But did Lucas also hold the merchandising rights to these helmets, if he didn't purchase the right for that from Ainsworth? I don't know if he did or should, but if Ainsworth really did a significant part of the design and all of the creation of these helmets, then it makes sense that he hold all rights to them, and Lucas might actually owe him quite a lot of money.
Though if Ainsworth didn't press that issue at all, that could be because too much of the helmet wasn't really his design at all. Still, would have been a funny outcome if Lucas would have had to pay him a couple of million.
What I don't get about this is: Lucas claims the helmets are sculptures and therefore protected by copyright. But why would Lucas hold that copyright? Andrew Ainsworth made the prototype and all individual helmets, and as I understand it, the deal was sealed on a handshake, so he didn't sign away any rights whatsoever. So even if it's death + 70, it's still his, and only his. Right?
This is the most insightful comment I've seen here. Git encourages exactly the kind of behavior that one doesn't want to see in a well-run development environment. Commit early, commit often, update daily - that's how I like to work - and how I'd prefer others to work too. Git provides easy tools for hero developers to go off and do their own hero work and drop it all in one go onto everyone else. How is this a good thing?
What? No, in my experience, SVN encourages that much more than git does. Because of its distributed nature, git makes it much easier to share code that's not yet ready for release, while other developers work on the release. Having worked with both, git encourages commit early and often much more than SVN does. It makes it easy for people to work together on code that's not yet finished. In SVN, that's a lot harder. It's SVN branches that I see live on forever, whereas git branches tend to have a very short lifespan, sometimes less than a day, exactly because it is so trivial to merge them again.
Git has some nice advantages, especially in distributed environments.. but I still prefer svn because it's just a lot easier to use. I'm sure it's good for merging, but as a developer it ends up being a headache. For instance, if you want to check in a group of specific files and not every change you've made.. PITA
How is this a problem with git? I find SVN frustrating because I have to commit all changes in a file, whereas git allows me to commit only the changes that I want to commit. For example, I may have fixed several bugs in one go. The right thing to do would be to put them in separate commits, but SVN makes that really hard to do. In git it's trivial.
I only stated that a true indication of how this *experiment* works out would be better gained by allowing a payment of zero.
I disagree. Then you attract people who aren't interested in these games at all. They just get it because they can, and that skews the statistics of what people who are interested in these games are willing to pay for them. A minimum of $0.01 is completely reasonable.
Not sure how Single Transferable Vote works, but proportional representation does a much better job than a very coarse district system, which is what the US has. The district system ensures that there can only be two relevant parties at any time. Voting for a third party is wasting your vote. With proportional representation, you'll get a lot more variety of parties in parliament, and different parties set aside their differences and agree on stuff in order to get a majority.
It's by no means perfect, but surely better than the toxic system that the US currently has.
Depends on what left-wingers you ask. Christian left wingers are likely to associate Christianity with helping those in need, giving to the poor, preserving nature, etc.
Though you make a good point. The problem with people, including religious people, is that they tend to get organised, and the problem with organisations is that they tend to get political. And when religion gets political, both religion and politics tend to get corrupted. So any religion not wary of this danger is likely to organise its own corruption. And that of the politics of the country it's in.
I prefer a more anarchistic approach to my Christianity.
Well, mathematically, an electoral college system actually maximizes the power of the individual voter. (There is more chance that a change in one vote will flip the smaller group, and that the magnified power of the smaller group will flip the bigger group, than that the entire electorate is only one vote apart.)
That just means it gives magnified power to one voter that's most likely not you. Equal voting power for everybody is obviously the most fair. Also, it makes sense to have a system that rewards voting for your preferred candidate, rather than forcing you to vote for the lesser evil.
I do think that proportional representation would be better for the House, but I would remove the Senate from electoral considerations altogether. Or maybe instead have three Senators per State, one elected by majority, one appointed by the governor or the legislature, and one selected at random from the jury pool.
Sounds like an awesome idea.
But then, I suspect my desires are different from yours. My goal is the establishment of a more solid republic, to combat majoritarian tendencies, while I suspect that your goal would be a more majoritarian system, given your statement.
I'm happy with it just being somewhat less corrupt than it currently is. Having the Senate represent the states while the House represents the people sounds perfectly reasonable in a federal system like the US. Just as long as somebody somewhere is representing the people, which doesn't seem to be the case at the moment.
While I do hope Apple loses this patent troll suit...
"it will soon acquire an extra 235 patents from its takeover of S3 Graphics"...I really hope HTC doesn't become tomorrow's patent troll.
This is how it works, unfortunately. It's not about who invents what, it's just ammo to be bought and hoarded in a destructive corporate war. It's this behaviour that gets rewarded, while companies who are against software patents get punished.
You just start with 10% of a much smaller group. You and 9 friends, for example. Once they're convinced, expose 100 people to the idea. Build up like that, until eventually it's big enough to go mainstream.
This really feels like the first study in memetics or psychohistory or something.
And on the topic of politics, can't the Americans here all agree that the US electoral system needs to change: proportional representation for the houses, and approval voting for the president. Get 10% of the US to believe that's a vast improvement over the current system, and the US will eventually be forced to fix its political system.
I guess they mean that of those idea that catch on, the point was at 10%. More than 10% Americans "believe" in evolution, but I don't see it spreading like wildfire.
But it did, originally. Only now there's 10% believing in Intelligent Design, so you're screwed.
There's one subtle but important difference between the App Store and any other kind of store: When you don't want to sell your stuff through a normal store, you can always look for an alternative, go to the competitor, set up your own store, or whatever.
If you're an informed consumer then you know that's the case when you buy an iDevice. You'll either have to use Apple's stores or jailbreak. If you're fine with that then an iDevice is just the thing for you.
If you're not an informed consumer then caveat emptor. You always have the option of returning the device and buying another brand that better fits how you want to use it.
Returning something you bought over a month ago is generally not that easy. And with Apple changing its conditions like this, I doubt anyone really knew in advance what was coming.
Ruger Mini-14 would be meaningless to a Norwegian audience, but in a country with conscription, most people know what a Glock, AG-3 or HK-416 is.
I have no idea what an AG-3 or HK-416 is, but I do know what a Glock is. (Note, my country doesn't have conscription. And I also know what an Uzi, AK-47 or M-16 is. Some weapons are just more iconic than others.)
And calling himself a "conservative Christian" is a crock - he can say he is Jesus for all I care, I'd like to see him justify "Thou Shall not Kill" and "Thou Shall not Steal" in front of God.
I don't think being a "conservative Christian" has much to do with actually following Christ. It seems to be more cultural, traditionalist and tribalist (as in "us" vs "them") than actually having anything to do with a faith in the god of Christianity.
If you get to the "Christianity" part, supporting Israel is strange. First, the promised land has already been given, the diaspora comes with the Roman destruction of the Temple but, by that time, Jesus had already spread the faith to the whole world. Some of the guys choose not to recognize Christ, to think they still have to get the promised land and await the Messiah? They are entitled to their opinion, but supporting this vision is not compatible with Christianity.
My thoughts exactly. Christian Zionists seem to have missed something important that happened nearly 2000 years ago.
I didn't see any video game headlines either until I came to Slashdot. If there's any media frenzy, it's about rightwing extremism. My newspaper was all about how he claimed to be a cultural conservative christian freemason who produced his own ideology about starting a European civil war. And they compared recent killing sprees in the West to the Malaysian concept of amok.
I still need to read TFA, but this is really the first time I've seen anyone mention games in relation to the Oslo killings. The violent game relationship seems ridiculously far fetched in this case.
Note that the Amazon app store (or whatever it's called) is reportedly an extremely poor choice: Amazon can change prices, screwing the developer, allows users to install apps that won't work on their device, and doesn't give developers a good way to communicate with or reimburse users.
Slashdot Mirror
But did Lucas also hold the merchandising rights to these helmets, if he didn't purchase the right for that from Ainsworth? I don't know if he did or should, but if Ainsworth really did a significant part of the design and all of the creation of these helmets, then it makes sense that he hold all rights to them, and Lucas might actually owe him quite a lot of money.
Though if Ainsworth didn't press that issue at all, that could be because too much of the helmet wasn't really his design at all. Still, would have been a funny outcome if Lucas would have had to pay him a couple of million.
Not only is he making physical objects, he's the designer and creator of the originals. If there's no contract, shouldn't any copyright simply be his?
What I don't get about this is: Lucas claims the helmets are sculptures and therefore protected by copyright. But why would Lucas hold that copyright? Andrew Ainsworth made the prototype and all individual helmets, and as I understand it, the deal was sealed on a handshake, so he didn't sign away any rights whatsoever. So even if it's death + 70, it's still his, and only his. Right?
This is the most insightful comment I've seen here. Git encourages exactly the kind of behavior that one doesn't want to see in a well-run development environment. Commit early, commit often, update daily - that's how I like to work - and how I'd prefer others to work too. Git provides easy tools for hero developers to go off and do their own hero work and drop it all in one go onto everyone else. How is this a good thing?
What? No, in my experience, SVN encourages that much more than git does. Because of its distributed nature, git makes it much easier to share code that's not yet ready for release, while other developers work on the release. Having worked with both, git encourages commit early and often much more than SVN does. It makes it easy for people to work together on code that's not yet finished. In SVN, that's a lot harder. It's SVN branches that I see live on forever, whereas git branches tend to have a very short lifespan, sometimes less than a day, exactly because it is so trivial to merge them again.
Git has some nice advantages, especially in distributed environments.. but I still prefer svn because it's just a lot easier to use. I'm sure it's good for merging, but as a developer it ends up being a headache. For instance, if you want to check in a group of specific files and not every change you've made.. PITA
How is this a problem with git? I find SVN frustrating because I have to commit all changes in a file, whereas git allows me to commit only the changes that I want to commit. For example, I may have fixed several bugs in one go. The right thing to do would be to put them in separate commits, but SVN makes that really hard to do. In git it's trivial.
You can always cherry pick the commits you want from a different branch. Git is way more flexible here than SVN.
I only stated that a true indication of how this *experiment* works out would be better gained by allowing a payment of zero.
I disagree. Then you attract people who aren't interested in these games at all. They just get it because they can, and that skews the statistics of what people who are interested in these games are willing to pay for them. A minimum of $0.01 is completely reasonable.
Can SVN or any other version control system handle 50GB of code? I'd hate to see what synchronising with a repository of that size would look like.
Not sure how Single Transferable Vote works, but proportional representation does a much better job than a very coarse district system, which is what the US has. The district system ensures that there can only be two relevant parties at any time. Voting for a third party is wasting your vote. With proportional representation, you'll get a lot more variety of parties in parliament, and different parties set aside their differences and agree on stuff in order to get a majority.
It's by no means perfect, but surely better than the toxic system that the US currently has.
Depends on what left-wingers you ask. Christian left wingers are likely to associate Christianity with helping those in need, giving to the poor, preserving nature, etc.
Though you make a good point. The problem with people, including religious people, is that they tend to get organised, and the problem with organisations is that they tend to get political. And when religion gets political, both religion and politics tend to get corrupted. So any religion not wary of this danger is likely to organise its own corruption. And that of the politics of the country it's in.
I prefer a more anarchistic approach to my Christianity.
Well, mathematically, an electoral college system actually maximizes the power of the individual voter. (There is more chance that a change in one vote will flip the smaller group, and that the magnified power of the smaller group will flip the bigger group, than that the entire electorate is only one vote apart.)
That just means it gives magnified power to one voter that's most likely not you. Equal voting power for everybody is obviously the most fair. Also, it makes sense to have a system that rewards voting for your preferred candidate, rather than forcing you to vote for the lesser evil.
I do think that proportional representation would be better for the House, but I would remove the Senate from electoral considerations altogether. Or maybe instead have three Senators per State, one elected by majority, one appointed by the governor or the legislature, and one selected at random from the jury pool.
Sounds like an awesome idea.
But then, I suspect my desires are different from yours. My goal is the establishment of a more solid republic, to combat majoritarian tendencies, while I suspect that your goal would be a more majoritarian system, given your statement.
I'm happy with it just being somewhat less corrupt than it currently is. Having the Senate represent the states while the House represents the people sounds perfectly reasonable in a federal system like the US. Just as long as somebody somewhere is representing the people, which doesn't seem to be the case at the moment.
While I do hope Apple loses this patent troll suit...
"it will soon acquire an extra 235 patents from its takeover of S3 Graphics" ...I really hope HTC doesn't become tomorrow's patent troll.
This is how it works, unfortunately. It's not about who invents what, it's just ammo to be bought and hoarded in a destructive corporate war. It's this behaviour that gets rewarded, while companies who are against software patents get punished.
You just start with 10% of a much smaller group. You and 9 friends, for example. Once they're convinced, expose 100 people to the idea. Build up like that, until eventually it's big enough to go mainstream.
This really feels like the first study in memetics or psychohistory or something.
So if we can get 10% of Facebookers onto Google+, the rest will follow!
This sounds like politics as usual.
And on the topic of politics, can't the Americans here all agree that the US electoral system needs to change: proportional representation for the houses, and approval voting for the president. Get 10% of the US to believe that's a vast improvement over the current system, and the US will eventually be forced to fix its political system.
I guess they mean that of those idea that catch on, the point was at 10%. More than 10% Americans "believe" in evolution, but I don't see it spreading like wildfire.
But it did, originally. Only now there's 10% believing in Intelligent Design, so you're screwed.
There's one subtle but important difference between the App Store and any other kind of store: When you don't want to sell your stuff through a normal store, you can always look for an alternative, go to the competitor, set up your own store, or whatever.
If you're an informed consumer then you know that's the case when you buy an iDevice. You'll either have to use Apple's stores or jailbreak. If you're fine with that then an iDevice is just the thing for you.
If you're not an informed consumer then caveat emptor. You always have the option of returning the device and buying another brand that better fits how you want to use it.
Returning something you bought over a month ago is generally not that easy. And with Apple changing its conditions like this, I doubt anyone really knew in advance what was coming.
Then use Clojure! I'm sure it can compile to Dalvik too.
if you do too little, you won't know that you failed.
And if you do too much, the failure couldn't possibly have been your fault, can it?
Ruger Mini-14 would be meaningless to a Norwegian audience, but in a country with conscription, most people know what a Glock, AG-3 or HK-416 is.
I have no idea what an AG-3 or HK-416 is, but I do know what a Glock is. (Note, my country doesn't have conscription. And I also know what an Uzi, AK-47 or M-16 is. Some weapons are just more iconic than others.)
And calling himself a "conservative Christian" is a crock - he can say he is Jesus for all I care, I'd like to see him justify "Thou Shall not Kill" and "Thou Shall not Steal" in front of God.
I don't think being a "conservative Christian" has much to do with actually following Christ. It seems to be more cultural, traditionalist and tribalist (as in "us" vs "them") than actually having anything to do with a faith in the god of Christianity.
If you get to the "Christianity" part, supporting Israel is strange. First, the promised land has already been given, the diaspora comes with the Roman destruction of the Temple but, by that time, Jesus had already spread the faith to the whole world. Some of the guys choose not to recognize Christ, to think they still have to get the promised land and await the Messiah? They are entitled to their opinion, but supporting this vision is not compatible with Christianity.
My thoughts exactly. Christian Zionists seem to have missed something important that happened nearly 2000 years ago.
Can we call it a terrorist massacre? It definitely was a massacre. No sense in disguising that part.
I didn't see any video game headlines either until I came to Slashdot. If there's any media frenzy, it's about rightwing extremism. My newspaper was all about how he claimed to be a cultural conservative christian freemason who produced his own ideology about starting a European civil war. And they compared recent killing sprees in the West to the Malaysian concept of amok.
I still need to read TFA, but this is really the first time I've seen anyone mention games in relation to the Oslo killings. The violent game relationship seems ridiculously far fetched in this case.
Note that the Amazon app store (or whatever it's called) is reportedly an extremely poor choice: Amazon can change prices, screwing the developer, allows users to install apps that won't work on their device, and doesn't give developers a good way to communicate with or reimburse users.