Pretty, but I still can't imagine the average person paying to have a machine at home to make either of those.
I've got too much decorative crap around the house already. It's far too easy to accumulate if you just go on vacation once or twice a year. Most people have absolutely no need to invest thousands of dollars in a machine to produce decorative crap. Souvenirs pile up over time, but at least they remind you of all the places you've visited and things you've seen and done. And who really needs to fabricate ultralight fractal based support structures at home?
Depending on your job it may make perfect sense for your business to own one or more 3D printers. If you work anywhere that makes objects of any kind then somebody ought to be at least evaluating a business case for buying a 3D printer. But for the average person, having one in their house or apartment makes no sense.
None of my stuff on Github has a license specified. But then the only stuff I have on Github is a random bunch of Arduino sketches that are of no use to anybody else. Github charges for private repositories but provides public ones for free. So it costs me nothing to be able to view my code from anywhere, even if I just get an urge to double check something from my phone or iPad when I'm out of the house.
I wonder how many of the projects they found without an explicit license are even intended for any distribution at all. Perhaps there are others like me who use version control for code (or perhaps even non-code) that is for their own personal use but is in no way personal or sensitive.
Because atheists have formed a conclusion, they have a belief, they merely have come to the opposite conclusion, the opposite belief.
Opposite to what? Shintoism? Hinduism? Judaism?
What's the opposite of Ford? Is it GM, Honda, or a bicycle or a good pair of walking shoes?
Suppose your favorite brand of car is Ford. You're a devout Fordist (Fordian?) and you ask me if I believe Ford is the one true brand of car. If I don't have a car, live in the city, and honestly just don't even think any car is worth the hassle would you still insist that I have come to the "opposite" belief of your Fordianity?
The word "theist" is derived from the word for god and means someone who believes in one or more gods. The prefix "a" means "not" and an atheist is simply someone who is not a theist. This is really no different than someone who is not a basketball fan. They might hate basketball or they might simply not care. The mere fact that they are not a theist, doesn't tell you anything at all about their beliefs.
The word "gnostic" derives from the word for knowledge and refers to a set of beliefs about "knowability" which is more a branch of philosophy than religion. An agnostic is simply someone who is not a gnostic and thus does not share the Gnostics' beliefs on the subject of knowability.
The most important thing about braces to me is that in vim a single keystroke (%) allows me to bounce back and forth between the start and end of a block.
I haven't tried python yet but it would definitely be a big minus to me if the percent key no longer lets me bounce to block start/end points.
Saving a shitload of money wasn't enough of a reason?
No, certainly not. What's the point of a shitload of money if all you do is save it? Are you going to swim in it like Scrooge McDuck?
There's no point in earning or saving money if you aren't going to do something with it. Spending money on children (and grandchildren) is something that a lot of people (though obviously not 100% of all people) get a lot of enjoyment out of.
Feel free to spend your money on whatever you like if you dislike children, but you're just ignorant if you think that raising children isn't an excellent way to make use of hard earned cash for the vast majority of the human race who like children.
Saving money so that you have lots of funds for spoiling grandchildren is also highly popular and a worthwhile way to spend money for many people, but it's a bit more difficult to have grandchildren if you don't have children (though not impossible obviously.)
It's a typical geek tendency to see everything in black and white. I have an iPhone 4s and a Samsung galaxy siii. I like the iPhone better but carry both all the time since I have to have to separate work and personal phones. I can easily distinguish between "the iPhone is better" vs "I like the iPhone better"
Too many geeks say the former when they mean the latter (s/iPhone/android as needed) and utterly failing to realize that "I like better" != "is better".
What is your source on the "Tech Salary" percentage? Is that the "standard" salary increase given on average across everybody for doing the same job overall? If so then it should be as close to zero as possible after accounting for inflation. If you're doing the same job today as you were doing six years ago then you SHOULD be making the same amount after adjusting for inflation.
Salary increases that beat inflation year over year should only be for those people who increase the quality and/or quantity of their work year over year.
If you increase the pay of everybody regardless of their performance we have a word for that. The word is "inflation" and the old phrase "a rising tide lifts all boats" is relevant.
Generally what people are interested in is how to increase their pay relative to other people, but in order to do that in a fair and honest economy requires increasing your own output relative to other people. You shouldn't expect "everybody" to receive increases that beat inflation because if RELATIVE wealth doesn't change then the numerical values of the pay figures don't matter.
Except for a handful of people, who's going to see it? If there are more than a couple people in a datacenter you're doing it wrong. Rack the equipment (preconfigured), plug in the cables and switch it on. From that point on no one should touch it until it breaks and needs to be RMA'd or scrapped.
How much money are you going to invest in beautifying a space that very few people will see?
That being said, there is some nasty stuff going on on wall street that very much needs to be strangled. Manipulations with total return swaps and similar instruments that put cash into the hands of folks with massive investment holdings without having to report the cash as income. I certainly don't understand all the machinations, but I fully support giving the IRS teeth to dig into the results, not the methods.
If you've got three yachts, five mansions, and twenty three luxury cars you'd better have paid income tax consistent with your level of spending. If it looks like income and it smells like income then as far as I'm concerned it's income. I don't care what elaborate financial transaction ultimately resulted into that valuable asset finding it's way physically into your hands.
If your houses collectively are worth 1000 times what my one house is worth and you're paying 1000 times the property taxes then I'm happy. If you're playing some trickery where they're not "really" your houses, you merely have exclusive access to them and control over them but they're "actually" expenses on the balance sheet of a Burmuda Corp that you own through seven subsidiaries then I've got a problem with that.
As long as the money just circulates through and never falls into any person's hands, who cares? At some point some human being is going to want another mansion or yacht. When they reach their hand into the pot that's when you grab them and take the government's cut.
Nobody is going to waste their life shuffling funds around and endless loop of shell corporations with no intention or method of eventually extracting some of it.
Imagine a Kennedy or Romney getting a house foreclosed on because the local government requires property taxes to be paid in cash. Or unable to restock on champagne and caviar because the clerk at the checkout doesn't accept "I own umpteen offshore corporations" as a valid method of payment. Or cleaning their own pool because every pool boy wants cash, no numbered Swiss accounts please.
The folks running these tax scams aren't doing it for kicks. They're doing it because they want to live high on the hog. As long as the taxes on their luxury lifestyles are in fair proportion to the taxes on us regular folks and our regular lifestyles who cares how the corporate books are structured.
Incidentally all those offshore shell corporations are setup by lawyers and accountants who ultimately want a cash paycheck to buy stuff with. If the CEO can buy another yacht by laying off the hoard of lawyers/accountants that spend their days fabricating shell corps he/she certainly will.
BTW, I support taxing cap gains same as income. If you had X dollars yesterday and X+Y today you owe tax on Y. I don't care where it came from or how you got it. If you're a human being you owe your fair share tax on $Y.
Well, that was a much longer and carefully structured comment on the preview screen. What's the point of a preview if what's on the preview gets truncated when you hit submit?
Oh well, I'm not going to retype that long and detailed dissertation.
How about we just eliminate the corporate taxes altogether. Instead ensure that all money paid out to individuals is properly taxed as income, apply sales tax to all purchas
So do dogs. Cats yawn too. I'm not sure about mice.
What's the point of this story, is there some burning question as to what organisms yawn? A yawning controversy I haven't heard of perhaps? Or some prospective line of in inquiry into the science of yawning?
This story seems like a puff piece devoid of any significant detail or content worth posting to Slashdot.
The UI on the SIII spends a much larger percentage of its time annoying me than the UI on the iPhone does. Among other things:
Autocorrect was so bad I had to turn it off.
Getting the insert point where I want it when editing text is much more cumbersome than the iPhone's magnifying glass mechanism.
It's not always clear why some functionality is available on screen while other functionality requires using the off screen button on the bottom left.
Way more preloaded junk apps than iPhone.
It doesn't handle my blue tooth keyboard as gracefully as my iPhone does.
The two types of app launcher screens aren't actually a problem but they seem to me like an indication of lack of a unified approach to UI design.
The main good point about the SIII is the voicemail to text feature, but if I remember correctly I had to locate and install the application to do that. Out of the box I don't think it could even do visual voicemail. Even now, tapping the little cassette tape icon on the phone screen initiates a voice call to a pre-iPhone-era touch tone driven voicemail system rather than bringing up a list of voicemails on screen.
That's nonsense. Do you even know what lockout/tagout is? How did those "suits" remove your coworker's lock? Did they cut it off or did he not put it on? Every person working on that circuit should have had their own lock and tag on that breaker.
I assume if they had cut his lock off you would have mentioned it since that's a much more serious offense than simply flipping a breaker that isn't locked/tagged.
Your coworker definitely should have been fired if he was working on an industrial power circuit without following lockout/tagout procedures.
BTW, for those not familiar the slash in this case means AND. It is always mandatory to use both a lock and a tag, it's not an either or choice.
I wonder if the definition of city limits (which is what those densities are based off of) has any general usefullness anymore. The only US city on that list is Union City which turns out to be in New Jersey. I've lived in New Jersey for 38 years and never heard of Union City and certainly wouldn't have recognized it as being bigger than New York City.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be able to identify any city limits between the northernmost part of New Jersey and at least halfway down the state. Things get a bit more spread out further south, but from central Jersey on up it's pretty much all contiguous. From residential to commercial to industrial it all pretty much flows together without any obvious boundaries.
I didn't see any contradiction in that person's post. Maybe you should re-read it. I don't have any personal knowledge of teachers' salaries, but the claim that was made is that they consist primarily of union guaranteed annual salary increases regardless of skill or talent. That is entirely consistent with the claim that during a budget crunch it would be difficult for new teachers (or even experienced teachers who have moved around rather than staying at one school for 40+ years) to get a job because the entire budget is consumed by paying large salaries to the small number of teachers who have been collecting annual increases for decades and are guaranteed continued employment and salary increases even if their performance falls short of the new teachers (whether they're fresh out of school or starting teaching after a decade or two of work in private industry.)
Frank Partnoy gives a pretty good explanation in F.I.A.S.C.O Blood in the Water on Wall Street of how the wealthy can use a Total Return Swap to avoid taxes.
We're running vCenter on a pair of physical (non-VM) servers with heartbeat. Heartbeat is a huge pain to get working and apparently pretty much requires Windows Active Directory and MS SQL (we would have preferred Oracle since we already had that in place, but our VMWare support folks couldn't get the combination of vCenter, Heartbeat and Oracle working together.)
This seems like it goes too far. I'd rather just see a ban on mandatory soda purchases. All those places that require you to buy a big gulp the moment you enter the door and refuse to allow you to leave until you've drunk it.
Oh, wait, you mean there aren't any places like that? We're only talking about banning voluntary purchases? Well we don't need the government to do anything in that case. If "the people" want to stop voluntary purchases they can do that themselves with no government effort or expense at all.
Sounds like it's even more useless than our current telepresence rooms.
We've got expensive telepresence rooms all over our company, but they're useless as far as I'm concerned. First of all, they didn't even bother to mount whiteboards on the walls, just a couple of easel style ones. Second, when you stand up to draw a diagram the fixed position cameras can't pick up anything above the middle to bottom of your chest (depending on how tall you are) and cut out the top half of even a tiny easel style whiteboard. If I wanted to be limited to screen sharing from my computer I don't need the telepresence room at all.
What sort of meeting is all about people staring at each other and walking in circles around each other examining each other from every angle? It doesn't appear that this cylindrical display is suitable for showing anything more than a single person just standing there.
I guess it would be useful for mail order prostitutes if there is such a thing, but I can't think of any other reason anyone would walk 360 degrees around another person examining them.
As far as I'm concerned a face to face meeting means standing up, drawing diagrams on the largest whiteboard available or at the very least drawing on sheets of paper and sliding them back and forth across the table.
If you're just going to show me Powerpoint slides, I'll sit in my home office and watch your screen sharing program or better yet just email me the Powerpoint. I don't need to stare at a fixed HD camera image of your face, nor do I need to walk around a "hologram" and stare at your butt.
The theft of the public domain by companies and politicians is the true criminal act.
I hope Project Gutenberg adheres to the letter of the law but doesn't give an inch of generosity to grey areas.
Personally I don't see why the author's death should figure into it at all. A couple of decades from publication to public domain is plenty. If you don't want your thoughts and ideas to enter the public domain then keep them to yourself.
A decade or three of exclusivity is a reasonable incentive to create. Carving out chunks of language and idea space for your own exclusive ownership practically forever is not.
Our shared cultural heritage is far more important that someone's "right" to continue profiting from work they or their ancestors did half a century ago. And if no one is profiting but the works are simply being suppressed because they're out of print but "protected" anyway then that is a crime against humanity.
You do know Valve has promised to patch around Steam authentication if the shit ever does hit the fan?
I was not familiar with the link you provided, but I just read it now and it says this:
According to the Steam Subscriber Agreement, Steam's availability is not guaranteed and Valve is under no legal obligation to release an update disabling the authentication system in the event that Steam becomes permanently unavailable.
Forgive me for failing to be reassured. I think my point still stands. I haven't played Civilization Call to Power in over a year (nearly two years I think) but I'm planning to install it onto the netbook I just purchased last week after I get Linux installed and then a VirtualBox Windows install. I'm pretty confident that it will work fine, but I have serious doubts about whether I would be able to do so if the sort of DRM we have these days had been in effect back when I bought Civ:CtP.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty, but I still can't imagine the average person paying to have a machine at home to make either of those.
I've got too much decorative crap around the house already. It's far too easy to accumulate if you just go on vacation once or twice a year. Most people have absolutely no need to invest thousands of dollars in a machine to produce decorative crap. Souvenirs pile up over time, but at least they remind you of all the places you've visited and things you've seen and done. And who really needs to fabricate ultralight fractal based support structures at home?
Depending on your job it may make perfect sense for your business to own one or more 3D printers. If you work anywhere that makes objects of any kind then somebody ought to be at least evaluating a business case for buying a 3D printer. But for the average person, having one in their house or apartment makes no sense.
None of my stuff on Github has a license specified. But then the only stuff I have on Github is a random bunch of Arduino sketches that are of no use to anybody else. Github charges for private repositories but provides public ones for free. So it costs me nothing to be able to view my code from anywhere, even if I just get an urge to double check something from my phone or iPad when I'm out of the house.
I wonder how many of the projects they found without an explicit license are even intended for any distribution at all. Perhaps there are others like me who use version control for code (or perhaps even non-code) that is for their own personal use but is in no way personal or sensitive.
Because atheists have formed a conclusion, they have a belief, they merely have come to the opposite conclusion, the opposite belief.
Opposite to what? Shintoism? Hinduism? Judaism?
What's the opposite of Ford? Is it GM, Honda, or a bicycle or a good pair of walking shoes?
Suppose your favorite brand of car is Ford. You're a devout Fordist (Fordian?) and you ask me if I believe Ford is the one true brand of car. If I don't have a car, live in the city, and honestly just don't even think any car is worth the hassle would you still insist that I have come to the "opposite" belief of your Fordianity?
The word "theist" is derived from the word for god and means someone who believes in one or more gods. The prefix "a" means "not" and an atheist is simply someone who is not a theist. This is really no different than someone who is not a basketball fan. They might hate basketball or they might simply not care. The mere fact that they are not a theist, doesn't tell you anything at all about their beliefs.
The word "gnostic" derives from the word for knowledge and refers to a set of beliefs about "knowability" which is more a branch of philosophy than religion. An agnostic is simply someone who is not a gnostic and thus does not share the Gnostics' beliefs on the subject of knowability.
Does the percent key in vim work?
The most important thing about braces to me is that in vim a single keystroke (%) allows me to bounce back and forth between the start and end of a block.
I haven't tried python yet but it would definitely be a big minus to me if the percent key no longer lets me bounce to block start/end points.
Saving a shitload of money wasn't enough of a reason?
No, certainly not. What's the point of a shitload of money if all you do is save it? Are you going to swim in it like Scrooge McDuck?
There's no point in earning or saving money if you aren't going to do something with it. Spending money on children (and grandchildren) is something that a lot of people (though obviously not 100% of all people) get a lot of enjoyment out of.
Feel free to spend your money on whatever you like if you dislike children, but you're just ignorant if you think that raising children isn't an excellent way to make use of hard earned cash for the vast majority of the human race who like children.
Saving money so that you have lots of funds for spoiling grandchildren is also highly popular and a worthwhile way to spend money for many people, but it's a bit more difficult to have grandchildren if you don't have children (though not impossible obviously.)
It's a typical geek tendency to see everything in black and white. I have an iPhone 4s and a Samsung galaxy siii. I like the iPhone better but carry both all the time since I have to have to separate work and personal phones. I can easily distinguish between "the iPhone is better" vs "I like the iPhone better"
Too many geeks say the former when they mean the latter (s/iPhone/android as needed) and utterly failing to realize that "I like better" != "is better".
What is your source on the "Tech Salary" percentage? Is that the "standard" salary increase given on average across everybody for doing the same job overall? If so then it should be as close to zero as possible after accounting for inflation. If you're doing the same job today as you were doing six years ago then you SHOULD be making the same amount after adjusting for inflation.
Salary increases that beat inflation year over year should only be for those people who increase the quality and/or quantity of their work year over year.
If you increase the pay of everybody regardless of their performance we have a word for that. The word is "inflation" and the old phrase "a rising tide lifts all boats" is relevant.
Generally what people are interested in is how to increase their pay relative to other people, but in order to do that in a fair and honest economy requires increasing your own output relative to other people. You shouldn't expect "everybody" to receive increases that beat inflation because if RELATIVE wealth doesn't change then the numerical values of the pay figures don't matter.
Except for a handful of people, who's going to see it? If there are more than a couple people in a datacenter you're doing it wrong. Rack the equipment (preconfigured), plug in the cables and switch it on. From that point on no one should touch it until it breaks and needs to be RMA'd or scrapped.
How much money are you going to invest in beautifying a space that very few people will see?
That being said, there is some nasty stuff going on on wall street that very much needs to be strangled. Manipulations with total return swaps and similar instruments that put cash into the hands of folks with massive investment holdings without having to report the cash as income. I certainly don't understand all the machinations, but I fully support giving the IRS teeth to dig into the results, not the methods.
If you've got three yachts, five mansions, and twenty three luxury cars you'd better have paid income tax consistent with your level of spending. If it looks like income and it smells like income then as far as I'm concerned it's income. I don't care what elaborate financial transaction ultimately resulted into that valuable asset finding it's way physically into your hands.
If your houses collectively are worth 1000 times what my one house is worth and you're paying 1000 times the property taxes then I'm happy. If you're playing some trickery where they're not "really" your houses, you merely have exclusive access to them and control over them but they're "actually" expenses on the balance sheet of a Burmuda Corp that you own through seven subsidiaries then I've got a problem with that.
As long as the money just circulates through and never falls into any person's hands, who cares? At some point some human being is going to want another mansion or yacht. When they reach their hand into the pot that's when you grab them and take the government's cut.
Nobody is going to waste their life shuffling funds around and endless loop of shell corporations with no intention or method of eventually extracting some of it.
Imagine a Kennedy or Romney getting a house foreclosed on because the local government requires property taxes to be paid in cash. Or unable to restock on champagne and caviar because the clerk at the checkout doesn't accept "I own umpteen offshore corporations" as a valid method of payment. Or cleaning their own pool because every pool boy wants cash, no numbered Swiss accounts please.
The folks running these tax scams aren't doing it for kicks. They're doing it because they want to live high on the hog. As long as the taxes on their luxury lifestyles are in fair proportion to the taxes on us regular folks and our regular lifestyles who cares how the corporate books are structured.
Incidentally all those offshore shell corporations are setup by lawyers and accountants who ultimately want a cash paycheck to buy stuff with. If the CEO can buy another yacht by laying off the hoard of lawyers/accountants that spend their days fabricating shell corps he/she certainly will.
BTW, I support taxing cap gains same as income. If you had X dollars yesterday and X+Y today you owe tax on Y. I don't care where it came from or how you got it. If you're a human being you owe your fair share tax on $Y.
Well, that was a much longer and carefully structured comment on the preview screen. What's the point of a preview if what's on the preview gets truncated when you hit submit?
Oh well, I'm not going to retype that long and detailed dissertation.
How about we just eliminate the corporate taxes altogether. Instead ensure that all money paid out to individuals is properly taxed as income, apply sales tax to all purchas
So do dogs. Cats yawn too. I'm not sure about mice.
What's the point of this story, is there some burning question as to what organisms yawn? A yawning controversy I haven't heard of perhaps? Or some prospective line of in inquiry into the science of yawning?
This story seems like a puff piece devoid of any significant detail or content worth posting to Slashdot.
The UI on the SIII spends a much larger percentage of its time annoying me than the UI on the iPhone does. Among other things:
Autocorrect was so bad I had to turn it off.
Getting the insert point where I want it when editing text is much more cumbersome than the iPhone's magnifying glass mechanism.
It's not always clear why some functionality is available on screen while other functionality requires using the off screen button on the bottom left.
Way more preloaded junk apps than iPhone.
It doesn't handle my blue tooth keyboard as gracefully as my iPhone does.
The two types of app launcher screens aren't actually a problem but they seem to me like an indication of lack of a unified approach to UI design.
The main good point about the SIII is the voicemail to text feature, but if I remember correctly I had to locate and install the application to do that. Out of the box I don't think it could even do visual voicemail. Even now, tapping the little cassette tape icon on the phone screen initiates a voice call to a pre-iPhone-era touch tone driven voicemail system rather than bringing up a list of voicemails on screen.
That's nonsense. Do you even know what lockout/tagout is? How did those "suits" remove your coworker's lock? Did they cut it off or did he not put it on? Every person working on that circuit should have had their own lock and tag on that breaker.
I assume if they had cut his lock off you would have mentioned it since that's a much more serious offense than simply flipping a breaker that isn't locked/tagged.
Your coworker definitely should have been fired if he was working on an industrial power circuit without following lockout/tagout procedures.
BTW, for those not familiar the slash in this case means AND. It is always mandatory to use both a lock and a tag, it's not an either or choice.
I wonder if the definition of city limits (which is what those densities are based off of) has any general usefullness anymore. The only US city on that list is Union City which turns out to be in New Jersey. I've lived in New Jersey for 38 years and never heard of Union City and certainly wouldn't have recognized it as being bigger than New York City.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be able to identify any city limits between the northernmost part of New Jersey and at least halfway down the state. Things get a bit more spread out further south, but from central Jersey on up it's pretty much all contiguous. From residential to commercial to industrial it all pretty much flows together without any obvious boundaries.
I didn't see any contradiction in that person's post. Maybe you should re-read it. I don't have any personal knowledge of teachers' salaries, but the claim that was made is that they consist primarily of union guaranteed annual salary increases regardless of skill or talent. That is entirely consistent with the claim that during a budget crunch it would be difficult for new teachers (or even experienced teachers who have moved around rather than staying at one school for 40+ years) to get a job because the entire budget is consumed by paying large salaries to the small number of teachers who have been collecting annual increases for decades and are guaranteed continued employment and salary increases even if their performance falls short of the new teachers (whether they're fresh out of school or starting teaching after a decade or two of work in private industry.)
Frank Partnoy gives a pretty good explanation in F.I.A.S.C.O Blood in the Water on Wall Street of how the wealthy can use a Total Return Swap to avoid taxes.
We're running vCenter on a pair of physical (non-VM) servers with heartbeat. Heartbeat is a huge pain to get working and apparently pretty much requires Windows Active Directory and MS SQL (we would have preferred Oracle since we already had that in place, but our VMWare support folks couldn't get the combination of vCenter, Heartbeat and Oracle working together.)
This seems like it goes too far. I'd rather just see a ban on mandatory soda purchases. All those places that require you to buy a big gulp the moment you enter the door and refuse to allow you to leave until you've drunk it.
Oh, wait, you mean there aren't any places like that? We're only talking about banning voluntary purchases? Well we don't need the government to do anything in that case. If "the people" want to stop voluntary purchases they can do that themselves with no government effort or expense at all.
Mission accomplished! Good job mayor.
I'm pretty sure that acronym should be AFSTAR, I've never heard of the word "for" being spelled with an asterisk.
Sounds like it's even more useless than our current telepresence rooms.
We've got expensive telepresence rooms all over our company, but they're useless as far as I'm concerned. First of all, they didn't even bother to mount whiteboards on the walls, just a couple of easel style ones. Second, when you stand up to draw a diagram the fixed position cameras can't pick up anything above the middle to bottom of your chest (depending on how tall you are) and cut out the top half of even a tiny easel style whiteboard. If I wanted to be limited to screen sharing from my computer I don't need the telepresence room at all.
What sort of meeting is all about people staring at each other and walking in circles around each other examining each other from every angle? It doesn't appear that this cylindrical display is suitable for showing anything more than a single person just standing there.
I guess it would be useful for mail order prostitutes if there is such a thing, but I can't think of any other reason anyone would walk 360 degrees around another person examining them.
As far as I'm concerned a face to face meeting means standing up, drawing diagrams on the largest whiteboard available or at the very least drawing on sheets of paper and sliding them back and forth across the table.
If you're just going to show me Powerpoint slides, I'll sit in my home office and watch your screen sharing program or better yet just email me the Powerpoint. I don't need to stare at a fixed HD camera image of your face, nor do I need to walk around a "hologram" and stare at your butt.
The theft of the public domain by companies and politicians is the true criminal act.
I hope Project Gutenberg adheres to the letter of the law but doesn't give an inch of generosity to grey areas.
Personally I don't see why the author's death should figure into it at all. A couple of decades from publication to public domain is plenty. If you don't want your thoughts and ideas to enter the public domain then keep them to yourself.
A decade or three of exclusivity is a reasonable incentive to create. Carving out chunks of language and idea space for your own exclusive ownership practically forever is not.
Our shared cultural heritage is far more important that someone's "right" to continue profiting from work they or their ancestors did half a century ago. And if no one is profiting but the works are simply being suppressed because they're out of print but "protected" anyway then that is a crime against humanity.
And your reaction is reason enough to call them legos as often as possible. Please try to relax before you have an burst a blood vessel.
You do know Valve has promised to patch around Steam authentication if the shit ever does hit the fan?
I was not familiar with the link you provided, but I just read it now and it says this:
According to the Steam Subscriber Agreement, Steam's availability is not guaranteed and Valve is under no legal obligation to release an update disabling the authentication system in the event that Steam becomes permanently unavailable.
Forgive me for failing to be reassured. I think my point still stands. I haven't played Civilization Call to Power in over a year (nearly two years I think) but I'm planning to install it onto the netbook I just purchased last week after I get Linux installed and then a VirtualBox Windows install. I'm pretty confident that it will work fine, but I have serious doubts about whether I would be able to do so if the sort of DRM we have these days had been in effect back when I bought Civ:CtP.