Anyways, about the Catholic Church what matters? Why do you even care? In practice most catholics don't care at all. I care because even though I don't want anything to do with them, they force me to. In my country, the church has seats in commissions that decide about the television and radio programs of the public stations, about youth-related laws and standards such as the age limits for computer games, and many, many more things of public interest that affect me.
In addition, through trickery and decades (and sometimes centuries) old agreements, they take quite a share of tax money, in addition to what they take from their followers. For example, they own extensive property, some of which is very old. The maintainance of those buildings is in part paid for by taxes, even though the public has no rights to the buildings themselves.
There is more that would take too much space to elaborate about here.
Since Spore isn't out yet I don't know about all of its features. But there are a number of things for integration, both behind-the-scenes and visible. Going from networking to drag-and-drop of textures for your creatures, for example.
Or take the example about every user having their own preferences and save-games. You have no idea how valuable that is to a family.
What you said is mostly true for the previous pope, who worked hard and long to return catholicism from the fringes to the mainstream. The current pope is moving in the opposite direction, but it'll take him a few years to undo everything his predecessor did in a few decades.
Wikipedia defines religion as "A religion is a set of common beliefs and practices generally held by a group of people, often codified as prayer, ritual, and religious law.". There are other possible definitions, but not a single of them makes it as simple as you try to make it. Most importantly, religion always carries an active part, a set of actions or practices.
Atheism isn't the "null religion". In geek speak, atheism is not "$belief = NULL", atheism is the case where $belief is undefined.
a-theism is greek. We know what theism is (I hope), and a- is the greek prefix for negativation, so atheism isn't a religion but best translated as non-religionism or non-belief - the exact opposite.
Silencing includes silence, but none of these scientists ever said that the pope should be silent. They asked him to not speak in one specific place at one specific date. If I tell you to get off my lawn, that's not an infringement to your free speech. You (and the pope) can speak your mind any other place.
Exactly, finally, creates the impression of a precise copy. As a previous comment wrote: When scientists burn the pope at the stake, then you can talk about "exactly". Until then, you should use less loaded words like "I see this as similar to..." or "comparable to..."
Interestingly, messing with words and meanings is what religion is all about. Once we've abandoned it like we've abolished the belief that not eating all your meal will cause rain to fall, it'll be shoveled into psychology (as a mental disease) and linguistics (for its abuse and creation of words).
What if the guy went to the University? Even the fierstest atheist may find interesting what the man has to say, being that either as a filosofical exercise or simply to get the knowledge on how the Catholic Church thinks. The guy was a professor at a university. Why don't you spend 5 seconds with Google or Wikipedia before asking dumb questions? However, even at university, he was a theologian and (quoting Wikipedia): "his inaugural lecture was on "The God of Faith and the God of Philosophy." " - he already was at odds with philosophy, not to even mention any science.
Read up on the guy. He's as fundamentalist as any muslim leader we call a terrorist, except that he has the "right" faith and has enough political know-how to understand that calling for another crusade isn't exactly going to help his cause.
On the one hand, I am really looking forward to Spore on OS X.
But transgaming? I am not feeling good about that. This isn't a proper port, it will very likely not take advantage of any OS X features, for example. I loved the Loki Linux ports because they did - Civ:CTP on Linux had different profiles and savegames for each user, by storing them in the user's home directory. The windos version didn't. On OS X, one of the things that's great is how integrated everything is - calender and TODO apps all use the same backend storage so you can access the same data with them all, you aren't tied into a specific program, you can change to another program without losing your data, without even converting or ex-/importing it. There are a number of integrations that Spore could make use of, but if it's not a proper port, then none of that will happen.
EA, if you are listening, please tell us that this is only a stepping stone and that you do plan to properly (sup)port games to OS X in the future.
The idea is that sometimes it's not worth it to create a 'dummy' version of your software. It makes some sense for 'winzip', but not for 'word'. While I agree to the general point, your example was chosen badly. 90% of word users are dummies.
(and now that the +1 Funny mods had their day, I can point out that I meant that seriously: Almost everyone who uses word uses it as a slightly enhanced text editor. A dummy version with almost all features completely hidden (not the abomination of MS "auto-hiding" that ranks high on the list of worst-ever-UI-ideas) is exactly what they'd need.)
Congratulations. UI design is one of the most under-appreciated areas of computers. Programmers thinking they can design an interface is like designers thinking they can code - except that it isn't as immediately obvious when they fail.
But how certain are you that you are actually losing sales? How does the free advertisement count against that? I'm seriously interested if you have any numbers or guesses.
A friend of mine is selling content, too. One of his packs appeared on a torrent a few days ago. He considers that as some kind of being knighted, as if he's now being taken serious. For all I know, he also doesn't believe it'll cost him money, because he is sure everyone who would buy it still will.
Because that's how the market works if your price and offer are reasonable. The main reason piracy is so rampant is that corporations are creating massive desire in a target audience that doesn't have the money to satisfy it. If you listen to the media, you as a school kid or student absolutely have to buy at least 3-5 new games and 5-10 new CDs and 2-3 new DVDs a month. Which adds up to what? At least 250-300 bucks.
But, let's not kid ourselves, it is breaking real legitimate laws. Where I live, the courts decide that, not a random crowd on a blogging website. And so far, the swedish courts have not decided that this is indeed the case. The fact that the prosecutors need thousands of pages to explain why and what laws were broken makes it likely that the case is far from straightforward.
People who actually share copyrighted material may very well be breaking the law (depending on country and other fine details, but I think we agree that generally, they do). But PirateBay doesn't share any actual copyrighted material.
I know I probably shouldn't have but I used a Windows PC so I knew I wouldn't get infected." Right, because a baddie trying to infect your Mac will absolutely not ever get the idea to put some IE exploit on his page as well, just for good measure, you know?
I don't get the plural form of "reason" in this context. To me there is exactly one reason why making a game into a movie is difficult:
Games are interactive, movies are to be watched.
The rules for both kinds of entertainment are very different. What makes one great simply doesn't work on the other. Games suck whenever you don't control what happens (one reason why too many or too long cutscenes make games suck), whereas in a movie you never have control. Movies can generate tension by giving you (the viewer) information that the protagonist does not have - games can't, because you are the protagonist. And so on and so forth.
In sum, you can't make a game into a movie. You can make a movie with the same background story as some game, but you can't turn the game into a movie if you want it to be any good.
Even if the average user knows there are alternatives, it is additional work, he is insecure, and MS works hard to make it as inconvenient as possible.
More importantly, corporate IT departments are very reluctant to install any additional software if there is already software of the same kind. They'll support one browser, one office suite, one media player. Guess which ones. Not because those are better, but because those are pre-installed and they have to support them anyways.
The one thing I hate about the iPhone firmware update is that it requires you to re-activate your iPhone. Which means that if you got the SIM-Lock removed in yours (which, for example, T-Mobile had to do for free in Germany for a limited time) then the SIM-Lock will be active again after the update.
Since the Apple hotline is closed now (9 pm over here) I can't yet say whether they'll remove it again without trouble or not. I'll see tomorrow.
Bad move. Being able to get it without a SIM-Lock was an important deciding factor for me.
Just like locks, copy protection can be useful to make it clear to people that you don't want your stuff to be copied. At the same time, you must realize that anyone who seriously wants in, will get in. Either through the lock or through the window. One way or the other, you can't keep someone dedicated and with know-how out. You can raise the bars, like banks do with their vaults, but there is no guarantee and different from banks it's enough for one guy to break in and you're open to the entire world.
So if I were making commercial software (which I'm not) I would install some copy protection that I know anyone with a clue can break, but that reminds my honest users that it said "one install per license" or whatever the agreement was. Speaking of that, I also wouldn't tempt my honest (paying!) users and grant them liberal licenses, like multiple installs as long as you only use one at a time (for those with a desktop and a notebook) or cheap family licenses, etc. - making an effort to offer those who are willing to pay an option they are willing to accept will go a long way, and probably work better than installing a better lock.
I'd attempt to privatize it. Because that's been such a tremendeously successful concept for the past decades?
I live in Germany. Let me tell you a few short stories:
Energy. Used to be in the hands of local, government-owned companies. Privatized around 15 years ago. Now largely in the hands of a handfull of international corporations. Energy prizes have risen ever since. The government-owned companies used to make good profits already, which were often used to subsidize less profitable government-owned companies, like public transportation. Currently, the major energy corporations are under investigation for illegal price agreements. Meanwhile, energy costs just rose another 7% (on average) at years's start.
Post Office. Privatized maybe 10 years ago. Prices mostly stable since then (still under government control), quality slightly dropped (e.g. number of lost mail has increased considerably). Lots and lots of post offices have been closed, especially in rural areas. Not profitable. The mailmen have much larger areas to cover now, and most of them are employed part-time or as temporary workers. Wages have gone down.
Public Transport - train service. The german Bundesbahn (federal train company) used to be world-famous for punctuality, maybe you still remember. The Bundesbahn was turned into "Die Bahn AG" ("the train company") in a slow process that started maybe 10 years ago. Since then, tickets have become more expensive constantly. During the past four years, on the line that I frequently use the price went up about 40%, that's around 10% per year. Punctuality is a thing of the past, delays of 5-15 minutes are frequent, delays of 30-60 minutes fairly common. My personal record is four hours on a trip that should've taken 6 hours (and took 10). Service is horrible, you will find long queues in front of every ticket counter in every train station in every major city. Or at least I see them _every_ time I look and that's not an exaggeration. Hundreds of train stations are closed every year, especially in rural areas. Not profitable. Trains are regularily filled to capacity, not randomly but at well-known times, always. You'd think they'd add a train or at least a few cars, but you're mistaken, they don't. Not even for trains where I can tell you today that that train will be filled to capacity this week, next week, and every week of the year. Work conditions for the employees have become so bad that the drivers went on strike last year in order to get their weekly work week reduced to 40 hours. They also haven't had a raise in years.
Should I go on? There are more examples. I will say for the sake of being fair, that the privatization of the telco company has been mostly successful. It is also still heavily regulated by a government office.
No, you miss one very important point: The purpose of a government isn't to make money. It is to serve the people.
And that is true of most of the examples I mentioned above. The purpose of the train system shouldn't be to make money, but to provide mobility to a people. The purpose of the post office shouldn't be profit, but to provide communications to a people. etc.
and yes, I know this would probably lead to civil war, but I think its going to happen anyway, just delayed while we're there "lead to"? Isn't the difference between whatever you call it now and a civil war that right now, if you are a civilian, you could get killed just for going to the market, and in a civil war you could get killed just for going to the market?
Really, I don't think there's much difference, except that the body count right now is distributed over a longer stretch of time.
I'd do just one thing, and trust that everything else will right itself as a result of that:
Any lobbying of the executive or congress or any senator that is false or misleading (intentionally or not) or fails to include at the very least a mentioning and pointers to the opposite opinion will be punishable by death.
About 200 executions later, the US would be a lot better off.
After all these years, finally an investigation with enough width to actually cover the problem.
The browser, or the video player, all that were only just whatever the current incarnation of the real crime was. Looking into the bundling issue independent of a specific problem is what should've been done long ago.
And interoperability as well! Someone in the EU has looked at and really understood what it's all about.
That's one of the days where I'm proud to be a European.
TFA doesn't do the TouchStream justice. It's essentially the predecessor to multi-touch. In fact, TouchStream was acquired by Apple quite a while ago...
The TouchStream wasn't just a "keyboard plus mouse". It didn't have mouse buttons, instead recognizing up to 3 mouse buttons by tapping (different number of fingers). It could also do mouse-gestures, again with multiple fingers.
Very nifty device. Only disadvantage: If you can't touch-type, it's hard to use.
Ok, what the heck is up with these paid MS shills that mod down every anti-MS, pro-Apple or otherwise "Steve wouldn't like to read that" comment? They've been invading like locusts for weeks now. I've written quite a few emotional comments recently, but the only time they're modded down is when they even so slightly mention something about MS that isn't 100% perfect.
It could also be the opposite, because we geeks don't shut off our brains when we're unemployed. We need to do something, and joining some Free Software project could be just the thing to a) keep us occupied, b) train our skills and thus c) improve our chances to get a new job.
Slashdot Mirror
Par for the course for MS.
Serious question: Has anyone ever worked with MS and hasn't been fucked with?
In addition, through trickery and decades (and sometimes centuries) old agreements, they take quite a share of tax money, in addition to what they take from their followers. For example, they own extensive property, some of which is very old. The maintainance of those buildings is in part paid for by taxes, even though the public has no rights to the buildings themselves.
There is more that would take too much space to elaborate about here.
Since Spore isn't out yet I don't know about all of its features. But there are a number of things for integration, both behind-the-scenes and visible. Going from networking to drag-and-drop of textures for your creatures, for example.
Or take the example about every user having their own preferences and save-games. You have no idea how valuable that is to a family.
What you said is mostly true for the previous pope, who worked hard and long to return catholicism from the fringes to the mainstream. The current pope is moving in the opposite direction, but it'll take him a few years to undo everything his predecessor did in a few decades.
The fact that a bad implementation of an idea was dumped doesn't mean that the idea was bad.
And we all know that MS never gets anything right the first time, they always need until version 3 before it's any good.
Nonsense.
Wikipedia defines religion as "A religion is a set of common beliefs and practices generally held by a group of people, often codified as prayer, ritual, and religious law.". There are other possible definitions, but not a single of them makes it as simple as you try to make it. Most importantly, religion always carries an active part, a set of actions or practices.
Atheism isn't the "null religion". In geek speak, atheism is not "$belief = NULL", atheism is the case where $belief is undefined.
Words are such tricky beasts.
a-theism is greek. We know what theism is (I hope), and a- is the greek prefix for negativation, so atheism isn't a religion but best translated as non-religionism or non-belief - the exact opposite.
Silencing includes silence, but none of these scientists ever said that the pope should be silent. They asked him to not speak in one specific place at one specific date. If I tell you to get off my lawn, that's not an infringement to your free speech. You (and the pope) can speak your mind any other place.
Exactly, finally, creates the impression of a precise copy. As a previous comment wrote: When scientists burn the pope at the stake, then you can talk about "exactly". Until then, you should use less loaded words like "I see this as similar to..." or "comparable to..."
Interestingly, messing with words and meanings is what religion is all about. Once we've abandoned it like we've abolished the belief that not eating all your meal will cause rain to fall, it'll be shoveled into psychology (as a mental disease) and linguistics (for its abuse and creation of words).
Read up on the guy. He's as fundamentalist as any muslim leader we call a terrorist, except that he has the "right" faith and has enough political know-how to understand that calling for another crusade isn't exactly going to help his cause.
On the one hand, I am really looking forward to Spore on OS X.
But transgaming? I am not feeling good about that. This isn't a proper port, it will very likely not take advantage of any OS X features, for example. I loved the Loki Linux ports because they did - Civ:CTP on Linux had different profiles and savegames for each user, by storing them in the user's home directory. The windos version didn't.
On OS X, one of the things that's great is how integrated everything is - calender and TODO apps all use the same backend storage so you can access the same data with them all, you aren't tied into a specific program, you can change to another program without losing your data, without even converting or ex-/importing it. There are a number of integrations that Spore could make use of, but if it's not a proper port, then none of that will happen.
EA, if you are listening, please tell us that this is only a stepping stone and that you do plan to properly (sup)port games to OS X in the future.
(and now that the +1 Funny mods had their day, I can point out that I meant that seriously: Almost everyone who uses word uses it as a slightly enhanced text editor. A dummy version with almost all features completely hidden (not the abomination of MS "auto-hiding" that ranks high on the list of worst-ever-UI-ideas) is exactly what they'd need.)
Congratulations. UI design is one of the most under-appreciated areas of computers. Programmers thinking they can design an interface is like designers thinking they can code - except that it isn't as immediately obvious when they fail.
But how certain are you that you are actually losing sales? How does the free advertisement count against that? I'm seriously interested if you have any numbers or guesses.
A friend of mine is selling content, too. One of his packs appeared on a torrent a few days ago. He considers that as some kind of being knighted, as if he's now being taken serious. For all I know, he also doesn't believe it'll cost him money, because he is sure everyone who would buy it still will.
Because that's how the market works if your price and offer are reasonable. The main reason piracy is so rampant is that corporations are creating massive desire in a target audience that doesn't have the money to satisfy it. If you listen to the media, you as a school kid or student absolutely have to buy at least 3-5 new games and 5-10 new CDs and 2-3 new DVDs a month. Which adds up to what? At least 250-300 bucks.
People who actually share copyrighted material may very well be breaking the law (depending on country and other fine details, but I think we agree that generally, they do). But PirateBay doesn't share any actual copyrighted material.
Stupid, meet journalist, your brother.
I don't get the plural form of "reason" in this context. To me there is exactly one reason why making a game into a movie is difficult:
Games are interactive, movies are to be watched.
The rules for both kinds of entertainment are very different. What makes one great simply doesn't work on the other. Games suck whenever you don't control what happens (one reason why too many or too long cutscenes make games suck), whereas in a movie you never have control. Movies can generate tension by giving you (the viewer) information that the protagonist does not have - games can't, because you are the protagonist. And so on and so forth.
In sum, you can't make a game into a movie. You can make a movie with the same background story as some game, but you can't turn the game into a movie if you want it to be any good.
Education matters little.
Even if the average user knows there are alternatives, it is additional work, he is insecure, and MS works hard to make it as inconvenient as possible.
More importantly, corporate IT departments are very reluctant to install any additional software if there is already software of the same kind. They'll support one browser, one office suite, one media player. Guess which ones. Not because those are better, but because those are pre-installed and they have to support them anyways.
The one thing I hate about the iPhone firmware update is that it requires you to re-activate your iPhone. Which means that if you got the SIM-Lock removed in yours (which, for example, T-Mobile had to do for free in Germany for a limited time) then the SIM-Lock will be active again after the update.
Since the Apple hotline is closed now (9 pm over here) I can't yet say whether they'll remove it again without trouble or not. I'll see tomorrow.
Bad move. Being able to get it without a SIM-Lock was an important deciding factor for me.
Just like locks, copy protection can be useful to make it clear to people that you don't want your stuff to be copied. At the same time, you must realize that anyone who seriously wants in, will get in. Either through the lock or through the window. One way or the other, you can't keep someone dedicated and with know-how out. You can raise the bars, like banks do with their vaults, but there is no guarantee and different from banks it's enough for one guy to break in and you're open to the entire world.
So if I were making commercial software (which I'm not) I would install some copy protection that I know anyone with a clue can break, but that reminds my honest users that it said "one install per license" or whatever the agreement was. Speaking of that, I also wouldn't tempt my honest (paying!) users and grant them liberal licenses, like multiple installs as long as you only use one at a time (for those with a desktop and a notebook) or cheap family licenses, etc. - making an effort to offer those who are willing to pay an option they are willing to accept will go a long way, and probably work better than installing a better lock.
I live in Germany. Let me tell you a few short stories:
Energy. Used to be in the hands of local, government-owned companies. Privatized around 15 years ago. Now largely in the hands of a handfull of international corporations. Energy prizes have risen ever since. The government-owned companies used to make good profits already, which were often used to subsidize less profitable government-owned companies, like public transportation. Currently, the major energy corporations are under investigation for illegal price agreements. Meanwhile, energy costs just rose another 7% (on average) at years's start.
Post Office. Privatized maybe 10 years ago. Prices mostly stable since then (still under government control), quality slightly dropped (e.g. number of lost mail has increased considerably). Lots and lots of post offices have been closed, especially in rural areas. Not profitable. The mailmen have much larger areas to cover now, and most of them are employed part-time or as temporary workers. Wages have gone down.
Public Transport - train service. The german Bundesbahn (federal train company) used to be world-famous for punctuality, maybe you still remember. The Bundesbahn was turned into "Die Bahn AG" ("the train company") in a slow process that started maybe 10 years ago. Since then, tickets have become more expensive constantly. During the past four years, on the line that I frequently use the price went up about 40%, that's around 10% per year. Punctuality is a thing of the past, delays of 5-15 minutes are frequent, delays of 30-60 minutes fairly common. My personal record is four hours on a trip that should've taken 6 hours (and took 10). Service is horrible, you will find long queues in front of every ticket counter in every train station in every major city. Or at least I see them _every_ time I look and that's not an exaggeration. Hundreds of train stations are closed every year, especially in rural areas. Not profitable. Trains are regularily filled to capacity, not randomly but at well-known times, always. You'd think they'd add a train or at least a few cars, but you're mistaken, they don't. Not even for trains where I can tell you today that that train will be filled to capacity this week, next week, and every week of the year. Work conditions for the employees have become so bad that the drivers went on strike last year in order to get their weekly work week reduced to 40 hours. They also haven't had a raise in years.
Should I go on? There are more examples. I will say for the sake of being fair, that the privatization of the telco company has been mostly successful. It is also still heavily regulated by a government office.
No, you miss one very important point: The purpose of a government isn't to make money. It is to serve the people.
And that is true of most of the examples I mentioned above. The purpose of the train system shouldn't be to make money, but to provide mobility to a people. The purpose of the post office shouldn't be profit, but to provide communications to a people. etc.
Really, I don't think there's much difference, except that the body count right now is distributed over a longer stretch of time.
I'd do just one thing, and trust that everything else will right itself as a result of that:
Any lobbying of the executive or congress or any senator that is false or misleading (intentionally or not) or fails to include at the very least a mentioning and pointers to the opposite opinion will be punishable by death.
About 200 executions later, the US would be a lot better off.
After all these years, finally an investigation with enough width to actually cover the problem.
The browser, or the video player, all that were only just whatever the current incarnation of the real crime was. Looking into the bundling issue independent of a specific problem is what should've been done long ago.
And interoperability as well! Someone in the EU has looked at and really understood what it's all about.
That's one of the days where I'm proud to be a European.
TFA doesn't do the TouchStream justice. It's essentially the predecessor to multi-touch. In fact, TouchStream was acquired by Apple quite a while ago...
The TouchStream wasn't just a "keyboard plus mouse". It didn't have mouse buttons, instead recognizing up to 3 mouse buttons by tapping (different number of fingers). It could also do mouse-gestures, again with multiple fingers.
Very nifty device. Only disadvantage: If you can't touch-type, it's hard to use.
Ok, what the heck is up with these paid MS shills that mod down every anti-MS, pro-Apple or otherwise "Steve wouldn't like to read that" comment? They've been invading like locusts for weeks now. I've written quite a few emotional comments recently, but the only time they're modded down is when they even so slightly mention something about MS that isn't 100% perfect.
It could also be the opposite, because we geeks don't shut off our brains when we're unemployed. We need to do something, and joining some Free Software project could be just the thing to a) keep us occupied, b) train our skills and thus c) improve our chances to get a new job.