Piracy rates of 80-90 % are an unfortunate reality for AAA games, and have been for many years.
But they're also irrelevant from a business standpoint. Better focus on people who are willing to pay.
Why else would companies be willing to risk offending their paying customers with things like DRM that requires a constant Internet connection? Its because converting even 1/10th of the pirates into paying customers would give their sales a huge boost.
According to stats mentioned in TFA, 1/1000 of the pirates is about the best they can hope for.
I just hope they don't fall into the same trap that Star Wars Galaxies fell into (knowingly pissed off all of their existing customers in order to change their game to something they hoped more new people would pay to join... but they lost more players than they gained).
Several publishers seem to be working very hard to get into that exact same trap.
There's still one more problem: if your app is server-based, you need to maintain 10x as much bandwidth and CPU power to keep it running if the pirates use it too.
That's easily solved: only make it server-based if the server adds anything meaningful. That way pirates will be missing a significant part of the experience. (Possibly all of it, as is the case with MMORPGs.)
Blizzard isn't more successful because they are better games developers, it's successful because they require use of a subscription service for the game to be interesting at all. In other words, it's because they are tied to external content that remains under their control.
Are you saying all MMORPG publishers are equally successful?
That's like saying people who go to burger king instead of mcdonalds are somehow "pirates".
I disagree. Your McDonald's/Burger King analogy would match better with people playing Age of Conan rather than WoW - something that is clearly not piracy, just choosing another vendor. Running WOW on private servers would be more like having someone tape a cinema showing of a movie, then showing that privately to a large group of friends.
I think it'd be more like making your own hamburger. Possibly serving it in a McDonald's container that you saved from the last time you bought a hamburger there.
I would gladly dedicate another 5mm to a decent keyboard:(
Not 5 mm for me, but 1 mm would have been acceptable. But I use the on-screen keyboard half the time anyway.
As for the camera: The thing with the autofocus (not focusing until you push the camera button halfway down) is normal - this allows you to pick the spot you'd like to focus on;)
It's annoying. It's way too slow. When I press the button, I want a picture NOW, not at some point in the future.
However, saying the camera takes decent pictures borders on a crime against geek-humanity...:P. They're grainy and noisy, and the flash is completely useless unless you like red eyes:(
I had an iPhone before, so I'm already glad buildings and other straight lines aren't wavy. And to be honest, I've never seen a flash that doesn't completely spoil the picture. I've got a digital compact camera that makes excellent photos outside, but indoor I can choose between excessively grainy (much worse than an iPhone or Milestone), or completely completely dead because of the stupid flash. A direct flash just above the lens has got to be one of the stupidest ideas ever.
I'm more or less satisfied with my Milestone, but I'd really love a working camera (the one in there right now takes blurry color combinations rather than photos) and a keyboard that doesn't feel like you're pressing on a cracker.
I love my Milestone. Most of the hardware is excellent. Best screen I've ever seen. Even the camera takes very decent pictures. The problem with my camera is that it's glacially slow. I press the button and it takes several seconds before it finally takes the picture. (I wonder if that can't be fixed in software, though. I think it's the autofocus that's so slow, what what if it was constantly autofocusing when in the Camera app, instead of waiting until I press the button?)
The keyboard, yes, it's odd that such a nice, solid feeling device has such a flimsy piece of plastic as keyboard. I guess they didn't want to dedicate another millimeter of thickness to proper keys.
They already have a perfectly good OS - now the hardware just needs to catch up.
Most of the hardware is actually very nice, but I agree that Motorola needs to focus on hardware. They're a hardware company. Focus on that, and leave the software to others.
if you want to bring a smartphone to market, you run Android. But at the same time, of course you customize it: you don't want to be a commodity vendor.
After all, whats the difference between Dell and HP? Not much. HTC doesn't want to be the same as motorola, so in order to preserve a competitive advantage, you try to make your GUI better AND don't feedback your gui changes back to your competition.
You're right, but I'd rather see them compete by making the best hardware for the lowest price, and let me figure out which customised version of Android I want to run on that. HTC already is different from Motorola, because they make different hardware. I haven't seen anything like the Milestone from them (but instead lots of other phones that are no doubt interesting to other people).
Hardware makers should try to differentiate through software. Focus on the best hardware, support a common platform, and let software people take care of the software. (This goes double for Motorola. Their hardware is excellent, their software sucks.)
Umm, why weren't they 'prepared to deal with it then'? What's so special about '60s and '70s. Were we somehow all less aware, as a human race, that pedophilia and child abuse are bad back then? WTF?!
You need to draw a line somewhere. In ancient times (ancient Kelts and Greeks), sex with kids was socially acceptable. In the middle ages, marrying at age 13 was not uncommon. People doing horrible stuff has been acceptable for ages. It's hard to decide where to draw the line, so I just decided that the middle ages really ended in 1980. Or should have.
Actually we prefere to be called average American patriots who are sick and tired of being ripped off by the politicians elected to represent us. You want to support all these social causes? Good, empty your own pockets and donate to the cause.
It would have been very nice, wouldn't it, if you'd been able to opt out of paying for the expenses of the Iraq war.
Some sysadmins have waaay too high an opinion of the importance of their computer systems.
True, but some managers and politicians have a way too low opinion of the importance of security on their computer systems.
If this system contains sensitive public information or performs an important public function, then Childs' boss shouldn't have the right to endanger the security of that system.
It's not that simple. It costs more money to do what you would want to do, or live in a flat you'd like to live in, make the holiday you'd get yourself, for 2 people instead of 1.
But you also have two people to pay for it, so that stuff averages out. It's mostly the kids that cost extra money.
So what am I gonna do if she doesn't? Dump her for someone who does? Funny idea, that.
That's up to you of course. I'm just pointing out that the general notion that girlfriends cost money is false. They only cost money if you want them to. It's the kids that come out of them that really cost you.
Since all girlfriends cost you money one way or another,
Girlfriends don't cost money, doing fun stuff together costs money. Mortgages costs money. Kids cost money. Girlfriends should, on average, have about just as much income as you do. And she gets that income from you, then she's not your girlfriend. There's another word for that.
My search for an alternative to Apple’s iPhone has been long and frustrating.
Why? What's wrong with the Motorola Milestone/Droid in that respect?
On paper, the Desire is the first serious challenger to the iPhone’s reign as king of phones.
Really? Is the Desire that old, or is the reviewer just misinformed?
Its screen is bright and colourful indoors, but almost unusable in sunlight.
Isn't there an autobrightness option somewhere? My Milestone is perfectly usable in sunlight. Except when autobrightness mysteriously managed to turn itself off.
Really, the biggest issue with my Milestone is that various features seem to be turning themselves on or off by themselves.
The touchscreen intermittently remains active during phone calls and it’s too easy to press the on-screen buttons with your ear. I’ve accidentally hung up on people dozens of times.
I don't think that's happened to me, but my Milestone has on occasion called someone all by itself. It only did that when I just had it, so maybe I learned not to do whatever it was that caused that.
Sound quality during calls is noticeably worse than the iPhone.
On the Milestone, sound quality is excellent, and people on the other side of the phone call tell me it's a lot better than the iPhone on their end.
when viewing photos or web sites you realise that the screen is severely over-saturated. People’s faces become beetroot red.
That's bad. On the Milestone, the screen looks pretty much perfect all the time, except when autobrightness managed to turn itself off again.
The on-screen keyboard is more fiddly and auto-correction is often silly.
This is unfortunately also true for the Milestone. Although I've turned autocorrection off, it still keeps turning "wel" into "we'll". I don't know what mind-bogglingly stupid idiot thought that could possibly be a good idea.
Battery life is appalling. With moderate use I have to charge the Desire twice each day. The phone loses around a fifth of its charge just sitting on the bedside table overnight.
I have on occasion had a half-full battery be dead the next morning, probably because my Milestone occasionally fails to turn itself off properly (it will keep the lockscreen on indefinitely, and it loves going to the lockscreen when you try to turn it off -- by far its most silly and unnecessary bugs). Most of the time, however, battery life is excellent. I should recharge every day, but when I forget, I can usually use it for the next day with little trouble.
My impression from the review is that the HTC Desire is a decent enough attempt, but still flawed in comparison to the Milestone.
Right now we have so many people trying to, on one side, prove global warming is nothing to do with humans and is perfectly natural and something we can live with, and on the other side that it's all caused by humans and unless we fix things now we have 20 years left,
Exactly what I'm talking about. According to some people, we should be moving to the hills pretty soon. But according to the worst case scenario, sea level rise over the next 100 years is not going to be more than 1 meter. I live below sea level, and strengthening our dikes to deal with 1 meter sea level rise is going to cost money, but it can be done. If we do nothing, it's going to take well over a century before we actually need to evacuate. But when that happens, evacuating 7 million people (probably double that by that time) is going to cost a fortune. Fighting global warming might actually be cheaper.
Fighting global warming isn't so much for us, it's for generations to come. We're not going to drown, we're only going to suffer inconvenience. Different weather patterns. More extreme weather, possibly. Eco-systems disrupted. Low-lying island nations like the Maldives are in real trouble. Problems, sure, expensive ones perhaps, but not fatal ones. With sufficient money and resources, we can deal with that.
The real problems are centuries in the future. Evacuating coastal cities and stuff like that is only necessary once really major continental icecaps melt away completely. I believe Greenland represents 3 meters of sea level rise (but it'll still take centuries before it all melts), West Antarctica is about 7 meters, and East Antarctica 30 meters. If that ever starts to melt (no sign of that yet, fortunately), might be in real trouble.
Ah yea, the old "everyone else was doing it, too" defense. Committing heinously evil crimes, then using a global organization to cover it up, can not be excused simply because someone else who is not a part of your organization committed the same crimes. Every time a representative of the oh-so holy Church gets on the radio or on CNN to defend their criminal organization, they feel compelled to mention that Catholic priests are not the only people who rape kids, which completely misses the point. That would be very funny, if this were a topic where humor could ever be found. And if I were to rape a bunch of kids, or even one, at my job, I would not be given new job duties or shipped to a different location - I'd go to prison. My employer, and most international employers, would never even consider covering up things like this instead of immediately reporting criminals to law enforcement. The Roman Cathnolic Church did this, many times.
That's exactly my issue with this. Sure, people fail, but when that failure is criminal, then the organisation shouldn't assist in covering it up, and certainly not allow it to continue. I can accept that bad stuff happened in the '60s and '70s, and that they weren't prepared to deal with it then. But once high-ranking officials became aware that abuse occurred, they should have made absolutely sure that it wouldn't happen again. I'm not sure if (high-ranking members of) the RC Church were aware of cover-ups in the last 30 years, but if so, I'd have some trouble figuring out how not to consider it a criminal organisation.
That is really how serious it is, and I get the impression that the Vatican still doesn't realise that. They seem to think it's a PR problem. If you really think child abuse is a PR problem, then you've got not a shred of the moral authority that the Vatican claims.
Environmentalism is not like Palinism. It's science based not cult based.
True, but due to lack of scientific understanding in society, anything science-based can still have a tendency to become cultish when it becomes mainstream. Remember, there are also people who treat evolution as a religion. I've been hearing lots of really crazy stuff pretending to be environmentalism in the past couple of years.
Good and bad isn't as one-dimensional as that. Things that are good for one thing, may turn out to be bad for something else. Alcohol, for example, is good for your heart and blood pressure, but bad for your liver. Same thing with some kinds of pollution. Some kinds of pollution may block some of the sun's rays from entering our atmosphere, which slows global warming. But then again, they may hurt the ozone layer, causing more skin cancer.
When I first heard about Ubuntu, I thought to myself, "Great, a user friendly Linux distro!" Then I had chance to actually try and use it.
Not impressed. Not at all. It's user friendly, to a point.
My experience is similar. Installation is really easy and painless. Well, unless you have some unusual piece of hardware of course, but then the Ubuntu wiki and forums are extremely helpful. (Getting my Belkin wifi card working in Windows was a lot more painful.)
User friendly installation is definitely a huge improvement over the Linux distributions I used before Ubuntu. But a user friendly OS? Not really. It's not awful, but if I called the shots, I'd kick out Gnome, stay away from KDE and come up with something better.
Hamas runs several orphanages and public welfare organizations.
They do. It was a big factor in why they won the elections in Gaza. They build schools and hospitals and stuff like that. With Saudi money of course, but to the people living in Gaza, Hamas does a lot more good than Fatah, the EU or the US. That Hamas is one of the groups keeping them in a war they cannot win is just a bit too abstract in comparison.
Here's a thought, just to play devil's advocate. Is it legal to modify the content being transmitted to my own machine? I don't have copyright over it, so do I only have permission to transfer it for viewing? The browser has to render it of course,
If you only change how the browser renders it, then you're not modifying the content itself (the html, or the embedded images), but only the presentation of that content, which the entire purpose of the browser. You can't dictate exactly how a website will look on a visitor's machine, because his browser does that.
But they don't pay for their visitors' CPU power or bandwidth. The site is well within their rights to show ads, but visitors are well within their rights to block them from their screens.
As I understand from the discussion, you can also pay The Escapist and never see an ad again, which sounds like a pretty good deal for a site with that much original content. Even when a site is free, it may be worth supporting it with your money.
I read an interview with the director of Der Untergang where he said that he liked all those Untergang parodies. Not every filmmaker has his pivotal scene become such a big internet meme, and he was very flattered by that, and tried to watch every one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Piracy rates of 80-90 % are an unfortunate reality for AAA games, and have been for many years.
But they're also irrelevant from a business standpoint. Better focus on people who are willing to pay.
Why else would companies be willing to risk offending their paying customers with things like DRM that requires a constant Internet connection? Its because converting even 1/10th of the pirates into paying customers would give their sales a huge boost.
According to stats mentioned in TFA, 1/1000 of the pirates is about the best they can hope for.
I just hope they don't fall into the same trap that Star Wars Galaxies fell into (knowingly pissed off all of their existing customers in order to change their game to something they hoped more new people would pay to join... but they lost more players than they gained).
Several publishers seem to be working very hard to get into that exact same trap.
There's still one more problem: if your app is server-based, you need to maintain 10x as much bandwidth and CPU power to keep it running if the pirates use it too.
That's easily solved: only make it server-based if the server adds anything meaningful. That way pirates will be missing a significant part of the experience. (Possibly all of it, as is the case with MMORPGs.)
Blizzard isn't more successful because they are better games developers, it's successful because they require use of a subscription service for the game to be interesting at all. In other words, it's because they are tied to external content that remains under their control.
Are you saying all MMORPG publishers are equally successful?
That's like saying people who go to burger king instead of mcdonalds are somehow "pirates".
I disagree. Your McDonald's/Burger King analogy would match better with people playing Age of Conan rather than WoW - something that is clearly not piracy, just choosing another vendor. Running WOW on private servers would be more like having someone tape a cinema showing of a movie, then showing that privately to a large group of friends.
I think it'd be more like making your own hamburger. Possibly serving it in a McDonald's container that you saved from the last time you bought a hamburger there.
What I'd like to know is: do private servers offer the same game experience, or is it more like you're playing a lame rip-off clone?
"only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."
That's just as wrong as claiming that every pirated copy is a lost sale. 10% of potential customers isn't the same as 10% of the sales.
It's by no means "just as wrong". It's not terribly accurate, but it's a much better estimate.
I would gladly dedicate another 5mm to a decent keyboard :(
Not 5 mm for me, but 1 mm would have been acceptable. But I use the on-screen keyboard half the time anyway.
As for the camera: The thing with the autofocus (not focusing until you push the camera button halfway down) is normal - this allows you to pick the spot you'd like to focus on ;)
It's annoying. It's way too slow. When I press the button, I want a picture NOW, not at some point in the future.
However, saying the camera takes decent pictures borders on a crime against geek-humanity... :P. They're grainy and noisy, and the flash is completely useless unless you like red eyes :(
I had an iPhone before, so I'm already glad buildings and other straight lines aren't wavy. And to be honest, I've never seen a flash that doesn't completely spoil the picture. I've got a digital compact camera that makes excellent photos outside, but indoor I can choose between excessively grainy (much worse than an iPhone or Milestone), or completely completely dead because of the stupid flash. A direct flash just above the lens has got to be one of the stupidest ideas ever.
I'm more or less satisfied with my Milestone, but I'd really love a working camera (the one in there right now takes blurry color combinations rather than photos) and a keyboard that doesn't feel like you're pressing on a cracker.
I love my Milestone. Most of the hardware is excellent. Best screen I've ever seen. Even the camera takes very decent pictures. The problem with my camera is that it's glacially slow. I press the button and it takes several seconds before it finally takes the picture. (I wonder if that can't be fixed in software, though. I think it's the autofocus that's so slow, what what if it was constantly autofocusing when in the Camera app, instead of waiting until I press the button?)
The keyboard, yes, it's odd that such a nice, solid feeling device has such a flimsy piece of plastic as keyboard. I guess they didn't want to dedicate another millimeter of thickness to proper keys.
They already have a perfectly good OS - now the hardware just needs to catch up.
Most of the hardware is actually very nice, but I agree that Motorola needs to focus on hardware. They're a hardware company. Focus on that, and leave the software to others.
if you want to bring a smartphone to market, you run Android. But at the same time, of course you customize it: you don't want to be a commodity vendor.
After all, whats the difference between Dell and HP? Not much. HTC doesn't want to be the same as motorola, so in order to preserve a competitive advantage, you try to make your GUI better AND don't feedback your gui changes back to your competition.
You're right, but I'd rather see them compete by making the best hardware for the lowest price, and let me figure out which customised version of Android I want to run on that. HTC already is different from Motorola, because they make different hardware. I haven't seen anything like the Milestone from them (but instead lots of other phones that are no doubt interesting to other people).
Hardware makers should try to differentiate through software. Focus on the best hardware, support a common platform, and let software people take care of the software. (This goes double for Motorola. Their hardware is excellent, their software sucks.)
Umm, why weren't they 'prepared to deal with it then'? What's so special about '60s and '70s. Were we somehow all less aware, as a human race, that pedophilia and child abuse are bad back then? WTF?!
You need to draw a line somewhere. In ancient times (ancient Kelts and Greeks), sex with kids was socially acceptable. In the middle ages, marrying at age 13 was not uncommon. People doing horrible stuff has been acceptable for ages. It's hard to decide where to draw the line, so I just decided that the middle ages really ended in 1980. Or should have.
Actually we prefere to be called average American patriots who are sick and tired of being ripped off by the politicians elected to represent us. You want to support all these social causes? Good, empty your own pockets and donate to the cause.
It would have been very nice, wouldn't it, if you'd been able to opt out of paying for the expenses of the Iraq war.
Some sysadmins have waaay too high an opinion of the importance of their computer systems.
True, but some managers and politicians have a way too low opinion of the importance of security on their computer systems.
If this system contains sensitive public information or performs an important public function, then Childs' boss shouldn't have the right to endanger the security of that system.
It's not that simple. It costs more money to do what you would want to do, or live in a flat you'd like to live in, make the holiday you'd get yourself, for 2 people instead of 1.
But you also have two people to pay for it, so that stuff averages out. It's mostly the kids that cost extra money.
So what am I gonna do if she doesn't? Dump her for someone who does? Funny idea, that.
That's up to you of course. I'm just pointing out that the general notion that girlfriends cost money is false. They only cost money if you want them to. It's the kids that come out of them that really cost you.
Since all girlfriends cost you money one way or another,
Girlfriends don't cost money, doing fun stuff together costs money. Mortgages costs money. Kids cost money. Girlfriends should, on average, have about just as much income as you do. And she gets that income from you, then she's not your girlfriend. There's another word for that.
My search for an alternative to Apple’s iPhone has been long and frustrating.
Why? What's wrong with the Motorola Milestone/Droid in that respect?
On paper, the Desire is the first serious challenger to the iPhone’s reign as king of phones.
Really? Is the Desire that old, or is the reviewer just misinformed?
Its screen is bright and colourful indoors, but almost unusable in sunlight.
Isn't there an autobrightness option somewhere? My Milestone is perfectly usable in sunlight. Except when autobrightness mysteriously managed to turn itself off.
Really, the biggest issue with my Milestone is that various features seem to be turning themselves on or off by themselves.
The touchscreen intermittently remains active during phone calls and it’s too easy to press the on-screen buttons with your ear. I’ve accidentally hung up on people dozens of times.
I don't think that's happened to me, but my Milestone has on occasion called someone all by itself. It only did that when I just had it, so maybe I learned not to do whatever it was that caused that.
Sound quality during calls is noticeably worse than the iPhone.
On the Milestone, sound quality is excellent, and people on the other side of the phone call tell me it's a lot better than the iPhone on their end.
when viewing photos or web sites you realise that the screen is severely over-saturated. People’s faces become beetroot red.
That's bad. On the Milestone, the screen looks pretty much perfect all the time, except when autobrightness managed to turn itself off again.
The on-screen keyboard is more fiddly and auto-correction is often silly.
This is unfortunately also true for the Milestone. Although I've turned autocorrection off, it still keeps turning "wel" into "we'll". I don't know what mind-bogglingly stupid idiot thought that could possibly be a good idea.
Battery life is appalling. With moderate use I have to charge the Desire twice each day. The phone loses around a fifth of its charge just sitting on the bedside table overnight.
I have on occasion had a half-full battery be dead the next morning, probably because my Milestone occasionally fails to turn itself off properly (it will keep the lockscreen on indefinitely, and it loves going to the lockscreen when you try to turn it off -- by far its most silly and unnecessary bugs). Most of the time, however, battery life is excellent. I should recharge every day, but when I forget, I can usually use it for the next day with little trouble.
My impression from the review is that the HTC Desire is a decent enough attempt, but still flawed in comparison to the Milestone.
Right now we have so many people trying to, on one side, prove global warming is nothing to do with humans and is perfectly natural and something we can live with, and on the other side that it's all caused by humans and unless we fix things now we have 20 years left,
Exactly what I'm talking about. According to some people, we should be moving to the hills pretty soon. But according to the worst case scenario, sea level rise over the next 100 years is not going to be more than 1 meter. I live below sea level, and strengthening our dikes to deal with 1 meter sea level rise is going to cost money, but it can be done. If we do nothing, it's going to take well over a century before we actually need to evacuate. But when that happens, evacuating 7 million people (probably double that by that time) is going to cost a fortune. Fighting global warming might actually be cheaper.
Fighting global warming isn't so much for us, it's for generations to come. We're not going to drown, we're only going to suffer inconvenience. Different weather patterns. More extreme weather, possibly. Eco-systems disrupted. Low-lying island nations like the Maldives are in real trouble. Problems, sure, expensive ones perhaps, but not fatal ones. With sufficient money and resources, we can deal with that.
The real problems are centuries in the future. Evacuating coastal cities and stuff like that is only necessary once really major continental icecaps melt away completely. I believe Greenland represents 3 meters of sea level rise (but it'll still take centuries before it all melts), West Antarctica is about 7 meters, and East Antarctica 30 meters. If that ever starts to melt (no sign of that yet, fortunately), might be in real trouble.
Ah yea, the old "everyone else was doing it, too" defense. Committing heinously evil crimes, then using a global organization to cover it up, can not be excused simply because someone else who is not a part of your organization committed the same crimes. Every time a representative of the oh-so holy Church gets on the radio or on CNN to defend their criminal organization, they feel compelled to mention that Catholic priests are not the only people who rape kids, which completely misses the point. That would be very funny, if this were a topic where humor could ever be found. And if I were to rape a bunch of kids, or even one, at my job, I would not be given new job duties or shipped to a different location - I'd go to prison. My employer, and most international employers, would never even consider covering up things like this instead of immediately reporting criminals to law enforcement. The Roman Cathnolic Church did this, many times.
That's exactly my issue with this. Sure, people fail, but when that failure is criminal, then the organisation shouldn't assist in covering it up, and certainly not allow it to continue. I can accept that bad stuff happened in the '60s and '70s, and that they weren't prepared to deal with it then. But once high-ranking officials became aware that abuse occurred, they should have made absolutely sure that it wouldn't happen again. I'm not sure if (high-ranking members of) the RC Church were aware of cover-ups in the last 30 years, but if so, I'd have some trouble figuring out how not to consider it a criminal organisation.
That is really how serious it is, and I get the impression that the Vatican still doesn't realise that. They seem to think it's a PR problem. If you really think child abuse is a PR problem, then you've got not a shred of the moral authority that the Vatican claims.
Environmentalism is not like Palinism. It's science based not cult based.
True, but due to lack of scientific understanding in society, anything science-based can still have a tendency to become cultish when it becomes mainstream. Remember, there are also people who treat evolution as a religion. I've been hearing lots of really crazy stuff pretending to be environmentalism in the past couple of years.
Cleaner air is bad for the planet?
Good and bad isn't as one-dimensional as that. Things that are good for one thing, may turn out to be bad for something else. Alcohol, for example, is good for your heart and blood pressure, but bad for your liver. Same thing with some kinds of pollution. Some kinds of pollution may block some of the sun's rays from entering our atmosphere, which slows global warming. But then again, they may hurt the ozone layer, causing more skin cancer.
So do we need to take Bender's lead and start to pollute like we've never polluted before?
Only if it's the right kind of pollution. Small particles high in the upper atmosphere is what we need.
When I first heard about Ubuntu, I thought to myself, "Great, a user friendly Linux distro!" Then I had chance to actually try and use it.
Not impressed. Not at all. It's user friendly, to a point.
My experience is similar. Installation is really easy and painless. Well, unless you have some unusual piece of hardware of course, but then the Ubuntu wiki and forums are extremely helpful. (Getting my Belkin wifi card working in Windows was a lot more painful.)
User friendly installation is definitely a huge improvement over the Linux distributions I used before Ubuntu. But a user friendly OS? Not really. It's not awful, but if I called the shots, I'd kick out Gnome, stay away from KDE and come up with something better.
Hamas runs several orphanages and public welfare organizations.
They do. It was a big factor in why they won the elections in Gaza. They build schools and hospitals and stuff like that. With Saudi money of course, but to the people living in Gaza, Hamas does a lot more good than Fatah, the EU or the US. That Hamas is one of the groups keeping them in a war they cannot win is just a bit too abstract in comparison.
Here's a thought, just to play devil's advocate. Is it legal to modify the content being transmitted to my own machine? I don't have copyright over it, so do I only have permission to transfer it for viewing? The browser has to render it of course,
If you only change how the browser renders it, then you're not modifying the content itself (the html, or the embedded images), but only the presentation of that content, which the entire purpose of the browser. You can't dictate exactly how a website will look on a visitor's machine, because his browser does that.
It's their site, they pay for hosting.
But they don't pay for their visitors' CPU power or bandwidth. The site is well within their rights to show ads, but visitors are well within their rights to block them from their screens.
As I understand from the discussion, you can also pay The Escapist and never see an ad again, which sounds like a pretty good deal for a site with that much original content. Even when a site is free, it may be worth supporting it with your money.
I read an interview with the director of Der Untergang where he said that he liked all those Untergang parodies. Not every filmmaker has his pivotal scene become such a big internet meme, and he was very flattered by that, and tried to watch every one of them.
Clearly he's not the one who calls these shot.