The machinery of extradition is pretty low level. Bush, Iraq, Neo-con revisionism, tantrums by lefty Parisian students and the legacy of De Gaul aside, relations between France and the US are not bad enough to interfere with standard operations of this sort.
France is a WIPO member nation, which means that they are a signatory to treaties promising to enact DMCA-like laws.
Legal precedent (such as that established by finding this fellow guilty by creative application of current law) would it easier to stealth a comprehensive law into place over the protest of an elected assembly that might vote against it.
I disagree that everyone is a powergamer. One of the drivers you mention, prestige, is a primitive social phenomenon. People do play games and MMOs for different reasons and not everyone cares about power, it's rare for someone to be totally disinterested in power - but fairly common for it to be a secondary or lesser desire.
Even if everyone were a powergamer, there would be more people disappointed than gratified by extreme rarity. Only those powergammers who also seek fame are unhappy in a system like that of WoW.
Seriously, we could play "what if" games all day long, but let's not blow this issue all out of proportion
Dangerously wrong. It is incredibly common for web applications to have holes that allow execution of arbitrary programs. A "local only" vulnerability is the other half of the weakness an attacker needs to turn a simple coding or configuration error into a root exploit.
Except for homosexuals. The slightest shred of a nano-iota of criticism for their "gay mariage" efforts, and then you *are* hateful. Care to explain that dichotomy to me?
There is no dichotomy. An American nationalist that treats any criticism or discussion as hate is wrong, and a homosexual that treats any criticism or discussion as hate is wrong. The error of the nationalist must be treated more seriously because the stakes are much greater.
Anyway, Bill should grow up and know better than to call people commies. It's unprofessional.
I'm astonished by how often Gates shoots his mouth off and says insulting and unprofessional things in interviews. Somehow he never seems to get called on it.
This is one case where I think the EU has the right of it. Every kid should be strongly encouraged to take a year after highschool and do something in the real world. Americans in general have a remarkable lack of empathy for people who are worse off than them. That was the attitude that allowed Reagan to create the myth of the 'welfare parasite'. and covers an actual hatred of the poor. Another result of that attitude is that a large number of Americans ignore all politicians because only those who have lived privileged lives are eligible for high office - why should some kid working a dead end job care at all whether it is Bush or Kerry is the president.
Which guarantees their loss all the more, the people they are competing with in the IP business are parasites with no ethics. At some point there will be a window in which the failing Transmeta will be subject to takeover by a vulture herder like Canopy. The zombified remains may lurch over the landscape for several years and sue everyone the real Transmeta ever did business with.
A moderation system does nothing to solve the problem of groupthink and favoritism.
Take the example of the "FOX News" entry someone made earlier. Since the subject has somehow become emotionally and politically charged it is clear that people will tend to moderate edits based on which side they are on - not on research and facts.
Groupthink tends to be reinforced by a moderation system by allowing administrators to easily determine which "side" someone is on, the site administrators can then easily identify undesirables (that is people they don't agree with) and strip them of moderation privileges.
According to the
US bureau of labor statistics
there were 400k people employed as computer programmers at last count (november 2003), and only 17k of those were employed by software publishers.
From my own experience I've worked entirely on in-house projects, they were occasionally sold or given to external customers, but were never developed with anything other than internal use in mind.
I agree very much that good tools would make UML more valuable than it is right now, but I think there is also a fundamental problem that something too close to implementation is specified by UML as commonly used. When used in that manner the UML becomes nothing more than additional version of the code in a more abstract form, this is fine if the UML is generated from actual code, harmful if not.
I guess the design tool that I would like to see would be a reverse engineering tool, UML use case tool, physical spec tool, and architectural spec tool. All as easy to use as visio and with the capability to export in image or pdf format.
As it stands the 3x5 and whiteboard method are far more useful than most of the tools that Rational provides.
this kind of software accounts for the vast majority of software expenditures
That has been my experience. It is the type of software that is largely invisible to OSS other than as frameworks and libraries (which are often incidentally useful to these types of applications).
Most projects seem to wind up with some UML for the specifications and use cases, high level architecture diagram with no particular modeling language and UMLish whiteboard discussions between teams and individuals working on interfaces.
The only time I see formal UML is when it is generated by a reverse engineer tool that spits out UML for what has actually been coded.
If there were some actual useful UML tools I might use it a bit more, but as it stands I don't much care for any of the diagraming tools that are available.
bespoke and vertical market applications which seem to be completely ignored by the article
Actually they are briefly mentioned as "software that has no commercial viability" and then pretty much ignored for the rest of the article other than as the "FOSS corner case".
if we look at this historically, isn't Microsoft already dead?
Every business and society is mortal (and already dead) from a historical perspective. It may be valid, but is generally not useful - and can even be a somewhat poisonous world view.
You know it is kind of funny that much of the rhetoric of the extreme FOSS advocates mirrors that of the development of communism somewhat. There is the split between those who want to ally themselves with the bourgeoisie and those who believe only those dedicated to the principles of FOSS are to be trusted. Some FOSS advocates state that commercial software development companies are "decadent" and ready to be swept aside by the forces of history. The founder of the Free Software movement believes that software should be a government provided service and commercial software should ultimately wither away.
Not saying FOSS equals communism, but there is some of the same belief in historical inevitability and a curious mixture of mindless optimism and bloody minded pessimism that color so much political philosophy.
Microsoft has been trying to dominate the server market for years, and has never succeeded.
In specific server markets MS dominates completely. They basically have the same enterprise market share (in a much larger market) that Novell once enjoyed, and even though they are losing slowly in this market they will remain a key player for at least two upgrade cycles. In the Internet server market MS has always been an also ran, and what share they have is doomed.
"I was never connected to that shit. If they found out, I'd be in jail." and "You do not need some 350-pound hit man with a Glock at your front door." are a couple choice quotes from these sad little people that can't separate reality from fiction.
The people they interview sound like any jackass you might meet on IRC or working at a CompUSA who will make up ridiculous stories to impress random strangers. I'm sure the article has some basis in reality, but I wouldn't believe that water is wet on the say-so of one of these people.
I agree that in real life the killing of some nobody conscript in some stupid war is as big a tragedy as the assassination of a leader. There are some differences in depicting the two as the subject of game violence.
First, JFK was an actual person - the victims in most games are just game counters. Few people could defend GTA if your victims in the game were real life victims of street violence. Second, popular leaders are the representative of an expression of free speech, the murder of MLK was an attempt to murder the idea of racial equality - you would have a difficult time trying to convince people that acting out that murder would be a fit subject for a video game.
You paid for some entertainment, which you received, and now you want your money back?
The media companies are the ones that want to eat the cake and have it too, either they are selling media or content. If it is content then back up copies and multiple formats are legal use, if it is media then you can resell the media when you are done with it.
That said I think Steam is a fairly good idea, but there are some issues that need to be worked out.
The way smuggler players were treated typified the entire SWG experience. SOE basically took a guaranteed hit and flushed it down the toilet by ignoring what players wanted and focusing on what marketing decided would pull in new players.
So yeah I agree that SWG as a whole was really one of the lows of 2004.
It is wrong of me to gloat, but I am thrilled that EQ2 looks to be a dud - maybe ignoring and insulting your customers really isn't a good move. It really looked to many SWG players as though their game was being ignored for the sake of the "next big thing". SWG had a great number of innovations, excellent ideas and a setting that guaranteed them fans, but for some reason development seemed to flail around and never focused on the bug fixes or polishing that are essential to long term success.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm no, the DMCA itself was a fulfillment of those treaty obligations I mentioned. The blame belongs to the member nations of WIPO as a whole.
The machinery of extradition is pretty low level. Bush, Iraq, Neo-con revisionism, tantrums by lefty Parisian students and the legacy of De Gaul aside, relations between France and the US are not bad enough to interfere with standard operations of this sort.
France is a WIPO member nation, which means that they are a signatory to treaties promising to enact DMCA-like laws. Legal precedent (such as that established by finding this fellow guilty by creative application of current law) would it easier to stealth a comprehensive law into place over the protest of an elected assembly that might vote against it.
Even if everyone were a powergamer, there would be more people disappointed than gratified by extreme rarity. Only those powergammers who also seek fame are unhappy in a system like that of WoW.
Dangerously wrong. It is incredibly common for web applications to have holes that allow execution of arbitrary programs. A "local only" vulnerability is the other half of the weakness an attacker needs to turn a simple coding or configuration error into a root exploit.
There is no dichotomy. An American nationalist that treats any criticism or discussion as hate is wrong, and a homosexual that treats any criticism or discussion as hate is wrong. The error of the nationalist must be treated more seriously because the stakes are much greater.
I'm astonished by how often Gates shoots his mouth off and says insulting and unprofessional things in interviews. Somehow he never seems to get called on it.
This is one case where I think the EU has the right of it. Every kid should be strongly encouraged to take a year after highschool and do something in the real world. Americans in general have a remarkable lack of empathy for people who are worse off than them. That was the attitude that allowed Reagan to create the myth of the 'welfare parasite'. and covers an actual hatred of the poor. Another result of that attitude is that a large number of Americans ignore all politicians because only those who have lived privileged lives are eligible for high office - why should some kid working a dead end job care at all whether it is Bush or Kerry is the president.
Which guarantees their loss all the more, the people they are competing with in the IP business are parasites with no ethics. At some point there will be a window in which the failing Transmeta will be subject to takeover by a vulture herder like Canopy. The zombified remains may lurch over the landscape for several years and sue everyone the real Transmeta ever did business with.
Take the example of the "FOX News" entry someone made earlier. Since the subject has somehow become emotionally and politically charged it is clear that people will tend to moderate edits based on which side they are on - not on research and facts.
Groupthink tends to be reinforced by a moderation system by allowing administrators to easily determine which "side" someone is on, the site administrators can then easily identify undesirables (that is people they don't agree with) and strip them of moderation privileges.
From my own experience I've worked entirely on in-house projects, they were occasionally sold or given to external customers, but were never developed with anything other than internal use in mind.
Naw, not stoned enough for that to be deep, and I distrust philosophers of all sorts - I simply stated the consequences of that line of thinking.
I guess the design tool that I would like to see would be a reverse engineering tool, UML use case tool, physical spec tool, and architectural spec tool. All as easy to use as visio and with the capability to export in image or pdf format.
As it stands the 3x5 and whiteboard method are far more useful than most of the tools that Rational provides.
That has been my experience. It is the type of software that is largely invisible to OSS other than as frameworks and libraries (which are often incidentally useful to these types of applications).
The only time I see formal UML is when it is generated by a reverse engineer tool that spits out UML for what has actually been coded.
If there were some actual useful UML tools I might use it a bit more, but as it stands I don't much care for any of the diagraming tools that are available.
Actually they are briefly mentioned as "software that has no commercial viability" and then pretty much ignored for the rest of the article other than as the "FOSS corner case".
Every business and society is mortal (and already dead) from a historical perspective. It may be valid, but is generally not useful - and can even be a somewhat poisonous world view.
Not saying FOSS equals communism, but there is some of the same belief in historical inevitability and a curious mixture of mindless optimism and bloody minded pessimism that color so much political philosophy.
In specific server markets MS dominates completely. They basically have the same enterprise market share (in a much larger market) that Novell once enjoyed, and even though they are losing slowly in this market they will remain a key player for at least two upgrade cycles. In the Internet server market MS has always been an also ran, and what share they have is doomed.
"I was never connected to that shit. If they found out, I'd be in jail." and "You do not need some 350-pound hit man with a Glock at your front door." are a couple choice quotes from these sad little people that can't separate reality from fiction.
The people they interview sound like any jackass you might meet on IRC or working at a CompUSA who will make up ridiculous stories to impress random strangers. I'm sure the article has some basis in reality, but I wouldn't believe that water is wet on the say-so of one of these people.
It's legal, but offensive - that means you may not be able to convince anyone to fund its development or convince anyone to buy it.
First, JFK was an actual person - the victims in most games are just game counters. Few people could defend GTA if your victims in the game were real life victims of street violence. Second, popular leaders are the representative of an expression of free speech, the murder of MLK was an attempt to murder the idea of racial equality - you would have a difficult time trying to convince people that acting out that murder would be a fit subject for a video game.
The media companies are the ones that want to eat the cake and have it too, either they are selling media or content. If it is content then back up copies and multiple formats are legal use, if it is media then you can resell the media when you are done with it.
That said I think Steam is a fairly good idea, but there are some issues that need to be worked out.
The way smuggler players were treated typified the entire SWG experience. SOE basically took a guaranteed hit and flushed it down the toilet by ignoring what players wanted and focusing on what marketing decided would pull in new players.
So yeah I agree that SWG as a whole was really one of the lows of 2004.
It is wrong of me to gloat, but I am thrilled that EQ2 looks to be a dud - maybe ignoring and insulting your customers really isn't a good move. It really looked to many SWG players as though their game was being ignored for the sake of the "next big thing". SWG had a great number of innovations, excellent ideas and a setting that guaranteed them fans, but for some reason development seemed to flail around and never focused on the bug fixes or polishing that are essential to long term success.