For those of you who have never been to Asia, piracy in Asia isn't like it is in the western world. People don't go download things, they buy it at a street market. The same markets which will sell counterfeit handbags, sunglasses, and watches will sell you counterfeit DVD's(I'd argue that they are indeed counterfeit as they are packaged in a way to make them look identical to the real thing, they aren't just burnt CD's in a drawer.
As these markets certainly exist in every single tourist centre, and probably quite a number of places, and the new locations which appeared when old ones were shut down were probably counted as separate markets, I have no problem believing those numbers.
Generally it's a lot easier to ban a technology than a specific application of a technology. You can't stop people from using bittorrent to do whatever they want to do with it including break the law, but you could probably stop any bittorrent client from being hosted anywhere within a country with extradition rights, and could get ISP's to check for bittorrent traffic and ban or report users to the feds.
As to your other points, a bought lawmaker is as close to making your own laws as to make no odds, and lots of things are illegal outside of the states because America wants them to be. Admitedly no government enforces laws which don't benefit it's citizens more than is convenient(for instance see the fact that pretty well every dvd player outside region one is region free despite the fact that this is not technically legal in most of those countries).
In iTune's defense, Weird Al signed a bad contract. He doesn't seem to have predicted that on-line sales were going to be big so the relevant part of his contract is pretty awful. When more artists realize that this is a big thing they'll start negotiating decent contracts. Then again there's also something to be said for the idea that even if you make less per song with iTunes you might sell more songs and so even out in the end anyway.
The gold farmers only exist because people want to buy gold from them. If people stopped buying gold/items, and/or the game was designed so that it was unecessary, then you wouldn't have gold farmers.
That said the only reason half the stuff is affordable is because the gold farmers farm the item while the rest of us are having fun.
Well just to put another view point on here. We have a 14 year old kid who is exhibiting the following behaviour:
1) Staying up all night(hands up anyone who didn't do this at 14).
2) Disobeying his parents(see above).
3) Doesn't want to attend family functions(see above).
4) Is sullen and anti-social when dealing with his family(see above).
5) Skipping school(this isn't something that everyone does, but it's not that uncommon, and seemingly he either got a note from his mother, or hasn't done it terribly often as you don't have to miss all that much school before they start getting the police involved these days).
So we have a 14 year old boy, who is exhibiting relatively normal behavior for a 14 year old boy(if he was spending all that time with his friends in real life he wouldn't be considered a friend addict). Is seemingly capable of paying for the game himself, and whose behavior has not seemingly caused any serious problems to his ability to function within his life(ie he's still doing as well in school as before, this being the largest metric of success in a 14 year old).
From where I see so long as the "skipping school" is restriced to the occasional "playing sick" which ever kid does, we don't actually have any business criticizing him. If his parents aren't happy with his behavior then they can deal with it.
He's just your regular garden variety geek, which from the sounds of things you were too, so until and unless he actually starts hurting himself, keep your nose where it belongs and deal with your own problems.
Users don't run as non admin in XP because you can't actually run XP as non admin because unlike a unix system there is essentially no way of doing userspace modifications. To do pretty much anything you need admin rights. If Vista alters this people will run it as non admin if it doesn't they won't.
Re:What's the copy protection like?
on
Prey Review
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· Score: 1
Am I the only one who still wonders why they do this crap? No copy protection(I don't count things like WoW which work by associating a key with an account and are on-line only) ever developed has ever stopped the game from being pirated, usually before official release. So why do they bother. The best form I ever saw was the old way of having symbols in the manual, less effective now that we have access to really nice scanners and printers, but at least as effective as securerom and whatnot, and I'm sure there's a way to do it which makes scanning harder as opposed to this silly crap. Of course that would involve writing manuals again, but still.
A man who created a game, which, from all accounts, is a complete and direct rip off of Diablo 2, and which most of reviews have given relatively poor scores, is complaining because a game which revolutionized its genre is beating it sales wise.
There is no story, TQ is yet another Diablo rip off, and from what I've read it's not even a particularly good one. None of these games ever do well because everything they do Blizzard already did, but better.
As to his general argument, I play WoW, and I buy a lot fewer games, but I buy a lot fewer games because they cost $100 here and a very large percentage of them are crap. For me, it's much more cost effective to pay $20/month to play a game I know I'm going to enjoy, and which I can play at pretty much any time for however long I want to play it, than to pay $100 every 3 months trying to find a game which isn't a crappy console rip off, unoriginal, poorly coded, or in some other way unsatisfactory. I get more value for money out of WoW than I would out of buying more regular games, so I play WoW.
The reason Kobe Bryant got sexual assault instead of rape is that he wasn't yet convicted. If he'd had sex with the girl and they could prove it he'd be automatically guilty and the mother would be using "rape", because when you don't have to worry about defamation, you use much more emotionally impacting words in your frivelous lawsuit.
Might I point out that the only thing we know about what he did was that they didn't have sex, and we only know this because in the US if he had sex with her he'd be charged with rape and not sexual assault.
In the US sex with a minor is a statutory crime(hence statutory rape). This means that you are guilty of it merely by having been proven to have commited the act, there are no extenuating circumstances.
Therefor we know that he didn't have sex with her(or that she was consenting, is still consenting and won't testify against him). As he's not being charged with attempted rape we can probably even presume he didn't come very close to commiting said act.
Now we've got down to sexual assault, which can be pretty much anything from innapropriate touching, upward. That's probably very questionable behaviour, but not really all that unexpected on a date, particularly if they knew each other for a while.
All we really know in this case is that a 19 year old tried to date a 14 year old. While I personally think this is probably wrong, I also know that if he'd been 17 it would have been perfectly legal, even though she'd still be 14. She knew he was a high school senior on the football team(and it's not totally unheard of for guys on the football team to have been held back either for educational reasons or by parents who want them to have a size advantage), doesn't sound like too much of a lie to me. He didn't just abduct her off the street, and he seems(based on the levels of crime involved) to have let her go without too much of a fuss. So while he's probably a bit of an idiot, he's not exactly scum of the earth material.
Well first off I'd like everyone who never did anything ridiculous in Uni to raise their hands. I can think of at least a dozen myself, and that's only the ones I can specifically remember. I'm sure I'm not alone even on slashdot, home of many guys with even less of a social life than I had in those days. Now, seven years later, I almost never get drunk or even consume more than a glass of wine, I'm not the same person I was then and most people aren't.
Then there's the "thinking ahead to your future" line. Personally as I get older I've discovered that more and more of what I thought was important for my future really isn't. A lot of the things I thought would assure my future didn't, and a lot of the things I thought would destroy it wouldn't have. No one knows what their future will be.
Where I live, rubbing alcohol(at least anything with a greater than 60% purity) actually is restricted. You can't buy it in a pharmacy here. Not because you can make anything out of it, but because idiots drink it. It's inconvenient and meant that I've had to use acetone for things I would ordinarily use isopropyl alcohol for, but it's not the end of the world and neither is having to restrict yourself to buying only a couple of boxes of cough medicine at once.
Probably wouldn't work actually. Tech based mmorpg's don't tend to do terribly well, there have been quite a number of them, and the closest thing to a successful model is star wars galaxies, and there are a lot more star wars geeks than starcraft geeks. Even then it's not all that successful, and they just retooled it to try and make it more profitable, at the expense apparently of what made it fun to play in the first place.
The second thing is that in starcraft the racial style was just too different for an MMO. You could probably do humans and protoss, though you'd be seriously limited in the classes you could choose, but what would you do for zerg? How do you reflect a swarm race in an MMO?
EA is a publisher, sort of like Interplay was. They used to make their own games, and possibly still do, but the vast majority of their titles are developed externally, same is true of Microsoft, and possibly Sony. To the best of my knowledge no Blizzard game has ever been released from a third party developer(according to TFA, Blizzard North was separate when they were making Diablo, but not when it was released).
I think the point is that you aren't who they made the unlockable content for.
They made the unlockable content for the young guy who spends most of his expendable income(and at that age that's a pretty high percentage of your income) on games. It's like everything else the males 18-25 bracket is what they want.
Of course you could argue that while a 30 or 40 year old, might only play two games a year, that 30 or 40 year old is probably at least five times as likely to actually purchase said games than a 20 year old is to purchase all the games he plays, but that would involve the industry admitting it can't legislate piracy and starting to work towards steps to positively motivate games not to do it anymore, but hey, it could happen.
That said of course when a marketing person asks me to redo their word templates because they don't know how it pisses me right off. That's their job, not mine, to be honest I have almost zero advanced knowledge of the office suite because I don't do anything that uses those features.
Nah, the fiddlers are the ones who go on windows update themselves and put on untested updates and tank their systems(true story happened, had to systematically roll back patches and applications till I could uninstall this thing). Not only that he did it on a shared computer as well as his own and made everyone elses life miserable.
Anything else is superfluous. They don't need to know it and most of them don't want to know it. If organizations provide adequate training on new applications that should be all this shouldn't be a problem.
Lots of people even on slashdot don't know how to rebuild their car's engine, but yet people expect that regular ordinary people should be able to build a PC from scratch and install an OS. Lots of people don't know lots of things, but not knowing something you don't need to know isn't the end of the world.
That basically boils down to, surfing the web, checking e-mail, composing basic documents, doing basic work with a spreadsheet, putting together a presentation, how to touch type, and whatever you need to do for your job.
Astonishingly enough this is pretty much exactly what they teach in schools. It might also be helpful to be able to install basic software and even some basic hardware(like a mouse, keyboard, printer), but that's not really necessary for everyone to know.
As much as we might think otherwise, for most people computers are tools not a puzzle which needs to be worked out, or perhaps more precisely collections of tools. You're literate with a hammer if you know how to hit things with it, and you can be literate with a hammer without having any idea how to use an arc welder, or even a screwdriver.
You don't have to be computer literate, you have to be literate in the parts of the computer you use.
Don't be afraid. If you don't know how to do something, poke around. You probably won't break anything.
Don't you dare tell people this, they not only can break things, they quite frequently do, over and over and over again. Then they call me and ask me to fix things which wouldn't have been broken in the first place if they didn't treat their PC's like a toy.
Anyone who has worked in IT support knows damned well that an idiot who can't turn the thing on is better than a fiddler. Idiots don't try to "fix" things which aren't broken, idiots don't make my life miserable. Let em fiddle with their own PC's and leave mine alone, it's bad enough that everything on them is 3 years out of date because the managers are stuck in the stone age, I don't need them installing iTunes on them as well.
Did I not say that he ought to have kept it a bit more low key. We also don't really know what was sent in either direction. Was her e-mail explicit? How explicit was his? Almost anything can be sexual harrassment if it's not welcome, and obviously it wasn't deemed to be inappropriate in and of itselfi as the story contains no disciplinary action from the man. I would suggest that it was probably reasonably tame if he didn't get fired anyway, or that the original e-mail was pretty much a penthouse letter.
Only on slashdot could anyone be surprised that a man responded to an attractive woman flirting with him. Personally if he's single then he'd have been a dumbass not to(though it might have been more appropriate to keep the physical evidence lower key).
The problem with your theory is that it's part of the job of parents to both teach knowledge and prevent at least some basic mistakes. True you have to let your kids learn some things the hard way(particularly as they get older and for some reason particularly with interpersonal relationships), but it's also your job as a parent to prevent them from doing things like sticking their finger in the pretty flame or in the power socket or drinking the bottle of bleech.
The reason why human children are cared for by their parents for so much longer than other animals isn't because we have some sort of wierd ideas about what parents should do, it's because we're capable of having those ideas. Human brains are very complicated, moreso than at least most of the animal kingdom, they take a long time to properly develop. I can't remember the exact age, but it takes several years for children to even become aware of the feelings of others(theory of mind), let alone things like abstract thought.
Maybe when parents tell their children to "act their age" they're asking them to "shut up and do what I tell you" and sometimes that's just for their own convenience(too much noise), but for the most part the reason good parents want their children to listen to them and accept what they have to say is to spare them pain. Part of growing up is making your own mistakes, but you can't blame parents for wanting to spare their kids as much pain as possible.
I also disagree with your hounding assessment, a 6 year old isn't capable of making the decision not to do their homework. They don't know what the long term consequences are, and aren't capable of understanding them. No, on average, missing one assignment isn't going to seriously affect your life, but what about 5, what about a big test? I know that even when I was in high school I didn't really understand how what I was doing would really affect my life, you can't know that sort of thing without experience, and so people with experience try to help those without it to make the right decisions.
and for the most part I think that kids hating school is more to do with the school system than with parents.
I confess I don't go to the theatre too much(I also don't pirate movies anymore and haven't done so in quite a while).
I still watch movies, but mostly I rent them, and I'm not alone, wanna know why?
I rent them because except on tuesday nights or during the day on weekdays it costs me $15 to go to a movie. A new release costs me about $8 to rent or about $30 to buy. Now you may say, what about the big screen, what about dolby 5.1. Well that's fine and dandy if you're going alone, but if I take my girlfriend that's $30(enough to buy the dvd and watch it forever). For a family of four(which I admitedly don't have) even with kids prices(about $9) you're looking at about $50, without food or drink. For your average family renting a dvd saves at minimum $42, and you can watch it in the comfort of your own home. Throw in the fact that most movies lately are crap, and you can see why people don't go.
Movie theatre revenues here are going down the drain as more and more people are deciding it's just too expensive.
Microsoft bundles IE with Windows because you have to put some sort of web browser there and it's cheaper in the long run for them to make their own that to be reliant on a third party for such a vital component.
In order for the general consumer to be able to make the choice between available free and non free web browsers, something has to be bundled with Windows to allow them to obtain whatever they choose.
The fact that the average consumer will quite happily sit with IE because it's already there isn't Microsofts fault.
What is contrary to common assumptions is that there's anything there at all. Most theories basically said the whole area would be a denuded wasteland for a rather long time. The presence of animals which are healthy enough to function and reproduce is, considering what went on there and is still going on there, pretty astonishing.
Slashdot Mirror
As these markets certainly exist in every single tourist centre, and probably quite a number of places, and the new locations which appeared when old ones were shut down were probably counted as separate markets, I have no problem believing those numbers.
As to your other points, a bought lawmaker is as close to making your own laws as to make no odds, and lots of things are illegal outside of the states because America wants them to be. Admitedly no government enforces laws which don't benefit it's citizens more than is convenient(for instance see the fact that pretty well every dvd player outside region one is region free despite the fact that this is not technically legal in most of those countries).
In iTune's defense, Weird Al signed a bad contract. He doesn't seem to have predicted that on-line sales were going to be big so the relevant part of his contract is pretty awful. When more artists realize that this is a big thing they'll start negotiating decent contracts. Then again there's also something to be said for the idea that even if you make less per song with iTunes you might sell more songs and so even out in the end anyway.
That said the only reason half the stuff is affordable is because the gold farmers farm the item while the rest of us are having fun.
1) Staying up all night(hands up anyone who didn't do this at 14). 2) Disobeying his parents(see above). 3) Doesn't want to attend family functions(see above). 4) Is sullen and anti-social when dealing with his family(see above). 5) Skipping school(this isn't something that everyone does, but it's not that uncommon, and seemingly he either got a note from his mother, or hasn't done it terribly often as you don't have to miss all that much school before they start getting the police involved these days).
So we have a 14 year old boy, who is exhibiting relatively normal behavior for a 14 year old boy(if he was spending all that time with his friends in real life he wouldn't be considered a friend addict). Is seemingly capable of paying for the game himself, and whose behavior has not seemingly caused any serious problems to his ability to function within his life(ie he's still doing as well in school as before, this being the largest metric of success in a 14 year old).
From where I see so long as the "skipping school" is restriced to the occasional "playing sick" which ever kid does, we don't actually have any business criticizing him. If his parents aren't happy with his behavior then they can deal with it.
He's just your regular garden variety geek, which from the sounds of things you were too, so until and unless he actually starts hurting himself, keep your nose where it belongs and deal with your own problems.
Users don't run as non admin in XP because you can't actually run XP as non admin because unlike a unix system there is essentially no way of doing userspace modifications. To do pretty much anything you need admin rights. If Vista alters this people will run it as non admin if it doesn't they won't.
Am I the only one who still wonders why they do this crap? No copy protection(I don't count things like WoW which work by associating a key with an account and are on-line only) ever developed has ever stopped the game from being pirated, usually before official release. So why do they bother. The best form I ever saw was the old way of having symbols in the manual, less effective now that we have access to really nice scanners and printers, but at least as effective as securerom and whatnot, and I'm sure there's a way to do it which makes scanning harder as opposed to this silly crap. Of course that would involve writing manuals again, but still.
There is no story, TQ is yet another Diablo rip off, and from what I've read it's not even a particularly good one. None of these games ever do well because everything they do Blizzard already did, but better.
As to his general argument, I play WoW, and I buy a lot fewer games, but I buy a lot fewer games because they cost $100 here and a very large percentage of them are crap. For me, it's much more cost effective to pay $20/month to play a game I know I'm going to enjoy, and which I can play at pretty much any time for however long I want to play it, than to pay $100 every 3 months trying to find a game which isn't a crappy console rip off, unoriginal, poorly coded, or in some other way unsatisfactory. I get more value for money out of WoW than I would out of buying more regular games, so I play WoW.
The reason Kobe Bryant got sexual assault instead of rape is that he wasn't yet convicted. If he'd had sex with the girl and they could prove it he'd be automatically guilty and the mother would be using "rape", because when you don't have to worry about defamation, you use much more emotionally impacting words in your frivelous lawsuit.
In the US sex with a minor is a statutory crime(hence statutory rape). This means that you are guilty of it merely by having been proven to have commited the act, there are no extenuating circumstances.
Therefor we know that he didn't have sex with her(or that she was consenting, is still consenting and won't testify against him). As he's not being charged with attempted rape we can probably even presume he didn't come very close to commiting said act.
Now we've got down to sexual assault, which can be pretty much anything from innapropriate touching, upward. That's probably very questionable behaviour, but not really all that unexpected on a date, particularly if they knew each other for a while.
All we really know in this case is that a 19 year old tried to date a 14 year old. While I personally think this is probably wrong, I also know that if he'd been 17 it would have been perfectly legal, even though she'd still be 14. She knew he was a high school senior on the football team(and it's not totally unheard of for guys on the football team to have been held back either for educational reasons or by parents who want them to have a size advantage), doesn't sound like too much of a lie to me. He didn't just abduct her off the street, and he seems(based on the levels of crime involved) to have let her go without too much of a fuss. So while he's probably a bit of an idiot, he's not exactly scum of the earth material.
Then there's the "thinking ahead to your future" line. Personally as I get older I've discovered that more and more of what I thought was important for my future really isn't. A lot of the things I thought would assure my future didn't, and a lot of the things I thought would destroy it wouldn't have. No one knows what their future will be.
Where I live, rubbing alcohol(at least anything with a greater than 60% purity) actually is restricted. You can't buy it in a pharmacy here. Not because you can make anything out of it, but because idiots drink it. It's inconvenient and meant that I've had to use acetone for things I would ordinarily use isopropyl alcohol for, but it's not the end of the world and neither is having to restrict yourself to buying only a couple of boxes of cough medicine at once.
The second thing is that in starcraft the racial style was just too different for an MMO. You could probably do humans and protoss, though you'd be seriously limited in the classes you could choose, but what would you do for zerg? How do you reflect a swarm race in an MMO?
EA is a publisher, sort of like Interplay was. They used to make their own games, and possibly still do, but the vast majority of their titles are developed externally, same is true of Microsoft, and possibly Sony. To the best of my knowledge no Blizzard game has ever been released from a third party developer(according to TFA, Blizzard North was separate when they were making Diablo, but not when it was released).
They made the unlockable content for the young guy who spends most of his expendable income(and at that age that's a pretty high percentage of your income) on games. It's like everything else the males 18-25 bracket is what they want.
Of course you could argue that while a 30 or 40 year old, might only play two games a year, that 30 or 40 year old is probably at least five times as likely to actually purchase said games than a 20 year old is to purchase all the games he plays, but that would involve the industry admitting it can't legislate piracy and starting to work towards steps to positively motivate games not to do it anymore, but hey, it could happen.
That said of course when a marketing person asks me to redo their word templates because they don't know how it pisses me right off. That's their job, not mine, to be honest I have almost zero advanced knowledge of the office suite because I don't do anything that uses those features.
Nah, the fiddlers are the ones who go on windows update themselves and put on untested updates and tank their systems(true story happened, had to systematically roll back patches and applications till I could uninstall this thing). Not only that he did it on a shared computer as well as his own and made everyone elses life miserable.
Lots of people even on slashdot don't know how to rebuild their car's engine, but yet people expect that regular ordinary people should be able to build a PC from scratch and install an OS. Lots of people don't know lots of things, but not knowing something you don't need to know isn't the end of the world.
That basically boils down to, surfing the web, checking e-mail, composing basic documents, doing basic work with a spreadsheet, putting together a presentation, how to touch type, and whatever you need to do for your job.
Astonishingly enough this is pretty much exactly what they teach in schools. It might also be helpful to be able to install basic software and even some basic hardware(like a mouse, keyboard, printer), but that's not really necessary for everyone to know.
As much as we might think otherwise, for most people computers are tools not a puzzle which needs to be worked out, or perhaps more precisely collections of tools. You're literate with a hammer if you know how to hit things with it, and you can be literate with a hammer without having any idea how to use an arc welder, or even a screwdriver.
You don't have to be computer literate, you have to be literate in the parts of the computer you use.
Don't you dare tell people this, they not only can break things, they quite frequently do, over and over and over again. Then they call me and ask me to fix things which wouldn't have been broken in the first place if they didn't treat their PC's like a toy.
Anyone who has worked in IT support knows damned well that an idiot who can't turn the thing on is better than a fiddler. Idiots don't try to "fix" things which aren't broken, idiots don't make my life miserable. Let em fiddle with their own PC's and leave mine alone, it's bad enough that everything on them is 3 years out of date because the managers are stuck in the stone age, I don't need them installing iTunes on them as well.
Did I not say that he ought to have kept it a bit more low key. We also don't really know what was sent in either direction. Was her e-mail explicit? How explicit was his? Almost anything can be sexual harrassment if it's not welcome, and obviously it wasn't deemed to be inappropriate in and of itselfi as the story contains no disciplinary action from the man. I would suggest that it was probably reasonably tame if he didn't get fired anyway, or that the original e-mail was pretty much a penthouse letter.
Only on slashdot could anyone be surprised that a man responded to an attractive woman flirting with him. Personally if he's single then he'd have been a dumbass not to(though it might have been more appropriate to keep the physical evidence lower key).
The reason why human children are cared for by their parents for so much longer than other animals isn't because we have some sort of wierd ideas about what parents should do, it's because we're capable of having those ideas. Human brains are very complicated, moreso than at least most of the animal kingdom, they take a long time to properly develop. I can't remember the exact age, but it takes several years for children to even become aware of the feelings of others(theory of mind), let alone things like abstract thought.
Maybe when parents tell their children to "act their age" they're asking them to "shut up and do what I tell you" and sometimes that's just for their own convenience(too much noise), but for the most part the reason good parents want their children to listen to them and accept what they have to say is to spare them pain. Part of growing up is making your own mistakes, but you can't blame parents for wanting to spare their kids as much pain as possible.
I also disagree with your hounding assessment, a 6 year old isn't capable of making the decision not to do their homework. They don't know what the long term consequences are, and aren't capable of understanding them. No, on average, missing one assignment isn't going to seriously affect your life, but what about 5, what about a big test? I know that even when I was in high school I didn't really understand how what I was doing would really affect my life, you can't know that sort of thing without experience, and so people with experience try to help those without it to make the right decisions. and for the most part I think that kids hating school is more to do with the school system than with parents.
I still watch movies, but mostly I rent them, and I'm not alone, wanna know why?
I rent them because except on tuesday nights or during the day on weekdays it costs me $15 to go to a movie. A new release costs me about $8 to rent or about $30 to buy. Now you may say, what about the big screen, what about dolby 5.1. Well that's fine and dandy if you're going alone, but if I take my girlfriend that's $30(enough to buy the dvd and watch it forever). For a family of four(which I admitedly don't have) even with kids prices(about $9) you're looking at about $50, without food or drink. For your average family renting a dvd saves at minimum $42, and you can watch it in the comfort of your own home. Throw in the fact that most movies lately are crap, and you can see why people don't go.
Movie theatre revenues here are going down the drain as more and more people are deciding it's just too expensive.
In order for the general consumer to be able to make the choice between available free and non free web browsers, something has to be bundled with Windows to allow them to obtain whatever they choose.
The fact that the average consumer will quite happily sit with IE because it's already there isn't Microsofts fault.
What is contrary to common assumptions is that there's anything there at all. Most theories basically said the whole area would be a denuded wasteland for a rather long time. The presence of animals which are healthy enough to function and reproduce is, considering what went on there and is still going on there, pretty astonishing.