Similarly, if you have loud neighbors, you should just move and boycott the loud neighbors. Get rid of your HOA rules or local ordinances, because they clearly have a negative impact by being enforced -- in fact, they require even more enforcement than this proposed rule would: local police have to enforce noise rules, whereas this would be a simple, network-level enforced rule, easy to monitor and issue fines for offenders.
So, clearly, this proposed legislation is a bad idea, and noise ordinances are a bad idea as well.
Sarcasm aside, it sure would be nice if the broadcasting industry could have come together and implemented something like this to begin with. It would be really nice if they'd just said, "ok, hey, we're going to normalize our content so that typical conversation will play at 50dB. Commercials will be compressed to have a maximum volume of 55dB." Then I wouldn't have to readjust the volume every time I changed channels, or be blasted out of the room when I have the volume set high for a quiet show on a quiet network, then flip channels and hit a Dodge truck ad on Spike. I guess the invisible hand of the free market hasn't sorted that one out yet.
I lend more credence to someone who served in the military and is now anti-military than someone who never served, but is gung-ho about sending soldiers off to "serve". (Romney, Cheney, Rumsfeld...)
Eve has the advantage of being a space-based game. If they need more "room" for ships in a zone/quadrant/whatever (I don't play the game), they just make a zone that's 100,000x100,000 instead of 10,000x10,000 and insert some more stock items for asteroids and planets to populate the area. (I don't know how detailed their planets are, but would assume that they aren't modeled and interactive down to a person-scale or even a city-scale)
WoW is based on land. While it would be entirely possible to have procedurally-generated areas of land, it really *wouldn't* be possible to have procedurally-generated cities that weren't bland and uninteresting. I'll say WoW in general, and the capital cities in particular, are already crowded enough. If they were to consolidate every player into one server, Dalaran would be a sea of characters. It would be absolutely terrible. In Elwynn Forest, instead of a few dozen players screwing around in Goldshire, you'd have thousands or tens of thousands. For world bosses, you'd have, say, 40 people in a raid (or more likely, 25) to down them when they spawned on their 24 hour/7 day spawn timers. So for each timer, you'd have 25 out of 12,000,000 able to kill it for gear/achievements.
There's a reason that Blizzard "doesn't seem to care" about consolidating everyone onto a single server. It's because it's a terrible idea, and while it would be nice to be able to run instances with your cross-server friends, I definitely wouldn't the entire planet's WoW-playing population all in Dalaran complaining about the unplayable framerates and lag at once.
I have to disagree with you on the simplification of stats, and to expand on what Prien715 says.
The multitude of stats and their interaction, and their impact on your performance is just ridiculous. As a caster, in addition to the base stats which I can pretty much ignore, I have hit, crit, spellpower, haste, and mp5. Each talent and skill has slightly different modifiers and coefficients for some of these stats. There's no way, using the stock UI, to actually see what a particular stat will do for you, as spell tooltips don't reflect all of your bonuses (they have made improvements, but information is still missing). So there's no way to actually figure things out without running it through a calculator and a spreadsheet. Now consider that you have more than a dozen slots to optimize, and potentially several pieces of gear to choose from for each slot... who wants to spend all that time to figure out an optimal set-up?
What's that, you say? Just plug your gear into Rawr and do what it tells you? Well if you're going to do that, then you just subverted the whole "difficulty" thing you said you wanted by letting someone else do the work for you. The fact that Rawr exists at all is a pretty good indicator that the stats system is just too opaque for people who don't have time to spend to take statistically significant samples of their performance using different gear combinations on the target dummies. (Oh, and I hope you're not using a damage meter either, what's the challenge there? You're also not using stock specs/rotations, because what's the challenge there?)
It's even worse on my tank. I have defense, dodge, block, parry, expertise. But each one of these is subject to either diminishing returns or a hard cap -- and on top of that, the tooltips you get don't tell you what your effective avoidance rate is. Without some other tool/spreadsheet/whatever, there's no way to tell what stat is actually better for you. (well, this trinket has 120 dodge on it, but is it going to be subject to more diminishing returns than this one that has only 98 parry?) Then there's also stamina, which most tanks load up on because they just like to be a mana sponge for their healer. Tanking is even worse to try to gather performance data on, because well, you can only do it if you're actually tanking a raid boss.
That said, I don't mind juggling stats in most games. What I do mind is the stupid system that Blizzard has put in place that's nearly impossible to decipher. It's one thing to say, "this item has 100 spellpower, so it will do X to my spells." It's another thing entirely to have to figure out, "this item has 100 spellpower. Arcane missiles is a 5 second base cast, so its coefficient will be Y. Fireball's coefficient will be Z. Frostbolt's coefficient will be W. Oh, but I also have talents that modify the base coefficient for this school, so Frostbolt's will be W+Q. Or is it W*Q? The tooltip isn't really clear. Flamestrike has a 2.5 second cast time, but then it has a DoT component... what's the coefficient for the DoT effect? Oh, and how does the AoE damage cap work in this patch? Oh fuck it, I'll just go look up Rawr and press 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2 like everyone in the forums tells me to."
When players' gear is equal, latency comes next in who has the advantage. When I charge an opponent and end up 10 yards away, and someone else charges me and is immediately able to start hacking away, that's all due to client side latency. When I'm tracking my opponent with mouse turning as they jump around in circles and all I ever see is "target must be in front of you" while they happily land every blow, that's client side latency. When my opponent is pinging the server with sub-50ms round trips and I'm hovering between 150 and 300, there isn't a whole hell of a lot I can do.
So Gear > Latency > Skill. Personally, I'd rather play something where skill ranks a little higher in importance. PvE isn't a whole lot better in that regard.
But that's really beside the point anyway -- small-scale PvP in WoW is almost entirely about stuns, disorients, fears, and silence. It's very poorly designed and executed (witness the countless game changing class rebalances centered *solely* on arenas), and really not a whole lot of fun to play, when half the time you're not even in control of your character.
Or maybe there was an exciting part of the movie and she wanted to catch the birthday party's reaction to it. Or maybe she just wanted to film part of the movie watching experience and caught the movie as the backdrop.
But we don't know exactly what was recorded, so it's all just speculation. However, the idea that someone should have criminal charges leveled against them because they caught a few minutes of a movie on tape is absurd, regardless of the nature of what was recorded.
I like how you've managed to work a 2nd amendment reference in to a half dozen unrelated posts on a discussion about copyright infringement. I guess we all have our pet issues.
Is your insurance company one of the ones who decided to screw their (paying!) customers who had bought flood protection because it was determined that the damage to their homes was caused by wind and rain, and not flooding?
Even if it's not, I don't expect much sympathy for your company. I hope your customers get every penny they can -- turnabout is fair play, IMO.
But what fscking kind of a low life loser are you when you track random/. users?
I'll let you in on a secret: some people leave such a negative impression on you that you don't need to "track" them to remember them. Having an easily-identified all-caps username makes them stand out even more. And then when you read the first couple of posts on a thread that they take over, you say to yourself, "Oh, I remember this guy" and quickly start looking for the end of the tread.
I use Trillian, FWIW, and go out of my way to uninstall the MSN Messenger adware client on every machine I use. I have friends on AIM, MSN, and ICQ, so Microsoft's client doesn't meet my needs, and having 2 (or more) IM clients installed on a machine is just stupid.
(Your reply, I imagine, because I won't be checking back: "I don't use 2 messengers because MSN is the best and I wouldn't want to talk to anyone stupid enough to not use it. MSN is the best network because it's already filtered out all the people who think AIM is good. You're stupid for talking to them, and you're stupid for not using Microsoft's client.")
Even if two APIs are offered, the stupid surveys will *still* use the privileged one with access to your personal information.
Why? Those surveys only exist so that the company that writes them can data-mine your profile. Personally, I don't see a lot of value in knowing what my network of friends is and my relationship status, but apparently there's enough monetary demand for that information that they can stay in business.
Nothing comes for free, ever, in a commercialized environment. There are no home modder enthusiasts who take great personal satisfaction in writing up a 10-question 80s movie quiz or a viral vampire vs. werewolf game. (If I'm wrong, I my heart goes out to the sad people who enjoy building those inane apps.) It's all just data mining and ad revenue generating BS.
So I took a look at those numbers, and I honestly don't think they prove anything, and here's why:
If you remember the lead-up to the election, what was Obama campaigning for? Hope and change. For the most part, he ran a positive campaign, making claims about what he was going to do as president. I don't watch TV, so I can't really speak to any negative spots that may have run, but during debates I really don't recall him harping on the shortcomings of McCain all that much other than linking him to Bush's policies.
What did we have out of the McCain/Palin camp? Well, we had the lie that was Joe the Plumber and all of his easily refuted claims. We had Palin accusing Obama of "palling around with terrorists." (Note also that she used the Beck tactic of, "we just want to know what you were doing, so why don't you acknowledge this statement, even though it's utter BS? We won't use your reaction to smear you, honest.") We had McCain saying that "the fundamentals of the economy are good" as the Dow was in the middle of a 50% plunge, with record numbers of home foreclosures and huge financial institutions on the verge of collapse. We had coverage of town hall meetings with Palin and McCain where their constituents shouted out "terrorist!" and "socialist!" while the candidates egged them on.
In light of that, there was a lot more negative to report about the McCain camp than there was about the Obama camp. If you run a negative campaign that relies on easily refutable material, expect to have negative coverage. According to your links, even Fox had twice as much negative coverage of McCain as they did positive coverage. In the end, Obama's campaign promises may have just been empty words, but at least they couldn't be verified or disputed until after he had already been elected. You can't do much negative reporting on "hope and change" unless you're arguing for the status quo.
Opera is excellent in this regard, and it's one of the reasons I use it. If you navigate back, not only will the page not have to refresh, but in nearly all cases, the page will be in the same state as it was left in after any Javascript had run on it. (Say, you clicked a couple of things and expanded some AJAX-y controls, the controls will still be expanded when you navigate back)
I *believe* that this even works after a restart->restore previous session, but honestly haven't experimented with it that much.
Most games in general are shit. This has been true of all consoles in all generations. The Wii is not special in that regard. Has everyone already forgotten the huge amount of shovelware that the PS2 had?
The same can be said for pretty much any medium: most music, movies, books and TV is shit.
And if you don't mind being a douchebag and getting kicked out of restaurants, then go ahead and assert your "right".
Do you seriously expect every person and business you deal with throughout the day to explicitly enumerate the things that you may not do? Is that the only way you know how you're expected to behave? Do you keep a lawyer on a leash to stick up for you and say, "well, you never said that he *couldn't* do that" as you're being escorted out of buildings?
I think what the parent poster is asking is how to handle a habitual "infringer", with the assumption that they have been caught and "convicted" multiple times.
Everyone has responded by throwing a fit that one only has to be accused 3 times, with no due process, and that is bad. Well, of course it is. Here's a gold star for everyone insightful enough to point this out. No reasonable person would argue against due process. (note: reasonable person) Clearly, as it is written now, it's a bad law.
Instead, maybe someone should try to answer the question. Assuming there's a method to catch and "convict" copyright infringers, how do you deal with habitual offenders? Community service, IMO. Personally, I don't want to waste tax dollars on jail time.
And no the "you can read on the train" argument doesn't fly, because I prefer listening to the news radio in the morning. Or music. Or books-on-tape, so my time in the car is not wasted.
STRAWMAN ARGUMENT. Where exactly did the GP even mention reading books on the train?
And 1 billion people eating roughly the same foods in the same proportion as the current 7 billion we have will be 1/7th as taxing on the environment as what we have now. And quite probably sustainable to boot.
Personally, I can't imagine the planet with 12 billion people living on it. It's already crowded enough as is.
Full disclosure: I'm a songwriter and a member of a PRS. The money I make a year on songwriting could maybe buy a nice dinner. Without someone looking out for my interests, I'd make nothing.
I find this hard to understand. Your yearly nice dinner is enough compensation to justify empowering an overzealous organization to harass people?
If it were me, I'd rather just have my work used with no compensation than have a team of lawyers use it to justify squeezing money out of people. Let them leech off of someone else or, preferably, starve if everybody refuses to play their game.
Then try it again and add some topspin and watch all the crazy shit you can make the ball do. Or are you not that advanced of a player to handle the controls for this "one button game"?
If you don't think how you swing it matters, you are absolutely 100% wrong. No, you don't get a different animation on screen, but the way it reacts off the racket (you know, the thing that actually matters) changes drastically. And bowling works exactly the same way. Baseball not so much, or at least I haven't played it enough to notice any differences in swings.
You have probably an overly optimistic guess as to what the police would have done. (On top of that, the article does not specify one way or the other whether or not she called the police)
Here's my guess about what that 911 call would have sounded like:
911) What's your emergency? Woman) A man is coming to my house. 911) Who is the man, and has he threatened you? Woman) I don't know, and no, he hasn't threatened me. He's just coming to my house. 911) You don't know who the man is? Woman) No, I only got an email. I've never met him. 911) I'm sorry, unless there is a man in your presence who has made a credible threat against you or physically assaulted you, we can't do anything. Have a nice day.
No one in America has an excuse for not having a job with the exception of the disabled
Are we living in the same America? The one I'm in, referred to as the United States of America, is approaching 10% unemployment, with over 500,000 new applications for unemployment benefits last month, which was the *lowest* new-app-monthly-total in 2009 IIRC.
Maybe you're living in Canada and unemployment stats are better there, or in some country south of the US (seems unlikely), but to say that nobody has an excuse for not having a job in the US is utter BS.
Agreed. When I play solitaire, I just deal myself into a winning position because it's stupid that I paid for the aces, but they're always buried behind cards that I can't get rid of.
Oh wait, no, that's dumb, because it defeats the purpose of the game entirely.
Also, if you look at a game purchase as buying "content," you're doing it wrong. If you want content, watch a movie or read a book if what you really want is just passive entertainment. Don't lobby for the video game industry to remove what little challenge is left in my hobby so that you can see all of the asinine, predictable cinematic sequences. If you just want to press a button to move on to the next part, try watching your DVDs chapter by chapter and call it a "game" instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Similarly, if you have loud neighbors, you should just move and boycott the loud neighbors. Get rid of your HOA rules or local ordinances, because they clearly have a negative impact by being enforced -- in fact, they require even more enforcement than this proposed rule would: local police have to enforce noise rules, whereas this would be a simple, network-level enforced rule, easy to monitor and issue fines for offenders.
So, clearly, this proposed legislation is a bad idea, and noise ordinances are a bad idea as well.
Sarcasm aside, it sure would be nice if the broadcasting industry could have come together and implemented something like this to begin with. It would be really nice if they'd just said, "ok, hey, we're going to normalize our content so that typical conversation will play at 50dB. Commercials will be compressed to have a maximum volume of 55dB." Then I wouldn't have to readjust the volume every time I changed channels, or be blasted out of the room when I have the volume set high for a quiet show on a quiet network, then flip channels and hit a Dodge truck ad on Spike. I guess the invisible hand of the free market hasn't sorted that one out yet.
--Jeremy
I lend more credence to someone who served in the military and is now anti-military than someone who never served, but is gung-ho about sending soldiers off to "serve". (Romney, Cheney, Rumsfeld...)
--Jeremy
This doesn't bother me nearly as much as watching arrows magically track their targets.
--Jeremy
Eve has the advantage of being a space-based game. If they need more "room" for ships in a zone/quadrant/whatever (I don't play the game), they just make a zone that's 100,000x100,000 instead of 10,000x10,000 and insert some more stock items for asteroids and planets to populate the area. (I don't know how detailed their planets are, but would assume that they aren't modeled and interactive down to a person-scale or even a city-scale)
WoW is based on land. While it would be entirely possible to have procedurally-generated areas of land, it really *wouldn't* be possible to have procedurally-generated cities that weren't bland and uninteresting. I'll say WoW in general, and the capital cities in particular, are already crowded enough. If they were to consolidate every player into one server, Dalaran would be a sea of characters. It would be absolutely terrible. In Elwynn Forest, instead of a few dozen players screwing around in Goldshire, you'd have thousands or tens of thousands. For world bosses, you'd have, say, 40 people in a raid (or more likely, 25) to down them when they spawned on their 24 hour/7 day spawn timers. So for each timer, you'd have 25 out of 12,000,000 able to kill it for gear/achievements.
There's a reason that Blizzard "doesn't seem to care" about consolidating everyone onto a single server. It's because it's a terrible idea, and while it would be nice to be able to run instances with your cross-server friends, I definitely wouldn't the entire planet's WoW-playing population all in Dalaran complaining about the unplayable framerates and lag at once.
--Jeremy
I have to disagree with you on the simplification of stats, and to expand on what Prien715 says.
The multitude of stats and their interaction, and their impact on your performance is just ridiculous. As a caster, in addition to the base stats which I can pretty much ignore, I have hit, crit, spellpower, haste, and mp5. Each talent and skill has slightly different modifiers and coefficients for some of these stats. There's no way, using the stock UI, to actually see what a particular stat will do for you, as spell tooltips don't reflect all of your bonuses (they have made improvements, but information is still missing). So there's no way to actually figure things out without running it through a calculator and a spreadsheet. Now consider that you have more than a dozen slots to optimize, and potentially several pieces of gear to choose from for each slot ... who wants to spend all that time to figure out an optimal set-up?
What's that, you say? Just plug your gear into Rawr and do what it tells you? Well if you're going to do that, then you just subverted the whole "difficulty" thing you said you wanted by letting someone else do the work for you. The fact that Rawr exists at all is a pretty good indicator that the stats system is just too opaque for people who don't have time to spend to take statistically significant samples of their performance using different gear combinations on the target dummies. (Oh, and I hope you're not using a damage meter either, what's the challenge there? You're also not using stock specs/rotations, because what's the challenge there?)
It's even worse on my tank. I have defense, dodge, block, parry, expertise. But each one of these is subject to either diminishing returns or a hard cap -- and on top of that, the tooltips you get don't tell you what your effective avoidance rate is. Without some other tool/spreadsheet/whatever, there's no way to tell what stat is actually better for you. (well, this trinket has 120 dodge on it, but is it going to be subject to more diminishing returns than this one that has only 98 parry?) Then there's also stamina, which most tanks load up on because they just like to be a mana sponge for their healer. Tanking is even worse to try to gather performance data on, because well, you can only do it if you're actually tanking a raid boss.
That said, I don't mind juggling stats in most games. What I do mind is the stupid system that Blizzard has put in place that's nearly impossible to decipher. It's one thing to say, "this item has 100 spellpower, so it will do X to my spells." It's another thing entirely to have to figure out, "this item has 100 spellpower. Arcane missiles is a 5 second base cast, so its coefficient will be Y. Fireball's coefficient will be Z. Frostbolt's coefficient will be W. Oh, but I also have talents that modify the base coefficient for this school, so Frostbolt's will be W+Q. Or is it W*Q? The tooltip isn't really clear. Flamestrike has a 2.5 second cast time, but then it has a DoT component ... what's the coefficient for the DoT effect? Oh, and how does the AoE damage cap work in this patch? Oh fuck it, I'll just go look up Rawr and press 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2 like everyone in the forums tells me to."
--Jeremy
Well, if the movies were copied illegally and the media cartels chose to pursue it in court, they could easily end up being "worth" more than £22,250.
--Jeremy
When players' gear is equal, latency comes next in who has the advantage. When I charge an opponent and end up 10 yards away, and someone else charges me and is immediately able to start hacking away, that's all due to client side latency. When I'm tracking my opponent with mouse turning as they jump around in circles and all I ever see is "target must be in front of you" while they happily land every blow, that's client side latency. When my opponent is pinging the server with sub-50ms round trips and I'm hovering between 150 and 300, there isn't a whole hell of a lot I can do.
So Gear > Latency > Skill. Personally, I'd rather play something where skill ranks a little higher in importance. PvE isn't a whole lot better in that regard.
But that's really beside the point anyway -- small-scale PvP in WoW is almost entirely about stuns, disorients, fears, and silence. It's very poorly designed and executed (witness the countless game changing class rebalances centered *solely* on arenas), and really not a whole lot of fun to play, when half the time you're not even in control of your character.
--Jeremy
Or maybe there was an exciting part of the movie and she wanted to catch the birthday party's reaction to it. Or maybe she just wanted to film part of the movie watching experience and caught the movie as the backdrop.
But we don't know exactly what was recorded, so it's all just speculation. However, the idea that someone should have criminal charges leveled against them because they caught a few minutes of a movie on tape is absurd, regardless of the nature of what was recorded.
--Jeremy
I like how you've managed to work a 2nd amendment reference in to a half dozen unrelated posts on a discussion about copyright infringement. I guess we all have our pet issues.
--Jeremy
Is your insurance company one of the ones who decided to screw their (paying!) customers who had bought flood protection because it was determined that the damage to their homes was caused by wind and rain, and not flooding?
Even if it's not, I don't expect much sympathy for your company. I hope your customers get every penny they can -- turnabout is fair play, IMO.
--Jeremy
I'll let you in on a secret: some people leave such a negative impression on you that you don't need to "track" them to remember them. Having an easily-identified all-caps username makes them stand out even more. And then when you read the first couple of posts on a thread that they take over, you say to yourself, "Oh, I remember this guy" and quickly start looking for the end of the tread.
I use Trillian, FWIW, and go out of my way to uninstall the MSN Messenger adware client on every machine I use. I have friends on AIM, MSN, and ICQ, so Microsoft's client doesn't meet my needs, and having 2 (or more) IM clients installed on a machine is just stupid.
(Your reply, I imagine, because I won't be checking back: "I don't use 2 messengers because MSN is the best and I wouldn't want to talk to anyone stupid enough to not use it. MSN is the best network because it's already filtered out all the people who think AIM is good. You're stupid for talking to them, and you're stupid for not using Microsoft's client.")
--Jeremy
Even if two APIs are offered, the stupid surveys will *still* use the privileged one with access to your personal information.
Why? Those surveys only exist so that the company that writes them can data-mine your profile. Personally, I don't see a lot of value in knowing what my network of friends is and my relationship status, but apparently there's enough monetary demand for that information that they can stay in business.
Nothing comes for free, ever, in a commercialized environment. There are no home modder enthusiasts who take great personal satisfaction in writing up a 10-question 80s movie quiz or a viral vampire vs. werewolf game. (If I'm wrong, I my heart goes out to the sad people who enjoy building those inane apps.) It's all just data mining and ad revenue generating BS.
--Jeremy
So I took a look at those numbers, and I honestly don't think they prove anything, and here's why:
If you remember the lead-up to the election, what was Obama campaigning for? Hope and change. For the most part, he ran a positive campaign, making claims about what he was going to do as president. I don't watch TV, so I can't really speak to any negative spots that may have run, but during debates I really don't recall him harping on the shortcomings of McCain all that much other than linking him to Bush's policies.
What did we have out of the McCain/Palin camp? Well, we had the lie that was Joe the Plumber and all of his easily refuted claims. We had Palin accusing Obama of "palling around with terrorists." (Note also that she used the Beck tactic of, "we just want to know what you were doing, so why don't you acknowledge this statement, even though it's utter BS? We won't use your reaction to smear you, honest.") We had McCain saying that "the fundamentals of the economy are good" as the Dow was in the middle of a 50% plunge, with record numbers of home foreclosures and huge financial institutions on the verge of collapse. We had coverage of town hall meetings with Palin and McCain where their constituents shouted out "terrorist!" and "socialist!" while the candidates egged them on.
In light of that, there was a lot more negative to report about the McCain camp than there was about the Obama camp. If you run a negative campaign that relies on easily refutable material, expect to have negative coverage. According to your links, even Fox had twice as much negative coverage of McCain as they did positive coverage. In the end, Obama's campaign promises may have just been empty words, but at least they couldn't be verified or disputed until after he had already been elected. You can't do much negative reporting on "hope and change" unless you're arguing for the status quo.
--Jeremy
but rather to happily fuck over the children themselves
And then, in the ultimate act of hypocrisy, telling them that it's being done for their own good.
--Jeremy
Opera is excellent in this regard, and it's one of the reasons I use it. If you navigate back, not only will the page not have to refresh, but in nearly all cases, the page will be in the same state as it was left in after any Javascript had run on it. (Say, you clicked a couple of things and expanded some AJAX-y controls, the controls will still be expanded when you navigate back)
I *believe* that this even works after a restart->restore previous session, but honestly haven't experimented with it that much.
--Jeremy
Most games in general are shit. This has been true of all consoles in all generations. The Wii is not special in that regard. Has everyone already forgotten the huge amount of shovelware that the PS2 had?
The same can be said for pretty much any medium: most music, movies, books and TV is shit.
--Jeremy
And if you don't mind being a douchebag and getting kicked out of restaurants, then go ahead and assert your "right".
Do you seriously expect every person and business you deal with throughout the day to explicitly enumerate the things that you may not do? Is that the only way you know how you're expected to behave? Do you keep a lawyer on a leash to stick up for you and say, "well, you never said that he *couldn't* do that" as you're being escorted out of buildings?
--Jeremy
I think what the parent poster is asking is how to handle a habitual "infringer", with the assumption that they have been caught and "convicted" multiple times.
Everyone has responded by throwing a fit that one only has to be accused 3 times, with no due process, and that is bad. Well, of course it is. Here's a gold star for everyone insightful enough to point this out. No reasonable person would argue against due process. (note: reasonable person) Clearly, as it is written now, it's a bad law.
Instead, maybe someone should try to answer the question. Assuming there's a method to catch and "convict" copyright infringers, how do you deal with habitual offenders? Community service, IMO. Personally, I don't want to waste tax dollars on jail time.
--Jeremy
STRAWMAN ARGUMENT. Where exactly did the GP even mention reading books on the train?
Do you even know what a strawman argument is?
--Jeremy
And 1 billion people eating roughly the same foods in the same proportion as the current 7 billion we have will be 1/7th as taxing on the environment as what we have now. And quite probably sustainable to boot.
Personally, I can't imagine the planet with 12 billion people living on it. It's already crowded enough as is.
--Jeremy
Full disclosure: I'm a songwriter and a member of a PRS. The money I make a year on songwriting could maybe buy a nice dinner. Without someone looking out for my interests, I'd make nothing.
I find this hard to understand. Your yearly nice dinner is enough compensation to justify empowering an overzealous organization to harass people?
If it were me, I'd rather just have my work used with no compensation than have a team of lawyers use it to justify squeezing money out of people. Let them leech off of someone else or, preferably, starve if everybody refuses to play their game.
--Jeremy
Then try it again and add some topspin and watch all the crazy shit you can make the ball do. Or are you not that advanced of a player to handle the controls for this "one button game"?
If you don't think how you swing it matters, you are absolutely 100% wrong. No, you don't get a different animation on screen, but the way it reacts off the racket (you know, the thing that actually matters) changes drastically. And bowling works exactly the same way. Baseball not so much, or at least I haven't played it enough to notice any differences in swings.
IOW: L2P, noob.
--Jeremy
You have probably an overly optimistic guess as to what the police would have done. (On top of that, the article does not specify one way or the other whether or not she called the police)
Here's my guess about what that 911 call would have sounded like:
911) What's your emergency?
Woman) A man is coming to my house.
911) Who is the man, and has he threatened you?
Woman) I don't know, and no, he hasn't threatened me. He's just coming to my house.
911) You don't know who the man is?
Woman) No, I only got an email. I've never met him.
911) I'm sorry, unless there is a man in your presence who has made a credible threat against you or physically assaulted you, we can't do anything. Have a nice day.
--Jeremy
Are we living in the same America? The one I'm in, referred to as the United States of America, is approaching 10% unemployment, with over 500,000 new applications for unemployment benefits last month, which was the *lowest* new-app-monthly-total in 2009 IIRC.
Maybe you're living in Canada and unemployment stats are better there, or in some country south of the US (seems unlikely), but to say that nobody has an excuse for not having a job in the US is utter BS.
--Jeremy
Agreed. When I play solitaire, I just deal myself into a winning position because it's stupid that I paid for the aces, but they're always buried behind cards that I can't get rid of.
Oh wait, no, that's dumb, because it defeats the purpose of the game entirely.
Also, if you look at a game purchase as buying "content," you're doing it wrong. If you want content, watch a movie or read a book if what you really want is just passive entertainment. Don't lobby for the video game industry to remove what little challenge is left in my hobby so that you can see all of the asinine, predictable cinematic sequences. If you just want to press a button to move on to the next part, try watching your DVDs chapter by chapter and call it a "game" instead.
--Jeremy