If you used to play WoW but quit, perhaps because you ran out of non-40-man-raid things to do, you might want to restart your account and get the expansion. It's rather fun.
My account was cancelled for a full year, but I picked it back up in January, got the expansion, and have enjoyed it so far. I reached 70 on my main a few nights ago, and spent last night just flying around on my (flying, obviously) mount.
He could have said "it was like I was disconnected from my body, watching someone else do the things I was doing."
I've heard that plenty of times from people doing wrong and right in a variety of situations - committing a crime, being a victim of crime, serving as a soldier in combat, dealing with an emergency situation.
I saw an interview where the teen stated quite clearly "when it all started it was just like we were playing a video game". Thus, in his mind at least, there was some connection.
Sure, he sees both video games and this murder as an example of him standing over the scene, pulling strings, like it wasn't really happening. What he says implies no causal relationship at all, it was just a convenient analogy.
If he says something further about video games causing his behavior, then we can call him a manipulative bastard. For now we'll just call him a murderer.
"Foster said that she owned the account, but that she was completely ignorant of the existence and use of file-sharing software. Foster did say that her adult daughter and estranged husband had access to the account, and may have been responsible for the infringement."
Most legal scholars (and judges, and juries) would agree that no reasonable person would consider a gun safe to give to minors, but for now it's not so clear that an unsupervised internet account is equally unsafe. Regardless, in this case it was an adult daughter.
The first CD discovered and compared only had very limited time shifts - as little as 0.2% - and seems to have been close enough to not confuse the CDDB.
After the first CD, the investigators went out looking for older recordings to match. In these they found some with shifts as high as 15%. CDDB was no longer being used as an analysis tool; they were directly comparing the sampled data from the two sources, adjusting the time shifts until the measured aligned.
The other group that found a match (linked on page 5 or so of the article) has a musical comparison technique that they claim is based on relative timing, so they could compare without first making any adjustments.
"GE makes a dimming compact fluorescent light bulb (called the GE Longlife Plus Soft White Energy Saving Bulb) that is specially designed for use with dimming switches."
Ahh, so I just need to *borrow* your iPod, like say from your bag while you are at the gym, then return it to you before you notice it's gone. Voila, instant P2P distribution, and you'll never know to report it as stolen.
The request specifically says to offer just the top three free Linux distributions. Such a limitation is probably reasonable; if you know enough to not want one of the three most common versions, you can probably install your own.
On the other hand, inserting a customer-provided distribution into a limited run would be a nightmare for a company such as Dell; they'd have to maintain that particular flavor for a very small number of potential sales.
So you're saying that a person won't mind if they buy a Blu-Ray of a movie, and find that it looks exactly like the DVD they had already bought/rented a few years ago?
I'm not talking about DVD. I'm talking about Blu-Ray. No one is going to shell out $30 extra for a Blu-Ray without expecting to get something back for it.
Also, it's really not as hard to see that a game is a port if the graphics still look up-to-date for the console. Given the Wii's graphics capabilities, most any recent PS2 game is going to still look really good.
FTA: The LAST thing Wii needs is lazy ports of existing games, particularly games that have been out for A YEAR or thereabouts on other consoles (Prince of Persia, Blazing Angels). They could do more harm than good.
Funny, isn't this exactly what Sony is doing with the Blu-Ray format, releasing dozens of older movies to flood the market and claim that they are releasing more titles than their competition?
In both cases, having older games/movies available is just fine if enough customers haven't played/seen the original. In both cases, the ports are probably shoddy, and it would be cheaper to play the original from its native disk.
Well, I used soap opera as an example because it's the only form of drama that can write, film, and air a script in less than a week.
I suppose "Survivor" or another "reality" TV show would have been an equally valid example. "This week, the survivors have to locate destroy each of the 17 drug and weapon stockpiles on the island, then breach the command center and shut down the communications link. The losing team has to send one member home, and the other members get shot."
I installed this cool game called SETI. It's all about searching for life in the universe or something.
But, I never have time to play. The cool thing is, I got it configured so that my computer can play the game itself. I just let it run whenever I'm not using the machine, and check up to see if I've found anything yet.
No luck so far. You'd think they would put more aliens into a game like this to make it exciting. If I haven't found any by next month, I think I'm going to return it.
No, in this case you are wrong. Until the information has been made public, it could be claimed (and a jury would likely agree) that the material is a Fox trade secret. It contains plot twists and other elements that are confidential until their air date, so that their impact has not been diluted by pre-emptive copies. Imagine if a writer for a soap opera saw a plot twist on a pre-release version of 24, then wrote that same twist into his or her soap to air before the 24 air date.
Federal law does prohibit stealing of trade secrets, and it is classified as "theft". See for example the recent conviction of a Coca-Cola ex-secretary, who attempted to sell formula information to Pepsi-Cola. Copying the data and providing it to Pepsi did not cause Coke to lose possession of their formula, but it did potentially deprive them of a trade secret.
Before you respond, please read through and understand Title 18, United States Code, Section 1832(a)(1-3).
But, in any case, the idea of paying $400 for Vista Ultimate + $80 for Parallels, just to run the occasional windows only binary on your mac, is incredibly noxious.
Agreed. And CodeWeavers are grinning ear to ear over the new market Apple and Microsoft have handed them for CrossOver Office for the Mac.
(Apple by switching to Intel allowed them to compile Wine with ease, the MS making to too darn expensive to run the occasional Windows binary using MS software.)
The music no longer has any restrictions, and there are no downsides to this. You can use rewritable CDs, or there is even a way to trick iTunes into writing into an ISO instead of a real CD, then rip it back out of that.
A possible downside is introduced if you try to compress the file from your CD/ISO. In that case, you are recompressing a file that was already compressed (then decompressed). Likely, you are doing so into a new and different format (like MP3, instead of AAC). If you ears can hear them, you are degrading the recording through this process. If you rip from CD/ISO into a lossless format, you won't see this downside. (But, if you care that much, you probably wouldn't have bought music in a compressed format in the first place!)
My ears can't hear the difference, and this works great. My wife uses the original iTMS songs on her iPod, but everything is converted to high bitrate MP3 before being dropped onto the house music server.
The problem is, the last game I saw that was designed and marketed for "little girls" was Barbie Horse Adventure. The implication these two games share a target market insults Viva Piñata.
To put it another way: if you wanted to record a cover of a Beatles song, or play one in public, you would need to contact Sony, Northernsongs division. If you wanted to use an actual Beatles recording--that is, one actually made by the Beatles--then you would need to contact Apple Corp.
If you wanted to use an actual recording, wouldn't you need to contact both? Apple Corps. owns the recording, but the words and music are owned by Sony. I understood that you needed to pay royalties to both parties. Or do you just need to get permission from one, and the other automatically grants permission provided you pay the royalty? Isn't there a third party that sometimes needs to be paid, or is that only the case when the songwriter and song performer are different entities?
Actually, if anyone on here who's licensed music for use (or is a copyright lawyer) could explain this, I'd greatly appreciate it. I won't take anything I read on the internet as legal advice, yadda, yadda, but I'm curious.
100% agreed. The first thing I did when I saw this story was A) skim the article for M.U.L.E., then B) type "M.U" into page search on these comments. I'm quite pleased to find someone else already covered this with a well-modded post, as M.U.L.E. truly was the first great multiplayer game.
I don't know, did this schoolmaster knowingly "pirate" his software? It's not clear to me from the article. Gorbachev argues the nuance he didn't know he was committing a crime. That to me sounds like splitting semantic hairs.
It's possible the schoolmaster assumed he could make unlimited copies of the software for non-profit, academic use only. If he works at a school that has to watch every penny in its budget (like 90% of schools in the world), and he makes barely enough to live on himself (like 90% of teachers in the world), he probably assumed Microsoft would not attempt to charge a price that he and his school would be unable to pay.
Clearly Russian schools need a donation of 10,000 Kubuntu live CDs. This will provide them with well-needed coasters, and maybe a few schools would try it out and switch to legitimate software rather than risk having their teachers sent to Siberia.
If Intel just sold their processors to Dell for $1 each, then Apple could force the price they pay for processors down; the Intel-Apple contract likely spells out that Apple will pay no more per processor than Dell.
Even if Intel clears with the feds and shrugs off the shareholders, they'll be in hot water will all their other major customers.
That shows I don't work on commercial PC hardware. The marketing line for hard drives and drive controllers used to be IDE, now its SATA. (I'm talking about what Fry's puts in its ads, or what's on the description page on Newegg, etc.) Listening solely to the marketing, SATA is "new" while IDE is "old".
I don't mean to bash EB and Gamestop, because it's not like they are committing a crime by selling an overpriced, used piece of garbage to an ignorant parent (any customer should be responsible enough to either know exactly what he/she is buying, or to not care).
I don't see that as a problem. They aren't overpriced and the buyers aren't ignorant. If I go into a store to buy a game, and can get 20% off by buying it used, I'm saving money. The fact I could have bought it on eBay for 60% off is irrelevant, because I didn't want to deal with that hassle. Likewise, the people selling used games back to GameStop could have gotten a little more selling it online/in the paper, but then there would be the hassle of finding a buyer, securing payment, mailing it, etc.
Used products stores fill a perfectly acceptable niche in the commercial market. They give people a low-hassle way to dispose of unwanted materials while getting back some of their value in cash. Then, they act as central, convenient locations for those who want to buy used products at a discount over new. They make their profit on the buy-sell gradient.
That's like saying CarMax is a bad deal because they offer you less than you could get selling your car in the newpaper, and sell for more than you would pay buying a car in the newspaper. Both are true, but neither make it a bad deal if the lack of hassle is worth more to you than the potential money you lost.
(I'm assuming the used dealer is honest about material quality and can refund or replace defective merchandise. GameStop does this, and, after some lawsuits IIRC, CarMax is okay about this now, too.)
I'm generally in shape, and I eat moderately well. The problem has to do with what I eat well.
glass of red wine with dinner = heartburn tomato sauce on pasta (or any tomato products) = heartburn hamburger = heartburn not eating at the correct times = sometimes heartburn (haven't figured this out)
If I eat enough milk fats with any of the above, I dont't get heartburn. Hence, I mix tomato sauce with a little Alfredo sauce, put cheese on the burger and have a glass of milk, and I don't have a problem.
Incidentally, this runs in the familiy. My father is on daily prescription medication and needs the valve at the top of his stomach replaced at some point. My older sister now takes daily over-the-counter medication and is still having problems. Both, like me, are generally in shape. My dad's suffered from it for most of his life, and I've been dealing with it since I was 20 or so.
Slashdot Mirror
If you used to play WoW but quit, perhaps because you ran out of non-40-man-raid things to do, you might want to restart your account and get the expansion. It's rather fun.
My account was cancelled for a full year, but I picked it back up in January, got the expansion, and have enjoyed it so far. I reached 70 on my main a few nights ago, and spent last night just flying around on my (flying, obviously) mount.
He could have said "it was like I was disconnected from my body, watching someone else do the things I was doing."
I've heard that plenty of times from people doing wrong and right in a variety of situations - committing a crime, being a victim of crime, serving as a soldier in combat, dealing with an emergency situation.
I saw an interview where the teen stated quite clearly "when it all started it was just like we were playing a video game". Thus, in his mind at least, there was some connection.
Sure, he sees both video games and this murder as an example of him standing over the scene, pulling strings, like it wasn't really happening. What he says implies no causal relationship at all, it was just a convenient analogy.
If he says something further about video games causing his behavior, then we can call him a manipulative bastard. For now we'll just call him a murderer.
RTFAs
"Foster said that she owned the account, but that she was completely ignorant of the existence and use of file-sharing software. Foster did say that her adult daughter and estranged husband had access to the account, and may have been responsible for the infringement."
Most legal scholars (and judges, and juries) would agree that no reasonable person would consider a gun safe to give to minors, but for now it's not so clear that an unsupervised internet account is equally unsafe. Regardless, in this case it was an adult daughter.
Are you implying that Slashdot's editors should be using their biases to present a unified image of the state of Nintendo's console?
Wouldn't you rather have the editors accept stories from a spectrum of viewpoints, and let you read them and make your own decisions?
The first CD discovered and compared only had very limited time shifts - as little as 0.2% - and seems to have been close enough to not confuse the CDDB.
After the first CD, the investigators went out looking for older recordings to match. In these they found some with shifts as high as 15%. CDDB was no longer being used as an analysis tool; they were directly comparing the sampled data from the two sources, adjusting the time shifts until the measured aligned.
The other group that found a match (linked on page 5 or so of the article) has a musical comparison technique that they claim is based on relative timing, so they could compare without first making any adjustments.
"GE makes a dimming compact fluorescent light bulb (called the GE Longlife Plus Soft White Energy Saving Bulb) that is specially designed for use with dimming switches."
q s/cfl.htm#3
http://www.gelighting.com/na/business_lighting/fa
Ahh, so I just need to *borrow* your iPod, like say from your bag while you are at the gym, then return it to you before you notice it's gone. Voila, instant P2P distribution, and you'll never know to report it as stolen.
The request specifically says to offer just the top three free Linux distributions. Such a limitation is probably reasonable; if you know enough to not want one of the three most common versions, you can probably install your own.
On the other hand, inserting a customer-provided distribution into a limited run would be a nightmare for a company such as Dell; they'd have to maintain that particular flavor for a very small number of potential sales.
So you're saying that a person won't mind if they buy a Blu-Ray of a movie, and find that it looks exactly like the DVD they had already bought/rented a few years ago?
I'm not talking about DVD. I'm talking about Blu-Ray. No one is going to shell out $30 extra for a Blu-Ray without expecting to get something back for it.
Also, it's really not as hard to see that a game is a port if the graphics still look up-to-date for the console. Given the Wii's graphics capabilities, most any recent PS2 game is going to still look really good.
FTA: The LAST thing Wii needs is lazy ports of existing games, particularly games that have been out for A YEAR or thereabouts on other consoles (Prince of Persia, Blazing Angels). They could do more harm than good.
Funny, isn't this exactly what Sony is doing with the Blu-Ray format, releasing dozens of older movies to flood the market and claim that they are releasing more titles than their competition?
In both cases, having older games/movies available is just fine if enough customers haven't played/seen the original. In both cases, the ports are probably shoddy, and it would be cheaper to play the original from its native disk.
Well, I used soap opera as an example because it's the only form of drama that can write, film, and air a script in less than a week.
I suppose "Survivor" or another "reality" TV show would have been an equally valid example.
"This week, the survivors have to locate destroy each of the 17 drug and weapon stockpiles on the island, then breach the command center and shut down the communications link. The losing team has to send one member home, and the other members get shot."
I installed this cool game called SETI. It's all about searching for life in the universe or something.
But, I never have time to play. The cool thing is, I got it configured so that my computer can play the game itself. I just let it run whenever I'm not using the machine, and check up to see if I've found anything yet.
No luck so far. You'd think they would put more aliens into a game like this to make it exciting. If I haven't found any by next month, I think I'm going to return it.
No, in this case you are wrong. Until the information has been made public, it could be claimed (and a jury would likely agree) that the material is a Fox trade secret. It contains plot twists and other elements that are confidential until their air date, so that their impact has not been diluted by pre-emptive copies. Imagine if a writer for a soap opera saw a plot twist on a pre-release version of 24, then wrote that same twist into his or her soap to air before the 24 air date.
Federal law does prohibit stealing of trade secrets, and it is classified as "theft". See for example the recent conviction of a Coca-Cola ex-secretary, who attempted to sell formula information to Pepsi-Cola. Copying the data and providing it to Pepsi did not cause Coke to lose possession of their formula, but it did potentially deprive them of a trade secret.
Before you respond, please read through and understand Title 18, United States Code, Section 1832(a)(1-3).
But, in any case, the idea of paying $400 for Vista Ultimate + $80 for Parallels, just to run the occasional windows only binary on your mac, is incredibly noxious.
Agreed. And CodeWeavers are grinning ear to ear over the new market Apple and Microsoft have handed them for CrossOver Office for the Mac.
(Apple by switching to Intel allowed them to compile Wine with ease, the MS making to too darn expensive to run the occasional Windows binary using MS software.)
Moreover, Texas is predicted to be a swing state within 10 years, due to demographics shifts from legal immigration.
(Legal immigration, obviously, since this is concerning voting.)
The music no longer has any restrictions, and there are no downsides to this. You can use rewritable CDs, or there is even a way to trick iTunes into writing into an ISO instead of a real CD, then rip it back out of that.
A possible downside is introduced if you try to compress the file from your CD/ISO. In that case, you are recompressing a file that was already compressed (then decompressed). Likely, you are doing so into a new and different format (like MP3, instead of AAC). If you ears can hear them, you are degrading the recording through this process. If you rip from CD/ISO into a lossless format, you won't see this downside. (But, if you care that much, you probably wouldn't have bought music in a compressed format in the first place!)
My ears can't hear the difference, and this works great. My wife uses the original iTMS songs on her iPod, but everything is converted to high bitrate MP3 before being dropped onto the house music server.
The problem is, the last game I saw that was designed and marketed for "little girls" was Barbie Horse Adventure. The implication these two games share a target market insults Viva Piñata.
To put it another way: if you wanted to record a cover of a Beatles song, or play one in public, you would need to contact Sony, Northernsongs division. If you wanted to use an actual Beatles recording--that is, one actually made by the Beatles--then you would need to contact Apple Corp.
If you wanted to use an actual recording, wouldn't you need to contact both? Apple Corps. owns the recording, but the words and music are owned by Sony. I understood that you needed to pay royalties to both parties. Or do you just need to get permission from one, and the other automatically grants permission provided you pay the royalty? Isn't there a third party that sometimes needs to be paid, or is that only the case when the songwriter and song performer are different entities?
Actually, if anyone on here who's licensed music for use (or is a copyright lawyer) could explain this, I'd greatly appreciate it. I won't take anything I read on the internet as legal advice, yadda, yadda, but I'm curious.
100% agreed. The first thing I did when I saw this story was A) skim the article for M.U.L.E., then B) type "M.U" into page search on these comments. I'm quite pleased to find someone else already covered this with a well-modded post, as M.U.L.E. truly was the first great multiplayer game.
I don't know, did this schoolmaster knowingly "pirate" his software? It's not clear to me from the article. Gorbachev argues the nuance he didn't know he was committing a crime. That to me sounds like splitting semantic hairs.
It's possible the schoolmaster assumed he could make unlimited copies of the software for non-profit, academic use only. If he works at a school that has to watch every penny in its budget (like 90% of schools in the world), and he makes barely enough to live on himself (like 90% of teachers in the world), he probably assumed Microsoft would not attempt to charge a price that he and his school would be unable to pay.
Clearly Russian schools need a donation of 10,000 Kubuntu live CDs. This will provide them with well-needed coasters, and maybe a few schools would try it out and switch to legitimate software rather than risk having their teachers sent to Siberia.
If Intel just sold their processors to Dell for $1 each, then Apple could force the price they pay for processors down; the Intel-Apple contract likely spells out that Apple will pay no more per processor than Dell.
Even if Intel clears with the feds and shrugs off the shareholders, they'll be in hot water will all their other major customers.
That shows I don't work on commercial PC hardware. The marketing line for hard drives and drive controllers used to be IDE, now its SATA. (I'm talking about what Fry's puts in its ads, or what's on the description page on Newegg, etc.) Listening solely to the marketing, SATA is "new" while IDE is "old".
*shrug*
Both are "off topic".
I don't mean to bash EB and Gamestop, because it's not like they are committing a crime by selling an overpriced, used piece of garbage to an ignorant parent (any customer should be responsible enough to either know exactly what he/she is buying, or to not care).
I don't see that as a problem. They aren't overpriced and the buyers aren't ignorant. If I go into a store to buy a game, and can get 20% off by buying it used, I'm saving money. The fact I could have bought it on eBay for 60% off is irrelevant, because I didn't want to deal with that hassle. Likewise, the people selling used games back to GameStop could have gotten a little more selling it online/in the paper, but then there would be the hassle of finding a buyer, securing payment, mailing it, etc.
Used products stores fill a perfectly acceptable niche in the commercial market. They give people a low-hassle way to dispose of unwanted materials while getting back some of their value in cash. Then, they act as central, convenient locations for those who want to buy used products at a discount over new. They make their profit on the buy-sell gradient.
That's like saying CarMax is a bad deal because they offer you less than you could get selling your car in the newpaper, and sell for more than you would pay buying a car in the newspaper. Both are true, but neither make it a bad deal if the lack of hassle is worth more to you than the potential money you lost.
(I'm assuming the used dealer is honest about material quality and can refund or replace defective merchandise. GameStop does this, and, after some lawsuits IIRC, CarMax is okay about this now, too.)
I'm generally in shape, and I eat moderately well. The problem has to do with what I eat well.
glass of red wine with dinner = heartburn
tomato sauce on pasta (or any tomato products) = heartburn
hamburger = heartburn
not eating at the correct times = sometimes heartburn (haven't figured this out)
If I eat enough milk fats with any of the above, I dont't get heartburn. Hence, I mix tomato sauce with a little Alfredo sauce, put cheese on the burger and have a glass of milk, and I don't have a problem.
Incidentally, this runs in the familiy. My father is on daily prescription medication and needs the valve at the top of his stomach replaced at some point. My older sister now takes daily over-the-counter medication and is still having problems. Both, like me, are generally in shape. My dad's suffered from it for most of his life, and I've been dealing with it since I was 20 or so.
Sounds like an opportunity to plug OpenSourceParking.com.
Disclaimer: I'm not associated with this project, but I do have a domain parked there.