I can still play my legally purchased copy of Quake and even Half-Life, but I know 10 years from now I most likely won't be able to go back and replay HL2.
10 years from now, should Steam be switched off (or some other event occur that prevents the game from playing even in 'offine mode') I'm banking that some nice cracker will release a patch:) Seriously.
Re:Electric Till Corporation vs. Microsoft
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
·
· Score: 2, Informative
>Neal, in Cryptonomicon why did you call Windows and MacOS by
> their true names but used the fictitious name 'Finux' to refer
>to what is obviously 'Linux?' Does this mean that you hate Linux?
Since Finux was the principal operating system used by the characters in the book, I needed some creative leeway to have the fictitious operating system as used by the characters be different in minor ways from the real operating system called Linux. Otherwise I would receive many complaints from Linux users pointing out errors in my depiction of Linux. This is why Batman works in Gotham City, instead of New York--by putting him in Gotham City, the creators afforded themselves the creative license to put buildings in different places, etc.
Re:Confidential Proposal, Off shore data haven
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
·
· Score: 1
Maybe if you guys had Australian-style preferential voting like (other?) sane western democracies, it wouldn't an issue.
Quick primer -- it works on the principle of "if I can't have blah1, I'd take blah2 as the next best choice".
Three candidates - A, B and C. When I vote, I put a number next to all three of them (eg. A-2, B-1, C-3). My vote immediately goes to B.
Once all the "1" votes are counted, whomever is in last place is ruled out, and all the "1" votes they had are reconsidered. In this case, my "2" vote would be added to A's tally.
In this way, you can safely vote for candidates you prefer, but you know aren't going to win. This sends a clear message to minor-party candidates about how much actual support they have, but doesn't 'split' the vote.
We still have major parties who grab most of the media attention (and therefore the vote) - but at least you don't get Democrats strongarming Naders etc. Of course, to change the system, your dominant parties would risk their own hegemony. Good luck getting that to happen.
I haven't seen US territory get hit with another major attack in the last three years.
Is that progress to you? It's chilling and sad to think that such a statement can be considered a "strong point" of any 1st world governmental regime. Five years ago it would have been dystopian in the extreme to suggest it.
To me, that's reason enough to steer well clear of the guys who have been sailing everyone into this shitstorm... on both (all?) sides.
I feel compelled to answer your post; my initial thought was to mod you as over-rated, since there was no "-1, racist" option (off-topic would have worked also). Besides, in a thread about censorship, the last thing I wanted to do was bury your idea where it could grow like a fungus.
So let me tell you the difference between Christians and Muslems when it comes to sacrilege...Christians boycotted...urged others to boycott...wrote letters to the newspapers. Muslems(sic)...threatened us with bombings and death.
You're saying that because in your job selling books you dealt with some people who expressed anger and resentment in different ways, you can tell everyone that Islam is more violent and evil than Christianity. Yes, that was implied by your post.
I don't expect you to bother learningsomehistory, but perhaps others who read this will pause for a second and realise that violence and rationality varies from one person to another, within the same person at different times and in different situations - and that's dangerous and foolish and ignorant to forget.
It's people with simplistic world-views like yours who thought it was a justifible idea to crash planes into buildings three years ago. Those who moderated you 'interesting' can perhaps be forgiven for pointing out an example of the sort of dogmatic thinking that causes so many global fisticuffs. Those who moderated you 'insightful' are clearly a bit feeble-minded. No dobut I'll be labelled a troll for this - but if you, Brandybuck, at least, consider how easily you jumped from subjective experience through to stereotyping and cultural generalisation and plain out-and-out insult, maybe you'll notice the next time you think to do the same.
The BCC proves it.
So some Googling shows up a truckload of press releases demonstrating that BMG UK/Ireland is hyping a fifty year old tune as the first rock and roll song. More Googling indicates that many others disagree with that assertion (I'll leave it to you to explore it).
Am I simply forming a conspiracy theory, or does anyone else think the argument for extending copyright based on 'sustained revenues' is significantly boosted by hyping some ancient tune at exactly the time the point is made?
...as much as I dont like people invading my privacy, I would rather not be on a plane with a criminal.
Quick points:
There are (current and former) criminals catching flights daily and nobody ever notices because they're not committing crimes at those moments.
If there's one thing everyone should have realised in the past few years, no matter how hard you look you can't tell the difference between a true threat and an innocent passenger.
Persons who are known to, and watched by, agencies like your FBI will be tipped off by this sort of thing, making useful intelligence that much harder to gather on them, and their associates.
The potential for abuse of such powers lessens the quality of life for everybody in society; it's one more unfair thing that can happen to you.
History has shown the worst affected by such measures are minority groups, which in turn broadens social divides which can lead to more crime/terror than ever.
When the next major terrorist attack against US civilians is not prevented in the slightest by measures taken to harden aerosecurity, what will you wish for next?
Only barely on topic I know - but fascinating nonetheless. A fascinating book by Simon Winchester - The Professor and the Madman tells the story of the creation of the OED - compiled from thousands upon thousands of annotated submissions and contributions from ordinary people over (initially) 70 years.
The book centres on one contributor in particular, an American expat/Civil War veteran named Dr W.C. Minor, who submitted tens of thousands of entries from his room in a criminal asylum. If you're into Victorian madness, the English language or both, it's worth a read.
1) I think you might be confusing the installation and maintenance of cabling infrastructure with operating an ISP. These are two very different things.
2) Everything in your list can be (and is being) done by a private company. There's nothing special about governments that makes any of that more likely.
More detail:
see it as a cash cow and milk it for more than you're paying now, sinking the money into higher salaries for town officials If there is already fibre now with services running through it, more fibre won't drive prices up. If there's no fibre already, and it's offered at an uncompetitive wholesale rate, and you can't afford it, as an individual you're scarcely worse off without it.
farm out the maintenance to the lowest bidder, who has 20 hours of downtime/week This might happen, and it might not. I work in a government environment - contractual stuff rarely comes down to the cheapest price - it's the best price for an agreed service. Provided the tender process is kosher and guarantees uptime etc. this is a non-issue. Again, a private company is faced with the same choice.
outsource support to india If it's infrastructure they're maintaining and not an ISP it makes less sense to outsource bulldozers and guys with shovels to another continent. I will not delve into the politics of outsourced tech (eg ISP) support here because it's been done to death and isn't relevant anyway.
decide that 500kbps is fast enough for everyone Private ISPs do this all the time. There's nothing inherent in fibre that puts a ceiling on throughput, except how much of it you decide to lay. Somewhere somebody has to make that decision, but how likely is it that such capital expenditure wouldn't have a clause in the brief that it has to be useful for at least x years?
mandate Windows usage if you want to get on the net As mentioned earlier, this is an issue if you're an ISP, not a piece of fibre.
any number of other stupid things Sure everyone does stupid things sometimes. I think any sane person would agree that private companies are just as able to make poor implementations as governments. The difference is that private companies dry up and disappear so nobody can see them when they stuff up - governments generally hang around and wear the cost through the electoral process, to a greater or lesser extent.
I'd rather see towns mandate multiple cable/DSL providers and let the market drive the prices down.
It all comes back to this: if private enterprise has had a decade of mainstream acceptance of the Internet and still hasn't found it cost-effective to sink some cable in areas where municipalities are considering it, then do the residents and businesses there just miss out? This is as much an ideological position as anything. But the fact remains - mandating multiple providers is already there and it hasn't resulting in one bit of fast data transfer (pun intended) for places that won't drive enough profit.
This new OS "will be released in limited, selected markets later this year". What's the bet one of the very first markets is the black market at Pantip Plaza??
You're trolling, but who cares. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt in the hope you might learn to think.
You missed the point...
No - nobody missed your point.
most here on slashdot are just itching for a fight.
That's why you've posted four times in this story already, I guess.
Anyone or anything...that tries to predict the future...is stupid.
I guess you won't be trusting that Sun to come up tomorrow morning, then, will you. If you did, you'd be employing a predictive model. Since you've called that stupid, I suppose you honestly have no feeling one way or the other about the possibility. You certainly haven't got plans for tomorrow (like waking up) because that would again imply a prediction based on your model of the way the solar system hangs together.
I, and many others, see the point you're painfully laboring: that prediction is an asymptotic game. Please get down out of your tree for a moment and consider that it doesn't matter if models are not 100% right. They are provably not 100% wrong. Somewhere in the middle is where useful work can get done - something you seem not to be interested in.
How many of you jumping on the global warming bandwagon don't believe the weather predictions on the local news?
How come you're willing to believe weather prediction of 50 to 100 years into the future?
Quick clue. If I watch one spin of a roulette wheel, I have a pretty ordinary chance of guessing whether the casino will win, or the dude betting against it.
If however I look at all the games in the casino, understand their rules and the associated probabilities, measure the number of people who come inside to play, it becomes exceedingly easy -- like high school math easy -- to predict whether or not the casino will win overall, and even by how much.
If you haven't understood from this why your post betrayed your ignorance then you've further proved my point.
And you're modded insightful for that sort of reasoning? Bah. We call ourselves an intelligent community... faith in scientists as long as they're not environmental scientists...
True - but at the moment we can 'safely' ignore the law because nobody seriously cares about enforcing illegal things like timeshifting TV broadcasts. Companies are starting to care in a big way in the US, and that's a bad sign:(
While Webster might not stand up in court, I think the US Code will.
The US legal code isn't law in Australia yet, but while Dubya keeps dangling the Free Trade Agreement carrot in front of us, it's only a matter of time before the US Congress re-writes our copyright laws for us, despite the on-paper affirmations to the contrary:(
...And the networks want to implement technologies that make it more difficult for these young people to watch their shows (Tivo, taping, etc.)
It's not about the shows - they're just a vehicle for advertising. "TV"'s customers are vendors of products and services - not people who watch shows.
What the content creators want is not people to watch their programming, but people to watch the ads within their shows. Is it any wonder that the quality of the bait goes down as the ability to lock the ads in goes up?
Slashdot Mirror
10 years from now, should Steam be switched off (or some other event occur that prevents the game from playing even in 'offine mode') I'm banking that some nice cracker will release a patch :) Seriously.
>Neal, in Cryptonomicon why did you call Windows and MacOS by
> their true names but used the fictitious name 'Finux' to refer
>to what is obviously 'Linux?' Does this mean that you hate Linux?
Since Finux was the principal operating system used by the characters in the book, I needed some creative leeway to have the fictitious operating system as used by the characters be different in minor ways from the real operating system called Linux. Otherwise I would receive many complaints from Linux users pointing out errors in my depiction of Linux. This is why Batman works in Gotham City, instead of New York--by putting him in Gotham City, the creators afforded themselves the creative license to put buildings in different places, etc.
There already is a data haven, on Sealand. It's even mentioned on Neal's own site. :)
Maybe if you guys had Australian-style preferential voting like (other?) sane western democracies, it wouldn't an issue.
Quick primer -- it works on the principle of "if I can't have blah1, I'd take blah2 as the next best choice".
Three candidates - A, B and C. When I vote, I put a number next to all three of them (eg. A-2, B-1, C-3). My vote immediately goes to B.
Once all the "1" votes are counted, whomever is in last place is ruled out, and all the "1" votes they had are reconsidered. In this case, my "2" vote would be added to A's tally.
In this way, you can safely vote for candidates you prefer, but you know aren't going to win. This sends a clear message to minor-party candidates about how much actual support they have, but doesn't 'split' the vote.
We still have major parties who grab most of the media attention (and therefore the vote) - but at least you don't get Democrats strongarming Naders etc. Of course, to change the system, your dominant parties would risk their own hegemony. Good luck getting that to happen.
Is that progress to you? It's chilling and sad to think that such a statement can be considered a "strong point" of any 1st world governmental regime. Five years ago it would have been dystopian in the extreme to suggest it.
To me, that's reason enough to steer well clear of the guys who have been sailing everyone into this shitstorm... on both (all?) sides.
You're saying that because in your job selling books you dealt with some people who expressed anger and resentment in different ways, you can tell everyone that Islam is more violent and evil than Christianity. Yes, that was implied by your post.
I don't expect you to bother learning some history, but perhaps others who read this will pause for a second and realise that violence and rationality varies from one person to another, within the same person at different times and in different situations - and that's dangerous and foolish and ignorant to forget.
It's people with simplistic world-views like yours who thought it was a justifible idea to crash planes into buildings three years ago. Those who moderated you 'interesting' can perhaps be forgiven for pointing out an example of the sort of dogmatic thinking that causes so many global fisticuffs. Those who moderated you 'insightful' are clearly a bit feeble-minded. No dobut I'll be labelled a troll for this - but if you, Brandybuck, at least, consider how easily you jumped from subjective experience through to stereotyping and cultural generalisation and plain out-and-out insult, maybe you'll notice the next time you think to do the same.
And for those who can see the enormous prank value in the above post... here it is :)
You mean, apart from all the rest of us people outside the USA?
Am I simply forming a conspiracy theory, or does anyone else think the argument for extending copyright based on 'sustained revenues' is significantly boosted by hyping some ancient tune at exactly the time the point is made?
British troops testing LSD - 14mb video, but essential viewing for those considering mixing hallucinogens with the workplace
... which allows you to use MSN IM. Your point is??
- There are (current and former) criminals catching flights daily and nobody ever notices because they're not committing crimes at those moments.
- If there's one thing everyone should have realised in the past few years, no matter how hard you look you can't tell the difference between a true threat and an innocent passenger.
- Persons who are known to, and watched by, agencies like your FBI will be tipped off by this sort of thing, making useful intelligence that much harder to gather on them, and their associates.
- The potential for abuse of such powers lessens the quality of life for everybody in society; it's one more unfair thing that can happen to you.
- History has shown the worst affected by such measures are minority groups, which in turn broadens social divides which can lead to more crime/terror than ever.
When the next major terrorist attack against US civilians is not prevented in the slightest by measures taken to harden aerosecurity, what will you wish for next?Ah, well that's okay then ! :)
Exactly how many people consider Esperanto their native language? Seriously... what is your point, and why is it modded 'insightful'?
The book centres on one contributor in particular, an American expat/Civil War veteran named Dr W.C. Minor, who submitted tens of thousands of entries from his room in a criminal asylum. If you're into Victorian madness, the English language or both, it's worth a read.
1) I think you might be confusing the installation and maintenance of cabling infrastructure with operating an ISP. These are two very different things.
2) Everything in your list can be (and is being) done by a private company. There's nothing special about governments that makes any of that more likely.
More detail:
If there is already fibre now with services running through it, more fibre won't drive prices up. If there's no fibre already, and it's offered at an uncompetitive wholesale rate, and you can't afford it, as an individual you're scarcely worse off without it.
This might happen, and it might not. I work in a government environment - contractual stuff rarely comes down to the cheapest price - it's the best price for an agreed service. Provided the tender process is kosher and guarantees uptime etc. this is a non-issue. Again, a private company is faced with the same choice.
If it's infrastructure they're maintaining and not an ISP it makes less sense to outsource bulldozers and guys with shovels to another continent. I will not delve into the politics of outsourced tech (eg ISP) support here because it's been done to death and isn't relevant anyway.
Private ISPs do this all the time. There's nothing inherent in fibre that puts a ceiling on throughput, except how much of it you decide to lay. Somewhere somebody has to make that decision, but how likely is it that such capital expenditure wouldn't have a clause in the brief that it has to be useful for at least x years?
As mentioned earlier, this is an issue if you're an ISP, not a piece of fibre.
Sure everyone does stupid things sometimes. I think any sane person would agree that private companies are just as able to make poor implementations as governments. The difference is that private companies dry up and disappear so nobody can see them when they stuff up - governments generally hang around and wear the cost through the electoral process, to a greater or lesser extent.
I'd rather see towns mandate multiple cable/DSL providers and let the market drive the prices down.
It all comes back to this: if private enterprise has had a decade of mainstream acceptance of the Internet and still hasn't found it cost-effective to sink some cable in areas where municipalities are considering it, then do the residents and businesses there just miss out? This is as much an ideological position as anything. But the fact remains - mandating multiple providers is already there and it hasn't resulting in one bit of fast data transfer (pun intended) for places that won't drive enough profit.
This new OS "will be released in limited, selected markets later this year". What's the bet one of the very first markets is the black market at Pantip Plaza??
Mostly in Australia.
You missed the point...
No - nobody missed your point.
most here on slashdot are just itching for a fight.
That's why you've posted four times in this story already, I guess.
Anyone or anything...that tries to predict the future...is stupid.
I guess you won't be trusting that Sun to come up tomorrow morning, then, will you. If you did, you'd be employing a predictive model. Since you've called that stupid, I suppose you honestly have no feeling one way or the other about the possibility. You certainly haven't got plans for tomorrow (like waking up) because that would again imply a prediction based on your model of the way the solar system hangs together.
I, and many others, see the point you're painfully laboring: that prediction is an asymptotic game. Please get down out of your tree for a moment and consider that it doesn't matter if models are not 100% right. They are provably not 100% wrong. Somewhere in the middle is where useful work can get done - something you seem not to be interested in.
If however I look at all the games in the casino, understand their rules and the associated probabilities, measure the number of people who come inside to play, it becomes exceedingly easy -- like high school math easy -- to predict whether or not the casino will win overall, and even by how much.
If you haven't understood from this why your post betrayed your ignorance then you've further proved my point. And you're modded insightful for that sort of reasoning? Bah. We call ourselves an intelligent community... faith in scientists as long as they're not environmental scientists...
True - but at the moment we can 'safely' ignore the law because nobody seriously cares about enforcing illegal things like timeshifting TV broadcasts. Companies are starting to care in a big way in the US, and that's a bad sign :(
Google's HTML transcript
It's not about the shows - they're just a vehicle for advertising. "TV"'s customers are vendors of products and services - not people who watch shows.
What the content creators want is not people to watch their programming, but people to watch the ads within their shows. Is it any wonder that the quality of the bait goes down as the ability to lock the ads in goes up?