You don't see Sony putting rootkits on CDs anymore, do you?
No, because it turned out to be unprofitable after the nefarious nature of their actions was outed, ballyhooed, analyzed and tantrummed over. This reaction did not come because Sony's actions were wrong, however, but because they were damaging. When a sufficient number of people believe (or can be represented as believing) that they are being materially harmed as a direct consequence of an action, often the guilty business changes its tack in order to stem a loss of profit (by direct consumer action or by marketplace perception affecting the valuation of their enterprise).
The issue, therefore, is whether or not these WoW actions are, in fact, damaging in and of themselves or merely unpalatable to those who care to think about such things. My opinion is that they are merely unpalatable, and that those who are in a position to even appreciate the unpalatability aren't a group that wields a lot of clout.
However, your ad hominem righteousness is still pretty amusing. Keep it up!
Where does right enter into it? We're talking about business here, so the operative qualifier is whether or not it is profitable.
How many users will these alienate? A slim minority of elite geeks who actually have a clue what's going on inside their boxes -- you know, the set that contains the sub-set of people technically advanced enough to bother pirating games.
Is this going to slow the sign-ups of new accounts? Not bloody likely. Who listens to geeks? Not my boss, and not my neighbours asking for computer advice.
Take your right|wrong games and play them where they belong: in the cramped ivory tower of a university philosophy department that smells faintly of institutional-grade disinfectant. In the real world, practicality rules.
No more shall we endure your taunts of being too obscure a minority to content with! Even the Russian Mafia thinks we're worth taking notice of now.
...Now we too shall now the bane of being pestered by colleagues and neighbours to help them score pirate software and to undo the embarrassing things they do their machines.
I'm currently working in AfterEffects in another window, compositing 10-bit CGI with stereoscopic HD video -- that's 2 x 1920x1080 pixels just for the raw footage, 29.97 times per second, plus effects precomps, plus stereo CGI elements.
I'm doing this on a hellafast workstation, yet I've been spending most of my morning surfing the net and sucking coffee while Adobe's bitch chomps through my frames to deliver low-res previews.
And Adobe thinks I'm going to add Interweb pipes into the equation?
Fuck them. Fuck them right in the arse. Unless I've got an iQuantum Computing Array and triply redundant mega-speed net access, this will never, ever fly. It would require such a profound and concerted shift of technological paradigms that "ten years" as a prediction sounds positively mentally retarded.
I fart in the general direction of Adobe, and scoff at this forecast as the hype-ballyhooed pile of steaming malarkey it truly, truly is.
Right -- because giving paralyzed people the ability to locomote and manipulate objects isn't remotely useful, is it? After all, who will buy supper for the accessibility ramp-makers once their industry dries up?
I'm sending my quadruplegic friend over to your house right now to beat you up.
It's the user's bandwidth, too. Every time I visit a site I expend their bandwidth to request the data and my bandwidth to get that content in front of me.
By the logic of the article, if a website is sending me unrequested kilobytes unrelated to the content I came to see, shouldn't they pay me?
If the submitter weren't poor they would have no excuse not to make themselves Clear, and once they were Clear they would unquestionably see the wisdom in spending the money to become Clear. Q.E.D. Praise Tom!
Xenu knows when you are sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He knows when you've been bad or good, so audit yourself thoroughly for Elron's sake.
(NB: The contents of this comment are sardonic. I am not a Scientologist, and I have never played one on TV. Defenders and apologists of this rubbish do so only because they lack the jewels to take on its elder siblings like Jesusism, Dirrka-dirrkaism, and Americanism. All poppycock equal, I say.)
Using a Mac is often seized upon by support technicians or customer service squids as a one-size-fits-all scapegoat to excuse themselves from providing assistance.
If I call anyone's support about difficulties (cable modem troubles at home, network issues at work) they will frequently jump as soon as they realize (sometimes after a comically long time) that I'm using a Mac, and declare with infinite righteousness and authority that my problem is definitely "Mac-related." And then they're off the hook, as far as they're concerned.
It doesn't really matter if it's a router issue, or even a bad password -- for some reason, the cause is always "Mac-related." They wash their hands of it and skip away free, easy as pie.
For me, when a technician or supportist utters that phrase what I hear is, "I'm incompetent, and I'm hoping you don't know enough to see that. See the pretty icon? Clicky-clicky!"
It plays into the myth that Mac users are somehow rare -- somehow few and far between. You can bash about market-share voodoo until you're blue in the face, it won't change the fact that it isn't hard to find Mac users. There are definitely fewer Mac users than Windows users, but that smaller number isn't nearly as insignificant as some would have us believe.
"I'm sorry, but the vast majority of our users use Windows. I can't help you."
Despite my poor grammar, I was trying to suggest that soldiers -- as a collective nouon -- would experience more frequent death.
However, upon reflection, it occurs to me that soldiers die and are resusitated fairly frequently. Some of them heal and return to service, others end up looking like Gollum. But still -- they die and are revived, given the presence of adequately trained medical professionals or at least a reasonably functioning obnoxious medical hologram.
"What is the nature of the medical -- eeeeuuuuu, gross!"
Am I the only one reading too much pulp scifi or are there others out there who are also worried about what will happen when one of the fearless genetically modified super-soldiers decides to seek vengence on those who wrought his unnatural life?
It could be messy.
Although, it occurs to me that soldiers without fear might die often. I mean, fear is not without its uses.
There aren't an infinite amount of planets -- there's like a golybillion. And everyone knows that infinity less a golybillion is a whopping sum, so your error is truly is staggering proportions.
The universe is largely transparent, and we can see almost all the way to its privates. The decorations are of the same style and motif throughout, so we can pit our local gravity-well spirlies against theirs and make some reasonable guesses about how far away far is. Since it turns out it's in the neighbourhood of 13 billion lightyears away, I think we can -- as civilized folk -- agree that 13 billion is more than a golybillion shy of infinity.
Check my maths if you're a stickler, but I'm pretty sure I'm on solid ground here.
Space is finite (if gummy), therefore the number of decorations whorled up by our familiar physics is finite, therefore the number of little planety lumps inside of them is finite. Q.E.D.
Rumours are surfacing that Sony has also been employing similar fluid sacs to absorb the blow of piracy. These fluid sacs are called "people" and, by inserting them into a judicial system, they can be induced release quantities of money.
"How would the community have coped with two of the largest vendors doing so?"
This isn't a particularly well-angled question, in my opinion. The answers are too obvious. The community would cope by...
* Printing up obscure if arguably quasi-witty T-shirts with phrases on them like "PATENTS == MURDER" or "LESSIG SIGNED MY TITS" or "THE BORG HAVE THE RED BOX!"
* Posting foaming diatribes to hot-spots of cultural influence like the ass-end of a deeply nested thread on Slashdot or, worse, on a crappy, template-raped personal weblog and then spammed via Digg.
* Ruining a potentially good date by trying to lecture the poor girl about the GPL.
* Catharsis through extra masturbation.
* News: Red Hat and Microsoft strike a deal. Not-news: Some geek writes a snarky headline about it on Fark. Take THAT, Redmond!
* Lego re-enactments of famous scenes from movies re-written to reflect the patent deal situation, uploaded to YouTube. "Luke, I am your patent holder." "Noo-o-o-o-o-ooo-oo!"
* LOL i haz ur intellec2al properdy portpholeo!!11!!11
Oh yeah, baby -- it'd be like the Million Man March all over again.
This is an obvious honeypot ploy to draw unsuspecting, God-fearing users everywhere to upload their copywrong material and thereby indict themselves for extraordinary rendering by a nefarious acronym.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't see Sony putting rootkits on CDs anymore, do you?
No, because it turned out to be unprofitable after the nefarious nature of their actions was outed, ballyhooed, analyzed and tantrummed over. This reaction did not come because Sony's actions were wrong, however, but because they were damaging. When a sufficient number of people believe (or can be represented as believing) that they are being materially harmed as a direct consequence of an action, often the guilty business changes its tack in order to stem a loss of profit (by direct consumer action or by marketplace perception affecting the valuation of their enterprise).
The issue, therefore, is whether or not these WoW actions are, in fact, damaging in and of themselves or merely unpalatable to those who care to think about such things. My opinion is that they are merely unpalatable, and that those who are in a position to even appreciate the unpalatability aren't a group that wields a lot of clout.
However, your ad hominem righteousness is still pretty amusing. Keep it up!
Where does right enter into it? We're talking about business here, so the operative qualifier is whether or not it is profitable.
How many users will these alienate? A slim minority of elite geeks who actually have a clue what's going on inside their boxes -- you know, the set that contains the sub-set of people technically advanced enough to bother pirating games.
Is this going to slow the sign-ups of new accounts? Not bloody likely. Who listens to geeks? Not my boss, and not my neighbours asking for computer advice.
Take your right|wrong games and play them where they belong: in the cramped ivory tower of a university philosophy department that smells faintly of institutional-grade disinfectant. In the real world, practicality rules.
...was unfortunately deleted by an overzealous editor who argued that the issue did not meet notability criteria.
Now there is an idea worthy of speculation -- modular porn.
No more shall we endure your taunts of being too obscure a minority to content with! Even the Russian Mafia thinks we're worth taking notice of now.
...Now we too shall now the bane of being pestered by colleagues and neighbours to help them score pirate software and to undo the embarrassing things they do their machines.
My issues of Newsweek from 1993 are practically useless now.
I'm currently working in AfterEffects in another window, compositing 10-bit CGI with stereoscopic HD video -- that's 2 x 1920x1080 pixels just for the raw footage, 29.97 times per second, plus effects precomps, plus stereo CGI elements.
...Still waiting for that preview...
I'm doing this on a hellafast workstation, yet I've been spending most of my morning surfing the net and sucking coffee while Adobe's bitch chomps through my frames to deliver low-res previews.
And Adobe thinks I'm going to add Interweb pipes into the equation?
Fuck them. Fuck them right in the arse. Unless I've got an iQuantum Computing Array and triply redundant mega-speed net access, this will never, ever fly. It would require such a profound and concerted shift of technological paradigms that "ten years" as a prediction sounds positively mentally retarded.
I fart in the general direction of Adobe, and scoff at this forecast as the hype-ballyhooed pile of steaming malarkey it truly, truly is.
1. A filter that shifts 70% of pixels one pixel to the left.
2. A filter that munges the rows of pixels around the frame area, distorting the video fingerprint without affecting viewing quality.
3. A filter that randomly inserts the Goatse man for a Fight Club-like single frame.
4. A utility that uploads the clip backwards, and then a browser-player that automatically time-remaps it forward for playback.
5. A watermarking process designed to distort the video fingerprint while remaining invisible to non-AI viewers.
Okay now -- code it.
They don't need food, and they hardly breathe.
Wake me when this is applied to something useful.
Right -- because giving paralyzed people the ability to locomote and manipulate objects isn't remotely useful, is it? After all, who will buy supper for the accessibility ramp-makers once their industry dries up?
I'm sending my quadruplegic friend over to your house right now to beat you up.
I suggest attaching a nasty note and lobbing them through Apple's iWindows.
It's the user's bandwidth, too. Every time I visit a site I expend their bandwidth to request the data and my bandwidth to get that content in front of me.
By the logic of the article, if a website is sending me unrequested kilobytes unrelated to the content I came to see, shouldn't they pay me?
If the submitter weren't poor they would have no excuse not to make themselves Clear, and once they were Clear they would unquestionably see the wisdom in spending the money to become Clear. Q.E.D. Praise Tom!
Xenu knows when you are sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He knows when you've been bad or good, so audit yourself thoroughly for Elron's sake.
(NB: The contents of this comment are sardonic. I am not a Scientologist, and I have never played one on TV. Defenders and apologists of this rubbish do so only because they lack the jewels to take on its elder siblings like Jesusism, Dirrka-dirrkaism, and Americanism. All poppycock equal, I say.)
Using a Mac is often seized upon by support technicians or customer service squids as a one-size-fits-all scapegoat to excuse themselves from providing assistance.
If I call anyone's support about difficulties (cable modem troubles at home, network issues at work) they will frequently jump as soon as they realize (sometimes after a comically long time) that I'm using a Mac, and declare with infinite righteousness and authority that my problem is definitely "Mac-related." And then they're off the hook, as far as they're concerned.
It doesn't really matter if it's a router issue, or even a bad password -- for some reason, the cause is always "Mac-related." They wash their hands of it and skip away free, easy as pie.
For me, when a technician or supportist utters that phrase what I hear is, "I'm incompetent, and I'm hoping you don't know enough to see that. See the pretty icon? Clicky-clicky!"
It plays into the myth that Mac users are somehow rare -- somehow few and far between. You can bash about market-share voodoo until you're blue in the face, it won't change the fact that it isn't hard to find Mac users. There are definitely fewer Mac users than Windows users, but that smaller number isn't nearly as insignificant as some would have us believe.
"I'm sorry, but the vast majority of our users use Windows. I can't help you."
"As a Mac user, that's very disappointing."
"Yeah, I get that all the time."
Despite my poor grammar, I was trying to suggest that soldiers -- as a collective nouon -- would experience more frequent death.
However, upon reflection, it occurs to me that soldiers die and are resusitated fairly frequently. Some of them heal and return to service, others end up looking like Gollum. But still -- they die and are revived, given the presence of adequately trained medical professionals or at least a reasonably functioning obnoxious medical hologram.
"What is the nature of the medical -- eeeeuuuuu, gross!"
Am I the only one reading too much pulp scifi or are there others out there who are also worried about what will happen when one of the fearless genetically modified super-soldiers decides to seek vengence on those who wrought his unnatural life?
It could be messy.
Although, it occurs to me that soldiers without fear might die often. I mean, fear is not without its uses.
s/steal off/steal from
* This corrections service is offered as a courtesy by Cheeseburger Brown, author, clown and smart-ass. *
There aren't an infinite amount of planets -- there's like a golybillion. And everyone knows that infinity less a golybillion is a whopping sum, so your error is truly is staggering proportions.
The universe is largely transparent, and we can see almost all the way to its privates. The decorations are of the same style and motif throughout, so we can pit our local gravity-well spirlies against theirs and make some reasonable guesses about how far away far is. Since it turns out it's in the neighbourhood of 13 billion lightyears away, I think we can -- as civilized folk -- agree that 13 billion is more than a golybillion shy of infinity.
Check my maths if you're a stickler, but I'm pretty sure I'm on solid ground here.
Space is finite (if gummy), therefore the number of decorations whorled up by our familiar physics is finite, therefore the number of little planety lumps inside of them is finite. Q.E.D.
Rumours are surfacing that Sony has also been employing similar fluid sacs to absorb the blow of piracy. These fluid sacs are called "people" and, by inserting them into a judicial system, they can be induced release quantities of money.
Scifi short story that takes place at the heat-death of our universe.
Topical? Yes!
Tipping encouraged. I'll be here all week.
Assorted narrative jokes about robots and spacehips
[Bangs on side of computer] "Be more funny!"
"How would the community have coped with two of the largest vendors doing so?"
This isn't a particularly well-angled question, in my opinion. The answers are too obvious. The community would cope by...
* Printing up obscure if arguably quasi-witty T-shirts with phrases on them like "PATENTS == MURDER" or "LESSIG SIGNED MY TITS" or "THE BORG HAVE THE RED BOX!"
* Posting foaming diatribes to hot-spots of cultural influence like the ass-end of a deeply nested thread on Slashdot or, worse, on a crappy, template-raped personal weblog and then spammed via Digg.
* Ruining a potentially good date by trying to lecture the poor girl about the GPL.
* Catharsis through extra masturbation.
* News: Red Hat and Microsoft strike a deal. Not-news: Some geek writes a snarky headline about it on Fark. Take THAT, Redmond!
* Lego re-enactments of famous scenes from movies re-written to reflect the patent deal situation, uploaded to YouTube. "Luke, I am your patent holder." "Noo-o-o-o-o-ooo-oo!"
* LOL i haz ur intellec2al properdy portpholeo!!11!!11
Oh yeah, baby -- it'd be like the Million Man March all over again.
This is an obvious honeypot ploy to draw unsuspecting, God-fearing users everywhere to upload their copywrong material and thereby indict themselves for extraordinary rendering by a nefarious acronym.
Run away! Run away!
Oh...wait.
Nevermind.