Well, I am a lawyer (though not copyright) and I would say theoriginal poster has a point.
Licenses are simply a way to diseminate the different rights granted by copyrights. The thing is, though, that our new (post-1972) copyright law has an enumerated list of granted rights, any of which may be given or reserved by choice of the creator. Licenses simply are a legal mix of flexibility and technicality that covers the disemination of those rights in a set fashion.
So, if I were a webcomic author, I can say "Derivative works are allowed [insert hoops such as such works not being sold for service or profit]. All other rights to [stuff's] content are reserved solely by [me]."
And you can be sure of what you're saying there if you're smart, because there's a hundred years of precedent telling everyone what derivatives work (I'm pretty sure it's even written into the law).
Licenses don't create rights. They just distribute them. When you're dealing with something stupidly simple ("go ahead and make fanart! Just don't steal my stuff!"), a big license simply doesn't make sense when you're only worried about a few provisions of the relevant law.
You need enough taxpayers to care enough about the program to be willing to fund it. Which is already hard enough to do with actual people going up and doing things, and would probably be impossible if you were talking about a robot or some guy in houston with a joystick.
This line of argument also discounts that there are still biological (human) tests going on in space, and the fact that we have a big ol' space station being worked on and lived in, which is a pretty important stepping stone if we're going to take peoples' (the same people whining about the shuttle program, often) dream of colonizing space and planets anywhere.
Perhaps pure science would benefit more from no manned spaceflights. But scientific knowledge isn't the entire point, and there are other concerns that need to be addressed about both NASA's operation and its long-term goals.
I must admit my fiance and I got a little teary-eyed during the Jedi pogrom. It was very sad and very well-done, from both thematic and cinematic views.
Cody and Obi-Wan was a good example of that (though moreso if you've seen Clone Wars). Here you have a Jedi, their leader, the person upon whose skill their success lied directly, getting shot down by someone who we are to assume he had become friends with. Just like that. And then they cut to big-forehead-guy (whatever his name is), who was actually LEADING A CHARGE into a droid unit, waving wildly to egg them on, except WE know that he's trapped.
So, these people are out fighting a war they don't want to fight, performing superbly, and then out of the blue, get shot in the back by their allies. I can't think of a more sad betrayal than that.
Awards and expenses are usually downgraded rather sharply during the tort process, so throwing around the initial numbers is relatively useless. The idea is to ask for as much as you possibly can get away with without lying and then hope that a lot of it won't be nixed.
Then again, that can also come back to bite attournies, like that counsel that lost all of his fees for a case he worked on exclusively for 3 years because a jury found his fees excessive in a lawsuit the appelants in the last case (his former clients) brought against him.
You know what'll be awesome? A few years down the road, when maybe The Cool Kids have moved on and bashing Star Wars isn't so in vogue.
It's amazing all the amazing twists people will contort into... and quite amusing. "Well, episodes 1 and 2 sucked. ALL BECAUSE OF JAR JAR. I am so terribly aghast at his screentime that it ruins everything for me! Look at me! mememe!"
or, perhaps "these two suck because Lucas wrote them himself, unlike ESB. I'm going to ignore ANH. Because it doesn't fit my point."
or even "the romantic scenes suck! Because, ya know, the ones in the first trilogy were so wonderfully done!" They were pretty bad. Funny how immediacy seems to be much more relevant. Or perhaps its the construction of the first trilogy that people have created for themselves that put everything about it above reproach.
In education, there is an "ideal draft" theory, that states, essentially, that when an instructor has an ideal essay on a particular subject in mind when reading/grading an assignment, both the instructor and student lose. We see the same sort of thing going on with star wars, by a lot of people that really should know better... when an "idea copy" of star wars has been created in one's mind, even if it is murky and nonspecific, nothing will ever hope to live up to it, and the experience is ruined, ie, fans whining and Lucas getting a lot of criticism.
The real problem with actions along this theory, however, is that the more "disappointing" the movie is, the more disproportionally "bad" it ends up being in the reviewer's mind. Ergo, we have an annoying character becoming the most hated fictional character of all time, and a bunch of people talking about their childhood being ruined.
Sure, I was disappointed, too. But this is a bit silly.
But he statement is still true. Just because fines and such vary doesn't mean that some classes of laws are less "important" than others, merely more eggregious or harmful to the parties/public.
Hey look, it's a rehash of the Valerie Plame case, except nowhere near as important!
What people always forget, just as the journalists who were threatened with jail forget, is that there is, legally, absolutely no inherent RIGHT for the press to keep sources secret, aside from a very small set of closely-defined situations. The legal basis for this is very sound; unless there is a significant issue of security, or there is a significant issue of gained public good, journalists should not, and cannot, hide behind status to avoid doing what everyone else would be forced to to. Should someone come up to me and leak specs to macgizmo5000, and I then told every single person I know and many that I don't, I would have no protection, because my source violated an NDA, and in order to find that, during discovery, they must FIND THE SOURCE TO BE SURE THAT THEY WERE SO BOUND. As a normal person, it wouldn't be a question, I would go to jail for failing to satisfy a subpeona. But the press has this mystical quality, apparently, that keeps problems like this away, according to them, at least.
The problem is that there is no great public good in allowing sources in cases such as this to be kept secret from the courts. There is a significant tort matter (breach of contract) that possibly hangs in the balance, and unless this person is a CIA mole trying to out spies among Apple's employees, there's probably not much of a national interest in keeping their identity hidden.
That leaves the intangible feeling that if sources were allowed to be outed in this fashion, no one would talk to reporters. The folly of this argument is that it assumes that claims such as this can be made about anything, ie, some facet of unclassified information is leaked by an official in the executive branch and the government can then bring a suit against the reporter and have them turn over the official, which has its own problems. While the chilling effect they describe would be a problem to a free press, the government would have no grounds to bring a suit against them unless they could demonstrate that there was some breach of contract regarding classified information or other sensitive information, which is always clearly demarked.
If journalists think they want a right to never have to reveal sources, than that is great for them. What they shouldn't do is pretend that they already HAVE that right, and then whine when it seems to be "taken away." If they want something like it, that's great. Go to jail, then. Make a statement about how our government is jailing journalists for "just doing their job." There's probably a decent chance they could get some sort of legislation codifying that right. But as of now, outside of a few narrow cases, it simply does not exist.
You're confusing originality with... I'm not even sure there's a word for it, but something along the lines of "lack of franchises." Just because something sports the name of a franchise doesn't necissarily that it'll be old-hat, nor does it mean it won't have both new content and novel concepts. To whit, Super Mario 64 was completely off from the previous games in the franchise. Sure, it was still a platformer, but the way it played was so completely different. Difficulty could no longer come only from enemy placement, everything had to be more non-linear, and so on and so forth. So what you saw was a game that could have been old hat do a lot of crazy things to take advantage of the new system instead of simply trying to recreate previous incarnations.
So, if the only test you have for originality in a game is whether or not it is in a series, than yeah, sure, a lot of the list will upset you. I think that most of us, however, are going to wait and see what the developers DO with the new hardware using the franchise they've already built up. I, for one, am looking forward to what a touchpad can do for some of these franchises (maps and menus in castlevania, minigames in goemon, control in metroid, and whatever else they thing up), because I realize that innovation, while many times is running around in left field, is also taking what you have and making it new and exciting with new capabilities and ideas.
The problem is, Joe's Local News will never, ever be able to compete with CNN on issues that most people care about, simply because CNN has money and reporters and expert commentators on retainer, whereas Joe's Local News would have, perhaps, local news and maybe some op-ed on news others have reported. Getting the scoop is an extremely expensive deal, as is hiring and retaining talented reporters and anchors and technicians. The problem with consolidated media isn't going to be solved simply by more bandwidth.
You are correct, however, that the government is definitely in on the whole deal, and wouldn't be the ideal partner for this. However, no one else has the authority to create legislation that would solve the problem.
The other problem is that it's more cost-effective to use the sources' opinions and fact-checking instead of your own, which is why there is inaccurate information occassionaly released to the public. When a journalist writes a "he-said, she-said" piece, that's one less chunk of research the journalist (or researcher-on-retainer) would have to do, cutting down on both time and expense. One reason that this is given such priority, I believe, is the consolidation of the media companies and the cutthroat ratings war it has brought. The way I see it, more companies would mean competition on the merits of the news brought, since you would need unique and important news to get a leg-up on the competition. With so few big players, it's easy for them to just piggy-back on each others' stuff, regardless of what it is.
What they say and what is true are two entirely different things.
The rules of ownership (I have this, I can do what I want with it, and give it to my friends as fair use in a limited domain) are completely different from the rules of broadcast (I have this thing, and I'm going to do what I want with it and give it to anyone that is even remotely interested).
Though I understand where the math people are coming from, I have to respectfully disagree. While a certain level of math is required for tasks (discrete math for AI, for example), I don't think a computer scientist (at least, one not in academia) has to know them on the level that they recieve taking all these courses from the math major. What the cs person cares about isn't so much how or why certain aspects of the math work out, just that they do work, and can be relied on. In my experience, at least, learning the theory gets in the way of what I find useful, and the non-theory (engineering-oriented, application-only) courses end with the calculus series, at least at OSU.
Perhaps I'm just crazy, but this makes sense to me... it's the only way I can justify the fact that, even in higher-level courses in each, I can do very well in my CIS courses and so abysmally bad in every single math.
So, we have an investigation by the senate sergeant-at-arms with 120 interviews, plus the admissions by prominent republicans that it happened (though not that they had anything to do with it) in one corner. In the other corner we have you making the statement that this is a) commonplace and that b) the liberal media is out to get the poor republicans.
So, uh, I guess my question is, what manner of magic have you obtained to give you such insight into congress? And, perhaps, a bonus followup, how can you in your right mind say there's a liberal media when no one is calling the president on his story in the runup to Iraq, the felonous ouster of a CIA operative, and the continued stonewalling of the 9/11 commission (which, heck, is even headed by a republican).
The anger has less to do with the electoral college and more to do with the incredible discrepencies and shady goings-on that overshadowed Florida. There were reports of entire districts being turned away at the polls. The state of Florida admitted to not only having a truckfull of ballots go completely missing for a matter or hours, but that they also completely lost a few of them. Add in 1 Catherine Harris coming up with creative ways to avoid, omit or close down recounts and 1 supreme court which, in its incredible fairness, stopped the entire process until it decided on the case, and then gave them 2 days to finish it after that.
On top of all that, Earlier in the day I had already checked Florida off because every single exit poll had Gore completely clobbering Bush. Those are the things that the public should be outraged about, not the electoral college, and I think that those who are complaining are complaining about that.
Online versions of print papers prefer that people who reference them include a top of site link in place of the traditional footnote or whatever. Sean-Paul Kelley actually got in trouble for not doing that.
NINTENDO IS NOT STRUGGLING. They were Nikkei's company of the year last year. The reason their stock has lost ground was because they are so heavily invested in the dollar, which took a beating by the yen. They have not operated at a loss in over two decades. They have, at last number I got, 3 billion in the bank, and last year they made more money than SCE. They are, as last I heard, neck and neck with Xbox in the US, but numbers are hard to come by because a lot of retail release figures exclude places such as Walmart, Nintendo's top distributor. Yes, in Europe they are struggling, but they are doing fine and dandy everywhere else.
For a place that complains about so much FUD, you would think people would know the difference between Sega (operating at a loss for a decade with millions in red) and Nintendo. It's astounding.
No, it is legal to share or distribute a piece of copyrighted material you own to a very small and select group of people. The more people gain access to the item, the less protection you have. If you start distributing it to people you don't even know publically (and directly), congratulations, you've violated copyright law. Even if you know, personally, a large number of people you are exclusively sharing with, there is a (fuzzy) spot where protection ends, so saying "well, all these 100 people are my friends" does not cut it.
You speak as if you are an insider at the NYT, know everything on the subject, and can even then definitively state that you know the exact cause for all actions in this snafu. I'm sorry to say this, but no one is omnipotent, and you are jumping to conclusions that you simply cannot. If you want a good discussion about BOTH sides of the race issue in question salon has an excellent article on the subject. To say that it is just about race is reactionary and absurd as saying that the editors insist they were doing their jobs correctly- they screwed up, they admitted it. To say they should beat themselves up until they give a signed confession supporting your view of the story is immature.
I think his point was that there's no great reason for making these games require the latest and greatest cards other than the general consensus in the community that a game is unplayable if it isn't pretty and you need to have a great system to play it decently. I, myself, find that rather silly that everything is aimed towards the highest-end the developers can think of, with the very weak method of stripping random features to the point where it does look like crap because they don't give a damn how their game runs on inferior hardware being the only possible way to play a game on older stuff. Very bothersome.
While I think allowing them to post would be a bit much, this would be nice since I'd be willing to wager that the subscribing members make up a decent chunk of the people that actually read every article in the story before posting, and their number should be small enough that it'll both spread the load on the remote webserver a bit AND would probably have no detrimental effect on the rest of us.
Sure, the fee is a pain, but I would like to stress how good a product PCGen is. I play 3 sessions a week, and although I only use PCGen for one of them (The others are an insanely complicated multi-prestige-class-class-altering-equipment-usin g monk/cleric/thing and another is essentially a crane samurai under the Rokugan d20 rules), the rest of my party in all 3 (and the DM sometimes) use it for quick, easy character generation, because it's fast, it's easy to level up your character, you have a nice backup in case your sheet turns into a dew towel and let's face it, some players are either too new to do this without some assistance (whether PCGen or another player) or just really, really suck at simple math.
That said, I would really like PCGen to stop paying full attention to just wizards. Yes, it's D&D, d20 is the 3E system and D&D is a very important game. But I think this is a VERY good opportunity to help some excellent companies (or at least one) who are REALLY in bad shape, and have been for a long time. I'm refering, of course, to Alderac Entertainment Group, publishers of two excellent games (L5R CCG and RPG) who started after wizards and really never stood a chance in hell of unseating them, and have been sitting around getting financially beaten up because no one will give their product a second look. It would be really, really nice if PCGen would branch out and try to include a game like L5R to help a great company (who at the moment have to pay their writers something like 2 cents per word. Well, at least the one I know) and help those of us who play either Oriental Adventures or Rokugan d20 in a conventional or L5R setting. For an extra few bucks, I think that would be a good deal for everyone involved.
I think that this is just a logical step in the MS ass-covering train, nothing really crazy. They already blame users for security lapses in their products with that silly "if you don't patch it's not our fault" idea, ignoring the fact that sometimes the patches hurt worse than most of the bugs you're patching against....
Still, I think they have a semivalid point here that I'm sure not everything that they get as a bug report is their fault. I'm sure there are a lot of people using 3rd party apps that get errors that they think are OS-related and bug MS about them. I'm also sure that a lot of people that DO run into MS bugs don't bother to report them, given their track record.
Still, even if they do get a bunch of non-issues as bugs, to take such a condenscending tone with their userbase and suggest that they're complaining about what they believe is a valid problem is abhorrent. Then again, no amount of bad publicity like this will hurt them at all. So, I think, people should find lots of VALID bugs and submit them (even though they know the bugs won't be fixed). And someone do double for me, I don't think they'd react kindly to me sending them bug reports from my linux box.:/
Because if the laws are simple enough for anyone to understand them, court cases become a contest of who's wittiest and who can come up with the most loopholes. All the little exemptions and clarifications and bizzare terms have the purpose of making things precise, and most importantly, changing "clever" to "clever at working with the law." Without all that nitty-gritty lawyer stuff, a trial would just be a philosophy debate.
Yes, but not buying an xbox at all means they make even LESS profit off it. Just because they sell at a loss doesn't mean it's better than no sell at all.
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Well, I am a lawyer (though not copyright) and I would say theoriginal poster has a point.
Licenses are simply a way to diseminate the different rights granted by copyrights. The thing is, though, that our new (post-1972) copyright law has an enumerated list of granted rights, any of which may be given or reserved by choice of the creator. Licenses simply are a legal mix of flexibility and technicality that covers the disemination of those rights in a set fashion.
So, if I were a webcomic author, I can say "Derivative works are allowed [insert hoops such as such works not being sold for service or profit]. All other rights to [stuff's] content are reserved solely by [me]."
And you can be sure of what you're saying there if you're smart, because there's a hundred years of precedent telling everyone what derivatives work (I'm pretty sure it's even written into the law).
Licenses don't create rights. They just distribute them. When you're dealing with something stupidly simple ("go ahead and make fanart! Just don't steal my stuff!"), a big license simply doesn't make sense when you're only worried about a few provisions of the relevant law.
You do need people, actually.
You need enough taxpayers to care enough about the program to be willing to fund it. Which is already hard enough to do with actual people going up and doing things, and would probably be impossible if you were talking about a robot or some guy in houston with a joystick.
This line of argument also discounts that there are still biological (human) tests going on in space, and the fact that we have a big ol' space station being worked on and lived in, which is a pretty important stepping stone if we're going to take peoples' (the same people whining about the shuttle program, often) dream of colonizing space and planets anywhere.
Perhaps pure science would benefit more from no manned spaceflights. But scientific knowledge isn't the entire point, and there are other concerns that need to be addressed about both NASA's operation and its long-term goals.
I must admit my fiance and I got a little teary-eyed during the Jedi pogrom. It was very sad and very well-done, from both thematic and cinematic views.
Cody and Obi-Wan was a good example of that (though moreso if you've seen Clone Wars). Here you have a Jedi, their leader, the person upon whose skill their success lied directly, getting shot down by someone who we are to assume he had become friends with. Just like that. And then they cut to big-forehead-guy (whatever his name is), who was actually LEADING A CHARGE into a droid unit, waving wildly to egg them on, except WE know that he's trapped.
So, these people are out fighting a war they don't want to fight, performing superbly, and then out of the blue, get shot in the back by their allies. I can't think of a more sad betrayal than that.
Awards and expenses are usually downgraded rather sharply during the tort process, so throwing around the initial numbers is relatively useless. The idea is to ask for as much as you possibly can get away with without lying and then hope that a lot of it won't be nixed.
Then again, that can also come back to bite attournies, like that counsel that lost all of his fees for a case he worked on exclusively for 3 years because a jury found his fees excessive in a lawsuit the appelants in the last case (his former clients) brought against him.
You know what'll be awesome? A few years down the road, when maybe The Cool Kids have moved on and bashing Star Wars isn't so in vogue.
It's amazing all the amazing twists people will contort into... and quite amusing. "Well, episodes 1 and 2 sucked. ALL BECAUSE OF JAR JAR. I am so terribly aghast at his screentime that it ruins everything for me! Look at me! mememe!"
or, perhaps "these two suck because Lucas wrote them himself, unlike ESB. I'm going to ignore ANH. Because it doesn't fit my point."
or even "the romantic scenes suck! Because, ya know, the ones in the first trilogy were so wonderfully done!" They were pretty bad. Funny how immediacy seems to be much more relevant. Or perhaps its the construction of the first trilogy that people have created for themselves that put everything about it above reproach.
In education, there is an "ideal draft" theory, that states, essentially, that when an instructor has an ideal essay on a particular subject in mind when reading/grading an assignment, both the instructor and student lose. We see the same sort of thing going on with star wars, by a lot of people that really should know better... when an "idea copy" of star wars has been created in one's mind, even if it is murky and nonspecific, nothing will ever hope to live up to it, and the experience is ruined, ie, fans whining and Lucas getting a lot of criticism.
The real problem with actions along this theory, however, is that the more "disappointing" the movie is, the more disproportionally "bad" it ends up being in the reviewer's mind. Ergo, we have an annoying character becoming the most hated fictional character of all time, and a bunch of people talking about their childhood being ruined.
Sure, I was disappointed, too. But this is a bit silly.
That's not really planting evidence, it's a form of entrapment.
But he statement is still true. Just because fines and such vary doesn't mean that some classes of laws are less "important" than others, merely more eggregious or harmful to the parties/public.
They do that because SuSE has a load of people on staff that work on KDE. Not so with gnome.
Which has, much to my chagrin, made KDE the preferred SuSE desktop, making us SuSE gnome users feel a little shunted-off.
Hey look, it's a rehash of the Valerie Plame case, except nowhere near as important!
What people always forget, just as the journalists who were threatened with jail forget, is that there is, legally, absolutely no inherent RIGHT for the press to keep sources secret, aside from a very small set of closely-defined situations. The legal basis for this is very sound; unless there is a significant issue of security, or there is a significant issue of gained public good, journalists should not, and cannot, hide behind status to avoid doing what everyone else would be forced to to. Should someone come up to me and leak specs to macgizmo5000, and I then told every single person I know and many that I don't, I would have no protection, because my source violated an NDA, and in order to find that, during discovery, they must FIND THE SOURCE TO BE SURE THAT THEY WERE SO BOUND. As a normal person, it wouldn't be a question, I would go to jail for failing to satisfy a subpeona. But the press has this mystical quality, apparently, that keeps problems like this away, according to them, at least.
The problem is that there is no great public good in allowing sources in cases such as this to be kept secret from the courts. There is a significant tort matter (breach of contract) that possibly hangs in the balance, and unless this person is a CIA mole trying to out spies among Apple's employees, there's probably not much of a national interest in keeping their identity hidden.
That leaves the intangible feeling that if sources were allowed to be outed in this fashion, no one would talk to reporters. The folly of this argument is that it assumes that claims such as this can be made about anything, ie, some facet of unclassified information is leaked by an official in the executive branch and the government can then bring a suit against the reporter and have them turn over the official, which has its own problems. While the chilling effect they describe would be a problem to a free press, the government would have no grounds to bring a suit against them unless they could demonstrate that there was some breach of contract regarding classified information or other sensitive information, which is always clearly demarked.
If journalists think they want a right to never have to reveal sources, than that is great for them. What they shouldn't do is pretend that they already HAVE that right, and then whine when it seems to be "taken away." If they want something like it, that's great. Go to jail, then. Make a statement about how our government is jailing journalists for "just doing their job." There's probably a decent chance they could get some sort of legislation codifying that right. But as of now, outside of a few narrow cases, it simply does not exist.
You're confusing originality with... I'm not even sure there's a word for it, but something along the lines of "lack of franchises." Just because something sports the name of a franchise doesn't necissarily that it'll be old-hat, nor does it mean it won't have both new content and novel concepts. To whit, Super Mario 64 was completely off from the previous games in the franchise. Sure, it was still a platformer, but the way it played was so completely different. Difficulty could no longer come only from enemy placement, everything had to be more non-linear, and so on and so forth. So what you saw was a game that could have been old hat do a lot of crazy things to take advantage of the new system instead of simply trying to recreate previous incarnations.
So, if the only test you have for originality in a game is whether or not it is in a series, than yeah, sure, a lot of the list will upset you. I think that most of us, however, are going to wait and see what the developers DO with the new hardware using the franchise they've already built up. I, for one, am looking forward to what a touchpad can do for some of these franchises (maps and menus in castlevania, minigames in goemon, control in metroid, and whatever else they thing up), because I realize that innovation, while many times is running around in left field, is also taking what you have and making it new and exciting with new capabilities and ideas.
The problem is, Joe's Local News will never, ever be able to compete with CNN on issues that most people care about, simply because CNN has money and reporters and expert commentators on retainer, whereas Joe's Local News would have, perhaps, local news and maybe some op-ed on news others have reported. Getting the scoop is an extremely expensive deal, as is hiring and retaining talented reporters and anchors and technicians. The problem with consolidated media isn't going to be solved simply by more bandwidth.
You are correct, however, that the government is definitely in on the whole deal, and wouldn't be the ideal partner for this. However, no one else has the authority to create legislation that would solve the problem.
The other problem is that it's more cost-effective to use the sources' opinions and fact-checking instead of your own, which is why there is inaccurate information occassionaly released to the public. When a journalist writes a "he-said, she-said" piece, that's one less chunk of research the journalist (or researcher-on-retainer) would have to do, cutting down on both time and expense. One reason that this is given such priority, I believe, is the consolidation of the media companies and the cutthroat ratings war it has brought. The way I see it, more companies would mean competition on the merits of the news brought, since you would need unique and important news to get a leg-up on the competition. With so few big players, it's easy for them to just piggy-back on each others' stuff, regardless of what it is.
What they say and what is true are two entirely different things.
The rules of ownership (I have this, I can do what I want with it, and give it to my friends as fair use in a limited domain) are completely different from the rules of broadcast (I have this thing, and I'm going to do what I want with it and give it to anyone that is even remotely interested).
Though I understand where the math people are coming from, I have to respectfully disagree. While a certain level of math is required for tasks (discrete math for AI, for example), I don't think a computer scientist (at least, one not in academia) has to know them on the level that they recieve taking all these courses from the math major. What the cs person cares about isn't so much how or why certain aspects of the math work out, just that they do work, and can be relied on. In my experience, at least, learning the theory gets in the way of what I find useful, and the non-theory (engineering-oriented, application-only) courses end with the calculus series, at least at OSU.
Perhaps I'm just crazy, but this makes sense to me... it's the only way I can justify the fact that, even in higher-level courses in each, I can do very well in my CIS courses and so abysmally bad in every single math.
So, we have an investigation by the senate sergeant-at-arms with 120 interviews, plus the admissions by prominent republicans that it happened (though not that they had anything to do with it) in one corner. In the other corner we have you making the statement that this is a) commonplace and that b) the liberal media is out to get the poor republicans.
So, uh, I guess my question is, what manner of magic have you obtained to give you such insight into congress? And, perhaps, a bonus followup, how can you in your right mind say there's a liberal media when no one is calling the president on his story in the runup to Iraq, the felonous ouster of a CIA operative, and the continued stonewalling of the 9/11 commission (which, heck, is even headed by a republican).
The anger has less to do with the electoral college and more to do with the incredible discrepencies and shady goings-on that overshadowed Florida. There were reports of entire districts being turned away at the polls. The state of Florida admitted to not only having a truckfull of ballots go completely missing for a matter or hours, but that they also completely lost a few of them. Add in 1 Catherine Harris coming up with creative ways to avoid, omit or close down recounts and 1 supreme court which, in its incredible fairness, stopped the entire process until it decided on the case, and then gave them 2 days to finish it after that.
On top of all that, Earlier in the day I had already checked Florida off because every single exit poll had Gore completely clobbering Bush. Those are the things that the public should be outraged about, not the electoral college, and I think that those who are complaining are complaining about that.
Online versions of print papers prefer that people who reference them include a top of site link in place of the traditional footnote or whatever. Sean-Paul Kelley actually got in trouble for not doing that.
NINTENDO IS NOT STRUGGLING. They were Nikkei's company of the year last year. The reason their stock has lost ground was because they are so heavily invested in the dollar, which took a beating by the yen. They have not operated at a loss in over two decades. They have, at last number I got, 3 billion in the bank, and last year they made more money than SCE. They are, as last I heard, neck and neck with Xbox in the US, but numbers are hard to come by because a lot of retail release figures exclude places such as Walmart, Nintendo's top distributor. Yes, in Europe they are struggling, but they are doing fine and dandy everywhere else.
For a place that complains about so much FUD, you would think people would know the difference between Sega (operating at a loss for a decade with millions in red) and Nintendo. It's astounding.
No, it is legal to share or distribute a piece of copyrighted material you own to a very small and select group of people. The more people gain access to the item, the less protection you have. If you start distributing it to people you don't even know publically (and directly), congratulations, you've violated copyright law. Even if you know, personally, a large number of people you are exclusively sharing with, there is a (fuzzy) spot where protection ends, so saying "well, all these 100 people are my friends" does not cut it.
Your speculation is correct, more or less.
You speak as if you are an insider at the NYT, know everything on the subject, and can even then definitively state that you know the exact cause for all actions in this snafu. I'm sorry to say this, but no one is omnipotent, and you are jumping to conclusions that you simply cannot. If you want a good discussion about BOTH sides of the race issue in question salon has an excellent article on the subject. To say that it is just about race is reactionary and absurd as saying that the editors insist they were doing their jobs correctly- they screwed up, they admitted it. To say they should beat themselves up until they give a signed confession supporting your view of the story is immature.
I think his point was that there's no great reason for making these games require the latest and greatest cards other than the general consensus in the community that a game is unplayable if it isn't pretty and you need to have a great system to play it decently. I, myself, find that rather silly that everything is aimed towards the highest-end the developers can think of, with the very weak method of stripping random features to the point where it does look like crap because they don't give a damn how their game runs on inferior hardware being the only possible way to play a game on older stuff. Very bothersome.
While I think allowing them to post would be a bit much, this would be nice since I'd be willing to wager that the subscribing members make up a decent chunk of the people that actually read every article in the story before posting, and their number should be small enough that it'll both spread the load on the remote webserver a bit AND would probably have no detrimental effect on the rest of us.
Although it is really, REALLY confusing.
Sure, the fee is a pain, but I would like to stress how good a product PCGen is. I play 3 sessions a week, and although I only use PCGen for one of them (The others are an insanely complicated multi-prestige-class-class-altering-equipment-usin g monk/cleric/thing and another is essentially a crane samurai under the Rokugan d20 rules), the rest of my party in all 3 (and the DM sometimes) use it for quick, easy character generation, because it's fast, it's easy to level up your character, you have a nice backup in case your sheet turns into a dew towel and let's face it, some players are either too new to do this without some assistance (whether PCGen or another player) or just really, really suck at simple math.
That said, I would really like PCGen to stop paying full attention to just wizards. Yes, it's D&D, d20 is the 3E system and D&D is a very important game. But I think this is a VERY good opportunity to help some excellent companies (or at least one) who are REALLY in bad shape, and have been for a long time. I'm refering, of course, to Alderac Entertainment Group, publishers of two excellent games (L5R CCG and RPG) who started after wizards and really never stood a chance in hell of unseating them, and have been sitting around getting financially beaten up because no one will give their product a second look. It would be really, really nice if PCGen would branch out and try to include a game like L5R to help a great company (who at the moment have to pay their writers something like 2 cents per word. Well, at least the one I know) and help those of us who play either Oriental Adventures or Rokugan d20 in a conventional or L5R setting. For an extra few bucks, I think that would be a good deal for everyone involved.
I think that this is just a logical step in the MS ass-covering train, nothing really crazy. They already blame users for security lapses in their products with that silly "if you don't patch it's not our fault" idea, ignoring the fact that sometimes the patches hurt worse than most of the bugs you're patching against....
:/
Still, I think they have a semivalid point here that I'm sure not everything that they get as a bug report is their fault. I'm sure there are a lot of people using 3rd party apps that get errors that they think are OS-related and bug MS about them. I'm also sure that a lot of people that DO run into MS bugs don't bother to report them, given their track record.
Still, even if they do get a bunch of non-issues as bugs, to take such a condenscending tone with their userbase and suggest that they're complaining about what they believe is a valid problem is abhorrent. Then again, no amount of bad publicity like this will hurt them at all. So, I think, people should find lots of VALID bugs and submit them (even though they know the bugs won't be fixed). And someone do double for me, I don't think they'd react kindly to me sending them bug reports from my linux box.
Because if the laws are simple enough for anyone to understand them, court cases become a contest of who's wittiest and who can come up with the most loopholes. All the little exemptions and clarifications and bizzare terms have the purpose of making things precise, and most importantly, changing "clever" to "clever at working with the law." Without all that nitty-gritty lawyer stuff, a trial would just be a philosophy debate.
Yes, but not buying an xbox at all means they make even LESS profit off it. Just because they sell at a loss doesn't mean it's better than no sell at all.