In a way it might be comparable to a gun show though. People of all stripes go to gun shows, except of course pacifists. Firearms are pretty well commoditized. Like technology, there are so many variations of them and even a lot of engineering that goes into them. Not only that but there's a lot of survival and outdoors gear, military surplus, knives of all kinds, and more.
The thing with steam DRM though is that you don't really even notice it is there. Contrast to that of CD's of yore where if you forgot to put the right disc in the drive, your game won't start even though it doesn't actually need it. Or when you had those challenge response code books. Or worse, the ones where you had to read the damn manual with a red filter.
Also offline mode is an option with steam too, unlike say diablo 3.
One thing about older DRM was that the pirated version offered better value than the legit version because you didn't have to bother with that crap. Steam on the other hand the legit version offers many benefits that you don't get with a pirated version, like cloud save data and no need to hunt down the game discs if you re-format your PC.
Personally I wouldn't pay for a search engine or email access. I'd rather just have the ads be there and I can ignore them.
Frankly, advertising to me is rather pointless, I can't think of anything I've ever bought based on an online ad, but if they're willing to pay google to let me search for free and use gmail for free, that's fine with me. (I have bought stuff based on TV ads before, but its very uncommon, and I do independent research elsewhere before purchasing.)
What you're seeing is a cat and mouse game in action, and likewise it's a back and forth battle.
Search engines of yore just indexed based on words contained in a page. This worked fine at first until people started sticking meta tags for every word in the dictionary into their page in order to maximize page hits.
Google broke this trend by indexing pages based on their popularity by looking at cross-linking. This worked fine until people started link farming and link-sharing.
Google doesn't talk much about what it does to stay ahead of the curve anymore (because they don't want anybody to be able to artificially boost their page rank) but they continue to tune search results in different ways with the aim of giving the user what they are looking for. For example, when they dropped ehow's ranking due to its content being largely useless to its viewers.
Without advertising, and without any kind of funding, google wouldn't be able to afford to keep tuning this. The spammers would always be ahead of the curve, because they'd be the ones with deeper pockets. Leaving that up to a government entity would be a horrible idea, because spammers would be able to claim that their free speech rights are being violated, and they would have a sound argument too because then you have the government deciding for the people what is good and what isn't.
Several spammers have already tried to have the government nationalize google and make it a public utility, and it's pretty obvious why they want that. Google also uses that ad money to fend off frivolous lawsuits from spammers angry at the fact that their little scams lost their page rank one day.
Well you need to look at the difference between advertising and spam. Yes, spammers call theirs advertising, but advertising implies that you're subsidizing a service so that others can obtain it at a lower price. Spammers don't do that, rather they increase the costs associated with the service and don't subsidize anything.
I pay slightly less today for internet access than I did in 1996. My current ISP charges 38.90 for 30Mbit.
In the dialup days, the ISP was $10 (which was cheaper than most due to a student discount - most at the time cost $20 if you wanted a guaranteed no busy signals service, which mine had,) and the second voice line was $20. When you take inflation into account, that goes up to $42.
As an added bonus, today I don't even use any phone line at all, rather I use a cell phone (which I already had at the time, and it cost even more at the time) and it includes internet access much faster than I had at home at the time. All in all, I'm paying less to be "connected" today than I was back then, and the service is much better.
When facebook did their last round of donation requests, they put that annoying banner at the top of the page that would follow you as you scrolled. On my desktop, it often covered up what I was trying to read. On my tablet, if I zoomed in it would sometimes cover the entire page.
That alone is probably the most obnoxious form of internet advertising outside of popups.
And that's just working out so well for them, isn't it? It doesn't take a genius to open a history book and find out what happened to every economy who has done what they did, and see what kind of damage it did all in the name of keeping some loudmouth politician employed.
But I really don't care to be honest, it isn't my problem. Keep thinking that way though if it puts a smile on your face.
This is one of those "eye of the beholder" kind of things. You hold a particular viewpoint, so you are particularly sensitive to anything that goes against that viewpoint.
Really if you go look at slashdot's history, you'll actually find that it's rather left leaning. I still remember a long time ago during memogate how one of the slashdot editors added his two cents to a summary saying that even though the documents were proved false, they probably told a true story, while in a previous summary he claimed that slashdot was politically unbiased. I'm not sure what happened to him (kdawson) but it seemed that pretty much everybody (left and right) hated him anyways.
And this isn't a freedom of speech kind of thing either. Slashdot is a private entity, they can post whatever the hell they want to their own website, and they can remove whatever the hell they want from their own website. In this case, they let the moderation system determine that. Regardless, that is their choice. That the law doesn't force otherwise is free speech. If you want to get your message across, either do it in a public venue or your own private venue - the law won't stop that, and that is what makes it free speech.
Besides, you really ought to get out of the political labels, they are nothing but a distraction from the real issues. Left and right are a black and white illusion to what is really a big grey blob of different ideas.
Well you never know just how far technology will take you. A thousand years ago, flight was for the birds. We now do a much better job of flight than they do - granted with lower efficiency, we can go several times the sound barrier and for days at a time - something that wasn't even comprehensible back then.
Right now, space travel is for the photons. Will that be the same in a thousand years? A lot can happen in that time.
Oh and by the way I am a libertarian, and I never had any guilt for ignoring them to begin with, never mind not wanting to. To me that's like feeling guilty for fish or trees. What about them? I just don't care. Why, does that make me evil or something?
If you want to get technical, a bio-hazardous virus (it's not an animal in any sense at all - debatable that it is even what you'd consider living matter) splices its RNA payload into a cell, which reprograms it to transcript more viruses and fewer organelles (destroying the cell in the process,) which then spread to inject their RNA into other cells ad infinitum.
A computer virus splices its code payload into another executable program that it finds, causing the program to do repeat the process in addition to its normal function.
Fundamentally similar in that they are just blindly reprogramming their host.
Today what most people refer to as a virus doesn't really do that anymore though - modifying binary code nowadays is often a very easy way to be discovered without even having anti-virus software, because there's no telling if the software you are modifying includes its own integrity checks, which is commonly done to prevent cheating in video games, piracy, or a number of other things. Crackers get around this because they know exactly what they are targeting, but hitting software blindly like a virus needs to do is a no-no.
Instead people call what is actually a trojan or a worm a virus, much like most people tend to confuse the difference between a virus or a bacterium.
I think the problems netbooks hit in terms of price were windows, which in many cases increased the price of them by up to 30%. Originally the OS didn't cost anything. I don't really think google makes money off of chrome OS, however unlike the linux that ran on early netbooks, the OS itself has major backing of a very high income commercial entity.
And no, I'm not bashing windows or linux here (I use and enjoy both, actually, and I have yet to use chromeOS) just stating things as I see them in that particular market segment.
I remember during the Bush years, it was popular to blame high gas prices on a conspiracy run by the administration, under the reasoning that it would make Dick Cheney wealthier.
Anyways, here's to hope for more change for gas next time I need to fill up.
Hmm...while I'd love to have an autobahn here, I do agree - the economic woes that the US currently faces are responsible in part due to the eurozone crisis, namely because many european countries failed to implement austerity when it was blatantly necessary. Conversely, the eurozone is also hurt by other economic issues here so there's plenty of blame to throw around.
Oh, I have fast and cheap mobile internet by the way - varies from 10-30mbit for $30 a month. Also what is arguably the best end user ISP only exists in the US.
Probably because it tells foreign companies that investing into your country's economy is a very bad idea. Hell not just foreign ones, even domestic ones whose industries they've also nationalized. They're going to pay pretty dearly for that when the hype dies down and suddenly they find they are behind the rest of the world technologically and no commercial interests want to touch them with a ten foot pole.
Judaism (in my view, anyways as I have read the torah - english translated) started out the same way as islam, only not quite so violent. I think christianity was more like a "let's still be jewish but break from the old ways and be nice to one another" (whether or not it actually turned out that way is debatable) rather than understanding the world.
I am neither anti-semetic nor christian, that's just how I view it. If you read the old testament, it's pretty blatantly tribal in nature. (I am non-religious.)
I learned metric in elementary school (circa 1986 to 1993) and I do prefer metric due to its simplicity of conversions within units (or even conversions from one form of unit to another in many cases, e.g. 1 meter cubed = 1 kiloliter.)
However it does irk me a bit when people say imperial is stupid because it is arbitrary, when metric is every bit as arbitrary - just planned better. Also, some imperial measurements work better than metric, take time for example, which works better when scaled against global coordinates and zones, which are broken into degrees, which imperial time not only neatly figures into, but also dividing it into odd segments like 1/8th or 1/4th doesn't involve any decimals, which are harder for your brain to process.
I still to this day write dates as 2-JAN-13 as per military requirements when dating documents from when I was on active duty, I just like doing it that way because there's no confusion no matter who reads it - the month is literally spelled out.
I wouldn't say software is useless after 5 years. Think about linux for example, 2.6 is the de-facto kernel version that a huge number of embedded devices use, yet it is 9 years old. Windows XP is still used heavily, Windows 3.11 is also used extensively in point of sale systems (Microsoft didn't stop selling it until just before windows 7 came out.)
Personally though I like the universal 14 years for everything idea.
Actually they weren't hosting anything, they were relying upon sites much like megaupload as well as torrents. Not much different from what piratebay is, actually.
It's really not a good idea to do both austerity and tax increases at the same time because effectively the government is just draining from the economy. That is a very bad thing, especially right now given that the retail industry has reported the worst holiday season in a very long time (consumer spending inevitably ripples to other areas of the economy - good or bad.)
Yes we need to get rid of the debt, but you need to either cut taxes or implement austerity. Doing both will just bite you in the ass.
I personally wouldn't mind seeing us go off of the fiscal cliff very soon, better now than later when it gets even worse than it already is.
Slashdot Mirror
In a way it might be comparable to a gun show though. People of all stripes go to gun shows, except of course pacifists. Firearms are pretty well commoditized. Like technology, there are so many variations of them and even a lot of engineering that goes into them. Not only that but there's a lot of survival and outdoors gear, military surplus, knives of all kinds, and more.
The thing with steam DRM though is that you don't really even notice it is there. Contrast to that of CD's of yore where if you forgot to put the right disc in the drive, your game won't start even though it doesn't actually need it. Or when you had those challenge response code books. Or worse, the ones where you had to read the damn manual with a red filter.
Also offline mode is an option with steam too, unlike say diablo 3.
One thing about older DRM was that the pirated version offered better value than the legit version because you didn't have to bother with that crap. Steam on the other hand the legit version offers many benefits that you don't get with a pirated version, like cloud save data and no need to hunt down the game discs if you re-format your PC.
So what would the "adults" group be for? (that is, sans the kids.)
For me it was just:
load "*",8,1
I thought this was a "code" to start until I hit around 8, which is about the time I started understanding the basic interpreter.
Personally I wouldn't pay for a search engine or email access. I'd rather just have the ads be there and I can ignore them.
Frankly, advertising to me is rather pointless, I can't think of anything I've ever bought based on an online ad, but if they're willing to pay google to let me search for free and use gmail for free, that's fine with me. (I have bought stuff based on TV ads before, but its very uncommon, and I do independent research elsewhere before purchasing.)
Nobody is forced to offer content to everybody. If a certain block of users drains your revenue, you're free to deny them access to your content.
What you're seeing is a cat and mouse game in action, and likewise it's a back and forth battle.
Search engines of yore just indexed based on words contained in a page. This worked fine at first until people started sticking meta tags for every word in the dictionary into their page in order to maximize page hits.
Google broke this trend by indexing pages based on their popularity by looking at cross-linking. This worked fine until people started link farming and link-sharing.
Google doesn't talk much about what it does to stay ahead of the curve anymore (because they don't want anybody to be able to artificially boost their page rank) but they continue to tune search results in different ways with the aim of giving the user what they are looking for. For example, when they dropped ehow's ranking due to its content being largely useless to its viewers.
Without advertising, and without any kind of funding, google wouldn't be able to afford to keep tuning this. The spammers would always be ahead of the curve, because they'd be the ones with deeper pockets. Leaving that up to a government entity would be a horrible idea, because spammers would be able to claim that their free speech rights are being violated, and they would have a sound argument too because then you have the government deciding for the people what is good and what isn't.
Several spammers have already tried to have the government nationalize google and make it a public utility, and it's pretty obvious why they want that. Google also uses that ad money to fend off frivolous lawsuits from spammers angry at the fact that their little scams lost their page rank one day.
Well you need to look at the difference between advertising and spam. Yes, spammers call theirs advertising, but advertising implies that you're subsidizing a service so that others can obtain it at a lower price. Spammers don't do that, rather they increase the costs associated with the service and don't subsidize anything.
I pay slightly less today for internet access than I did in 1996. My current ISP charges 38.90 for 30Mbit.
In the dialup days, the ISP was $10 (which was cheaper than most due to a student discount - most at the time cost $20 if you wanted a guaranteed no busy signals service, which mine had,) and the second voice line was $20. When you take inflation into account, that goes up to $42.
As an added bonus, today I don't even use any phone line at all, rather I use a cell phone (which I already had at the time, and it cost even more at the time) and it includes internet access much faster than I had at home at the time. All in all, I'm paying less to be "connected" today than I was back then, and the service is much better.
When facebook did their last round of donation requests, they put that annoying banner at the top of the page that would follow you as you scrolled. On my desktop, it often covered up what I was trying to read. On my tablet, if I zoomed in it would sometimes cover the entire page.
That alone is probably the most obnoxious form of internet advertising outside of popups.
And that's just working out so well for them, isn't it? It doesn't take a genius to open a history book and find out what happened to every economy who has done what they did, and see what kind of damage it did all in the name of keeping some loudmouth politician employed.
But I really don't care to be honest, it isn't my problem. Keep thinking that way though if it puts a smile on your face.
This is one of those "eye of the beholder" kind of things. You hold a particular viewpoint, so you are particularly sensitive to anything that goes against that viewpoint.
Really if you go look at slashdot's history, you'll actually find that it's rather left leaning. I still remember a long time ago during memogate how one of the slashdot editors added his two cents to a summary saying that even though the documents were proved false, they probably told a true story, while in a previous summary he claimed that slashdot was politically unbiased. I'm not sure what happened to him (kdawson) but it seemed that pretty much everybody (left and right) hated him anyways.
And this isn't a freedom of speech kind of thing either. Slashdot is a private entity, they can post whatever the hell they want to their own website, and they can remove whatever the hell they want from their own website. In this case, they let the moderation system determine that. Regardless, that is their choice. That the law doesn't force otherwise is free speech. If you want to get your message across, either do it in a public venue or your own private venue - the law won't stop that, and that is what makes it free speech.
Besides, you really ought to get out of the political labels, they are nothing but a distraction from the real issues. Left and right are a black and white illusion to what is really a big grey blob of different ideas.
Well you never know just how far technology will take you. A thousand years ago, flight was for the birds. We now do a much better job of flight than they do - granted with lower efficiency, we can go several times the sound barrier and for days at a time - something that wasn't even comprehensible back then.
Right now, space travel is for the photons. Will that be the same in a thousand years? A lot can happen in that time.
Oh and by the way I am a libertarian, and I never had any guilt for ignoring them to begin with, never mind not wanting to. To me that's like feeling guilty for fish or trees. What about them? I just don't care. Why, does that make me evil or something?
If you want to get technical, a bio-hazardous virus (it's not an animal in any sense at all - debatable that it is even what you'd consider living matter) splices its RNA payload into a cell, which reprograms it to transcript more viruses and fewer organelles (destroying the cell in the process,) which then spread to inject their RNA into other cells ad infinitum.
A computer virus splices its code payload into another executable program that it finds, causing the program to do repeat the process in addition to its normal function.
Fundamentally similar in that they are just blindly reprogramming their host.
Today what most people refer to as a virus doesn't really do that anymore though - modifying binary code nowadays is often a very easy way to be discovered without even having anti-virus software, because there's no telling if the software you are modifying includes its own integrity checks, which is commonly done to prevent cheating in video games, piracy, or a number of other things. Crackers get around this because they know exactly what they are targeting, but hitting software blindly like a virus needs to do is a no-no.
Instead people call what is actually a trojan or a worm a virus, much like most people tend to confuse the difference between a virus or a bacterium.
I think the problems netbooks hit in terms of price were windows, which in many cases increased the price of them by up to 30%. Originally the OS didn't cost anything. I don't really think google makes money off of chrome OS, however unlike the linux that ran on early netbooks, the OS itself has major backing of a very high income commercial entity.
And no, I'm not bashing windows or linux here (I use and enjoy both, actually, and I have yet to use chromeOS) just stating things as I see them in that particular market segment.
I remember during the Bush years, it was popular to blame high gas prices on a conspiracy run by the administration, under the reasoning that it would make Dick Cheney wealthier.
Anyways, here's to hope for more change for gas next time I need to fill up.
Hmm...while I'd love to have an autobahn here, I do agree - the economic woes that the US currently faces are responsible in part due to the eurozone crisis, namely because many european countries failed to implement austerity when it was blatantly necessary. Conversely, the eurozone is also hurt by other economic issues here so there's plenty of blame to throw around.
Oh, I have fast and cheap mobile internet by the way - varies from 10-30mbit for $30 a month. Also what is arguably the best end user ISP only exists in the US.
Hear hear. (That coming from a very free-market free-enterprise whacko libertarian such as myself.)
Probably because it tells foreign companies that investing into your country's economy is a very bad idea. Hell not just foreign ones, even domestic ones whose industries they've also nationalized. They're going to pay pretty dearly for that when the hype dies down and suddenly they find they are behind the rest of the world technologically and no commercial interests want to touch them with a ten foot pole.
Judaism (in my view, anyways as I have read the torah - english translated) started out the same way as islam, only not quite so violent. I think christianity was more like a "let's still be jewish but break from the old ways and be nice to one another" (whether or not it actually turned out that way is debatable) rather than understanding the world.
I am neither anti-semetic nor christian, that's just how I view it. If you read the old testament, it's pretty blatantly tribal in nature. (I am non-religious.)
I learned metric in elementary school (circa 1986 to 1993) and I do prefer metric due to its simplicity of conversions within units (or even conversions from one form of unit to another in many cases, e.g. 1 meter cubed = 1 kiloliter.)
However it does irk me a bit when people say imperial is stupid because it is arbitrary, when metric is every bit as arbitrary - just planned better. Also, some imperial measurements work better than metric, take time for example, which works better when scaled against global coordinates and zones, which are broken into degrees, which imperial time not only neatly figures into, but also dividing it into odd segments like 1/8th or 1/4th doesn't involve any decimals, which are harder for your brain to process.
I still to this day write dates as 2-JAN-13 as per military requirements when dating documents from when I was on active duty, I just like doing it that way because there's no confusion no matter who reads it - the month is literally spelled out.
I wouldn't say software is useless after 5 years. Think about linux for example, 2.6 is the de-facto kernel version that a huge number of embedded devices use, yet it is 9 years old. Windows XP is still used heavily, Windows 3.11 is also used extensively in point of sale systems (Microsoft didn't stop selling it until just before windows 7 came out.)
Personally though I like the universal 14 years for everything idea.
Actually they weren't hosting anything, they were relying upon sites much like megaupload as well as torrents. Not much different from what piratebay is, actually.
It's really not a good idea to do both austerity and tax increases at the same time because effectively the government is just draining from the economy. That is a very bad thing, especially right now given that the retail industry has reported the worst holiday season in a very long time (consumer spending inevitably ripples to other areas of the economy - good or bad.)
Yes we need to get rid of the debt, but you need to either cut taxes or implement austerity. Doing both will just bite you in the ass.
I personally wouldn't mind seeing us go off of the fiscal cliff very soon, better now than later when it gets even worse than it already is.