Gaming will cease to be a teenage phenomena? It already did, years ago. 69% of gamers are 18 or older. Even limiting it to consoles (thus dropping all the solitaire players), 60% are 18 and over.
As far as I can tell, Keen's more interested in sell books by stirring up controversy than actually covering the situation in an evenhanded way.
Take, for example, the claim that Craigslist is killing newspaper reporting. Craiglist is in no way shape or form a substitute for news. It has nothing to do with "amateurs." It's a freaking classified ads site. It's been the land of amateur advertising for decades. It is killing the classified ads section of the newspaper, and that may make running a newspaper harder, but it has nothing to do with "amateurs" and everything to do with a changing market. Expecting one particular revenue source to last forever, or complaining that you've lost a revenue source because technology has moved on it selfish and short sighted. Should we instead prefer a more expensive and less efficient advertising route just to support journalism? At that point it's charity work, and I'd rather have them be honest about.
As you note, the decline of newspapers has taken decades. The internet is shaking things up, but newspapers have already suffered hits from radio and television. To drive up profits newspapers were consolidating and cutting down on the number of reporters long before the web existed. In an effort to increase readership, all too many newspapers are pandering to masses, dumbing themselves down. With newspapers generally sucking more, is it any surprise that people look elsewhere for content. And it doesn't mean that nothing will replace the newspaper. There are several self-sufficient online news sources that do original reporting (Salon.com and Slate.com immediately leap to mind).
Finally, how is this related to Nielson's article? Indeed, his entire point is: specialize, be knowledgeable, earn a reputation as being an expert in your area, and write solid in depth articles. He believes this will directly or indirectly turn into money for the author (in the form of selling related products or services, or advertising, or whatever. His core assumption is that you have a web site that you want visitors to. What you do with them is your problem.). This suggests that the situation will self correct, directly conflicting with Keen's fundamental premise.
Check the instructions that came with your meter. If it's like mine, there's a big warning that says something like, "WARNING: Apply only to individual people one at a time. Applying to a group of people will return nonsensical results and will likely result in your making an ass of yourself in public." Slashdot is a mixed group of people with differing opinions. Attempting to pin a particular set of beliefs on Slashdot's posters as a whole is foolish. That you can find, say, two different people in the same group with different beliefs doesn't make you a clever investigator of hypocrisy, it makes you look stupid.
I'm very much part of the group arguing that "theft" and "stolen" are deeply inaccurate words for describing copyright infringement. And in this case it's not really theft either, so we should avoid those words. Now, it's not the "exact same thing," as it may not may not be copyright infringement, depending on what files the techs made copies of. What it absolutely is is a violation of privacy, which may not be illegal, but is immoral and should be grounds for being sacked by Best Buy. Depending on what exactly was copied, it might also be copyright infringement.
So what you're saying is, if I break into your house and write down the combination for your safe, I haven't stolen the combination? I think the popular use of the word "theft" would cover such a case. I've stolen the secrecy, which is the value in a secret combination.
To use popular terminology, sure, you've "stolen" the combination. But legally you haven't. You've engaged in breaking and entering and trespass. But writing down something you've seen isn't a crime and you can't be charged for it. Heck, you could have learned the conversation by drugging someone who knew it and not bothered to write it down, just memorizing it. While you've committed a crime (Poisoning?), it's certainly not theft. It would be more accurate so say that you've compromised the secrecy of the combination in both cases.
Sometimes it's important to be accurate to minimize confusion and ambiguity. In this case, there are groups like the RIAA and MPAA who are intentionally trying to confuse the very different crimes of "theft" and "copyright infringement." By doing so, they can make illogical statements like making shoplifting of a CD equivalent to making an infringing copy of a song, despite the different levels of damage, different victims, and different penalties. So it should be understandable that some of us now strive to be more careful about our use of the term.
Abuse of data is a matter of when, not if. My money is on it only being a matter of time before we discover that a murder victim was stalked by someone with access to the victim's cell phone location data. By erring on the side of limiting how much data you give businesses or government, you limit the possible damage if you're the unlucky person who gets incorrectly targeted.
I think you're trying to suggest that Slashdot readers are, generally, hypocrites because they don't care if new technology or business models drive old ones out of business. Of course, that's utter nonsense. This isn't about Zap2It's business model being harmed by new technology or new business models. This is about Zap2It offering something to individuals for free out of simple generosity. This generosity has been abused and does threaten their business model, so they going to stop being generous. Zap2It doesn't suffer in the slightest, only those who benefited from their generosity do.
Now, if a third party started giving away television schedules without relying on Zap2It's data, harming Zap2It's business model, then we'd be on the same ground. Of course, if that happened and Zap2It whined about it, I don't think you'd see much sympathy here.
Assuming you're a technical professional, I think I can safely assume your time is worth $30 or more per hour. So you believe you can write and maintain a web scraper in less than two hours per year? This includes coping with the web site changing their formatting occasionally as hordes of scrapers start hitting their site as other MythTV users switch over. Me, I'm expecting it will take more than 2 hours of my time per year to deal with it, so it's a bad tradeoff. I'm prepared to pay $5 a month for reliable data that just works. Now, of course, if your time is worth less than this, perhaps because you enjoy doing it and it's a hobby, or your a student with more free time than money, it might be a good tradeoff for you.
As for $5 a month being what Tivo charges, it's never been that cheap. (Lifetime service could get you that low, but the "lifetime" expired when your Tivo did and it hasn't been available in years.) The cheapest Tivo service is $8.31 per month and that requires that you pay in advance for 3 years. If you're not so keen on coughing that much out up front, the best you're doing is $12.95 per month.
Is $5 too much? Possibly. Ideally we'll have competition and prices will drop to just above the production cost.
Clinton signed the three bad laws. Okay. This may come as a surprise, but Bill Clinton and Al Gore are different human beings. Our constitution doesn't give vice-presidents any right to veto things.
Even if Clinton's actions somehow taint Gore, it's possible to admire someone for the good things they've done, even if they have serious flaws.
As for sharing Gore's movie, remember that "share" can mean things besides "distribute copies of." You can loan your friends your DVD perfectly legally. You can invite a few friends over and show them your copy of the DVD without breaking any laws.
As for why it's for profit, there are trade-offs whenever one wants to get a message out. The people who funded the movie probably to make a profit. In exchange the movie got widespread distribution and plenty of media attention. Having the movie available in theaters across the country may have gotten his message out to more people than making a less polished movie freely available would have. Maybe Gore made the wrong trade-off, but it's not an obvious decision.
This will be the killing blow for MythTV and other open source DVRs? I think not. MythTV predates Zap2It and managed to do okay. Yes, it relied on screen scraping, but it worked. Furthermore, I know I'm perfectly prepared to pay a small monthly fee for a good data source. Maybe $5 a month? Since a company offering such a service doesn't need to recoup costs for selling hardware below cost (as Tivo does), such a price should be feasible. Since Zap2It was free, there wasn't much incentive for someone to offer the service, but now there is. I'm hoping the free market will see the opportunity and we can work something else.
Based on their previous complaints and this message, I think the problem was people were using the free data set, then redistributing it, probably for profit, possibly indirectly (say, selling devices that used Zap2It's free service). Zap2It makes money selling their data set and they were very generously offering it for free to individuals. But you weren't allow to redistribute it.
Nonsense. The summary made it perfectly clear why they don't want the AO mark: a number of cowardly stores refuse to stock AO games. Fewer stores means less visibility and fewer sales, even if they really only want adults purchasing the game. For a game that was expensive to produce, an AO rating can destroy the producers chance of making a profit. A Mature mark would get them into most stores with almost identical effectiveness (AO is 18+, while M is 17+).
Exactly as many people predicted, the ratings system, even a voluntary one, has stifled creativity. The ratings system resulted in incentives for stores to refuse to stock the highest rated games to appease the whiners. Not being carried in stores reduces sales, frequently to the point of ensuring the game will be a commercial failure. Developers and publishers to restrict what they do to avoid the top rating mark. End result: you get almost nothing specifically intended for the adult market. What you do get tends to be low quality and pandering, because shameless crap is the only thing likely to make money. The end result is that the highest rating becomes associated with pandering garbage, which just reenforces the entire cycle. You're pretty much guaranteed that some topics and some styles of gameplay that serious game developers might want to turn into a top quality title will either be watered down or simply never produced.
Hells yeah! While we're at it, let's get rid of those stupid drunk driving laws! Oh, and those inane "no hunting too close to the highway" laws! And what's with the "you have to stop at red lights" bullshit? We can't make it perfectly safe, so fuck it! There is clearly no point to any of these laws.
Please explain me this: how is talking to my wife sitting next to me safer than talking to her on the phone through a headset?
Easy. If you start paying too much attention to a conversation with your wife, and start driving recklessly, she's likely to, "Hey, dindi, eyes on the road" Or perhap, "Woah! Stop! Red light!" That an accident will cost her time, and possibly injury or death, gives her incentive to pay attention. The person on the other end of the cell phone has no way to knowing if you're compromising your driving by focusing on the conversation.
Yes, this means that children who are less aware of road safety do present a real increase in danger in a car. I assume that's obvious. Tradeoffs must be made; muzzling your kids is regrettably child abuse is too many jusidictions.
Or to put it another way. Sure, you're a good solid driver, and perhaps the risk of your talking on a cell phone is negligable. But have you seen the other idiots they let onto the road? We need traffic laws designed not for the top 50% of drivers, but for the bottom 50%. The bottom 50% doesn't tend to recognize that they're worse than median drivers, so they'll cheerfully assume it's safe for them to drive faster than the speed limit, to roll through a stop sign, and talk on their cell phone, just like the top 50%.
It doesn't sound like you're sick of tabletop gaming, it just sounds like you need a change. You've gotten into a rut of a single game (D&D from the sound of it) and simply accepting each additional book as an addition without further consideration. Break free and experiment!
If you're tired of all the books, don't use them. I just finished playing in a D&D campaign that was almost exclusively run from the core three books (PHB, DMG, MM) and had a blast. Or try out games that are inherently less rules heavy. Amber Diceless, Big Eyes, Small Mouth, Fudge, and Call of Cthulhu leap to mind. Or take a break and run some shorter games. Games like My Life with Master, The Mountain Witch, and Dread are designed for relatively short lived games. As an added bonus, all three are relatively rules light; there simply isn't enough rules to argue over. Or check out something longer term, but just really different like Dogs in the Vineyard, Prime Time Adventures, or Spirit of the Century. You can even explore interesting new things and stay mainstream. Too much D&D? Maybe it's time to play a little Vampire: the Requim, or enjoy a little cowboy horror action with the Savage Worlds edition of Deadlands, or a bit of dystopian fantasy cyberpunk with Shadowrun. Especially if your group is new to the system there is far less incentive to use more than the core book and it's a lot easier to have a "only the core book or books" rule. Or for something more familiar, but without the pile of books behind it, check out the newest d20-based Star Wars edition.
I played a little bit of the original variant of the d20 Star Wars game, and I don't see how the ruleset bound it from not feeling enough like Star Wars. A good GM is never bound by the ruleset...
Rules matter. If they didn't matter, you could have just used 3e D&D and saved yourself $30. But apparently D&D wasn't quite a good fit and you felt that the Star Wars rules might be a better fit. Hopefully they were.
Now, did your GM fudge things, tweak, ignore, and modify rules? Then you weren't, strictly speaking, playing d20 Star Wars but a variant. Apparently the rules weren't good enough and your GM spend some time creating a variant that he felt was better suited to Star Wars. While it's good that he made the effort, it meant he was spending time worrying about the system that could have been better spent on thinking up cool plot twists, exciting scenes, or drinking beer.
If you are playing closely to the published rules, I think you'll find there are some problems.
Valdrax has a good summary of the problems with d20 Star Wars. Essentially it's a system that rewards close reading of the rules and careful tuning of your character. A better tuned character gets to be "cooler" for whatever definition you like than a less tuned character. A party containing two Jedis might have one well tuned one that slices through droids like butter and another who slowly slogs through them, even if that was what his player envisioned. Because the player wasn't as good at tuning the numbers, his character is less likely to fulfill his vision. That's a definite problem.
If you can't play Star Wars without a chart to tell you if a heavy blaster kills you more than a light rifle, you've missed the entire point of roleplaying games.
The Story.
Right.
Excepting for the people who play to "see" exciting a new things, a sort of fictional adventure tourism. This is one of the appeals of pulp action games, science fiction and fantasy in general. The Eberron setting in D&D has decided elements of this. Sure, story is nice and all, but that they had a cool fight top of a speeding train as it heads toward a damaged bridge is more important than that the scene was a proper climax after several scenes of rising action preceded by exposition.
You've also got the people who want to "be" cool and exciting. They won't be satisfied with being cool and exciting by GM fiat, they need a yardstick to measure themselves by. The rules provide those yardsticks. Sure, Superguy is really, really strong, but is he stronger than Evil Muscle Dude?
You probably don't want to ostracize the people who enjoy being presented with challenges and working their way through them. This is common is espionage games set in any area; Shadowrun is a fairly mainstream example. To be satisfied they need a reliable world model that they can base their decisions on. In a very rules light game they are unable to accurately predict the results of their actions, making their planning and execution less relevant.
Oh, and you can't forget the people whose focus is on working through the complex emotional lives of their characters, even if the resulting story isn't all that interesting. It might not be terribly interesting for the story for a character to refuse to join in on the major plot line, but the player is enjoying their character's perspective. I've had more than one game derailed by a player who insisted on taking actions that may have made sense from the character's perspective, but were damaging to the story as a whole; typically by refusing to participate. Conversely, the player would be upset that they were discouraged from accurately role-playing their character.
And there are those whose focus in on the rules. There is more to the category than "twinks" and "munchkins." Role-playing games did not spring fully formed from wargaming; it slowly split off with early games being very combat focused with the primary decisions being tactical. Tuning a character is as a logical to these players as tuning an army for a wargame. Optimizing the situation requires stable baseline rules with enough complexity to make decisions uncertain.
You definitely don't want to forget a relatively new branch of role-play, the sort of role-play done on chat rooms and forums all over the internet. Fans of this style relish "role-playing their character." There is some basic setting ("You're all in a fantasy tavern," or "You're all Pokemon masters in the city of Exampleton"). There is little or no interest in overarching story. It's pure playing of roles with a focus on enjoying the moment. If story happens, great, but it might not and that's fine too.
The rules tell you what the game is really about instead of
what it claims to be about. A game might promise "exciting pulp
action," but if the conflict system is highly lethal you're not
going to see lots of exciting pulp moments in actual play. The
heroes will either die quickly and pointlessly, or they'll become
cautious. The very tone of the game is set by the rules.
The rules impact a player's success at fulfilling their vision
for their character. To take Star Wars for example, say I want
to be a great pilot. However, the rules set has enough
complexity and tradeoffs that I accidentally build a decidedly
sub-optimal pilot. As a result, another character, for whom "be
a cool pilot" wasn't their goal but who is better at working the
system, is the best pilot on the team and regularly outdoes you.
That's no fun. Or maybe your vision is a dangerous Jedi, but
poor choices in character generation mean a lone storm trooper is
a major threat and a pair is insurmountable. Not terribly fun.
Ultimately, having to resign yourself to being the hanger-on to
the team because of lack of rules master isn't fun. A player
should play a bumbler because they want to, not because they are
forced to.
Now, a GM can fudge or outright ignore the dice to lead to
more desirable results, but then why are you rolling? Your
success and failure ends up having little to do with your
preparation and design and is in the hands of the GM fiat. The
resulting success is hollow.
A GM can modify the rules to try and improve things, but then you're playing a new game. If the rules need to be modified to make it better, surely the publisher should try to improve their source material so their customers don't need to do so. At the very least it will same countless GMs from wasting their time fiddling with the rules.
This is why the Star Wars overhaul is important. If it works,
there should be fewer cases of PCs failing to meet expectations.
The new tone of the rules says, "You're really cool all the
time." The old set of rules said a bunch of things, including "You can be exceptionally
cool in some ways if you've mastered the rules, but if you haven't
you have a
real chance of being just mediocre," and "You can be really cool in a few areas, but totally useless in others, or you can be unexceptional in a bunch of ways." Neither one of those seems to reinforce the pulp space-opera feel of Star Wars.
The new rules help balance the playing field. A group of players, some of whom are love studying and using rules, and some who don't, have a more even chance of satisfying their visions for their characters.
Ultimately the focus on "role" play instead of "roll" play is the entire point of these changes. The resulting system, if the changes work, will encourage role-playing. If it works, it's a huge win for everyone.
Are Emacs and Vi even worth learning for the next generation? I say this as a fan of Vim who uses it for all his text editing; and many of my coworkers are Vim or Emacs fans. Both are exceptionally powerful tools. But neither program is especially user friendly, and other editors and IDE seem to be catching up in terms of power. It's perfectly possible to achieve mastery and speed in more user friendly tools as well. (I know a guy who uses Visual Studio's editor with the fluidity I normally only see in Vim or Emacs users, almost never removing his fingers from the keyboard. He works almost entirely on muscle memory so his editor is almost a direct extension of his thoughts.)
Much though I love Vim and look forward to new releases, as I expect the Emacs fans do, I suspect our favorite editors are going to be increasingly marginalized. I can't in good faith suggest that younger programmers spend the time to learn either one. (Excepting of course people working on Unix, where you should know enough pure-Vi to muddle along in a worst case scenario.)
Wow. 47,000 sales. Truly amazing. Clearly Blu-Ray has won.
Of course, Cars sold 5,000,000 DVDs in 2 days. The direct-to-DVD movie American Pie Presents: Band Camp sold over 1,000,000 copies in its initial week. (Sorry I can't find anything newer; studios seem pretty secretive about these numbers.)
Conclusion: If you're looking for a "winner", DVD continues to crush both Blu-Ray and HD DVD without even noticing. The Blu-Ray and HD DVD numbers are minor and insignificant. Nothing useful can be deduced from these numbers. Declaring one a "winner" over another based on this sort of data is foolish. When one or the other starts selling a million of copies of a movie in a week, I'll pay more attention.
It's hard to blame the team from Neversoft if the game's playing a little differently at the moment, as they didn't have access to the code (created by Harmonix) from the original two games.
Yes, I can blame Neversoft a great deal. How did that happen? "Yeah, we'll make a sequel. Naw, we don't need the source or anything." Admittedly, there may be perfectly good reasons to start from scratch, but having the original source code at the very least is a good reference point.
And while they're fiddling with the UI, could they make the hammer-on/pull-of black rings more visible please?
No, but throughout the majority of the world (even China is adopting it), supply and demand does. If the demand for ebay's services increases, why shouldn't they be able to match demand with an increase in price?
Excepting of course that the free market is a harsh mistress and in an idealized environment does not tolerate large profit margins. If there are large profit margins it means that a competitor should start up with lower profits. Absent such natural checks and balances capitalism would be a disaster for most people. Unfortunately frequently the checks and balances aren't actually present. The free market isn't ideal: Consumers aren't entirely rational, information is frequently withheld, participants commit fraud, governments meddle, and sometimes natural monopolies form. When the market is distorted in such a way, one can no longer reasonably hold that the prices are necessarily reasonable and should be accepted without question.
eBay might be such an example. Thanks to the network effect, eBay is enjoying a very natural monopoly. If a seller jumps to another service, they look 90% or more of their potential buyers, dramatically reducing effective demand for their product and lowering their own profits. As a result the sellers generally don't leave. Given so few sellers, buyers have little incentive to jump services, creating a feedback loop.
Given this overwhelming cost to jumping services, there is no realistic competition. Absent competition, eBay can afford to jack prices and generate large profit margins with no real risk.
I don't know if eBay really is gouging, if regulation (the typical solution) is needed, and if so what sort of regulation we should enact, but it is definitely within the realm of possibility. You can't simply wave around supply-and-demand like it's a magical wand that magically makes everything good.
You thundering moron. Wisconsin is run by the democrats, the idiot governor here doesn't trust good people to be honest and instead caves to criminals and the RIAA.
Truly, Wisconsin is firmly under the thumb of the Democrats. That's why we have a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and civil unions. That's why we have a constitutional amendment protecting the "right to hunt." That's why whenever Madison does someting uppity and liberal like a handgun ban, the state rushes to pass a law trumping Madison's law. Prior to Doyle, we had a Republican Governor for 14 years.
In reality, Wisconsin is a closely split state, with Madison and Milwaukee tending Democrat and the rest of the state tending Republican in a common urban/rural split. That Democrats have an edge now mostly reflects the general centrist positions of many Wisconsin Democrat politicians.
There are lots of commentators pulling out the "It's computer science, not computer engineering, so it's okay to strip down the programming aspects." This is nonsense that flies in the face of reality.
First, the overwhelming majority of people who earn CS degrees are going to go on to careers that are programming oriented. In a perfect world we'd probably have two different degrees: software engineering and computer science, in much the same way we have chemical engineering and chemistry. But we're not there yet. For now we need computer programmers with what is essentially software engineering education. The only practical source for this education is computer science.
In case someone wants to pipe up with, "If you just want to program, go to a technical college, leave us real scientists alone," save yourself the trouble. That's as silly as telling someone who wants to, say, design motor vehicles that auto shop class is a suitable replacement for a, say, mechanical engineering degree. To be a great software engineer your average geek needs a solid basis in computer science, just as a chemical engineer typically spends a lot of his undergraduate education in the chemistry department. A guy who learned to program in a technical college may be a fine rank-and-file programmer, but your average technical college doesn't provide the basis in computer science to help create great software engineer. If I need a great software engineer, I'm going to be biased toward the one with the CS degree, in much the same way that if I need a bridge designed, I'm going to prefer the designer with the engineering degree.
Second, programming is a key part of computer science; a basis you need to understand and be able to execute trivially. Chemistry and biology majors are expected to be able to competently do the grunt laboratory work. Chemistry and biology majors who go on in their fields will usually still be doing some amount of laboratory work. I expect a computer scientist to be able to write a compiler and an operating system. (Not necessarily particularly great ones, but functional ones.) Sure, the science needs some highly theoretical computer scientists, but the majority of computer scientists are going to be spending their time doing research that will require practical implementations to validate theories or do analysis. They'll need to be able to solve their own problems for at least a while until they can afford to hire a few research assistants to handle the grubby coding work (again, with parallels to a chemist or biologist). Once they've got their RAs, they'll need to know enough about practical programming to be able to evaluate and validate their RAs work. Beyond that, ultimately grant money for professors or jobs for those in industry flows to those who can show practical results; without a basis in knowing what is actually practical to program, you can easily end up with brilliant ideas that cannot be utilized. It may be valuable to society in the long run, but most people need to balance their ideals with putting food on the table.
Slashdot Mirror
Gaming will cease to be a teenage phenomena? It already did, years ago. 69% of gamers are 18 or older. Even limiting it to consoles (thus dropping all the solitaire players), 60% are 18 and over.
As far as I can tell, Keen's more interested in sell books by stirring up controversy than actually covering the situation in an evenhanded way.
Take, for example, the claim that Craigslist is killing newspaper reporting. Craiglist is in no way shape or form a substitute for news. It has nothing to do with "amateurs." It's a freaking classified ads site. It's been the land of amateur advertising for decades. It is killing the classified ads section of the newspaper, and that may make running a newspaper harder, but it has nothing to do with "amateurs" and everything to do with a changing market. Expecting one particular revenue source to last forever, or complaining that you've lost a revenue source because technology has moved on it selfish and short sighted. Should we instead prefer a more expensive and less efficient advertising route just to support journalism? At that point it's charity work, and I'd rather have them be honest about.
As you note, the decline of newspapers has taken decades. The internet is shaking things up, but newspapers have already suffered hits from radio and television. To drive up profits newspapers were consolidating and cutting down on the number of reporters long before the web existed. In an effort to increase readership, all too many newspapers are pandering to masses, dumbing themselves down. With newspapers generally sucking more, is it any surprise that people look elsewhere for content. And it doesn't mean that nothing will replace the newspaper. There are several self-sufficient online news sources that do original reporting (Salon.com and Slate.com immediately leap to mind).
Finally, how is this related to Nielson's article? Indeed, his entire point is: specialize, be knowledgeable, earn a reputation as being an expert in your area, and write solid in depth articles. He believes this will directly or indirectly turn into money for the author (in the form of selling related products or services, or advertising, or whatever. His core assumption is that you have a web site that you want visitors to. What you do with them is your problem.). This suggests that the situation will self correct, directly conflicting with Keen's fundamental premise.
Check the instructions that came with your meter. If it's like mine, there's a big warning that says something like, "WARNING: Apply only to individual people one at a time. Applying to a group of people will return nonsensical results and will likely result in your making an ass of yourself in public." Slashdot is a mixed group of people with differing opinions. Attempting to pin a particular set of beliefs on Slashdot's posters as a whole is foolish. That you can find, say, two different people in the same group with different beliefs doesn't make you a clever investigator of hypocrisy, it makes you look stupid.
I'm very much part of the group arguing that "theft" and "stolen" are deeply inaccurate words for describing copyright infringement. And in this case it's not really theft either, so we should avoid those words. Now, it's not the "exact same thing," as it may not may not be copyright infringement, depending on what files the techs made copies of. What it absolutely is is a violation of privacy, which may not be illegal, but is immoral and should be grounds for being sacked by Best Buy. Depending on what exactly was copied, it might also be copyright infringement.
To use popular terminology, sure, you've "stolen" the combination. But legally you haven't. You've engaged in breaking and entering and trespass. But writing down something you've seen isn't a crime and you can't be charged for it. Heck, you could have learned the conversation by drugging someone who knew it and not bothered to write it down, just memorizing it. While you've committed a crime (Poisoning?), it's certainly not theft. It would be more accurate so say that you've compromised the secrecy of the combination in both cases.
Sometimes it's important to be accurate to minimize confusion and ambiguity. In this case, there are groups like the RIAA and MPAA who are intentionally trying to confuse the very different crimes of "theft" and "copyright infringement." By doing so, they can make illogical statements like making shoplifting of a CD equivalent to making an infringing copy of a song, despite the different levels of damage, different victims, and different penalties. So it should be understandable that some of us now strive to be more careful about our use of the term.
Thank god the government and businesses are perfectly honest. Law enforcement officials never abuse access to such data for personal use. The government never uses data originally collected for innocent purposes then uses it to round up everyone of a particular ethnicity. Private investigators and stalkers never engage in pretexting and other forms of fraud to get access to phone records and other private information.
Abuse of data is a matter of when, not if. My money is on it only being a matter of time before we discover that a murder victim was stalked by someone with access to the victim's cell phone location data. By erring on the side of limiting how much data you give businesses or government, you limit the possible damage if you're the unlucky person who gets incorrectly targeted.
Relatedly, some comic artists are no longer doing free sketches for fans because too many "fans" actually turn around and hawk them on eBay. Because some people can't play nice, everyone suffers. It's a shame. Perhaps unsurprising, basic economic theory predicts these results.
I think you're trying to suggest that Slashdot readers are, generally, hypocrites because they don't care if new technology or business models drive old ones out of business. Of course, that's utter nonsense. This isn't about Zap2It's business model being harmed by new technology or new business models. This is about Zap2It offering something to individuals for free out of simple generosity. This generosity has been abused and does threaten their business model, so they going to stop being generous. Zap2It doesn't suffer in the slightest, only those who benefited from their generosity do.
Now, if a third party started giving away television schedules without relying on Zap2It's data, harming Zap2It's business model, then we'd be on the same ground. Of course, if that happened and Zap2It whined about it, I don't think you'd see much sympathy here.
Assuming you're a technical professional, I think I can safely assume your time is worth $30 or more per hour. So you believe you can write and maintain a web scraper in less than two hours per year? This includes coping with the web site changing their formatting occasionally as hordes of scrapers start hitting their site as other MythTV users switch over. Me, I'm expecting it will take more than 2 hours of my time per year to deal with it, so it's a bad tradeoff. I'm prepared to pay $5 a month for reliable data that just works. Now, of course, if your time is worth less than this, perhaps because you enjoy doing it and it's a hobby, or your a student with more free time than money, it might be a good tradeoff for you.
As for $5 a month being what Tivo charges, it's never been that cheap. (Lifetime service could get you that low, but the "lifetime" expired when your Tivo did and it hasn't been available in years.) The cheapest Tivo service is $8.31 per month and that requires that you pay in advance for 3 years. If you're not so keen on coughing that much out up front, the best you're doing is $12.95 per month.
Is $5 too much? Possibly. Ideally we'll have competition and prices will drop to just above the production cost.
Clinton signed the three bad laws. Okay. This may come as a surprise, but Bill Clinton and Al Gore are different human beings. Our constitution doesn't give vice-presidents any right to veto things. Even if Clinton's actions somehow taint Gore, it's possible to admire someone for the good things they've done, even if they have serious flaws.
As for sharing Gore's movie, remember that "share" can mean things besides "distribute copies of." You can loan your friends your DVD perfectly legally. You can invite a few friends over and show them your copy of the DVD without breaking any laws.
As for why it's for profit, there are trade-offs whenever one wants to get a message out. The people who funded the movie probably to make a profit. In exchange the movie got widespread distribution and plenty of media attention. Having the movie available in theaters across the country may have gotten his message out to more people than making a less polished movie freely available would have. Maybe Gore made the wrong trade-off, but it's not an obvious decision.
This will be the killing blow for MythTV and other open source DVRs? I think not. MythTV predates Zap2It and managed to do okay. Yes, it relied on screen scraping, but it worked. Furthermore, I know I'm perfectly prepared to pay a small monthly fee for a good data source. Maybe $5 a month? Since a company offering such a service doesn't need to recoup costs for selling hardware below cost (as Tivo does), such a price should be feasible. Since Zap2It was free, there wasn't much incentive for someone to offer the service, but now there is. I'm hoping the free market will see the opportunity and we can work something else.
Based on their previous complaints and this message, I think the problem was people were using the free data set, then redistributing it, probably for profit, possibly indirectly (say, selling devices that used Zap2It's free service). Zap2It makes money selling their data set and they were very generously offering it for free to individuals. But you weren't allow to redistribute it.
Nonsense. The summary made it perfectly clear why they don't want the AO mark: a number of cowardly stores refuse to stock AO games. Fewer stores means less visibility and fewer sales, even if they really only want adults purchasing the game. For a game that was expensive to produce, an AO rating can destroy the producers chance of making a profit. A Mature mark would get them into most stores with almost identical effectiveness (AO is 18+, while M is 17+).
Exactly as many people predicted, the ratings system, even a voluntary one, has stifled creativity. The ratings system resulted in incentives for stores to refuse to stock the highest rated games to appease the whiners. Not being carried in stores reduces sales, frequently to the point of ensuring the game will be a commercial failure. Developers and publishers to restrict what they do to avoid the top rating mark. End result: you get almost nothing specifically intended for the adult market. What you do get tends to be low quality and pandering, because shameless crap is the only thing likely to make money. The end result is that the highest rating becomes associated with pandering garbage, which just reenforces the entire cycle. You're pretty much guaranteed that some topics and some styles of gameplay that serious game developers might want to turn into a top quality title will either be watered down or simply never produced.
Hells yeah! While we're at it, let's get rid of those stupid drunk driving laws! Oh, and those inane "no hunting too close to the highway" laws! And what's with the "you have to stop at red lights" bullshit? We can't make it perfectly safe, so fuck it! There is clearly no point to any of these laws.
Where is the line?
Easy. If you start paying too much attention to a conversation with your wife, and start driving recklessly, she's likely to, "Hey, dindi, eyes on the road" Or perhap, "Woah! Stop! Red light!" That an accident will cost her time, and possibly injury or death, gives her incentive to pay attention. The person on the other end of the cell phone has no way to knowing if you're compromising your driving by focusing on the conversation.
Yes, this means that children who are less aware of road safety do present a real increase in danger in a car. I assume that's obvious. Tradeoffs must be made; muzzling your kids is regrettably child abuse is too many jusidictions.
Or to put it another way. Sure, you're a good solid driver, and perhaps the risk of your talking on a cell phone is negligable. But have you seen the other idiots they let onto the road? We need traffic laws designed not for the top 50% of drivers, but for the bottom 50%. The bottom 50% doesn't tend to recognize that they're worse than median drivers, so they'll cheerfully assume it's safe for them to drive faster than the speed limit, to roll through a stop sign, and talk on their cell phone, just like the top 50%.
It doesn't sound like you're sick of tabletop gaming, it just sounds like you need a change. You've gotten into a rut of a single game (D&D from the sound of it) and simply accepting each additional book as an addition without further consideration. Break free and experiment!
If you're tired of all the books, don't use them. I just finished playing in a D&D campaign that was almost exclusively run from the core three books (PHB, DMG, MM) and had a blast. Or try out games that are inherently less rules heavy. Amber Diceless, Big Eyes, Small Mouth, Fudge, and Call of Cthulhu leap to mind. Or take a break and run some shorter games. Games like My Life with Master, The Mountain Witch, and Dread are designed for relatively short lived games. As an added bonus, all three are relatively rules light; there simply isn't enough rules to argue over. Or check out something longer term, but just really different like Dogs in the Vineyard, Prime Time Adventures, or Spirit of the Century. You can even explore interesting new things and stay mainstream. Too much D&D? Maybe it's time to play a little Vampire: the Requim, or enjoy a little cowboy horror action with the Savage Worlds edition of Deadlands, or a bit of dystopian fantasy cyberpunk with Shadowrun. Especially if your group is new to the system there is far less incentive to use more than the core book and it's a lot easier to have a "only the core book or books" rule. Or for something more familiar, but without the pile of books behind it, check out the newest d20-based Star Wars edition.
Rules matter. If they didn't matter, you could have just used 3e D&D and saved yourself $30. But apparently D&D wasn't quite a good fit and you felt that the Star Wars rules might be a better fit. Hopefully they were.
Now, did your GM fudge things, tweak, ignore, and modify rules? Then you weren't, strictly speaking, playing d20 Star Wars but a variant. Apparently the rules weren't good enough and your GM spend some time creating a variant that he felt was better suited to Star Wars. While it's good that he made the effort, it meant he was spending time worrying about the system that could have been better spent on thinking up cool plot twists, exciting scenes, or drinking beer.
If you are playing closely to the published rules, I think you'll find there are some problems. Valdrax has a good summary of the problems with d20 Star Wars. Essentially it's a system that rewards close reading of the rules and careful tuning of your character. A better tuned character gets to be "cooler" for whatever definition you like than a less tuned character. A party containing two Jedis might have one well tuned one that slices through droids like butter and another who slowly slogs through them, even if that was what his player envisioned. Because the player wasn't as good at tuning the numbers, his character is less likely to fulfill his vision. That's a definite problem.
Right.
Excepting for the people who play to "see" exciting a new things, a sort of fictional adventure tourism. This is one of the appeals of pulp action games, science fiction and fantasy in general. The Eberron setting in D&D has decided elements of this. Sure, story is nice and all, but that they had a cool fight top of a speeding train as it heads toward a damaged bridge is more important than that the scene was a proper climax after several scenes of rising action preceded by exposition.
You've also got the people who want to "be" cool and exciting. They won't be satisfied with being cool and exciting by GM fiat, they need a yardstick to measure themselves by. The rules provide those yardsticks. Sure, Superguy is really, really strong, but is he stronger than Evil Muscle Dude?
You probably don't want to ostracize the people who enjoy being presented with challenges and working their way through them. This is common is espionage games set in any area; Shadowrun is a fairly mainstream example. To be satisfied they need a reliable world model that they can base their decisions on. In a very rules light game they are unable to accurately predict the results of their actions, making their planning and execution less relevant.
Oh, and you can't forget the people whose focus is on working through the complex emotional lives of their characters, even if the resulting story isn't all that interesting. It might not be terribly interesting for the story for a character to refuse to join in on the major plot line, but the player is enjoying their character's perspective. I've had more than one game derailed by a player who insisted on taking actions that may have made sense from the character's perspective, but were damaging to the story as a whole; typically by refusing to participate. Conversely, the player would be upset that they were discouraged from accurately role-playing their character.
And there are those whose focus in on the rules. There is more to the category than "twinks" and "munchkins." Role-playing games did not spring fully formed from wargaming; it slowly split off with early games being very combat focused with the primary decisions being tactical. Tuning a character is as a logical to these players as tuning an army for a wargame. Optimizing the situation requires stable baseline rules with enough complexity to make decisions uncertain.
You definitely don't want to forget a relatively new branch of role-play, the sort of role-play done on chat rooms and forums all over the internet. Fans of this style relish "role-playing their character." There is some basic setting ("You're all in a fantasy tavern," or "You're all Pokemon masters in the city of Exampleton"). There is little or no interest in overarching story. It's pure playing of roles with a focus on enjoying the moment. If story happens, great, but it might not and that's fine too.
Rules matter.
The rules tell you what the game is really about instead of what it claims to be about. A game might promise "exciting pulp action," but if the conflict system is highly lethal you're not going to see lots of exciting pulp moments in actual play. The heroes will either die quickly and pointlessly, or they'll become cautious. The very tone of the game is set by the rules.
The rules impact a player's success at fulfilling their vision for their character. To take Star Wars for example, say I want to be a great pilot. However, the rules set has enough complexity and tradeoffs that I accidentally build a decidedly sub-optimal pilot. As a result, another character, for whom "be a cool pilot" wasn't their goal but who is better at working the system, is the best pilot on the team and regularly outdoes you. That's no fun. Or maybe your vision is a dangerous Jedi, but poor choices in character generation mean a lone storm trooper is a major threat and a pair is insurmountable. Not terribly fun. Ultimately, having to resign yourself to being the hanger-on to the team because of lack of rules master isn't fun. A player should play a bumbler because they want to, not because they are forced to.
Now, a GM can fudge or outright ignore the dice to lead to more desirable results, but then why are you rolling? Your success and failure ends up having little to do with your preparation and design and is in the hands of the GM fiat. The resulting success is hollow.
A GM can modify the rules to try and improve things, but then you're playing a new game. If the rules need to be modified to make it better, surely the publisher should try to improve their source material so their customers don't need to do so. At the very least it will same countless GMs from wasting their time fiddling with the rules.
This is why the Star Wars overhaul is important. If it works, there should be fewer cases of PCs failing to meet expectations. The new tone of the rules says, "You're really cool all the time." The old set of rules said a bunch of things, including "You can be exceptionally cool in some ways if you've mastered the rules, but if you haven't you have a real chance of being just mediocre," and "You can be really cool in a few areas, but totally useless in others, or you can be unexceptional in a bunch of ways." Neither one of those seems to reinforce the pulp space-opera feel of Star Wars. The new rules help balance the playing field. A group of players, some of whom are love studying and using rules, and some who don't, have a more even chance of satisfying their visions for their characters.
Ultimately the focus on "role" play instead of "roll" play is the entire point of these changes. The resulting system, if the changes work, will encourage role-playing. If it works, it's a huge win for everyone.
Are Emacs and Vi even worth learning for the next generation? I say this as a fan of Vim who uses it for all his text editing; and many of my coworkers are Vim or Emacs fans. Both are exceptionally powerful tools. But neither program is especially user friendly, and other editors and IDE seem to be catching up in terms of power. It's perfectly possible to achieve mastery and speed in more user friendly tools as well. (I know a guy who uses Visual Studio's editor with the fluidity I normally only see in Vim or Emacs users, almost never removing his fingers from the keyboard. He works almost entirely on muscle memory so his editor is almost a direct extension of his thoughts.)
Much though I love Vim and look forward to new releases, as I expect the Emacs fans do, I suspect our favorite editors are going to be increasingly marginalized. I can't in good faith suggest that younger programmers spend the time to learn either one. (Excepting of course people working on Unix, where you should know enough pure-Vi to muddle along in a worst case scenario.)
Wow. 47,000 sales. Truly amazing. Clearly Blu-Ray has won.
Of course, Cars sold 5,000,000 DVDs in 2 days . The direct-to-DVD movie American Pie Presents: Band Camp sold over 1,000,000 copies in its initial week. (Sorry I can't find anything newer; studios seem pretty secretive about these numbers.)
Conclusion: If you're looking for a "winner", DVD continues to crush both Blu-Ray and HD DVD without even noticing. The Blu-Ray and HD DVD numbers are minor and insignificant. Nothing useful can be deduced from these numbers. Declaring one a "winner" over another based on this sort of data is foolish. When one or the other starts selling a million of copies of a movie in a week, I'll pay more attention.
Yes, I can blame Neversoft a great deal. How did that happen? "Yeah, we'll make a sequel. Naw, we don't need the source or anything." Admittedly, there may be perfectly good reasons to start from scratch, but having the original source code at the very least is a good reference point.
And while they're fiddling with the UI, could they make the hammer-on/pull-of black rings more visible please?
Excepting of course that the free market is a harsh mistress and in an idealized environment does not tolerate large profit margins. If there are large profit margins it means that a competitor should start up with lower profits. Absent such natural checks and balances capitalism would be a disaster for most people. Unfortunately frequently the checks and balances aren't actually present. The free market isn't ideal: Consumers aren't entirely rational, information is frequently withheld, participants commit fraud, governments meddle, and sometimes natural monopolies form. When the market is distorted in such a way, one can no longer reasonably hold that the prices are necessarily reasonable and should be accepted without question.
eBay might be such an example. Thanks to the network effect, eBay is enjoying a very natural monopoly. If a seller jumps to another service, they look 90% or more of their potential buyers, dramatically reducing effective demand for their product and lowering their own profits. As a result the sellers generally don't leave. Given so few sellers, buyers have little incentive to jump services, creating a feedback loop.
Given this overwhelming cost to jumping services, there is no realistic competition. Absent competition, eBay can afford to jack prices and generate large profit margins with no real risk.
I don't know if eBay really is gouging, if regulation (the typical solution) is needed, and if so what sort of regulation we should enact, but it is definitely within the realm of possibility. You can't simply wave around supply-and-demand like it's a magical wand that magically makes everything good.
Truly, Wisconsin is firmly under the thumb of the Democrats. That's why we have a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and civil unions. That's why we have a constitutional amendment protecting the "right to hunt." That's why whenever Madison does someting uppity and liberal like a handgun ban, the state rushes to pass a law trumping Madison's law. Prior to Doyle, we had a Republican Governor for 14 years.
In reality, Wisconsin is a closely split state, with Madison and Milwaukee tending Democrat and the rest of the state tending Republican in a common urban/rural split. That Democrats have an edge now mostly reflects the general centrist positions of many Wisconsin Democrat politicians.
There are lots of commentators pulling out the "It's computer science, not computer engineering, so it's okay to strip down the programming aspects." This is nonsense that flies in the face of reality.
First, the overwhelming majority of people who earn CS degrees are going to go on to careers that are programming oriented. In a perfect world we'd probably have two different degrees: software engineering and computer science, in much the same way we have chemical engineering and chemistry. But we're not there yet. For now we need computer programmers with what is essentially software engineering education. The only practical source for this education is computer science.
In case someone wants to pipe up with, "If you just want to program, go to a technical college, leave us real scientists alone," save yourself the trouble. That's as silly as telling someone who wants to, say, design motor vehicles that auto shop class is a suitable replacement for a, say, mechanical engineering degree. To be a great software engineer your average geek needs a solid basis in computer science, just as a chemical engineer typically spends a lot of his undergraduate education in the chemistry department. A guy who learned to program in a technical college may be a fine rank-and-file programmer, but your average technical college doesn't provide the basis in computer science to help create great software engineer. If I need a great software engineer, I'm going to be biased toward the one with the CS degree, in much the same way that if I need a bridge designed, I'm going to prefer the designer with the engineering degree.
Second, programming is a key part of computer science; a basis you need to understand and be able to execute trivially. Chemistry and biology majors are expected to be able to competently do the grunt laboratory work. Chemistry and biology majors who go on in their fields will usually still be doing some amount of laboratory work. I expect a computer scientist to be able to write a compiler and an operating system. (Not necessarily particularly great ones, but functional ones.) Sure, the science needs some highly theoretical computer scientists, but the majority of computer scientists are going to be spending their time doing research that will require practical implementations to validate theories or do analysis. They'll need to be able to solve their own problems for at least a while until they can afford to hire a few research assistants to handle the grubby coding work (again, with parallels to a chemist or biologist). Once they've got their RAs, they'll need to know enough about practical programming to be able to evaluate and validate their RAs work. Beyond that, ultimately grant money for professors or jobs for those in industry flows to those who can show practical results; without a basis in knowing what is actually practical to program, you can easily end up with brilliant ideas that cannot be utilized. It may be valuable to society in the long run, but most people need to balance their ideals with putting food on the table.