Little trick that's probably already too late for you, use the fact that gmail allows you to add an arbritrary +text after your username and before the @ and that you can filter based on that to help control the spam.
i.e. Use adam.dada+slashdot@gmail.com here and setup a filter to send anything to that address to be autolabeled and to skip the inbox. If someone finds your address and starts spaming, just change your +text and set the old address to auto delete.
Beleive me, the amount of time it takes to get to level 60 is so relatively trivial that as long as you don't mind being around people's 3rd, 4th, and 5th new character as opposed to completely new kids, you won't have a problem with "everyone is more uber than I".
That sort of problem really only exsists in games where getting uber takes more than a few months.
I'm not sure in what world Prison Break would be considered a top show, however it's not mine.
Which is a damn shame since the actors playing the two brothers are favorites of mine.
But come on, a supposed genius that needs a tattoo to remind him of the name of the company that manufactured his prison toliet, the SHAPE and NAME of an Allen wrench, and out of the entire prision could only find one free bolt to turn into said wrench.
Not to mention, a warden (with prior experience at another prison no less) with the street sense of an eight year old, pointless sterotypical thugs, a weak "outside the prison we are looking for the real killer" plot, I stopped watching a few episodes in.
Maybe everything suddenly changed after that, perhaps we learn that the 'mastermind' brother was once a genious but went on a paint chip binge which resulted in his current sub-moron IQ, or perhaps the warden reveals he knew about the plan all along and was just suckering the kid into hanging himself. But frankly, to me it's just the latest crud Fox pushed out in an attempt to create another blockbuster hit and will abandon in another 10 episodes when it doesn't cause them to excrete solid gold bricks.
bleh, never put your hand down on the keyboard when looking over your shoulder to find out what a co-worker is laughing about.
What the last part of my comment was meant to include is that without the legal ability to do business in the EU, Microsoft loses access to a large market, it's dobutful they'll allow things to go that way. Especially since EU politicians are just as buyable as US or ME ones are, why bring things to a head when you can pad a few pockets and make it all go away?
To do business in the EU, just as you have to in the US, you have to have licenses, permits, etc. All of which require periodic renewal. If Microsoft simply said "See ya!" and let the fines rack up, they would not be allowed to renew those items. They would eventually no longer have the legal ability to do business in the EU. Then they would either have to settle (for a far smaller sum if history is any indicator) or pay up to be able to regain that privledge.
Also, since they have headquarters and subsidaries in the EU, those would be shut down when the licenses and permits expired.
Plus, if the EU really wanted to be mean, they could order seizures of Microsoft products being sold in EU stores.
Will any of this happen? Unlikely, but it works on paper.
When you connect to the internet via a cable modem, how do you think your data gets from one end to the other? Your cable company has to connect to a backbone through someone. So do dial-up ISPs. And ALL of them are connected through the telcos in one manner or another.
Maturity has nothing to do with what we were talking about, and the fact that you keep insisting to take that route shows something of the limitations that you are imposing on how you see the world. And that IS a judgment.
Smarts, work ethic, morals, I don't care whether you have them such a great supply that you keep extra in baskets in your garage or if you have to stand on the street begging for them. I don't care about your bank account or the number of jobs you've held while working on it.
That has nothing to do with how far you've been willing to stray from your safe crystallized view of the world into the vast mess that IS reality. Some of the laziest people I've known have been the ones who 'got life' the best. No one I have ever known, including myself, ever 'got it' when they were in their twenties. And I don't care how many credentials you toss my way, you aren't going to convince me that you have either. The mere fact that you both think that they have anything to do with it, and that there is some merit in the exercise to begin with, simply prove you still haven't.
And that's NOT a bad thing. To run, you must first learn to walk. To walk, you must first learn to crawl. To crawl, you must first learn to move your body. Would you think it shameful that a baby can not yet run?
Then why do you act as if it's an insult to be told that you don't yet know it all when you aren't even a quarter of a century old?
And for the record, while your age was a supporting factor in how I viewed your posts, it was mostly the tone and way you replied that determined what I saw.
No offense, however if you are twenty three then you ARE just starting to realize how the world works.
And that is nothing you need to be defensive about, everyone starts out with an idealized view of the world, whether they want to believe it or not. The fact that you use the idea that you are a 'scientific man' to rationalize not being able to stomache C.S. tells me that regardless of the rest of your worldview, that part is still very idealized.
"A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men." It may have been said in a work of fiction, but that doesn't make it any less true.
Why would it have to be PSP quality when there are already plans out there on how to hack your own MP3 player out of $20 of parts.
We live in an age where they sell what are meant to be (to us) disposable digital cammeras.
And these are products aimed at kids, the one demographic that you can always provide crap to and still have them act as if they are getting a deal (look at the VideoNow players, and those are in the $20-$40 range.)
Just because Travolta or Cruise are loons doesn't mean I can't be entertained by them.
Just because Heinlein was a crochety, self-righteous old man and about as perverse as one could get, doesn't mean his stories aren't fasinating.
All people are flawed, and given the vast possibilities of opinions out there, it's seldom that you'll ever find someone who doesn't disagree with you on some fundimental issue or another.
Growing disenchanted with the people you looked up to while growing up is just one of the begining stages of learning to think critically for yourself.
The next is learning not to blame them and realizing that you now have the opportunity to view their works from a different perpsective.
If you only read things written by people whom you agree with, only think about things that fit in your world view, and only tolerate opinions that match yours, all you do is reinforce your own narrow-mindedness.
The issues with the USPTO lie almost exclusively in the fact that you can patent software and software ideas and are a tribute more to how lousy an idea it is to allow software patents then they are indications of the patent offices own problems.
Software is simply too new, too versatile, and too variable to be suited to the patent model of intellectual property. And the results are that the patent office is frequently inconsistent in what they allow or don't allow, and more importantly they are often overly generous in what they allow a patent to cover.
Who says they don't? I've seen people get slapped down, drop off the net and disappear, simply for posting 'for pay' content on Usenet.
Just because they aren't in the news, doesn't mean they aren't doing it. It just happens that the *IAA's are more interested in publicity than most porn production groups.
Why do we have to turn everything in to a time limited, disposable, keep repurchasing nightmare?>
Because eveyone has to eat, and few people are willing to work for nothing and rely on the soup kitchen.
Sell Mindstorm kits at $50, have them fly off the shelves this Christmas. Have every kid in the world own a kit.
Then what? What do you sell then? Or are you going to take the miniscule profits you made off the first run and continue to pay your employees off of it? Fat Chance.
They have to continue to sell because they need your money to pay the cost of doing buisness. They charged $200 not because they were gouging, but because that's the price point where they thought they could make back the loss in repeat customers with direct profit.
Now, I'm not taking their side on the issue, I'm not taking the stance that they should just return to 100% reusable cheap parts either.
But to not see why people build obselence into their products is to have a fundemental misunderstanding of economics in this world. There is nothing wrong with trying to 'keep them coming back', the problem is when the methods you choose in themselves are poor or unethical. In Lego's case, I would agree with another poster, they've failed in either case. That's why they are pulling back from the line. They can't see a way to sell it that won't cut their throat further down the road, so they are just slowly abandoning the line. It's sad. But it's the fate of hundreds of products out there and it's simply an economic fact that not everything the public loves is going to be something a company can make money off of in the long-term, at regarldess of price.
That isn't dumbing down, that is attempting to force you to buy new sets instead of using old ones.
If 60% of your legos are 'one use only' parts, then that's 40% more you have to buy before you could do as much with them as you could a decade ago. The problem Lego has is that their product was designed to last and is always 'backwards compatable' they are afraid of saturating their market and having what happened when I was growing up. Back then, they were having problems selling sets, not because no one thought they were worth anything, but because after about three or four sets, you never needed to buy any more unless Billy managed to sitck the entire set up his nose or down the heating vents.
This is also why they are moving onto things like "Star Wars" and "Spiderman" instead of generic Space Police or 'build a city' sets. Even if you have all the pieces then, you want to buy the next set because you 'cant' build Spiderman without the 20 pieces they specially molded to make it look like Spiderman.
Mindstorm is a perfect example of the problem. They had a $200 set, and once you bought it, there wasn't any hook to make you buy more. So no one did. It didn't matter that they made huge profit on that $200 set that would have probably been more like $20 to create. If you aren't continuing to buy, then they failed.
That's your choice, and you are welcome to continue to live in the 1990's for as long as you can. However given that every argueement other than the "Valve can take their ball and go home" one has been shot down, the only real reason you could have is that you just don't want to buy games online.
Do you know what would happen if Valve suddenly just upped and turned everyone off? The next day they'd be buried under class action suits and the week later they'd have turned the servers back on and potentially permentantly unlocked the software.
Do you know what would happen if Valve suddenly just fell off the surface of the Earth? The next day people would have posted the work arounds to setting up your clients to work permentantly without the servers.
And you know what, neither of those things are ever going to happen. So worrying about them is about as productive as wondering what will become of the world when Bill Gates wakes up and realizes that the true path to happiness and heaven is in humility and a life of public service.
...with a book, once the publisher prints and sells it, that is the end of their involvement. Game developers are expected to provide warranties, support, and online resources (servers) for games after sale, and they often do even when the users don't have a right to it...
Bull Hockey! I have stacks binders full of game CD's in my computer room and I can move the complete list of ones which provided more than a cursory amount of effort into after-sales support into half a binder and still probably have room for the cd's containing the combinded patches provided by those companies.
There are a few, extremely few, companies that have supported their games offically past the six month sales mark. There are even fewer that rely on their own bandwidth these days for patches. Most rely on sites like FilePlanet or fan comminity mirrors to distribute everything.
I salute those companies, and every single game of theirs I own new. In fact, for most of them I would have to own new, because they tie access to things such as the game servers or even online access to accounts created off of CD Keys.
And I've YET to see a 'warranty' on a video game. In fact, the majority of games I purchase not only tell you specificly that they aren't warrantied, but they include even more restrictions on what you can expect in their EULA.
Nor have I seen any tech support provided (outside of a handful of patches) which wasn't in the form of static web pages which are updated off a knowledge base once a year or "please give us your CC# and we'll charge what we think the answer is worth before giving it to you".
...go to EB Games and they pay you something like $6 for a $60 game, and then sell the used copy for $50. I'd actually not be oppose to reselling MMOs, since they have a monthly fee attached in addition to the boxed cost. So companies are getting paid for the after-sale resources consumed by a used buyer....
This is called economics.
The game company shouldn't care what price the games are being resold at, but even if they did, if you don't like paying $50 for a used game, there is a quick, easy, and affordable way to win. Shell out the extra $10 and buy new.
But don't expect people to go your route simply because it sticks in your craw to spend $10 less on the latest "Tony Hawks Underground NFL 2006 NBA Tourny for Speed!" because it's used.
First off, I take it you've never been to a used book store? Never used eBay, an auction, or even Goodwill?
What's so special about game developers that they deserve protection from their products being resold used that the rest of the world doesn't have?
I don't see a problem with selling or purchasing used games at a small fraction of the cost of a new package as long as the games themselves are marked as used and aren't already 'tied' to an individual like most MMO's are.
Secondly, if a developer can't get the majority of people to purchase their games at the new game price point, that's a good sign their product deserves the bargin bin or that they need to lower their prices.
Because that's almost as bad as installing a rootkit on your machine as a trojan, one opens your computer up to all sorts of nasty tricks if you have it installed and someone else comes along to exploit it?
Sony would never do that, right? They are a responsible company which looks out for the consumer of their products?
Lets face it, Sony's had a break from reality, they'll pull this crap in an instant as long as it doesn't cost them much more in production.
But what happens when you cross the streams? Does it use Dilithium or the more unstable Trilithium matrix? Have you considered the impact your actions have on the neutrinos? I think you need to synergize to leverage your resources to network maximally. Badgers.
Slashdot Mirror
Little trick that's probably already too late for you, use the fact that gmail allows you to add an arbritrary +text after your username and before the @ and that you can filter based on that to help control the spam.
i.e. Use adam.dada+slashdot@gmail.com here and setup a filter to send anything to that address to be autolabeled and to skip the inbox. If someone finds your address and starts spaming, just change your +text and set the old address to auto delete.
In America, the only really important color you need to remember is Green. The rest are just trimming.
Beleive me, the amount of time it takes to get to level 60 is so relatively trivial that as long as you don't mind being around people's 3rd, 4th, and 5th new character as opposed to completely new kids, you won't have a problem with "everyone is more uber than I".
That sort of problem really only exsists in games where getting uber takes more than a few months.
I'm not sure in what world Prison Break would be considered a top show, however it's not mine.
Which is a damn shame since the actors playing the two brothers are favorites of mine.
But come on, a supposed genius that needs a tattoo to remind him of the name of the company that manufactured his prison toliet, the SHAPE and NAME of an Allen wrench, and out of the entire prision could only find one free bolt to turn into said wrench.
Not to mention, a warden (with prior experience at another prison no less) with the street sense of an eight year old, pointless sterotypical thugs, a weak "outside the prison we are looking for the real killer" plot, I stopped watching a few episodes in.
Maybe everything suddenly changed after that, perhaps we learn that the 'mastermind' brother was once a genious but went on a paint chip binge which resulted in his current sub-moron IQ, or perhaps the warden reveals he knew about the plan all along and was just suckering the kid into hanging himself. But frankly, to me it's just the latest crud Fox pushed out in an attempt to create another blockbuster hit and will abandon in another 10 episodes when it doesn't cause them to excrete solid gold bricks.
Death. http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE339.html
bleh, never put your hand down on the keyboard when looking over your shoulder to find out what a co-worker is laughing about.
What the last part of my comment was meant to include is that without the legal ability to do business in the EU, Microsoft loses access to a large market, it's dobutful they'll allow things to go that way. Especially since EU politicians are just as buyable as US or ME ones are, why bring things to a head when you can pad a few pockets and make it all go away?
To do business in the EU, just as you have to in the US, you have to have licenses, permits, etc. All of which require periodic renewal. If Microsoft simply said "See ya!" and let the fines rack up, they would not be allowed to renew those items. They would eventually no longer have the legal ability to do business in the EU. Then they would either have to settle (for a far smaller sum if history is any indicator) or pay up to be able to regain that privledge.
Also, since they have headquarters and subsidaries in the EU, those would be shut down when the licenses and permits expired.
Plus, if the EU really wanted to be mean, they could order seizures of Microsoft products being sold in EU stores.
Will any of this happen? Unlikely, but it works on paper.
Without the legal ability
I'd vote for Zinwrath the Movie myself. ^_^
5 8 (hope that's the right link,I'm at work.)
http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=75
You can also use the Warlock spell, Eye of Kilrogg or the engineering made Ornate Spyglass to get similar effects.
When you connect to the internet via a cable modem, how do you think your data gets from one end to the other? Your cable company has to connect to a backbone through someone. So do dial-up ISPs. And ALL of them are connected through the telcos in one manner or another.
This would affect EVERYTHING. Not just DSL.
Maturity has nothing to do with what we were talking about, and the fact that you keep insisting to take that route shows something of the limitations that you are imposing on how you see the world. And that IS a judgment.
Smarts, work ethic, morals, I don't care whether you have them such a great supply that you keep extra in baskets in your garage or if you have to stand on the street begging for them. I don't care about your bank account or the number of jobs you've held while working on it.
That has nothing to do with how far you've been willing to stray from your safe crystallized view of the world into the vast mess that IS reality. Some of the laziest people I've known have been the ones who 'got life' the best. No one I have ever known, including myself, ever 'got it' when they were in their twenties. And I don't care how many credentials you toss my way, you aren't going to convince me that you have either. The mere fact that you both think that they have anything to do with it, and that there is some merit in the exercise to begin with, simply prove you still haven't.
And that's NOT a bad thing. To run, you must first learn to walk. To walk, you must first learn to crawl. To crawl, you must first learn to move your body. Would you think it shameful that a baby can not yet run?
Then why do you act as if it's an insult to be told that you don't yet know it all when you aren't even a quarter of a century old?
And for the record, while your age was a supporting factor in how I viewed your posts, it was mostly the tone and way you replied that determined what I saw.
No offense, however if you are twenty three then you ARE just starting to realize how the world works.
And that is nothing you need to be defensive about, everyone starts out with an idealized view of the world, whether they want to believe it or not. The fact that you use the idea that you are a 'scientific man' to rationalize not being able to stomache C.S. tells me that regardless of the rest of your worldview, that part is still very idealized.
"A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men." It may have been said in a work of fiction, but that doesn't make it any less true.
Why would it have to be PSP quality when there are already plans out there on how to hack your own MP3 player out of $20 of parts.
We live in an age where they sell what are meant to be (to us) disposable digital cammeras.
And these are products aimed at kids, the one demographic that you can always provide crap to and still have them act as if they are getting a deal (look at the VideoNow players, and those are in the $20-$40 range.)
Just because Travolta or Cruise are loons doesn't mean I can't be entertained by them.
Just because Heinlein was a crochety, self-righteous old man and about as perverse as one could get, doesn't mean his stories aren't fasinating.
All people are flawed, and given the vast possibilities of opinions out there, it's seldom that you'll ever find someone who doesn't disagree with you on some fundimental issue or another.
Growing disenchanted with the people you looked up to while growing up is just one of the begining stages of learning to think critically for yourself.
The next is learning not to blame them and realizing that you now have the opportunity to view their works from a different perpsective.
If you only read things written by people whom you agree with, only think about things that fit in your world view, and only tolerate opinions that match yours, all you do is reinforce your own narrow-mindedness.
Unless you use public transit to get to your mistresses apartment, is this really an issue?
And if you do have to use public transit to get to your mistresses apartment, don't you have better things to worry about?
The issues with the USPTO lie almost exclusively in the fact that you can patent software and software ideas and are a tribute more to how lousy an idea it is to allow software patents then they are indications of the patent offices own problems.
Software is simply too new, too versatile, and too variable to be suited to the patent model of intellectual property. And the results are that the patent office is frequently inconsistent in what they allow or don't allow, and more importantly they are often overly generous in what they allow a patent to cover.
Who says they don't? I've seen people get slapped down, drop off the net and disappear, simply for posting 'for pay' content on Usenet.
Just because they aren't in the news, doesn't mean they aren't doing it. It just happens that the *IAA's are more interested in publicity than most porn production groups.
Because eveyone has to eat, and few people are willing to work for nothing and rely on the soup kitchen.
Sell Mindstorm kits at $50, have them fly off the shelves this Christmas. Have every kid in the world own a kit.
Then what? What do you sell then? Or are you going to take the miniscule profits you made off the first run and continue to pay your employees off of it? Fat Chance.
They have to continue to sell because they need your money to pay the cost of doing buisness. They charged $200 not because they were gouging, but because that's the price point where they thought they could make back the loss in repeat customers with direct profit.
Now, I'm not taking their side on the issue, I'm not taking the stance that they should just return to 100% reusable cheap parts either.
But to not see why people build obselence into their products is to have a fundemental misunderstanding of economics in this world. There is nothing wrong with trying to 'keep them coming back', the problem is when the methods you choose in themselves are poor or unethical. In Lego's case, I would agree with another poster, they've failed in either case. That's why they are pulling back from the line. They can't see a way to sell it that won't cut their throat further down the road, so they are just slowly abandoning the line. It's sad. But it's the fate of hundreds of products out there and it's simply an economic fact that not everything the public loves is going to be something a company can make money off of in the long-term, at regarldess of price.
That isn't dumbing down, that is attempting to force you to buy new sets instead of using old ones.
If 60% of your legos are 'one use only' parts, then that's 40% more you have to buy before you could do as much with them as you could a decade ago. The problem Lego has is that their product was designed to last and is always 'backwards compatable' they are afraid of saturating their market and having what happened when I was growing up. Back then, they were having problems selling sets, not because no one thought they were worth anything, but because after about three or four sets, you never needed to buy any more unless Billy managed to sitck the entire set up his nose or down the heating vents.
This is also why they are moving onto things like "Star Wars" and "Spiderman" instead of generic Space Police or 'build a city' sets. Even if you have all the pieces then, you want to buy the next set because you 'cant' build Spiderman without the 20 pieces they specially molded to make it look like Spiderman.
Mindstorm is a perfect example of the problem. They had a $200 set, and once you bought it, there wasn't any hook to make you buy more. So no one did. It didn't matter that they made huge profit on that $200 set that would have probably been more like $20 to create. If you aren't continuing to buy, then they failed.
That's your choice, and you are welcome to continue to live in the 1990's for as long as you can. However given that every argueement other than the "Valve can take their ball and go home" one has been shot down, the only real reason you could have is that you just don't want to buy games online.
Do you know what would happen if Valve suddenly just upped and turned everyone off? The next day they'd be buried under class action suits and the week later they'd have turned the servers back on and potentially permentantly unlocked the software.
Do you know what would happen if Valve suddenly just fell off the surface of the Earth? The next day people would have posted the work arounds to setting up your clients to work permentantly without the servers.
And you know what, neither of those things are ever going to happen. So worrying about them is about as productive as wondering what will become of the world when Bill Gates wakes up and realizes that the true path to happiness and heaven is in humility and a life of public service.
Welcome to 2005. Orwell was wrong.
Bull Hockey! I have stacks binders full of game CD's in my computer room and I can move the complete list of ones which provided more than a cursory amount of effort into after-sales support into half a binder and still probably have room for the cd's containing the combinded patches provided by those companies.
There are a few, extremely few, companies that have supported their games offically past the six month sales mark. There are even fewer that rely on their own bandwidth these days for patches. Most rely on sites like FilePlanet or fan comminity mirrors to distribute everything.
I salute those companies, and every single game of theirs I own new. In fact, for most of them I would have to own new, because they tie access to things such as the game servers or even online access to accounts created off of CD Keys.
And I've YET to see a 'warranty' on a video game. In fact, the majority of games I purchase not only tell you specificly that they aren't warrantied, but they include even more restrictions on what you can expect in their EULA.
Nor have I seen any tech support provided (outside of a handful of patches) which wasn't in the form of static web pages which are updated off a knowledge base once a year or "please give us your CC# and we'll charge what we think the answer is worth before giving it to you".
This is called economics.
The game company shouldn't care what price the games are being resold at, but even if they did, if you don't like paying $50 for a used game, there is a quick, easy, and affordable way to win. Shell out the extra $10 and buy new.
But don't expect people to go your route simply because it sticks in your craw to spend $10 less on the latest "Tony Hawks Underground NFL 2006 NBA Tourny for Speed!" because it's used.
First off, I take it you've never been to a used book store? Never used eBay, an auction, or even Goodwill?
What's so special about game developers that they deserve protection from their products being resold used that the rest of the world doesn't have?
I don't see a problem with selling or purchasing used games at a small fraction of the cost of a new package as long as the games themselves are marked as used and aren't already 'tied' to an individual like most MMO's are.
Secondly, if a developer can't get the majority of people to purchase their games at the new game price point, that's a good sign their product deserves the bargin bin or that they need to lower their prices.
Because that's almost as bad as installing a rootkit on your machine as a trojan, one opens your computer up to all sorts of nasty tricks if you have it installed and someone else comes along to exploit it?
Sony would never do that, right? They are a responsible company which looks out for the consumer of their products?
Lets face it, Sony's had a break from reality, they'll pull this crap in an instant as long as it doesn't cost them much more in production.
As I understand it. If you own the games, then you have the right to convert the music for those games to a format you can play per the DMCA.
But what happens when you cross the streams? Does it use Dilithium or the more unstable Trilithium matrix? Have you considered the impact your actions have on the neutrinos? I think you need to synergize to leverage your resources to network maximally. Badgers.