Ask any craftsman how long he would continue to produce crafts if he has a pile of unsold masks in the back room and the flaws in your analogy become obvious.
I hear a lot of people describing companies like Sony and the RIAA as parasitical, but no one here seems to think of file sharers as parasitical, despite their enjoying the fruits of someone else's labors for free.
Just because it is now easy to duplicate something, doesn't mean it was easy to create it. And virtual duplication, like physical duplication, still costs the creator something.
It doesn't cost much in materials to print a book, but there is a considerable amount of cost in writing, editing, and preparing the press to print it, let alone marketing it. The retail price of a book reflects this. The people involved in preparing the book expect to recoup this money, or they will find more rewarding uses for their time.
If you xerox every page of the book and take it home with you, you have not stolen anything, so you can argue that it isn't theft. You didn't take anything, right? Heck, you even paid for the xerox copies.
But the clerk at the book store probably won't let you do it, because he spent a lot of money in an effort to make the book available to you in hopes that you would buy it. He feels you are cheating him of the sale. Maybe you were likely to buy the book if you couldn't xerox it, and maybe you weren't. But no one is going to call him a nazi and a parasite because he won't let you xerox the book. They would call you a thoughtless cad for trying.
If the guy at the book store was a friend of yours and nice enough to loan you the book, it wouldn't be likely to hurt overall sales of the book, because he isn't going to make that offer to everybody that walks in the door. In fact, you might recommend the book to others and sales would benefit. But if the book store owner decided to suddenly embrace Marxism and start photocopying all of his books and giving away the copies, he wouldn't have his job very long, and neither would the publishers he is buying books from. And without a publisher, the authors would be left with the prospect of selling their own books door to door, or not at all.
That's a lot of jobs lost to an act that doesn't cost anyone anything.
Information is free. It says so in the Constitution. You can say what you want, write what you want, paint what you want and listen to or watch whatever you want. But the compiling, organizing, packaging and dissemination of information are all resource intensive activities that are most assuredly NOT free, and when you make a copy of a book or a song or a movie you are deriving the value of that activity without compensating those who labored to create that value.
Someone who derives value from someone else's labor without compensation is a parasite.
So how are file sharers any better than the RIAA? Sounds to me like two thieves arguing over another man's wallet.
Taxes are irrelevant. Money is simply an abstraction of the ability to do work. A truer indicator of the wealth of our nation is not money, but energy, which is a less debatable way of defining the ability to do work. If you want to increase the wealth of a nation, you need to either acquire more energy resources, or become more efficient at consuming the ones you already have. Money will follow.
Any other solution is just pointless bickering. Call it taxes or deficit spending, either way you are just spreading the icing a little thinner.
The flu virus can be fatal by setting off what is known as a cytokine storm, which is essentially the immune system ramped up to the point where it kills the host as well as the pathogen. There are bodily chemicals that are supposed to limit the release of cytokines so that this does not happen, but sometimes they fail to stem the tide.
I don't completely understand it, but I suspect that is why healthy adults often succumb to flu pandemics while children and elderly people survive. The healthy adults have more robust immune systems and they respond more strongly to the virus.
Cytokines produce an inflammatory response (which fights the virus but also produces all the unpleasant symptoms), so I would think that a good anti-inflammatory would help, but I'm not sure. There is a ton of good info on it at wikipedia, though. I suggest everyone read up on it before panicking.
No one in the U.S. has died yet, and I suspect that this flu outbreak has actually been going on for many months before the papers got wind of it. No one in the U.S. has died yet. I think it's a bit premature to start handing out surgical masks.
Comparing helicopters with jet-powered VTOL aircraft is an apples and oranges comparison. The helicopter is utilizing lift to stay aloft...the Harrier/JSF use only thrust to hover. They are both moving air downward, but they are using very different methods, and I don't think you could easily compare their efficiency based on a narrow portion of their performance envelope. At 40000 feet, a Harrier has far better efficiency than a helicopter, which would be plummeting like a rock with its rotor spinning uselessly in the thin air.
There is an implicit assumption by the mathematicians that people are not being rational because they are not choosing the mathematically optimal result.
But I would argue that they are choosing the evolutionarily optimal result.
Consider this: All game theory experiments in which the participants were likely to encounter the same players more than once during the experiment have indicated that the optimal strategy in the prisoners dilemma was an eye for an eye, with a tendency to cooperate or reconcile. That is, they would be inclined to trust the other guy, unless the other guy defects. This offers the best chance of achieving optimal results over multiple games.
This is exactly what the participants did in the math study. And this is how people generally behave in a social society.
Contrast that with a game where the participants are never known to one another and unlikely to encounter each other twice. In those scenarios, the optimum strategy was to screw your neighbor (defect). This was the strategy considered optimal by the mathematicians in the article. Since this is an unnatural environment, it is small wonder that the participants appeared to behave irrationally. But you don't need special math to describe it.
This must be one of the most self-serving organizations on the planet. Why on Earth anyone would want to join them is beyond me. Their annual dues BEGIN at 90 dollars a year and are adjusted on a sliding scale for an author's writing income(!) In exchange, what do they provide? A quarterly newsletter, "discount" health, legal and web services, and, uh, oh yes, they will work very hard to sue anyone attempting to promote your writing, like Google, Amazon, etc.
Just how do they recruit members? Do they send trench-coated representatives in the middle of the night to your house and make you an offer you can't refuse? Do they even have any members? Who is bankrolling these nutballs?
I smell a scam. It smells a lot like lawyers looking for work...
While everyone is caught up in the spirit of finger pointing, let's not forget to shine the light on the IT industry, who has soaked up billions of dollars while promising better education through technology....which has had little tangible result other than giving the schools one more mouth to feed.
The fact is, school spending is less than productive because the community as a whole treats the schools as a deep-pocketed marketplace for their wares. The union is not the cartel. The cartel is a city full of nine-to-fivers living in a parasitic relationship with their own children's future. We herd them off to our taxpayer-financed daycare so we can go to jobs that thrive on selling overpriced textbooks, photo portraits, candy bars, magazine subscriptions, soda, software, self-help seminars, computers and construction projects to cash-strapped schools and then blame the teachers when the buses can't afford to run and our kids demonstrate little interest in taking government mandated tests all week.
Guess what? We have met the enemy, and he's right there in your mirror in the morning. Quit blaming others and step up. We give tax breaks to churches, drop piles of money in their collection plates every week and line up to volunteer for their programs. Why do the schools have to go begging?
THANK you. That really needed to be said. I enjoy the show, because I am generally hungry for any science fiction on TV, but I find it largely devoid of any logic. Why would a race of machines attempt to exterminate 99% of the human race, and then follow the rest around trying to convert them to monotheism like a bunch of horny space baptists? Why would anyone ever attempt to defect to another species? Why wouldn't they be blasted out of the nearest airlock if they were even suspected of doing so? Why don't Cylons come in more flavors than Baskin Robbins? Did someone really think it was more efficient to keep twenty thousand copies of themselves in orbit rather than just keep the blueprints on file? Why would a machine build a new improved model of itself that was nearly identical to a species it considered inferior, and then put it in charge? If a machine wanted a baby, why wouldn't it just build one?
The series may pose some interesting moral questions, but it also poses a lot of stupid ones, too...and leaves them unanswered.
I think plenty of people "get" the new economy, and the impact of the internet on media. The problem (for publishers and content producers, anyway) is that no one has quite figured out how to make a buck from a culture that has become accustomed to getting their news and entertainment for free. Advertising isn't working, because people have a choice now, and advertisers finally have the ability to quantify just how ignored their ads really are. Subscriptions aren't working, because there are a million monkeys with keyboards churning out similar drivel just around the corner. The long tail works for the retailer wagging it, but not for content creators, who get the smelly end of the beast.
Why is it every advance in technology seems to rob us of interesting jobs, while the broom-pushing and dirt-hauling jobs remain the province of men?
My wife worked at a Dunkin Donuts once...for about two hours. The little old Chinese lady running it asked her to go get some donuts out of the back, and when she turned on the light of the storeroom, she saw roaches scurrying all over them. When she told the old woman about it, her attitude was "Phah, just knock them off."
She left and called the local health inspector. That shop closed the next day.
The tech community has an almost diametrically opposed attitude to permanence than exists in the art world. Artists have always had great concern for the permanence of their work. The reason you can still see paintings that were created hundreds of years ago is because their creators rendered them on...and with....media that was mixed with permanence uppermost in mind.
This is why fine art paints have such catchy names as "burnt umber". They don't describe the color, they describe the chemical process used to create them. All modern paints have numbers that actually rate their lightfastness and permanence. The most permanent colors are ones made from naturally existing, inorganic materials. If you are going to spend hundreds of hours working on a painting, you don't want it to fade in the first flash of sunlight.
Contrast this with programming, where no one can be bothered to even comment their code for the guy in the next cubicle, and everything is obsolete within a decade. I have CD's (the format that was reputed to last a hundred years) that have gone bad in just a few years, the data on them often irrevocably lost. It was only after the complaints rolled in that the printing companies started making inks that lasted more than a year. Half of my perfectly serviceable hardware gets shunted into the closet every time Steve Jobs has a new idea for something newer and faster. The whole "planned obsolescence" meme inherent in our commercial culture seems to have become magnified in the tech world, where the tools we all now use to do our work are designed as much by marketers as by engineers, and their utility is entirely dependent upon the continuing existence of the monopolies that sell them.
This is a bad, bad thing.
I am already a slave to the whims of Adobe. My artwork is in constant peril of destruction if I do not take great pains to insure a multitude of copies exist on it in a variety of media. I have lost more than one collection of art to the decision of my toolmaster to quit supporting some older, proprietary file format. Many digital works I have printed have already faded. I recently had to buy a PC for no other reason than I needed to be able to work with files a client had. I've been backed into unwanted software upgrades for the same reason. And it took less than three months of Vista to make it obvious just how long all those video games are going to last.
My traditional artwork still sits quietly in a box, as legible as the day I created it. The brush I bought to paint with over twenty years ago still works as well as when I bought it...even on new paper.
I think there is an increasing disconnect with the natural world and modern living that will eventually bite everyone in their collective behinds if we don't come to terms with it, and our latest virtual utopia is the most conspicuous manifestation of that disconnect. There is great power to be had with all of this new technology. But it needs to be employed with an eye on the future, not the company bottom line.
Otherwise, we stand to lose all that we have created with it.
The writing is on the wall for PC's. As soon as gaming went mainstream, they had one foot in the grave. Most sane people don't want to spend half their sparse leisure time monkeying with video drivers, downloading patches, watching scroll bars, ad nauseum...they just want to play. The console offers a good and reliable gaming experience, the PC does not. With the continued proliferation of HD sets and a wider variety of controller options (thanks to USB), there is very little a PC game can offer that a console cannot. (I'm a flight simmer, so I have always lamented the lack of realistic flight sims for the console, but HD and increasing computing power is changing that, too...the IL-2 codebase has been leveraged to make the first honest flight sim on the xbox due next year, and the in-game video I've seen of it blows the PC version away)
Given the growing number of compelling reasons to buy a console, the increasing number of reasons to NOT want to own a PC (Vista, cell phones with tricorder-like capabilities, etc ), and the ever shrinking shelf of non-returnable PC games in your local game store, I'd say that arguing about the future of DRM in PC gaming is like fighting over the paddle in a canoe headed down the Niagara...
Does anyone else think the bridge photo looks like a bad SNL sketch of Star Trek? Why does Uhuru look like she is about to check and see if our table is ready?
That sounds unlikely to me. The autopilot is generally not engaged until a few minutes after takeoff. Even if it disengaged suddenly during a stable ascent, there is no reason for the plane to suddenly start falling out of the sky. (That would be a stall, and commercial airliners have so many stall warning devices that it requires some truly extraordinary circumstances to stall one.)
In any event, if your airliner was stalled for a good ten seconds, you would have lost several thousands of feet and would probably no longer be around to complain about it.
It is actually far more likely that a small plane blundered into the flight path or the airliner and forced a temporary altitude change to avoid him (Happens all the time...there is significant tension between the airlines and GA pilots for this reason).
What information do you have that makes you believe the pilot was lying?
A Mustang can pull over 8g's when maneuvering (more than you can, without training or a pressure suit). I wouldn't want to be in an Airbus if a pilot tried that...
Boo-hoo, get motivated? Yes, you have only yourself to blame as a single earner who overpaid for his worthless degree and now must work seventy hours a week mopping floors to make ends meet. You have only yourself to blame if you are a single mom whose deadbeat dad split and left you with three mouths to feed, no alimony and a GED. You have only yourself to blame if you lost your legs digging in the desert for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and can now only survive on welfare checks and the legendary quality of VA medical services.
Yes, boo-hoo for the fat guy bringing up the rear when the lions attack.
Very compassionate.
Just because you embrace social Darwinism doesn't mean you need to sit by the pit and cheer when the lion eats another Christian.
I have used the DMCA to have Cafepress remove products that were using my artwork without permission. I would have preferred to simply contact the sellers directly and talked it out (Theses particular copyright violations I believed to be honest mistakes), but no contact information was available, and Cafepress wouldn't give it to me.
I could not have afforded to take legal action, so in that case, the DMCA served its purpose.
Like most laws, the DMCA works fine when employed as intended in good faith. The problem is that, like most laws, it is subject to abuse by powerful entities with no incentive to act in good faith.
Griping about the DMCA won't make the world better. Making corporations accountable for their misdeeds will.
Further, we here at Slashdot, who are probably biased heavily to the educated, analytical, and practical, will always see through more of the scams.
...because we here at Slashdot never fall for bogus news articles, inflated claims by hardware manufacturers, or the promise of yet another best programming language ever.
Slashdot Mirror
Ask any craftsman how long he would continue to produce crafts if he has a pile of unsold masks in the back room and the flaws in your analogy become obvious.
I hear a lot of people describing companies like Sony and the RIAA as parasitical, but no one here seems to think of file sharers as parasitical, despite their enjoying the fruits of someone else's labors for free.
Just because it is now easy to duplicate something, doesn't mean it was easy to create it. And virtual duplication, like physical duplication, still costs the creator something.
It doesn't cost much in materials to print a book, but there is a considerable amount of cost in writing, editing, and preparing the press to print it, let alone marketing it. The retail price of a book reflects this. The people involved in preparing the book expect to recoup this money, or they will find more rewarding uses for their time.
If you xerox every page of the book and take it home with you, you have not stolen anything, so you can argue that it isn't theft. You didn't take anything, right? Heck, you even paid for the xerox copies.
But the clerk at the book store probably won't let you do it, because he spent a lot of money in an effort to make the book available to you in hopes that you would buy it. He feels you are cheating him of the sale. Maybe you were likely to buy the book if you couldn't xerox it, and maybe you weren't. But no one is going to call him a nazi and a parasite because he won't let you xerox the book. They would call you a thoughtless cad for trying.
If the guy at the book store was a friend of yours and nice enough to loan you the book, it wouldn't be likely to hurt overall sales of the book, because he isn't going to make that offer to everybody that walks in the door. In fact, you might recommend the book to others and sales would benefit. But if the book store owner decided to suddenly embrace Marxism and start photocopying all of his books and giving away the copies, he wouldn't have his job very long, and neither would the publishers he is buying books from. And without a publisher, the authors would be left with the prospect of selling their own books door to door, or not at all.
That's a lot of jobs lost to an act that doesn't cost anyone anything.
Information is free. It says so in the Constitution. You can say what you want, write what you want, paint what you want and listen to or watch whatever you want. But the compiling, organizing, packaging and dissemination of information are all resource intensive activities that are most assuredly NOT free, and when you make a copy of a book or a song or a movie you are deriving the value of that activity without compensating those who labored to create that value.
Someone who derives value from someone else's labor without compensation is a parasite.
So how are file sharers any better than the RIAA? Sounds to me like two thieves arguing over another man's wallet.
Taxes are irrelevant. Money is simply an abstraction of the ability to do work. A truer indicator of the wealth of our nation is not money, but energy, which is a less debatable way of defining the ability to do work. If you want to increase the wealth of a nation, you need to either acquire more energy resources, or become more efficient at consuming the ones you already have. Money will follow.
Any other solution is just pointless bickering. Call it taxes or deficit spending, either way you are just spreading the icing a little thinner.
The flu virus can be fatal by setting off what is known as a cytokine storm, which is essentially the immune system ramped up to the point where it kills the host as well as the pathogen. There are bodily chemicals that are supposed to limit the release of cytokines so that this does not happen, but sometimes they fail to stem the tide.
I don't completely understand it, but I suspect that is why healthy adults often succumb to flu pandemics while children and elderly people survive. The healthy adults have more robust immune systems and they respond more strongly to the virus.
Cytokines produce an inflammatory response (which fights the virus but also produces all the unpleasant symptoms), so I would think that a good anti-inflammatory would help, but I'm not sure. There is a ton of good info on it at wikipedia, though. I suggest everyone read up on it before panicking.
No one in the U.S. has died yet, and I suspect that this flu outbreak has actually been going on for many months before the papers got wind of it. No one in the U.S. has died yet. I think it's a bit premature to start handing out surgical masks.
Comparing helicopters with jet-powered VTOL aircraft is an apples and oranges comparison. The helicopter is utilizing lift to stay aloft...the Harrier/JSF use only thrust to hover. They are both moving air downward, but they are using very different methods, and I don't think you could easily compare their efficiency based on a narrow portion of their performance envelope. At 40000 feet, a Harrier has far better efficiency than a helicopter, which would be plummeting like a rock with its rotor spinning uselessly in the thin air.
Woohoo! My first mod point. At last, I have geek cred :-)
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go install Linux...
There is an implicit assumption by the mathematicians that people are not being rational because they are not choosing the mathematically optimal result.
But I would argue that they are choosing the evolutionarily optimal result.
Consider this: All game theory experiments in which the participants were likely to encounter the same players more than once during the experiment have indicated that the optimal strategy in the prisoners dilemma was an eye for an eye, with a tendency to cooperate or reconcile. That is, they would be inclined to trust the other guy, unless the other guy defects. This offers the best chance of achieving optimal results over multiple games.
This is exactly what the participants did in the math study. And this is how people generally behave in a social society.
Contrast that with a game where the participants are never known to one another and unlikely to encounter each other twice. In those scenarios, the optimum strategy was to screw your neighbor (defect). This was the strategy considered optimal by the mathematicians in the article. Since this is an unnatural environment, it is small wonder that the participants appeared to behave irrationally. But you don't need special math to describe it.
We are hard wired to cooperate.
That IS rational.
Speaking as a starving artist who has been living off of used Macs for a while, um, no, I don't think it's funny. I think it sucks.
To think I used to complain about the cost of art supplies. Argghhh.
I feel like an overworked streetwalker with two pimps...Apple and Adobe.
This must be one of the most self-serving organizations on the planet. Why on Earth anyone would want to join them is beyond me. Their annual dues BEGIN at 90 dollars a year and are adjusted on a sliding scale for an author's writing income(!) In exchange, what do they provide? A quarterly newsletter, "discount" health, legal and web services, and, uh, oh yes, they will work very hard to sue anyone attempting to promote your writing, like Google, Amazon, etc.
Just how do they recruit members? Do they send trench-coated representatives in the middle of the night to your house and make you an offer you can't refuse? Do they even have any members? Who is bankrolling these nutballs?
I smell a scam. It smells a lot like lawyers looking for work...
You mean, like carpool lanes?
Gee, it's nice to see the government is getting busy creating new jobs.
While everyone is caught up in the spirit of finger pointing, let's not forget to shine the light on the IT industry, who has soaked up billions of dollars while promising better education through technology....which has had little tangible result other than giving the schools one more mouth to feed.
The fact is, school spending is less than productive because the community as a whole treats the schools as a deep-pocketed marketplace for their wares. The union is not the cartel. The cartel is a city full of nine-to-fivers living in a parasitic relationship with their own children's future. We herd them off to our taxpayer-financed daycare so we can go to jobs that thrive on selling overpriced textbooks, photo portraits, candy bars, magazine subscriptions, soda, software, self-help seminars, computers and construction projects to cash-strapped schools and then blame the teachers when the buses can't afford to run and our kids demonstrate little interest in taking government mandated tests all week.
Guess what? We have met the enemy, and he's right there in your mirror in the morning. Quit blaming others and step up. We give tax breaks to churches, drop piles of money in their collection plates every week and line up to volunteer for their programs. Why do the schools have to go begging?
THANK you. That really needed to be said. I enjoy the show, because I am generally hungry for any science fiction on TV, but I find it largely devoid of any logic. Why would a race of machines attempt to exterminate 99% of the human race, and then follow the rest around trying to convert them to monotheism like a bunch of horny space baptists? Why would anyone ever attempt to defect to another species? Why wouldn't they be blasted out of the nearest airlock if they were even suspected of doing so? Why don't Cylons come in more flavors than Baskin Robbins? Did someone really think it was more efficient to keep twenty thousand copies of themselves in orbit rather than just keep the blueprints on file? Why would a machine build a new improved model of itself that was nearly identical to a species it considered inferior, and then put it in charge? If a machine wanted a baby, why wouldn't it just build one?
The series may pose some interesting moral questions, but it also poses a lot of stupid ones, too...and leaves them unanswered.
I miss Babylon Five.
I think plenty of people "get" the new economy, and the impact of the internet on media. The problem (for publishers and content producers, anyway) is that no one has quite figured out how to make a buck from a culture that has become accustomed to getting their news and entertainment for free. Advertising isn't working, because people have a choice now, and advertisers finally have the ability to quantify just how ignored their ads really are. Subscriptions aren't working, because there are a million monkeys with keyboards churning out similar drivel just around the corner. The long tail works for the retailer wagging it, but not for content creators, who get the smelly end of the beast.
Why is it every advance in technology seems to rob us of interesting jobs, while the broom-pushing and dirt-hauling jobs remain the province of men?
I totally agree. Frustratingly, there seems to always be a backlash against just the sort of digital data gathering that serving relevant ads demand.
But you are absolutely right, and that was a very well-written response. Kudos.
My wife worked at a Dunkin Donuts once...for about two hours. The little old Chinese lady running it asked her to go get some donuts out of the back, and when she turned on the light of the storeroom, she saw roaches scurrying all over them. When she told the old woman about it, her attitude was "Phah, just knock them off."
She left and called the local health inspector. That shop closed the next day.
Sometimes criticism is GOOD.
The tech community has an almost diametrically opposed attitude to permanence than exists in the art world. Artists have always had great concern for the permanence of their work. The reason you can still see paintings that were created hundreds of years ago is because their creators rendered them on...and with....media that was mixed with permanence uppermost in mind.
This is why fine art paints have such catchy names as "burnt umber". They don't describe the color, they describe the chemical process used to create them. All modern paints have numbers that actually rate their lightfastness and permanence. The most permanent colors are ones made from naturally existing, inorganic materials. If you are going to spend hundreds of hours working on a painting, you don't want it to fade in the first flash of sunlight.
Contrast this with programming, where no one can be bothered to even comment their code for the guy in the next cubicle, and everything is obsolete within a decade. I have CD's (the format that was reputed to last a hundred years) that have gone bad in just a few years, the data on them often irrevocably lost. It was only after the complaints rolled in that the printing companies started making inks that lasted more than a year. Half of my perfectly serviceable hardware gets shunted into the closet every time Steve Jobs has a new idea for something newer and faster. The whole "planned obsolescence" meme inherent in our commercial culture seems to have become magnified in the tech world, where the tools we all now use to do our work are designed as much by marketers as by engineers, and their utility is entirely dependent upon the continuing existence of the monopolies that sell them.
This is a bad, bad thing.
I am already a slave to the whims of Adobe. My artwork is in constant peril of destruction if I do not take great pains to insure a multitude of copies exist on it in a variety of media. I have lost more than one collection of art to the decision of my toolmaster to quit supporting some older, proprietary file format. Many digital works I have printed have already faded. I recently had to buy a PC for no other reason than I needed to be able to work with files a client had. I've been backed into unwanted software upgrades for the same reason. And it took less than three months of Vista to make it obvious just how long all those video games are going to last.
My traditional artwork still sits quietly in a box, as legible as the day I created it. The brush I bought to paint with over twenty years ago still works as well as when I bought it...even on new paper.
I think there is an increasing disconnect with the natural world and modern living that will eventually bite everyone in their collective behinds if we don't come to terms with it, and our latest virtual utopia is the most conspicuous manifestation of that disconnect. There is great power to be had with all of this new technology. But it needs to be employed with an eye on the future, not the company bottom line.
Otherwise, we stand to lose all that we have created with it.
The writing is on the wall for PC's. As soon as gaming went mainstream, they had one foot in the grave. Most sane people don't want to spend half their sparse leisure time monkeying with video drivers, downloading patches, watching scroll bars, ad nauseum...they just want to play. The console offers a good and reliable gaming experience, the PC does not. With the continued proliferation of HD sets and a wider variety of controller options (thanks to USB), there is very little a PC game can offer that a console cannot. (I'm a flight simmer, so I have always lamented the lack of realistic flight sims for the console, but HD and increasing computing power is changing that, too...the IL-2 codebase has been leveraged to make the first honest flight sim on the xbox due next year, and the in-game video I've seen of it blows the PC version away)
Given the growing number of compelling reasons to buy a console, the increasing number of reasons to NOT want to own a PC (Vista, cell phones with tricorder-like capabilities, etc ), and the ever shrinking shelf of non-returnable PC games in your local game store, I'd say that arguing about the future of DRM in PC gaming is like fighting over the paddle in a canoe headed down the Niagara...
Does anyone else think the bridge photo looks like a bad SNL sketch of Star Trek? Why does Uhuru look like she is about to check and see if our table is ready?
That sounds unlikely to me. The autopilot is generally not engaged until a few minutes after takeoff. Even if it disengaged suddenly during a stable ascent, there is no reason for the plane to suddenly start falling out of the sky. (That would be a stall, and commercial airliners have so many stall warning devices that it requires some truly extraordinary circumstances to stall one.)
In any event, if your airliner was stalled for a good ten seconds, you would have lost several thousands of feet and would probably no longer be around to complain about it.
It is actually far more likely that a small plane blundered into the flight path or the airliner and forced a temporary altitude change to avoid him (Happens all the time...there is significant tension between the airlines and GA pilots for this reason).
What information do you have that makes you believe the pilot was lying?
A Mustang can pull over 8g's when maneuvering (more than you can, without training or a pressure suit). I wouldn't want to be in an Airbus if a pilot tried that...
Boo-hoo, get motivated? Yes, you have only yourself to blame as a single earner who overpaid for his worthless degree and now must work seventy hours a week mopping floors to make ends meet. You have only yourself to blame if you are a single mom whose deadbeat dad split and left you with three mouths to feed, no alimony and a GED. You have only yourself to blame if you lost your legs digging in the desert for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and can now only survive on welfare checks and the legendary quality of VA medical services.
Yes, boo-hoo for the fat guy bringing up the rear when the lions attack.
Very compassionate.
Just because you embrace social Darwinism doesn't mean you need to sit by the pit and cheer when the lion eats another Christian.
Woohoo!
WTF?
I have used the DMCA to have Cafepress remove products that were using my artwork without permission. I would have preferred to simply contact the sellers directly and talked it out (Theses particular copyright violations I believed to be honest mistakes), but no contact information was available, and Cafepress wouldn't give it to me.
I could not have afforded to take legal action, so in that case, the DMCA served its purpose.
Like most laws, the DMCA works fine when employed as intended in good faith. The problem is that, like most laws, it is subject to abuse by powerful entities with no incentive to act in good faith.
Griping about the DMCA won't make the world better. Making corporations accountable for their misdeeds will.
Further, we here at Slashdot, who are probably biased heavily to the educated, analytical, and practical, will always see through more of the scams.
...because we here at Slashdot never fall for bogus news articles, inflated claims by hardware manufacturers, or the promise of yet another best programming language ever.
If you've never had the munchies or gotten paranoid or giggled uncontrollably, try inhaling next time.