This has moved well past the scientific sphere now in virtually every country except in the West - of course - America. These comments will be seized upon and used as weapons in a political fight - where the cost of doing nothing is far too high.
Gore's use of the muckraker Upton Sinclair's quote in an Inconvenient Truth was balls on: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
If the broad mass of people were capable of evaluating pro/contra arguments without being caught like deer in the headlights and manipulated by those whose entrenched position is to fail to understand the danger and maintain the status quo - than traditional scientific questioning and all the values which go with peer review and rigorous analysis would have their place - as they almost always do. But we've done that for decades now and the evidence is too clear to keep raising the flags. There is a time for that...but that time is past.
I think calling men who suggest that there is a government conspiracy to silence them - and MIT profs who use words like "alarmism" to describe the reactions of people's concern as they watch glaciers vanish and ice shelfs break up have stopped being scientific: they have descended into a decidedly political discussions and have lost appreciation for the damage such dogmatic questioning can cause in the general media.
Deniers is exactly what they appear to be when language like this is being employed. The stakes are far too high. Cut em off from funding and shuffle em off to the dark corners of obscurity. Heap upon them the derisions and scorn they appear to richly deserve.
And by doing so, Microsoft has created a product that is defective by design - and for the first time in at least 15 years - has marketed with a straight face a product that appears to include features which make it an inferior good.
I mean inferior good in the econonmic sense of the term, not in the Linux M$ basher sense. I mean that with capped 960x540 media resolution and the rest of the DRM crap in Vista, MS has created an OS that will genuinely make a lot of people want to look for an alternative superior good that does not lock the user into DRM hell.
MS does not care about Linux much. But if their efforts antagonize end users enough that they will PAY for an alternative OS, my guess is that you will see MS backpedal mighty damn fast.
Apple has a real opportunity here. It remains to be seen if they will let it slip by. Were it not for DirectX10, I would confidently state that I will never, ever, install Vista on a machine that I own. Because of games, XP is my only current option. 18-24 mons from now I might have to install Vista - but I will actively resist doing so for as bloody long as I can.
They are going to put a substitute teacher in JAIL or - at a minimum - take away her livlihood and proclaim her a felon - over this? They have already caused INCALCULABLE harm upon a citizen of America - for this? In your name they did this?
You don't need an NGO. Buddy - *wake up* - you need a rifle.
You would sit back and accept your government - allow them to do this in your name - to a teacher? To use the criminal power of the state to put a woman in prison over something like this? What is wrong with you?
Your forefathers dressed up like Indians and threw tea into Boston Harbour over an afront of less significance than this. Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine are spinning in their grave.
This isn't somebody else's fault - this is YOUR fault.
I'm in Canada. Every one of my friends watches BSG religiously. Every single week.
But not a single one of them watches it on Space. BSG is the reason for bittorrent. What's the adjusted ratings for bittorent users?:)
As for the ratings discussion...they are not that bad nor at any sort of critical stage. Leave it to the Slashdot crowd to ignore the Direct To Video movie discussion and seize on the ratings speculation one-liner.
As for the Iraq war parallels. They were strong, solid scripts. The ranting about those issues regarding the show come from American viewers - not those from other countries. Methinks your flag is getting in the way of your enjoyment of the best show on TV.
Look at the current President - then consider William Gates III as the alternative.
Do you seriously think - for even one minute - that the deficit would have swelled, the US dollar dropped as low as it has and that Bill Gates would have plunged the USA into a war in Iraq for fictitious reasons - and LOST THAT WAR - by surrounding himself with incompetent people and letting ideology dictate policy?
Say what you want about Bill Gates - he'd make a far better President than the current one. The bible thumpers and the lickspittle money grubbers would not be getting a seat at the cabinet table.
You could easily come up with 270,000,000 worse choices than Bill Gates.
Actually - we are hoping that he makes "a hash" out of it in exactly the same manner as before.
I somehow doubt that New Line is this stupid. This is just sabre rattling. If they think they can pull off The Hobbit without Jackson and WETA - they are dreaming.
The system broke down - it seems (as I do not know the facts other than as reported - and you don't either) as the lawyer who notarized the power of attorney appears to have done improperly.
The loss in this case is
89 yr old goes to land titles comensation fund - gets his monsey back. Compensation funs sues lawyer lawyer is covered by LawPro (our legal malpractic insurer in Ontario) LawPro pays back compensation fund LAwPRo collects its money to pay for this from all other lawyers in Ontario.
Result? >>I and the rest of my collegues in the Bar who do our jobs properly will end up being the ones who will end up paying for this. Happy now?
Well I am an Ontario lawyer and it seems to me that you don't really appreciate the facts in this case.
The 89 year old owner did not have *any* mortgage on the property, ok? There were simply no charges against the title. What happened was that it was a fully paid for rental property. He rarely visited it. The fraudsters obtained a notarized power of attorney to effect the sale and did so. The owner simply didn't visit the property and never knew about the sale until his rent cheques started to bounce.
The result in any American State using a Torrens system of Land titles would not be much different with these facts.
The newspaper does not report on the vital fact that the compensation fund will ensure the original home owner does not suffer a loss. (The spin of 89 year old man losing everything seems more tragic and makes for a bettter story.) The original home owner tells a bootstrap story about how hard he worked to buy the rental property and how attached he is to it. That's the angle that the Star and Gobe and Mail are playing up. They are playing down his right to get his money loss covered by the land titles compensation fund.
89 year old wants the rental property; not the money. He isn't going to get the property. Someone has to lose. We can clone sheep and dogs - but we have yet to be able to clone real estate and make a new spot out of thin air to put the house on.
Someone has to lose. In this case, it's the home owner and not the bona fide purchaser who took all the reasonable steps required of them under the law. To do otherwise would slow the economy, increase transaction costs and possibly kill the housing market as the ripple effect of the slowdown hit like a Tsunami.
As a real estate agent - what would happen to the economy if - out of the blue - evey new mortgage instantly had a $2,000 service charge and 60 days added to the time it would take to obtain - irrespective of the deal signed RIGHT NOW premised upon the prior expectations of the parties?
The answer is: chaos in the housing market is what would happen. It would be a proverbial kick to the genitals across the entire real estate market.
You are incorrect and do not know what the hell you are talking about.
The 89 year old man is going to get his money. He is pretending he isn't. He will. We DO have a compensation fund created for this very purpose in Ontario. The problem is - he doesnt' want his money - he wants his rental property back. Well, he isn't going to get it back.
Morever, in a land title system such as this occurred in, that is a just result which favors the bona fide purchaser and the smallest transaction cost overall for the economy, as a whole.
The problem is that you are letting a distorted newspaper article and emotion get in the way of both common and *commercial* sense.
The lawyer involved will be disciplined if it's necessary. I prefer to wait for the facts to emerge after an investigation, and not move to a trial-by-sensationalized-newspaper-article. Perhaps you should too.
There is some quick and dirty misreporting on this issue.
First - there is a difference between "Registry" and "Land Titles". Land Titles is a Torrens based system where your title is guaranteed. The problems described in these articles largely arise under the Land Titles registration system, not Registry.
Secondly, when you have a bona fide purchaser for value without notice, you have someone who is equity's darling. They are NOT the party who ought to "suffer."
Thirdly, these articles also misreport the consequences of being the victim of land fraud. The man who lost a rental property will get full compensation from the Land Titles fund. This is not a case where the victim or the purchaser *should* be out any appreciable money. What is really going on is an attachment of an 89 year old man to the rental property itself. He doesn't want the money - he wants the property back. And that's not going to happen; moreover, in my submission - it should NOT happen in the circumstances of this case.
Fourthly, this is the third such big case to hit our courts over the past year. The one prior to this involved a woman who lost the house she resided in. Morris Cooper, the lawyer for the original home owner, lost at first instance based on a recent decision of the Court of Appeal for Ontario. Cooper's case is off to the Court of Appeal and the Court will be invited to re-examine its decision in light of the new facts in this most recent wave of land fraud.
Fifthly - this is really nothing new, in the sense that American jurisdictions have experienced a wave of fraud over the years, especially though the use of Quit Claim deeds in Florida and other jurisdictions. It is relatively new to Canada. Frankly, I think title insurance has made the problem worse - not better.
Sixthly, the "Slashdot solution" of imprisoning everybody for a bazillion years is not going to happen. We don't do that in Canada. The North York lawyer whose notarized a power of attorney will, I expect, be investigated by the Law Society of Upper Canada and the LSUC will take disciplinary action - if required - based on the evidence that their investigation reveals. I don't know the details and after only reading a newspaper article which probably does not appreciate the real details and nuances of what happened and what didn't - you don't know the real "facts" either. I'm prepared to withhold judgment of a colleague's practice until I know what happened - and what didn't.
Seventh, and perhaps most importantly, the suggestion of putting extraordinary obligations on the mortgagee sounds deceptively appealing. That's only because you have not thought it through. It only wise to a point. Mortgagees do their titles searches - that's why we *have* a land registry/ land titles system in the first place. If you put an in-depth investigatory onus upon the lender (which is what a Torrens Land Titles system is designed to avoid in the first place), what we will all have is *significantly higher* mortgage fee on every transaction, a significant increase in the time it takes to secure mortgage financing and a *significant* slowdown in the housing market which will ripple like a shockwave across our economy and trigger a recession. That's simply not just an unwise idea - it's a plainly *STUPID* idea.
What we are *REALLY* talking about here is how to deal with a problem - a *risk* - that you can never remove entirely from any land system. All you can so is manage the risk and spread the cost of that risk out across a lot of people so that the cost of that burden is at least manageable and transaction costs are minimized for all. We DO have a compensation fund. What we don't have is a magic wand so that a home owner and a home purchaser both get the same property when they are victims of a third party rogue. The money we can deal with - the question of possession and specific performance we cannot. >>Someone has to lose that right to possess the property.
The common law has treated the bona fide purchaser
The ESA just made CMP order a case of Dom Perignon. It is high-fives and giggles in San Francisco today.
If the plan is to downsize it to meeting rooms and developers and a few members of the press, why bloody bother?
That gig already exists - it's called GDC and it's growing strong. If E3 gets cancelled, GDC will begin its inexorable rise and before you know it - GDC won't look like GDC at all anymore. They'll leave that for their semi-monthly "Serious Games Summits" and they'll be right back in the Bling-Bling in a year or three.
If the public and gamers is the target - they'll go to Comic-Con in San Diego or GenCon in Indy (as many of the publishers already already do). Or stop pretending and ante up the big bucks for CES.
I really don't understand this move. Worse, the entire game development cycle is premised on E3. E3 is a date that developers can't control and which does not get moved. Without E3, a lot of game developers admit that it is often difficult to achieve the necessary focus to get things done. No E3? Producers will **FLIP**.
If some bean counter suggests you cna achive this focus by getting reeady for the publishers own media events, (Which they can control the timing of and delay if need be) I doubt it. I doubt it a lot.
John Romero, once upon a time, had a lot to be jealous about. He was the cool guy, the one with the ferrari, the tats, the boss with the rocsktar long hair - and he was rich and successful. His GF, Stevie Case, was not only a gamer - she was a definite *babe* and - not coincidentally - JR helped create Doom, the game which remains the #1 computer game of all time. Romero, the quintessential developer-as-rockstar, inspired the jealousy which is a part of the fabric of every one of us.
When you are a guy who is prone to excess - and someone who had previously been prone to success - people enjoy watching your fall. Sad, but true; we are a petty lot.
For all that, while people may have laughed at Romero from time to time - John Romero was never a "laughing stock". That wouldn't be accurate at all.
In any event - it is wiser to keep your words soft and sweet, in case you are forced to eat them.
No. I was suggesting that your assessment was so incompetent, illogical and short-sighted that you were displaying the midnset of someone who works there.
"Atari wants new content coming out for the sequel game, to increase the odds of people shelling out for it."
I see.
So, following this logic you propose to:
1 - Alienate the team who was at work on reverse engineering Granny3d, key proprietary middleware your developers at Obsidian used which has the effect of preventing the community from creating new animated content for your new game; 2- Infuriate the same guys who were working on NWmax 2 - so that there would actually BE a means for people to create said content for NWN2 and migrate old material over from NWN1; 3- Alienate the largest team of pro level artists in the community, who have, collectively, well in excess of 1 million downloads and several members now employees at EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft and BioWare; and, 4- Alienate Remington Studios (CODI) the second largest mod team of pro level artists on a what-the-hell basis.
as the best way of achieving your goal og getting new content for your new game? o_0
You want new content for NWN2, and your "solution" to this need is to circumvent the contracts of the very people you need to do it - ensuring that the fifty people capable of making those tools and delivering that quality content are so furious that they walk away from the community, vowing never to mod for an Atari game again...
And this makes perfect sense? When the altenrnative was for you to do nothing - have it cost you nothing - and all of the above would have come to pass...
Yes, I can really see how a surgically delivered nano peptide to promote axon growth would instantly make 65 years of work on nerve agents such as sarin totally redundant.:roll eyes:
Or then again, you might just be a clueless immature slashdotter too wrapped up in his own life to understand encouraging medical research when you read it.
In the spinal cord, you have 31 pairs of very long nerve cells. It isn't one small cell bridging to another. So I don't think this technology necessarily scales for spinal injuries - and the BBC site was not suggesting it did either.
Nevertheless, this is important research and a serious step forward in reapiring neurological damage.
I hope the researchers run with this a long way and get major practical treatments of wide ranging application from it. Great wealth, a trip to Stockholm and a grateful planet awaits if this sort of research scales up to humans in a major way.
There are all kinds of reasons to suggest that it won't, however. Not the time to be throwing away the motorcycle helmets in devil-may-care ecstasy quite yet.
Exactly right. Even though not a lawyer, by accessing and turning over documents created during the course of a file for the purposes of proviing legal advice, this guy breached attorney-client privilege.
When one of Deibold's employees does this - he's a whistle blower. When the law firm's employee does this, he's a) unemployed and b) in deep shit.
I have no sympathy for Diebold - but I have none for this guy either.
The problem in the industry is that the competition is so cutthroat at retail, that the profit per unit to the retailer is 10% or less. On big release titles, profit is frequently far less than that.
Retailers have gone used because the margins are comparatively huge. A good used game retailer can do the following:
-Stock a brand new game bought at $55 and retailing at $60 and get it at net 30 (he does not pay for 30 days) - He takes in 4 used games and gives a store credit, used to buy the new release title - puts the 4 used games on the shelf, 1 at $35, 1 at 30 and two at $25 - all based on age and popularity of title. - he sells one at $30 and another at $25 fast - 48 hours or less. He's broken even and the next sale puts him in the black. Chances are - in the next 4 weeks - he'll sell one and probably both
What does this get you?
- instead of 10% margin - it gets you 100% margin. Better still, getting "new" selection of "used" games on a daily basis gets frequent customers into the store more frequently. Guys who would be in only once every month or two will come in once or twice a week. when they do - they buy stuff.
Simply put, the margin on used games is not only huge -it's kick ass huge. One of my best clients runs the largest Video game Store in Toronto. His selection of used games and DVDs is also the largest in the city.
His used games earn vastly more $$ per shelf space than new titles. He carries em all to attract customers and to have in demand new titles to trade to those with used games - but his really money is in used software.
EB can't touch his used price. He kicks the crap out of them.
Why do you think EB got in to the used market? They got in because they could make a lot more money p.s.f. of shelves on used than they could on new.
And most especially, because the publishers and distributors and yes, Wal-Mart have put the squeeze on retailers. Used is their only way to make real money.
This is a vast oversimplification. If breaking the speed of light means that time travel is clearly possible - then you can break the speed of light for about $300 and fun microwave emitter.
Quantum telportation already breaks the speed of light. (And I still don't get to pick the right 6/49 numbers. Dayum!)
The question of causality and moving Kip's wormhole and the projection of a general RULE that C+n = time travel is a vast oversimplification of special relativity.
I'm not a linux fan. At all. I know the rest of you are and that's fine - but I like and use Windows XP. Linux is simply just not for me.
That said, my wife got a Ubuntu disc (live and install duo) at her university and brought it home.
We were having some dificulty on a system and as a rescue disc, we fired up Ubuntu the live CD.
We were impressed. My wife ran it as her OS for a few months, but ultimately relented and switched back to windows. We simply run and play too many windows games for linux to be a real solution for us.
We have installed it on an older laptop and have been impressed with it. We have passed on the discs to relatives who have difficulty retrieving files or who have "lost" their Windows XP install codes.
So, coming from somone who really *doesn't like linux at all* - Ubuntu was easy to install, atractive, mostly easy to use and quite powerful out of the box with OpenOffice installed via default.
I still don't use linux on my machines as there are too many Windows game dev issues I deal with on a daily basis. But if game dev was not a part of my life, I might be tempted to try it.
This should come as a surprise to nobody. 3d modeling programs are - surprise - PC applications. The market has demonstrated that over the course of time, there is only one PC software application that survives in the marketplace.
That is the nature of an industry where piracy helps the market leader and hurts those behind it. It has ever been thus. This is no different.
Softimage's days are numbered. They can't compete with a united 3dsmax/Maya. They were a third whell to begin with. It's not going to get better for them.
discreet will ultimately stream the united 3dsmax/Maya apps under the same user interface and will create packages and plug-in extentions for film and 3d gaming use. As the differences in modeling requirements narrow over time, the differences and different plug-ins will being to vanish and become consolidated under a generic program feature.
Students will learn one interface in school. Pirates will use one application before they go to 3d school and mpod games. Companies will reduce training costs and as for price? Well - that remains to be seen. I have not seen a Monopolist reduce prices yes, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
Honestly though - even a dead man could have seen this merger coming: "That is the sound of inevitibility."
Google as a real threat to MS' core business? This is alarmist nonsense.
The true threat to Windows continued prosperity is the Xbox 360 and the PS3.
PC sales have been dominated by growth since 1998 in two sectors:
1 - Home PCs 2 - Notebook sales (which has just this past year also shifted to personal use notebooks and away from business use notebooks as the main growth factor in main growth)
Business desktop sales no longer lead market growth and there is no reason to believe that is going to change anytime soon. There is simply no killer app which requires it. There are none on the horizon either.
The new sales of personal use PCs critically depends upon continued hardware evolution and "killer apps" to fuel demand for those platform upgrades. It is those upgrades which is the source of all Microsoft's future growth.
Home sales rely upon PC games as their primary killer app with evolving hardware requirements. It's that simple. Reduce demand for that natural hardware churn and you have a REAL problem with your bottom line in Redmond.
And that business is seriously imperiled.
Make no mistake: PC Game developement of Triple A titles is essentially dead in the water. And I don't mean maybe. I mean STONE COLD FUCKING DEAD. It's a mere FRACTION of what it was even five years ago. Piracy is the perceived problem and the publishers have bailed en masse from funding development for the PC platform in favour of the PS3 and Xbox.
We are NOT in a market lull in PC games. We are in a wholesale abandonment of the market by hundreds of game developers and virtually every software publisher. It's been happening for three years and the effects are really starting to show up now. From here on in for the next 36 months - it only gets worse and worse.
Introduce Windows Vista? To that market? Dream on guys. Dream on.
Without new PC Games fueling demand for new PCs - there is a vastly reduced need for new operating systems. Microsoft's sales of Windows Vista OS are already sharply imperiled.
If Redmond wants to worry - worry about that. Google is a hiccup in history. The disappearance of the renewable killer app which has fueled continuous platform upgrades, on the other hand, is a grave and serious problem for the entire PC industry.
They's better hope business takes to Skype in a hurry - or the whole industry is in for a wave of depening red ink and contracting sales.
Slashdot Mirror
That is exactly correct.
This has moved well past the scientific sphere now in virtually every country except in the West - of course - America. These comments will be seized upon and used as weapons in a political fight - where the cost of doing nothing is far too high.
Gore's use of the muckraker Upton Sinclair's quote in an Inconvenient Truth was balls on: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
If the broad mass of people were capable of evaluating pro/contra arguments without being caught like deer in the headlights and manipulated by those whose entrenched position is to fail to understand the danger and maintain the status quo - than traditional scientific questioning and all the values which go with peer review and rigorous analysis would have their place - as they almost always do. But we've done that for decades now and the evidence is too clear to keep raising the flags. There is a time for that...but that time is past.
I think calling men who suggest that there is a government conspiracy to silence them - and MIT profs who use words like "alarmism" to describe the reactions of people's concern as they watch glaciers vanish and ice shelfs break up have stopped being scientific: they have descended into a decidedly political discussions and have lost appreciation for the damage such dogmatic questioning can cause in the general media.
Deniers is exactly what they appear to be when language like this is being employed. The stakes are far too high. Cut em off from funding and shuffle em off to the dark corners of obscurity. Heap upon them the derisions and scorn they appear to richly deserve.
And by doing so, Microsoft has created a product that is defective by design - and for the first time in at least 15 years - has marketed with a straight face a product that appears to include features which make it an inferior good.
I mean inferior good in the econonmic sense of the term, not in the Linux M$ basher sense. I mean that with capped 960x540 media resolution and the rest of the DRM crap in Vista, MS has created an OS that will genuinely make a lot of people want to look for an alternative superior good that does not lock the user into DRM hell.
MS does not care about Linux much. But if their efforts antagonize end users enough that they will PAY for an alternative OS, my guess is that you will see MS backpedal mighty damn fast.
Apple has a real opportunity here. It remains to be seen if they will let it slip by. Were it not for DirectX10, I would confidently state that I will never, ever, install Vista on a machine that I own. Because of games, XP is my only current option. 18-24 mons from now I might have to install Vista - but I will actively resist doing so for as bloody long as I can.
An NGO? Sing Cumbaya?
They are going to put a substitute teacher in JAIL or - at a minimum - take away her livlihood and proclaim her a felon - over this? They have already caused INCALCULABLE harm upon a citizen of America - for this? In your name they did this?
You don't need an NGO. Buddy - *wake up* - you need a rifle.
You would do this - to a teacher?
You would sit back and accept your government - allow them to do this in your name - to a teacher? To use the criminal power of the state to put a woman in prison over something like this? What is wrong with you?
Your forefathers dressed up like Indians and threw tea into Boston Harbour over an afront of less significance than this. Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine are spinning in their grave.
This isn't somebody else's fault - this is YOUR fault.
BSG is on broadcast TV?
:)
I'm in Canada. Every one of my friends watches BSG religiously. Every single week.
But not a single one of them watches it on Space. BSG is the reason for bittorrent. What's the adjusted ratings for bittorent users?
As for the ratings discussion...they are not that bad nor at any sort of critical stage. Leave it to the Slashdot crowd to ignore the Direct To Video movie discussion and seize on the ratings speculation one-liner.
As for the Iraq war parallels. They were strong, solid scripts. The ranting about those issues regarding the show come from American viewers - not those from other countries. Methinks your flag is getting in the way of your enjoyment of the best show on TV.
Look at the current President - then consider William Gates III as the alternative.
Do you seriously think - for even one minute - that the deficit would have swelled, the US dollar dropped as low as it has and that Bill Gates would have plunged the USA into a war in Iraq for fictitious reasons - and LOST THAT WAR - by surrounding himself with incompetent people and letting ideology dictate policy?
Say what you want about Bill Gates - he'd make a far better President than the current one. The bible thumpers and the lickspittle money grubbers would not be getting a seat at the cabinet table.
You could easily come up with 270,000,000 worse choices than Bill Gates.
Actually - we are hoping that he makes "a hash" out of it in exactly the same manner as before.
I somehow doubt that New Line is this stupid. This is just sabre rattling. If they think they can pull off The Hobbit without Jackson and WETA - they are dreaming.
The system broke down - it seems (as I do not know the facts other than as reported - and you don't either) as the lawyer who notarized the power of attorney appears to have done improperly.
The loss in this case is
89 yr old goes to land titles comensation fund - gets his monsey back.
Compensation funs sues lawyer
lawyer is covered by LawPro (our legal malpractic insurer in Ontario)
LawPro pays back compensation fund
LAwPRo collects its money to pay for this from all other lawyers in Ontario.
Result? >>I and the rest of my collegues in the Bar who do our jobs properly will end up being the ones who will end up paying for this. Happy now?
Well I am an Ontario lawyer and it seems to me that you don't really appreciate the facts in this case.
The 89 year old owner did not have *any* mortgage on the property, ok? There were simply no charges against the title. What happened was that it was a fully paid for rental property. He rarely visited it. The fraudsters obtained a notarized power of attorney to effect the sale and did so. The owner simply didn't visit the property and never knew about the sale until his rent cheques started to bounce.
The result in any American State using a Torrens system of Land titles would not be much different with these facts.
The newspaper does not report on the vital fact that the compensation fund will ensure the original home owner does not suffer a loss. (The spin of 89 year old man losing everything seems more tragic and makes for a bettter story.) The original home owner tells a bootstrap story about how hard he worked to buy the rental property and how attached he is to it. That's the angle that the Star and Gobe and Mail are playing up. They are playing down his right to get his money loss covered by the land titles compensation fund.
89 year old wants the rental property; not the money. He isn't going to get the property. Someone has to lose. We can clone sheep and dogs - but we have yet to be able to clone real estate and make a new spot out of thin air to put the house on.
Someone has to lose. In this case, it's the home owner and not the bona fide purchaser who took all the reasonable steps required of them under the law. To do otherwise would slow the economy, increase transaction costs and possibly kill the housing market as the ripple effect of the slowdown hit like a Tsunami.
As a real estate agent - what would happen to the economy if - out of the blue - evey new mortgage instantly had a $2,000 service charge and 60 days added to the time it would take to obtain - irrespective of the deal signed RIGHT NOW premised upon the prior expectations of the parties?
The answer is: chaos in the housing market is what would happen. It would be a proverbial kick to the genitals across the entire real estate market.
No thanks.
You are incorrect and do not know what the hell you are talking about.
The 89 year old man is going to get his money. He is pretending he isn't. He will. We DO have a compensation fund created for this very purpose in Ontario. The problem is - he doesnt' want his money - he wants his rental property back. Well, he isn't going to get it back.
Morever, in a land title system such as this occurred in, that is a just result which favors the bona fide purchaser and the smallest transaction cost overall for the economy, as a whole.
The problem is that you are letting a distorted newspaper article and emotion get in the way of both common and *commercial* sense.
The lawyer involved will be disciplined if it's necessary. I prefer to wait for the facts to emerge after an investigation, and not move to a trial-by-sensationalized-newspaper-article. Perhaps you should too.
There is some quick and dirty misreporting on this issue.
First - there is a difference between "Registry" and "Land Titles". Land Titles is a Torrens based system where your title is guaranteed. The problems described in these articles largely arise under the Land Titles registration system, not Registry.
Secondly, when you have a bona fide purchaser for value without notice, you have someone who is equity's darling. They are NOT the party who ought to "suffer."
Thirdly, these articles also misreport the consequences of being the victim of land fraud. The man who lost a rental property will get full compensation from the Land Titles fund. This is not a case where the victim or the purchaser *should* be out any appreciable money. What is really going on is an attachment of an 89 year old man to the rental property itself. He doesn't want the money - he wants the property back. And that's not going to happen; moreover, in my submission - it should NOT happen in the circumstances of this case.
Fourthly, this is the third such big case to hit our courts over the past year. The one prior to this involved a woman who lost the house she resided in. Morris Cooper, the lawyer for the original home owner, lost at first instance based on a recent decision of the Court of Appeal for Ontario. Cooper's case is off to the Court of Appeal and the Court will be invited to re-examine its decision in light of the new facts in this most recent wave of land fraud.
Fifthly - this is really nothing new, in the sense that American jurisdictions have experienced a wave of fraud over the years, especially though the use of Quit Claim deeds in Florida and other jurisdictions. It is relatively new to Canada. Frankly, I think title insurance has made the problem worse - not better.
Sixthly, the "Slashdot solution" of imprisoning everybody for a bazillion years is not going to happen. We don't do that in Canada. The North York lawyer whose notarized a power of attorney will, I expect, be investigated by the Law Society of Upper Canada and the LSUC will take disciplinary action - if required - based on the evidence that their investigation reveals. I don't know the details and after only reading a newspaper article which probably does not appreciate the real details and nuances of what happened and what didn't - you don't know the real "facts" either. I'm prepared to withhold judgment of a colleague's practice until I know what happened - and what didn't.
Seventh, and perhaps most importantly, the suggestion of putting extraordinary obligations on the mortgagee sounds deceptively appealing. That's only because you have not thought it through. It only wise to a point. Mortgagees do their titles searches - that's why we *have* a land registry/ land titles system in the first place. If you put an in-depth investigatory onus upon the lender (which is what a Torrens Land Titles system is designed to avoid in the first place), what we will all have is *significantly higher* mortgage fee on every transaction, a significant increase in the time it takes to secure mortgage financing and a *significant* slowdown in the housing market which will ripple like a shockwave across our economy and trigger a recession. That's simply not just an unwise idea - it's a plainly *STUPID* idea.
What we are *REALLY* talking about here is how to deal with a problem - a *risk* - that you can never remove entirely from any land system. All you can so is manage the risk and spread the cost of that risk out across a lot of people so that the cost of that burden is at least manageable and transaction costs are minimized for all. We DO have a compensation fund. What we don't have is a magic wand so that a home owner and a home purchaser both get the same property when they are victims of a third party rogue. The money we can deal with - the question of possession and specific performance we cannot. >>Someone has to lose that right to possess the property.
The common law has treated the bona fide purchaser
The ESA just made CMP order a case of Dom Perignon. It is high-fives and giggles in San Francisco today.
If the plan is to downsize it to meeting rooms and developers and a few members of the press, why bloody bother?
That gig already exists - it's called GDC and it's growing strong. If E3 gets cancelled, GDC will begin its inexorable rise and before you know it - GDC won't look like GDC at all anymore. They'll leave that for their semi-monthly "Serious Games Summits" and they'll be right back in the Bling-Bling in a year or three.
If the public and gamers is the target - they'll go to Comic-Con in San Diego or GenCon in Indy (as many of the publishers already already do). Or stop pretending and ante up the big bucks for CES.
I really don't understand this move. Worse, the entire game development cycle is premised on E3. E3 is a date that developers can't control and which does not get moved. Without E3, a lot of game developers admit that it is often difficult to achieve the necessary focus to get things done. No E3? Producers will **FLIP**.
If some bean counter suggests you cna achive this focus by getting reeady for the publishers own media events, (Which they can control the timing of and delay if need be) I doubt it. I doubt it a lot.
John Romero, once upon a time, had a lot to be jealous about. He was the cool guy, the one with the ferrari, the tats, the boss with the rocsktar long hair - and he was rich and successful. His GF, Stevie Case, was not only a gamer - she was a definite *babe* and - not coincidentally - JR helped create Doom, the game which remains the #1 computer game of all time. Romero, the quintessential developer-as-rockstar, inspired the jealousy which is a part of the fabric of every one of us.
When you are a guy who is prone to excess - and someone who had previously been prone to success - people enjoy watching your fall. Sad, but true; we are a petty lot.
For all that, while people may have laughed at Romero from time to time - John Romero was never a "laughing stock". That wouldn't be accurate at all.
In any event - it is wiser to keep your words soft and sweet, in case you are forced to eat them.
No. I was suggesting that your assessment was so incompetent, illogical and short-sighted that you were displaying the midnset of someone who works there.
"Atari wants new content coming out for the sequel game, to increase the odds of people shelling out for it."
...
I see.
So, following this logic you propose to:
1 - Alienate the team who was at work on reverse engineering Granny3d, key proprietary middleware your developers at Obsidian used which has the effect of preventing the community from creating new animated content for your new game;
2- Infuriate the same guys who were working on NWmax 2 - so that there would actually BE a means for people to create said content for NWN2 and migrate old material over from NWN1;
3- Alienate the largest team of pro level artists in the community, who have, collectively, well in excess of 1 million downloads and several members now employees at EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft and BioWare; and,
4- Alienate Remington Studios (CODI) the second largest mod team of pro level artists on a what-the-hell basis.
as the best way of achieving your goal og getting new content for your new game? o_0
You want new content for NWN2, and your "solution" to this need is to circumvent the contracts of the very people you need to do it - ensuring that the fifty people capable of making those tools and delivering that quality content are so furious that they walk away from the community, vowing never to mod for an Atari game again...
And this makes perfect sense? When the altenrnative was for you to do nothing - have it cost you nothing - and all of the above would have come to pass
You wouldn't happen to work for Atari, do you?
Yes, I can really see how a surgically delivered nano peptide to promote axon growth would instantly make 65 years of work on nerve agents such as sarin totally redundant. :roll eyes:
Or then again, you might just be a clueless immature slashdotter too wrapped up in his own life to understand encouraging medical research when you read it.
In the spinal cord, you have 31 pairs of very long nerve cells. It isn't one small cell bridging to another. So I don't think this technology necessarily scales for spinal injuries - and the BBC site was not suggesting it did either.
Nevertheless, this is important research and a serious step forward in reapiring neurological damage.
I hope the researchers run with this a long way and get major practical treatments of wide ranging application from it. Great wealth, a trip to Stockholm and a grateful planet awaits if this sort of research scales up to humans in a major way.
There are all kinds of reasons to suggest that it won't, however. Not the time to be throwing away the motorcycle helmets in devil-may-care ecstasy quite yet.
Exactly right. Even though not a lawyer, by accessing and turning over documents created during the course of a file for the purposes of proviing legal advice, this guy breached attorney-client privilege.
When one of Deibold's employees does this - he's a whistle blower. When the law firm's employee does this, he's a) unemployed and b) in deep shit.
I have no sympathy for Diebold - but I have none for this guy either.
This is just not only wrong, but dead wrong.
The problem in the industry is that the competition is so cutthroat at retail, that the profit per unit to the retailer is 10% or less. On big release titles, profit is frequently far less than that.
Retailers have gone used because the margins are comparatively huge. A good used game retailer can do the following:
-Stock a brand new game bought at $55 and retailing at $60 and get it at net 30 (he does not pay for 30 days)
- He takes in 4 used games and gives a store credit, used to buy the new release title
- puts the 4 used games on the shelf, 1 at $35, 1 at 30 and two at $25 - all based on age and popularity of title.
- he sells one at $30 and another at $25 fast - 48 hours or less. He's broken even and the next sale puts him in the black. Chances are - in the next 4 weeks - he'll sell one and probably both
What does this get you?
- instead of 10% margin - it gets you 100% margin. Better still, getting "new" selection of "used" games on a daily basis gets frequent customers into the store more frequently. Guys who would be in only once every month or two will come in once or twice a week. when they do - they buy stuff.
Simply put, the margin on used games is not only huge -it's kick ass huge. One of my best clients runs the largest Video game Store in Toronto. His selection of used games and DVDs is also the largest in the city.
His used games earn vastly more $$ per shelf space than new titles. He carries em all to attract customers and to have in demand new titles to trade to those with used games - but his really money is in used software.
EB can't touch his used price. He kicks the crap out of them.
Why do you think EB got in to the used market? They got in because they could make a lot more money p.s.f. of shelves on used than they could on new.
And most especially, because the publishers and distributors and yes, Wal-Mart have put the squeeze on retailers. Used is their only way to make real money.
50% on a new game? Dream on.
This is a vast oversimplification. If breaking the speed of light means that time travel is clearly possible - then you can break the speed of light for about $300 and fun microwave emitter.
Quantum telportation already breaks the speed of light. (And I still don't get to pick the right 6/49 numbers. Dayum!)
The question of causality and moving Kip's wormhole and the projection of a general RULE that C+n = time travel is a vast oversimplification of special relativity.
As a Canadian, all I can say is... uhm...sorry about all of this. It WAS the sixties you know.
To think that Paul Hellyer was serious considered as a potential leader of the Liberal Party of Canada at one point.
Yikes!!
I very much agree with this. Let me tell you why.
I'm not a linux fan. At all. I know the rest of you are and that's fine - but I like and use Windows XP. Linux is simply just not for me.
That said, my wife got a Ubuntu disc (live and install duo) at her university and brought it home.
We were having some dificulty on a system and as a rescue disc, we fired up Ubuntu the live CD.
We were impressed. My wife ran it as her OS for a few months, but ultimately relented and switched back to windows. We simply run and play too many windows games for linux to be a real solution for us.
We have installed it on an older laptop and have been impressed with it. We have passed on the discs to relatives who have difficulty retrieving files or who have "lost" their Windows XP install codes.
So, coming from somone who really *doesn't like linux at all* - Ubuntu was easy to install, atractive, mostly easy to use and quite powerful out of the box with OpenOffice installed via default.
I still don't use linux on my machines as there are too many Windows game dev issues I deal with on a daily basis. But if game dev was not a part of my life, I might be tempted to try it.
So... hell yes - pay close attnetion to Ubuntu.
This should come as a surprise to nobody. 3d modeling programs are - surprise - PC applications. The market has demonstrated that over the course of time, there is only one PC software application that survives in the marketplace.
That is the nature of an industry where piracy helps the market leader and hurts those behind it. It has ever been thus. This is no different.
Softimage's days are numbered. They can't compete with a united 3dsmax/Maya. They were a third whell to begin with. It's not going to get better for them.
discreet will ultimately stream the united 3dsmax/Maya apps under the same user interface and will create packages and plug-in extentions for film and 3d gaming use. As the differences in modeling requirements narrow over time, the differences and different plug-ins will being to vanish and become consolidated under a generic program feature.
Students will learn one interface in school. Pirates will use one application before they go to 3d school and mpod games. Companies will reduce training costs and as for price? Well - that remains to be seen. I have not seen a Monopolist reduce prices yes, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
Honestly though - even a dead man could have seen this merger coming: "That is the sound of inevitibility."
I got to admit - these photos look suspicious and alsmot fake.
One looks like a squash or some other type of gourd - the other like rendered coral or a pumice stone.
I'd have a hard time believing these for "real" if they were on Galactica. I'm having just slightly less of a hard time now - but only slightly.
Google as a real threat to MS' core business? This is alarmist nonsense.
The true threat to Windows continued prosperity is the Xbox 360 and the PS3.
PC sales have been dominated by growth since 1998 in two sectors:
1 - Home PCs
2 - Notebook sales (which has just this past year also shifted to personal use notebooks and away from business use notebooks as the main growth factor in main growth)
Business desktop sales no longer lead market growth and there is no reason to believe that is going to change anytime soon. There is simply no killer app which requires it. There are none on the horizon either.
The new sales of personal use PCs critically depends upon continued hardware evolution and "killer apps" to fuel demand for those platform upgrades. It is those upgrades which is the source of all Microsoft's future growth.
Home sales rely upon PC games as their primary killer app with evolving hardware requirements. It's that simple. Reduce demand for that natural hardware churn and you have a REAL problem with your bottom line in Redmond.
And that business is seriously imperiled.
Make no mistake: PC Game developement of Triple A titles is essentially dead in the water. And I don't mean maybe. I mean STONE COLD FUCKING DEAD. It's a mere FRACTION of what it was even five years ago. Piracy is the perceived problem and the publishers have bailed en masse from funding development for the PC platform in favour of the PS3 and Xbox.
We are NOT in a market lull in PC games. We are in a wholesale abandonment of the market by hundreds of game developers and virtually every software publisher. It's been happening for three years and the effects are really starting to show up now. From here on in for the next 36 months - it only gets worse and worse.
Introduce Windows Vista? To that market? Dream on guys. Dream on.
Without new PC Games fueling demand for new PCs - there is a vastly reduced need for new operating systems. Microsoft's sales of Windows Vista OS are already sharply imperiled.
If Redmond wants to worry - worry about that. Google is a hiccup in history. The disappearance of the renewable killer app which has fueled continuous platform upgrades, on the other hand, is a grave and serious problem for the entire PC industry.
They's better hope business takes to Skype in a hurry - or the whole industry is in for a wave of depening red ink and contracting sales.