If Richard's (RMS) criteria for what is free software isn't good enough to make all *free software* licenses compatible, then perhaps his criteria is wrong?
RMS's opinion has nothing to do with whether two different free software licenses are compatible. That's a question of what the licenses say you are licensed to do, not of whether RMS approves.
It's quaint that you have such a high opinion of his power, but even with all the magic he commands, he is not able to change international copyright law in such a way that it suddenly becomes legal to combine two pieces of software with mutually contradictory requirements attached to them and distribute the end result.
Windows is an inelegant mess, OS X is elegant and consistent in comparison.
This is in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I find OS X to be inelegant and inconsistent. You have the Dock, where icons behave totally differently from any other icons anywhere else on the entire system, and where a whole bunch of totally different tasks -- launching applications, monitoring running tasks, etc. -- are all mixed together in one confusing zooming bouncing distracting usability nightmare. You have Finder windows that flip from brushed metal to Aqua when you merely show/hide the toolbar, and that STILL, after six years of OS X, have not come close to regaining the unparalleled usability of the classic Finder. You have places where drag-and-drop works beautifully inexplicably mixed up with places where it doesn't work at all: why can't I drag a document from the Recent Items list to open it in a non-default application? Why can't I assign an icon to a folder by dragging it into the Get Info window? Why can't I drag a document from the Dock to the Desktop? I thought this was supposed to be the One Consistent OS, where everything Just Worked?!
And you have limitations introduced in the name of "elegance". Like the crazy file selector dialogs that force you to laboriously click your way through the folder hierarchy, because Apple has decided you shouldn't want to save time by just typing the path in. Like iTunes, with its "streamlined" interface that just leaves average users upset because they can't understand why there isn't a "stop" button.
Not to mention the inelegant limitations. Why the hell can't I play videos fullscreen in the built-in media player? Oh, that's right, because they want extra money for that privilege. Yeah, let's enhance our customers' multimedia experience with a whole bunch of greyed-out menu options with price tags -- that'll make more elegant!
And the confusing interface that makes no distinction between the fundamental system menus and an individual application's menus. I still haven't managed to teach one aging Mac fanatic friend the difference between closing a document window and closing an application. On Windows, it's obvious, because the application either closes when you run out of documents, or has a giant application window that you can't miss. On OS 9, at least you had the clear and readable task list in the task switcher menu thingummy. In OS X, the application just sits there in the background, with the only indication that it's still running and taking up memory and system resources being a tiny black triangle in the dock. Thank God her new Intel Mac has enough memory that she isn't constantly running out any more -- that was a real pain on the old one.
For all that, OS X is a great OS, and for the most part, the more Microsoft copies from it, the better Windows will get. But let's be honest here: using OS X can be just as frustrating an experience as using Windows. Neither actually has a major advantage in terms of "elegance" or "consistency". When it comes down to it, OS X is just as inelegant, just as inconstent as Windows -- just in different areas.
But don't let that stop you being a smug Mac weenie and wallowing in your delightful self-delusion that Windows sucks in every way imaginable while using OS X is the closest a mere human can come to basking in the reflected glory of God Almighty Himself.
There might be some japanese hentai games that will only work on a japanese Windows, but everything else should work fine on any PC.
Ancient DOS games, perhaps. But Western Windows has been able to run all Japanese Windows software for years. Win2k+ with the system codepage ("language for non-Unicode applications" in XP) set to Japanese is indistinguishable from Japanese Windows from a software point of view.
Regional lockouts in video game consoles are made specifically to enforce 17 USC 602 and foreign counterparts
Huh, maybe you're reading a different 17 USC 602 than the one I'm reading, which specifically states that it does not apply to "importation, for the private use of the importer and not for distribution, by any person".
Regional lockouts in video game consoles thus manage to restrict explicitly legal activities, without significantly hampering the illegal activities they're supposedly targeting. Sound familiar?
I suggest you examine the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA, I think it's 1998). See what the going assumption is if you've been served with a disclosure warrant and you can't find an encryption key. Unless you have well documented crypto key management and disposal methods that give you a decent audit trail you will be charged with contempt of court.
Has this actually ever happened? Even once? No? Forgive me if I don't run screaming for the hills, then.
There are a number of other dodgy provisions in there that makes you wonder precisely how many decades ago the UK stopped being a democracy
Huh? How do you get from the existence of a law that might in theory be used in such a way that somebody was presumed guilty, to the claim that we are no longer a democracy? Our government is still representative of the will of the people. We still have regular elections, which are free and fair, in which no major fraud takes place, nobody is denied their right to vote, and regular changes in the composition of the government prove that the people still choose who will lead the country. Indeed, since we have three mainstream parties rather than two, our democracy is in a substantially better shape than that of e.g. the USA. It's far from perfect; proportional representation would be a vast improvement. But it functions.
If you want an example of guilty-until-proven-innocent scaremongering that actually hurts people, it's not Blair you should be pointing the finger at, it's the tabloids. Which is nothing to do with the government, of course, and thus less apt for ranting against, but a far better measure of the real ills in our society.
Unfortunately, the DRM in games often makes it easier to download, patch, and play--no worries about having the right disc on hand, no swapping discs when you switch to another game.
So I guess you love systems like Steam, then? Download and play, perfectly legally, without even having to worry about finding a crack or trusting the pirates not to have stuck any malware in there.
As more and more companies catch on and begin to distribute online, the convenience argument will dry up too. I wonder what lines people will use to justify piracy then? I guess it'll be back to the old anti-DRM one: "I don't like the idea of a game that phones home occasionally, even though I have no problem giving out my IP address and full details of all the piracy I'm committing to all kinds of random people on various P2P services."
Well, in the Mac side of life, it was a sign that the ROM had loaded properly, that the RAM test was successful, all that wonderful stuff that appears as text on BIOS-based computers. If one of the tests failed, then a different noise was heard.
This is not Mac-specific in the slightest. Historically, PCs did exactly the same. Beep once if the BIOS self-test succeeded; if there was an error, emit various other sequences of beeps to indicate what the problem was. They only stopped doing that when manufacturers stopped building speakers into the case.
However, that reason is quite irrelevant in this case, where the startup sound is apparently going to be played to tell you that the reason the computer is displaying a login screen is that it's ready for you to log in. That is to say, after the computer has finished booting, and long after the monitor has begun displaying useful information.
An optional sound makes sense in such a context, since some people find audio cues useful. A mandatory sound, with the inevitable backlash from hordes of enraged customers, is simply incomprehensible.
Can your GUI easily distinguish all files ending in.mp3 and then send them, in sequence(not in parallel), to a music player to play them?
In a GUI system, this interface is part of the music player, not the file manager. Music player GUIs are designed to make locating music files and playing them in easily-customisable sequences simple and efficient.
Incidentally, why the heck are you requiring that the sending be done in sequence not in parallel? If I send a bunch of files to a music player from my GUI file manager in parallel, the music player automatically plays them in sequence. This is more useful than sending them in sequence, because the sequence is retained by the music player: I can set it to loop or shuffle the files I've opened in it, and so forth.
And why are you restricting things to MP3s? If I did that, I'd miss many of my favourite tracks, which are stored in Ogg Vorbis format. A decent music player GUI knows what files it can play, and will find and play oggs and so forth automatically without requiring you to remember all the possible extensions that could be used for music.
I guess you were picking a contrived example of something that's easier to do with a CLI. Well done. Now, how easy is it for your CLI to do something that's trivial in a GUI music player, like pick out all the 1980s jazz tracks that you haven't listened to in the last three days?
(By the way, don't go writing me off as a CLI-phobe. I do most of my file management in bash, to the extent that if I want to browse a folder in Explorer, I generally open an rxvt window and type "open/path/whatever" instead of faffing about with clunky tree views. But I don't use CLIs where they don't make sense.)
Only about 10% of games have legal ratings in the UK.
But the 10% of games that are not exempt from BBFC classification are specifically those that contain things like "human sexual activity", "acts of gross violence towards humans or animals", and "techniques likely to be useful in the commission of offences" (Video Recordings Act 1984).
So, despite your nitpicking, the outcome is effectively as described: the games we're actually talking about, games in series like the Doom, Quake, and Grand Theft Auto series, have legally-enforced ratings.
She is arguing that video ratings need to be rethought, for instance that games should be actually played before they are designated 'violence free'.
Don't be ridiculous. If the Hot Coffee scandal has taught us anything, it's that merely playing a game would be an utterly inadequate means of rating it, since one can view the worst accessible content in a game and give it a "mature" rating and still be lambasted in the press for failing to guess that it can be hacked to display simulated sex.
It's not feasible for game raters to play games in depth, and even if they did, they would inevitably miss content. That's why the current system has them rate games based on videos of the most violent/whatever moments. It's a good system, and no more flawed than the alternatives.
Writing off violence just because it is cartoon violence doesn't really cut it, since young children can be affected by cartoons as well as real life.
Why, could this possibly be why ESRB ratings have contained helpful little content descriptions like "animated violence" for about 10 years now?
the ESRB needs to provide more information about the games it rates so that parents can have a better idea of the content in their kid's games.
Perhaps the real problem is that nobody, apparently not even Harvard researchers, bothers to read the content information the ESRB already provides.
I find, as long as you stay in the adobe line from beginning to press things should be alright.
Sure. Similarly, staying in the Corel line until you generate the output works beautifully. Indeed, you can even produce an EPS in CorelDraw that you can use just fine in InDesign.
But I'm not sure what all this has got to do with the actual question, which was how to produce an SVG that renders the same in a variety of products from different sources.
No, that will only help you to understand the view of the artists who actually produce the creative work. It won't do anything for your understanding of the view of the people who are actually bringing these lawsuits, whose involvement is purely to do with marketing and distribution and whose motivation is entirely to do with profit, not any personal investment in specific creative acts.
Not that protecting a financial investment is any less valid than feeling protective of a creative work, of course. And you're also right that understanding the artists' point of view is extremely helpful in making the ethical decision to uphold copyright law. Which, as we must remember, is the only thing that enables the GPL to keep Free software Free. (Without copyright law, anyone could copy any software, but companies would still be able e.g. to produce closed-source binary hardware drivers, and suddenly there would be no way to stop them using one's own code to do so!)
I'd like to ask any complainers: where exactly do you see the fun in strategy games, if not in conceiving and executing elaborate and detailed strategies? What sort of a real player complains about the tedium of building an efficient railroad network for transporting troops and goods, when exactly such logistical advantages often mean the difference between victory and defeat?
That's exactly the issue. Coming up with a strategy = fun. The question is, how high-level are your orders going to be?
If implementing your strategy involves moving individual workers and ships one square at a time, then I'm sorry, but no normal person will enjoy that. Even having "go there" orders doesn't necessarily help. In the old versions of Civ I used to play, you couldn't group units, so you couldn't just say "send these 25 workers to Athens and these 25 to Thermopylae", you had to issue 50 separate orders to units. That's not fun. It doesn't give you any more strategic options, it just makes you click a lot.
Similarly, in the versions of Civ I played, there were only two ways to build a railway. If you wanted a specific route, you had to build it manually: tell a worker to build a railway on the square it was on, wait for it to finish, move it to the next square, repeat. Alternatively, you could tell it to build a railway from where it was to some other place, but then you lost control of the route and it would build it somewhere stupid and take twice as long as it should have. What you couldn't do was tell a unit to go to a certain point, then from there build a railway via a specific route to some other point. So you either had to give up strategic control, or you had to click a lot.
Nobody's saying they want games dumbed down. They just want smoother interfaces that make it easier for you to tell the game what your strategy is and how you want it implemented, without forcing you to perform every single step yourself.
The point is that "accepting responsibility for one's actions" is being used to mean "looking for an optimal outcome given one's actions".
Who said anything about an optimal outcome? Why this assumption that "they shouldn't necessarily have been fired" must automatically mean "they shouldn't have been punished at all"? The point is that people who accept responsibility for their actions might reasonably hope to avoid the worst outcome, which they might reasonably expect to be reserved for those who refuse to acknowledge that they have done anything wrong.
There are plenty of disciplinary measures available that don't involve termination. Nobody is saying that these employees should not have been punished for breaking the law and violating their employer's trust. They did something bad. Apple was right to punish them. All people are saying is that it is not completely and absolutely obvious that firing was the one and only way in which they could possibly have been punished for their wrongdoing. All we are saying is that the possibility should be considered that it might have been better for Apple to fine them, suspend them, or demote them rather than terminating them. We aren't even saying that that is definitely the case. We are merely suggesting that the possibility be considered.
I despair of Slashdot. It seems not only have people given up on reading the article and then on reading the summary, but they now don't even bother reading the comments they reply to. They just click on a random "Reply" link and type in a devastating rebuttal to a point of view that nobody actually holds. Yay for intelligent debate.
It is this inability to read and comprehend what someone else has actually written, instead insisting on merely glancing at their words and assuming they say what you expect, that makes me despair for the future of society.
Let's do some reading.
What you claim: "You act as if they have a God-given-right to work at Apple." What he really said: "Apple can hire and fire whoever they want, for whatever (legal) reason."
What you claim: "What we have now is the whining of somebody who doesn't like that he is being held accountable for his own actions." What he really said: "The complaint is not that they were punished at all, it's that the punishment was excessive and gives nobody any incentive to be honest."
Welcome to the wonderful world of the straw man argument, where answering people's points is too hard, so you just pretend they said something stupid instead and tell them how stupid they were to say it. You've got a bright future ahead of you in politics.
So a large corporation has ripped off a small company's software, which was specifically designed to stop people ripping off software.
No, a large corporation has infringed on a small company's patent. The small company doesn't appear to actually produce any software or other tangible products; they just claim to own a bunch of ideas.
The software in question was written wholly by Microsoft, and probably without reference to anything owned or produced by z4 at all. Unfortunately for Microsoft, ignorance of an obscure patent is no excuse for daring to have the same idea.
Tim O'Reilly and his Web 2.0 trademark are now being seen for what they really are - evil attempts at forcing others out of his industry (technology publishing) by trademarking the jargin related to it.
The Web 2.0 trademark is specifically restricted to two fields: "Arranging and conducting live events, namely, trade shows, expositions and business conferences in various fields, namely, computers, communications, and information technology", and "Organizing and conducting educational conferences, tutorials and workshops in the fields of computers, communication and information technology."
So, Tim O'Reilly won't let you use the term "Web 2.0" as a name for a conference. Forgive me, but I can't for the life of me see how this is going to restrict your ability to compete in the publishing industry.
The trademark is completely irrelevant to the whole field of publishing. You can publish books on Web 2.0 to your heart's content, because O'Reilly does not claim any rights to the name in any sense whatsoever except in the incredibly specific context of computer-related conferences. You can use the name in any way you like, you can say anything you like about it, you can publish a thousand pages consisting of nothing other than the name repeated over and over again in very small letters - provided solely that you do not choose it as the name for a computer-related conference.
Exactly how does this restrict other technical publishers? Exactly where does the evil come into this picture?
Excellent reply, and I'll add that when you get out of school you're very likely to buy shitloads of Green Day CDs. Your "ripping them off" will make money for them.
Is he really going to buy shitloads of Green Day CDs? Or is he just going to say that to make himself feel better, but never actually get round to it? Maybe he'll just buy one CD with a couple of his favourite songs on it, and tell himself that that's good enough, because he's paid them something. Or maybe he'll be so used to piracy as a way of life by then that he just won't care any more.
People are constantly making this claim that pirates are predominantly impoverished students who will pay for what they copied when they start earning. I don't buy it. Frankly, I think you're making stuff up. Show me the figures, please.
(Also, if he's using P2P, then far from making money for them, his "ripping them off" is also directly assisting others to rip them off too. How noble.)
Any proprietary software vendor "takes contributions from all comers" - especially when they free.
This is utterly untrue.
For example, Microsoft - arguably the prototypical proprietary software vendor, and the one most often accused of stealing ideas - explicitly states, and I quote,
MICROSOFT OR ANY OF ITS EMPLOYEES DO NOT ACCEPT OR CONSIDER UNSOLICITED IDEAS, INCLUDING IDEAS FOR NEW ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS, NEW PROMOTIONS, NEW PRODUCTS OR TECHNOLOGIES, PROCESSES, MATERIALS, MARKETING PLANS OR NEW PRODUCT NAMES.... PLEASE DO NOT SEND YOUR UNSOLICITED IDEAS TO MICROSOFT OR ANYONE AT MICROSOFT.
That doesn't exactly sound like a company that's eager to take contributions from all comers, does it, now?
The problem of ppolice powers stems from the fact that Britain does not have a consitution so the government can do what it likes.
(a) Britain (or, more precisely, the United Kingdom) most certainly does have a consitution. It just doesn't consist of a single concise written document.
(b) A written constitution is no guarantee of civil rights. For nearly 80 years, the USA had both a written constitution and legal slavery.
who else would buy or not buy a product solely based on the advertising surrounding it?
Someone who is aware that to a competent user the differences between the various products are, in reality, largely aesthetic, and who is not attracted to a lifestyle that appears to revolve around insulting people who have made different choices?
Slashdot Mirror
If Richard's (RMS) criteria for what is free software isn't good enough to make all *free software* licenses compatible, then perhaps his criteria is wrong?
RMS's opinion has nothing to do with whether two different free software licenses are compatible. That's a question of what the licenses say you are licensed to do, not of whether RMS approves.
It's quaint that you have such a high opinion of his power, but even with all the magic he commands, he is not able to change international copyright law in such a way that it suddenly becomes legal to combine two pieces of software with mutually contradictory requirements attached to them and distribute the end result.
There simply is no reason to own a PC anymore.
Unless you, uh, don't actually want a Mac in the first place, in which case owning a PC instead can save you a small fortune.
Windows is an inelegant mess, OS X is elegant and consistent in comparison.
This is in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I find OS X to be inelegant and inconsistent. You have the Dock, where icons behave totally differently from any other icons anywhere else on the entire system, and where a whole bunch of totally different tasks -- launching applications, monitoring running tasks, etc. -- are all mixed together in one confusing zooming bouncing distracting usability nightmare. You have Finder windows that flip from brushed metal to Aqua when you merely show/hide the toolbar, and that STILL, after six years of OS X, have not come close to regaining the unparalleled usability of the classic Finder. You have places where drag-and-drop works beautifully inexplicably mixed up with places where it doesn't work at all: why can't I drag a document from the Recent Items list to open it in a non-default application? Why can't I assign an icon to a folder by dragging it into the Get Info window? Why can't I drag a document from the Dock to the Desktop? I thought this was supposed to be the One Consistent OS, where everything Just Worked?!
And you have limitations introduced in the name of "elegance". Like the crazy file selector dialogs that force you to laboriously click your way through the folder hierarchy, because Apple has decided you shouldn't want to save time by just typing the path in. Like iTunes, with its "streamlined" interface that just leaves average users upset because they can't understand why there isn't a "stop" button.
Not to mention the inelegant limitations. Why the hell can't I play videos fullscreen in the built-in media player? Oh, that's right, because they want extra money for that privilege. Yeah, let's enhance our customers' multimedia experience with a whole bunch of greyed-out menu options with price tags -- that'll make more elegant!
And the confusing interface that makes no distinction between the fundamental system menus and an individual application's menus. I still haven't managed to teach one aging Mac fanatic friend the difference between closing a document window and closing an application. On Windows, it's obvious, because the application either closes when you run out of documents, or has a giant application window that you can't miss. On OS 9, at least you had the clear and readable task list in the task switcher menu thingummy. In OS X, the application just sits there in the background, with the only indication that it's still running and taking up memory and system resources being a tiny black triangle in the dock. Thank God her new Intel Mac has enough memory that she isn't constantly running out any more -- that was a real pain on the old one.
For all that, OS X is a great OS, and for the most part, the more Microsoft copies from it, the better Windows will get. But let's be honest here: using OS X can be just as frustrating an experience as using Windows. Neither actually has a major advantage in terms of "elegance" or "consistency". When it comes down to it, OS X is just as inelegant, just as inconstent as Windows -- just in different areas.
But don't let that stop you being a smug Mac weenie and wallowing in your delightful self-delusion that Windows sucks in every way imaginable while using OS X is the closest a mere human can come to basking in the reflected glory of God Almighty Himself.
(Flamebait oblivion, here I come!)
There might be some japanese hentai games that will only work on a japanese Windows, but everything else should work fine on any PC.
Ancient DOS games, perhaps. But Western Windows has been able to run all Japanese Windows software for years. Win2k+ with the system codepage ("language for non-Unicode applications" in XP) set to Japanese is indistinguishable from Japanese Windows from a software point of view.
Regional lockouts in video game consoles are made specifically to enforce 17 USC 602 and foreign counterparts
Huh, maybe you're reading a different 17 USC 602 than the one I'm reading, which specifically states that it does not apply to "importation, for the private use of the importer and not for distribution, by any person".
Regional lockouts in video game consoles thus manage to restrict explicitly legal activities, without significantly hampering the illegal activities they're supposedly targeting. Sound familiar?
I suggest you examine the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA, I think it's 1998). See what the going assumption is if you've been served with a disclosure warrant and you can't find an encryption key. Unless you have well documented crypto key management and disposal methods that give you a decent audit trail you will be charged with contempt of court.
Has this actually ever happened? Even once? No? Forgive me if I don't run screaming for the hills, then.
There are a number of other dodgy provisions in there that makes you wonder precisely how many decades ago the UK stopped being a democracy
Huh? How do you get from the existence of a law that might in theory be used in such a way that somebody was presumed guilty, to the claim that we are no longer a democracy? Our government is still representative of the will of the people. We still have regular elections, which are free and fair, in which no major fraud takes place, nobody is denied their right to vote, and regular changes in the composition of the government prove that the people still choose who will lead the country. Indeed, since we have three mainstream parties rather than two, our democracy is in a substantially better shape than that of e.g. the USA. It's far from perfect; proportional representation would be a vast improvement. But it functions.
If you want an example of guilty-until-proven-innocent scaremongering that actually hurts people, it's not Blair you should be pointing the finger at, it's the tabloids. Which is nothing to do with the government, of course, and thus less apt for ranting against, but a far better measure of the real ills in our society.
Unfortunately, the DRM in games often makes it easier to download, patch, and play--no worries about having the right disc on hand, no swapping discs when you switch to another game.
So I guess you love systems like Steam, then? Download and play, perfectly legally, without even having to worry about finding a crack or trusting the pirates not to have stuck any malware in there.
As more and more companies catch on and begin to distribute online, the convenience argument will dry up too. I wonder what lines people will use to justify piracy then? I guess it'll be back to the old anti-DRM one: "I don't like the idea of a game that phones home occasionally, even though I have no problem giving out my IP address and full details of all the piracy I'm committing to all kinds of random people on various P2P services."
Well, in the Mac side of life, it was a sign that the ROM had loaded properly, that the RAM test was successful, all that wonderful stuff that appears as text on BIOS-based computers. If one of the tests failed, then a different noise was heard.
This is not Mac-specific in the slightest. Historically, PCs did exactly the same. Beep once if the BIOS self-test succeeded; if there was an error, emit various other sequences of beeps to indicate what the problem was. They only stopped doing that when manufacturers stopped building speakers into the case.
However, that reason is quite irrelevant in this case, where the startup sound is apparently going to be played to tell you that the reason the computer is displaying a login screen is that it's ready for you to log in. That is to say, after the computer has finished booting, and long after the monitor has begun displaying useful information.
An optional sound makes sense in such a context, since some people find audio cues useful. A mandatory sound, with the inevitable backlash from hordes of enraged customers, is simply incomprehensible.
Can your GUI easily distinguish all files ending in .mp3 and then send them, in sequence(not in parallel), to a music player to play them?
/path/whatever" instead of faffing about with clunky tree views. But I don't use CLIs where they don't make sense.)
In a GUI system, this interface is part of the music player, not the file manager. Music player GUIs are designed to make locating music files and playing them in easily-customisable sequences simple and efficient.
Incidentally, why the heck are you requiring that the sending be done in sequence not in parallel? If I send a bunch of files to a music player from my GUI file manager in parallel, the music player automatically plays them in sequence. This is more useful than sending them in sequence, because the sequence is retained by the music player: I can set it to loop or shuffle the files I've opened in it, and so forth.
And why are you restricting things to MP3s? If I did that, I'd miss many of my favourite tracks, which are stored in Ogg Vorbis format. A decent music player GUI knows what files it can play, and will find and play oggs and so forth automatically without requiring you to remember all the possible extensions that could be used for music.
I guess you were picking a contrived example of something that's easier to do with a CLI. Well done. Now, how easy is it for your CLI to do something that's trivial in a GUI music player, like pick out all the 1980s jazz tracks that you haven't listened to in the last three days?
(By the way, don't go writing me off as a CLI-phobe. I do most of my file management in bash, to the extent that if I want to browse a folder in Explorer, I generally open an rxvt window and type "open
Only about 10% of games have legal ratings in the UK.
But the 10% of games that are not exempt from BBFC classification are specifically those that contain things like "human sexual activity", "acts of gross violence towards humans or animals", and "techniques likely to be useful in the commission of offences" (Video Recordings Act 1984).
So, despite your nitpicking, the outcome is effectively as described: the games we're actually talking about, games in series like the Doom, Quake, and Grand Theft Auto series, have legally-enforced ratings.
She is arguing that video ratings need to be rethought, for instance that games should be actually played before they are designated 'violence free'.
Don't be ridiculous. If the Hot Coffee scandal has taught us anything, it's that merely playing a game would be an utterly inadequate means of rating it, since one can view the worst accessible content in a game and give it a "mature" rating and still be lambasted in the press for failing to guess that it can be hacked to display simulated sex.
It's not feasible for game raters to play games in depth, and even if they did, they would inevitably miss content. That's why the current system has them rate games based on videos of the most violent/whatever moments. It's a good system, and no more flawed than the alternatives.
Writing off violence just because it is cartoon violence doesn't really cut it, since young children can be affected by cartoons as well as real life.
Why, could this possibly be why ESRB ratings have contained helpful little content descriptions like "animated violence" for about 10 years now?
the ESRB needs to provide more information about the games it rates so that parents can have a better idea of the content in their kid's games.
Perhaps the real problem is that nobody, apparently not even Harvard researchers, bothers to read the content information the ESRB already provides.
And yet these guys have probably been writing successful software systems for years, what's going on?
Here's a clue.
I find, as long as you stay in the adobe line from beginning to press things should be alright.
Sure. Similarly, staying in the Corel line until you generate the output works beautifully. Indeed, you can even produce an EPS in CorelDraw that you can use just fine in InDesign.
But I'm not sure what all this has got to do with the actual question, which was how to produce an SVG that renders the same in a variety of products from different sources.
No, that will only help you to understand the view of the artists who actually produce the creative work. It won't do anything for your understanding of the view of the people who are actually bringing these lawsuits, whose involvement is purely to do with marketing and distribution and whose motivation is entirely to do with profit, not any personal investment in specific creative acts.
Not that protecting a financial investment is any less valid than feeling protective of a creative work, of course. And you're also right that understanding the artists' point of view is extremely helpful in making the ethical decision to uphold copyright law. Which, as we must remember, is the only thing that enables the GPL to keep Free software Free. (Without copyright law, anyone could copy any software, but companies would still be able e.g. to produce closed-source binary hardware drivers, and suddenly there would be no way to stop them using one's own code to do so!)
I'd like to ask any complainers: where exactly do you see the fun in strategy games, if not in conceiving and executing elaborate and detailed strategies? What sort of a real player complains about the tedium of building an efficient railroad network for transporting troops and goods, when exactly such logistical advantages often mean the difference between victory and defeat?
That's exactly the issue. Coming up with a strategy = fun. The question is, how high-level are your orders going to be?
If implementing your strategy involves moving individual workers and ships one square at a time, then I'm sorry, but no normal person will enjoy that. Even having "go there" orders doesn't necessarily help. In the old versions of Civ I used to play, you couldn't group units, so you couldn't just say "send these 25 workers to Athens and these 25 to Thermopylae", you had to issue 50 separate orders to units. That's not fun. It doesn't give you any more strategic options, it just makes you click a lot.
Similarly, in the versions of Civ I played, there were only two ways to build a railway. If you wanted a specific route, you had to build it manually: tell a worker to build a railway on the square it was on, wait for it to finish, move it to the next square, repeat. Alternatively, you could tell it to build a railway from where it was to some other place, but then you lost control of the route and it would build it somewhere stupid and take twice as long as it should have. What you couldn't do was tell a unit to go to a certain point, then from there build a railway via a specific route to some other point. So you either had to give up strategic control, or you had to click a lot.
Nobody's saying they want games dumbed down. They just want smoother interfaces that make it easier for you to tell the game what your strategy is and how you want it implemented, without forcing you to perform every single step yourself.
The point is that "accepting responsibility for one's actions" is being used to mean "looking for an optimal outcome given one's actions".
Who said anything about an optimal outcome? Why this assumption that "they shouldn't necessarily have been fired" must automatically mean "they shouldn't have been punished at all"? The point is that people who accept responsibility for their actions might reasonably hope to avoid the worst outcome, which they might reasonably expect to be reserved for those who refuse to acknowledge that they have done anything wrong.
There are plenty of disciplinary measures available that don't involve termination. Nobody is saying that these employees should not have been punished for breaking the law and violating their employer's trust. They did something bad. Apple was right to punish them. All people are saying is that it is not completely and absolutely obvious that firing was the one and only way in which they could possibly have been punished for their wrongdoing. All we are saying is that the possibility should be considered that it might have been better for Apple to fine them, suspend them, or demote them rather than terminating them. We aren't even saying that that is definitely the case. We are merely suggesting that the possibility be considered.
I despair of Slashdot. It seems not only have people given up on reading the article and then on reading the summary, but they now don't even bother reading the comments they reply to. They just click on a random "Reply" link and type in a devastating rebuttal to a point of view that nobody actually holds. Yay for intelligent debate.
It is this inability to read and comprehend what someone else has actually written, instead insisting on merely glancing at their words and assuming they say what you expect, that makes me despair for the future of society.
Let's do some reading.
What you claim: "You act as if they have a God-given-right to work at Apple."
What he really said: "Apple can hire and fire whoever they want, for whatever (legal) reason."
What you claim: "What we have now is the whining of somebody who doesn't like that he is being held accountable for his own actions."
What he really said: "The complaint is not that they were punished at all, it's that the punishment was excessive and gives nobody any incentive to be honest."
Welcome to the wonderful world of the straw man argument, where answering people's points is too hard, so you just pretend they said something stupid instead and tell them how stupid they were to say it. You've got a bright future ahead of you in politics.
So a large corporation has ripped off a small company's software, which was specifically designed to stop people ripping off software.
No, a large corporation has infringed on a small company's patent. The small company doesn't appear to actually produce any software or other tangible products; they just claim to own a bunch of ideas.
The software in question was written wholly by Microsoft, and probably without reference to anything owned or produced by z4 at all. Unfortunately for Microsoft, ignorance of an obscure patent is no excuse for daring to have the same idea.
Tim O'Reilly and his Web 2.0 trademark are now being seen for what they really are - evil attempts at forcing others out of his industry (technology publishing) by trademarking the jargin related to it.
The Web 2.0 trademark is specifically restricted to two fields: "Arranging and conducting live events, namely, trade shows, expositions and business conferences in various fields, namely, computers, communications, and information technology", and "Organizing and conducting educational conferences, tutorials and workshops in the fields of computers, communication and information technology."
So, Tim O'Reilly won't let you use the term "Web 2.0" as a name for a conference. Forgive me, but I can't for the life of me see how this is going to restrict your ability to compete in the publishing industry.
The trademark is completely irrelevant to the whole field of publishing. You can publish books on Web 2.0 to your heart's content, because O'Reilly does not claim any rights to the name in any sense whatsoever except in the incredibly specific context of computer-related conferences. You can use the name in any way you like, you can say anything you like about it, you can publish a thousand pages consisting of nothing other than the name repeated over and over again in very small letters - provided solely that you do not choose it as the name for a computer-related conference.
Exactly how does this restrict other technical publishers? Exactly where does the evil come into this picture?
Excellent reply, and I'll add that when you get out of school you're very likely to buy shitloads of Green Day CDs. Your "ripping them off" will make money for them.
Is he really going to buy shitloads of Green Day CDs? Or is he just going to say that to make himself feel better, but never actually get round to it? Maybe he'll just buy one CD with a couple of his favourite songs on it, and tell himself that that's good enough, because he's paid them something. Or maybe he'll be so used to piracy as a way of life by then that he just won't care any more.
People are constantly making this claim that pirates are predominantly impoverished students who will pay for what they copied when they start earning. I don't buy it. Frankly, I think you're making stuff up. Show me the figures, please.
(Also, if he's using P2P, then far from making money for them, his "ripping them off" is also directly assisting others to rip them off too. How noble.)
Why? Who cares? It's only karma, for crying out loud. It's hardly a big deal.
Anyway, posting as a logged-in user actually reduces the number of modpoints that are wasted if the post is modded up to +5!
This is utterly untrue.
For example, Microsoft - arguably the prototypical proprietary software vendor, and the one most often accused of stealing ideas - explicitly states, and I quote,
That doesn't exactly sound like a company that's eager to take contributions from all comers, does it, now?
The problem of ppolice powers stems from the fact that Britain does not have a consitution so the government can do what it likes.
(a) Britain (or, more precisely, the United Kingdom) most certainly does have a consitution. It just doesn't consist of a single concise written document.
(b) A written constitution is no guarantee of civil rights. For nearly 80 years, the USA had both a written constitution and legal slavery.
Sure, but the article is talking about emails to private individuals and not companies.
What does that have to do with anything? Plenty of private individuals, such as myself, run websites and support things online.
who else would buy or not buy a product solely based on the advertising surrounding it?
Someone who is aware that to a competent user the differences between the various products are, in reality, largely aesthetic, and who is not attracted to a lifestyle that appears to revolve around insulting people who have made different choices?