If you don't like the commercials, don't watch the show. Understand me - I hate the digital rights management and I especially hate the damn anti-piracy mini movies and warnings in front of every film. But the only moral way to avoid that crap is to not watch the show at all - you can't ignore the terms of use because they don't suit you.
I'm not talking about incentive, I'm talking about right and wrong. Other people corrected me, copyright infringement is technically not theft - if I steal someone's car, they can't use it. If I make a copy of their movie, they can still watch it and continue to sell it. So theft is an incorrect term. But I'm still using something without permission because I don't feel like using it in a way the content creator wants. It's still wrong.
Obviously I'm not going to convince you or most of the other people here to stop downloading content. But don't pretend you have the moral high ground - you don't.
You're right, technically it's not theft. It's not the same as taking a car or a computer or a sandwich from someone. Call it copying without permission, call it illegal duplication, I don't care - you're still using something without permission.
The nice thing about the internet distribution of content is that when an artist actually does manage to get famous, they still own their content. Under the old model, the artist got famous but the studio got more income from the content than they did.
If you don't like the terms and conditions of a car sale, or a home purchase, or a truck rental, you don't get to rewrite the contract. You just buy the car or home, or rent the truck, somewhere else. So if Sony or Warner or Dreamworks has DRM you dislike on their stuff, don't get it.
There are thousands or maybe millions of writers, musicians, and movie producers who gladly give away their content for free. When we continue to use content from DRM, Inc. we validate their business model, even if we work around the DRM itself. The real solution is to stop supporting them entirely.
I do agree that fiber is a pipe dream - Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and so forth have consumers giving them billions of dollars per year for the bandwidth they provide right now. There is not nearly enough competition or other incentive for them to increase bandwidth or increase monthly data caps. I'm hoping the Google Fiber project in Kansas City is spread or copied by other companies or non-profits in other areas - I doubt the big players will get serious about true high speed internet everywhere until they're seriously concerned that failing to act will cost them their customer base.
No, being a pirate is still theft. If you don't like the DRM, don't use the product. The best way to burn the MPAA and RIAA for their actions is to stop using the content they own, period.
Creative Commons books, movies, and music are awesome because I do not pay anything and I'm not violating any terms of service imposed by the original content creator by not paying anything. Those content creators, the ones that are working with their consumers instead of against them, deserve our support.
Don't pretend your theft of content is morally justified because you don't like the conditions of sale. If you don't like the conditions of sale, don't buy.
Yes. If you'll forgive me for pimping FantasyCraft some more (though I am not affiliated with the game or its creators in any way) they have a tunable mechanic for restricting the amount of supernatural gear the characters have. Player characters get Reputation Points for heroic acts and can spend the points on holdings (a farm, a keep, control of a merchant guild, a castle), titles (knight, baron, duke, captain), and gear (traditional magic weapons, arm, and wands). The Game Master can take those holdings, titles, or gear away but is encouraged to make it relatively easy for characters to recover them. Player characters can acquire holdings, titles, and gear without spending Reputation Points but the Game Master is permitted to remove them permanently whenever it suits the story. So you generally don't have surplus magical items galore or a PC covered from head to toe with magical gear and carrying a magic bag full of spare weapons, scrolls, and potions - and some players would rather have their characters skip the fancy magic doodads entirely in return for being able to ask the local elf king to field an army on his behalf or periodically withdraw huge funds from his merchant guild.
There's nothing wrong with playing demigods, if that's your cup of tea. As long as the narrator/Game Master/Dungeon Master and players approach the game with knowledge up front about where their characters are heading and consent to that type of game, it's fine.
I was turned off to standard d20 and its variants (starting with Dungeons and Dragons 3rd and 3rd revised editions, all of the way through the Pathfinder RPG) because of two features: 1. The distinction between arcane and divine magic and restrictions on what each can do seems pointless and is often frustrating. I personally prefer games where the mechanics for magic are more universal and flexible and the distinction between the magic of priests, wizards, sorcerors, druids, and so forth is cosmetic. 2. Unless a Dungeon Master bends over backwards to custom tailor threats and opponents, past level 9 or so all of the players in the group that are not playing primary spellcasters (Cleric, Druid, Wizard, Sorceror) sit back and twiddle their thumbs while the players that are playing primary spellcasters dominate gameplay.
On the other hand, the game [i]FantasyCraft[/i] has its distant roots in d20 but is sufficiently modified that I love it. Players still do end up like demigods over time, but the distinction between magic types is purely flavor and at high levels primary spellcasters do not dominate play. It's up there with GURPS and Spirit of the Century as my favorite games.
As others have said - watching football or soccer or baseball is pretend. Fantasy baseball and fantasy football, which are wildly popular, are pretend. First person shooter games, fighting games like Mortal Kombat, adventure games like Zelda or of course computer roleplaying games like Fallout and World of Warcraft are pretend. Farmville and Mafia Wars are pretend. Risk and Monopoly are pretend.
Hell, buying a Corvette convertible when you're a fat fifty year old with a receding hairline and hair growing out of your ears so you can drive around and fantasize about being young and athletic is pretend. In fact, most advertising is a mix between offering people some products they can actually use (a minority) and presenting them with a fantasy image of themselves in order to get them to buy something they don't need (a majority). It's pretend everywhere.
Everybody plays pretend. We who play tabletop roleplaying games, or tabletop war games, are no worse than the rest. The stigma is a relic of a time before computers and pervasive advertising, when pretend for sports was socially acceptable and everything else was viewed as odd. The world has changed, and eventually opinions have caught up.
I agree with your logic. If supply side economics worked, all of the economic growth from 2002 to 2007 would have been from something other than a real estate bubble. Not to mention the insane logic behind keeping taxes low when the nation is at war. But what do I know, I'm just some idiot on a discussion board.
I am extremely pleased that Blizzard provided a nice severance package, and extremely pleased that employees of a company that services an MMORPG are themselves fans of pen and paper roleplaying games. Cool.
I'm pro union and borderline socialist myself, but I can't see asking or forcing companies to employ people they can't use. I hope your friend and everyone else laid off finds gainful employment elsewhere.
It only makes sense to employ people if you have a job for them to do. If Blizzard had nothing useful for them to do, keeping them around to twiddle their thumbs doesn't make much sense.
I love the Humble Indie Bundles and buy all of them for Linux. But look at total Linux revenue, period from the humble bundles. A huge number of games wouldn't cover the expense of porting the game to Linux and supporting it for that kind of money - and of course the money listed there is gross revenue, not net.
When the Humble Bundles are consistently bringing in $5 million in Linux purchases, things might change. Until then, we're just dreaming.
I've played Starcraft2 on my PC on Wine with the AMD/ATI proprietary drivers and on Windows, and on Wine I have all the graphics at the lowest setting at 1920x1200 and get 20 frames per second. On Windows I have all the graphics at the highest setting at 1900x1200 and get 50 frames per second. I know a professional gamer doesn't care because he can slaughter me in seven minutes using the lower visual effects and frames per second. But if you haven't seen the visual differences between lowest settings/20 and highest settings/50, it will blow you away. It's like seeing an entirely different game.
My brother was sued for pirating a movie. He settled out of court with the film company, and one of the terms of the agreement was that he not even disclose that it happened (so it was a violation of those terms for him to tell me about it). I wouldn't be surprised if hundreds or thousands of others had similar settlements.
Of course I can't provide evidence and it would be absurd to take something written in a Slashdot comment on faith.
Wine won't run some games as well because the nVidia and especially ATI/AMD graphics card drivers for Linux aren't as good as the ones for Windows. The performance difference is something you can live with, but if you want to squeeze the most visual beauty out of your expensive video card you'll have to do it under Windows.
Java is painfully verbose, and I think a lot of the use of auto would save typing without losing readability.
auto x = new Customer();// versus Customer x = new Customer();
List<Customer> customers =// initialize it somehow
for (auto x : customers) {... }// versus (for Customer x : customers) {... }
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Comcast, Verizon... all are far away from privacy. I like Google best of the group because they release the most open source software, but in terms of privacy there is no winner in the bunch. Use the cloud, but don't trust it.
The smart phone and tablet device market has grown from very small to massive in the past five years, and it's only going to keep growing. Android and especially iOS are the established players. But Microsoft is spending money like water to get Windows Phone a serious piece of the market - and it makes sense, because even if it takes ten years of investment before Windows Phone starts to pay off, the payoff can be colossal.
Now obviously HP doesn't have the financial assets of Google, Microsoft, and especially Apple. So maybe they flat out couldn't afford the necessary investment to make WebOS a major player in the market. But I suspect this is the biggest opportunity for long term profit that HP leadership has screwed up in the history of the company.
Again, if you're buying your own hardware then maxing the RAM is important. I'm strictly speaking of renting cloud servers from hosting companies - added RAM for your virtual servers gets expensive fast.
If you're running your own machines, maxing out the RAM makes sense. It's a one time cost and the ongoing cost to power and cool the added memory is negligible next to the rest of your budget.
But if you're renting capacity from a virtual hosting provider, adding more RAM sends your monthly costs through the roof. Since tens of thousands of little websites run in that type of environment, it's a serious problem for a lot of low and lower-middle tier companies. I'm starting to think cloud hosting for small companies only makes sense financially if they write all their server code in C and C++. (Scary)
I don't think it really matters what Apache makes the defaults, as long as there's plentiful, clear documentation on what the configuration parameters mean and how to make an educated guess as to what values you should set for your own deployment.
Android 4.0 is open source, full stop. Google can make Android 5.0 or 6.0 closed source, but they can't retroactively close anything that's already opened. So in that sense particular versions of Android might be closed, but Android itself will still be open. If you don't like what your manufacturer ships on your device, put your own build on it.
But in any event, competition in the open source space is great.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't like the commercials, don't watch the show. Understand me - I hate the digital rights management and I especially hate the damn anti-piracy mini movies and warnings in front of every film. But the only moral way to avoid that crap is to not watch the show at all - you can't ignore the terms of use because they don't suit you.
I'm not talking about incentive, I'm talking about right and wrong. Other people corrected me, copyright infringement is technically not theft - if I steal someone's car, they can't use it. If I make a copy of their movie, they can still watch it and continue to sell it. So theft is an incorrect term. But I'm still using something without permission because I don't feel like using it in a way the content creator wants. It's still wrong.
Obviously I'm not going to convince you or most of the other people here to stop downloading content. But don't pretend you have the moral high ground - you don't.
You're right, technically it's not theft. It's not the same as taking a car or a computer or a sandwich from someone. Call it copying without permission, call it illegal duplication, I don't care - you're still using something without permission.
The nice thing about the internet distribution of content is that when an artist actually does manage to get famous, they still own their content. Under the old model, the artist got famous but the studio got more income from the content than they did.
If you don't like the terms and conditions of a car sale, or a home purchase, or a truck rental, you don't get to rewrite the contract. You just buy the car or home, or rent the truck, somewhere else. So if Sony or Warner or Dreamworks has DRM you dislike on their stuff, don't get it.
There are thousands or maybe millions of writers, musicians, and movie producers who gladly give away their content for free. When we continue to use content from DRM, Inc. we validate their business model, even if we work around the DRM itself. The real solution is to stop supporting them entirely.
I do agree that fiber is a pipe dream - Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and so forth have consumers giving them billions of dollars per year for the bandwidth they provide right now. There is not nearly enough competition or other incentive for them to increase bandwidth or increase monthly data caps. I'm hoping the Google Fiber project in Kansas City is spread or copied by other companies or non-profits in other areas - I doubt the big players will get serious about true high speed internet everywhere until they're seriously concerned that failing to act will cost them their customer base.
No, being a pirate is still theft. If you don't like the DRM, don't use the product. The best way to burn the MPAA and RIAA for their actions is to stop using the content they own, period.
Creative Commons books, movies, and music are awesome because I do not pay anything and I'm not violating any terms of service imposed by the original content creator by not paying anything. Those content creators, the ones that are working with their consumers instead of against them, deserve our support.
Don't pretend your theft of content is morally justified because you don't like the conditions of sale. If you don't like the conditions of sale, don't buy.
Yes. If you'll forgive me for pimping FantasyCraft some more (though I am not affiliated with the game or its creators in any way) they have a tunable mechanic for restricting the amount of supernatural gear the characters have. Player characters get Reputation Points for heroic acts and can spend the points on holdings (a farm, a keep, control of a merchant guild, a castle), titles (knight, baron, duke, captain), and gear (traditional magic weapons, arm, and wands). The Game Master can take those holdings, titles, or gear away but is encouraged to make it relatively easy for characters to recover them. Player characters can acquire holdings, titles, and gear without spending Reputation Points but the Game Master is permitted to remove them permanently whenever it suits the story. So you generally don't have surplus magical items galore or a PC covered from head to toe with magical gear and carrying a magic bag full of spare weapons, scrolls, and potions - and some players would rather have their characters skip the fancy magic doodads entirely in return for being able to ask the local elf king to field an army on his behalf or periodically withdraw huge funds from his merchant guild.
Dammit, I forgot the markup rules for slashdot. Please forgive the [i] ... [/i] above.
There's nothing wrong with playing demigods, if that's your cup of tea. As long as the narrator/Game Master/Dungeon Master and players approach the game with knowledge up front about where their characters are heading and consent to that type of game, it's fine.
I was turned off to standard d20 and its variants (starting with Dungeons and Dragons 3rd and 3rd revised editions, all of the way through the Pathfinder RPG) because of two features: 1. The distinction between arcane and divine magic and restrictions on what each can do seems pointless and is often frustrating. I personally prefer games where the mechanics for magic are more universal and flexible and the distinction between the magic of priests, wizards, sorcerors, druids, and so forth is cosmetic. 2. Unless a Dungeon Master bends over backwards to custom tailor threats and opponents, past level 9 or so all of the players in the group that are not playing primary spellcasters (Cleric, Druid, Wizard, Sorceror) sit back and twiddle their thumbs while the players that are playing primary spellcasters dominate gameplay.
On the other hand, the game [i]FantasyCraft[/i] has its distant roots in d20 but is sufficiently modified that I love it. Players still do end up like demigods over time, but the distinction between magic types is purely flavor and at high levels primary spellcasters do not dominate play. It's up there with GURPS and Spirit of the Century as my favorite games.
As others have said - watching football or soccer or baseball is pretend. Fantasy baseball and fantasy football, which are wildly popular, are pretend. First person shooter games, fighting games like Mortal Kombat, adventure games like Zelda or of course computer roleplaying games like Fallout and World of Warcraft are pretend. Farmville and Mafia Wars are pretend. Risk and Monopoly are pretend.
Hell, buying a Corvette convertible when you're a fat fifty year old with a receding hairline and hair growing out of your ears so you can drive around and fantasize about being young and athletic is pretend. In fact, most advertising is a mix between offering people some products they can actually use (a minority) and presenting them with a fantasy image of themselves in order to get them to buy something they don't need (a majority). It's pretend everywhere.
Everybody plays pretend. We who play tabletop roleplaying games, or tabletop war games, are no worse than the rest. The stigma is a relic of a time before computers and pervasive advertising, when pretend for sports was socially acceptable and everything else was viewed as odd. The world has changed, and eventually opinions have caught up.
I agree with your logic. If supply side economics worked, all of the economic growth from 2002 to 2007 would have been from something other than a real estate bubble. Not to mention the insane logic behind keeping taxes low when the nation is at war. But what do I know, I'm just some idiot on a discussion board.
I am extremely pleased that Blizzard provided a nice severance package, and extremely pleased that employees of a company that services an MMORPG are themselves fans of pen and paper roleplaying games. Cool.
I'm pro union and borderline socialist myself, but I can't see asking or forcing companies to employ people they can't use. I hope your friend and everyone else laid off finds gainful employment elsewhere.
It only makes sense to employ people if you have a job for them to do. If Blizzard had nothing useful for them to do, keeping them around to twiddle their thumbs doesn't make much sense.
I love the Humble Indie Bundles and buy all of them for Linux. But look at total Linux revenue, period from the humble bundles. A huge number of games wouldn't cover the expense of porting the game to Linux and supporting it for that kind of money - and of course the money listed there is gross revenue, not net.
When the Humble Bundles are consistently bringing in $5 million in Linux purchases, things might change. Until then, we're just dreaming.
I've played Starcraft2 on my PC on Wine with the AMD/ATI proprietary drivers and on Windows, and on Wine I have all the graphics at the lowest setting at 1920x1200 and get 20 frames per second. On Windows I have all the graphics at the highest setting at 1900x1200 and get 50 frames per second. I know a professional gamer doesn't care because he can slaughter me in seven minutes using the lower visual effects and frames per second. But if you haven't seen the visual differences between lowest settings/20 and highest settings/50, it will blow you away. It's like seeing an entirely different game.
My brother was sued for pirating a movie. He settled out of court with the film company, and one of the terms of the agreement was that he not even disclose that it happened (so it was a violation of those terms for him to tell me about it). I wouldn't be surprised if hundreds or thousands of others had similar settlements.
Of course I can't provide evidence and it would be absurd to take something written in a Slashdot comment on faith.
Wine won't run some games as well because the nVidia and especially ATI/AMD graphics card drivers for Linux aren't as good as the ones for Windows. The performance difference is something you can live with, but if you want to squeeze the most visual beauty out of your expensive video card you'll have to do it under Windows.
Interesting post, thanks for sharing.
Java is painfully verbose, and I think a lot of the use of auto would save typing without losing readability. // versus Customer x = new Customer(); // initialize it somehow ... } // versus (for Customer x : customers) { ... }
auto x = new Customer();
List<Customer> customers =
for (auto x : customers) {
Reading the declaration should be child's play.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Comcast, Verizon... all are far away from privacy. I like Google best of the group because they release the most open source software, but in terms of privacy there is no winner in the bunch. Use the cloud, but don't trust it.
The smart phone and tablet device market has grown from very small to massive in the past five years, and it's only going to keep growing. Android and especially iOS are the established players. But Microsoft is spending money like water to get Windows Phone a serious piece of the market - and it makes sense, because even if it takes ten years of investment before Windows Phone starts to pay off, the payoff can be colossal.
Now obviously HP doesn't have the financial assets of Google, Microsoft, and especially Apple. So maybe they flat out couldn't afford the necessary investment to make WebOS a major player in the market. But I suspect this is the biggest opportunity for long term profit that HP leadership has screwed up in the history of the company.
Again, if you're buying your own hardware then maxing the RAM is important. I'm strictly speaking of renting cloud servers from hosting companies - added RAM for your virtual servers gets expensive fast.
If you're running your own machines, maxing out the RAM makes sense. It's a one time cost and the ongoing cost to power and cool the added memory is negligible next to the rest of your budget.
But if you're renting capacity from a virtual hosting provider, adding more RAM sends your monthly costs through the roof. Since tens of thousands of little websites run in that type of environment, it's a serious problem for a lot of low and lower-middle tier companies. I'm starting to think cloud hosting for small companies only makes sense financially if they write all their server code in C and C++. (Scary)
I don't think it really matters what Apache makes the defaults, as long as there's plentiful, clear documentation on what the configuration parameters mean and how to make an educated guess as to what values you should set for your own deployment.
Legalese nonsense. Intel was guilty and settled out of court to avoid the costs, bad publicity, and higher damages from a real court battle.
Android 4.0 is open source, full stop. Google can make Android 5.0 or 6.0 closed source, but they can't retroactively close anything that's already opened. So in that sense particular versions of Android might be closed, but Android itself will still be open. If you don't like what your manufacturer ships on your device, put your own build on it.
But in any event, competition in the open source space is great.