You might begin by asking which red and blue states are important in the entertainment industry, in production, employment, finance, and distribution.
You might begin by asking about the balance of trade. The U.S.is extraordinarily successful in the export of culture. To the point where it can easily overwealm the local product.
You might begin by thinking about Los Angeles. New York. Nashville. Miami-Orlando.
The grand prizes in the next federal election.
You might begin by thinking about who votes in this country. The demographics of age, income and politial philosophy.
Plot, well it's a FPS, plot is light anyhow but ya.
I don't think you can back to the days when a FPS could get by without a coherent narrative, a stong sense of how to tell a story. Given the choice, would you replay the Half-Life or the most recent re-incarnation of Doom?
This used to irritate me so much when I was under 18. It still irritates me, because no where in the constitution does it say anywhere, "these rights are only applicable to those 18 years old or older".
The Constitution had almost nothing to say about the rights of wonen, children or slaves. Fundamentally, these were considered matters for state and local legislation.
The Constitution did, however, set minimum age requirements for the President and members of Congress. Rather stiff rwquirements, when you look at the life expectancy of an eighteeth century male.
The rights of children do not become a significant federal concern until the New Deal labor legislation of the nineteen thirties and the activist Supreme Court of ten, twenty, and thirty years later.
How were they supposed to find some better method when the PM's office wouldn't even dignify their request with a response, pray tell? If the secretary had even made an attempt to arrange something that would be one thing, but being ignored completely is unacceptable.
You come up with something better than the moth-eaten idea of a scroll of 100,000 names. This is political hack work, as easily ground out as the burgers at MacDonalds.
You choose a local man or woman to make the presentation. Someone known and admired in the capital. You do not import RMS from the states, which is clear proof of political impotence at home.
If the politicians still think it is safe to ignore you, they are very probably right.
So basically the guy with lots of money gets a meeting, but the guy who represents 165,000 people does not? What a remarkably clear-cut demonstration that democracy is dead and plutocracy has taken its place.
The guy with the big bucks made the Time 100 list this year for funding 1/3 of the world's research on Malaria. The guy with the big bucks is the man the President of China (poulation, 1.3 billion) came to see before he saw George Bush. The guy with the big bucks is the one who understands protocol and security.
and then on Fedora because of the copy protection it won't play strait off (you need an update from livna).
DVD players are $30 at Walmart. No one but a Geek gives a damn about Fedora.
You want DRM'd media play out of the box from a PC you buy Windows, a Mac or Linspire. Where it is part of the OEM bundle or a Click and Run download.
With Netfix and TiVO and the other all-you-can-eat buffet options, ownership is becoming less important and much harder to justify, given the transition to HD formats and media.
Oh, and due to double jeopardy rules, you can't get locked up for it twice, so the judge can't just keep you in a loop
I wouldn't bet on that.
Double Jeopardy means you can't be punished twice for the same offense. It does not give you a license to repeat the offense by continuing to refuse a judge's lawful order.
"Get Out Of Jail Free" cards aren't often to be found in real life.
Aren't they making a movie out of World of Warcraft?
It's interesting that you should mention WOW, since Rob Pardo did make the Time 100 list this year.
Others that caught Time's attention:
Bill and Melinda Gates, The Gates Foundation
Ranked here anong world leaders and revolutionaries. Currrently funding 1/3 of the world's research on Malarlia.
Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, Flickr
Chris Sewolf and Tom Anderson, Myspace.com
Omid Kordestan, Google
Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Frilis, Skype
Matt Drudge, blogger, drudgereport.com
Wayne Fouls, Sudoku
Okay, so most people are fundamentally selfish to such an extreme that makes me embarrassed to call myself human, but what makes these programmers so different from other "Creators"?
They were making very good money before their contributions to open source.
J.K. Eowling was on welfare before her success with Harry Potter. It's forgiotten on Slashdot. But you will find very few writers of low and middle class origins making it into print before the copyright era.
Copyright laws are just like unions now. In the beginning, they both had their use, but as timee have changed, copyright laws, like unions have not adapted to suit current conditions. In the end, they cause more bad than good. Hello GM!
I open Netflix or the Movies Unlimited catalog and see 60,000 DVDs in print.
I click on Amazon.com and find hundreds of thousands of books in print. 1,000 Penquin Classics in modern English translations. 183 titles in The Library of Ammerica series, including a superb new edition of H.P. Lovecraft. $22 in hardcover. Ribbon marker, Smythe binding, acid-neutral stock. Shelf life 200-400 years.
You will excuse me, perhapd, if I don't feel noticeably deprived by the current, extended, copyright regime.
Why did anyone care about this. Not only was it not in the main game it was by far the least offensive thing in the list I just mentioned... I'd rather my children had sex than killed policemen>
Several reasons:
1 Rockstar has a history of pushing the limits of public tolerance. The gamer may have disagreed. But the gamer wasn't living in Little Haiti.
2 Rockstar's brain-dead PR campaign put the blame on modders. Then "Hot Coffee" was unlocked in the two console pressings of the game. No third-party skins. No scripts.
Once caught in the big lie, the story could have only one ending.
3 Ignoring "Hot Coffee" would have set a terrible precedent and made a complete wreakage of the voluntary ratings system.
The *AA industry is feverishly lobbying the Congress to remove fair-use protections
You never had the right to public performnce. To broadcast. To re-distibute. "Fair Use" has always been more narrowly defined than the Geek would like.
It's scary how far the US is willing to go to pressure other countries into changing their laws to suit US interests. I can almost imagine the US going to war with other countries that "don't have the same copyright laws as us."
World traders aligh their laws with those of their major world trading partners. It is remarkably naive to think that the system can work or has ever worked in any other way.
.. because this smacks of the whole EC Horror Comics furore years back. And did anything change for good? Did it hell. Gory and violence in comics is still going today
There were three strikes against the pre-code comic book industry:
It was rapidly losing older readers to the cheap paperback novel. Mickey Spillane.
The crime and horror comics intended to compete in this new "adult" market were distributed through the same channels and off the same racks as Scrooge McDuck.
The product itself was eminently lousy. We are not talkng The Dark Knight Returns or Sin City here.
Perhaps the best thing we can do is to send a clear message that we do not approve of trivial issues being used as political tools when there are real serious issues that haven't been addressed. The best way to do that is to identify the politicians that use these tactics and then vote the bums out of office.
Rockstar touched a raw nerve in both the inner city and the suburbs. Gamers who didn't see the crack-up coming were politically deaf, dumb, and blind. Which is not the formula for winning an election.
Why not face the fact that Windows isn't being deleted in the numbers that matter to Microsoft or Lenovo?
No one gives a damn about the "Microsoft Tax." They do give a damn about the default OEM Windows install. Which is why OEM Linux has all but disappeared from Walmart.com.
Copyright infringement isn't theft. Anyone claiming it is automatically loses all credibility.
--- on Slashdot.
The association in the public mind of copyright infringement with theft goes back to a time when the Black Flag was still flying over the Carribbean. It is too solidy anchored now to be dislodged. That is why warez sites are given names like The Pirate Bay and the NET (No Electronic Theft) Act sails through Congress.
What DRM issues are involved with Vista? The only ones I have heard about are that a HDMI adapter may be needed to view blu-ray / HD-dvd video.
I'm honestly interested because I'm a bit tired of building computers, and so my next may be Vista or OSX...
You are starting to think like a typical home user:
Music X has 200 on-line radio stations and a library of over four million tracks available for rent or download. Playlists make it trivially easy to program your media players with hours or days worth of music from the major labels and most of the independents. Rips are consistently high quality.
You take a trial subscription for $15 a month and discover that DRM isn't a deal-breaker.
that doesn't explain why sane people should pay $50 a year for onecare
You subscribe to the service. Routine maintenance is automated. Life goes on. One Care is being marketed to non technical end-users who haven't shown the slightest interest in a migration to Linux or the Mac.
Back in college, I would have LOVED to have proposed this in a marketing class. While I never took a marketing class...
If you had taken the class, the instuctor would have pointed you towards the maintaince and service contracts that have been part of the consumer marketplace for over one hundred years. He would have reminded you that Windows has ninety-five percent of the home market and self-service Linux less than three.
Slashdot Mirror
You might begin by asking which red and blue states are important in the entertainment industry, in production, employment, finance, and distribution.
You might begin by asking about the balance of trade. The U.S.is extraordinarily successful in the export of culture. To the point where it can easily overwealm the local product.
You might begin by thinking about Los Angeles. New York. Nashville. Miami-Orlando.
The grand prizes in the next federal election.
You might begin by thinking about who votes in this country. The demographics of age, income and politial philosophy.
But was the code you pumped out so easily in the classroom ready to be woven into an OS distribution with an installed base of 300-500 million users?
I don't think you can back to the days when a FPS could get by without a coherent narrative, a stong sense of how to tell a story. Given the choice, would you replay the Half-Life or the most recent re-incarnation of Doom?
The Constitution had almost nothing to say about the rights of wonen, children or slaves. Fundamentally, these were considered matters for state and local legislation.
The Constitution did, however, set minimum age requirements for the President and members of Congress. Rather stiff rwquirements, when you look at the life expectancy of an eighteeth century male.
The rights of children do not become a significant federal concern until the New Deal labor legislation of the nineteen thirties and the activist Supreme Court of ten, twenty, and thirty years later.
You come up with something better than the moth-eaten idea of a scroll of 100,000 names. This is political hack work, as easily ground out as the burgers at MacDonalds.
You choose a local man or woman to make the presentation. Someone known and admired in the capital. You do not import RMS from the states, which is clear proof of political impotence at home.
If the politicians still think it is safe to ignore you, they are very probably right.
The guy with the big bucks made the Time 100 list this year for funding 1/3 of the world's research on Malaria.
The guy with the big bucks is the man the President of China (poulation, 1.3 billion) came to see before he saw George Bush. The guy with the big bucks is the one who understands protocol and security.
DVD players are $30 at Walmart. No one but a Geek gives a damn about Fedora.
You want DRM'd media play out of the box from a PC you buy Windows, a Mac or Linspire. Where it is part of the OEM bundle or a Click and Run download.
With Netfix and TiVO and the other all-you-can-eat buffet options, ownership is becoming less important and much harder to justify, given the transition to HD formats and media.
I wouldn't bet on that.
Double Jeopardy means you can't be punished twice for the same offense. It does not give you a license to repeat the offense by continuing to refuse a judge's lawful order.
"Get Out Of Jail Free" cards aren't often to be found in real life.
It's interesting that you should mention WOW, since Rob Pardo did make the Time 100 list this year.
Others that caught Time's attention:
Bill and Melinda Gates, The Gates Foundation
Ranked here anong world leaders and revolutionaries. Currrently funding 1/3 of the world's research on Malarlia.
Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, Flickr
Chris Sewolf and Tom Anderson, Myspace.com
Omid Kordestan, Google
Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Frilis, Skype
Matt Drudge, blogger, drudgereport.com
Wayne Fouls, Sudoku
They were making very good money before their contributions to open source.
J.K. Eowling was on welfare before her success with Harry Potter. It's forgiotten on Slashdot. But you will find very few writers of low and middle class origins making it into print before the copyright era.
I open Netflix or the Movies Unlimited catalog and see 60,000 DVDs in print.
I click on Amazon.com and find hundreds of thousands of books in print. 1,000 Penquin Classics in modern English translations. 183 titles in The Library of Ammerica series, including a superb new edition of H.P. Lovecraft. $22 in hardcover. Ribbon marker, Smythe binding, acid-neutral stock. Shelf life 200-400 years.
You will excuse me, perhapd, if I don't feel noticeably deprived by the current, extended, copyright regime.
Several reasons:
1 Rockstar has a history of pushing the limits of public tolerance. The gamer may have disagreed. But the gamer wasn't living in Little Haiti.
2 Rockstar's brain-dead PR campaign put the blame on modders. Then "Hot Coffee" was unlocked in the two console pressings of the game. No third-party skins. No scripts.
Once caught in the big lie, the story could have only one ending.
3 Ignoring "Hot Coffee" would have set a terrible precedent and made a complete wreakage of the voluntary ratings system.
You do if you want to stay in business. You can't sell alcohol to minors, you can't sell cigarettes to minors.
You never had the right to public performnce. To broadcast. To re-distibute. "Fair Use" has always been more narrowly defined than the Geek would like.
World traders aligh their laws with those of their major world trading partners. It is remarkably naive to think that the system can work or has ever worked in any other way.
There were three strikes against the pre-code comic book industry:
It was rapidly losing older readers to the cheap paperback novel. Mickey Spillane.
The crime and horror comics intended to compete in this new "adult" market were distributed through the same channels and off the same racks as Scrooge McDuck.
The product itself was eminently lousy. We are not talkng The Dark Knight Returns or Sin City here.
Rockstar touched a raw nerve in both the inner city and the suburbs. Gamers who didn't see the crack-up coming were politically deaf, dumb, and blind. Which is not the formula for winning an election.
I am not interested in how much you care. I am interested in what you can accomplish.
WinRadio is available as internal PCI and external USB devices. Prices start at $500 US for general-coverage shortwave. Winradio Receivers
Why not face the fact that Windows isn't being deleted in the numbers that matter to Microsoft or Lenovo?
No one gives a damn about the "Microsoft Tax." They do give a damn about the default OEM Windows install. Which is why OEM Linux has all but disappeared from Walmart.com.
The Geek converting his relatives to Linux (not always by choice) counts for little in the larger scheme of things.
--- on Slashdot.
The association in the public mind of copyright infringement with theft goes back to a time when the Black Flag was still flying over the Carribbean. It is too solidy anchored now to be dislodged. That is why warez sites are given names like The Pirate Bay and the NET (No Electronic Theft) Act sails through Congress.
I'm honestly interested because I'm a bit tired of building computers, and so my next may be Vista or OSX...
You are starting to think like a typical home user:
Music X has 200 on-line radio stations and a library of over four million tracks available for rent or download.
Playlists make it trivially easy to program your media players with hours or days worth of music from the major labels and most of the independents. Rips are consistently high quality.
You take a trial subscription for $15 a month and discover that DRM isn't a deal-breaker.
You subscribe to the service. Routine maintenance is automated. Life goes on. One Care is being marketed to non technical end-users who haven't shown the slightest interest in a migration to Linux or the Mac.
If you had taken the class, the instuctor would have pointed you towards the maintaince and service contracts that have been part of the consumer marketplace for over one hundred years. He would have reminded you that Windows has ninety-five percent of the home market and self-service Linux less than three.