I think downloadable games (like Steam) is a interesting new direction for PC games to go in, but I don't like it for consoles. I guess downloading Zuma or something (I don't have a 360) is kinda cool when you're bored (though can't you get all those games for free on a PC?), but I'll take my full-length RPGs in a box with a manual, thank you, and skip the download wait and futzing around getting wifi (or long obnoxious cables) to my consoles. I also don't want, when I switch my consle because it broke/there's a shiney new redesign/the new one is backwards-compatible, to have to worry about transferring all my old games to it. Consoles are supposes to be simple, put in game and go. Anything else is a PC, and would be better played on a PC.
Microsoft themselves say that Office documents are not appropriate for sharing. Office documents are for printing or saving to PDF for e-mailing. In my experience they're right.
Then why doesn't Office have save as PDF built in?
The only question I have is whether or not any games that appeal to the Japanese audience have been released for the console yet?
I think Enchanted Arms and Dead or Alive 4, and maybe some obscure names, are it . Dead or Alive is pretty much the reason why either XBox has sold anything in Japan. It makes sense for Microsoft to do this, at least if they can't afford a price drop, but I don't think it will make that big of a difference.
Can anyone comment on the possibility that the Japanese simply don't want to buy a console from a non-Japanese company? I understand the level of nationalism over there is turned up to 11, but I could be wrong. Thoughts?
I think the problem is that Microsoft doesn't make a console that many Japanese people want. They make this huge bulky thing, when Japanese like their tiny electronics for their tiny apartments, and they don't put nearly enough Japanese-style games on it and the Japanese do not like American games nearly as much as Americans like Japanese games. The original XBox was worse than the 360, but they remember that the original XBox sucked so they're waiting for more games or price drops or not bothering.
So I don't think it's so much they hate the 360 because it's American, they just don't like it because it's made for Americans, and they're not Americans.
i don't think the beliefs of a christian leader are higher than any single 'lowly' follower's. Think of Mother Theresa. Same goes for the fanatic muslims. None of those head honchos who issue the suicide bomber fatwas do actually become suicide bombers.
Mother Theresa wasn't Jane Average Catholic. She had one the highest positions a woman can have in the Catholic Church, and could definately be considered a leader. And Islamic terrorism (not Islam, but the crazy terrorists) could be considered a cult.
Hmmmm.... something electronic, and, er, um, moisture.
You could end up electrifying your own damned Wii.
What I don't understand is why so many vibrators are not waterproof. My Hello Kitty vibe actually has openings over where the batteries are! Are they trying to kill me? So I doubt any of the Wii peripherals will be waterproof. Grr.
Why do I need a wifi connection for a console? Mine don't travel very often and I'd prefer the lower latencey and higher reliability of a wired connection anyway.
Well, I don't want a cable stretching from one end of my apartment (where my DSL modem lives), through the hallway, under doors, across the dining room and then through the living room finally to my consoles. The Wii will be my first console (well, besides my DS) that I connect to the internet, for this exact reason.
I make most of my own clothes; I have not shopped new clothes for 10 years, however the few times that i have used a dressing room, I put on a pair of new, clean underwear prior to leaving home to go shopping. This way, I have no cause to care if I am watched in the dressing rooms.
Your biggest concern about being watched in the dressing room is that your underwear might be dirty? Huh?
There is no "buying without trying" if you are a woman who wants things to actually fit.
I got around that for years by buying mens' clothes. 30/30 pants, small shirts, every brand, every store. Then I got a job were I can't wear jeans and a t-shirt everyday, so now I'm stuck again navigating the disaster that is womens' clothing. Sucks.
Re:Consumers don't care about their privacy
on
The Death of Privacy
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· Score: 4, Interesting
GMail isn't any more of a privacy mess than any other webmail, they're just a little more obvious about it. Anytime you have your mail saved on someone else's server, they can do anything they want to it, and you just won't know. So GMail has some bots looking for keywords for ads. You know that. Do you know if Hotmail or Yahoo have bots looking at your emails? Or if their security is tight enough that random employees aren't reading random emails?
Copyright - more accurately the enforcement thereof - is what gives you the *ability* (ie: makes it "practical") to charge for things that could otherwise, easily, be obtained for free (or close enough to free).
If it *could* be obtained for free without copyright, then chances are it currently is obtainable for free with copyrights. Copyright doesn't enforce anything pricewise, and it's *really* not effective against stopping people from giving stuff away for free. Copyright is effective at stopping large companies and publishers from selling things they don't have the rights to, because that's what it was designed to do in the first place. I'm not supporting piracy here, I'm just saying that copyright has obviously not been very effective against it.
Again, my only major point is that trying to equate book and software sales is disingenuous, to say the least - both with or without the existence of copyright.
Guess what? I didn't. You brought up software sales while I was talking about books. Also, we were talking in specific about a PDF book. Tell me how exactly it's more difficult to copy and distribute a PDF than it is to copy and distribute a program?
I have the Firefox extention where the mouse is a little hand, and you can grab and drag a webpage from anywhere (like a PDF) and I realized while reading your comment that I keep the mouse-hand on the left side of the screen, even though I'm using a right handed mouse. People are different. I think the submitter wants it to be an option, not force everyone to have left sided scrollbars. Just like most people don't set their mice to left handed, but it's a great option for those that like it.
I'm on an XP (Pro) computer and that's not doing anything. What's it supposed to do?
Re:Probably that you're running Ubuntu, like me.
on
GNOME 2.16 Released
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· Score: 1
I always wondered, how big of a PITA is it to do a "live update" from one release to the next with Ubuntu? Are you better off just re-installing from scratch or?
When it goes well, it's very very easy. When it doesn't go well, well, make some backups beforehand, but you should know that. I've had some bad luck, but that was with upgrading from Hoary, they've probably fixed a lot of things since then. Try the live update first, if it doesn't work you can always install from CD.
That's why CAPTCHA images should contain ALT attributes containing the solution, allowing readers to dictate it to the visually impaired.
Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of a CAPTCHA, which is to stop automated bots from using the site. A bot can read an ALT tag, so why even have a CAPTCHA then?
Zelda's a Gamecube game. As for Mario, there's only so realistic a cartoony charactor in a cartoony world can look. Give it some time, it won't be much longer before we can actually compare the systems side by side. Anyways, I haven't been that impressed with the 360's graphics (not that I've seen it in HD) so I don't think Nintendo will have too much of a problem looking good enough next to it, at least on non-HD TVs.
You said it wasn't copyright that allowed someone to "charge for stuff", and used the example of a bookshop selling books to support your argument. My point is this conclusion is wrong, because someone selling physical books is a vastly different prospect to someone trying to sell software, in a world without copyright.
You would still have the right to charge for software in a world without copyright. It wouldn't be as practical, which is one reason why we have copyrights, but copyright is certainly not what gives you the right to sell something. Copyright gives you exclusive distribution rights. There's a difference.
Could you give an example of such a work? If it has gone out of copyright why would you need permission?
We're talking about things that haven't gone out of copyright.
Can you give an example of a juristiction where copyright is valid for 200 years.
200 years was a little bit of hyperbole, but in the United States, copyright lasts for 70 years after the author's death (and possibly indefinately if the author is Walt Disney). So, in 150 years, if someone finds your book and wishes to distribute it (as part of something on historical computing? I don't know.), they would need to figure out when you died (which might be a problem - how many Marcus Greens are there?) and if it was less than 70 years ago, they will need to track down your decedents and ask them who has the copyright. Maybe you have no decendents, maybe they can't be found, maybe they just don't know who has the copyright. Then your book is not allowed to be copied, by anyone. By the time it is out of copyright, all copies could be gone. Maybe that's not so important for a Java book, but it's kinda said that's happening to all of the movies made in the first decades of the media. We're losing a lot of culture to excessive copyright terms, and that's not a good thing.
I've watched illegal immigrants walk in, show NO form of identification, register, and vote in much quicker than 4 minutes.
Assuming that's true, that's a difference of one vote. Hacking a voting machine can make the difference of thousands. Sure, we shouldn't have illegal immigrants voting (or dead people, or people voting multiple times) but that's a tiny trickle compared to the potential of widespread forgery on these crapass Diebold machines.
For 200 years. Most works only last 10 years. So for 190 years no one is making money because no one can sell it. That's just wrong.
You can sell it, you just don't have a monopoly on selling it (but you knew that)
No, you're confused. Once the orginal copyright holder disapears or dies, it becomes pretty much impossible to distribute the work because it's so hard to figure out who has the rights to get permission from. So there's a lot of classic works that are just going to die because people don't have the rights to them anymore.
What you're saying reflects how I think copyright should be. Copyright should last about 10 or 20 years or something (not 200 years), and then it's public domain. Then, if there's still a market and the creator still cares, s/he, or whoever, can still sell it, but not at a monopoly. And if the creator doesn't care, it can still be a part of culture and not be lost.
Much as I dislike copyright, your analogy is broken. Books are quite difficult to reproduce and distribute, whereas software is trivial.
It wasn't an analogy. The person I was responding to wrote a book, and I don't think anyone in this thread or even the original topic was talking specifically about software. Incidentally, since his book is in PDF, it would be just as easy to reproduce and distribute his book as it would be to reproduce and distribute software.
Slashdot Mirror
I think downloadable games (like Steam) is a interesting new direction for PC games to go in, but I don't like it for consoles. I guess downloading Zuma or something (I don't have a 360) is kinda cool when you're bored (though can't you get all those games for free on a PC?), but I'll take my full-length RPGs in a box with a manual, thank you, and skip the download wait and futzing around getting wifi (or long obnoxious cables) to my consoles. I also don't want, when I switch my consle because it broke/there's a shiney new redesign/the new one is backwards-compatible, to have to worry about transferring all my old games to it. Consoles are supposes to be simple, put in game and go. Anything else is a PC, and would be better played on a PC.
So I don't think it's so much they hate the 360 because it's American, they just don't like it because it's made for Americans, and they're not Americans.
GMail isn't any more of a privacy mess than any other webmail, they're just a little more obvious about it. Anytime you have your mail saved on someone else's server, they can do anything they want to it, and you just won't know. So GMail has some bots looking for keywords for ads. You know that. Do you know if Hotmail or Yahoo have bots looking at your emails? Or if their security is tight enough that random employees aren't reading random emails?
Guess what? I didn't. You brought up software sales while I was talking about books. Also, we were talking in specific about a PDF book. Tell me how exactly it's more difficult to copy and distribute a PDF than it is to copy and distribute a program?
I have the Firefox extention where the mouse is a little hand, and you can grab and drag a webpage from anywhere (like a PDF) and I realized while reading your comment that I keep the mouse-hand on the left side of the screen, even though I'm using a right handed mouse. People are different. I think the submitter wants it to be an option, not force everyone to have left sided scrollbars. Just like most people don't set their mice to left handed, but it's a great option for those that like it.
I'm on an XP (Pro) computer and that's not doing anything. What's it supposed to do?
How many PS1 games actually used the right stick and the L2/R2 buttons?
Zelda's a Gamecube game. As for Mario, there's only so realistic a cartoony charactor in a cartoony world can look. Give it some time, it won't be much longer before we can actually compare the systems side by side. Anyways, I haven't been that impressed with the 360's graphics (not that I've seen it in HD) so I don't think Nintendo will have too much of a problem looking good enough next to it, at least on non-HD TVs.
What you're saying reflects how I think copyright should be. Copyright should last about 10 or 20 years or something (not 200 years), and then it's public domain. Then, if there's still a market and the creator still cares, s/he, or whoever, can still sell it, but not at a monopoly. And if the creator doesn't care, it can still be a part of culture and not be lost.