Yeah, and what happens if, in 5 or 10 years, Valve goes out of business, and nobody's maintaining Steam any more? And then I want to reinstall HL2? Whoops, no more authentication servers. Can't ever play it again without going and finding a crack.
I'm not playing HL2 until Valve gives me the ability to install and play the game without needing an internet connection. Until then, they don't get my business.
Yeah, good job making stupid assumptions about every single person on Slashdot. I'm bitching about online activation BS and I'm not going to be buying HL2 unless Valve can guarantee me that in five, ten, or twenty years, I can reinstall HL2 and play it even if Valve has gone out of business.
In other words, as long as the game has to be activated online in order for me to play the single player game, I refuse to buy it.
And I didn't buy Halo or Halo 2, either. Nor do I own an XBox. So shove your assumptions up your ass.
To rational folks, this system is retarded, because the best-quality movies you can download off of Suprnova or wherever are DVD rips made by the employees of the production and distribution companies, from DVD copies that are produced internally for various purposes. Some of these copies don't even identify themselves as screeners, so for all intents and purposes, they're perfect copies.
Camcorder rips are crappy by comparison, but the general public can create them, so the studios loudly go after them. This makes them look good to, well, someone, I suppose. I hope they're making the same internal efforts to prevent their employees from committing piracy, but I don't think they've got a chance in hell of ever actually stopping it.
No, I wouldn't say I'm entirely sure. I'm under the impression that both people are committing CI in that case because (for example) the person making it available to others is allowing people to make copies of it, and the person downloading the copy is the one actually *doing* the copying, from a legal intent point of view.
But I could be wrong; I do know that both downloaders and people hosting copyrighted stuff on their machines have been sued for copyright infringement, so I assumed that there was at least some legal standing for each person to have committed it.
You get a copy without compensating the copyright holder.
This sentence is misleading because it assumes that a new copy is created when you buy the used CD, for which the copyright holder is not separately compensated. This is not necessarily true. As far as I know, the overwhelming majority of people who sell old CDs do not keep copies of those CDs, either burn dupes or rips.
If someone buys a copy of a CD from a copyright holder, and then sells that CD to some third party without making a copy of it, the copyright holder has received everything he is entitled to under the law. Neither the buyer nor the third party need permission from the copyright holder in order to transact their business; this is known as the Right of First Sale.
If a copy has been made, then the buyer has committed copyright infringement, but the third party has not, whereas in your example of downloading it from Kazaa, both parties have committed copyright infringement.
The copy is an "unauthorized distribution" (i.e., against the will of the copyright holder).
Those terms are not equivalent. "Unauthorized distribution" implies (in cases where it does not expressly mean) "distribution of a copy without the legal right to do so." Since you are not creating a new copy and distributing it, but are merely distributing the same copy that was already purchased from the copyright holder, it is entirely legal.
Whether it's against the will of the copyright holder is irrelevant, so long as it's not against the law.
And, as others have noted, you're also supporting a business by buying used, especially since most used music stores are independently owned. And you're also encouraging the primary market, since people are more likely to buy goods like CDs if they know that they can resell the good later once they've gotten some use out of it.
Okay. I liked it, but random plot hole: If all the superheroes went into retirement, what happened to all the supervillains? Did they all agree to retire as well?
Sounds like a good game
on
Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 1, Troll
Too bad I won't buy it. Not really into giving any more money to Microsoft.
I'd imagine it was a way of making the state more attractive as a prize: CA, FL, NY, OH are all prizes because with their n votes they inflict -2n damage to the loser. Splitting the vote, assuming a 55/45 or even a 60/40 tally, would make it less attractive to campaign in that state - a candidate would say, hey, my party organization would deliver me 40% of the vote and (say 4 seats out of 10) here with just an appearance or two, lemme move on to that other state which is all-or-nothing.
Good point. Probably once one state did it, everyone else said, "Hey, we need to do that too!" Now nobody wants to go back, because nobody wants to be ignored.
On the other hand, I don't know these days whether a split state really would be ignored. Those electoral votes are still votes. Considering that the percentages who said they'd vote for Kerry or Bush didn't really vary all that much during the course of the election, though, you're probably right. If you can't influence enough people to gain any electoral votes, then there's not much point in campaigning there -- intense campaigning might gain you one or two electoral votes -- whereas campaigning in the non-split state the same amount might get you 10 or 20 votes.
Btw, I'm a big skeptic about proportional representation for this reason: all-or-nothing raises the stakes and makes the prize that much more attractive. Proportional systems try to represent *everyone*, resulting in so many voices in the decision making process that nothing ever gets done, any point of view is buried under layers of "consensus" (as is happening in.de and.fr today, at the risk of offending our Euro visitors).
It seems to me that what you describe as happening in Germany and France is the result of a multi-party system, rather than the two-party system we have now. Both sets of governments have proportional representation, it's just that in the U.S. half the population is represented by one faction, and the other half by a second faction.
There's nothing wrong with proportional representation, you just don't want it to get drilled down so far that it devolves into pure democracy, where every individual citizen gets to vote on each law.
Practically speaking, this isn't feasible. I actually tried implementing something like this once, years ago in college: I wrote a random Quake map generator that would create a nethack-like grid of corridors and rooms. It wasn't too hard to write, the problem was that it was extremely repetitive -- just a bunch of rectangular rooms with randomly placed monsters and items in them.
To avoid ending up with what's basically a two-dimensional grid, you have to take advantage of the third dimension, and that makes things significantly more difficult. Plus, you have to start making custom rooms with different entrances and exits, and then make sure you can connect those entrances and exits with corridors. And custom rooms have to be hand-crafted so that they look good and are interesting, if they're going to fly in a pay-to-play MMOG like EverQuest.
With enough work, I'm sure it's doable to make a randomly-generated 3D MMOG dungeon environment (there would be myriad other background differences that would have taken way too much time and effort for SOE to implement with EQ), and it would be interesting to see an MMOG designed along those lines. But to make it any more interesting than just a place where you go to hack 'n' slash and get loot, you have to start adding quests and stuff, and the more randomly generated the dungeon, the harder it is to add properly themed content. There are dungeons in EQ and World of Warcraft that have themed quests running all through the place, and lots of background "flavor" that is reflected in their design. Random generation can't really support this any better than Diablo II did, with its randomly generated dungeons that had specific hard-coded, fixed-design areas in it for the quest elements. D2 didn't have a whole lot of plot interaction, even if there was a lot of background stuff (not to mention the awesome cutscenes).
I want to make those obsolete by having a world with ever-changing content around central areas....It'll be hard,
It's harder than you think. Creating good content cannot be done algorithmically (not yet, anyway). It requires sentience. You can randomly generate certain kinds of content, which extends things... but the limits of the random generation reveal themselves after a while. Which means that in order to have a large quantity of good content, it all has to be crafted by hand. That takes time, and time is money. Ergo creating a lot of good content is expensive.
Now, an MMO that can survive for a couple of years has an advantage, because they've had the time to build up enough content that it now takes 3 or 4 times as long for a new player to go through it all as it would have if they started when the game launched. EverQuest has so much content now from its 8+ expansions (not all of it great, but whatever) that the average new "casual" player could play 10 hours a week for about two years without exhausting it all (and by then, it'll have two years' worth of new content).
A brand-new MMO can't have that much content unless the developers have enough money to create that much content before launching. Realistically it never happens, unless some millionaire investor decides to let an MMO team take 5 years to develop that much content before launching.:)
Err...are you aware that the # of EC votes is not the # in the house, but is the # in both combined?
Yes, I am. And you're right; I was incorrect to say that the population differences were not a factor in the design of the Electoral College. However, I still believe that in today's world, the Electoral College is more harmful than helpful.
That's 615,848 per EC vote for Californians, 251,615 per for South Dakota.
Thus the Electoral College is even more tilted toward small states than the House is. To wit:
- California
- Population 33,871,648
- Reps: 53 (639,087 people per representative)
- EVs: 55 (615,848 people per electoral vote)
- South Dakota
- Population 754,844
- Reps: 1 (754,844 people per representative)
- EVs: 3 (251,614 people per electoral vote)
Actually, in the case of South Dakota, their people are under-represented in the House, compared to California. But they are vastly over-represented in the Electoral College.
Fixing the representation of the House would go a long way toward fixing both problems (inaccurate House and EV representation), since the number of votes each state would get in the House/EV would scale with population.
Thanks for the info; I hadn't considered the "favorite son" problem.
Unfortunately, that paragraph conflates two separate problems:
- that the largest states would decide the President; and - that people in a given state would vote for their "favorite son" because they lack info about other candidates.
The latter problem is no longer relevant, in this age of information. (Well, whether or not people ACTUALLY go out and get all the information is another story, but it's available.) The former problem is fundamentally no different than the current problem, which is that a handful of medium-sized states decide who's President because of this silly winner-take-all electoral vote system.
I still want to know how it happened that every single state happened to have the exact same system of assigning its electoral votes: hold a popular vote, and the candidate with the most votes gets all the electoral votes. (Excluding Maine and Nebraska, which do split the votes.)
The middle east has been propetually in conflict. We've now established two democracies (well, probably 1.5 so far). The region used to only have death. Now it has both death and hope.
Remember back when democracy arose because the people of a nation were sick of being oppressed, and not because some other country decided to invade them for no good reason? How exactly do you force people to want self-government, exactly?
Considering that, on the grand scale of pollution, automobiles contribute a lot and smokers contribute almost nothing, are you also going after the drivers?
If I based my entire assessment of something on how polluting it was, I might. But like any rational person, I also take into account what positive effects that thing has on the world. People smoking benefits the smokers (although it also greatly harms them), benefits tobacco companies and the stores that sell cigarettes, and directly harms the health care industry by overloading it with people who would otherwise have many fewer health problems, making it more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming for people with non-self-induced health problems to get health care.
Automobiles also contribute to health care problems, but they also allow us to have this titanic, powerful economy that we have. No automobiles means trade is much slower (have fun getting goods from sea ports like Los Angeles to places like Colorado without using machine power), people have less mobility, and the economy and everyone's quality of life would greatly suffer. Also note that we continue to make efforts to require automobiles to be less-polluting, with the eventual intention of moving to zero-emission vehicles.
I don't think cigarettes, tobacco, or nicotine should be illegal (in fact, I think all drugs should be legalized). I do think that using a drug in such a way that other people are necessarily affected by it (like smoking a cigarette in a public place) should be illegal.
There was a _reason_ the electoral college came into being: so that populous states would not "drown" out the less populous ones.
Incorrect. The electoral college was created because when the U.S. was founded, the Founders thought that having a direct popular vote was a terrible idea. They wanted to insulate the Presidential election from a popular vote, and it also played into states' rights because the Federal government was a way for the state governments to band together. It wasn't like it is now, where the Federal government has more direct power over individual citizens' lives than their state governments do.
The argument about populous states not drowning out the less populous states was the argument for having a bicameral legislature: in the House, more populous states have more power, and in the Senate, less populous states have more power. And since a law was passed fixing the number of House representatives at 435, the low-pop states now have proportionally more power than the high-pop states, because a state like Wyoming has 1 representative for its ~500,000 people (for a ratio of about 1:500,000) where as California has 53 representatives for its ~34,000,000 people, for a ratio of about 1:640,000.)
Even if they did fix the House so that its membership was proportionate, the Senate already takes care of the "more populous states have more power" problem. Having the electoral college also give that power to small states is unnecessary. And, as I noted before, because the Federal government has so much direct power over individuals, having the states choose the President is a horrible idea. It should be a direct popular vote. (Yes, I know Bush still would have won it with the results we got yesterday, although if everyone had known beforehand that it would be a direct vote, the campaigns would have been run differently and the population might have voted differently.) Either that, or vastly reduce the Federal government's power. (That would be preferable, actually.)
Ah, Slashdot. I can't think of anywhere else I can get into a legitimate argument about the taste of snake urine amidst a conversation about cigarettes.
California banning smoking in all public places is an attack on personal freedoms.
And you smoking near me in public isn't an attack on my personal freedoms? Specifically, the freedom to not have to breathe concentrated carcinogens so that someone else can indulge their drug addiction?
Voting, or running myself, would be supporting the very fucking system I oppose.
Good thing you ignored the part where I said:
Aren't willing to put out any effort to change the system?
...a notion you haven't disabused. Are you actually working to change the system in one of these "work-outside-the-system" ways? Or are you just an armchair revolutionary?
Since you think the system is defective, presumably you want the system to change. Are you actually going to do something to get it to change, or are you just going to whine? How about finding a candidate who's for the kind of political reform that you want, and voting for him? Or hell, run for office yourself.
What's that? Can't find an appropriate candidate, or can't run yourself? Aren't willing to put out any effort to change the system? THEN SHUT THE FUCK UP.
If so, it doesn't work very well. The XP boost lasts for about 10 minutes, or 3-5 monsters, and then it's back to normal. That's not really much of an incentive to "rest". At least that was its state a week ago...
You've misrepresented how the rest system works. You can accumulate up to 1.5 levels' worth of bonus exp, which you earn when you kill monsters (being "rested" means you get double exp for killing a monster; quest exp is unaffected). You accumulate rest exp at the rate of 5% of a level every 8 hours offline, as long as you log out in an inn or major city. Log out elsewhere, and it accumulates at 1/4 of the inn rate.
If your rest exp is only lasting for 3-5 kills, then you've only been resting offline for an hour or two. And as far as I can tell, it's working exactly as advertised; I've always had exactly as much rest exp as I should, given the amount of time I've been offline.
Whether the rest system is a good idea is a different argument entirely.
Boringness is too subjective a criterion for badness.
Can you name a criterion for badness that isn't 100% subjective? This seems like an impossible task, considering that any criteria you can come up with for whether art is "good" or "bad" is going to be purely subjective, so...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and what happens if, in 5 or 10 years, Valve goes out of business, and nobody's maintaining Steam any more? And then I want to reinstall HL2? Whoops, no more authentication servers. Can't ever play it again without going and finding a crack.
I'm not playing HL2 until Valve gives me the ability to install and play the game without needing an internet connection. Until then, they don't get my business.
Yeah, good job making stupid assumptions about every single person on Slashdot. I'm bitching about online activation BS and I'm not going to be buying HL2 unless Valve can guarantee me that in five, ten, or twenty years, I can reinstall HL2 and play it even if Valve has gone out of business.
In other words, as long as the game has to be activated online in order for me to play the single player game, I refuse to buy it.
And I didn't buy Halo or Halo 2, either. Nor do I own an XBox. So shove your assumptions up your ass.
This is great and all, but I don't know if humanitarians are really the best processors to use in a grid computer.
To rational folks, this system is retarded, because the best-quality movies you can download off of Suprnova or wherever are DVD rips made by the employees of the production and distribution companies, from DVD copies that are produced internally for various purposes. Some of these copies don't even identify themselves as screeners, so for all intents and purposes, they're perfect copies.
Camcorder rips are crappy by comparison, but the general public can create them, so the studios loudly go after them. This makes them look good to, well, someone, I suppose. I hope they're making the same internal efforts to prevent their employees from committing piracy, but I don't think they've got a chance in hell of ever actually stopping it.
No, I wouldn't say I'm entirely sure. I'm under the impression that both people are committing CI in that case because (for example) the person making it available to others is allowing people to make copies of it, and the person downloading the copy is the one actually *doing* the copying, from a legal intent point of view.
But I could be wrong; I do know that both downloaders and people hosting copyrighted stuff on their machines have been sued for copyright infringement, so I assumed that there was at least some legal standing for each person to have committed it.
If someone buys a copy of a CD from a copyright holder, and then sells that CD to some third party without making a copy of it, the copyright holder has received everything he is entitled to under the law. Neither the buyer nor the third party need permission from the copyright holder in order to transact their business; this is known as the Right of First Sale.
If a copy has been made, then the buyer has committed copyright infringement, but the third party has not, whereas in your example of downloading it from Kazaa, both parties have committed copyright infringement.
Those terms are not equivalent. "Unauthorized distribution" implies (in cases where it does not expressly mean) "distribution of a copy without the legal right to do so." Since you are not creating a new copy and distributing it, but are merely distributing the same copy that was already purchased from the copyright holder, it is entirely legal.Whether it's against the will of the copyright holder is irrelevant, so long as it's not against the law.
And, as others have noted, you're also supporting a business by buying used, especially since most used music stores are independently owned. And you're also encouraging the primary market, since people are more likely to buy goods like CDs if they know that they can resell the good later once they've gotten some use out of it.
Okay. I liked it, but random plot hole: If all the superheroes went into retirement, what happened to all the supervillains? Did they all agree to retire as well?
Too bad I won't buy it. Not really into giving any more money to Microsoft.
On the other hand, I don't know these days whether a split state really would be ignored. Those electoral votes are still votes. Considering that the percentages who said they'd vote for Kerry or Bush didn't really vary all that much during the course of the election, though, you're probably right. If you can't influence enough people to gain any electoral votes, then there's not much point in campaigning there -- intense campaigning might gain you one or two electoral votes -- whereas campaigning in the non-split state the same amount might get you 10 or 20 votes.
It seems to me that what you describe as happening in Germany and France is the result of a multi-party system, rather than the two-party system we have now. Both sets of governments have proportional representation, it's just that in the U.S. half the population is represented by one faction, and the other half by a second faction.There's nothing wrong with proportional representation, you just don't want it to get drilled down so far that it devolves into pure democracy, where every individual citizen gets to vote on each law.
Practically speaking, this isn't feasible. I actually tried implementing something like this once, years ago in college: I wrote a random Quake map generator that would create a nethack-like grid of corridors and rooms. It wasn't too hard to write, the problem was that it was extremely repetitive -- just a bunch of rectangular rooms with randomly placed monsters and items in them.
To avoid ending up with what's basically a two-dimensional grid, you have to take advantage of the third dimension, and that makes things significantly more difficult. Plus, you have to start making custom rooms with different entrances and exits, and then make sure you can connect those entrances and exits with corridors. And custom rooms have to be hand-crafted so that they look good and are interesting, if they're going to fly in a pay-to-play MMOG like EverQuest.
With enough work, I'm sure it's doable to make a randomly-generated 3D MMOG dungeon environment (there would be myriad other background differences that would have taken way too much time and effort for SOE to implement with EQ), and it would be interesting to see an MMOG designed along those lines. But to make it any more interesting than just a place where you go to hack 'n' slash and get loot, you have to start adding quests and stuff, and the more randomly generated the dungeon, the harder it is to add properly themed content. There are dungeons in EQ and World of Warcraft that have themed quests running all through the place, and lots of background "flavor" that is reflected in their design. Random generation can't really support this any better than Diablo II did, with its randomly generated dungeons that had specific hard-coded, fixed-design areas in it for the quest elements. D2 didn't have a whole lot of plot interaction, even if there was a lot of background stuff (not to mention the awesome cutscenes).
Now, an MMO that can survive for a couple of years has an advantage, because they've had the time to build up enough content that it now takes 3 or 4 times as long for a new player to go through it all as it would have if they started when the game launched. EverQuest has so much content now from its 8+ expansions (not all of it great, but whatever) that the average new "casual" player could play 10 hours a week for about two years without exhausting it all (and by then, it'll have two years' worth of new content).
A brand-new MMO can't have that much content unless the developers have enough money to create that much content before launching. Realistically it never happens, unless some millionaire investor decides to let an MMO team take 5 years to develop that much content before launching. :)
- California
- Population 33,871,648
- Reps: 53 (639,087 people per representative)
- EVs: 55 (615,848 people per electoral vote)
- South Dakota
- Population 754,844
- Reps: 1 (754,844 people per representative)
- EVs: 3 (251,614 people per electoral vote)
Actually, in the case of South Dakota, their people are under-represented in the House, compared to California. But they are vastly over-represented in the Electoral College.
Fixing the representation of the House would go a long way toward fixing both problems (inaccurate House and EV representation), since the number of votes each state would get in the House/EV would scale with population.
Thanks for the info; I hadn't considered the "favorite son" problem.
Unfortunately, that paragraph conflates two separate problems:
- that the largest states would decide the President; and
- that people in a given state would vote for their "favorite son" because they lack info about other candidates.
The latter problem is no longer relevant, in this age of information. (Well, whether or not people ACTUALLY go out and get all the information is another story, but it's available.) The former problem is fundamentally no different than the current problem, which is that a handful of medium-sized states decide who's President because of this silly winner-take-all electoral vote system.
I still want to know how it happened that every single state happened to have the exact same system of assigning its electoral votes: hold a popular vote, and the candidate with the most votes gets all the electoral votes. (Excluding Maine and Nebraska, which do split the votes.)
Automobiles also contribute to health care problems, but they also allow us to have this titanic, powerful economy that we have. No automobiles means trade is much slower (have fun getting goods from sea ports like Los Angeles to places like Colorado without using machine power), people have less mobility, and the economy and everyone's quality of life would greatly suffer. Also note that we continue to make efforts to require automobiles to be less-polluting, with the eventual intention of moving to zero-emission vehicles.
I don't think cigarettes, tobacco, or nicotine should be illegal (in fact, I think all drugs should be legalized). I do think that using a drug in such a way that other people are necessarily affected by it (like smoking a cigarette in a public place) should be illegal.
The argument about populous states not drowning out the less populous states was the argument for having a bicameral legislature: in the House, more populous states have more power, and in the Senate, less populous states have more power. And since a law was passed fixing the number of House representatives at 435, the low-pop states now have proportionally more power than the high-pop states, because a state like Wyoming has 1 representative for its ~500,000 people (for a ratio of about 1:500,000) where as California has 53 representatives for its ~34,000,000 people, for a ratio of about 1:640,000.)
Even if they did fix the House so that its membership was proportionate, the Senate already takes care of the "more populous states have more power" problem. Having the electoral college also give that power to small states is unnecessary. And, as I noted before, because the Federal government has so much direct power over individuals, having the states choose the President is a horrible idea. It should be a direct popular vote. (Yes, I know Bush still would have won it with the results we got yesterday, although if everyone had known beforehand that it would be a direct vote, the campaigns would have been run differently and the population might have voted differently.) Either that, or vastly reduce the Federal government's power. (That would be preferable, actually.)
...they want their statue back.
Ah, Slashdot. I can't think of anywhere else I can get into a legitimate argument about the taste of snake urine amidst a conversation about cigarettes.
Aren't willing to put out any effort to change the system?
Since you think the system is defective, presumably you want the system to change. Are you actually going to do something to get it to change, or are you just going to whine? How about finding a candidate who's for the kind of political reform that you want, and voting for him? Or hell, run for office yourself.
What's that? Can't find an appropriate candidate, or can't run yourself? Aren't willing to put out any effort to change the system? THEN SHUT THE FUCK UP.
You've misrepresented how the rest system works. You can accumulate up to 1.5 levels' worth of bonus exp, which you earn when you kill monsters (being "rested" means you get double exp for killing a monster; quest exp is unaffected). You accumulate rest exp at the rate of 5% of a level every 8 hours offline, as long as you log out in an inn or major city. Log out elsewhere, and it accumulates at 1/4 of the inn rate.
If your rest exp is only lasting for 3-5 kills, then you've only been resting offline for an hour or two. And as far as I can tell, it's working exactly as advertised; I've always had exactly as much rest exp as I should, given the amount of time I've been offline.
Whether the rest system is a good idea is a different argument entirely.