You didn't notice the first part "RIAA is left out". By that the author meant that the music is not produced by major labels that are members of the RIAA cartel. And if music is not produced by the members of such cartel, then there is no need to spend all those millions on unnecessary stuff. Without the cartel, music would be really cheap, the choice would be bigger, the quality higher. But alas...
That's why communism is just as needed today
on
A College Guide to EA
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Many people believed that the collapse of Soviet Union meant that capitalism won forever (one of them was that retard Fuckuyama). This is blatantly wrong and it should be obvious to Americans. These are the very same problems that people faced in 1900s, 1910s and 1920s, it's just that it's not very common you are allowed to speak about it. Labour conditions were abysmal in many industries for many decades, EA is not really such a deviation.
The solutions to these problems are the same as ever. A temporary solution is the creation of a welfare state, a la Scandinavia, where the "national mission" is to make life fun and enjoyable for everyone by collecting enough in taxes and spending it generously (and smartly) on welfare. A better solution, the one which unfortunately was indefinitely postponed, but is inevitable anyway, is abandonment of all private property, which is the only way to destroy the alienation of people from the fruits of their labour, which is the only way to make people free.
Don't despair, it will come. We blew the chance we had in the USSR, but it will come "real soon now". Don't lose hope.
P.S. I intentionally didn't try to explain why it will come, because that's a wholly different (and very long) discussion.
Not everyone is heartless. Personally, I don't want a single person suffer from inhumane working conditions, I don't want people collapsing from stress, having heart attacks, losing loved ones because they don't have time for a relationship, only for me to receive another shiny game. If that's the price, I'd rather go outside and play frisbee, capitalism be damned. Who's with me?
Why I was boycotting EA even before this scandal
on
A College Guide to EA
·
· Score: 1
I really don't buy EA games, I just pirate them. This is not done as a sign of support for these poor programmers, no, this is done as a sign of my annoyance over the corporate brand-building fucktard, who decided that their retarded slogan "Challenge everything" deserves to be beaten into my brain by sheer repetition, probably in hopes that I would then become a lovely loyal EA-buying customer whore.
Fuck this, morons. As long as you make it impossible to avoid playing this annoying clip, I am not buying a single EA game. All other game developers have intros, publishers usually have them too, but a) pressing Esc during startup allows you not to play these b) their are not as fucking annoying c) those companies are rather small and so I am not subjected to this crap for so many titles
Not buying a game means not contributing to the market at all. EA's marketshare change only when someone buys a game - if it's their game, the market expands, their sales increase and their share increases. If it's their competitor's game, the market expands, their sales stay constant and their share decreases.
When someone pirates a game, the market stays constant, EA's sales stay constant, their marketshare doesn't change.
You really are an idiot for thinking that their sales and profits increases when someone pirates their games.
In addition to some non-traditional plain search engines I decided to test three visual search tools: Grokker - a desktop application for Windows, flash-based Kartoo and HTML-based Mooter. First I searched for "raleigh" and tried exploring the visual results. The next search was for "Alsatian dog IQ", the last for "what is the time in Sydney". I didn't expect to see the results on the first page, since these engines are not really page-oriented, I was willing to quickly refine the results using their special facilities.
It looks cool, clearly has the potential, but the algorithms for grouping the results is bad, which results in excessive exploring and browsing. Also, the program emphasises grouping of categories instead of grouping the links. So you open categories, which contain categories, which contain categories, when you would really like a clearly market relevant link.
Many results, all visible (to some extent) at once - rather impressive. Created two categories for the explorer and the city immediately. Zooming to more categories didn't show anything, zooming again shows bikes and zooming again showed "International", which had the links to charity. In the first step there were categories for Guide, Hotels, Local, Weather, News, Area, which might have been helpful if we were looking for the North Carolina city. The category for Sir Walter Raleigh appears to be very well structured. Interestingly, the bikes category had information about biking IN Raleigh (links to TriangleMTB mountain biking association).
Quite slow. It collects a lot of information during grokking, with results being gradually added to the concept map.
After expanding the map twice (clicking on the More Categories), there was one named "Average". It immediately caught my eye and after mousing over it I found a familiar title (the page, which had the IQ=60 answer). It's not as visible as it was in Google, but still better than nothing and a dedicated searcher would have probably found it.
Had the category "Local time in Sydney", which had a link to the main page of World Time Server. Nothing better than that.
Looks nice, there are a lot of additional options near the edges (found sites, refinements, etc.), but it just fails to find relevant links and present them in a coherent way.
Enough results, but the scope doesn't look as impressive as in Grokker. Had some pretty maps, with many links and keywords for the North Carolina city. Completely useless if you were looking for other "raleighs".
Rather slow.
After some browsing and page checking, found this one, where TARA, a 10 month Alsatian/Husky mix gal from Lloret de Mar, Girona Spain apparently scored 95 on an IQ test. Not something BBC had in mind, but still.
Nothing even remotedly relevant. Very irrelevant results!
Looks very simple, no clutter at all. The visual part is mostly a gimmick, as it doesn't provide anything a simple list of refinements can't.
Few results, some less pretty maps. Nothing useful, besides city-related links.
Very fast.
It had the 95 semi-result, but not the real one. Funny, the 3rd cluster had such refinements as "lap dog republican red state moron" and "attack dog on bush military service".:)
The refinements weren't really needed, since the question is so simple and the timeanddate.com result is so prevalent. But anyway, clicking on "sydney", "current", "time", "australian" or "wales" brought the list of results where the link to curr
I know that I use non-google search engines quite a lot, so I decided to contribute with my results. I repeated the test for Teoma, Vivisimo and AllTheWeb. The results are presented below in the format generally similar to that in the BBC article.
These sites don't give the time it took them, so I could only measure how fast the page loaded. My connection is relatively slow (google loads in 2-3 seconds, Yahoo in 7 seconds), so speed measurements are not very reliable or useful, but I gave them anyway.
It's not clear from the BBC article what was the exact query for the second test. I used "What's the reported IQ of an Alsatian" (without quotes) for the first attempt (later I tried this at Google and it didn't work, so consider this attempt invalid). After none of the search engines gave anything, I tried "Alsatian dog IQ" (without quotes).
Original interface with clustered results (frame-based), metasearch. 2 sponsored links.
Top 249 results only. City No 1 (6), bikes No 2 (3), charity 11 (there are 20 results per page), explorer No 17.
10 seconds
No result on the first attempt. During second attempt using the "Shepherd" cluster and the 6th result I found out that Alsatians are the 3rd smartest breed (after border collies and poodles), but no exact IQ estimate.
Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 1.
3 sponsored results (marked as such) on top, no clutter, search refinements.
8,350,000 results. Bikes No 1 (and 2), city is No 3 (4,5...), charity No 9, explorer No 13.
5 seconds
No result on the first attempt. On the second attempt it listed the relevant page at No 11 (although unlike at Google, the answer itself wasn't in the site summary).
Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 3.
Conclusions: AllTheWeb is excellent for searching, basically as good as Google (from this very limited test). Vivisimo is good for searching, clustering is very good. Teoma no as good - didn't find the charity.
Refinements at Teoma are almost as good as Jeeves. Refinements at Vivisimo the clustering is not as effective as at Jeeves (because the number of search results is smaller), but still good. Refinements at AllTheWeb, though there wasn't any for explorer or charity.
Interface is great everywhere, no gimmicks, like at A9 (which has a monstrously huge 200Kbyte page), everything is slick. Frame interface at Vivisimo is good. Not too much ads, at Vivisimo they are marked, at AllTheWeb they are marked too, but not as well, and Teoma doesn't have ads.
Next I will try some visual search tools (Grokker, Kartoo, etc.) and will post the results in the reply to this post.
MojoWorld from Pandromeda is a world-generation engine that generates fractal-based worlds with "pixel-perfect quality" (that is without obvious pixelation artefacts and loss of details in closeups). It's not yet photorealistic, but already very impressive (Gallery)
School Tycoon game developed by Cat Daddy Games - 4 sounds for a rocker guy (ollie_0.wav, ollie_1.wav, ollie_2.wav and ollie_3.wav). Tower of the Ancients, a shareware game by SmallRockets, a company EXTREMELY NOTORIOUS for combating piracy of their own games - one sound (EarthQuake.wav).
This is bullshit. No person can work for 80 hours per week and remain healthy. This is simply not possible - you will get sick, your mental health will deteriorate, your immunity will be reduced and you will be effectively screwed, as in any case after a few years your two choices would be quitting and dying.
I could somewhat agree with the notion that there is competitive pressure on EA to pay employees less or make them work longer hours to avoid outsourcing, but it still doesn't change the facts: a) Even Indian workers would not endure such treatment. b) The programmers would do more per week if they work 35 hours, have two days off, have fresh fruits in the office, lots of natural light and ergonomic furniture and good displays.
No company can run with only management because they don't actually do any of the work.
This is a blatant lie. In fact, there are many companies, such as management agencies, management consultants, etc. that can be run filled almost entirely with managers, who would do most of the work.:)
As a matter of fact (if we can trust the comments on that page), the MS Windows notebook that the Microsoftie had didn't work correctly with the multimedia projector, so they had to use another laptop, which ran Linux and Open Office.
So the conclusions are that: 1) Some notebooks doesn't always work correctly with projectors 2) Open Office is good enough to be used by MS People for presentations when they have no other choice
My 2 kopeiks as well.:-) When trying to study on one IT Master program (which was so pathetic, I'd rather not link to it), one of the students didn't even know what a browser was. Ignorance is abound.
P.S. BTW, do you know what a mind-mapping program is?
Re:Slashdot loves to astroturf for the Segway
on
Segway vs. Roomba
·
· Score: 1
You're so bitter, man, relax. There are a more than a million Roomba users and it's not like there is a lack of cheap traditional vacuum cleaners. Anything that sells as well as Roomba does probably has something to it.
As for Segway, it was a risky bet, which didn't quite pay off. It's still an amazing product and I would buy one as soon as I can.
Re:Some little problems...
on
Segway vs. Roomba
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah, I am sure that people NEVER fall when stepping into some liquid. I am sure that all those "Slippery when wet" signs are just a paranoid conspiracy designed to scare us.
Why is Segway at fault? It is not designed to operate 100% because the physical environment is inherently unpredictable and dangerous and people are clumsy. You can design a lot of safety into a product, but people will still manage to injure or kill themselves using it.
Yes, Segway has amazing next-generation tires, designed by Michelin to have extraordinary traction on any kind of terrain, but face it, there are surfaces where even the world best wheels will fail. Like molten lava or quicksand... What, are you saying that Segway can't ride over molten lava? How impractical, noone will ever use it.
But the conservative Right is more wrong than right. This statement has another meaning which is quite interesting as well. The positions of the Right are often based on irrational beliefs and so are not just different opintions (right, as in right vs. left), but are mistaken opinions (wrong). So the media sometimes leans to the left, not because it's inherently liberal, but because many of the views of lefties are correct, while the corresponding views of righties are wrong.
Well said. Scientific consensus is the only way to distinguish between truth and falsity. Yes, it doesn't always work - there can be a hypothesis which later turns out to be true, but is not yet accepted by all. However, the only way we in practice learn that it actually is true is ex post, when a consensus finally forms.
It would be great if there was a way for a lay-person to instantly tell whether "viewpoint A" or "viewpoint B" is correct, but no such way is known to us today. The best approach for us non-scientists is to wait until the scientific consensus forms and then stick to it.
Incidentally, the article linked in this story is the rare example of a journalist being right, because he writes about the only field where journalists have more experience than others - the journalism itself.:)
Saying that people should simply quit and go elsewhere is not dealing the problem of employee abuses. Absolutely right. Now everyone can go and label me a socialist (go ahead, but I actually lean more to communism), but the real solution is not even unionizing. A real solution is an outright industry strike, with trashing the offices of EA and other behemoths. It's not 1970s we are talking about when Western European countries built their socialist societies. It's fucking 1910s, with greedy capitalists heartlessly exploiting the proletariat. The companies that practice this sort of business deserve nothing less than to be burned to the ground, their CEOs lynched and their names erased from the annals of history.
Unfortunately, people are even less willing to discuss revolutionary action than they are willing to discuss perfectly legal unionizing.:( For these I have another word of advice. Sell everything you have and move to Scandinavia. Or any other place on this Earth where labour laws are upheld.
Because it's really difficult to make an audio recording.:) A camera needs to be rather high and pointed towards the screen, making it rather easy to detect (but it won't be very soon, as portable recording equipment improves). However, to record audio I just need to get the almost invisible mike out of my pocket. It's so easy, that audio watermarking is going to be absolutely pointless.
And of course, it's extremely easy to combine cam video made in one theatre (say in South Korea, or France, or Sweden) with audio recorded in the US or UK. The Borne Supremacy cam (or was it a telesync?) that I downloaded had French (or was it German) subtitles for Russian language, but the audio was English, indicating that such setup was used.
Watermarking is promising, but only if you can pull it off 100%. That is you need to develop watermarking technology that can be added to thousands of prints made, that is difficult to detect and remove, which does not negatively affect image quality, which will survive a poor quality cam recording and MPG/AVI encoding, to force all your distributors worldwide to implement camera tracking systems (and if you can't persuade the distributors in Egypt to do it, you either end up with Egiptian video + USA audio versions, or lose the money because you can't release films in this countries), all with the questionable goal of getting 50$ (two tickets + popcorn and stuff) from people, who care about your movie so little that they are content with a crap recording. Not to mention the risk that it won't work because of some ingenious trick like pressing Shift.:)
This is totally retarded and the only problem is waste of money. The legitimate moviegoers will indirectly pay for this shit. Really stupid.
Personally I don't usually care about cam versions, but telesyncs (done with a tripod in an empty theatre) are good enough for films I don't particularly care about. A screener is ok for the rest, and if there is no screener, I can wait a few months for the retail DVD-rip. Of course, if the movie is good, I can just go to the theatre to see it.:)
but that's a long way from lynch mobs trying to kill people. The problem with lynch mobs is that they are stupid. Mobs don't have strategy, vision, goals, plans and the like. They might have intentions, but mostly they just have impulses. When a mob forms with the intention to attack a presumed child molestor (though a paediatrician will do just fine too), they might be provoked into beating him, into setting his house on fire and possibly even killing him.
Any vigilantism is dangerous, but mob vigilantism is even more so.
The people here, as usually, caught the contradiction virus. Suddenly, every post modded up extols the virtues of not upgrading at all. I am sure, if the story was about prolonging the life of old software and hardware, everyone would keep blubbering about sucky Win 3.11 and boast downloading a new distro every day.
But enough complaining. My question/idea/point was how much more expensive is always living on the cuttin edge? Assuming that your local computer stores have liberal upgrade/return/replacement policies and that they have new gear in store as soon as it's released, how much, on average, would it cost to replace everything you buy every 3 months? Every 1 month? Every 6 months? Once per year? Every 3 years? Yeah, you can spend 500$ every 5 years to get a new computer (the cheapest and the slowest), but you are doomed to drag behind the curve, unable to play new games, unable to enjoy the latest technology, etc.
Alternatively, you can preorder all hardware and keep your hardware on the cutting edge. How much would it realistically cost (without spending for the sake of spending)? Instead of buying 150$ video cards every 2-3 years, worrying about framerates and basically throwing old cards away, you can buy 400$ ones when they are released, but sell your old card each time for 300$. Yeah, it's more expensive, but considering you are getting more for the money, may be it's worth it?
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't notice the first part "RIAA is left out". By that the author meant that the music is not produced by major labels that are members of the RIAA cartel. And if music is not produced by the members of such cartel, then there is no need to spend all those millions on unnecessary stuff. Without the cartel, music would be really cheap, the choice would be bigger, the quality higher. But alas...
Many people believed that the collapse of Soviet Union meant that capitalism won forever (one of them was that retard Fuckuyama). This is blatantly wrong and it should be obvious to Americans. These are the very same problems that people faced in 1900s, 1910s and 1920s, it's just that it's not very common you are allowed to speak about it. Labour conditions were abysmal in many industries for many decades, EA is not really such a deviation.
The solutions to these problems are the same as ever. A temporary solution is the creation of a welfare state, a la Scandinavia, where the "national mission" is to make life fun and enjoyable for everyone by collecting enough in taxes and spending it generously (and smartly) on welfare. A better solution, the one which unfortunately was indefinitely postponed, but is inevitable anyway, is abandonment of all private property, which is the only way to destroy the alienation of people from the fruits of their labour, which is the only way to make people free.
Don't despair, it will come. We blew the chance we had in the USSR, but it will come "real soon now". Don't lose hope.
P.S. I intentionally didn't try to explain why it will come, because that's a wholly different (and very long) discussion.
Not everyone is heartless. Personally, I don't want a single person suffer from inhumane working conditions, I don't want people collapsing from stress, having heart attacks, losing loved ones because they don't have time for a relationship, only for me to receive another shiny game. If that's the price, I'd rather go outside and play frisbee, capitalism be damned. Who's with me?
I really don't buy EA games, I just pirate them. This is not done as a sign of support for these poor programmers, no, this is done as a sign of my annoyance over the corporate brand-building fucktard, who decided that their retarded slogan "Challenge everything" deserves to be beaten into my brain by sheer repetition, probably in hopes that I would then become a lovely loyal EA-buying customer whore.
Fuck this, morons. As long as you make it impossible to avoid playing this annoying clip, I am not buying a single EA game. All other game developers have intros, publishers usually have them too, but
a) pressing Esc during startup allows you not to play these
b) their are not as fucking annoying
c) those companies are rather small and so I am not subjected to this crap for so many titles
What are you, a moron?
Not buying a game means not contributing to the market at all. EA's marketshare change only when someone buys a game - if it's their game, the market expands, their sales increase and their share increases. If it's their competitor's game, the market expands, their sales stay constant and their share decreases.
When someone pirates a game, the market stays constant, EA's sales stay constant, their marketshare doesn't change.
You really are an idiot for thinking that their sales and profits increases when someone pirates their games.
I don't have a Mac at the moment, but might get one in a few months. I'll add this to my ToDo list for now.
flash-based Kartoo and HTML-based Mooter. First I searched for "raleigh" and tried exploring the visual results. The next search was for "Alsatian dog IQ", the last for "what is the time in Sydney". I didn't expect to see the results on the first page, since these engines are not really page-oriented, I was willing to quickly refine the results using their special facilities.
Grokker:
Kartoo:
Mooter:
These sites don't give the time it took them, so I could only measure how fast the page loaded. My connection is relatively slow (google loads in 2-3 seconds, Yahoo in 7 seconds), so speed measurements are not very reliable or useful, but I gave them anyway.
It's not clear from the BBC article what was the exact query for the second test. I used "What's the reported IQ of an Alsatian" (without quotes) for the first attempt (later I tried this at Google and it didn't work, so consider this attempt invalid). After none of the search engines gave anything, I tried "Alsatian dog IQ" (without quotes).
Teoma:
- No ads, no clutter, to the right search refinements and relevant links from catalogs.
- 3,272,000 results. City is No 1 (as well as 2,4...), bikes are No 3 (and 6), explorer is No 5, charity is not on the first 6 pages.
- 7 seconds
- No result on the first attempt. No results on the second attempt.
- Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 1.
Vivisimo:- Original interface with clustered results (frame-based), metasearch. 2 sponsored links.
- Top 249 results only. City No 1 (6), bikes No 2 (3), charity 11 (there are 20 results per page), explorer No 17.
- 10 seconds
- No result on the first attempt. During second attempt using the "Shepherd" cluster and the 6th result I found out that Alsatians are the 3rd smartest breed (after border collies and poodles), but no exact IQ estimate.
- Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 1.
AllTheWeb:- 3 sponsored results (marked as such) on top, no clutter, search refinements.
- 8,350,000 results. Bikes No 1 (and 2), city is No 3 (4,5...), charity No 9, explorer No 13.
- 5 seconds
- No result on the first attempt. On the second attempt it listed the relevant page at No 11 (although unlike at Google, the answer itself wasn't in the site summary).
- Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 3.
Conclusions: AllTheWeb is excellent for searching, basically as good as Google (from this very limited test). Vivisimo is good for searching, clustering is very good. Teoma no as good - didn't find the charity.Refinements at Teoma are almost as good as Jeeves. Refinements at Vivisimo the clustering is not as effective as at Jeeves (because the number of search results is smaller), but still good. Refinements at AllTheWeb, though there wasn't any for explorer or charity.
Interface is great everywhere, no gimmicks, like at A9 (which has a monstrously huge 200Kbyte page), everything is slick. Frame interface at Vivisimo is good. Not too much ads, at Vivisimo they are marked, at AllTheWeb they are marked too, but not as well, and Teoma doesn't have ads.
Next I will try some visual search tools (Grokker, Kartoo, etc.) and will post the results in the reply to this post.
MojoWorld from Pandromeda is a world-generation engine that generates fractal-based worlds with "pixel-perfect quality" (that is without obvious pixelation artefacts and loss of details in closeups). It's not yet photorealistic, but already very impressive (Gallery)
School Tycoon game developed by Cat Daddy Games - 4 sounds for a rocker guy (ollie_0.wav, ollie_1.wav, ollie_2.wav and ollie_3.wav).
Tower of the Ancients, a shareware game by SmallRockets, a company EXTREMELY NOTORIOUS for combating piracy of their own games - one sound (EarthQuake.wav).
Buy an application, use a keygen. :)
This is bullshit. No person can work for 80 hours per week and remain healthy. This is simply not possible - you will get sick, your mental health will deteriorate, your immunity will be reduced and you will be effectively screwed, as in any case after a few years your two choices would be quitting and dying.
I could somewhat agree with the notion that there is competitive pressure on EA to pay employees less or make them work longer hours to avoid outsourcing, but it still doesn't change the facts:
a) Even Indian workers would not endure such treatment.
b) The programmers would do more per week if they work 35 hours, have two days off, have fresh fruits in the office, lots of natural light and ergonomic furniture and good displays.
No company can run with only management because they don't actually do any of the work.
:)
This is a blatant lie. In fact, there are many companies, such as management agencies, management consultants, etc. that can be run filled almost entirely with managers, who would do most of the work.
As a matter of fact (if we can trust the comments on that page), the MS Windows notebook that the Microsoftie had didn't work correctly with the multimedia projector, so they had to use another laptop, which ran Linux and Open Office.
So the conclusions are that:
1) Some notebooks doesn't always work correctly with projectors
2) Open Office is good enough to be used by MS People for presentations when they have no other choice
My 2 kopeiks as well. :-) When trying to study on one IT Master program (which was so pathetic, I'd rather not link to it), one of the students didn't even know what a browser was. Ignorance is abound.
P.S. BTW, do you know what a mind-mapping program is?
You're so bitter, man, relax. There are a more than a million Roomba users and it's not like there is a lack of cheap traditional vacuum cleaners. Anything that sells as well as Roomba does probably has something to it.
As for Segway, it was a risky bet, which didn't quite pay off. It's still an amazing product and I would buy one as soon as I can.
Yeah, I am sure that people NEVER fall when stepping into some liquid. I am sure that all those "Slippery when wet" signs are just a paranoid conspiracy designed to scare us.
Why is Segway at fault? It is not designed to operate 100% because the physical environment is inherently unpredictable and dangerous and people are clumsy. You can design a lot of safety into a product, but people will still manage to injure or kill themselves using it.
Yes, Segway has amazing next-generation tires, designed by Michelin to have extraordinary traction on any kind of terrain, but face it, there are surfaces where even the world best wheels will fail. Like molten lava or quicksand... What, are you saying that Segway can't ride over molten lava? How impractical, noone will ever use it.
But the conservative Right is more wrong than right.
This statement has another meaning which is quite interesting as well. The positions of the Right are often based on irrational beliefs and so are not just different opintions (right, as in right vs. left), but are mistaken opinions (wrong). So the media sometimes leans to the left, not because it's inherently liberal, but because many of the views of lefties are correct, while the corresponding views of righties are wrong.
Well said. Scientific consensus is the only way to distinguish between truth and falsity. Yes, it doesn't always work - there can be a hypothesis which later turns out to be true, but is not yet accepted by all. However, the only way we in practice learn that it actually is true is ex post, when a consensus finally forms.
It would be great if there was a way for a lay-person to instantly tell whether "viewpoint A" or "viewpoint B" is correct, but no such way is known to us today. The best approach for us non-scientists is to wait until the scientific consensus forms and then stick to it.
Incidentally, the article linked in this story is the rare example of a journalist being right, because he writes about the only field where journalists have more experience than others - the journalism itself. :)
Saying that people should simply quit and go elsewhere is not dealing the problem of employee abuses.
:( For these I have another word of advice. Sell everything you have and move to Scandinavia. Or any other place on this Earth where labour laws are upheld.
Absolutely right. Now everyone can go and label me a socialist (go ahead, but I actually lean more to communism), but the real solution is not even unionizing. A real solution is an outright industry strike, with trashing the offices of EA and other behemoths. It's not 1970s we are talking about when Western European countries built their socialist societies. It's fucking 1910s, with greedy capitalists heartlessly exploiting the proletariat. The companies that practice this sort of business deserve nothing less than to be burned to the ground, their CEOs lynched and their names erased from the annals of history.
Unfortunately, people are even less willing to discuss revolutionary action than they are willing to discuss perfectly legal unionizing.
Because it's really difficult to make an audio recording. :) A camera needs to be rather high and pointed towards the screen, making it rather easy to detect (but it won't be very soon, as portable recording equipment improves). However, to record audio I just need to get the almost invisible mike out of my pocket. It's so easy, that audio watermarking is going to be absolutely pointless.
And of course, it's extremely easy to combine cam video made in one theatre (say in South Korea, or France, or Sweden) with audio recorded in the US or UK. The Borne Supremacy cam (or was it a telesync?) that I downloaded had French (or was it German) subtitles for Russian language, but the audio was English, indicating that such setup was used.
Watermarking is promising, but only if you can pull it off 100%. That is you need to develop watermarking technology that can be added to thousands of prints made, that is difficult to detect and remove, which does not negatively affect image quality, which will survive a poor quality cam recording and MPG/AVI encoding, to force all your distributors worldwide to implement camera tracking systems (and if you can't persuade the distributors in Egypt to do it, you either end up with Egiptian video + USA audio versions, or lose the money because you can't release films in this countries), all with the questionable goal of getting 50$ (two tickets + popcorn and stuff) from people, who care about your movie so little that they are content with a crap recording. Not to mention the risk that it won't work because of some ingenious trick like pressing Shift. :)
:)
This is totally retarded and the only problem is waste of money. The legitimate moviegoers will indirectly pay for this shit. Really stupid.
Personally I don't usually care about cam versions, but telesyncs (done with a tripod in an empty theatre) are good enough for films I don't particularly care about. A screener is ok for the rest, and if there is no screener, I can wait a few months for the retail DVD-rip. Of course, if the movie is good, I can just go to the theatre to see it.
but that's a long way from lynch mobs trying to kill people.
The problem with lynch mobs is that they are stupid. Mobs don't have strategy, vision, goals, plans and the like. They might have intentions, but mostly they just have impulses. When a mob forms with the intention to attack a presumed child molestor (though a paediatrician will do just fine too), they might be provoked into beating him, into setting his house on fire and possibly even killing him.
Any vigilantism is dangerous, but mob vigilantism is even more so.
The people here, as usually, caught the contradiction virus. Suddenly, every post modded up extols the virtues of not upgrading at all. I am sure, if the story was about prolonging the life of old software and hardware, everyone would keep blubbering about sucky Win 3.11 and boast downloading a new distro every day.
But enough complaining. My question/idea/point was how much more expensive is always living on the cuttin edge? Assuming that your local computer stores have liberal upgrade/return/replacement policies and that they have new gear in store as soon as it's released, how much, on average, would it cost to replace everything you buy every 3 months? Every 1 month? Every 6 months? Once per year? Every 3 years? Yeah, you can spend 500$ every 5 years to get a new computer (the cheapest and the slowest), but you are doomed to drag behind the curve, unable to play new games, unable to enjoy the latest technology, etc.
Alternatively, you can preorder all hardware and keep your hardware on the cutting edge. How much would it realistically cost (without spending for the sake of spending)? Instead of buying 150$ video cards every 2-3 years, worrying about framerates and basically throwing old cards away, you can buy 400$ ones when they are released, but sell your old card each time for 300$. Yeah, it's more expensive, but considering you are getting more for the money, may be it's worth it?