Have you read what I wrote ? Or the article ? Or the short version of the article ?
Any postal employee might be able to read the contents of your mail, but you might just notice something wrong about the envelope. Or you might not. Any sysadmin could read your e-mail, and you would never know about it. And that's almost certain.
It's not the CONTENTS, it's the "wrapping". Sender, receiver, time and location of mail sent.
Is it a secret for the postal service, yes or no ? If it's not a secret, why should e-mail be any different ? If it is a secret, why allow it for e-mail then ? I wasn't expressing an absolute oppinion, I was pointing out similarities and differences.
Hmm... "It would be difficult to sell PS3 initially as anything other than a game machine" ? So what if ? No, wait... better: does anybody even expect to buy it as anything else than a gaming rig in the first place ?
XBox360, between 300 and 400. Games. Plus some other stuff. PS3, between 350 and 400. Games. Plus some other stuff. No idea on Nintendo. Barebones but decent PC (plus cheap monitor or TVout capable), between 400 and 600. Trivial stuff. Plus some older games. Reality check for PS3 ? Checked.
People who buy the PS3 will buy it *primarily* for the games ANYWAY. They MIGHT use it for something else too, but at a price tag comparable to any other decent alternative, what's the harm ? If anything (*shock*), people who didn't plan on buying it for games might actually buy the console.
Will PS3 games sales plummet because of that ? If you look at it from a games sold per unit of console sold, then yes, that might go down. But as an absolute number of expected sales... I really, really doubt a significant decline, no matter what anybody else might say.
One word: Romania. And yes, I don't give a rat's behind about "official" privacy policies.
What you grow accustomed to, during a "totalitarian regime", was to be TOLD your government is good, cares for you, and so on and so forth... while all along KNOWING that if you make a false move you risk your freedom, or even life. That certainty of knowledge makes it more than easy to ignore any privacy issues... as you are too paranoid already to even start believing your government will do what they say they do.
The only difference in a "free" state is that, from time to time, people actually believe the bullshit... and other times, the state gets slapped for not being carefull enough to hide he didn't respect your privacy.
As a non-US-resident, I have no idea how the US Postal Service actually handles "privacy" issues. Although, I find it hard to believe that generic data (who sent a letter, whom it was adressed to, when and where it was dropped in the mailbox, letter weight) would be deemed "private" enough, so that the government would have absolutely no access to it, if it wanted to. (Note: perspective from a citizen of an ex-communist state)
Now, think about how the US Post handles this, and ask yourself if it's any different (rights-wise) when we talk about e-mail.
P.S. How does the "regular" post handle this in the US anyway ?
Well, it's not like this is unheard of, but not in THIS specific form:) Can you say "X-Prize" or "DARPA Grand Challenge" ? How about "PayPal donate link on Sourceforge" ? Or, even cuter, "shareware" ?:D
It's on a different level (of commitment), yet it's (basically) the same thing: you work for something you care about, expect no (financial and/or direct) reward, yet, if you do it right, you end up with something.
So, yeah, always a good idea to keep hopes up for those who work for free and/or as a hobby... it's way cheaper (and on a much grander scale) as paying a lot of employees;)
Re:There are three types of windows users...
on
Halo 2 Only on Vista
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· Score: 1
...and lazy people who'd rather pay cash to some monopoly than read a few manuals (or people who have no problem pirating software.. so it's free anyway, yay)...and people who need to develop crud^H^H^H^H^H applications that only run on XP (and test them too)
I always fitted at least 2 of the above criteria (one of mine and one from the parent), not necessarily in that order and not necessarily the same at all times.
Ok, I have no idea what the heck are you complaining about. You say everything revolves around MINING ? You meant, most of anything in EVE revolves around MONEY and time spent learning since char-creation. Mining is one of the lowest income-generating professions, in "secure space".
I have went through 7 (yes, seven) pieces of 14-day-trial accounts before finally deciding what it is I want to do in EVE. And that, after playing for a couple of hours on an almost one year old account of a friend, who makes his living mining.
In 0.5 space (considered "pretty secure", at least no player-controlled pirates around), he was making *at best* 3 mil ISK per hour with a Covetor and 3 strip miners fitted. I was making 2 mil per hour with a 9-days old account in a less than 2 mil total worth frigate (including equipment).
Don't complain about the lack of options. Just step aside your "normal" account, cancel the learning, create a 2nd character focused on combat (high perception, willpower, average mem/int, low charisma), "gift" yourself a full set of +3 implants and some cash, start up with frigate L4 and command L2, train science 3 and cybernetics 1, plug the implants, learn "learning-related" skills up to L3, then focus another 2-3 weeks on gunnery and related skills... and see the difference.
There's a limit of max 3000 "trial" accounts online on the cluster, but I never saw more than maybe 1500 online. Yes, the game tells you how many players are logged in at the moment, and how many are trial accounts (if you are a trial account yourself, that is). Not that you would stand a chance to do anything decent in the 14 days you get for a trial account.
AND, actually, there are 100,000+ accounts with fees paid for "NOW". That's what "active game subscribers" means to me, anyway. Well, not bad, 1.5 mil $ per month (actually, less, as most active players paid for the entire year). The average "online users" load on the cluster is around 10k-15k during the GMT day, and peaks at around 20+k each and every day.
First of all, the link is/. already, so I won't be able to comment on the contents, yet. However, let me just tell you that "Intelligent Design" can not be logically PROVED, just as much as it cannot be disproved... it's just a theory with a "limbo-like" life. I guess it's just flamebait, isn't it ? And I took it:P
I always assumed a FF-VII remake would mean everything remains EXACTLY the same as the original EXCEPT for the graphics... but I think I might have assumed too much.
Now, I (at least) hope we (the prospective players) will be given a few choices when playing the remake, as we start the game, like "use only original gameplay content" vs. "use updated content too", and maybe "use old style textboxes" vs. "use newly created speech and subtitles".
To move the analogy further, you have on one hand a car like, let's say a Bugatti Veyron (i.e. Darwinia) priced around 1 mil (30 for the game)... while on the other hand you have a fairly popular stock car priced around 20-30k (but 50 for a game fitting the profile).
Do you see a vast discrepance here ? Note: currency intentionally left blank.
"very difficult for most marketers to handle a good product, because they can't find the right people who don't want it"
Now that's a load of bollocks if I ever saw one... or a very stealthy sarcasm-laced line.
It's just like saying "I'm an used car salesman, I sold junk all my life, but now I'm having trouble selling these brand new non-polluting high-power low-price machines I just got".
Shareware, as in "download now, pay later if you like". And 20 pounds (30 USD or 30 Euro) is hardly "sharewarly pricing"... cut it down by a factor of 4 or 5 to get it right.
The reason behind my personal opinion of "do it shareware" ? As I said, a game that's FULL VERSION at around 30 MB and has no copy protection... what's there to stop you from downloading it ilegally other than your consicence ? I'd rather see them get 20 shareware donations of 5 euro average than sell 3 copies for 30 euros each.
It's the base story of Planescape:Torment all over again. Once you make a game that's awesome for a certain type of people (let's stereotype "Slashdotter" here a bit), you're pretty much locked in that demographic. Publishers hate niche products, even if they would be embraced by 90+% of that niche and a bit of the "neighbouring" ones... it's just not "profitable enough" for them.
On the other hand, the fact that the game is so small (and has no shred of decent copy-protection) makes it a prime candidate for "pirating".
Heck, they should just release it as shareware than bother with a publisher.
I live in one of those high-piracy, low-income ex-communist countries. As a kid/student (no income of my own), I could have counted on my hands the number of items in the music/software category I purchased. Books though, that was a different story... most of my allowance went downhill on book purchases.
Let's put it this way... if I would have had plenty of money, I would have bought back then everything in those categories that I might have liked. But I didn't (have the money, I mean).
Even today, being a lucky person and earning several times above the average wage, I still have resentments towards buying software I could not test beforehand (crippled demos don't count). And even then, if it's for something I feel it's overpriced for the features/entertainment value, I do have a lot of reservations towards the purchase. I mean, heck, if a copy of Windows sells for DOUBLE the minimal MONTHLY wage in your country, you know something's very, very wrong.
I just buy the bare minimum and go to opensource/shareware for all the rest of the needs. Games ? Same there, most of the time... free online games, open betas, etc. And songs ? I can't remember when was the last time I even went to a shop where they sold music (and if I was, I was checking out the software section anyway). Radio is where I listen to music.
Speaking of which... if I record a MP3 off the radio, is it legal or ilegal to listen to it ? And is it legal to give that MP3 file to a friend ? Or get one such MP3 from a friend ? Same with TV shows (heck, don't cut commercials out if that's a legal problem).
How many people fileshare (DC, BT, eDonkey, etc) ? Lots. Hundreds of millions, maybe.
How many of those fileshare (some) illegal "stuff" ? Most of them, for sure. Even if it's only ONE music file that doesn't belong there, that's still illegal. Not necessarily imoral, but illegal.
Now, on to the "making some money" part... IF (by some cosmic accident) it suddendly becomes LEGAL to share with the world everything you ever bought (or worse, everything you ever downloaded)... imagine how the number of sales would plummet. And I'm not talking "music", I'm talking about everything that's storable on digital media.
So it makes PERFECT bussiness sense to keep people SCARED of filesharing, and what better way to do that is than find some scapegoats ? The more "innocent" they look, the bigger the "scare factor".
So there you have it, a perfectly logical explanation. And the reason RIAA and their kind will never give up on this "witch-hunt".
I am talking about the article poster, not the parent/grandparent: - first off, he delivers us the NASA page where the trajectory and course corrections are described. There's 5 correction, of which the first is the "strongest". You can also see there the form of the trajectory ; - then, the initial poster also delivers us the link to the orbital mechanics page, where you can see various orbital mechanics facts, including the tiny bit where "Hohmann transfer orbits" are described.
For the "slow" guys, here's a small digest that will answer ALL of your questions...
1. The only reason why NASA launches spacecraft to Mars only every so many days is FUEL EFFICIENCY. If you look in second link, you will notice this small phrase: "Hohmann transfer orbits are interplanetary trajectories whose advantage is that they consume the least possible amount of propellant.". Also, "To reach a planet requires that the spacecraft be inserted into an interplanetary trajectory at the correct time so that the spacecraft arrives at the planet's orbit when the planet will be at the point where the spacecraft will intercept it. [...] The interval of time in which a spacecraft must be launched in order to complete its mission is called a launch window." Well, it doesn't get any more clear than that.
2. The calculations are VERY simple, actually. And that is because you will need course corrections anyway, as the combination of observation / measurement errors and thruster imprecision will make them more important as any gravitational interference when it comes to fuel efficiency.
In other words, there's only a handfull of factors, and those are: - the Sun (i.e. potential energy, orbital speed decrease as you go away from the Sun) - Earth's position at launch - Mars' position at launch/arrival
All the other factors are so small, that they can be ignored completely in all calculations and compensated in the trajectory adjustments (which are needed anyway).
Well, it's one thing to have "malicious code" executed client-side without any confirmations whatsoever, but it's a whole different thing to have something beneficial executed client-side after (a few) confirmation(s).
Sure, it's dangerous to have such a level of access from a browser to the computer, but heck, if I *really* want to run something that is possible to be run from a browser (with the appropriate plugins, confirmations, etc), then dammit, let me run it.
If you're BOTH hard working and knowledgeable, nobody would dare take away your job. Problem is you're maybe not one of the two you mentioned you are...
You mean "Agnosticism", right ? Steven Spielberg. Heh. What a joke. "New inductee" ??? MAYBE if this was about the SciFi HoF 10 or 15 years ago, sure... but now ? Does the "life-long work" deplete in value as crappy outputs are produced, or only the "max" is considered ???
P.S. I have to admit, the other 2 names are completely foreign to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you read what I wrote ? Or the article ? Or the short version of the article ?
Any postal employee might be able to read the contents of your mail, but you might just notice something wrong about the envelope. Or you might not.
Any sysadmin could read your e-mail, and you would never know about it. And that's almost certain.
It's not the CONTENTS, it's the "wrapping". Sender, receiver, time and location of mail sent.
Is it a secret for the postal service, yes or no ?
If it's not a secret, why should e-mail be any different ?
If it is a secret, why allow it for e-mail then ?
I wasn't expressing an absolute oppinion, I was pointing out similarities and differences.
Hmm... "It would be difficult to sell PS3 initially as anything other than a game machine" ?
So what if ? No, wait... better: does anybody even expect to buy it as anything else than a gaming rig in the first place ?
XBox360, between 300 and 400. Games. Plus some other stuff.
PS3, between 350 and 400. Games. Plus some other stuff.
No idea on Nintendo.
Barebones but decent PC (plus cheap monitor or TVout capable), between 400 and 600. Trivial stuff. Plus some older games.
Reality check for PS3 ? Checked.
People who buy the PS3 will buy it *primarily* for the games ANYWAY.
They MIGHT use it for something else too, but at a price tag comparable to any other decent alternative, what's the harm ?
If anything (*shock*), people who didn't plan on buying it for games might actually buy the console.
Will PS3 games sales plummet because of that ?
If you look at it from a games sold per unit of console sold, then yes, that might go down.
But as an absolute number of expected sales... I really, really doubt a significant decline, no matter what anybody else might say.
One word: Romania.
And yes, I don't give a rat's behind about "official" privacy policies.
What you grow accustomed to, during a "totalitarian regime", was to be TOLD your government is good, cares for you, and so on and so forth... while all along KNOWING that if you make a false move you risk your freedom, or even life.
That certainty of knowledge makes it more than easy to ignore any privacy issues... as you are too paranoid already to even start believing your government will do what they say they do.
The only difference in a "free" state is that, from time to time, people actually believe the bullshit... and other times, the state gets slapped for not being carefull enough to hide he didn't respect your privacy.
Anybody remember the story about manifestogames.com ?
Well, let's see.
As a non-US-resident, I have no idea how the US Postal Service actually handles "privacy" issues.
Although, I find it hard to believe that generic data (who sent a letter, whom it was adressed to, when and where it was dropped in the mailbox, letter weight) would be deemed "private" enough, so that the government would have absolutely no access to it, if it wanted to.
(Note: perspective from a citizen of an ex-communist state)
Now, think about how the US Post handles this, and ask yourself if it's any different (rights-wise) when we talk about e-mail.
P.S. How does the "regular" post handle this in the US anyway ?
Well, it's not like this is unheard of, but not in THIS specific form :) :D
;)
Can you say "X-Prize" or "DARPA Grand Challenge" ?
How about "PayPal donate link on Sourceforge" ?
Or, even cuter, "shareware" ?
It's on a different level (of commitment), yet it's (basically) the same thing: you work for something you care about, expect no (financial and/or direct) reward, yet, if you do it right, you end up with something.
So, yeah, always a good idea to keep hopes up for those who work for free and/or as a hobby... it's way cheaper (and on a much grander scale) as paying a lot of employees
...and lazy people who'd rather pay cash to some monopoly than read a few manuals (or people who have no problem pirating software.. so it's free anyway, yay) ...and people who need to develop crud^H^H^H^H^H applications that only run on XP (and test them too)
I always fitted at least 2 of the above criteria (one of mine and one from the parent), not necessarily in that order and not necessarily the same at all times.
Ok, I have no idea what the heck are you complaining about.
You say everything revolves around MINING ?
You meant, most of anything in EVE revolves around MONEY and time spent learning since char-creation.
Mining is one of the lowest income-generating professions, in "secure space".
I have went through 7 (yes, seven) pieces of 14-day-trial accounts before finally deciding what it is I want to do in EVE.
And that, after playing for a couple of hours on an almost one year old account of a friend, who makes his living mining.
In 0.5 space (considered "pretty secure", at least no player-controlled pirates around), he was making *at best* 3 mil ISK per hour with a Covetor and 3 strip miners fitted. I was making 2 mil per hour with a 9-days old account in a less than 2 mil total worth frigate (including equipment).
Don't complain about the lack of options. Just step aside your "normal" account, cancel the learning, create a 2nd character focused on combat (high perception, willpower, average mem/int, low charisma), "gift" yourself a full set of +3 implants and some cash, start up with frigate L4 and command L2, train science 3 and cybernetics 1, plug the implants, learn "learning-related" skills up to L3, then focus another 2-3 weeks on gunnery and related skills... and see the difference.
There's a limit of max 3000 "trial" accounts online on the cluster, but I never saw more than maybe 1500 online.
Yes, the game tells you how many players are logged in at the moment, and how many are trial accounts (if you are a trial account yourself, that is).
Not that you would stand a chance to do anything decent in the 14 days you get for a trial account.
AND, actually, there are 100,000+ accounts with fees paid for "NOW".
That's what "active game subscribers" means to me, anyway.
Well, not bad, 1.5 mil $ per month (actually, less, as most active players paid for the entire year).
The average "online users" load on the cluster is around 10k-15k during the GMT day, and peaks at around 20+k each and every day.
But, I, for one, really do like to welcome our new wasp zombie-master overlords ;)
First of all, the link is /. already, so I won't be able to comment on the contents, yet. :P
However, let me just tell you that "Intelligent Design" can not be logically PROVED, just as much as it cannot be disproved... it's just a theory with a "limbo-like" life.
I guess it's just flamebait, isn't it ? And I took it
I always assumed a FF-VII remake would mean everything remains EXACTLY the same as the original EXCEPT for the graphics... but I think I might have assumed too much.
Now, I (at least) hope we (the prospective players) will be given a few choices when playing the remake, as we start the game, like "use only original gameplay content" vs. "use updated content too", and maybe "use old style textboxes" vs. "use newly created speech and subtitles".
To move the analogy further, you have on one hand a car like, let's say a Bugatti Veyron (i.e. Darwinia) priced around 1 mil (30 for the game)... while on the other hand you have a fairly popular stock car priced around 20-30k (but 50 for a game fitting the profile).
Do you see a vast discrepance here ?
Note: currency intentionally left blank.
Actually, it assumes that listening to your conscience comes somewhere lower than listening to your wallet... for most people.
"very difficult for most marketers to handle a good product, because they can't find the right people who don't want it"
Now that's a load of bollocks if I ever saw one... or a very stealthy sarcasm-laced line.
It's just like saying "I'm an used car salesman, I sold junk all my life, but now I'm having trouble selling these brand new non-polluting high-power low-price machines I just got".
Shareware, as in "download now, pay later if you like". And 20 pounds (30 USD or 30 Euro) is hardly "sharewarly pricing"... cut it down by a factor of 4 or 5 to get it right.
The reason behind my personal opinion of "do it shareware" ? As I said, a game that's FULL VERSION at around 30 MB and has no copy protection... what's there to stop you from downloading it ilegally other than your consicence ? I'd rather see them get 20 shareware donations of 5 euro average than sell 3 copies for 30 euros each.
It's the base story of Planescape:Torment all over again.
Once you make a game that's awesome for a certain type of people (let's stereotype "Slashdotter" here a bit), you're pretty much locked in that demographic.
Publishers hate niche products, even if they would be embraced by 90+% of that niche and a bit of the "neighbouring" ones... it's just not "profitable enough" for them.
On the other hand, the fact that the game is so small (and has no shred of decent copy-protection) makes it a prime candidate for "pirating".
Heck, they should just release it as shareware than bother with a publisher.
I live in one of those high-piracy, low-income ex-communist countries.
:D
As a kid/student (no income of my own), I could have counted on my hands the number of items in the music/software category I purchased. Books though, that was a different story... most of my allowance went downhill on book purchases.
Let's put it this way... if I would have had plenty of money, I would have bought back then everything in those categories that I might have liked. But I didn't (have the money, I mean).
Even today, being a lucky person and earning several times above the average wage, I still have resentments towards buying software I could not test beforehand (crippled demos don't count). And even then, if it's for something I feel it's overpriced for the features/entertainment value, I do have a lot of reservations towards the purchase.
I mean, heck, if a copy of Windows sells for DOUBLE the minimal MONTHLY wage in your country, you know something's very, very wrong.
I just buy the bare minimum and go to opensource/shareware for all the rest of the needs. Games ? Same there, most of the time... free online games, open betas, etc.
And songs ? I can't remember when was the last time I even went to a shop where they sold music (and if I was, I was checking out the software section anyway). Radio is where I listen to music.
Speaking of which... if I record a MP3 off the radio, is it legal or ilegal to listen to it ?
And is it legal to give that MP3 file to a friend ? Or get one such MP3 from a friend ?
Same with TV shows (heck, don't cut commercials out if that's a legal problem).
Now THAT is a good question
How many people fileshare (DC, BT, eDonkey, etc) ?
Lots. Hundreds of millions, maybe.
How many of those fileshare (some) illegal "stuff" ?
Most of them, for sure. Even if it's only ONE music file that doesn't belong there, that's still illegal. Not necessarily imoral, but illegal.
Now, on to the "making some money" part...
IF (by some cosmic accident) it suddendly becomes LEGAL to share with the world everything you ever bought (or worse, everything you ever downloaded)... imagine how the number of sales would plummet. And I'm not talking "music", I'm talking about everything that's storable on digital media.
So it makes PERFECT bussiness sense to keep people SCARED of filesharing, and what better way to do that is than find some scapegoats ? The more "innocent" they look, the bigger the "scare factor".
So there you have it, a perfectly logical explanation. And the reason RIAA and their kind will never give up on this "witch-hunt".
I am talking about the article poster, not the parent/grandparent:
- first off, he delivers us the NASA page where the trajectory and course corrections are described. There's 5 correction, of which the first is the "strongest". You can also see there the form of the trajectory ;
- then, the initial poster also delivers us the link to the orbital mechanics page, where you can see various orbital mechanics facts, including the tiny bit where "Hohmann transfer orbits" are described.
For the "slow" guys, here's a small digest that will answer ALL of your questions...
1. The only reason why NASA launches spacecraft to Mars only every so many days is FUEL EFFICIENCY.
If you look in second link, you will notice this small phrase: "Hohmann transfer orbits are interplanetary trajectories whose advantage is that they consume the least possible amount of propellant.".
Also, "To reach a planet requires that the spacecraft be inserted into an interplanetary trajectory at the correct time so that the spacecraft arrives at the planet's orbit when the planet will be at the point where the spacecraft will intercept it. [...] The interval of time in which a spacecraft must be launched in order to complete its mission is called a launch window."
Well, it doesn't get any more clear than that.
2. The calculations are VERY simple, actually. And that is because you will need course corrections anyway, as the combination of observation / measurement errors and thruster imprecision will make them more important as any gravitational interference when it comes to fuel efficiency.
In other words, there's only a handfull of factors, and those are:
- the Sun (i.e. potential energy, orbital speed decrease as you go away from the Sun)
- Earth's position at launch
- Mars' position at launch/arrival
All the other factors are so small, that they can be ignored completely in all calculations and compensated in the trajectory adjustments (which are needed anyway).
Well, it's one thing to have "malicious code" executed client-side without any confirmations whatsoever, but it's a whole different thing to have something beneficial executed client-side after (a few) confirmation(s).
Sure, it's dangerous to have such a level of access from a browser to the computer, but heck, if I *really* want to run something that is possible to be run from a browser (with the appropriate plugins, confirmations, etc), then dammit, let me run it.
...and as with every other "freedom", for one who deserves it there's at least ten idiots who abuse it.
Depends on how you view 16-20 years... as "long" or "short".
Do I really have to explain WHY ?
If you're BOTH hard working and knowledgeable, nobody would dare take away your job. Problem is you're maybe not one of the two you mentioned you are...
You mean "Agnosticism", right ?
Steven Spielberg. Heh. What a joke. "New inductee" ??? MAYBE if this was about the SciFi HoF 10 or 15 years ago, sure... but now ? Does the "life-long work" deplete in value as crappy outputs are produced, or only the "max" is considered ???
P.S. I have to admit, the other 2 names are completely foreign to me.