He's not complaining that WoW doesn't have those things - he's saying that the Free Starter Edition version doesn't include them, so you're missing out on a lot more of the game than just not getting above Level 20.
Yes, if you're making money selling razor blades for your shiny shiny razor, and somebody else makes competing razor blades that can also use your razor, and sells them cheaper (in this case, gives them away free), then you won't make as much money. That's not called "crime", it's called "competition", and if your business model can't cope with competition, that's called "capitalism", or as Schumpeter put it, "Creative Destruction".
And Sony's PS3 revenue stream model is also at risk if Microsoft comes out with a cool game for the X-Box, and potential customers buy it instead of your game, or if Ubuntu Linux starts shipping with Free really cool games like "apt-get" and "Zombie Target Practice!"
One disadvantage of living in the burbs is driving to bars - I'll have my one drink at the pub and that's it, since I'm driving home. (Nominally I live in a city, but I'm in the residential area, two mile from downtown, and the dive bar I can walk to is really divey.)
In a Real City, you can walk to bars and restaurants, or take the bus or streetcar or subway if it's farther, and you can crawl home if the bus is too confusing.
A friend of mine moved to San Francisco because his area of Silicon Valley didn't have very many single women at the local social venues, and he was tired of being single. The neighborhood he moved to _did_ have a lot of women frequenting the bars, but he wasn't the right gender to be their type. (On the other hand, a few months later he met somebody through other social activities he was already involved in, and they hit it off and soon got married, and he moved in to her place in another neighborhood.)
One of the things I really liked about C was that once you've learned a few basics like how pointers and structs work, looking at code written by people much better at C than you just makes sense and comments like/* you are not expected to understand this */ are quite rare. That wasn't as true about C++ or Java, where many kinds of things are readable (after getting the basic "object" stuff down") but some of the template stuff is too obscure. It wasn't true at all about APL or PERL:-)
I was expecting Python to resemble LISP with a different syntax, but it's looking a lot messier than even Common LISP, and of course a lot of the moving parts are hidden in the large number of pre-written modules that come with Python.
When you bought the PDF, what format was it - Kindle-shaped, or letter-sized paper (A4 or 8.5x11 etc.) or something else? If it's Kindle, it looks like a good price.
Also, I was surprised by the terms of the free HTML - you're not allowed to change it! The big reason for reading it in that format is precisely to change it, by copying code examples and pasting them into your Python interpreter to see what they do:-)
A month or so ago I decided to pick up a Python book at the Borders-is-dying sale, and while it's from O'Reilly, the book is too much of a reference - a lot of bottom-up "here's are six different list-like things" and "nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition, which is why you need to use this method to catch the exception it throws, but you can change that by overloading _ _ that _ _ method name's variable __pope__ or using _ComFyChaiR_ instead, but you can't set __pope__ to French, because that object uses __antipope__ instead, though in later versions you can modify it by using Cardinal()."
A friend of mine pointed me to python.org's tutorials", which were going to be my next step, but this looks pretty simple and accessible too.
It was not on purpose, and it was really annoying, especially since the iPod Shuffle is a no-user-serviceable-parts design. Once it dried out and I got the switch unstuck, I found that the electronics were mostly ok, but the battery or its charging system was toast, so it only works when plugged into a USB power source. Since then I've mostly used it as a memory stick, but 1GB is becoming less useful than it used to be.
There was a classic article from back in 1984 comparing the relative benefits and costs of getting a Macintosh or a Cairn Terrier. A cairn terrier is a dog like Toto. Costs less than the Mac, probably has less memory, can't do astrophysics, does a much better job of playing fetch, good with kids.
It's too late for the advice "say thank you" or "and then shut up" to do any good. But cash the checks, put some of it in diversified investments where you'll have a safe income stream for life, blow some of it drinking rum on tropical islands, and then either shut up or go invent something else new and cool.
FTFY. Our alien overlord-wannabees will get some details right on their giant mecha robot imitation Michael Jackson, like the single glove and holding the grandchild out the window, but just because they've walked on the moon doesn't mean they'll be able to do the moonwalk credibly.
The typical geeky wearable electronics system these days (not counting wristwatches or holders for smartphones) is a Lilypad Arduino, some LEDs and switches, sewable conductive thread, and a battery pack. You might or might not end up soldering - a lot of the parts are connectorized or made for sewing with conductive thread.
The expensive, hard-to-find part - the creativity it takes to make something interesting that you'd actually wear more than once.
As other people have pointed out, when Patent Trolls come to court saying that your misappropriation of their intellectual property cost them $130 million, it's not frivolous, because they're pointing at the $130 million you actually made, and saying it ought to belong to them. On the other hand, this spammer is coming into court, and saying "Judge, I coulda been a contender*, I coulda made'a 130 million dollars selling Nigerian Herbal Fake Viagra, but Spamhaus put me on their list, and now I'm just a bum!", and that's frivolous because all they can really demonstrate is that now they're just a bum.
The music industry is an intermediate case. They're the people who made hundreds of millions of dollars selling the public music from Britney Spears and N'Sync, so yeah, they coulda been a contender if you hadn't been sharing their music for free. On the other hand, just because Joe's Garage Metal Band really does have more talent than Britney, it's really dodgy to argue that they could have made $130m from the stuff you gave away without demonstrating that you'd given away 10 million copies, as opposed to the three copies that people actually downloaded that they don't have proof of.
Having the term of copyright extend past the author's death still makes sense, and doesn't violate the concept of "limited time". Publishers pay authors based on how much money they expect to make selling the book (or program or whatever.) Some of that money is an advance, and some of it's royalties as copies of the book get sold. Under the current system, the publisher makes a guess about how many copies they'll sell, and if it's enough to be worth publishing at all, they decide how much advance to pay you, and (if the book actually keeps selling), after the advance is paid off, they keep paying you royalties. If you die, well probably your spouse or kids get it, or your creditors or whatever.
If you're an 88-year-old author, and copyright ends when you die, a publisher is unlikely to be willing to risk publishing your book, because you might die in a year and they wouldn't make much money - if the book is selling well, other publishers could print their own copies and sell it (like the ebooks on Amazon which are often ripped off from still-living authors) - and if they do publish it, they're not going to give you much of an advance, and your kids aren't going to get royalties from the other publishers if you die.
(*Ok, technically she published it with a university press, sold a couple hundred copies mostly to libraries, and then somebody from a commercial publishing house saw it, thought it was great, and then she got the good publishing deal, and died a year or two later. So she did get a reasonable chunk of the royalties before she died, but the book stayed in print for a long time.)
Oh hai ! Learn some English before publishing lists like this - "thou, thee, thy, thine" are the informal second person equivalents of the formal second person "you, you, your, yours" pronouns. (It's like "Du" vs. "Sie" in German or "Tu" vs. "Vous" in French.) So you wouldn't say "thine player's mouse" - the correct version is "thy player's mouse".
Surprisingly, the FBI waited to give out these new powers to their agents until just _after_ the Congress approved renewal of the PATRIOT Act. Wouldn't want to risk losing a few votes by doing it beforehand, while they were whining about how they needed to keep all the power they had.
Finland's easy to explain - "Why did you kill him?" "I've been stuck in the cabin for two months while it's been dark and snowing, and he just pissed me off!"
I want my VOIP connection and most UDP to get higher priority than web pages. I want web pages to get higher priority than Bittorrent. I might even want small web pages to load faster than YouTube; I'm not sure what the technically best prioritization is on that. I don't want laws that prevent service providers from offering me that kind of service.
There are kinds of net neutrality that I do want - I don't want my ISP to refuse to carry Google because Google isn't buying transit from them directly or competes with services they sell, and I don't want my ISP to give higher priority to Microsoft or Yahoo than Google because Google isn't paying them enough. On the other hand, if Akamai wants to pay my ISP to put a bunch of their cache boxes in the ISP's network so that they can make some web pages go faster (by caching them closer to me), I'm all in favor of that.
I don't expect my legislators, or even their staffs, to understand the technology well enough to make policy decisions like that. I don't always understand it well enough myself, and I've been working in this field for 30 years. And you know how newspaper articles never describe events you were at the way you thought they happened? Legislators are even less accurate than newspaper reporters. I just wish businesses would stop offering bad service because they're greedy (as opposed to offering better service because they're greedy), and I wish governments would stop making rules just because they want us to know they're doing something.
That would be enough to let users in the Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan get Kazakh-tuned Google results without having to comply with the government restrictions on content hosting inside their country.
8-character passwords were strong enough for Unix thirty years ago, but that was a long time ago in Moore's Law cycles; I've got wristwatches faster than that PDP-11. It's annoying how many systems still seem to use them.
For systems that do passwords interactively, you're not going to get the same brute force speed, but you're still exposed to automated attacks - using a CAPTCHA in addition to the password can help prevent them.
Slashdot Mirror
He's not complaining that WoW doesn't have those things - he's saying that the Free Starter Edition version doesn't include them, so you're missing out on a lot more of the game than just not getting above Level 20.
Sure, its value is floating and fictitious, but apparently the market thinks it's 1000x more valuable than MySpace by now.
+LIKE! Wouldn't you like a nice shiny "First Post" in your Slashdot Karma Garden? First one's free!
Yes, if you're making money selling razor blades for your shiny shiny razor, and somebody else makes competing razor blades that can also use your razor, and sells them cheaper (in this case, gives them away free), then you won't make as much money. That's not called "crime", it's called "competition", and if your business model can't cope with competition, that's called "capitalism", or as Schumpeter put it, "Creative Destruction".
And Sony's PS3 revenue stream model is also at risk if Microsoft comes out with a cool game for the X-Box, and potential customers buy it instead of your game, or if Ubuntu Linux starts shipping with Free really cool games like "apt-get" and "Zombie Target Practice!"
One disadvantage of living in the burbs is driving to bars - I'll have my one drink at the pub and that's it, since I'm driving home. (Nominally I live in a city, but I'm in the residential area, two mile from downtown, and the dive bar I can walk to is really divey.)
In a Real City, you can walk to bars and restaurants, or take the bus or streetcar or subway if it's farther, and you can crawl home if the bus is too confusing.
A friend of mine moved to San Francisco because his area of Silicon Valley didn't have very many single women at the local social venues, and he was tired of being single. The neighborhood he moved to _did_ have a lot of women frequenting the bars, but he wasn't the right gender to be their type. (On the other hand, a few months later he met somebody through other social activities he was already involved in, and they hit it off and soon got married, and he moved in to her place in another neighborhood.)
One of the things I really liked about C was that once you've learned a few basics like how pointers and structs work, looking at code written by people much better at C than you just makes sense and comments like /* you are not expected to understand this */ are quite rare. That wasn't as true about C++ or Java, where many kinds of things are readable (after getting the basic "object" stuff down") but some of the template stuff is too obscure. It wasn't true at all about APL or PERL :-)
I was expecting Python to resemble LISP with a different syntax, but it's looking a lot messier than even Common LISP, and of course a lot of the moving parts are hidden in the large number of pre-written modules that come with Python.
When you bought the PDF, what format was it - Kindle-shaped, or letter-sized paper (A4 or 8.5x11 etc.) or something else? If it's Kindle, it looks like a good price.
Also, I was surprised by the terms of the free HTML - you're not allowed to change it! The big reason for reading it in that format is precisely to change it, by copying code examples and pasting them into your Python interpreter to see what they do :-)
A month or so ago I decided to pick up a Python book at the Borders-is-dying sale, and while it's from O'Reilly, the book is too much of a reference - a lot of bottom-up "here's are six different list-like things" and "nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition, which is why you need to use this method to catch the exception it throws, but you can change that by overloading _ _ that _ _ method name's variable __pope__ or using _ComFyChaiR_ instead, but you can't set __pope__ to French, because that object uses __antipope__ instead, though in later versions you can modify it by using Cardinal()."
A friend of mine pointed me to python.org's tutorials", which were going to be my next step, but this looks pretty simple and accessible too.
It was not on purpose, and it was really annoying, especially since the iPod Shuffle is a no-user-serviceable-parts design. Once it dried out and I got the switch unstuck, I found that the electronics were mostly ok, but the battery or its charging system was toast, so it only works when plugged into a USB power source. Since then I've mostly used it as a memory stick, but 1GB is becoming less useful than it used to be.
Discontinue use of Happy First Poster if any of the following occurs:
There was a classic article from back in 1984 comparing the relative benefits and costs of getting a Macintosh or a Cairn Terrier. A cairn terrier is a dog like Toto. Costs less than the Mac, probably has less memory, can't do astrophysics, does a much better job of playing fetch, good with kids.
It's too late for the advice "say thank you" or "and then shut up" to do any good. But cash the checks, put some of it in diversified investments where you'll have a safe income stream for life, blow some of it drinking rum on tropical islands, and then either shut up or go invent something else new and cool.
FTFY. Our alien overlord-wannabees will get some details right on their giant mecha robot imitation Michael Jackson, like the single glove and holding the grandchild out the window, but just because they've walked on the moon doesn't mean they'll be able to do the moonwalk credibly.
The typical geeky wearable electronics system these days (not counting wristwatches or holders for smartphones) is a Lilypad Arduino, some LEDs and switches, sewable conductive thread, and a battery pack. You might or might not end up soldering - a lot of the parts are connectorized or made for sewing with conductive thread.
The expensive, hard-to-find part - the creativity it takes to make something interesting that you'd actually wear more than once.
+ Mr. Redmond hold's an extensive issued patent and pending patent portfolio
of historically seminal patents.
He's obviously not good at precision or accuracy. And I'm not quite sure what you do with a portfolio of pending patents other than trolling.
As other people have pointed out, when Patent Trolls come to court saying that your misappropriation of their intellectual property cost them $130 million, it's not frivolous, because they're pointing at the $130 million you actually made, and saying it ought to belong to them. On the other hand, this spammer is coming into court, and saying "Judge, I coulda been a contender*, I coulda made'a 130 million dollars selling Nigerian Herbal Fake Viagra, but Spamhaus put me on their list, and now I'm just a bum!", and that's frivolous because all they can really demonstrate is that now they're just a bum.
The music industry is an intermediate case. They're the people who made hundreds of millions of dollars selling the public music from Britney Spears and N'Sync, so yeah, they coulda been a contender if you hadn't been sharing their music for free. On the other hand, just because Joe's Garage Metal Band really does have more talent than Britney, it's really dodgy to argue that they could have made $130m from the stuff you gave away without demonstrating that you'd given away 10 million copies, as opposed to the three copies that people actually downloaded that they don't have proof of.
(*Hey, it's fair use, don't sue me!)
Back in the 80s, 88-year-old Helen Hooven Santmyer published And Ladies Of The Club, a novel which became a New York Times best seller.*
Having the term of copyright extend past the author's death still makes sense, and doesn't violate the concept of "limited time". Publishers pay authors based on how much money they expect to make selling the book (or program or whatever.) Some of that money is an advance, and some of it's royalties as copies of the book get sold. Under the current system, the publisher makes a guess about how many copies they'll sell, and if it's enough to be worth publishing at all, they decide how much advance to pay you, and (if the book actually keeps selling), after the advance is paid off, they keep paying you royalties. If you die, well probably your spouse or kids get it, or your creditors or whatever.
If you're an 88-year-old author, and copyright ends when you die, a publisher is unlikely to be willing to risk publishing your book, because you might die in a year and they wouldn't make much money - if the book is selling well, other publishers could print their own copies and sell it (like the ebooks on Amazon which are often ripped off from still-living authors) - and if they do publish it, they're not going to give you much of an advance, and your kids aren't going to get royalties from the other publishers if you die.
(*Ok, technically she published it with a university press, sold a couple hundred copies mostly to libraries, and then somebody from a commercial publishing house saw it, thought it was great, and then she got the good publishing deal, and died a year or two later. So she did get a reasonable chunk of the royalties before she died, but the book stayed in print for a long time.)
Disapproving Judge is Disapproving.
Oh hai ! Learn some English before publishing lists like this - "thou, thee, thy, thine" are the informal second person equivalents of the formal second person "you, you, your, yours" pronouns. (It's like "Du" vs. "Sie" in German or "Tu" vs. "Vous" in French.) So you wouldn't say "thine player's mouse" - the correct version is "thy player's mouse".
Surprisingly, the FBI waited to give out these new powers to their agents until just _after_ the Congress approved renewal of the PATRIOT Act. Wouldn't want to risk losing a few votes by doing it beforehand, while they were whining about how they needed to keep all the power they had.
Finland's easy to explain - "Why did you kill him?" "I've been stuck in the cabin for two months while it's been dark and snowing, and he just pissed me off!"
I want my VOIP connection and most UDP to get higher priority than web pages. I want web pages to get higher priority than Bittorrent. I might even want small web pages to load faster than YouTube; I'm not sure what the technically best prioritization is on that. I don't want laws that prevent service providers from offering me that kind of service.
There are kinds of net neutrality that I do want - I don't want my ISP to refuse to carry Google because Google isn't buying transit from them directly or competes with services they sell, and I don't want my ISP to give higher priority to Microsoft or Yahoo than Google because Google isn't paying them enough. On the other hand, if Akamai wants to pay my ISP to put a bunch of their cache boxes in the ISP's network so that they can make some web pages go faster (by caching them closer to me), I'm all in favor of that.
I don't expect my legislators, or even their staffs, to understand the technology well enough to make policy decisions like that. I don't always understand it well enough myself, and I've been working in this field for 30 years. And you know how newspaper articles never describe events you were at the way you thought they happened? Legislators are even less accurate than newspaper reporters. I just wish businesses would stop offering bad service because they're greedy (as opposed to offering better service because they're greedy), and I wish governments would stop making rules just because they want us to know they're doing something.
That would be enough to let users in the Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan get Kazakh-tuned Google results without having to comply with the government restrictions on content hosting inside their country.
8-character passwords were strong enough for Unix thirty years ago, but that was a long time ago in Moore's Law cycles; I've got wristwatches faster than that PDP-11. It's annoying how many systems still seem to use them.
For systems that do passwords interactively, you're not going to get the same brute force speed, but you're still exposed to automated attacks - using a CAPTCHA in addition to the password can help prevent them.