What if even the records of who owns the rights have been lost? It's almost a self-referential problem...in the era before computers, not only works but the legal documents about the works were stored as paper. And paper can get misplaced, or eaten by insects, or destroyed in fires, floods, etc. What happens to a work that there is no way even to find out who owns it anymore?
You've completely missed the point of the rating system. It's not there to tell adults what to buy. It's there to tell adults what *not* to buy for their kids.
I mean, alternatively, you could label all non-M games as "Child friendly", but that'll work to turn off the kids who write up the lists of what they want.
Yes, because Bush is oh-so-known for actually giving a rat's ass about what the American Public thinks.
War in Iraq without the UN? No problem. Internment Camps in guantanemo bay? What the hell. Lying to the public about WMDs? Seems to work. PATRIOT I & II? In a heartbeat. Gay Marriage? Not if it hits his desk.
I'm sorry, Microsoft donates a helluva lot more to the Bush Campaign coffers than John Q. Public.. I hardly think they'll blink on this one.
Ah, yes, but who does it harm if you sue a corporation? So what if an abstract entity goes banckrupt? It doesn't affect the people who were responsible. You can't put a company in jail.
Well.. if it's public.. investors. Hopefully if investor get burned by investing in a company headed by person A, they'd wise up and not invest in second company headed by person A.
Of course, really all there needs to be is an acknolwedgement that even corporate liability protection does not protect a person from criminal prosecution -- and negligence leading to injury or death is a criminal matter.
Man does not live by gratification alone. If we don't ensure that the innovators, inventors, and creators get some monetary benefit out of the work they create, then they're simply going to wind up spending a lot of their time doing other crap so that they can put food on the table.
That's simply a waste of their talents. I'd rather be encouraging some crap inventors simply so that the truly talented ones could be spending the majority of their time doing what they're best at.
Picture, some guy you've never heard from before sends you an email.. is it legit? Check with your boss to see if they're working with anybody new and have referred them to you.. if they have, then check if this guy is the one? Yes? Okay.. accept him then.. now wait for what the email was in the first place.
Or, even worse when you're expecting email from a new group of clients, but don't know their email addresses?
Plus, it does absolutely nothing to deal with someone spoofing someone on your white list.
So it's not "you only receive email from people you want to" it's, "you only receive email from people you already know the email addresses of" very different thing.
You manage a fund that has $400 million available for investment. A company that has over 30 BILLION dollars sitting in the bank and is not a current investor of yours calls up and says "Could you please put some money into this stock?" 1/8th of your available capital is peanuts compared to a company that could quadruple your available capital without blinking..
This is just an eye-on-the-pie thing. You show the potentially huge investor that you're receptive and think along the same lines as they do and hope that they scratch your back as well.
Yes, because after all, we know any programmer smart enough to drop a back-door into the system wouldn't think of the fact that little things like Presidential Elections only run on a certain day every four years.
Why, there's absolutely no chance that a corrupt programmer wouldn't have put in a simple check for the date before setting the corrupt bit to run.
Actually it does. Especially ideas on political theory.
Unless there's hard evidence to back her up, accepting ideas from someone who's "mostly a lunatic" is probably not the best way to go.
After all, it's kind of like the idea that some folks have that a tin-foil hat will stop them from being able to brain-wash you....everybody knows you need a full Faraday cage.
Here's the thing about Black & White that most of the people who don't like it completely miss.
It's not a game, it's a sim.
I know, it was advertised as a game. I know, it sort of kind of feels like a game because there are all these little challenges in it that you can succeed or fail at. But when it boils down to it, it's not a game.
The key failings of B&W were the interface (grabbing the ground and pulling is ridiculous. You couldn't play the thing well with just the mouse anyway as you needed shortcuts to move from place to place quickly, why not bite the bullet and give it movement keys like a flight-sim, or any FPS with "fly" on), and the incredibly long tutorial that, while it overemphasized all the little problems with the controls, completely negated to tell people how to manage their worshippers.
The key to managing the little worshippers is simply not to micro-manage them. It's hard to do because we're so used to "Demand-Response" interaction in games as being the route to success, not "Demand-Ignore". Those little guys really do learn. If they learn that when they cry "We need food," some mystical force shows up and gives it to them.. guess what they're going to do next time they're hungry? On the other hand, if a couple starve, they soon figure out that if they need food, they'd best go get it.
PFah.. for the gaming company, their fondest wish is that you don't play, but continue to pay so that you have the privelege of playing whenever you get around to it.
After all, if they can get money simply for giving you the idea that you might use their service.. that's awesome.
Kind of like how the insurance agency works.. but their payouts are soemtimes better.
permanent death may sound like a great idea, until the griefers start coming after the newbies.
At which point griefers get a bounty placed on their head equal to some constant times the difference between their level and the level of the player they killed.
Couple this with a "non-disappearance" type of game, where if you log off your character lays down and goes to sleep.. (hope you did so in a safe hotel.. which of course would not be open to known killers), and all a griefer is doing is setting themselves up to be unable to grief.
There's a bunch of refinements you could add to the system.. (the killed players getting a portion of the experience generated when the griefer finally dies, etc..) but it basically works along the lines of quick severe punishment working as deterrence.
I tend to agree, but it doesn't change what folks have been saying here.
Namely that Darl is an idiot.
He's missing a fundamental business point about IBM. IBM is big enough to be able to think long term. And the long-term view says that if you pay one person to stop trying to piss on you, sooner or later everybody is trying to piss on you.
I don't even see AutoZone's insurers going to IBM, since from what Jim Greer says, IBM had next-to-nothing for involvement in the decision to switch over.
If SCO said that the Holy Roman Catholic Church was involved in AutoZone's decision to switch, would the AutoZone insurers immediately try and get the Pope on the phone? Of course not, it's an obvious waste of the insurer's money and time.
If you're really want to see Paranoia as a movie, you could do worse than to see THX-1138. (Available on VHS only).
Lucas' first feature length movie.. and when I saw it, I couldn't help but thinking "God! Lucas even stole the idea for his first movie!" Of course, the movie was written before Paranoia was, so maybe it's the other way around.
To make the analogy more accurate, the choice MicroCar would have isn't just to make a car either with or without their version of the radio.. it'd be to make a car either completely without the radio, or with both their version and the versions of their competitors.
Now, after the car is sold, they can offer a "Free upgrade to a new MicroCar radio", and that'd be fine. Of course, some people wouldn't bother. Some people would go for a standard radio, and some people would take advantage of it.. but the point is, the choice would be there for the consumer to make, it wouldn't be already made by MicroCar.
The problem isn't that people may or may not choose MicroCar's radio, or Microsoft's media player, it's that the company with the monopoly, not the consumer, is making the choice.
Perhaps you would prefer to approach this from a different angle - Could you explain to me how giving away a browser benefitted Microsoft?
It allowed MS to control the defacto internet standards for a long time.. we're still in the process of getting away from that. How many sites do you see that still say "Best viewed with IE", and browsers that are actually adhering to W3C standards are being blocked?
That kind of lock-in means any possible competition is always playing catch-up. Not to mention gives MS huge leverage (which they used) against other standards, such as Java (hence why Sun sued), or in the market for selling server software ("IE works best with our software.. and everybody uses IE, so you should really get ours.")
But beyond this, it doesn't even matter. If IE was offered for free, but *not included* with the OS, Netscape wouldn't even have had arguing rights, because at that point MS would not have been leveraging monopoly status in one market (OS) to affect the business of another (Browser). However, they did, and that's where they crossed the line.
As for baseless generalizations, you also make one when you suggest that without MS we'd have a far worse mess. There's no proof of that, as the computing industry was already starting to realize the benefits of standardization, at least for interoperability, when MS came along.
From where I sit, MS's overwhelming monopoly actually hurt interoperability.. why? Because people didn't need to think about designing their programs for multiple systems.. they could just design for Windows and that was good enough.
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Hey.. what a great idea.. too bad somebody didn't think of this before..
Oh wait.. they did
What if even the records of who owns the rights have been lost? It's almost a self-referential problem...in the era before computers, not only works but the legal documents about the works were stored as paper. And paper can get misplaced, or eaten by insects, or destroyed in fires, floods, etc. What happens to a work that there is no way even to find out who owns it anymore?
Then who's going to sue?
You've completely missed the point of the rating system. It's not there to tell adults what to buy. It's there to tell adults what *not* to buy for their kids.
I mean, alternatively, you could label all non-M games as "Child friendly", but that'll work to turn off the kids who write up the lists of what they want.
Yes, because Bush is oh-so-known for actually giving a rat's ass about what the American Public thinks.
War in Iraq without the UN? No problem.
Internment Camps in guantanemo bay? What the hell.
Lying to the public about WMDs? Seems to work.
PATRIOT I & II? In a heartbeat.
Gay Marriage? Not if it hits his desk.
I'm sorry, Microsoft donates a helluva lot more to the Bush Campaign coffers than John Q. Public.. I hardly think they'll blink on this one.
Ah, yes, but who does it harm if you sue a corporation? So what if an abstract entity goes banckrupt? It doesn't affect the people who were responsible. You can't put a company in jail.
Well.. if it's public.. investors.
Hopefully if investor get burned by investing in a company headed by person A, they'd wise up and not invest in second company headed by person A.
Of course, really all there needs to be is an acknolwedgement that even corporate liability protection does not protect a person from criminal prosecution -- and negligence leading to injury or death is a criminal matter.
Yes.. but you miss one key point.
Man does not live by gratification alone. If we don't ensure that the innovators, inventors, and creators get some monetary benefit out of the work they create, then they're simply going to wind up spending a lot of their time doing other crap so that they can put food on the table.
That's simply a waste of their talents. I'd rather be encouraging some crap inventors simply so that the truly talented ones could be spending the majority of their time doing what they're best at.
..what's really scary about this is that it applies just as much to pharmaceutical companies.
Think about that next time some politician is talking about having to protect the industry.
And we all know how well that went over.
Not to mention slow email to a crawl.
Picture, some guy you've never heard from before sends you an email.. is it legit? Check with your boss to see if they're working with anybody new and have referred them to you.. if they have, then check if this guy is the one? Yes? Okay.. accept him then.. now wait for what the email was in the first place.
Or, even worse when you're expecting email from a new group of clients, but don't know their email addresses?
Plus, it does absolutely nothing to deal with someone spoofing someone on your white list.
So it's not "you only receive email from people you want to" it's, "you only receive email from people you already know the email addresses of" very different thing.
Presumably the company suing the employee should be able to indicate what code was actually illegally copied.
You manage a fund that has $400 million available for investment. A company that has over 30 BILLION dollars sitting in the bank and is not a current investor of yours calls up and says "Could you please put some money into this stock?" 1/8th of your available capital is peanuts compared to a company that could quadruple your available capital without blinking..
This is just an eye-on-the-pie thing. You show the potentially huge investor that you're receptive and think along the same lines as they do and hope that they scratch your back as well.
Yes, because after all, we know any programmer smart enough to drop a back-door into the system wouldn't think of the fact that little things like Presidential Elections only run on a certain day every four years.
Why, there's absolutely no chance that a corrupt programmer wouldn't have put in a simple check for the date before setting the corrupt bit to run.
Of course not.
No.. we base it on the fact that on the rare occasion when an election is close enough to require a recount, we don't have to go to court over it.
Actually it does.
..everybody knows you need a full Faraday cage.
Especially ideas on political theory.
Unless there's hard evidence to back her up, accepting ideas from someone who's "mostly a lunatic" is probably not the best way to go.
After all, it's kind of like the idea that some folks have that a tin-foil hat will stop them from being able to brain-wash you..
Here's the thing about Black & White that most of the people who don't like it completely miss.
It's not a game, it's a sim.
I know, it was advertised as a game. I know, it sort of kind of feels like a game because there are all these little challenges in it that you can succeed or fail at. But when it boils down to it, it's not a game.
The key failings of B&W were the interface (grabbing the ground and pulling is ridiculous. You couldn't play the thing well with just the mouse anyway as you needed shortcuts to move from place to place quickly, why not bite the bullet and give it movement keys like a flight-sim, or any FPS with "fly" on), and the incredibly long tutorial that, while it overemphasized all the little problems with the controls, completely negated to tell people how to manage their worshippers.
The key to managing the little worshippers is simply not to micro-manage them. It's hard to do because we're so used to "Demand-Response" interaction in games as being the route to success, not "Demand-Ignore". Those little guys really do learn. If they learn that when they cry "We need food," some mystical force shows up and gives it to them.. guess what they're going to do next time they're hungry? On the other hand, if a couple starve, they soon figure out that if they need food, they'd best go get it.
This is only a problem if your game is not player-skill based.
And if your game isn't skill based, you're basically in a glorified chat-room anyway.
PFah.. for the gaming company, their fondest wish is that you don't play, but continue to pay so that you have the privelege of playing whenever you get around to it.
After all, if they can get money simply for giving you the idea that you might use their service.. that's awesome.
Kind of like how the insurance agency works.. but their payouts are soemtimes better.
permanent death may sound like a great idea, until the griefers start coming after the newbies.
At which point griefers get a bounty placed on their head equal to some constant times the difference between their level and the level of the player they killed.
Couple this with a "non-disappearance" type of game, where if you log off your character lays down and goes to sleep.. (hope you did so in a safe hotel.. which of course would not be open to known killers), and all a griefer is doing is setting themselves up to be unable to grief.
There's a bunch of refinements you could add to the system.. (the killed players getting a portion of the experience generated when the griefer finally dies, etc..) but it basically works along the lines of quick severe punishment working as deterrence.
I tend to agree, but it doesn't change what folks have been saying here.
Namely that Darl is an idiot.
He's missing a fundamental business point about IBM. IBM is big enough to be able to think long term. And the long-term view says that if you pay one person to stop trying to piss on you, sooner or later everybody is trying to piss on you.
I don't even see AutoZone's insurers going to IBM, since from what Jim Greer says, IBM had next-to-nothing for involvement in the decision to switch over.
If SCO said that the Holy Roman Catholic Church was involved in AutoZone's decision to switch, would the AutoZone insurers immediately try and get the Pope on the phone? Of course not, it's an obvious waste of the insurer's money and time.
If you're really want to see Paranoia as a movie, you could do worse than to see THX-1138. (Available on VHS only).
Lucas' first feature length movie.. and when I saw it, I couldn't help but thinking "God! Lucas even stole the idea for his first movie!" Of course, the movie was written before Paranoia was, so maybe it's the other way around.
Heh.. you forgot to mention that Skotos already has the liscence to do an online version of Paranoia.
Okay, here's the thing..
To make the analogy more accurate, the choice MicroCar would have isn't just to make a car either with or without their version of the radio.. it'd be to make a car either completely without the radio, or with both their version and the versions of their competitors.
Now, after the car is sold, they can offer a "Free upgrade to a new MicroCar radio", and that'd be fine. Of course, some people wouldn't bother. Some people would go for a standard radio, and some people would take advantage of it.. but the point is, the choice would be there for the consumer to make, it wouldn't be already made by MicroCar.
The problem isn't that people may or may not choose MicroCar's radio, or Microsoft's media player, it's that the company with the monopoly, not the consumer, is making the choice.
Because, in America, it's all an integral part of the OS.. don't you remember the court testimony?
Of course, when it crosses over the ocean, the currents alter the bits so that they can separate things.
No.. not big=evil. You're perfectly allowed to become a monopoly and stay one, doing whatever you like, within the sphere of your monopoly.
It's when you use that monopoly to start affecting other sectors of industry.
And there's damn good reason for this too. Big!=Evil, but lack-of-choice sure as hell does.
Perhaps you would prefer to approach this from a different angle - Could you explain to me how giving away a browser benefitted Microsoft?
It allowed MS to control the defacto internet standards for a long time.. we're still in the process of getting away from that. How many sites do you see that still say "Best viewed with IE", and browsers that are actually adhering to W3C standards are being blocked?
That kind of lock-in means any possible competition is always playing catch-up. Not to mention gives MS huge leverage (which they used) against other standards, such as Java (hence why Sun sued), or in the market for selling server software ("IE works best with our software.. and everybody uses IE, so you should really get ours.")
But beyond this, it doesn't even matter. If IE was offered for free, but *not included* with the OS, Netscape wouldn't even have had arguing rights, because at that point MS would not have been leveraging monopoly status in one market (OS) to affect the business of another (Browser). However, they did, and that's where they crossed the line.
As for baseless generalizations, you also make one when you suggest that without MS we'd have a far worse mess. There's no proof of that, as the computing industry was already starting to realize the benefits of standardization, at least for interoperability, when MS came along.
From where I sit, MS's overwhelming monopoly actually hurt interoperability.. why? Because people didn't need to think about designing their programs for multiple systems.. they could just design for Windows and that was good enough.