What are you going to do when the fucking ragheads stuff an IED into their baby's diaper?
You water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots, that's what. And if the boom-lottery chooses you to be on that flight... that's the risk you take as the price of freedom. A very tiny percentage of us will die at the hands of terrorists. We suck it up and preserve our Constitution.
Yeah, I know, fantasyland. Americans with spines, willing to accept a risk that is smaller than that of being hit by lightning in return for preventing huge abuses by political police? Never happen.
Silver wallpaper? Cool! It will go with the 5000-dollar brick I put on top of my stereo amplifier to screen out cosmic rays.
How long do you think it will be before Monster gets into the wallpaper market and starts suing anyone who uses the term "wallpaper" in their domain names?
Scenario: a "little guy" gets a patent. A "big guy" violates it. The little guy takes the big guy to court, and the big guy throws an entire legal department at the little guy, and essentially buys the result. The little guy then has to pay treble damages of the expenses of that great big huge legal department, and goes out of business because of the punitive award. As part of the punitive award as the little guy goes under, the ownership of the little guy's patent then goes to the big guy.
Want a patent held by a little guy? Willfully violate it, then bleed the little guy dry with protracted court proceedings. You'll get the patent through bankruptcy. And if the little guy doesn't defend his patent... free IP!
Think it through. "Automatic" damages means you create a system that can easily be gamed by armies of lawyers far better at manipulating the system they crafted than you, and ties the hands of the judge to prevent it.
That's not exactly true, the jury's verdict read that what was copied was the "structure, sequence, and organization" of Java APIs. Of which, if you're up for implementing a non-standardized version of Java, you should take note.
Correct. While the idea of the API might not be copyrightable, implementation of that API is.
Except that Google is an American company, and EU law has no effect on American soil. What Google does in America is governed by American law and no other.
He's pretty much in line with his Republican pals here. Making "letting Obama fail" your sole stated political goal is borderline treasonous. Well, I watch it from a distance, but it is sad to see such a promising, yet shortlived experiment like the US fail.
Is the same true of someone who said "I don't like how Florida counted votes or that the Supreme Court didn't do what I wanted them to, so George Bush is not my president"?
In a democracy, you have to accept the results even if you lose. In a democracy you don't scream "fraud" just because you lost.
Be careful about throwing around words like "treason" (and "terrorism") just because you want to sound loud and powerful and savor the taste of outrage. Are you so absolutely certain those words could never, ever be applied to you?
The team for TES has been around for a while. No need to transfer anybody; TESMMO is already fully staffed, and the single-player/MMO teams have already existed in parallel for some time. This is the "secret project" folks attending GDC:Austin and GDC have been hearing Zenimax/Bethesda hinting at for the last four years... during which they also brought out Skyrim.
Yeah, I think they can handle both at once... or, at least, if the MMO fails or the next single-player TES game sucks, it won't be because of cross-team poaching.
Not quite true. You have to have someone write the content, and NWN/NWN2 are primitive compared to anything remotely recent.
I'm quite happy to pay professionals to generate large amounts of good content. (I've played on hobbyist NWN servers.... not impressed.) Server hosting and client engines are only a part of what I pay for.
There will be another single-player TES game when Bethesda decides they want another few dozen "Game of the Year" awards.
Bethesda wants BOTH markets (single player and multi player) and are not about to abandon single-player (which they utterly own and which is a license to print money) in favor of a market which is proving to be more and more difficult to succeed in. They're not going to abandon their cash cow in favor of high risk... they're simply doing both at the same time. They certainly can afford it. If their TES MMO fails, well, they'll wipe away their tears with the stacks of hundred dollar bills being airlifted in from TES 6 and Fallout 4.
That being said, yes, they're going to have serious problems if they go linear story.
Now, if they had a service in which a guild could pay for an instance of the entire game-world, invite-only, I'd be all about that. 15 a month for the privilege of being griefed by ten thousand man-child jerks? No. I quit WoW over that (and LotRO and AoC and WHO and...). I don't want to play these games with strangers any more, and nobody gets my money if that's the only way to play a given MMO. But I would pay 30 a month (maybe even more) for a quality sandbox game that was instanced that only I and my guild (also paying 30 a month) could access that instance. Or, if it were a Second Life style billing system, I and my buddies would happily pay a couple thousand to create an instance of the world then standard subscription rates, if we could be the gatekeepers and keep the jerks out.
Yeah, I'm not particularly keen on my fellow human beings these days. I will pay good money to not have to deal with most of them. Elitist? Hardly. I don't care if others bring up their own instances, I just want them the hell out of mine (and off of my lawn, too).
Modern superhero comics are pretty much uniformly targeted at teen-to-adult age groups. In the quest to become more "edgy", the storylines are more violent and disturbing than ever before. This is not intended as a criticism... I likes me some edgy comics, and when I was college-aged supplemented my income doing lettering work on comic books... but don't be under any sort of illusion about the content the big labels are releasing. It's just not good material for someone as young as your son.
Most kid's TV is also either completely inane/stupid/mind-rotting, or inappropriate for 3-year-olds. There are a few shows out there which are just fine for young kids and which have a goodly bit of intelligence, worthwhile stories, and a meaningful positive "message", but I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to discover them. (Hint: one of them is a huge Internet sensation right about now.)
He didn't say "no" 101 times, though. When someone asks "wanna go blow up a bridge", you have to choose the correct answer EVERY SINGLE TIME. Forever.
Peer pressure is no excuse for enacting a terrorist plot. If you're corruptible and in a position in which your corruption gets people killed (either by your own hand or by your willful inaction), you're everyone's rightful prey.
Part of me wants to say "Nicely done, when can I buy one", but part of me says "...and this differs from the packaging jobs done by premium laptop manufacturers like Apple and Sony how? They've been making custom funky-shaped motherboards with this amount of acreage for a while now."
1. The instant anything goes wrong, you're back on the command line.
2. There remains the expectation in the Linux community that ANY person using a computer should be required to have syadmin-level skills before they're allowed into the Internet.
3. You can't do a good user interface for users whom you hold in contempt. Many Linux developers hold ordinary people in contempt. See (2) above.
4. GUIs like KDE and Gnome have a lot in common with Microsoft BOB: the belief that if something is difficult, make the fonts and buttons bigger and that makes it all OK.
5. User interface design is hard, but Linux developers don't believe that; anything that requires a GUI more complex than "man myprogram" (or, if you want to be Stallmanishly Correct, "info myprogram") is obviously unimportant and a waste of good developer time best spent elsewhere. Getting kinda close should be "good enough". See (2) above.
6. User interfaces are all about polish and smoothness. But, like any open source project, once the sexy bragworthy stuff is done (core functionality, edge cases and exception-handling NOT included), interest in putting in the effort to refine and tweak just isn't there. There's nobody to crack the whip and say "it's NOT okay that scrolling is jumpy if there's a large JPEG embedded in the document". In other words, there's no recognition that core functionality is the first 90% of the effort, the second 90% is robustness/exception-handling, and the third 90% is polish and tweaking. With most open-source projects, you're lucky if you get past the first 90%, and by the time you're on the third 90%, all your devs have wandered off into Skyrim.
This may sound harsh and snide, but it has the property of being true.
Actually, the results of the essay evaluation - that form is valued over content, that eloquence is valued over truth - strongly mirrors my own experiences in academia. So many of the "soft" arts are either teaching how to put a shiny veneer over a turd, or simply an evaluation of how closely the student's expressed beliefs match their professor's. Form exceeds function; indoctrination exceeds learning. We're coming full circle, aren't we?
Just try expressing libertarian or conservative views on campus these days. See what it does to your grades.
For what it's worth, when I took the required W.E.S.T. (Writing Effectiveness Screening Test) in my junior year at a California State University campus, my percentile ranking and evaluation placed me second in the state that year (as in, only one person scored higher). I did it with a combination of "this is probably what you want to hear," and "the entire question is full of shit". I did it grammatically correctly, spelled correctly with the flowery words, purple prose and the kind of empty turns of phrase that make liberal arts professors titter like Japanese schoolgirls in a hentai video. Shows you what evaluation boards know....
1. Write test plan
2. Hand it to developers for review
3. Developers read test plan
4. Developers consider factors, conditions and workflows spelled out in test cases that they hadn't thought of before, because they are developers not QA engineers (if a developer were capable of doing what I do, they would never have written into code the bugs that I find. Developers are not, and never will be, superior to QA engineers. Life lesson, prima donnas: QA saves you from yourselves.)
5. Developers examine their code with these new insights
6. Developers fix bugs in the code, prompted by the document (test plan)
I realize this all breaks down at step 3, but I can dream.
Controversy and flamebait generate page-views as outraged nationalists and functionally incompetent OS bigots click and re-click to see how people react to their irrelevant options. This is extremely predictable, and generates ad income. Slashdot editors know this.
John Dvorak and other fucktard "pundits" realized this a long time ago and turned it into a career.
The solution's simple: if someone threatens you in a manner that is even slightly credible, you get a free pass to shoot and kill them. That way the state doesn't have to involve itself, or pay for the bullet or the lawyer.
...what, you think I'm joking, even a little?
Yes, the Arizona law is way too broad. But watching people here try to defend a "right" to lie about someone and threaten them, and target people for harassment... yeah, I see why the "there oughta be a law" crowd has support that's widespread enough to get the Arizona bill passed. Online stalkers need to start paying dearly for their behavior, and if the state doesn't exact that payment, "street justice" will do.
Vigilantism arises when the state fails in its duty.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you going to do when the fucking ragheads stuff an IED into their baby's diaper?
You water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots, that's what. And if the boom-lottery chooses you to be on that flight... that's the risk you take as the price of freedom. A very tiny percentage of us will die at the hands of terrorists. We suck it up and preserve our Constitution.
Yeah, I know, fantasyland. Americans with spines, willing to accept a risk that is smaller than that of being hit by lightning in return for preventing huge abuses by political police? Never happen.
Silver wallpaper? Cool! It will go with the 5000-dollar brick I put on top of my stereo amplifier to screen out cosmic rays.
How long do you think it will be before Monster gets into the wallpaper market and starts suing anyone who uses the term "wallpaper" in their domain names?
Scenario: a "little guy" gets a patent. A "big guy" violates it. The little guy takes the big guy to court, and the big guy throws an entire legal department at the little guy, and essentially buys the result. The little guy then has to pay treble damages of the expenses of that great big huge legal department, and goes out of business because of the punitive award. As part of the punitive award as the little guy goes under, the ownership of the little guy's patent then goes to the big guy.
Want a patent held by a little guy? Willfully violate it, then bleed the little guy dry with protracted court proceedings. You'll get the patent through bankruptcy. And if the little guy doesn't defend his patent... free IP!
Think it through. "Automatic" damages means you create a system that can easily be gamed by armies of lawyers far better at manipulating the system they crafted than you, and ties the hands of the judge to prevent it.
That's not exactly true, the jury's verdict read that what was copied was the "structure, sequence, and organization" of Java APIs. Of which, if you're up for implementing a non-standardized version of Java, you should take note.
Correct. While the idea of the API might not be copyrightable, implementation of that API is.
Except that Google is an American company, and EU law has no effect on American soil. What Google does in America is governed by American law and no other.
He's pretty much in line with his Republican pals here. Making "letting Obama fail" your sole stated political goal is borderline treasonous. Well, I watch it from a distance, but it is sad to see such a promising, yet shortlived experiment like the US fail.
Is the same true of someone who said "I don't like how Florida counted votes or that the Supreme Court didn't do what I wanted them to, so George Bush is not my president"?
In a democracy, you have to accept the results even if you lose. In a democracy you don't scream "fraud" just because you lost.
Be careful about throwing around words like "treason" (and "terrorism") just because you want to sound loud and powerful and savor the taste of outrage. Are you so absolutely certain those words could never, ever be applied to you?
Yeah! Standards!
The team for TES has been around for a while. No need to transfer anybody; TESMMO is already fully staffed, and the single-player/MMO teams have already existed in parallel for some time. This is the "secret project" folks attending GDC:Austin and GDC have been hearing Zenimax/Bethesda hinting at for the last four years... during which they also brought out Skyrim.
Yeah, I think they can handle both at once... or, at least, if the MMO fails or the next single-player TES game sucks, it won't be because of cross-team poaching.
Not quite true. You have to have someone write the content, and NWN/NWN2 are primitive compared to anything remotely recent.
I'm quite happy to pay professionals to generate large amounts of good content. (I've played on hobbyist NWN servers.... not impressed.) Server hosting and client engines are only a part of what I pay for.
Haters have a very serious problem with truth. It's as simple as that. (It's part of why they're haters)
There will be another single-player TES game when Bethesda decides they want another few dozen "Game of the Year" awards.
Bethesda wants BOTH markets (single player and multi player) and are not about to abandon single-player (which they utterly own and which is a license to print money) in favor of a market which is proving to be more and more difficult to succeed in. They're not going to abandon their cash cow in favor of high risk... they're simply doing both at the same time. They certainly can afford it. If their TES MMO fails, well, they'll wipe away their tears with the stacks of hundred dollar bills being airlifted in from TES 6 and Fallout 4.
That being said, yes, they're going to have serious problems if they go linear story.
Now, if they had a service in which a guild could pay for an instance of the entire game-world, invite-only, I'd be all about that. 15 a month for the privilege of being griefed by ten thousand man-child jerks? No. I quit WoW over that (and LotRO and AoC and WHO and...). I don't want to play these games with strangers any more, and nobody gets my money if that's the only way to play a given MMO. But I would pay 30 a month (maybe even more) for a quality sandbox game that was instanced that only I and my guild (also paying 30 a month) could access that instance. Or, if it were a Second Life style billing system, I and my buddies would happily pay a couple thousand to create an instance of the world then standard subscription rates, if we could be the gatekeepers and keep the jerks out.
Yeah, I'm not particularly keen on my fellow human beings these days. I will pay good money to not have to deal with most of them. Elitist? Hardly. I don't care if others bring up their own instances, I just want them the hell out of mine (and off of my lawn, too).
It's because people exactly like you are My Little Pony haters, dick.
Already took that particular test. Passed.
Black Belt in CCW Permit.
Modern superhero comics are pretty much uniformly targeted at teen-to-adult age groups. In the quest to become more "edgy", the storylines are more violent and disturbing than ever before. This is not intended as a criticism... I likes me some edgy comics, and when I was college-aged supplemented my income doing lettering work on comic books... but don't be under any sort of illusion about the content the big labels are releasing. It's just not good material for someone as young as your son.
Most kid's TV is also either completely inane/stupid/mind-rotting, or inappropriate for 3-year-olds. There are a few shows out there which are just fine for young kids and which have a goodly bit of intelligence, worthwhile stories, and a meaningful positive "message", but I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to discover them. (Hint: one of them is a huge Internet sensation right about now.)
Please supply your residential address so I can bring my water-boarding tools
You'd better bring more friends than I have bullets, Anonymous Brave-Man.
He didn't say "no" 101 times, though. When someone asks "wanna go blow up a bridge", you have to choose the correct answer EVERY SINGLE TIME. Forever.
Peer pressure is no excuse for enacting a terrorist plot. If you're corruptible and in a position in which your corruption gets people killed (either by your own hand or by your willful inaction), you're everyone's rightful prey.
Then you don't buy the fake bomb in the first place, regardless.
Part of me wants to say "Nicely done, when can I buy one", but part of me says "...and this differs from the packaging jobs done by premium laptop manufacturers like Apple and Sony how? They've been making custom funky-shaped motherboards with this amount of acreage for a while now."
1. The instant anything goes wrong, you're back on the command line.
2. There remains the expectation in the Linux community that ANY person using a computer should be required to have syadmin-level skills before they're allowed into the Internet. 3. You can't do a good user interface for users whom you hold in contempt. Many Linux developers hold ordinary people in contempt. See (2) above.
4. GUIs like KDE and Gnome have a lot in common with Microsoft BOB: the belief that if something is difficult, make the fonts and buttons bigger and that makes it all OK.
5. User interface design is hard, but Linux developers don't believe that; anything that requires a GUI more complex than "man myprogram" (or, if you want to be Stallmanishly Correct, "info myprogram") is obviously unimportant and a waste of good developer time best spent elsewhere. Getting kinda close should be "good enough". See (2) above.
6. User interfaces are all about polish and smoothness. But, like any open source project, once the sexy bragworthy stuff is done (core functionality, edge cases and exception-handling NOT included), interest in putting in the effort to refine and tweak just isn't there. There's nobody to crack the whip and say "it's NOT okay that scrolling is jumpy if there's a large JPEG embedded in the document". In other words, there's no recognition that core functionality is the first 90% of the effort, the second 90% is robustness/exception-handling, and the third 90% is polish and tweaking. With most open-source projects, you're lucky if you get past the first 90%, and by the time you're on the third 90%, all your devs have wandered off into Skyrim.
This may sound harsh and snide, but it has the property of being true.
Actually, the results of the essay evaluation - that form is valued over content, that eloquence is valued over truth - strongly mirrors my own experiences in academia. So many of the "soft" arts are either teaching how to put a shiny veneer over a turd, or simply an evaluation of how closely the student's expressed beliefs match their professor's. Form exceeds function; indoctrination exceeds learning. We're coming full circle, aren't we?
Just try expressing libertarian or conservative views on campus these days. See what it does to your grades.
For what it's worth, when I took the required W.E.S.T. (Writing Effectiveness Screening Test) in my junior year at a California State University campus, my percentile ranking and evaluation placed me second in the state that year (as in, only one person scored higher). I did it with a combination of "this is probably what you want to hear," and "the entire question is full of shit". I did it grammatically correctly, spelled correctly with the flowery words, purple prose and the kind of empty turns of phrase that make liberal arts professors titter like Japanese schoolgirls in a hentai video. Shows you what evaluation boards know....
Bah. Kids these days.
First computer: Processor Technology SOL-20. Intel 8080 processor, Northstar BASIC and a screamin' 143k floppy drive. 1975.
You kids and your square keyboards.
I call it a "test plan".
1. Write test plan
2. Hand it to developers for review
3. Developers read test plan
4. Developers consider factors, conditions and workflows spelled out in test cases that they hadn't thought of before, because they are developers not QA engineers (if a developer were capable of doing what I do, they would never have written into code the bugs that I find. Developers are not, and never will be, superior to QA engineers. Life lesson, prima donnas: QA saves you from yourselves.)
5. Developers examine their code with these new insights
6. Developers fix bugs in the code, prompted by the document (test plan)
I realize this all breaks down at step 3, but I can dream.
Controversy and flamebait generate page-views as outraged nationalists and functionally incompetent OS bigots click and re-click to see how people react to their irrelevant options. This is extremely predictable, and generates ad income. Slashdot editors know this.
John Dvorak and other fucktard "pundits" realized this a long time ago and turned it into a career.
Yeah, this isn't creepy or invasive in ANY way.
(If I played ukeleles in an attempt to get hoochy-koochy, I certainly wouldn't want Google or anyone else to know that...)
The solution's simple: if someone threatens you in a manner that is even slightly credible, you get a free pass to shoot and kill them. That way the state doesn't have to involve itself, or pay for the bullet or the lawyer.
...what, you think I'm joking, even a little?
Yes, the Arizona law is way too broad. But watching people here try to defend a "right" to lie about someone and threaten them, and target people for harassment... yeah, I see why the "there oughta be a law" crowd has support that's widespread enough to get the Arizona bill passed. Online stalkers need to start paying dearly for their behavior, and if the state doesn't exact that payment, "street justice" will do.
Vigilantism arises when the state fails in its duty.