I received those bits, yes. But they were provided to me, free of charge, by the Slashdot administrators. I did not steal anything, I took something that was being given away. That is not stealing, that is accepting charity.
If I had to pay to read Slashdot, and I hacked into their system and read this article for free, then your argument would hold value. But as it stands, you're using a strawman.
One cannot steal an idea, one cannot steal the text of a book, one cannot steal the image of a mouse. Even if it is copied and the copy is somehow proven to impact the sales payable to the original creator, it is not theft.
I can't agree with that statement. The pirate receives something (a string of bits, an idea, a computer file, whatever) and gives nothing in exchange. The pirate has acquired something that, by all rights, he should have paid for.
In copying the latest music from the 'net, you have acquired something that by all rights you should have paid for. You received something for nothing. Any way you slice it, you've stolen.
I swear, I've been sitting here for 5 minutes trying to come up with a joke for this topic. But as soon as I think of an idea for a joke, I have this overwhelming sense of pity for some poor lonely guy out there who would have to get a Virtual Girlfriend because he cannot hold a real relationship. All this guy wants is a bit of love and respect, but he just can't get it. Then I get disgusted at the greedy, money-grubbing company trying to capitalize on these poor souls, feeding their thirst for money off of their victim's need for love and acceptance...
Honestly, is anybody surprised by this move? If there's one thing that history has taught us about George Lucas, it's that he has exactly one master - money.
If Lucas thinks that he can get money out of the frothing masses of geeks, then he'll do it. Hence, the DVDs to be released this fall, after saying that he would only release DVDs as a full 6-box set?
One needs to implement semi-twitch gameplay... "perform 5-hit combos with the proper key sequence". What? Are these crack-monkeys making D&D Online or Street Fighter II Online?
You bash Dungeons and Dragons Online for trying something new while simultaneously bemoaning the fact that all MMORPGs are the same. That level of doublethink is amazing.
All data in those graphs are based on owner-reported numbers. "We have more than 7 billion subscribers!" means a data point of 7 billion.
There is no standard for the data. For example, Star Wars Galaxies is in the habit of reporting the total number of unique numbers in their database. So everybody who downloads a free trial counts as "a new subscriber"
Finally, we have the biggest laugh of them all. "...proof that a well-executed MMOG can still garner substantial numbers even in the current competitive climate." The problem is that "substantial numbers" does not equal success. City of Heroes has been out for about 3 months. Most of the people currently playing CoH are still in the MMORPG "honeymoon" phase where everything is new, the end-game content is still unexplored, and people are trying out new ideas and new play styles. A year from now, we'll see if CoH is still succeeding.
The same goes for World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, and whatever new games come out. The only measure of a game's success is staying power.
Penguin Putnam, publishers of "A Girl's Life Online" (previously titled Katie.com) are thrilled at the enormous amount of free publicity they have received. They clearly did not intend to pursue the lawsuit in question, merely to make enough of a gesture to arouse interest in certain tech communities.
Such astroturfing is top-notch, the likes of which has not been seen since the Phantom Video Game Console. Penguin Putnam thanks all the gullible editors and saps who provided their free advertising.
Yeah, this is exactly what we want to do to virus writers - give them recognition and a "ranking". Jesus Christ on a pogo stick.
It's bad enough that they feel the need to "compete" against other virus writers for some internet version of "street cred" but now we're fucking ranking them?
How long until people start writing viruses just to "get points" on some chart somewhere? Christ, you people have no logic whatsoever.
Wow, does anybody actually go to the ilovebees.com link at Slashdot? In about 10 seconds you can tell that this is a marketing ploy. Fucking flash animation pops up and starts talking about "SYSTEM PERIL DISTRIBUTED REFLEX" and gives a fucking countdown. Jesus Christ on a Stick, do you honestly think that ANY webmaster wouldn't have pulled their fucking site from the 'net if something like that happened?
IT'S FUCKING FLASH ANIMATION. Free advertising by starting an astroturf campaign to "figure out what went wrong". Here's a hint of what went wrong - Slashdot no longer reads its submissions with a critital eye.
Forgive me for being so stupid, but what's the point of making a craft that can go Mach 7? The article claims travel benefits, going from New York to London in 2 hours. But honestly, travelling that fast, if anything went wrong you're toast. Turn a little bit to the wrong side, and suddenly you've lost a wing from the shock. No commercial airliner would stand for that.
The only possible use I can think of is hyper-range weapons. Ground-controlled planes armed with lethal cargo (nuclear or not) could be flown around the globe faster than any ICBM, and guided with better accuracy.
I'm all for "Science for Science's sake" but I think this is worthless for any practical purposes.
The excerpt arguing for "There are as many numbers [0,1] as [0,0.1]" just illustrates a common misconception of people - that we can somehow count infinity. So often people associate infinity with a number... "I have infinity billion dollars" or "The biggest number is infinity plus one." Infinity is a concept, one that has inexorably become tied with numbers, to the detriment of both.
I, for one, grew out of being mystified by infinity shortly after I graduated middle school and began to learn about truly mystifying things like "women" and "alcohol's effect on the human body". Why can I drink on Friday without a hangover, but when it comes Monday morning my head is being pounded by sledgehammers?
If you think BNet.d was about "lessening strain from their network" or "improving the gaming experience" you're dead wrong. It was about being able to play a game you didn't pay for. Blizzard servers are not strained, they work just fine. The only possible reason for playing on Bnet.d was to play with illegally-obtained software.
Christ, you probably also think that virus writers are writing them because they want to check the security of Windows.
Not only that, their transporters are amazing. People on the planet below never seem to mind waiting until Picard got to the Transporter Room, and as soon as Picard walked in he gave the order to Energize. But people on the surface are always ready to greet the Away Team, no matter how much time they fiddle around arguing with the Doctor or configuring the Image Enhancers.
If I were standing on a planet waiting to be beamed up, I'd be terrified about moving too far, sitting down (I'd be beamed up without the chair!), or even worse going to the bathroom. Could you imagine the kind of embarassing situations that would arise from being beamed out of the toilet?
Recently there has been almost no inovation whatsoever
You're not playing the right games. The Sims introduced a whole new idea to gaming, and in the process introduced a whole new market. Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles on the Gamecube introduced the idea of using 4 GBAs as "inventory" screens, while also controlling the game on the TV. I challenge you to put Pikmin into a category. I challenge you to put Cubivore into a category. I challenge you to put Animal Crossing into a category.
You're just not playing the right games. If you want innovation, choose Nintendo.
Oh yeah? Well my cousin works with your roommate and he told me that they don't even need your name. They can look you up by just thinking about you. And not only that, they can tell you how many times you have masturbated since you were 16.
I hope to God that people don't believe this shit. The government, corporations, and private investigators do not have some vast database where everything you have ever done is recorded.
What you're describing is just conditioning. You likely gave Elmo food while saying "Want Food" a lot. Thus, the brain connected "Want Food" with you giving food. Then, whenever Elmo is hungry, she just triggers your response by saying "Want Food"
This has been done for centuries. It neither demonstrates knowledge nor understanding - just primitive cause-and-effect association.
I'm just adding my voice to the others who have protested the release of DVDs as being merely a profit motivation. Lucas is only motivated by profit - he proved that when he re-released the "Special Edition" to theatres, destroying the films in the process.
Don't buy the DVDs. Tell your parents not to buy them for you. Tell your siblings not to buy them for you. Tell your girlfriend not to buy them for you. Do not see Episode 3. It's the only way to get George's attention.
Sorry, I used the wrong word. Replace "intelligent" with "civilized". And any sufficiently intelligent species would learn that civilization and society is a necessary step towards the survival of their species. After all, why rely on wolf teeth when you could create a much more efficient method of finding prey?
Any extra-terrestrial intelligence which is not civilized would just be animals - hardly Earth's intellectual peers.
And maybe if you inverted the warp plasma through the deflector dish, you could create an inverse tachyon field that could disrupt that thersian constant! Make it so, Number One!
You see, I was limiting myself to thinking of... what's the word... reality. I was talking about plausable scenarios of intelligent extra-terrestrial life. You've obviously spent too much time reading Sci-Fi novels and not enough time in what we like to call the "real world" - and it's not that shitty MTV show you watch.
Numbers are numbers
on
The Golden Ratio
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Regardless of what radix used (10-based, hex, octal, etc) "6" of something is still "6". Call it whatever you want, some alien name. There are still 6 items there.
By the same nature, prime numbers are always prime. There exist a certain number of things (5, 7, 11, etc) and cannot be evenly divided. Period. We call them prime numbers, and we use our base-10 radix. Aliens could call them Borgolsmocks in their base-182, but the fact still remains that a Borgolsmock cannot be divided evenly.
And I firmly believe that no intelligence would survive for long without a knowledge of mathematics. Counting the days for crop rotation, the ability to evenly divide food among the tribe, and communication of the number of animals in a herd... mathematics will be generated in the evolution of any intelligent species.
It's not stated outright, but that sounds like they do record all that information
Hi, do you know anything about TiVo? You see, there's this "subscription" you have to sign up for, which lets you use all the bells and whistles of the machine. In that "subscription" you have to provide things like, oh, your name, age, gender, and even credit card number! Of course they're going to keep this information on file. Wouldn't you? Oh, I forgot, you're a Slashdot Privacy Zealot who sees boogeymen everywhere.
And for that matter, who gives a shit if Kroger knows that I buy condoms? I get a discount on my groceries, and they get information. So, essentially, they're buying my information (or, if you like, I'm selling my information to them). I honestly don't care if they know that I buy condoms. Hell, they could determine that by using cameras at the checkout counter. But are you in arms about that? Of course not.
And finally, you summarize it all with "OMG WTF teh goverment will get j00 OMG LOL". What are you worried about? If the store sees that I've bought a few thousand pounds of fertilizer in the past week, they might trip an alarm and I get a visit from the FBI. I explain to them I'm maintaining gardens for a local park, and there's no problem. I lose 5 minutes of my day answering the FBI's questions. Wah.
When you move out of your parents' basement and start living in the Real World, you'll understand.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad you cleared that up. I thought you were talking about Bush.
I mean seriously, how do you get funding? I could use some cash right about now.
I received those bits, yes. But they were provided to me, free of charge, by the Slashdot administrators. I did not steal anything, I took something that was being given away. That is not stealing, that is accepting charity.
If I had to pay to read Slashdot, and I hacked into their system and read this article for free, then your argument would hold value. But as it stands, you're using a strawman.
In copying the latest music from the 'net, you have acquired something that by all rights you should have paid for. You received something for nothing. Any way you slice it, you've stolen.
No, it's actually true. I really do wish I had thought of it first.
Then I get pissed I didn't think of it first.
If Lucas thinks that he can get money out of the frothing masses of geeks, then he'll do it. Hence, the DVDs to be released this fall, after saying that he would only release DVDs as a full 6-box set?
I honestly ask, is anybody surprised anymore?
Are you John Ashcroft?
There is no standard for the data. For example, Star Wars Galaxies is in the habit of reporting the total number of unique numbers in their database. So everybody who downloads a free trial counts as "a new subscriber"
Finally, we have the biggest laugh of them all. "...proof that a well-executed MMOG can still garner substantial numbers even in the current competitive climate." The problem is that "substantial numbers" does not equal success. City of Heroes has been out for about 3 months. Most of the people currently playing CoH are still in the MMORPG "honeymoon" phase where everything is new, the end-game content is still unexplored, and people are trying out new ideas and new play styles. A year from now, we'll see if CoH is still succeeding.
The same goes for World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, and whatever new games come out. The only measure of a game's success is staying power.
Such astroturfing is top-notch, the likes of which has not been seen since the Phantom Video Game Console. Penguin Putnam thanks all the gullible editors and saps who provided their free advertising.
It's bad enough that they feel the need to "compete" against other virus writers for some internet version of "street cred" but now we're fucking ranking them?
How long until people start writing viruses just to "get points" on some chart somewhere? Christ, you people have no logic whatsoever.
Well, that describes my attitude towards the movie, anyways.
</karmawhore>
IT'S FUCKING FLASH ANIMATION. Free advertising by starting an astroturf campaign to "figure out what went wrong". Here's a hint of what went wrong - Slashdot no longer reads its submissions with a critital eye.
It's as bad as Acclaim's pigeons, their "Name your kid Turok" marketing shit, and who can forget their tombstone advertisements?
It's time to wake up, Slashdot, and not get duped by these obvious ploys for free advertisement.
The only possible use I can think of is hyper-range weapons. Ground-controlled planes armed with lethal cargo (nuclear or not) could be flown around the globe faster than any ICBM, and guided with better accuracy.
I'm all for "Science for Science's sake" but I think this is worthless for any practical purposes.
I, for one, grew out of being mystified by infinity shortly after I graduated middle school and began to learn about truly mystifying things like "women" and "alcohol's effect on the human body". Why can I drink on Friday without a hangover, but when it comes Monday morning my head is being pounded by sledgehammers?
Christ, you probably also think that virus writers are writing them because they want to check the security of Windows.
If I were standing on a planet waiting to be beamed up, I'd be terrified about moving too far, sitting down (I'd be beamed up without the chair!), or even worse going to the bathroom. Could you imagine the kind of embarassing situations that would arise from being beamed out of the toilet?
You're not playing the right games. The Sims introduced a whole new idea to gaming, and in the process introduced a whole new market. Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles on the Gamecube introduced the idea of using 4 GBAs as "inventory" screens, while also controlling the game on the TV. I challenge you to put Pikmin into a category. I challenge you to put Cubivore into a category. I challenge you to put Animal Crossing into a category.
You're just not playing the right games. If you want innovation, choose Nintendo.
I hope to God that people don't believe this shit. The government, corporations, and private investigators do not have some vast database where everything you have ever done is recorded.
This has been done for centuries. It neither demonstrates knowledge nor understanding - just primitive cause-and-effect association.
Don't buy the DVDs. Tell your parents not to buy them for you. Tell your siblings not to buy them for you. Tell your girlfriend not to buy them for you. Do not see Episode 3. It's the only way to get George's attention.
But perhaps it is too late for him...
Any extra-terrestrial intelligence which is not civilized would just be animals - hardly Earth's intellectual peers.
You see, I was limiting myself to thinking of... what's the word... reality. I was talking about plausable scenarios of intelligent extra-terrestrial life. You've obviously spent too much time reading Sci-Fi novels and not enough time in what we like to call the "real world" - and it's not that shitty MTV show you watch.
By the same nature, prime numbers are always prime. There exist a certain number of things (5, 7, 11, etc) and cannot be evenly divided. Period. We call them prime numbers, and we use our base-10 radix. Aliens could call them Borgolsmocks in their base-182, but the fact still remains that a Borgolsmock cannot be divided evenly.
And I firmly believe that no intelligence would survive for long without a knowledge of mathematics. Counting the days for crop rotation, the ability to evenly divide food among the tribe, and communication of the number of animals in a herd... mathematics will be generated in the evolution of any intelligent species.
And it is truly universal.
Hi, do you know anything about TiVo? You see, there's this "subscription" you have to sign up for, which lets you use all the bells and whistles of the machine. In that "subscription" you have to provide things like, oh, your name, age, gender, and even credit card number! Of course they're going to keep this information on file. Wouldn't you? Oh, I forgot, you're a Slashdot Privacy Zealot who sees boogeymen everywhere.
And for that matter, who gives a shit if Kroger knows that I buy condoms? I get a discount on my groceries, and they get information. So, essentially, they're buying my information (or, if you like, I'm selling my information to them). I honestly don't care if they know that I buy condoms. Hell, they could determine that by using cameras at the checkout counter. But are you in arms about that? Of course not.
And finally, you summarize it all with "OMG WTF teh goverment will get j00 OMG LOL". What are you worried about? If the store sees that I've bought a few thousand pounds of fertilizer in the past week, they might trip an alarm and I get a visit from the FBI. I explain to them I'm maintaining gardens for a local park, and there's no problem. I lose 5 minutes of my day answering the FBI's questions. Wah.
When you move out of your parents' basement and start living in the Real World, you'll understand.