Why is it that a gaming company still thinks that we should shell out bucks to buy a game that we need to subscribe to?
Because they think the market will bear that price. If you don't like it, tell them why you aren't buying their game, and if enough people tell them the same thing, maybe they'll change. But don't sit around getting offended by basic economics.:)
Hm, well, I don't really think that the idea is that just lowering SMS prices would grab a bunch of customers; it'd be part of their overall pricing strategy. Maybe not a lot of people would switch just from that change, but combine that with other offers, better plan pricing, better phones, etc. and it'd help. I just don't understand why they aren't competing on SMS price at all. It's not like giving someone 3000 minutes for $50 instead of 2500 minutes is going to convince that many more people, but the carriers are competing on that front... so why not SMS?
I understand that SMS is expensive in the U.S. because it's what people are willing to pay. Fine. What I don't understand is why the cell carriers aren't competing on that feature. For the past decade, the number of features, number of minutes, etc. have all been steadily climbing, while calling plan prices have remained more or less steady. And yet, for some reason, there isn't a cell carrier in the country who charges less than 15 cents for an SMS. Why aren't they competing on this feature? Why isn't there a single carrier who said, "You know, we could charge 5 cents a message, and still make an enormous profit on SMS messages, and grab a bunch of our competitors' business!"? What am I missing here? Are they call colluding on SMS, but not on other features?
The DRM still only allows three total installs for the lifetime of the game (although you can call EA tech support and ask for more, no guarantee though). Yeah. When I saw the headline, I was hopeful that maybe it would now be okay to buy Spore or Mass Effect; but, nope. Any kind of remote activation is a complete non-starter for me. Once I buy the game, I want to take it home and be able to play it without having to worry about any kind of activation.
Sorry, EA. You've still lost two sales until you completely remove this DRM nonsense. And no, I will not be pirating the games.
brainstorming... which is universally known to be a really bad way to come up with ideas
It... is? Perhaps you could link to some of the undoubtedly numerous peer-reviewed scientific articles that prove your claim? Because I guess in the universe I'm in, this "fact" isn't universally known.
I was actually planning to buy Spore (first game I'd have bought in a long time -- all I play is WoW, and no, I don't pirate games), and possibly Mass Effect too, but now... forget it. You just lost definitely one, and almost definitely two sales, EA. Yeah, I know that's a drop in the bucket, but that's the most one person can do.
Editing posts in a forum like this is a bad idea. It means you can post something, wait for a response to criticize you, and then alter your original post to make it look like the replier's an idiot. Perhaps having an edit history log available would mitigate that, except it'd be hard for people to mentally keep track of which version of the post existed at a given time, and know what was being replied to.
In practice, it means that the discussion is a *discussion*, so you can see everything everyone said, instead of letting things get changed and redacted later on. All things considered, not being able to edit is a good thing.
Honestly, when will journalists, and scientists, stop making claims that are obviously NOT true?!? Probably about the same time that humans in general stop doing so? Don't take this the wrong way, but are you new here, and by "here" I mean "among humans"?:)
3. Handcoding takes far more time than is necessary in a changing scenario of today's news. Effort not proportional to returns. As a shareholder, i would sue them for wasting money. Score: Hancoding 2: Dreamweaver: 1
Then you'd be a foolish shareholder. They're not handcoding the HTML and CSS for every single story; they're handcoding the HTML and CSS for the story templates they use.
Okay, so I know replying to yourself is frowned upon, but after reading Wikipedia's entry on the State Secrets Privilege, I have to amend my argument. It turns out that the presiding judge in the case is the one who considers the evidence and determines whether it qualifies as a state secret and can be excluded from the case; however (as the article points out) most judges are not especially qualified to make that determination -- and know it -- and so they frequently defer to the Executive, meaning that there is no effective judicial review on the SSP claim.
Well, it's not quite as simple as that -- there ARE pieces of information that it could be disastrous if the government had to reveal them publicly in court, or even to parties to a lawsuit who aren't otherwise cleared for it.
The problem with the way the state secrets privilege is currently used is that there is no oversight. The government says that they can't give evidence because it would compromise national security; all right, fair enough. But there has to be a check on that claim; someone relatively independent has to verify it. Otherwise, there's no way to know whether the executive branch is telling the truth about the evidence, and that's simply unacceptable in a democracy (or at least, it should be).
So who's independent? Well, the legislative and judicial branches are the people who generally exercise checks against the power of the executive. While you're more likely to find legislators who already have the security clearance necessary for the information than you are to find qualifying judges, legislators all inevitably have a political axe to grind. It'd be tough to come up with a system that would allow them to decide whether a given set of evidence should stay secret or not, without letting their political bias come into it. Perhaps if there was a Senate Intelligence subcommittee, that would meet in secret and only declare as a whole whether or not a given state secrets claim was valid; that way the individual members could vote their conscience, as it were, without their political parties having any way to know how they voted. So that might be a way to mitigate the political impact.
Having the judiciary do it would more or less solve the political angle, since judges are (in theory and in fact) much more neutral than legislators. However virtually none of them would have a security clearance, and just because they're judges doesn't make them automatically trustworthy, so having the presiding judge in the case make the decision wouldn't necessarily be feasible. But it certainly wouldn't be that hard to get a security clearance for a dozen or so judges, and have them constitute a panel (or a pool from which they could be randomly selected, 5 or 7 at a time) that would make the decision. That would deal with the security clearance issue.
Actually, the difference is that game rules and mechanics are not copyrightable. The particular text that explains them could be (it is writing, after all) but the actual rules themselves are not.
Wait.. the earth is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old itself... so the entire universe is only ~3 times older than the earth itself?
...and therefore...? What's your point? Consider that when Earth was 1 million years old, the universe was therefore around 9.2 billion years old, and therefore 9,200 times as old as Earth.
The most annoying thing about the term "intellectual property" is that when invoked it's virtually always in reference to copyrights. The amount of trademark and patent infringement is tiny by comparison, and is almost always undertaken by commercial entities for significant commercial gain. The number of people who engage in trademark or patent infringement is relatively tiny when compared to copyright infringement, which is being practiced worldwide by tens of millions of people.
Honestly, I doubt we'd be having any of these discussions if the length of copyright was something short and fixed, like twenty years. We'd all have the sense that creative contribution needs to be relatively continuous, rather than being something that you can get lucky on once and then live off forever. You know what, if you can't figure out a way to make a profit on something after twenty years, too bad, you should lose your chance. If you weren't able to make anything else in those intervening twenty years that's worth buying, too goddamn bad for you, but We the People are giving you a limited monopoly on profiting from your (easily reproducible) work so that we can get the benefit of it going into the public domain some time later. If we don't get that benefit as a people, then why the blue bloody fuck are we giving you a long copyright?
And this is coming from someone who is trying to make a living selling copyrighted works; I don't want my work being copyrighted more than twenty years either. Everything I release (for the forseeable future) will be under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license anyway, and after 20 years will be released into pure public domain. And I'm making a bet that my writing's good enough that I'll still be able to make a living doing it.
The smile on Trent's face should be worth a few pictures.
I was saying the other day that the next Rolling Stone cover should be a painting of a Godzilla-sized Trent Reznor smashing the Capitol Records building under his heel.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct. The solution to bad speech is more speech. (That's a quote from someone famous like Jefferson or Adams, but I don't remember who.)
Oh yeah, well what does the Space Pope have to say about this?
Hm, well, I don't really think that the idea is that just lowering SMS prices would grab a bunch of customers; it'd be part of their overall pricing strategy. Maybe not a lot of people would switch just from that change, but combine that with other offers, better plan pricing, better phones, etc. and it'd help. I just don't understand why they aren't competing on SMS price at all. It's not like giving someone 3000 minutes for $50 instead of 2500 minutes is going to convince that many more people, but the carriers are competing on that front... so why not SMS?
I understand that SMS is expensive in the U.S. because it's what people are willing to pay. Fine. What I don't understand is why the cell carriers aren't competing on that feature. For the past decade, the number of features, number of minutes, etc. have all been steadily climbing, while calling plan prices have remained more or less steady. And yet, for some reason, there isn't a cell carrier in the country who charges less than 15 cents for an SMS. Why aren't they competing on this feature? Why isn't there a single carrier who said, "You know, we could charge 5 cents a message, and still make an enormous profit on SMS messages, and grab a bunch of our competitors' business!"? What am I missing here? Are they call colluding on SMS, but not on other features?
Sorry, EA. You've still lost two sales until you completely remove this DRM nonsense. And no, I will not be pirating the games.
I heard that when the population of Earth is exactly 7,777,777,777, everyone will do 7,777 damage per hit 77 times!!
Or maybe I'm thinking of something else.
Yeah... I've always hated the overrated modifier, since it's entirely subjective.
I was actually planning to buy Spore (first game I'd have bought in a long time -- all I play is WoW, and no, I don't pirate games), and possibly Mass Effect too, but now... forget it. You just lost definitely one, and almost definitely two sales, EA. Yeah, I know that's a drop in the bucket, but that's the most one person can do.
Hm, Stein's Corollary to Godwin's Law: Anything the Nazis did, used, or believed in is evil.
Water and power suppliers are usually prohibited by law from putting those terms into their contracts. Internet providers are not.
Editing posts in a forum like this is a bad idea. It means you can post something, wait for a response to criticize you, and then alter your original post to make it look like the replier's an idiot. Perhaps having an edit history log available would mitigate that, except it'd be hard for people to mentally keep track of which version of the post existed at a given time, and know what was being replied to.
In practice, it means that the discussion is a *discussion*, so you can see everything everyone said, instead of letting things get changed and redacted later on. All things considered, not being able to edit is a good thing.
Okay, so I know replying to yourself is frowned upon, but after reading Wikipedia's entry on the State Secrets Privilege, I have to amend my argument. It turns out that the presiding judge in the case is the one who considers the evidence and determines whether it qualifies as a state secret and can be excluded from the case; however (as the article points out) most judges are not especially qualified to make that determination -- and know it -- and so they frequently defer to the Executive, meaning that there is no effective judicial review on the SSP claim.
:)
So basically, I'm gonna shut up now.
Well, it's not quite as simple as that -- there ARE pieces of information that it could be disastrous if the government had to reveal them publicly in court, or even to parties to a lawsuit who aren't otherwise cleared for it.
The problem with the way the state secrets privilege is currently used is that there is no oversight. The government says that they can't give evidence because it would compromise national security; all right, fair enough. But there has to be a check on that claim; someone relatively independent has to verify it. Otherwise, there's no way to know whether the executive branch is telling the truth about the evidence, and that's simply unacceptable in a democracy (or at least, it should be).
So who's independent? Well, the legislative and judicial branches are the people who generally exercise checks against the power of the executive. While you're more likely to find legislators who already have the security clearance necessary for the information than you are to find qualifying judges, legislators all inevitably have a political axe to grind. It'd be tough to come up with a system that would allow them to decide whether a given set of evidence should stay secret or not, without letting their political bias come into it. Perhaps if there was a Senate Intelligence subcommittee, that would meet in secret and only declare as a whole whether or not a given state secrets claim was valid; that way the individual members could vote their conscience, as it were, without their political parties having any way to know how they voted. So that might be a way to mitigate the political impact.
Having the judiciary do it would more or less solve the political angle, since judges are (in theory and in fact) much more neutral than legislators. However virtually none of them would have a security clearance, and just because they're judges doesn't make them automatically trustworthy, so having the presiding judge in the case make the decision wouldn't necessarily be feasible. But it certainly wouldn't be that hard to get a security clearance for a dozen or so judges, and have them constitute a panel (or a pool from which they could be randomly selected, 5 or 7 at a time) that would make the decision. That would deal with the security clearance issue.
Actually, the difference is that game rules and mechanics are not copyrightable. The particular text that explains them could be (it is writing, after all) but the actual rules themselves are not.
The most annoying thing about the term "intellectual property" is that when invoked it's virtually always in reference to copyrights. The amount of trademark and patent infringement is tiny by comparison, and is almost always undertaken by commercial entities for significant commercial gain. The number of people who engage in trademark or patent infringement is relatively tiny when compared to copyright infringement, which is being practiced worldwide by tens of millions of people.
Honestly, I doubt we'd be having any of these discussions if the length of copyright was something short and fixed, like twenty years. We'd all have the sense that creative contribution needs to be relatively continuous, rather than being something that you can get lucky on once and then live off forever. You know what, if you can't figure out a way to make a profit on something after twenty years, too bad, you should lose your chance. If you weren't able to make anything else in those intervening twenty years that's worth buying, too goddamn bad for you, but We the People are giving you a limited monopoly on profiting from your (easily reproducible) work so that we can get the benefit of it going into the public domain some time later. If we don't get that benefit as a people, then why the blue bloody fuck are we giving you a long copyright?
And this is coming from someone who is trying to make a living selling copyrighted works; I don't want my work being copyrighted more than twenty years either. Everything I release (for the forseeable future) will be under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license anyway, and after 20 years will be released into pure public domain. And I'm making a bet that my writing's good enough that I'll still be able to make a living doing it.
Because I live in Los Angeles. It's sunny here all the time! Even at night!