I realize that there's probably not a single company in the world that reuses IP as much as Nintendo, but I can't help but think "bullshit" when I see or hear somebody comment that they don't want to play another game with Mario in it. You just can't empathize. It's like ambience in a restaurant. It doesn't affect gameplay, but at some point I personally got turned off by the whole Mario universe. Overexposure.
I might as well say that I'm tired of playing games with AK-47's. Or, if you want to stick to the playable characters, soldiers. Lots of games have a distinctive look to their soldiers, but I get burned out on genres too. I'm sick of first-person shooters. I'm also sick of the giant, in-your-face, screaming monster you see in these games too. This particular image has been done to death.
I think the most persuasive thing in those commercials was the $399 price. $600 and $500 were just too much. A $400 price just in time for Christmas just might save their console.
The Snopes article you link to puts the day after Thanksgiving in the top 4-8 days of the year. It also says "The consistent holiday shopping trend is that sales figures spike on the day after Thanksgiving, drop sharply immediately afterwards, then steadily increase throughout December, peaking on the four days comprising the two weekends before Christmas." So it's hard to say, based on the Snopes article, what the overall impact would be for the whole week, but I would expect more sales, not fewer.
The "myth" it is busting is that it is the biggest shopping day of the year. Maybe it's overhyped, but it's certainly big.
I re-arranged and consolidated my reply to make it as coherent and succint as possible.
What exactly is the problem with doing business with a corporation? [...] I don't know what non-profit and tax law requires, but I'd believe the Foundation would be restricted in the use of its assets (which includes the Corp.) in the same way as for any other non-profit. My point is that it's claimed that the Corporation gives them freedom from legal issues when dealing with corporations, yet they still have to deal with the Corporation as a corporation. What have they gained? How is it claimed that they both have freedom as a corporation and proper restrictions at the same time?
Don't you think a ten-fold increase in staff size is significant? Why couldn't this ten-fold increase have been done under the Foundation?
The salaries of the Corp.'s officers are reported in their tax statement, available online. I could only find the tax statement for the Foundation. Presumably the Corporation filed a separate tax document. Does Mitchell Baker pull a salary from both?
The Foundation's Board of Trustees certainly wouldn't approve of any money-making scams Seems that there is some overlap between the boards.
But tell me, if this was their plan all along, why haven't they done something like this already? What is their rush? Why cause an uproar when they can take their time and cover their tracks?
It's interesting that the Mozilla community isn't making the big accusations of corruption and control by Google [...] One community member even suggested Mozilla was being too pure and should try to get rich! I'm not surprised. I often see this attitude from the community towards it's benefactors.
Understandable, but this sounds like a "guilty until proven innocent" attitude. Accusing a person or organization of being corrupt because they could be corrupt is FUD. I think the $50+ million from Google followed by creating a for-profit corporation to handle that revenue justifies the skepticism.
Every time Mozilla wanted to work on some project with a corporation (like the arrangements with their default search engines or the creation of customized partner builds for eBay and others), they had to consult lawyers to find out if it was legal. Oversight for a non-profit is a good thing. But besides that, I don't see how using the Mozilla Corporation as a proxy is any different from working with a 3rd party corporation. Either way a business deal is going on with a corporation.
The key part of Mozilla's arrangement is that the Foundation is the sole shareholder of the Corporation; the employees don't get any shares to sell off in some kind of IPO (though they'd make a ton of money doing so). This allows it to generate revenue easily through the Corporation, but requires that this revenue must then be used for non-profit purposes (i.e. supporting the project and the internet). How is this requirement enforced? If the for-profit wanted to spend $10 million as salaried compensation for its top brass, what would prevent them from doing so? They wouldn't even have to report it publically, since they aren't a public corporation.
The increase in revenue, though, has been very fruitful to the project. Didn't they already have this revenue before the for-profit? Didn't they already spend money on developers, QA, etc?
From what I can tell, the Mozilla Foundation grew Firefox with goodwill, donations, and other community support under the heading of a non-profit. They then received a $50+ million yearly windfall from Google. They transferred this windfall from a non-profit to a for-profit in a shell game in which they have complete freedom to do with the money as they wish, with no accountability to the public, and the community is expected to believe that everything will be on the up-and-up.
It's happened before with non-profits, and that's why I have no faith in them. Color me jaded.
I agree that the two attacks listed start to approach 9/11, though I'll say 9/11 was at least ten times bigger. You still have answered the question of who you would have invaded in response. What government was threatening worse attacks? Northern Ireland was already under control of the British army.
By the same reasoning you would accept it as ok when Jihad is declared on America. No, because I don't see the US as at war against Islam. However, I can't fault Iraqis who fight against occupation.
Except that the USA attacked Iraq, and by and large these people weren't planning terrorist actions against the US, or probably much anyone else outside of Iraq. I never said I agreed to the Iraq war. I just said that comparing 3,000 dead to the number of traffic deaths is simplistic and doesn't take into account all the causes of the Iraq war. Before the invasion I was ambivalent.
On the one hand it seemed to me that we had good cause to take out Saddam during the Gulf War, but since we let him stay it was clearly a war of aggression to start it a decade later. On the other hand, after 9/11 the idea that we would sit around while an enemy acquired WMD after throwing out the inspectors didn't sound too good either.
I lived in the UK during some of the bombings - and they were far more frequent than anything that the USA has experienced - and the amazing thing was the amount of restraint that the UK showed. I don't know much about the Northern Ireland conflict. Was there a 9/11 size attack in the UK? Was there a government that officially gave sanctuary to the terrorists? And lastly, weren't you guys already in Northern Ireland, conducting combat operations? Who would you have invaded?
I do know that the Afghanistan government was giving official sanctuary to Osama and his organization, and that for me and most of the world was enough reason to go in. Iraq was a different matter, and in hindsight a terrible mistake, especially considering all the lies told leading up to the invasion.
So why have we spent over $600 billion since 9/11 fighting global terror? Because 3,000 people died in a terrorist attack. You're just looking at number of deaths that died from the initial strike. There are more things to consider, like the economic impact of losing the World Trade Center, the disruption to society, and how all the debris affected the surrounding area.
And here's the real kicker -- are cars aren't going to conspire to kill more of us. Whereas after 9/11 it seems like bigger targets such as cities would be considered fair game. That's why the Iraq war was hinged on WMD.
I'm not saying I agree with the Iraq war, but just that using the 3,000 death number as your sole criteria is myopic. I definitely agreed with the Afghanistan war. Did you? And if so, it must have been justified by something more than 3,000 people dying vs the number of traffic deaths.
I personally enjoyed Crimson Skies as well - I thought the controls were very solid, good environments, and (most importantly) was a lot of fun to play. I agree about the environments, controls, and physics of the game. It was a pure joy to fly around in. Some of the missions, though, were extremely frustrating. I ended up quitting the game in the middle, on a very annoying cave mission that I just couldn't get out of without stalling.
If a game is going to have frustrating missions then it really needs to let you save the game at any point in the mission. I hate repeating the same old crap just to lose again at a critical juncture.
Having followed Mozilla very closely for the past several years, I can tell you that these people are not in it for the money; they are religiously devoted to the idea of advancing the Open Web for the public good. Could you explain, then, why they created the for-profit corporation?
They could have made way more money by selling shares in the Mozilla Corp., instead of having it be fully owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, but they didn't. I don't even understand how a non-profit can own a for-profit. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Feynman was damning of NASA management in his investigation of the Challenger disaster when it came to evaluating safety. I also saw a show on the disaster, where they had interviews with the engineers of the contractor responsible for the o-rings. The head engineer had been screaming for a while that the o-rings were a problem in cold weather, and he finally convinced his management to call NASA to scrub the launch.
The night before the launch they had a conference call with NASA, and told NASA that they should cancel the flight. NASA pressured them to reconsider, and as the contractor was up for a contract renewal, they caved in.
Not only that, one of the astronauts had told his wife that he expected the flight would be canceled, because the weather was too cold. What was management thinking? They were either too incompetent to evaluate safety correctly, or reckless.
The need for a Messiah, as I see it, is strictly a Terran problem. It's strictly a "what religion do you believe?" problem. Not all people on earth subscribe to a need for a Messiah. There's an infinite number of religious scenarios you can make up for us and a hypothetical alien race. The "Messiah", in particular, is Judaic.
Understood. By the way, I don't buy the idea that music was better before than it is now. This is said by every generation of music listeners. Most stuff put out it is crap, and always has been, with a few good songs mixed in.
What creates legal obligations are copyright law and licenses. Red Hat only has rights to distribute FSF code via the GPL. It's quite obvious that Red Hat is selling an operating system as a whole, derived in large parts from FSF owned GNU. Without the FSF code Red Hat would have no operating system to sell. Your claims of "mere aggregation" are specious, and don't stand up to any scrutiny.
I agree with your position about try before you buy, and then buy if you like. I just don't understand paying $5 for something you don't like, just because you might like it later. If you like it later then why not just buy it then?
"The GNU Project was not, is not, a project to develop specific software packages. It was not a project to develop a C compiler, although we did that. It was not a project to develop a text editor, although we developed one. The GNU Project's aim was to develop a complete free Unix-like system: GNU."
Now it sounds like you would like the FSF to make a claim a claim on all of RedHat. No, I want them to make a claim on the parts they own. It's obvious Red Hat is distributing an operating system as a single product. A very large portion of that is based on GNU. Linus chose to make his kernel GPL for exactly this reason -- so that he could distribute it with GNU. It is not "mere aggregation", and to claim so is completely disingenuous.
However, this is a reason to recruit more and better patent examiners (and in particular more in the area of computing), not to throw out the entire system. Before there were software patents the industry innovated just fine without them. There is absolutely no need for software patents.
Slashdot Mirror
Google says it was from his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.
Ha, I love the ringing endorsement from 11-year old girls. That's the worst compliment you could have given the Wii for the average Slashdotter gamer.
I think the most persuasive thing in those commercials was the $399 price. $600 and $500 were just too much. A $400 price just in time for Christmas just might save their console.
The Snopes article you link to puts the day after Thanksgiving in the top 4-8 days of the year. It also says "The consistent holiday shopping trend is that sales figures spike on the day after Thanksgiving, drop sharply immediately afterwards, then steadily increase throughout December, peaking on the four days comprising the two weekends before Christmas." So it's hard to say, based on the Snopes article, what the overall impact would be for the whole week, but I would expect more sales, not fewer.
The "myth" it is busting is that it is the biggest shopping day of the year. Maybe it's overhyped, but it's certainly big.
From what I can tell, the Mozilla Foundation grew Firefox with goodwill, donations, and other community support under the heading of a non-profit. They then received a $50+ million yearly windfall from Google. They transferred this windfall from a non-profit to a for-profit in a shell game in which they have complete freedom to do with the money as they wish, with no accountability to the public, and the community is expected to believe that everything will be on the up-and-up.
It's happened before with non-profits, and that's why I have no faith in them. Color me jaded.
I agree that the two attacks listed start to approach 9/11, though I'll say 9/11 was at least ten times bigger. You still have answered the question of who you would have invaded in response. What government was threatening worse attacks? Northern Ireland was already under control of the British army.
Ok, then the next question is why did you submit a product plug as a story? And why would the editors accept a story labeled as such?
I looked. Which one do you claim as the 9/11 size attack? And again, who would you have invaded in response, as you were already in Northern Ireland?
On the one hand it seemed to me that we had good cause to take out Saddam during the Gulf War, but since we let him stay it was clearly a war of aggression to start it a decade later. On the other hand, after 9/11 the idea that we would sit around while an enemy acquired WMD after throwing out the inspectors didn't sound too good either. I lived in the UK during some of the bombings - and they were far more frequent than anything that the USA has experienced - and the amazing thing was the amount of restraint that the UK showed. I don't know much about the Northern Ireland conflict. Was there a 9/11 size attack in the UK? Was there a government that officially gave sanctuary to the terrorists? And lastly, weren't you guys already in Northern Ireland, conducting combat operations? Who would you have invaded?
I do know that the Afghanistan government was giving official sanctuary to Osama and his organization, and that for me and most of the world was enough reason to go in. Iraq was a different matter, and in hindsight a terrible mistake, especially considering all the lies told leading up to the invasion.
And here's the real kicker -- are cars aren't going to conspire to kill more of us. Whereas after 9/11 it seems like bigger targets such as cities would be considered fair game. That's why the Iraq war was hinged on WMD.
I'm not saying I agree with the Iraq war, but just that using the 3,000 death number as your sole criteria is myopic. I definitely agreed with the Afghanistan war. Did you? And if so, it must have been justified by something more than 3,000 people dying vs the number of traffic deaths.
If a game is going to have frustrating missions then it really needs to let you save the game at any point in the mission. I hate repeating the same old crap just to lose again at a critical juncture.
Feynman was damning of NASA management in his investigation of the Challenger disaster when it came to evaluating safety. I also saw a show on the disaster, where they had interviews with the engineers of the contractor responsible for the o-rings. The head engineer had been screaming for a while that the o-rings were a problem in cold weather, and he finally convinced his management to call NASA to scrub the launch.
The night before the launch they had a conference call with NASA, and told NASA that they should cancel the flight. NASA pressured them to reconsider, and as the contractor was up for a contract renewal, they caved in.
Not only that, one of the astronauts had told his wife that he expected the flight would be canceled, because the weather was too cold. What was management thinking? They were either too incompetent to evaluate safety correctly, or reckless.
Intelligent people can hold irrational beliefs. It's not an all or nothing situation.
Understood. By the way, I don't buy the idea that music was better before than it is now. This is said by every generation of music listeners. Most stuff put out it is crap, and always has been, with a few good songs mixed in.
What creates legal obligations are copyright law and licenses. Red Hat only has rights to distribute FSF code via the GPL. It's quite obvious that Red Hat is selling an operating system as a whole, derived in large parts from FSF owned GNU. Without the FSF code Red Hat would have no operating system to sell. Your claims of "mere aggregation" are specious, and don't stand up to any scrutiny.
Buh bye.
I agree with your position about try before you buy, and then buy if you like. I just don't understand paying $5 for something you don't like, just because you might like it later. If you like it later then why not just buy it then?
"The GNU Project was not, is not, a project to develop specific software packages. It was not a project to develop a C compiler, although we did that. It was not a project to develop a text editor, although we developed one. The GNU Project's aim was to develop a complete free Unix-like system: GNU." Now it sounds like you would like the FSF to make a claim a claim on all of RedHat. No, I want them to make a claim on the parts they own. It's obvious Red Hat is distributing an operating system as a single product. A very large portion of that is based on GNU. Linus chose to make his kernel GPL for exactly this reason -- so that he could distribute it with GNU. It is not "mere aggregation", and to claim so is completely disingenuous.
Ah, the dirty truth. How refreshing!