What can be done to protect consumers without stifling the technological innovation that we all know is so important?
Technical innovation from a company like Time Warner means DRM, shitty media players that force you to watch commercials and pay for bundled crap, and AOL.
I'll take my chances with the innovations offered by smaller companies.
Believe it or not, the gaming business isn't about giving you and your friends fun games to play, it's about making money.
I'm sorry—did someone make you the meaning-fairy? Are you the semiotically-blessed logarchical god who determines what everything is about? Consider that maybe the gaming business is about a whole lot of different things—as many facets as there are people involved, even tangentially involved.
I don't give a shit whether the company makes money on a console. I care whether they deliver fun games to play. And a few other things, but definitely no shit at all about their money-making. Still, it's at least partially about the money-making, as you know, and yet, if it were only about the money-making, I wouldn't give a shit, you wouldn't give a shit, almost no one would give a shit, and they wouldn't make any money at all.
So, like, look at things from a different angle, for fuck's sakes.
We used to have physical barriers to information flow. Clay tablets are awful heavy and camels only go so fast. You can only recopy the same drowsy bootleg tape so many times before it wears out. We all know where this is going, and it involves Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and bad metaphors.
So physical barriers have crumbled. At this point, when it could be so *very* easy for people to freely share information, there are some interests who are diligently rebuilding the old walls, brick by brick.
So what do we do? We go around them. As another poster wrote, commercial content is only produced by a few entities. These are the barricaded castellans of the information landscape, hiding atop their fortress hills. But all around them is the commons, the pastoral birthright of its tillers. What use of the bastioned strongholds when we can walk blissfully by the walls, thumbing our noses.
Support non-commercial artists. Don't buy shit. Feed on the fallow ground.
Until they had to install an application, wanted to play their favorite videogame or upgrade their hardware.
Videogames--all right, you got me.
But apps? Who the fuck cares about going to the store? Tell Grandma that if she clicks a little link, she can have money-managing software automatically installed over the internet. For free. Cerveza-free.
There are good desktop linux distros out there; we don't need to pawn Debian off on Grams.
Plus--hardware upgrade? Get the fuck out of here! Maybe if Grandma's using Gentoo it's a bit of a clusterbomb, but somehow I doubt that'd be the choice of her dear young grandson, or for that matter, of Mr. Dell.
If the company was an abortion clinic and the opinion expressed by the employee was anti-abortion, then there would be no uproar if they were fired.
Anti-abortion -> no abortions for anyone. Anti-copyright -> people still make creative works and profit by them.
Plus, I wouldn't fire someone in my abortion clinic just for expressing anti-abortion opinions; if it interfered with her ability to provide safe abortions to women who choose to get them, then she'd be gone, but until then, meh.
Since it now turns out that Dvorak was apparently not smoking crack when he predicted the Apple move, could he be right on this one too?
So with this success, Dvorak's crack-smoking ratio dips down to like 0.85. So he's not smoking crack as much as he used to, but I wouldn't take away his pipe if I were you.
Is 13 too young for stylized violence? They are budding teenagers after all, flowering into the pollen-haze of sexual spring. Lord knows I wasn't cool at that age, but someone restricted to PG fluffy-bubble games and motion pictures while picking out his first pubes strikes me as pitiable and consigned to naivete. Siddhartha Gautama he is not.
Does your grocery store sell copies of an original piece of bread that can be manufactured at will with essentially zero marginal cost? Are you paying for upgrades to your milk design which are largely incompatible with the milk you paid for last week?
I'm odd man out on this conversation, because I don't think human intelligence is computable, and I don't think we're likely to get things like universal constructors or technological singularities. Not for lack of enthusiasm, unfortunately.
But what strikes me in all the comments heretofore has been this idea of improving usability and efficiency by having the computer anticipate your actions, get to know you, listen in real language.
Well, I don't think this would at all be useful. I switched over to GNU/Linux two years ago on a lark, but I've stayed over because of the absolute richness of the toolset, especially textutils and text editors like vim--as I'm a writer, good text-manipulation is important.
These tools are generic, but precise. I have made my own toolchain to cope with the tasks I have to do each day. On Windows, I had Word. That's it--just Word. On Linux, I use awk, bash-scripting, perl, textutils, darcs, vim, (La)TeX and a host of others.
Having tools is where it's at. Better and more tools. Evolve tools and evolve toolchains.
Natural language is wonderful for human expression, but it's imprecise for detailed specification. Witness the development of mathematical notation, BNR notation, architectural schematics, UML. Programming languages aren't simply weird because it's easier to parse, but because their stilted format gives them predictable behavior. Real human language dips into and out of metaphor freely, invents neologisms, is imbued with dialect, invokes slang, and is more full than not of social and emotional content. Which makes writing stories really fun and easy, but is shit for writing programs--which, let's face it, are just automated tasks.
I don't want Windows Search to tweak my search based on the last fifty items I looked for; I *do* want to be able to tweak the Search myself so that it can bring up relavent text within the file, as well as strip some metainformation I myself added to it and display it. That's my idea of efficient.
I fail to see how the german laws you cite are any more stifling to free speech than laws prohibiting libel.
Really? Like, honest-to-God you don't? Huh.
Nazism = libel. Well, I suppose you could make the argument, analogizing from specifici individuals to an entire groupassuming everything national socialism says is anti-semitic propaganda, which like, I guess 0.6 is approx. equal to 1, in some places.
But: nice machinations, though. Really. Original poster points out that suppression of politically-charged speech happens on a continuum and that some of those countries who would condemn Turkey are only a little bit further on the left of it. That somehow turns into a test of hatred for anti-semitism. And from all these threads you manage a nice, stout strawman, all prickly with delight.
EA doesn't deserve all this criticism. We live in a free market, if those coders don't like their 80 hour weeks, they should quit.
They can quit, and if everything works out for them okay, they probably should, and probably do. But that's not to say that EA doesn't deserve criticism. Any shitty employer deserves criticism. Any shitty person deserves criticism.
Pretty much anything that's shitty deserves as much criticism as we in 40 hours/week can dish.
perhaps the journalists studied enough history in College to remember all the times when the general view of accepted science was horribly wrong.
We were wrong when we thought matter was indivisible. We were wrong with Bohr's model of the atom. But we were less wrong with ol' Niels than we were in the Middle Ages.
We are probably wrong about global climate change. But much less wrong than people who still try to claim there's no good evidence that humans cause it.
Today, scientists can't say anything that appears to agree with the church, because they'll loose their funding, their credibility and possibly their lives.
This is blatant bullshit. Scientists may be blackballed for their religious views, sure, but it's because their religious views are along the lines of, THE WORLD WAS CREATED DEFINITIVELY IN 4004 B.C. WITH THE APPEARANCE OF AGE TO TEST OUR FAITH. Just like, e.g., churches generally expel satanic members. There's just no place for them.
I tell ya, while I like to tell myself it was just the beer and the Red Sox winning and -- well, just sheepish loneliness that led me to bang that brunette from the bar the other night, I gotta say, the whole freakin' encounter was set up, encouraged, and programmed ultimately by a 2Gbp message deep inside my cells.
Now, if What's-Her-Name doesn't call me again at the end of the month, I'll give the point to you. But if she does, I say you're partly culpable for paternity.
The whole "information wants to be free" thing has gotten insanely out of hand.
Will someone mod this motherfucker up? PLEASE?
No other person in this thread has correctly identified that
Right And Wrong are explicitly dependent on legislative status quo,
where potentially monetizable assets are a priori non-exclusive, the erection of artificial barriers to their easy dissemination is not only desirable but a religio-commercio-moral obligation;
that theftipso facto is not simply deprivation of some entity's property, but a moral failing of untouchable classes to respect the limits to all kinds of access reasonably and righteously imposed, and finally
that since the sky is obviously falling, politically, culturally, and intellectually in this country, you better start wearing a fucking hardhat.
And oh man! in so few words! What a guy, this. A true skewerer. "This whole 'Information wants to be free' thing has gotten out of hand" in one fell swoop condemning pile upon pile of hippie thought to obvious absurdity, and then reproving us, the degenerates, for our foolishness.
Plus, the legend is that Galileo said this after having renounced the truth; it's almost a kind of sour apples thing, except for the fact that, metaphorically, Galileo's legacy got the last word. What does the pope say now? Eh?
Fucking wacko complex, at some point in the future, will be as widely understood to be such as is the solar system to be heliocentric.
I think most of us are happier without measles, smallpox, polio, diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus. In each one of these cases, we've modified our bodies by injecting extremely rudimentary nanobots: little chemical machines that interact with our immune systems to bolster their activity against dangerous pathogenic microbes.
Slashdot Mirror
Powerful tools can be used for good or ill!
Take a second look at those knives, fellas! Monitor the internet! Be aware before pushing on that gas pedal! Think twice with that plutonium, kid!
Yes, BB guns are fun--but you'll shoot your eye out if you're not careful!
!!!!!!
That's what I "saw" as I glanced over the title, and basically just about lost it.
Technical innovation from a company like Time Warner means DRM, shitty media players that force you to watch commercials and pay for bundled crap, and AOL.
I'll take my chances with the innovations offered by smaller companies.
I'm sorry—did someone make you the meaning-fairy? Are you the semiotically-blessed logarchical god who determines what everything is about? Consider that maybe the gaming business is about a whole lot of different things—as many facets as there are people involved, even tangentially involved.
I don't give a shit whether the company makes money on a console. I care whether they deliver fun games to play. And a few other things, but definitely no shit at all about their money-making. Still, it's at least partially about the money-making, as you know, and yet, if it were only about the money-making, I wouldn't give a shit, you wouldn't give a shit, almost no one would give a shit, and they wouldn't make any money at all.
So, like, look at things from a different angle, for fuck's sakes.
Is that OED, or Webster's?
I and everyone else in my neighborhood called it an "N-E-S."
As if this was the choice.
We used to have physical barriers to information flow. Clay tablets are awful heavy and camels only go so fast. You can only recopy the same drowsy bootleg tape so many times before it wears out. We all know where this is going, and it involves Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and bad metaphors.
So physical barriers have crumbled. At this point, when it could be so *very* easy for people to freely share information, there are some interests who are diligently rebuilding the old walls, brick by brick.
So what do we do? We go around them. As another poster wrote, commercial content is only produced by a few entities. These are the barricaded castellans of the information landscape, hiding atop their fortress hills. But all around them is the commons, the pastoral birthright of its tillers. What use of the bastioned strongholds when we can walk blissfully by the walls, thumbing our noses.
Support non-commercial artists. Don't buy shit. Feed on the fallow ground.
Videogames--all right, you got me.
But apps? Who the fuck cares about going to the store? Tell Grandma that if she clicks a little link, she can have money-managing software automatically installed over the internet. For free. Cerveza-free.
There are good desktop linux distros out there; we don't need to pawn Debian off on Grams.
Plus--hardware upgrade? Get the fuck out of here! Maybe if Grandma's using Gentoo it's a bit of a clusterbomb, but somehow I doubt that'd be the choice of her dear young grandson, or for that matter, of Mr. Dell.
Fucking disingenuous.
Anti-abortion -> no abortions for anyone.
Anti-copyright -> people still make creative works and profit by them.
Plus, I wouldn't fire someone in my abortion clinic just for expressing anti-abortion opinions; if it interfered with her ability to provide safe abortions to women who choose to get them, then she'd be gone, but until then, meh.
No.
No.
But is this justice?
So with this success, Dvorak's crack-smoking ratio dips down to like 0.85. So he's not smoking crack as much as he used to, but I wouldn't take away his pipe if I were you.
Is 13 too young for stylized violence? They are budding teenagers after all, flowering into the pollen-haze of sexual spring. Lord knows I wasn't cool at that age, but someone restricted to PG fluffy-bubble games and motion pictures while picking out his first pubes strikes me as pitiable and consigned to naivete. Siddhartha Gautama he is not.
They're working on it.
Does your grocery store sell copies of an original piece of bread that can be manufactured at will with essentially zero marginal cost? Are you paying for upgrades to your milk design which are largely incompatible with the milk you paid for last week?
I'm odd man out on this conversation, because I don't think human intelligence is computable, and I don't think we're likely to get things like universal constructors or technological singularities. Not for lack of enthusiasm, unfortunately.
But what strikes me in all the comments heretofore has been this idea of improving usability and efficiency by having the computer anticipate your actions, get to know you, listen in real language.
Well, I don't think this would at all be useful. I switched over to GNU/Linux two years ago on a lark, but I've stayed over because of the absolute richness of the toolset, especially textutils and text editors like vim--as I'm a writer, good text-manipulation is important.
These tools are generic, but precise. I have made my own toolchain to cope with the tasks I have to do each day. On Windows, I had Word. That's it--just Word. On Linux, I use awk, bash-scripting, perl, textutils, darcs, vim, (La)TeX and a host of others.
Having tools is where it's at. Better and more tools. Evolve tools and evolve toolchains.
Natural language is wonderful for human expression, but it's imprecise for detailed specification. Witness the development of mathematical notation, BNR notation, architectural schematics, UML. Programming languages aren't simply weird because it's easier to parse, but because their stilted format gives them predictable behavior. Real human language dips into and out of metaphor freely, invents neologisms, is imbued with dialect, invokes slang, and is more full than not of social and emotional content. Which makes writing stories really fun and easy, but is shit for writing programs--which, let's face it, are just automated tasks.
I don't want Windows Search to tweak my search based on the last fifty items I looked for; I *do* want to be able to tweak the Search myself so that it can bring up relavent text within the file, as well as strip some metainformation I myself added to it and display it. That's my idea of efficient.
if for no other reason than it doesn't take five minutes to start up.
Really? Like, honest-to-God you don't? Huh.
Nazism = libel. Well, I suppose you could make the argument, analogizing from specifici individuals to an entire groupassuming everything national socialism says is anti-semitic propaganda, which like, I guess 0.6 is approx. equal to 1, in some places.
But: nice machinations, though. Really. Original poster points out that suppression of politically-charged speech happens on a continuum and that some of those countries who would condemn Turkey are only a little bit further on the left of it. That somehow turns into a test of hatred for anti-semitism. And from all these threads you manage a nice, stout strawman, all prickly with delight.
I call rhetorical shenanigans.
They can quit, and if everything works out for them okay, they probably should, and probably do. But that's not to say that EA doesn't deserve criticism. Any shitty employer deserves criticism. Any shitty person deserves criticism.
Pretty much anything that's shitty deserves as much criticism as we in 40 hours/week can dish.
We were wrong when we thought matter was indivisible. We were wrong with Bohr's model of the atom. But we were less wrong with ol' Niels than we were in the Middle Ages.
We are probably wrong about global climate change. But much less wrong than people who still try to claim there's no good evidence that humans cause it.
This is blatant bullshit. Scientists may be blackballed for their religious views, sure, but it's because their religious views are along the lines of, THE WORLD WAS CREATED DEFINITIVELY IN 4004 B.C. WITH THE APPEARANCE OF AGE TO TEST OUR FAITH. Just like, e.g., churches generally expel satanic members. There's just no place for them.
No, it's Brazil, so unless you're one of the Boys From there, it'd be:
Viva vitória!
I tell ya, while I like to tell myself it was just the beer and the Red Sox winning and -- well, just sheepish loneliness that led me to bang that brunette from the bar the other night, I gotta say, the whole freakin' encounter was set up, encouraged, and programmed ultimately by a 2Gbp message deep inside my cells.
Now, if What's-Her-Name doesn't call me again at the end of the month, I'll give the point to you. But if she does, I say you're partly culpable for paternity.
Will someone mod this motherfucker up? PLEASE?
No other person in this thread has correctly identified that
And oh man! in so few words! What a guy, this. A true skewerer. "This whole 'Information wants to be free' thing has gotten out of hand" in one fell swoop condemning pile upon pile of hippie thought to obvious absurdity, and then reproving us, the degenerates, for our foolishness.
How 'bout you don't tell me what I think, eh?
Plus, the legend is that Galileo said this after having renounced the truth; it's almost a kind of sour apples thing, except for the fact that, metaphorically, Galileo's legacy got the last word. What does the pope say now? Eh?
Fucking wacko complex, at some point in the future, will be as widely understood to be such as is the solar system to be heliocentric.
I think most of us are happier without measles, smallpox, polio, diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus. In each one of these cases, we've modified our bodies by injecting extremely rudimentary nanobots: little chemical machines that interact with our immune systems to bolster their activity against dangerous pathogenic microbes.