As for the hoary and facile 'big government' trope... dude, really. Look at the election returns over the last 16 years. That ship has bloody well sailed. There's a reason that domestic discretionary spending has been rising faster under Bush than under Clinton, there's a reason that a Republican Congress passed a huge (and I do mean huge) Medicare expansion which was signed by a Republican president, there's a reason that No Child Left Behind represents one of the biggest power grabs from local governments to the federal government in the last 30 years. The (political) argument over the size of the federal government is over, and your side didn't win. The majority, the vast majority, of the voting population wants bigger government. They want college grants for their children, as much health care as they can get, and insurance against disaster and/or old age.
Now, it is possible to make an argument that they shouldn't want these things. But your side has lost, and lost hard, politically speaking.
I describe System Shock 2 to my friends as 'The best game I've ever played'. I have a half-completed design doc for System Shock 3: Earth, a MMORPG (it's a good idea, trust me). I'll be... checking GameSpot tomorrow.
Given the popularity and renown that Bujold's Vorkosigan series has won, I'd be stunned if she couldn't make significantly more money off another in that series than in anything else she could sign her name to.
[opinionated]If you didn't like A Civil Campaign, you have no romance in your soul.[/opinionated]
Oh, I agree totally. These ideas that US workers have, about 'living wages' and 'human work environments' and 'my life is not my work', they make me sick. What a bunch of whiners. Not like those stand-up Chinese factory workers who know how lucky they are to have jobs at all.
It could even be pointed that that MUDs are, in many cases, the perfect example of games that DO succeed with an open-source model. NetHack, similarly.
However, something like a Doom 3, Half-Life 2, or Madden 200x simply can't be made by 8 programmers working part-time. It's not that games qua games requires art, modeling, etc, etc, but those games are simply ones that cannot, at this time, work as open-source projects. But the entirety of gamesdom is not represented by Id, Valve, and EA Sports.
By saying things like 'good games needs good artists and good sound designers, Kumiorava defines his problem space away from the strengths of open-source game development. So it's inevitable that any games I could name that use an open-source development model will not compare well. But, none the less, there are plenty of people that would rather play NetHack than Doom 3.
Precisely. The balance between labor and capital is so absurdly unbalanced right now that, frankly, seeing capital get squeezed right now is good for my soul. My heart does not bleed for poor electronics manufacturers who's bottom lines aren't as fat as they were in 1999, nor do I lose sleep over the fact that consumers (who are the people who's benefit this is theoretically all for) are getting more and better tool for less money.
When was the last time standing in front of the bleeding edge of technological progress and screaming 'Stop!' did anything except get you cut off at the knees?
Those of us who are, in fact, interested in what advanced content tools are authentically useful for are uninterested in your neo-Luddite tendancies. Lynx is a fine browser for those things that can be represented in text, but if you think that everything the web is good for can be presented in Lynx, you're living in a dream world. Or 1991.
In my opinion, lawyers for class action lawsuits should be paid, "in like manner and no more than 10x the individual payout."
So that means the lawyers should get $120 worth of Microsoft coupons. That seems fair to me. Hell, I'd even be willing to increase it to 100x the individual payout, but the "in like manner" needs to stay. I've been screwed before with the coupon payouts (BoA many years ago), and won't have anything to do with class action lawsuits because of that.
Under the current system, the lawyer's only incentive is to enrich themselves, without regard to the clients.
So a lawyer that might well have spent several thousand dollars on fees alone in the course of pursuing this case should get... $120 for their efforts? Let's assume that MS settled for an amount more equal to the damage they did and everybody in FL got $50 to $500, depending on what they bought and how many. The lawyer now gets... $5,000?
Sorry, your post seems to be to be little more than logical malapplied to the end of lawyer bashing. Many lawyers, many class-action lawyers, work long hours to secure settlements or decisions for clients that can't defend themselves in court against companies like MS. They're entitled to the fruits of their labor, and their labor is more worthy than many (such as, oh, MS's corporate lawyers, just for starters).
It does bear mentioning that while the lawyers involved are getting a rather tidy sum of cash, it does only amount to 20% of the total. If the lawyers were all saints and accepted no money for their slaying of the MS dragon, the payouts would have gone from, and I agree that it's a silly small amount, $5 to $12 to... $6 to $14.40.
If the payout seems rediculously small compared to how much MS's actions cost consumers, then it's less the fault of the lawyers skimming the payouts and more the fault of the anti-trust system that allows MS to profit billions from it's illegal monopolies and only pay millions when caught.
On the broader topic of 'frivolous' lawsuits, I do deeply recommend to people that are interested in a fair society that they educate themselves about where that particular piece of memetic propaganda is coming from. It's not from anybody that has your interests as a citizen or consumer at heart.
"Here's what's wrong with kids in the digital age. They live in front of their TV and PC screens. They steal music online. Their attention span is zilch. They multitask on everything and concentrate on nothing except video games. They will buy any trashy product that the media goliaths can sell them, then drop it as soon as the next big hype comes along."
Isn't that the problem with adults in the digital age as well?
That was my major problem with that part of the article, too (aside from the fact that the article suddenly went from 'Books good, movies bad' to 'Piracy BAAAD' for no apparent reason). Yeah, plenty of the teen set use Kazaa, etc, etc. But isn't the major growth of P2P based on the usage among twenty-somethings? And, in any case, doesn't everything he say about teens also go for adults, if not in fact moreso for adults? I mean, teens are supposed to do dumb things. Responsible adults (like yours truly at 25) are supposed to know better, right?
There's an extent to which I don't like the way this article dumps this entire problem on teens. Definitionally, teens are not responsible for this behavior. At worst, their parents are. And if, as I suspect, teens aren't even the primary users and sharers of files on P2P networks, then why is this article talking as if they were?
DirectX. I haven't had to worry about an IRQ conflict from a game since Win95. DirectX has vastly simplified game programming for the Windows platform. Any game developer that remember what it was like before DirectX, trying to support all the possible graphics and sound interfaces in one product, will tell you the world of good that DirectX has been. DirectX is direct forerunner of other graphics/sound/input/etc middlewares that are now industry-standard, including some that support the best kind of platform independant game development (i.e. SDL, Allegro, and, more than any, OpenGL).
I'm not as down on the likelihood of winning as Steinhardt is. Cryptography remains essentially unsolvable in bulk.
Unfortunatley, the borderless nature of much technology means there's a scary point to be made that while the next ten years of surveilance technology is unlikely to be all that useful against sophisticated terrorist, it'll be perfectly effective against broke domestic dissidents.
I would suspect that the long-term effects of low and zero-g environments that humans on a Mars mission would be exposed to for the three-odd years such a mission would require would actually be somewhat more dangerous than the radiation involved. It's possible to shield against radiation, after all....
The only RPG that will ever have a "strong" storyline is Planescape: Torment. Every other game can have an "ok" storyline. The only First-Person shooter with a "strong" storyline is Marathon. Everything else can have an "ok" storyline, at best.
Uh.... yeah. System Shock 2 and Deux Ex had really weak plotlines, right?
As far as RPGs go, Torment was great, it's true. But I wouldn't praise it as highly, and as far above the competition for 'strongest'. It certainly had a lot of the same dependance on 'Do odd-jobs for strangers that have no idea who you are but who'll ask you to help with embarresing personal problems' and combat to advance the plotline, while completely lacking the go-anywhere world simulation that makes something like Morrowind remarkable (mind, I don't like Morrowind, but it does a lot that Torment doesn't)
Some of us really do want to be paid for our work. I'm doing small for-profit, closed source game development now because, frankly, life is too short to write business applications for the next thirty years.
I'd like to quibble with describing 2001, the movie, as Clarke's. I like Clarke's work, but, as the epigram goes, '2010 showed that Arthur C. Clarke had no idea what Stanley Kubrick did to his nice little SF story.'
I, unlike you, have no desire to leave entirely in the hands of Read Admiral Poindexter and VP Cheney the decision of what to care about. The government has no business recording that data in the first place, and it shouldn't be incumbant upon me to rid myself of the trappings of civil society simply to keep the State from knowing what brand of toilet paper I use.
A republican is bitching because someone used that new, innovative (hint: it's only been around since the greeks, and they're probably just the first ones to write it down) rhetorical device of stating opinion as fact?
Code that runs perfectly but is uncommented, undocumented, and mostly consists of one 3000 line file titled main.cpp with five methods == bad code
The distinction between information and data is critical. If Site A has the data I want, but Site B has it and has already intelligently decomposed it into information for me, then Site B wins. It's not even a distinction that only matters to non-power users; any thoughtful person will prefer to spend less time digesting data into information and more time applying that information in interesting ways. This is a dynamic that is seen in good coding practice, in (G)UI design, in web design, in short, in any sort of content presentation.
This is not to defend presentations that _obscure_ the information being presented, but rather to highlight the importance of _correct_ content presentation. Clarity of presentation is a creature of balance; neither too little nor too much. If Flash can make your information clearer, use it. If Flash obscures your information, ditch it.
It's not an entirely unreasonable sentiment. However, I do see a _major_ difference between private victimless lawbreaking in the home by private individuals and systematic lawbreaking by large companies that has active and serious consequences for the public environment, done for profit.
I have no sympathy at all for your position. As far as I can tell, you're arguing in favor for landowners to be able to do whatever they want, even in open violation of state and federal environmental laws, on their own property.
Adelman is doing _nothing_ that's even questionable. He's not going onto the property, he invades nothing. He is simply documenting violations and letting the California Costal Commission take it from there. Calling him a 'vigiliante' is simple hyperbole and nothing more.
You ask what good this really does. The article itself answers this question, going into some detail on how the C^3 is making use of these efforts. If you believe that California's coastline is a public resource that a few (very wealthy) developers shouldn't be allowed to despoil to make themselves even wealthier, then you shouldn't have any problem with this.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you think 'progressive' means? Christ.
As for the hoary and facile 'big government' trope... dude, really. Look at the election returns over the last 16 years. That ship has bloody well sailed. There's a reason that domestic discretionary spending has been rising faster under Bush than under Clinton, there's a reason that a Republican Congress passed a huge (and I do mean huge) Medicare expansion which was signed by a Republican president, there's a reason that No Child Left Behind represents one of the biggest power grabs from local governments to the federal government in the last 30 years. The (political) argument over the size of the federal government is over, and your side didn't win. The majority, the vast majority, of the voting population wants bigger government. They want college grants for their children, as much health care as they can get, and insurance against disaster and/or old age.
Now, it is possible to make an argument that they shouldn't want these things. But your side has lost, and lost hard, politically speaking.
I describe System Shock 2 to my friends as 'The best game I've ever played'. I have a half-completed design doc for System Shock 3: Earth, a MMORPG (it's a good idea, trust me). I'll be... checking GameSpot tomorrow.
How would you tell the difference?
Given the popularity and renown that Bujold's Vorkosigan series has won, I'd be stunned if she couldn't make significantly more money off another in that series than in anything else she could sign her name to.
[opinionated]If you didn't like A Civil Campaign, you have no romance in your soul.[/opinionated]
Oh, I agree totally. These ideas that US workers have, about 'living wages' and 'human work environments' and 'my life is not my work', they make me sick. What a bunch of whiners. Not like those stand-up Chinese factory workers who know how lucky they are to have jobs at all.
It could even be pointed that that MUDs are, in many cases, the perfect example of games that DO succeed with an open-source model. NetHack, similarly.
However, something like a Doom 3, Half-Life 2, or Madden 200x simply can't be made by 8 programmers working part-time. It's not that games qua games requires art, modeling, etc, etc, but those games are simply ones that cannot, at this time, work as open-source projects. But the entirety of gamesdom is not represented by Id, Valve, and EA Sports.
By saying things like 'good games needs good artists and good sound designers, Kumiorava defines his problem space away from the strengths of open-source game development. So it's inevitable that any games I could name that use an open-source development model will not compare well. But, none the less, there are plenty of people that would rather play NetHack than Doom 3.
Precisely. The balance between labor and capital is so absurdly unbalanced right now that, frankly, seeing capital get squeezed right now is good for my soul. My heart does not bleed for poor electronics manufacturers who's bottom lines aren't as fat as they were in 1999, nor do I lose sleep over the fact that consumers (who are the people who's benefit this is theoretically all for) are getting more and better tool for less money.
Please.
When was the last time standing in front of the bleeding edge of technological progress and screaming 'Stop!' did anything except get you cut off at the knees?
Those of us who are, in fact, interested in what advanced content tools are authentically useful for are uninterested in your neo-Luddite tendancies. Lynx is a fine browser for those things that can be represented in text, but if you think that everything the web is good for can be presented in Lynx, you're living in a dream world. Or 1991.
Ok, I laughed. I'll admit it. I have a low threshhold of humor.
But how did this get front page on Slashdot? Uh... standards, folks. Learn it, love it, live it.
And you can have my Dreamcast when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. I just wish I could find THPS 3 for it....
So a lawyer that might well have spent several thousand dollars on fees alone in the course of pursuing this case should get... $120 for their efforts? Let's assume that MS settled for an amount more equal to the damage they did and everybody in FL got $50 to $500, depending on what they bought and how many. The lawyer now gets... $5,000?
Sorry, your post seems to be to be little more than logical malapplied to the end of lawyer bashing. Many lawyers, many class-action lawyers, work long hours to secure settlements or decisions for clients that can't defend themselves in court against companies like MS. They're entitled to the fruits of their labor, and their labor is more worthy than many (such as, oh, MS's corporate lawyers, just for starters).
It does bear mentioning that while the lawyers involved are getting a rather tidy sum of cash, it does only amount to 20% of the total. If the lawyers were all saints and accepted no money for their slaying of the MS dragon, the payouts would have gone from, and I agree that it's a silly small amount, $5 to $12 to... $6 to $14.40.
If the payout seems rediculously small compared to how much MS's actions cost consumers, then it's less the fault of the lawyers skimming the payouts and more the fault of the anti-trust system that allows MS to profit billions from it's illegal monopolies and only pay millions when caught.
On the broader topic of 'frivolous' lawsuits, I do deeply recommend to people that are interested in a fair society that they educate themselves about where that particular piece of memetic propaganda is coming from. It's not from anybody that has your interests as a citizen or consumer at heart.
That was my major problem with that part of the article, too (aside from the fact that the article suddenly went from 'Books good, movies bad' to 'Piracy BAAAD' for no apparent reason). Yeah, plenty of the teen set use Kazaa, etc, etc. But isn't the major growth of P2P based on the usage among twenty-somethings? And, in any case, doesn't everything he say about teens also go for adults, if not in fact moreso for adults? I mean, teens are supposed to do dumb things. Responsible adults (like yours truly at 25) are supposed to know better, right?
There's an extent to which I don't like the way this article dumps this entire problem on teens. Definitionally, teens are not responsible for this behavior. At worst, their parents are. And if, as I suspect, teens aren't even the primary users and sharers of files on P2P networks, then why is this article talking as if they were?
If your lawyer lets you hang on a flawed interpretation of the evidence, that's hardly the technology's fault.
And, yes, I'm aware that the public defense system in many states is horribly flawed. But that's not the fault of black boxes in cars.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-08 -28&res=h
DirectX. I haven't had to worry about an IRQ conflict from a game since Win95. DirectX has vastly simplified game programming for the Windows platform. Any game developer that remember what it was like before DirectX, trying to support all the possible graphics and sound interfaces in one product, will tell you the world of good that DirectX has been. DirectX is direct forerunner of other graphics/sound/input/etc middlewares that are now industry-standard, including some that support the best kind of platform independant game development (i.e. SDL, Allegro, and, more than any, OpenGL).
*insert Benjamin Franklin quote here*
I'm not as down on the likelihood of winning as Steinhardt is. Cryptography remains essentially unsolvable in bulk.
Unfortunatley, the borderless nature of much technology means there's a scary point to be made that while the next ten years of surveilance technology is unlikely to be all that useful against sophisticated terrorist, it'll be perfectly effective against broke domestic dissidents.
I would suspect that the long-term effects of low and zero-g environments that humans on a Mars mission would be exposed to for the three-odd years such a mission would require would actually be somewhat more dangerous than the radiation involved. It's possible to shield against radiation, after all....
Uh.... yeah. System Shock 2 and Deux Ex had really weak plotlines, right?
As far as RPGs go, Torment was great, it's true. But I wouldn't praise it as highly, and as far above the competition for 'strongest'. It certainly had a lot of the same dependance on 'Do odd-jobs for strangers that have no idea who you are but who'll ask you to help with embarresing personal problems' and combat to advance the plotline, while completely lacking the go-anywhere world simulation that makes something like Morrowind remarkable (mind, I don't like Morrowind, but it does a lot that Torment doesn't)
Some of us really do want to be paid for our work. I'm doing small for-profit, closed source game development now because, frankly, life is too short to write business applications for the next thirty years.
I'd like to quibble with describing 2001, the movie, as Clarke's. I like Clarke's work, but, as the epigram goes, '2010 showed that Arthur C. Clarke had no idea what Stanley Kubrick did to his nice little SF story.'
2001, the movie, was nobody's but Kubrick's.
I, unlike you, have no desire to leave entirely in the hands of Read Admiral Poindexter and VP Cheney the decision of what to care about. The government has no business recording that data in the first place, and it shouldn't be incumbant upon me to rid myself of the trappings of civil society simply to keep the State from knowing what brand of toilet paper I use.
A republican is bitching because someone used that new, innovative (hint: it's only been around since the greeks, and they're probably just the first ones to write it down) rhetorical device of stating opinion as fact?
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Code that runs perfectly but is uncommented, undocumented, and mostly consists of one 3000 line file titled main.cpp with five methods == bad code
The distinction between information and data is critical. If Site A has the data I want, but Site B has it and has already intelligently decomposed it into information for me, then Site B wins. It's not even a distinction that only matters to non-power users; any thoughtful person will prefer to spend less time digesting data into information and more time applying that information in interesting ways. This is a dynamic that is seen in good coding practice, in (G)UI design, in web design, in short, in any sort of content presentation.
This is not to defend presentations that _obscure_ the information being presented, but rather to highlight the importance of _correct_ content presentation. Clarity of presentation is a creature of balance; neither too little nor too much. If Flash can make your information clearer, use it. If Flash obscures your information, ditch it.
It's not an entirely unreasonable sentiment. However, I do see a _major_ difference between private victimless lawbreaking in the home by private individuals and systematic lawbreaking by large companies that has active and serious consequences for the public environment, done for profit.
I have no sympathy at all for your position. As far as I can tell, you're arguing in favor for landowners to be able to do whatever they want, even in open violation of state and federal environmental laws, on their own property.
Adelman is doing _nothing_ that's even questionable. He's not going onto the property, he invades nothing. He is simply documenting violations and letting the California Costal Commission take it from there. Calling him a 'vigiliante' is simple hyperbole and nothing more.
You ask what good this really does. The article itself answers this question, going into some detail on how the C^3 is making use of these efforts. If you believe that California's coastline is a public resource that a few (very wealthy) developers shouldn't be allowed to despoil to make themselves even wealthier, then you shouldn't have any problem with this.