I can have more of that without religion than with it.
peace: without a religion, many wars cease to exist, since there's no "promised land" to fight over, no divine commands to wage war that would otherwise not be necessary. There's no holy war, and no infidels to conquer or convert, no crusades to wage. Certainly, war doesn't disappear completely if you remove religion, but the amount of reasons to wage it shrinks considerably.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that religion provides reasons for war. At best, it provides excuses. Politics provides reasons. Abolishing religion and keeping politics is not going to reduce the number of wars in any way.
acceptance: of what you mean more specifically?
Not judging people, not hating them for being different, accepting their shortcomings, etc. Of course this can vary quite a lot by religion, but Christianity's core scriptures are pretty big on loving your enemy, forgiving everything, not taking vengeance, considering all humans of equal value. Radical notions at that time, and in fact, they still are. They go rather against human nature, but I consider them very positive.
equality: The bible isn't big on this, especially regarding women, who for instance may not speak in church (Corinthians 14:34).
In other letters, Paul proposes women for church functions, so it's not as clear-cut as that. It's a popular verse in patriarchical societies, however.
Religion is very much coming in conflict with equality. For instance, the opposition to gay marriage and ordaining women.
Yet lots of churches do ordain women and accept gay marriages. Note though that the position of women was pretty awful in for example ancient Greece, before the arrival of Christianity.
critical thought: right. Critical thought and blind obedience are mutually exclusive. Did Abraham exericse a lot of critical thought in pondering whether to sacrifice his son? Now of course he was stopped at the last moment, but the whole event is a show of the complete lack of any kind of thought. When told to sacrifice he does, and when told to stop he does.
You're confusing blind obedience with trust. Trust is not mutually exclusive with critical thought. The bible contains quite a bit of philosophical works, and at some point commands to "examine all things and keep the good".
You're picking and choosing very specific verses that suit your argument. If you want to do honest criticism, you should read the rest too. And keep an eye on the historical context. (Not something a lot of people are good at, I admit.)
The proper response to that is of course to advertise widely and loudly which phones are locked down, and which aren't. People who want an open system will buy the unlocked phones, and those manufacturers will be rewarded with extra sales.
I really don't see the point for manufacturers to lock their phones like this. For networks, I can understand, but when I buy a phone without a contract, I should own it, without any limitations. If we want high-end, fully unlocked/unlockable phones, we need to make sure there's a market for them. Manufacturers would be stupid to deny that market.
Yes, but without the ability to deny some of those rights, it's not very useful. Case in point: couple days ago I wanted to install a simple music app. It wanted GPS access and internet access. Fuck that, I didn't install the app but I'd much rather block those two things.
I agree. It could be useful if you could install an app while denying it some of the rights it wants. Of course that could make the app unstable and useless, but at least you had the option to do so and it was your own free choice.
As someone who lives in Amsterdam, I'm always amazed when somebody calls places that are definitely outside the Amsterdam area, outside the Randstad even, "near Amsterdam". From my point of view, they're practically on the other side of the country, like 100 km away or something.
Of course someone who actually lives on the other side of the country would point out that HAR was a lot closer to Amsterdam than to were they lived. (It was only just outside the Randstad, and probably less than 100 km away.) But Netherland is a small country, and 100 km counts for quite a lot. Also, Amsterdammers think everything outside the city limits is far away and doesn't really count.
I'm wondering how this is different from the GSM network at Hacking At Random, which is most definitely an Open Source as well as anarchistic art crowd. Quite likely some drugs too (considering it's Dutch). Not a lot of sex, though.
Anyway, HAR had its own GSM network last year. Probably not solar powered, but very likely open source. You'd get a new phone number, however, which wasn't really what I wanted. (Unfortunately my iPhone had absolutely no reception there. Excellent wifi, but no phone calls.)
Are you sure? I thought that in recent months, the euro had been dropping relative to the dollar. I take it you've got reason to believe the euro will go up again?
So all we need to do now is wait for some neocons to abduct Obama, and a governor (I propose Schwarzenegger for that role) to save his skin and in the mean time dissolve the union.
In the mainframe shop we used to have 5 stages; (production, shadow (with similar load to production), functional acceptance, system integration and development), next to that 2 well secured "emergency" stages linking to prod and shadow and a single "free for all" development area outside the control of the basic stages.
How do you get shadow to have the same load as production? That's the really important part that often makes the production-clone quite different: much lower load.
Anyway, we develop locally, deploy regularly (once or twice a week) to test (which has mocks of all external services). Then it goes to it (integration-test, which uses real external services), then there's acc1 and acc2, training, prod, and probably a couple more. I've only ever had anything to do with the test, integration and training servers. Everything else is way beyond my reach. (This is a Groovy shop, by the way.)
I've also worked in a Java shop at the same company, where they had 3 stages and a locally for dev, but the stages were much less controlled and you could easily skip straight to production. Obviously only the most experienced of programmers did this and only when they were absolutely certain. Obviously quite some more fixes went wrong on production.
Currently working in an environment without stages, I try to work on test copies as much as possible but the temptation of bugfixing directly in production is quite large.
At the previous job, I have on occasion done bug testing and fixing on production. But all my changes were always absolutely guaranteed to be completely safe very much nearly all of the time. Only rarely did I completely fuck up the production environment.
Exactly. I love my iMac at work. I particularly love the full power of my unix shell, sudo, the ability to install unix and linux libraries, and all while having a pretty slick UI that (practically) always works quite well. It's not perfect, but it works better than any linux or windows machine I've ever worked with.
But the moment Apple starts closing stuff down, I'm out of here.
This is what it has looked like for a long time. iOS is on their every other line of devices and the walled garden apps economy is a significant money maker for Apple.
That was my first question: how does the combination of a very closed system like iOS combine with the openness of OS X?
You're saying that the people who believe in your math are right.
Not at all. I'm merely giving an illustrative argument, hence the "if" in the text you quoted.
Do you mean that whether they are looking at something or not determines whether it's true or not? That may work in quantum physics, but it sounds rather unlikely in business.
Like smarter game developers have pointed out already: pirates are irrelevant.
Really? And who are they? I have never seen any professional game developer make any such claim.
Then you haven't been paying attention. Slashdot has had several links to such claims from Brad Wardell (who literally said this), as well as a few others who said similar things.
Pirates who aren't going to by your stuff anyway are irrelevant from a commercial point of view, or even a net plus due to the advertising effect. However, pirates who would buy your stuff if you made it harder for them to rip it illegally are very relevant, and pretending that there are no such people in the world is about as silly as pretending that every pirated copy equates to a lost sale.
Is it? I'm sure there are some people like that in the world, but how many are there? I'm pretty sure you have no idea, and neither does anyone else. I haven't seen any evidence that suggests that number of people is larger than the number of people put off by DRM.
That's true, there isn't. However, you are completely missing the point.
Logical proof is utterly irrelevant here. The exact figures don't matter either.
This was my point. Your point was:
In cold, hard maths, if they are looking at piracy rates of 90% on a DRM-free title and DRM can cut that down to 80%, that doubles the amount of income they're making on that game
And that's wrong. Your cold hard math is based on loose sand. It's a rationalization, but it's not fact.
You're saying that the people who believe in your math are right. I'm pointing out that that belief is based on nothing. It's a line of reasoning that leaves out every single figure that actually matters. Like the real number of sales, and the developments cost, which are really the only figures that actually matter.
Like smarter game developers have pointed out already: pirates are irrelevant.
if they are looking at piracy rates of 90% on a DRM-free title and DRM can cut that down to 80%, that doubles the amount of income they're making on that game, which probably does a lot more than doubling their profits
This is a fallacy. There's no guarantee that those missing 10% now paid money for the game. It could easily be that simply less people are playing the game. It could even be that the total number of players dropped by more than 10%, in which case you're actually worse off.
If you want a meaningful comparison, you have to compare the actual numbers of people paying for the game when all other factors (marketing, attractiveness of the game (admittedly impossible to determine)) are equal.
In the process of creating a company, I am planning to deliver my software purely as SaaS. That is the only way in which you are absolutely certain you won't have piracy. The downside is that you need to justify the *need* for an internet connection. Multiplayer games are such a justification.
I intent to do the exact same thing. Not so much in order to fight piracy, but simply because I am a web developer by trade, and making my games web-based is by far the easiest way for me to start.
If I ever create single-player desktop games, they'll be playable without disk and without internet connection. Playing anything beyond the free demo requires a simple key. Only updates, patches, discussion on the members forum, any multiplayer features (if any) and other cool stuff requires that the key is actually valid.
Slashdot Mirror
I can have more of that without religion than with it.
peace: without a religion, many wars cease to exist, since there's no "promised land" to fight over, no divine commands to wage war that would otherwise not be necessary. There's no holy war, and no infidels to conquer or convert, no crusades to wage. Certainly, war doesn't disappear completely if you remove religion, but the amount of reasons to wage it shrinks considerably.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that religion provides reasons for war. At best, it provides excuses. Politics provides reasons. Abolishing religion and keeping politics is not going to reduce the number of wars in any way.
acceptance: of what you mean more specifically?
Not judging people, not hating them for being different, accepting their shortcomings, etc. Of course this can vary quite a lot by religion, but Christianity's core scriptures are pretty big on loving your enemy, forgiving everything, not taking vengeance, considering all humans of equal value. Radical notions at that time, and in fact, they still are. They go rather against human nature, but I consider them very positive.
equality: The bible isn't big on this, especially regarding women, who for instance may not speak in church (Corinthians 14:34).
In other letters, Paul proposes women for church functions, so it's not as clear-cut as that. It's a popular verse in patriarchical societies, however.
Religion is very much coming in conflict with equality. For instance, the opposition to gay marriage and ordaining women.
Yet lots of churches do ordain women and accept gay marriages. Note though that the position of women was pretty awful in for example ancient Greece, before the arrival of Christianity.
critical thought: right. Critical thought and blind obedience are mutually exclusive. Did Abraham exericse a lot of critical thought in pondering whether to sacrifice his son? Now of course he was stopped at the last moment, but the whole event is a show of the complete lack of any kind of thought. When told to sacrifice he does, and when told to stop he does.
You're confusing blind obedience with trust. Trust is not mutually exclusive with critical thought. The bible contains quite a bit of philosophical works, and at some point commands to "examine all things and keep the good".
You're picking and choosing very specific verses that suit your argument. If you want to do honest criticism, you should read the rest too. And keep an eye on the historical context. (Not something a lot of people are good at, I admit.)
Peace, tolerance, acceptance, equality, taking good care of your family, critical thought, responsibility.
I'm sure you can find something in that list that should appeal to you.
When I was young, old people were still properly annoyed at the stupid things we used to do, instead of secretly enjoying it!
By somebody else, I assume.
When I was there, I learned that Pilsner Urquell is brewed to 12%, and then watered down to 3.1%.
Also note that Budweis is also a Czech town. So aren't they really the ones to blame for lame beers?
"real" beer like the Germans or Ale that the Bristish make...
You mention German and British beer, and fail to mention Belgian beer? Those people really know how to make good beer. Best beers in the world.
The proper response to that is of course to advertise widely and loudly which phones are locked down, and which aren't. People who want an open system will buy the unlocked phones, and those manufacturers will be rewarded with extra sales.
I really don't see the point for manufacturers to lock their phones like this. For networks, I can understand, but when I buy a phone without a contract, I should own it, without any limitations. If we want high-end, fully unlocked/unlockable phones, we need to make sure there's a market for them. Manufacturers would be stupid to deny that market.
Yes, but without the ability to deny some of those rights, it's not very useful. Case in point: couple days ago I wanted to install a simple music app. It wanted GPS access and internet access. Fuck that, I didn't install the app but I'd much rather block those two things.
I agree. It could be useful if you could install an app while denying it some of the rights it wants. Of course that could make the app unstable and useless, but at least you had the option to do so and it was your own free choice.
Hacking At Random near Amsterdam
As someone who lives in Amsterdam, I'm always amazed when somebody calls places that are definitely outside the Amsterdam area, outside the Randstad even, "near Amsterdam". From my point of view, they're practically on the other side of the country, like 100 km away or something.
Of course someone who actually lives on the other side of the country would point out that HAR was a lot closer to Amsterdam than to were they lived. (It was only just outside the Randstad, and probably less than 100 km away.) But Netherland is a small country, and 100 km counts for quite a lot. Also, Amsterdammers think everything outside the city limits is far away and doesn't really count.
I'm wondering how this is different from the GSM network at Hacking At Random, which is most definitely an Open Source as well as anarchistic art crowd. Quite likely some drugs too (considering it's Dutch). Not a lot of sex, though.
Anyway, HAR had its own GSM network last year. Probably not solar powered, but very likely open source. You'd get a new phone number, however, which wasn't really what I wanted. (Unfortunately my iPhone had absolutely no reception there. Excellent wifi, but no phone calls.)
Are you sure? I thought that in recent months, the euro had been dropping relative to the dollar. I take it you've got reason to believe the euro will go up again?
So all we need to do now is wait for some neocons to abduct Obama, and a governor (I propose Schwarzenegger for that role) to save his skin and in the mean time dissolve the union.
Wasn't that something with a crumbling economy, and an ambitious reformer lacking the political clout he needed?
Exactly my thought. It makes it very easy to make an exact copy of the production environment.
Of course you do need to be careful that it doesn't accidentally still talk to the production database.
In the mainframe shop we used to have 5 stages; (production, shadow (with similar load to production), functional acceptance, system integration and development), next to that 2 well secured "emergency" stages linking to prod and shadow and a single "free for all" development area outside the control of the basic stages.
How do you get shadow to have the same load as production? That's the really important part that often makes the production-clone quite different: much lower load.
Anyway, we develop locally, deploy regularly (once or twice a week) to test (which has mocks of all external services). Then it goes to it (integration-test, which uses real external services), then there's acc1 and acc2, training, prod, and probably a couple more. I've only ever had anything to do with the test, integration and training servers. Everything else is way beyond my reach. (This is a Groovy shop, by the way.)
I've also worked in a Java shop at the same company, where they had 3 stages and a locally for dev, but the stages were much less controlled and you could easily skip straight to production. Obviously only the most experienced of programmers did this and only when they were absolutely certain. Obviously quite some more fixes went wrong on production.
Currently working in an environment without stages, I try to work on test copies as much as possible but the temptation of bugfixing directly in production is quite large.
At the previous job, I have on occasion done bug testing and fixing on production. But all my changes were always absolutely guaranteed to be completely safe very much nearly all of the time. Only rarely did I completely fuck up the production environment.
Because the Eurozone is doing so well lately. Has anyone bought Greece yet?
Vesta, Pallas and Juno used to be planets, 150 years ago.
Yeah, they're not anymore, but I'm about as upset at that as I am about Pluto losing its full planet status. (Not a lot.)
Man, hyperbole is so hard to spot these days!
And ignore Vesta, Pallas and Juno?
Exactly. I love my iMac at work. I particularly love the full power of my unix shell, sudo, the ability to install unix and linux libraries, and all while having a pretty slick UI that (practically) always works quite well. It's not perfect, but it works better than any linux or windows machine I've ever worked with.
But the moment Apple starts closing stuff down, I'm out of here.
This is what it has looked like for a long time. iOS is on their every other line of devices and the walled garden apps economy is a significant money maker for Apple.
That was my first question: how does the combination of a very closed system like iOS combine with the openness of OS X?
You're saying that the people who believe in your math are right.
Not at all. I'm merely giving an illustrative argument, hence the "if" in the text you quoted.
Do you mean that whether they are looking at something or not determines whether it's true or not? That may work in quantum physics, but it sounds rather unlikely in business.
Like smarter game developers have pointed out already: pirates are irrelevant.
Really? And who are they? I have never seen any professional game developer make any such claim.
Then you haven't been paying attention. Slashdot has had several links to such claims from Brad Wardell (who literally said this), as well as a few others who said similar things.
Pirates who aren't going to by your stuff anyway are irrelevant from a commercial point of view, or even a net plus due to the advertising effect. However, pirates who would buy your stuff if you made it harder for them to rip it illegally are very relevant, and pretending that there are no such people in the world is about as silly as pretending that every pirated copy equates to a lost sale.
Is it? I'm sure there are some people like that in the world, but how many are there? I'm pretty sure you have no idea, and neither does anyone else. I haven't seen any evidence that suggests that number of people is larger than the number of people put off by DRM.
That's true, there isn't. However, you are completely missing the point.
Logical proof is utterly irrelevant here. The exact figures don't matter either.
This was my point. Your point was:
In cold, hard maths, if they are looking at piracy rates of 90% on a DRM-free title and DRM can cut that down to 80%, that doubles the amount of income they're making on that game
And that's wrong. Your cold hard math is based on loose sand. It's a rationalization, but it's not fact.
You're saying that the people who believe in your math are right. I'm pointing out that that belief is based on nothing. It's a line of reasoning that leaves out every single figure that actually matters. Like the real number of sales, and the developments cost, which are really the only figures that actually matter.
Like smarter game developers have pointed out already: pirates are irrelevant.
if they are looking at piracy rates of 90% on a DRM-free title and DRM can cut that down to 80%, that doubles the amount of income they're making on that game, which probably does a lot more than doubling their profits
This is a fallacy. There's no guarantee that those missing 10% now paid money for the game. It could easily be that simply less people are playing the game. It could even be that the total number of players dropped by more than 10%, in which case you're actually worse off.
If you want a meaningful comparison, you have to compare the actual numbers of people paying for the game when all other factors (marketing, attractiveness of the game (admittedly impossible to determine)) are equal.
In the process of creating a company, I am planning to deliver my software purely as SaaS. That is the only way in which you are absolutely certain you won't have piracy. The downside is that you need to justify the *need* for an internet connection. Multiplayer games are such a justification.
I intent to do the exact same thing. Not so much in order to fight piracy, but simply because I am a web developer by trade, and making my games web-based is by far the easiest way for me to start.
If I ever create single-player desktop games, they'll be playable without disk and without internet connection. Playing anything beyond the free demo requires a simple key. Only updates, patches, discussion on the members forum, any multiplayer features (if any) and other cool stuff requires that the key is actually valid.