You're the one committing the appeal to authority fallacy;
the material you cite contains no historical information of any kind, so far as I can see;
the criticism was not purely ad hominem: a demonstration of your "inaccurance" on one point demonstrates a tendency towards error and creates legitimate doubt about all claims that you make, pending examination of your sources; and
"Thanks for playing"? Learn to be civil or no one will ever take you seriously. Even after you leave high school.
My "Magic and Witchcraft in Ancient Greece and Rome" class (yeah, I was one of _those_ majors) claimed non-collusium ritual human sacrifice was quite common into the Roman Empire along the frontiers. Christianity substituted the symbolic ritual of consuming the single, essential all-powerful and life-everlasting human sacrifice.
Heh, I guess that class didn't extend as far as how to spell "colosseum". Anyway, many of the practices and tenets of Pauline Christianity are based more on pre-Christian Dionysiac cults than on human sacrifice per se: the ideas of the sacrifice, tearing-apart, and eating of the god at a feast, of the god having an intensely personal relationship with the individual practitioner, the god dying in order to give eternal life to the practitioner, miracles etc at the birth of the god, and others, are basically Dionysiac. These aspects of Dionysiac/Orphic religion go back a lot earlier than the Roman Empire; if they, in turn, were adapting aspects of human sacrifice practices, it probably dates to the 6th/5th century BCE.
Telengard was directly inspired by the PLATO dnd game mentioned above, with minimal graphics and randomized dungeons.
This is inaccurate: Telengard's dungeon is not random, but procedurally generated (rather like the universe of Elite).
Out of interest, this map rather entertainingly shows someone's abortive attempt to map the dungeon (they got only a tiny fraction of the way through mapping the first level, tee hee).
I realise this -- sigh... I rant because I'm still seething over the article earlier on about New Zealand's DMCA copycat law -- I live there. (I'm contemplating circulating an e-mail to everyone in my faculty suggesting that they write to the select committee evaluating the bill, when everyone comes back from their summer holidays, though I wonder if that wouldn't be counterproductive.)
Oddly enough, probably not. DRM on classical music CDs is very very rare. I've never yet come across an example. (I once thought I did, but it turned out to be a physical flaw on the CD.)
Having said that, DRM on DVDs of Mozart operas... well, that's another matter.
I get the impression that, indirectly, you're agreeing with the gpp. I'd venture a guesstimate that before the 20th century, most artists -- literary, musical, and otherwise -- made the bulk of their income out of performance, rather than publication.
On second thought, that's way too generalised, but I'd still bet on performance representing a hefty percentage of income.
I still wouldn't accept uncritically any cocktail suggestions he had.
Oh, I'd give 'em a try. He was a hell of an experienced drinker -- that's one thing the Bruces' Philosophers' Song certainly got right. Scenario: Socrates and a bunch of friends at a party. They basically find that it's impossible to get him drunk -- he drinks them all under the table, and then wanders off on his usual daily round without even having a nap. (It's all in Plato, all in Plato. My word, what do they teach them in these schools?)
Copyright is good. Protecting it is good. DRM is not inherently evil.
You need to start realising that the third sentence here has nothing whatsoever to do with the first two sentences.
DRM, inherently evil? You bet it is. DRM is an imposition on the rights of the public way beyond the restrictions imposed by copyright. It's double-dipping.
Copyright is saying, "I own this, so you're not allowed to make money out of it"; DRM is saying, "It doesn't matter whether I own this or not, but if you do anything with it that I choose to prevent you from doing, you're a criminal."
Copyright is a compromise that in a reasonable world should promote creativity. DRM is designed precisely to impose obligations and restrictions on the public that have nothing whatsoever to do with copyright, but everything to do with greed and taking away legitimate rights.
I find that astonishing, given that it's hard to find a DVD player in a shop that doesn't have "multi-region" or "region-free" written on the box! Well, if you hang out in shops like the Warehouse or DSE, that is.
... which is a good thing. On the other hand, it looks to me as though it could perhaps make it a criminal offence to own a region-free DVD player. Maybe not (I'm not enough of a lawyer to be able to read beyond the introduction to the bill), but region-coding doesn't seem morally different from "technological preventions measures" to me.
People copying and mass distributing ALSO break the 'copyright bargain', what about the copyright owner's rights of limiting distribution to people who actually PAY for their works? You think its 'fair' to only think about the users rights, but the copyright owners have rights too you know.
You are terminally clueless. Of course copyright owners have rights too: those rights are protected by a thing called "copyright".
New Zealand is a country of 4 million people. It gets a lot of attention on Slashdot because people speak English there.
Even so, this news is obviously of interest to you, since you're bothering to post a comment. This news is certainly of interest to me, since I live in NZ. The population may be small, but there's no shortage of NZers reading Slashdot. In any case, population-size and newsworthiness don't always go hand-in-hand: if they did, nearly 20% of/. articles would be about things going on in China.
The KJV of the Bible was translated from Latin. The Bible was written in Greek and Hebrew.
Sorry, your first sentence is wrong: one of the key things that makes the KJV special is that it was, in fact, an extremely scholarly translation from Greek and Hebrew, not from Latin. I can't read Hebrew, but can attest that its rendition of Greek is generally pretty precise.
By that argument, creationism should be taught in schools.
Yes, I know it's easy to modify your quotation to make it more nuanced and more sensible. All that means is that "enough said" often isn't enough after all.
Sigh... thank you. I wasted a lot of time scanning through the comments in this discussion before finding yours, the only relevant and informative one of the whole sorry lot. Move along folks, nothing to see here... FWIW, the article points out that this is not the first time this year that CryTek has been investigated for this.
Actually we've now done away with 5c pieces in NZ as well. And shrunk the remaining 10c/20c/50c coins to a sensible size. My wallet feels a lot lighter:-)
Can you name a single library anywhere other than in one of the world's major capitals, that carries the complete works of Mozart? Or even 20% of that?
Having the complete works of Mozart is really not a big deal. Most public libraries would not have it, but almost any university or college with a music school will. I guess if the university library has a policy of not letting in people except students/staff, that's pretty tough and certainly unreasonable (they're not that bastardly where I am, and a lot of university libraries will give cards to people who live in the same town).
The site is a UI disaster. It's unclear how to find actual music.
What do you mean? Click on "Search the NMA Online", and they give you a list of volumes. Click on the volume to expand it. Once you're looking at a list of individual works and movements, click on the Adobe logo to get a PDF file. Where's the difficulty?
The AC wasn't referring to FPS Optimizer, in fact, but to Timeslip's Morrowind Graphics Enhancer. As of version 3, MGE can indeed render landscape to the horizon in the same way that Oblivion does. Yes, you can see all of Vvardenfell from the top of Red Mountain. It's not by any means perfect -- it doesn't render objects and buildings nearly far enough away (they pop into existence about 30 metres away) -- but it's still a very impressive achievement, and regularly updated.
What's also interesting is that MS will be offering a "bridge" (as a separate download) that enables Office software to read and write ODF (the OpenOffice Open Document Format) files.
Do you have a source for that? Because it is contradictory to what I thought was the case, and Microsoft themselves give no hint of this on their FAQ about MSXML vs. ODF (which they've updated today). Incidentally, you seem to have adopted that FAQ's habit of identifying ODF as "the OpenOffice format" -- as you're aware, but others often seem not to be, it's a file format, not something dependent on a specific software product.
On an unrelated note, from TFA:
Van den Beld of ECMA International said the standard recognized reality. "The vast amount of data in the world is in Microsoft format," he said.
-- I'd be very surprised if it is indeed the case that the majority of the world's information is in MSXML format...
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder when they'll get to beer? Then maybe it won't be a criminal offence to serve Austrian beer in the correct glasses ...
Heh, I guess that class didn't extend as far as how to spell "colosseum". Anyway, many of the practices and tenets of Pauline Christianity are based more on pre-Christian Dionysiac cults than on human sacrifice per se: the ideas of the sacrifice, tearing-apart, and eating of the god at a feast, of the god having an intensely personal relationship with the individual practitioner, the god dying in order to give eternal life to the practitioner, miracles etc at the birth of the god, and others, are basically Dionysiac. These aspects of Dionysiac/Orphic religion go back a lot earlier than the Roman Empire; if they, in turn, were adapting aspects of human sacrifice practices, it probably dates to the 6th/5th century BCE.
FTFA:
Telengard was directly inspired by the PLATO dnd game mentioned above, with minimal graphics and randomized dungeons.This is inaccurate: Telengard's dungeon is not random, but procedurally generated (rather like the universe of Elite).
Out of interest, this map rather entertainingly shows someone's abortive attempt to map the dungeon (they got only a tiny fraction of the way through mapping the first level, tee hee).
I realise this -- sigh ... I rant because I'm still seething over the article earlier on about New Zealand's DMCA copycat law -- I live there. (I'm contemplating circulating an e-mail to everyone in my faculty suggesting that they write to the select committee evaluating the bill, when everyone comes back from their summer holidays, though I wonder if that wouldn't be counterproductive.)
Oddly enough, probably not. DRM on classical music CDs is very very rare. I've never yet come across an example. (I once thought I did, but it turned out to be a physical flaw on the CD.)
Having said that, DRM on DVDs of Mozart operas ... well, that's another matter.
I get the impression that, indirectly, you're agreeing with the gpp. I'd venture a guesstimate that before the 20th century, most artists -- literary, musical, and otherwise -- made the bulk of their income out of performance, rather than publication.
On second thought, that's way too generalised, but I'd still bet on performance representing a hefty percentage of income.
Oh, I'd give 'em a try. He was a hell of an experienced drinker -- that's one thing the Bruces' Philosophers' Song certainly got right. Scenario: Socrates and a bunch of friends at a party. They basically find that it's impossible to get him drunk -- he drinks them all under the table, and then wanders off on his usual daily round without even having a nap. (It's all in Plato, all in Plato. My word, what do they teach them in these schools?)
You need to start realising that the third sentence here has nothing whatsoever to do with the first two sentences.
DRM, inherently evil? You bet it is. DRM is an imposition on the rights of the public way beyond the restrictions imposed by copyright. It's double-dipping.
Copyright is saying, "I own this, so you're not allowed to make money out of it"; DRM is saying, "It doesn't matter whether I own this or not, but if you do anything with it that I choose to prevent you from doing, you're a criminal."
Copyright is a compromise that in a reasonable world should promote creativity. DRM is designed precisely to impose obligations and restrictions on the public that have nothing whatsoever to do with copyright, but everything to do with greed and taking away legitimate rights.
I find that astonishing, given that it's hard to find a DVD player in a shop that doesn't have "multi-region" or "region-free" written on the box! Well, if you hang out in shops like the Warehouse or DSE, that is.
... which is a good thing. On the other hand, it looks to me as though it could perhaps make it a criminal offence to own a region-free DVD player. Maybe not (I'm not enough of a lawyer to be able to read beyond the introduction to the bill), but region-coding doesn't seem morally different from "technological preventions measures" to me.
You are terminally clueless. Of course copyright owners have rights too: those rights are protected by a thing called "copyright".
Even so, this news is obviously of interest to you, since you're bothering to post a comment. This news is certainly of interest to me, since I live in NZ. The population may be small, but there's no shortage of NZers reading Slashdot. In any case, population-size and newsworthiness don't always go hand-in-hand: if they did, nearly 20% of /. articles would be about things going on in China.
That's certainly worth knowing -- thanks for the references. (I'll even look them up someday when I have time!)
Sorry, your first sentence is wrong: one of the key things that makes the KJV special is that it was, in fact, an extremely scholarly translation from Greek and Hebrew, not from Latin. I can't read Hebrew, but can attest that its rendition of Greek is generally pretty precise.
By that argument, creationism should be taught in schools.
Yes, I know it's easy to modify your quotation to make it more nuanced and more sensible. All that means is that "enough said" often isn't enough after all.
Sigh ... thank you. I wasted a lot of time scanning through the comments in this discussion before finding yours, the only relevant and informative one of the whole sorry lot. Move along folks, nothing to see here ... FWIW, the article points out that this is not the first time this year that CryTek has been investigated for this.
Actually we've now done away with 5c pieces in NZ as well. And shrunk the remaining 10c/20c/50c coins to a sensible size. My wallet feels a lot lighter :-)
Having the complete works of Mozart is really not a big deal. Most public libraries would not have it, but almost any university or college with a music school will. I guess if the university library has a policy of not letting in people except students/staff, that's pretty tough and certainly unreasonable (they're not that bastardly where I am, and a lot of university libraries will give cards to people who live in the same town).
What do you mean? Click on "Search the NMA Online", and they give you a list of volumes. Click on the volume to expand it. Once you're looking at a list of individual works and movements, click on the Adobe logo to get a PDF file. Where's the difficulty?
Don't worry, the ones that are still around in a few hundred years will.
Well, to be fair, if the ggpp's sig is true, the gpp AC could well be correct about the "AIDS" part. Not so sure about the "faggot" part, though.
The AC wasn't referring to FPS Optimizer, in fact, but to Timeslip's Morrowind Graphics Enhancer. As of version 3, MGE can indeed render landscape to the horizon in the same way that Oblivion does. Yes, you can see all of Vvardenfell from the top of Red Mountain. It's not by any means perfect -- it doesn't render objects and buildings nearly far enough away (they pop into existence about 30 metres away) -- but it's still a very impressive achievement, and regularly updated.
Cool, thanks.
Do you have a source for that? Because it is contradictory to what I thought was the case, and Microsoft themselves give no hint of this on their FAQ about MSXML vs. ODF (which they've updated today). Incidentally, you seem to have adopted that FAQ's habit of identifying ODF as "the OpenOffice format" -- as you're aware, but others often seem not to be, it's a file format, not something dependent on a specific software product.
On an unrelated note, from TFA:
Van den Beld of ECMA International said the standard recognized reality. "The vast amount of data in the world is in Microsoft format," he said.-- I'd be very surprised if it is indeed the case that the majority of the world's information is in MSXML format ...