If you are not careful, you absolutely can click on the X and count as a click through, because some of these scum sucking low lifes just put a picture of an X there and it is not really the close button. Sometimes you can tell because your windows theme is different and they have made a static picture of the standard close X. I'm sure plenty of people are fooled by that.
Actually, with the rise in Flash-based ads (including autoplay videos), more and more ads appear in the browser with a custom close button anyway. There is no way of telling the real ones from the fakes any more.
Bullshit. Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination. Period. You may call it "positive sexism" but it's still sexism. (It's also weird how this "positive sexism" doesn't apply to increasing the number of men teaching elementary school or the number of women garbage collectors. Wonder why THAT is.)
If I tell my best friend he's talking bullshit, he isn't likely to take offence, as he knows how much I respect him and his views. If I tell a stranger he's talking bullshit, it's offensive, because there is no background of respect between us. Therefore I discriminate between people in the way I speak to them. Is it not clear, then, that discrimination is not inherently a bad thing?
Sexism is a lack of equality of respect, not mere lack of parity in opportunity.
At the weekend, I had to do the "false boyfriend" trick to get a overly insistent guy to leave a friend of mine alone. Her multiple refusals weren't enough to shut him up, but just by putting my arm round her waist and saying her name, I shut him up completely. Would you like to be a woman in a world like this? Where you need a man to "save" you from another man?
And that means we need to trick girls who'd rather be doing something else into coding, why, exactly?
The same reason why we trick them into reading and writing while they'd rather be climbing trees, or trick them into arithmetic when they rather be bouncing a rubber ball off the wall. It's a controversial notion that I like to call "education".
As a geek, what is this bullshit that one has to be interested in computers and particularly in coding? There is engineering, math and yes, criminalistics.
Coding is a general skill - there isn't a single white-collar job that can't be automated to improve efficiency, if only people knew how to do it. When I moved from programming into "IT" (apps, servers and networks), my bosses gave me various shitty data entry/collection tasks. It hadn't occurred to them that manual work was a mugs game. The first morning of each task I spent experimenting to refine batch scripts, keyboard macros etc. By lunchtime, I'd have a quick-and-dirty process that produced a text file with false positives, but with no false negatives missing. I filtered out the false positives and finished early for the day. Then the next day I sat twiddling my thumbs until they came up with another job for me, as I'd just done three or more days' work in a single day. I can imagine many situations where a forensic scientist might want to batch process comparisons of test results - finding family links in DNA samples, for instance.
"Sexism" is believing yourself superior to others based on your biological gender. If the campaign said "We must get more women coding as men are rubbish coders," that would be sexist. Positive discrimination to redress the balance is not sexism. Even if you believe in strong inherent gender differences, you still want more women to learn computers; hell, ESPECIALLY if you believe in gender differences. Everything in the world needs computers, and developers are more efficient if they understand the systems that they're creating, so we need programmers with every possible type of background.
Or, conversely, the politicians that ban guns in all federal buildings yet believe wholeheartedly that anyone should be able to carry semi-automatic assault rifles into their local Walmart.
Those tend not to be the same politicians.
Go on, find me one politician that complains that visitors to his office aren't allowed to come in with a Smith & Weston hanging from their waist....
It's no different from TicketMaster, really. Your ticket is a contract between you and the company responsible for the event.
Well, actually it is different from TicketMaster, because TM explicitly states that the booking fee is an agent's fee and not refundable, and by leaving that out, KS leave the projects liable for all money paid by the backers -- if you cancelled a KS project the day after receiving funding, you'd immediately lose cash.
1. There are HTML versions of many of the articles.
Many != all.
2. We're giving this away for free! To share and adapt. Feel free to pull the text from the PDFs and put it up on GitHub.
How nice. You've put it up to share and adapt... in a delivery format, not an edit format. You presumably have source files (I doubt the copy was originally written directly in Acrobat) but you won't burden us with them, you'll just give us your blessing to fight with copying and pasting from PDF.
If you're still angry about PDFs, we'll happily give you your money back... Oh wait, you got it for free!:-)
That's no excuse. You built up a lot of goodwill (and generated crowdfunding) with your promise of adaptible content, and you've left up an irritating barrier to adaptation.
Also, I was under the impression that PDF was an open format, just Adobe's reader is closed. PDF will make most people happy.
Have you ever tried to copy the text out of a PDF? It's a horrible exercise where you spend the rest of the even reinserting spaces and reordering weird phantom jumps. PDF is a delivery format, not a format for editing.
Kickstarter project creators are obliged to deliver on their promises. This leaves four options, deliver, refund, renegotiate or declare bankrupcy. Frontier Developments is a long-running company and can't afford to declare bankrupcy over a single project. Renegotiating with every dissatisfied customer/backer would be a long, slow process, so the offer of a refund is the best option. If they don't immediately have the cash to support it, then they'll have to defer payment until the game is on sale and further copies sold.
No, I have a mobile phone, which also means I live in a country that has reasonably adequate consumer protection. For example, I have a 3G phone with a network provider that does not allow tethering on any of their current offerings, but my 2012 prepay SIM deal allows it. They don't want any tethering, but they can't stop me, because that's the deal we agreed, and they would have to renegotiate with me. I'm currently missing out on slightly lower prices, but as a tradeoff I can use my iPad for browsing, instead of the tiny screen.
I'm using the legal definition. If we argue semantics we'll end up including psychological investment, where people align their ego with the product and therefore refuse to evaluate it objectively. IE "every fanboy is an investor". That would, of course, be stupid. We're talking about legal status, so for now let's talk in legal terms.
WE ALL DO IT, because we work in a field where it is impossible to know everything before you implement,
This is precisely why we need to write maintainable code, because we don't have the luxury of just writing it and forgetting about it. My current (personal) code project is pure design-by-prototype, and I was getting back into coding after a hiatus. My earliest work had to be completely rewritten because it wasn't tolerant to changes, and kept suffering exponential bloat and becoming undebuggable. So I modularised, I increased encapsulation and I decreased coupling. I did this without having to think too much about it -- I just had to be a tiny bit more patient. Every time I spend a bit of time working on the project, my coding gets cleaner and cleaner, and every time changes get easier to make.
I would ask you to be less rude in future, and I'm not referring to you telling me to fuck off. No, I'm referring to those nasty words "best practices" and "coding standards". These things are nothing more than lip-service to code hygiene -- the academic approach relies on teaching understanding of the consequence of decisions, which equips the individual coder to make an informed decision based on the needs of the individual project in question. "Coding standards" and "best practices" are blunt instruments that impose rules without any regard to the appropriacy to the situation.
A good kitchen hygiene programme doesn't just tell you "touched something? Wash your hands!" but provides you with an understanding of what it means to touch different things in differen (eg knowing that boiling kills all germs means you know you're not going to need to wash your hands to pick up a single potato that was left out of the pot after cutting raw chicken). That's basically the same as the difference between genuine code hygiene and best practices/coding standards/design patterns.
I'm not expecting anyone to be perfect. None of us reach the unobtainable academic ideal of perfect encapsulation and no unnecessary coupling, but you can't help but internalise some of it. People who've been taught code hygiene still produce hacky code, but it's at least a little less hacky than self-taught coders, in general, at least.
There's also a tonne of quick and dirty code that proves itself incredibly useful, eventually becoming a production system. Code hygiene habits are golden.
What is a creator obligated to do once their project is funded?
When a project is successfully funded, the creator is responsible for completing the project and fulfilling each reward. Their fundamental obligation to backers is to finish all the work that was promised. [...]
And:
What should creators do if they're having problems completing their project? [...]
If the problems are severe enough that the creator can't fulfill their project, creators need to find a resolution. Steps should include offering refunds, detailing exactly how funds were used, and other actions to satisfy backers.
Project creators are directly answerable to their backers. As with any retail contract, they are free to offer alternative reward, but the customer can cancel the contract and demand refund for failure to deliver.
its another case of the law not yet catching up to new technological platforms and abilities.
The law seems to be perfectly suited to this situation. It imposes all applicable consumer protections. It means Kickstarter projects have three options: deliver, refund or file for bankrupcy, and protects against the same species of shysters who cried "be a part of the movie industry" generations ago returning with the cry of "be a part of the games industry".
What is a creator obligated to do once their project is funded?
When a project is successfully funded, the creator is responsible for completing the project and fulfilling each reward. Their fundamental obligation to backers is to finish all the work that was promised.
That leaves you three options: deliver, refund, or file for bankrupcy.
In this case, it appears to be because they beta'd up the universe engine on mammoth servers and found they couldn't refactor the code to work efficiently on user machines. The client software seems to be essentially just the flight engine and an API that interacts with the servers.
Slashdot Mirror
Except I'm not allowed to buy my Facebook from a different provider. While interoperability is impossible, Facebook is a monopoly.
If you are not careful, you absolutely can click on the X and count as a click through, because some of these scum sucking low lifes just put a picture of an X there and it is not really the close button. Sometimes you can tell because your windows theme is different and they have made a static picture of the standard close X. I'm sure plenty of people are fooled by that.
Actually, with the rise in Flash-based ads (including autoplay videos), more and more ads appear in the browser with a custom close button anyway. There is no way of telling the real ones from the fakes any more.
Bullshit. Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination. Period. You may call it "positive sexism" but it's still sexism. (It's also weird how this "positive sexism" doesn't apply to increasing the number of men teaching elementary school or the number of women garbage collectors. Wonder why THAT is.)
If I tell my best friend he's talking bullshit, he isn't likely to take offence, as he knows how much I respect him and his views. If I tell a stranger he's talking bullshit, it's offensive, because there is no background of respect between us. Therefore I discriminate between people in the way I speak to them. Is it not clear, then, that discrimination is not inherently a bad thing?
Sexism is a lack of equality of respect, not mere lack of parity in opportunity.
At the weekend, I had to do the "false boyfriend" trick to get a overly insistent guy to leave a friend of mine alone. Her multiple refusals weren't enough to shut him up, but just by putting my arm round her waist and saying her name, I shut him up completely. Would you like to be a woman in a world like this? Where you need a man to "save" you from another man?
And that means we need to trick girls who'd rather be doing something else into coding, why, exactly?
The same reason why we trick them into reading and writing while they'd rather be climbing trees, or trick them into arithmetic when they rather be bouncing a rubber ball off the wall. It's a controversial notion that I like to call "education".
That sound you're hearing is either his geek card sailing over your head, or maybe just the joke.
As a geek, what is this bullshit that one has to be interested in computers and particularly in coding? There is engineering, math and yes, criminalistics.
Coding is a general skill - there isn't a single white-collar job that can't be automated to improve efficiency, if only people knew how to do it. When I moved from programming into "IT" (apps, servers and networks), my bosses gave me various shitty data entry/collection tasks. It hadn't occurred to them that manual work was a mugs game. The first morning of each task I spent experimenting to refine batch scripts, keyboard macros etc. By lunchtime, I'd have a quick-and-dirty process that produced a text file with false positives, but with no false negatives missing. I filtered out the false positives and finished early for the day. Then the next day I sat twiddling my thumbs until they came up with another job for me, as I'd just done three or more days' work in a single day. I can imagine many situations where a forensic scientist might want to batch process comparisons of test results - finding family links in DNA samples, for instance.
"Sexism" is believing yourself superior to others based on your biological gender. If the campaign said "We must get more women coding as men are rubbish coders," that would be sexist. Positive discrimination to redress the balance is not sexism. Even if you believe in strong inherent gender differences, you still want more women to learn computers; hell, ESPECIALLY if you believe in gender differences. Everything in the world needs computers, and developers are more efficient if they understand the systems that they're creating, so we need programmers with every possible type of background.
Or, conversely, the politicians that ban guns in all federal buildings yet believe wholeheartedly that anyone should be able to carry semi-automatic assault rifles into their local Walmart.
Those tend not to be the same politicians.
Go on, find me one politician that complains that visitors to his office aren't allowed to come in with a Smith & Weston hanging from their waist....
Because anti-personnel mines are now illegal, and anti-tank mines don't kill gunmen.
What is this, "we're English so we have to have crazy words for everything instead"?
What is this, "we're American so we have to believe that the only English-speaking country outside the US is England"?
It's no different from TicketMaster, really. Your ticket is a contract between you and the company responsible for the event.
Well, actually it is different from TicketMaster, because TM explicitly states that the booking fee is an agent's fee and not refundable, and by leaving that out, KS leave the projects liable for all money paid by the backers -- if you cancelled a KS project the day after receiving funding, you'd immediately lose cash.
1. There are HTML versions of many of the articles.
Many != all.
2. We're giving this away for free! To share and adapt. Feel free to pull the text from the PDFs and put it up on GitHub.
How nice. You've put it up to share and adapt... in a delivery format, not an edit format. You presumably have source files (I doubt the copy was originally written directly in Acrobat) but you won't burden us with them, you'll just give us your blessing to fight with copying and pasting from PDF.
If you're still angry about PDFs, we'll happily give you your money back... Oh wait, you got it for free! :-)
That's no excuse. You built up a lot of goodwill (and generated crowdfunding) with your promise of adaptible content, and you've left up an irritating barrier to adaptation.
Also, I was under the impression that PDF was an open format, just Adobe's reader is closed. PDF will make most people happy.
Have you ever tried to copy the text out of a PDF? It's a horrible exercise where you spend the rest of the even reinserting spaces and reordering weird phantom jumps. PDF is a delivery format, not a format for editing.
Kickstarter project creators are obliged to deliver on their promises. This leaves four options, deliver, refund, renegotiate or declare bankrupcy. Frontier Developments is a long-running company and can't afford to declare bankrupcy over a single project. Renegotiating with every dissatisfied customer/backer would be a long, slow process, so the offer of a refund is the best option. If they don't immediately have the cash to support it, then they'll have to defer payment until the game is on sale and further copies sold.
Except for all those ones that do.
Do you have a cell phone?
No, I have a mobile phone, which also means I live in a country that has reasonably adequate consumer protection. For example, I have a 3G phone with a network provider that does not allow tethering on any of their current offerings, but my 2012 prepay SIM deal allows it. They don't want any tethering, but they can't stop me, because that's the deal we agreed, and they would have to renegotiate with me. I'm currently missing out on slightly lower prices, but as a tradeoff I can use my iPad for browsing, instead of the tiny screen.
I'm using the legal definition. If we argue semantics we'll end up including psychological investment, where people align their ego with the product and therefore refuse to evaluate it objectively. IE "every fanboy is an investor". That would, of course, be stupid. We're talking about legal status, so for now let's talk in legal terms.
WE ALL DO IT, because we work in a field where it is impossible to know everything before you implement,
This is precisely why we need to write maintainable code, because we don't have the luxury of just writing it and forgetting about it. My current (personal) code project is pure design-by-prototype, and I was getting back into coding after a hiatus. My earliest work had to be completely rewritten because it wasn't tolerant to changes, and kept suffering exponential bloat and becoming undebuggable. So I modularised, I increased encapsulation and I decreased coupling. I did this without having to think too much about it -- I just had to be a tiny bit more patient. Every time I spend a bit of time working on the project, my coding gets cleaner and cleaner, and every time changes get easier to make.
I would ask you to be less rude in future, and I'm not referring to you telling me to fuck off. No, I'm referring to those nasty words "best practices" and "coding standards". These things are nothing more than lip-service to code hygiene -- the academic approach relies on teaching understanding of the consequence of decisions, which equips the individual coder to make an informed decision based on the needs of the individual project in question. "Coding standards" and "best practices" are blunt instruments that impose rules without any regard to the appropriacy to the situation.
A good kitchen hygiene programme doesn't just tell you "touched something? Wash your hands!" but provides you with an understanding of what it means to touch different things in differen (eg knowing that boiling kills all germs means you know you're not going to need to wash your hands to pick up a single potato that was left out of the pot after cutting raw chicken). That's basically the same as the difference between genuine code hygiene and best practices/coding standards/design patterns.
I'm not expecting anyone to be perfect. None of us reach the unobtainable academic ideal of perfect encapsulation and no unnecessary coupling, but you can't help but internalise some of it. People who've been taught code hygiene still produce hacky code, but it's at least a little less hacky than self-taught coders, in general, at least.
There's also a tonne of quick and dirty code that proves itself incredibly useful, eventually becoming a production system. Code hygiene habits are golden.
Ther's a risk that this will confuse concept with implementation, though.
Not even Web programmer or HTML developer?
I told my mechanic you said that. He cried. Stop being so mean to mechanics.
What is a creator obligated to do once their project is funded?
When a project is successfully funded, the creator is responsible for completing the project and fulfilling each reward. Their fundamental obligation to backers is to finish all the work that was promised. [...]
And:
What should creators do if they're having problems completing their project?
[...]
If the problems are severe enough that the creator can't fulfill their project, creators need to find a resolution. Steps should include offering refunds, detailing exactly how funds were used, and other actions to satisfy backers.
Project creators are directly answerable to their backers. As with any retail contract, they are free to offer alternative reward, but the customer can cancel the contract and demand refund for failure to deliver.
so its not an investment....according to the law.
This sentence is irrelevant:
but it very much an investment in concept.
This sentence is (IMHO) outright wrong:
its another case of the law not yet catching up to new technological platforms and abilities.
The law seems to be perfectly suited to this situation. It imposes all applicable consumer protections. It means Kickstarter projects have three options: deliver, refund or file for bankrupcy, and protects against the same species of shysters who cried "be a part of the movie industry" generations ago returning with the cry of "be a part of the games industry".
So no interest or commitment to Elite: Dangerous,
Commitment? Why should customers be committed to something that doesn't exist yet?
What is a creator obligated to do once their project is funded?
When a project is successfully funded, the creator is responsible for completing the project and fulfilling each reward. Their fundamental obligation to backers is to finish all the work that was promised.
That leaves you three options: deliver, refund, or file for bankrupcy.
In this case, it appears to be because they beta'd up the universe engine on mammoth servers and found they couldn't refactor the code to work efficiently on user machines. The client software seems to be essentially just the flight engine and an API that interacts with the servers.