Please think it through, Dilbert is right. How can you not support the BSA's actions ?
The BSA is making sure copyrights are respected (i.e. the law). Now the only way we are going to get reasonable copyright laws is when people realize that current terms are unacceptable. If people think that they can get away with copyright infringement they wont put as much effort into voicing their opinion regarding how much they think current laws sucks.
In other words people are now saying: "yes, copyright sucks but it doesn't affect me, I can get all the software/music/videos I want (not need) through [P2P du jour], and I can get away scott-free".
Moreover the BSA supports Linux. Yes it does.
It is when companies and individuals realize how much money their have to give to BSA members like Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and others and what little return they get that they'll take a long hard look at Linux and all the excellent Free applications out there.
There is no need for a vast majority of people to give their money to run Windows or Photoshop. They can get all the software they need and more and stay on the right side of the law.
The GPL, BSD license and the like all use the underlying copyright laws. If copyright laws are not enforced then those licenses are worthless as well.
Dilbert is supporting the BSA and so should you. The worse the BSA treats the consumer, the more strongarmed its tactics are, the more audits it conducts, the better for Free software.
Unless you think you have a right to freely access all the copyrighted works in the world?
The fallacy of the "average income". This doesn't mean that people living in the US necessarily have a higher income than in other countries.
For example the poverty line is defined as an income lower than 50% of the *median* income. By that measure the US has the third highest level of population (17%) living below that line (source), just behind such countries as Mexico and Russia.
The US is very rich but it is also unequal. Inequality is a recipe for social unrest.
1- Apple stores in Europe, Asia and Australia carry almost zero games. Maybe the US situation is different, but I don't live there at the moment.
2a- Major counter-example not out on Mac yet: doom3. Major game that may never come out on Macs: HL2 (!), Major games that *will* never come out on macs: MystII Uru and many many others. One year wait is typical. There are better and worse cases of course.
2b - Major counter-examples that are *just* coming out on Mac: KOTOR (the original, not the sequel!), Homeworld2, Medal of Honor (how old is that game?), Halo (again, the original), Fallout2 (Isn't that incredible?). All at full price (US$49). For the PC you have been able to find FO2 for $5 for a long time now.
It seems porting is hard and expensive.
2c - Extremely Rare Exceptions: MystIV, WoW.
You've obviously never tried to buy Mac games. Do yourself a favour and look on the US Apple Store. You can now buy the *extention* to BG-II, a game that came out 4-5 years ago at the *full price* of the original game. RTCW is at US$40. The situation is even worse outside of the US.
Last time I went to a US Apple Store was in 2000, in SF. I wasn't impressed by the selection even then.
As for console, thanks but I'd like to play on the road with my laptop if possible. I wouldn't like to lug around these things and you can't play on airplanes (loooooong flights to anywhere from Australia).
I'm happy with playing old games but I don't like the small selection and the prices.
The super-killer PC you talk about to play nice games are all cheaper than all but the cheapest macs, and I have one around anyway that I use for other tasks, so it's zero extra cost. I only play old, tested, reliable cheap games my PC is way overkill to play. I once bought a new game (Falcon4), never again (bug galore). The games I'm interested in are mostly not available on consoles.
Finally I don't have a TV set, out of choice. I occasionally watch a DVD on the aforementionned Super Duper PC that cost a few hundred bucks to build months ago.
What tends to happen in the OSS world is that (in my experience)
(a) I will find an unusual bug with some functionality I haven't tried before, trace it down and find this is a kernel issue.
(b) hit google and the forums and find out that the bug had already been
1- reported 2- duplicated 3- fixed already.
(c) apply the solution.
(d) profit.
Once in the last 10 years I found a bug no one else had reported. I posted it on the Linux kernel mailing list, then someone responded with a methodology for narrowing the possibilities which implied applying a one-line patch, and gave a workaround immediately. The patch was in the next minor release of the kernel.
My experience with proprietary unices is opposite to yours. I would find a problem, narrow it down to a kernel issue, find it had been reported and then that unless it was for some reason a priority for the vendor it hadn't been fixed, with no workaround other than "disable the service". My experience is particularly bad with HP/Tru64 and SGI.
This is not universal. There have been long-standing problems with Linux like with USB or the VM subsystem at some point and FireWire now, that tend not to get fixed quickly because there is conflict as to how to go about it amongst the developers. Usually however you are not completely stuck. Some unofficial patch can make your hardware work, unless you are out of luck due to the hardware vendor not playing ball for example.
From my point of view Bill Gates is a very smart man, no doubt about it, and he is also probably individually a very nice man. I mean I can think of a few people in his position who would do a whole lot more damage. McNealy, Jobs or Ellison would simply be unbearable. However his control freak attitude when he was CEO of Microsoft with the *whole world* makes me want to have as little relationship with his company and products as possible.
Also Microsoft is not an intellectually inspiring company. By and large its products are mediocre, "good enough" is often as they are described, with a few exceptions. They show reasonable functional engineering like a large grey bridge with an expensive tollway on it, but they don't inspire like a cathedral or an opera house. They are not made for people who really like computers.
If Bill Gates truly liked computers and software like he pretends he does, he would have made sure his company made the very best software on the planet by a mile. They have the means, including the in-house smarts and dedictation, they simply don't have the vision or inspiration. How come a somewhat little software house like Apple is doing so much better with less than 10% of the resources? How can a band of *volunteer* around the world spending their spare time tinkering with pet software project almost match what Microsoft can conjure up?
I wouldn't say Mac gaming is non-existent. If you are not dying to play the latest titles you can find many decent games on Macs, but they are pricy.
Mac game typically come out one year after their PC equivalent, cost the same as the PC version when it was first shipped, and don't come down in price very fast.
It's almost impossible to find games for Macs on shelves even at Apple stores (they usually have a few token ones). You need to buy them online.
However a few publishers do have Mac-PC games in the same box like for the Myst series.
As for Linux the situation is not very good. Of recent memory only the Neverwinter and the ID games series have been good on Linux. The rest must be run through Cedega/WineX, and this is *hard*.
Neither Linux or Mac games are a patch on the Windows scene, and that one is being overtaken by consoles at the moment.
There is a price to everything, including your own time.
You are writing that BT is slow and obnoxious. People have to pay for bandwidth and their own time. Few people want to spend their Sundays downloading music or TV show from weird places. They just want it quickly and painlessly.
That means not too expensive, but it can carry a price and people will still buy it.
GWB's vision of a free Iraq is righteous, but it's implementation is far from over. A single day of election is not going to solve the country's problems. This is only the beginning.
Al-Sharq newspaper in Qatar had a political cartoon by Khamis al-Rashidi showing an Iraqi at a ballot box facing a masked insurgent pointing a gun at him, while a U.S. soldier pointed a gun at his back.
I'm not convinced we needed a war to get where we are now.
Of course he is the largest contributer to charity. He is also the richest man on Earth.
This guy is absolutely *loaded* with money. If a $1000 bill fell off his pocket it wouldn't be worth his time picking it up.
If he gives away 90% of his multi-billion personal fortune away, this still leaves him with hundreds of millions of dollars under his own name. Most people can only expect to earn at most a couple of these same millions over a life time.
In other words he doesn't feel the difference. On the contrary giving away money gives hime a sense of achievement, some kind of warm feeling, etc.
This is great that the guy is giving away some of his money, but he is not doing it for the people he gives the money to. He does it for (a) ego, (b) feeling of accomplishment and (c) warm fuzzy feeling.
In other words for himself.
In my eyes it is much more worthy to give away $1000 that one could also use for one's own personal purposes, rather than $1B that one wouldn't be able to use anyway. If you are Christian, Jesus said exactly the same thing if you remember.
What makes me most unhappy about the Bill Gates situation is that I'm forced, through his main accomplishment (Windows almost everywhere) to use his products even when I really don't want to (e.g. at work, etc), thereby contributing directly or indirectly to his wealth.
I've also been forced to even *buy* his products (with new computers for example), over a period of years, only to never actually use them. Various Microsoft licenses have been bought under my name without my consent at various workplaces supposedly to enable me to work. Only I've never actually used them or indeed needed them.
Essentially this guy is taking money that I've earned to give to his ideas of charity for his own ends, and this is simply not a kind of thought that I enjoy.
Cigarette makers have been found guilty in a court of law of putting additives in cigarettes that makes them addictive.
Concerning addiction, not everybody is created equal. For some people quitting is easy and for others it is impossible. Many people started smoking while under the age of 18 due to peer pressure and then found themselves unable to quit later.
The point is to stop smoking may not be as easy as to choose the colour of one's car.
The Americans are getting pretty good at fighting wars and not actually having any *American* die.
One million Vietnamese died in the Vietnam "policing effort" and estimates of 50,000 Iraqis have been killed so far in the conflict. Mostly civilians.
Re:Consumerism isn't really new or american
on
China Bans 50 Games
·
· Score: 1
Ever since Deng Xiaoping became leader, one of the messages the Chinese government give to their people is "enrich yourself".
There is a small (in proportion) but growing middle-class in China. If you travelled to Beijing today you would recognize the prototype of the yuppie in the streets almost indistinguishable from the ones in Tokyo or NYC. These guys have money, nice cars, cell phones, sattelite TV and broadband at home, etc.
Today Chinese tourists in Europe make up the second largest contingent after the Japanese. They don't stay for long but they spend *more*. Read more about it there .
I don't think China is opposed to consumerism, but the Chinese government or some part of it would probably want some kind of control over it.
This decision smacks of obvious over-reaction by some conservative factions in power. It may not have much actual effect. P2P is alive in China as well. If anything it will encourage piracy.
The SW-AotC resolution is now 3-4 of years old and a limitation of the camera he used. I'm sure that if Lucas could have shot the film in a higher resolution he would have. BTW I thought the film had a definite `video-game' feel to it even though it was higher quality.
For digital work from film (archiving, restoration, duplication, special effects etc), a full 35mm frame is generally digitized at 4k x 3k x 12bits, or thereabouts. That's 75MB per frame or well over 1TB for a standard 20mn reel. Some films are digitized at higher resolutions still.
Most current computers are not able to animate these digitized films at full frame rate, let alone render it!
At that resolution you can generally see the grain of the film in dark areas, but it's obvious you have not captured everything the film has to offer.
I've done some recent film restoration, so I know, believe me.
You'll notice eventually (around retirement age maybe) that people are in fact making not nearly enough babies in the `first' world, particularly in Europe and Japan, and way too many in Africa, China or India.
Unfortunately no one has devised a solution to this conundrum right now. In particular shipping babies around where they are needed seems to be very difficult.
In fact what societies need are young, educated, productive people, not so much babies per se and those aren't so easy to come by.
Your mum and dad did not witness the price of gas going from 34 cents a gallon to $2 overnight, it took quite a while.
If changes are slow enough people can adapt and what you suggest makes sense. The poster is talking about very rapid change. I seem to recall people complaining loudly about the recent, quite mild price hike on gas.
I remember the time in Europe when gas prices more than doubled and stayed there over the course of a few months at the end of the seventies. The depression that followed wasn't much fun. Now Europeans have tiny efficient cars, but it took a long time to adjust.
Activation curves of most chemicals look like sigmoids, they are highly non-linear. Assuming the LD50 of dirt is a pound (i.e. 50% of individuals eating a pound of dirt would die), then maybe only 10% would die eating only 15oz. They would be sick mind you, but they would survive. Similarly about only 1% would die eating 14oz.
This is not a very good analogy. In complex systems you can have very strong thresholds above which the system switches local equilibrium, and they may not be reversible.
The thing to understand is that our society forms an increasingly complex system. Our economy in particular is very fragile. It wouldn't take much irreversible weather pattern changes to send the world economy in turmoil, make wars happen, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Please think it through, Dilbert is right. How can you not support the BSA's actions ?
The BSA is making sure copyrights are respected (i.e. the law). Now the only way we are going to get reasonable copyright laws is when people realize that current terms are unacceptable. If people think that they can get away with copyright infringement they wont put as much effort into voicing their opinion regarding how much they think current laws sucks.
In other words people are now saying: "yes, copyright sucks but it doesn't affect me, I can get all the software/music/videos I want (not need) through [P2P du jour], and I can get away scott-free".
Moreover the BSA supports Linux. Yes it does.
It is when companies and individuals realize how much money their have to give to BSA members like Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and others and what little return they get that they'll take a long hard look at Linux and all the excellent Free applications out there.
There is no need for a vast majority of people to give their money to run Windows or Photoshop. They can get all the software they need and more and stay on the right side of the law.
The GPL, BSD license and the like all use the underlying copyright laws. If copyright laws are not enforced then those licenses are worthless as well.
Dilbert is supporting the BSA and so should you. The worse the BSA treats the consumer, the more strongarmed its tactics are, the more audits it conducts, the better for Free software.
Unless you think you have a right to freely access all the copyrighted works in the world?
Hello,
The fallacy of the "average income". This doesn't mean that people living in the US necessarily have a higher income than in other countries.
For example the poverty line is defined as an income lower than 50% of the *median* income. By that measure the US has the third highest level of population (17%) living below that line (source), just behind such countries as Mexico and Russia.
The US is very rich but it is also unequal. Inequality is a recipe for social unrest.
First of all the computer did not invent anything.
If they had fed the computer with some Bach and it had come up with some Jazz or some Messian-sounding music I would have been more impressed.
No need to knock someone out cold for such an achievement (cool as it is).
I'd be interested to see if the very same program can be fed some John Cage and then witness what happens.
1- Apple stores in Europe, Asia and Australia carry almost zero games. Maybe the US situation is different, but I don't live there at the moment.
2a- Major counter-example not out on Mac yet: doom3. Major game that may never come out on Macs: HL2 (!), Major games that *will* never come out on macs: MystII Uru and many many others. One year wait is typical. There are better and worse cases of course.
2b - Major counter-examples that are *just* coming out on Mac: KOTOR (the original, not the sequel!), Homeworld2, Medal of Honor (how old is that game?), Halo (again, the original), Fallout2 (Isn't that incredible?). All at full price (US$49). For the PC you have been able to find FO2 for $5 for a long time now.
It seems porting is hard and expensive.
2c - Extremely Rare Exceptions: MystIV, WoW.
You've obviously never tried to buy Mac games. Do yourself a favour and look on the US Apple Store. You can now buy the *extention* to BG-II, a game that came out 4-5 years ago at the *full price* of the original game. RTCW is at US$40. The situation is even worse outside of the US.
Last time I went to a US Apple Store was in 2000, in SF. I wasn't impressed by the selection even then.
As for console, thanks but I'd like to play on the road with my laptop if possible. I wouldn't like to lug around these things and you can't play on airplanes (loooooong flights to anywhere from Australia).
I'm happy with playing old games but I don't like the small selection and the prices.
The super-killer PC you talk about to play nice games are all cheaper than all but the cheapest macs, and I have one around anyway that I use for other tasks, so it's zero extra cost. I only play old, tested, reliable cheap games my PC is way overkill to play. I once bought a new game (Falcon4), never again (bug galore). The games I'm interested in are mostly not available on consoles.
Finally I don't have a TV set, out of choice. I occasionally watch a DVD on the aforementionned Super Duper PC that cost a few hundred bucks to build months ago.
Hmm,
What tends to happen in the OSS world is that (in my experience)
(a) I will find an unusual bug with some functionality I haven't tried before, trace it down and find this is a kernel issue.
(b) hit google and the forums and find out that the bug had already been
1- reported
2- duplicated
3- fixed already.
(c) apply the solution.
(d) profit.
Once in the last 10 years I found a bug no one else had reported. I posted it on the Linux kernel mailing list, then someone responded with a methodology for narrowing the possibilities which implied applying a one-line patch, and gave a workaround immediately. The patch was in the next minor release of the kernel.
My experience with proprietary unices is opposite to yours. I would find a problem, narrow it down to a kernel issue, find it had been reported and then that unless it was for some reason a priority for the vendor it hadn't been fixed, with no workaround other than "disable the service". My experience is particularly bad with HP/Tru64 and SGI.
This is not universal. There have been long-standing problems with Linux like with USB or the VM subsystem at some point and FireWire now, that tend not to get fixed quickly because there is conflict as to how to go about it amongst the developers. Usually however you are not completely stuck. Some unofficial patch can make your hardware work, unless you are out of luck due to the hardware vendor not playing ball for example.
I wouldn't go so far as you do.
From my point of view Bill Gates is a very smart man, no doubt about it, and he is also probably individually a very nice man. I mean I can think of a few people in his position who would do a whole lot more damage. McNealy, Jobs or Ellison would simply be unbearable. However his control freak attitude when he was CEO of Microsoft with the *whole world* makes me want to have as little relationship with his company and products as possible.
Also Microsoft is not an intellectually inspiring company. By and large its products are mediocre, "good enough" is often as they are described, with a few exceptions. They show reasonable functional engineering like a large grey bridge with an expensive tollway on it, but they don't inspire like a cathedral or an opera house. They are not made for people who really like computers.
If Bill Gates truly liked computers and software like he pretends he does, he would have made sure his company made the very best software on the planet by a mile. They have the means, including the in-house smarts and dedictation, they simply don't have the vision or inspiration. How come a somewhat little software house like Apple is doing so much better with less than 10% of the resources? How can a band of *volunteer* around the world spending their spare time tinkering with pet software project almost match what Microsoft can conjure up?
Insipid, uninspiring, strictly commercial, depressing.
I wouldn't say Mac gaming is non-existent. If you are not dying to play the latest titles you can find many decent games on Macs, but they are pricy.
Mac game typically come out one year after their PC equivalent, cost the same as the PC version when it was first shipped, and don't come down in price very fast.
It's almost impossible to find games for Macs on shelves even at Apple stores (they usually have a few token ones). You need to buy them online.
However a few publishers do have Mac-PC games in the same box like for the Myst series.
As for Linux the situation is not very good. Of recent memory only the Neverwinter and the ID games series have been good on Linux. The rest must be run through Cedega/WineX, and this is *hard*.
Neither Linux or Mac games are a patch on the Windows scene, and that one is being overtaken by consoles at the moment.
There is a price to everything, including your own time.
You are writing that BT is slow and obnoxious. People have to pay for bandwidth and their own time. Few people want to spend their Sundays downloading music or TV show from weird places. They just want it quickly and painlessly.
That means not too expensive, but it can carry a price and people will still buy it.
Not true, they will learn in time (and forget again). Companies can only get away with so much badwill. Look at Nike.
You can already easily and more cheaply buy music online.
And sometimes you only know if something is physically possible if you try it.
Without that spirit, no DVD playing on Linux, to name only one thing.
Go hackers.
see CNN.com
I'm not convinced we needed a war to get where we are now.
And India shall rise again.
India is the world's largest democracy, far more an example of the difficulties and successes of democracy than the US.
disclaimer: I'm not Indian. I have no relationship with India, but I do admire the country.
I'm sorry, this doesn't wash with me.
Of course he is the largest contributer to charity. He is also the richest man on Earth.
This guy is absolutely *loaded* with money. If a $1000 bill fell off his pocket it wouldn't be worth his time picking it up.
If he gives away 90% of his multi-billion personal fortune away, this still leaves him with hundreds of millions of dollars under his own name. Most people can only expect to earn at most a couple of these same millions over a life time.
In other words he doesn't feel the difference. On the contrary giving away money gives hime a sense of achievement, some kind of warm feeling, etc.
This is great that the guy is giving away some of his money, but he is not doing it for the people he gives the money to. He does it for (a) ego, (b) feeling of accomplishment and (c) warm fuzzy feeling.
In other words for himself.
In my eyes it is much more worthy to give away $1000 that one could also use for one's own personal purposes, rather than $1B that one wouldn't be able to use anyway. If you are Christian, Jesus said exactly the same thing if you remember.
What makes me most unhappy about the Bill Gates situation is that I'm forced, through his main accomplishment (Windows almost everywhere) to use his products even when I really don't want to (e.g. at work, etc), thereby contributing directly or indirectly to his wealth.
I've also been forced to even *buy* his products (with new computers for example), over a period of years, only to never actually use them. Various Microsoft licenses have been bought under my name without my consent at various workplaces supposedly to enable me to work. Only I've never actually used them or indeed needed them.
Essentially this guy is taking money that I've earned to give to his ideas of charity for his own ends, and this is simply not a kind of thought that I enjoy.
Allow me not to applaud.
Cigarette makers have been found guilty in a court of law of putting additives in cigarettes that makes them addictive.
Concerning addiction, not everybody is created equal. For some people quitting is easy and for others it is impossible. Many people started smoking while under the age of 18 due to peer pressure and then found themselves unable to quit later.
The point is to stop smoking may not be as easy as to choose the colour of one's car.
Are you being sarcastic or callous?
The Americans are getting pretty good at fighting wars and not actually having any *American* die.
One million Vietnamese died in the Vietnam "policing effort" and estimates of 50,000 Iraqis have been killed so far in the conflict. Mostly civilians.
Ever since Deng Xiaoping became leader, one of the messages the Chinese government give to their people is "enrich yourself".
There is a small (in proportion) but growing middle-class in China. If you travelled to Beijing today you would recognize the prototype of the yuppie in the streets almost indistinguishable from the ones in Tokyo or NYC. These guys have money, nice cars, cell phones, sattelite TV and broadband at home, etc.
Today Chinese tourists in Europe make up the second largest contingent after the Japanese. They don't stay for long but they spend *more*. Read more about it there
.
I don't think China is opposed to consumerism, but the Chinese government or some part of it would probably want some kind of control over it.
This decision smacks of obvious over-reaction by some conservative factions in power. It may not have much actual effect. P2P is alive in China as well. If anything it will encourage piracy.
The SW-AotC resolution is now 3-4 of years old and a limitation of the camera he used. I'm sure that if Lucas could have shot the film in a higher resolution he would have. BTW I thought the film had a definite `video-game' feel to it even though it was higher quality.
For digital work from film (archiving, restoration, duplication, special effects etc), a full 35mm frame is generally digitized at 4k x 3k x 12bits, or thereabouts. That's 75MB per frame or well over 1TB for a standard 20mn reel. Some films are digitized at higher resolutions still.
Most current computers are not able to animate these digitized films at full frame rate, let alone render it!
At that resolution you can generally see the grain of the film in dark areas, but it's obvious you have not captured everything the film has to offer.
I've done some recent film restoration, so I know, believe me.
You'll notice eventually (around retirement age maybe) that people are in fact making not nearly enough babies in the `first' world, particularly in Europe and Japan, and way too many in Africa, China or India.
Unfortunately no one has devised a solution to this conundrum right now. In particular shipping babies around where they are needed seems to be very difficult.
In fact what societies need are young, educated, productive people, not so much babies per se and those aren't so easy to come by.
TLA overload alert:
CDC = center for disease control.
You end up needing perhaps less than 1% of the stuff you've stashed, but it's the 1% that bites.
If you knew which 1% you would need in the future you would have no problem.
Very often have I deleted something I was quite sure I would never use ever again, only to urgently require this very same data about 2 days later.
You can reformat the Mac iPod easily to FAT32 though.
Peak discovery did occur sometimes in the seventies, this is a known fact, unfortunately.
Now peak oil *production* hasn't been reached yet. This is when things supposedly start going bad.
You can read more about the various hypothesis regarding the origin of oil at the refered link.
Your mum and dad did not witness the price of gas going from 34 cents a gallon to $2 overnight, it took quite a while.
If changes are slow enough people can adapt and what you suggest makes sense. The poster is talking about very rapid change. I seem to recall people complaining loudly about the recent, quite mild price hike on gas.
I remember the time in Europe when gas prices more than doubled and stayed there over the course of a few months at the end of the seventies. The depression that followed wasn't much fun. Now Europeans have tiny efficient cars, but it took a long time to adjust.
Yes, or maybe nuclear fusion.
Activation curves of most chemicals look like sigmoids, they are highly non-linear. Assuming the LD50 of dirt is a pound (i.e. 50% of individuals eating a pound of dirt would die), then maybe only 10% would die eating only 15oz. They would be sick mind you, but they would survive. Similarly about only 1% would die eating 14oz.
This is not a very good analogy. In complex systems you can have very strong thresholds above which the system switches local equilibrium, and they may not be reversible.
The thing to understand is that our society forms an increasingly complex system. Our economy in particular is very fragile. It wouldn't take much irreversible weather pattern changes to send the world economy in turmoil, make wars happen, etc.