No, and here's a small newsflash for you -- that's the whole problem. If our current legal system wasn't severely flawed in the area of copyright, then the EFF wouldn't exist.
Why isn't Slashdot celebrating the fact that these five lawyers are now not working for RIAA? This whole conversation is truly maddening.
If these high-profile RIAA lawyers are just extremely talented mercenaries who sell their services to the highest bidder (regardless of the morals or ethics), why should we be happy that these shills are moving up in the world? What happens when a lobbyist comes along with more money? Would Gershengorn compromise his morals again for money, just like he did against Grokster?
I suppose we shouldn't have expected anything less from a politician -- most of the backlash here is from disappointed voters who had been hoping for change in the areas of freedom. They were excited that we were finally getting a tech-savvy President, and were hoping for someone who would make the right decisions, rather than just catering to their high-dollar lobbyists.
Third: Nothing I have seen indicates that any of these "RIAA lawyers" are going to have anything to do with the more unsavory aspects of copyright law. The DOJ does not have the time or the inclination to go after 13 year old children downloading Britteny Spears. The DOJ is only after the big boys. Is it really a problem if the DOJ goes after the more notorious pirates? (those making a profit off piracy).
People aren't just concerned about him hiring lawyers that chase dollars rather than justice -- people are concerned that he's continuing in an established precedent that is selling its copyright ethical soul to the highest bidder. If this were "just an standard top-of-the-class lawyer who worked on questionable cases", that would be one thing. The problem is that a lot of Obama voters are extremely disappointed in the way that they feel he's not giving "change" at all, but rather more of the same pro-exploitative-business and anti-citizen policies that they've been so frustrated for years past.
It's only been 12 weeks, and he's already made an extremely disappointing track record of appointments. Let's try to remain hopeful, and continue asking for change.
You are correct -- you're not in breach of contract. It would be a breach of contract for the band to accept that money. They would either have to send the money back to the donater, or give the money to their label company.
Great. You're from the USA. I don't think a couple of slashdot replies can really penetrate your country's glorious myth making machine but i'll try anways!:) i will make it brief:
Yes, I was born in the States -- not all of my family was. I'd appreciate it if you talked to me as a person, and not to your prejudices of my race or my country.
Capital is a social product. Yet, the benefit of capitalism is private. Therein lies a contradiction.
Did you not read my post? I already countered this, explaining it as a logical fallacy -- I gave a clear example of how the benefits of capitalism can indeed be mutual ("social" as you said). But maybe you aren't listening to me, and are happy to continue spout your own opinion.
Products aren't produced because there is a clearly defined allocation of need, they are produced in the hopes of realising a profit. Therein lies a contradiction.
No contradiction necessary -- they can quite easily be complementary. No one in their right mind would produce something for which there was no need. No free person would buy something that would not give them greater value than that which they paid, and no free and sane producer would sell something for less than it cost them to make it. Again, you are making fallacious connections in your attempt to vilify private property, when people will always be villains, whether or not money exists.
Human beings are social creatures that developed their humanity by shared living and cooperation, over a long period of time, and we lived in clans and commonly owned the means of production. Classes did not exist.
I'm not sure what utopian noble savage setup you're referring to -- are you talking about tribal living? Or something that predates that? You're making a lot of claims to an idealized historic communal living that don't seem to gel with modern understanding of anthropology.
Although i would agree with the claim that our human nature is slowly but surely being modified.
Perhaps I was unclear or misspoke. I never meant to imply that human nature is evolving past anything that it has always been, and always will be. Selfish, hedonistic, and ultimately corrupt. We can't change our nature -- the best we can hope to do is to manage it, control it, and seek to bring out the best in us.
Therein lies a contradiction we probably won't survive.
Oh, we always survive. It's what humans do. And we always come out of the crisis both better and worse than before.
Well, it seems you're now content to pejoratively consider me the stereotypically unread and ideologically inbred American. Though perhaps that's only fair, since I'm starting to consider you to be a stereotypical Marxist who doesn't pay heed to the history of mass-movements towards classless society.
I don't know that you actually addressed anything I wrote in my post, and so this conversation feels a bit one-sided. Unless you feel like having a conversation, I probably won't reply again.
I wasn't addressing the bourgeoisie, but apparently you were. Yes, you are now being very clear.
Though as for mixing terms, you are now conflating profit and exploitation. Value is relative, and legal profit is a two-way street. If I am able to obtain food, but not water, and you are able to get water, but not food, we can exchange goods and both profit, neither having necessarily exploited the other. We have both profited, and I daresay are both much happier (and better off) for it. While slavers certainly "profit" from their slaves, not everyone who profits is exploiting.
I honestly hope you're not anti-profit, because that makes it sound like you're against people being able to help each other to mutually benefit (unless you want to redefine "profit" from its original meaning).
As far the "absurdity" of a member of the proletariat raising his social "class", I naturally don't think it's absurd, because I very much feel like that is exactly where my parents and their parents have fulfilled the "American Dream" that is made possible in this country by liberty. Perhaps I'm unusual in finding the life story of President Obama somewhat encouraging that way?
Though I might close by stating again that slavery is not unique to America, nor to capitalism. The current Chinese government arresting political or religious prisoners and imprisoning them to work without pay in forced labor factories -- I think I would equate that with slavery. The American coal mining companies that would use violent and monopolistic tactics to indenture their workers -- I would consider that slavery too.
Capitalism is not the problem when it comes to slavery. Human nature is the problem. If Capitalism was the problem, then Solzhenitsyn would have had nothing to complain about.
...that would be akin to the entire class of employers across the world volunteering to share their loot with the people they looted from!
You're conflating terms. If they're employers, they are creating jobs that help the economy. If they're "looting," they're thieves, and should be arrested. Please don't confuse the terms.
What's your plan, are you going to ask them nicely?!
No, I'm all in favor of arresting and punishing with force those who break the law.
Next you'll be telling me you didn't know capitalism was a system of exploitation and oppression!
Again, you're conflating terms. Capitalism is merely economic Darwinism, and while survival-of-the-fittest is a hard thing to grapple with, it's a necessary part of reality. To try to fight it, or to artificially prevent the evolution of technology, business, and production is to artificially stymie progress. Monopolistic oppression and exploitation of slave labor is certainly found within Capitalistic systems, but such oppression is also found in other economic and regulatory models as well (communism, socialistic dictatorships, etc). Capitalism doesn't have a "monopoly" on oppression.
With the two kinds of inkjet technology that I'm basically familiar with (bubble-jet and pezio-electric), neither of those require magnetic ink -- you can print distilled water if you want.
Speaking as someone who is in a mixed-race marriage, I'm honestly not sure how to take your comment as anything other than expressing racial prejudice (or "race-power" or "racism" however else you want to express it).
Race is never supposed to be a factor in interviewing a job candidate, and comments like this only exacerbate the issue for the next generation, and teach them that race somehow matters.
For a thought experiment, take any NYT article that's ecstatic about this "historic" president and swap all instances of "white" with "black", and the articles start to sound a lot more offensive.
Is racial prejudice truly something to be eliminated from society, or is racism only a vice when you're white?
Therapeutic cloning has a host of problems all its own -- in addition to the fact that "there is no such thing as a normal clone", the large number of donor embryos that would be required for ever person treated. We have a limited supply of unused living human embryos that we've built up over the years through IVF treatments, but if therapeutic cloning became widespread, there's no way IVF surplus would keep up with the demand. Harvesting aborted humans is another option, but that wouldn't work so well for the cloning part since the aborted organism is largely dead, and is often aborted later on in the development cycle, when performing a wholesale cloning operation is no longer feasible (though I've heard things about some clinics being able to offset costs by selling aborted human embryonic biomatter for research).
Cord blood is a great way to get near-pluripotent ASCs that still maintain most of an ESC's potentiality, but have increased availability and the added stability of being further on down the specialization line. Increased supply means increased odds of finding a matching donor (similar to how bone marrow transplants are done today).
but embryonic stem cells would raise the likelihood of success in such cases as they are more likely to adapt to the required level.
IANAB (I am not a biologist), but if the possibility set of the patient-harvested polypotent stem cells include trachea cells, I don't see why you would need pluripotent stem cells in order for it to be a "success"?
Sadly, your friends are wrong in that if embryonic stem cells had been used in this case, that it somehow would have had a higher chance of success. The very fact that the safer and stabler ASCs (adult stem cells) were used in this operation means that the patient won't reject the organ, and the patient won't get cancer. Embryonic stem cells are too unstable in their pluripotency for them to be usable, and always go cancerous (tumor rates is one of the measures that is used to determine how well the embryonic cells have been accepted by the test mice/rats -- more tumors means that more embryonic cells lived).
you can save embryonic stem cells from the birth of a living baby for example
Sorry, but you cannot harvest truly pluripotent cells without destroying the embryo. You can get polypotent ASCs that are very nearly the equivalent of pluripotent embryonic stem cells by using cord blood stem cells, but you cannot actually gain pluripotent stem cells without destroying the living organism.
This is why many people (such as myself) are truly puzzled as to why so many people aren't more excited about ASC research -- it is usable today, and the cancer and rejection risks are so much lower than ESCs. As you noted, ASCs harvested from live births through cord blood have more than enough polypotency to treat even many neurological disorders, and they are far superior in their cancer-potential-stability.
Part of the trouble is that the verses you're referencing in the Old Testament were from a specific war -- "Go and kill the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead" or "Destroy the Amalekites" -- particular people who they were fighting at the time. Unlike the Qu'ran, the Old Testament doesn't say that these instructions to wage war are standing orders.
Honestly, I would love for the justice system to be perfect. Ideally, every crime is to be treated equally (justice is "blind").
The best reason I can think of why we don't have a perfect justice system is because, unlike the ideal, the one we have is affordable and feasible. Despite all of its faults, we have one of the best justice systems in the history of the world, and particularly with improvements in fingerprinting, DNA testing, and other forensics, it's becoming increasingly rare to get false convictions, or to confirm cases that otherwise would have been thrown out on lack of evidence.
So no, there's no good reason for why we want my pie-faced neighbor to not be able to charge me with assault, but we only have so many resources, and law enforcement unfortunately needs to pick its battles. If I were to repeatedly pie my neighbor, I would be given more than a warning and would eventually be slapped with something larger. The squeakiest wheels get the grease. We have a whole division for protecting just our high-profile figures (presidents and presidential candidates) called the secret service, and because this b/tard chose to kick sand into the face of this particular doberman, he's facing the music more than most b/tards because resources had previously been allocated to protect these particular high-profile people.
"You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask off the 'ol Lone Ranger, and you don't mess around with Palin." (or anyone else the secret service is guarding, for that matter)
Sorry I don't have a good answer. The best I can do is, "It's not perfect, but it's the best we got. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater as we continue to work to make this one better."
Since when is a federal campaign state governor's business? It would be out of place for Obama to organize his presidential campaign from his senate e-mail address, just as it would be out of place for Palin to discuss her VP campaign on her governor's account.
I'm still working through it, but this is exactly the subject matter dealt with by Ian Bogost in his recent book: "Persuasive Games"
In Persuasive Games, I advance a theory of how videogames make arguments and influence players. Games represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. Drawing on the history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, I analyze rhetoric's unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already studies visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Here I argue that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric.
I call this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation.
Basically, he looks at rule-based systems as a form of rhetoric, a method by which to artfully and effectively communicate ideas. Just as Melville had a point to make about life in Moby Dick, so too Bogost talks about how you can use rule-based systems to communicate in similarly effective ways through the rule-based systems of video games.
I bought it a few weeks ago and am partway through it -- so far it is really good.
If you're not interested in shelling out $$ for the book, you can get a free paper from MIT Press Journals entitled "The Rhetoric of Video Games", also by Ian Bogost.
If you keep thinking of the other players as 'intruding on _YOUR_ game', you'll never understand EVE. The players are the game, not the brainless rats.
Wow, that was insightful, thanks.
In all seriousness, this may be one reason why I've never understood EVE.
Lord knows there's certainly stuff to criticize about de Icaza, but this isn't really one of them.
"I hope so" refers to Mono becoming the officially sanctioned.Net standard for Linux -- not that de Icaza hopes Microsoft would open up.Net. If you actually read the very next question in the article (I must be new here...), you'd have seen where de Icaza said:
In the meantime - I really don't think they are going to open source.Net.
-- they are talking about the possibility of Microsoft pulling a Sun/Java thing, and if the open-source effort would have been wasted as a result. The answer is "no, but I don't think they would open-source it anyways".
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Care to link to the ruling?
There was a link to one such ruling in TFA. I'm sure the EFF will happily supply you with many more.
Any of them been found guilty in a court of law?
No, and here's a small newsflash for you -- that's the whole problem . If our current legal system wasn't severely flawed in the area of copyright, then the EFF wouldn't exist.
Why isn't Slashdot celebrating the fact that these five lawyers are now not working for RIAA? This whole conversation is truly maddening.
If these high-profile RIAA lawyers are just extremely talented mercenaries who sell their services to the highest bidder (regardless of the morals or ethics), why should we be happy that these shills are moving up in the world? What happens when a lobbyist comes along with more money? Would Gershengorn compromise his morals again for money, just like he did against Grokster?
I suppose we shouldn't have expected anything less from a politician -- most of the backlash here is from disappointed voters who had been hoping for change in the areas of freedom. They were excited that we were finally getting a tech-savvy President, and were hoping for someone who would make the right decisions, rather than just catering to their high-dollar lobbyists.
Third: Nothing I have seen indicates that any of these "RIAA lawyers" are going to have anything to do with the more unsavory aspects of copyright law. The DOJ does not have the time or the inclination to go after 13 year old children downloading Britteny Spears. The DOJ is only after the big boys. Is it really a problem if the DOJ goes after the more notorious pirates? (those making a profit off piracy).
Sadly, Obama's administration does take time to go after the little guys (in this case, siding against a former Boston U. student in support of $15k damages per song).
People aren't just concerned about him hiring lawyers that chase dollars rather than justice -- people are concerned that he's continuing in an established precedent that is selling its copyright ethical soul to the highest bidder. If this were "just an standard top-of-the-class lawyer who worked on questionable cases", that would be one thing. The problem is that a lot of Obama voters are extremely disappointed in the way that they feel he's not giving "change" at all, but rather more of the same pro-exploitative-business and anti-citizen policies that they've been so frustrated for years past.
It's only been 12 weeks, and he's already made an extremely disappointing track record of appointments. Let's try to remain hopeful, and continue asking for change.
Well said.
You are correct -- you're not in breach of contract. It would be a breach of contract for the band to accept that money. They would either have to send the money back to the donater, or give the money to their label company.
I wonder how hard it would be to do something like this with Flash
Hilarious meta-game. :)
Great. You're from the USA. I don't think a couple of slashdot replies can really penetrate your country's glorious myth making machine but i'll try anways! :) i will make it brief:
Yes, I was born in the States -- not all of my family was. I'd appreciate it if you talked to me as a person, and not to your prejudices of my race or my country.
Capital is a social product. Yet, the benefit of capitalism is private. Therein lies a contradiction.
Did you not read my post? I already countered this, explaining it as a logical fallacy -- I gave a clear example of how the benefits of capitalism can indeed be mutual ("social" as you said). But maybe you aren't listening to me, and are happy to continue spout your own opinion.
Products aren't produced because there is a clearly defined allocation of need, they are produced in the hopes of realising a profit. Therein lies a contradiction.
No contradiction necessary -- they can quite easily be complementary. No one in their right mind would produce something for which there was no need. No free person would buy something that would not give them greater value than that which they paid, and no free and sane producer would sell something for less than it cost them to make it. Again, you are making fallacious connections in your attempt to vilify private property, when people will always be villains, whether or not money exists.
Human beings are social creatures that developed their humanity by shared living and cooperation, over a long period of time, and we lived in clans and commonly owned the means of production. Classes did not exist.
I'm not sure what utopian noble savage setup you're referring to -- are you talking about tribal living? Or something that predates that? You're making a lot of claims to an idealized historic communal living that don't seem to gel with modern understanding of anthropology.
Although i would agree with the claim that our human nature is slowly but surely being modified.
Perhaps I was unclear or misspoke. I never meant to imply that human nature is evolving past anything that it has always been, and always will be. Selfish, hedonistic, and ultimately corrupt. We can't change our nature -- the best we can hope to do is to manage it, control it, and seek to bring out the best in us.
Therein lies a contradiction we probably won't survive.
Oh, we always survive. It's what humans do. And we always come out of the crisis both better and worse than before.
Well, it seems you're now content to pejoratively consider me the stereotypically unread and ideologically inbred American. Though perhaps that's only fair, since I'm starting to consider you to be a stereotypical Marxist who doesn't pay heed to the history of mass-movements towards classless society.
I don't know that you actually addressed anything I wrote in my post, and so this conversation feels a bit one-sided. Unless you feel like having a conversation, I probably won't reply again.
Good day, sir -- I appreciate discussion.
I wasn't addressing the bourgeoisie, but apparently you were. Yes, you are now being very clear.
Though as for mixing terms, you are now conflating profit and exploitation. Value is relative, and legal profit is a two-way street. If I am able to obtain food, but not water, and you are able to get water, but not food, we can exchange goods and both profit, neither having necessarily exploited the other. We have both profited, and I daresay are both much happier (and better off) for it. While slavers certainly "profit" from their slaves, not everyone who profits is exploiting.
I honestly hope you're not anti-profit, because that makes it sound like you're against people being able to help each other to mutually benefit (unless you want to redefine "profit" from its original meaning).
As far the "absurdity" of a member of the proletariat raising his social "class", I naturally don't think it's absurd, because I very much feel like that is exactly where my parents and their parents have fulfilled the "American Dream" that is made possible in this country by liberty. Perhaps I'm unusual in finding the life story of President Obama somewhat encouraging that way?
Though I might close by stating again that slavery is not unique to America, nor to capitalism. The current Chinese government arresting political or religious prisoners and imprisoning them to work without pay in forced labor factories -- I think I would equate that with slavery. The American coal mining companies that would use violent and monopolistic tactics to indenture their workers -- I would consider that slavery too.
Capitalism is not the problem when it comes to slavery. Human nature is the problem. If Capitalism was the problem, then Solzhenitsyn would have had nothing to complain about.
...that would be akin to the entire class of employers across the world volunteering to share their loot with the people they looted from!
You're conflating terms. If they're employers, they are creating jobs that help the economy. If they're "looting," they're thieves, and should be arrested. Please don't confuse the terms.
What's your plan, are you going to ask them nicely?!
No, I'm all in favor of arresting and punishing with force those who break the law.
Next you'll be telling me you didn't know capitalism was a system of exploitation and oppression!
Again, you're conflating terms. Capitalism is merely economic Darwinism, and while survival-of-the-fittest is a hard thing to grapple with, it's a necessary part of reality. To try to fight it, or to artificially prevent the evolution of technology, business, and production is to artificially stymie progress. Monopolistic oppression and exploitation of slave labor is certainly found within Capitalistic systems, but such oppression is also found in other economic and regulatory models as well (communism, socialistic dictatorships, etc). Capitalism doesn't have a "monopoly" on oppression.
With the two kinds of inkjet technology that I'm basically familiar with (bubble-jet and pezio-electric), neither of those require magnetic ink -- you can print distilled water if you want.
+1 everything.
Speaking as someone who is in a mixed-race marriage, I'm honestly not sure how to take your comment as anything other than expressing racial prejudice (or "race-power" or "racism" however else you want to express it).
Race is never supposed to be a factor in interviewing a job candidate, and comments like this only exacerbate the issue for the next generation, and teach them that race somehow matters.
For a thought experiment, take any NYT article that's ecstatic about this "historic" president and swap all instances of "white" with "black", and the articles start to sound a lot more offensive.
Is racial prejudice truly something to be eliminated from society, or is racism only a vice when you're white?
I clicked "+1 Insightful" and for some reason it assigned it as "-1 Redundant" -- posting to remove moderation.
Therapeutic cloning has a host of problems all its own -- in addition to the fact that "there is no such thing as a normal clone", the large number of donor embryos that would be required for ever person treated. We have a limited supply of unused living human embryos that we've built up over the years through IVF treatments, but if therapeutic cloning became widespread, there's no way IVF surplus would keep up with the demand. Harvesting aborted humans is another option, but that wouldn't work so well for the cloning part since the aborted organism is largely dead, and is often aborted later on in the development cycle, when performing a wholesale cloning operation is no longer feasible (though I've heard things about some clinics being able to offset costs by selling aborted human embryonic biomatter for research).
Cord blood is a great way to get near-pluripotent ASCs that still maintain most of an ESC's potentiality, but have increased availability and the added stability of being further on down the specialization line. Increased supply means increased odds of finding a matching donor (similar to how bone marrow transplants are done today).
but embryonic stem cells would raise the likelihood of success in such cases as they are more likely to adapt to the required level.
IANAB (I am not a biologist), but if the possibility set of the patient-harvested polypotent stem cells include trachea cells, I don't see why you would need pluripotent stem cells in order for it to be a "success"?
Sadly, your friends are wrong in that if embryonic stem cells had been used in this case, that it somehow would have had a higher chance of success. The very fact that the safer and stabler ASCs (adult stem cells) were used in this operation means that the patient won't reject the organ, and the patient won't get cancer. Embryonic stem cells are too unstable in their pluripotency for them to be usable, and always go cancerous (tumor rates is one of the measures that is used to determine how well the embryonic cells have been accepted by the test mice/rats -- more tumors means that more embryonic cells lived).
you can save embryonic stem cells from the birth of a living baby for example
Sorry, but you cannot harvest truly pluripotent cells without destroying the embryo. You can get polypotent ASCs that are very nearly the equivalent of pluripotent embryonic stem cells by using cord blood stem cells, but you cannot actually gain pluripotent stem cells without destroying the living organism.
This is why many people (such as myself) are truly puzzled as to why so many people aren't more excited about ASC research -- it is usable today, and the cancer and rejection risks are so much lower than ESCs. As you noted, ASCs harvested from live births through cord blood have more than enough polypotency to treat even many neurological disorders, and they are far superior in their cancer-potential-stability.
The NY Times is about as much "news" as the WWF is a "sport".
Part of the trouble is that the verses you're referencing in the Old Testament were from a specific war -- "Go and kill the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead" or "Destroy the Amalekites" -- particular people who they were fighting at the time. Unlike the Qu'ran, the Old Testament doesn't say that these instructions to wage war are standing orders.
Honestly, I would love for the justice system to be perfect. Ideally, every crime is to be treated equally (justice is "blind").
The best reason I can think of why we don't have a perfect justice system is because, unlike the ideal, the one we have is affordable and feasible. Despite all of its faults, we have one of the best justice systems in the history of the world, and particularly with improvements in fingerprinting, DNA testing, and other forensics, it's becoming increasingly rare to get false convictions, or to confirm cases that otherwise would have been thrown out on lack of evidence.
So no, there's no good reason for why we want my pie-faced neighbor to not be able to charge me with assault, but we only have so many resources, and law enforcement unfortunately needs to pick its battles. If I were to repeatedly pie my neighbor, I would be given more than a warning and would eventually be slapped with something larger. The squeakiest wheels get the grease. We have a whole division for protecting just our high-profile figures (presidents and presidential candidates) called the secret service, and because this b/tard chose to kick sand into the face of this particular doberman, he's facing the music more than most b/tards because resources had previously been allocated to protect these particular high-profile people.
"You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask off the 'ol Lone Ranger, and you don't mess around with Palin." (or anyone else the secret service is guarding, for that matter)
Sorry I don't have a good answer. The best I can do is, "It's not perfect, but it's the best we got. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater as we continue to work to make this one better."
Since when is a federal campaign state governor's business? It would be out of place for Obama to organize his presidential campaign from his senate e-mail address, just as it would be out of place for Palin to discuss her VP campaign on her governor's account.
I threw a pie at my neighbor's face and he was lucky to even get the police to give me a phone call.
But when I tried to throw a pie at the mayor, suddenly the police were all up in arms. What injustice! America is teh sux0rz!!!
Basically, he looks at rule-based systems as a form of rhetoric, a method by which to artfully and effectively communicate ideas. Just as Melville had a point to make about life in Moby Dick, so too Bogost talks about how you can use rule-based systems to communicate in similarly effective ways through the rule-based systems of video games.
I bought it a few weeks ago and am partway through it -- so far it is really good.
If you're not interested in shelling out $$ for the book, you can get a free paper from MIT Press Journals entitled "The Rhetoric of Video Games", also by Ian Bogost.
If you keep thinking of the other players as 'intruding on _YOUR_ game', you'll never understand EVE. The players are the game, not the brainless rats.
Wow, that was insightful, thanks.
In all seriousness, this may be one reason why I've never understood EVE.
I'm intrigued.
Several have used it, including Borland's Kylix.
"I hope so" refers to Mono becoming the officially sanctioned .Net standard for Linux -- not that de Icaza hopes Microsoft would open up .Net. If you actually read the very next question in the article (I must be new here...), you'd have seen where de Icaza said:
In the meantime - I really don't think they are going to open source .Net.
-- they are talking about the possibility of Microsoft pulling a Sun/Java thing, and if the open-source effort would have been wasted as a result. The answer is "no, but I don't think they would open-source it anyways".