Want video game developers to be free to work in their craft without the fear of government interference? Well, I hope you don't plan on voting for Hillary in 2008.
This is a different bill than the 130+ page monstrosity that Ted Stevens introduced. In fact, TFA notes that this bill is an alternative being introduced a day after Stevens and Inouye brought their telecom bill to the committee.
I'm pretty sure Boucher would never sponsor a bill that included the broadcast flag.
Congress wasn't hopping-to fast enough with that $3.5 billion number, so the MPAA figured they would just throw the new $6.1 billion number out there in hopes that their pawns Berman and Coble would hurry up and get to work.
If legislation doesn't solve the lack of network neutrality (and not in poison-pill form, either), the people will solve it for them, probably by use of anonymizing distributed surfing apps like Tor which will render traffic types and sources/destinations indistinguishable from each other. That'd be Big Brother's big nightmare, so if the Homeland Security folks in Congress want to keep snooping on us, they'd better fix network neutrality without all this Broadcast Flag bullshit tagging along.
Well, it sounds like most of your complaints would be solved if WoW were simply a harder game for right now until hero classes finally get implemented. It's too late now, of course, since zillions of people already have multiple level 60 characters. When it comes right down to it, WoW is a much easier game than most other MMOGs, which is probably part of the reason why it has been so popular with casual gamers. But that same comparative lack of difficulty makes a lot of people who are used to the EQ model get bored once they run out of content.
EQ is a much harder game - and ironically, it'd be even harder if SOE *hadn't* released so many more expansions. Every time they release an expansion, it invariably has one or two zones accessible by people who haven't done a lot of endgame content from the older expansions, and those zones cough up copious amounts of loot that ultimately trivializes older content. I played EQ on and off for five years, and ultimately got sick of paying over and over for expansions that made the older expansions obsolete. On the other hand, I quit playing WoW after soloing up two characters to level 60, because I'd done the raid thing in EQ and I'd already done most of the non-raid quests on both Horde and Alliance sides.
I thought maybe this could be used to check whether a function ended up being a pure virtual member function or not through an accessor function defined in the base class, but it turns out you can't just ask for (f != 0) when f is a member function of a class.
Also, interestingly, with gcc 3.3.3, you can do, say, (k != 0) with no warnings, but if you do cout << k << endl;, you get the warning, the address of `void k()', will always be `true', which you would have thought it would figure out for the comparison operator as well.
There's probably a reason why a warning isn't generated, but I can't think of it at the moment:)
The lvl 60 skill cap comes to mind...the taking a whole year to release an expansion also comes to mind...oh and the lack of an alternate advancement system...and...well the list goes on and on.
I detect some serious EQ/SOE fanboyism in that statement. The truly sad part is that, apparently, Sony has brainwashed you into enjoying forking out an extra $35 every six months for another unnecessary mudflating expansion pack - twice that if you play both EQ and EQ2.
He also said that the way to avoid it was for ISPs to start implementing egress filtering to prevent spoofed packets from making their way onto the Intarweb at large. So if the problem isn't all that severe, perhaps it's because the ISPs actually took his advice.
Developers are fully justified in complaining about Nintendo's stupidity with respect to how they market their game console. If your development schedule for the next two years is jam-packed with titles set to release exclusively on the Wii, your company's livelihood depends on the Wii selling well. So if Nintendo drops the ball, they aren't the only ones to lose - the developers do, too. And so the developers complain.
The Wii could be the console system to end all consoles, with the user interface to end all user interfaces (and all universal remotes as well). But if nobody buys it because the name is dumb, none of that matters.
As for The Gimp, nobody's livelihood depends on The Gimp selling well, because it's free. The authors can call it whatever they want, and if nobody uses the software, who cares. They're still putting food on the table with their real jobs, even if everyone opts to use Photoshop instead of Gimp just because of the name.
By the way - Wii for "we" isn't a good pun. The only place that pun has been even remotely successful is on the television network "We", in which the word is an acronym for Women's Entertainment. And if you happen to be in the target demographic for the Wii, then We totally sucks ass.
Everyone here's going OMG I can't stream mp3s on teh intarweb anymore, but the real reason for this legislation is to stifle satellite radio technology - specifically, the devices they are producing that allow a person to record the songs they hear on XM or Sirius (you know, same as terrestrial radio, where our right to record is actually ensconced in statute). But the RIAA, rather than comparing satellite and terrestrial radio, is comparing satellite radio to Internet streaming (and, by extension, Internet-based piracy).
Of course, they're making moves against HD radio as well, as Senator Ferguson (R-NJ) has introduced legislation that would revoke the same rights granted to citizens as they apply to HD radio.
Just click on the link in the/. article to the text of the bill as printed in the Congressional Record, and go to the next page. The RIAA's stance is plainly outlined there.
Bank Teller: Hmm.... We don't seem to have your retina scan, your fingerprint, or your colonic map on file. Fry: Yeah, well, I did open the account over a thousand years ago.
The French Resistance were 'criminals' under the laws of the Vichy regime during WWII. Nelson Mandela was a 'criminal' under the laws of Apartheid South Africa.
And pot growers are criminals under the laws of the US. Sometimes a spade really is a spade.
The kneejerk reaction against a national ID card is being driven by anarchists who favor the legalization of certain things (mostly drugs), and who think that having a national ID card will make it more difficult for them to evade the warrants they accrue when they skip out on court dates. And they're right, it will make things more difficult for them. But they bring the demand for better crime prevention on themselves, because they break the law in the first place and then lay low or move to another jurisdiction to evade the judicial system.
I suspect that in those cases, the defendants were claiming that the FCC had no jurisdiction, not that the state or local government also had jurisdiction. Those are two different beasts, so the question still remains whether a state or local government can bring an action against a person in addition to the FCC.
Far be it from me to argue with someone so well-versed in the art of being louder than his opposition, but "separation of powers" refers to a model of government where the activities of the government are divided into multiple branches.
Besides that, local governments could argue that the usable range of a wifi signal is very short, occurring fully within their jurisdiction. They could also argue that they aren't regulating the physical communications layer (the radio signal), but rather the configuration of the data link layer, which doesn't necessarily depend on transmission via wireless signal (even though, in practice, that's the only way it's communicated). While there is the potential for a battle up into federal court, I don't see it as being nearly as cut-and-dried as you do... unless you have some legal precedents you'd like to share with us.
Says you. I found SS2 to be gripping the whole way through (the final battle was a bit lacking, I'll admit). The whole point is that you spend the entire game just arm's length out of reach with other human contact, whether it's finding the e-mail log of someone who was there and who didn't quite make it, or seeing the young couple running for the escape pods, or following Polito's guidance to get to her only to find out... well... you know.
I wouldn't be skeptical that reason it isn't readily available on ebay is that hardly anyone bought it to begin with.
Maybe it's actually because nobody who does own it is willing to part with their copy of the game. Also, as a sibling post mentions, Half-Life had come out the previous year, and combined with comparatively poor publicity, System Shock 2 just didn't get the attention it deserved. Poor sales don't mean poor game.
Also, he may have to wait around for a little while, depending on what time of day it is. There are clues inside the ruins as to when the guy shows up.
My problem was that I lost track of Mazoga on the way to the ruins, so I had to finish it solo (which, since I was playing a stealthy character, was no problem at all). Never did see her or her corpse again.
This smacks of hypocrisy to me. If online piracy is also such a massive problem in the US and Europe, why aren't they drastically slashing prices on DVDs here to help people come into compliance with the law?
Is this a legitimate/. article or a shill? Gamespy comes up with a list of ten of the "most influential and eye-catching" Oblivion mods, despite the fact that there are hundreds (513, in fact) of mods listed here, notall of which are hosted on Planet Elder Scrolls.
Note that Gamespy only included mods hosted on their website, and that Gamespy is notorious for running interstitial ads that require a Greasemonkey script to bypass. Besides, this wasn't submitted by a Slashdot reader - Zonk posted it himself. The linked article had nothing more than some guy's opinion on what mods were good, so if Zonk is such an Oblivion fan, why not just link us to his favorite mods right there in the Slashdot article, rather than shilling for the ad-ridden IGN network?
Slashdot Mirror
That's okay, because non-IE websurfers probably won't see your ads, either.
Want video game developers to be free to work in their craft without the fear of government interference? Well, I hope you don't plan on voting for Hillary in 2008.
Not the same bill. RTFA.
This is a different bill than the 130+ page monstrosity that Ted Stevens introduced. In fact, TFA notes that this bill is an alternative being introduced a day after Stevens and Inouye brought their telecom bill to the committee.
I'm pretty sure Boucher would never sponsor a bill that included the broadcast flag.
Congress wasn't hopping-to fast enough with that $3.5 billion number, so the MPAA figured they would just throw the new $6.1 billion number out there in hopes that their pawns Berman and Coble would hurry up and get to work.
The three women actually attack you first, so it's self-defense, but there is an entire line of quests dedicated to killing in cold blood.
some retard like you can defend me on Slashdot
Hey, Slashdot is full of retards, so come five years from now, you'll have nothing to worry about.
If legislation doesn't solve the lack of network neutrality (and not in poison-pill form, either), the people will solve it for them, probably by use of anonymizing distributed surfing apps like Tor which will render traffic types and sources/destinations indistinguishable from each other. That'd be Big Brother's big nightmare, so if the Homeland Security folks in Congress want to keep snooping on us, they'd better fix network neutrality without all this Broadcast Flag bullshit tagging along.
Do you really want to listen to, say, every Britney Spears song five times?
Well, it sounds like most of your complaints would be solved if WoW were simply a harder game for right now until hero classes finally get implemented. It's too late now, of course, since zillions of people already have multiple level 60 characters. When it comes right down to it, WoW is a much easier game than most other MMOGs, which is probably part of the reason why it has been so popular with casual gamers. But that same comparative lack of difficulty makes a lot of people who are used to the EQ model get bored once they run out of content.
EQ is a much harder game - and ironically, it'd be even harder if SOE *hadn't* released so many more expansions. Every time they release an expansion, it invariably has one or two zones accessible by people who haven't done a lot of endgame content from the older expansions, and those zones cough up copious amounts of loot that ultimately trivializes older content. I played EQ on and off for five years, and ultimately got sick of paying over and over for expansions that made the older expansions obsolete. On the other hand, I quit playing WoW after soloing up two characters to level 60, because I'd done the raid thing in EQ and I'd already done most of the non-raid quests on both Horde and Alliance sides.
I thought maybe this could be used to check whether a function ended up being a pure virtual member function or not through an accessor function defined in the base class, but it turns out you can't just ask for (f != 0) when f is a member function of a class.
:)
Also, interestingly, with gcc 3.3.3, you can do, say, (k != 0) with no warnings, but if you do cout << k << endl;, you get the warning, the address of `void k()', will always be `true', which you would have thought it would figure out for the comparison operator as well.
There's probably a reason why a warning isn't generated, but I can't think of it at the moment
The lvl 60 skill cap comes to mind...the taking a whole year to release an expansion also comes to mind...oh and the lack of an alternate advancement system...and...well the list goes on and on.
I detect some serious EQ/SOE fanboyism in that statement. The truly sad part is that, apparently, Sony has brainwashed you into enjoying forking out an extra $35 every six months for another unnecessary mudflating expansion pack - twice that if you play both EQ and EQ2.
He also said that the way to avoid it was for ISPs to start implementing egress filtering to prevent spoofed packets from making their way onto the Intarweb at large. So if the problem isn't all that severe, perhaps it's because the ISPs actually took his advice.
Developers are fully justified in complaining about Nintendo's stupidity with respect to how they market their game console. If your development schedule for the next two years is jam-packed with titles set to release exclusively on the Wii, your company's livelihood depends on the Wii selling well. So if Nintendo drops the ball, they aren't the only ones to lose - the developers do, too. And so the developers complain.
The Wii could be the console system to end all consoles, with the user interface to end all user interfaces (and all universal remotes as well). But if nobody buys it because the name is dumb, none of that matters.
As for The Gimp, nobody's livelihood depends on The Gimp selling well, because it's free. The authors can call it whatever they want, and if nobody uses the software, who cares. They're still putting food on the table with their real jobs, even if everyone opts to use Photoshop instead of Gimp just because of the name.
By the way - Wii for "we" isn't a good pun. The only place that pun has been even remotely successful is on the television network "We", in which the word is an acronym for Women's Entertainment. And if you happen to be in the target demographic for the Wii, then We totally sucks ass.
Everyone here's going OMG I can't stream mp3s on teh intarweb anymore, but the real reason for this legislation is to stifle satellite radio technology - specifically, the devices they are producing that allow a person to record the songs they hear on XM or Sirius (you know, same as terrestrial radio, where our right to record is actually ensconced in statute). But the RIAA, rather than comparing satellite and terrestrial radio, is comparing satellite radio to Internet streaming (and, by extension, Internet-based piracy).
/. article to the text of the bill as printed in the Congressional Record, and go to the next page. The RIAA's stance is plainly outlined there.
Of course, they're making moves against HD radio as well, as Senator Ferguson (R-NJ) has introduced legislation that would revoke the same rights granted to citizens as they apply to HD radio.
Just click on the link in the
Bank Teller: Hmm.... We don't seem to have your retina scan, your fingerprint, or your colonic map on file.
Fry: Yeah, well, I did open the account over a thousand years ago.
The French Resistance were 'criminals' under the laws of the Vichy regime during WWII.
Nelson Mandela was a 'criminal' under the laws of Apartheid South Africa.
And pot growers are criminals under the laws of the US. Sometimes a spade really is a spade.
The kneejerk reaction against a national ID card is being driven by anarchists who favor the legalization of certain things (mostly drugs), and who think that having a national ID card will make it more difficult for them to evade the warrants they accrue when they skip out on court dates. And they're right, it will make things more difficult for them. But they bring the demand for better crime prevention on themselves, because they break the law in the first place and then lay low or move to another jurisdiction to evade the judicial system.
I suspect that in those cases, the defendants were claiming that the FCC had no jurisdiction, not that the state or local government also had jurisdiction. Those are two different beasts, so the question still remains whether a state or local government can bring an action against a person in addition to the FCC.
Yet where possible many of them teach from their own book.
Now who's making unsubstantiated claims? At least the other guy says he's a professor.
Far be it from me to argue with someone so well-versed in the art of being louder than his opposition, but "separation of powers" refers to a model of government where the activities of the government are divided into multiple branches.
Besides that, local governments could argue that the usable range of a wifi signal is very short, occurring fully within their jurisdiction. They could also argue that they aren't regulating the physical communications layer (the radio signal), but rather the configuration of the data link layer, which doesn't necessarily depend on transmission via wireless signal (even though, in practice, that's the only way it's communicated). While there is the potential for a battle up into federal court, I don't see it as being nearly as cut-and-dried as you do... unless you have some legal precedents you'd like to share with us.
Says you. I found SS2 to be gripping the whole way through (the final battle was a bit lacking, I'll admit). The whole point is that you spend the entire game just arm's length out of reach with other human contact, whether it's finding the e-mail log of someone who was there and who didn't quite make it, or seeing the young couple running for the escape pods, or following Polito's guidance to get to her only to find out... well... you know.
I wouldn't be skeptical that reason it isn't readily available on ebay is that hardly anyone bought it to begin with.
Maybe it's actually because nobody who does own it is willing to part with their copy of the game. Also, as a sibling post mentions, Half-Life had come out the previous year, and combined with comparatively poor publicity, System Shock 2 just didn't get the attention it deserved. Poor sales don't mean poor game.
I'm still running in 320x200, you insensitive clod!
Also, he may have to wait around for a little while, depending on what time of day it is. There are clues inside the ruins as to when the guy shows up.
My problem was that I lost track of Mazoga on the way to the ruins, so I had to finish it solo (which, since I was playing a stealthy character, was no problem at all). Never did see her or her corpse again.
This smacks of hypocrisy to me. If online piracy is also such a massive problem in the US and Europe, why aren't they drastically slashing prices on DVDs here to help people come into compliance with the law?
Is this a legitimate /. article or a shill? Gamespy comes up with a list of ten of the "most influential and eye-catching" Oblivion mods, despite the fact that there are hundreds (513, in fact) of mods listed here, not all of which are hosted on Planet Elder Scrolls.
Note that Gamespy only included mods hosted on their website, and that Gamespy is notorious for running interstitial ads that require a Greasemonkey script to bypass. Besides, this wasn't submitted by a Slashdot reader - Zonk posted it himself. The linked article had nothing more than some guy's opinion on what mods were good, so if Zonk is such an Oblivion fan, why not just link us to his favorite mods right there in the Slashdot article, rather than shilling for the ad-ridden IGN network?