What are the limits ? While I find some of such regulations reasonable, I didn't ever hear of one which didn't contain at least some disturbing elements.
So, if I have a pub, with about 10 fights (or else) in a year, and I disgustedly refuse to take people's fingerprints just because they want a beer, and there will be 15 fights in the next year, they will take away my license ? What will they consider reasonable reduction ? What change in numbers will they consider unreasonable growth ?
Who can guarantee that the data containing the drinking habits of people won't land in the hands of insurance companies who will raise their fees because people drink from time to time ? Yes, they probably say now that they won't misuse the data. But what about tomorrow, when a new regulation will allow, or require them to give out the data ?
We will probably be just better off by buying the booze ourselves and party at home with our friends. Or better, buy that long-dreamed of mini beer brewery in the basement.
Oh. My. Friggin. God. Some people are stupid to such extent I can't comprehend with my small brain. Just trying makes me burst out in laughs and cry with falling tears at the same time.
If you people - you know, not you, but you there who make these stupidities - now start making these regulations, then add another one: create an artifial island in the middle of the Pacific, surrounded with ten foot high walls for you kind and deport yourselves thankyouverymuch.
It seems there exist martians, after all. They transformed, and look like us and walk among us. They just lost their brains in the transformation process.
Cost is often a reasonably good indicator of resource requirements. Scarce resources put costs up while common ones drive it down.
That's a very simplistic view. In some cases the costs reflect that we don't have efficient enough technology to produce the elements of a certain solution. Solar energy harvesting would become more efficient faster if more companies, people and research would be put into it. To make another simplistic statement, you have to put in more money [etc] to make more money [etc]. Petrol and fossil fuels are relatively cheap, until we have plenty of it, after that we're sacked, unless we keep investing in efficient renewable energy source utilization.
Cost savings, cost savings, cost saving... This is why humanity's lifespan as we know it will be much shorter than it could've been. It should not be just about the money and cost saving, but about nature saving, resource saving, human saving.
Any company who deploys renewable energy sources as a partial or total replacement, gets my support.
And, this news is proof for one more thing: geeks should have more money, they can do the coolest things.
So pay them those taxes, but if they demand, make your demands too: deduct the costs of playing: cost of PC, cost of electricity, cost of buying the game, cost of monthly subscription fees, etc.:)
BTW, how will they know you had any income ? Who will tell them that you are playing, what is your character's id and how much money you made with it ? Will they ask every player's all data from the game maker ? Can they ask and will them give ?
Not a new tactic, not a new rhetorical element. Those with power have often tried to give new meanings to facts, events, words, ideas, etc. to make them sound and be thought of as being worse (sometimes less worse) as they originally were. After a while people will just pick up the new terms and use them as if they were natural, and they'll have more easy ways of achieving their goals. We can see this happening even in our lives, in many areas, no need to search for historical examples. You can raise attention to the intent, but most people just don't care at first and dismiss the issue saying it's ok, we know it's just rhetoric, but after a while it'll just subside and be forgotten. Well, these days it's no hard job to try painting a somehow doomed future, we have fairly many places to start from. Freedoms, laws, protection, rights, there were times when measures we happily accept today would have caused civil wars at least, still, we - as a crowd - have nothing against them.
Please, Google, make us a presentation editor that could save the presentations in S5 (http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ ). This would rock really hard.
This whole thing smells really badly. Meaning: we know our products suck, people know what we tell them, and it's good for us this way. If somebody makes them possible with some tools to find out anything about what we don't want to tell them, that's bad for us. Even if they could find out these things without using those tools, it's good for us they have those tools since now we have somebody to blame. Either way, we win.
5 years later I bet almost all of you windows folks are running XP at this point
Emphasis added. That's the point. 5 years from now ? Who knows. But thing is, as with XP (and FYI very many people, companies, etc. don't even use XP yet) there will probably not be an enormous rush to switch in the beginning. Especially since it will require many people to buy new computers (since most of them don't build their systems and many just usually buy new PCs instead of changing components).
A more important cause for not being able to buy legitimate mp3s for a lot (!) of people is that such services are not available. And I'm not talking here about hundred feet deep windowsless cell under the Anctartica ice.
If you're a big company having dozens of products (volume), some selling good, some selling low, you can let yourself play with prices, with product placement stretegies, etc. If you have some products which sell in high quantitites (volume) you can allow yourself to play with it's pricing, feature set, release freuency, etc. If you have enough customers (volume) you can make big releases more infreuent, letting time for development, for working out some selling strategies, marketing, etc. But if you're a company with well, about one product and its related services, then you don't have much choice, and you still need money for development, for paying the coders and engineers, electricity and stuff. Pretty much the only thing you can strive for is trying to make a high quality product and raise its pricing to levels that suit your needs. You can later make changes depending on the sales numbers, but still, you have far less freedom in choosing what and how to do.
A silver membership will be more expensive than Vista in just 2-3 years. I think
Just one question: what do you think how many new releases Mandriva will live to see during those years ? And Windows ? I'm not saying it's cheap, I'm saying your comparison is flawed.
Certainly not because of apt. I fully agree with you on the rest.
Mandrake/riva has been a very friendly (I didn't write user-friendly on purpose) distro for much more years than Ubuntu has lived and it still is a very very nice distro. No reason to mock it, and certainly no fanboy ubuntuism can lower its merits.
One big difference, though, which of the two you think terrorists hate more, which of the two are likely to be picked as targets ?
If I have to choose from 2 conferences, one in the US, the other not, I'd choose the latter. Why ? Not because of fear from terrorist attacks, not because of data handling fears, no, but because it's so much less hassle to travel to anywhere else. That's why. Vacation, holiday ? Who wants to start and end the resting period with such airport tortures ? No thanks.
The people of Debian are being stupid. The Firefox logo is an important logo and should be kept. Debian protects their trademark(s), why shouldn't Mozilla? I use Ubuntu over Debian, I just hope Ubuntu doesn't follow this stupid example of Debian.
First, you are the stupid here. Second, Ubuntu is also running a poll about whether to change the name of the browser, following Debian. Third, it would do you good to read up on the story before talking crap, since this is not about Debian not wanting to comply or not knowing or letting Mozilla use or protect their trademark, it's Mozilla who asked them to either post them every current and backport patches for review or stop using the name, so Debian just does what they asked. I'm just f*cking tired of so many ignorant stupid folks trying to make a criminal stupid gang out of the Debian governing and developmer people. Go get a life.
After all, if there's an enemy to the FOSS movement, it's *definitely* the Mozilla Foundation...
I'm getting fed up woth you guys' ignorance. At least try to explore the story behind the "news" before talking stupid lines like that. First, Mozilla said if you modify, you can't use the official logo, so Debian didn't use it. Second, Mozilla said you're distributing Firefox so use the official logo and let us approve your current and backport patches, or don't use the name either. Debian said ok, we won't use the name then.
It was not Debian who picked up a fight here, although large crowds of Firefox-using and ignorant-in-every-other-regard people try to make it seem being so. But it's not.
In fact there is not even a fight here. Debian just does what the Mozilla guys asked them to do. It's the crowd that wants to make this into a holy war or something. I've even read someone saying that he can't recommend Debian anymore to anyone since those guys are against Mozilla. Bullshit big time.
Thing is, no matter what anti-Debian folks or ignorant crowds try to do, people who know take time to read the real news, the lists and research the situation will stick to Debian because you can call Debian everything you want but there's one thing they always keep first: keeping Debian's quality and serving the community with the best and largest free Linux-based distro there is.
Apple fans are overconfident in the iPod because Apple once commanded 92% of music player market share, a number that has since fallen to around 70%. About 30 million people own iPods. But Microsoft owns more than 90% of the worldwide operating systems market (compared with Apple's roughly 5%), representing some 300 million people. The company expects to have 200 million Vista users within two years.
Erm, excuse me, it's just me or this "reasoning" has, well, about nothing close to even start to convince me about anything at all ? This just smells so typical: we make a colution, then we try to create a problem for it, and try to convince the people that they have the problem so they will want our solution for it. And the main arguments are that a. the other major player's fans are overconfident b. they have many apples [:) ] but we have way too many oranges c. our one will be the winner since so many people use our other product ? This is stupid. And I won't even go into detailing the really bad drm-infecting behaviour of this world-conquering new MS player since we have already talked and read about that one for a while now.
It's so simple: if some player is really better than some other, people will buy it. Not because they are some not yet existant hypothetical Vista users, and not because they are overconfident in anything. But, if it will suck, then it will fail.
One more thing, I'd really like to see a context like: try to guess which company's product is a text about, even if it doesn't directly mention the company. Too bad everyone will guess MS right all the time.
Until they will listen to what we fear [regarding fair use, copying, drm, etc.] I don't really care what they fear. But then again, I'm no lawmaker, and they will listen and do everything to make that fear go away. It's our fears that remain and slowly become reality.
if it weren't for the insecurity of Windows, you wouldn't have companies such as
Sooowhat? Then those people would work at some other places, doing something else. It's idiotic to assume some people only have jobs just because MS exists and does what it does. This world has been going before MS, and it will keep going after MS. This is the same argument that other people raise falsely above when saying that Vista will make more jobs thus make the economies grow, but at the same time they forget that the money they make is the money you pay, and for what ? For an iteration of an OS that implicitely makes you shell out large sums of money for new hardware to drop the old one you could just as effectively continue to use for 4-5 more years ? This whole thing is just idiotic.
Wrong, wrong, wrong ! It always raises my blood pressure above the skies when I see [regarding any topic] that the analysts/writers/etc. start by saying most of the people are criminals anyway so it doesn't matter. Stupid and outrageous assumption. Why couldn't a student raise his/her voice when (s)he feels _any_ of his/her rights might be violated or just simply not taken into consideration ? Why should anybody feel like living in a goddamn' prison ?
No, I'm not a student who'd be related to these events, nor do I know anyone who is.
Well, good for you that you don't ever need laptops, don't ever travel for work or business issues, never visit conferences. For the rest of us, such opinions are not one we could even consider. It's not us who should drop our laptops, it's the freaking companies who'd better start not screwing us over with junk, for once.
Given the scope of the operation, are these losses to be expected or is this an example of poor government security standards?
I sure hope you're only kidding and this is onyl a rhetorical question. Losses to be expected ? Is this a war ? One should really "expect" his data to be stolen ? One should easily just "forgive" state/government security policy weaknesses ? And we should just believe their word when they say all of those laptops contained data protection measures ? Oh come on.
a U.S. state sueing anybody for global warming ? now, see, that's funny; first because of the kyoto treaty [i.e. first ratify, then we can talk], secondly because it smells like trying to shift the blame, i.e. it's not he industry silly, it's the carmakers, who's next
While I believe the creating process of a video games to be very close to what we'd call "art", and game design usually probably needs or involves a lot of creative thinking and production, I won't ever call any production process being driven by sales goals "art". It's just that, a production process, like factories do. Like parfume companies do, like cloth companies do. They produce products that are likely to be paid for by the masses in order to gain profit. Nothing else. Artists [well, in my onw little world] create things driven by their imagination, inner creative forces, a need to express themselves in a special way. Of course I'm also living in this world and I know everybody has financial needs. Still, I refuse to think of artists like commercial product fabricators. This whole issue is always taken up by some people who would like to be taken as artists, and they always take two approaches: either try to raise themselves to the level of real artists, or try to make an image of the artists that would seemingly bring them down to their level. Here they say we are artists and being creative with sales goals is an extra feature. Well, famous painters also painted painting for orders for money. But fame usually didn't came from those works. Working driven by sales goals will create works that are fashionable, that can be sold [hey, this is your goal, right] in masses - art is very often not about that.
Slashdot Mirror
What are the limits ? While I find some of such regulations reasonable, I didn't ever hear of one which didn't contain at least some disturbing elements.
So, if I have a pub, with about 10 fights (or else) in a year, and I disgustedly refuse to take people's fingerprints just because they want a beer, and there will be 15 fights in the next year, they will take away my license ? What will they consider reasonable reduction ? What change in numbers will they consider unreasonable growth ?
Who can guarantee that the data containing the drinking habits of people won't land in the hands of insurance companies who will raise their fees because people drink from time to time ? Yes, they probably say now that they won't misuse the data. But what about tomorrow, when a new regulation will allow, or require them to give out the data ?
We will probably be just better off by buying the booze ourselves and party at home with our friends. Or better, buy that long-dreamed of mini beer brewery in the basement.
...but I have to let this out...
Oh. My. Friggin. God. Some people are stupid to such extent I can't comprehend with my small brain. Just trying makes me burst out in laughs and cry with falling tears at the same time.
If you people - you know, not you, but you there who make these stupidities - now start making these regulations, then add another one: create an artifial island in the middle of the Pacific, surrounded with ten foot high walls for you kind and deport yourselves thankyouverymuch.
It seems there exist martians, after all. They transformed, and look like us and walk among us. They just lost their brains in the transformation process.
Cost is often a reasonably good indicator of resource requirements. Scarce resources put costs up while common ones drive it down.
That's a very simplistic view. In some cases the costs reflect that we don't have efficient enough technology to produce the elements of a certain solution. Solar energy harvesting would become more efficient faster if more companies, people and research would be put into it. To make another simplistic statement, you have to put in more money [etc] to make more money [etc]. Petrol and fossil fuels are relatively cheap, until we have plenty of it, after that we're sacked, unless we keep investing in efficient renewable energy source utilization.
Cost Savings
Cost savings, cost savings, cost saving... This is why humanity's lifespan as we know it will be much shorter than it could've been. It should not be just about the money and cost saving, but about nature saving, resource saving, human saving.
Any company who deploys renewable energy sources as a partial or total replacement, gets my support.
And, this news is proof for one more thing: geeks should have more money, they can do the coolest things.
So pay them those taxes, but if they demand, make your demands too: deduct the costs of playing: cost of PC, cost of electricity, cost of buying the game, cost of monthly subscription fees, etc. :)
BTW, how will they know you had any income ? Who will tell them that you are playing, what is your character's id and how much money you made with it ? Will they ask every player's all data from the game maker ? Can they ask and will them give ?
Not a new tactic, not a new rhetorical element. Those with power have often tried to give new meanings to facts, events, words, ideas, etc. to make them sound and be thought of as being worse (sometimes less worse) as they originally were. After a while people will just pick up the new terms and use them as if they were natural, and they'll have more easy ways of achieving their goals. We can see this happening even in our lives, in many areas, no need to search for historical examples. You can raise attention to the intent, but most people just don't care at first and dismiss the issue saying it's ok, we know it's just rhetoric, but after a while it'll just subside and be forgotten. Well, these days it's no hard job to try painting a somehow doomed future, we have fairly many places to start from. Freedoms, laws, protection, rights, there were times when measures we happily accept today would have caused civil wars at least, still, we - as a crowd - have nothing against them.
Please, Google, make us a presentation editor that could save the presentations in S5 (http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ ). This would rock really hard.
This whole thing smells really badly. Meaning: we know our products suck, people know what we tell them, and it's good for us this way. If somebody makes them possible with some tools to find out anything about what we don't want to tell them, that's bad for us. Even if they could find out these things without using those tools, it's good for us they have those tools since now we have somebody to blame. Either way, we win.
5 years later I bet almost all of you windows folks are running XP at this point
Emphasis added. That's the point. 5 years from now ? Who knows. But thing is, as with XP (and FYI very many people, companies, etc. don't even use XP yet) there will probably not be an enormous rush to switch in the beginning. Especially since it will require many people to buy new computers (since most of them don't build their systems and many just usually buy new PCs instead of changing components).
A more important cause for not being able to buy legitimate mp3s for a lot (!) of people is that such services are not available. And I'm not talking here about hundred feet deep windowsless cell under the Anctartica ice.
If you're a big company having dozens of products (volume), some selling good, some selling low, you can let yourself play with prices, with product placement stretegies, etc. If you have some products which sell in high quantitites (volume) you can allow yourself to play with it's pricing, feature set, release freuency, etc. If you have enough customers (volume) you can make big releases more infreuent, letting time for development, for working out some selling strategies, marketing, etc. But if you're a company with well, about one product and its related services, then you don't have much choice, and you still need money for development, for paying the coders and engineers, electricity and stuff. Pretty much the only thing you can strive for is trying to make a high quality product and raise its pricing to levels that suit your needs. You can later make changes depending on the sales numbers, but still, you have far less freedom in choosing what and how to do.
Now this gives a whole new meaning to biological warfare, chip-targeting bioweapons on the rise.
A silver membership will be more expensive than Vista in just 2-3 years. I think
Just one question: what do you think how many new releases Mandriva will live to see during those years ? And Windows ? I'm not saying it's cheap, I'm saying your comparison is flawed.
why didn't Debian win sometime in 1999
Certainly not because of apt. I fully agree with you on the rest.
Mandrake/riva has been a very friendly (I didn't write user-friendly on purpose) distro for much more years than Ubuntu has lived and it still is a very very nice distro. No reason to mock it, and certainly no fanboy ubuntuism can lower its merits.
One big difference, though, which of the two you think terrorists hate more, which of the two are likely to be picked as targets ?
If I have to choose from 2 conferences, one in the US, the other not, I'd choose the latter. Why ? Not because of fear from terrorist attacks, not because of data handling fears, no, but because it's so much less hassle to travel to anywhere else. That's why. Vacation, holiday ? Who wants to start and end the resting period with such airport tortures ? No thanks.
The people of Debian are being stupid. The Firefox logo is an important logo and should be kept. Debian protects their trademark(s), why shouldn't Mozilla? I use Ubuntu over Debian, I just hope Ubuntu doesn't follow this stupid example of Debian.
First, you are the stupid here. Second, Ubuntu is also running a poll about whether to change the name of the browser, following Debian. Third, it would do you good to read up on the story before talking crap, since this is not about Debian not wanting to comply or not knowing or letting Mozilla use or protect their trademark, it's Mozilla who asked them to either post them every current and backport patches for review or stop using the name, so Debian just does what they asked. I'm just f*cking tired of so many ignorant stupid folks trying to make a criminal stupid gang out of the Debian governing and developmer people. Go get a life.
After all, if there's an enemy to the FOSS movement, it's *definitely* the Mozilla Foundation...
I'm getting fed up woth you guys' ignorance. At least try to explore the story behind the "news" before talking stupid lines like that. First, Mozilla said if you modify, you can't use the official logo, so Debian didn't use it. Second, Mozilla said you're distributing Firefox so use the official logo and let us approve your current and backport patches, or don't use the name either. Debian said ok, we won't use the name then.
It was not Debian who picked up a fight here, although large crowds of Firefox-using and ignorant-in-every-other-regard people try to make it seem being so. But it's not.
In fact there is not even a fight here. Debian just does what the Mozilla guys asked them to do. It's the crowd that wants to make this into a holy war or something. I've even read someone saying that he can't recommend Debian anymore to anyone since those guys are against Mozilla. Bullshit big time.
Thing is, no matter what anti-Debian folks or ignorant crowds try to do, people who know take time to read the real news, the lists and research the situation will stick to Debian because you can call Debian everything you want but there's one thing they always keep first: keeping Debian's quality and serving the community with the best and largest free Linux-based distro there is.
And that's what matters.
Apple fans are overconfident in the iPod because Apple once commanded 92% of music player market share, a number that has since fallen to around 70%. About 30 million people own iPods. But Microsoft owns more than 90% of the worldwide operating systems market (compared with Apple's roughly 5%), representing some 300 million people. The company expects to have 200 million Vista users within two years.
:) ] but we have way too many oranges c. our one will be the winner since so many people use our other product ? This is stupid. And I won't even go into detailing the really bad drm-infecting behaviour of this world-conquering new MS player since we have already talked and read about that one for a while now.
Erm, excuse me, it's just me or this "reasoning" has, well, about nothing close to even start to convince me about anything at all ? This just smells so typical: we make a colution, then we try to create a problem for it, and try to convince the people that they have the problem so they will want our solution for it. And the main arguments are that a. the other major player's fans are overconfident b. they have many apples [
It's so simple: if some player is really better than some other, people will buy it. Not because they are some not yet existant hypothetical Vista users, and not because they are overconfident in anything. But, if it will suck, then it will fail.
One more thing, I'd really like to see a context like: try to guess which company's product is a text about, even if it doesn't directly mention the company. Too bad everyone will guess MS right all the time.
entertainment companies fear
Until they will listen to what we fear [regarding fair use, copying, drm, etc.] I don't really care what they fear. But then again, I'm no lawmaker, and they will listen and do everything to make that fear go away. It's our fears that remain and slowly become reality.
if it weren't for the insecurity of Windows, you wouldn't have companies such as
Sooowhat? Then those people would work at some other places, doing something else. It's idiotic to assume some people only have jobs just because MS exists and does what it does. This world has been going before MS, and it will keep going after MS. This is the same argument that other people raise falsely above when saying that Vista will make more jobs thus make the economies grow, but at the same time they forget that the money they make is the money you pay, and for what ? For an iteration of an OS that implicitely makes you shell out large sums of money for new hardware to drop the old one you could just as effectively continue to use for 4-5 more years ? This whole thing is just idiotic.
a sizable percentage of these
Wrong, wrong, wrong ! It always raises my blood pressure above the skies when I see [regarding any topic] that the analysts/writers/etc. start by saying most of the people are criminals anyway so it doesn't matter. Stupid and outrageous assumption. Why couldn't a student raise his/her voice when (s)he feels _any_ of his/her rights might be violated or just simply not taken into consideration ? Why should anybody feel like living in a goddamn' prison ?
No, I'm not a student who'd be related to these events, nor do I know anyone who is.
Well, good for you that you don't ever need laptops, don't ever travel for work or business issues, never visit conferences. For the rest of us, such opinions are not one we could even consider. It's not us who should drop our laptops, it's the freaking companies who'd better start not screwing us over with junk, for once.
Given the scope of the operation, are these losses to be expected or is this an example of poor government security standards?
I sure hope you're only kidding and this is onyl a rhetorical question. Losses to be expected ? Is this a war ? One should really "expect" his data to be stolen ? One should easily just "forgive" state/government security policy weaknesses ? And we should just believe their word when they say all of those laptops contained data protection measures ? Oh come on.
a U.S. state sueing anybody for global warming ? now, see, that's funny; first because of the kyoto treaty [i.e. first ratify, then we can talk], secondly because it smells like trying to shift the blame, i.e. it's not he industry silly, it's the carmakers, who's next
being driven by sales is a good thing
While I believe the creating process of a video games to be very close to what we'd call "art", and game design usually probably needs or involves a lot of creative thinking and production, I won't ever call any production process being driven by sales goals "art". It's just that, a production process, like factories do. Like parfume companies do, like cloth companies do. They produce products that are likely to be paid for by the masses in order to gain profit. Nothing else. Artists [well, in my onw little world] create things driven by their imagination, inner creative forces, a need to express themselves in a special way. Of course I'm also living in this world and I know everybody has financial needs. Still, I refuse to think of artists like commercial product fabricators. This whole issue is always taken up by some people who would like to be taken as artists, and they always take two approaches: either try to raise themselves to the level of real artists, or try to make an image of the artists that would seemingly bring them down to their level. Here they say we are artists and being creative with sales goals is an extra feature. Well, famous painters also painted painting for orders for money. But fame usually didn't came from those works. Working driven by sales goals will create works that are fashionable, that can be sold [hey, this is your goal, right] in masses - art is very often not about that.