> You are the least fallible > instrument in the arsenal?
Well, I don't know that I'd put it THAT way.;)
I know some very bright people who just don't get along well with testing environments. These people are simply never going to be certified as anything, but it takes about five minutes of conversation to figure out that they really do know their stuff.
On the other hand, I also know a few people with stacks of certifications that... well, let's just say I wouldn't hire them, or recommend that anyone else hire them either. Again, it takes about five minutes of conversation to figure this out.
So I consider that five minutes of conversation to be the real dividing line. I'm lucky enough to get reasonable numbers of resumes, so I can usually afford to go through them all by hand and bring in over half of the applicants for an interview. If my company ever gets to the point that this isn't really an option, I'll have to reexamine my methodology.
When hiring, I'm not really impressed by certifications. To me, a certification means you stopped working long enough to play games with an authority figure -- usually in the hopes of getting more money -- and that authority figure may or may not have given you a rigorous testing to determine your eligibility for the certification. It's not just the certification that matters, it's where you got it.
Essentially, I judge applicants based on how I perceive their level of talent during the interview. I'm more interested in the flavor of a resume than I am in the experience and skills listed on it; I can *get* you experience and skills, but I can't get you talent -- let alone the basic ability to "fit in" at my company.
You cannot *make* us watch your commercials, and the harder you try, the more we will hate you.
Let's take the recent commercial for Lime Coke. They have this neat little play on Harry Nilsson's classic song "Coconut", which is amusing already, and they made a cute little vignette out of it. But once I've seen it four or five times, I'm done. I never need to see it again. If I was going to try Lime Coke, and I was, I would already have tried it -- which I did -- and decided whether I wanted to continue buying it, which I do. The sale is over. Any *further* commercials they show me for Lime Coke are a complete waste of time. And that's a commercial that SUCCEEDS.
So when you start worrying about whether I'm going to skip your commercials and you won't get your money's worth, you need a reality check. I don't watch your commercials ANYWAY. When your commercials come on, I will either watch them -- the first couple of times -- or else I will converse with my wife, go to the bathroom, check my email, or grab a snack from the kitchen.
I am not going to sit and watch your commercials no matter WHAT you do. The most you can do is force me to wait for what I actually *want* to be doing, during which time I will be annoyed and impatient and looking at your product's name. How do you think I'm going to feel when I see your product in a store? Why, I'll feel annoyed and impatient, of course. And that *doesn't* translate to increased sales.
(IANAL, but I spent a few years writing software for a legal company.)
Found in the Microsoft testimony:
"One of the better comments I think that was submitted to you was from somebody who does a lot of employment class action litigation. And she expressed that very concern. She also cited a few statutes, like Title 7 and maybe the Wage and Hours Act in the employment area, that very specifically tell companies what they must keep and what they must not. And I bet those statutes also provide penalties if they are not kept. And I'm pretty sure that they provide -- is it ten to twenty years in prison for the intentional destruction of documents? I mean, I think it would be insanity beyond belief for anybody, any serious lawyer, to advise their client that, oh, yeah, this is a way to get rid of something that might come back to bite us. Because the moment you have that thought, you're engaging in basically criminal conduct. So the routine operations of systems has to strictly be for the business purposes of keeping your IT systems running."
Where this differs from the "safe harbor" provision (IMO) is that some companies *routinely* engage in the intentional destruction of electronic documents. Last week I had some confidential records for a client, and when I was done with them, I deleted my copy as a routine IT practice: don't store confidential data any longer than necessary. My client has the data, so I don't need to retain it; even if I need it again later, the risk of someone walking away with my laptop *far* outweighs the convenience factor of holding onto the file. When documents are deleted for security reasons, this amounts to intentional deletion for the express purpose of denying access, and *might* be viewed rather harshly under the safe harbor guidelines.
After Warcraft, Starcraft, and the Command and Conquer series... I pretty much gave up on RTS games. I was impressed as hell by Sacrifice, which never got the attention and praise it deserved, but I don't know if anyone else would call that an RTS.
I have a design document for a new RTS game, but no team to build it just yet.
I've always thought a simple legal requirement to place "adult" material on a.xxx domain would make a huge difference in the ability to content filter. Then we could shut down all sorts of people who tried to skirt around it.
And I think.ro is "read only". I don't get it either.;)
> similar to disallowing > unlisted phone numbers.
Businesses already can't have unlisted phone numbers. If you want an unlisted phone number, you can't have a business at that phone number.
Now.us domain owners can't have a private domain. If you want a private domain, you can't have a.us domain.
I don't see the problem.
> user@mydomain.com becomes > your phone number
And mydomain.com can be private. However, mydomain.us cannot. So don't put your phones on mydomain.us, and the problem goes away.
Please don't hand me a slippery slope argument about "first they came for the.us domains". We live in a reasonably free market economy. If there is a market for the kind of privacy you want, someone will sell it to you.
> what if your political views put > your life in danger?
Nexus actually sounds like a cool game. It's missing the one thing that pisses me off about most RTS games: breakneck speed in combat.
Computers do one thing very well that most human beings can't -- they track buttloads of stuff and never forget any of it. Even with grouping, I always seem to end up having trouble when I want to order my troops around in RTS games. A slower-paced battle would suit me just fine.
Not to slam the reviewer or anything, but it sounds like maybe he's just not really in the game's target audience.
Gattaca dealt with this a little. The unenhanced human passed as enhanced by concealing a small pouch in his hand with a blood sample.
I like the idea of using skin cells. You insert your hand into a reader, and a small collector scrapes a few cells from three different random locations. Unless you wear a fake skin glove, this will almost certainly collect *your* skin. The question is, how quickly can we determine whether this skin came from a known criminal?
You're right. I tend to get the ninth and tenth amendments muddled up in my head, where the ninth admits the existence of other rights and powers for states while the tenth admits the existence of other rights and powers for individuals; it's actually divided on the other axis -- the ninth admits the existence of further rights, while the tenth admits the existence of further powers.
> I've seen what happens when > you let monkeys run any server
Yes, they apfrangle the overscan. So don't do it unless you're *positive* you have solved the problem. I mentioned this already.
> Competent admins cost
And an apfrangled overscan can only be detected, prevented, or resolved by a competent admin.
Translation: inexperienced admins always create situations that only an experienced admin can resolve. They need experienced supervision and guidance, both to prevent these situations when possible, and to clean them up when not. So you need to have enough experienced and competent IT professionals to supervise and guide all your interns and monkeys.
That's where people go wrong. Hiring a *few* stupid people dirt-cheap will free up your experienced admins to work on things only they can do. Hiring a LOT of stupid people dirt-cheap just wastes all your experienced admins on managing interns and monkeys instead of running the network. Replacing your experienced people with interns and monkeys... well, apfrangles the overscan.
This is precisely why I recommend WILO: Windows Inside, Linux Outside (of the firewall). Microsoft is far too slow patching security problems to expose their servers to the public internet, but since their servers are very convenient to administer and deploy within the organisation, you can reduce your IT needs drastically by using them behind the firewall.
Spending $1000 per server per year is rather less of an expense than hiring competent Linux admins throughout the organisation. I can train an intern to run a Windows server. (Hell, I could probably train a *monkey* to run a Windows server.) All I need is one or two Linux guys running our internet presence, and that can be outsourced.
Disclaimer: Please do not run off and staff your entire IT department with interns and monkeys unless you're POSITIVE you won't apfrangle the overscan.
I'm not sure, either, but it *can* be productively argued. At the very least, it will produce an argument.;)
I've been of the opinion for some years that privacy is an illusion; if people want to know something about you, they will find out. This has given me a somewhat detached view of the whole online privacy thing. I tend to believe that making things hard for automated processes is good enough, so I have no problem with a lack of anonymity on.US domain records -- I just think it should be unavailable to automated processes without some sort of delay to impede large-scale harvesting.
First off, the university in question *here* was compromised by a student that had external and unrelated access to her professors' personal information.
Second, the UCB article linked as additional evidence of carelessness discusses a laptop theft which took place in a restricted area of campus where the theft was actually witnessed.
This is careless? Why in the world would you blame the universities for these situations? It's not like either of these incidents involved someone breaking into the network from off-campus and downloading records or changing grades.
Holy crap, someone ELSE on the planet knows this. I keep having to explain this over and over to people who claim there's no right to privacy in the Constitution except under the catch-all clause of the tenth amendment. You have just restored some small amount of my faith in humanity.
What concerns me is that people feel that knowing who owns a given domain name is an unreasonable search. When you operate a public presence like a domain name, you *normally* have to identify yourself. Nobody is allowed to operate a broadcast station or publishing operation without providing a certain amount of identification to the public, and it can be productively argued that a web site is both.
I think sometimes we get a little carried away with our demands for rights, and forget that while we are guaranteed the right to freedom of speech, we are NOT guaranteed the right to own a mass-media outlet for broadcast and dissemination of that speech. The bar has gotten a lot lower, but there's still a bar.
> Eddie Izzard as the Doctor could be > the best thing to happen to television > ever.
A cross-dressing Time Lord with fake breasts?!
Actually, that *would* be pretty funny. Besides, Izzard did an excellent job in "Shadow of the Vampire", where there was no cross-dressing at all. Although "Velvet Goldmine" was sort of... questionable.
"If you steal, you are wrong. You should have to deal with the consequences. We have plenty of laws on the book to make sure that happens."
That's smart. It underscores what a lot of people forget... that piracy via P2P networks doesn't really need to be specifically outlawed, because it's already illegal.
My purpose is not to say that NT kernel source is *bad*, but that NT kernel source is not what people actually need.
I'm not sure why you keep trying to convince me NT is such a great architecture; I'm only saying it's different enough that the people who think they need it are probably wrong. So far, it seems like you'd agree with this. So what's the sitch?
I've built three enterprise-class web systems on MySQL and I'm in the middle of building a fourth.
In the early days, it was hard to work around the lack of stored procedures, triggers, and views... I was coming from an Informix background with some Oracle experience... but nobody I worked for wanted to license one of those for web stuff at the time. And now that MySQL is about to add the stuff I used to wish for, I actually don't really need it -- I've long ago gotten over the lack of these features.
So I'm primarily going to use the 5.0 release as an excuse to demand a week or two of feature-freeze for hack cleanup, under the guise of migration testing.
> I just don't like games that > emulates such evil behavior [...] > The most violent game I'd play > is something like Final Fantasy
So you have a problem with criminals killing criminals, but you don't see anything wrong with wandering around the countryside slaughtering innocent animals for gold and experience?
How much of that is because FF games don't look like Real Life? Would GTA be acceptable with cartoon characters instead of realistic people?
You know, I have a theory about why people dislike GTA. The first thing you do in a new situation is test your boundaries; once you know where they are, you can settle down and think about where in that space you want to be. But GTA doesn't have a lot of boundaries, so people go to where they think a boundary ought to be, and when it isn't there they get uncomfortable. After milling about in that area for a while, they realise they're outside the boundary they felt should be there, and they blame the game for not having it.
So what's your reasoning? Do you have any particular reason for not liking the game, or is it just "cool" in your circles to dislike GTA?
> You're making the assumption > that all FOSS is completely > undocumented and uncommented
No, I'm making the *observation* that *most* FOSS is *effectively* undocumented and *largely* uncommented, which is somewhat different.
Note that I'm specifically talking about CODE documentation; most FOSS has reasonable documentation on how to use it (for sufficiently limited values of "reasonable"), but little to no documentation on how to understand its source implementation.
> How do you know that?
Well, I waved a dead chicken over the map of Brazil, and it said "B'KAWK, nobody in Brazil is going to learn C so they can check their source for privacy violations". How dare you argue with the dead chicken? The dead chicken knows all.
Seriously, the number of people who will do this is statistically insignificant, so there may as well not be any.
> You sound like an MS apologist
That's Microsoft *Partner*, and don't you forget it.
> you just don't get Open Source.
Sure I do. In fact, I "get" that open source is purely about the redistribution freedom, because that's the only one you don't already have. You want the right to sell someone else's work for your own personal profit and not pay the original author anything.
Because, EULA or no EULA, you have a protected right to use and examine and modify the software you buy... as long as you don't circumvent its revenue generation mechanisms. And if you're fixing bugs or improving the software, you don't need to do that. You're even allowed to redistribute your modifications with instructions on how to apply them, again as long as you don't circumvent revenue generation mechanisms.
So the only thing you get from open source is a way to sell something that isn't yours. While I agree that this is a nice thing to have when people want to give it to you, I find it extremely rude to complain when people don't want you to have it.
I'm already skating mighty close to the edge of the topic, so I won't go into how open source development actively encourages bad software... but it does. This will become more evident as time goes on.
> I have yet to find anyone who > actually sends money to the > artist they claim want to > support.
However, in this case at least, you have found someone who does not use P2P networks on principle. I don't *like* my CD purchases going primarily to support someone other than the artist, but it's the only legitimate option available. So while I would be *happier* buying Manson's CDs directly through him, I continue to buy them through the usual channels, and every MP3 in my collection was ripped from a CD I actually own -- unless I downloaded from a legitimate source (usually an independent artist who doesn't release CDs).
While piracy is indeed people wanting to get stuff for free, the RIAA is people wanting to sell a 20 cent piece of plastic for $15 and then give the artist *squat* because the label still hasn't recouped the cost of the multi-million dollar marketing campaign the artist neither requested nor wanted. I think that's worse.
On top of that, when the RIAA sees all the P2P downloaders who aren't paying the $15, they don't say "those people have our money". They turn to the artists and say "those people have YOUR money". Then they dock the artists' pay. So the artists get mad. They SHOULD be mad at an industry that treats them like crap, but instead they lash out at the people who support them.
Thus the abused become the abusers. It's not like we, the music-listening public, aren't being abused enough by the labels that charge us out the ass for everything... we must now be abused by the artists we want to support, because we did the only thing we could think of to stop the abuse.
I am not by any stretch of the imagination trying to justify piracy, but these artists need to get the hell away from the RIAA. We need to develop an artist-owned, artist-operated organisation that can actually treat musicians like human beings.
I am more than happy to pay $15 for the next Marilyn Manson CD, if *he's* going to get the money -- because he'll use it to do something cool. I just have a problem with giving another $15 to the RIAA, who will spend most of it on their own self-involved crap. I want to support the ARTIST and his ART. Not the marketing and production machine that helped him make it shiny, aluminum, plastic, and digital.
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> You are the least fallible
;)
> instrument in the arsenal?
Well, I don't know that I'd put it THAT way.
I know some very bright people who just don't get along well with testing environments. These people are simply never going to be certified as anything, but it takes about five minutes of conversation to figure out that they really do know their stuff.
On the other hand, I also know a few people with stacks of certifications that... well, let's just say I wouldn't hire them, or recommend that anyone else hire them either. Again, it takes about five minutes of conversation to figure this out.
So I consider that five minutes of conversation to be the real dividing line. I'm lucky enough to get reasonable numbers of resumes, so I can usually afford to go through them all by hand and bring in over half of the applicants for an interview. If my company ever gets to the point that this isn't really an option, I'll have to reexamine my methodology.
When hiring, I'm not really impressed by certifications. To me, a certification means you stopped working long enough to play games with an authority figure -- usually in the hopes of getting more money -- and that authority figure may or may not have given you a rigorous testing to determine your eligibility for the certification. It's not just the certification that matters, it's where you got it.
Essentially, I judge applicants based on how I perceive their level of talent during the interview. I'm more interested in the flavor of a resume than I am in the experience and skills listed on it; I can *get* you experience and skills, but I can't get you talent -- let alone the basic ability to "fit in" at my company.
You cannot *make* us watch your commercials, and the harder you try, the more we will hate you.
Let's take the recent commercial for Lime Coke. They have this neat little play on Harry Nilsson's classic song "Coconut", which is amusing already, and they made a cute little vignette out of it. But once I've seen it four or five times, I'm done. I never need to see it again. If I was going to try Lime Coke, and I was, I would already have tried it -- which I did -- and decided whether I wanted to continue buying it, which I do. The sale is over. Any *further* commercials they show me for Lime Coke are a complete waste of time. And that's a commercial that SUCCEEDS.
So when you start worrying about whether I'm going to skip your commercials and you won't get your money's worth, you need a reality check. I don't watch your commercials ANYWAY. When your commercials come on, I will either watch them -- the first couple of times -- or else I will converse with my wife, go to the bathroom, check my email, or grab a snack from the kitchen.
I am not going to sit and watch your commercials no matter WHAT you do. The most you can do is force me to wait for what I actually *want* to be doing, during which time I will be annoyed and impatient and looking at your product's name. How do you think I'm going to feel when I see your product in a store? Why, I'll feel annoyed and impatient, of course. And that *doesn't* translate to increased sales.
(IANAL, but I spent a few years writing software for a legal company.)
Found in the Microsoft testimony:
"One of the better comments I think that was submitted to you was from somebody who does a lot of employment class action litigation. And she expressed that very concern. She also cited a few statutes, like Title 7 and maybe the Wage and Hours Act in the employment area, that very specifically tell companies what they must keep and what they must not.
And I bet those statutes also provide penalties if they are not kept. And I'm pretty sure that they provide -- is it ten to twenty years in prison for the intentional destruction of documents? I mean, I think it would be insanity beyond belief for anybody, any serious lawyer, to advise their client that, oh, yeah, this is a way to get rid of something that might come back to bite us. Because the moment you have that thought, you're engaging in basically criminal conduct.
So the routine operations of systems has to strictly be for the business purposes of keeping your IT systems running."
Where this differs from the "safe harbor" provision (IMO) is that some companies *routinely* engage in the intentional destruction of electronic documents. Last week I had some confidential records for a client, and when I was done with them, I deleted my copy as a routine IT practice: don't store confidential data any longer than necessary. My client has the data, so I don't need to retain it; even if I need it again later, the risk of someone walking away with my laptop *far* outweighs the convenience factor of holding onto the file. When documents are deleted for security reasons, this amounts to intentional deletion for the express purpose of denying access, and *might* be viewed rather harshly under the safe harbor guidelines.
> what RTS games are you playing?
After Warcraft, Starcraft, and the Command and Conquer series... I pretty much gave up on RTS games. I was impressed as hell by Sacrifice, which never got the attention and praise it deserved, but I don't know if anyone else would call that an RTS.
I have a design document for a new RTS game, but no team to build it just yet.
ESPECIALLY if it's illegal to do so.
After all, that jacks up the price.
I've always thought a simple legal requirement to place "adult" material on a .xxx domain would make a huge difference in the ability to content filter. Then we could shut down all sorts of people who tried to skirt around it.
.ro is "read only". I don't get it either. ;)
And I think
> similar to disallowing
.us domain owners can't have a private domain. If you want a private domain, you can't have a .us domain.
.us domains". We live in a reasonably free market economy. If there is a market for the kind of privacy you want, someone will sell it to you.
> unlisted phone numbers.
Businesses already can't have unlisted phone numbers. If you want an unlisted phone number, you can't have a business at that phone number.
Now
I don't see the problem.
> user@mydomain.com becomes
> your phone number
And mydomain.com can be private. However, mydomain.us cannot. So don't put your phones on mydomain.us, and the problem goes away.
Please don't hand me a slippery slope argument about "first they came for the
> what if your political views put
> your life in danger?
Maybe that's natural selection at work.
Nexus actually sounds like a cool game. It's missing the one thing that pisses me off about most RTS games: breakneck speed in combat.
Computers do one thing very well that most human beings can't -- they track buttloads of stuff and never forget any of it. Even with grouping, I always seem to end up having trouble when I want to order my troops around in RTS games. A slower-paced battle would suit me just fine.
Not to slam the reviewer or anything, but it sounds like maybe he's just not really in the game's target audience.
> Can DNA be spoofed?
Gattaca dealt with this a little. The unenhanced human passed as enhanced by concealing a small pouch in his hand with a blood sample.
I like the idea of using skin cells. You insert your hand into a reader, and a small collector scrapes a few cells from three different random locations. Unless you wear a fake skin glove, this will almost certainly collect *your* skin. The question is, how quickly can we determine whether this skin came from a known criminal?
You're right. I tend to get the ninth and tenth amendments muddled up in my head, where the ninth admits the existence of other rights and powers for states while the tenth admits the existence of other rights and powers for individuals; it's actually divided on the other axis -- the ninth admits the existence of further rights, while the tenth admits the existence of further powers.
Sorry about that.
> I've seen what happens when
> you let monkeys run any server
Yes, they apfrangle the overscan. So don't do it unless you're *positive* you have solved the problem. I mentioned this already.
> Competent admins cost
And an apfrangled overscan can only be detected, prevented, or resolved by a competent admin.
Translation: inexperienced admins always create situations that only an experienced admin can resolve. They need experienced supervision and guidance, both to prevent these situations when possible, and to clean them up when not. So you need to have enough experienced and competent IT professionals to supervise and guide all your interns and monkeys.
That's where people go wrong. Hiring a *few* stupid people dirt-cheap will free up your experienced admins to work on things only they can do. Hiring a LOT of stupid people dirt-cheap just wastes all your experienced admins on managing interns and monkeys instead of running the network. Replacing your experienced people with interns and monkeys... well, apfrangles the overscan.
This is precisely why I recommend WILO: Windows Inside, Linux Outside (of the firewall). Microsoft is far too slow patching security problems to expose their servers to the public internet, but since their servers are very convenient to administer and deploy within the organisation, you can reduce your IT needs drastically by using them behind the firewall.
Spending $1000 per server per year is rather less of an expense than hiring competent Linux admins throughout the organisation. I can train an intern to run a Windows server. (Hell, I could probably train a *monkey* to run a Windows server.) All I need is one or two Linux guys running our internet presence, and that can be outsourced.
Disclaimer: Please do not run off and staff your entire IT department with interns and monkeys unless you're POSITIVE you won't apfrangle the overscan.
I'm not sure, either, but it *can* be productively argued. At the very least, it will produce an argument. ;)
.US domain records -- I just think it should be unavailable to automated processes without some sort of delay to impede large-scale harvesting.
I've been of the opinion for some years that privacy is an illusion; if people want to know something about you, they will find out. This has given me a somewhat detached view of the whole online privacy thing. I tend to believe that making things hard for automated processes is good enough, so I have no problem with a lack of anonymity on
First off, the university in question *here* was compromised by a student that had external and unrelated access to her professors' personal information.
Second, the UCB article linked as additional evidence of carelessness discusses a laptop theft which took place in a restricted area of campus where the theft was actually witnessed.
This is careless? Why in the world would you blame the universities for these situations? It's not like either of these incidents involved someone breaking into the network from off-campus and downloading records or changing grades.
> an interpretation of the Fourth Amendment
Holy crap, someone ELSE on the planet knows this. I keep having to explain this over and over to people who claim there's no right to privacy in the Constitution except under the catch-all clause of the tenth amendment. You have just restored some small amount of my faith in humanity.
What concerns me is that people feel that knowing who owns a given domain name is an unreasonable search. When you operate a public presence like a domain name, you *normally* have to identify yourself. Nobody is allowed to operate a broadcast station or publishing operation without providing a certain amount of identification to the public, and it can be productively argued that a web site is both.
I think sometimes we get a little carried away with our demands for rights, and forget that while we are guaranteed the right to freedom of speech, we are NOT guaranteed the right to own a mass-media outlet for broadcast and dissemination of that speech. The bar has gotten a lot lower, but there's still a bar.
> Eddie Izzard as the Doctor could be
> the best thing to happen to television
> ever.
A cross-dressing Time Lord with fake breasts?!
Actually, that *would* be pretty funny. Besides, Izzard did an excellent job in "Shadow of the Vampire", where there was no cross-dressing at all. Although "Velvet Goldmine" was sort of... questionable.
I personally liked this quote from the article:
"If you steal, you are wrong. You should have to deal with the consequences. We have plenty of laws on the book to make sure that happens."
That's smart. It underscores what a lot of people forget... that piracy via P2P networks doesn't really need to be specifically outlawed, because it's already illegal.
> you're missing one small point
You're missing a big one.
My purpose is not to say that NT kernel source is *bad*, but that NT kernel source is not what people actually need.
I'm not sure why you keep trying to convince me NT is such a great architecture; I'm only saying it's different enough that the people who think they need it are probably wrong. So far, it seems like you'd agree with this. So what's the sitch?
I've built three enterprise-class web systems on MySQL and I'm in the middle of building a fourth.
In the early days, it was hard to work around the lack of stored procedures, triggers, and views... I was coming from an Informix background with some Oracle experience... but nobody I worked for wanted to license one of those for web stuff at the time. And now that MySQL is about to add the stuff I used to wish for, I actually don't really need it -- I've long ago gotten over the lack of these features.
So I'm primarily going to use the 5.0 release as an excuse to demand a week or two of feature-freeze for hack cleanup, under the guise of migration testing.
> I just don't like games that
> emulates such evil behavior
[...]
> The most violent game I'd play
> is something like Final Fantasy
So you have a problem with criminals killing criminals, but you don't see anything wrong with wandering around the countryside slaughtering innocent animals for gold and experience?
How much of that is because FF games don't look like Real Life? Would GTA be acceptable with cartoon characters instead of realistic people?
You know, I have a theory about why people dislike GTA. The first thing you do in a new situation is test your boundaries; once you know where they are, you can settle down and think about where in that space you want to be. But GTA doesn't have a lot of boundaries, so people go to where they think a boundary ought to be, and when it isn't there they get uncomfortable. After milling about in that area for a while, they realise they're outside the boundary they felt should be there, and they blame the game for not having it.
So what's your reasoning? Do you have any particular reason for not liking the game, or is it just "cool" in your circles to dislike GTA?
> You're making the assumption
> that all FOSS is completely
> undocumented and uncommented
No, I'm making the *observation* that *most* FOSS is *effectively* undocumented and *largely* uncommented, which is somewhat different.
Note that I'm specifically talking about CODE documentation; most FOSS has reasonable documentation on how to use it (for sufficiently limited values of "reasonable"), but little to no documentation on how to understand its source implementation.
> How do you know that?
Well, I waved a dead chicken over the map of Brazil, and it said "B'KAWK, nobody in Brazil is going to learn C so they can check their source for privacy violations". How dare you argue with the dead chicken? The dead chicken knows all.
Seriously, the number of people who will do this is statistically insignificant, so there may as well not be any.
> You sound like an MS apologist
That's Microsoft *Partner*, and don't you forget it.
> you just don't get Open Source.
Sure I do. In fact, I "get" that open source is purely about the redistribution freedom, because that's the only one you don't already have. You want the right to sell someone else's work for your own personal profit and not pay the original author anything.
Because, EULA or no EULA, you have a protected right to use and examine and modify the software you buy... as long as you don't circumvent its revenue generation mechanisms. And if you're fixing bugs or improving the software, you don't need to do that. You're even allowed to redistribute your modifications with instructions on how to apply them, again as long as you don't circumvent revenue generation mechanisms.
So the only thing you get from open source is a way to sell something that isn't yours. While I agree that this is a nice thing to have when people want to give it to you, I find it extremely rude to complain when people don't want you to have it.
I'm already skating mighty close to the edge of the topic, so I won't go into how open source development actively encourages bad software... but it does. This will become more evident as time goes on.
> I have yet to find anyone who
> actually sends money to the
> artist they claim want to
> support.
However, in this case at least, you have found someone who does not use P2P networks on principle. I don't *like* my CD purchases going primarily to support someone other than the artist, but it's the only legitimate option available. So while I would be *happier* buying Manson's CDs directly through him, I continue to buy them through the usual channels, and every MP3 in my collection was ripped from a CD I actually own -- unless I downloaded from a legitimate source (usually an independent artist who doesn't release CDs).
While piracy is indeed people wanting to get stuff for free, the RIAA is people wanting to sell a 20 cent piece of plastic for $15 and then give the artist *squat* because the label still hasn't recouped the cost of the multi-million dollar marketing campaign the artist neither requested nor wanted. I think that's worse.
On top of that, when the RIAA sees all the P2P downloaders who aren't paying the $15, they don't say "those people have our money". They turn to the artists and say "those people have YOUR money". Then they dock the artists' pay. So the artists get mad. They SHOULD be mad at an industry that treats them like crap, but instead they lash out at the people who support them.
Thus the abused become the abusers. It's not like we, the music-listening public, aren't being abused enough by the labels that charge us out the ass for everything... we must now be abused by the artists we want to support, because we did the only thing we could think of to stop the abuse.
I am not by any stretch of the imagination trying to justify piracy, but these artists need to get the hell away from the RIAA. We need to develop an artist-owned, artist-operated organisation that can actually treat musicians like human beings.
I am more than happy to pay $15 for the next Marilyn Manson CD, if *he's* going to get the money -- because he'll use it to do something cool. I just have a problem with giving another $15 to the RIAA, who will spend most of it on their own self-involved crap. I want to support the ARTIST and his ART. Not the marketing and production machine that helped him make it shiny, aluminum, plastic, and digital.