Actually, shouldn't it be something like "Flash RAM"? A drive refers to a moving part, while the storage is, well, random access memory. I know it would confuse the hell out of the poor bastards who buy computers at Wal-Mart (PIII with 50 GB of RAM!!! Only 99.99!!!), but it seems to me that that would be the most accurate name...
It depends - what are you looking to find out when you get the answer? A better understanding of heat waves? Of local climate patterns? Of global climate patterns? Of crop growth? Of migration patterns? Of chaos theory? Of ice shelf tectonics? Of human habitat impact? Of randomness? Asking a question without knowing what you intend to learn is worse than no question - it's mindless wandering.
So I'd like to ask you: what topic did you have in mind?
A bad metaphor is still a bad metaphor. Service != product != idea. Different rules. Acceptable laws for one are not for another. I understand what you mean, it just doesn't mean anything to the current discussion.
Furthermore, you overestimate the control courts of law have over what actually happens. To get to a court of law, you have to pay the entry fee. No money, no play.
You also completely fail to understand that I know what a license is, and that the problem lies within the concept of license applied to all interactions with abstract works. Furthermore, you contradict both yourself and current facts when you state that copyright holders may not disallow the resale of copies. If books are merely sold under a license deal, then the copyright owner can make that license say whatever they want. Furthermore, based on how abstract works are sold these days, the mere exchange of money seems to imply acceptance of whatever license term the copyright holder has in mind, without the copyright owner actually having to disclose those terms. When was the last time you signed a license when you bought a book? A second hand book? Never, and that's the point.
Here's the long story short: I'm not interested in discussing the present situation - I know what it is, and it is as useful as discussing the weather. Here's what's interesting to me: how do we best develop the cultural richness we have, and is the current setup the way to do it? Treating abstract works as having inherent licenses, and therefore inherent arbitrary rules, leads to stagnation - at least from what I've seen.
And it's comments like this that make me believe in the concept of the shill who is paid by his corporate taskmasters to spout whatever idiotic, wrong, counterproductive and unhelpful idea they want to disseminate.
I don't license a book - I buy it. I don't license a DVD - I buy it. Yes, the concept of owning works of art may be foreign to you, but that's exactly what's happening, and I refuse your attempt to rewrite history for your employers' benefits. The concept of first sale extends to works of art, and has been affirmed multiple times by various courts.
Furthermore, you - and your employer - fail to understand the consequences of this approach. Art is not created in a vacuum. Everyone is inspired by everything, and uses everything around them. Lord of the rings ripped off the various creation myths. Harry Potter is little more than teen books with magic and shapeshifters (lots of them). Your concept of buying something merely implying a transfer of license implies that none of it can be reused - which suits only the publisher, not the actual author, or the public at large.
Quite frankly, I find your attempts at reworking public opinion pathetic - not to mention that you managed to confuse a service (being transported from point A to point B) with a good (a book).
Wrong. Regenerative braking, though not a big source of energy, is an energy source. And it is not available in a regular gas-engine car.
Why do people always have to spew flat-out falsehoods to make themselves feel better that they're not driving a hybrid? Accept you're polluting more than someone who does drive one, and move on. No need to be an idiot about it too.
I understand the part about the waterproof thing... though I have to say that so far, I haven't had any problems with showers or similar wetness. I doubt though that I'll take it scuba diving after having my battery replaced at the local watch shop.:)
As said, it's not just the water proof thing - there are a host of reasons why I like to have a watch on my wrist. I'd like to see anyone time their swim or their noodles with a pda.
I never understand why people supplant watches with phones or pdas. My watch needs to have its battery changed once every two years, and is water proof to 100m. Meaning I put it on, and for the next two years, I don't have to worry about it. I don't lose it, I don't forget it, it doesn't run out of juice and is always accurate. It's got a stopwatch to boot, so I can use it to time cooking, running, swimming and sundry other things. Lastly, it's easy access. I flick my wrist, and know the time. There's no digging, no flipping, no unlocking, no nothing.
As said, I have no idea why people think that a phone is a good timepiece. And that's coming from someone who is eternally late.:)
I've read all of them, they just aren't very coherent.
To clarify then: you deem the question of free will pointless because a) society won't function without it, b) it is impossible to even suspect that one does not have free will, and c) it's a completely abstract concept not tractable with the scientific method. Is this about right?
It seems to me more that you gave up on the question after you couldn't find a decisive proof for or against it. The problem is, free will is at the root of a lot of our social conventions. Throw free will out, throw out all kinds of other things like punishment and reward. You're right in a strictly abstract sense - it is very unlikely that we can prove the existence or absence of free will, just like we will probably not do it for God. However, the more important question is: would you rather live in a world with or without free will? What does it mean to you? How would you build your life?
I have the suspicion you simply ignored that aspect and starting pushing forward "just because".... Which can lead to all kinds of uglyness at specific points in life.
Holy crap, batman - someone completely missed the point of a boycott. Note: you boycott a company if you decide that you are not going to buy their products regardless of their intrinsic merit. So yes, you boycott a company even if they release the best rear-projection TV ever, or if it comes with the kitchen sink and does your laundry, too. Finally - can I point out that you just placed watching TV on a nice TV set above having principles and following through with them?
Personally, I see the exchange happening a little differently...
Muckety Muck: Last quarter your unit had profits of $1.5mil. But this quarter you have a loss of $.5mil. Care to explain? Weasely Sony Music Exec: Pirates! Yes, Pirates! With swords and parrots! Our DRM just wasn't strong enough to hold them off. But if you give us another 2 million dollars, we have this surefire thing that is guaranteed to work! Muckety Muck: You sound full of confidence, so you must be right. Here's another 2 million dollars. \Weasely Sony Music Exec already working on how to use that money to gild his Gulfstream
I see very little scrambling that will be done by Execs. At most I see some fingerslapping for the poor guy who implemented it.
Let me give you a real example of how ads can be actually dangerous: in the Bay Area, there's a huge LCD billboard near one of the freeways. It's so large and bright, that driving past it at night actually caused short-term blindness. It's been a while since I last drove that way, but it used to be that when I saw the bluish glow come up over the horizon, I knew that I would have to keep my eyes on the other side of the road in order to still be able to see in the dark. The reason for that was the first couple of times I drove by, my eyes naturally wandered over to the bright spot on the side, had to adjust to the unnatural brightness, and then took a little while to return back to night-time sensitivity.
I expect there to be more than a few ads that will have a similar effect in games.
Other people already pointed this out, but I'd like to emphasize this: if I see ads in my game, they a) better blend into the environment b) significantly reduce the cost of the game
If I would have seen Subway or Pepsi ads in Skies of Arcadia similarly to how they were implemented in CS, I can guarantee you that I would have tossed it out very quickly. Those ads would have completely destroyed what is a very-well crafted and coherent universe.
Furthermore, I would not expect to pay full price for the game. Take the BK games for example: 3.99 for silly games, but competent games that are essentially one big-ass ad. I can live with that. I probably won't buy them because they're not my cup of tea, but at least I know what I would be getting myself into: a giant ad for Burger King. There is no surprise there.
However, I have the strong suspicion that the ads in CS are going to work very differently: most likely, they'll just be images of current billboard ads or newspaper inserts. Furthermore, since all Valve games need to phone home, they'll be part of a mandatory patch to an existing game. The end result of this is that I'll be looking at badly misplaced ads in a game for which I paid full-price initially, and which I bought with the understanding that there would be no ads in it.
oolo; Piss off, Valve. That's not the way to go about it. Sometimes I think that Marketing execs need to put into a torture chamber for some of their ideas. Just so that they get some decency conditioned back into them. "What's that, Fred? You think we ought to use cartoon characters in our cigarette ads? On with the thumb screws!" I think that'll solve 90% of the problems with advertising. Then again, it assumes decency being part of a CEO's moral makeup.
I wasn't referring to the fact that travel through the world took a long time. I was referring to the fact that nothing ever changed. Though I have to admit that the fast travel function could have been a little clearer... I was about to give up on the game before I figured out the fast travel button.
I suspect he played it on the X360, not on a PC. Personally, I stopped playing because I couldn't be arsed to trudge through a wide-open, yet completely unchanging world. Oh, and the entire leveling system pissed me off too much as well.
This is the funniest and most accurate description of the Sony effort I've seen so far. The only difference being that Sony put a little bit more planning into the hardware, and didn't just slap on a few more SPEs when they saw what MS had in mind.
Oh please - stop being condescending. In all your rambling about how you're being oppressed by others' wishes for peace and quiet, you're completely failing to see the 2 by 4 in your own eye. What your main complaint is that people aren't taking your crap lying down, and your whining amounts to little more than "No fair! You're taking the high ground!"
Let's start from the top. #1, Morality is not about interpersonal relationships. It is your code of conduct, which can range from something like "I shall not kill" to "I will honor the stars every night with a bonfire." Yes, at some point your morality will intersect and interact with others, but that's not the primary focus of morality. It's a secondary, though necessary effect. #2, you don't get to decide whose morality prevails, and certainly not with an argument as lame as "but I wanna!" #3, people have been arguing for a couple of thousand years about this problem, and one of the more popular approaches is that as long as no harm is done to someone else, you are free to exercise your own morality. Certainly, it put a stop to things like execution of protestants in France, witch hunts and general bigotry. Furthermore, harm is defined in direct terms. Merely exercising my beliefs in your presence does not count as harm.
Finally, be careful what you wish for. Resolving conflict by running to a higher or more powerful authority can easily backfire on you. You might think that that's a great solution, but that's just because you've never been part of a persecuted minority (and I'm talking persecution as in extermination, not merely evil looks).
Here's another thought: what if your copyright license expressly forbids this kind of downloading? Can you then sue whoever downloaded your home grown musical, fanfic or picture of your cat via that tool?
Then again, this entire counter-suing point is completely moot. Very few individuals have the money to slug it out in court with large media publishers, and not too many businesses can either.
You're assuming anyone is going to manually verify any of the results. From my experience with people using monitoring software (especially non-techies who are simply consumers of the technology, but who provided the money for it), the vast majority of them are simply going to call their lawyers when they see the dashboard light up. I see vast letter writing campaigns come from this, with little actual infringing being prosecuted.
This is a scary product. Not so much because of the technology behind it, but because of how it is going to be implemented and (ab)used.
Edge used to have a sister magazine in the US, which was called Next Generation. It was the only magazine to which I ever bought a subscription: quality news, interviews, articles and game reviews. It wasn't condescending, had no fanboy tones, and was just a great resource for all kinds of info on games and the industry. Then it went downhill, and the relationship must have been severed a couple of years ago.
So yes, Edge/Next Generation was present in the US as well, and it was THE Game Magazine. The fact that you don't know about them makes me ponder how much you've sampled the gaming literature - or whether you've had a chance to sample it very much.
Thanks for pointing this out. I had the same exact thought a couple of days ago. This is the real danger in the Middle East right now: the posturing of Iran and Israel to get the US involved in the Middle East - each in their own way and for their own goals.
You're right. In Iran, people aren't herded into free speech zones. Instead, they are beaten to a pulp. This is just one case. There are several more. I invite you to just dig through the results of "iran student protests", or to find out what happened to prominent politicians who got a little too close to the West.
Just because you don't want your kids exposed to something doesn't mean that they should't. People die in this world, and it is a traumatic experience. Do you think your kids should never see a death? People cheat, lie and cuss everywhere. Do you think your kids should never be exposed to a lie, a cheater or a cuss word?
Here's a little hint: if something's so pervasive that it is not possible for you to shield your kids from it without getting the government to ban it, it's probably something they should get used to sooner rather than later. Note that this is not an endorsement for anything that's happening - it's merely an endorsement for the idea that if something happens on a regular basis, kids should learn about it sooner rather than later. Because they will find out about it - and don't you want to be around to guide them when they see death, lies, cheats, famine, disease, abuse, and all the other horrors of life?
So yes, the fact that you want a little help from the government in protecting your kids from being exposed to things *you* (and I can't stress the *YOU* enough) is indeed *you* failing to do your job. So stop trying to impose your morality on me, just because you're too lazy to raise your own kids.
Another one (and I'm surprised no one brought this up - maybe no one from Google reads Slashdot): Google. From what I understand, everyone there who has a technical duty gets a Linux desktop and an Apple laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, shouldn't it be something like "Flash RAM"? A drive refers to a moving part, while the storage is, well, random access memory. I know it would confuse the hell out of the poor bastards who buy computers at Wal-Mart (PIII with 50 GB of RAM!!! Only 99.99!!!), but it seems to me that that would be the most accurate name...
Got a source for that? Or are you just making shit up?
It depends - what are you looking to find out when you get the answer? A better understanding of heat waves? Of local climate patterns? Of global climate patterns? Of crop growth? Of migration patterns? Of chaos theory? Of ice shelf tectonics? Of human habitat impact? Of randomness? Asking a question without knowing what you intend to learn is worse than no question - it's mindless wandering.
So I'd like to ask you: what topic did you have in mind?
A bad metaphor is still a bad metaphor. Service != product != idea. Different rules. Acceptable laws for one are not for another. I understand what you mean, it just doesn't mean anything to the current discussion. Furthermore, you overestimate the control courts of law have over what actually happens. To get to a court of law, you have to pay the entry fee. No money, no play. You also completely fail to understand that I know what a license is, and that the problem lies within the concept of license applied to all interactions with abstract works. Furthermore, you contradict both yourself and current facts when you state that copyright holders may not disallow the resale of copies. If books are merely sold under a license deal, then the copyright owner can make that license say whatever they want. Furthermore, based on how abstract works are sold these days, the mere exchange of money seems to imply acceptance of whatever license term the copyright holder has in mind, without the copyright owner actually having to disclose those terms. When was the last time you signed a license when you bought a book? A second hand book? Never, and that's the point. Here's the long story short: I'm not interested in discussing the present situation - I know what it is, and it is as useful as discussing the weather. Here's what's interesting to me: how do we best develop the cultural richness we have, and is the current setup the way to do it? Treating abstract works as having inherent licenses, and therefore inherent arbitrary rules, leads to stagnation - at least from what I've seen.
And it's comments like this that make me believe in the concept of the shill who is paid by his corporate taskmasters to spout whatever idiotic, wrong, counterproductive and unhelpful idea they want to disseminate.
I don't license a book - I buy it. I don't license a DVD - I buy it. Yes, the concept of owning works of art may be foreign to you, but that's exactly what's happening, and I refuse your attempt to rewrite history for your employers' benefits. The concept of first sale extends to works of art, and has been affirmed multiple times by various courts.
Furthermore, you - and your employer - fail to understand the consequences of this approach. Art is not created in a vacuum. Everyone is inspired by everything, and uses everything around them. Lord of the rings ripped off the various creation myths. Harry Potter is little more than teen books with magic and shapeshifters (lots of them). Your concept of buying something merely implying a transfer of license implies that none of it can be reused - which suits only the publisher, not the actual author, or the public at large.
Quite frankly, I find your attempts at reworking public opinion pathetic - not to mention that you managed to confuse a service (being transported from point A to point B) with a good (a book).
Wrong. Regenerative braking, though not a big source of energy, is an energy source. And it is not available in a regular gas-engine car.
Why do people always have to spew flat-out falsehoods to make themselves feel better that they're not driving a hybrid? Accept you're polluting more than someone who does drive one, and move on. No need to be an idiot about it too.
I understand the part about the waterproof thing... though I have to say that so far, I haven't had any problems with showers or similar wetness. I doubt though that I'll take it scuba diving after having my battery replaced at the local watch shop. :)
As said, it's not just the water proof thing - there are a host of reasons why I like to have a watch on my wrist. I'd like to see anyone time their swim or their noodles with a pda.
Nice story about the "Rolex."
I never understand why people supplant watches with phones or pdas. My watch needs to have its battery changed once every two years, and is water proof to 100m. Meaning I put it on, and for the next two years, I don't have to worry about it. I don't lose it, I don't forget it, it doesn't run out of juice and is always accurate. It's got a stopwatch to boot, so I can use it to time cooking, running, swimming and sundry other things. Lastly, it's easy access. I flick my wrist, and know the time. There's no digging, no flipping, no unlocking, no nothing.
:)
As said, I have no idea why people think that a phone is a good timepiece. And that's coming from someone who is eternally late.
I've read all of them, they just aren't very coherent.
To clarify then: you deem the question of free will pointless because a) society won't function without it, b) it is impossible to even suspect that one does not have free will, and c) it's a completely abstract concept not tractable with the scientific method. Is this about right?
It seems to me more that you gave up on the question after you couldn't find a decisive proof for or against it. The problem is, free will is at the root of a lot of our social conventions. Throw free will out, throw out all kinds of other things like punishment and reward. You're right in a strictly abstract sense - it is very unlikely that we can prove the existence or absence of free will, just like we will probably not do it for God. However, the more important question is: would you rather live in a world with or without free will? What does it mean to you? How would you build your life?
I have the suspicion you simply ignored that aspect and starting pushing forward "just because".... Which can lead to all kinds of uglyness at specific points in life.
Holy crap, batman - someone completely missed the point of a boycott. Note: you boycott a company if you decide that you are not going to buy their products regardless of their intrinsic merit. So yes, you boycott a company even if they release the best rear-projection TV ever, or if it comes with the kitchen sink and does your laundry, too. Finally - can I point out that you just placed watching TV on a nice TV set above having principles and following through with them?
Wow.
Personally, I see the exchange happening a little differently...
Muckety Muck: Last quarter your unit had profits of $1.5mil. But this quarter you have a loss of $.5mil. Care to explain?
Weasely Sony Music Exec: Pirates! Yes, Pirates! With swords and parrots! Our DRM just wasn't strong enough to hold them off. But if you give us another 2 million dollars, we have this surefire thing that is guaranteed to work!
Muckety Muck: You sound full of confidence, so you must be right. Here's another 2 million dollars.
\Weasely Sony Music Exec already working on how to use that money to gild his Gulfstream
I see very little scrambling that will be done by Execs. At most I see some fingerslapping for the poor guy who implemented it.
Let me give you a real example of how ads can be actually dangerous: in the Bay Area, there's a huge LCD billboard near one of the freeways. It's so large and bright, that driving past it at night actually caused short-term blindness. It's been a while since I last drove that way, but it used to be that when I saw the bluish glow come up over the horizon, I knew that I would have to keep my eyes on the other side of the road in order to still be able to see in the dark. The reason for that was the first couple of times I drove by, my eyes naturally wandered over to the bright spot on the side, had to adjust to the unnatural brightness, and then took a little while to return back to night-time sensitivity.
I expect there to be more than a few ads that will have a similar effect in games.
Other people already pointed this out, but I'd like to emphasize this: if I see ads in my game, they a) better blend into the environment
b) significantly reduce the cost of the game
If I would have seen Subway or Pepsi ads in Skies of Arcadia similarly to how they were implemented in CS, I can guarantee you that I would have tossed it out very quickly. Those ads would have completely destroyed what is a very-well crafted and coherent universe.
Furthermore, I would not expect to pay full price for the game. Take the BK games for example: 3.99 for silly games, but competent games that are essentially one big-ass ad. I can live with that. I probably won't buy them because they're not my cup of tea, but at least I know what I would be getting myself into: a giant ad for Burger King. There is no surprise there.
However, I have the strong suspicion that the ads in CS are going to work very differently: most likely, they'll just be images of current billboard ads or newspaper inserts. Furthermore, since all Valve games need to phone home, they'll be part of a mandatory patch to an existing game. The end result of this is that I'll be looking at badly misplaced ads in a game for which I paid full-price initially, and which I bought with the understanding that there would be no ads in it.
oolo; Piss off, Valve. That's not the way to go about it. Sometimes I think that Marketing execs need to put into a torture chamber for some of their ideas. Just so that they get some decency conditioned back into them. "What's that, Fred? You think we ought to use cartoon characters in our cigarette ads? On with the thumb screws!" I think that'll solve 90% of the problems with advertising. Then again, it assumes decency being part of a CEO's moral makeup.
I wasn't referring to the fact that travel through the world took a long time. I was referring to the fact that nothing ever changed. Though I have to admit that the fast travel function could have been a little clearer... I was about to give up on the game before I figured out the fast travel button.
"no console commands"
I suspect he played it on the X360, not on a PC. Personally, I stopped playing because I couldn't be arsed to trudge through a wide-open, yet completely unchanging world. Oh, and the entire leveling system pissed me off too much as well.
This is the funniest and most accurate description of the Sony effort I've seen so far. The only difference being that Sony put a little bit more planning into the hardware, and didn't just slap on a few more SPEs when they saw what MS had in mind.
Oh please - stop being condescending. In all your rambling about how you're being oppressed by others' wishes for peace and quiet, you're completely failing to see the 2 by 4 in your own eye. What your main complaint is that people aren't taking your crap lying down, and your whining amounts to little more than "No fair! You're taking the high ground!"
Let's start from the top. #1, Morality is not about interpersonal relationships. It is your code of conduct, which can range from something like "I shall not kill" to "I will honor the stars every night with a bonfire." Yes, at some point your morality will intersect and interact with others, but that's not the primary focus of morality. It's a secondary, though necessary effect. #2, you don't get to decide whose morality prevails, and certainly not with an argument as lame as "but I wanna!" #3, people have been arguing for a couple of thousand years about this problem, and one of the more popular approaches is that as long as no harm is done to someone else, you are free to exercise your own morality. Certainly, it put a stop to things like execution of protestants in France, witch hunts and general bigotry. Furthermore, harm is defined in direct terms. Merely exercising my beliefs in your presence does not count as harm.
Finally, be careful what you wish for. Resolving conflict by running to a higher or more powerful authority can easily backfire on you. You might think that that's a great solution, but that's just because you've never been part of a persecuted minority (and I'm talking persecution as in extermination, not merely evil looks).
Here's another thought: what if your copyright license expressly forbids this kind of downloading? Can you then sue whoever downloaded your home grown musical, fanfic or picture of your cat via that tool?
Then again, this entire counter-suing point is completely moot. Very few individuals have the money to slug it out in court with large media publishers, and not too many businesses can either.
You're assuming anyone is going to manually verify any of the results. From my experience with people using monitoring software (especially non-techies who are simply consumers of the technology, but who provided the money for it), the vast majority of them are simply going to call their lawyers when they see the dashboard light up. I see vast letter writing campaigns come from this, with little actual infringing being prosecuted.
This is a scary product. Not so much because of the technology behind it, but because of how it is going to be implemented and (ab)used.
Edge used to have a sister magazine in the US, which was called Next Generation. It was the only magazine to which I ever bought a subscription: quality news, interviews, articles and game reviews. It wasn't condescending, had no fanboy tones, and was just a great resource for all kinds of info on games and the industry. Then it went downhill, and the relationship must have been severed a couple of years ago.
So yes, Edge/Next Generation was present in the US as well, and it was THE Game Magazine. The fact that you don't know about them makes me ponder how much you've sampled the gaming literature - or whether you've had a chance to sample it very much.
Thanks for pointing this out. I had the same exact thought a couple of days ago. This is the real danger in the Middle East right now: the posturing of Iran and Israel to get the US involved in the Middle East - each in their own way and for their own goals.
You're right. In Iran, people aren't herded into free speech zones. Instead, they are beaten to a pulp. This is just one case. There are several more. I invite you to just dig through the results of "iran student protests", or to find out what happened to prominent politicians who got a little too close to the West.
Just because you don't want your kids exposed to something doesn't mean that they should't. People die in this world, and it is a traumatic experience. Do you think your kids should never see a death? People cheat, lie and cuss everywhere. Do you think your kids should never be exposed to a lie, a cheater or a cuss word?
Here's a little hint: if something's so pervasive that it is not possible for you to shield your kids from it without getting the government to ban it, it's probably something they should get used to sooner rather than later. Note that this is not an endorsement for anything that's happening - it's merely an endorsement for the idea that if something happens on a regular basis, kids should learn about it sooner rather than later. Because they will find out about it - and don't you want to be around to guide them when they see death, lies, cheats, famine, disease, abuse, and all the other horrors of life?
So yes, the fact that you want a little help from the government in protecting your kids from being exposed to things *you* (and I can't stress the *YOU* enough) is indeed *you* failing to do your job. So stop trying to impose your morality on me, just because you're too lazy to raise your own kids.
Another one (and I'm surprised no one brought this up - maybe no one from Google reads Slashdot): Google. From what I understand, everyone there who has a technical duty gets a Linux desktop and an Apple laptop.