While most of the debate over the Pledge will focus on First Amendment issues, I look at this as an attack on cultural identity. The United States was indeed founded on religious principles. While these principles do not play an active role in government as they do in more theocratic societies, they are nonetheless essential to understanding this country's reasons for existing and the motivations of those who founded it. The Pledge merely describes the Founders' ideals: to create a Republic that is unified ("one nation", "indivisible"), promotes "liberty and justice for all" and so on. "Under God" points out the religious perspective from which they set forth such a nation, and should not be removed. One might just as well issue a revised version of the Declaration of Indepenence for schoolchildren to study that removes references to "Nature's God", "Divine Providence" and the "Creator".
And you know about professional journalism what exactly? And who appointed you to judge journalistic quality in the first place?
What specifically is so contentious about my standards for journalistic quality? Objectivity and fair treatment of the subject matter being reported on are good, unfounded premises and using phrases like "dark side" and "comrade" to shift the tone of the article from fact to rhetoric are not. True, I'm no journalistic professional myself, but these qualities seem to be among those that distinguish respected reporting from your average Slashdot troll.
How obvious is it? Care to quote a court case where a judge maintained so? Only the court maintains what's legal and what's not in this country. Care to quote a court case?
Please explain your counter-rationale, this is interesting. Linksys distributed a piece of copyrighted software without permission from the copyright holders. The GPL would grant them permission to do this, had they released the source for their derivative work, but they didn't, so that point is moot. Your position is what exactly, that there is no legal precedent for copyright infringement being illegal? Or because "only the court maintains what's legal and what's not" you can do whatever you want until you get convicted of a crime and/or are found liable for a civil tort?
I doubt anyone actually reads anything submitted from the "respond to this article" link, but I was annoyed enough by this article to write anyway. I'll post my comments here too so they can be seen by something other than Forbes's/dev/null:
Your article "Linux's Hit Men" was a very slanted and generally unprofessional piece of journalism.
Linksys has built their product directly on a piece of software for which they have willfully failed to abide by the licensing terms. In other words, they have made millions through software piracy.
Whether those licensing terms call for monetary payment, public acknowledgement, distribution of source code, or any other stipulation is irrelevant. If Linksys did not intend to abide by them, they should not have used the software in question, doing so is obviously a copyright violation, an offense that has often been likened to outright theft.
Of course the FSF is aggressive when intellectual property they are protecting is being flagrantly and illegally taken to build someone else's business. The premise of your article that this is somehow nefarious, that threatening legal action against those who pirate software makes one a villain. Does your magazine take the same tone when the party protecting their software is the Microsoft Corp., Software Publishers Association, or Business Software Alliance?
I originally got the Commodore Plus/4, a computer that would have been a slightly enhanced C64 except... no backwards compatibility. So, wanting to use my computer, but not being able to run games on it, I got into programming. I later got a C64 too, which was a much better gaming box, but even more difficult for programming than the Plus/4 was.
A few items to give you a feel for what programming the C64 was like...
You could program in BASIC, Assembly, or get a third party compiler of some kind. BASIC was by far the most approachable of these for the newbie. The BASIC interpreter was in ROM, so as soon as you turn on the computer, you could just start typing in code. The downside to it being in ROM, however, is that you are stuck with that version of the language.
Being interpreted, Commodore BASIC was pretty slow stuff. For anything where execution speed makes a difference (like a game), Assembly was the way to go... the 1 MHz CPU didn't really handle the overhead of an interpreter well.
Commodore BASIC programs were horridly unstructured. GOTO everywhere, dependent on line numbers (and yet lacking a command to renumber your program if you run out of numbers). BASIC had the usual PRINT, IF.. THEN, and such, but doing anything nontrivial required using POKE (write directly to memory) and PEEK (read directly from memory) to access magic locations in memory. You could write directly to the screen buffer or color palatte, for instance as well as other more obscure locations. There was also a SYS command to execute machine code starting at a specified address, which was used for kernel system calls or jumping to ml subroutines.
While the Plus/4 had BASIC commands for things like drawing lines on the screen or making music, the C64 did not. Get used to the PEEK/POKE/SYS stuff described above if you want your program to do anything like that.
The floppy drive, while interesting in that it had a CPU of comparable power to the main computer, was notoriously slow. Whereas with computers these days temp files, swap space, running commands from a disk, and such are ubiquitous things, on the Commodore, I/O had to be kept to a minimum or you could forget about any kind of speed. The Unix "everything is a file" philosophy wouldn't have worked too well on this platform.
This wonderful Commodore BASIC was written by a then little-known company named Microsoft.
I can think of lots of reasons EQ-style games don't enjoy wider appeal...
Barriers to entry - Not only do you have to buy the game like you do with other games, but you have to sign up for an account, provide a credit card or game card, etc. Sure, they may offer the first month free, but it's still much harder to just to check out what the game is about than other games.
Double dipping - People don't like to have to pay for the game, pay for the expansions, AND pay a monthly fee.
Monthly fee - These fees really discourage casual players. $13 is nothing to someone with a 200 hour a month EQ habit (they probably pay double this just for a second account) but if you only play a game a couple times a month, each gaming session costs you a lot more.
Time requirements - To hold your own in the end game of EQ... finish quests, do raids, gain xp takes a huge amount of time. People who play for 8 hours or more every day are not uncommon at this level. The masses certainly aren't going to devote this kind of time to a game, so they are stuck as perma-newbies.
Time sinks - Everything in MMOGs seems to take so long. Getting from point A to point B can take an hour. A raid might tie up an evening, and then only a few people present even get anything out of it. "Camping" a particularly rare creature or item could take a week or more of diligent effort.
Overhead - When I play a single player game and something in RL happens, I hit save, quit, and then come back and pick up where I left off later. In EQ, you might spend an hour looking for group, another hour getting there, waiting on other members, finding a good spot, or whatever, and then at the end of the session half an hour or so to deal with finding a replacement, divvying up loot, or whatever. If you have less than four hours to play (which casual players always will) you may not accomplish enough to justify even trying. You can't pause the game, and if you spend too much time going AFK or logging off suddenly when you're the only cleric in the zone, your reputation will suffer, just for having a life.
Culture - There is a lot to learn to play these games well. Maps, spells, strategies, quests, even a whole language of jargon. "A sk just trained us in KD then ninja'd the bp off of AoW." To a player, such a thing would be scandalous, to the masses, gibberish.
Dynamic nature - The fact that things are always happening on the game is both its greatest and worst attribute. Greatest because it is always fresh and new. Worst because you miss things when you don't play, and if you don't play much you miss too much to bother. Because you have to do enough to keep pace with the people you enjoy playing with or get left behind. Because you can't just install expansions and play them at whatever pace you want without serious problems... the world moves on and changes, with or without you reaping the benefits.
I could ramble on, but I think I've made my point. For people with a lot of time, few interruptions, a good attention span, and a desire for a strongly immersive game, MMOG are good. But for the masses, I don't see one gaining that much appeal, unless it deviates drastically from the EQ formula for success.
If anything should be illegal, it should be their shoddy technology. First, they create a CD that is obtensibly a music compact disc, but is in reality a CD-ROM that surreptitiously installs programs onto a user's computer without the computer owner's attempt, in a deliberate attempt to sabotage the functionality of the computer. This is what is known as a "virus"*.
Then they present this ill-concieved technology to their clients and shareholders as some sort of panacea, knowing all the while that it is utterly ineffective. This is what is known as "fraud".
To top off their audacity, they then threaten a lawsuit against the researcher who alerted the public to this fraud. This is completely ridiculous. What next, a medical researcher's tests prove that Quack Corp.'s Snake Oil does not really enlarge your penis, so the researcher is sent to prison?
This is a technology that is dependent on an unrealistic number of constraints. If the user of the CD is running Windows AND has autorun turned on AND doesn't press the shift key while putting the disc in AND allows the SunnComm virus to infect their computer AND leaves it running AND tries to copy the music, it won't work, otherwise it will. Oops I just pointed out how flawed their scheme is too, I guess that's a "possible felony"
.
* To be pedantic it's more of a trojan than a virus because the malicious code does not self-replicate beyond installing from the disc, but you get the idea.
Instead there should be ".vs" for VeriSign and ".gd" for GoDaddy.
Then you have a problem similar to the recent controversy about cell phones... lack of address (number, URL, etc.) portability. Changing providers causes more hassles than the benefit of ditching your old company, thus locking the customer in.
I asked about this in the previous thread, but got no explanation, so I'll try again... how can such a law be reconciled with what is explicitly specified in the U.S. Constitution?
"No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state." (Article I, Section 9.5)
That is, after all, exactly what these laws mandate, for merchants to collect a tax on some State's behalf on goods that they are exporting out of the state. How is this legal?
AnotherBlackHat also pointed out another relevant provision:
"No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress." (Article I, Section 10.2)
I am genuinely bewindered as to how proponents of such a law can think it would pass Constitutional muster. If anyone could explain the legal rationale behind such legislation, I'd really appreciate it.
this is not to say that there aren't other games out there that do the same things, but those games weren't made with MY money. i'm all for training recruits well. and if computer games work well for that, that's great. the problem is that the people this game is marketed to ARE NOT RECRUITS
The problem with this argument is that America's Army isn't a training tool so much as a recruiting one. And in that respect it is a very well devised one.
Previous Army recruiting tended to focus on things like "Be All That You Can Be" or a poster of Uncle Sam saying "I Want You". That's nice and all, but signing up for the military is a serious commitment and that sort of advertising doesn't do much to tell potential recruits what is in store for them. They still think it's all Beetle Bailey and Gomer Pyle or whatever preconceptions they have of the military.
The Army's current recruiting methods are different. They have things like America's Army, which is a computer simulation of some of the aspects of training they would encounter. The Army also has Web broadcasts of new soldiers in training so people can know what to expect if they sign up. They also seem to be helping Discovery channel and such with a lot of documentaries that let people learn what military training is about.
Personally, I applaud this approach. America's Army probably cost about as much to make as a couple thirty-second TV spots of Abrams Tanks and Old Glory, and is a lot more informative.
Characters in TV shows and movies have to use various items as props. Sometimes these are chosen with business motivations in mind. As a viewer, I'm okay with this, as long as it does not detract from the show.
For instance, Halle Berry has a Ford Thunderbird in the latest 007 film. That's fine. But if Bond had borrowed it for a gratuitous car chase, all the while commenting on its superb handling and acceleration, that would certainly have ruined the movie. Stick a product in in a context where one might realistically encounter it. Don't comment on it, extol its virtues, or zoom in for a close up of it.
Trying too hard to avoid product placement can be just as distracting. A can labelled "COLA" and with a not-quite-Coke design looks fake. Pixellating out the names of products and stores as if they were nudity is annoying.
Basically, I don't care whether the hero reaches for a Dasani or an Aquafina as long as it's unobtrusive, realistic for the character, non-distracting, and so on. If the audience consciously notices the item as being plugged, the advertising was too conspicuous.
The article is longwinded and legalistic, so I'll recap for the lazy:
Microsoft lost a class action case in California and owes a lot of people there money. msfreepc.com is offering people Lindows in return for their stake in the settlement. Microsoft's lawyers are complaining since the msfreepc.com form does not include things like signatures and certifications that filling out the legal forms firsthand would require, so they say claims from these people will be turned down. Microsoft's lawyers also portray Lindows as taking money away from schoolchildren, because leftover funds go to CA schools, and expiditing the claims means more of the money will be disbursed.
"As I recall, States were not allowed to levy tariffs and such against each other."
"No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state." (Article I, Section 9.5)
I have not really heard the proponents of such taxes try to justify their scheme in Constitutional terms. I suppose they would try to make some argument that this was originally intended to keep the exporter of the articles from having to pay taxes to the originating state as the goods go out, and now the exporter is collecting taxes to send to the destination state to make up for the revenue they supposedly lost because the goods weren't purchased locally. But this is really questionable logic, whether I buy something from California and get hit by taxes that wind up in the coffers of California or of my own state, someone is placing a questionable tax on the export of goods, and some state is infringing into the Federal purview of interstate commerce.
"Common, why not call a spade a spade. Everyone knows that this could mean the end off telemarketing as an economical way of doing bussiness."
Why should this hurt the telemarketers business? It could be a great thing both for the public and for the telemarketers. They now have a list of the 16% or so of the U.S. population who have no interest whatsoever in buying their product, so they can focus their efforts on the people who might be.
Imagine you are trying to get a job, so you wander randomly from building to building, handing resume's to the HR staffs. Then someone hands you an up-to-date list of every company in town who have no positions available in your field. You could whine about how missing out on being rejected by these companies firsthand is somehow ruining your job search, or you could use it to your advantage, concentrating on the remaining firms, where you at least have some chance, and have your overall success rate at getting interviews go up.
Warez sites with such a "license" don't exempt themselves from prosecution. It's just some idiotic ploy someone thought up long ago.
There's a big difference between government authorities prosecuting someone who is breaking the law, and a private organization violating one law to see if someone else is breaking another.
If I flagrantly violate the Windows EULA by decompiling, reverse engineering, benchmarking, and doing who-knows-what else to it, could I then absolve myself of this by telling them, "I just did it to see if you guys were up to anything illegal"?
This case is interesting because it pits one private organizations's pseudo-law-enforcement powers against another's ability to make up whatever terms of service they feel like. Whether the RIAA or EULAs get taken down a notch by this, the public stand to win.
Don't get me wrong, I love vim. However... most of the suggestions here have been along the lines of "vi in a browser" type ideas. This is excellent for power users, but might not suitable for the newspaper staff in question to do their content editing
vi (and emacs) have more wonderful features than almost anyone would ever use, but the learning curve that comes with this can be intimidating for some. Are the people who will be using this system tech types, or journalists? If the latter, they probably won't think that ":%s/Linux/GNU\/Linux/g" is quite as intuitive as a dialog box with boxes labelled "Find" and "Replace with".
Depending on the proficiency of the intended users, they may well be better off with some kind of plugin / applet / whatever that resembles Wordpad than trying to master an editor with hundreds of not-so-intuitive keystrokes and commands.
Covering all potential cases to prevent getting sued is one reason companies put so many warnings in their 10Q, part of it is also to bury the more alarming stuff so investors don't worry as much about it. As an exaggerated illustration, SCO could say:
Aliens might invade the earth and blow up our servers.
Congress might suddenly repeal all Intellectual Property related laws, which would render licensing-based business models unfeasable.
We might lose our case, get countersued, and go bankrupt.
By throwing in a couple things that aren't going to happen, the last item appears much more hypothetical than if it was all by itself.
I've also pondered whether this would be a valid approach or not. Virus stories in the media tend to portray the people who are actually spreading the viruses as innocent victims, with only the original author being the "bad guy". But the "bad guy" wouldn't have been able to do any damage unless people opened virus attachments, ran unpatched systems, and other no-no's.
Also, this type of approach is not unprecedented... if I fail to maintain my car and it spews pollution into the air, the fines are potentially quite hefty. How is an unmaintained computer spewing pollution onto the Internet that different?
In the end though, I don't such a thing will happen anytime soon. People would much rather think of themselves as victims when viruses go around than acknowledge they are contributing to the problem through irresponsibility. Also, enforcement is problematic at best. Finally, with many people afraid of technology already, the potential for running afoul of the law through their lack of knowledge would create a major backlash.
I too never really got into it. Part of it is the mundane nature of the subject material. Games in which you pretend to conquer the world, assassinate the head of the KGB, or plunder loot from a dragon are exciting. Pretending to scrub a toilet is not.
Women I know are fascinated by this game, and I'd be willing to give it more of a try, but like you have no desire to buy so many expansion packs. Most games that spawn several expansions periodically come out with cumulative versions that include the original game and first however-many expansions at a reasonable price. With The Sims, you have to buy everything separately at full price. It looks like a somewhat entertaining game, but certainly not a game worth $200 to play to me.
Okay, so we all know that C/NET owns news.com, but rather than run their site as that (which is a pretty good domain name), they point it to "news.com.com" which is just plain silly. Is there any kind of interesting story or reason behind this, or did the C/NET editors just wake up one day and decide they wanted their domain name to look more like a typographical error?
The pure electric cars have never made any sense to me. Instead of your engine producing pollution, the pollution is made at a coal plant somewhere so you can charge up the car, but same net result. And the logistics of charging the car up sounds a bit inconvenient to me.
Hybrids have more promise, and are interesting from a technology point of view. Right now they're mainly for the early adopter types though, because the benefits are debatable. You pay about $3000 more for the hybrid motor than an equivalent car with a 4-cylinder gas motor, and wind up saving roughly that much in fuel over the lifetime of the car. You more or less break even financially, but for some folks the satisfaction of saving the planet is the advantage.
Or you could just say the heck with being eco-fashionable and get a real car. There's nothing quite like horsepower, displacement, and 8 cylinders of Detroit muscle.;)
Does it have a mapping feature? Going through the first two Bard's Tales (III had a mapper) I went through so much graph paper drawing maps. For the most part, drawing them out by hand was fun, but in dungeons that went too crazy with magical darkness / spinners / teleporters making an accurate map was as hard as killing the monsters.
I really liked the optical mice about 12 years ago that were put out by Mouse Systems, and the ones on the Sun workstations at the time. Sure, optical is mainstream stuff now, but these cutting edge mice were so ahead of their time... how many people had an optical mouse on their 386?
Unlike the modern opticals, however, the early ones didn't let you use any old surface as a mouse pad. They came with special metal mouse pads with a tiny grid of shiny and not-as-shiny areas for the mouse to track. Get the pad too scratched or dented and your mouse started working funny. I liked the pads though, having your mouse on a futuristic metal surface instead of the usual felt-covered rubber was all part of the charm.
It's ironic that Microsoft provides that service [patch notification] for free, whereas Linux requires paying money.
That's a bit misleading. With Linux, you don't have to pay anything up front for the OS, and you can take whatever support strategy works best for your particular situation, from building updated sources yourself (free), downloading RPMs (free), using Red Hat's limited trial up2date (free), or getting one of the Red Hat Network subscription packages ($60+).
With Windows, you pay $300 or so up front for the OS plus whatever an office suite, developer tools, a DBMS, and the other types of apps that would have come free in the Linux distro cost you. Part of this cost goes to support, so you can use Windows Update all you want... you already paid for it. Unlike up2date and its counterparts in the other distros, however, Windows Update just updates the base OS, so you have to take additional steps to update your word processor, C++ compiler and such.
I'd say the Linux way isn't such a bad deal after all.
Slashdot Mirror
While most of the debate over the Pledge will focus on First Amendment issues, I look at this as an attack on cultural identity. The United States was indeed founded on religious principles. While these principles do not play an active role in government as they do in more theocratic societies, they are nonetheless essential to understanding this country's reasons for existing and the motivations of those who founded it. The Pledge merely describes the Founders' ideals: to create a Republic that is unified ("one nation", "indivisible"), promotes "liberty and justice for all" and so on. "Under God" points out the religious perspective from which they set forth such a nation, and should not be removed. One might just as well issue a revised version of the Declaration of Indepenence for schoolchildren to study that removes references to "Nature's God", "Divine Providence" and the "Creator".
And you know about professional journalism what exactly? And who appointed you to judge journalistic quality in the first place?
What specifically is so contentious about my standards for journalistic quality? Objectivity and fair treatment of the subject matter being reported on are good, unfounded premises and using phrases like "dark side" and "comrade" to shift the tone of the article from fact to rhetoric are not. True, I'm no journalistic professional myself, but these qualities seem to be among those that distinguish respected reporting from your average Slashdot troll.
How obvious is it? Care to quote a court case where a judge maintained so? Only the court maintains what's legal and what's not in this country. Care to quote a court case?
Please explain your counter-rationale, this is interesting. Linksys distributed a piece of copyrighted software without permission from the copyright holders. The GPL would grant them permission to do this, had they released the source for their derivative work, but they didn't, so that point is moot. Your position is what exactly, that there is no legal precedent for copyright infringement being illegal? Or because "only the court maintains what's legal and what's not" you can do whatever you want until you get convicted of a crime and/or are found liable for a civil tort?
I doubt anyone actually reads anything submitted from the "respond to this article" link, but I was annoyed enough by this article to write anyway. I'll post my comments here too so they can be seen by something other than Forbes's /dev/null:
Your article "Linux's Hit Men" was a very slanted and generally unprofessional piece of journalism.
Linksys has built their product directly on a piece of software for which they have willfully failed to abide by the licensing terms. In other words, they have made millions through software piracy.
Whether those licensing terms call for monetary payment, public acknowledgement, distribution of source code, or any other stipulation is irrelevant. If Linksys did not intend to abide by them, they should not have used the software in question, doing so is obviously a copyright violation, an offense that has often been likened to outright theft.
Of course the FSF is aggressive when intellectual property they are protecting is being flagrantly and illegally taken to build someone else's business. The premise of your article that this is somehow nefarious, that threatening legal action against those who pirate software makes one a villain. Does your magazine take the same tone when the party protecting their software is the Microsoft Corp., Software Publishers Association, or Business Software Alliance?
I originally got the Commodore Plus/4, a computer that would have been a slightly enhanced C64 except... no backwards compatibility. So, wanting to use my computer, but not being able to run games on it, I got into programming. I later got a C64 too, which was a much better gaming box, but even more difficult for programming than the Plus/4 was.
A few items to give you a feel for what programming the C64 was like...
You could program in BASIC, Assembly, or get a third party compiler of some kind. BASIC was by far the most approachable of these for the newbie. The BASIC interpreter was in ROM, so as soon as you turn on the computer, you could just start typing in code. The downside to it being in ROM, however, is that you are stuck with that version of the language.
Being interpreted, Commodore BASIC was pretty slow stuff. For anything where execution speed makes a difference (like a game), Assembly was the way to go... the 1 MHz CPU didn't really handle the overhead of an interpreter well.
Commodore BASIC programs were horridly unstructured. GOTO everywhere, dependent on line numbers (and yet lacking a command to renumber your program if you run out of numbers). BASIC had the usual PRINT, IF .. THEN, and such, but doing anything nontrivial required using POKE (write directly to memory) and PEEK (read directly from memory) to access magic locations in memory. You could write directly to the screen buffer or color palatte, for instance as well as other more obscure locations. There was also a SYS command to execute machine code starting at a specified address, which was used for kernel system calls or jumping to ml subroutines.
While the Plus/4 had BASIC commands for things like drawing lines on the screen or making music, the C64 did not. Get used to the PEEK/POKE/SYS stuff described above if you want your program to do anything like that.
The floppy drive, while interesting in that it had a CPU of comparable power to the main computer, was notoriously slow. Whereas with computers these days temp files, swap space, running commands from a disk, and such are ubiquitous things, on the Commodore, I/O had to be kept to a minimum or you could forget about any kind of speed. The Unix "everything is a file" philosophy wouldn't have worked too well on this platform.
This wonderful Commodore BASIC was written by a then little-known company named Microsoft.
I can think of lots of reasons EQ-style games don't enjoy wider appeal...
I could ramble on, but I think I've made my point. For people with a lot of time, few interruptions, a good attention span, and a desire for a strongly immersive game, MMOG are good. But for the masses, I don't see one gaining that much appeal, unless it deviates drastically from the EQ formula for success.
If anything should be illegal, it should be their shoddy technology. First, they create a CD that is obtensibly a music compact disc, but is in reality a CD-ROM that surreptitiously installs programs onto a user's computer without the computer owner's attempt, in a deliberate attempt to sabotage the functionality of the computer. This is what is known as a "virus"*.
Then they present this ill-concieved technology to their clients and shareholders as some sort of panacea, knowing all the while that it is utterly ineffective. This is what is known as "fraud".
To top off their audacity, they then threaten a lawsuit against the researcher who alerted the public to this fraud. This is completely ridiculous. What next, a medical researcher's tests prove that Quack Corp.'s Snake Oil does not really enlarge your penis, so the researcher is sent to prison?
This is a technology that is dependent on an unrealistic number of constraints. If the user of the CD is running Windows AND has autorun turned on AND doesn't press the shift key while putting the disc in AND allows the SunnComm virus to infect their computer AND leaves it running AND tries to copy the music, it won't work, otherwise it will. Oops I just pointed out how flawed their scheme is too, I guess that's a "possible felony"
.* To be pedantic it's more of a trojan than a virus because the malicious code does not self-replicate beyond installing from the disc, but you get the idea.
Instead there should be ".vs" for VeriSign and ".gd" for GoDaddy.
Then you have a problem similar to the recent controversy about cell phones... lack of address (number, URL, etc.) portability. Changing providers causes more hassles than the benefit of ditching your old company, thus locking the customer in.
I asked about this in the previous thread, but got no explanation, so I'll try again... how can such a law be reconciled with what is explicitly specified in the U.S. Constitution?
"No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state." (Article I, Section 9.5)
That is, after all, exactly what these laws mandate, for merchants to collect a tax on some State's behalf on goods that they are exporting out of the state. How is this legal?
AnotherBlackHat also pointed out another relevant provision:
"No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress." (Article I, Section 10.2)
I am genuinely bewindered as to how proponents of such a law can think it would pass Constitutional muster. If anyone could explain the legal rationale behind such legislation, I'd really appreciate it.
this is not to say that there aren't other games out there that do the same things, but those games weren't made with MY money. i'm all for training recruits well. and if computer games work well for that, that's great. the problem is that the people this game is marketed to ARE NOT RECRUITS
The problem with this argument is that America's Army isn't a training tool so much as a recruiting one. And in that respect it is a very well devised one.
Previous Army recruiting tended to focus on things like "Be All That You Can Be" or a poster of Uncle Sam saying "I Want You". That's nice and all, but signing up for the military is a serious commitment and that sort of advertising doesn't do much to tell potential recruits what is in store for them. They still think it's all Beetle Bailey and Gomer Pyle or whatever preconceptions they have of the military.
The Army's current recruiting methods are different. They have things like America's Army, which is a computer simulation of some of the aspects of training they would encounter. The Army also has Web broadcasts of new soldiers in training so people can know what to expect if they sign up. They also seem to be helping Discovery channel and such with a lot of documentaries that let people learn what military training is about.
Personally, I applaud this approach. America's Army probably cost about as much to make as a couple thirty-second TV spots of Abrams Tanks and Old Glory, and is a lot more informative.
Characters in TV shows and movies have to use various items as props. Sometimes these are chosen with business motivations in mind. As a viewer, I'm okay with this, as long as it does not detract from the show.
For instance, Halle Berry has a Ford Thunderbird in the latest 007 film. That's fine. But if Bond had borrowed it for a gratuitous car chase, all the while commenting on its superb handling and acceleration, that would certainly have ruined the movie. Stick a product in in a context where one might realistically encounter it. Don't comment on it, extol its virtues, or zoom in for a close up of it.
Trying too hard to avoid product placement can be just as distracting. A can labelled "COLA" and with a not-quite-Coke design looks fake. Pixellating out the names of products and stores as if they were nudity is annoying.
Basically, I don't care whether the hero reaches for a Dasani or an Aquafina as long as it's unobtrusive, realistic for the character, non-distracting, and so on. If the audience consciously notices the item as being plugged, the advertising was too conspicuous.
The article is longwinded and legalistic, so I'll recap for the lazy:
Microsoft lost a class action case in California and owes a lot of people there money. msfreepc.com is offering people Lindows in return for their stake in the settlement. Microsoft's lawyers are complaining since the msfreepc.com form does not include things like signatures and certifications that filling out the legal forms firsthand would require, so they say claims from these people will be turned down. Microsoft's lawyers also portray Lindows as taking money away from schoolchildren, because leftover funds go to CA schools, and expiditing the claims means more of the money will be disbursed.
"As I recall, States were not allowed to levy tariffs and such against each other."
"No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state." (Article I, Section 9.5)
I have not really heard the proponents of such taxes try to justify their scheme in Constitutional terms. I suppose they would try to make some argument that this was originally intended to keep the exporter of the articles from having to pay taxes to the originating state as the goods go out, and now the exporter is collecting taxes to send to the destination state to make up for the revenue they supposedly lost because the goods weren't purchased locally. But this is really questionable logic, whether I buy something from California and get hit by taxes that wind up in the coffers of California or of my own state, someone is placing a questionable tax on the export of goods, and some state is infringing into the Federal purview of interstate commerce.
"Common, why not call a spade a spade. Everyone knows that this could mean the end off telemarketing as an economical way of doing bussiness."
Why should this hurt the telemarketers business? It could be a great thing both for the public and for the telemarketers. They now have a list of the 16% or so of the U.S. population who have no interest whatsoever in buying their product, so they can focus their efforts on the people who might be.
Imagine you are trying to get a job, so you wander randomly from building to building, handing resume's to the HR staffs. Then someone hands you an up-to-date list of every company in town who have no positions available in your field. You could whine about how missing out on being rejected by these companies firsthand is somehow ruining your job search, or you could use it to your advantage, concentrating on the remaining firms, where you at least have some chance, and have your overall success rate at getting interviews go up.
Warez sites with such a "license" don't exempt themselves from prosecution. It's just some idiotic ploy someone thought up long ago.
There's a big difference between government authorities prosecuting someone who is breaking the law, and a private organization violating one law to see if someone else is breaking another.
If I flagrantly violate the Windows EULA by decompiling, reverse engineering, benchmarking, and doing who-knows-what else to it, could I then absolve myself of this by telling them, "I just did it to see if you guys were up to anything illegal"?
This case is interesting because it pits one private organizations's pseudo-law-enforcement powers against another's ability to make up whatever terms of service they feel like. Whether the RIAA or EULAs get taken down a notch by this, the public stand to win.
Don't get me wrong, I love vim. However... most of the suggestions here have been along the lines of "vi in a browser" type ideas. This is excellent for power users, but might not suitable for the newspaper staff in question to do their content editing
vi (and emacs) have more wonderful features than almost anyone would ever use, but the learning curve that comes with this can be intimidating for some. Are the people who will be using this system tech types, or journalists? If the latter, they probably won't think that ":%s/Linux/GNU\/Linux/g" is quite as intuitive as a dialog box with boxes labelled "Find" and "Replace with".
Depending on the proficiency of the intended users, they may well be better off with some kind of plugin / applet / whatever that resembles Wordpad than trying to master an editor with hundreds of not-so-intuitive keystrokes and commands.
I ran across this article today... apparently someone is already trying to put together a mobile system around AMD's new 64-bit offering.
Monday - Check mail from the weekend. If no new lawsuits, laze through the day like everyone else.
Tuesday - Write some spam.
Wednesday - Send out spam.
Thursday - Await responses to spam.
Friday - Deposit ill-gotten gains in the bank, take off early for the weekend.
Covering all potential cases to prevent getting sued is one reason companies put so many warnings in their 10Q, part of it is also to bury the more alarming stuff so investors don't worry as much about it. As an exaggerated illustration, SCO could say:
By throwing in a couple things that aren't going to happen, the last item appears much more hypothetical than if it was all by itself.
I've also pondered whether this would be a valid approach or not. Virus stories in the media tend to portray the people who are actually spreading the viruses as innocent victims, with only the original author being the "bad guy". But the "bad guy" wouldn't have been able to do any damage unless people opened virus attachments, ran unpatched systems, and other no-no's.
Also, this type of approach is not unprecedented... if I fail to maintain my car and it spews pollution into the air, the fines are potentially quite hefty. How is an unmaintained computer spewing pollution onto the Internet that different?
In the end though, I don't such a thing will happen anytime soon. People would much rather think of themselves as victims when viruses go around than acknowledge they are contributing to the problem through irresponsibility. Also, enforcement is problematic at best. Finally, with many people afraid of technology already, the potential for running afoul of the law through their lack of knowledge would create a major backlash.
Women I know are fascinated by this game, and I'd be willing to give it more of a try, but like you have no desire to buy so many expansion packs. Most games that spawn several expansions periodically come out with cumulative versions that include the original game and first however-many expansions at a reasonable price. With The Sims, you have to buy everything separately at full price. It looks like a somewhat entertaining game, but certainly not a game worth $200 to play to me.
Okay, so we all know that C/NET owns news.com, but rather than run their site as that (which is a pretty good domain name), they point it to "news.com.com" which is just plain silly. Is there any kind of interesting story or reason behind this, or did the C/NET editors just wake up one day and decide they wanted their domain name to look more like a typographical error?
Hybrids have more promise, and are interesting from a technology point of view. Right now they're mainly for the early adopter types though, because the benefits are debatable. You pay about $3000 more for the hybrid motor than an equivalent car with a 4-cylinder gas motor, and wind up saving roughly that much in fuel over the lifetime of the car. You more or less break even financially, but for some folks the satisfaction of saving the planet is the advantage.
Or you could just say the heck with being eco-fashionable and get a real car. There's nothing quite like horsepower, displacement, and 8 cylinders of Detroit muscle. ;)
Does it have a mapping feature? Going through the first two Bard's Tales (III had a mapper) I went through so much graph paper drawing maps. For the most part, drawing them out by hand was fun, but in dungeons that went too crazy with magical darkness / spinners / teleporters making an accurate map was as hard as killing the monsters.
Unlike the modern opticals, however, the early ones didn't let you use any old surface as a mouse pad. They came with special metal mouse pads with a tiny grid of shiny and not-as-shiny areas for the mouse to track. Get the pad too scratched or dented and your mouse started working funny. I liked the pads though, having your mouse on a futuristic metal surface instead of the usual felt-covered rubber was all part of the charm.
That's a bit misleading. With Linux, you don't have to pay anything up front for the OS, and you can take whatever support strategy works best for your particular situation, from building updated sources yourself (free), downloading RPMs (free), using Red Hat's limited trial up2date (free), or getting one of the Red Hat Network subscription packages ($60+).
With Windows, you pay $300 or so up front for the OS plus whatever an office suite, developer tools, a DBMS, and the other types of apps that would have come free in the Linux distro cost you. Part of this cost goes to support, so you can use Windows Update all you want... you already paid for it. Unlike up2date and its counterparts in the other distros, however, Windows Update just updates the base OS, so you have to take additional steps to update your word processor, C++ compiler and such.
I'd say the Linux way isn't such a bad deal after all.