This seems to stop the DOJ from prosecution these cases with tax money. That is NOT a-typical of the Bush administration. What they would rather see is that the record labels have their own private police force that the record labels pay for. Small goverment, big business. Makes perfect sense.
Remember that if it is the DOJ that prosecutes these cases AND the only one who can do this, that would put copyright infringement up against all other crimes for attention. Plus there would be far more oversight of the cases.
Remember what happened in germany? There these cases belong firmly in the hands of the justice department and then justice department told the record industry that they can't be arsed. Case closed.
That is NOT what happened in the US so far. In the US, the justice department can't be arsed BUT the record labels are given more and more powers (or not being stopped) from investigating and prosecuting these cases themselves. If you are worried about to much police power, you should be even more worried about police power in private hands.
Just as kidnapping CAN be legal, there can be legal wars. The state can for instance kidnap you, it is done in cases where a judge decides to hold an otherwise innocent person in jail to force their cooperation. You most often see this used against journalists to pressure them in revealing their sources.
The problem with understanding what a legal war is that it all depends on what set of rules you choose to use. International law as such does not exist, it more a set of rules that overtime have in general become accepted to be used as international law. Of course, by the time war becomes an option it would be fair to say that the parties who disagree to the extent that war is now an option are hardly going to agree on a common set of laws.
But a legal war WOULD for instance be if a party was attacked first. The right to defend yourself. Another legal war would be to come to the aid of a ally who requested your aid and after a decleration of war.
There are rules, and the US has been claimed to have ignored those rules in the case of the Iraq war.
The US had not been attacked by Iraq, nor did it come to the aid of allie.
This makes the war illegal, unless you accept the US claim the Iraq was behind 9/11.
The japanese war against the americans was illegal (no decleration of war) IN american eyes, the japanese didn't share the western practice of declaring war before attacking.
The american war against germany was legal. The german one against the US borderline. There was a decleration of war, but US property had been attacked before although not in attacks that could be seen as an outright attack.
The whole point of 'legal' wars is not just for the sake of argument, it is to prevent the world from sliding into anarchy. Basically, if everyone followed the concept of 'legal' wars, then war can't just break-out overnight.
That is what is so scary about the Iraq war. The idea that any nation with the means can just attack another country when they feel like it. The 'law' is a very thin shell we use to keep us all civilized. Wether it is that big guy who is 'restrained' by the law from punching your face in or the superpower who is restrained by international law to invade another country.
This was ages ago, before the bubble burst when international web-design companies seemed to make sense. I ended up working for a company that was partnering with an american firm. Never fully understood the reasons for it, and it soon fell apart anyway but part of it all was a videoconference with our US counterparts.
We had our meeting after-work and the US was of course just waking up then, but still, the difference was very start. The US, smoke-free, drinking water. We on alcohol and smoking... pot.
Oh not all of us, but that was still when smoking in the workplace was okay and being Amsterdam where softdrugs are legal, they smoked it. Kinda drove the point home to me that this whole venture was doomed from the start, just because two companies are succesful in their own market doesn't mean they should work together in a global market.
As for general attitudes, the US is generally more business friendly where as europeans tend to put people first. Discuss: Longer work hours lead to more productivity, if you want to earn more you got to work longer hours, the state should not be people's nanny and impose work-hours on the people.
On the whole, if you agree with this statement it would be likely that you are an american citizen.
If on the other hand you agree with: Work should be distrubuted evenly, workhours should allow for enough free time to have a social life outside work and the state should together with employers and unions supervise that work hours are reasonable. Then you are most likely a european.
To contrast, I seen americans working ordinary jobs for no extra pay doing 80 hours a week without question while most people in europe have less then 40 hours work. I am not going even to start the flamewar which economy is more productive (it ain't europe that is having tent-camps erected for people put out of their home, oops)
But the simplest thing might be that buying MS is supporting MS, an American Company run by an American living The American Dream(TM). To a european, buying MS means sending money abroad to make a rich, and not very sympathetic, guy even richer.
IP4 doesn't have enough addresses, of course a managers solution is to put of the inevitable so that it happens on someone elses watch rather then taking the time we got now to develop and implement a solution.
IF pushing IP6 doesn't work in the roughly 2 years remaining THEN we can use the buffer of under-used blocks as a last reserve. if we use the reserves now, and do nothing then we still have the same problem, just a bit further away but this time with no reserves remaining and no work chance of it being solves in time.
You should run for president, you would do well with your solutions.
To lazy to google it, but there have been several breakdowns of the costs a label charges to the artist to account for the difference between the price of a CD and the amount the artist gets paid.
Basically 10.5% of the sale price is just penauts. I am willing to bet quite a few RIAA execs choked on that before they could finally sign the agreement.
In other industries, it would be a lot. In music, it is childsplay.
Slashdot: Outlaw Planet, covering increased surveillance and loss of liberties
The site: Outlaw Planet embodies the volatile mix of new forms of surveillance, transparency, civil rights, and access to information as people work out new rules for human security.
Notice the difference? The GEAS clearly sees Outlaw planet as the struggle to balance civil rights with the need for security and hence accountability. You need openess of goverment but at the same time need secure systems safe from outside influence. How do you balance this?
Yet/. 'editors' (my apologies to all true editors) only highlight the loss of civil liberties and increased surveillance.
Not that I agree with GEAS either, we recently did have a huge attack on the finacial markets. 9/11 anyone? Trading suspended for a week? How about the bursting of the bubble, black friday?
The depression is as close as we got to a 'perfect storm' on the financial front and humanity survived just fine.
Same with migration, dust bowl anyone? Entire civilizations moved home before and humanity clearly survived by the evidence that we are still here.
What is odd, is that they miss the greatest threat. What has been the biggest killer so far? Killing millions and causing massive chaos? Intolrance. From the grand-daddy of them all the Holocaust to Rwanda to the latest 'race' riots in South Africa, this is the real killer. One group deciding they don't need to get along with everyone else and that if they upset the peace they can improve their lot.
All the other problems can be countered by humanity, but when we stop thinking of others as human beings we loose the need to cope with problems that NOW face others but might face us in the future.
Food shortage is a problem in some areas but not the west. Needless to say that food shortage ain't exactly at the top of the agenda. We are not spending nearly enough to come up with ways to fight food shortage, leaving us with NO soluntions IF/WHEN it hits us.
So, stupid people are criminals in your eyes. People who have simple jobs, are criminals because it is well known that no honor student ever became a criminal.
Why not show your true colors, have everyone who fails the grade put down humanly so they don't bother you.
Only one thing to worry you. The humanity exam, you just got an F. Please report to the execution chamber.
It would be unworkable at a public place like an airport, but for say security at the crossing it wouldn't be. The Israeli have special border gates where they check everyone and can isolate suspects quickly and safely, basically trapping suspects in a bomb proof area.
Since they don't care about the hassle this introduces (discussion in another area please) the system would be helpful, although how much better this is then a person trained for regonising suspicious behavior I don't know.
Fact is, the border checks stop and awful lot of suicide bombers but a lot get through as well.
For point security, where you don't mind the hassle introduced for the false positives, this system could be of use. It biggest failure is NOT so much the false positives, but the false negatives. What if it is installed not as a backup system BUT as a replacement?
Does the free speech go both ways? Would it be okay for the principal to publish in the school newspaper that the student in question gets her grades through sexual favors, that she had three abortions and has sex with her dog be allowed as free speech?
Oh dear no, that wouldn't be allowed would it. But if you truly support free speech, that is what you support.
Reality of course is that free speech does not exist other then as a fairy tale to keep the terminally stupid satisfied.
It is foolish to believe that slashdot is in the pockets of MS or Google or Apple. Slashdot editors are above that. They equally and openly take ANYONE's money for a frontpage story. No questions asked other then HOW MUCH
Then you must do a thing that no american could ever consider doing, learn about the rest of the world.
Geez, god. Ever heard of Blair? That is a popular guy in britain. The US had Ronald "howdee dodey" Reagan, britain had MadCow Thatcher.
The netherlands? We had "do nothing" Kok, and "if you don't vote for the new EU constitution it will start WW3" Balkende, a guy who nobody likes and only got into power because the popular guy got killed.
France had so choose between the crook and the fascist. Italy keeps re-electing Berlusconie, a guy so corrupt the mafia thinks he should clean up his act.
Frankly, democracy is in trouble. We are no longer comfortable with just letting the powers that be run our lives for us on the understanding that for the right to tell us how to run our lives, they leave us alone. That system is a bit hard to understand unless you actually understand human beings. Remember the age when Rome told catholics not to have sex outside marriage. All catholics agreed with that, just didn't follow it.
But now we want our leaders to actually do what we want them to do except we have no idea what we want them to do and no clue how to tell if they are telling what we want them to do.
Democracy, as we have it, just doesn't work. You can't vote for one guy, who somehow got into a position to be elected and then have him work for you. Doesn't work, you are just one voter but he owes allegiance to all those who backed his rise.
Further, all the voters for that one guy have different agenda's, with just the one popularity vote, who is to say what all those voters REALLY want. Even in the netherlands with dozens of parties there is not a single party that I completely agree with.
The best alternative would be to go purely referendum. Bring up each issue for a vote and work with that. Problem, the existing parties don't like that people can then vote against their policies. See the EU problems with getting the new constitution accepted. ALL political parties said yes. The voters ALWAYS said NO. Big embarresment and happily avoided the second time around by not listening to those pesky voters (the referendum is still a no-vote in holland, but there bill has been changed, so now they don't need a new vote because the voter didn't agree the first time so they surely agree this time)
If that doesn't make sense, well that is politics.
So be ashamamed of Bush and Reagan and the like, but other countries ain't doing any better. Frankly, the current system will never bring forward the honest and competent. An honest politician would never get elected because he would tell you the truth. You don't get popular with the truth.
If you look at the games, then the first ones are "simple" straightforward games that do one thing and do them well.
The second batch tries to do a lot, but then fail to actually deliver on any front instead becoming a confusing mix of micro-management and rigid gameplay.
Black&White failed because it tried to marry a creature sim with a empire building game with some RTS elements. None of them felt connected and it all just became a matter of baby sitting your civilisation and constantly having to attend to their needs with no AI to take care of the most mundane task. The creature part wasn't as rich as promised and the micro-manangement needs of your tribe soon wore your down and stopped you from exploring wandering until you just told you tribe to go screw it self.
Fable again, what was it? A hack&slash, an RPG, a empire-builder? You had lots of elements, but what were they together. There was a story, a path of good and evil but what did it all do. The story itself, was far to linear, good was just looking out for yourself and evil just being mean.
All that supposed complexity came at a price of the most simplistic combat this side of a gameboy, all weapons hit the same, wielded the same so it was just a matter of picking the one with the higest stats. The AI was moronic, none of the battles challenging.
The movies tried to marry a movie creation program with a management game. The movie creation element was okay and people still create movies with them but the management element was buggy as hell (after a certain point, right in the middle of the depression, NOBODY would be looking for a job) and again, way to mired in micro-management forcing you to handhold your employees through every stage rather then being allowed to just get on with it. People who play the game have modded it to remove almost all management elements from the 'game' and just use it is a movie-maker.
That is really this guys problem, he needs to focus on ONE aspect of his game and then do that well. Not try to make the mother of all games, combining every feature. If Molynoux ran a F1 team, F1 cars would have winches because winches are useful. It would however be a winch with a 1 meter cable. The prize would be that the car could only drive in 1st gear. But hey, it is a F1 car with a winch, nobody has ever done that before.
No indeed, nobody has ever done games the way Molyneux has done them. Perhaps that is a clue.
Why would some oil barons be able to out speak say the transport industry that suffers from the high oil prices? or the airline industry. Or the car industry.
If you think any powers that be only care about oil prices you have a very limited understanding of the economy. Surely any shadow goverment capable of organising this also realises that a high oil price would seriously hurt the rest of the economy?
As for four more years of power. If there is a secret goverment, they are in charge always, no matter who is sitting in the white house. Dick Cheney was hardly unemployed working for minimum wage before Bush and neither will he be unemployed afterwards.
Frankly if you want shadow goverments you need to go the whole way and accept that a shadow goverment doesn't care about oil prices or elections.
The US loves its conspiracies and the killing of JFK is perhaps the granddaddy of them all.
What is intresting to see is not the theories themselves but how simplistic and wishful they are. You get the idea that conspiracy theorists are people who desperately want to life in an organized world where at least SOMEONE is in charge. Look around, check all the conspiracy theories and they ALL lead to the same conclusion. SOMEONE somewhere is in charge. That makes the world a lot easier to deal with. If you like the world as it is, then X will keep it that way. If you don't like the world as it is, all you got to is topple X. Easy.
With JFK you got several theories who could have done the killing, all shadowy groups that are claimed to control far more then they are supposed to. If only you could expose them freedom of the people could be restored.
Yet the intresting thing is what the conspiracy theorists neatly ignore, because they don't want to hear this, but is far more damning. That several groups had seperate plans to assasinate the president of the united states. For certain groups like members of the FBI this in itself is treason enough. They never actually need to put the plan in motion, even discussing it should be enough to earn them some serious time at a secret location.
But the conspiracy theorists don't want to hear that the world ain't run by anyone and that bad things happen just because one group/person went beyond talking, that makes the world far to chaotic and random.
There were people planning to kill JFK, conspiracy theorists are right, they just didn't carry it out, but for a lot of them the planning alone should still be a crime in itself.
In a way it like a Murder She Wrote episode, where to find out the killer she tells everyone she has the evidence and will be at location Y. The person to then show up to kill her, is the killer. Well not always, SOMETIMES it is a person seeking to protect the real killer. This is what causes all the weirdness around JFK, various groups who had been thinking/hinting that JFK should be killed trying to cover up that they might have been involved. Had someone they knew taken their words to heart? The cover-up happened even when there was nothing to cover up.
The same, in a far more complex mess goes for 9/11. If you look at it, you can hope that someone somewhere is in charge OR come to the sickening conclusion that it all was just a mess of people suggesting things, others listening, misreading, misjudging until you come down to a case where some people did something and others failed to stop them because nobody really is in charge and all the things that normally go right, suddenly went wrong all together. 9/11 if you like was an accident. The idea that there is one person at the top on either side who planned it all is wishfull thinking. Osama on side and Dick Cheny on the other NEVER wanted this to happen. Not 9/11 and NOT the war on terror. Oh Osama wanted an attack BUT not one that would end up with two muslim countries under american control and NO worldwide muslim uprising. Realize this, Osama got NO response from western muslims. There are MILLIONS living in the west, and that is where they stayed.
Dick Cheney and the likes on the other hand haven't gained anything either. High oil prices? So what? America doesn't prosper from that at all.
No, 9/11 was just one of those things that happened.
If you want to make sense of it, then Captain Blackadder said it best. 9/11 happened because it was to much of an effort NOT to have a war.
Nobody planned it, just nobody worked hard enough to stop it. And that includes US the people who voted for the people to incompetent to create world peace.
Pain in the ass? I simply visit thepiratebay.org and type in the title of the product I want. No nasty going around the shops trying to find the title with annoying music blaring in the background.
Quick? The shops are 15 minutes away, that is 40 minutes if I hurry. I download a DVD easily in that time with bittorrent. All with me doing nothing but clicking the link.
Risky? No securerom side installs, the scene has better quality control then any company and if there is a problem patches are released in a matter of hours not years.
I get the uncensored proper release, not some localized version that can't take the official patches
No, sorry, spore is the prime example. I downloaded it in about 15 minutes, had it installed FAR quicker because it was installed from HD not DVD. No Securom was installed along side. Didn't help that the game itself can be played in a couple of hours. My god did that game suck, sure the design was fun, but so hopelessly limited that I got the distinct impression this game came directly from the 1990's with just a slightly improved graphics engine.
Oh, and if you mean to warn me about virusses, yes, some try to get people to install trojans but frankly, anyone with an IQ above room temperature can spot this easily. Hint, spore does not fit in a 300k exe.
Modern games have very succesfully managed to suck so badly, be so little fun long term, create so much hassle for the legit buyer and give no 'goodies' in the box like say a printed manual, to make piracy the clearly superior method.
For me as well it ain't the money. I buy new MP3 players because the battery ran down and a new phone because the old one is just to last week. But the PC game industry, mostly, has very succesfully managed to make piracy just the superior shopping experience.
I don't do Securom or anything like it EVER! I have all my old CD's (and used to have a huge box of floppies) all bought full price. It is a meter high stack. Do the math on how much money that has been since games started coming on CD's.
My recent game purchase was Age of Conan + 1 gamecard and Lotro CE (lifetime subscription) both at launch.
Companies can still get my money, but only if they offer me a reason and Securom is NOT that reason.
The turks are fighting their own religious nutters. The military would NEVER allow for turkey to support the likes of Bin Laden, turkey is secular and the army sees to it.
No, the likes of Bin Laden and Turks are natural enemies. Hell, Turkey is even friendly to Israel, almost allies, with Turkey using a LOT of Israeli made weapons.
No if you ever been to Turkey or met its people, you would know that the country is FAR to western and enjoying what that bring to ever go in support of extremists muslims.
The new religious uprising comes from poor people from the backwards parts of turkey migrating and when things go to good for to long people can forget what made things so prosperous and elect people who say that doing X would make it better when current properity has been down to avoiding X like the plague.
Look at the revival of christian parties in europe and the US.
I am sorry, but I got to disagree
on
Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Of course it seems to make sense, lead from the front, don't ask others to do what you won't/can't do you yourself.
But it is wrong. A manager has the task of managing, that is hard enough in itself. More importantly, it is a skill in itself. Make a programmer a manager and you most likely find yourself with a programmer who wasn't to good in the first place and a lousy manager partly because that was not what he was trained for but also because he will forever be stuck in the mindset 'in my day we did that...'
I have had plenty of bad managers who once wrote a little DB app or a VB script who somehow thought that made them experts on backoffice systems or server security. ARGH! It is as bad as letting the guy who put Apache on his desktop be in charge of the servers.
The best manager I ever had knew very little about any of the jobs he was managing, it was a web department for a large company but thanks to the company not thinking the web was going to worth anything (yes it was a telecom) the department was entirely seperate. He didn't know art, yet managed the artists, he didn't know servers, yet he managed the server guy, he didn't know coding, yet he managed me, he didn't know support, advertising etc etc. Yet he managed us all AND did a HELL of job. We sold more mobile phones then ALL other outlets combined.
So they ruined it, brought us in and clipped him and it all went to hell.
What the guy did was not so much manage as stand in the middle and direct all the traffic around him, giving each of us the resources we needed and distrubuting us to those who needed it.
If you needed input from someone, you got it. If you needed time, you got it. Because you could count on him, everyone used realistic estimates. No need to pad your estimates, because he already worked them in and if trouble happened, he managed it.
To this day I don't fully understand how he did it and haven't seen anything like him. In web development a lot of stuff is simple, but takes a long time to get everything together, an app might only take a couple of hours of development but a week for it all to happen in. Not with him. Marketing came up with an idea, quick meeting in the morning to check if it was possible, meet over lunch to check progress, end of the day, the page was up and running. Sure, simple things, rotationg banner, poll, lottery draw, product page. Nothing complex, but on the internet speed counts, if you can have that new phone promo ready before anyone else, it is your company that sells the most.
So please, don't give me a manager who ten years ago put together a 'hello world' program and thinks he can do my job. Give me a manager who can manage and then his job will be to trust me to code and my job to code and trust him to manage.
Like a F1 team. Michael Schumacher isn't a techie, he doesn't have to be, he doesn't have to know how to exchange a wheel or put petrol in a car. For that matter a F1 team manager doesn't have to have a driving license. Everyone their job and managing is a job. To bad so many such at it.
When MS uses the word Beta, they really mean pre-alpha. Release is Beta. If you want a release quality MS product you need to look for the discontinued tag.
Google is simpler, they got beta, beta and beta. One works, one doesn't, the other works for everyone except you and just when you became totally dependent on it, they kill the project.
Linux has Beta and RC. RC is solid but out of date so nvidia doesn't have drivers for it anymore, beta is solid but nvidia doesn't have drivers for it yet.
Solaris has only one version, more solid and sensible then a rock, it is labelled "Giving your accountant a heart attack".
Why? Because the next BIG mmorpg that really has a change to rival WoW is going to need a massive amount of investment AND tech resources that only a few companies could really muster. IBM, Google, perhaps MS. IBM because it already does the back end for MMORPG's and got the know-how for big servers handling massive tasks and running a trully massive MMORPG with all its transactions is remarkably similar to the requirements of its current business products.
Google because they again, know how to build a massive system to deal with many users at the same time, granted they know very little about 3d or indeed windows programming, but they would have the money to do it.
MS certainly knows windows (well you would hope so at least) and they got the money, they just would need to seriously buff up on the server end.
But why would any of them do such a thing? Sure, WoW makes good money but it is the only MMORPG to do so, all the others are finacial failures their revenue of no intrest to any large company.
Google has no experience whatsoever with games, at least MS and IBM make a lot of their money in that industry, Google doesn't.
They might make a simple game based on google earth but it will never be more then an edutainment type title. A true triple A title from Google? Unlikely, they got the money and knowhow to do a MMORPG server setup and could buy the 3d knowledge, but they don't know gaming, never dabbled in it and their real revenue is from advertising, and advertising in games is yet to take off.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems to stop the DOJ from prosecution these cases with tax money. That is NOT a-typical of the Bush administration. What they would rather see is that the record labels have their own private police force that the record labels pay for. Small goverment, big business. Makes perfect sense.
Remember that if it is the DOJ that prosecutes these cases AND the only one who can do this, that would put copyright infringement up against all other crimes for attention. Plus there would be far more oversight of the cases.
Remember what happened in germany? There these cases belong firmly in the hands of the justice department and then justice department told the record industry that they can't be arsed. Case closed.
That is NOT what happened in the US so far. In the US, the justice department can't be arsed BUT the record labels are given more and more powers (or not being stopped) from investigating and prosecuting these cases themselves. If you are worried about to much police power, you should be even more worried about police power in private hands.
Just as kidnapping CAN be legal, there can be legal wars. The state can for instance kidnap you, it is done in cases where a judge decides to hold an otherwise innocent person in jail to force their cooperation. You most often see this used against journalists to pressure them in revealing their sources.
The problem with understanding what a legal war is that it all depends on what set of rules you choose to use. International law as such does not exist, it more a set of rules that overtime have in general become accepted to be used as international law. Of course, by the time war becomes an option it would be fair to say that the parties who disagree to the extent that war is now an option are hardly going to agree on a common set of laws.
But a legal war WOULD for instance be if a party was attacked first. The right to defend yourself. Another legal war would be to come to the aid of a ally who requested your aid and after a decleration of war.
There are rules, and the US has been claimed to have ignored those rules in the case of the Iraq war.
The US had not been attacked by Iraq, nor did it come to the aid of allie.
This makes the war illegal, unless you accept the US claim the Iraq was behind 9/11.
The japanese war against the americans was illegal (no decleration of war) IN american eyes, the japanese didn't share the western practice of declaring war before attacking.
The american war against germany was legal. The german one against the US borderline. There was a decleration of war, but US property had been attacked before although not in attacks that could be seen as an outright attack.
The whole point of 'legal' wars is not just for the sake of argument, it is to prevent the world from sliding into anarchy. Basically, if everyone followed the concept of 'legal' wars, then war can't just break-out overnight.
That is what is so scary about the Iraq war. The idea that any nation with the means can just attack another country when they feel like it. The 'law' is a very thin shell we use to keep us all civilized. Wether it is that big guy who is 'restrained' by the law from punching your face in or the superpower who is restrained by international law to invade another country.
This was ages ago, before the bubble burst when international web-design companies seemed to make sense. I ended up working for a company that was partnering with an american firm. Never fully understood the reasons for it, and it soon fell apart anyway but part of it all was a videoconference with our US counterparts.
We had our meeting after-work and the US was of course just waking up then, but still, the difference was very start. The US, smoke-free, drinking water. We on alcohol and smoking... pot.
Oh not all of us, but that was still when smoking in the workplace was okay and being Amsterdam where softdrugs are legal, they smoked it. Kinda drove the point home to me that this whole venture was doomed from the start, just because two companies are succesful in their own market doesn't mean they should work together in a global market.
As for general attitudes, the US is generally more business friendly where as europeans tend to put people first. Discuss: Longer work hours lead to more productivity, if you want to earn more you got to work longer hours, the state should not be people's nanny and impose work-hours on the people.
On the whole, if you agree with this statement it would be likely that you are an american citizen.
If on the other hand you agree with: Work should be distrubuted evenly, workhours should allow for enough free time to have a social life outside work and the state should together with employers and unions supervise that work hours are reasonable. Then you are most likely a european.
To contrast, I seen americans working ordinary jobs for no extra pay doing 80 hours a week without question while most people in europe have less then 40 hours work. I am not going even to start the flamewar which economy is more productive (it ain't europe that is having tent-camps erected for people put out of their home, oops)
But the simplest thing might be that buying MS is supporting MS, an American Company run by an American living The American Dream(TM). To a european, buying MS means sending money abroad to make a rich, and not very sympathetic, guy even richer.
IP4 doesn't have enough addresses, of course a managers solution is to put of the inevitable so that it happens on someone elses watch rather then taking the time we got now to develop and implement a solution.
IF pushing IP6 doesn't work in the roughly 2 years remaining THEN we can use the buffer of under-used blocks as a last reserve. if we use the reserves now, and do nothing then we still have the same problem, just a bit further away but this time with no reserves remaining and no work chance of it being solves in time.
You should run for president, you would do well with your solutions.
To lazy to google it, but there have been several breakdowns of the costs a label charges to the artist to account for the difference between the price of a CD and the amount the artist gets paid.
Basically 10.5% of the sale price is just penauts. I am willing to bet quite a few RIAA execs choked on that before they could finally sign the agreement.
In other industries, it would be a lot. In music, it is childsplay.
Slashdot: Outlaw Planet, covering increased surveillance and loss of liberties
The site: Outlaw Planet embodies the volatile mix of new forms of surveillance, transparency, civil rights, and access to information as people work out new rules for human security.
Notice the difference? The GEAS clearly sees Outlaw planet as the struggle to balance civil rights with the need for security and hence accountability. You need openess of goverment but at the same time need secure systems safe from outside influence. How do you balance this?
Yet /. 'editors' (my apologies to all true editors) only highlight the loss of civil liberties and increased surveillance.
Not that I agree with GEAS either, we recently did have a huge attack on the finacial markets. 9/11 anyone? Trading suspended for a week? How about the bursting of the bubble, black friday?
The depression is as close as we got to a 'perfect storm' on the financial front and humanity survived just fine.
Same with migration, dust bowl anyone? Entire civilizations moved home before and humanity clearly survived by the evidence that we are still here.
What is odd, is that they miss the greatest threat. What has been the biggest killer so far? Killing millions and causing massive chaos? Intolrance. From the grand-daddy of them all the Holocaust to Rwanda to the latest 'race' riots in South Africa, this is the real killer. One group deciding they don't need to get along with everyone else and that if they upset the peace they can improve their lot.
All the other problems can be countered by humanity, but when we stop thinking of others as human beings we loose the need to cope with problems that NOW face others but might face us in the future.
Food shortage is a problem in some areas but not the west. Needless to say that food shortage ain't exactly at the top of the agenda. We are not spending nearly enough to come up with ways to fight food shortage, leaving us with NO soluntions IF/WHEN it hits us.
So, stupid people are criminals in your eyes. People who have simple jobs, are criminals because it is well known that no honor student ever became a criminal. Why not show your true colors, have everyone who fails the grade put down humanly so they don't bother you. Only one thing to worry you. The humanity exam, you just got an F. Please report to the execution chamber.
It would be unworkable at a public place like an airport, but for say security at the crossing it wouldn't be. The Israeli have special border gates where they check everyone and can isolate suspects quickly and safely, basically trapping suspects in a bomb proof area.
Since they don't care about the hassle this introduces (discussion in another area please) the system would be helpful, although how much better this is then a person trained for regonising suspicious behavior I don't know.
Fact is, the border checks stop and awful lot of suicide bombers but a lot get through as well.
For point security, where you don't mind the hassle introduced for the false positives, this system could be of use. It biggest failure is NOT so much the false positives, but the false negatives. What if it is installed not as a backup system BUT as a replacement?
It was an international force in that war, troops from all over the world took part.
Does the free speech go both ways? Would it be okay for the principal to publish in the school newspaper that the student in question gets her grades through sexual favors, that she had three abortions and has sex with her dog be allowed as free speech?
Oh dear no, that wouldn't be allowed would it. But if you truly support free speech, that is what you support.
Reality of course is that free speech does not exist other then as a fairy tale to keep the terminally stupid satisfied.
It is foolish to believe that slashdot is in the pockets of MS or Google or Apple. Slashdot editors are above that. They equally and openly take ANYONE's money for a frontpage story. No questions asked other then HOW MUCH
Almost, first part was right. Send them to the vets. Snip snip.
I knew it, damn those athletes! So that is how they get those human hormones for their dope scandals!
Buba, your roommate shoved his cock up your ass in Apil, but withdrew it in november, so what are you crying about?
They never should have demanded it in the first place, abuse of power and harrasment. They only withdrew after she fought back. That is bullying.
Then you must do a thing that no american could ever consider doing, learn about the rest of the world.
Geez, god. Ever heard of Blair? That is a popular guy in britain. The US had Ronald "howdee dodey" Reagan, britain had MadCow Thatcher.
The netherlands? We had "do nothing" Kok, and "if you don't vote for the new EU constitution it will start WW3" Balkende, a guy who nobody likes and only got into power because the popular guy got killed.
France had so choose between the crook and the fascist. Italy keeps re-electing Berlusconie, a guy so corrupt the mafia thinks he should clean up his act.
Frankly, democracy is in trouble. We are no longer comfortable with just letting the powers that be run our lives for us on the understanding that for the right to tell us how to run our lives, they leave us alone. That system is a bit hard to understand unless you actually understand human beings. Remember the age when Rome told catholics not to have sex outside marriage. All catholics agreed with that, just didn't follow it.
But now we want our leaders to actually do what we want them to do except we have no idea what we want them to do and no clue how to tell if they are telling what we want them to do.
Democracy, as we have it, just doesn't work. You can't vote for one guy, who somehow got into a position to be elected and then have him work for you. Doesn't work, you are just one voter but he owes allegiance to all those who backed his rise.
Further, all the voters for that one guy have different agenda's, with just the one popularity vote, who is to say what all those voters REALLY want. Even in the netherlands with dozens of parties there is not a single party that I completely agree with.
The best alternative would be to go purely referendum. Bring up each issue for a vote and work with that. Problem, the existing parties don't like that people can then vote against their policies. See the EU problems with getting the new constitution accepted. ALL political parties said yes. The voters ALWAYS said NO. Big embarresment and happily avoided the second time around by not listening to those pesky voters (the referendum is still a no-vote in holland, but there bill has been changed, so now they don't need a new vote because the voter didn't agree the first time so they surely agree this time)
If that doesn't make sense, well that is politics.
So be ashamamed of Bush and Reagan and the like, but other countries ain't doing any better. Frankly, the current system will never bring forward the honest and competent. An honest politician would never get elected because he would tell you the truth. You don't get popular with the truth.
If you look at the games, then the first ones are "simple" straightforward games that do one thing and do them well.
The second batch tries to do a lot, but then fail to actually deliver on any front instead becoming a confusing mix of micro-management and rigid gameplay.
Black&White failed because it tried to marry a creature sim with a empire building game with some RTS elements. None of them felt connected and it all just became a matter of baby sitting your civilisation and constantly having to attend to their needs with no AI to take care of the most mundane task. The creature part wasn't as rich as promised and the micro-manangement needs of your tribe soon wore your down and stopped you from exploring wandering until you just told you tribe to go screw it self.
Fable again, what was it? A hack&slash, an RPG, a empire-builder? You had lots of elements, but what were they together. There was a story, a path of good and evil but what did it all do. The story itself, was far to linear, good was just looking out for yourself and evil just being mean.
All that supposed complexity came at a price of the most simplistic combat this side of a gameboy, all weapons hit the same, wielded the same so it was just a matter of picking the one with the higest stats. The AI was moronic, none of the battles challenging.
The movies tried to marry a movie creation program with a management game. The movie creation element was okay and people still create movies with them but the management element was buggy as hell (after a certain point, right in the middle of the depression, NOBODY would be looking for a job) and again, way to mired in micro-management forcing you to handhold your employees through every stage rather then being allowed to just get on with it. People who play the game have modded it to remove almost all management elements from the 'game' and just use it is a movie-maker.
That is really this guys problem, he needs to focus on ONE aspect of his game and then do that well. Not try to make the mother of all games, combining every feature. If Molynoux ran a F1 team, F1 cars would have winches because winches are useful. It would however be a winch with a 1 meter cable. The prize would be that the car could only drive in 1st gear. But hey, it is a F1 car with a winch, nobody has ever done that before.
No indeed, nobody has ever done games the way Molyneux has done them. Perhaps that is a clue.
If you think any powers that be only care about oil prices you have a very limited understanding of the economy. Surely any shadow goverment capable of organising this also realises that a high oil price would seriously hurt the rest of the economy?
As for four more years of power. If there is a secret goverment, they are in charge always, no matter who is sitting in the white house. Dick Cheney was hardly unemployed working for minimum wage before Bush and neither will he be unemployed afterwards.
Frankly if you want shadow goverments you need to go the whole way and accept that a shadow goverment doesn't care about oil prices or elections.
The US loves its conspiracies and the killing of JFK is perhaps the granddaddy of them all.
What is intresting to see is not the theories themselves but how simplistic and wishful they are. You get the idea that conspiracy theorists are people who desperately want to life in an organized world where at least SOMEONE is in charge. Look around, check all the conspiracy theories and they ALL lead to the same conclusion. SOMEONE somewhere is in charge. That makes the world a lot easier to deal with. If you like the world as it is, then X will keep it that way. If you don't like the world as it is, all you got to is topple X. Easy.
With JFK you got several theories who could have done the killing, all shadowy groups that are claimed to control far more then they are supposed to. If only you could expose them freedom of the people could be restored.
Yet the intresting thing is what the conspiracy theorists neatly ignore, because they don't want to hear this, but is far more damning. That several groups had seperate plans to assasinate the president of the united states. For certain groups like members of the FBI this in itself is treason enough. They never actually need to put the plan in motion, even discussing it should be enough to earn them some serious time at a secret location.
But the conspiracy theorists don't want to hear that the world ain't run by anyone and that bad things happen just because one group/person went beyond talking, that makes the world far to chaotic and random.
There were people planning to kill JFK, conspiracy theorists are right, they just didn't carry it out, but for a lot of them the planning alone should still be a crime in itself.
In a way it like a Murder She Wrote episode, where to find out the killer she tells everyone she has the evidence and will be at location Y. The person to then show up to kill her, is the killer. Well not always, SOMETIMES it is a person seeking to protect the real killer. This is what causes all the weirdness around JFK, various groups who had been thinking/hinting that JFK should be killed trying to cover up that they might have been involved. Had someone they knew taken their words to heart? The cover-up happened even when there was nothing to cover up.
The same, in a far more complex mess goes for 9/11. If you look at it, you can hope that someone somewhere is in charge OR come to the sickening conclusion that it all was just a mess of people suggesting things, others listening, misreading, misjudging until you come down to a case where some people did something and others failed to stop them because nobody really is in charge and all the things that normally go right, suddenly went wrong all together. 9/11 if you like was an accident. The idea that there is one person at the top on either side who planned it all is wishfull thinking. Osama on side and Dick Cheny on the other NEVER wanted this to happen. Not 9/11 and NOT the war on terror. Oh Osama wanted an attack BUT not one that would end up with two muslim countries under american control and NO worldwide muslim uprising. Realize this, Osama got NO response from western muslims. There are MILLIONS living in the west, and that is where they stayed.
Dick Cheney and the likes on the other hand haven't gained anything either. High oil prices? So what? America doesn't prosper from that at all.
No, 9/11 was just one of those things that happened.
If you want to make sense of it, then Captain Blackadder said it best. 9/11 happened because it was to much of an effort NOT to have a war.
Nobody planned it, just nobody worked hard enough to stop it. And that includes US the people who voted for the people to incompetent to create world peace.
Pain in the ass? I simply visit thepiratebay.org and type in the title of the product I want. No nasty going around the shops trying to find the title with annoying music blaring in the background.
Quick? The shops are 15 minutes away, that is 40 minutes if I hurry. I download a DVD easily in that time with bittorrent. All with me doing nothing but clicking the link.
Risky? No securerom side installs, the scene has better quality control then any company and if there is a problem patches are released in a matter of hours not years.
I get the uncensored proper release, not some localized version that can't take the official patches
No, sorry, spore is the prime example. I downloaded it in about 15 minutes, had it installed FAR quicker because it was installed from HD not DVD. No Securom was installed along side. Didn't help that the game itself can be played in a couple of hours. My god did that game suck, sure the design was fun, but so hopelessly limited that I got the distinct impression this game came directly from the 1990's with just a slightly improved graphics engine.
Oh, and if you mean to warn me about virusses, yes, some try to get people to install trojans but frankly, anyone with an IQ above room temperature can spot this easily. Hint, spore does not fit in a 300k exe.
Modern games have very succesfully managed to suck so badly, be so little fun long term, create so much hassle for the legit buyer and give no 'goodies' in the box like say a printed manual, to make piracy the clearly superior method.
For me as well it ain't the money. I buy new MP3 players because the battery ran down and a new phone because the old one is just to last week. But the PC game industry, mostly, has very succesfully managed to make piracy just the superior shopping experience.
I don't do Securom or anything like it EVER! I have all my old CD's (and used to have a huge box of floppies) all bought full price. It is a meter high stack. Do the math on how much money that has been since games started coming on CD's.
My recent game purchase was Age of Conan + 1 gamecard and Lotro CE (lifetime subscription) both at launch.
Companies can still get my money, but only if they offer me a reason and Securom is NOT that reason.
The turks are fighting their own religious nutters. The military would NEVER allow for turkey to support the likes of Bin Laden, turkey is secular and the army sees to it.
No, the likes of Bin Laden and Turks are natural enemies. Hell, Turkey is even friendly to Israel, almost allies, with Turkey using a LOT of Israeli made weapons.
No if you ever been to Turkey or met its people, you would know that the country is FAR to western and enjoying what that bring to ever go in support of extremists muslims.
The new religious uprising comes from poor people from the backwards parts of turkey migrating and when things go to good for to long people can forget what made things so prosperous and elect people who say that doing X would make it better when current properity has been down to avoiding X like the plague.
Look at the revival of christian parties in europe and the US.
Of course it seems to make sense, lead from the front, don't ask others to do what you won't/can't do you yourself.
But it is wrong. A manager has the task of managing, that is hard enough in itself. More importantly, it is a skill in itself. Make a programmer a manager and you most likely find yourself with a programmer who wasn't to good in the first place and a lousy manager partly because that was not what he was trained for but also because he will forever be stuck in the mindset 'in my day we did that...'
I have had plenty of bad managers who once wrote a little DB app or a VB script who somehow thought that made them experts on backoffice systems or server security. ARGH! It is as bad as letting the guy who put Apache on his desktop be in charge of the servers.
The best manager I ever had knew very little about any of the jobs he was managing, it was a web department for a large company but thanks to the company not thinking the web was going to worth anything (yes it was a telecom) the department was entirely seperate. He didn't know art, yet managed the artists, he didn't know servers, yet he managed the server guy, he didn't know coding, yet he managed me, he didn't know support, advertising etc etc. Yet he managed us all AND did a HELL of job. We sold more mobile phones then ALL other outlets combined.
So they ruined it, brought us in and clipped him and it all went to hell.
What the guy did was not so much manage as stand in the middle and direct all the traffic around him, giving each of us the resources we needed and distrubuting us to those who needed it.
If you needed input from someone, you got it. If you needed time, you got it. Because you could count on him, everyone used realistic estimates. No need to pad your estimates, because he already worked them in and if trouble happened, he managed it.
To this day I don't fully understand how he did it and haven't seen anything like him. In web development a lot of stuff is simple, but takes a long time to get everything together, an app might only take a couple of hours of development but a week for it all to happen in. Not with him. Marketing came up with an idea, quick meeting in the morning to check if it was possible, meet over lunch to check progress, end of the day, the page was up and running. Sure, simple things, rotationg banner, poll, lottery draw, product page. Nothing complex, but on the internet speed counts, if you can have that new phone promo ready before anyone else, it is your company that sells the most.
So please, don't give me a manager who ten years ago put together a 'hello world' program and thinks he can do my job. Give me a manager who can manage and then his job will be to trust me to code and my job to code and trust him to manage.
Like a F1 team. Michael Schumacher isn't a techie, he doesn't have to be, he doesn't have to know how to exchange a wheel or put petrol in a car. For that matter a F1 team manager doesn't have to have a driving license. Everyone their job and managing is a job. To bad so many such at it.
It is 3.4 porn collections per second.
Sending goatse to SWAT, the people that can put you in a place where your asshole will be expanded. Doesn't sound like a smart idea to me.
It could end up being a real pain in the ass. Get it? Pain in the ass? I kill myself! (Applause from all of slashdot)
When MS uses the word Beta, they really mean pre-alpha. Release is Beta. If you want a release quality MS product you need to look for the discontinued tag.
Google is simpler, they got beta, beta and beta. One works, one doesn't, the other works for everyone except you and just when you became totally dependent on it, they kill the project.
Linux has Beta and RC. RC is solid but out of date so nvidia doesn't have drivers for it anymore, beta is solid but nvidia doesn't have drivers for it yet.
Solaris has only one version, more solid and sensible then a rock, it is labelled "Giving your accountant a heart attack".
Why? Because the next BIG mmorpg that really has a change to rival WoW is going to need a massive amount of investment AND tech resources that only a few companies could really muster. IBM, Google, perhaps MS. IBM because it already does the back end for MMORPG's and got the know-how for big servers handling massive tasks and running a trully massive MMORPG with all its transactions is remarkably similar to the requirements of its current business products.
Google because they again, know how to build a massive system to deal with many users at the same time, granted they know very little about 3d or indeed windows programming, but they would have the money to do it.
MS certainly knows windows (well you would hope so at least) and they got the money, they just would need to seriously buff up on the server end.
But why would any of them do such a thing? Sure, WoW makes good money but it is the only MMORPG to do so, all the others are finacial failures their revenue of no intrest to any large company.
Google has no experience whatsoever with games, at least MS and IBM make a lot of their money in that industry, Google doesn't.
They might make a simple game based on google earth but it will never be more then an edutainment type title. A true triple A title from Google? Unlikely, they got the money and knowhow to do a MMORPG server setup and could buy the 3d knowledge, but they don't know gaming, never dabbled in it and their real revenue is from advertising, and advertising in games is yet to take off.