Does anybody still believe that this election wasn't fixed?
As a matter of fact, I don't believe that it was fixed. I'm sure I'm in the vast majority on the liberal bastion that is Slashdot, however.
That said, between the warrantless wiretaps and the plan to let a UAE-based company run our ports (why that sort of thing isn't mandatorily domestic in the first place is beyond me), I'm almost regretting voting for Bush. In fact, had the Democrats chosen to put forward a moderate candidate in '04 (Lieberman, anyone?), I probably would have voted for him instead. Too bad I had to vote against Kerry.
But as far as the conspiracy theories whirling around, here's one for you to chew on:
If the election was fixed, perhaps it was fixed by Hillary Clinton. (Stay with me now!) If Kerry had won in '04, Hillary would have had to wait until '12 to make a serious effort at running. Besides, what better outgoing president to launch a presidential campaign off of than Bush? She's already got the ultra-left Howard Dean running the DNC, so compared to him, even she seems moderate, and given the way the current administration has got the moderate vote up in arms, she's practically a shoe-in to win in '08 now.
Seems unlikely? Sure. But no more unlikely than the election being fixed for any other reason, especially considering that there's been no substantiated evidence of willful fraud.
I know one of these is proposed for construction here in Georgia, and somehow the idea of "rural south" and "nuclear power plant" in the same sentence worries me.
I think a former President, certified nuclear engineer, and Georgia native would like a word with you.
The legality of such indexing remains questionable, however this has not deterred copyright enforcement actions.
Well, think of it this way - the content industry claims billions in annual losses. Getting sued over the confiscated servers, even for treble damages, after getting the government to do your dirty work for you is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
Region coding is DRM. Locking out the menu/FF/next track buttons is DRM. And, of course, CSS is DRM as well.
The thing is, DRM is not about preventing illegal copying. It's about controlling the consumer. Copy prevention is just the scapegoat that the media industry uses to get Congress and the electronics industry to force DRM down our throats.
She said NASA once had a policy of what to do, whom to call, and how to announce the news if someone detected a signal of intelligent life from space. "Today it is in fact a group of very generous philanthropists who will get the call before we get a press conference," Tarter said. They include Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold.
Crap. You can bet the aliens will end up with Windows on 90% of their desktops before they even hear of Linux.
This probably won't make you feel any better, but I submitted the same story and had it rejected as well (hence my semi-off-topic post above). In the end, no article on this topic was accepted, not even as the customary grossly-overlooked footnote limited to the YRO section. The XCP rootkit was the biggest news story for nerds in quite some time, what with the actual rootkit issues and the GPL violations, yet now that legal action against Sony has been taken and resolved, the Slashdot editors (at least, the ones who happened to see the probably dozens of submissions on this topic) don't want us to talk about it?
I know Rob Malda has refuted past claims that he and/or his editors are on the take (see previous controversies surrounding Roland Piquepaille and Beatles-Beatles), but this makes me wonder (at least a little bit - I'm not really a tin-foil-hat-wearing freak) (a) whether somebody here didn't get paid off by Sony to keep word of the settlement from making it onto popular tech sites, or (b) whether Rob isn't able to maintain full editorial control without interference from Slashdot's parent company.
Sure, it probably isn't true, but not putting up such an important and interesting story, as written by anyone, boggles the mind.
He points to piracy as a chief culprit in the sales drop. He says developers need to first find ways to make people pay.
Look, I'm an adult who plays my share of games. I pay actual, real money for them. I'm what you call an honest customer. But I'll be damned if I'm gonna let a Starforce-esque DRM scheme take over my computer just to play a game. And I'll be damned if I have to log in every time I want to play a single-player game on a computer that I might not even want to have connected to the Intarweb - twice damned if the company running the login server screws the world over by going out of business.
Game companies target the stereotypical gamer, the teenager or early twentysomething male. Just looking at the selection of games available makes this painfully obvious. But if you want to get more people to buy your games, why not target an audience that actually has money to blow? If you're going to make a FPS, make a Thief or a System Shock 2 - a thinking person's FPS - rather than another mindless Quake clone. Make a game with an interesting storyline like the Elder Scrolls series rather than focusing on smackin' up yo' bitches in GTA7: The Search for More Crack. The MMOG market, with its median age several years higher than the general gaming market, already shows that adults with money are willing to dump tons of that money into game entertainment.
Yet for every Civilization or SimCity, there are hundreds of loads of crap out there trying to turn adrenaline and testosterone into money.
Now, the game developers are welcome to make any sort of game they want. But when nearly all of their offerings target the people who don't have independently-earned incomes, they shouldn't complain that piracy is killing the industry. In fact, their insistence upon going where the money isn't tells me that piracy isn't nearly the problem they want us to believe it to be. Do people play the games without paying for them? Sure. Do they not sell as many copies because of it? Certainly. But if the industry were really on the verge of collapse, they would have started selling games to people with money rather than letting themselves all go under.
On a side note, Sony BMG settled the class action lawsuit filed against them by the EFF. If you want replacement CDs released by Sony BMG that don't have XCP or MediaMax on them, head to http://www.eff.org/sony for more info.
The difference is that most kids know that killing is wrong, and won't kill someone because of that (as opposed to not killing someone solely because they might get caught). But a lot of kids put graffiti in the same category as underage smoking/drinking, smoking marijuana, shoplifting, and other nonviolent offenses. Nobody gets injured by graffiti and vandalism, so it seems more like a victimless crime, and so a kid's sense of morality is more likely to be swayed by peer pressure and media influence.
I'm not saying the game should be banned. Freedom of speech and all that. But I am saying that games like Getting Up and Tony Hawk's Underground 2 should be rated closer to the adult end of the scale by the ESRB and that retailers should take this rating into account when selling games directly to minors. I'm also saying that developers should think about the impact that their work has on society and make an informed decision about whether they're handling things responsibly, rather than just thinking, "Man, this is sweet!" and charging forward.
I have a T-shirt around here somewhere that has the RSA encryption algorithm written in Perl in an easily OCR-able font, with a large barcode shown below it that encodes the same text. On the back, it says, "This Shirt is a Munition", and then goes on to list the federal regulations that restrict exporting the shirt.
At the time I got it, it was fairly geek-chic, but now it's just outdated;)
What's more, I realized that my Episode I-III turd sandwich also looked like a giant douche, when Cartoon Network ran the Clone Wars animated miniseries. Now that was Star Wars.
The U.S. auto and airline industries have been in such dire straits because of their pension and health plans, which became exorbitant because of the continuous hardball played by the labor unions.
The problem isn't the concept of the labor union, though, but rather the execution. Since unions are controlled by elected officials who serve as career union officers, they effectively have a mandate to continue to negotiate new contracts further and further in favor of the workers, even when all of the issues of safety and exploitation have long since been resolved. If they don't deliver, they don't get re-elected, and then they're out of a job.
Ideally, the company and the union would negotiate a contract that specified an indexed annual cost-of-living adjustment and reasonable benefits, and the two could go for decades just rubber-stamping the same contract over and over again. You wouldn't need some nationwide bureaucratic organization overseeing the contract negotiations - you'd just need a few of the most well-respected guys from the shop floor to come in and make sure the company just wanted to renew the same contract. But when you have career union officers running the show, even a fair deal isn't good enough.
Wikipedia notes that according to the Geneva Conventions:
The red cross emblem is to be used only to denote the following: * facilities for the care of injured and sick armed forces members * armed forces medical personnel and equipment; * military chaplains; * Red Cross groups such as the International Committee of the Red Cross; the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, formerly "the League of Red Cross Societies"; and the 182 national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies.
The Geneva Conventions obliged their signatories to prevent the unauthorized use of the name and emblem in wartime and peacetime in order to ensure universal respect for the emblem.
In other words, all those red cross symbols on MASH and other TV shows, on first aid kits, and in its numerous ubiquitous appearances in modern society, are apparently violations of the Geneva Conventions and must be banned, regardless of whether they are used in a context offensive to the ICRC or not.
So, to the ICRC: Stop picking and choosing what you're going to speak out about, and start treating all violations equally instead of politically.
Garriott (and/or Garriott) demonstrates a notable lack of vision when it comes to the willingness of indie developers to work in a variety of gamespaces. Not all games require tens of millions of dollars of content to be interesting to at least a small number of people, and the key to a successful game isn't necessarily selling millions of copies worldwide. In truth, all that's needed is to make a game that sells enough copies/subscriptions to make the money back on the development costs (i.e., the developers' families have food on the table).
Take A Tale in the Desert, for instance. It's an independently-developed game, published in online form only. The small development team has been maintaining the game for nearly three years off the $14 per month subscription fee from several hundred (perhaps a thousand or two) players at a time. Is this game a mega-super-ultra blockbuster? No, of course not. The market can only support a few of those at one time (though that'll increase as more people discover the genre). But is it successful? Definitely. It's not only stayed afloat for three years, but the enthusiasm of its subscribers and its developers continues to thrive.
Puzzle Pirates is another good example of an indie MMOG that has achieved success in the market (as well as critical acclaim). And what's more, MUDs are still around, some with dozens or hundreds of players daily experiencing freely-developed content. If Garriott were operating under valid assumptions, these MUDs would have died off long before WoW entered (and increased) the MMOG market.
Garriott is probably right that there's only room enough for a few World of Warcrafts or EverQuests or Lineages at a time. The expectation has grown that these games will require thousands of person-hours in development, and as customer expectations inflate, the costs for these games will eventually become prohibitive to all but larger media companies who can afford to bankroll such projects. But it demonstrates blindness to what's going on in the trenches to say that the market will suddenly close off to small developers with big visions.
She was a fast machine She kept her processor clean She was the best damn computer I had ever seen She had Bugzilla eyes Telling me no lies Knockin' me out with those APIs Taking more than her share Had me fighting for air She told me to com(pil)e but I was already there
'Cause the walls start shaking The game was Quaking My mind was aching And we were make-ing it and you -
Test me all night long Yeah you test me all night long
Slashdot Mirror
Does anybody still believe that this election wasn't fixed?
As a matter of fact, I don't believe that it was fixed. I'm sure I'm in the vast majority on the liberal bastion that is Slashdot, however.
That said, between the warrantless wiretaps and the plan to let a UAE-based company run our ports (why that sort of thing isn't mandatorily domestic in the first place is beyond me), I'm almost regretting voting for Bush. In fact, had the Democrats chosen to put forward a moderate candidate in '04 (Lieberman, anyone?), I probably would have voted for him instead. Too bad I had to vote against Kerry.
But as far as the conspiracy theories whirling around, here's one for you to chew on:
If the election was fixed, perhaps it was fixed by Hillary Clinton. (Stay with me now!) If Kerry had won in '04, Hillary would have had to wait until '12 to make a serious effort at running. Besides, what better outgoing president to launch a presidential campaign off of than Bush? She's already got the ultra-left Howard Dean running the DNC, so compared to him, even she seems moderate, and given the way the current administration has got the moderate vote up in arms, she's practically a shoe-in to win in '08 now.
Seems unlikely? Sure. But no more unlikely than the election being fixed for any other reason, especially considering that there's been no substantiated evidence of willful fraud.
I know one of these is proposed for construction here in Georgia, and somehow the idea of "rural south" and "nuclear power plant" in the same sentence worries me.
I think a former President, certified nuclear engineer, and Georgia native would like a word with you.
I may be able to experience games that even I can't imagine.
Sweet! A game console that dispenses hallucinogenic drugs directly into your bloodstream.
The legality of such indexing remains questionable, however this has not deterred copyright enforcement actions.
Well, think of it this way - the content industry claims billions in annual losses. Getting sued over the confiscated servers, even for treble damages, after getting the government to do your dirty work for you is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
Region coding is DRM. Locking out the menu/FF/next track buttons is DRM. And, of course, CSS is DRM as well.
The thing is, DRM is not about preventing illegal copying. It's about controlling the consumer. Copy prevention is just the scapegoat that the media industry uses to get Congress and the electronics industry to force DRM down our throats.
I don't disagree with you. But the RIAA does.
She said NASA once had a policy of what to do, whom to call, and how to announce the news if someone detected a signal of intelligent life from space. "Today it is in fact a group of very generous philanthropists who will get the call before we get a press conference," Tarter said. They include Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold.
Crap. You can bet the aliens will end up with Windows on 90% of their desktops before they even hear of Linux.
I submitted and was rejected again last night.
This probably won't make you feel any better, but I submitted the same story and had it rejected as well (hence my semi-off-topic post above). In the end, no article on this topic was accepted, not even as the customary grossly-overlooked footnote limited to the YRO section. The XCP rootkit was the biggest news story for nerds in quite some time, what with the actual rootkit issues and the GPL violations, yet now that legal action against Sony has been taken and resolved, the Slashdot editors (at least, the ones who happened to see the probably dozens of submissions on this topic) don't want us to talk about it?
I know Rob Malda has refuted past claims that he and/or his editors are on the take (see previous controversies surrounding Roland Piquepaille and Beatles-Beatles), but this makes me wonder (at least a little bit - I'm not really a tin-foil-hat-wearing freak) (a) whether somebody here didn't get paid off by Sony to keep word of the settlement from making it onto popular tech sites, or (b) whether Rob isn't able to maintain full editorial control without interference from Slashdot's parent company.
Sure, it probably isn't true, but not putting up such an important and interesting story, as written by anyone, boggles the mind.
So please explain why this game, above others, in it's unmodded retail form, upsets prostitutes and shareholders?
Because prostitutes and shareholders will do anything for a quick buck.
He points to piracy as a chief culprit in the sales drop. He says developers need to first find ways to make people pay.
Look, I'm an adult who plays my share of games. I pay actual, real money for them. I'm what you call an honest customer. But I'll be damned if I'm gonna let a Starforce-esque DRM scheme take over my computer just to play a game. And I'll be damned if I have to log in every time I want to play a single-player game on a computer that I might not even want to have connected to the Intarweb - twice damned if the company running the login server screws the world over by going out of business.
Game companies target the stereotypical gamer, the teenager or early twentysomething male. Just looking at the selection of games available makes this painfully obvious. But if you want to get more people to buy your games, why not target an audience that actually has money to blow? If you're going to make a FPS, make a Thief or a System Shock 2 - a thinking person's FPS - rather than another mindless Quake clone. Make a game with an interesting storyline like the Elder Scrolls series rather than focusing on smackin' up yo' bitches in GTA7: The Search for More Crack. The MMOG market, with its median age several years higher than the general gaming market, already shows that adults with money are willing to dump tons of that money into game entertainment.
Yet for every Civilization or SimCity, there are hundreds of loads of crap out there trying to turn adrenaline and testosterone into money.
Now, the game developers are welcome to make any sort of game they want. But when nearly all of their offerings target the people who don't have independently-earned incomes, they shouldn't complain that piracy is killing the industry. In fact, their insistence upon going where the money isn't tells me that piracy isn't nearly the problem they want us to believe it to be. Do people play the games without paying for them? Sure. Do they not sell as many copies because of it? Certainly. But if the industry were really on the verge of collapse, they would have started selling games to people with money rather than letting themselves all go under.
Continued higher education is the process of learning more and more about less and less, until one knows everything about nothing.
This state is commonly known as the Ph.D.
On a side note, Sony BMG settled the class action lawsuit filed against them by the EFF. If you want replacement CDs released by Sony BMG that don't have XCP or MediaMax on them, head to http://www.eff.org/sony for more info.
It's your chance to stick it to the man.
208 KB of storage for each person on this planet
And as everyone knows, 208kB should be enough for anybody.
Offer a local teen $150 + pizza for a day's work, and they'll jump at the chance.
Or you could offer a local graduate student just the pizza, and save yourself $150.
The difference is that most kids know that killing is wrong, and won't kill someone because of that (as opposed to not killing someone solely because they might get caught). But a lot of kids put graffiti in the same category as underage smoking/drinking, smoking marijuana, shoplifting, and other nonviolent offenses. Nobody gets injured by graffiti and vandalism, so it seems more like a victimless crime, and so a kid's sense of morality is more likely to be swayed by peer pressure and media influence.
I'm not saying the game should be banned. Freedom of speech and all that. But I am saying that games like Getting Up and Tony Hawk's Underground 2 should be rated closer to the adult end of the scale by the ESRB and that retailers should take this rating into account when selling games directly to minors. I'm also saying that developers should think about the impact that their work has on society and make an informed decision about whether they're handling things responsibly, rather than just thinking, "Man, this is sweet!" and charging forward.
I have a T-shirt around here somewhere that has the RSA encryption algorithm written in Perl in an easily OCR-able font, with a large barcode shown below it that encodes the same text. On the back, it says, "This Shirt is a Munition", and then goes on to list the federal regulations that restrict exporting the shirt.
;)
At the time I got it, it was fairly geek-chic, but now it's just outdated
What's more, I realized that my Episode I-III turd sandwich also looked like a giant douche, when Cartoon Network ran the Clone Wars animated miniseries. Now that was Star Wars.
Vista will play it in a reduced resolution.
Sort of a strange irony attached to the word "vista", then, huh?
Even a website called "Iraq Body Count" isn't as, er, optimistic as you are about civilian casualties.
Nowhere else in nature are rungs [chromosomes] "bonded" like this.
I'd like to see a reference for this assertion, if you don't mind.
The U.S. auto and airline industries have been in such dire straits because of their pension and health plans, which became exorbitant because of the continuous hardball played by the labor unions.
The problem isn't the concept of the labor union, though, but rather the execution. Since unions are controlled by elected officials who serve as career union officers, they effectively have a mandate to continue to negotiate new contracts further and further in favor of the workers, even when all of the issues of safety and exploitation have long since been resolved. If they don't deliver, they don't get re-elected, and then they're out of a job.
Ideally, the company and the union would negotiate a contract that specified an indexed annual cost-of-living adjustment and reasonable benefits, and the two could go for decades just rubber-stamping the same contract over and over again. You wouldn't need some nationwide bureaucratic organization overseeing the contract negotiations - you'd just need a few of the most well-respected guys from the shop floor to come in and make sure the company just wanted to renew the same contract. But when you have career union officers running the show, even a fair deal isn't good enough.
In other words, all those red cross symbols on MASH and other TV shows, on first aid kits, and in its numerous ubiquitous appearances in modern society, are apparently violations of the Geneva Conventions and must be banned, regardless of whether they are used in a context offensive to the ICRC or not.
So, to the ICRC: Stop picking and choosing what you're going to speak out about, and start treating all violations equally instead of politically.
Garriott (and/or Garriott) demonstrates a notable lack of vision when it comes to the willingness of indie developers to work in a variety of gamespaces. Not all games require tens of millions of dollars of content to be interesting to at least a small number of people, and the key to a successful game isn't necessarily selling millions of copies worldwide. In truth, all that's needed is to make a game that sells enough copies/subscriptions to make the money back on the development costs (i.e., the developers' families have food on the table).
Take A Tale in the Desert, for instance. It's an independently-developed game, published in online form only. The small development team has been maintaining the game for nearly three years off the $14 per month subscription fee from several hundred (perhaps a thousand or two) players at a time. Is this game a mega-super-ultra blockbuster? No, of course not. The market can only support a few of those at one time (though that'll increase as more people discover the genre). But is it successful? Definitely. It's not only stayed afloat for three years, but the enthusiasm of its subscribers and its developers continues to thrive.
Puzzle Pirates is another good example of an indie MMOG that has achieved success in the market (as well as critical acclaim). And what's more, MUDs are still around, some with dozens or hundreds of players daily experiencing freely-developed content. If Garriott were operating under valid assumptions, these MUDs would have died off long before WoW entered (and increased) the MMOG market.
Garriott is probably right that there's only room enough for a few World of Warcrafts or EverQuests or Lineages at a time. The expectation has grown that these games will require thousands of person-hours in development, and as customer expectations inflate, the costs for these games will eventually become prohibitive to all but larger media companies who can afford to bankroll such projects. But it demonstrates blindness to what's going on in the trenches to say that the market will suddenly close off to small developers with big visions.
She was a fast machine
She kept her processor clean
She was the best damn computer I had ever seen
She had Bugzilla eyes
Telling me no lies
Knockin' me out with those APIs
Taking more than her share
Had me fighting for air
She told me to com(pil)e but I was already there
'Cause the walls start shaking
The game was Quaking
My mind was aching
And we were make-ing it and you -
Test me all night long
Yeah you test me all night long