This is just an idea, but I think that it might really help students to get the idea of some of the problems with IP laws anyway.
First come up with a simple task, something that has one or two fairly obvious solutions- maybe use some of those logic questions that were really popular in IT interviews a while back, like how to tell which of three lightbulbs goes with which of three light switches from another room when you can only look once, etc.
Next, break the students up into teams. Give each team the project individually (don't tell them the other teams are working on the same one) and tell them they need to figure out how to do it. Tell them it's worth 100 points or something.
After all the groups have finished, tell everyone that nobody gets any points, because another group from a class earlier in the had already worked out how to do it. Of course, this group has an A right now and doesn't need the points, so they aren't actually going to do it for the credit, just stop anyone else from getting credit for it. If the students' don't want a 0, they can pay this group 70 points out of the 100 points for the assignment for the rights to be able to use it, or they can come up with an alternate and worse solution to the problem - wich will cause them to be docked points.
This should give them a pretty good understanding of how patents and copyright work- especially as it's related to software patents.
I think that sony really made a poor tradeoff with losing rumble and adding the sixaxis thing (though it's actually only THREE axises (axies?) being that +/-X is one axis, +/-Y is an axis, and +/-Z is an axis, but anyway...). The thing about rumble support is that game pads have had it for so long now that (for me anyway) I don't notice when it's there, but I certainly notice when it's missing.
Thanks very much, now that is going to happen to me from now on....although I think it might be more appropriate to hear the battle music while the compiler is running, then hear victory when you compile without errors (of course when your program segfaults that's like beating a boss then having your dog trip over the power cord and then you have to fight the boss again...)
People like to complain about sequals for video games, and I admit that a lot of times it becomes ridiculous, but I think that there are a lot of instances where sequals are really welcome and add to the overall series. The fact is that most often when I think of games, I think "what is my favorite series".
Mario, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Tony Hawk, Metroid, Tekken, Zelda, how many people are really doing to go "damn, not ANOTHER Zelda game, try something original nintendo!".
The problem really is when a company runs out of ideas (or at least out of good ideas) and tries to use the name of a great game or series to sell crap. It's bad for gamers who are tricked into buying crap, and it's bad for publishers who ruin the name of a great series.
Really, there shouldn't be much to teach them. It's not like the students and teachers are going to have to be installing or configuring software or anything. Just set them up with a desktop that has two icons on it, one labled "Office Software" that opens up OpenOffice.org and the other that says "Internet" that opens up Firefox. Disallow writing to the hard disk at all, and only allow users to write to floppy or usb.
If you want to go to the effort, you can even customise a setup like this, then create a LiveCD. That way even if the kids do manage to screw something up, a reboot will have you back to where you started at.
I know some people will say it's still too complicated, but really, at some point you need to just need to accept that no matter how easy something is, someone will always be too stupid/misinformed/lazy to do it.
IE7, like IE6, renders a lot of pages significantly differently than the other main HTML rendering engines available (Geko, KHTML, and Opera). At the same time, IE7 requires WGA to run - so that applications like Wine are unable to run it. This means that web developers who are using Linux and Mac OS X will have an extremely difficult time testing their sites with IE7. Was this intentional? If so what was the reason behind it (do you want to force developers to move to Windows for web development, or simply set IE aside as something different that isn't a regular browser and must be specifically developed for), and if not how do you plan to rectify the situation?
I'm not sure how we can use this new technology to further abuse telemarketers, but I have faith that the geeks of the world will find a way!
Personally, I think it would be useful to simply confuse the software by saying horrible things in honeyed tones. Especially things that use phrases that the programmers probably wouldn't have thought to include in the code to detect annoyance. "Sure, you can tell me about your companies products, after I force you to watch as I bathe in your offsprings viscera".
You know, ever since I dropped my land line and just stick with a cell phone, I kind of miss having telemarketers to abuse...guess I'll just stick to abusing spammers.
I'll count myself as one of the people who is not a big shakespeare fan.
I consider myself a moderately well read person, and I have read a lot of the classics. I've read a fair big of Shakespeare, and some of his stuff is good, a lot of it is crap. Even the best of it though is often melodramatic and basically reminds me of soap operas. Most of all, a lot of shakespears work, to me, just seems to be sub par when compared to Dante, Homer, or many other classic writers.
That, in and of itself, wouldn't really be bad. People have different tastes and I'm perfectly willing to say "oh, so and so likes shakespear better, but I like dante better" - but people have come up with this thing where Shakespeare is basically defined as the end-all-be-all poet and playwrite. The problem with this is that a lot of people are first exposed to the classics via shakespear, and are lead to beleive that all of the classics of literature are like shakespear and so they never try to read anything else.
I know that personally I was 20 before I ever went to see a play outside of what we shown in middle and high school, simply because all evidence that I had pointed to the fact that they were all shakespearian.
And the works of shakespeare themselves might appeal to more people if someone did a decent modern-english translation of them. In school everyone is exposed to the english of his era, and it is utterly incomprehencable to most people- adding to the layer of contempt for shakespear and most things that are not innately shakespearian- but which people are lead to beleive are (e.g. all plays, classic literature, and poetry).
Basically, I would say that William Shakespear - or at least zealots who preach in his name - have caused more damage to literacy and culture that most people ever realize.
Just like most other people here, I buy games both new and used. When I was younger and on a budget I would often sell games in order to get new games- now that I have a job I tend to hang on to my older games (especially since I realized how much I've spent re-buying games for the sake of nostalgia).
I generally don't buy games when the first come out- simply because I already have a backlog of games that I need to get through as it is- so when I do go to buy a game there are generally used copies available. Most of the time though, if there is a new copy I'll buy it.
I think that there is some psychological value of having a new game- from peeling off the cellophane and cursing for hours as you try to get those stickers off the edge so you can actually open the case to the smell of freshly stamped pastic and toner from the instruction manual.
Bullshit.
You are extending the definition of "addiction" far beyond it's intended meaning. "We, as a society" are not addicted to Foreign Oil or the Internet.
We have an Infrastructure built around the Internet and Foreign Oil which has been built up through significant investment over a long period of time
That's like saying that we have an "addiction" to the grocery store. People aren't addicted to grocery stores, we've simply been trained and adapted to living in a world where you get food from the grocery store. People would have a hard time if there were no more grocery stores and suddently they had to go hunting and gathering too. that isn't addiction.
I've seen real addicts, and there is a big difference between being an addict and adapting to an infrastructure. ...Or maybe you should tell Darwin that there is no such thing as evolution, some finches were just addicted to certain environmental niches;)
It's not the horror games that are scary
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Fraidy Cat Gamer
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I love the survival horror genre, as well as the horror themed action genre. Most of the games aren't really anything like what I would call scary though. The first two Resident Evils made me jump every so often- but they never really terrified me. Interestingly enough, I found Resident Evil 4 to be one of the most terrifying games, even though it was certainly more action focused - mostly because the enemies are smarter and vastly more numerous.
I would say that really, although I love the horror games for their atmosphere, a lot of the most tense and creepy games I have played haven't been horror games at all. Metal Gear Solid always creeped me out, simply because the tension would really build up- especially playing it on the hardest difficulty setting.
I think that games can really be a better platform for horror than movies, since movies are fundamentally a passive experience, whereas games are imersive.
There have been a few people who have replied with similiar statements to yours, so I'm just going to address all of them in one reply.
The thing of it is, there have always been people who would write programs like one that would need to be written to make WGA fark up a computer just out of a sense of fun. In the past these people have been in the majority, now days though, most of the crackers aren't in it to have fun, they are in it to make money.
To reply to your example- yes there are virus out there that delete files- but think about what a small portion of viruses actually do that. Sure, they are out there, but on the other hand, when I clean up my families machines and remove two or three thousand pieces of malware none of it has deleted any files or disabled any programs.
As for the blackmail aspect, I admit that I hadn't thought of that, but even then I don't see it as being a big possibility. For the most part, if you have enough money to pay off a blackmailer, you have enough money to instead pay someone to re-image your machines.
I'm not saying everyone should feel all warm and fuzzy about this, WGA is bad and it will be broken quickly, I'm just saying that I think that there are probably more lucrative holes in Vista that will be exploited by the majority of crackers.
I really fail to see what incentive a cracker would have in making someone's legitimate copy of Vista appear to be illigitament. Granted, I'm sure somone will write it to see if they can, and it'll make it's way to a few people, but it seems counter productive for any big time cracker to do this.
Most of the people who send out these exploits aren't doing it to piss people off, they are doing it to make money. The thing is, a botnet only works when the zombied machines are running. If you are Joe Cracker, you want those machines up so they can be sending your spam, performing your DDOSes, and collecting information for you to sell to ad companies. What you don't want is for the machine to stop working so that the owner takes it in to be fixed - especially when the person fixing it might just put some antivirus software on there that will stop your bots from running (for a while).
This would be trivial for the RIAA to do. They largely control what music is going to be popular at a given time anyway, since they basically control what MTV, the radio stations, etc. play- and people tend to buy things that they are conditioned to like through repeated playing.
All the RIAA would have to do would be to put out ads for an artist, then heavily advertise that artist to the exclusion of others for a month or so, and bam, they have statistics to prove that the song or artist that was advertised experienced a statistically significant increase in sales. And thats without doing something sneaky like including a "bonus" Compact-disc-shaped-bit-of-plastic-with-some-bits- on-it-that-could-be-vaugely-interpreted-as-music-b y-some-heavily-locked-down-crappy-software-and-als o-the-disk-will-make-your-computer-explode-...-twi ce so that basically any CD anyone buys ever will add to the number of people buying that song.
I agree with this, Flexlm can be a pain to deal with sometimes. I've had it break a few times on my work system, and it usually constitutes a massive pain to get things in working order again.
I disagree with this statement completely. I should say that I currently own a PS2, Gamecube, and an XBOX360 (as well as older consoles that do not really have an effect on this discussion) and I plan on buying both a PS3 and a Wii as soon as I am able to - I will probably get a Wii near launch and a PS3 sometime after Christmas once they (hopefully) can be found (I wasn't able to get a preorder in on either one of them, sadly, nor will I be able to take a day off work to wait in line to get one, so I expect I will have some waiting to do).
Basically, the way that I see it, both Sony and Nintendo are taking different but equally valid approaches to making their next-gen machines fun. Nintendo is adding novelty with their controller, as well as focusing a lot on nostalgia with the virtual console. I think that some fun games will come out of this, but I also expect a lot of really hokey lame and gimmicky games will come out for the Wii as well. In the end, I think most people are pretty aware of what Nintendo is bringing to the table this time around. I think a lot of people are disregarding what the PS3 can offer however.
Sony is basically using the brute-force method of creating a console. The tilt controller thing is stupid and I suspect that they will replace the default controller down the line (like they replaced the standard PS1 controller with the Dual Shock controller mid-way through the life of the PS1), but other than that, sony's philosophy seems to be try try to relax the limitations put on developers because of hardware and see what they come up with. As much as you might think that graphics were as good as they could get for the PS2/GC/XBOX era, and that gameplay was as good as it was going to get, but there is a lot that can be done with more power in the system. Graphics are important, sure, but one thing that I've began to notice in this current new-gen of games is that a lot of focus seems to be going into physics and AI. Both of these things can really have an effect on gameplay. I've also noticed a major upgrade in the amount of "stuff" on the screen in 360 games compared to, e.g., PS2 games. Sure a lot of the time this is eye-candy, but take Dead Rising for example, one of the core aspects of the gameplay in that game is that there are a LOT of zombies- more than could be reasonably rendered on the PS2, GC, or XBOX, and probably more than could be rendered on the Wii.
What I see happening is that Sony (and Microsoft, though to a lesser extent) enlarged the dimensions of the hardware, giving developers more room to realize their vision. Nintendo didn't bother enlarging the existing dimensions much, and instead focused on adding a new one. Both of these approaches are going to allow developers to do new things with their games, and I think both will lead to fun games, because some types of games are going to only be approachable from one way or the other. At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter much what the hardware is, it's what the developers do with it, and I think BOTH approaches will allow the developers to do good things if they are so inclined, and will allow them to make crappy games if that is what they are going to do.
Personally, I can give you three answers to this question, depending on how you define "watch tv". Although I have a television set, it is used exclusively for video games and DVDs. I have watched maybe 1 hour of television on a television in the last several months, and even then that was because I wasn't at home and had nothing else to do. As for watching television shows on DVD or that I've downloaded, I would say probably about 40 minutes a day (about the length of a 1 hour show without ads). This is because generally, if there is a show I like, I'll pick it up on DVD and watch an episode (or two if it's a half-hour show) while I have dinner- sometimes I'll watch two episodes if I'm cooking something that doesn't require a lot of attention. The last sort of way of measuring I guess would be how often I have something on, even if I'm not strictly watching it. This would probably bring my average up to about 3 hours an evening. A lot of times I will put a show on and sort of half pay attention to it while I do other things for an hour or so- most of the time it's something that I've seen a few times before, and it does't really reqiure my full attention. Of course, I also listen to audio books a lot too to fulfill the same gap (also in the car on my way to work and often during work I'll listen to audio books as well).
Just judging based on what other people seem to say about their habbits on slashdot, I would gess that there are quite a few people who are similar to me in their TV watching habbits.
I disagree, and here is why:
In order for people to fight for freedom, they essentially need to know two things: first they need to know what freedom is, and second they need to know that they don't have it. As this applies to free software, people need to understand what it means for software to be free, and they have to understand how people and companies go about taking away that freedom.
People are pretty much used to shrinkwrap EULAs, I would be surprised if anyone ever actually read the license that is displayed when they go to install a program (most people don't care, those who do would read the EULA before they install). However, I think that something like another poster mentioned, with a box that says basically "You don' have to agree to this license to use this program\nClick [[here]] to read the license if you want to change or redistribute the program" would get peoples attention and get them wondering.
Now, I also agree that it would be stupid to have this be a requirement for every package that you might install on your distribution. Instead, I would suggest something like this:
Since 99% of the software covered under any given distribution can be covered under one of about five licenses (GPL, LGPL, BSD, MPL, Apache) then just show those licenses once - either during install or just have them in the documentation. Include some software like a "license reader" that would have the licnese text, and programs that are covered under that license. If you install something that is covered under a different license, but is part of your distro, then pop up a little box that says basically "new license added to repository, click [here] to see it" or something. The idea basically being that you pretty much know what your getting when it comes to installing software that is part of your distro or in your distro's repository.
Now, when I think that a click-through license display is worthwhile is for software that isn't part of your distribution. Especially for binary installers for software on sourceforge, etc, I think that it is perfectly reasonable to include something to tell users that even though they are just running a binary installer, they have the freedom to get and look at and change the code, and to re-distribute the program.
There seem to be a lot of furries, more than one would think, on the net, and in the world in general. It seems very strange to me. Maybe it's some latent sort of ingrained attraction thing from back when our ancestors were still covered in fur?
While it's neat that this sort of thing can be done, there is just something about all of these AJAX applications that does not sit well with me. I think that part of it has to do with the issues that the submitter mentioned. That would actually be a fairly simple thing to fix though, I imagine it would be trivial to write a sort of ajax launcher that was basically a web browser with a slightly modified UI that added bookmark links to your dock/taskbar/etc.
I know a lot of my issues at one time were related to the whole "storing documents on someone else's server" thing, and I'm still not a fan of that idea, but even if I could just get the source code and run the apps over my own network or something, there is just something that doesn't sit well with me about it.
I think that a lot of what irritates me is that the sort of things that are being made are largely things that already exist. I have Abiword and OpenOffice and KOffice installed, and they are better. AJAX is a neat thing, but it seems like it might be better to focus on doing new things, or at least more web-specific things, instead of trying to shoehorn all of our desktop applications into the browser.
It's actually a rather complicated situation, and I'm not sure anyone in the US really understands completely how it works. Here is my attempt to explain it anyway.
Basically, medical insurance in theory is supposed to help protect you in the case that you have a bunch of medical bills. In practice what actually happens is that insurance companies either require deductables on the order of thousands of dollars per procedure (where every tiny thing is it's own procedure) or they simply don't cover very much.
Furthermore, unless you're extraordinarily healthy, once you get past a certain age it can be very difficult to get health insurance at all, because insurance companies are afraid you might actually use their services.
Finally on that note, even crappy insurance is extremely expensive- and unless you work for a company who helps pay for it, or are rich, you can't afford health care.
Now, for people who don't have health care, there is Medicaid and Medicare. These are basically government insurance. The problem is that over the last several years they have been gutted to the point where they are even more impotent than they used to be.
Whether you have Medicare or Medicaid or some insurance plan, the bills quickly add up and people are usually left in a situation where they can't afford any more medical treatment. From there the options depend basically on what exactly the person is dying of.
If you get shot/stabbed/dismemebered/etc. Then basically you can walk into any hospital in the US and they are required to give you "stabalizing treatment" - which basically amounts to stopping you from bleeding to death before they take your billing information. For people dying of long term terminal diseases (e.g. cancer, organ failure, etc.) then there are free hospitals. The idea is that when you go to one of these hospitals they take as much as they can get from you, and leave it at that. Of course these hospitals also generally have abysmal quality, so nobody who can afford to pay any medical bills goes to them, so they never get new equipment/have the budget to hire good doctors/etc. This makes a viscous sort of cycle. These also tend to be in rather bad areas in the bigger cities- they mainly serve to tread drug overdoses and gunshot wounds. If you live in a small town and need to get to a hosptial like this- too bad.
Your other choice aside from the free hospital is to go to a hospital that is equipped to give you some of the best medical care in the world, but it basically involves liquidating all of your assets and turning them over to the hospital, then getting as much on credit as you can, then when you have no more to give they cut you off of treatment and transfer you to the free hospital. These hospitals generally aren't equipped to keep up the level of treatment you've been getting, so at this point generally they dope you up on pain killers and let you die.
In the US it is generally labled "ground $meat" but it is almost universally referred to as hamburger or hamburger meat.
I doubt many in the US have ever heard the term mince.
However...
If a website implements this secretly, then gets information about your usage while having some sort of login information with which to associate this information, then they would be able to connect future sessions to that session, which they could then connect back to a user profile.
Although this seems to be focused on usage within a single website, it seems a reasonable extrapolation to think that someone could develop a less effective but more general algorithm that would help to identify on different sites as well.
I suspect that that is true, however the same problem arises, at some point you face the possibility of someone who really beleives in something getting ahold of the things and wiping everyone off the planet.
Nukes aren't really ok for anybody to have, but being that the cat is out of the bag, the only reason it is ok is because of the whole MAD thing. Of course, mutually assured destruction is only a deterrent if the other guy cares about being blown up.
I can't say much for North Korea's mindset (maybe they are just their own special brand of insane?) but for the militant islamist countries, they would certainly prefer everyone dead over both they and the "infidels" being alive.
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This is just an idea, but I think that it might really help students to get the idea of some of the problems with IP laws anyway.
First come up with a simple task, something that has one or two fairly obvious solutions- maybe use some of those logic questions that were really popular in IT interviews a while back, like how to tell which of three lightbulbs goes with which of three light switches from another room when you can only look once, etc.
Next, break the students up into teams. Give each team the project individually (don't tell them the other teams are working on the same one) and tell them they need to figure out how to do it. Tell them it's worth 100 points or something.
After all the groups have finished, tell everyone that nobody gets any points, because another group from a class earlier in the had already worked out how to do it. Of course, this group has an A right now and doesn't need the points, so they aren't actually going to do it for the credit, just stop anyone else from getting credit for it. If the students' don't want a 0, they can pay this group 70 points out of the 100 points for the assignment for the rights to be able to use it, or they can come up with an alternate and worse solution to the problem - wich will cause them to be docked points.
This should give them a pretty good understanding of how patents and copyright work- especially as it's related to software patents.
I think that sony really made a poor tradeoff with losing rumble and adding the sixaxis thing (though it's actually only THREE axises (axies?) being that +/-X is one axis, +/-Y is an axis, and +/-Z is an axis, but anyway...). The thing about rumble support is that game pads have had it for so long now that (for me anyway) I don't notice when it's there, but I certainly notice when it's missing.
Thanks very much, now that is going to happen to me from now on....although I think it might be more appropriate to hear the battle music while the compiler is running, then hear victory when you compile without errors (of course when your program segfaults that's like beating a boss then having your dog trip over the power cord and then you have to fight the boss again...)
People like to complain about sequals for video games, and I admit that a lot of times it becomes ridiculous, but I think that there are a lot of instances where sequals are really welcome and add to the overall series. The fact is that most often when I think of games, I think "what is my favorite series".
Mario, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Tony Hawk, Metroid, Tekken, Zelda, how many people are really doing to go "damn, not ANOTHER Zelda game, try something original nintendo!".
The problem really is when a company runs out of ideas (or at least out of good ideas) and tries to use the name of a great game or series to sell crap. It's bad for gamers who are tricked into buying crap, and it's bad for publishers who ruin the name of a great series.
Really, there shouldn't be much to teach them. It's not like the students and teachers are going to have to be installing or configuring software or anything. Just set them up with a desktop that has two icons on it, one labled "Office Software" that opens up OpenOffice.org and the other that says "Internet" that opens up Firefox. Disallow writing to the hard disk at all, and only allow users to write to floppy or usb.
If you want to go to the effort, you can even customise a setup like this, then create a LiveCD. That way even if the kids do manage to screw something up, a reboot will have you back to where you started at.
I know some people will say it's still too complicated, but really, at some point you need to just need to accept that no matter how easy something is, someone will always be too stupid/misinformed/lazy to do it.
IE7, like IE6, renders a lot of pages significantly differently than the other main HTML rendering engines available (Geko, KHTML, and Opera). At the same time, IE7 requires WGA to run - so that applications like Wine are unable to run it. This means that web developers who are using Linux and Mac OS X will have an extremely difficult time testing their sites with IE7. Was this intentional? If so what was the reason behind it (do you want to force developers to move to Windows for web development, or simply set IE aside as something different that isn't a regular browser and must be specifically developed for), and if not how do you plan to rectify the situation?
I'm not sure how we can use this new technology to further abuse telemarketers, but I have faith that the geeks of the world will find a way!
Personally, I think it would be useful to simply confuse the software by saying horrible things in honeyed tones. Especially things that use phrases that the programmers probably wouldn't have thought to include in the code to detect annoyance. "Sure, you can tell me about your companies products, after I force you to watch as I bathe in your offsprings viscera".
You know, ever since I dropped my land line and just stick with a cell phone, I kind of miss having telemarketers to abuse...guess I'll just stick to abusing spammers.
I'll count myself as one of the people who is not a big shakespeare fan.
I consider myself a moderately well read person, and I have read a lot of the classics. I've read a fair big of Shakespeare, and some of his stuff is good, a lot of it is crap. Even the best of it though is often melodramatic and basically reminds me of soap operas. Most of all, a lot of shakespears work, to me, just seems to be sub par when compared to Dante, Homer, or many other classic writers.
That, in and of itself, wouldn't really be bad. People have different tastes and I'm perfectly willing to say "oh, so and so likes shakespear better, but I like dante better" - but people have come up with this thing where Shakespeare is basically defined as the end-all-be-all poet and playwrite. The problem with this is that a lot of people are first exposed to the classics via shakespear, and are lead to beleive that all of the classics of literature are like shakespear and so they never try to read anything else.
I know that personally I was 20 before I ever went to see a play outside of what we shown in middle and high school, simply because all evidence that I had pointed to the fact that they were all shakespearian.
And the works of shakespeare themselves might appeal to more people if someone did a decent modern-english translation of them. In school everyone is exposed to the english of his era, and it is utterly incomprehencable to most people- adding to the layer of contempt for shakespear and most things that are not innately shakespearian- but which people are lead to beleive are (e.g. all plays, classic literature, and poetry).
Basically, I would say that William Shakespear - or at least zealots who preach in his name - have caused more damage to literacy and culture that most people ever realize.
Just like most other people here, I buy games both new and used. When I was younger and on a budget I would often sell games in order to get new games- now that I have a job I tend to hang on to my older games (especially since I realized how much I've spent re-buying games for the sake of nostalgia).
I generally don't buy games when the first come out- simply because I already have a backlog of games that I need to get through as it is- so when I do go to buy a game there are generally used copies available. Most of the time though, if there is a new copy I'll buy it.
I think that there is some psychological value of having a new game- from peeling off the cellophane and cursing for hours as you try to get those stickers off the edge so you can actually open the case to the smell of freshly stamped pastic and toner from the instruction manual.
Bullshit.
...Or maybe you should tell Darwin that there is no such thing as evolution, some finches were just addicted to certain environmental niches ;)
You are extending the definition of "addiction" far beyond it's intended meaning. "We, as a society" are not addicted to Foreign Oil or the Internet.
We have an Infrastructure built around the Internet and Foreign Oil which has been built up through significant investment over a long period of time
That's like saying that we have an "addiction" to the grocery store. People aren't addicted to grocery stores, we've simply been trained and adapted to living in a world where you get food from the grocery store. People would have a hard time if there were no more grocery stores and suddently they had to go hunting and gathering too. that isn't addiction.
I've seen real addicts, and there is a big difference between being an addict and adapting to an infrastructure.
I love the survival horror genre, as well as the horror themed action genre. Most of the games aren't really anything like what I would call scary though. The first two Resident Evils made me jump every so often- but they never really terrified me. Interestingly enough, I found Resident Evil 4 to be one of the most terrifying games, even though it was certainly more action focused - mostly because the enemies are smarter and vastly more numerous.
I would say that really, although I love the horror games for their atmosphere, a lot of the most tense and creepy games I have played haven't been horror games at all. Metal Gear Solid always creeped me out, simply because the tension would really build up- especially playing it on the hardest difficulty setting.
I think that games can really be a better platform for horror than movies, since movies are fundamentally a passive experience, whereas games are imersive.
There have been a few people who have replied with similiar statements to yours, so I'm just going to address all of them in one reply.
The thing of it is, there have always been people who would write programs like one that would need to be written to make WGA fark up a computer just out of a sense of fun. In the past these people have been in the majority, now days though, most of the crackers aren't in it to have fun, they are in it to make money.
To reply to your example- yes there are virus out there that delete files- but think about what a small portion of viruses actually do that. Sure, they are out there, but on the other hand, when I clean up my families machines and remove two or three thousand pieces of malware none of it has deleted any files or disabled any programs.
As for the blackmail aspect, I admit that I hadn't thought of that, but even then I don't see it as being a big possibility. For the most part, if you have enough money to pay off a blackmailer, you have enough money to instead pay someone to re-image your machines.
I'm not saying everyone should feel all warm and fuzzy about this, WGA is bad and it will be broken quickly, I'm just saying that I think that there are probably more lucrative holes in Vista that will be exploited by the majority of crackers.
I really fail to see what incentive a cracker would have in making someone's legitimate copy of Vista appear to be illigitament. Granted, I'm sure somone will write it to see if they can, and it'll make it's way to a few people, but it seems counter productive for any big time cracker to do this.
Most of the people who send out these exploits aren't doing it to piss people off, they are doing it to make money. The thing is, a botnet only works when the zombied machines are running. If you are Joe Cracker, you want those machines up so they can be sending your spam, performing your DDOSes, and collecting information for you to sell to ad companies. What you don't want is for the machine to stop working so that the owner takes it in to be fixed - especially when the person fixing it might just put some antivirus software on there that will stop your bots from running (for a while).
This would be trivial for the RIAA to do. They largely control what music is going to be popular at a given time anyway, since they basically control what MTV, the radio stations, etc. play- and people tend to buy things that they are conditioned to like through repeated playing.- on-it-that-could-be-vaugely-interpreted-as-music-b y-some-heavily-locked-down-crappy-software-and-als o-the-disk-will-make-your-computer-explode-...-twi ce so that basically any CD anyone buys ever will add to the number of people buying that song.
All the RIAA would have to do would be to put out ads for an artist, then heavily advertise that artist to the exclusion of others for a month or so, and bam, they have statistics to prove that the song or artist that was advertised experienced a statistically significant increase in sales. And thats without doing something sneaky like including a "bonus" Compact-disc-shaped-bit-of-plastic-with-some-bits
I agree with this, Flexlm can be a pain to deal with sometimes. I've had it break a few times on my work system, and it usually constitutes a massive pain to get things in working order again.
I disagree with this statement completely. I should say that I currently own a PS2, Gamecube, and an XBOX360 (as well as older consoles that do not really have an effect on this discussion) and I plan on buying both a PS3 and a Wii as soon as I am able to - I will probably get a Wii near launch and a PS3 sometime after Christmas once they (hopefully) can be found (I wasn't able to get a preorder in on either one of them, sadly, nor will I be able to take a day off work to wait in line to get one, so I expect I will have some waiting to do).
Basically, the way that I see it, both Sony and Nintendo are taking different but equally valid approaches to making their next-gen machines fun. Nintendo is adding novelty with their controller, as well as focusing a lot on nostalgia with the virtual console. I think that some fun games will come out of this, but I also expect a lot of really hokey lame and gimmicky games will come out for the Wii as well. In the end, I think most people are pretty aware of what Nintendo is bringing to the table this time around. I think a lot of people are disregarding what the PS3 can offer however.
Sony is basically using the brute-force method of creating a console. The tilt controller thing is stupid and I suspect that they will replace the default controller down the line (like they replaced the standard PS1 controller with the Dual Shock controller mid-way through the life of the PS1), but other than that, sony's philosophy seems to be try try to relax the limitations put on developers because of hardware and see what they come up with. As much as you might think that graphics were as good as they could get for the PS2/GC/XBOX era, and that gameplay was as good as it was going to get, but there is a lot that can be done with more power in the system. Graphics are important, sure, but one thing that I've began to notice in this current new-gen of games is that a lot of focus seems to be going into physics and AI. Both of these things can really have an effect on gameplay. I've also noticed a major upgrade in the amount of "stuff" on the screen in 360 games compared to, e.g., PS2 games. Sure a lot of the time this is eye-candy, but take Dead Rising for example, one of the core aspects of the gameplay in that game is that there are a LOT of zombies- more than could be reasonably rendered on the PS2, GC, or XBOX, and probably more than could be rendered on the Wii.
What I see happening is that Sony (and Microsoft, though to a lesser extent) enlarged the dimensions of the hardware, giving developers more room to realize their vision. Nintendo didn't bother enlarging the existing dimensions much, and instead focused on adding a new one. Both of these approaches are going to allow developers to do new things with their games, and I think both will lead to fun games, because some types of games are going to only be approachable from one way or the other. At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter much what the hardware is, it's what the developers do with it, and I think BOTH approaches will allow the developers to do good things if they are so inclined, and will allow them to make crappy games if that is what they are going to do.
Personally, I can give you three answers to this question, depending on how you define "watch tv". Although I have a television set, it is used exclusively for video games and DVDs. I have watched maybe 1 hour of television on a television in the last several months, and even then that was because I wasn't at home and had nothing else to do. As for watching television shows on DVD or that I've downloaded, I would say probably about 40 minutes a day (about the length of a 1 hour show without ads). This is because generally, if there is a show I like, I'll pick it up on DVD and watch an episode (or two if it's a half-hour show) while I have dinner- sometimes I'll watch two episodes if I'm cooking something that doesn't require a lot of attention. The last sort of way of measuring I guess would be how often I have something on, even if I'm not strictly watching it. This would probably bring my average up to about 3 hours an evening. A lot of times I will put a show on and sort of half pay attention to it while I do other things for an hour or so- most of the time it's something that I've seen a few times before, and it does't really reqiure my full attention. Of course, I also listen to audio books a lot too to fulfill the same gap (also in the car on my way to work and often during work I'll listen to audio books as well).
Just judging based on what other people seem to say about their habbits on slashdot, I would gess that there are quite a few people who are similar to me in their TV watching habbits.
I disagree, and here is why:
In order for people to fight for freedom, they essentially need to know two things: first they need to know what freedom is, and second they need to know that they don't have it. As this applies to free software, people need to understand what it means for software to be free, and they have to understand how people and companies go about taking away that freedom.
People are pretty much used to shrinkwrap EULAs, I would be surprised if anyone ever actually read the license that is displayed when they go to install a program (most people don't care, those who do would read the EULA before they install). However, I think that something like another poster mentioned, with a box that says basically "You don' have to agree to this license to use this program\nClick [[here]] to read the license if you want to change or redistribute the program" would get peoples attention and get them wondering.
Now, I also agree that it would be stupid to have this be a requirement for every package that you might install on your distribution. Instead, I would suggest something like this:
Since 99% of the software covered under any given distribution can be covered under one of about five licenses (GPL, LGPL, BSD, MPL, Apache) then just show those licenses once - either during install or just have them in the documentation. Include some software like a "license reader" that would have the licnese text, and programs that are covered under that license. If you install something that is covered under a different license, but is part of your distro, then pop up a little box that says basically "new license added to repository, click [here] to see it" or something. The idea basically being that you pretty much know what your getting when it comes to installing software that is part of your distro or in your distro's repository.
Now, when I think that a click-through license display is worthwhile is for software that isn't part of your distribution. Especially for binary installers for software on sourceforge, etc, I think that it is perfectly reasonable to include something to tell users that even though they are just running a binary installer, they have the freedom to get and look at and change the code, and to re-distribute the program.
There seem to be a lot of furries, more than one would think, on the net, and in the world in general. It seems very strange to me. Maybe it's some latent sort of ingrained attraction thing from back when our ancestors were still covered in fur?
While it's neat that this sort of thing can be done, there is just something about all of these AJAX applications that does not sit well with me. I think that part of it has to do with the issues that the submitter mentioned. That would actually be a fairly simple thing to fix though, I imagine it would be trivial to write a sort of ajax launcher that was basically a web browser with a slightly modified UI that added bookmark links to your dock/taskbar/etc.
I know a lot of my issues at one time were related to the whole "storing documents on someone else's server" thing, and I'm still not a fan of that idea, but even if I could just get the source code and run the apps over my own network or something, there is just something that doesn't sit well with me about it.
I think that a lot of what irritates me is that the sort of things that are being made are largely things that already exist. I have Abiword and OpenOffice and KOffice installed, and they are better. AJAX is a neat thing, but it seems like it might be better to focus on doing new things, or at least more web-specific things, instead of trying to shoehorn all of our desktop applications into the browser.
It's actually a rather complicated situation, and I'm not sure anyone in the US really understands completely how it works. Here is my attempt to explain it anyway.
Basically, medical insurance in theory is supposed to help protect you in the case that you have a bunch of medical bills. In practice what actually happens is that insurance companies either require deductables on the order of thousands of dollars per procedure (where every tiny thing is it's own procedure) or they simply don't cover very much.
Furthermore, unless you're extraordinarily healthy, once you get past a certain age it can be very difficult to get health insurance at all, because insurance companies are afraid you might actually use their services.
Finally on that note, even crappy insurance is extremely expensive- and unless you work for a company who helps pay for it, or are rich, you can't afford health care.
Now, for people who don't have health care, there is Medicaid and Medicare. These are basically government insurance. The problem is that over the last several years they have been gutted to the point where they are even more impotent than they used to be.
Whether you have Medicare or Medicaid or some insurance plan, the bills quickly add up and people are usually left in a situation where they can't afford any more medical treatment. From there the options depend basically on what exactly the person is dying of.
If you get shot/stabbed/dismemebered/etc. Then basically you can walk into any hospital in the US and they are required to give you "stabalizing treatment" - which basically amounts to stopping you from bleeding to death before they take your billing information. For people dying of long term terminal diseases (e.g. cancer, organ failure, etc.) then there are free hospitals. The idea is that when you go to one of these hospitals they take as much as they can get from you, and leave it at that. Of course these hospitals also generally have abysmal quality, so nobody who can afford to pay any medical bills goes to them, so they never get new equipment/have the budget to hire good doctors/etc. This makes a viscous sort of cycle. These also tend to be in rather bad areas in the bigger cities- they mainly serve to tread drug overdoses and gunshot wounds. If you live in a small town and need to get to a hosptial like this- too bad.
Your other choice aside from the free hospital is to go to a hospital that is equipped to give you some of the best medical care in the world, but it basically involves liquidating all of your assets and turning them over to the hospital, then getting as much on credit as you can, then when you have no more to give they cut you off of treatment and transfer you to the free hospital. These hospitals generally aren't equipped to keep up the level of treatment you've been getting, so at this point generally they dope you up on pain killers and let you die.
In the US it is generally labled "ground $meat" but it is almost universally referred to as hamburger or hamburger meat.
I doubt many in the US have ever heard the term mince.
However...
If a website implements this secretly, then gets information about your usage while having some sort of login information with which to associate this information, then they would be able to connect future sessions to that session, which they could then connect back to a user profile.
Although this seems to be focused on usage within a single website, it seems a reasonable extrapolation to think that someone could develop a less effective but more general algorithm that would help to identify on different sites as well.
I suspect that that is true, however the same problem arises, at some point you face the possibility of someone who really beleives in something getting ahold of the things and wiping everyone off the planet.
Nukes aren't really ok for anybody to have, but being that the cat is out of the bag, the only reason it is ok is because of the whole MAD thing. Of course, mutually assured destruction is only a deterrent if the other guy cares about being blown up.
I can't say much for North Korea's mindset (maybe they are just their own special brand of insane?) but for the militant islamist countries, they would certainly prefer everyone dead over both they and the "infidels" being alive.