Marco Rubio was around long before the Tea Party started getting traction. Yes, he was known has a hard-line conservative, but I wouldn't call him a Tea Partier - someone who rose to prominence solely through association with the Tea Party. Same with Rand Paul (Daddy helped), Pat Toomey and Jim DeMint. The only one out of that list who can be considered a Tea Partier instead of a Republican is Ron Johnson. That doesn't really make for a landslide.
The Tea Party provided a useful bandwagon for the experienced politicians to jump on. I suspect that in 2012, those who were voted in on a platform of "vote out the incumbents!" might find the going a bit tougher.
And you clearly don't understand that the order in which definitions for a word appear has absolutely no bearing on what the word actually means in a given context. For someone who is calling others an idiot, you are remarkably retarded.
So did Christine O'Donell and Joe Miller. Fortunately, all the hardcore Tea Party activists seem to have been defeated. Yes, there were a lot of old-style republicans who hopped on the Tea Party bandwagon, but it seems to me that the ones that were truly on the fringe like Sarah Palin were defeated at the polls. Considering that this was an election year in which republicans and tea partiers will have had had their high point for many years to come, I'm not too worried.
Can Sarah Palin get about 30% of the vote in a nationwide election?Quite possible. Will she win the presidency? I'm betting my citizenship that she doesn't.
That being said - I think this is a very good and cool idea. It's convergence and the ousting of old tech that needs to go.
On the contrary - this is a VERY BAD Thing (TM). It's not convergence, it's fragmentation. You know why ESPN is on there? Because it's ESPN3 (formerly known as ESPN360) and because ESPN3 is available only via exclusive deals. Type in ESPN 3 on your computer - if you're lucky, it loads correctly. If you have the wrong ISP, there is no begging or pleading you can do with ESPN, you will not be able to access any of it outside a sign that says "ESPN3 is available through the following ISPs: [...]"
Content providers and integrated ISPs like Comcast love this approach, because they can charge a la carte for websites, just like TV now. And the people who have signed on with the new service sound like the usual suspects who love to ream the customers with special deals. If anything, this is a harbinger of things to come, like a plague of locusts or raining frogs.
I like my Xbox for what it is allowing me to do with gaming. I can also see though that the future of the XBox is a horrible experience that will make 1990's internet look like Nirvana.
Who says he's reaping them? The author's widow is, no?
Quite possibly. But from what I've seen personally from this kind of behavior, it's because they're hoping to increase their inheritance.
This mostly means that he's maybe thought about copyright more than average.
Maybe. Or maybe he doesn't understand what his works owe to his predecessors.
And as a matter of fact, the works in question are not public domain yet; that's the point of the Gutenberg response that was cited.
Completely true. And completely irrelevant to my point that talking about the exploitation of orphan works betrays an ignorance of the entire creative process: if Homer had incorporated and the corporation owned the rights to Homer's works, no author today would be able to make a living, because they'd all be ripping off in one way or another from Homer.
Greg Bear benefits from the existence of orphan works in a way that he clearly doesn't understand.
It might be a tempest in a teacup from a legal sense, but the entitlement is nauseating. What did Mr Greg Bear contribute to the literary world that he may reap these royalty fees? He married the daughter of the author. And apparently, that means he feels that he can opine the following line: "They are not merely exploiting orphan works, but practicing a wholesale kidnapping of works that are under copyright protection." Exploiting orphan works? Excuse me? They are preserving works that have been returned to the public domain, from where they came in the first place.
It's attitudes like these that make me feel completely non-plussed to read a dead author's works without paying anybody.
In particular, the more CPU power you have the better you can make in-game AI... except, oh, consoles have crappy CPUs so we can't make a game with AI that takes advantage of the vastly superior performance of the PC because it has to run on five-year-old cut-price hardware.
Is that why the AI in Starcraft 2 is as craptacular as the one in Starcraft 1? Or because it's hard, and no one cares?
Shouldn't there be comparisons to Nazi book burnings or something? I know we would have seen that comparison made three years ago. I wonder what has changed since then.
Ah, the wonders of selection bias. Not to mention the standard confusion of Slashdot with a hive mind.
I'd like you to point out in my post the place where I argued that graphics do not matter. To save you the hunt: I didn't. What I called bullshit on is Yerli's claim that innovation - specifically, creative innovation - requires a high-end PC, therefore cannot be done on current consoles, and therefore technology is limiting the creativity of the industry at large.
Case in point: I actually disagree with you regarding CoD and Wolfenstein. Let's take Halo and Doom though, because I actually played Halo a lot more than CoD, and because I think that Doom brought the modern shooter along, not Wolfenstein. The AI is still dumb as rocks, and only marginally better than what was in Doom (woo, enemies run from you!). The levels are actual 3D instead of 2D, which makes for more interesting ambush situations. However, a lot of Halo maps do not take advantage of that. This is a particularly evident in the single player campaign. The only sound I need is the sound of a rifle going off and that of footsteps behind me. Because of that, I play on just a shade above mute. Sound is pretty irrelevant in a shooter, and hasn't evolved much beyond being positional. Hit boxes are more accurate, but that barely matters in single-player, and only somewhat in multi-player. Other than that, I play Halo (both single- and multi-player) very much like Doom. You can argue that that is a problem with Halo, and you have a point there. But I didn't see anything in CoD or MAG that was significantly better. So yes - take away the AI, the 3D in level design, the sound, the graphics, and you end up with a game that is still functionally the same. Is the shiny game overall better? Hell yes. Is it more innovative? No.
As for Civ 4/5 vs Civ Rev, the big changes were driven by two things: a joypad is a lousy replacement for a keyboard/mouse combo, and console gamers are generally less likely to be of "just one more turn sort" than PC gamers. There are some (I am one of them), but definitely less than those who game on PCs. Civ 4's requirements fit comfortably into the XBox 360 specs.
A long post just to correct the misunderstanding that I say poop to all graphical advancement. I like shiny as much as the next guy - but I know full well that the innovation behind that is purely technical, not creative. Yerli is off his rocker if he thinks his game design is constrained by the power of consoles or PCs.
Yes, it is indeed pretty clear they're talking about graphics. It is also pretty clear that when they say "is holding back creative expression" and "holding back quality games", what they mean is that all their creative expression and quality work is going into making a game prettier. Which in turns means they have no idea how to make quality games.
That's what I'm calling bullshit on. The fact that creative expression is identical with fill-rates or polygons/sec. I'm sorry you were so gung-ho to call me on my snobbery that you missed that point.
I haven't seen anything innovative done on a PC that couldn't have been done on a PS2. Crysis 2 is innovative? Oh please. Two extra bullet-points on the back of a box do not make a game "innovative". Portal: innovative. Tower of Goo: innovative. Minecraft: innovative. What do they have in common? They could run on hardware that is 10 years old.
I think the Mr. Crytek fails to see past his own problems: that the shiny that his company specializes in does very little to make a game special.
And merely stating that you're not trolling doesn't make it so. My only cable option is Comcast, and I'm boycotting them due to their shoddy service. And DSL is actually throttled to 100kbits/sec due to excessive line noise. Where do I live? In the heart of silicon valley. And this is a pretty common situation.
I thought seizing private property through eminent domain to turn it over to a private developer was going to be overturned by the Supreme Court as well. Common sense has little to do with the law.
No, we're having the government step in to prevent people from misrepresenting who they are. Scalpers in this case pretended to be individuals buying the tickets, but instead they bought them wholesale with the intention of cornering the market for desirable seats. free market can only exist if both the seller and the buyer have perfect information about the product and the people involved. Scalpers in this case changed that.
Here's a fun fact: the border extends to about 100 miles inland of the actual border to a country or the ocean. This means the Customs can search over 50% of the US population with near impunity.
The Internet is an infrastructure. People have figured out a long time ago that infrastructure is not something where you want people to create competing markets. That merely results in huge inefficiencies as duplication and underutilization abounds.
Furthermore, the Internet is ALREADY an network of networks. Hence the "Inter" in Internet. No need to build multiple Internets,unless you have some specific reasons why you don't want to hook up to the rest of the world - in which case, you build an Intranet.
Remember folks - free markets are never really free, and more competition is not always the answer.
Clearly, things need to be spelled out for you. Security is a right-wing/republican issue, public works is a left-wing/democrat issue. Both lead to Nanny States. Not to mention that the reason the TSA is supported by Democrats as well as by Republicans is because the Democrats are actually conservative/right wing when measured against standard political metrics. Only Americans think they have a left wing.
Do you really think Senators and Representatives have any problem creating things like the Great American Firewall? Remember, these are the people who brought you TSA and the 1-quart freedom pouch.
It seems to me that there has to be a reasonable limit.
It's not only reasonable, it's necessary. Nobody creates art in a vacuum. Walt Disney ripped off previous artists, and the Disney corporation has made its fortune through retelling European folk stories. If copyright had existed in its current fashion, neither Walt Disney nor Disney, Inc would have been able to make any money, because all their stories would already have been copyrighted.
What Disney and other copyright holders are doing is the exact same thing as the landgrabs Europeans did during the Age of Exploration. Plant a flag in an area, call it their own, and screw the locals. Bonus points for claiming stuff that they haven't even seen yet. And the copyright claims will be as disastrous for the locals (regular citizenry) as the landgrabs were. That's why there needs to be a static limit that does not exceed the reasonable human life span.
Here's the issue: racial profiling doesn't work. Why? Because the terrorists will just send people through the checkpoints until they find someone who doesn't fit the profile. And then you can't stop them.
Racial profiling doesn't make sense. Get that through your skull.
Slashdot Mirror
Marco Rubio was around long before the Tea Party started getting traction. Yes, he was known has a hard-line conservative, but I wouldn't call him a Tea Partier - someone who rose to prominence solely through association with the Tea Party. Same with Rand Paul (Daddy helped), Pat Toomey and Jim DeMint. The only one out of that list who can be considered a Tea Partier instead of a Republican is Ron Johnson. That doesn't really make for a landslide.
The Tea Party provided a useful bandwagon for the experienced politicians to jump on. I suspect that in 2012, those who were voted in on a platform of "vote out the incumbents!" might find the going a bit tougher.
And you clearly don't understand that the order in which definitions for a word appear has absolutely no bearing on what the word actually means in a given context. For someone who is calling others an idiot, you are remarkably retarded.
Well, to her credit, she has a lot of followers.
So did Christine O'Donell and Joe Miller. Fortunately, all the hardcore Tea Party activists seem to have been defeated. Yes, there were a lot of old-style republicans who hopped on the Tea Party bandwagon, but it seems to me that the ones that were truly on the fringe like Sarah Palin were defeated at the polls. Considering that this was an election year in which republicans and tea partiers will have had had their high point for many years to come, I'm not too worried.
Can Sarah Palin get about 30% of the vote in a nationwide election?Quite possible. Will she win the presidency? I'm betting my citizenship that she doesn't.
Mr Bear's Bibliography [wikipedia.org].
What in his bibliography entitles him to earn royalties from someone else's bibliography?
Non-plussed - A state of perplexity, confusion, or bewilderment.
2) (of a person) Unperturbed.
Can't read, can you?
That being said - I think this is a very good and cool idea. It's convergence and the ousting of old tech that needs to go.
On the contrary - this is a VERY BAD Thing (TM). It's not convergence, it's fragmentation. You know why ESPN is on there? Because it's ESPN3 (formerly known as ESPN360) and because ESPN3 is available only via exclusive deals. Type in ESPN 3 on your computer - if you're lucky, it loads correctly. If you have the wrong ISP, there is no begging or pleading you can do with ESPN, you will not be able to access any of it outside a sign that says "ESPN3 is available through the following ISPs: [...]"
Content providers and integrated ISPs like Comcast love this approach, because they can charge a la carte for websites, just like TV now. And the people who have signed on with the new service sound like the usual suspects who love to ream the customers with special deals. If anything, this is a harbinger of things to come, like a plague of locusts or raining frogs.
I like my Xbox for what it is allowing me to do with gaming. I can also see though that the future of the XBox is a horrible experience that will make 1990's internet look like Nirvana.
Who says he's reaping them? The author's widow is, no?
Quite possibly. But from what I've seen personally from this kind of behavior, it's because they're hoping to increase their inheritance.
This mostly means that he's maybe thought about copyright more than average.
Maybe. Or maybe he doesn't understand what his works owe to his predecessors.
And as a matter of fact, the works in question are not public domain yet; that's the point of the Gutenberg response that was cited.
Completely true. And completely irrelevant to my point that talking about the exploitation of orphan works betrays an ignorance of the entire creative process: if Homer had incorporated and the corporation owned the rights to Homer's works, no author today would be able to make a living, because they'd all be ripping off in one way or another from Homer.
Greg Bear benefits from the existence of orphan works in a way that he clearly doesn't understand.
It might be a tempest in a teacup from a legal sense, but the entitlement is nauseating. What did Mr Greg Bear contribute to the literary world that he may reap these royalty fees? He married the daughter of the author. And apparently, that means he feels that he can opine the following line: "They are not merely exploiting orphan works, but practicing a wholesale kidnapping of works that are under copyright protection." Exploiting orphan works? Excuse me? They are preserving works that have been returned to the public domain, from where they came in the first place.
It's attitudes like these that make me feel completely non-plussed to read a dead author's works without paying anybody.
In particular, the more CPU power you have the better you can make in-game AI... except, oh, consoles have crappy CPUs so we can't make a game with AI that takes advantage of the vastly superior performance of the PC because it has to run on five-year-old cut-price hardware.
Is that why the AI in Starcraft 2 is as craptacular as the one in Starcraft 1? Or because it's hard, and no one cares?
Department of Homeland Terrorism? How apt.
Shouldn't there be comparisons to Nazi book burnings or something? I know we would have seen that comparison made three years ago. I wonder what has changed since then.
Ah, the wonders of selection bias. Not to mention the standard confusion of Slashdot with a hive mind.
I'd like you to point out in my post the place where I argued that graphics do not matter. To save you the hunt: I didn't. What I called bullshit on is Yerli's claim that innovation - specifically, creative innovation - requires a high-end PC, therefore cannot be done on current consoles, and therefore technology is limiting the creativity of the industry at large.
Case in point: I actually disagree with you regarding CoD and Wolfenstein. Let's take Halo and Doom though, because I actually played Halo a lot more than CoD, and because I think that Doom brought the modern shooter along, not Wolfenstein. The AI is still dumb as rocks, and only marginally better than what was in Doom (woo, enemies run from you!). The levels are actual 3D instead of 2D, which makes for more interesting ambush situations. However, a lot of Halo maps do not take advantage of that. This is a particularly evident in the single player campaign. The only sound I need is the sound of a rifle going off and that of footsteps behind me. Because of that, I play on just a shade above mute. Sound is pretty irrelevant in a shooter, and hasn't evolved much beyond being positional. Hit boxes are more accurate, but that barely matters in single-player, and only somewhat in multi-player. Other than that, I play Halo (both single- and multi-player) very much like Doom. You can argue that that is a problem with Halo, and you have a point there. But I didn't see anything in CoD or MAG that was significantly better. So yes - take away the AI, the 3D in level design, the sound, the graphics, and you end up with a game that is still functionally the same. Is the shiny game overall better? Hell yes. Is it more innovative? No.
As for Civ 4/5 vs Civ Rev, the big changes were driven by two things: a joypad is a lousy replacement for a keyboard/mouse combo, and console gamers are generally less likely to be of "just one more turn sort" than PC gamers. There are some (I am one of them), but definitely less than those who game on PCs. Civ 4's requirements fit comfortably into the XBox 360 specs.
A long post just to correct the misunderstanding that I say poop to all graphical advancement. I like shiny as much as the next guy - but I know full well that the innovation behind that is purely technical, not creative. Yerli is off his rocker if he thinks his game design is constrained by the power of consoles or PCs.
Yes, it is indeed pretty clear they're talking about graphics. It is also pretty clear that when they say "is holding back creative expression" and "holding back quality games", what they mean is that all their creative expression and quality work is going into making a game prettier. Which in turns means they have no idea how to make quality games.
That's what I'm calling bullshit on. The fact that creative expression is identical with fill-rates or polygons/sec. I'm sorry you were so gung-ho to call me on my snobbery that you missed that point.
I haven't seen anything innovative done on a PC that couldn't have been done on a PS2. Crysis 2 is innovative? Oh please. Two extra bullet-points on the back of a box do not make a game "innovative". Portal: innovative. Tower of Goo: innovative. Minecraft: innovative. What do they have in common? They could run on hardware that is 10 years old.
I think the Mr. Crytek fails to see past his own problems: that the shiny that his company specializes in does very little to make a game special.
Err, that should be 100 kbytes, not kbits.
And merely stating that you're not trolling doesn't make it so. My only cable option is Comcast, and I'm boycotting them due to their shoddy service. And DSL is actually throttled to 100kbits/sec due to excessive line noise. Where do I live? In the heart of silicon valley. And this is a pretty common situation.
So yes, you're trolling.
I thought seizing private property through eminent domain to turn it over to a private developer was going to be overturned by the Supreme Court as well. Common sense has little to do with the law.
No, we're having the government step in to prevent people from misrepresenting who they are. Scalpers in this case pretended to be individuals buying the tickets, but instead they bought them wholesale with the intention of cornering the market for desirable seats. free market can only exist if both the seller and the buyer have perfect information about the product and the people involved. Scalpers in this case changed that.
Here's a fun fact: the border extends to about 100 miles inland of the actual border to a country or the ocean. This means the Customs can search over 50% of the US population with near impunity.
The Internet is an infrastructure. People have figured out a long time ago that infrastructure is not something where you want people to create competing markets. That merely results in huge inefficiencies as duplication and underutilization abounds.
Furthermore, the Internet is ALREADY an network of networks. Hence the "Inter" in Internet. No need to build multiple Internets,unless you have some specific reasons why you don't want to hook up to the rest of the world - in which case, you build an Intranet.
Remember folks - free markets are never really free, and more competition is not always the answer.
Clearly, things need to be spelled out for you. Security is a right-wing/republican issue, public works is a left-wing/democrat issue. Both lead to Nanny States. Not to mention that the reason the TSA is supported by Democrats as well as by Republicans is because the Democrats are actually conservative/right wing when measured against standard political metrics. Only Americans think they have a left wing.
Moron.
Do you really think Senators and Representatives have any problem creating things like the Great American Firewall? Remember, these are the people who brought you TSA and the 1-quart freedom pouch.
The right wing wants a Nanny state too, it's just a different one. Or what do you call sanctioned groping of 3 year old girls?
It seems to me that there has to be a reasonable limit.
It's not only reasonable, it's necessary. Nobody creates art in a vacuum. Walt Disney ripped off previous artists, and the Disney corporation has made its fortune through retelling European folk stories. If copyright had existed in its current fashion, neither Walt Disney nor Disney, Inc would have been able to make any money, because all their stories would already have been copyrighted.
What Disney and other copyright holders are doing is the exact same thing as the landgrabs Europeans did during the Age of Exploration. Plant a flag in an area, call it their own, and screw the locals. Bonus points for claiming stuff that they haven't even seen yet. And the copyright claims will be as disastrous for the locals (regular citizenry) as the landgrabs were. That's why there needs to be a static limit that does not exceed the reasonable human life span.
Here's the issue: racial profiling doesn't work. Why? Because the terrorists will just send people through the checkpoints until they find someone who doesn't fit the profile. And then you can't stop them.
Racial profiling doesn't make sense. Get that through your skull.