An interesting philosophical question that I have posed in the past... Would you take a one-way trip to Mars? You get to be the first person to ever set foot on the red planet, your family is generously rewarded, and you take a suicide pill N months after landing when your food supplies run out.
I log my mileage for taxes, and emissions are checked every year by the state so I can get new tags. Shocks going out arent going to cause an accident, they just make the ride a lot bumpier. Ditto struts, unless they actually physically break, and I dont think I have ever even heard of that happening. And who said anything about brakes? Brake pads and inspections are one of the few things that I *DO* keep up with, for safety reasons.
Try again on the "air pollution, oil, gas" bit. My car gets 45 MPG and is in the bottom 10% for air pollution (lower for some indices) among registered vehicles in my state. What do you mean by "irritation and dangerous situations"? The car doesn't make unseemly noises while running normally, and all of the safety features (airbag, etc) are still in good working order.
"limited server side resources" is crap. GOOD crap, in the sense that battle.net is free and Blizzard hasn't had to spend more than pocket change to keep SC and Diablo running all these years, but crap from the POV of cheating. Apply the FPS server model, dedicate a beefy machine to every 30-60 players, and you can do all sorts of wondrous things. The client doesnt have to be dumb, it just shouldnt be sent things it doesnt need to know. As to latency, for the game to be competitive you need minimal lag anyways, and how far is a unit going to move in 1/10th of a second? Sure, you have to send a *LITTLE* more data than the client needs, such as positions of units and projectiles that are [lag time]*[movement speed] distance into the fog, and that would be visible to a map hacker, but it would be orders of magnitude less trouble than now. EverQuest had to solve the same problem when people were sniffing the data stream to find NPC positions miles away, they just stopped sending that data, problem solved.
I have an old cheap car. I am currently driving it into the ground. Risk/return analysis says that no maintenance is the way to go. Maintaining it could cost $500/yr between oil/tires/[everything else that is going wrong with a 13-year-old car*], and the car would only cost about $750 to replace (with one in better shape!).
I explain all this to give context when I say that I don't lock my doors when I park my car. If someone is desperate enough to steal it, they probably need it a lot more than I do. It was "broken" into once, someone went through my glove box and left the contents scattered on the seat. Nothing there worth stealing.
* - It is in desperate need of new shocks and struts. Both window crank assemblies are warped from age. The electrical system is going out piece by piece. The engine sounds significantly worse every year, and is starting to choke when I turn it off. Etc, etc.
Paper and pencil for planning are completely obsolesced by a good tablet and stylus. Take everything you can do with paper and pencil, add the ability to save and duplicate your work, throw in a dash of cut/copy/paste, and give up paper forever.
Then get a keyboard that doesnt go 'tap-tap'? Pretend you are typing on the surface of your desk... There are plenty of keyboards *AT LEAST* that quiet, some virtually silent.
You may be referring to the MMCSS discovery recently. I call that moot. The same media plays on Linux with trivially little CPU time dedicated to it. The fact that it requires so much CPU time that Windows has to fudge process priority far enough to impact network performance says to me that SOMETHING other than just playback is going on, and until it is proven otherwise I am willing to assume that DRM is the culprit. Playing a common MP3 should not eat 80%+ of my CPU.
Care to elaborate? I do not believe there is any DRM checking involved when I am doing video or audio output on my linux desktop pc. Nothing is getting in the way of drive->cpu->gpu->screen, unlike Vista where even thinking about playing copyrighted audio can cut network performance by 90%.
Keep reading. He posits that the existence of honeypots lends credibility to the argument that *ANY* download *MIGHT* be coming from a legitimate source. We know the RIAA is distributing songs via P2P, and we know they are disguising themselves, so why can't we assume that the guy sending us music right now is really the RIAA in disguise, making it legal?
Adsense ads on my site are usually quite relevant and legitimate. I have a blog with some tech stuff, some personal stuff, and a large photo gallery from sci-fi and anime conventions. The tech stuff tends to get mediocre-and-higher store links, and the photo gallery (when its properly tagged) usually gets ads for costume stores and comic dealers.
Counter assertion? GP asked a handful of yes/no questions. I answered in the affirmative. That sort of exchange usually doesnt involve backing unless asked for.
I played EVE for a few months under [not-]emulation. I would probably give the game another try if they released a native Linux client. That is the only reason I started playing Second Life again.
What mistake? [Some Big Company] paid them for the raids, so they did them. No mistake. Never attribute to incompetence what can be explained by corruption.
I agree that Divineo broke the law, but I do not believe that your example is relevant. The HDLoader software was a key part of that decision. That was hardware/software that bypasses copy protection to actually make copies, as opposed to hardware/software that does not make copies (most mod chips). Some mod chips are sold software-less, or with software that only allows playing of imports (explicitly legal in some countries, sadly not USA yet) or homebrew (legal everywhere as far as I know).
Console mod chips that enable consumers to bypass disc authenticity checks, thereby defeating a technical copyright enforcement measure, are, because they do so, illegal under the DMCA. Wrong. Read the law. It is pretty straightforward. To be in violation of the DMCA, the device in question must not only defeat a technological access control measure, but that must be its *PRIMARY* purpose or *ONLY* commercial purpose. Which is not the case at all with mod chips. Most of the people that I know with chipped consoles use them to play imports, or legit backups, or to run homebrew software (including alternate OSes for HTPCs). *ANY* of those three purposes de-classifies the chip as a DMCA-breaking device, let alone all 3 of them.
If you, as an American coder, are having your code license infringed upon by a Chinese company that you can't touch, I wonder if you could go after stores selling the device. They, too, are violating the law. You could probably get ahold of their inventory, if nothing else.
Direct Representative Democracy is the solution. Everyone gets a vote, which they can give to someone else. Don't like how your representative['s representative's representative] is voting? Give your vote to someone else.
All votes to a single person. Your representative. Subdivision requires, among many other complications, someone to divide the issues to be voted on.
As to your conclusion, I disagree. Voting blocks are the thing I want to eliminate. If my representative starts voting against my interests in order to trade votes with others, then I pick a different representative. The goal is to end up with every vote being cast in the way the citizen would have cast it themselves. Of course that won't happen, but it could be quite close. There must be a few hundred people out there who would vote with me on at least 99% of issues. I imagine that among republicrats the numbers are much higher, possibly with millions willing to be represented by the same person. ONE of us could represent the rest.
No, tradition is why we are stuck with a Democratic-Republic. I am a proponent of direct democracy via direct representation. In short, everyone gets to vote on every issue, or they can delegate their vote to a representative (who can then delegate all of THOSE votes, and so on). I am sick and tired of being "represented" by someone who doesn't share ANY of my views. Or worse, someone who actively promotes the interests of corporations over their own constituents.
Slashdot Mirror
An interesting philosophical question that I have posed in the past... Would you take a one-way trip to Mars? You get to be the first person to ever set foot on the red planet, your family is generously rewarded, and you take a suicide pill N months after landing when your food supplies run out.
I log my mileage for taxes, and emissions are checked every year by the state so I can get new tags.
Shocks going out arent going to cause an accident, they just make the ride a lot bumpier. Ditto struts, unless they actually physically break, and I dont think I have ever even heard of that happening. And who said anything about brakes? Brake pads and inspections are one of the few things that I *DO* keep up with, for safety reasons.
Try again on the "air pollution, oil, gas" bit. My car gets 45 MPG and is in the bottom 10% for air pollution (lower for some indices) among registered vehicles in my state. What do you mean by "irritation and dangerous situations"? The car doesn't make unseemly noises while running normally, and all of the safety features (airbag, etc) are still in good working order.
"limited server side resources" is crap. GOOD crap, in the sense that battle.net is free and Blizzard hasn't had to spend more than pocket change to keep SC and Diablo running all these years, but crap from the POV of cheating. Apply the FPS server model, dedicate a beefy machine to every 30-60 players, and you can do all sorts of wondrous things. The client doesnt have to be dumb, it just shouldnt be sent things it doesnt need to know. As to latency, for the game to be competitive you need minimal lag anyways, and how far is a unit going to move in 1/10th of a second? Sure, you have to send a *LITTLE* more data than the client needs, such as positions of units and projectiles that are [lag time]*[movement speed] distance into the fog, and that would be visible to a map hacker, but it would be orders of magnitude less trouble than now. EverQuest had to solve the same problem when people were sniffing the data stream to find NPC positions miles away, they just stopped sending that data, problem solved.
I have an old cheap car. I am currently driving it into the ground. Risk/return analysis says that no maintenance is the way to go. Maintaining it could cost $500/yr between oil/tires/[everything else that is going wrong with a 13-year-old car*], and the car would only cost about $750 to replace (with one in better shape!).
I explain all this to give context when I say that I don't lock my doors when I park my car. If someone is desperate enough to steal it, they probably need it a lot more than I do. It was "broken" into once, someone went through my glove box and left the contents scattered on the seat. Nothing there worth stealing.
* - It is in desperate need of new shocks and struts. Both window crank assemblies are warped from age. The electrical system is going out piece by piece. The engine sounds significantly worse every year, and is starting to choke when I turn it off. Etc, etc.
Or maybe the game could just be secure and not allow map hacking at all?
Paper and pencil for planning are completely obsolesced by a good tablet and stylus. Take everything you can do with paper and pencil, add the ability to save and duplicate your work, throw in a dash of cut/copy/paste, and give up paper forever.
Then get a keyboard that doesnt go 'tap-tap'? Pretend you are typing on the surface of your desk... There are plenty of keyboards *AT LEAST* that quiet, some virtually silent.
You may be referring to the MMCSS discovery recently. I call that moot. The same media plays on Linux with trivially little CPU time dedicated to it. The fact that it requires so much CPU time that Windows has to fudge process priority far enough to impact network performance says to me that SOMETHING other than just playback is going on, and until it is proven otherwise I am willing to assume that DRM is the culprit. Playing a common MP3 should not eat 80%+ of my CPU.
Care to elaborate? I do not believe there is any DRM checking involved when I am doing video or audio output on my linux desktop pc. Nothing is getting in the way of drive->cpu->gpu->screen, unlike Vista where even thinking about playing copyrighted audio can cut network performance by 90%.
Given a spherical earth, you are ALWAYS flying in a circle :) Or an ellipse, depending on which factors you care to ignore.
Keep reading. He posits that the existence of honeypots lends credibility to the argument that *ANY* download *MIGHT* be coming from a legitimate source. We know the RIAA is distributing songs via P2P, and we know they are disguising themselves, so why can't we assume that the guy sending us music right now is really the RIAA in disguise, making it legal?
Adsense ads on my site are usually quite relevant and legitimate. I have a blog with some tech stuff, some personal stuff, and a large photo gallery from sci-fi and anime conventions. The tech stuff tends to get mediocre-and-higher store links, and the photo gallery (when its properly tagged) usually gets ads for costume stores and comic dealers.
Counter assertion? GP asked a handful of yes/no questions. I answered in the affirmative. That sort of exchange usually doesnt involve backing unless asked for.
For a public employee, an emphatic YES to every question that you asked. None of that information is private.
I played EVE for a few months under [not-]emulation. I would probably give the game another try if they released a native Linux client. That is the only reason I started playing Second Life again.
What mistake? [Some Big Company] paid them for the raids, so they did them. No mistake. Never attribute to incompetence what can be explained by corruption.
I agree that Divineo broke the law, but I do not believe that your example is relevant. The HDLoader software was a key part of that decision. That was hardware/software that bypasses copy protection to actually make copies, as opposed to hardware/software that does not make copies (most mod chips). Some mod chips are sold software-less, or with software that only allows playing of imports (explicitly legal in some countries, sadly not USA yet) or homebrew (legal everywhere as far as I know).
the right to sue for damages is one of the things you cant sign away in most (all?) states.
If you, as an American coder, are having your code license infringed upon by a Chinese company that you can't touch, I wonder if you could go after stores selling the device. They, too, are violating the law. You could probably get ahold of their inventory, if nothing else.
Direct Representative Democracy is the solution. Everyone gets a vote, which they can give to someone else. Don't like how your representative['s representative's representative] is voting? Give your vote to someone else.
All votes to a single person. Your representative. Subdivision requires, among many other complications, someone to divide the issues to be voted on.
As to your conclusion, I disagree. Voting blocks are the thing I want to eliminate. If my representative starts voting against my interests in order to trade votes with others, then I pick a different representative. The goal is to end up with every vote being cast in the way the citizen would have cast it themselves. Of course that won't happen, but it could be quite close. There must be a few hundred people out there who would vote with me on at least 99% of issues. I imagine that among republicrats the numbers are much higher, possibly with millions willing to be represented by the same person. ONE of us could represent the rest.
No, tradition is why we are stuck with a Democratic-Republic. I am a proponent of direct democracy via direct representation. In short, everyone gets to vote on every issue, or they can delegate their vote to a representative (who can then delegate all of THOSE votes, and so on). I am sick and tired of being "represented" by someone who doesn't share ANY of my views. Or worse, someone who actively promotes the interests of corporations over their own constituents.
The iPhone is everything the Nokia 770 could have been... if Nokia had the brains to *PUT A PHONE IN IT*.
PS: Yes, I got a 770 in the recent mass discounting craze. Yes, I love it. Yes, I use it for VOIP over EDGE... making it a phone.