I think eminem said it best.... "nobody listens to techno, so lets go"
Hmmm, if no one listens to techno, i wonder what it actually is that i'm listening to right now. Or what they were playing at the club i went to last night.
I can say for sure though that it certainly isn't Eminem.
Did you not read any of the article at all? Or did you just read every other word? He didn't accuse anyone of being a thief. He accused the recording industry of being unable to properly measure the popularity of an artist because the only metric they use is how many CDs get sold.
Well, if you like the music that a band puts out, you should buy the CD to support the band in the first place.
I d/led all the tracks from Rush's new CD, "Vapor Trails," through a P2P program a few weeks before it got released. I then went ahead and bought the CD when it was available in stores.
Insert standard gripe about how i'd rather d/l the CD and then send Rush $5 through PayPal and not have to deal with the record industry at all.
In addition to using encryption more often for genuine communication, we should have our boxen generate and mail large amounts of encrypted "junk" text designed to overwhelm government freedom-control systems.
Until your ISP decides to switch over to the charge by bandwidth used scheme.
The CNN article said it "is a lightweight among asteroids and incapable of causing damage on a global scale."
Oh really? If it hit India or Pakistan, nice little nuclear war starts before anyone can figure out what happens. Who knows how much fallout would be produced, how far it would spread, or how much damage it would do.
Or it hits China. They're pretty nervous with us aiming out nuclear weapons at them and all, so maybe they panic, launch at us, we launch at them, and there's a _big_ nuclear war.
Or worst case scenario, it hits the US. The next day we see in the newspaper:
"President Bush announced this morning that the destruction of New York City yesterday was determined to have been caused by a terrorist asteroid. In accordance with his policy that "those who harbor terrorists will be treated like terrorists," President Bush has declared war on Mother Nature. Immediate retaliatory drilling will begin in Alaska, soon to be followed by strip-mining and clear cutting action in areas yet to be named. He has also placed a bill before congress to rollback emissions standards to 1965 levels."
Deteriorate? It could stay the exact same and hit us the next time around. If it turns out that this asteroid is the only object in the entire solar system that is exactly synchronized with the earth/moon system's orbit around the sun, then we need to start checking for which alien intelligence diguised a space probe as an asteroid to examine us with.
Moreover, the Laws weren't "fuzzy", they were expressed by positron potentials, so the robot that went mad on Mars did so because potential of very weak order (Second Law) equated the very strong potential (for this specific robot) of the Third Law.
I think the idea of the same law having different potentials in different situations is a pretty well described as "fuzzy."
If they were all very discrete there would never be any conflicts. However in the particular case of the robot on mercury it's 3rd law was increased until the upper bounds of its fuzziness overlapped with the lower bounds of the 2nd law's fuzziness.
Oh great, a bunch of warrior robots that get involved in philosophic debates with each other every time you try to send them out to fight someone.
Imagine a sergant trying to convince all the robots under his command that since the Al Queda blew up the WTC, and the Taliban were protecting the Al Queda, that it was okay to shoot Taliban soldiers for the protection of the United States. And the robots saying no, they should only be shooting the Al Queda because the Taliban themselves hadn't taken any direct action against the US.
The military does _not_ want weapons that start questioning the morality of their actions when you pull the trigger.
The whole idea behind automated testing is that the computer will try all the possible inputs the user will be able to do, but _not_ in the order the programmers expected to do them. Programmers get into a mindset of "this is how it's supposed to work" and sometimes it is hard to break out of that mindset for testing.
So if you're working on a database program, you make an automated tester that puts in random types of information in random orders, if you're working on a console game you write a program that generates random controller inputs (i know a guy who did that last one.) This random generator will come up with combinations of input that you as a programmer would never have thought to test for.
You let the random input generator run overnight, and come back in the morning. If the program crashed, you've got a serious problem you need to deal with. If it didn't crash (and even if it did) you go back through the logs and see if it got into any weird states or gave any bad output, in which case you check what inputs generated that, and protect against that type of case.
It probably won't catch _all_ the errors, but it will catch a great many of them, leaving the testers to look for the more subtle errrors.
Like they said in the article, people will complain that there are all kinds of unneeded features. They'll also complain that it doesn't have the exact features they want added.
Likewise, you'll hear endless amount of bitching on the net about how X piece of software has been delayed again, yet when they finally give up and stop fixing bugs and release it, people will complain that it has bugs and needs to be patched. I wonder how many of those complainers are the same people who were complaining about the delay as well?
Like jamie said, if companies kept the projects in shop long enough to fix _everything_ they'd probably go bankrupt.
Good planning helps somewhat, but you really only have time for that at the begining of a project. And almost as soon as you finish planing and start working management starts demanding changes based on testers' responses or because of some new thing that a competitor added to their product.
I'm trying to remember the name of the very good algorithms book that i used in college, but it's not coming to mind. I'll have to check on that when I get home.
I totally agree, plagarizing is stealing, because the owner is deprived of whatever benefits the plagarized material receives.
So you agree that something non-material can be stolen. However none of the definitions of "steal" say anything about the value of the object in question. state only "To take (the property of another) without right or permission." The value is irrelevant, only the ownership and the act of taking.
I repeat: When a car is stolen, you are deprived the use of the car.
Only "theft" has the caveat (in the definitions of some dictionaries) that "it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief."
Although the two are similar they are not the same.
The definitions from Webster you quote for stealing state only that you need to "take away by force or unjust means," not that it must be in complete possession of the thief. You copied the music and carried it away when you had no right to do so. That definition doesn't take note of whether or not a pristine copy remains behind, because it is stealing not theft.
Employees at supermarkets can get charged with theft for taking home meat that has gone mildly bad and was going to be thrown out anyways. The supermarket isn't losing anything when they take it, it was going to be thrown out anyways, but it is still theft, and the employees can still be charged. Value is not the important factor.
Stealing a car is theft.
Stealing research material is plagiarism.
Stealing music is copyright infringement or whatever else you wish to call it.
They are all taking something that does not belong to you, they are all stealing.
P.S. And as for the picture question you keep harping about, if someone has a copyright on the art, then technically yes, you are stealing, at least from the Information view, which i view as valid. They own the rights to that image, if they intend it to be for first hand viewing only, ie they've told you not to take pictures or posted signs saying not to do so, then taking pictures of it is stealing, but not theft. I don't know which particular subcategory of stealing that falls under, probably copyright infringement again. Do i care? Not particularly, go ahead, but it is still technically stealing.
To put it clearly, the definition you are discussing is covered by the exact synonym larceny. The definition is:
The unlawful taking and removing of another's personal property with the intent of permanently depriving the owner; theft.
The definition i was discussing is not the one i quoted, but rather an "exact synonym" that has a different definition? That logic seems haze at best.
I don't have access to the OED, but from the American Heritage Dictionary:
"1: To take (the property of another) without right or permission. Synonyms: steal, purloin, filch, snitch, pilfer, cop, hook, swipe, lift, pinch. Steal is the most general: stole a car; steals research from colleagues.
I'm glad to know that some dictionaries have taken it under their purview to define what words mean for us rather than recording their usage. We certainly don't have enough people telling us how to do things.
However i think "To take (the property of another) without right or permission" is a very good definition for stealing.
We can quibble about weather or not stealing someone's ideas make you a thief or not, but it is most certainly stealing. People who steal research data or excerpts from works of literature are usually reffered to as plagiarists, not thieves, possibly because the original remains in the owners possesion. Yet Webster states:
"Plagiarize: To steal or purloin from the writings of another; to appropriate without due acknowledgement (the ideas or expressions of another)."
You cannot prove you lost anything when a public work of yours is stolen.
But wait! Aren't you trying to claim that it isn't stolen? Regardless, by your argument if i copy your plans for an invention, patent them, and sell the devices for millions of dollars, can i claim that you can not prove that you have lost money since you can not prove that those same people would have bought the device if you were the one marketing it?
This is the Information Age, we have quantized information discretly (bits and bytes) and abstractly (memes and meme complexes) and view it as a thing that can be managed, manipulated, and exchanged. Information is a thing, we can measure it even if we cannot touch it, and people have the same rights to it as any other thing.
If you steal information that belongs to someone else then you are denying them the ability to sell it to you, regardless of whether or not you would have bought it otherwise. You may decide to pay for those rights later, but if you go back two weeks later to the dealership you stole the porsche from and try to pay them for it, does that somehow mean you never stole in the first place?
The instance of you having that information has value, and the owners can attach any price to that they want, which you can choose to pay or not pay. Once having stolen it, your intent or ability to pay or not pay are irrelevant, just as when you steal a car it doesn't matter if you could or would pay for it under other circumstances
Perhaps the best analogy is this: if i had an uncountably infinite pile of money (Mathematicians out there, is that the right term?) and you take some of it without my permission, you have stolen it. Just because the amount i still have has not decreased does not mean that you did not take it from me or that i am undamaged. I am losing out on whatever i might have gotten in exchange for that money if things had proceded fairly.
Like the analogy, each piece of information is a infinite source point from which it may endlessly be taken, but taking it without permision is still stealing, because you are taking something you have no right to, no matter how much of the original is left behind.
Maybe that concept is a bit hard to wrap your mind around, but the world changes, technology changes, and our views of the world and our lanaguage need to change to adapt. Otherwise the recording industry would be declaiming "Cease and desist yon scoundrals! Thou hast done pilfered the lively spirt of our Bards' fair cries!" and you would be answering in kind.
Note that i'm not a fan of the recording industry, but i'm not going to blind my eyes to the truth and pretend that makes everything all better. The issue isn't black and white, but i'm not afraid to face them in the grey.
(from Webster) "Steal: 1 a : to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully b : to take away by force or unjust means c : to take surreptitiously or without permission d : to appropriate to oneself or beyond one's proper share : make oneself the focus of "
Glad to know the next time i steal a kiss that that person can never kiss anyone else again, cause i took it from them.
The definition doesn't actually specify that the original owner has to lose posesion of what was stolen, does it? How about when a spy steals some top secret plans? Which is normally accomplished in some method that leaves the originals perfectly intact.
If you accidently left the plans for a new invention or buisness venture lying around and i found them and copied them, and then patented it and made a few million of off your idea, you'd probably think i stole something from you. Or how bout when someone steals your credit card numbers over the net?
I'm not a fan of the big media interests, but denying that it's stealing doesn't really get us anywhere. We can't talk about the new Information Age if we're not willing to update our understanding of exactly what information is and how we interact with it.
If you take something that you do not have the rights to, it is stealing, it doesn't matter whether the thing yout took is tangible or not, or whether or not you left a copy behind.
The article suggests that the company with the data leak should tell the credit card company because of their contractual obligations so an eye can be kept on those accounts, but telling the customers themselves would "accomplish little other than 'making people worry'"
I'm sorry, but i think if my bank is going to be keeping a close eye on my credit card i'd like to know about it. I'll normally go for several weeks or a month making only small purchases and then suddenly splurge on several big things at once. I sometimes fly out of town for the weekend, and certainly don't think much of using my credit card out of state at the time.
If i was informed that my account was being watched over i might decide to do things a little differently. I might space out those big purchases, i might use a different credit card or carry more cash for that trip, or let my bank know if it's going to be a long one.
Knowing that the bank is keeping tabs on my card might allow me to avoid inadvertently doing something that could appear suspicious and get my account put on hold while the bank tries to get in contact with me.
Yeah having to change my life for the sake of those precautions sucks, but they're going to be checking anyway, and i'd rather know than not.
The Drej are made out of energy. At some point someone asks "how do you fight something that's made out of pure energy?"
Apparently by shooting them, hitting them really hard, setting them on fire, just about any old way. They all seemed to work well throughout the movie.
Perhaps the Drej got something tragically backwards somewhere along the line in their dealing with matter? Note that the spaceship controls for the energy spaceships, designed only for Drej use, work perfectly fine for a human, while prison walls designed to contain a human inexplicably fail to work.
And finally, the way Cale manages to reconfigure the ship to use Drej energy at the last minute just doesn't make any sense. Hey, next time your car runs our of gas, why not fiddle with it and then toss a pedestrian in? After all, it's all matter, right?
The whole movie would have made a lot more sense if the aliens had been about as invulnerable as originally portrayed (shooting just disrupts them for a minute or something) and the Titan had been designed to use Drej energy. The Drej would have had a damn good reason in that case to be worried about the humans and to decide to premptively blow up the Earth!
About two years ago in the PC game project I was on, I was responsible for running the Macrovision encryption on the final code. It was an annoying and time consuming process, and Macrovision charged us something like $1 for each shipped disk for the "privlidge" of using it.
Their brand new (as of late 2000) copy-protection software was "guaranteed" to be unbreakable or some such. I don't know the exact nature of their claim, but the techs all laughed at what our producers told us, and with good reason. About two days before the game hit the shelves, there were cracked versions available for download on the net.
Effectively we paid a few million dollars to keep the casual user from just copying the disk on their own without going online to d/l a crack. We could have done the same thing ourselves for about one tenth of 1% of the cost or less.
So when do i get a refund because of their software fixing?
ie the difference in price between the Windows 2000 that i wanted to get, and Windows XP which is the only thing computers in stores come installed with anymore.
As I've also said before, the natural price of music is now zero. The free market has decided that. This is is showing that the free market is forcing the RIAA to move towards that price. They're not going to give away music because that'll be the end of their business--but going from a $20 CD to a $9.99 downloadable album or a $0.99 track is the RIAA realizing that the natural price is lower than what they've been charging.
Of course, they still haven't realized that the natural price is zero. But it's a matter of time.
That is truely amazing. Given the chance to take free music, people will take it. I guess you could say that means that the natural price is zero.
You know though, given the chance, like say during a riot, people will take TVs and stereos and just about anything else they can carry for free. And if there is some kind of contest with prizes, people will take things for free then as well. So i guess that means that the natural price of all material objects is zero too huh?
And there are contests that give away money for free, and people take it! And don't give anything in return! I guess that means the natural value of money is zero?
Of course even if the natural value of money wasn't zero, there are people who voluntarily work for certain groups without charging anything at all! Sure, there are some people who demand money for their time and energy, and some companies that will pay them, but they are about as silly as the people who pay money for legal copies of music, don't you think? So clearly the natural price of an employee is zero.
So enjoy your free music, since you don't get paid for working. You do work for free don't you, since you aren't a hypocrite right?
Depending on the title 7-10 days is kind of optimistic.
A publisher has to be really intent on getting the game out as early as possible in order to get the thing from initial printings to the store in that amount of time. For most titles it's more likely to be 2-4 weeks or even longer i believe.
Of course lots of things factor into it. Neverwinter Nights has been delayed quite a bit so A: they may well have gotten a head start on the boxes and manuals and have everything ready for the CD to be slid inside, and B: now that it's finished they may want to get it out as quickly as possible in some kind of percieved compensation for the delay (despite the fact that a week or two more or less won't really make that big a difference.)
Last time I checked both their lineups, i was seriously disapointed by what i saw. From the way they advertise themselves you'd expect something never heard on the radio before. Instead you find mostly pretty much the same types of stations that you can get over normal FM or AM radio.
Perhaps i'm in the most marginalized of marginalized categories, but if i were to pay for the cable version of radio i would want to get: techno, goth, industrial, anime and RPG soundtracks, and J-pop. They seem to offer very little of the former categories and none of the later.
Yeah sure i'm a geek, but last i heard the sci-fi channel was starting to do pretty good on cable, so money _can_ be made off of geeks.
So rather than paying a ton of money for the same stuff i can hear on normal radio, i'll just stick with webradio (at least until they get shut down.)
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, if no one listens to techno, i wonder what it actually is that i'm listening to right now. Or what they were playing at the club i went to last night.
I can say for sure though that it certainly isn't Eminem.
Did you not read any of the article at all? Or did you just read every other word? He didn't accuse anyone of being a thief. He accused the recording industry of being unable to properly measure the popularity of an artist because the only metric they use is how many CDs get sold.
I d/led all the tracks from Rush's new CD, "Vapor Trails," through a P2P program a few weeks before it got released. I then went ahead and bought the CD when it was available in stores.
Insert standard gripe about how i'd rather d/l the CD and then send Rush $5 through PayPal and not have to deal with the record industry at all.
Until your ISP decides to switch over to the charge by bandwidth used scheme.
Oh really? If it hit India or Pakistan, nice little nuclear war starts before anyone can figure out what happens. Who knows how much fallout would be produced, how far it would spread, or how much damage it would do.
Or it hits China. They're pretty nervous with us aiming out nuclear weapons at them and all, so maybe they panic, launch at us, we launch at them, and there's a _big_ nuclear war.
Or worst case scenario, it hits the US. The next day we see in the newspaper:
"President Bush announced this morning that the destruction of New York City yesterday was determined to have been caused by a terrorist asteroid. In accordance with his policy that "those who harbor terrorists will be treated like terrorists," President Bush has declared war on Mother Nature. Immediate retaliatory drilling will begin in Alaska, soon to be followed by strip-mining and clear cutting action in areas yet to be named. He has also placed a bill before congress to rollback emissions standards to 1965 levels."
Deteriorate? It could stay the exact same and hit us the next time around. If it turns out that this asteroid is the only object in the entire solar system that is exactly synchronized with the earth/moon system's orbit around the sun, then we need to start checking for which alien intelligence diguised a space probe as an asteroid to examine us with.
I think the idea of the same law having different potentials in different situations is a pretty well described as "fuzzy."
If they were all very discrete there would never be any conflicts. However in the particular case of the robot on mercury it's 3rd law was increased until the upper bounds of its fuzziness overlapped with the lower bounds of the 2nd law's fuzziness.
They don't qualify as thinking robots that decide on their own actions without oversight from humans.
Imagine a sergant trying to convince all the robots under his command that since the Al Queda blew up the WTC, and the Taliban were protecting the Al Queda, that it was okay to shoot Taliban soldiers for the protection of the United States. And the robots saying no, they should only be shooting the Al Queda because the Taliban themselves hadn't taken any direct action against the US.
The military does _not_ want weapons that start questioning the morality of their actions when you pull the trigger.
So if you're working on a database program, you make an automated tester that puts in random types of information in random orders, if you're working on a console game you write a program that generates random controller inputs (i know a guy who did that last one.) This random generator will come up with combinations of input that you as a programmer would never have thought to test for.
You let the random input generator run overnight, and come back in the morning. If the program crashed, you've got a serious problem you need to deal with. If it didn't crash (and even if it did) you go back through the logs and see if it got into any weird states or gave any bad output, in which case you check what inputs generated that, and protect against that type of case.
It probably won't catch _all_ the errors, but it will catch a great many of them, leaving the testers to look for the more subtle errrors.
Likewise, you'll hear endless amount of bitching on the net about how X piece of software has been delayed again, yet when they finally give up and stop fixing bugs and release it, people will complain that it has bugs and needs to be patched. I wonder how many of those complainers are the same people who were complaining about the delay as well?
Like jamie said, if companies kept the projects in shop long enough to fix _everything_ they'd probably go bankrupt.
Good planning helps somewhat, but you really only have time for that at the begining of a project. And almost as soon as you finish planing and start working management starts demanding changes based on testers' responses or because of some new thing that a competitor added to their product.
I'm trying to remember the name of the very good algorithms book that i used in college, but it's not coming to mind. I'll have to check on that when I get home.
So you agree that something non-material can be stolen. However none of the definitions of "steal" say anything about the value of the object in question. state only "To take (the property of another) without right or permission." The value is irrelevant, only the ownership and the act of taking.
I repeat: When a car is stolen, you are deprived the use of the car.
Only "theft" has the caveat (in the definitions of some dictionaries) that "it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief."
Although the two are similar they are not the same.
The definitions from Webster you quote for stealing state only that you need to "take away by force or unjust means," not that it must be in complete possession of the thief. You copied the music and carried it away when you had no right to do so. That definition doesn't take note of whether or not a pristine copy remains behind, because it is stealing not theft.
Employees at supermarkets can get charged with theft for taking home meat that has gone mildly bad and was going to be thrown out anyways. The supermarket isn't losing anything when they take it, it was going to be thrown out anyways, but it is still theft, and the employees can still be charged. Value is not the important factor.
Stealing a car is theft.
Stealing research material is plagiarism.
Stealing music is copyright infringement or whatever else you wish to call it.
They are all taking something that does not belong to you, they are all stealing.
P.S. And as for the picture question you keep harping about, if someone has a copyright on the art, then technically yes, you are stealing, at least from the Information view, which i view as valid. They own the rights to that image, if they intend it to be for first hand viewing only, ie they've told you not to take pictures or posted signs saying not to do so, then taking pictures of it is stealing, but not theft. I don't know which particular subcategory of stealing that falls under, probably copyright infringement again. Do i care? Not particularly, go ahead, but it is still technically stealing.
The unlawful taking and removing of another's personal property with the intent of permanently depriving the owner; theft.
The definition i was discussing is not the one i quoted, but rather an "exact synonym" that has a different definition? That logic seems haze at best.
I don't have access to the OED, but from the American Heritage Dictionary:
"1: To take (the property of another) without right or permission. Synonyms: steal, purloin, filch, snitch, pilfer, cop, hook, swipe, lift, pinch. Steal is the most general: stole a car; steals research from colleagues.
I'm glad to know that some dictionaries have taken it under their purview to define what words mean for us rather than recording their usage. We certainly don't have enough people telling us how to do things.
However i think "To take (the property of another) without right or permission" is a very good definition for stealing.
We can quibble about weather or not stealing someone's ideas make you a thief or not, but it is most certainly stealing. People who steal research data or excerpts from works of literature are usually reffered to as plagiarists, not thieves, possibly because the original remains in the owners possesion. Yet Webster states:
"Plagiarize: To steal or purloin from the writings of another; to appropriate without due acknowledgement (the ideas or expressions of another)."
You cannot prove you lost anything when a public work of yours is stolen.
But wait! Aren't you trying to claim that it isn't stolen? Regardless, by your argument if i copy your plans for an invention, patent them, and sell the devices for millions of dollars, can i claim that you can not prove that you have lost money since you can not prove that those same people would have bought the device if you were the one marketing it?
This is the Information Age, we have quantized information discretly (bits and bytes) and abstractly (memes and meme complexes) and view it as a thing that can be managed, manipulated, and exchanged. Information is a thing, we can measure it even if we cannot touch it, and people have the same rights to it as any other thing.
If you steal information that belongs to someone else then you are denying them the ability to sell it to you, regardless of whether or not you would have bought it otherwise. You may decide to pay for those rights later, but if you go back two weeks later to the dealership you stole the porsche from and try to pay them for it, does that somehow mean you never stole in the first place?
The instance of you having that information has value, and the owners can attach any price to that they want, which you can choose to pay or not pay. Once having stolen it, your intent or ability to pay or not pay are irrelevant, just as when you steal a car it doesn't matter if you could or would pay for it under other circumstances
Perhaps the best analogy is this: if i had an uncountably infinite pile of money (Mathematicians out there, is that the right term?) and you take some of it without my permission, you have stolen it. Just because the amount i still have has not decreased does not mean that you did not take it from me or that i am undamaged. I am losing out on whatever i might have gotten in exchange for that money if things had proceded fairly.
Like the analogy, each piece of information is a infinite source point from which it may endlessly be taken, but taking it without permision is still stealing, because you are taking something you have no right to, no matter how much of the original is left behind.
Maybe that concept is a bit hard to wrap your mind around, but the world changes, technology changes, and our views of the world and our lanaguage need to change to adapt. Otherwise the recording industry would be declaiming "Cease and desist yon scoundrals! Thou hast done pilfered the lively spirt of our Bards' fair cries!" and you would be answering in kind.
Note that i'm not a fan of the recording industry, but i'm not going to blind my eyes to the truth and pretend that makes everything all better. The issue isn't black and white, but i'm not afraid to face them in the grey.
Glad to know the next time i steal a kiss that that person can never kiss anyone else again, cause i took it from them.
The definition doesn't actually specify that the original owner has to lose posesion of what was stolen, does it? How about when a spy steals some top secret plans? Which is normally accomplished in some method that leaves the originals perfectly intact.
If you accidently left the plans for a new invention or buisness venture lying around and i found them and copied them, and then patented it and made a few million of off your idea, you'd probably think i stole something from you. Or how bout when someone steals your credit card numbers over the net?
I'm not a fan of the big media interests, but denying that it's stealing doesn't really get us anywhere. We can't talk about the new Information Age if we're not willing to update our understanding of exactly what information is and how we interact with it.
If you take something that you do not have the rights to, it is stealing, it doesn't matter whether the thing yout took is tangible or not, or whether or not you left a copy behind.
Screw that, i'll perform a civic duty and check my neighbor's bedroom for intruders :)
I'm sorry, but i think if my bank is going to be keeping a close eye on my credit card i'd like to know about it. I'll normally go for several weeks or a month making only small purchases and then suddenly splurge on several big things at once. I sometimes fly out of town for the weekend, and certainly don't think much of using my credit card out of state at the time.
If i was informed that my account was being watched over i might decide to do things a little differently. I might space out those big purchases, i might use a different credit card or carry more cash for that trip, or let my bank know if it's going to be a long one.
Knowing that the bank is keeping tabs on my card might allow me to avoid inadvertently doing something that could appear suspicious and get my account put on hold while the bank tries to get in contact with me.
Yeah having to change my life for the sake of those precautions sucks, but they're going to be checking anyway, and i'd rather know than not.
The Drej are made out of energy. At some point someone asks "how do you fight something that's made out of pure energy?"
Apparently by shooting them, hitting them really hard, setting them on fire, just about any old way. They all seemed to work well throughout the movie.
Perhaps the Drej got something tragically backwards somewhere along the line in their dealing with matter? Note that the spaceship controls for the energy spaceships, designed only for Drej use, work perfectly fine for a human, while prison walls designed to contain a human inexplicably fail to work.
And finally, the way Cale manages to reconfigure the ship to use Drej energy at the last minute just doesn't make any sense. Hey, next time your car runs our of gas, why not fiddle with it and then toss a pedestrian in? After all, it's all matter, right?
The whole movie would have made a lot more sense if the aliens had been about as invulnerable as originally portrayed (shooting just disrupts them for a minute or something) and the Titan had been designed to use Drej energy. The Drej would have had a damn good reason in that case to be worried about the humans and to decide to premptively blow up the Earth!
Their brand new (as of late 2000) copy-protection software was "guaranteed" to be unbreakable or some such. I don't know the exact nature of their claim, but the techs all laughed at what our producers told us, and with good reason. About two days before the game hit the shelves, there were cracked versions available for download on the net.
Effectively we paid a few million dollars to keep the casual user from just copying the disk on their own without going online to d/l a crack. We could have done the same thing ourselves for about one tenth of 1% of the cost or less.
No it isn't, it's software fixing, like I clearly said in my post.
ie the difference in price between the Windows 2000 that i wanted to get, and Windows XP which is the only thing computers in stores come installed with anymore.
Of course, they still haven't realized that the natural price is zero. But it's a matter of time.
That is truely amazing. Given the chance to take free music, people will take it. I guess you could say that means that the natural price is zero.
You know though, given the chance, like say during a riot, people will take TVs and stereos and just about anything else they can carry for free. And if there is some kind of contest with prizes, people will take things for free then as well. So i guess that means that the natural price of all material objects is zero too huh?
And there are contests that give away money for free, and people take it! And don't give anything in return! I guess that means the natural value of money is zero?
Of course even if the natural value of money wasn't zero, there are people who voluntarily work for certain groups without charging anything at all! Sure, there are some people who demand money for their time and energy, and some companies that will pay them, but they are about as silly as the people who pay money for legal copies of music, don't you think? So clearly the natural price of an employee is zero.
So enjoy your free music, since you don't get paid for working. You do work for free don't you, since you aren't a hypocrite right?
A publisher has to be really intent on getting the game out as early as possible in order to get the thing from initial printings to the store in that amount of time. For most titles it's more likely to be 2-4 weeks or even longer i believe.
Of course lots of things factor into it. Neverwinter Nights has been delayed quite a bit so A: they may well have gotten a head start on the boxes and manuals and have everything ready for the CD to be slid inside, and B: now that it's finished they may want to get it out as quickly as possible in some kind of percieved compensation for the delay (despite the fact that a week or two more or less won't really make that big a difference.)
Perhaps i'm in the most marginalized of marginalized categories, but if i were to pay for the cable version of radio i would want to get: techno, goth, industrial, anime and RPG soundtracks, and J-pop. They seem to offer very little of the former categories and none of the later.
Yeah sure i'm a geek, but last i heard the sci-fi channel was starting to do pretty good on cable, so money _can_ be made off of geeks.
So rather than paying a ton of money for the same stuff i can hear on normal radio, i'll just stick with webradio (at least until they get shut down.)
They get a job?