[...]but it doesn't seem like the artists are doing too bad. As long as an artist can get one really good hit song out there they are sure to make a ton of cash. It's a trade off.
Without wanting to get too offtopic, this is pretty much false. It's perfectly possible, and in fact has happened multiple times, for a band to be very successfull, even with multiple hits, and end up owing the label money. There is a LOT of shady dealing in the music industry - but they're the only game in town. They rule the market and you really don't have the option to go it alone, even if you want to, because they have the distribution channels tied up with exlusive licensing. Basically, it's not what you'd call a clean model of a healthy market. In fact, I'd call it a pretty glaring example of the weakness of capitalism - it's no good for consumers, it's no good for the artists, it's only good for the middlemen, who can manipulate the market to prevent change.
you do poorly you lose time but get some money, if you do great you get rich, we get richer.
This is totally false. A band that tries to make a big splash and fails will end up broke, period. The label will usually end up eating a loss, but only cause the band doesn't have any money left. It's NOT a profit/risk sharing agreement! All the money for the studio, editing, even a lot of the distribution costs are an ADVANCE to the artist. And those advances come out of the artists royalties, which are the smallest section of the label price of the CD. if it really were a risk/profit sharing agreement like you seem to think it is, the industry would be a lot healthier. But it's not, and one of the reasons it's not is that they KNOW a artist can't hit it big without them. You can make money playing small time gigs and selling your own CDs, but you can't get the kind of exposure you need without backing, even if you have the money. It's that simple.
First off: retaliation is not defense, no matter how many times national leaders claim it is. When it happens on a small scale people recognize this, I don't get why peoples brains stop working when we talk about religions and nations. There also was more than one, so stop talking about it in the singular.
Second: Where did you learn about the Inquistion? Torquemada's Revision of The Truth School for Retards? The mandate of the Inquisition was the exposure and punishment of heresy. Confession by torture was common place. There's been more than one (and in fact the order of the Inquisition still exists today) and it's not always been about blood and torture and burning but it absolutely DID happen and it WAS under the mandate of the Church and trying to claim that it was about creating fair trials for heretics is so ridiculous it makes my brain hurt. The fact that Church was very heavily involved in secular governments at the time does mean you can always claim it "wasn't about religion", but it's pedantic and silly nitpicking at best, dishonest at worst - you can just define any behavior you don't approve as not about religion, even when religiously motivated and done at the behest of religions authority. The Church was a major secular power in the Middle Ages, something that's hard for people to comprehend now - it had it's own armies, it's own banks, and it essentially ruled huge swaths of land even larger numbers of people. It had it's own courts (yes, of Inquisition) and would try and condemn people purely on it's own authority as well as that of the local rulers. Some rulers didn't allow the Inquisition into thier lands, those rulers faced excommunication. To claim that all this was done in the "name" of religion rather than "for" religion is missing the point.
What is the incentive for a person to spend time and money to create a work if it will not be shared with the public (for profit probably)? Again, without copyright this person has no legal basis for recouping payment. So why would someone devot a lot of time and receive nothing (especially if it is their form of income)?
It's funny how often people say this, in spite of the fact that people will and do create stuff for enjoyment without the incentive of money. What do you think Open Source is? There may or may not be more created with copyright - I'm not convinced that copyright is working in that regard.
Metallica, and several other major acts, produce under thier own label, it's true. But you'll find a few things in common: They, almost without exception, did not get to be major artists that way - they created thier own label instead of re-signing or by breaking thier current contract. Second, the "label" they record under is generally merely an imprint or re-branding of another, larger label. I'm not familiar with Metallica specifically, although they are not the norm in the music industry, so I don't know if this is the case for them or not, but it's the general case for artist-owned labels - they don't actually have the infrastructure or contacts that a real label has, it's just a different branding of the same old crap.
"Free marketers" get around this by defining acting like an asshole as the preferred result. Always makes me laugh when someone supposedly in favor of a free market gets all uptight about extending IP rights. Piracy is Adam Smiths invisble hand fisting you in the ass, Mr. Gates.
Communism is a method of government, what we're talking about here is socialism, the economic theory. So with that out of the way, lets go on:
Copyright is a violation of "pure" economic principles, because it's a market control to create an artificial scarcity. However, nobody with any brains actually wants a market totally free of any controls, even so-called free-marketers. There's some other considerations, like that copyright creates a market where there otherwise wouldn't be one.
However, anti-copyright is not socialist, because socialism is ENFORCED public sharing/ownership. The absence of copyright means that there's no legal protection for works, not that you're required to share them. (As an aside: patents as well as registered copyrights require disclosure["sharing"] as a requirement).
The RIAA is an industry organization made up of record labels. It doesn't directly interact with artists in any way, but people (at least on Slashdot) will refer to "the RIAA" when they mean "record labels and/or the music industry as a whole", as well as the RIAA per se. Any artist with any signifigant amount of distribution (ie, outside their home county) will have to sign with an RIAA member, because record labels control access to all the major means of distribution - you won't get your album into stores and you won't get radio play without a record deal with a major label. One more note: despite there being a whole shit-ton of record labels, they're mostly subsidaries or imprints of each other. There's a fairly small set of people who control the music industry and while they compete with each other to a degree, they mostly collude.
In summary: Grandparent is wrong to call copyrights communist (or socialist), but your rebuttal is equally wrong pretty much everywhere.
You're probably not the only one but you're in the vast minority. I don't have any special claim to aesthetic sensibilities but I think Tk is ugly as hell and I won't use it except under duress.
Of course I really find them ugly. So do lots of other people, that's why they say it so often. Did you think everyone was just making it up so they could be part of the "It's cool to say Tk is ugly" club?
I was in New York City during the big power outage and there wasn't any sort of cataclysmic death and disaster involved. Despite what you may think, most people don't keep driving normally when the traffic lights fail. In fact, I daresay the quality of traffic in NYC was improved by the failed lights, because people drove defensively and slowly.
You touched on an important point there - one of the biggests costs of Y2K was not just fixing systems, but also the costs associated with GUARANTEES of correctness. There was so much hype about it that companies wanted a legal guarantee that it wasn't going to break. This resulted in higher costs and also wholesale replacement of a lot of systems at higher cost, because while they probably would have worked nobody was willing to sign off a legal contract saying so.
I've been playing it (I'm about 25 hours in), and I've been enjoying it too. Agree with most of your points, except I have to add that that unarmed combat is way too frigging powerful. I just recently made my lightsaber (and got a second for Keira), but up until now all my characters have exclusively used unarmed. It does far more damage than any gun I've come across and quite a bit more than any melee weapon, even an unmodified lightsaber.
I'm a little disapointed that there weren't any new useful powers for Light Side jedi. Dark Side was way cooler in the first game and it remains so in this one.
On at least half the machines I regularly use, the monitor takes long enough to warm up that you can't see the POST, or it's only visible for a small faction of the time. You could very easily do this and probably get away with it for quite some time, if you didn't stay in any one spot for too long. But of course it's a lot better of a strategy if you can rebrand them more completely.
Hypothetical: There's some function that accepts a crew change and returns either the number of schedule changes to date or an error code. The error code is a negative value. This is a really common paradigm in C code.
It's not the same wobble that causes seasons, but yes it does wobble. The earthquake, according to TFA, caused about an inch of wobble but the normal variation is in the range of 33 feet so it's well within normal parameters.
Sweet holy jesus. Did you actually read anything or do you have a "Use linux" postbot? Win4Lin won't solve any of the problems mentioned, although it would be a lot cheaper than a Citrix farm.
A possibly better alternative would be to secure IE using AD policies (and migrate to AD if they aren't on one), and standardize on Firefox/Mozilla for everything except these specific applications. Use a proxy server if neccesary. You could do this with Citrix also but a Citrix farm is a huge chunk of change and I don't see why you'd want to spend that much just for this.
In fact, a good transparent proxy might be sufficent anyway - simply restrict anything with an IE user-agent to the specific IE only applications required.
Actually, 64bit markets itself, because it's twice as much as 32 bit. You don't need to explain it. And if you do care about performance, there are some reasons to get an AMD64, because it's architecturally better than the 32 bit offerings. It's not just an Athlon that can address more memory. Obviously, if you aren't interested in upgrading your computer for more performance then you aren't in the market for a new processor of any kind, and your opinions aren't really important when it comes to them.
Some sort of dungeon game, I think the premise was exploring a pyramid. You found scrolls, rings, and potions...objects could be cursed...my favorite was when you picked up a cursed object, a little high pitched voice would go "oh no!":-)
Dungeon of Doom, probably. I played this on the 1st generation macs in middle school. My other favorite was Scarab of Ra.
You'll never win. After years of taking well-deserved flack from everyone for the mind-blowing lameness of the file selector, the great minds of the Gtk project sat down and came up with what you're looking at. Yep, thats right, after years of being repeatedly shown what a crappy file selector was, this was what they decided was perfect. Cretins.
Slashdot Mirror
Without wanting to get too offtopic, this is pretty much false. It's perfectly possible, and in fact has happened multiple times, for a band to be very successfull, even with multiple hits, and end up owing the label money. There is a LOT of shady dealing in the music industry - but they're the only game in town. They rule the market and you really don't have the option to go it alone, even if you want to, because they have the distribution channels tied up with exlusive licensing. Basically, it's not what you'd call a clean model of a healthy market. In fact, I'd call it a pretty glaring example of the weakness of capitalism - it's no good for consumers, it's no good for the artists, it's only good for the middlemen, who can manipulate the market to prevent change.
you do poorly you lose time but get some money, if you do great you get rich, we get richer.
This is totally false. A band that tries to make a big splash and fails will end up broke, period. The label will usually end up eating a loss, but only cause the band doesn't have any money left. It's NOT a profit/risk sharing agreement! All the money for the studio, editing, even a lot of the distribution costs are an ADVANCE to the artist. And those advances come out of the artists royalties, which are the smallest section of the label price of the CD. if it really were a risk/profit sharing agreement like you seem to think it is, the industry would be a lot healthier. But it's not, and one of the reasons it's not is that they KNOW a artist can't hit it big without them. You can make money playing small time gigs and selling your own CDs, but you can't get the kind of exposure you need without backing, even if you have the money. It's that simple.
First off: retaliation is not defense, no matter how many times national leaders claim it is. When it happens on a small scale people recognize this, I don't get why peoples brains stop working when we talk about religions and nations. There also was more than one, so stop talking about it in the singular.
Second: Where did you learn about the Inquistion? Torquemada's Revision of The Truth School for Retards? The mandate of the Inquisition was the exposure and punishment of heresy. Confession by torture was common place. There's been more than one (and in fact the order of the Inquisition still exists today) and it's not always been about blood and torture and burning but it absolutely DID happen and it WAS under the mandate of the Church and trying to claim that it was about creating fair trials for heretics is so ridiculous it makes my brain hurt. The fact that Church was very heavily involved in secular governments at the time does mean you can always claim it "wasn't about religion", but it's pedantic and silly nitpicking at best, dishonest at worst - you can just define any behavior you don't approve as not about religion, even when religiously motivated and done at the behest of religions authority. The Church was a major secular power in the Middle Ages, something that's hard for people to comprehend now - it had it's own armies, it's own banks, and it essentially ruled huge swaths of land even larger numbers of people. It had it's own courts (yes, of Inquisition) and would try and condemn people purely on it's own authority as well as that of the local rulers. Some rulers didn't allow the Inquisition into thier lands, those rulers faced excommunication. To claim that all this was done in the "name" of religion rather than "for" religion is missing the point.
It's funny how often people say this, in spite of the fact that people will and do create stuff for enjoyment without the incentive of money. What do you think Open Source is? There may or may not be more created with copyright - I'm not convinced that copyright is working in that regard.
Metallica, and several other major acts, produce under thier own label, it's true. But you'll find a few things in common: They, almost without exception, did not get to be major artists that way - they created thier own label instead of re-signing or by breaking thier current contract. Second, the "label" they record under is generally merely an imprint or re-branding of another, larger label. I'm not familiar with Metallica specifically, although they are not the norm in the music industry, so I don't know if this is the case for them or not, but it's the general case for artist-owned labels - they don't actually have the infrastructure or contacts that a real label has, it's just a different branding of the same old crap.
"Free marketers" get around this by defining acting like an asshole as the preferred result. Always makes me laugh when someone supposedly in favor of a free market gets all uptight about extending IP rights. Piracy is Adam Smiths invisble hand fisting you in the ass, Mr. Gates.
However, anti-copyright is not socialist, because socialism is ENFORCED public sharing/ownership. The absence of copyright means that there's no legal protection for works, not that you're required to share them. (As an aside: patents as well as registered copyrights require disclosure["sharing"] as a requirement).
The RIAA is an industry organization made up of record labels. It doesn't directly interact with artists in any way, but people (at least on Slashdot) will refer to "the RIAA" when they mean "record labels and/or the music industry as a whole", as well as the RIAA per se. Any artist with any signifigant amount of distribution (ie, outside their home county) will have to sign with an RIAA member, because record labels control access to all the major means of distribution - you won't get your album into stores and you won't get radio play without a record deal with a major label. One more note: despite there being a whole shit-ton of record labels, they're mostly subsidaries or imprints of each other. There's a fairly small set of people who control the music industry and while they compete with each other to a degree, they mostly collude.
In summary: Grandparent is wrong to call copyrights communist (or socialist), but your rebuttal is equally wrong pretty much everywhere.
Of course I really find them ugly. So do lots of other people, that's why they say it so often. Did you think everyone was just making it up so they could be part of the "It's cool to say Tk is ugly" club?
I was in New York City during the big power outage and there wasn't any sort of cataclysmic death and disaster involved. Despite what you may think, most people don't keep driving normally when the traffic lights fail. In fact, I daresay the quality of traffic in NYC was improved by the failed lights, because people drove defensively and slowly.
You touched on an important point there - one of the biggests costs of Y2K was not just fixing systems, but also the costs associated with GUARANTEES of correctness. There was so much hype about it that companies wanted a legal guarantee that it wasn't going to break. This resulted in higher costs and also wholesale replacement of a lot of systems at higher cost, because while they probably would have worked nobody was willing to sign off a legal contract saying so.
I'm a little disapointed that there weren't any new useful powers for Light Side jedi. Dark Side was way cooler in the first game and it remains so in this one.
On at least half the machines I regularly use, the monitor takes long enough to warm up that you can't see the POST, or it's only visible for a small faction of the time. You could very easily do this and probably get away with it for quite some time, if you didn't stay in any one spot for too long. But of course it's a lot better of a strategy if you can rebrand them more completely.
Because it's more complicated. People do that too, but the negative error code is more common.
Hypothetical: There's some function that accepts a crew change and returns either the number of schedule changes to date or an error code. The error code is a negative value. This is a really common paradigm in C code.
Most English speakers will understand "rotates 3ms faster" to mean that one rotation is completed in 3ms less time.
It's not the same wobble that causes seasons, but yes it does wobble. The earthquake, according to TFA, caused about an inch of wobble but the normal variation is in the range of 33 feet so it's well within normal parameters.
You know what one rotation of the earth is called, right? One of those is 3 microseconds faster.
A possibly better alternative would be to secure IE using AD policies (and migrate to AD if they aren't on one), and standardize on Firefox/Mozilla for everything except these specific applications. Use a proxy server if neccesary. You could do this with Citrix also but a Citrix farm is a huge chunk of change and I don't see why you'd want to spend that much just for this.
In fact, a good transparent proxy might be sufficent anyway - simply restrict anything with an IE user-agent to the specific IE only applications required.
#wxwidgets on freenode is full of nice people and we're only rude when people ask about skinning.
Actually, 64bit markets itself, because it's twice as much as 32 bit. You don't need to explain it. And if you do care about performance, there are some reasons to get an AMD64, because it's architecturally better than the 32 bit offerings. It's not just an Athlon that can address more memory. Obviously, if you aren't interested in upgrading your computer for more performance then you aren't in the market for a new processor of any kind, and your opinions aren't really important when it comes to them.
Dungeon of Doom, probably. I played this on the 1st generation macs in middle school. My other favorite was Scarab of Ra.
In a word, bullshit. In large portions of the US (New York, LA, Miami...) 2 salaries will pay for a decent level of living, but 1 won't.
Does this have anything to do with why bios in Japanese RPGs or fighting games almost always include the characters blood type?
I found a great apartment (actually shared room in a condo) when I needed one on very short notice for a contract job, too. Gets my thumbs up.
You'll never win. After years of taking well-deserved flack from everyone for the mind-blowing lameness of the file selector, the great minds of the Gtk project sat down and came up with what you're looking at. Yep, thats right, after years of being repeatedly shown what a crappy file selector was, this was what they decided was perfect. Cretins.
Actually, the docking/tabbing in VS 2005 is the best layout mechanism I've ever seen. GIMP could do a lot worse than to mimic it.
Falling is an uncontrolled descent, without the ability to land safely. Skydiving is falling before you open your parachute.
Gliding a fall where you have the ability to control your descent. The difference between gliding and falling is a matter of degree not an absolute.
Flying means that you can stay aloft under your own power, which means you need (some sort) of power mechanism, mechanical or organic.