecking is utterly inadequate. It misses most common errors (there/their/they're, for example), and doesn't even attempt to spot problems with spacing, punctuation, etc. The difference between a book that was spellchecked by a computer and a book that was proofread by a competent professional is like night and day.
The editor's job, meanwhile, is to check facts and consistency. Amazingly enough, even sci-fi novels require this. Would you be impressed if an author stated on page 37 that a Cx'thwogh starship could only travel at 88% of lightspeed, but on page 104 the Cx'thwogh fleet reached Earth from Alpha Centauri in a year? No? That's why writing a novel is damn well not something that any sensible publisher leaves to a single author.
I'd like to see the numbers but I doubt that it's over a hundred bucks per editor to read a book and make some notes.
It's more than just "reading a book and making some notes". We're talking about a full-time job here, remember. I'm sure you can read an average-length novel in a matter of hours, but it takes more than a few hours to edit a book.
Hell, I'd doit for free just for the oportunity to read the books.
Yes, everybody thinks they could do it. Proofreading (which is what you're thinking of, not editing) is actually a very difficult, highly skilled job. Most amateurs are worse than useless, since they miss trivial errors while giving the book a wholly unmerited stamp of correctness.
Hey, why do airline pilots get paid so much? It can't be that difficult to sit in a chair and pull the flight yoke around. I used to be really good on Microsoft Flight Simulator, too. And planes have computers these days that do most of the hard stuff, right? Hell, I'll fly the plane for free, just for the opportunity to travel a bit!
A decent editor will also mark any misspellings they come across while looking for substantative errors. Saying that they don't indicates that you have little experience with editors or editing.
Well, that would have been a crushing reply... if he'd actually said that.
What he actually said was that "editors don't do spellchecking". Which is true. They may mark any typos they spot, but they don't deliberately set out to find typos. It's not what they're paid for. Finding misspellings and so forth is the job of a proofreader, not an editor. It requires a whole different skillset and a very different approach to the text.
This is really a bad list. . . . They totally ignore things like Independence Day
Yeah, that could be something to do with the bit at the top of the article where they said they were deliberately excluding all science fiction movies.
I don't want to do extra work because someone is misusing my copyright
Too bad. The vast majority of Internet content providers do want their sites indexed and cached by Google. Why should they have to do extra work, just to save you the minuscule effort of creating a tiny file to inform the world that you want your site to receive special and unusual treatment?
Perl isn't a programming language, it's a natural language that is somehow parsed by the compiler
I must strongly object to your use of the term "natural" in that statement.
Use the Aero Theme and System Font (Segoe UI)
Good, but obvious.
Use common controls and common dialogs
ibid,
If these are so obvious, why do so many Windows XP products completely ignore them?
You know... Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visual Studio...
I run windows XP at work and it SUCKS! It crashes and also just stops working at least once a day.
I put it to you that it is not Windows that sucks, but rather your IT department.
I've never seen even Windows Me crash daily. Weekly, sure, but never daily. And whatever you think of XP, nobody in his right mind could possibly believe it to be less inherently stable than Windows Me...
Remember the old saying, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Yeah. It's about as true as that other fine old saying, "the moon is made of green cheese".
For example, consider the hypothetical case where a prominent politician is implicated in a child-porn ring, but never prosecuted due to lack of evidence. Do you think all the publicity he will get, as a suspected pedophile, is going to improve his chances of re-election? If there were no such thing as bad publicity, it would. Somehow I doubt it, though...
How many, when asked "What version of Microsoft Office do you have?" will respond, "oh, I have Microsoft XP"
Uh, and that's often a perfectly accurate answer. Or are you complaining that they haven't upgraded from Office XP to Office 2003?
If she is hot, hit on her. else, if she is not hot and I'm drunk hit on her. else go home.
looks like natural language to me.
Looks rather unnatural to me. The usual way to say it would be more like "Hit on her if she's hot or you're drunk, else go home."
Which, I realised as I typed it, is exactly how Python's new inline conditional syntax works. Neat.
To my knowledge, the book is still banned in Britain.
May I suggest you attempt to verify your knowledge before making accusations like that? In fact, the book was never banned in Britain at all, AFAICT, and has certainly been openly sold in Britain ever since its first publication abroad.
What really happened is more complicated and somewhat less sinister.
Once the British government brought proceedings against Wright in Australia, in June 1986 two British newspapers picked up on the story and published some excerpts. The government therefore obtained a legal injunction forbidding those newspapers (and those two alone) from publishing any more excerpts. In 1987, when the book was published in the USA, a third newspaper attempted to publish excerpts, and another injunction was issued. The three injunctions were then challenged in the House of Lords (the British equivalent of taking the case to the Supreme Court), which initially confirmed them while the case was in progress; but ultimately in October 1988 the Law Lords ruled in favour of the newspapers and overturned all the injunctions.
Note that at no point was possession of the book itself banned in Britain; while it was not published in Britain at first, many copies were imported from the USA, and no attempts were ever made to prevent that or to prosecute any importers.
The "bans" were very specifically limited to publication of excerpts in three newspapers, and those bans lasted less than 2 years before they were overturned by due legal process. So while the government did indeed attempt to censor the book, we're not talking about an oppressive totalitarian regime that decrees what its citizens are allowed to think; we're merely talking about a government being duly diligent in its efforts to ensure national security.
And I seem to recall that even in the USA, with its consitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of speech, you can cause a national scandal by revealing the identity of a CIA field agent...
On a windows computer when you install something it has to have some way to get it's [sic] hooks into the OS. This might be as simple as notifying the OS of what extension/suffixes it can open or what services or filters it provides to other applications. This is done through the registry. And you need to be root to modify the registry. So you can't really install anything properly without giving your application the ability to write to the registry.
/bin and maybe overwrite somethings [sic] in /lib.
/bin or /lib is abysmally poorly designed. Needless to say, I've never encountered such an application in 8 years of Linux use.
And since there's no selective privledges [sic] that would say "well I trust you to only modify this part of the registry and no where [sic] else nor any other file,["] you basically pull your pants down around your ankles, close your eyes and pray there is no unsolicited finger up the butt every time you install.
If you will forgive me for being blunt:
This is complete and utter nonsense. Not one word of it is remotely accurate. You don't know what you're talking about.
Some of that may have been true in antique versions of Windows, in much the same way that local security was absolutely dire in antique versions of MacOS. But it is nothing but lies where Windows NT, 2000, XP, and Vista are concerned: they all have very fine-grained privilege controls, and most certainly do not require Administrator privileges just to write application settings to the registry.
Linux is simmilar, [sic] since it propably [sic] wants to shove stuff in
Are you trolling or something? Any Linux application that wants to touch the contents of
Please, please, please, in future restrict your comments to platforms you actually know something about. Making wild (and wildly inaccurate) guesses about how other platforms work serves only to make you look stupid.
Anytime a patent infringement lawsuit comes in they will examine the business of the one suing them to see which patents they can counter-sue on. Their goal is to counter sue for enough damages to exceed the original complaint.
Most companies in the computer industry know not to sue IBM because they hold so many patents that everyone is most likely infringing on. Occasionally some small company does attempt to sue them and IBM makes an example of them.
But surely the solution is simply to sell your offensive patents to a patent-trolling company? You know, the ones that don't make any products at all, but merely collect patents and sue people for doing productive things. Since such a company doesn't have any business even remotely related to the field in which it holds the patents, it is presumably unlikely to be infringing any patents held by the victim, and will thus be immune to countersuits.
Or am I missing something? (Maybe IBM holds the legendary patent on frivolous patent lawsuits?)
Our taxes are higher than in the USA, but we get more for our money. You don't need health insurance in Britain, and your kids can get a world-class education dirt cheap (universities are not allowed to charge more than about $5500 a year, and the government pays some or all of that for students from low-income families).
Which all kind of evens things out a little.
But none of this explains why technology is so much more expensive here. Canada has a similar socially-aware government, similar taxes, and similar public services, but Canadians aren't expected to wait 6 months longer than consumers in the USA or to pay 50% more for the products when they finally appear.
who cares how many copies a computer makes of something? What matters is human experience. Under my model, "piracy" (skip the word debates, please) is not the act of downloading something, it's the act of actually viewing/hearing it. If you download something and immediately delete it, it's not piracy.
Under the model the **AA use, on the other hand, piracy is neither downloading nor viewing, but uploading, i.e. distributing content to other people.
Guess what? If you download something on a P2P service, even if you delete it as soon as the download has finished, you have nonetheless been helping distribute it to all sorts of other people all over the world. Many of whom will view/hear it when they finish their own downloads.
Sorry, but "I didn't use it" isn't a defence for piracy, any more than "I'll put it back" is a defence if you're caught trying to shoplift -- in neither case has the victim of your illegal activity actually lost anything, but that doesn't make it all OK.
Zenimax trademarked the names "Shivering Isles" and "Knights of the Nine" in August. Both of those names could easily be names for expansion packs for Oblivion.
Highly unlikely. The trademarks for "Shivering Isles" and "Knights of the Nine" are for the field of "providing downloadable computer game programs offered via handheld computers, wireless telephones and mobile and wireless devices; providing online computer game programs offered via handheld computers, wireless telephones and mobile and wireless devices". So if they are anything to do with the Elder Scrolls universe, they will almost certainly be new Elder Scrolls Travels games.
But when the time comes that people are getting "disappeared" for criticizing the government, I'd rather that TOR existed than not.
"When"? Not "if"? What unfortunate country do you live in where you consider it a foregone conclusion that your government will inevitably turn into a totalitarian police state?
Forgive me if I harbour a naive belief that freedom and democracy might possibly be self-sustaining.
Do you drive a car? Do you care about other people inhaling the exhaust fumes?
Do you drive your car with the exhaust pipe 2 feet away from someone else's face in a confined space?
Or, how about this: Personal networking sites moves outside the U.S. ... And then the sites don't have to give a fuck about verifying anybody!
Yeah, because that's working really well for the gambling sites, isn't it?
Go to http://www.budweiser.com/default.asp -- The first question you're asked is your birthday. If you're not 21 they send you a site for Anheuser-Busch theme parks instead of one about the beer.
But if you go to http://www.budweiser.co.uk/, the birthday checker only requires you to be 18. National laws don't really interact very well with an international internet.
(Why are honest under-21s not supposed even to read about beer, anyway? That's just plain silly. These birthday checks are one of the most pointless things ever invented.)
it's wound up being much easier to incorporate new technology (see: PS3 with blu-ray while PC games STILL sometimes don't ship on DVD by default) in consoles than in PC gaming.
PS3 with blu-ray? Where is this PS3 with blu-ray? Oh, that's right -- Sony just announced that it won't be released in my part of the world till March 2007, because they can't make enough blu-ray drives. Yeah, that's what I call "easy to incorporate new technology"...
BTW, why should PC games ship on DVD by default? Of the last five PC games I bought, one shipped on DVD by default, two shipped on CD because they were small enough to fit on a CD, and the other two didn't ship on any physical media at all because it was far more convenient just to download them straight from their creators.
Now there's one area where the PC market is miles ahead while the new generation of consoles is just beginning to think about catching up. IMO online delivery is a far more innovative advance than merely using a different kind of laser to cram more data onto yet another kind of optical disk. And more to the point, it's here now, and has been here on the PC for years now. Unlike Blu-Ray, which is here "Spring 2006... oops, Summer 2006... no, make that Winter 2006... uh, sorry guys, it's looking like Spring 2007 now..."
I vote C/C++.
Oh, great, as if our current laws weren't bad enough, now we get to have them written in an unsaf
Segmentation fault (core dumped)