A soon as they can get the multimodal reflection sorting working we can tap into the Borg collective. They have all the good warez, pr0n, music and movies from thousands of civilizations.:)
Nah you just get an ex space shuttle pilot to drive a giant laser/ultrasonic drilling machine into the core and drop off some really big nukes. As long as they avoid the giant floating diamonds they should be fine.
What happens when you can watch all your movies, on your TV, streamed from the net? Apple seems to be trying to push things in this direction with the AppleTV. I think this is really what the game is really all about. These guys don't want to be cut out of the loop when it comes to who provides your entertainment. Right now they have you locked in, as you usually have a choice of OTA, one cable company or a couple of sat companies. Eventually this list is going to grow to include dozens of online providers, and what then? Maybe you won't need that $100+ cable anymore, or maybe you at least stop using their pay-per-view service. It's just like the RIAA/MPAA, trying desperately to prevent an inevitable paradigm shift.
Actually a better analogy would be that they're forcing all the sports cars to stay in first gear, and just to be sure they're throwing up fake stop signs every so often to slow down traffic flow.
The proper solution (and the generally used for business-level connections such as DS3s) is to bill on 95th percentile bandwidth, which roughly speaking is the minimum bandwidth level that covers 95% of your usage over the month. The nice thing about this type of billing is that if you spike the connection to full bandwidth you aren't penalized. It's only when you start using bandwidth on a constant basis that you'll get billed. Then the people who abuse the connection 24/7 will get their big bill (as they should), but the guy who maybe downloads 20 gigs over a few days and then hardly touches the connection the rest of the month won't be penalized. However I suspect this type of billing is too complicated for the average user (which is also why cheap web hosting isn't usually sold this way.)
For example, why would O'Reilly publish its reference books if not for the profit made by doing so? If O'Reilly books were freely copied, why would they go to the expense of writing more?
Interesting choice, because they actually offer at least some of their books online for download, as PDF, no strings attached. I found this out a couple months back when I tried in vain to find a local bookstore with a copy of "Perl Best Practices" in stock. The PDF even has the cover art, so if I wanted to I could print up my own copy and throw it in a three-ring binder (though I find referencing the PDF itself is more than sufficient.)
There would also be a significant drop in software development, the profit incentive being undercut
On the software side almost nothing 5-10 years old is useful anymore and certainly not traded online in any significant volume. Even on the music/video side of things there's rarely anything old available, unless it was just re-released on DVD. As fast as things are outdated and replaced in our modern world 10 years is a lifetime. It's all about "0-day" these days.
I'd also like to point out that there could be another upside: imagine if all those interesting TV and movie projects that are currently in limbo because of uncertain, missing or just plain uncooperative copyright holders were suddenly free to be made, because that old stuff on which they are based has fallen into the public domain as the founding fathers intended? Copyright as it exists right now, with its insanely long terms, can stifle innovation even more easily than it protects it.
Personally I think the entire entertainment industry has built itself up into a huge bubble and now they're trying desperately to keep it from popping.
...and on that note, a little while ago I bought a $4 LED flashlight that needs no batteries. You just shake it a couple times, which passes a magnet through a coil and recharges a built-in battery. So far it's worked great. I've even used it to read in bed, and the incidental movement from me shifting around has been enough to keep it lit.
I had one of those for a while; I bought it to take camping. For some reason though it just stopped working after about a year. I guess something must've come loose inside, though nothing obvious was visible despite the mostly transparent housing in which it was encased.
I think I've only had two die prematurely. One was on my back porch, and since the bulb wasn't rated for outside use and it's Michigan I'm not surprised it died. It probably froze to death.:)
The other bulb was in a bathroom fixture that itself was acting up, so I'm not sure if it died on its own or if the fixture killed it. The fixture had a bad socket that was causing the light to flicker sometimes, and CFLs aren't designed to be turned to be turned on and off so quickly.
Speaking of that I just remembered a couple other "gotchas" for CFLs that I learned over the years as I ditched my incandescents:
1. They don't work correctly with X10 switches. If I recall this is because those switches need to leak a tiny bit of current through at all times so that they can operate with the light off, but fluorescents mess that up. The ones built for fluorescent lights should work but they're more expensive and not as common.
2. They also don't work with touch lamps, though this might be because many touch lamps are also dimmable. I have a wall-mounted lamp with a touch-sensitive on/off for my bedroom and realized pretty quickly that it wasn't going to work; the the CFL was flickering like crazy. I replaced the bulb with an incandescent, but it fried the circuitry in the light so now it only has two states: "on" and "slightly dimmer.":)
Are they straight fluorescent bulbs or CFLs? I hate fluorescent bulbs myself (they give me a nasty headache from the flicker) but the CFLs I use in my house never give me a problem, and the color, while not exactly like incandescent, is close enough that I don't notice most of the time. As a bonus I almost never have to change the darn things; I have one in my front hallway that I installed when I moved in in 1999 and it's still going. It's a wee bit dimmer than when it started but still looks like it has years of life left on it.
I haven't RTFA yet but I am guessing there is probably a clause in there that makes the law not apply to bulbs below a certain size and/or voltage. Otherwise, in theory you'd even be banning many replacement bulbs for flashlights, epsecially since there simply are no alternatives for such things since CFLs can't be made anywhere near that small right now.
I hope IPv8 is better than IPv7 ("protocol version 7"), with its annoying "I built my consciousness into the protocol" easter egg that the developer put in there...
(Serial Experiments Lain reference, for those wondering what the hell I'm talking about.)
Don't forget you'll need a tax ID too, if you don't already have one. Personally if I have to pay this extra 6% I'd rather take the hit as income tax, because at least that I don't need to track and file separately.
A 6% sales tax means that it's no longer worth it for me to do any work in Maryland
And this is where the real victims will be, those of us who do programming work on the side for some extra income. The hassle of getting a tax ID (which might require setting up a real company), collecting and passing on sales tax to the state is pretty big when all you had to do previously was declare a couple thousand extra dollars on your income taxes at the end of the year. The big consulting companies will complain about it, but in the end they'll just keep on rolling. The little guys will get rolled over.
Michigan (which is where I live and work) recently passed a large tax law change that will charge 6% sales tax on consulting services, among many other things such as massage services (yeah you'll pay 6% on your happy ending!) I'm still trying to decide if its worth the hassle anymore.
From the descriptions I have read it detects running software, not installed software. Wikipedia seems to concur: "Warden uses API function calls to collect data on open programs on the user's computer and sends it back to Blizzard servers as a hash values to be compared to those of known cheating programs". Note open programs, not installed programs.
I have read the occasional report of someone complaining that they got banned because they "played their account on their friend's computer who had Glider installed." I've never seen proof of this however, and you need to be careful what you believe from people who have been banned because they're most likely NOT going to admit that they got caught cheating.
They should give you 30 days to return the game for full refund, or partial even, if you don't aggree with any future changes of the TOS. Every patch, one has to agree to the TOS again. It would make them more careful of what they do to the TOS and the game.
Considering that $50 came with a free month of service that means the actual software itself cost you about $35. In reality what's happening is you're paying an activation fee plus one month of service up front, which is why you get 30 days to return it. How far does that $35 worth of software go? If you play for two years, paying $14.95/mo the whole time, can you really come back at the two year mark and decide you don't like the new TOS and demand your $35 back? Seems kinda silly at that point considering you've already paid $360 to play for that whole time. Instead you get the option of NOT paying to play anymore when you don't like the new TOS.
Slashdot Mirror
A soon as they can get the multimodal reflection sorting working we can tap into the Borg collective. They have all the good warez, pr0n, music and movies from thousands of civilizations. :)
Nah you just get an ex space shuttle pilot to drive a giant laser/ultrasonic drilling machine into the core and drop off some really big nukes. As long as they avoid the giant floating diamonds they should be fine.
But for a couple of trite but true old sayings -- once bitten, twice shy. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Hmm I thought it was more like this: "Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me...you can't get fooled again."
What happens when you can watch all your movies, on your TV, streamed from the net? Apple seems to be trying to push things in this direction with the AppleTV. I think this is really what the game is really all about. These guys don't want to be cut out of the loop when it comes to who provides your entertainment. Right now they have you locked in, as you usually have a choice of OTA, one cable company or a couple of sat companies. Eventually this list is going to grow to include dozens of online providers, and what then? Maybe you won't need that $100+ cable anymore, or maybe you at least stop using their pay-per-view service. It's just like the RIAA/MPAA, trying desperately to prevent an inevitable paradigm shift.
Actually a better analogy would be that they're forcing all the sports cars to stay in first gear, and just to be sure they're throwing up fake stop signs every so often to slow down traffic flow.
The proper solution (and the generally used for business-level connections such as DS3s) is to bill on 95th percentile bandwidth, which roughly speaking is the minimum bandwidth level that covers 95% of your usage over the month. The nice thing about this type of billing is that if you spike the connection to full bandwidth you aren't penalized. It's only when you start using bandwidth on a constant basis that you'll get billed. Then the people who abuse the connection 24/7 will get their big bill (as they should), but the guy who maybe downloads 20 gigs over a few days and then hardly touches the connection the rest of the month won't be penalized. However I suspect this type of billing is too complicated for the average user (which is also why cheap web hosting isn't usually sold this way.)
For example, why would O'Reilly publish its reference books if not for the profit made by doing so? If O'Reilly books were freely copied, why would they go to the expense of writing more?
Interesting choice, because they actually offer at least some of their books online for download, as PDF, no strings attached. I found this out a couple months back when I tried in vain to find a local bookstore with a copy of "Perl Best Practices" in stock. The PDF even has the cover art, so if I wanted to I could print up my own copy and throw it in a three-ring binder (though I find referencing the PDF itself is more than sufficient.)
Even worse, it's in Federal Pound-Me-in-the-Ass Prison. :)
There would also be a significant drop in software development, the profit incentive being undercut
On the software side almost nothing 5-10 years old is useful anymore and certainly not traded online in any significant volume. Even on the music/video side of things there's rarely anything old available, unless it was just re-released on DVD. As fast as things are outdated and replaced in our modern world 10 years is a lifetime. It's all about "0-day" these days.
I'd also like to point out that there could be another upside: imagine if all those interesting TV and movie projects that are currently in limbo because of uncertain, missing or just plain uncooperative copyright holders were suddenly free to be made, because that old stuff on which they are based has fallen into the public domain as the founding fathers intended? Copyright as it exists right now, with its insanely long terms, can stifle innovation even more easily than it protects it.
Personally I think the entire entertainment industry has built itself up into a huge bubble and now they're trying desperately to keep it from popping.
I wonder what you'd get from a genetic OUTER JOIN? :)
...and on that note, a little while ago I bought a $4 LED flashlight that needs no batteries. You just shake it a couple times, which passes a magnet through a coil and recharges a built-in battery. So far it's worked great. I've even used it to read in bed, and the incidental movement from me shifting around has been enough to keep it lit.
I had one of those for a while; I bought it to take camping. For some reason though it just stopped working after about a year. I guess something must've come loose inside, though nothing obvious was visible despite the mostly transparent housing in which it was encased.
I think I've only had two die prematurely. One was on my back porch, and since the bulb wasn't rated for outside use and it's Michigan I'm not surprised it died. It probably froze to death. :)
:)
The other bulb was in a bathroom fixture that itself was acting up, so I'm not sure if it died on its own or if the fixture killed it. The fixture had a bad socket that was causing the light to flicker sometimes, and CFLs aren't designed to be turned to be turned on and off so quickly.
Speaking of that I just remembered a couple other "gotchas" for CFLs that I learned over the years as I ditched my incandescents:
1. They don't work correctly with X10 switches. If I recall this is because those switches need to leak a tiny bit of current through at all times so that they can operate with the light off, but fluorescents mess that up. The ones built for fluorescent lights should work but they're more expensive and not as common.
2. They also don't work with touch lamps, though this might be because many touch lamps are also dimmable. I have a wall-mounted lamp with a touch-sensitive on/off for my bedroom and realized pretty quickly that it wasn't going to work; the the CFL was flickering like crazy. I replaced the bulb with an incandescent, but it fried the circuitry in the light so now it only has two states: "on" and "slightly dimmer."
Are they straight fluorescent bulbs or CFLs? I hate fluorescent bulbs myself (they give me a nasty headache from the flicker) but the CFLs I use in my house never give me a problem, and the color, while not exactly like incandescent, is close enough that I don't notice most of the time. As a bonus I almost never have to change the darn things; I have one in my front hallway that I installed when I moved in in 1999 and it's still going. It's a wee bit dimmer than when it started but still looks like it has years of life left on it.
I haven't RTFA yet but I am guessing there is probably a clause in there that makes the law not apply to bulbs below a certain size and/or voltage. Otherwise, in theory you'd even be banning many replacement bulbs for flashlights, epsecially since there simply are no alternatives for such things since CFLs can't be made anywhere near that small right now.
Or he accidentally blew up another solar system. :)
Happy Fun Ball (Do not taunt it!)
No doubt it's a result of the war between the Xeelee and the Photino Birds.
True it could just be that that spot on Mars is where the aliens keep all their cocaine. :)
So Perl is getting kinky. You can tell it to "say my $name" now. :)
I hope IPv8 is better than IPv7 ("protocol version 7"), with its annoying "I built my consciousness into the protocol" easter egg that the developer put in there...
(Serial Experiments Lain reference, for those wondering what the hell I'm talking about.)
Don't forget you'll need a tax ID too, if you don't already have one. Personally if I have to pay this extra 6% I'd rather take the hit as income tax, because at least that I don't need to track and file separately.
A 6% sales tax means that it's no longer worth it for me to do any work in Maryland
And this is where the real victims will be, those of us who do programming work on the side for some extra income. The hassle of getting a tax ID (which might require setting up a real company), collecting and passing on sales tax to the state is pretty big when all you had to do previously was declare a couple thousand extra dollars on your income taxes at the end of the year. The big consulting companies will complain about it, but in the end they'll just keep on rolling. The little guys will get rolled over.
Michigan (which is where I live and work) recently passed a large tax law change that will charge 6% sales tax on consulting services, among many other things such as massage services (yeah you'll pay 6% on your happy ending!) I'm still trying to decide if its worth the hassle anymore.
I significantly reduced the memory leaks and random crashes that I used to have by removing the Google Toolbar and Google Sync extensions.
From the descriptions I have read it detects running software, not installed software. Wikipedia seems to concur: "Warden uses API function calls to collect data on open programs on the user's computer and sends it back to Blizzard servers as a hash values to be compared to those of known cheating programs". Note open programs, not installed programs.
I have read the occasional report of someone complaining that they got banned because they "played their account on their friend's computer who had Glider installed." I've never seen proof of this however, and you need to be careful what you believe from people who have been banned because they're most likely NOT going to admit that they got caught cheating.
They should give you 30 days to return the game for full refund, or partial even, if you don't aggree with any future changes of the TOS. Every patch, one has to agree to the TOS again. It would make them more careful of what they do to the TOS and the game.
Considering that $50 came with a free month of service that means the actual software itself cost you about $35. In reality what's happening is you're paying an activation fee plus one month of service up front, which is why you get 30 days to return it. How far does that $35 worth of software go? If you play for two years, paying $14.95/mo the whole time, can you really come back at the two year mark and decide you don't like the new TOS and demand your $35 back? Seems kinda silly at that point considering you've already paid $360 to play for that whole time. Instead you get the option of NOT paying to play anymore when you don't like the new TOS.