I was unable to bring up the article in question, but what restrictions do we (I live in the United States) have in regard to our media? Are our anti-defamation laws or restrictions against attacking one's character the cause for our 17th place finish? Maybe it's because I have never worked in any job even remotely related to journalism, but I cannot summon up any examples of censorship in our media, persay. When it comes to our television, music, and movies, then yes, we are censored quite a bit.
Money from fraud and pyramid schemes do not simply "come out of nowhere": they are part of the economy - the money aquired by the criminals come from a legitimate and tangible source. Counterfiting does not have the same measurable impact in the real world as it does in the virtual, and is also more easily controlled.
Stories like these should make all of us involved in IT really make a push away from easily exploited systems like Microsoft operating systems and the applications/services that run on them. This is not an anti-Microsoft troll, but just the truth in these days and times: we all know the most common targets, we all know what is the most insecure. We should start vocally opposing Microsoft solutions by our management, both the well being of our networks, and the Internet in general.
I played Ultima Online of-and-on for about 3 years. My playing days ended a good year or so ago, but I spent so many hours obsessing over the particulars of the economy that much of it remains vivid in my mind. If there is one thing I can add to this discussion it's my belief that a "virtual economy" (like those in MMORPGs) can easily "run away" from the administrators of the game. The factors that give online economies their frailaties can not be applied to real world models.
When I first started playing Ultima Online, 10,000 gold pieces was a considerable amount of captial, and real estate of the lowest kind ran one roughly 55,000 gold pieces. Even with a considerably large user base, supply and demand of the various core resources (wood, cloth, ore) of the game was in a remarkable state of acceptable flux. Inflation was well controlled. The demand of "rares" (items that varied in degrees of difficulty to obtain) drove their prices high, but never to unreasonable levels.
This all ran smoothly, much like a real world economy of small nation might run. But then came factors that real world economists do not have to fret much over, factors that only exist in the virtual world. The most significant was that people started cheating. Specifically, a considerable amount of people found clever ways to mass produce gold by the tens of millions.
You might ask "why didn't the admins just remove all of the excess gold?". Well, they didn't know exactly who cheated, and therefore could not effectively enforce an across-the-board gold removal without losing valuable customers (where the real $$$ comes from). I stopped playing for a short period of time, and when I came back it was a new UO. Houses that were once 55,000 gold were now 1.5 million. Much sought over rares sky rocketed to values of 10 million gold (or more, I am told). New players (and long time players that decided not to cheat or purchase wealth off of Ebay) were now rendered "impoverished" for the duration of their UO life. Basic materialistic goals that players could pursue, goals that were promised to new players on the back of the box, were simply unattainable.
OSI, the company that runs UO, tried a plethora of schemes to make the economy bearable again. They failed utterly, and UO subscriptions continue to dwindle. What differentiates a make believe economy from a real one is the fact that people can do make believe things in a game. No one can dupe 1.5 million dollars out of thin air in the real world.
I always wondered why the publishers of new MMORPGs always insist on charging the standard $44.99-49.99 market price of computer titles when they release a MMORPG? The obvious exclusion is EverQuest with their expansions, but that is hardly a new game, and I am not sure that the expansions are complete games (I don't play that game, I don't know).
It would be more sensible to charge $20 for the game along with the inclusion of a free month. That would spur first and second month sales by removing the hint of caution that $50 puts into people when they go to buy a game that they know they cannot return, might suck, or might lag horribly for them.
Only intense boredom could drive one to undertake such an endeavor. Before I started using Linux, and before I got into IT, my system (Windows 95) went down with some VXD BSOD and would not boot. I was a web junkie (IRC, Ultima Online, pr0n), and without my poison, my fix, I develop a state of boredom that I have not reached sine. I found my nephew's enormous Lego collection and built myself a big PC, complete with monitor and keyboard, in the two days it took for my pal to get around to reinstalling Windows for me.
...unless they change strategy. They cannot fight Linux using conventional means. They have to change from the ground up, and intensify their advertising campaign. One problem is that they are so large that they have to maintain high prices if they are maintain their size and influence. Unfortuantely for Microsoft, open source and free software, much like combatants in a guerilla war, are immune to the operations of conventional tactics and undermine authority by winning the hearts of the people.
Microsoft needs to focus more on the longevity, security, and innovation of their products instead of trying to lock people in a rapid cycle of upgrades and spending. People are smart, the internet is in every home, they are being exposed to the truth and being enlightened by the movement. The average user will not stand for spending $1,000-$2,000 every few years to keep up. Microsoft has to lower prices. Microsoft has to implement cheaper per-user licensing. And frankly, this is all impossible for them and in the end fruitless, since the community that drives open source and free software have an infinite supply of man power and talent. Microsoft cannot rely on aggressive monopilistic "squashing" tactics to defeat this foe, for there is no one leader, committee, or company to snuff out. And all the time they waste trying to conduct warfare using the same famailar tactics that crushed their fellow proprietary opposition, Linux and open source keeps getting better and better and more and more popular.
Our judicial entities should render punishment in an impartial manner - that is what the whole "justice is blind" spiel is about. Major corporations (in the United States) are able to influence verdicts too easily. It seems that only Enron, once cast into a bright limelight that captured everyone's attention, was unable to execute their will upon the courts.
We should form a commitee. The RIAA and MPAA have their own commitees for lobbying and enforcing brute force legal tactics, why shouldn't we? How many people visit/. daily, maybe 50,000? That is a whole lot of people, with a whole lot of knowledge about these things. Collectively we can be the architects of some serious arguements. All we have to do is organize and start writing letters.
Revolution!!
By the way, when in the heck are they going to start selling that "Revolution OS" film? Come on already.
It only takes 4 to 6 years for a person that is well-rounded in the computer sciences to study another field, gain some experience in that field, and prosper. A common analogy is the professional middle-aged man or woman (we have all seen them in college hallways) that goes to back to school (usually a state college for 2 years), and slowly integrates themselves into a new field/trade. I wouldn't stick a fork in the techie crowd of generation X just yet.
The movement is about freedom. But that in no way guarantees that any company forged by that same movement, in a capatilist setting, will even vaguely treasure it's original values once money comes into play.
Besides, this site is full of people that busted a gut at the expense of some poor Korean guy that "played games to death". Why would these same people care about whether or not the bitmap of a flag for some little island nation off of the coast of China can be found in recent Redhat distributions?
I have read alot of interviews, press release notes, and newslist postings by Redhat concerning it's UI in the past, and most seemed uninspired. It is interesting to see the developers/designers interviewed here so enthusiastic and impressed with their own and each other's work.
At first I criticized Redhat's blending of KDE and Gnome, but now I am beginning to appreciate it. It is adding yet another dimension to Linux on the desktop, and seems to be doing so in the same spirit of creative development that has driven Linux as far as it has come. Maybe having only two choices wasn't enough?
...I would select 10 of the USMC's and Army's best snipers, give them intel of the area, and let them hunt the sniper down. Skilled and experienced snipers should theorectically be able to deduce the most favorable target locations - geography-wise any ways. You let these 10 snipers scope out the most favorable areas in the DC and Maryland area and camp them.
...deal is actually a good idea: A prepackeged solution that affords end users (I.E. non-technical users that lack the knowledge to use a collection of existing hardware and software to acccomplish this themselves) a simple "take out of the box, plug in, and go" solution for recording and viewing digital media, yet still remaining a fully-fledged PC. To top it all off, a legitimate OEM manufacturer will provide support for the package.
However, such a thing screams of after-the-inital-retail-sale revenue, and vultures like Microsoft and Sony will be the first to swoop in. (In fact, I bet Sony already has some comparable solution, or is planning on releasing one very shortly) If Microsoft bowed to user disgust on the point of encryption, then they must be planning on implementing a much more intrusive and restrictive feature that they can get away with mentioning in some "open the package and you activate me" license agreement. We cannot logically conclude that Microsoft will not implement something that will prevent people from sharing the content created with Microsoft applications, not without a fee or something anyways.
Sorry to sound like an anti-Microsoft troll, but it is so very hard to give them the benefit of the doubt on anything.
Are there any comprehensive articles floating around the web detailing the potential savings that such systems would deliver when compared to conventional rockets? (google searches are delivering hundreds of articles about the technology and the companies eager to continue their development, but nothing concerning costs) Pardon me for my laziness if I missed an obvious link in the article.
A thought/question I had though: would the best places to build such elevators be at the poles or the equator? I am having a hard time picturing it in my head, but a globe tilted to one side spinning through an airless void - I can't see how the positioning of such a system in one location on the globe would be more favorable to any other. Weather systems, perhaps, which would rule out Antartica (the Winter storms there are so violent that they generate the great Summer waves of California and Alaska - but I guess a site full of geeks already knew that).
No, they attack P2P networks because the lobbyists (RIAA, MPAA, Lars Ulrich) have massive amounts of cash. When politicians speak of those elusive "interests" that drive them to do the things they do, that is what they are talking: cold hard cash.
P.S.: if you don't like the country's political climate, then try changing it yourself, take action, use your own vote and political self-worth. Stop sitting around crying about it. Otherwise, why don't you just move to China or Russia - they would love to have ya.
Out sourcing, consulting, internal hiring, whatever, I don't care what works as long as it gets me a developer job so that I can be like the guy in the Monster.com commercial sniffing my business card all hard when no one is looking.
As far as those nations let them. The most obvious way to approach the legal issues involved would be to pull a China and deny access to these resources to the American public. There are a number of constitutional and capatilistic (I.E. ownership of lines and resources and how much control the government has over them) factors that would deny such a move by our government, in my opinion. So the next step (if that fails) would be to write up an acceptable set of international laws protecting copyrighted works, and lobbying the hosting nations to sign off on it.
This will all take some time. Laws concerning information on the internet varies widely between nations, even preventing the United States from prosecuting or suing harmful virus writers in SouthEast Asia. With enough money and promises however, the United States may very well talk nations like Denmark and Thailand into more restrictive and reasonable laws concerning their cyber-space.
No, the entire "Planet X" debacle was about some inter-dimensional hoopla that hits the Earth every 2 million years or something (psuedo science). Now that a credible discovery in Astronomy that followed the scientific model has been made, the Planet X goons will cry out that they discovered it first using their Atlantiean power crystals and dimensional warps fields.
You can't have the credibility and wording of science when it's convenient to you - you have to go all the way - this is no doubt published in a journal with a horde of credible and tangible evidence that can be verified and observed. "Planet X" was not.
300 bucks? Great googaa moongaa. Well, I didn't check the link that was provided, so I don't know the answer to a question that I should have asked before making the following comment, but, if it's interface is in English, I'm buying one.
Slashdot Mirror
I was unable to bring up the article in question, but what restrictions do we (I live in the United States) have in regard to our media? Are our anti-defamation laws or restrictions against attacking one's character the cause for our 17th place finish? Maybe it's because I have never worked in any job even remotely related to journalism, but I cannot summon up any examples of censorship in our media, persay. When it comes to our television, music, and movies, then yes, we are censored quite a bit.
Money from fraud and pyramid schemes do not simply "come out of nowhere": they are part of the economy - the money aquired by the criminals come from a legitimate and tangible source. Counterfiting does not have the same measurable impact in the real world as it does in the virtual, and is also more easily controlled.
Stories like these should make all of us involved in IT really make a push away from easily exploited systems like Microsoft operating systems and the applications/services that run on them. This is not an anti-Microsoft troll, but just the truth in these days and times: we all know the most common targets, we all know what is the most insecure. We should start vocally opposing Microsoft solutions by our management, both the well being of our networks, and the Internet in general.
She's also mega-masturbating-while-your-girlfriend-is-in-the- other-room-and-you-are-watching-Jag-hot.
Comparing emotions to the value gold is ridiculous.
When I first started playing Ultima Online, 10,000 gold pieces was a considerable amount of captial, and real estate of the lowest kind ran one roughly 55,000 gold pieces. Even with a considerably large user base, supply and demand of the various core resources (wood, cloth, ore) of the game was in a remarkable state of acceptable flux. Inflation was well controlled. The demand of "rares" (items that varied in degrees of difficulty to obtain) drove their prices high, but never to unreasonable levels.
This all ran smoothly, much like a real world economy of small nation might run. But then came factors that real world economists do not have to fret much over, factors that only exist in the virtual world. The most significant was that people started cheating. Specifically, a considerable amount of people found clever ways to mass produce gold by the tens of millions.
You might ask "why didn't the admins just remove all of the excess gold?". Well, they didn't know exactly who cheated, and therefore could not effectively enforce an across-the-board gold removal without losing valuable customers (where the real $$$ comes from). I stopped playing for a short period of time, and when I came back it was a new UO. Houses that were once 55,000 gold were now 1.5 million. Much sought over rares sky rocketed to values of 10 million gold (or more, I am told). New players (and long time players that decided not to cheat or purchase wealth off of Ebay) were now rendered "impoverished" for the duration of their UO life. Basic materialistic goals that players could pursue, goals that were promised to new players on the back of the box, were simply unattainable.
OSI, the company that runs UO, tried a plethora of schemes to make the economy bearable again. They failed utterly, and UO subscriptions continue to dwindle. What differentiates a make believe economy from a real one is the fact that people can do make believe things in a game. No one can dupe 1.5 million dollars out of thin air in the real world.
It would be more sensible to charge $20 for the game along with the inclusion of a free month. That would spur first and second month sales by removing the hint of caution that $50 puts into people when they go to buy a game that they know they cannot return, might suck, or might lag horribly for them.
Ahhhh...only on a geek site will you witness people arguing over Hz differences and something called PAL.
Only intense boredom could drive one to undertake such an endeavor. Before I started using Linux, and before I got into IT, my system (Windows 95) went down with some VXD BSOD and would not boot. I was a web junkie (IRC, Ultima Online, pr0n), and without my poison, my fix, I develop a state of boredom that I have not reached sine. I found my nephew's enormous Lego collection and built myself a big PC, complete with monitor and keyboard, in the two days it took for my pal to get around to reinstalling Windows for me.
Microsoft needs to focus more on the longevity, security, and innovation of their products instead of trying to lock people in a rapid cycle of upgrades and spending. People are smart, the internet is in every home, they are being exposed to the truth and being enlightened by the movement. The average user will not stand for spending $1,000-$2,000 every few years to keep up. Microsoft has to lower prices. Microsoft has to implement cheaper per-user licensing. And frankly, this is all impossible for them and in the end fruitless, since the community that drives open source and free software have an infinite supply of man power and talent. Microsoft cannot rely on aggressive monopilistic "squashing" tactics to defeat this foe, for there is no one leader, committee, or company to snuff out. And all the time they waste trying to conduct warfare using the same famailar tactics that crushed their fellow proprietary opposition, Linux and open source keeps getting better and better and more and more popular.
I say let the chips fall where they may.
This is inexcusable.
Revolution!!
By the way, when in the heck are they going to start selling that "Revolution OS" film? Come on already.
Yes, mod me down for redundancy, for I did not read through the previous posts and I know that at least 20 people have said this already.
It only takes 4 to 6 years for a person that is well-rounded in the computer sciences to study another field, gain some experience in that field, and prosper. A common analogy is the professional middle-aged man or woman (we have all seen them in college hallways) that goes to back to school (usually a state college for 2 years), and slowly integrates themselves into a new field/trade. I wouldn't stick a fork in the techie crowd of generation X just yet.
Besides, this site is full of people that busted a gut at the expense of some poor Korean guy that "played games to death". Why would these same people care about whether or not the bitmap of a flag for some little island nation off of the coast of China can be found in recent Redhat distributions?
At first I criticized Redhat's blending of KDE and Gnome, but now I am beginning to appreciate it. It is adding yet another dimension to Linux on the desktop, and seems to be doing so in the same spirit of creative development that has driven Linux as far as it has come. Maybe having only two choices wasn't enough?
...I would select 10 of the USMC's and Army's best snipers, give them intel of the area, and let them hunt the sniper down. Skilled and experienced snipers should theorectically be able to deduce the most favorable target locations - geography-wise any ways. You let these 10 snipers scope out the most favorable areas in the DC and Maryland area and camp them.
...this is horrible. Why the hell didn't someone stop him?
However, such a thing screams of after-the-inital-retail-sale revenue, and vultures like Microsoft and Sony will be the first to swoop in. (In fact, I bet Sony already has some comparable solution, or is planning on releasing one very shortly) If Microsoft bowed to user disgust on the point of encryption, then they must be planning on implementing a much more intrusive and restrictive feature that they can get away with mentioning in some "open the package and you activate me" license agreement. We cannot logically conclude that Microsoft will not implement something that will prevent people from sharing the content created with Microsoft applications, not without a fee or something anyways.
Sorry to sound like an anti-Microsoft troll, but it is so very hard to give them the benefit of the doubt on anything.
A thought/question I had though: would the best places to build such elevators be at the poles or the equator? I am having a hard time picturing it in my head, but a globe tilted to one side spinning through an airless void - I can't see how the positioning of such a system in one location on the globe would be more favorable to any other. Weather systems, perhaps, which would rule out Antartica (the Winter storms there are so violent that they generate the great Summer waves of California and Alaska - but I guess a site full of geeks already knew that).
P.S.: if you don't like the country's political climate, then try changing it yourself, take action, use your own vote and political self-worth. Stop sitting around crying about it. Otherwise, why don't you just move to China or Russia - they would love to have ya.
Out sourcing, consulting, internal hiring, whatever, I don't care what works as long as it gets me a developer job so that I can be like the guy in the Monster.com commercial sniffing my business card all hard when no one is looking.
This will all take some time. Laws concerning information on the internet varies widely between nations, even preventing the United States from prosecuting or suing harmful virus writers in SouthEast Asia. With enough money and promises however, the United States may very well talk nations like Denmark and Thailand into more restrictive and reasonable laws concerning their cyber-space.
You can't have the credibility and wording of science when it's convenient to you - you have to go all the way - this is no doubt published in a journal with a horde of credible and tangible evidence that can be verified and observed. "Planet X" was not.
300 bucks? Great googaa moongaa. Well, I didn't check the link that was provided, so I don't know the answer to a question that I should have asked before making the following comment, but, if it's interface is in English, I'm buying one.