Players are _not_ overwhelmingly pirating single player PC games. Single player PC games are selling better than ever. I am not sure where you get the idea that pirates are dominating the PC market from...
The console market has got bigger proportionately for years and years, and it's not due to piracy. However, the key word is proportionately. Despite what the harbingers of doom tell you, PC gaming is alive and well.
Calm down... some mods will probably restore your precious points (which they probably should, IMO). From your original post, that is. Your little tantrum about a couple of mod points will likely be modded to karma hell, on the other hand.
a VM feels pretty much native unless you try to edit video or play 3D games in it.
And therein lies the problem. Loads of semi-technical people play those games, and those are exactly the people who install the operating systems on their parent's computers. I'm not even running Linux at home, despite working with Linux for years, because I don't need to... I do need to run Windows at home though, purely for the games.
DRM is here to stay... Intrusive DRM is not. The reason why Steam is successful is because it gives loads of advantages over previous delivery methods. I had windows go all blue screen on me, complete reinstall needed, a while back (it was my fault, I was running Europa Universalis, and the entire OS went kaput... I wondered what had happened, until I noticed I'd pulled out one of the SATA data cables of my striped primary drives with my toe - the case is open because cooling is not optimal for the graphics card... I even laughed at the time). I just reinstalled (wasn't laughing so much then), logged in, and my games were available again. It has a few disadvantages too, but most of them are small. The disadvantages are less bad than the old days with lost CD-Keys, etcs, IMO.
Intrusive DRM, and DRM that requires permanent online prescence will never work.
By having the ability to levy taxes, and the power to force the sale of property to recover those taxes, the government ultimately has effective ownership of your "property". Ownership is a matter of control, and if you don't control something you really don't own it.
Erm... basically every government that has ever existed has required taxes, and has had the authority to claim owned assets to redeem those taxes. This is not something new, and is perfectly reasonable. I'm really not sure where you are coming from with this - if the government did not enforce tax collection via means of asset seizure, no one would pay taxes.
A government without the ability to levy taxes and the power to force the sale of property to recover those taxes would be entirely inneffectual.
GWB never tried to tell me that I must buy a product from a for-profit industry.....
Good luck buying oil from those who have not profited from the Iraq war. Wait... there are no large multinationals that profited from the war?
Also, the US is losing wetlands at a rate of thousands of acres _per year_, because of short sighted industrial practices. The BP oil spill has affected hundreds of acres of US land.
That said exercising your brain may be fun and give you that spandex in the morning feeling but push comes to shove a person is likely to die from cancer or alzheimer's so what's the point after all?
The only way you are able to exercise your brain the way you are doing is because of those who have come before you and left a legacy of decent information. Without those who have come before, you'd be starting from basics, and it'd be supremely arrogant to claim you'd get from starting a fire to string theory in one lifetime.
Basically I'm saying the _point_ is helping those who follow you. You've got a foundation, that it's easy to take for granted, but impossible to ignore. If those that follow you have a higher foundation (however slightly), that's the point.
You've missed the point. Having a thesaurus and dictionary on hand _does_ decrease activity in certain parts of the brain. They've always been crutches, just old fashioned ones. Relying on any kind of reference habitually craps up the the ability to maintain knowledge within your own brain.
I'm not proposing a solution here - I use a plethora of references. If they are there, it is nonsensical not to use them. However, by doing so you're diminishing your ability to retain information contained in those references.
There is an entirely different argument to be made that retaining information is not the point of human existance, and that genius relies upon the processing of that information as opposed to categorisation. Genius relies upon at least some retention of information though - The more information retained, the larger the pool that is quickly accessible. It's a trade off - remembering all information and doing nothing with it produces nothing, attempting to produce without information produces rubbish.
Personally though I've never seen the point of a thesaurus... apart from for crap writers.
The entire idea of the three robot laws, ie. the idea that we should be aiming to program deliberately to protect ourselves is ludicrous. All it takes is _one_ person to decide otherwise, and they go out of the window. A lot of early theories about how the internet would turn out were based upon the ideal of harmonious trust. Trust does not work when you're confronted with billions of people.
What I'm saying is that not that it _should_ be done, just that it _will_ be done. Putting your head in the sand and telling people they should not do it will not prevent it.
TFA is _not_ dumb. Did you even read it? Above a certain threshold, money does not increase happiness. Power and happiness are not one and the same.
There have been plenty of studies showing that richer nations are equally as happy as poorer nations, once they get above that theshold. Also, there have been loads of studies showing that large income disparity has a very bad effect on happiness within societies.
Also, limited drug intake has a massively beneficial effect on me... I enjoy having a few beers with friends.
The Artic Monkeys had very little paid for advertising prior to their no.1 single "I bet you look good on the dancefloor". Much of what has been written about their popularity prior to their success has been exaggerated, but their success was not due to marketing primarily, at least. They signed to a small label only a couple of months prior to the single's release.
I work at a tyre wholesaler in the UK. You basically have to go out of your way to buy any car tyres now that are below H rated, which is 130mph. The commonest tyres sold are 205/55/16 91V, which fit all manner of standard cars which can get nowhere near the 149mph speed rating of them. You can get that size in H rating, but only with some specific branded tyres (like Michelin energy saver, Goodyear NCT5, Bridgestone ER300, Continental Premium 2). The budget performance tyres we sell most of, (Enduro 916+, Autogrip F107), are actually W rated... 168mph. No car that runs on this size of tyre will ever see that kind of speed... quick cars use lower profile, wider tyres.
The lowest (not truck) speed rating that sells is N (87mph) - they're commercial specification though - high profile, high load rating. I've not seen a standard tyre with a lower than N rating. You'll also sometimes get lower (than H) speed ratings on small high profile tyres (for old small cars), and 4x4 offroad tyres.
The problem is people have no idea what those agreements mean.
Which is the entire problem. I consider myself relatively well educated, relatively intelligent, relatively knowledgeable about IT, and relatively knowledgeable about law. I never read EULAs because doing so would take way, way too long. The amount of man hours used if everyone read and understood every EULA or legal agreement they clicked would result in the crippling of the economy, and the free time of the populace being reduced drastically. EULAs and legal agreements aimed at those who don't understand them are shit, and there needs to be _massive_ simplification.
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I'm a relatively left wing progressive anti-corporation liberal (in a nutshell), and I'll just say this : You're doing fuck all for your cause by spouting nonsensical incoherent rants. <Yoda>Repeatedly calling people teabaggers does not an argument make.</Yoda>
I wish jury service was a voluntary duty, not unlike voting.
The point of jury service is so that the defendant will be tried by their peers, not by those who have the spare time or inclination to voluntarily show up. If you make jury service voluntary, you'll be introducing bias into the system.
That being said, I was on jury service a while back. The main case I saw was one where it seemed likely this guy did what he was charged with, but there was not the evidence there to substantiate it enough in my opinion (there was reasonable doubt). I kept myself to myself, and fully expected to have to fight my corner against the other jurors during deliberation, but they all just thought basically exactly the same as me. I was pleasantly suprised.
Another interesting note was that I was locked up and ended up being cautioned in the same police station the accused was a week before the trial (possession of class A;P)... when I got my jury notice letter, I almost shat my pants thinking I was going to have to go to trial for some reason. I told them about this, but they said only mention it to the court if I recognised any witnesses.
This is exactly the consumerist poplurarist tabloid-esque kind of response that is _not_ fucking helpful, and that I hate. This is a study showing that heavy drinkers live longer than abstainers - question the methods, question the source, but don't ascribe it to "boffins" who "said the opposite" a minute ago (no they didn't). Such blinkered thinking about what scientific studies are pisses me off no end.
I don't _know_ it. Neither does anyone. Antivirus does nothing against 99% of online bank fraud, which is caused by users being ignorant (I mean that in the true sense).
I run with nothing protecting me... Remote exploits which do not require user interaction are very rare, especially if you don't run Internet Explorer, I generally run open source applications and/or small 3rd party applications.
I've been following the same policy for 10 years or so, and have had _one_ virus infection that got through, when I was running win2k. It screwed up literally about 3 files,and took about an hout to clean.
And with no anti-virus scanner or anything, how would you even know if you were infected?
Occasionally I'll hit an online scanner, like the trend micro one. 0 positives, except for dodgy temporary files which will never get run. Don't get me wrong, I do end up with viruses and worms and malware planted on my system... they're just never run. If I'm actually suspicious of something I want to run, I'll throw it at an online scanner.
Regarding Flash exploits, I run flashblock (more for convenience than security) - most sites I'll block flash from just not wanting them to advertise to me.
Basically, I've had a windows system of 2 kinds open to the world for about 10 years, and I've been hit once by a virus/malware, and then not hard at all. - I think a lot of the hysteria about windows boxes getting owned prior to updates is just that - Hysteria. I've actually got my old win2k install, bootable in my current PC still... though I haven't launched it recently.
I'm running Windows Vista, installed a few years ago (very soon after Vista was released), no auto updates, disabled security that I could, always turn off defender at boot, running in administator account, no anti-virus. I'm not anal about the sites I visit - however I never run anything from a source I don't trust at least a bit.
No viruses, no slowdown. I've just moved my PC, but prior to that it was at over a month uptime (I know I should probably turn it off when I'm at work, but I'm lazy).
The myth about Windows installs necessarily degenerating and being inherently liable to viruses has to get squished soon - it does nothing for Linux. The users who you are trying to switch over will install any old thing whatever OS they are using.
ps. I just bought a new HD to install Linux on on my computer, I'll probably go Slackware since it's what I'm most familiar with. One of the reasons I'm not running Linux yet is because the fakeraid implementation was pretty technical when I got this computer, and I didn't want to jump right in and hose the partition (which is what the Ubuntu installer suggested... fortunately I knew enough about my system partitioning to not allow it to do that).
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So when I'm sold a game, then the publishers release a patch, I've got to pay for it? Screw accounting rules.
Players are _not_ overwhelmingly pirating single player PC games. Single player PC games are selling better than ever. I am not sure where you get the idea that pirates are dominating the PC market from...
The console market has got bigger proportionately for years and years, and it's not due to piracy. However, the key word is proportionately. Despite what the harbingers of doom tell you, PC gaming is alive and well.
Calm down... some mods will probably restore your precious points (which they probably should, IMO). From your original post, that is. Your little tantrum about a couple of mod points will likely be modded to karma hell, on the other hand.
I converted my wife to Ubuntu after the 8th virus in 3 months.
So now she can't contact her friends and get more viruses?
Oh, you meant _computer_ viruses......
(sorry :P)
a VM feels pretty much native unless you try to edit video or play 3D games in it.
And therein lies the problem. Loads of semi-technical people play those games, and those are exactly the people who install the operating systems on their parent's computers. I'm not even running Linux at home, despite working with Linux for years, because I don't need to... I do need to run Windows at home though, purely for the games.
DRM is here to stay... Intrusive DRM is not. The reason why Steam is successful is because it gives loads of advantages over previous delivery methods. I had windows go all blue screen on me, complete reinstall needed, a while back (it was my fault, I was running Europa Universalis, and the entire OS went kaput... I wondered what had happened, until I noticed I'd pulled out one of the SATA data cables of my striped primary drives with my toe - the case is open because cooling is not optimal for the graphics card... I even laughed at the time). I just reinstalled (wasn't laughing so much then), logged in, and my games were available again. It has a few disadvantages too, but most of them are small. The disadvantages are less bad than the old days with lost CD-Keys, etcs, IMO.
Intrusive DRM, and DRM that requires permanent online prescence will never work.
By having the ability to levy taxes, and the power to force the sale of property to recover those taxes, the government ultimately has effective ownership of your "property". Ownership is a matter of control, and if you don't control something you really don't own it.
Erm... basically every government that has ever existed has required taxes, and has had the authority to claim owned assets to redeem those taxes. This is not something new, and is perfectly reasonable. I'm really not sure where you are coming from with this - if the government did not enforce tax collection via means of asset seizure, no one would pay taxes.
A government without the ability to levy taxes and the power to force the sale of property to recover those taxes would be entirely inneffectual.
GWB never tried to tell me that I must buy a product from a for-profit industry.....
Good luck buying oil from those who have not profited from the Iraq war. Wait... there are no large multinationals that profited from the war?
Also, the US is losing wetlands at a rate of thousands of acres _per year_, because of short sighted industrial practices. The BP oil spill has affected hundreds of acres of US land.
That said exercising your brain may be fun and give you that spandex in the morning feeling but push comes to shove a person is likely to die from cancer or alzheimer's so what's the point after all?
The only way you are able to exercise your brain the way you are doing is because of those who have come before you and left a legacy of decent information. Without those who have come before, you'd be starting from basics, and it'd be supremely arrogant to claim you'd get from starting a fire to string theory in one lifetime.
Basically I'm saying the _point_ is helping those who follow you. You've got a foundation, that it's easy to take for granted, but impossible to ignore. If those that follow you have a higher foundation (however slightly), that's the point.
You've missed the point. Having a thesaurus and dictionary on hand _does_ decrease activity in certain parts of the brain. They've always been crutches, just old fashioned ones. Relying on any kind of reference habitually craps up the the ability to maintain knowledge within your own brain.
I'm not proposing a solution here - I use a plethora of references. If they are there, it is nonsensical not to use them. However, by doing so you're diminishing your ability to retain information contained in those references.
There is an entirely different argument to be made that retaining information is not the point of human existance, and that genius relies upon the processing of that information as opposed to categorisation. Genius relies upon at least some retention of information though - The more information retained, the larger the pool that is quickly accessible. It's a trade off - remembering all information and doing nothing with it produces nothing, attempting to produce without information produces rubbish.
Personally though I've never seen the point of a thesaurus... apart from for crap writers.
The entire idea of the three robot laws, ie. the idea that we should be aiming to program deliberately to protect ourselves is ludicrous. All it takes is _one_ person to decide otherwise, and they go out of the window. A lot of early theories about how the internet would turn out were based upon the ideal of harmonious trust. Trust does not work when you're confronted with billions of people.
What I'm saying is that not that it _should_ be done, just that it _will_ be done. Putting your head in the sand and telling people they should not do it will not prevent it.
TFA is _not_ dumb. Did you even read it? Above a certain threshold, money does not increase happiness. Power and happiness are not one and the same.
There have been plenty of studies showing that richer nations are equally as happy as poorer nations, once they get above that theshold. Also, there have been loads of studies showing that large income disparity has a very bad effect on happiness within societies.
Also, limited drug intake has a massively beneficial effect on me... I enjoy having a few beers with friends.
The Artic Monkeys had very little paid for advertising prior to their no.1 single "I bet you look good on the dancefloor". Much of what has been written about their popularity prior to their success has been exaggerated, but their success was not due to marketing primarily, at least. They signed to a small label only a couple of months prior to the single's release.
I work at a tyre wholesaler in the UK. You basically have to go out of your way to buy any car tyres now that are below H rated, which is 130mph. The commonest tyres sold are 205/55/16 91V, which fit all manner of standard cars which can get nowhere near the 149mph speed rating of them. You can get that size in H rating, but only with some specific branded tyres (like Michelin energy saver, Goodyear NCT5, Bridgestone ER300, Continental Premium 2). The budget performance tyres we sell most of, (Enduro 916+, Autogrip F107), are actually W rated... 168mph. No car that runs on this size of tyre will ever see that kind of speed... quick cars use lower profile, wider tyres.
The lowest (not truck) speed rating that sells is N (87mph) - they're commercial specification though - high profile, high load rating. I've not seen a standard tyre with a lower than N rating. You'll also sometimes get lower (than H) speed ratings on small high profile tyres (for old small cars), and 4x4 offroad tyres.
Don't think you're special... I'm banking on another Julius and Augustus to come along in the next couple of years, then I'll get my 13/13/13 :P
The problem is people have no idea what those agreements mean.
Which is the entire problem. I consider myself relatively well educated, relatively intelligent, relatively knowledgeable about IT, and relatively knowledgeable about law. I never read EULAs because doing so would take way, way too long. The amount of man hours used if everyone read and understood every EULA or legal agreement they clicked would result in the crippling of the economy, and the free time of the populace being reduced drastically. EULAs and legal agreements aimed at those who don't understand them are shit, and there needs to be _massive_ simplification.
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I'm a relatively left wing progressive anti-corporation liberal (in a nutshell), and I'll just say this : You're doing fuck all for your cause by spouting nonsensical incoherent rants. <Yoda>Repeatedly calling people teabaggers does not an argument make.</Yoda>
What useful thing has the UN ever really done?
The extradition treaties, trade treaties, and eradication of some major diseases that we have now would not have occured as soon without the UN.
They're useless at best
Absolutely wrong.
potentially hazardous at worst.
Absolutely right.
I wish jury service was a voluntary duty, not unlike voting.
The point of jury service is so that the defendant will be tried by their peers, not by those who have the spare time or inclination to voluntarily show up. If you make jury service voluntary, you'll be introducing bias into the system.
That being said, I was on jury service a while back. The main case I saw was one where it seemed likely this guy did what he was charged with, but there was not the evidence there to substantiate it enough in my opinion (there was reasonable doubt). I kept myself to myself, and fully expected to have to fight my corner against the other jurors during deliberation, but they all just thought basically exactly the same as me. I was pleasantly suprised.
Another interesting note was that I was locked up and ended up being cautioned in the same police station the accused was a week before the trial (possession of class A ;P)... when I got my jury notice letter, I almost shat my pants thinking I was going to have to go to trial for some reason. I told them about this, but they said only mention it to the court if I recognised any witnesses.
This is in the UK, btw.
Just to let you know, since we all seem to be in an asserting our superiority over others mood today, it's hear, hear, not here here.
This is exactly the consumerist poplurarist tabloid-esque kind of response that is _not_ fucking helpful, and that I hate. This is a study showing that heavy drinkers live longer than abstainers - question the methods, question the source, but don't ascribe it to "boffins" who "said the opposite" a minute ago (no they didn't). Such blinkered thinking about what scientific studies are pisses me off no end.
I don't _know_ it. Neither does anyone. Antivirus does nothing against 99% of online bank fraud, which is caused by users being ignorant (I mean that in the true sense).
I don't do any of my banking online at all.
I run with nothing protecting me... Remote exploits which do not require user interaction are very rare, especially if you don't run Internet Explorer, I generally run open source applications and/or small 3rd party applications.
I've been following the same policy for 10 years or so, and have had _one_ virus infection that got through, when I was running win2k. It screwed up literally about 3 files,and took about an hout to clean.
And with no anti-virus scanner or anything, how would you even know if you were infected?
Occasionally I'll hit an online scanner, like the trend micro one. 0 positives, except for dodgy temporary files which will never get run. Don't get me wrong, I do end up with viruses and worms and malware planted on my system... they're just never run. If I'm actually suspicious of something I want to run, I'll throw it at an online scanner.
Regarding Flash exploits, I run flashblock (more for convenience than security) - most sites I'll block flash from just not wanting them to advertise to me.
Basically, I've had a windows system of 2 kinds open to the world for about 10 years, and I've been hit once by a virus/malware, and then not hard at all. - I think a lot of the hysteria about windows boxes getting owned prior to updates is just that - Hysteria. I've actually got my old win2k install, bootable in my current PC still... though I haven't launched it recently.
I'm running Windows Vista, installed a few years ago (very soon after Vista was released), no auto updates, disabled security that I could, always turn off defender at boot, running in administator account, no anti-virus. I'm not anal about the sites I visit - however I never run anything from a source I don't trust at least a bit.
No viruses, no slowdown. I've just moved my PC, but prior to that it was at over a month uptime (I know I should probably turn it off when I'm at work, but I'm lazy).
The myth about Windows installs necessarily degenerating and being inherently liable to viruses has to get squished soon - it does nothing for Linux. The users who you are trying to switch over will install any old thing whatever OS they are using.
ps. I just bought a new HD to install Linux on on my computer, I'll probably go Slackware since it's what I'm most familiar with. One of the reasons I'm not running Linux yet is because the fakeraid implementation was pretty technical when I got this computer, and I didn't want to jump right in and hose the partition (which is what the Ubuntu installer suggested... fortunately I knew enough about my system partitioning to not allow it to do that).