Heh, the old "It sucks, therefore copying is not a crime" argument. If it sucks, why are you stealing it?
I personally pirate music because I have not been offered the correct price. I have a couple of bands that I really like, and I buy their CDs and go to their shows when they come to town. I have a few other bands that I kinda like, and listen to once every blue moon, but not enough to buy the music. I'd pay a buck for their whole catalogue. But not $1 a track or even $1 an album. Get the RIAA to sell me that stuff at the right price and I'll pay.
Show of hands: Who did not already understand that floats are approximations?
Sorry to say it, but/.'s readership has really slipped in educational level since the early days. There are a lot of non-coders reading it these days, so yeah, I bet there were a lot who didn't know that...
George W. Bush's brain doesn't work. The man is an emotionally stunted monkey-tard. Osama might have been a threat to our security at one time, but through the efforts of a lot of people working together in countries all over the world, al-queda has been dealt a severe check. This has been done, despite King Jr's bumbling efforts. Now the biggest threat to American security is president fucktard, and his blundering policies that provoke international anger and apathy toward us. His dad was a one term wonder, and he was twice the president that Jr. will ever be.
I could go on and on, but the point is, contracts are mostly one-sided. Why? Because we want their service. Its not about service anymore, its about locking you into monthly fees, termination fees, fee fees, payment fees, early payment fees, etc....
Jaded much? It could be that there are a lot of contracts these days because companies have to deal with a lot of loonies who take their special deals and refuse to pay them. Of course, this is slashdot and all coporations are evil incarnate, bar none.
Consider that companies aren't stupid. If they could forgo paying the expense of a legal department, they probably would. It is quite likely that they would like to forgo the expense of dealing with managing customer contracts entirely, but can't.
I actually dont really object to having a place like gitmo, where people are stripped of their rights and summarily tortured, if we can send the people who implimented it there too, if/when they are deemed a 'threat to national security'.
Please do not compare Jack Thomposn to Adolph Hitler. They are nothing alike. After all, Adolph helped build the autobahns. What sort of worthwile contribution to the world has Jack made?
Ok bad joke, but really comparing a guy who is considered the embodyment of evil and insanity with a two bit shyster? I make posting from time to time on/. about hysterical demonization of people and groups that are the antithesis of the average slashdot reader. Jack T will be dead within another fifty years, and completely forgotten in twice that time. He might make idiotic aggrandizing claims about his 'opponents', but don't fall into the same trap.
Humans have not been around for anywhere near 100 million years.
Moot point, you are debating scemantics. The specise that would be come the species that would be come the species (etc.) has been evolving for a VERY long time. All that time, genetic information is being 'stored up' and passed on.
You make an excellent point about why the brian might be found in the head, but lets go one step further. I am going to state that other than minor changes to the human form (say to remove sicle cell anemia or similar genetic problems), changing people's basic physiology is a bad idea. Here is why:
I'm going to say that we are what we are, because that is what allowed us to survive for the last hundred minllion odd years. The species that we dig out of canyon walls weren't adapted properly to deal with changes to their environment. While it might be cool to have a prehensile tail, I'm going to assume that since evolution doesn't think I need it, it's probably for the best that I don't have it.
Evolution: ~100 million years of keeping the species alive and kicking.
Human Scientific Biology: Going on the big two hundred and fifty...
We are being asked to believe Microsoft's upper management is extremely "ethical" by a Microsoft employee who thinks working there is pretty good, and hasn't himself been privy to the illegal decisions we know as a matter of public record that organization has made.
If he hasn't been privy to the illegal decisions, how can they be a matter of public record? Are these some sort of public records that are public for everyone but MS employees?
BTW, it is a minor point, but MS is not really 'evil'. Lets assume that all of MS's bad behavior was planned from the start to destroy their rivals in the most expedient method available. It still isn't evil. The bolshevik communist party was evil. The Khimir Rouge was evil. The Nazi party was evil. Microsoft was at worst, unethical. Please don't confuse organizations that purvey true evil and misery on the world with a bunch of greedy executives.
You don't really know much about encryption, do you?
Yes, I know plenty about encryption. But you will probably go on to explain it to me, since you are so brilliant.
Most modern-day encryption techniques are based on mathematical problems which (always assuming that no genius comes up with a shortcut) have an exponential time-to-solve curve based on the size of the problem.
Oh hey, there is is. No kidding? Mathematical problems? Like, numbers and stuff?
So this, 'exponatinunshiun time to solve' curvy thingy, would that be your attempt to say that this class of problems can be computed in P time?
is quite possible to have worked for the mob, be well treated, and not see any nefarious activity. It is not only possible but likely (and therefore infinitely reasonable) that such activities will be concealed from such an observer.
...And on the other hand, such a wonderfully circular logic loop cannot be debated. 'If I cannot see any source of wrong doing', says the conspiracy nut, 'Then it must be deliberately concealed from me, hence a conspiracy!'
At a hearing last week, Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican who heads a House oversight and investigations subcommittee, suggested that data retention laws would be useful to police investigating crimes against children.
Your point about blancing privacy rights against government protection is well stated, sir. If everyone would just wear a gps neck collar, we could track everyone's movements 24/7. Manditory fingerpinting and DNA collection would solve quite a number of crimes, and having a sizeable secret police force, you could monitor the activites of many social, religious, and political organizations. These are simple facts. The closer you watch people, the more crimes you can catch.
However, what these dimmwits in washington don't seem to get, is that nobody would want to live in a country that was like that. People don't excactly flock to police states, begging to emigrate...
Having encryption will do nothing to save you from this sort of snooping. They can retain records for later, encrypted or not. The explicit goal of cryptography isn't to prevent people from reading your encrypted messages, its to stop them from doing it in a timely fashion. Any method of encryption short of say, a private cypher, can be eventually cracked.
Now someone will probably make a point about a 4096 bit key to make the effort take years, but consider this: how long ago would a 64 bit key been considered sufficient?
The solution here is to simply stomp this initiave flat before it gains traction. The government does not have a need or right to know what you are doing.
So can I be expecting a late night, drunken I'm-so-sorry-I-broke-up-with-you-will-you-please-t ake-me-back phone call from my ex-manager?
Quite possibly. I suggest the traditional response is the best approach to this situation: Pertend to take him back, and then sleep with his best friend as revenge.
I field tested the new design on my techie, smart wife, and she said "if this is how they expect to attract women, no wonder most of their readers are home alone jerking off".
...and her reaction confirms that she really is a girl techie. She's bitter, surly, and hostile to men.
Actually the East German Version and British versions would be quite different:
East German: "PAPERS NOW, DUMPKOFT!"
Bristish: "I say chap, but could I trouble you for your papers? Terribly sorry to intrude, but you see, ah, we're looking for these terribly unsporting chaps called terrorists, although I suppose they consider themselves freedom fighters. Miserable blighters, always blowing things up with out warning anyone first. Can't blame them for trying, I suppose. Anyway, I have to ask everybody who wants to pass my check point for their papers, and since you seem intent on going down this street, I shall have to ask you if I could see them. And, if itsn't too much trouble, I need some DNA samples taken rectally. Terribly sorry for the fuss. Oh, and don't WORRY! I'm sure that my computer here will give you a green flag, Rarely does it tell me to mow a bloke down on the spot with my submachine gun here."
(best read in a faux cleese voice for maximum balck comic effect)
Quinn went on to further add that there were too many 'colored' people and 'orientals' working on open source for it to ever be viable in the market. "I mean, really", he mused, "I can see these people doing manual labor, like railroad work, but software development? Please!"
This guy would have fit in well in the 1930's, where it was acceptable to judge people in broad sweeping strokes. To suggest that all open source devs are granola eating hippies is no different than saying blacks are criminals, blonde women are dumb, and polish people are stupid.
Hey, Quinn eat some of your own crap - You are just like all other worthless white CEOs: Stupid, overpaid, and probably a thief just waiting for the SEC to blink so you can rob everyone blind.
So, I'm going to hit the new interface with some patience and learned wisdom before I trash it.
An excellent goal to live one's life by. Just as an FYI, my rant was written from a unique point of view: I have worked with test builds of vista, and I didn't find the new effects to be particularly performance enchancing. The hardware for vista is STEEP. Now, the question is, are the severe system requirements due to the fact that there was debug code in the build, other features were sucking up resources, or because the pretty interface takes a lot of cpu power.
If you can get past the OS sucking the life out of your cpu, the interface looks pretty...
TFA is working with a sound premise, but the author just didn't spell it out very well. I have been saying the same thing, and I will offer odds that it will happen in the next decade or so.
Here is what I think he was trying to say: Given that MMORPG games have become an established genere onto themselves, and their basic design archetecture is very similar, when will the developers get together and design a basic MMORPG API to aleviate the need to reinvent the wheel for each game? While the game mechanics for each given world can vary, there isn't anything preventing publishers from comming up with a basic MMORPG 'standard' if you will, so that servers can be linked between games. Why would you want to do this?
1) Reuse of a code base. If you reduce your development to coding environment rules and creating models, there is one less element to worry about.
2) Support. If all your MMORPG games run the same system software, you can fix a single bug and deploy the fix to all your games. Each game doesn't need its own set of testers, devs, etc. Support is expensive.
3) Upgrades. Ok, DiabloWorld4 has been out for two years now. Pleople are getting bored with it. Since it uses your MMORPG API, it is simple to migrate them to Diabloworld5, or Ringquest2, or Dragonhunter7. You might have some sort of transform that has to be applied to their character, but it gives you a better chance to keep them as customers.
3) Upgrades. Ok, DiabloWorld4 has been out for two years now. Pleople are getting bored with it. Since it uses your MMORPG API, it is simple to migrate them to Diabloworld5, or Ringquest2, or Dragonhunter7. You might have some sort of transform that has to be applied to their character, but it gives you a better chance to keep them as customers.
4) Cross company efforts. If several companies decide that by pooling their resources they can build an even better persistent world than other companies individually, this will give them a common meidum to work in.
The MMORPG market is a rapidly growing market. Games are becomming huge in terms of development costs, and companies will spring up to start specializing in specific areas of development. A standardized framework will allow this sort of business to thrive.
The final side effect of all this would be that it would be trivial to allow such interactions as described by the author to occur. Would there be a point in having GTA characters wander around a WoW instance? I wouldn't think so, but I could see armies of WoW players fighting armies of D&D online players.
...you made a good point, that eye candy is ok, provided that it can be turned off. However, you may not realize that isn't always that simple.
Let's take a hypethetical situation. Lets say I write a UI that uses a 3d api to render the desktop. (we will call this supposed UI, 'SparrowGrass' so we have a name to work with.)
Using 'SparrowGrass' I can enable all sorts of 'spiffy-wa'(as my console gamer friend calls them) hardware accelerated effects, such as dynamic shadows, translucency, and such. But because they are expecting that there is a 3d card with a good T&L chip in the machine, it will run like a dog without it.
So either because I find such 'spiffy-wa' effects morally offensive when I am trying to remotely reconfigure a DC, or because I lack the latest 3d card, I choose to disable the fancy 3d features of 'SparrowGrass'. However, I am still using a 3d API to render the desktop.
If you looks at one very famous company's 3d API, printing text to the screen involves rendering a couple of polygons, and basically texture mapping the text onto them. While you have turned off the 'spiffy-wa' features, you are still going to be taking a hit for using the 3d API in the first place.
it seems unlikely that there will be two sets of.dlls supported, one for providing a 3d based desktop, and another for providing a 2d desktop.
Ok, lets think about it like this: You are traversing (for example) say twice the volume of radiation filled space in a givin time, therefore you are being exposed to radiation in any selected area for half the duration. Simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, the old "It sucks, therefore copying is not a crime" argument. If it sucks, why are you stealing it?
I personally pirate music because I have not been offered the correct price. I have a couple of bands that I really like, and I buy their CDs and go to their shows when they come to town. I have a few other bands that I kinda like, and listen to once every blue moon, but not enough to buy the music. I'd pay a buck for their whole catalogue. But not $1 a track or even $1 an album. Get the RIAA to sell me that stuff at the right price and I'll pay.
Show of hands: Who did not already understand that floats are approximations?
/.'s readership has really slipped in educational level since the early days. There are a lot of non-coders reading it these days, so yeah, I bet there were a lot who didn't know that...
Sorry to say it, but
George W. Bush's brain doesn't work. The man is an emotionally stunted monkey-tard. Osama might have been a threat to our security at one time, but through the efforts of a lot of people working together in countries all over the world, al-queda has been dealt a severe check. This has been done, despite King Jr's bumbling efforts. Now the biggest threat to American security is president fucktard, and his blundering policies that provoke international anger and apathy toward us. His dad was a one term wonder, and he was twice the president that Jr. will ever be.
I could go on and on, but the point is, contracts are mostly one-sided. Why? Because we want their service. Its not about service anymore, its about locking you into monthly fees, termination fees, fee fees, payment fees, early payment fees, etc....
Jaded much? It could be that there are a lot of contracts these days because companies have to deal with a lot of loonies who take their special deals and refuse to pay them. Of course, this is slashdot and all coporations are evil incarnate, bar none.
Consider that companies aren't stupid. If they could forgo paying the expense of a legal department, they probably would. It is quite likely that they would like to forgo the expense of dealing with managing customer contracts entirely, but can't.
I actually dont really object to having a place like gitmo, where people are stripped of their rights and summarily tortured, if we can send the people who implimented it there too, if/when they are deemed a 'threat to national security'.
Please do not compare Jack Thomposn to Adolph Hitler. They are nothing alike. After all, Adolph helped build the autobahns. What sort of worthwile contribution to the world has Jack made?
Ok bad joke, but really comparing a guy who is considered the embodyment of evil and insanity with a two bit shyster? I make posting from time to time on/. about hysterical demonization of people and groups that are the antithesis of the average slashdot reader. Jack T will be dead within another fifty years, and completely forgotten in twice that time. He might make idiotic aggrandizing claims about his 'opponents', but don't fall into the same trap.
Humans have not been around for anywhere near 100 million years.
Moot point, you are debating scemantics. The specise that would be come the species that would be come the species (etc.) has been evolving for a VERY long time. All that time, genetic information is being 'stored up' and passed on.
You make an excellent point about why the brian might be found in the head, but lets go one step further. I am going to state that other than minor changes to the human form (say to remove sicle cell anemia or similar genetic problems), changing people's basic physiology is a bad idea. Here is why:
I'm going to say that we are what we are, because that is what allowed us to survive for the last hundred minllion odd years. The species that we dig out of canyon walls weren't adapted properly to deal with changes to their environment. While it might be cool to have a prehensile tail, I'm going to assume that since evolution doesn't think I need it, it's probably for the best that I don't have it.
Evolution: ~100 million years of keeping the species alive and kicking.
Human Scientific Biology: Going on the big two hundred and fifty...
I am simply oddities in peoples logic. Your turn:
We are being asked to believe Microsoft's upper management is extremely "ethical" by a Microsoft employee who thinks working there is pretty good, and hasn't himself been privy to the illegal decisions we know as a matter of public record that organization has made.
If he hasn't been privy to the illegal decisions, how can they be a matter of public record? Are these some sort of public records that are public for everyone but MS employees?
BTW, it is a minor point, but MS is not really 'evil'. Lets assume that all of MS's bad behavior was planned from the start to destroy their rivals in the most expedient method available. It still isn't evil. The bolshevik communist party was evil. The Khimir Rouge was evil. The Nazi party was evil. Microsoft was at worst, unethical. Please don't confuse organizations that purvey true evil and misery on the world with a bunch of greedy executives.
I think your heart's in the right place, but you are light years away from reality.
...and this from a person who has a sig advocting murdering Republicans. Wow...
You don't really know much about encryption, do you?
Yes, I know plenty about encryption. But you will probably go on to explain it to me, since you are so brilliant. Most modern-day encryption techniques are based on mathematical problems which (always assuming that no genius comes up with a shortcut) have an exponential time-to-solve curve based on the size of the problem. Oh hey, there is is. No kidding? Mathematical problems? Like, numbers and stuff?
So this, 'exponatinunshiun time to solve' curvy thingy, would that be your attempt to say that this class of problems can be computed in P time?
Asshat.
is quite possible to have worked for the mob, be well treated, and not see any nefarious activity. It is not only possible but likely (and therefore infinitely reasonable) that such activities will be concealed from such an observer.
...And on the other hand, such a wonderfully circular logic loop cannot be debated. 'If I cannot see any source of wrong doing', says the conspiracy nut, 'Then it must be deliberately concealed from me, hence a conspiracy!'
From TFA:
..Some drives bought by the reporters contained material marked secret..
Hey, this is ok, as President Jr. decided to declassify the data and sell the drives to make a few bucks for a whitehouse kegger.
Badum-BUM! Hey, I'll be here all week...
From TFA:
At a hearing last week, Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican who heads a House oversight and investigations subcommittee, suggested that data retention laws would be useful to police investigating crimes against children.
Your point about blancing privacy rights against government protection is well stated, sir. If everyone would just wear a gps neck collar, we could track everyone's movements 24/7. Manditory fingerpinting and DNA collection would solve quite a number of crimes, and having a sizeable secret police force, you could monitor the activites of many social, religious, and political organizations. These are simple facts. The closer you watch people, the more crimes you can catch.
However, what these dimmwits in washington don't seem to get, is that nobody would want to live in a country that was like that. People don't excactly flock to police states, begging to emigrate...
Having encryption will do nothing to save you from this sort of snooping. They can retain records for later, encrypted or not. The explicit goal of cryptography isn't to prevent people from reading your encrypted messages, its to stop them from doing it in a timely fashion. Any method of encryption short of say, a private cypher, can be eventually cracked.
Now someone will probably make a point about a 4096 bit key to make the effort take years, but consider this: how long ago would a 64 bit key been considered sufficient?
The solution here is to simply stomp this initiave flat before it gains traction. The government does not have a need or right to know what you are doing.
So can I be expecting a late night, drunken I'm-so-sorry-I-broke-up-with-you-will-you-please-t ake-me-back phone call from my ex-manager?
Quite possibly. I suggest the traditional response is the best approach to this situation: Pertend to take him back, and then sleep with his best friend as revenge.
I field tested the new design on my techie, smart wife, and she said "if this is how they expect to attract women, no wonder most of their readers are home alone jerking off".
...and her reaction confirms that she really is a girl techie. She's bitter, surly, and hostile to men.
*ducks*
...where is all the front page pr0n?
Ok boys, he asked for it. Let him have a little taste of the ol' Goatse.cx.....
Papers please.
(Not to be confused with the East German version)
Actually the East German Version and British versions would be quite different:
East German: "PAPERS NOW, DUMPKOFT!"
Bristish: "I say chap, but could I trouble you for your papers? Terribly sorry to intrude, but you see, ah, we're looking for these terribly unsporting chaps called terrorists, although I suppose they consider themselves freedom fighters. Miserable blighters, always blowing things up with out warning anyone first. Can't blame them for trying, I suppose. Anyway, I have to ask everybody who wants to pass my check point for their papers, and since you seem intent on going down this street, I shall have to ask you if I could see them. And, if itsn't too much trouble, I need some DNA samples taken rectally. Terribly sorry for the fuss. Oh, and don't WORRY! I'm sure that my computer here will give you a green flag, Rarely does it tell me to mow a bloke down on the spot with my submachine gun here."
(best read in a faux cleese voice for maximum balck comic effect)
Addendum to article, before editorial cuts:
Quinn went on to further add that there were too many 'colored' people and 'orientals' working on open source for it to ever be viable in the market. "I mean, really", he mused, "I can see these people doing manual labor, like railroad work, but software development? Please!"
This guy would have fit in well in the 1930's, where it was acceptable to judge people in broad sweeping strokes. To suggest that all open source devs are granola eating hippies is no different than saying blacks are criminals, blonde women are dumb, and polish people are stupid.
Hey, Quinn eat some of your own crap - You are just like all other worthless white CEOs: Stupid, overpaid, and probably a thief just waiting for the SEC to blink so you can rob everyone blind.
So, I'm going to hit the new interface with some patience and learned wisdom before I trash it.
An excellent goal to live one's life by. Just as an FYI, my rant was written from a unique point of view: I have worked with test builds of vista, and I didn't find the new effects to be particularly performance enchancing. The hardware for vista is STEEP. Now, the question is, are the severe system requirements due to the fact that there was debug code in the build, other features were sucking up resources, or because the pretty interface takes a lot of cpu power.
If you can get past the OS sucking the life out of your cpu, the interface looks pretty...
TFA is working with a sound premise, but the author just didn't spell it out very well. I have been saying the same thing, and I will offer odds that it will happen in the next decade or so.
Here is what I think he was trying to say: Given that MMORPG games have become an established genere onto themselves, and their basic design archetecture is very similar, when will the developers get together and design a basic MMORPG API to aleviate the need to reinvent the wheel for each game? While the game mechanics for each given world can vary, there isn't anything preventing publishers from comming up with a basic MMORPG 'standard' if you will, so that servers can be linked between games. Why would you want to do this?
1) Reuse of a code base. If you reduce your development to coding environment rules and creating models, there is one less element to worry about.
2) Support. If all your MMORPG games run the same system software, you can fix a single bug and deploy the fix to all your games. Each game doesn't need its own set of testers, devs, etc. Support is expensive.
3) Upgrades. Ok, DiabloWorld4 has been out for two years now. Pleople are getting bored with it. Since it uses your MMORPG API, it is simple to migrate them to Diabloworld5, or Ringquest2, or Dragonhunter7. You might have some sort of transform that has to be applied to their character, but it gives you a better chance to keep them as customers.
3) Upgrades. Ok, DiabloWorld4 has been out for two years now. Pleople are getting bored with it. Since it uses your MMORPG API, it is simple to migrate them to Diabloworld5, or Ringquest2, or Dragonhunter7. You might have some sort of transform that has to be applied to their character, but it gives you a better chance to keep them as customers.
4) Cross company efforts. If several companies decide that by pooling their resources they can build an even better persistent world than other companies individually, this will give them a common meidum to work in.
The MMORPG market is a rapidly growing market. Games are becomming huge in terms of development costs, and companies will spring up to start specializing in specific areas of development. A standardized framework will allow this sort of business to thrive.
The final side effect of all this would be that it would be trivial to allow such interactions as described by the author to occur. Would there be a point in having GTA characters wander around a WoW instance? I wouldn't think so, but I could see armies of WoW players fighting armies of D&D online players.
If true, this would be pretty much the biggest breakthrough since Einstein.
And what a breakthrough he was! I don't recall who invented him, but man, they don't build jews like that anymore...
...you made a good point, that eye candy is ok, provided that it can be turned off. However, you may not realize that isn't always that simple.
.dlls supported, one for providing a 3d based desktop, and another for providing a 2d desktop.
Let's take a hypethetical situation. Lets say I write a UI that uses a 3d api to render the desktop. (we will call this supposed UI, 'SparrowGrass' so we have a name to work with.)
Using 'SparrowGrass' I can enable all sorts of 'spiffy-wa'(as my console gamer friend calls them) hardware accelerated effects, such as dynamic shadows, translucency, and such. But because they are expecting that there is a 3d card with a good T&L chip in the machine, it will run like a dog without it.
So either because I find such 'spiffy-wa' effects morally offensive when I am trying to remotely reconfigure a DC, or because I lack the latest 3d card, I choose to disable the fancy 3d features of 'SparrowGrass'. However, I am still using a 3d API to render the desktop.
If you looks at one very famous company's 3d API, printing text to the screen involves rendering a couple of polygons, and basically texture mapping the text onto them. While you have turned off the 'spiffy-wa' features, you are still going to be taking a hit for using the 3d API in the first place.
it seems unlikely that there will be two sets of
Ok, lets think about it like this: You are traversing (for example) say twice the volume of radiation filled space in a givin time, therefore you are being exposed to radiation in any selected area for half the duration. Simple.