"However, companies have an obligation to make products that are safe."
Just like the weapons, fossil fuels, car and knife industries!
There are risks involved when using most products in a manner that was not intended, driving a car and drinking coffee is not safe for reasons other than 3rd degree burns and cannot be considered as intended use. It is perfectly reasonable to serve near-boiling temperature coffee (what is generally considered "fresh") and let the customer decide when to start consuming the beverage. This lawsuit is ridiculous, and this posting is as off topic as a panda in switzerland so don't be afraid to mod it such. I am not a lawyer either.
But then what are you paying for if you're not paying for the music? The price of a starbuck cup is too high for the actual content (few choices of coffee, and the one choice is kind of bad at that), there is no cleaning of cup cost or service charge applicable (all preparation is behind the counter), there is a fixed very low price for the actual cup, etc.
So in effect, aren't you paying out of your ears for the atmosphere? Isn't the music a major part of that?
My educated guess is Superman punches Batman in the face during a superfriends reunion at a bar (open, free drinks for everyone) and starts to sing:...Batman smells, Robin Laid an egg... after which Batman runs home and washes his cape and returns with a baseball bat, asking around for Superman who incidentally saw Batman returning, then ran in to the mens room and changed clothes into Clark Kent.
The next day Clark wakes up with a hangover and Batwoman and realises he is full of regrets. Batman eventually kills Sherlock Holmes after confusing him with Superman the same night.
The final script will be slightly fleshed out with further musical numbers by Danny Elfman but this is essentially the story of the movie according to my sources.
Laws regarding Hate and slander are generally covering only such instances where people are attacked for their beliefs or doings, not what they actually believe in.
As a religious symbol, madonna the biblical figure, jesus and his fathers etc. are simply mythical creatures and there is really nothing upsetting about setting these in new environments, putting jesus in bondage is in effect no different from putting santa claus in a porn movie. It is just free speech and expired copyrights at work! IANAL but hey, they aren't all that great themselves.
I live in L.A. and I don't drive. I walk or bicycle. Sometimes I go with other people in cars when we need to get somewhere. And there are plenty of buses to take people from any point in L.A. to any other point in L.A. People who live here drive far too much and they whine all day how they depend on their cars.
If TiVO was voice controlled, all programs would start with a clear voice saying "stop recording" during the program content and "resume recording" whenever there was a commercial break.
It might even get emotional and stop suggesting programs you like (and maybe suggest ones you don't) after you scream "stupid Tivo" enough times after it stopped recording the show right at the punchline of the last skit.
Voice Control isn't my idea of reliable solution. Imagine the Voice Controlled Family Van for reasons why I don't believe in VC.
Unless you have something like an HDTV already, you just won't get a decent picture.. And how much text do you need to display for a music station anyway? Set up your computer so that the fonts are easily readable on the TV instead of trying to make the pc picture look good on the TV... Any old TV card should do for that purpose.
I wouldn't recommend playing PC games on a TV though (which might be tempting if you already have the PC hooked up) unless you have a much better TV card than me.
Of course I know telemarketers are people too, but they are bad people and deserve the abuse I give them. Unless they find other jobs there is no reason why they wouldn't be verbally abused and looked down on.
I'm sorry, but they are down there with physical professional torturers. It may not be their fault and it may be the result of circustances beyond their control but I'd rather they picked up a social security check. I'd pitch in a dollar a month for that.
The solution is simple - refuse telemarketing jobs WITHOUT EXCEPTION AND WITHOUT ANY REASONING TO THE CONTRARY.
Ok, the reason this might work in Sweden is that the postal service has credibility, that people in Sweden care more about the environment (paper mills smell like hell) than other peoples money and that the postal service has all the address records anyway, kind of like social services in the US so there is no real privacy threat other than there already is.
The reason this won't work is that if you stick a note with "no advertising" on your mailbox you don't get any junk mail (direct advertising at least), plus you can collect the junk mail over time and stuff it in any office of the company that sent it for them to recycle.
The Fixed Point solution :)
on
Pet Bugs?
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· Score: 0
using the smallest kept bit (kept==not truncated after rounding) to determine whether to round.5 up or down is probably ok for statistics and such, but for a fixed point number where you want to make an integer out of a 12:4 (bits) and the value is something like %11000 after a multiplication operation (with a down-shift) it is much more probable than not (1/16 in this case) that what was removed was exactly zero, so rounding the fixed point ".5" up in all cases is more likely to end up closer than doing it in every second case. I guess you could also use the 4 (in this case) least significant kept bits as a random seed to determine whether you go up or go down.
But if those mathematicians want it some other way they don't need to know what my rendering code does under the surface;)
The only good way to round is to jsut pretend to the user you're rounding and use "%.2f" when you display the result and let sprintf worry about the rules.
IANAL, but assuming that I am a very evil person by nature, and sometimes enjoy writing code that directly harms my employer and my colleagues and as a result I would get fired and found a new job, can I then use the same (rewritten of course) code if the urge falls upon me in my new job? Sort of "Stupid Property" (SP), or do the company I worked for own the rights to their own damnation?
This also applies to a new cult for which I am directing a new bible (the old one got suicidal and the royalty payments have since started to dry up) so I have some personal interest in this as well.
Why are you so much against simplifying counting?
on
Greenbacks No More
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· Score: 0
Finding a twenty of world currency in your wallet: find the corresponding colour.
Finding a twenty of republicland currency: while holding the wallet really close so as not to be robbed, carefully pull out bill by bill without anyone noticing the total amount you're carrying until you find one with the correct number in the corner.
Bah, this is like explaining tradition and cultural values to a republican...
I probably shouldn't be programming 3D videogames since I hate touching hardware chips and much prefer the solutions of Nintendo ("OpenGL-like is the only rendering interface") to the solutions of Sony and Microsoft, but why actually making this shit high-level? Ok for the purpose of writing some sort of optimizer but not for the rendering stuff as I will eventually have to suffer through using something like this.
No, I don't think this language will kill off all the other graphics-wannabe-languages but I think it will join them. Why can't consumers start buying games based on the physics, behaviours, AI, collision and all the other things that are fun to work with instead of basing their purchases purely on graphics?
Besides from my ranting, what does it actually do apart from setting up the material settings before you do the rendering? And isn't that just stuffing parameters into some registers anyway?
Is there some sort of stand for it or are you supposed to hold it up yourself when you're working with it? I am aware you could hang it on the wall but would anyone really be able to work that way? It seems great if all you do is go places and push buttons with a stylus or your fingers but how can you write and read of it? How about the viewing angle? I am all for browsing the web in the tv couch but any old laptop with wifi seems more appropriate for doing that..
Not quite... For EA, they would need to arrange their own fees in addition to microsoft's $50/year to profit from the online portion.
It makes a lot more sense for EA to bring a number of titles online at once and start their own server grid (just not ea.com again).
The point is that for a game that is not made by microsoft you will pay the same for that game per month whether you play it on PS2 or xbox. The $50 is just a microsoft server fee, the publishers will have to charge on top of that.
There is a slight possibility that the monthly fee will be marginally smaller because microsoft is running the servers, but it may also be much higher, because microsoft is running the servers. The point is microsoft is not sharing the xboxlive money with other publishers.
The only differance if you plan to play either console online for 1 year is that you get a headset for free from microsoft, and get to play microsoft games online for free (possibly). That doesn't mean that sony won't make an online game with no monthly fees (less bandwidth, using smaller resources from fee servers).
Right now you can't tell what the total price is, but if you plan to enjoy playing games online, might I recommend a PC?
Re:Decrease length of time copyright applies
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 0
Code may well stay functional for 100 years, not that any code has had any chance to do so yet but that does not mean it won't.
Music is in many cases obsolete the _next_year_ and besides, far too much music are copying other sets of music still being protected, the margins of what is protectable in the music industry is simply shrinking.
Literary works are not deteriorating quite as quick as the individuality of a piece of music, but with the amount of copied-off-stories it is sometimes getting hard to distinguish one low budget novel from another. And why on earth would an author's offspring have any rights to their parents work? That simply does not work, as it gives advantages to people not involved in the work.
The major reason why long copyright periods is bad however is the fact that much of IP is held by the publishing companies, which means that any music, book or software is mainly owned by corporations who don't give shit about future innovations unless they bring actual profits.
My personal opinion is that noone should be able to claim copyright unless that person can also provide the material which is copyrighted, for a charge or not. Any drawing or painting should reward royalties to the author but the author should not be allowed to completely move a work off the public if the copyright is to stick.
The simple reason for that is that without a reference product readily available, you're an easy target for a copyright suit even though you could not by any means have known about the product of infringements.
(I am not a lawyer, but I complain by means of logic which must in any reasonable culture override the law. My logic may be flawed (!logic) which may be argued with freely. I provide this thought free of charge to the public so that I may eventually copyright it under my own set of laws if I so wish).
as soon as the xnet thingy is on, they will create a critical update that will take up most of your harddisk space, and radically change your dashboard into red colours instead of green and it will change all logos to read "XPbox" and all users will have to sign up to ms passport to play any game so they can be charged for the hour of non-online games as well to subsidize the development of future office products.
I'd say it is only possible to lose much per console if you have a small installed user base, if you sold lots, then you'd obviously lose more:)
By the way, doesn't it seem kind of suspicious that they claim to make up the differance in loss per machine in game royalties?
Assume that Microsoft makes $7 per sold game (That's about 15% - which would leave about 21% each to retailer, distributor, publisher/developer, seems a bit much really). In order to make up a $150 loss per machine (assuming the cost to M$ is $350 which seems low for the sum of the price of the parts) or that for each sold console, the average number of [full price] games sold would be over 21!!!
Now, I'm no fancy analyst(tm) (IANAA) but it seems to me that shelling out over $1000 in games for one console is more than the average xbox owner is ready to do.. Assuming the average xbox owner isn't a complete gaming freak or really, really rich.
I think the way to make console hardware money is to perhaps sell at a loss _initially_ but when there's plenty of games and R&D costs have been covered to actually make a profit from the hardware. I suspect in my dark mind that the PS2 has been profitable at the $299 price point for a while now. I doubt the xbox will be profitable even at $299 for some time...
Unless you work on paper, the CMYK difference is not detectable since computer monitors display RGB. RGB has true blackness in definition (zero _is_ a number). Filtering the CMYK components out of an RGB image is not hard, it is similar to HSV or YUV color picking but tweaking the result so that it ends up in a printable manner is, and also needs to be aligned to the Pantone palette for quality quantizing.
What RGB is missing is some colours that you can get from CMYK, but again those are not visible on a computer screen. Unless someone invents a digital screen with a subtractive color scheme fitted exactly to CMYK specs you may have a point, but right now all you have is RGB filtered as CMYK until you print it on paper. CMYK is a virtual palettizing tool, not an actual improvement to the software graphics editing environment.
I am a professional graphics programmer by the way.
Looking at the pictures with the minidisc and comparing a quarter to a CD, I've come to realise my quarters are the wrong size. Is there an authority I should report my obviously counterfeit quarters to? Can I still play arcade games with the new quarters? If I buy music on the quarter sized discs, can I trick an arcade game to accept it?
Just making a point, ok. Can't really point to any public documents since they don't gain anything from publishing these deals. What people commonly believe is one thing, what you might be sued over later is another.
Sorry, I can't do that from my position, but it is common in Los Angeles with the movie industry. Generally, if you create something and broadcast it you're better off asking permission (and possibly offer a licensing solution if permission is not given) than risk a lawsuit after the fact. Many of these buildings have corporate trademarks written on top of them, some even use the buildings themselves as part of their trademark.
Slashdot Mirror
"However, companies have an obligation to make products that are safe."
Just like the weapons, fossil fuels, car and knife industries!
There are risks involved when using most products in a manner that was not intended, driving a car and drinking coffee is not safe for reasons other than 3rd degree burns and cannot be considered as intended use. It is perfectly reasonable to serve near-boiling temperature coffee (what is generally considered "fresh") and let the customer decide when to start consuming the beverage. This lawsuit is ridiculous, and this posting is as off topic as a panda in switzerland so don't be afraid to mod it such. I am not a lawyer either.
You mean like a Nintendo 64 or something?
But then what are you paying for if you're not paying for the music? The price of a starbuck cup is too high for the actual content (few choices of coffee, and the one choice is kind of bad at that), there is no cleaning of cup cost or service charge applicable (all preparation is behind the counter), there is a fixed very low price for the actual cup, etc.
So in effect, aren't you paying out of your ears for the atmosphere? Isn't the music a major part of that?
My educated guess is Superman punches Batman in the face during a superfriends reunion at a bar (open, free drinks for everyone) and starts to sing: ...Batman smells, Robin Laid an egg... after which Batman runs home and washes his cape and returns with a baseball bat, asking around for Superman who incidentally saw Batman returning, then ran in to the mens room and changed clothes into Clark Kent.
The next day Clark wakes up with a hangover and Batwoman and realises he is full of regrets. Batman eventually kills Sherlock Holmes after confusing him with Superman the same night.
The final script will be slightly fleshed out with further musical numbers by Danny Elfman but this is essentially the story of the movie according to my sources.
Laws regarding Hate and slander are generally covering only such instances where people are attacked for their beliefs or doings, not what they actually believe in.
As a religious symbol, madonna the biblical figure, jesus and his fathers etc. are simply mythical creatures and there is really nothing upsetting about setting these in new environments, putting jesus in bondage is in effect no different from putting santa claus in a porn movie. It is just free speech and expired copyrights at work! IANAL but hey, they aren't all that great themselves.
I live in L.A. and I don't drive. I walk or bicycle. Sometimes I go with other people in cars when we need to get somewhere. And there are plenty of buses to take people from any point in L.A. to any other point in L.A. People who live here drive far too much and they whine all day how they depend on their cars.
Losers.
Yes, I'll move away soon and stop bothering you.
If TiVO was voice controlled, all programs would start with a clear voice saying "stop recording" during the program content and "resume recording" whenever there was a commercial break.
It might even get emotional and stop suggesting programs you like (and maybe suggest ones you don't) after you scream "stupid Tivo" enough times after it stopped recording the show right at the punchline of the last skit.
Voice Control isn't my idea of reliable solution. Imagine the Voice Controlled Family Van for reasons why I don't believe in VC.
Unless you have something like an HDTV already, you just won't get a decent picture.. And how much text do you need to display for a music station anyway? Set up your computer so that the fonts are easily readable on the TV instead of trying to make the pc picture look good on the TV... Any old TV card should do for that purpose.
I wouldn't recommend playing PC games on a TV though (which might be tempting if you already have the PC hooked up) unless you have a much better TV card than me.
Of course I know telemarketers are people too, but they are bad people and deserve the abuse I give them. Unless they find other jobs there is no reason why they wouldn't be verbally abused and looked down on.
I'm sorry, but they are down there with physical professional torturers. It may not be their fault and it may be the result of circustances beyond their control but I'd rather they picked up a social security check. I'd pitch in a dollar a month for that.
The solution is simple - refuse telemarketing jobs WITHOUT EXCEPTION AND WITHOUT ANY REASONING TO THE CONTRARY.
Ok, the reason this might work in Sweden is that the postal service has credibility, that people in Sweden care more about the environment (paper mills smell like hell) than other peoples money and that the postal service has all the address records anyway, kind of like social services in the US so there is no real privacy threat other than there already is.
The reason this won't work is that if you stick a note with "no advertising" on your mailbox you don't get any junk mail (direct advertising at least), plus you can collect the junk mail over time and stuff it in any office of the company that sent it for them to recycle.
using the smallest kept bit (kept==not truncated after rounding) to determine whether to round .5 up or down is probably ok for statistics and such, but for a fixed point number where you want to make an integer out of a 12:4 (bits) and the value is something like %11000 after a multiplication operation (with a down-shift) it is much more probable than not (1/16 in this case) that what was removed was exactly zero, so rounding the fixed point ".5" up in all cases is more likely to end up closer than doing it in every second case. I guess you could also use the 4 (in this case) least significant kept bits as a random seed to determine whether you go up or go down.
;)
But if those mathematicians want it some other way they don't need to know what my rendering code does under the surface
The only good way to round is to jsut pretend to the user you're rounding and use "%.2f" when you display the result and let sprintf worry about the rules.
IANAL, but assuming that I am a very evil person by nature, and sometimes enjoy writing code that directly harms my employer and my colleagues and as a result I would get fired and found a new job, can I then use the same (rewritten of course) code if the urge falls upon me in my new job? Sort of "Stupid Property" (SP), or do the company I worked for own the rights to their own damnation?
This also applies to a new cult for which I am directing a new bible (the old one got suicidal and the royalty payments have since started to dry up) so I have some personal interest in this as well.
Finding a twenty of world currency in your wallet: find the corresponding colour.
Finding a twenty of republicland currency: while holding the wallet really close so as not to be robbed, carefully pull out bill by bill without anyone noticing the total amount you're carrying until you find one with the correct number in the corner.
Bah, this is like explaining tradition and cultural values to a republican...
I probably shouldn't be programming 3D videogames since I hate touching hardware chips and much prefer the solutions of Nintendo ("OpenGL-like is the only rendering interface") to the solutions of Sony and Microsoft, but why actually making this shit high-level? Ok for the purpose of writing some sort of optimizer but not for the rendering stuff as I will eventually have to suffer through using something like this.
No, I don't think this language will kill off all the other graphics-wannabe-languages but I think it will join them. Why can't consumers start buying games based on the physics, behaviours, AI, collision and all the other things that are fun to work with instead of basing their purchases purely on graphics?
Besides from my ranting, what does it actually do apart from setting up the material settings before you do the rendering? And isn't that just stuffing parameters into some registers anyway?
Is there some sort of stand for it or are you supposed to hold it up yourself when you're working with it? I am aware you could hang it on the wall but would anyone really be able to work that way? It seems great if all you do is go places and push buttons with a stylus or your fingers but how can you write and read of it? How about the viewing angle? I am all for browsing the web in the tv couch but any old laptop with wifi seems more appropriate for doing that..
Mario Kart is great, Diddy Kong Racing is a N64 game and Donkey Kong racing is coming. But No Kong Racing could ever top Mario Kart.
Not quite... For EA, they would need to arrange their own fees in addition to microsoft's $50/year to profit from the online portion. It makes a lot more sense for EA to bring a number of titles online at once and start their own server grid (just not ea.com again).
The point is that for a game that is not made by microsoft you will pay the same for that game per month whether you play it on PS2 or xbox. The $50 is just a microsoft server fee, the publishers will have to charge on top of that.
There is a slight possibility that the monthly fee will be marginally smaller because microsoft is running the servers, but it may also be much higher, because microsoft is running the servers. The point is microsoft is not sharing the xboxlive money with other publishers.
The only differance if you plan to play either console online for 1 year is that you get a headset for free from microsoft, and get to play microsoft games online for free (possibly). That doesn't mean that sony won't make an online game with no monthly fees (less bandwidth, using smaller resources from fee servers).
Right now you can't tell what the total price is, but if you plan to enjoy playing games online, might I recommend a PC?
Code may well stay functional for 100 years, not that any code has had any chance to do so yet but that does not mean it won't. Music is in many cases obsolete the _next_year_ and besides, far too much music are copying other sets of music still being protected, the margins of what is protectable in the music industry is simply shrinking. Literary works are not deteriorating quite as quick as the individuality of a piece of music, but with the amount of copied-off-stories it is sometimes getting hard to distinguish one low budget novel from another. And why on earth would an author's offspring have any rights to their parents work? That simply does not work, as it gives advantages to people not involved in the work. The major reason why long copyright periods is bad however is the fact that much of IP is held by the publishing companies, which means that any music, book or software is mainly owned by corporations who don't give shit about future innovations unless they bring actual profits. My personal opinion is that noone should be able to claim copyright unless that person can also provide the material which is copyrighted, for a charge or not. Any drawing or painting should reward royalties to the author but the author should not be allowed to completely move a work off the public if the copyright is to stick. The simple reason for that is that without a reference product readily available, you're an easy target for a copyright suit even though you could not by any means have known about the product of infringements. (I am not a lawyer, but I complain by means of logic which must in any reasonable culture override the law. My logic may be flawed (!logic) which may be argued with freely. I provide this thought free of charge to the public so that I may eventually copyright it under my own set of laws if I so wish).
as soon as the xnet thingy is on, they will create a critical update that will take up most of your harddisk space, and radically change your dashboard into red colours instead of green and it will change all logos to read "XPbox" and all users will have to sign up to ms passport to play any game so they can be charged for the hour of non-online games as well to subsidize the development of future office products.
I'd say it is only possible to lose much per console if you have a small installed user base, if you sold lots, then you'd obviously lose more :)
By the way, doesn't it seem kind of suspicious that they claim to make up the differance in loss per machine in game royalties?
Assume that Microsoft makes $7 per sold game (That's about 15% - which would leave about 21% each to retailer, distributor, publisher/developer, seems a bit much really). In order to make up a $150 loss per machine (assuming the cost to M$ is $350 which seems low for the sum of the price of the parts) or that for each sold console, the average number of [full price] games sold would be over 21!!!
Now, I'm no fancy analyst(tm) (IANAA) but it seems to me that shelling out over $1000 in games for one console is more than the average xbox owner is ready to do.. Assuming the average xbox owner isn't a complete gaming freak or really, really rich.
I think the way to make console hardware money is to perhaps sell at a loss _initially_ but when there's plenty of games and R&D costs have been covered to actually make a profit from the hardware. I suspect in my dark mind that the PS2 has been profitable at the $299 price point for a while now. I doubt the xbox will be profitable even at $299 for some time...
Unless you work on paper, the CMYK difference is not detectable since computer monitors display RGB. RGB has true blackness in definition (zero _is_ a number). Filtering the CMYK components out of an RGB image is not hard, it is similar to HSV or YUV color picking but tweaking the result so that it ends up in a printable manner is, and also needs to be aligned to the Pantone palette for quality quantizing. What RGB is missing is some colours that you can get from CMYK, but again those are not visible on a computer screen. Unless someone invents a digital screen with a subtractive color scheme fitted exactly to CMYK specs you may have a point, but right now all you have is RGB filtered as CMYK until you print it on paper. CMYK is a virtual palettizing tool, not an actual improvement to the software graphics editing environment. I am a professional graphics programmer by the way.
Looking at the pictures with the minidisc and comparing a quarter to a CD, I've come to realise my quarters are the wrong size. Is there an authority I should report my obviously counterfeit quarters to? Can I still play arcade games with the new quarters? If I buy music on the quarter sized discs, can I trick an arcade game to accept it?
Just making a point, ok. Can't really point to any public documents since they don't gain anything from publishing these deals. What people commonly believe is one thing, what you might be sued over later is another.
Sorry, I can't do that from my position, but it is common in Los Angeles with the movie industry. Generally, if you create something and broadcast it you're better off asking permission (and possibly offer a licensing solution if permission is not given) than risk a lawsuit after the fact. Many of these buildings have corporate trademarks written on top of them, some even use the buildings themselves as part of their trademark.