what is the justification for incarcerating an individual who only potentially damaged a private company's profits?
Because it's not only about reform, it's about retribution.
It's the same reason we have the death penalty in this country. Sure, we can remove dangerous individuals from society. Hell, it's actually cheaper than killing them. No, the death penalty isn't a deterrent. Yes, we sometimes make mistakes. But it's not about what's best in the long run for society. It's about the sweet satisfaction you get from raw vengeance. It's not about the convict; nothing, and I mean nothing, is as cathartic for us as frying them in the chair.
The same is true about locking up non-violent offenders. We don't have to, and a lot of the time (especially in cases like these), it's not the best way to reform an individual. But the industry must have its pound of flesh from the evildoers that skimmed a few pennies from their deep, deep pockets.
It's hard to justify buying an Xbox 360 if Sony does cut their prices.
How about a great line of games and a platform that developers have shown a commitment to producing more for?
I have yet to see the "killer" game, the one that would make someone have to have a PS3. Lacking that, the fact that almost all games available for the PS3--plus way more--are also available on the Xbox 360 would make it a much better platform to buy. Remember, most people buy gaming platforms based not on nebulous potential and mere claims of superiority, and most people don't buy gaming platforms based on its ability to play movies, especially in a format that still has virutally no market penetration.
Most people (and yes, there are exceptions) buy gaming platforms based on having really great games at a pretty good price point. In fact, the last time I looked, the PS2 was still outselling the PS3. This could have shifted by now, but I don't think it has. To me, this indicates that people still don't value the marginal improvement of the PS3 over the PS2 to be worth the price difference. The marginal improvement of the PS3 over the Xbox 360 is debatable, but very minor at best, and the price difference is still significant.
My prediction? Yes, if they drop the price of the PS3 by $100, they will sell a few more units, but it will still be a distant third in the current generation console war. After screwing up the launch so badly and not giving people the features and games they expected for that premium price, it's too little, too late.
Maybe they'll learn their lessons in engineering and marketing the PS4. If anything good can come to Sony from the PS3 debacle and Ken Kutaragi's departure, maybe it's a healthy dose of much-needed humility. As the company is so painfully aware of now, Microsoft and Nintendo aren't stupid, and maybe now they'll start treating them as serious competitors they are. And maybe, just maybe, it will stop thinking so much about what Sony wants and start thinking about its customers want.
It really depends on the artist and style of music.
With some artists, like the Beatles for instance, I like their singles. Their good stuff was really good, but their bad stuff was, well, crap.
However, some artists are much more conducive to an album-type experience. I always kind of hate hearing a Pink Floyd song on the radio. Not that I hate Pink Floyd, they're one of my all-time favorite bands. But pulling a song like Comfortably Numb out of the context of The Wall, Brain Damage out of the context of Dark Side of the Moon, and so on, well, it just doesn't do it justice.
It doesn't just have to be concept albums this applies to. A lot of albums have themes that run through them, even though each song stands pretty well on its own. Fleetwood Mac's Rumors is like that. Sure, each song is great, but all of them together are greater than the sum of their parts.
I think that a HUGE problem (in capital letters!) with the music industry today, aside from treating its customers as extortion victims, is that they don't want to aim for specialized tastes any more. They want everyone just to listen to the same pop crap they forcefeed us all, and if you don't like it, well, don't listen to anything at all. There is no room in their business model for people who like x type of music and other people who like y.
My question would be how it knows you don't have an original copy of the materials in question?
Your answer is that it doesn't matter, they'll come after you anyway.
Are you innocent? They don't care. It's completely irrelevant, because you'll be given a choice: Pay us a couple of thousand dollars and this will be over with, or go hire a lawyer that is much more expensive and defend yourself. Pay attention the the news here, and read up on their tactics. The RIAA/MPAA has a history of going after people that it knows are innocent.
If you choose option #2, you'll waste all kinds of time and money, possibly even face financial ruin as a result of paying dozens of thousands of dollars. In the end, after the RIAA/MPAA's lawyers have extracted as much money from you as they can, the RIAA/MPAA will drop their case. It will all just silently go away, except for the bills from the lawyers.
You've mistakenly assumed that it's all about your guilt or innocence as an individual person. The real point is to keep up appearances for their extortion ring to continue to be effective. The real point is to scare the shit out of people so badly that whether you're innocent or guilty, you'll still pay up.
Let's not fool ourselves, this is organized crime, plain and simple, except that for now, it's still legal. (Organized "Legal," I guess you'd call it.) What can you do about it? Well, if the thought of paying a lawyer to defend you and, if you actually want damages from the RIAA/MPAA for screwing around with you, paying $114,000 to a lawyer (the amount that is at stake in the most famous to date case of Capitol v. Foster), then you need to support organizations dedicated to changing the laws to make this type of extortion illegal. I would suggest the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who has a pretty good record of success, but at the very least, you need to write to your Congresscritters and let them know that the current situation is unacceptable.
Just to clarify, because obviously some of you don't get it: I have nothing against autistic people. Some of them are quite cool people. If they make an informed consent to refuse treatment for their condition, good for them, and I support them 100%. But we're not talking about an adult making an informed decision about the state of their own health here. We're talking about someone making a decision about the state of someone else's health based not on what's in the best interests of that person, but their own agenda.
And let's talk about agendas. The first one presented in the parent's post was religion. This is going to sound harsh, but it needs to be said. The health of your children takes precedence over your own delusions of how you think your god of choice defines moral. Let's say that instead of treating autism, we're talking about taking your son up on a mountaintop and killing him. If Bob the plumber does that and the police find out about it, when he tells them, "God is testing my faith," are they supposed to just say, "Oh, freedom of religion, we can't interfere. By all means, kill your son, Bob."? That's bullshit, and Abraham, who was presented with this situation in the Bible, should have told his petty god to go to hell; he's not going to kill his son.
Likewise, if you're going to deny treatment of a medical condition to your child because of religion, you should have that child taken away from you because while you're free to practice your religion to your hearts content when it comes to living your life how you want, you're obviously not capable of making responsible, informed decisions for someone else's health. (Sorry Jehovah's Witnesses, but this applies to you when it comes to blood transfusions.) Believe it or not, I highly respect religion, but not when it's causing direct harm to others.
The other situation presented was the "my child is special and I wouldn't want them any other way" agenda. Notice the wording of that sentence: I wouldn't want them any other way. Notice that a parent who says that isn't talking about what's best for the child; they're talking about what they want. There is a small contingent of people out there who are what I call "sufferers." You know the type, whenever you ask them, "How's it going?" instead of answering "not too bad" like any reasonable person does, they proceed to tell you about their back ache, their car repairs, their plumbing problems, their stupid brother who got arrested, and so on. They're the people who, if they won the lottery, would complain about how much taxes they're having to pay.
A subset of these people actually get off on being in a constant state of suffering. They love the attention that it brings to them from people who don't know them well. They just love that feeling when someone tells them, "Oh my god, that's awful! You poor thing!" Having a disabled child and not treating them because of this is about as scummy as it gets. If they want to wallow in their misery, I say, fine. But if they want to impose that misery on someone who can't make the decision for himself or herself, that's where I draw the line and say that a baseball bat is appropriate.
Now, speaking of the misery of autism, I'm not saying that everyone who has autism is miserable. Some of them are pretty much normal, and the cure may in fact be worse than the condition. If parents weigh the risks and benefits and come to the decision that it's not worth it, I'm fine with that, more power to them. But in many cases, autism is not just a matter of a child being different, it's a matter of a child not being able to function in society.
Is there a gray area? Sure, there almost always is. Should parents get leeway when they're operating within that gray area? You bet. But 1) if a low-risk high-success treatment becomes available, and 2) parents make the decision whether or not to have their child undergo it because of religion or what they want instead of the long-term health and well-being of the child, it's time for the baseball bat.
First, there are the religious types, who dissapprove because "that's how God made them."
Then there are the parents (religious or not) who say "my child is special and I wouldn't want them any other way." You'd be surprised how often this sentiment gets expressed.
I wouldn't say that "a lot of people" feel this way.
Also, I won't beat around the bush: These people are stupid idiots that ought to be arrested for severe child abuse. Anyone who thinks this for any reason is a bad and extraordinarily selfish parent and should immediately have their children taken away from them. Anyone who would deliberately impose a curable handicap on their children should be beaten, and I'd be happy to volunteer to be the one who brings the baseball bat and takes the first few swings. I sure as hell don't think I'd be the last one, either.
Old: Spend literally days planning and laying out tables so that you can make sure stuff is lined up correctly and (gasp!) maybe put a menu on the left or something.
New: Assign it a CSS attribute and call it done.
Old: Want to change the font of your site? Go through Each. And. Every. Single. Page. and change it.
New: Change one line in one file.
Old: Create HTML files that were several kilobytes worth of extraneous #@$*! attributes do the most minor of things. Want the data in a table centered? Be prepared to modify hundreds (thousands?) of td tags. (Even programmatically, this is stupid.)
New: Define the attribute once in one place and have it apply to the whole file.
Old: Everyone who wanted to display anything meaningful on the web had to be an HTML coding expert as well as a design expert.
New: There's a pretty good division of labor that will if desired, allow the designers to be designers and the developers to be developers.
Old: Every browser had its own standards of how tags and their attributes were interpreted.
New: Every browser still has its own standards of how tags and their attributes are interpreted, but it's a lot better and tons more consistent than it used to be.
Old: 99% of all web sites looked the same, like crap, because although lots of people kinda sorta knew HTML, coding a site consistently pretty was a lot of time and effort, most of the time, prohibitively much.
New: Lots of sites still look like crap, but at least they're their own unique brand of crap. Seriously, web sites have gotten generally much prettier, and most importantly, easy to use because of CSS and, yes, Javascript. Simple example: I use Gmail as my e-mail client now. Without CSS and Javascript (and a related subject, AJAX), there wouldn't be a chance in hell of using a web application as my e-mail client. And before too long, it looks like Google is going to have some really nifty other office-type applications. And Google's not alone.
I could go on, but do I really have to?
Look, CSS isn't perfect, there still needs to be some work done both by the W3C and especially the browser developers to make it reach its ultimate goal of separating content from presentation. But the fact that it has a few downsides doesn't take away from how much better the world of the web is now than it used to be.
we actually acted out characters in our tabletop sessions
So what's stopping you now? Just because a lot of old D&D players were really "roll" players instead of role-players, did that mean that you couldn't enjoy the game the way you wanted to?
My addiction of choice is City of Heroes, and my characters and I are pretty much totally separate. Just because there are people in the games that don't roleplay does not mean that you can't. In fact, there's quite a large contingent of role-players around in City of Heroes, ranging from casual to "I never speak of game mechanics even if my character ends up dead, dead, dead" players. You just have to get out there and find them.
My advice if you ever do decide to try out any of these games is to get on the official game site's roleplaying forums (they all have them) and ask for guilds/supergroup/whatever where the primary focus is roleplaying. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
That's the same as with oh-so-many "artists" who rant away how they would rather see their songs pirated than not heard.
That's a little different. Most of the works by these oh-so-many "artists" don't actually belong to them, they belong to the labels that sign them, lock, stock, and barrel. If an artist doesn't sell CDs, it doesn't impact them that much since most of their income is from concerts and such anyway. (And the more pirated copies of their CDs out there, the more people are likely to show up at their concerts.) Piracy doesn't hurt the artists too terribly much, just the music labels, which is why they can afford to take a stand like that.
I don't know what Michael Moore's arrangement with Lionsgate is, but I suspect that he has a much higher financial interest in his movies than the vast majority of musicians do in their CDs.
At any rate, I'm going to go see it in the theater. Aside from being the right thing to do, I really enjoy Michael Moore's movies and I'd like to encourage him to make more by voting with my dollars what is worth paying to see and what isn't. Here's the trailer, it looks like it might be his best one yet.
two adults, one child and two cats (in carriers) will not fit
Try two adults and four kids. That was my family when we were growing up. We never had an SUV. The typical seating arrangement when we all went somewhere was Mom and Dad up front with one kid between them and three kids in the back. Was it cramped? Sure, but rare were the times when we all had to be piled into the car at the same time.
Nowadays, I would suggest against that arrangement for safety reasons (this was when most cars didn't even have seat belts). Still, there is nothing wrong with two adults up front and three kids (or one kid and two cats, in carriers) in the back of any modern sedan.
I can't believe that someone out there actually thinks that two adults, one child, and two cants (in carriers) will not fit in a sedan. I mean, really. Damn. Not only can they safely fit, but quite comfortably.
By your standard, almost every family in the country should have an SUV.
In case it wasn't obvious, the Presidential Debates aren't there for your amusement and entertainment. They're supposed to give you an idea of where the candidates stand on important issues and what they're going to do if they're elected to the office. I'm sorry you find that boring; I don't.
I don't know if you're kidding or not, but people with attitudes like the one expressed here frustrate me. Because of their constant demand for entertainment over information, we have a media that caters to the sensational and a woefully uneducated electorate. You're the reason we only get these horrid "sound bite" candidates and office-holders instead of people of real substance. And believe it or not, when a candidate does give "the same answers & message over and over and over," well, even that is a good thing and serves a purpose. It shows you how important they feel that thing is, or depending on what those answers and that message is, how shallow they are.
So if you're being sarcastic, ha ha, you pegged the typical politically ignorant American pretty nicely. If you're not, you need to sit your but down and watch the debates in spite of (gasp!) having to suffer through a few dull moments now and then. You've seen what happens to a country when all of its voters are watching Jackass instead of making well-informed choices at the polls.
Sure, it may seem like it's a foolish investment, but if it pays off... Oh, man... Invest a penny at the beginning at time, and before you know it, you'll be dining at Milliways.
What he's leaving out is that the case was over the "fleeting" use of such words, such as during live events when something accidentally slips through. If a pre-recorded show has the words in there and it is deliberately broadcasted, the indecency rules still apply.
The problem is that currently, the FCC sometimes enforces the standard of "fleeting use," and sometimes it doesn't. The courts are just saying that it needs to be standardized and rationally applied.
Why does it fall onto the Government to take care of you when you, yourself, cannot?
Well, for one thing, there are the ethical implications of not doing so. Believe it or not, there are people in our society who cannot take care of themselves through no fault of their own. Why should we allow people to needlessly suffer and die when we have it within our means to not?
For another, ethical concerns aside, we as a society have a vested interest in making sure that our population is a healthy and productive one. If some members of it aren't, we should do what we can—for the sake of ourselves, if for no other reason, since we also benefit from their future productivity—to ensure that they have a chance to become so again.
Now, I know what you're thinking, that everyone on welfare and other government programs are leeches sucking off the teat of our hard-earned pay. And yes, there are a few people out there like that. But as weird as it may seem, the vast majority of people on government programs don't want to be. They'd love to be in the middle class, or even wealthy.
The problem is that most of these people either 1) don't know how to do so, or 2) have gotten so depressed with a society that systematically prevents them from making more of themselves because everyone is so damned greedy that they figure it's not worth their time and effort. They figure that they'll just end up right where they are now, just shorter of breath and one day closer to death. What's sad is that we as a country used to not be so much this way, but that these people are for the most part correct now.
Do I think that government is doing a spectacular job of helping people to help themselves? No, because it's become rather corrupt with greedy bastards who don't really care about you or me and just want to enjoy the lavish lifestyle of a Congressman. But do I think that one of the reasons government exists is to provide for the general welfare of society by doing things like providing assistance to those who need it? Yes, I most wholeheartedly do.
Maybe it was the note at the top of the article that says, "Level: Introductory."
Maybe it was the author's comment at the end that said, "At this point, you may be thinking, 'Wow. That was a big waste of time. All of this stuff is obvious and everyone knows it. Why did anyone write all of this?' I hope this is what you're thinking. Then you're already smart. Good for you."
But somewhere along the course of reading the article, I got the impression that he wasn't writing it for professional developers (at least, smart ones), but for people relatively new to programming.
But then, maybe I'm just stating the obvious, Cap'n...
Free, as in no incremental cost if you already own an Xbox for gaming that you're willing to mod.;-)
(Unlike the Apple TV, which you very unlikely own unless you're using it for this specific purpose.)
And I accidentally misidentified the project as being for the 360 instead of the original Xbox, which you can actually get pretty dirt cheap these days.
If you're a nerd, you should either a) already know what XBMC is, b) be able to figure it out without help, or c) both.
a) is extremely arguable. I hate to burst your bubble, but most nerds I know do not own an Xbox, 1 or 360. The ones that do (I own one of each myself) don't keep up with the mod/homebrew scene, they just use them to unwind after their day at the office. (Which is why I had never heard of XBMC, and even mistakenly claimed that it was for the 360.) As such, it's unlikely that XBMC will mean anything to, well, I'm guessing around 99% of the nerds that read Slashdot.
As for b), being a nerd myself, the first thing I thought of when I saw XBMC was BMC, the huge company that makes enterprise monitoring, alerting, and capacity planning software. The first thing that crossed my brain when I stopped a second to ponder, "What is XBMC?" was that maybe it was some sort of open-source equivalent, like ZenOSS or such. Of course, the reference to "home-brew" kind of threw me off, because typically, people don't describe applications like that as such.
So, curious, I followed the link and read a little bit about it and figured out what it was. And just to be clear, I never said or implied in my post that anyone here can't figure out what XBMC is, only that they shouldn't have to figure out what XBMC is. That doesn't make anyone an idiot (except maybe the person who claims that they should), it just means that they have better things to do with their valuable nerd time.
As it turns out, it's a good thing that I'm a Slashdot subscriber and got to see the article when it was to be posted in the mysterious future, because once it hit the front page in green status, the site got slashdotted, and the only way to figure out what XBMC stood for was to hover over the link. (Unless, of course, you've just got to know so badly that you pull up the HTML source for the page and find the URL that way.)
Of course, if you're like me and typically don't look at the URL of where Slashdot links go to, or if the link had been like most here, in the form of http://somwhere.com/index.php?articleid=48372901, it would have been more trouble than it's worth, and you would have just moved on, and that's not good for anyone involved.
And the solution is so stupidly simple that I can't believe you're still needlessly arguing about it. If you're a story submitter, make sure you spell out all but the most common of technical acronyms or abbreviations in full before assuming everyone knows what you're talking about.
While I agree that this is good practice, and should be followed
Well, funny enough, it sounds like you agree with me, which is what I said that you're needlessly arguing about it. At this point, you're wasting more of my valuable nerd time than you're worth.
What kind of nerd can't do some fucking research?
Not a very good one. But as you said, this is a News for Nerds site, not a fucking research project. If a lot of stories here were like this one, I would stop subscribing and find another site to get my news from that actually doesn't like irritating its readers.
All it takes to avoid looking like an idiot is to use some common sense and hover over the first word of the summary.
And all it takes to keep people from having to jump through idiotic non-intuitive hoops that may or may not yield a modicum of an explanation of what the hell you're talking about is to spell out your obscure abbreviation at least once in the summary.
I'm glad that people like you, who blame problems with a user interface on those "idiot" end users, are becoming fewer and fewer. And next time you want to lecture me on what is and isn't "common sense" (let alone who is the real idiot), try counting how many URLs in summaries here, completely independent of the summary text, indicate the subject of the article. Oh yeah, that's obvious.
For reference, for the 99% of us out here who have no frickin' clue what something like XBMC might stand for, it would be nice to spell out the whole abbreviation at least once in summaries. Since it wasn't mentioned, XBMC is the Xbox Media Center, an open source media center project to play images and videos of various formats and from various sources, such as streaming from your PC or even the Internet, on your Xbox 360. It will let you use your Xbox 360 kind of like a beefed-up and free Apple TV
Sounds pretty cool, but it does require that you mod your Xbox 360, and Microsoft has been banning modded Xboxes from their Xbox Live service. I'm not saying do it or don't do it, just that before you get too excited and start downloading stuff, you ought to know that as part of your decision.
Because, you know, allowing people to improve your product for free by adding a ton of useful functionality, customizing the thing they've laid out a not-insignificant amount of hard-earned cash for to better suit their needs must be stopped at all costs. After all, it might cost you a few bucks in not selling movies that people already own to them again.
I'm sure as hell not sold on it. It suffers the same problems that the prequels do.
We know it has explosions and light saber-wielding Jedi, woohoo.
Um... Am I the only one that thinks that that was kind of cool in the original movie, but not what makes it the timeless classic that it is? It also needs a great story and no small amount of heart, and I see absolutely nothing in that trailer except, well, explosions and waving light sabers.
Damn, I wish this post could have been higher in the thread, but here it is anyway.
This is why I hope that on-demand programming over the Internet, using services such as iTunes or something similar, eventually takes off. To do away with the networks completely.
Think about it. What if Jericho wasn't beholden to the networks to decide their fate? What if instead of sending peanuts to CBS, you could donate a few bucks to the show's production company instead? If you're a loyal viewer of the show, would you be willing to pay $2 an episode, or $30-$40 bucks for an entire second season of it? I know that for the shows I like, I sure would, especially if I didn't have that stupid cable/satellite bill to pay (which I don't any more, incidentally.
Wouldn't it be nice if whether or not you watch Jericho did not depend on if CBS wanted to put another Dancing with the Stars clone on in its time slot? With on-demand payment and viewing, you can have an infinite number of time slots, and whether or not a show gets picked up and/or renewed would depend entirely on whether or not the viewers of that show were willing to directly support it financially.
This would also have a great impact on the quality of programming, too. For one thing, with big corporate advertising sponsors out of the picture (or at least, relegated to minor financial support instead), shows' creators would have complete artistic freedom over their shows. If they want to take on a controversial subject, as long as people are willing to pay to see it, they could have at it. If they wanted to appeal to a niche audience, as long as people are willing to pay to see it, they could have at it. You get the idea.
Personally, I never cared for Jericho. But hey, if you and enough other people do, then by all means, it shouldn't be killed just because millions of people aren't watching it on CBS.
Wow, to the poster above, thank you, that's a fantastic analogy!
I've been beaten over the head with the "it does a LOT of things!" stick so many times it makes me sick. The problem is that it really sucks at all of them!
It's really comical. Here's a typical me/Notes goober conversation:
Me: The Notes client truly sucks as an e-mail client. It doesn't adhere to any OS's standard conventions, and it crashes a lot.
Them: Well, Notes does kind of suck on the client side, but the servers are where it counts, and it's really stable.
Me: Okay, well explain to me why we have at least one or two servers crash every week, and we have to schedule a reboot once a week then. Oh, and what happened to my e-mail? It's all gone!
Them: Oh, sometimes databases just eat themselves. Don't worry, I'll restore everything up through last night from backup. But the rest of the time, it's stable! And besides, it's more than just an e-mail system. It's also a database!
Me: Oh! Well, in that case, I have these two related tables that I need to store in an--
Them: It's not a relational database, just a database.
Me: Come again?
Them: You can't actually relate the information from one table in another. They're just flat tables. No relations.
Me: So, for most practical purposes, it's just a storage bucket that can't do what even Microsoft Access can then?
Them: Oh, it can do rapid application development too, though. Yeah, it's a development environment, that's the ticket!
Me: Oh! In that case, I'd like to create some kind of form where I can enter this information and store it. Then when I click that button, send an e-mail to those people with the information in it.
Them: No problema.
Me: Okay, that's a title, so it needs to be bold text--
Them: Oh, that's a rich text field.
Me: Yeah, so how do I code up a rich text field?
Them: Well, that's kind of a beast. You can't really code it up directly, you have to create another object to store the information in and... Well... I don't really understand rich text fields myself. It's best just to avoid them. Even professional Notes developers know that.
Me: So, it sucks as an e-mail system, it sucks as a database system, I can't even send out a frickin' formatted e-mail... Is there anything Notes does do well? Anything at all?
Them: Oh, yes! Replication and security!
Me: Fuck you. I'm using Gmail account.
As a technical professional with a strong background in systems architecture and server administration, I would highly advice any serious businessperson to avoid Lotus Notes like the plague. Ignore me at you and your career's peril.
When I started working at the huge multinational company I work at now, there were three things that I had very little experience with that everyone swore would last at the company for decades to come: Token Ring, Netware, and Lotus Notes. I insisted that within the next few years, these technologies would be dead and the company would have to change, and I was constantly reminded of the millions of dollars invested in them.
It's eight years later. We have no Token Ring network. We have no Netware servers. I'm doing my damned best to convince people of how bad Lotus Notes sucks, and most everyone agrees, but we have a Notes support team that really likes their jobs and somehow manages to convince upper level management that it would cost billions of dollars to change to a real e-mail and collaboration solution. But I'm still holding out hope.
Godwilling, Lotus Notes will soon be on this list as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's not only about reform, it's about retribution.
It's the same reason we have the death penalty in this country. Sure, we can remove dangerous individuals from society. Hell, it's actually cheaper than killing them. No, the death penalty isn't a deterrent. Yes, we sometimes make mistakes. But it's not about what's best in the long run for society. It's about the sweet satisfaction you get from raw vengeance. It's not about the convict; nothing, and I mean nothing, is as cathartic for us as frying them in the chair.
The same is true about locking up non-violent offenders. We don't have to, and a lot of the time (especially in cases like these), it's not the best way to reform an individual. But the industry must have its pound of flesh from the evildoers that skimmed a few pennies from their deep, deep pockets.
sigh...
How about a great line of games and a platform that developers have shown a commitment to producing more for?
I have yet to see the "killer" game, the one that would make someone have to have a PS3. Lacking that, the fact that almost all games available for the PS3--plus way more--are also available on the Xbox 360 would make it a much better platform to buy. Remember, most people buy gaming platforms based not on nebulous potential and mere claims of superiority, and most people don't buy gaming platforms based on its ability to play movies, especially in a format that still has virutally no market penetration.
Most people (and yes, there are exceptions) buy gaming platforms based on having really great games at a pretty good price point. In fact, the last time I looked, the PS2 was still outselling the PS3. This could have shifted by now, but I don't think it has. To me, this indicates that people still don't value the marginal improvement of the PS3 over the PS2 to be worth the price difference. The marginal improvement of the PS3 over the Xbox 360 is debatable, but very minor at best, and the price difference is still significant.
My prediction? Yes, if they drop the price of the PS3 by $100, they will sell a few more units, but it will still be a distant third in the current generation console war. After screwing up the launch so badly and not giving people the features and games they expected for that premium price, it's too little, too late.
Maybe they'll learn their lessons in engineering and marketing the PS4. If anything good can come to Sony from the PS3 debacle and Ken Kutaragi's departure, maybe it's a healthy dose of much-needed humility. As the company is so painfully aware of now, Microsoft and Nintendo aren't stupid, and maybe now they'll start treating them as serious competitors they are. And maybe, just maybe, it will stop thinking so much about what Sony wants and start thinking about its customers want.
(But I kind of doubt it.)
I like your original version better. I figured you must have really wanted in the industry to go to such great lengths. :-D
It really depends on the artist and style of music.
With some artists, like the Beatles for instance, I like their singles. Their good stuff was really good, but their bad stuff was, well, crap.
However, some artists are much more conducive to an album-type experience. I always kind of hate hearing a Pink Floyd song on the radio. Not that I hate Pink Floyd, they're one of my all-time favorite bands. But pulling a song like Comfortably Numb out of the context of The Wall, Brain Damage out of the context of Dark Side of the Moon, and so on, well, it just doesn't do it justice.
It doesn't just have to be concept albums this applies to. A lot of albums have themes that run through them, even though each song stands pretty well on its own. Fleetwood Mac's Rumors is like that. Sure, each song is great, but all of them together are greater than the sum of their parts.
I think that a HUGE problem (in capital letters!) with the music industry today, aside from treating its customers as extortion victims, is that they don't want to aim for specialized tastes any more. They want everyone just to listen to the same pop crap they forcefeed us all, and if you don't like it, well, don't listen to anything at all. There is no room in their business model for people who like x type of music and other people who like y.
Your answer is that it doesn't matter, they'll come after you anyway.
Are you innocent? They don't care. It's completely irrelevant, because you'll be given a choice: Pay us a couple of thousand dollars and this will be over with, or go hire a lawyer that is much more expensive and defend yourself. Pay attention the the news here, and read up on their tactics. The RIAA/MPAA has a history of going after people that it knows are innocent.
If you choose option #2, you'll waste all kinds of time and money, possibly even face financial ruin as a result of paying dozens of thousands of dollars. In the end, after the RIAA/MPAA's lawyers have extracted as much money from you as they can, the RIAA/MPAA will drop their case. It will all just silently go away, except for the bills from the lawyers.
You've mistakenly assumed that it's all about your guilt or innocence as an individual person. The real point is to keep up appearances for their extortion ring to continue to be effective. The real point is to scare the shit out of people so badly that whether you're innocent or guilty, you'll still pay up.
Let's not fool ourselves, this is organized crime, plain and simple, except that for now, it's still legal. (Organized "Legal," I guess you'd call it.) What can you do about it? Well, if the thought of paying a lawyer to defend you and, if you actually want damages from the RIAA/MPAA for screwing around with you, paying $114,000 to a lawyer (the amount that is at stake in the most famous to date case of Capitol v. Foster), then you need to support organizations dedicated to changing the laws to make this type of extortion illegal. I would suggest the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who has a pretty good record of success, but at the very least, you need to write to your Congresscritters and let them know that the current situation is unacceptable.
Just to clarify, because obviously some of you don't get it: I have nothing against autistic people. Some of them are quite cool people. If they make an informed consent to refuse treatment for their condition, good for them, and I support them 100%. But we're not talking about an adult making an informed decision about the state of their own health here. We're talking about someone making a decision about the state of someone else's health based not on what's in the best interests of that person, but their own agenda.
And let's talk about agendas. The first one presented in the parent's post was religion. This is going to sound harsh, but it needs to be said. The health of your children takes precedence over your own delusions of how you think your god of choice defines moral. Let's say that instead of treating autism, we're talking about taking your son up on a mountaintop and killing him. If Bob the plumber does that and the police find out about it, when he tells them, "God is testing my faith," are they supposed to just say, "Oh, freedom of religion, we can't interfere. By all means, kill your son, Bob."? That's bullshit, and Abraham, who was presented with this situation in the Bible, should have told his petty god to go to hell; he's not going to kill his son.
Likewise, if you're going to deny treatment of a medical condition to your child because of religion, you should have that child taken away from you because while you're free to practice your religion to your hearts content when it comes to living your life how you want, you're obviously not capable of making responsible, informed decisions for someone else's health. (Sorry Jehovah's Witnesses, but this applies to you when it comes to blood transfusions.) Believe it or not, I highly respect religion, but not when it's causing direct harm to others.
The other situation presented was the "my child is special and I wouldn't want them any other way" agenda. Notice the wording of that sentence: I wouldn't want them any other way. Notice that a parent who says that isn't talking about what's best for the child; they're talking about what they want. There is a small contingent of people out there who are what I call "sufferers." You know the type, whenever you ask them, "How's it going?" instead of answering "not too bad" like any reasonable person does, they proceed to tell you about their back ache, their car repairs, their plumbing problems, their stupid brother who got arrested, and so on. They're the people who, if they won the lottery, would complain about how much taxes they're having to pay.
A subset of these people actually get off on being in a constant state of suffering. They love the attention that it brings to them from people who don't know them well. They just love that feeling when someone tells them, "Oh my god, that's awful! You poor thing!" Having a disabled child and not treating them because of this is about as scummy as it gets. If they want to wallow in their misery, I say, fine. But if they want to impose that misery on someone who can't make the decision for himself or herself, that's where I draw the line and say that a baseball bat is appropriate.
Now, speaking of the misery of autism, I'm not saying that everyone who has autism is miserable. Some of them are pretty much normal, and the cure may in fact be worse than the condition. If parents weigh the risks and benefits and come to the decision that it's not worth it, I'm fine with that, more power to them. But in many cases, autism is not just a matter of a child being different, it's a matter of a child not being able to function in society.
Is there a gray area? Sure, there almost always is. Should parents get leeway when they're operating within that gray area? You bet. But 1) if a low-risk high-success treatment becomes available, and 2) parents make the decision whether or not to have their child undergo it because of religion or what they want instead of the long-term health and well-being of the child, it's time for the baseball bat.
I wouldn't say that "a lot of people" feel this way.
Also, I won't beat around the bush: These people are stupid idiots that ought to be arrested for severe child abuse. Anyone who thinks this for any reason is a bad and extraordinarily selfish parent and should immediately have their children taken away from them. Anyone who would deliberately impose a curable handicap on their children should be beaten, and I'd be happy to volunteer to be the one who brings the baseball bat and takes the first few swings. I sure as hell don't think I'd be the last one, either.
Old: Spend literally days planning and laying out tables so that you can make sure stuff is lined up correctly and (gasp!) maybe put a menu on the left or something.
New: Assign it a CSS attribute and call it done.
Old: Want to change the font of your site? Go through Each. And. Every. Single. Page. and change it.
New: Change one line in one file.
Old: Create HTML files that were several kilobytes worth of extraneous #@$*! attributes do the most minor of things. Want the data in a table centered? Be prepared to modify hundreds (thousands?) of td tags. (Even programmatically, this is stupid.)
New: Define the attribute once in one place and have it apply to the whole file.
Old: Everyone who wanted to display anything meaningful on the web had to be an HTML coding expert as well as a design expert.
New: There's a pretty good division of labor that will if desired, allow the designers to be designers and the developers to be developers.
Old: Every browser had its own standards of how tags and their attributes were interpreted.
New: Every browser still has its own standards of how tags and their attributes are interpreted, but it's a lot better and tons more consistent than it used to be.
Old: 99% of all web sites looked the same, like crap, because although lots of people kinda sorta knew HTML, coding a site consistently pretty was a lot of time and effort, most of the time, prohibitively much.
New: Lots of sites still look like crap, but at least they're their own unique brand of crap. Seriously, web sites have gotten generally much prettier, and most importantly, easy to use because of CSS and, yes, Javascript. Simple example: I use Gmail as my e-mail client now. Without CSS and Javascript (and a related subject, AJAX), there wouldn't be a chance in hell of using a web application as my e-mail client. And before too long, it looks like Google is going to have some really nifty other office-type applications. And Google's not alone.
I could go on, but do I really have to?
Look, CSS isn't perfect, there still needs to be some work done both by the W3C and especially the browser developers to make it reach its ultimate goal of separating content from presentation. But the fact that it has a few downsides doesn't take away from how much better the world of the web is now than it used to be.
So what's stopping you now? Just because a lot of old D&D players were really "roll" players instead of role-players, did that mean that you couldn't enjoy the game the way you wanted to?
My addiction of choice is City of Heroes, and my characters and I are pretty much totally separate. Just because there are people in the games that don't roleplay does not mean that you can't. In fact, there's quite a large contingent of role-players around in City of Heroes, ranging from casual to "I never speak of game mechanics even if my character ends up dead, dead, dead" players. You just have to get out there and find them.
My advice if you ever do decide to try out any of these games is to get on the official game site's roleplaying forums (they all have them) and ask for guilds/supergroup/whatever where the primary focus is roleplaying. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
I don't know what Michael Moore's arrangement with Lionsgate is, but I suspect that he has a much higher financial interest in his movies than the vast majority of musicians do in their CDs.
At any rate, I'm going to go see it in the theater. Aside from being the right thing to do, I really enjoy Michael Moore's movies and I'd like to encourage him to make more by voting with my dollars what is worth paying to see and what isn't. Here's the trailer, it looks like it might be his best one yet.
Try two adults and four kids. That was my family when we were growing up. We never had an SUV. The typical seating arrangement when we all went somewhere was Mom and Dad up front with one kid between them and three kids in the back. Was it cramped? Sure, but rare were the times when we all had to be piled into the car at the same time.
Nowadays, I would suggest against that arrangement for safety reasons (this was when most cars didn't even have seat belts). Still, there is nothing wrong with two adults up front and three kids (or one kid and two cats, in carriers) in the back of any modern sedan.
I can't believe that someone out there actually thinks that two adults, one child, and two cants (in carriers) will not fit in a sedan. I mean, really. Damn. Not only can they safely fit, but quite comfortably.
By your standard, almost every family in the country should have an SUV.
In case it wasn't obvious, the Presidential Debates aren't there for your amusement and entertainment. They're supposed to give you an idea of where the candidates stand on important issues and what they're going to do if they're elected to the office. I'm sorry you find that boring; I don't.
I don't know if you're kidding or not, but people with attitudes like the one expressed here frustrate me. Because of their constant demand for entertainment over information, we have a media that caters to the sensational and a woefully uneducated electorate. You're the reason we only get these horrid "sound bite" candidates and office-holders instead of people of real substance. And believe it or not, when a candidate does give "the same answers & message over and over and over," well, even that is a good thing and serves a purpose. It shows you how important they feel that thing is, or depending on what those answers and that message is, how shallow they are.
So if you're being sarcastic, ha ha, you pegged the typical politically ignorant American pretty nicely. If you're not, you need to sit your but down and watch the debates in spite of (gasp!) having to suffer through a few dull moments now and then. You've seen what happens to a country when all of its voters are watching Jackass instead of making well-informed choices at the polls.
How do you know they didn't?
Sure, it may seem like it's a foolish investment, but if it pays off... Oh, man... Invest a penny at the beginning at time, and before you know it, you'll be dining at Milliways.
What he's leaving out is that the case was over the "fleeting" use of such words, such as during live events when something accidentally slips through. If a pre-recorded show has the words in there and it is deliberately broadcasted, the indecency rules still apply.
The problem is that currently, the FCC sometimes enforces the standard of "fleeting use," and sometimes it doesn't. The courts are just saying that it needs to be standardized and rationally applied.
Well, for one thing, there are the ethical implications of not doing so. Believe it or not, there are people in our society who cannot take care of themselves through no fault of their own. Why should we allow people to needlessly suffer and die when we have it within our means to not?
For another, ethical concerns aside, we as a society have a vested interest in making sure that our population is a healthy and productive one. If some members of it aren't, we should do what we can—for the sake of ourselves, if for no other reason, since we also benefit from their future productivity—to ensure that they have a chance to become so again.
Now, I know what you're thinking, that everyone on welfare and other government programs are leeches sucking off the teat of our hard-earned pay. And yes, there are a few people out there like that. But as weird as it may seem, the vast majority of people on government programs don't want to be. They'd love to be in the middle class, or even wealthy.
The problem is that most of these people either 1) don't know how to do so, or 2) have gotten so depressed with a society that systematically prevents them from making more of themselves because everyone is so damned greedy that they figure it's not worth their time and effort. They figure that they'll just end up right where they are now, just shorter of breath and one day closer to death. What's sad is that we as a country used to not be so much this way, but that these people are for the most part correct now.
Do I think that government is doing a spectacular job of helping people to help themselves? No, because it's become rather corrupt with greedy bastards who don't really care about you or me and just want to enjoy the lavish lifestyle of a Congressman. But do I think that one of the reasons government exists is to provide for the general welfare of society by doing things like providing assistance to those who need it? Yes, I most wholeheartedly do.
Maybe it was the note at the top of the article that says, "Level: Introductory."
Maybe it was the author's comment at the end that said, "At this point, you may be thinking, 'Wow. That was a big waste of time. All of this stuff is obvious and everyone knows it. Why did anyone write all of this?' I hope this is what you're thinking. Then you're already smart. Good for you."
But somewhere along the course of reading the article, I got the impression that he wasn't writing it for professional developers (at least, smart ones), but for people relatively new to programming.
But then, maybe I'm just stating the obvious, Cap'n...
Free, as in no incremental cost if you already own an Xbox for gaming that you're willing to mod. ;-)
(Unlike the Apple TV, which you very unlikely own unless you're using it for this specific purpose.)
And I accidentally misidentified the project as being for the 360 instead of the original Xbox, which you can actually get pretty dirt cheap these days.
Reprieve:
I just noticed that you're not the parent of my other post, so you're not still needlessly arguing, only needlessly arguing. Stop that!
a) is extremely arguable. I hate to burst your bubble, but most nerds I know do not own an Xbox, 1 or 360. The ones that do (I own one of each myself) don't keep up with the mod/homebrew scene, they just use them to unwind after their day at the office. (Which is why I had never heard of XBMC, and even mistakenly claimed that it was for the 360.) As such, it's unlikely that XBMC will mean anything to, well, I'm guessing around 99% of the nerds that read Slashdot.
As for b), being a nerd myself, the first thing I thought of when I saw XBMC was BMC, the huge company that makes enterprise monitoring, alerting, and capacity planning software. The first thing that crossed my brain when I stopped a second to ponder, "What is XBMC?" was that maybe it was some sort of open-source equivalent, like ZenOSS or such. Of course, the reference to "home-brew" kind of threw me off, because typically, people don't describe applications like that as such.
So, curious, I followed the link and read a little bit about it and figured out what it was. And just to be clear, I never said or implied in my post that anyone here can't figure out what XBMC is, only that they shouldn't have to figure out what XBMC is. That doesn't make anyone an idiot (except maybe the person who claims that they should), it just means that they have better things to do with their valuable nerd time.
As it turns out, it's a good thing that I'm a Slashdot subscriber and got to see the article when it was to be posted in the mysterious future, because once it hit the front page in green status, the site got slashdotted, and the only way to figure out what XBMC stood for was to hover over the link. (Unless, of course, you've just got to know so badly that you pull up the HTML source for the page and find the URL that way.)
Of course, if you're like me and typically don't look at the URL of where Slashdot links go to, or if the link had been like most here, in the form of http://somwhere.com/index.php?articleid=48372901, it would have been more trouble than it's worth, and you would have just moved on, and that's not good for anyone involved.
And the solution is so stupidly simple that I can't believe you're still needlessly arguing about it. If you're a story submitter, make sure you spell out all but the most common of technical acronyms or abbreviations in full before assuming everyone knows what you're talking about.
Well, funny enough, it sounds like you agree with me, which is what I said that you're needlessly arguing about it. At this point, you're wasting more of my valuable nerd time than you're worth.
Not a very good one. But as you said, this is a News for Nerds site, not a fucking research project. If a lot of stories here were like this one, I would stop subscribing and find another site to get my news from that actually doesn't like irritating its readers.
And all it takes to keep people from having to jump through idiotic non-intuitive hoops that may or may not yield a modicum of an explanation of what the hell you're talking about is to spell out your obscure abbreviation at least once in the summary.
I'm glad that people like you, who blame problems with a user interface on those "idiot" end users, are becoming fewer and fewer. And next time you want to lecture me on what is and isn't "common sense" (let alone who is the real idiot), try counting how many URLs in summaries here, completely independent of the summary text, indicate the subject of the article. Oh yeah, that's obvious.
For reference, for the 99% of us out here who have no frickin' clue what something like XBMC might stand for, it would be nice to spell out the whole abbreviation at least once in summaries. Since it wasn't mentioned, XBMC is the Xbox Media Center, an open source media center project to play images and videos of various formats and from various sources, such as streaming from your PC or even the Internet, on your Xbox 360. It will let you use your Xbox 360 kind of like a beefed-up and free Apple TV
Sounds pretty cool, but it does require that you mod your Xbox 360, and Microsoft has been banning modded Xboxes from their Xbox Live service. I'm not saying do it or don't do it, just that before you get too excited and start downloading stuff, you ought to know that as part of your decision.
Because, you know, allowing people to improve your product for free by adding a ton of useful functionality, customizing the thing they've laid out a not-insignificant amount of hard-earned cash for to better suit their needs must be stopped at all costs. After all, it might cost you a few bucks in not selling movies that people already own to them again.
I'm sure as hell not sold on it. It suffers the same problems that the prequels do.
We know it has explosions and light saber-wielding Jedi, woohoo.
Um... Am I the only one that thinks that that was kind of cool in the original movie, but not what makes it the timeless classic that it is? It also needs a great story and no small amount of heart, and I see absolutely nothing in that trailer except, well, explosions and waving light sabers.
Damn, I wish this post could have been higher in the thread, but here it is anyway.
This is why I hope that on-demand programming over the Internet, using services such as iTunes or something similar, eventually takes off. To do away with the networks completely.
Think about it. What if Jericho wasn't beholden to the networks to decide their fate? What if instead of sending peanuts to CBS, you could donate a few bucks to the show's production company instead? If you're a loyal viewer of the show, would you be willing to pay $2 an episode, or $30-$40 bucks for an entire second season of it? I know that for the shows I like, I sure would, especially if I didn't have that stupid cable/satellite bill to pay (which I don't any more, incidentally.
Wouldn't it be nice if whether or not you watch Jericho did not depend on if CBS wanted to put another Dancing with the Stars clone on in its time slot? With on-demand payment and viewing, you can have an infinite number of time slots, and whether or not a show gets picked up and/or renewed would depend entirely on whether or not the viewers of that show were willing to directly support it financially.
This would also have a great impact on the quality of programming, too. For one thing, with big corporate advertising sponsors out of the picture (or at least, relegated to minor financial support instead), shows' creators would have complete artistic freedom over their shows. If they want to take on a controversial subject, as long as people are willing to pay to see it, they could have at it. If they wanted to appeal to a niche audience, as long as people are willing to pay to see it, they could have at it. You get the idea.
Personally, I never cared for Jericho. But hey, if you and enough other people do, then by all means, it shouldn't be killed just because millions of people aren't watching it on CBS.
Wow, to the poster above, thank you, that's a fantastic analogy!
I've been beaten over the head with the "it does a LOT of things!" stick so many times it makes me sick. The problem is that it really sucks at all of them!
It's really comical. Here's a typical me/Notes goober conversation:
As a technical professional with a strong background in systems architecture and server administration, I would highly advice any serious businessperson to avoid Lotus Notes like the plague. Ignore me at you and your career's peril.
When I started working at the huge multinational company I work at now, there were three things that I had very little experience with that everyone swore would last at the company for decades to come: Token Ring, Netware, and Lotus Notes. I insisted that within the next few years, these technologies would be dead and the company would have to change, and I was constantly reminded of the millions of dollars invested in them.
It's eight years later. We have no Token Ring network. We have no Netware servers. I'm doing my damned best to convince people of how bad Lotus Notes sucks, and most everyone agrees, but we have a Notes support team that really likes their jobs and somehow manages to convince upper level management that it would cost billions of dollars to change to a real e-mail and collaboration solution. But I'm still holding out hope.
Godwilling, Lotus Notes will soon be on this list as well.