What a surprise. Anything bundled with windos and IE will reach numbers like that quickly and easily. If they were to add a cooking recipe to IE, they would reach those numbers with it. In fact, given the de-facto monopoly especially in companies, and that it was lobbied/bought as the only choice if you wanted streaming videos of the last two Olympics, that is a surprisingly low number
while 97% of web surfers have Flash installed
Flash was introduced in 1996. That was 14 years ago. And for many of those years it was a de-facto standard for the loud and colourful parts of the web (games, movie sites, anything that wanted "more interactivity").
And then he compares two plugin technologies to an operating system. Because, you know, 27% of elephants have one leg slightly shorter than the other, which clearly proves that the 32% of plane flights that are delayed is a much too high number!
Elimination doesn't simply mean erradication. It means beating them to the point of being combat ineffectual so that the transitional government can take up his defense.
Given that the Taliban are one version of a movement that is spanning pretty much all of the muslim states (minus Turkey and Egypt, mostly), how long do you think any transitional government would hold? Would you invade again when the Taliban win a majority in a democratic election in five or ten years?
They are a militant group fueled by an idea and by ethnic tensions. They are to be eliminated or contained by military means and by reconstructing Afghanistan (so that youth have better alternatives.) As it is, they are a fringe even among the conservative Pashtuns.
True, they are the extremists. True, building up Afghanistan is the only thing that may (may!) prevent their return to power.
We have all done a lousy job on reconstruction. Mostly due to those stupid political compromises. Nevertheless, you can bomb Hussein's Republic Guard into oblivion as they were an organized unit and once destroyed are unlikely to reform. The Taliban, however, are not a military unit. They have all the advantages of the guerilla - mostly being able to choose when to fight and when to simply disappear in the population - and the additional plus of being religious fanatics. They could go farming for five years and then come back.
t has nothing to do with illusion. Right or wrong, 9/11 happened and the only recourse of action was to attack them, and to assist those Afghans already at war with the Taliban, or are they an illusion, too?
Yes, obviously, the only recourse to a group of Saudis and UAE nationals flying planes into buildings is to bomb Afghanistan.
Not that I don't understand you had to bomb someone, and that there actually is a link between the Taliban and Al Kaida - but the certainty above is not rational. There would have been other ways to spend the same amount of money to undermine both organisations. They could have been more successful. We'll never know, because the only option was choosen...
Unfortunately, you seem to forget that the majority of Afghans were against the Taliban yoke to begin with, in particular among the non-Pashtun and moderate Pashhuns (the bulk of the population.) You are still trying to make this as if it were a war of assimilation. It is not.
Contrary to the thinking of Bush, it is not "with us or against us". Afghans may not be all Taliban, that doesn't mean they are automatically pro-US. Wasn't that kind of the same mistake your leaders made in Iraq, where they were so sure the people would welcome them with open arms once they had removed Saddam? Ooops.
Unfortunately, you seem to forget that the majority of Afghans were against the Taliban yoke to begin with, in particular among the non-Pashtun and moderate Pashhuns (the bulk of the population.) You are still trying to make this as if it were a war of assimilation. It is not.
Could be. Could also turn out not to be. Again, looking at Iraq it was probably the dumbest idea ever to dispose of a secular dictator in favour of religious fanatics who all hate your guts. We'll find out which way Afghanistan turns, but how many lessons about foreign policy has america got to learn and pay for with the blood of foreign civilians ?
Yes, I am partisan in that sense. I find it deeply disturbing to run this kind of experiments with the lives of other people.
I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable. I wouldn't even know where to start given that words is the only thing I have.:-)
However, I fail to see why "intellectual honesty" has to be politically correct. Is it dishonest to call a pile of horse shit "pile of horse shit" ? Would it not be a lot less honest to call it "a bit of not very nicely smelling 100% natural fertilizer" ?
Hi Bob, Clippy, all your friends, welcome back. I see they've finally ported you over to Linux.
So if I'm of the more bouncy kind, my video player will constantly go full-window-full-window-full-window-etc. until I explicitly tell it to stop, sit in the corner and be a bad dog?
Yeah, that's exactly what I want in a computer. Look, no matter how smart you think you are, there is no way you can find out my intent without telepathy. All you are creating is yet another interface that people have to learn and deal with. Get the interface out of my way, not into it.
This is from the geek perspective. From the non-geek perspective, regular people are already afraid of computers because they don't understand them and they constantly do weird stuff. Making them do even more weird stuff for no apparent reason, even if you're not even touching the damn thing, will put the final nail in the coffin. After this, regular people will treat computers as some kind of black magic, just when we were beginning to get off that train.
Nice work.
Here's to hoping that it'll crater just like Bob did.
So you really think you can eliminate the Taliban by war? They're not an army, they are an idea. It strikes me as the same stupidity the romans exhibited when they thought they could eliminate christians by feeding them to the lions.
It is this illusion of america as the world power, the guys who can go into bad places to "fix" them.
If my history serves correctly, it worked once in the entire american history - with Germany after WW2. You forget, however, that this was with a people that were looking up to the US, considered it a land of dreams and were from a similar culture anyways.
Now try to put yourself into the average Afghan's shoes. There are some people, not from any foreign country, but from the Great Satan. They speak only gibberish in their own language and come over to tell you - after all you've endured with the russians and the Taliban and the warlord and the drug trade and everything else - how to run your life. They are also heretics at best, followers of an outright evil religion at worst, some even those guys you've heard about slaughtering your brothers in far away Palestine. Oh, and they bombed the village next door yesterday. Some people you knew died.
Yeah, you are sure to listen to them. Well, if you treasure your survival, you will pretend to, wait until they leave (like every invader before them) and then go back to your old ways.
You call me arrogant. I call you partisantly disingenuous at best (and hypocrite at worst).
As I have no part in american politics, I mostly find both parties equally distasteful. Though the republicans under Bush certainly set new standards.
They can reimburse you for your losses, but people shouldn't be on the hook for hypothetical future losses 40 years into the future
Why?
No, seriously. If they do something that can potentially have repercussions so far down the line, you'd assume they act with appropriate care. They didn't. In fact, on the contrary. You're saying that the damage to the culprit should be reasonably limited. How about the damage to the victims?
For example, let's say a massive Cat 4 hurricane came in 2 weeks later and literally washed your store away. Would the company that cratered the street and made your store unreachable be liable for your now non-existant store?
Worst strawman I've seen on/. for years. It doesn't even remotely tie in with the story.
Remimburse the damage, pay compensation for the inconvenience to establish a new store, and then any associated fines for failing to follow regulations.
The problem being, of course, that "the damage" is the hard part to calculate. Fortunately, courts and not/. trolls will figure it out.
fishermen being interviewed saying that BP owed them several YEARS worth of fishing profits (since they were presumptively assuming that they wouldn't be able to fish for years).
And, if past experiences count for anything, they are right.
but those poor bastards
I agree on the "bastards" part, but they are anything but poor.
Had the Iraq war never started, chances are we would have been out of Afghanistan quite a while ago.
You would've been the first foreigners in over 2000 years to win a war in Afghanistan. Please. I find the Iraq war as offensive as anyone with a brain, but claiming that "if only (whatever) we would have won in Afghanistan" is arrogant at best.
I'm far from an expert, but having looked into this a few years ago for a personal project, I determined stego. was (at that time) not useful for anything beyond novelty encryption.
There is good and bad stego just like there is good and bad encryption.
For one, yes if you give someone the original and the copy with the steganographically hidden information in it, there will be a difference, easily found.
Good stego means, among other things, that you can't tell which one is the original and which one has hidden data.
Years ago, several crucial flaws were identified in practically all available steganographic software. The one you mention is one of them, unequal distribution over the destination data means that it has different entropy in different places, which is a surefire sign that something strange is going on. Those flaws have since been fixed in any halfway good stego software. It's not that easy anymore. But this is exactly why you need to know a little about it - otherwise how do you even identify a good stego program?
Bullshit. A name has to stand for something, it doesn't have to be "good" in any sense.
The green party is a good example. The were actually named simply "The Green" when they entered the german parliament. That's as silly a name as "Pirate Party". But people didn't care for the name, they cared for the program.
Hard to say from your question, but if you haven't done already, get yourself some crypto knowledge. Crypto is hard, there is a reason that you are laughed out of the room if you say you've invented a new crypto algorithm and you don't already have strong credentials.
Randomness is one of the harder computer problems. Especially in steganography, many implementations have been defeated by creating not enough or too much randomness. If you want to hide your message in something, it doesn't matter if your output is distinguishable from randomness, it matters if it is distinguishable from what should be there. Simple approaches like LSB tricks have often fallen because those happen to be not random in many input data.
Am I missing a few steps in this conversation? I think you lost me at the turn where you started talking about right and wrong without offering any evidence that would make a reader think twice about the general knowledge.
Currently people make the decision to put their data on Facebook. With a distributed networking service they decide to use ServiceProviderA and put their data there, in the exact same manner.
I'm afraid you are the one not getting it.
People in general do not prefer choice. It's an illusion. For a very rough summary of the topic, Google "The Tyranny of Choice". There are many things where we are really happier if we do not have to make the choice. For the vast majority of social network users, the question "where do I want to store my data?" never even entered their minds. What you are trying to do is force them into a decision that they don't even want to make in the first place.
They want each and every user to be responsible for where he wants to host his own data, be it on a home server, on a rented remote server, or via a specialized service provider.
And that, more than anything else, shows their disconnect with reality.
Because, you know, this is about the last thing that the user of your typical social networking site wants. They want it, but maybe wondering a bit what the user wants would've been a smarter approach.
From what I've seen, they're missing the point. By about one pacific ocean.
Open Source is great when you're talking about an app on your computer that does stuff. For a website that is primarily a service, it matters little. As others have written, the interfaces are more important. The data is more important. Critical mass is more important. Image is more important. Heck, pretty much everything else is more important than the stupid code that runs the stupid site.
Building a "Facebook competitor" is about pretty much everything else but the code.
And it's sooo much easier to justify pirating games when we decide for no reason other than we want to believe it, that the entire industry is full of nitwits who have no idea what so ever how to do their jobs.
I certainly hope they know how to do their jobs - but their jobs is to design and build a game. I don't expect them to be experts in copy protection. In fact, as a customer I certainly hope they are not, because every $ they spend on copy protection is a $ they don't spend on the game itself.
You are right, of course, that it too often serves as a cheap excuse. That's not my intention. I do want to be very clear, however, that until someone offers evidence to the contrary, I am convinced that DRM is hurting games a lot more than piracy does. One of the reasons is exactly because it offers a convenient excuse. And let's be honest, it is even more difficult to stay honest if you know that the paid-for original comes with all kinds of restrictions and DRM trouble and the torrent doesn't.
Like it or not, DRM is part of the package.
Your examples don't fit the crime. The main character, or the background music, or the sound FX are part of the package the same way that your examples are. DRM is an additional restriction added afterwards that has nothing to do with the contents themselves. As such, I can very well like "the package" and at the same time dislike the DRM.
I didn't say that gives anyone a right to make unauthorized copies. However, again, I point out that it makes the deal worse for the customer, because he gets less for his money than he'd get with a DRM-free product. Less value means less customers. But, of course, the game industry is only slowly coming around to that Economics 101 fact, it is a lot easier to blame it all on the scapegoat "piracy".
Also, you're assertion that uncracked games don't lead to increased sales is demonstrably false.
Is it? There are a number of games in recent history that took a long time to crack (Bloodbowl comes to mind). By your logic, there should be a) higher sales for those than for other, comparable PC games and b) a noticeable drop in sales as the crack was released. Since for most games the crack is available at or even before official release, those games are the few where we could measure the effect.
I have not seen any reporting anywhere indicating that either of theses things came to pass.
Claiming that the success of WoW is due to DRM is... uh... ridiculous. Would it sell less if it were crackable? Heck, I don't know, what would Mount Fuji taste like if it were made of icecream? The question makes no sense.
Because of what? Me calling a debunked propaganda theory what it is?
Pick another example if you want a neutral opinion. Being honest does not mean being nice or even neutral about everything, and neither does being rational, scientific, etc.. The verdict is in on ID, and it is precisely by not dancing around the fire but saying out clearly that what it is, that we are being honest.
Here's a good reason not to act like a criminal. Because it makes things worse for the next release.
You construct a causation that does not exist. My acts, no matter what they are, can not possibly be the immediate cause for any change in the next release. There is still an important step inbetween that you omit - the conscious decision of the developer or distributor to make things worse. Nothing in my actions forces them to make that decision, no matter how I act. If they feel that this is the only possible reaction, that is a sign of their limited imagination, nothing more.
Or, in the much more terse words of psychotherapy: I am not responsible for their feelings.
If people actually just didn't play games that they don't think are worth the money instead of stealing them, publishers might actually have some incentive to make the product better instead of making stronger DRM.
You believe those people are informed, rational and impartial. I doubt all three of those assumptions. Don't forget that DRM is an industry all in itself, there are people out there working full-time just on convincing those developers that DRM is a necessity. Not because it is, but because the company they work for sells DRM products.
If you don't like a publisher's game offering, for whatever reason, then don't play it!
You oversimplify. In most cases, people do like the game offering. They dislike the additional baggage. Ok, most of them dislike the price tag, but we don't need to talk about those, you won't turn them into customers anyway, no matter what DRM or not you do, so for this discussion they're irrelevant.
Which is precisely why DRM is such a failure. You're trying to force people into buying something that most of them will never buy. If the industry were to find a perfect DRM system tomorrow, I predict they would be very unhappy by next week, when they realize that it doesn't help sales one bit. It reduces piracy rate, but the number of additional sales it generates is vanishingly small.
So, as a game producer, you have to get your priorities straight. Do you first and foremost want to make money, or make something people enjoy? In the first case, forget about DRM because it doesn't help you make money. In the second case, forget about DRM because it doesn'tmake anyone happy. One way or the other, the way to both profit and happiness is to make an offering people want. I don't see anyone on the customer side complaining that games don't have enough DRM.
So you would advocate the teaching of Intelligent Design?
Not in the least. However, I advocate discussing Intelligent Design. By showing kids how a scientific theory works in contrast to some made-up bullshit they would learn much better which is which. I would definitely confront them with the shit and let them rip it apart, applying the knowledge they have acquired until that point.
Opposing views can remain just that. I never said you should give all possible views equal credit or even just time. But what you shouldn't do is filter them out entirely, pretend that they don't exist, and set up a fantasy world around yourself where nothing critical or no other opinion even exists.
It is by challenge that we find out if our opinions have merit.
Because formal means following a process, which is the right thing to do if you want to have reliable, repeatable results. But is it the right thing to do when you're looking to blow off some steam, get some new ideas into your head, bounce yours off others just to see what happens, and relax a little from all the rest?
"Civilization has been tamed by religion and forced to adapt"
That's an interesting challenge. There could even be some truth in it. However given the known history of mankind - and the studies towards specifically religion in that - well, I don't have complete knowledge of every paper every written or every study ever done, but from what I have read, religion's influence has been largely a destructive one. Not entirely, but then again, as they say here in Germany when they want to point out that by looking hard enough you can find something good in every evil: "Hitler built the Autobahn".
Which is true. What it leaves out is that he didn't build it for the people to drive on, but for the tanks (it's one of the reasons Blitzkrieg became possible).
Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.
Next please, this one has no idea what he is talking about.
Semantics hint: Every sentence starting with "every" or any other all-quantor is by definition false. You are always able to find an exception. Yes, this is an intentional paradox.
atheism is often far less harmful than some religious notions, but it is no more rational.
1rational adj \rash-nl, ra-sh-nl\ Definition of RATIONAL 1 a : having reason or understanding b : relating to, based on, or agreeable to reason : reasonable 2 : involving only multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction and only a finite number of times 3 : relating to, consisting of, or being one or more rational numbers -- rationally adverb -- rationalness noun (source: Merriam-Webster)
I must assume from context that you mean that 1st definition. I must also assume that you are referring to early 21st century atheism, not some ancient or fictional one. If my assumptions are correct, then you should maybe try to do a bit of research on the subject matter. Most of the current-day atheists are also strict rationalists. It is not an accident that most of the famous ones are scientists.
Stating "I know..." about a thing that is, by definition, unknowable, is irrational.
Only in a simplified universe that doesn't want to open itself to reason and insists that by fiat, some things are unknowable. Where do you even take it from that some things are "unknowable"? Oh yes, "by definition". Wait, isn't that exactly the kind of a priori reasoning that you are trying to put down?
21st century atheists do not usually state "I know there is no god". What they do state is that there is no evidence whatsoever, that all the claims made by believers either have been disproved or are easy to disprove, or are pure semantic trickery to avoid falsification. The end result, as Dawkins put it so nicely, is that there may be a chinese teapot in orbit around Saturn, and with current technology it is impossible to be absolutely certain that there isn't - but it is so unlikely that whoever makes the claim ought to provide the evidence, not the other way around.
Atheists differ from Agnostics in that an agnostic essentially assumes the chances are 50:50 while an atheist has come to the conclusion that the chances that there is a god even remotely resembling the description of any of the major religions is so ridiculously small that believing in a teapot orbiting Saturn is a better idea, because that's more likely.
If you were a comedian, you couldn't come up with something better than that. Are these people really that stupid?
Yes, they are. And one of the reasons they are is that they filter out evidence to the contrary. Having their own search engines just reduces the mental load, but one key point of all religious teaching is that you know the truth and everything contradicting it is false and/or a temptation by the devil (or whatever your equivalent is). So you train in filtering it out mentally. Having your computer do it for you is only the next logical step.
But without opposing views, your chosen view of the world gets ever stronger and - over time - ever more absurd. Do it long enough and you lose touch with reality entirely and start to believe in... I don't know, gods or some such nonsense.
I sell a bit of stuff online - skyboxes and tools for indie game developers. With one of my tools I made a similar "experiment". I offer the very same product at four different prices, from 10 to 50 bucks. I'm very upfront about it and basically say "you know what the time you save with these tools is worth to you, pay what you find fair".
Turns out that my most optimistic estimates were about spot on. About half of the buyers pick the lowest price, the rest pays more. And yes I've sold several for the highest price.
My lesson from that is that people will treat you fairly if you treat them fairly - be honest about what you offer, tell them up front what the deal is, give them your trust and let them do the right thing. You'll be surprised at how often they will.
Meanwhile, with computer games we're pretty much back where we were in the early 90s when we all traded floppy discs on the school yard and didn't think anything off it. Since you are continuously being treated like a criminal by the software companies, even if you are a perfectly honest customer, with all their limited activations, and DRM and invasive copy protection and key and so on, heck, if you treat me like a criminal anyways, give me one reason to not become one.
If your mechanic thinks that "The Little Mermaid" was a Shakespearean drama, that really doesn't affect his ability to fix your car. Same with this.
One is simple knowledge, and can presumably be fixed by showing him the credits.
The other is... I don't know. It's hard to really find a word for it. Assuming that there are maybe 0.1% in those numbers who actually have a tennable position - not agreeing with the majority is not per see a sign of insanity. But I assume the vast majority of these people could not even begin to argue their position. There's probably a good part among them who'd say "it says so in the bible" (ignorant of the fact that all major churches have since carved int).
Slashdot Mirror
What a series of ridiculous assertions.
Silverlight penetration now stands at 51%
What a surprise. Anything bundled with windos and IE will reach numbers like that quickly and easily. If they were to add a cooking recipe to IE, they would reach those numbers with it. In fact, given the de-facto monopoly especially in companies, and that it was lobbied/bought as the only choice if you wanted streaming videos of the last two Olympics, that is a surprisingly low number
while 97% of web surfers have Flash installed
Flash was introduced in 1996. That was 14 years ago. And for many of those years it was a de-facto standard for the loud and colourful parts of the web (games, movie sites, anything that wanted "more interactivity").
And then he compares two plugin technologies to an operating system. Because, you know, 27% of elephants have one leg slightly shorter than the other, which clearly proves that the 32% of plane flights that are delayed is a much too high number!
Elimination doesn't simply mean erradication. It means beating them to the point of being combat ineffectual so that the transitional government can take up his defense.
Given that the Taliban are one version of a movement that is spanning pretty much all of the muslim states (minus Turkey and Egypt, mostly), how long do you think any transitional government would hold? Would you invade again when the Taliban win a majority in a democratic election in five or ten years?
They are a militant group fueled by an idea and by ethnic tensions. They are to be eliminated or contained by military means and by reconstructing Afghanistan (so that youth have better alternatives.) As it is, they are a fringe even among the conservative Pashtuns.
True, they are the extremists.
True, building up Afghanistan is the only thing that may (may!) prevent their return to power.
We have all done a lousy job on reconstruction. Mostly due to those stupid political compromises. Nevertheless, you can bomb Hussein's Republic Guard into oblivion as they were an organized unit and once destroyed are unlikely to reform. The Taliban, however, are not a military unit. They have all the advantages of the guerilla - mostly being able to choose when to fight and when to simply disappear in the population - and the additional plus of being religious fanatics. They could go farming for five years and then come back.
t has nothing to do with illusion. Right or wrong, 9/11 happened and the only recourse of action was to attack them, and to assist those Afghans already at war with the Taliban, or are they an illusion, too?
Yes, obviously, the only recourse to a group of Saudis and UAE nationals flying planes into buildings is to bomb Afghanistan.
Not that I don't understand you had to bomb someone, and that there actually is a link between the Taliban and Al Kaida - but the certainty above is not rational. There would have been other ways to spend the same amount of money to undermine both organisations. They could have been more successful. We'll never know, because the only option was choosen...
Unfortunately, you seem to forget that the majority of Afghans were against the Taliban yoke to begin with, in particular among the non-Pashtun and moderate Pashhuns (the bulk of the population.) You are still trying to make this as if it were a war of assimilation. It is not.
Contrary to the thinking of Bush, it is not "with us or against us". Afghans may not be all Taliban, that doesn't mean they are automatically pro-US. Wasn't that kind of the same mistake your leaders made in Iraq, where they were so sure the people would welcome them with open arms once they had removed Saddam? Ooops.
Unfortunately, you seem to forget that the majority of Afghans were against the Taliban yoke to begin with, in particular among the non-Pashtun and moderate Pashhuns (the bulk of the population.) You are still trying to make this as if it were a war of assimilation. It is not.
Could be. Could also turn out not to be. Again, looking at Iraq it was probably the dumbest idea ever to dispose of a secular dictator in favour of religious fanatics who all hate your guts. We'll find out which way Afghanistan turns, but how many lessons about foreign policy has america got to learn and pay for with the blood of foreign civilians ?
Yes, I am partisan in that sense. I find it deeply disturbing to run this kind of experiments with the lives of other people.
I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable. I wouldn't even know where to start given that words is the only thing I have. :-)
However, I fail to see why "intellectual honesty" has to be politically correct. Is it dishonest to call a pile of horse shit "pile of horse shit" ? Would it not be a lot less honest to call it "a bit of not very nicely smelling 100% natural fertilizer" ?
Hi Bob, Clippy, all your friends, welcome back. I see they've finally ported you over to Linux.
So if I'm of the more bouncy kind, my video player will constantly go full-window-full-window-full-window-etc. until I explicitly tell it to stop, sit in the corner and be a bad dog?
Yeah, that's exactly what I want in a computer. Look, no matter how smart you think you are, there is no way you can find out my intent without telepathy. All you are creating is yet another interface that people have to learn and deal with. Get the interface out of my way, not into it.
This is from the geek perspective. From the non-geek perspective, regular people are already afraid of computers because they don't understand them and they constantly do weird stuff. Making them do even more weird stuff for no apparent reason, even if you're not even touching the damn thing, will put the final nail in the coffin. After this, regular people will treat computers as some kind of black magic, just when we were beginning to get off that train.
Nice work.
Here's to hoping that it'll crater just like Bob did.
So you really think you can eliminate the Taliban by war? They're not an army, they are an idea. It strikes me as the same stupidity the romans exhibited when they thought they could eliminate christians by feeding them to the lions.
It is this illusion of america as the world power, the guys who can go into bad places to "fix" them.
If my history serves correctly, it worked once in the entire american history - with Germany after WW2. You forget, however, that this was with a people that were looking up to the US, considered it a land of dreams and were from a similar culture anyways.
Now try to put yourself into the average Afghan's shoes. There are some people, not from any foreign country, but from the Great Satan. They speak only gibberish in their own language and come over to tell you - after all you've endured with the russians and the Taliban and the warlord and the drug trade and everything else - how to run your life. They are also heretics at best, followers of an outright evil religion at worst, some even those guys you've heard about slaughtering your brothers in far away Palestine.
Oh, and they bombed the village next door yesterday. Some people you knew died.
Yeah, you are sure to listen to them. Well, if you treasure your survival, you will pretend to, wait until they leave (like every invader before them) and then go back to your old ways.
You call me arrogant. I call you partisantly disingenuous at best (and hypocrite at worst).
As I have no part in american politics, I mostly find both parties equally distasteful. Though the republicans under Bush certainly set new standards.
They can reimburse you for your losses, but people shouldn't be on the hook for hypothetical future losses 40 years into the future
Why?
No, seriously. If they do something that can potentially have repercussions so far down the line, you'd assume they act with appropriate care. They didn't. In fact, on the contrary. You're saying that the damage to the culprit should be reasonably limited. How about the damage to the victims?
For example, let's say a massive Cat 4 hurricane came in 2 weeks later and literally washed your store away. Would the company that cratered the street and made your store unreachable be liable for your now non-existant store?
Worst strawman I've seen on /. for years. It doesn't even remotely tie in with the story.
Remimburse the damage, pay compensation for the inconvenience to establish a new store, and then any associated fines for failing to follow regulations.
The problem being, of course, that "the damage" is the hard part to calculate. Fortunately, courts and not /. trolls will figure it out.
fishermen being interviewed saying that BP owed them several YEARS worth of fishing profits (since they were presumptively assuming that they wouldn't be able to fish for years).
And, if past experiences count for anything, they are right.
but those poor bastards
I agree on the "bastards" part, but they are anything but poor.
Had the Iraq war never started, chances are we would have been out of Afghanistan quite a while ago.
You would've been the first foreigners in over 2000 years to win a war in Afghanistan. Please. I find the Iraq war as offensive as anyone with a brain, but claiming that "if only (whatever) we would have won in Afghanistan" is arrogant at best.
I'm far from an expert, but having looked into this a few years ago for a personal project, I determined stego. was (at that time) not useful for anything beyond novelty encryption.
There is good and bad stego just like there is good and bad encryption.
For one, yes if you give someone the original and the copy with the steganographically hidden information in it, there will be a difference, easily found.
Good stego means, among other things, that you can't tell which one is the original and which one has hidden data.
Years ago, several crucial flaws were identified in practically all available steganographic software. The one you mention is one of them, unequal distribution over the destination data means that it has different entropy in different places, which is a surefire sign that something strange is going on.
Those flaws have since been fixed in any halfway good stego software. It's not that easy anymore. But this is exactly why you need to know a little about it - otherwise how do you even identify a good stego program?
but JS and SC are doing the EXACT same thing they're bitching about Glen Beck doing...
Comedy often is about doing the exact same thing - just in a context or with a small twist that reveals how ridiculous it is.
Bullshit. A name has to stand for something, it doesn't have to be "good" in any sense.
The green party is a good example. The were actually named simply "The Green" when they entered the german parliament. That's as silly a name as "Pirate Party". But people didn't care for the name, they cared for the program.
Hard to say from your question, but if you haven't done already, get yourself some crypto knowledge. Crypto is hard, there is a reason that you are laughed out of the room if you say you've invented a new crypto algorithm and you don't already have strong credentials.
Randomness is one of the harder computer problems. Especially in steganography, many implementations have been defeated by creating not enough or too much randomness. If you want to hide your message in something, it doesn't matter if your output is distinguishable from randomness, it matters if it is distinguishable from what should be there. Simple approaches like LSB tricks have often fallen because those happen to be not random in many input data.
Am I missing a few steps in this conversation? I think you lost me at the turn where you started talking about right and wrong without offering any evidence that would make a reader think twice about the general knowledge.
Currently people make the decision to put their data on Facebook. With a distributed networking service they decide to use ServiceProviderA and put their data there, in the exact same manner.
I'm afraid you are the one not getting it.
People in general do not prefer choice. It's an illusion. For a very rough summary of the topic, Google "The Tyranny of Choice". There are many things where we are really happier if we do not have to make the choice. For the vast majority of social network users, the question "where do I want to store my data?" never even entered their minds. What you are trying to do is force them into a decision that they don't even want to make in the first place.
They want each and every user to be responsible for where he wants to host his own data, be it on a home server, on a rented remote server, or via a specialized service provider.
And that, more than anything else, shows their disconnect with reality.
Because, you know, this is about the last thing that the user of your typical social networking site wants. They want it, but maybe wondering a bit what the user wants would've been a smarter approach.
From what I've seen, they're missing the point. By about one pacific ocean.
Open Source is great when you're talking about an app on your computer that does stuff. For a website that is primarily a service, it matters little. As others have written, the interfaces are more important. The data is more important. Critical mass is more important. Image is more important. Heck, pretty much everything else is more important than the stupid code that runs the stupid site.
Building a "Facebook competitor" is about pretty much everything else but the code.
And it's sooo much easier to justify pirating games when we decide for no reason other than we want to believe it, that the entire industry is full of nitwits who have no idea what so ever how to do their jobs.
I certainly hope they know how to do their jobs - but their jobs is to design and build a game. I don't expect them to be experts in copy protection. In fact, as a customer I certainly hope they are not, because every $ they spend on copy protection is a $ they don't spend on the game itself.
You are right, of course, that it too often serves as a cheap excuse. That's not my intention. I do want to be very clear, however, that until someone offers evidence to the contrary, I am convinced that DRM is hurting games a lot more than piracy does. One of the reasons is exactly because it offers a convenient excuse. And let's be honest, it is even more difficult to stay honest if you know that the paid-for original comes with all kinds of restrictions and DRM trouble and the torrent doesn't.
Like it or not, DRM is part of the package.
Your examples don't fit the crime. The main character, or the background music, or the sound FX are part of the package the same way that your examples are. DRM is an additional restriction added afterwards that has nothing to do with the contents themselves. As such, I can very well like "the package" and at the same time dislike the DRM.
I didn't say that gives anyone a right to make unauthorized copies. However, again, I point out that it makes the deal worse for the customer, because he gets less for his money than he'd get with a DRM-free product. Less value means less customers. But, of course, the game industry is only slowly coming around to that Economics 101 fact, it is a lot easier to blame it all on the scapegoat "piracy".
Also, you're assertion that uncracked games don't lead to increased sales is demonstrably false.
Is it? There are a number of games in recent history that took a long time to crack (Bloodbowl comes to mind). By your logic, there should be a) higher sales for those than for other, comparable PC games and b) a noticeable drop in sales as the crack was released. Since for most games the crack is available at or even before official release, those games are the few where we could measure the effect.
I have not seen any reporting anywhere indicating that either of theses things came to pass.
Claiming that the success of WoW is due to DRM is... uh... ridiculous. Would it sell less if it were crackable? Heck, I don't know, what would Mount Fuji taste like if it were made of icecream? The question makes no sense.
Because of what? Me calling a debunked propaganda theory what it is?
Pick another example if you want a neutral opinion. Being honest does not mean being nice or even neutral about everything, and neither does being rational, scientific, etc.. The verdict is in on ID, and it is precisely by not dancing around the fire but saying out clearly that what it is, that we are being honest.
Here's a good reason not to act like a criminal. Because it makes things worse for the next release.
You construct a causation that does not exist. My acts, no matter what they are, can not possibly be the immediate cause for any change in the next release. There is still an important step inbetween that you omit - the conscious decision of the developer or distributor to make things worse. Nothing in my actions forces them to make that decision, no matter how I act. If they feel that this is the only possible reaction, that is a sign of their limited imagination, nothing more.
Or, in the much more terse words of psychotherapy: I am not responsible for their feelings.
If people actually just didn't play games that they don't think are worth the money instead of stealing them, publishers might actually have some incentive to make the product better instead of making stronger DRM.
You believe those people are informed, rational and impartial. I doubt all three of those assumptions. Don't forget that DRM is an industry all in itself, there are people out there working full-time just on convincing those developers that DRM is a necessity. Not because it is, but because the company they work for sells DRM products.
If you don't like a publisher's game offering, for whatever reason, then don't play it!
You oversimplify. In most cases, people do like the game offering. They dislike the additional baggage. Ok, most of them dislike the price tag, but we don't need to talk about those, you won't turn them into customers anyway, no matter what DRM or not you do, so for this discussion they're irrelevant.
Which is precisely why DRM is such a failure. You're trying to force people into buying something that most of them will never buy. If the industry were to find a perfect DRM system tomorrow, I predict they would be very unhappy by next week, when they realize that it doesn't help sales one bit. It reduces piracy rate, but the number of additional sales it generates is vanishingly small.
So, as a game producer, you have to get your priorities straight. Do you first and foremost want to make money, or make something people enjoy? In the first case, forget about DRM because it doesn't help you make money. In the second case, forget about DRM because it doesn'tmake anyone happy. One way or the other, the way to both profit and happiness is to make an offering people want. I don't see anyone on the customer side complaining that games don't have enough DRM.
So you would advocate the teaching of Intelligent Design?
Not in the least. However, I advocate discussing Intelligent Design. By showing kids how a scientific theory works in contrast to some made-up bullshit they would learn much better which is which. I would definitely confront them with the shit and let them rip it apart, applying the knowledge they have acquired until that point.
Opposing views can remain just that. I never said you should give all possible views equal credit or even just time. But what you shouldn't do is filter them out entirely, pretend that they don't exist, and set up a fantasy world around yourself where nothing critical or no other opinion even exists.
It is by challenge that we find out if our opinions have merit.
Oh, ok. Why save it for formal occasions?
Because formal means following a process, which is the right thing to do if you want to have reliable, repeatable results. But is it the right thing to do when you're looking to blow off some steam, get some new ideas into your head, bounce yours off others just to see what happens, and relax a little from all the rest?
"Civilization has been tamed by religion and forced to adapt"
That's an interesting challenge. There could even be some truth in it. However given the known history of mankind - and the studies towards specifically religion in that - well, I don't have complete knowledge of every paper every written or every study ever done, but from what I have read, religion's influence has been largely a destructive one. Not entirely, but then again, as they say here in Germany when they want to point out that by looking hard enough you can find something good in every evil: "Hitler built the Autobahn".
Which is true. What it leaves out is that he didn't build it for the people to drive on, but for the tanks (it's one of the reasons Blitzkrieg became possible).
Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.
Next please, this one has no idea what he is talking about.
Semantics hint: Every sentence starting with "every" or any other all-quantor is by definition false. You are always able to find an exception. Yes, this is an intentional paradox.
atheism is often far less harmful than some religious notions, but it is no more rational.
1rational
adj \rash-nl, ra-sh-nl\
Definition of RATIONAL
1
a : having reason or understanding b : relating to, based on, or agreeable to reason : reasonable
2
: involving only multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction and only a finite number of times
3
: relating to, consisting of, or being one or more rational numbers
-- rationally adverb
-- rationalness noun
(source: Merriam-Webster)
I must assume from context that you mean that 1st definition. I must also assume that you are referring to early 21st century atheism, not some ancient or fictional one. If my assumptions are correct, then you should maybe try to do a bit of research on the subject matter. Most of the current-day atheists are also strict rationalists. It is not an accident that most of the famous ones are scientists.
Stating "I know..." about a thing that is, by definition, unknowable, is irrational.
Only in a simplified universe that doesn't want to open itself to reason and insists that by fiat, some things are unknowable. Where do you even take it from that some things are "unknowable"? Oh yes, "by definition". Wait, isn't that exactly the kind of a priori reasoning that you are trying to put down?
21st century atheists do not usually state "I know there is no god". What they do state is that there is no evidence whatsoever, that all the claims made by believers either have been disproved or are easy to disprove, or are pure semantic trickery to avoid falsification. The end result, as Dawkins put it so nicely, is that there may be a chinese teapot in orbit around Saturn, and with current technology it is impossible to be absolutely certain that there isn't - but it is so unlikely that whoever makes the claim ought to provide the evidence, not the other way around.
Atheists differ from Agnostics in that an agnostic essentially assumes the chances are 50:50 while an atheist has come to the conclusion that the chances that there is a god even remotely resembling the description of any of the major religions is so ridiculously small that believing in a teapot orbiting Saturn is a better idea, because that's more likely.
If you were a comedian, you couldn't come up with something better than that. Are these people really that stupid?
Yes, they are. And one of the reasons they are is that they filter out evidence to the contrary. Having their own search engines just reduces the mental load, but one key point of all religious teaching is that you know the truth and everything contradicting it is false and/or a temptation by the devil (or whatever your equivalent is). So you train in filtering it out mentally. Having your computer do it for you is only the next logical step.
But without opposing views, your chosen view of the world gets ever stronger and - over time - ever more absurd. Do it long enough and you lose touch with reality entirely and start to believe in... I don't know, gods or some such nonsense.
I sell a bit of stuff online - skyboxes and tools for indie game developers. With one of my tools I made a similar "experiment". I offer the very same product at four different prices, from 10 to 50 bucks. I'm very upfront about it and basically say "you know what the time you save with these tools is worth to you, pay what you find fair".
Turns out that my most optimistic estimates were about spot on. About half of the buyers pick the lowest price, the rest pays more. And yes I've sold several for the highest price.
My lesson from that is that people will treat you fairly if you treat them fairly - be honest about what you offer, tell them up front what the deal is, give them your trust and let them do the right thing. You'll be surprised at how often they will.
Meanwhile, with computer games we're pretty much back where we were in the early 90s when we all traded floppy discs on the school yard and didn't think anything off it. Since you are continuously being treated like a criminal by the software companies, even if you are a perfectly honest customer, with all their limited activations, and DRM and invasive copy protection and key and so on, heck, if you treat me like a criminal anyways, give me one reason to not become one.
If your mechanic thinks that "The Little Mermaid" was a Shakespearean drama, that really doesn't affect his ability to fix your car. Same with this.
One is simple knowledge, and can presumably be fixed by showing him the credits.
The other is... I don't know. It's hard to really find a word for it. Assuming that there are maybe 0.1% in those numbers who actually have a tennable position - not agreeing with the majority is not per see a sign of insanity. But I assume the vast majority of these people could not even begin to argue their position. There's probably a good part among them who'd say "it says so in the bible" (ignorant of the fact that all major churches have since carved int).
"Ignorance" doesn't even begin to describe it.