I would drop cash in a heartbeart to play a MMORPG with Oblivion-like gameplay.
Oh definitely! Instead of gold farming and the endless grind for experience points, we'll get to see people running and bouncing all over the place, or standing ankle deep in water to train their Light Armour skill. Should be fun to watch.
Did you notice the name of the bill? Intellectual Property Enhanced Criminal Enforcement Act. Isn't crime enforcement the opposite of law enforcement? Did we suddenly get surprisingly honest politicians?
Smart people know "canon" has more meanings than the one you know about.
I generally don't like people complaining about weird modding on slashdot, but this time the ignorant post got modded up to +5 insightful, and the insightful/informative posts didn't get modded up at all. Read this message's siblings for more details.
It is also believed that Mitochondria are not part of our body, they are aliens to our body who formed a symbiotic relationship with our cell.
Who believes mitochondria are not part of our body? And are you really sure they're sane and you didn't seriously misunderstand them?
Mitocgondria are most definitely part of our body. They're not part of the nucleus of our cells, though, and look like they were once, in pre-eukariotic times, independent prokaryotes that formed, indeed, a symbiotic relationship with other cells, and that relationship eventually grew into our complex cell structure. But that doesn't stop them from being part of our body.
It seems to me that if this thing is mechanically applying 16 PSI in vacuum then it must apply 32 PSI when inside the capsule. That's going to raise your blood pressure. Not by enough to be harmful, (after all scuba divers have the same). But more importantly, if you take our helmet off now you suffocate inside the space capusle. You suffocate first because you cannot physcally open your lungs with 32 PSI pressing on them in a 16psi atmosphere. And secondly even if you solved that, then you still have the problem of the 32 psi pressure making it harder to dissolve gas in your blood, so your cells cant get air or release CO2. And finally, if you took your kemet off then you have the extra 16 psi in your bloodstream pushing against the back of your eye-balls.
I wonder how they dealt with that?
By not using 16 PSI (about 110 kPa, apparently) of pressure. Read the article, they're going for 30 kPa, so that's probably about 5 PSI. You don't need a full atmosphere to breathe, and your skin doesn't need the pressure of a full atmosphere either, so 30 kPa is probably plenty, once you're used to it. I suspect breathing aboard a pressurised spaceship in one of these suits without your helmet on will be heavy and tiring, but probably not bad enough to suffocate befoore you get the chance to take the suit of.
I don't doubt that somewhere in the science fictioney future these skin-tight suits will be made of smart materials that adapt their pressure to your environment.
at least in the U.S. then perhaps you have forgotten that our most fundamental law states that Congress has the authority "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Limited times, so doesn't that mean that the current practically indefinite extension of copyright is unconstitutional? Okay, 120 years is still limited, but as long as Disney survives, that will become 150 years, 200 years, 10,000 years. How limited is that? Copyright for 30 years is fine. For 120 years is not.
There are a lot of software developers here. How do you expect to make money if everyone copies your work? Are you going to make money on product support? Tell me, how much money have you spent on product support in the last few years?
I make money writing Open Source software. Go ahead and copy it if you like. It's a heavy duty, scalable enterprise CMS, and you can find it here. We make money with custom implementations, support and consultancy. We're doing very well, thank you.
If you have a problem with the RIAA's tactics, fine.
Well, I have. RIAA is destroying their own market by treating their customers as criminals, even if they aren't, and spending money on lowering the value of their products. Considering all that, it's really no surprise to me that some people in the music industry are struggling. If they were to focus on lowering prices and increasing value, I don't doubt their revenue would go way up. It's really simple business sense.
Revenue is not the same as profit. Some time ago I heard (but I can't back it up with sources) that Sony's games division was their only division that was making a profit.
There is a role playing version of Warhammer (with the ever so original name of Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing or FRP), which is actually not a bad system at all.
I'm not familiar with WFRP2, but the original game actually is a pretty bad system. I love it and have played it for ages, and played it again when Hogdhead Games rereleased it, but its awesomeness is entirely due to the setting, the mood, the atmosphere. And the The Enemy Within campaign, ofcourse. The system itself had lots of problems. I hope WFRP fixed them, but I haven't looked at it yet.
From the 7 winners I have only seen Chichen Itza, but my father has seen the Wall of China and the Machu Pichu and my girlfriend have seen the Coliseum, and both agree that they *really* are wonderful.
I've seen the pyramids of Gizeh (and those of Saqarra), but I'm afraid they were a bit disapointing. The pyramids themselves were huge and impressive, but they didn't look quite as impressive as they do on TV, partially because the city of Cairo has grown around it, and they're not in the desert at all, and mostly because it's been turned into an amusement park with tons of tourists and tons of Egyptians trying to sell them overpriced crap. The Valley of the Kings was even less impressive.
In my opinion, these kind of "wonders of the world" get less impressive the more famous and touristey they get. Ofcourse you still have to see the pyramids if you ever manage to visit Egypt, even if they're not as impressive as they should have been.
But perhaps I'll visit Ankor Wat next, instead of the entries of this official list of tourist hotspots.
No, being testable means that it doesn't matter whether or not God played a role.
Exactly. It's still possible that God did play a role, but that's scientifically irrelevant. If God did indeed create the universe, he's outside the universe, not subject to the laws of nature, well outside the scope of science, and by definition untestable.
As a christian, I think the whole creationist notion that God's existence is provable is belittling to God and possibly blasphemous. If God indeed exists, good, pure science can't help but point out God's greatness. And if he doesn't, at least it's proving the greatness of this universe, and whatever it turns out to be part of. I anxiously await the results of these experiments.
why would they build a pyramid to themselves instead of lasting national infrastructure?
Because there already was a very good national infrastructure. Living in Egypt was quite easy as long as you let the Nile do most of your work for you.
You seem to be assuming that we know everything that happened in ancient Egypt. We don't. There are pharaos of whom we know only the name and nothing else. How is some work dispute going to show up compared to that?
Take all of the slaves out of Georgia in 1840. Just that one state. Imagine trying to hide the impact.
If you don't like that year pick another. If you don't like that state, pick another. Or pick another society like ancient Rome. Remove the slaves and then try to hide the impact on the economy. Then remember there's a reason we all know of Spartacus.
Neither 1840 not Spartacus were anywhere near as long ago as ancient Egypt. They may have kept lots of records, but that doesn't mean we've found them all. The only stuff that kept was what was built in the dry desert. In the Nile Delta, entire temples have disappeared over time. I'd be surprised if we knew more than 1% of everything that happened in ancient Egypt.
Just to make one thing clear here: "Czar" comes etimologically from "caesar", just like the German word "Kaisar". Both mean "emperor". And emperors are (usually) autocrats. But that doesn't mean that every word related to "caesar" means autocrat.
And not even all emperors are autocrats. I believe Japan's power is firmly in the hands of a democratically elected government nowadays, for example. Just like kings and queens aren't autocrats anymore.
It's true. Large amounts of cash are suspicious. There's an entire money laundering business to turn large amounts of suspicious cash into large amounts of unsuspicious cash. If you can't prove you got your large amount of cash legally, it's suspicious.
There are many holes in the way law enforcement tries to catch illegally acquired cash at the moment. If they try to close those holes, it's quite likely that using cash for large transactions will become illegal. Or even using cash at all; Dutch banks already want everybody to use a kind of credit chips.
No one ever said Real-Time with pausing is the same thing as turn-based.
Baldur's Gate proved that they can be very closely related, though. Turn-based can be real-time that automatically pauses every time you finished your move and can start your next one.
Not really. Mark Twain once remarked that two men can keep a secret only if one of them is dead. The government can't keep the political firings of US Attorneys' General secret. Why do you think that could keep bribing for election wins secret? HP can't violate the privacy of their own board members without everyone in the world reading about it.
Your examples represent a slightly different situation than this sort of corruption. When a corporation buys a politician or a politician buys a voting machine manufacturer, both have an extreme interest in keeping it secret. With the firing of Attorneys General it's possible, even likely, that someone involved may not agree or doesn't have as much to lose if it becomes public. Secrets can be kept as long as all parties involved have much more to lose by disclosure than they could possibly gain by it.
It's not all that uncommon that long-standing, deep, dark secrets do become public years later, so secrets can most certainly be kept for a reasonable amount of time.
Why is that Microsoft doesn't deserve to have its interests represented by their government the same as every other citizen and corporation.
Because Microsoft isn't a citizen, and corporations don't have the same rights to representation as citizens. Or shouldn't have. In these plutocratic times they actually appear to have more representation than citizens, but that's not the way it should be. Not if you want to pretend you live in a democracy.
I disagree about the 'violent culture', though. There's plenty of countries that have a -lot- more violent culture than ours, and you don't see school massacres there, either. There are countries that have basically been at war for their entire history. Maybe those countries just don't have time to think about killing themselves, though.
Exactly. I think there's a big difference between a warlike country and a country that's internally violent.
I'm not claiming that video games turn people into murdering psycopaths more than anything else does. It's just 1 piece of the puzzle. "Familiarity breeds contempt." If people (children are people too!) are overly familiar with violence from watching movies and playing games, they are less likely to shy away from it when they feel they need to take action.
Violent games don't -create- psychopaths, but they help remove society's taboos. Without the exposure to violence, they'd -might- do something else instead of murdering the entire school. Suicide, drugs, paint something... Who knows.
Good point. I think I already mentioned somewhere that violent games, movies and books might provide inspiration to psychopaths. Perhaps removing taboos, or lessening the impression to some people that it is a taboo.
People sometimes point out that the laws for gun ownership in much of Europe aren't all that different from the US laws. The real difference might be in the taboo. In much of western Europe, gun ownership is taboo. In most of the US it's quite clearly not. Perhaps society is ruled more by taboos than we often think.
You are more likely to hear about a school shooting in the U.S. than Europe, because Europeans are more likely to obsess over the U.S. than people in the U.S. are likely to obsess over Europe.
But somehow I expect Europeans to obsess more about the EU than about the US. And despite having a larger population than the US, I hear about less school massacres in Europe than in the US. I remember one in Germany, one in the UK, and that's it for massacres. Shootings with a single victim get less press obviously, but the only one I can remember in my own country (of 16 million people) is one abnout 5-10 years ago where a student shot his teacher.
I think it's mostly knives over here. It's hard for a student to get a gun.
Violent crime in Europe is higher than the United States... Europeans just like to pretend that Turkey, Eastern Europe, etc. are somehow not a part of Europe. If the U.S. excluded Compton California, and Camden NJ, and Washington DC and the like from its crime statistics, and cherry picked only the richest areas to be included in the "United States", then you would find violent crime lower than Europe. "California? Oh, that isn't a part of the United States! That doesn't really count!".
I was talking about just the EU, not all of Europe, as that would include a decent part of Russia. I mean, we could allso throw Mexico in the mix, right? I'd actually prefer to compare so-called "western" cultures, like western Europe and the US. But ofcourse statistics are easily manipulated by careful selection.
My impression of school massacres in the US was actually that most of them were in the mid west or the south, not in California or New Jersey.
And I am not even including Haiti, South Africa, India, etc., all the places politically and socially controlled by Europe, until Europe decided to dump them.
India and South Africa have been independent for quite some time now. It would make more sense too include the Fillipines in the US statistics.
If the U.S. could somehow geographicly isolate and exclude its disadvantaged population the same way Europe excluded the billions of people that lived in their territories up until the mid-20th Century, the U.S. would sure have far less of the crime-producing social problems to worry about.
Billions of people? I think the EU has aboout half a billion people. If you add Russia and other non-EU European countries, I don't think you'd get to a billion.
What was the murder rate in that former British territory of Zimbabwe again? What about French-Indochina? Tell me about how well the Belgians are doing fighting crime in the Congo while you are at it!
Like I said, statistics are easily manipulated. Want to add the murder rates of Iraq to the US statistics?
Are you blaming the developer or the law in Germany for forcing the developer to change their product for a single country that really isn't that big?
Are you calling Germany "not really that big"? It's the biggest country in Europe, has over 100 million people, and it's one of the 7 biggest economies in the world (I suspect it's in the top 3, actually). If Germany is "not really that big", then no country other than the US is.
Unless you look at land mass ofcourse. Then Russia wins and everything else is small.
On the other hand, a friend pointed out to me today that you never hear of school-massacres from countries other than the US. Is it because we don't pay attention to world-wide events, or is it because it just doesn't happen as often? Does it not happen because of 'stupid' laws like these?
My impression is that the US has a lot more school massacres than all of the EU put together, but ironically Germany did have a school massacre not so long ago. In any case, I doubt violent games turn people murdering psychopaths, or that these laws prevent them from becoming murdering psychopaths. But I can imagine that some murdering psychopaths draw inspiration from violent games. Or movies, in the absense of games. Or books, in the absense of movies. Or perhaps their own deranged mind provides ample inspiration.
Personally, I think the reason that the US has more massacres is that it's simply a more violent culture. Europe has become a bunch of peaceniks after that big war tore this continent to shreds.
Threaten and bully"? Now you're just being silly wasting my time. Either your English comprehension is impaired, or you are deliberately baiting me.
You are wasting your time responding to ancient discussions. My English comprehension is fine, i'm just pointing out simple facts.
1. They explained quite clearly that he was in violation, that he should talk to his own lawyer, why they couldn't answer his legal questions, and then their lawyers were painfully clear about how he was in violation.
The MS guy claimed he was in violation, but he didn't explain how. It's the same thing as with those 235 unspecified mystery copyright violations in OSS code. You can cry all you like, but if you're unable to explain how your license, copyright or whatever is being violated, you should shut the fuck up and go home. Otherwise you can bully anyone into jumping through your hoops without any legal grounds, which unfortunately is an all too common occurance in this lawyer-driven society. Time to put a stop to that.
2. He didn't cooperate. Read the fucking thread. They were consistent and clear in their message from the start. He kept changing his fucking mind. Stop spreading FOSS wannabe FUD.
He did cooperate. Read the fucking thread. He only stopped cooperating when the MS guy refused to tell him how he was in violation. MS was expecting blind obedience and thought they got it, but that's not how it works. Not how it should work, anyway.
3. You're apparently not a lawyer. Or, if you are, you're a very bad one, and God help your clients.
Well duh. I'm a programmer. What do you think I'm doing on slashdot?
But to get back to the central issue: the license doesn't say he wasn't allowed to extend the free version. The license does state you're not allowed to circumvent technical limitations, but the dev didn't do that. He used an open and well documented interface. His lawyer (who I'm sure is a lawyer) told him he wasn't in violation. If MS insists that he should obey them, then they should provide a bit more evidence that they're actually right.
This thread is over. I will not respond again.
You realise you were already responding to a week old discussion, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh definitely! Instead of gold farming and the endless grind for experience points, we'll get to see people running and bouncing all over the place, or standing ankle deep in water to train their Light Armour skill. Should be fun to watch.
Problem is, not everybody here has a local congressman/woman, and some of those who have, probably have one that has no influence on this bill.
Ofcourse the good news is that those people will also not be subject to this silly law. At least not for a while.
Did you notice the name of the bill? Intellectual Property Enhanced Criminal Enforcement Act. Isn't crime enforcement the opposite of law enforcement? Did we suddenly get surprisingly honest politicians?
Smart people know "canon" has more meanings than the one you know about.
I generally don't like people complaining about weird modding on slashdot, but this time the ignorant post got modded up to +5 insightful, and the insightful/informative posts didn't get modded up at all. Read this message's siblings for more details.
In Civ 1, we replaced its original creation text ("the earth was without form and void" etc) with quotes from Douglas Adams. Worked very well.
Who believes mitochondria are not part of our body? And are you really sure they're sane and you didn't seriously misunderstand them?
Mitocgondria are most definitely part of our body. They're not part of the nucleus of our cells, though, and look like they were once, in pre-eukariotic times, independent prokaryotes that formed, indeed, a symbiotic relationship with other cells, and that relationship eventually grew into our complex cell structure. But that doesn't stop them from being part of our body.
By not using 16 PSI (about 110 kPa, apparently) of pressure. Read the article, they're going for 30 kPa, so that's probably about 5 PSI. You don't need a full atmosphere to breathe, and your skin doesn't need the pressure of a full atmosphere either, so 30 kPa is probably plenty, once you're used to it. I suspect breathing aboard a pressurised spaceship in one of these suits without your helmet on will be heavy and tiring, but probably not bad enough to suffocate befoore you get the chance to take the suit of.
I don't doubt that somewhere in the science fictioney future these skin-tight suits will be made of smart materials that adapt their pressure to your environment.
Limited times, so doesn't that mean that the current practically indefinite extension of copyright is unconstitutional? Okay, 120 years is still limited, but as long as Disney survives, that will become 150 years, 200 years, 10,000 years. How limited is that? Copyright for 30 years is fine. For 120 years is not.
I make money writing Open Source software. Go ahead and copy it if you like. It's a heavy duty, scalable enterprise CMS, and you can find it here. We make money with custom implementations, support and consultancy. We're doing very well, thank you.
Well, I have. RIAA is destroying their own market by treating their customers as criminals, even if they aren't, and spending money on lowering the value of their products. Considering all that, it's really no surprise to me that some people in the music industry are struggling. If they were to focus on lowering prices and increasing value, I don't doubt their revenue would go way up. It's really simple business sense.
Revenue is not the same as profit. Some time ago I heard (but I can't back it up with sources) that Sony's games division was their only division that was making a profit.
I'm not familiar with WFRP2, but the original game actually is a pretty bad system. I love it and have played it for ages, and played it again when Hogdhead Games rereleased it, but its awesomeness is entirely due to the setting, the mood, the atmosphere. And the The Enemy Within campaign, ofcourse. The system itself had lots of problems. I hope WFRP fixed them, but I haven't looked at it yet.
I've seen the pyramids of Gizeh (and those of Saqarra), but I'm afraid they were a bit disapointing. The pyramids themselves were huge and impressive, but they didn't look quite as impressive as they do on TV, partially because the city of Cairo has grown around it, and they're not in the desert at all, and mostly because it's been turned into an amusement park with tons of tourists and tons of Egyptians trying to sell them overpriced crap. The Valley of the Kings was even less impressive.
In my opinion, these kind of "wonders of the world" get less impressive the more famous and touristey they get. Ofcourse you still have to see the pyramids if you ever manage to visit Egypt, even if they're not as impressive as they should have been. But perhaps I'll visit Ankor Wat next, instead of the entries of this official list of tourist hotspots.
Exactly. It's still possible that God did play a role, but that's scientifically irrelevant. If God did indeed create the universe, he's outside the universe, not subject to the laws of nature, well outside the scope of science, and by definition untestable.
As a christian, I think the whole creationist notion that God's existence is provable is belittling to God and possibly blasphemous. If God indeed exists, good, pure science can't help but point out God's greatness. And if he doesn't, at least it's proving the greatness of this universe, and whatever it turns out to be part of. I anxiously await the results of these experiments.
Because there already was a very good national infrastructure. Living in Egypt was quite easy as long as you let the Nile do most of your work for you.
You seem to be assuming that we know everything that happened in ancient Egypt. We don't. There are pharaos of whom we know only the name and nothing else. How is some work dispute going to show up compared to that?
Neither 1840 not Spartacus were anywhere near as long ago as ancient Egypt. They may have kept lots of records, but that doesn't mean we've found them all. The only stuff that kept was what was built in the dry desert. In the Nile Delta, entire temples have disappeared over time. I'd be surprised if we knew more than 1% of everything that happened in ancient Egypt.
Am I the only one to wonder what business it is of Manhunt 2 to ban the upcoming Fallout 3?
Just to make one thing clear here: "Czar" comes etimologically from "caesar", just like the German word "Kaisar". Both mean "emperor". And emperors are (usually) autocrats. But that doesn't mean that every word related to "caesar" means autocrat.
And not even all emperors are autocrats. I believe Japan's power is firmly in the hands of a democratically elected government nowadays, for example. Just like kings and queens aren't autocrats anymore.
It's true. Large amounts of cash are suspicious. There's an entire money laundering business to turn large amounts of suspicious cash into large amounts of unsuspicious cash. If you can't prove you got your large amount of cash legally, it's suspicious.
There are many holes in the way law enforcement tries to catch illegally acquired cash at the moment. If they try to close those holes, it's quite likely that using cash for large transactions will become illegal. Or even using cash at all; Dutch banks already want everybody to use a kind of credit chips.
Baldur's Gate proved that they can be very closely related, though. Turn-based can be real-time that automatically pauses every time you finished your move and can start your next one.
Your examples represent a slightly different situation than this sort of corruption. When a corporation buys a politician or a politician buys a voting machine manufacturer, both have an extreme interest in keeping it secret. With the firing of Attorneys General it's possible, even likely, that someone involved may not agree or doesn't have as much to lose if it becomes public. Secrets can be kept as long as all parties involved have much more to lose by disclosure than they could possibly gain by it.
It's not all that uncommon that long-standing, deep, dark secrets do become public years later, so secrets can most certainly be kept for a reasonable amount of time.
Because Microsoft isn't a citizen, and corporations don't have the same rights to representation as citizens. Or shouldn't have. In these plutocratic times they actually appear to have more representation than citizens, but that's not the way it should be. Not if you want to pretend you live in a democracy.
Exactly. I think there's a big difference between a warlike country and a country that's internally violent.
Good point. I think I already mentioned somewhere that violent games, movies and books might provide inspiration to psychopaths. Perhaps removing taboos, or lessening the impression to some people that it is a taboo.
People sometimes point out that the laws for gun ownership in much of Europe aren't all that different from the US laws. The real difference might be in the taboo. In much of western Europe, gun ownership is taboo. In most of the US it's quite clearly not. Perhaps society is ruled more by taboos than we often think.
But somehow I expect Europeans to obsess more about the EU than about the US. And despite having a larger population than the US, I hear about less school massacres in Europe than in the US. I remember one in Germany, one in the UK, and that's it for massacres. Shootings with a single victim get less press obviously, but the only one I can remember in my own country (of 16 million people) is one abnout 5-10 years ago where a student shot his teacher.
I think it's mostly knives over here. It's hard for a student to get a gun.
I was talking about just the EU, not all of Europe, as that would include a decent part of Russia. I mean, we could allso throw Mexico in the mix, right? I'd actually prefer to compare so-called "western" cultures, like western Europe and the US. But ofcourse statistics are easily manipulated by careful selection.
My impression of school massacres in the US was actually that most of them were in the mid west or the south, not in California or New Jersey.
India and South Africa have been independent for quite some time now. It would make more sense too include the Fillipines in the US statistics.
Billions of people? I think the EU has aboout half a billion people. If you add Russia and other non-EU European countries, I don't think you'd get to a billion.
Like I said, statistics are easily manipulated. Want to add the murder rates of Iraq to the US statistics?
Are you calling Germany "not really that big"? It's the biggest country in Europe, has over 100 million people, and it's one of the 7 biggest economies in the world (I suspect it's in the top 3, actually). If Germany is "not really that big", then no country other than the US is.
Unless you look at land mass ofcourse. Then Russia wins and everything else is small.
My impression is that the US has a lot more school massacres than all of the EU put together, but ironically Germany did have a school massacre not so long ago. In any case, I doubt violent games turn people murdering psychopaths, or that these laws prevent them from becoming murdering psychopaths. But I can imagine that some murdering psychopaths draw inspiration from violent games. Or movies, in the absense of games. Or books, in the absense of movies. Or perhaps their own deranged mind provides ample inspiration.
Personally, I think the reason that the US has more massacres is that it's simply a more violent culture. Europe has become a bunch of peaceniks after that big war tore this continent to shreds.
You are wasting your time responding to ancient discussions. My English comprehension is fine, i'm just pointing out simple facts.
The MS guy claimed he was in violation, but he didn't explain how. It's the same thing as with those 235 unspecified mystery copyright violations in OSS code. You can cry all you like, but if you're unable to explain how your license, copyright or whatever is being violated, you should shut the fuck up and go home. Otherwise you can bully anyone into jumping through your hoops without any legal grounds, which unfortunately is an all too common occurance in this lawyer-driven society. Time to put a stop to that.
He did cooperate. Read the fucking thread. He only stopped cooperating when the MS guy refused to tell him how he was in violation. MS was expecting blind obedience and thought they got it, but that's not how it works. Not how it should work, anyway.
Well duh. I'm a programmer. What do you think I'm doing on slashdot?
But to get back to the central issue: the license doesn't say he wasn't allowed to extend the free version. The license does state you're not allowed to circumvent technical limitations, but the dev didn't do that. He used an open and well documented interface. His lawyer (who I'm sure is a lawyer) told him he wasn't in violation. If MS insists that he should obey them, then they should provide a bit more evidence that they're actually right.
You realise you were already responding to a week old discussion, right?