That would be a dead-end. As 64-bit becomes the norm, the Vista kernel requires Microsoft-signed drivers. Are you going to pay Microsoft for the honor of providing a driver for their OS?
All the OSS community needs is the right to install their own root cert for drivers. (They don't even need it preinstalled by MS... they just need to be able to do it period.)
This wouldn't even impact Vista's DRM related stuff, because the 'mpaa/bluray/hdmi/protected-media-path' crap requires drivers signed by the MPAA not Microsoft. (In practice the drivers are currently signed by both, but the point remains. If MS allowed us to install our own trusted root certs and sign our own oss drivers, the MPAA wouldn't care, because -they- didn't sign them, so hidef blu-ray playback etc will be disabled, and everyone is happy.
Does microsoft object to us installing our our certs, or self-signing code? Can you think of a single reason why they would? Think about why x64 requires signed drivers... it has more to do with genuine security and reliability than anything else.
But it IS already possible to install your own cert, and sign code you compile yourself, and run it in x64 with driver signing turned ON. Check out the Microsoft Driver Development Kit, etc.
The reason it isn't easier and more widespread and well known is that there isn't much demand for it, outside actual driver developers.
Is that all YOU'VE got. The fact that you labeled it a herring doesn't make it one, and I'm tired of absorbing your pointless abuse. Make your case or walk away.
You mean least harm was all you had?
Least harm is enough. What have you got that supports your position that its not? Oh, right, nothing, except more passive aggressive ad hominem. Why should I bother to go further abroad?
So in fact, the way your head works, is that you believe in your version of "least harm" more than you believe in free speech. Which just happened to be my point all along.
There you go again: "your version of least harm".
I suppose I could say, "So in fact, the way your head works, is that you clearly believe in your version of free speech to the exclusion of least harm. Which just happens to be my point all along. You clearly think free speech somehow will magically lead to least harm and also manage to avoid running into conflict with any other principle, but that's obviously absurd. Of course, you've resolved any conflicts by convincing yourself they don't exist, by asserting that any conflict is either somehow not an example of free speech, or pretending that it doesn't cause harm.
See, I can be a condescending dick too. Its actually harder not to. You should try it.
BTW, the problem with your version of least harm is that you are clearly more interested in short term harm than long term harm.
And that would be a ANOTHER strawman. I didn't say anything of the sort, I do not believe anything of the sort. I said "least harm", and I stand by it. Seeing as you disagree, make your case.
BTW 'it leads to fascism' isn't an argument; its an unsupported conclusion.
You clearly do not even know what you're talking about. Please spend some time using OS X or at least do a bit of research before you try to troll again.
He probably would if he didn't have to commit 100% and buy a bloody mac to spend some time using it.
That is -my- only complaint about OSX, I don't like the hardware. I'm not talking about the 'value' or the price, I just straight up don't like it. I want a Core 2 Quad in a mini tower that will take a couple hard drives, video card upgrades, and some PCI/PCI-express cards as needed.
I don't want an overkill Xeon or two. I don't want an all-in-one imac.
On the laptop front, I want a tablet, or maybe an ultraportable like the macbook air. The modbook is too much money (given that you have to buy a macbook and then frankenstein it) and its not functional enough. I'm also interested in GPS and cellular data support as optional built-ins which apple doesn't offer, and definitely more usb ports than the air sports (ie more than ONE).
On the pricing front, apple's store is ridiculous for the 'upgrade' pricing, ridiculous to the point of obscene. Sure I buy the base model upgrade it myself, and sell off the spare parts, but I shouldn't have to.
Bottom line, I'd be a potential OSX customer, but their hardware just doesn't line up with my requirements. I'd consider a hackintosh... or a psystar... but I'm just not that desperate to run OSX. I had an old G4 tower that I quite liked, and G3's before that in beige tower and desktop boxes that I was very happy with, and I had an original ibook when I was in university... but now I don't have a single mac, not that I don't want OSX, but just just don't want their hardware.
Pretty much the 'stereotypes' I was hoping for. My point isn't that ass-guy isn't the best for the job; he might me. My point is more that when doing interviews you seem to either have far too many applications to filter, or far too few. If the latter, sure interview them all... but if the former, you can't... and people have to be eliminated, and only returned to if the candidates interviewed are unsatisfactory.
So if I was going to interview 10 people, and these three were sitting at 9,10,11, I'd cut ass-guy. If these three were 10,11,12 then I don't know, ass-guy is still gone... I'd probably pick family-guy...as it happens I just taught my kids to ride so there's an element of commonality and shared experience there "we do the same stuff". But if it was just pictures of him at his wedding, or gardening, then I'd probably pick PS3-guy.
So if in reality, all 3 would have been suitable hires, ass-guy doesn't get his chance. If I'd actually interviewed him, he'd have impressed me, but he was out of the running before he got a shot.
If in reality, ps3-guy was a script-kiddie scene type,who probably copied his walk-thru from someone else, and family-guy turned out to be a droning-moron, then yeah, I reject them and interview ass-guy and if it turns out he comes accross as mature he's got the job.
But your public presentation is essentially part of your resume. It helps recruiters decide whether you ever get the interview. If it makes you look good you rise up the pile, if it makes you look like an ass then you sink down.
Yes. And why would you bother doing anything for an employer who is petty enough to hold your web presence against you?
Think of it more as an employer who uses how you act in public as part of the selection process. Given three otherwise identical candidates, with equivalent resumes: one has a facebook page with pictures of him lighting his ass hair on fire, the 2nd has some generic pictures of him teaching his kids to ride a bike, the 3rd has a pictorial walkthru on how to mod a PS3 to run DOS and use a Wii controller to enter commands.
Assuming you are hiring for a tech type job, which one do you call first? second? last?
First, nitpick (or, being charitable to my intentions, "opportunity for education"): you mean prescribes, not proscribes.
Heh. Thanks. I thought it looked off, but the spell check didn't complain, so I didn't dig deeper.
IMO, it's irrelevant whether the majority of US citizens feels that abortion should or should not be performed. That is simply not a question that should be legislated federally.
In your opinion. I'm guessing your pro-choice. (FWIW I am too.) But if you believed that abortion was equivalent to murdering innocent babies as some pro-lifers argue, then there would be no question that federal legislation is entirely appropriate.
I'm not quite sure what you're suggesting, but I don't see any effective way to have 51% of candidate A and 49% of candidate B performing a single executive role.
Agreed. But there are a number of powers assigned to the president that I think would be better vested in more representative bodies like congress and the senate that would diminish the importance of the president. And a number of the 'so-called' checks and balances haven't proven terribly effective in practice when push comes to shove.
According to whose ethics? The classic example being abortion -- some feel that abortion is not wrong, others feel abortion is wrong. And please no one start a debate about abortion -- it's a very polarizing subject (and irrelevant to the topic at hand). But that's why it's such a good example.
Our system of government already proscribes a solution: take a vote. And take another one periodically to make sure it reflects what people want.
Not everyone will be happy with the result, and they can work to educate others on their point of view, and if they manage to convince enough people to agree with them, when its time to take the next vote they'll win.
For an issue that's really contentious, polarizing, and has approaching a 50/50 split, arbitrators should suggest compromises, and the people will vote on those. Nobody outright 'wins', but everybody gets at least something. And odds are we'll find a compromise that consistently wins, and it works on a philosophical level too.
(Hell, this is how presidential elections should be run... when 51% vote one guy and 49% vote the other, there is no way it should be be winner take all, where 49% of the population can just stuff it.
No, the debate is whether or not one can truthfully claim they believe in free speech and yet be perfectly happy to censor speech they don't like.
Note quite. Nobody said merely 'not liking it' is sufficient. They have to appeal to another universal principle that would require preventing that speech. The principle of least harm, for example. If the speech is harmful to society or even individuals then preventing it could be supported by the principle of least harm.
Whether or not speech can be considered harmful devolved into a debate about the nature of free will.
All of your examples are attempts to prove that the world is full of hypocrisy so therefore your particular hypocrisy must be truth rather than hypocrisy.
There is nothing hypocritical about believing in more than one principle. There is nothing hypocritical about having to find a balance when multiple principles conflict.
When I talk about fascism I am pointing out to you where your particular brand of hypocrisy leads in societies that have embraced it.
Any set of principles which a society embraces will have conflicts. Accepting that and coping with it isn't hypocrisy and doesn't lead to fascism.
And it probably requires a player that isn't set in the "release in america, then elsewhere" model.
But that doesn't explain why there weren't released in Asia, then showing up here.
The answer to that is that the american telcos strictly limit the handsets that are available, and impose strict limitations on their features, require them to be branded to the carrier.
Its almost a testament to Apple's market power that they were able to release their product without it being utterly and completely crippled by the carrier. I doubt any one else could have done that... I seriously doubted apple would have been able to pull it off. I would have believed it more likely that apple would launch their own carrier piggybacking off one of the telcos systems before they'd be able to get the telcos to carry it directly.
Of course Apple is even more closed than most carrier offerings, so its not like we've really moved forward on opening things up.
I'm reaching the point where I laugh and roll my eyes every time you claim something I've said is false, because its usually followed by you proving my point and simultaneously being completely unwilling to fathom it, while, of course, pronouncing how "wrong I must be".
But the debate really has nothing to do with free speech or democracy or fascism. The debate comes down to the nature of free will. We evidently disagree on what free will is.
Why are 80 percent of touch screen phones marketed in Asia? Why aren't the touch screens being created for the Asian market showing up here?
The american cellular market has the telco as the gatekeeper. Each handset that shows up here has to get past them; and they are only interested in 'showcasing' a limited number of handsets.
With the one exception of the nVidia proprietary driver (which I use over the open-source driver for performance reasons, not stability reasons), every last driver on my machine came with the kernel.
You know, there is really no reason whatsoever that you can't use an open source driver with windows. The driver API is well published, and there is nothing stopping the community from stepping up and writing its own drivers.
The biggest reason oss drivers exist for linux is that the vendors couldn't be bothered. There is really nothing stopping the oss community from writing oss drivers for windows.
I can use drivers that I know will work and that I know will be extremely stable. I'm sure someone out there is using some strange hardware combination and this is his cue to pipe up that this was not his experience, but I believe the vast majority of desktop Linux users can say the same thing.
I guess that's my cue: until extremely recently wireless was a nightmare, it still is sometimes; multiple monitors is still half-baked; SLI/Crossfire is even worse. Gizmos like usb-network adapters, print-server boxes that use 'virtual usb ports', and all sorts of other stuff just doesn't work.
The Windows approach is demonstrably inferior in this case, and I just don't believe that Microsoft is the pitiful helpless victim that's powerless to change this.
Microsoft would be perfectly happy if the OSS community released drivers, especially for hardware the vendor has abandoned.
That certainly is true, but then, why should so many user applications have the ability to affect the rest of the operating system?
If you install crap on Linux it screws it up too. For the moment, there isn't a lot of useless browser toolbars to popup ads because the scumware creators don't see much ROI... yet... but if linux ever became mainstream, the crapflood will come.
Luckily for apple, they are the sole vendor, so they don't have to worry about OEMS crufting up your Mac for a few extra nickles, and the crud makers have to do it the old fasioned way... convince end users to install it. But it is starting to appear.
Its all about responsibility and your belief distributes responsibility for a person's actions to anyone they have ever interacted with
Something like that.
which is antithetical to the concept of free will
Not at all. The fact that other people can share in the responsibility for your actions doesn't mean you aren't responsible for your own actions, and it doesn't mean you don't have free will.
It would in your on-off binary universe, but that isn't how the real one works.
In the real world, the actions of others (including their speech) changes and shapes the choices of others. Everyone has the freedom to make their own choices, but their choices are limited, and stacked.
A trivial example would be a US election. Everyone can exercise free will when they vote. Yet they only have a handful of choices of what they may vote for. More over depending on where they live, in many cases we can guess with high probability what they will vote. Its not that they are really any different than people elsewhere, or have lost the freedom to choose, but they have been shaped and molded by their upbringing to the point where we can predict their vote before its case. They have freedom to choose, but the influences in their lives will direct enough of them in a given direction that we can predict it.
and democracy
He who can influence what the most people think wins. Advertising works. That's democracy. Or did you think the US wanted George Bush to be President? Not that I'm saying they wanted Kerry. But I suspect if you opened it wide open, most Americans wanted neither.
The dirty sekret is that the dealerships couldn't either. They simply resorted to part-swapping to confirm their half-assed diagnosis(manufacturer flow charts(Step 14: Replace with known good part), NOT actual testing).
I don't disagree. But often replacing with 'known good part' is often a more efficient use of time than testing.
I HIGHLY suspect that your a victim of that same process. One good reason to AUTOMATICALLY suspect your bill when there is more then one component replaced. If there was, more then likely, the first part didn't fix it, but the second did, and they want to get paid for the time it took to install the first part, so they simply tell you one part "took out" the other.
I agree there are plenty of dirty mechanics out there too.
But a lot of customers would rather have 3 new parts and peace of mind that its fixed than 1 new part, higher labour costs for testing and reinstallation of used parts, and a reasonable chance they'll be back next week getting one of the others replaced... or worst possible case that one of the other piece "took out" the piece they replaced AGAIN. Especially if the price for new parts is close to a wash anyway compared to the extra labour that would be required to swap the old ones back in.
If I'm repairing a PC that's crashing a lot for seemingly no reason one of the first things I do is swap in a new powersupply. (becuase testing an old one is time consuming, and if it was a cheap power supply to start its just not worth it). If that doesn't fix it, the next suspect might be the RAM. If that solves it... do I go back and restore the old PS?
Somestimes yes, sometimes no. If the old was was embarassingly cheap, and/or the fan was starting to go then no, even if it wasn't the problem. I don't want to have to fix this PC again next week, and that powersupply was likely to be a problem soon; it might even be responsible for the fried ram.
If its not my PC I'd give the owner the choice and my recommendation. They usually elect to keep the new power supply. (And I don't bill my friends labour to fix their PCs, just parts... so it straight up costs more to keep it. If I was billing them, and they had to pay me to test their old one, measure the voltage levels under different loads, and then replace it... it would be that much more sensible getting a newer (and higher quality one) rather than paying for my time.
You showed that it is a serial process and that the last step is "minds choose" In your diagram nothing happens without "minds choose."
The choice minds make is altered by speech that came before it. When its at the point that they choose what YOU chose to maliciously influence them to choose you share responsibility for the action.
Either you are responsible for your actions or you are not. It is a binary state.
Life just isn't that simple.
You are normally responsible for your own actions. You are also responsible for the actions of others if you influenced them.
Naturally all human interaction including speech is inevitably influential, so the perceived degree of influence and perceived intent of your influence is taken into account.
Your premise - ideas cause auctions. You will never find that in an authoritative dictionary. The best you can do is that ideas cause more ideas.
speech -> influences minds -> minds choose -> compels the body to act
It really is that simple.
The fact that the mind can choose to reject the speech, or exercise free will in any number of ways doesn't detract from the fact that speech and influence have a direct impact on the particular actions the mind chooses.
If speech happens to accompany the threat, punishing someone for the threat is not a restriction of speech.
Stopping/punishing someone for saying something, ANYTHING, is a restriction of speech.
I perceive your posts to be a threat to myself and my freedoms, so off to jail with you.
You see, I said what the people people, meaning society as a whole. That is entirely different than what YOU perceive. Moreover, yes, if -society- perceived my posts to be a threat to themselves and their freedoms, off to jail I go. That is exactly my point. That is in fact precisely how the world works.
It is not the perception that matters, it is the intent.
Correct. But there is NO way to know the intent. There is only what society can percieve the intent to be. So for all practical purposes, perception is more important because its all we ever actually know.
You might as well argue that food should be banned because the calories it provides are what enable people to kill and maim.
Certain drugs are banned precisely because they alter the chemistry of the mind, and enable people to harm themselves or others... and when you think about it: altering the brain chemistry is all that an idea really does too.
Your premise - ideas cause auctions.
ideas do not equal speech
Re:Are Quests in MMOGs doable?
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Quests
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· Score: 1
Things like that already happen somewhat in WoW, when it comes to higher lvls acting as a help to lower lvls.
Predominantly in stupid pathetic ways.
Is a common thing that lower lvls will pay for runs through lower lvl instances by a higher lvl, or paying for them to help in a quest that requires more than one person.
That would be a good example of stupid and pathetic. Do you really think a level 15 player getting a level 70 to 'help' him with an instance is anything but pathetic? Why doesn't he get a group of level 14-17 and beat it with them? Maybe even learn some tactics, and how to play his class in the process. That's actually what the game was designed to be played. Its how the first wave of players played... and guess what they had a lot more fun doing it too, far more then the leeches who came after.
The fact that you can play the first 4/5ths of WoW by following a level 70 around is sad, the fact that you'd advocate this is pathetic.
Can you imagine if single player games were like that. You load up Baldurs gate, and then have your max-level friend join the game, and he kills everything while you follow him looting stuff. Ooo fun.
Then you fire up Need for Speed... and someone else drives you around in all the hard parts! Woooohooo!
Or even paying for enchants, items and craft when you twink a character. There's always interaction between lower and higher levels.
The game wasn't really designed with the idea that the low level characters would just mooch off the leavings of the higher level characters. The idea was that you'd help people around your own level range accomplish common goals, not power level or twink lowbies.
Why do you think there are all those level limits, and stat requirements, no drop, and binding items, and so on? Its to limit this mooching to keep it from getting utterly and completely out of hand.
So that hopefully you'll venture out on your own, and have an adventure where you stand or fall by you and your groups skills rather than relying on a grown-up to hold your hand all the fricking time.
When it comes to guilds, I've seen hardcore raiding ones that have lvling guilds at one side, where the members can level and learn their classes, and then when they consider them ready, move them to the main guild.
Think about that for a minute. A leveling guild, there to powerlevel you through first 4/5ths of the game as quickly as possible and get you up to speed so you can be low man on the totem pole in their main guild, and play the last 1/5th of the game over and over again until you die of boredom.
Good stuff. Take away the entire journey of discovery by spoon-feeding everything I need to know about the game in some sort of glorified bootcamp. And then drop me into the biggest grindfest of them all, endgame raiding. Yeah, sign me up to that.
Again, lets put it into single player terms... buying Super Mario Brothers, being told immediately where all the warp-tunnels are, and how to solve every maze and tunnel, then warping to world 8, and just doing that over and over again. Never seeing much of anything else. Never discovering a secret for yourself. Hurray! Way to suck all the fun out a game. What kind of people choose to play games like that? The distinct minority of people in MMOG endgame guilds.
Re:It gives you something just as bad...
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Review: Spore
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Also as far as people who have a 360 goes, how many of them download games from the Internet then disconnect the console from the network? Nobody I know.
I agree. Probably not very many.
But the point stands: If I give away my copy of Guitar Hero... can I give away all the add-on tracks with it? If I buy a title on XBL, and decide I don't care for it; but since you like it, can I give it to you?
My original point was that DRM =is= starting to make using things you bought for your console a lot more of a hassle than "He who holds the disk can play the game" model of the past. And its getting progressively worse. Within a generation or two you'll be straight up required to have internet access offline won't be an option; at that point the games die when the server is turned off.
Again, I don't see any need to grand stand about copyrights on this. If I pay $5 for a copy of Galaga, I'm not going to whine about it not being around forever.
And what if you couldn't buy Galaga because 20 years ago when it was made, it was locked up on some DRM platform that expired, there were no emulators, no copies of the rom floating around for fans to play, and the company went under or got bought out by a pharmaceutical company for some patent that just shut down and ignored the game rights it ended up with.
Then there'd be no Galaga anymore. How is that a 'win' for anyone?
If you don't like it, don't buy it,
Not buying it doesn't solve the problem. The game is still lost. A piece of our culture is still gone forever.
You can buy most titles on different platforms and if preservation is your goal, get the original arcade roms and PC versions.
The original arcade roms and PC versions are all heading down the same DRM / internet phone home path. There, very soon, is going to be a lot of stuff that's online only.
Right now, you can still go back and have a retro moment and play something from your old NES. 20 years from now, you likely won't be able to legally do that with a lot of the stuff on your xbox 360. You might not give a shit, but a lot of people do.
Re:It gives you something just as bad...
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Review: Spore
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· Score: 1
And "I'll bet your ass" (whatever that means) micropayment titles are easily moved from one Xbox to the next because it's tied to your XBox Live information. If you go over to a friend's house, you can simply log in your controller manually, download the game again (free), and everyone can enjoy that title.
And apparently this is a pretty recent feature. Of course, its only good for as long as MS decides to make the online tool available, and you can only do this once every 12 months.
According to the article, the PS3 on the other hand apparently doesn't tie it to your console, just your profile... but in either case you still can't transfer them to someone elses account. So reselling them is pretty much off limits. As is lending them to your friends.
Also, if you xbox dies, just keep the hard drive and slap it into a new xbox. Everything should work. If the drive itself dies, get a new one and log in with your account. Again, go download whatever you bought before and it'll work.
Not quite that simple. See above link.
Of course, the problems will crop up some day when the games are no longer available for download. But 99% of the general public isn't in this for a permanent investment to begin with, they are dropping 5-10 bucks for an indefinite amount of time being entertained.
Copyright is designed to encourage and reward creativity. Combined with DRM it results in the permanent destruction of works, and the removal of them from our culture.
If we can't copy them until they expire and enter the public domain, that means to do things legally: 1) we have to preserve the originals and the technology to access them for a hundred years. 2) 100 years from now, not only are we coping with rare antiquated technology, deteriorated originals, but we have to break the DRM too. 3) And its not clear that even if we did all that would we be clear of a DMCA violation, because it doesn't actually require that the drm being circumvented apply to a work actually still protected by copyright. On the upside, since its out of copyright, no one should have standing to sue... unless violating the DMCA is criminal (or is criminal 100 years from now).
That's ridiculous. If we had to wait 100 years before we're allowed to copy a c64 title, how many do you think will make it?
Re:Are Quests in MMOGs doable?
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Quests
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Thats simple. All you have to do put a limit on how much time a player can spend log'd in.
I've often thought that might be workable. Its actually how the old BBS games used to work, since phone lines were limited, you had to restrict people to a limited set of time just to let people play. It worked very well, and everyone could compete effectively... even if they -gasp- had a job or life.
This will never happen though
Agreed. Sadly.
as hardcore gammers tend to be the most loyal and spend the most money. So executives will keep trying to please everyone
That is an interesting assumption. I'm not sure its actually true.
1) Perhaps casuals are less loyal because the games are designed to punish us for being casuals. The ridiculous hard-core time sinks and blocked unaccessible raid-only content, being relagated to scavenging the hardcore leavings from the auction house because that's the most "efficient" way to gear up... etc... all weighs heavily against us, and ruin the fun, and burns us out and bores us.
2) Perhaps casuals in a game designed for them, would be every bit as loyal as a hard core, because the challenges and timesinks were appropriate.
3) Hardcores may spend "more money", but the casuals are more profitable. The guy who logs in 10 hours a month pays the same $15/mo as a hard core, but uses a tiny fraction of the content and bandwidth that a hardcore does. He's also far less likely to raise a massive stink about some perceived class or weapon imbalance he's perceived.
4) Casuals vastly outnumber the hardcores. I remember reading the statistics for everquest once that they published in a newsletter. The number of active (meaning paid) accounts that were multiple years old that didn't have a character past 50th level or higher was shocking. The number of paid multiple year accounts that didn't have a single character "flagged" or "keyed" for various high level zones was staggering. Something like 95% of accounts had never been to the top end Luclin Zone (Vex Thal), or visited Tier 2 planes in Planes of Power. (They later relaxed the requirements to get in... I'm not sure exactly.) The significant majority of players didn't have their "Epic 1.0" item, and this was at a point, YEARS after they were introduced, but were still considered 'good' to 'very good' for most classes and a desireable status symbol even if you'd gotten something better. (and really only a hardcore had much shot of having something much better in most cases) at the time.
Overall most of the players had at least one high level player, and spent the vast majority of their time mucking around in the pre-endgame content of the most recent expansion or two.
Everquest was clearly not designed for the majority of its players. WoW I'm confident isn't either, although I've never seen numbers to back it up.
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That would be a dead-end. As 64-bit becomes the norm, the Vista kernel requires Microsoft-signed drivers. Are you going to pay Microsoft for the honor of providing a driver for their OS?
All the OSS community needs is the right to install their own root cert for drivers. (They don't even need it preinstalled by MS... they just need to be able to do it period.)
This wouldn't even impact Vista's DRM related stuff, because the 'mpaa/bluray/hdmi/protected-media-path' crap requires drivers signed by the MPAA not Microsoft. (In practice the drivers are currently signed by both, but the point remains. If MS allowed us to install our own trusted root certs and sign our own oss drivers, the MPAA wouldn't care, because -they- didn't sign them, so hidef blu-ray playback etc will be disabled, and everyone is happy.
Does microsoft object to us installing our our certs, or self-signing code? Can you think of a single reason why they would? Think about why x64 requires signed drivers... it has more to do with genuine security and reliability than anything else.
But it IS already possible to install your own cert, and sign code you compile yourself, and run it in x64 with driver signing turned ON. Check out the Microsoft Driver Development Kit, etc.
The reason it isn't easier and more widespread and well known is that there isn't much demand for it, outside actual driver developers.
My running friends all have laughed at the ipod offering as a gadget and not a real tool.
My running friends all have laughed your running friends for thinking they need 'real tools' in order to run.
Again on the herring.
Is that all YOU'VE got. The fact that you labeled it a herring doesn't make it one, and I'm tired of absorbing your pointless abuse. Make your case or walk away.
You mean least harm was all you had?
Least harm is enough. What have you got that supports your position that its not? Oh, right, nothing, except more passive aggressive ad hominem. Why should I bother to go further abroad?
So in fact, the way your head works, is that you believe in your version of "least harm" more than you believe in free speech. Which just happened to be my point all along.
There you go again: "your version of least harm".
I suppose I could say, "So in fact, the way your head works, is that you clearly believe in your version of free speech to the exclusion of least harm. Which just happens to be my point all along. You clearly think free speech somehow will magically lead to least harm and also manage to avoid running into conflict with any other principle, but that's obviously absurd. Of course, you've resolved any conflicts by convincing yourself they don't exist, by asserting that any conflict is either somehow not an example of free speech, or pretending that it doesn't cause harm.
See, I can be a condescending dick too. Its actually harder not to. You should try it.
BTW, the problem with your version of least harm is that you are clearly more interested in short term harm than long term harm.
And that would be a ANOTHER strawman. I didn't say anything of the sort, I do not believe anything of the sort. I said "least harm", and I stand by it. Seeing as you disagree, make your case.
BTW 'it leads to fascism' isn't an argument; its an unsupported conclusion.
But are unable to explain your belief without relying on misdirection.
You think least harm is achieved with completely unrestricted speech. I don't. We disagree.
There is no conflict between "least harm" and free speech.
'blah blah blah...'
I obviously disagree.
'nuff said.
You clearly do not even know what you're talking about. Please spend some time using OS X or at least do a bit of research before you try to troll again.
He probably would if he didn't have to commit 100% and buy a bloody mac to spend some time using it.
That is -my- only complaint about OSX, I don't like the hardware. I'm not talking about the 'value' or the price, I just straight up don't like it. I want a Core 2 Quad in a mini tower that will take a couple hard drives, video card upgrades, and some PCI/PCI-express cards as needed.
I don't want an overkill Xeon or two. I don't want an all-in-one imac.
On the laptop front, I want a tablet, or maybe an ultraportable like the macbook air. The modbook is too much money (given that you have to buy a macbook and then frankenstein it) and its not functional enough. I'm also interested in GPS and cellular data support as optional built-ins which apple doesn't offer, and definitely more usb ports than the air sports (ie more than ONE).
On the pricing front, apple's store is ridiculous for the 'upgrade' pricing, ridiculous to the point of obscene. Sure I buy the base model upgrade it myself, and sell off the spare parts, but I shouldn't have to.
Bottom line, I'd be a potential OSX customer, but their hardware just doesn't line up with my requirements. I'd consider a hackintosh... or a psystar... but I'm just not that desperate to run OSX. I had an old G4 tower that I quite liked, and G3's before that in beige tower and desktop boxes that I was very happy with, and I had an original ibook when I was in university... but now I don't have a single mac, not that I don't want OSX, but just just don't want their hardware.
Pretty much the 'stereotypes' I was hoping for. My point isn't that ass-guy isn't the best for the job; he might me. My point is more that when doing interviews you seem to either have far too many applications to filter, or far too few. If the latter, sure interview them all... but if the former, you can't... and people have to be eliminated, and only returned to if the candidates interviewed are unsatisfactory.
So if I was going to interview 10 people, and these three were sitting at 9,10,11, I'd cut ass-guy. If these three were 10,11,12 then I don't know, ass-guy is still gone... I'd probably pick family-guy...as it happens I just taught my kids to ride so there's an element of commonality and shared experience there "we do the same stuff". But if it was just pictures of him at his wedding, or gardening, then I'd probably pick PS3-guy.
So if in reality, all 3 would have been suitable hires, ass-guy doesn't get his chance. If I'd actually interviewed him, he'd have impressed me, but he was out of the running before he got a shot.
If in reality, ps3-guy was a script-kiddie scene type,who probably copied his walk-thru from someone else, and family-guy turned out to be a droning-moron, then yeah, I reject them and interview ass-guy and if it turns out he comes accross as mature he's got the job.
But your public presentation is essentially part of your resume. It helps recruiters decide whether you ever get the interview. If it makes you look good you rise up the pile, if it makes you look like an ass then you sink down.
Yes. And why would you bother doing anything for an employer who is petty enough to hold your web presence against you?
Think of it more as an employer who uses how you act in public as part of the selection process. Given three otherwise identical candidates, with equivalent resumes: one has a facebook page with pictures of him lighting his ass hair on fire, the 2nd has some generic pictures of him teaching his kids to ride a bike, the 3rd has a pictorial walkthru on how to mod a PS3 to run DOS and use a Wii controller to enter commands.
Assuming you are hiring for a tech type job, which one do you call first? second? last?
First, nitpick (or, being charitable to my intentions, "opportunity for education"): you mean prescribes, not proscribes.
Heh. Thanks. I thought it looked off, but the spell check didn't complain, so I didn't dig deeper.
IMO, it's irrelevant whether the majority of US citizens feels that abortion should or should not be performed. That is simply not a question that should be legislated federally.
In your opinion. I'm guessing your pro-choice. (FWIW I am too.) But if you believed that abortion was equivalent to murdering innocent babies as some pro-lifers argue, then there would be no question that federal legislation is entirely appropriate.
I'm not quite sure what you're suggesting, but I don't see any effective way to have 51% of candidate A and 49% of candidate B performing a single executive role.
Agreed. But there are a number of powers assigned to the president that I think would be better vested in more representative bodies like congress and the senate that would diminish the importance of the president. And a number of the 'so-called' checks and balances haven't proven terribly effective in practice when push comes to shove.
According to whose ethics? The classic example being abortion -- some feel that abortion is not wrong, others feel abortion is wrong. And please no one start a debate about abortion -- it's a very polarizing subject (and irrelevant to the topic at hand). But that's why it's such a good example.
Our system of government already proscribes a solution: take a vote. And take another one periodically to make sure it reflects what people want.
Not everyone will be happy with the result, and they can work to educate others on their point of view, and if they manage to convince enough people to agree with them, when its time to take the next vote they'll win.
For an issue that's really contentious, polarizing, and has approaching a 50/50 split, arbitrators should suggest compromises, and the people will vote on those. Nobody outright 'wins', but everybody gets at least something. And odds are we'll find a compromise that consistently wins, and it works on a philosophical level too.
(Hell, this is how presidential elections should be run... when 51% vote one guy and 49% vote the other, there is no way it should be be winner take all, where 49% of the population can just stuff it.
No, the debate is whether or not one can truthfully claim they believe in free speech and yet be perfectly happy to censor speech they don't like.
Note quite. Nobody said merely 'not liking it' is sufficient. They have to appeal to another universal principle that would require preventing that speech. The principle of least harm, for example. If the speech is harmful to society or even individuals then preventing it could be supported by the principle of least harm.
Whether or not speech can be considered harmful devolved into a debate about the nature of free will.
All of your examples are attempts to prove that the world is full of hypocrisy so therefore your particular hypocrisy must be truth rather than hypocrisy.
There is nothing hypocritical about believing in more than one principle. There is nothing hypocritical about having to find a balance when multiple principles conflict.
When I talk about fascism I am pointing out to you where your particular brand of hypocrisy leads in societies that have embraced it.
Any set of principles which a society embraces will have conflicts. Accepting that and coping with it isn't hypocrisy and doesn't lead to fascism.
And it probably requires a player that isn't set in the "release in america, then elsewhere" model.
But that doesn't explain why there weren't released in Asia, then showing up here.
The answer to that is that the american telcos strictly limit the handsets that are available, and impose strict limitations on their features, require them to be branded to the carrier.
Its almost a testament to Apple's market power that they were able to release their product without it being utterly and completely crippled by the carrier. I doubt any one else could have done that... I seriously doubted apple would have been able to pull it off. I would have believed it more likely that apple would launch their own carrier piggybacking off one of the telcos systems before they'd be able to get the telcos to carry it directly.
Of course Apple is even more closed than most carrier offerings, so its not like we've really moved forward on opening things up.
False. It is called voting for a write-in.
I'm reaching the point where I laugh and roll my eyes every time you claim something I've said is false, because its usually followed by you proving my point and simultaneously being completely unwilling to fathom it, while, of course, pronouncing how "wrong I must be".
But the debate really has nothing to do with free speech or democracy or fascism. The debate comes down to the nature of free will. We evidently disagree on what free will is.
So be it.
Why are 80 percent of touch screen phones marketed in Asia? Why aren't the touch screens being created for the Asian market showing up here?
The american cellular market has the telco as the gatekeeper. Each handset that shows up here has to get past them; and they are only interested in 'showcasing' a limited number of handsets.
With the one exception of the nVidia proprietary driver (which I use over the open-source driver for performance reasons, not stability reasons), every last driver on my machine came with the kernel.
You know, there is really no reason whatsoever that you can't use an open source driver with windows. The driver API is well published, and there is nothing stopping the community from stepping up and writing its own drivers.
The biggest reason oss drivers exist for linux is that the vendors couldn't be bothered. There is really nothing stopping the oss community from writing oss drivers for windows.
I can use drivers that I know will work and that I know will be extremely stable. I'm sure someone out there is using some strange hardware combination and this is his cue to pipe up that this was not his experience, but I believe the vast majority of desktop Linux users can say the same thing.
I guess that's my cue: until extremely recently wireless was a nightmare, it still is sometimes; multiple monitors is still half-baked; SLI/Crossfire is even worse. Gizmos like usb-network adapters, print-server boxes that use 'virtual usb ports', and all sorts of other stuff just doesn't work.
The Windows approach is demonstrably inferior in this case, and I just don't believe that Microsoft is the pitiful helpless victim that's powerless to change this.
Microsoft would be perfectly happy if the OSS community released drivers, especially for hardware the vendor has abandoned.
That certainly is true, but then, why should so many user applications have the ability to affect the rest of the operating system?
If you install crap on Linux it screws it up too. For the moment, there isn't a lot of useless browser toolbars to popup ads because the scumware creators don't see much ROI ... yet... but if linux ever became mainstream, the crapflood will come.
Luckily for apple, they are the sole vendor, so they don't have to worry about OEMS crufting up your Mac for a few extra nickles, and the crud makers have to do it the old fasioned way... convince end users to install it. But it is starting to appear.
Its all about responsibility and your belief distributes responsibility for a person's actions to anyone they have ever interacted with
Something like that.
which is antithetical to the concept of free will
Not at all. The fact that other people can share in the responsibility for your actions doesn't mean you aren't responsible for your own actions, and it doesn't mean you don't have free will.
It would in your on-off binary universe, but that isn't how the real one works.
In the real world, the actions of others (including their speech) changes and shapes the choices of others. Everyone has the freedom to make their own choices, but their choices are limited, and stacked.
A trivial example would be a US election. Everyone can exercise free will when they vote. Yet they only have a handful of choices of what they may vote for. More over depending on where they live, in many cases we can guess with high probability what they will vote. Its not that they are really any different than people elsewhere, or have lost the freedom to choose, but they have been shaped and molded by their upbringing to the point where we can predict their vote before its case. They have freedom to choose, but the influences in their lives will direct enough of them in a given direction that we can predict it.
and democracy
He who can influence what the most people think wins. Advertising works. That's democracy. Or did you think the US wanted George Bush to be President? Not that I'm saying they wanted Kerry. But I suspect if you opened it wide open, most Americans wanted neither.
and thus leads directly to fascism.
What exactly do you think fascism means?
The dirty sekret is that the dealerships couldn't either. They simply resorted to part-swapping to confirm their half-assed diagnosis(manufacturer flow charts(Step 14: Replace with known good part), NOT actual testing).
I don't disagree. But often replacing with 'known good part' is often a more efficient use of time than testing.
I HIGHLY suspect that your a victim of that same process. One good reason to AUTOMATICALLY suspect your bill when there is more then one component replaced. If there was, more then likely, the first part didn't fix it, but the second did, and they want to get paid for the time it took to install the first part, so they simply tell you one part "took out" the other.
I agree there are plenty of dirty mechanics out there too.
But a lot of customers would rather have 3 new parts and peace of mind that its fixed than 1 new part, higher labour costs for testing and reinstallation of used parts, and a reasonable chance they'll be back next week getting one of the others replaced... or worst possible case that one of the other piece "took out" the piece they replaced AGAIN. Especially if the price for new parts is close to a wash anyway compared to the extra labour that would be required to swap the old ones back in.
If I'm repairing a PC that's crashing a lot for seemingly no reason one of the first things I do is swap in a new powersupply. (becuase testing an old one is time consuming, and if it was a cheap power supply to start its just not worth it). If that doesn't fix it, the next suspect might be the RAM. If that solves it... do I go back and restore the old PS?
Somestimes yes, sometimes no. If the old was was embarassingly cheap, and/or the fan was starting to go then no, even if it wasn't the problem. I don't want to have to fix this PC again next week, and that powersupply was likely to be a problem soon; it might even be responsible for the fried ram.
If its not my PC I'd give the owner the choice and my recommendation. They usually elect to keep the new power supply. (And I don't bill my friends labour to fix their PCs, just parts... so it straight up costs more to keep it. If I was billing them, and they had to pay me to test their old one, measure the voltage levels under different loads, and then replace it ... it would be that much more sensible getting a newer (and higher quality one) rather than paying for my time.
You showed that it is a serial process and that the last step is "minds choose"
In your diagram nothing happens without "minds choose."
The choice minds make is altered by speech that came before it. When its at the point that they choose what YOU chose to maliciously influence them to choose you share responsibility for the action.
Either you are responsible for your actions or you are not. It is a binary state.
Life just isn't that simple.
You are normally responsible for your own actions.
You are also responsible for the actions of others if you influenced them.
Naturally all human interaction including speech is inevitably influential, so the perceived degree of influence and perceived intent of your influence is taken into account.
And as long as you do not accept that "minds choose" is the one and only arbiter of the final result, then you are a fascist.
And as long as you do not accept that the choices minds make is not heavily influenced by the 'speech' around them, then you are an idiot.
Your premise - ideas cause auctions. You will never find that in an authoritative dictionary. The best you can do is that ideas cause more ideas.
speech -> influences minds -> minds choose -> compels the body to act
It really is that simple.
The fact that the mind can choose to reject the speech, or exercise free will in any number of ways doesn't detract from the fact that speech and influence have a direct impact on the particular actions the mind chooses.
If speech happens to accompany the threat, punishing someone for the threat is not a restriction of speech.
Stopping/punishing someone for saying something, ANYTHING, is a restriction of speech.
I perceive your posts to be a threat to myself and my freedoms, so off to jail with you.
You see, I said what the people people, meaning society as a whole. That is entirely different than what YOU perceive. Moreover, yes, if -society- perceived my posts to be a threat to themselves and their freedoms, off to jail I go. That is exactly my point. That is in fact precisely how the world works.
It is not the perception that matters, it is the intent.
Correct. But there is NO way to know the intent. There is only what society can percieve the intent to be. So for all practical purposes, perception is more important because its all we ever actually know.
You might as well argue that food should be banned because the calories it provides are what enable people to kill and maim.
Certain drugs are banned precisely because they alter the chemistry of the mind, and enable people to harm themselves or others... and when you think about it: altering the brain chemistry is all that an idea really does too.
Your premise - ideas cause auctions.
ideas do not equal speech
Things like that already happen somewhat in WoW, when it comes to higher lvls acting as a help to lower lvls.
Predominantly in stupid pathetic ways.
Is a common thing that lower lvls will pay for runs through lower lvl instances by a higher lvl, or paying for them to help in a quest that requires more than one person.
That would be a good example of stupid and pathetic. Do you really think a level 15 player getting a level 70 to 'help' him with an instance is anything but pathetic? Why doesn't he get a group of level 14-17 and beat it with them? Maybe even learn some tactics, and how to play his class in the process. That's actually what the game was designed to be played. Its how the first wave of players played... and guess what they had a lot more fun doing it too, far more then the leeches who came after.
The fact that you can play the first 4/5ths of WoW by following a level 70 around is sad, the fact that you'd advocate this is pathetic.
Can you imagine if single player games were like that. You load up Baldurs gate, and then have your max-level friend join the game, and he kills everything while you follow him looting stuff. Ooo fun.
Then you fire up Need for Speed... and someone else drives you around in all the hard parts! Woooohooo!
Or even paying for enchants, items and craft when you twink a character. There's always interaction between lower and higher levels.
The game wasn't really designed with the idea that the low level characters would just mooch off the leavings of the higher level characters. The idea was that you'd help people around your own level range accomplish common goals, not power level or twink lowbies.
Why do you think there are all those level limits, and stat requirements, no drop, and binding items, and so on? Its to limit this mooching to keep it from getting utterly and completely out of hand.
So that hopefully you'll venture out on your own, and have an adventure where you stand or fall by you and your groups skills rather than relying on a grown-up to hold your hand all the fricking time.
When it comes to guilds, I've seen hardcore raiding ones that have lvling guilds at one side, where the members can level and learn their classes, and then when they consider them ready, move them to the main guild.
Think about that for a minute. A leveling guild, there to powerlevel you through first 4/5ths of the game as quickly as possible and get you up to speed so you can be low man on the totem pole in their main guild, and play the last 1/5th of the game over and over again until you die of boredom.
Good stuff. Take away the entire journey of discovery by spoon-feeding everything I need to know about the game in some sort of glorified bootcamp. And then drop me into the biggest grindfest of them all, endgame raiding. Yeah, sign me up to that.
Again, lets put it into single player terms... buying Super Mario Brothers, being told immediately where all the warp-tunnels are, and how to solve every maze and tunnel, then warping to world 8, and just doing that over and over again. Never seeing much of anything else. Never discovering a secret for yourself. Hurray! Way to suck all the fun out a game. What kind of people choose to play games like that? The distinct minority of people in MMOG endgame guilds.
Also as far as people who have a 360 goes, how many of them download games from the Internet then disconnect the console from the network? Nobody I know.
I agree. Probably not very many.
But the point stands: If I give away my copy of Guitar Hero... can I give away all the add-on tracks with it? If I buy a title on XBL, and decide I don't care for it; but since you like it, can I give it to you?
My original point was that DRM =is= starting to make using things you bought for your console a lot more of a hassle than "He who holds the disk can play the game" model of the past. And its getting progressively worse. Within a generation or two you'll be straight up required to have internet access offline won't be an option; at that point the games die when the server is turned off.
Again, I don't see any need to grand stand about copyrights on this. If I pay $5 for a copy of Galaga, I'm not going to whine about it not being around forever.
And what if you couldn't buy Galaga because 20 years ago when it was made, it was locked up on some DRM platform that expired, there were no emulators, no copies of the rom floating around for fans to play, and the company went under or got bought out by a pharmaceutical company for some patent that just shut down and ignored the game rights it ended up with.
Then there'd be no Galaga anymore. How is that a 'win' for anyone?
If you don't like it, don't buy it,
Not buying it doesn't solve the problem. The game is still lost. A piece of our culture is still gone forever.
You can buy most titles on different platforms and if preservation is your goal, get the original arcade roms and PC versions.
The original arcade roms and PC versions are all heading down the same DRM / internet phone home path. There, very soon, is going to be a lot of stuff that's online only.
Right now, you can still go back and have a retro moment and play something from your old NES. 20 years from now, you likely won't be able to legally do that with a lot of the stuff on your xbox 360. You might not give a shit, but a lot of people do.
And "I'll bet your ass" (whatever that means) micropayment titles are easily moved from one Xbox to the next because it's tied to your XBox Live information. If you go over to a friend's house, you can simply log in your controller manually, download the game again (free), and everyone can enjoy that title.
You'd be wrong.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080627-more-than-a-year-too-late-microsoft-fixes-360-drm-with-license-tool.html
And apparently this is a pretty recent feature. Of course, its only good for as long as MS decides to make the online tool available, and you can only do this once every 12 months.
According to the article, the PS3 on the other hand apparently doesn't tie it to your console, just your profile... but in either case you still can't transfer them to someone elses account. So reselling them is pretty much off limits. As is lending them to your friends.
Also, if you xbox dies, just keep the hard drive and slap it into a new xbox. Everything should work.
If the drive itself dies, get a new one and log in with your account. Again, go download whatever you bought before and it'll work.
Not quite that simple. See above link.
Of course, the problems will crop up some day when the games are no longer available for download. But 99% of the general public isn't in this for a permanent investment to begin with, they are dropping 5-10 bucks for an indefinite amount of time being entertained.
Copyright is designed to encourage and reward creativity. Combined with DRM it results in the permanent destruction of works, and the removal of them from our culture.
If we can't copy them until they expire and enter the public domain, that means to do things legally:
1) we have to preserve the originals and the technology to access them for a hundred years.
2) 100 years from now, not only are we coping with rare antiquated technology, deteriorated originals, but we have to break the DRM too.
3) And its not clear that even if we did all that would we be clear of a DMCA violation, because it doesn't actually require that the drm being circumvented apply to a work actually still protected by copyright. On the upside, since its out of copyright, no one should have standing to sue... unless violating the DMCA is criminal (or is criminal 100 years from now).
That's ridiculous. If we had to wait 100 years before we're allowed to copy a c64 title, how many do you think will make it?
Thats simple. All you have to do put a limit on how much time a player can spend log'd in.
I've often thought that might be workable. Its actually how the old BBS games used to work, since phone lines were limited, you had to restrict people to a limited set of time just to let people play. It worked very well, and everyone could compete effectively... even if they -gasp- had a job or life.
This will never happen though
Agreed. Sadly.
as hardcore gammers tend to be the most loyal and spend the most money. So executives will keep trying to please everyone
That is an interesting assumption. I'm not sure its actually true.
1) Perhaps casuals are less loyal because the games are designed to punish us for being casuals. The ridiculous hard-core time sinks and blocked unaccessible raid-only content, being relagated to scavenging the hardcore leavings from the auction house because that's the most "efficient" way to gear up ... etc... all weighs heavily against us, and ruin the fun, and burns us out and bores us.
2) Perhaps casuals in a game designed for them, would be every bit as loyal as a hard core, because the challenges and timesinks were appropriate.
3) Hardcores may spend "more money", but the casuals are more profitable. The guy who logs in 10 hours a month pays the same $15/mo as a hard core, but uses a tiny fraction of the content and bandwidth that a hardcore does. He's also far less likely to raise a massive stink about some perceived class or weapon imbalance he's perceived.
4) Casuals vastly outnumber the hardcores. I remember reading the statistics for everquest once that they published in a newsletter. The number of active (meaning paid) accounts that were multiple years old that didn't have a character past 50th level or higher was shocking. The number of paid multiple year accounts that didn't have a single character "flagged" or "keyed" for various high level zones was staggering. Something like 95% of accounts had never been to the top end Luclin Zone (Vex Thal), or visited Tier 2 planes in Planes of Power. (They later relaxed the requirements to get in... I'm not sure exactly.) The significant majority of players didn't have their "Epic 1.0" item, and this was at a point, YEARS after they were introduced, but were still considered 'good' to 'very good' for most classes and a desireable status symbol even if you'd gotten something better. (and really only a hardcore had much shot of having something much better in most cases) at the time.
Overall most of the players had at least one high level player, and spent the vast majority of their time mucking around in the pre-endgame content of the most recent expansion or two.
Everquest was clearly not designed for the majority of its players. WoW I'm confident isn't either, although I've never seen numbers to back it up.