does everyone have time to do that? do YOU do that? have you read the magazines they read? watched the TV shows? listened to the radio programs? have you read the list of ingredients on the food they eat? Most people think its good that food has how much fat and sugar it contains written on the packet. If so, what's wrong with a game having how much violence and sex is in the game on the box? Bioshock has an 18 certificate printed on the box cover. I'm fine with that. What's the problem? cigarettes in the Uk even have SMOKING KILLS written by law on every packet. Is that a problem?
interesting. I presume you are in favour of a 100% inheritance tax levied on property, cash and stocks yes? Because if my father starts up a huge successful billion dollar business, why is it a social advantage for me to live off my ancestors? Most people think its ok to leave a house, or a business to children, but not to leave the fruits of a creative lifes work? is that because you value shares and property more than you value creativity?
spoken by someone who presumably does not work in the content-production industry, and maybe not even a British licence fee payer, so in short, you are swearing and ranting about how the work of thousands of people should be given to you for free, on your terms. What is it with people on slashdot thinking the world owes them everything? If the BBC was american, they would probably ban foreigners from even accessing their site, let alone watching their content.
They don't. But this is slashdot. people don't care what happens to anyone who produces content. they are the enemy, often referred to by infantile phrases as 'teh mafiaaa'. Nobody gives a damn about the content creators. we get free stuff Wheeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!
true, but when the same argument is applied to people who make software, games, music and movies, the general slashdot consensus is that these people have a 'broken business model' and do not 'deserve a right to earn money'. Surely if they are relying on donations, yet we all benefit regardless if we donate, they have a 'broken business model' too? I've donated to a number of organisations myself, but I find it interesting to see this logic applied on slashdot, where it is normally just sneered at.
you think the UK has a socialist government? what nonsense. sorry, but apart from the introduction of the minimum wage, this government has been as right wing and pro-business, fuck the consumer / worker as any I can remember.
I run my own company, and set a fixed dollar price, so I would be better off in the US, because $22.95 buys me more in the US than it does in the UK:D The health thing is a hard one to judge, The thing I like about the state health system is that if I get some major league illness or disability, which would cost a fortune, the state has it covered, whereas I'd be facing big bills in the US. True that I can just buy health insurance, but how do I know which company to go with? and am i really going to have to argue with lawyers about what is and is not covered when I need an operation? I guess its hard to judge which system works best, although I know technically the UK system has way less bureaucracy and should therefore be more efficient. I think the brain drain thing is purely because its expensive to go relocate that distance,so minimum wage manual labourers in the UK are not going to go live in the US, they could just move to France. Knowledge workers can basically afford to go anywhere, and anecdotally, most people I know in the Uk who do that go the Australia or New Zealand. I'm staying put for now though:D
Statistics please, your assumption that everyone in Europe is mediocre with all the clever ones going to the USA, is just... well speculation. I am tempted to go live in the states (rather than the Uk). why? the dollar is so weak. I sell on-line, so i get paid in dollars, and the dollar is so weak in Europe it badly affects my income. I wonder how many other people are making the move on the same basis. Nothing to do with the the US as a place to live, just a wise currency move. in fact, I'd really miss our state health service, which is one reason I'm still here.
Not sure what to make of that. Not a big influx from Europe though, to be expected due to distance maybe. huge number from india, and china. Also, how do we rate mexico? are the people fleeing capitalism or socialism? (don't know fuck all about mexico).
the good old slippery slope argument. But hold on, if we give the right to the state to imprison murderers and rapists, next it will be tax evaders, next litterbugs, next it will be gays and black people! No system where you give strong powers to the state is perfect, for obvious reasons, but I'm glad the state can lock people up, given due process, fair trials etc. I'm also glad the state has people with guns to shoot the *bad guys* and that it has wire tapping tech to find out what the *bad guys* are planning. Granted that these days the *good guys* are fucking up big time, and we have all kinds of issues with fair trials etc etc, but I'd still prefer the current system over the total anarchy that would come from the slippery slope argument to law enforcement. If there is another 9/11 style attack in the planning stages, I'd be VERY happy for any government to send out a few PC trojans if it thought (and satisfied a judge) that this would be of serious help in catching the guys before it goes ahead. And the day after that attack, you would wish they had done so too.
99% of Googles content is being linked to without any complaint from anyone. they are like a roadmap. the problem with many torrent sites is they are a very specific roadmap to very specific, and mostly illegal destinations. Google may enable you to find illegal material, but thats an accidental by product of what is an entirely impartial and blanket coverage system. A site that contains links that are 99% copyrighted and illegally shared cannot claim to be anywhere near innocent of what is going on. Google's business model does not depend on copyright infringement. many torrent sites business models do. If a site really wants to highlight the legitimate uses of torrents, they should be massively pro-active about removing all copyrighted content, and publiclly state on the homepage that they do not host copyrighted torrents. Most of them do not do this, because they rely on a 'nudge nudge wink wink' approach to pretending its not just a warez aggregator.
if they didn't fix bugs you would whine. they are fixing them, and you whine. Does no distro of linux have any bugs right now? welcome to slashdot I guess *sigh*
sigh. this cavity search seems to happen transparently without 99% of the buyers even noticing so hardly a fair comparison. Plus the game has NOT been cracked, just try installing and running the crack to find out what a total failure it is.
its justified because a VAST chunk of the potential demographic for the game were intending to steal it the day it went on sale. What would you do? cross your fingers and hope all those kids would somehow feel guilty and buy it anyway? check out a few warez boards, modern PC Gaming kids expect the world on a plate for free. No market can work that way. If I go into a retail store and spot a security guard, I *could* feel intimidated, insulted, and assume the store owner does not trust me. ditto if I spot security cameras (as most stores have). The fact is, the store does not trust me, nor should it, as long experience teaches retail that a significant proprtion of people will shoplift if they think its safe to do so. Its way easier to pirate a game than to shoplifdt, so its even mroe rampant. The copy protection on bioshock is that security camera in the store. It sucks to put up with it, to think your privacy may theoretically be invaded, and to know somehow you are paying for it, but do we think the store owners are bastards? or do we pity them for having to deal with the shit they get from shoplifters trying to wreck their business? A game as jaw-droppingly awesome as bioshock costs megabucks to make. Nobody sane makes that kind of investment and doesn't try to protect it. If you hate the protection enough to skip the game, thats fine, but don't be insulted or surprised that the company is trying to protect itself against thieves. BTW, there is no crack in the wild. The game is 7 days on sale with no piracy. The DRM worked.
have you used vista? it's a far better user experience than windows XP. if they did put some DRM related stuff in there, I haven't noticed, nor will 99.99% of its userbase.
That last statement of yours just seems woefully arrogant. Not everyone agrees on this. There is more than enough energy hitting europe in wind power alone for all our energy needs. Needless to say, a ton of energy hits our coasts too, and god knows how much falls onto the ground from the sun for a good 8 hours a day. No tech breakthroughs needed, we have solar power now, wind power now, decent tidal power is not far off. Iceland captures a lot of geothermal power, many nations get huge amounts of hydro-electric power. It seems every week slashdot has a new article about solar energy efficiency breakthroughs. And none of that takes into account the huge amount of wasted energy right now, even through such trivial issues as using incandescent bulbs. Then there are consumer electrics on standby, stores and street lighting using dumb lighting thats on at 3AM to annoy the bats and be seen by nobody else. Nuclear seems a quick fix, because it has a rich powerful lobby behind it, insisting its the only solution. The thing is very little money will be made by big corporations if we go with energy efficiency measures, so there is little lobbying for it, despite it being the most sensible approach to take right now.
As a coder, I know the best optimization is to remove code that doesn't need to be called every frame. It's the obvious algorithmic change you do before you dig deep and try and speed stuff up. The best way to solve an energy problem is to cut down those places where you use energy but don't need to. We are all bad at that, the USA is especially bad. Lets not rush into nuclear power expansion when we may well not need it.
about nuclear power. I'm opposed to it. not on any technical grounds, or any dogmatic or spiritual bollocks, just because I do NOT trust private companies with this stuff, nor do I trust them to handle GM food responsibly either. If we had decades of perfect safety records on existing reactors, combined with absolute transparency on what goes wrong and who is to blame and what happened if something does fail, then maybe I'd be convinced that this is a technology that you can trust private companies, or for that matter, the government, to use safely. This is not currently the case. here in the UK, we even falsified documents to show the japanese we had carried out safety procedures on their reprocessed fuel. Not surprisingly, they sent it back.
The risk of nuclear accidents is VERY small, but the potential worst case effect of one if it does happen is massive. With other forms of power like tidal, solar, wind, the worst case scenarios tend to be very very benign. As a result, I'd rather we spent the same cash investing in those technologies than one with so many potential downsides, including the leak risk, the theoretical meltdown, the security risks, potential health problems, need for uranium, centralised nature of the technology, need to be near large supplies of water, yada yada yada...
nuclear is great in theory, so is GM, but in practice, I don't vaguely think we are there yet in terms of safety.
agreed 100%. But you cannot get a story on slashdot unless it allows people to tag it with MAFIAAA and thus look like they are 'sticking it to the man'.
indeed. I happily use my home network whilst listening to music I ripped from a legally bought new CD here, all under vista. Of course, using vista just fine, and considering it a strong improvement over XP will not make the slashdot front page, because its not a way to bash the RIAA and whine about DRM. People read the news that confirms what they have already decided.
In world war two a dangerous power that had invaded numerous neighbouring countries and was armed to to teeth posed a threat to world peace. This is not true of china. You may consider the people of North Korea to be ignorant of what is wrong with their govt and the better system that you have in the US, but there are people in scandinavian countries with high systems of state welfare who would consider the USA to be barbaric in some ways, and assume that its brainwashed citizens just aren't aware of how much better a socialist government can be. Looking at other countries, and saying they need to all be like you, rarely works out well. Empires do not last, regardless how many guns you have, and attempting to interfere with the way other countries are run tends to breed resentment. People in Texas went ballistic at a UK letter writing campaign prior to the last US election, where UK liberals asked them not to vote for Bush. I can only imagine how Americans would react to spam for Venezuella telling you whats wrong with your government.
Slashdot Mirror
does everyone have time to do that? do YOU do that? have you read the magazines they read? watched the TV shows? listened to the radio programs? have you read the list of ingredients on the food they eat?
Most people think its good that food has how much fat and sugar it contains written on the packet. If so, what's wrong with a game having how much violence and sex is in the game on the box?
Bioshock has an 18 certificate printed on the box cover. I'm fine with that. What's the problem? cigarettes in the Uk even have SMOKING KILLS written by law on every packet. Is that a problem?
cool, lets all tolerate spam, trojans, botnets and fuck knows what else so you don't have to worry about someone finding your porn.
interesting. I presume you are in favour of a 100% inheritance tax levied on property, cash and stocks yes? Because if my father starts up a huge successful billion dollar business, why is it a social advantage for me to live off my ancestors?
Most people think its ok to leave a house, or a business to children, but not to leave the fruits of a creative lifes work? is that because you value shares and property more than you value creativity?
spoken by someone who presumably does not work in the content-production industry, and maybe not even a British licence fee payer, so in short, you are swearing and ranting about how the work of thousands of people should be given to you for free, on your terms.
What is it with people on slashdot thinking the world owes them everything?
If the BBC was american, they would probably ban foreigners from even accessing their site, let alone watching their content.
They don't. But this is slashdot. people don't care what happens to anyone who produces content. they are the enemy, often referred to by infantile phrases as 'teh mafiaaa'. Nobody gives a damn about the content creators. we get free stuff Wheeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!
true, but when the same argument is applied to people who make software, games, music and movies, the general slashdot consensus is that these people have a 'broken business model' and do not 'deserve a right to earn money'. Surely if they are relying on donations, yet we all benefit regardless if we donate, they have a 'broken business model' too?
I've donated to a number of organisations myself, but I find it interesting to see this logic applied on slashdot, where it is normally just sneered at.
what?
you think the UK has a socialist government? what nonsense. sorry, but apart from the introduction of the minimum wage, this government has been as right wing and pro-business, fuck the consumer / worker as any I can remember.
I run my own company, and set a fixed dollar price, so I would be better off in the US, because $22.95 buys me more in the US than it does in the UK :D :D
The health thing is a hard one to judge, The thing I like about the state health system is that if I get some major league illness or disability, which would cost a fortune, the state has it covered, whereas I'd be facing big bills in the US. True that I can just buy health insurance, but how do I know which company to go with? and am i really going to have to argue with lawyers about what is and is not covered when I need an operation? I guess its hard to judge which system works best, although I know technically the UK system has way less bureaucracy and should therefore be more efficient.
I think the brain drain thing is purely because its expensive to go relocate that distance,so minimum wage manual labourers in the UK are not going to go live in the US, they could just move to France. Knowledge workers can basically afford to go anywhere, and anecdotally, most people I know in the Uk who do that go the Australia or New Zealand.
I'm staying put for now though
Statistics please, your assumption that everyone in Europe is mediocre with all the clever ones going to the USA, is just... well speculation.
- immigration-net-migration-rate
I am tempted to go live in the states (rather than the Uk). why?
the dollar is so weak.
I sell on-line, so i get paid in dollars, and the dollar is so weak in Europe it badly affects my income.
I wonder how many other people are making the move on the same basis. Nothing to do with the the US as a place to live, just a wise currency move. in fact, I'd really miss our state health service, which is one reason I'm still here.
also Ireland has net immigration:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/imm_net_mig_rat
which seems to be higher than the USA. Luxembourg and Portugal also beat the USA in terms of net migration.
well lets consult the stats: (just adding some data to the discussion)u ni_sta_ori_2004-immigration-united-states-origin-2 004
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/imm_imm_to_the_
this is where people new to the USA came from in 2004:
#1 Mexico: 8,544,600
#2 China: 1,594,600
#3 Philippines:1,413,200
#4 India: 1,244,200
#5 Cuba: 1,011,200
#6 Ireland: 997,800
#7 El Salvador: 899,000
#8 Dominican Republic: 791,600
#9 Canada: 774,800
#10 Korea, South: 772,600
Not sure what to make of that. Not a big influx from Europe though, to be expected due to distance maybe. huge number from india, and china. Also, how do we rate mexico? are the people fleeing capitalism or socialism? (don't know fuck all about mexico).
we also invented computers , the web and rockets. :D
we win
the good old slippery slope argument. But hold on, if we give the right to the state to imprison murderers and rapists, next it will be tax evaders, next litterbugs, next it will be gays and black people!
No system where you give strong powers to the state is perfect, for obvious reasons, but I'm glad the state can lock people up, given due process, fair trials etc. I'm also glad the state has people with guns to shoot the *bad guys* and that it has wire tapping tech to find out what the *bad guys* are planning.
Granted that these days the *good guys* are fucking up big time, and we have all kinds of issues with fair trials etc etc, but I'd still prefer the current system over the total anarchy that would come from the slippery slope argument to law enforcement.
If there is another 9/11 style attack in the planning stages, I'd be VERY happy for any government to send out a few PC trojans if it thought (and satisfied a judge) that this would be of serious help in catching the guys before it goes ahead. And the day after that attack, you would wish they had done so too.
99% of Googles content is being linked to without any complaint from anyone. they are like a roadmap. the problem with many torrent sites is they are a very specific roadmap to very specific, and mostly illegal destinations. Google may enable you to find illegal material, but thats an accidental by product of what is an entirely impartial and blanket coverage system. A site that contains links that are 99% copyrighted and illegally shared cannot claim to be anywhere near innocent of what is going on.
Google's business model does not depend on copyright infringement. many torrent sites business models do. If a site really wants to highlight the legitimate uses of torrents, they should be massively pro-active about removing all copyrighted content, and publiclly state on the homepage that they do not host copyrighted torrents. Most of them do not do this, because they rely on a 'nudge nudge wink wink' approach to pretending its not just a warez aggregator.
if they didn't fix bugs you would whine. they are fixing them, and you whine. Does no distro of linux have any bugs right now?
welcome to slashdot I guess *sigh*
sigh.
this cavity search seems to happen transparently without 99% of the buyers even noticing so hardly a fair comparison. Plus the game has NOT been cracked, just try installing and running the crack to find out what a total failure it is.
its justified because a VAST chunk of the potential demographic for the game were intending to steal it the day it went on sale. What would you do? cross your fingers and hope all those kids would somehow feel guilty and buy it anyway? check out a few warez boards, modern PC Gaming kids expect the world on a plate for free. No market can work that way.
If I go into a retail store and spot a security guard, I *could* feel intimidated, insulted, and assume the store owner does not trust me. ditto if I spot security cameras (as most stores have). The fact is, the store does not trust me, nor should it, as long experience teaches retail that a significant proprtion of people will shoplift if they think its safe to do so. Its way easier to pirate a game than to shoplifdt, so its even mroe rampant.
The copy protection on bioshock is that security camera in the store. It sucks to put up with it, to think your privacy may theoretically be invaded, and to know somehow you are paying for it, but do we think the store owners are bastards? or do we pity them for having to deal with the shit they get from shoplifters trying to wreck their business?
A game as jaw-droppingly awesome as bioshock costs megabucks to make. Nobody sane makes that kind of investment and doesn't try to protect it. If you hate the protection enough to skip the game, thats fine, but don't be insulted or surprised that the company is trying to protect itself against thieves. BTW, there is no crack in the wild. The game is 7 days on sale with no piracy. The DRM worked.
have you used vista?
it's a far better user experience than windows XP. if they did put some DRM related stuff in there, I haven't noticed, nor will 99.99% of its userbase.
the twin towers were designed to withstand a plane crash too. remember what happened?
That last statement of yours just seems woefully arrogant. Not everyone agrees on this. There is more than enough energy hitting europe in wind power alone for all our energy needs. Needless to say, a ton of energy hits our coasts too, and god knows how much falls onto the ground from the sun for a good 8 hours a day.
No tech breakthroughs needed, we have solar power now, wind power now, decent tidal power is not far off. Iceland captures a lot of geothermal power, many nations get huge amounts of hydro-electric power. It seems every week slashdot has a new article about solar energy efficiency breakthroughs.
And none of that takes into account the huge amount of wasted energy right now, even through such trivial issues as using incandescent bulbs. Then there are consumer electrics on standby, stores and street lighting using dumb lighting thats on at 3AM to annoy the bats and be seen by nobody else.
Nuclear seems a quick fix, because it has a rich powerful lobby behind it, insisting its the only solution. The thing is very little money will be made by big corporations if we go with energy efficiency measures, so there is little lobbying for it, despite it being the most sensible approach to take right now.
As a coder, I know the best optimization is to remove code that doesn't need to be called every frame. It's the obvious algorithmic change you do before you dig deep and try and speed stuff up. The best way to solve an energy problem is to cut down those places where you use energy but don't need to. We are all bad at that, the USA is especially bad. Lets not rush into nuclear power expansion when we may well not need it.
about nuclear power. I'm opposed to it. not on any technical grounds, or any dogmatic or spiritual bollocks, just because I do NOT trust private companies with this stuff, nor do I trust them to handle GM food responsibly either. If we had decades of perfect safety records on existing reactors, combined with absolute transparency on what goes wrong and who is to blame and what happened if something does fail, then maybe I'd be convinced that this is a technology that you can trust private companies, or for that matter, the government, to use safely.
This is not currently the case. here in the UK, we even falsified documents to show the japanese we had carried out safety procedures on their reprocessed fuel. Not surprisingly, they sent it back.
The risk of nuclear accidents is VERY small, but the potential worst case effect of one if it does happen is massive. With other forms of power like tidal, solar, wind, the worst case scenarios tend to be very very benign. As a result, I'd rather we spent the same cash investing in those technologies than one with so many potential downsides, including the leak risk, the theoretical meltdown, the security risks, potential health problems, need for uranium, centralised nature of the technology, need to be near large supplies of water, yada yada yada...
nuclear is great in theory, so is GM, but in practice, I don't vaguely think we are there yet in terms of safety.
shouldn't you be whining about DRM somewhere? surely you haven't stuck it to teh evil mafiaaaaaa enough today?
agreed 100%. But you cannot get a story on slashdot unless it allows people to tag it with MAFIAAA and thus look like they are 'sticking it to the man'.
it's not true of sweden yet either. or Andorra. You consider every nation that's not the USA a threat?
No wonder the US seems paranoid.
indeed. I happily use my home network whilst listening to music I ripped from a legally bought new CD here, all under vista. Of course, using vista just fine, and considering it a strong improvement over XP will not make the slashdot front page, because its not a way to bash the RIAA and whine about DRM.
People read the news that confirms what they have already decided.
In world war two a dangerous power that had invaded numerous neighbouring countries and was armed to to teeth posed a threat to world peace. This is not true of china.
You may consider the people of North Korea to be ignorant of what is wrong with their govt and the better system that you have in the US, but there are people in scandinavian countries with high systems of state welfare who would consider the USA to be barbaric in some ways, and assume that its brainwashed citizens just aren't aware of how much better a socialist government can be.
Looking at other countries, and saying they need to all be like you, rarely works out well. Empires do not last, regardless how many guns you have, and attempting to interfere with the way other countries are run tends to breed resentment.
People in Texas went ballistic at a UK letter writing campaign prior to the last US election, where UK liberals asked them not to vote for Bush. I can only imagine how Americans would react to spam for Venezuella telling you whats wrong with your government.