Even if it does, you can set the server up on your own system for whatever duration the disc requires.
Um, if the consumer had the ability to modify the software running on the Blu-Ray player, this whole discussion would've been much much shorter.
If you think you can modify software on the player, then just go ahead and patch the playback to never check DRM flags, instead of installing a whole phony DRM server on there to spoof it into getting apparently-valid keys.
Well what you explain to them is that in the case of ANY mod it might get disabled, espically mods they like to do.
Therefore, if the vendors are at all intelligent, they will WAIT until a few years of adoption have gone by before starting to enforce the remote blacklisting of any mods. This is the "fundamental organizational advantage"; the corporation will always have more unity, patience, and foresight than consumers (or workers).
Because the DRM systems are beholden to a distant corporate master, all the anti-features can be left inactive until marketshare critical mass has been surpassed. (Witness how PVRs are becoming more irritating as each firmware "upgrade" introduces new advertising)
Take DVD, remove some of the cool features and require people to pay per view.
Don't be so complacent. You just explained why the DIVX rollout was so different from the BluRay rollout, which is why it failed.
DIVX = DVD - eternal_playability BluRay = DVD + (resolution * 5) - eternal_playability
DIVX was a worse product from the consumer's perspective. BluRay will be tremendously better in some ways. Nobody sought out DIVX, because it'd be silly to intentionally request a product whose only new feature is to sometimes refuse to work.
But BluRay is different. It doesn't merely remove free playing, but it also adds significant new features consumers haven't had yet. It will be the first way they buy / rent movies that take advantage of HDTV sets, and that alone will ensure decent popularity.
They are also the ones with the real power, the electronics industry is FAR larger than the entertainment industry.
Do you live in the USA? Which one of those industries has the USA Congress in it's pocket, passing DMCA laws merely as an appetizer?
It has been reported that admins have perma-banned certain accounts from ever getting modpoints again. Allegedly, after direct argumentation on some normal topic.
Monopolies only occur in markets with a barrier to entry, either natural or man-made.
Gravity only occurs near objects with mass, either natural or man-made.
Monopolies only occur in markets with a barrier to entry, either natural or man-made.
Number of markets with zero barriers-to-entry: 0.
There's always some natural obstruction, but more importantly, anytime that capital is allowed to accumulate, barriers to entry will arise.
No matter what kind of society it is, there will always be some fields requiring a decent startup investment to get going. And no matter how many companies are competing in that field, eventually one of them will get lucky and have more cash than the others. Possession of that capital will make it (on average) more efficient and profitable than the rest, so it's marketshare will grow in a vicious circle.
If it wasn't for trust-busters from the democratic government, dozens of monopolists from Esso through Microsoft could've strangled the rest of the economy and set themselves up as feudal lords.
Sure: The Standard Oil monopoly in the 1890's. Read Upton Sinclar's The Jungle. Read about the DeBeers diamond monopoly.
Standard Oil is a fine example. So would be the old railroad barons, or 1960 AT&T, or 1997 Microsoft*. But DeBeers doesn't deserve to be put on the same level as them.
Diamonds are a luxury. Practical industrial uses for them are uncommon- few other economic sectors depend on DeBeers. But every business needs transport, telephones, and computers. At their heights (and if unfettered by regulators), the true mega-monopolists could've selected a random corporation from any other part of the economy and drove it into bankrupcy by withholding service. With that kind of leverage, any of them could've become a true corporate dictatorship, entirely killing the "free market" and installing a reign of central control reminiscent of communism (minus the hypothetical obligation to keep each citizen fed and healthy)
* In some ways, all of those were partially government-created: rail and telephone by reciept of public-domain land rights to build their infrastructure, and less directly, Microsoft was dependent on government enforcement of "Intellectual Property".
I had thought that PDF was that format. PDF is the format of all IRS publication downloads.
PDF can barely even be considered for these purposes. It is a "write-only" filetype. You'd have to be a mascohistic moron to store intermediate copies of a work-in-progress as PDF.
PDF is like paper; only useful when the document is FINISHED and no longer changed. And in modern times, the best & most important documents never really stop growing.
Sigh. Since Rehnquist was a conservative, replacing him with another conservative won't change the balance of the Court.
When comparing balance, you must measure not only how skewed the composition is, but also how long that composition will last.
Rehnquist was a conservative with the durability to serve no more than 5 more years, maximum. His replacement will be a conservative young enough to last for 40-plus years. Effectively, a "lame duck justice" is being replaced with one who will have the opportunity to rule for decades.
If Rehnquist hadn't died or retired before Bush was out of office, chances are that the next President would've been much less conservative, and selected a moderate (or even liberal) replacement judge.
Conservative judges are typically "constructionists", meaning that they tend to view the law through the lens of authority.
You're using "conservative" to mean something different there than in the rest of the post (and also different from the rest of this thread). Judges who are politically conservative has been as activist as any liberals.
By using gratuitous newlines after { and before }, it wastes space on the HTML page, which is rude to everyone who reads slashdot. If you're trying to emphasize the brevity of the needed code, then omitting extraneous whitespace is a natural step.
If the GPL isn't valid, you don't have a right to the copy.
True, but irrelevant. That the GPL is valid has nothing to do with it being an EULA. (In fact, EULAs are arguably invalid as inadequate contracts, so it's good that the GPL is nothing like them)
EULA: prevent you from doing things you are legally allowed. GPL: allow you to do things that are legally forbidden.
US law allows you to make a copy of the program if required to run it if you own the program.
False. You are allowed to make whatever copies are needed to execute the program if you have legally acquired a copy of the program. You explicitly do not have to be the owner of the copyright to run a program. (Other countries have differed on this, but we're talking USA)
You must have some form of license to make a copy of the program.
False. You can also make copies of things according to Fair Use doctrine. One example of a Fair Use is the ability to make transient copies (CD -> HD -> RAM) in order to use a program normally.
That license is the GPL. The GPL is only different from Microsoft EULA's in it's terms. In point of fact, the GPL is one of a category called End User License Agreement.
False, false, false. (It's a waste of time to explain this to you, of course, because it's clear that you're just interested in spreading lies)
The GPL is not a kind of an End User License Agreement. You could call it an "Intermediate Developer / Republisher License Agreement", and that would make some sense.
Wolfenstein 3D was revolutionary. Doom and Quake were just incremental technical refinements of the same basic gameplay mechanics. But a game doesn't have to be revolutionary to be good.
Wrong, Doom's gameplay was barely like Wolf3d's (unless you also believe tennis is about the same as baseball).
Besides, if you want to talk "incremental improvement", then Wolf3d was just a step up from Catacomb 3D, replacing fireballs with bullets and trolls with Sturmtruppen.
We told them. That is where the consumer is most important.
At best, that can lead to popular games, not good ones.
or do you play games like WoW, EQ, 1/2-Life, Doom3, etc? Then you fell for some marketers ploy.
Wrong. All those games were sold mainly on the reputation of the programmers' earlier work. Marketing hardly made a difference there. Except for Doom3, those are all decent products that were popularized through word-of-mouth.
Marketers become important when you've got a sucky game to sell.
If there were no testers at EA, or the testers did a mediocre job, the games would be crap
The output of EA testers is already worse than mediocre. Look at the inescable game balance mistakes plaguing the first releases of both Battlefield Vietnam and Battlefield 2.
Not only do they fail to get things right the first time, but usually not on the 2nd or 3rd attempt either.
but it is at least giving the testers equal position on the chopping block.
They deserve nothing close to equality. They are replacable- in a pinch, coders designers and producers can do the job of a tester, but the reverse is never true.
If they are not listened to you can have the best creatives in the world and still produce awful games.
Maybe. Or maybe the game will turn out fine despite being untested (it's not as if testers haven't sometimes made things worse with their biased complaints).
So, stipulating that testers usually improve game quality, they are still far less important than anyone else in the game creation process, marketers excepted.
Programmers + artists + luck = good game. Tester + luck = nothing at all.
Any company that wants to be successful wants to crush competitors. That's what the word 'competition' means.
Wrong. Otherwise the Tour de France would've been a wrestling match. Just get off your bikes and stomp the other teams' faces, and you'll be sure to win the race.
That's cheating, which is one kind of competition, but not the only kind, and not the kind a free market nation will support.
Similarly, instead of simply explaining how you're wrong, which is productive competition that helps others, I could crush your face in with my elbow.
GM and Ford are falling flat on their asses because they make cars that no one wants.
Nope, not at this particular instant in time. GM is doing poorly because some people want their cars. Each time GM sells a car, they lose $1227. GM's real problem is that they made overly-generous retirement promises to ex-employees, which means they can't compete on price with new or foreign companies that aren't subsidizing legions of unionized nonworkers.
Table of mean per-vehicle profit by manufacturer: Nissan....$1826 Toyota....$1488 Honda.....$1203 Chrysler...$186 Ford......-$139 GM.......-$1227
For short term savings, GM should stop selling any cars at all... except that it would signal they never intend to sell them in the future either. If not for competition from non-union makers, GM could charge more per vehicle, collecting enough to cover their costs.
AC: On Wednesday reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics.
They're airforce. They fly, not swim. They don't have training to operate boats, trucks, buses or even helicopters- and more importantly, they don't have that equipment. The New Orleans superdome contains 4000+ able-bodied young men, who are useless because they don't have vehicles to travel in and out. More manpower by itself won't help: it'll only divert supplies from the needy.
Furthermore, those Air Force men have a mission involving national air defense. Wouldn't it look great if a terrorist succeeds in an airliner hijack because the fighter pilots were all wading around in Louisana mud?
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Even if it does, you can set the server up on your own system for whatever duration the disc requires.
Um, if the consumer had the ability to modify the software running on the Blu-Ray player, this whole discussion would've been much much shorter.
If you think you can modify software on the player, then just go ahead and patch the playback to never check DRM flags, instead of installing a whole phony DRM server on there to spoof it into getting apparently-valid keys.
That's just fine. Because it only has to be done ONCE, and then the information on how to do it will be public knowledge.
And then anybody possessing that public knowledge will be arrestable under DMCA "circumvention device" clause.
And what law prevents you from showing me that stuff?
No law! The file has a "don't play" bit activated for some reason. It's not illegal to view the file; but it would be illegal to ignore the bitflag.
See how different that is?
Well what you explain to them is that in the case of ANY mod it might get disabled, espically mods they like to do.
Therefore, if the vendors are at all intelligent, they will WAIT until a few years of adoption have gone by before starting to enforce the remote blacklisting of any mods. This is the "fundamental organizational advantage"; the corporation will always have more unity, patience, and foresight than consumers (or workers).
Because the DRM systems are beholden to a distant corporate master, all the anti-features can be left inactive until marketshare critical mass has been surpassed. (Witness how PVRs are becoming more irritating as each firmware "upgrade" introduces new advertising)
Take DVD, remove some of the cool features and require people to pay per view.
Don't be so complacent. You just explained why the DIVX rollout was so different from the BluRay rollout, which is why it failed.
DIVX = DVD - eternal_playability
BluRay = DVD + (resolution * 5) - eternal_playability
DIVX was a worse product from the consumer's perspective. BluRay will be tremendously better in some ways. Nobody sought out DIVX, because it'd be silly to intentionally request a product whose only new feature is to sometimes refuse to work.
But BluRay is different. It doesn't merely remove free playing, but it also adds significant new features consumers haven't had yet. It will be the first way they buy / rent movies that take advantage of HDTV sets, and that alone will ensure decent popularity.
They are also the ones with the real power, the electronics industry is FAR larger than the entertainment industry.
Do you live in the USA? Which one of those industries has the USA Congress in it's pocket, passing DMCA laws merely as an appetizer?
There's no admin involved in it, at all.
It has been reported that admins have perma-banned certain accounts from ever getting modpoints again. Allegedly, after direct argumentation on some normal topic.
I run Debian unstable and I don't think it is 'incredibly out of date'.
Debian sid still (as of last week) doesn't have KDE 3.4 yet, meaning it's KDE filebrowser doesn't permit removing media like CDs or USB keys.
Monopolies only occur in markets with a barrier to entry, either natural or man-made.
Gravity only occurs near objects with mass, either natural or man-made.
Monopolies only occur in markets with a barrier to entry, either natural or man-made.
Number of markets with zero barriers-to-entry: 0.
There's always some natural obstruction, but more importantly, anytime that capital is allowed to accumulate, barriers to entry will arise.
No matter what kind of society it is, there will always be some fields requiring a decent startup investment to get going. And no matter how many companies are competing in that field, eventually one of them will get lucky and have more cash than the others. Possession of that capital will make it (on average) more efficient and profitable than the rest, so it's marketshare will grow in a vicious circle.
If it wasn't for trust-busters from the democratic government, dozens of monopolists from Esso through Microsoft could've strangled the rest of the economy and set themselves up as feudal lords.
Sure: The Standard Oil monopoly in the 1890's. Read Upton Sinclar's The Jungle. Read about the DeBeers diamond monopoly.
Standard Oil is a fine example. So would be the old railroad barons, or 1960 AT&T, or 1997 Microsoft*. But DeBeers doesn't deserve to be put on the same level as them.
Diamonds are a luxury. Practical industrial uses for them are uncommon- few other economic sectors depend on DeBeers. But every business needs transport, telephones, and computers. At their heights (and if unfettered by regulators), the true mega-monopolists could've selected a random corporation from any other part of the economy and drove it into bankrupcy by withholding service. With that kind of leverage, any of them could've become a true corporate dictatorship, entirely killing the "free market" and installing a reign of central control reminiscent of communism (minus the hypothetical obligation to keep each citizen fed and healthy)
* In some ways, all of those were partially government-created: rail and telephone by reciept of public-domain land rights to build their infrastructure, and less directly, Microsoft was dependent on government enforcement of "Intellectual Property".
I had thought that PDF was that format. PDF is the format of all IRS publication downloads.
PDF can barely even be considered for these purposes. It is a "write-only" filetype. You'd have to be a mascohistic moron to store intermediate copies of a work-in-progress as PDF.
PDF is like paper; only useful when the document is FINISHED and no longer changed. And in modern times, the best & most important documents never really stop growing.
Sigh. Since Rehnquist was a conservative, replacing him with another conservative won't change the balance of the Court.
When comparing balance, you must measure not only how skewed the composition is, but also how long that composition will last.
Rehnquist was a conservative with the durability to serve no more than 5 more years, maximum. His replacement will be a conservative young enough to last for 40-plus years. Effectively, a "lame duck justice" is being replaced with one who will have the opportunity to rule for decades.
If Rehnquist hadn't died or retired before Bush was out of office, chances are that the next President would've been much less conservative, and selected a moderate (or even liberal) replacement judge.
Conservative judges are typically "constructionists", meaning that they tend to view the law through the lens of authority.
You're using "conservative" to mean something different there than in the rest of the post (and also different from the rest of this thread). Judges who are politically conservative has been as activist as any liberals.
How is it messed up pray tell?
By using gratuitous newlines after { and before }, it wastes space on the HTML page, which is rude to everyone who reads slashdot. If you're trying to emphasize the brevity of the needed code, then omitting extraneous whitespace is a natural step.
Cyan did inspire a whole horde of copycats and invigorated the adventure genre.
It is never valid to use any word based on "vigor" in relationship to Myst!
What about restricting it to the MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows platforms and excluding games packaged with the operating system?
In that case, Tetris beats Myst by far.
If the GPL isn't valid, you don't have a right to the copy.
True, but irrelevant. That the GPL is valid has nothing to do with it being an EULA. (In fact, EULAs are arguably invalid as inadequate contracts, so it's good that the GPL is nothing like them)
EULA: prevent you from doing things you are legally allowed.
GPL: allow you to do things that are legally forbidden.
US law allows you to make a copy of the program if required to run it if you own the program.
False. You are allowed to make whatever copies are needed to execute the program if you have legally acquired a copy of the program. You explicitly do not have to be the owner of the copyright to run a program. (Other countries have differed on this, but we're talking USA)
You must have some form of license to make a copy of the program.
False. You can also make copies of things according to Fair Use doctrine. One example of a Fair Use is the ability to make transient copies (CD -> HD -> RAM) in order to use a program normally.
That license is the GPL. The GPL is only different from Microsoft EULA's in it's terms. In point of fact, the GPL is one of a category called End User License Agreement.
False, false, false. (It's a waste of time to explain this to you, of course, because it's clear that you're just interested in spreading lies)
The GPL is not a kind of an End User License Agreement. You could call it an "Intermediate Developer / Republisher License Agreement", and that would make some sense.
Wolfenstein 3D was revolutionary. Doom and Quake were just incremental technical refinements of the same basic gameplay mechanics. But a game doesn't have to be revolutionary to be good.
Wrong, Doom's gameplay was barely like Wolf3d's (unless you also believe tennis is about the same as baseball).
Besides, if you want to talk "incremental improvement", then Wolf3d was just a step up from Catacomb 3D, replacing fireballs with bullets and trolls with Sturmtruppen.
When is the last time a solid freeware game caught the imagination of millions? About 15 years.
About 15 months ago. The name is "Bejeweled".
We told them. That is where the consumer is most important.
At best, that can lead to popular games, not good ones.
or do you play games like WoW, EQ, 1/2-Life, Doom3, etc? Then you fell for some marketers ploy.
Wrong. All those games were sold mainly on the reputation of the programmers' earlier work. Marketing hardly made a difference there. Except for Doom3, those are all decent products that were popularized through word-of-mouth.
Marketers become important when you've got a sucky game to sell.
If there were no testers at EA, or the testers did a mediocre job, the games would be crap
The output of EA testers is already worse than mediocre. Look at the inescable game balance mistakes plaguing the first releases of both Battlefield Vietnam and Battlefield 2.
Not only do they fail to get things right the first time, but usually not on the 2nd or 3rd attempt either.
but it is at least giving the testers equal position on the chopping block.
They deserve nothing close to equality. They are replacable- in a pinch, coders designers and producers can do the job of a tester, but the reverse is never true.
If they are not listened to you can have the best creatives in the world and still produce awful games.
Maybe. Or maybe the game will turn out fine despite being untested (it's not as if testers haven't sometimes made things worse with their biased complaints).
So, stipulating that testers usually improve game quality, they are still far less important than anyone else in the game creation process, marketers excepted.
Programmers + artists + luck = good game.
Tester + luck = nothing at all.
Do you have any idea how much it costs to put a game on a shelf at BestBuy?
Little enough that 5000+ corporations could afford it if they desire. That's no more a barrier-to-entry than if you wanted to sell ice cream sundaes.
Furthermore, the most profitable games today don't go through storefronts.
Any company that wants to be successful wants to crush competitors. That's what the word 'competition' means.
Wrong. Otherwise the Tour de France would've been a wrestling match. Just get off your bikes and stomp the other teams' faces, and you'll be sure to win the race.
That's cheating, which is one kind of competition, but not the only kind, and not the kind a free market nation will support.
Similarly, instead of simply explaining how you're wrong, which is productive competition that helps others, I could crush your face in with my elbow.
GM and Ford are falling flat on their asses because they make cars that no one wants.
Nope, not at this particular instant in time. GM is doing poorly because some people want their cars. Each time GM sells a car, they lose $1227. GM's real problem is that they made overly-generous retirement promises to ex-employees, which means they can't compete on price with new or foreign companies that aren't subsidizing legions of unionized nonworkers.
Table of mean per-vehicle profit by manufacturer:
Nissan....$1826
Toyota....$1488
Honda.....$1203
Chrysler...$186
Ford......-$139
GM.......-$1227
For short term savings, GM should stop selling any cars at all... except that it would signal they never intend to sell them in the future either. If not for competition from non-union makers, GM could charge more per vehicle, collecting enough to cover their costs.
AC: On Wednesday reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics.
They're airforce. They fly, not swim. They don't have training to operate boats, trucks, buses or even helicopters- and more importantly, they don't have that equipment. The New Orleans superdome contains 4000+ able-bodied young men, who are useless because they don't have vehicles to travel in and out. More manpower by itself won't help: it'll only divert supplies from the needy.
Furthermore, those Air Force men have a mission involving national air defense. Wouldn't it look great if a terrorist succeeds in an airliner hijack because the fighter pilots were all wading around in Louisana mud?
The neandarthals were a different species
You are begging the question.
which means (by definition) there was no interbreeding.
So by definition, mules do not exist. In the real world, speciation is rarely a bright line.