Laser eye surgery, from my perspective, amounts to _elective_ surgery on what I consider to be an irreplaceable part of my anatomy.
The article's not about you. You presumably work in a field where contacts or glasses are an option. If you're a fighter pilot and your vision is failing your career is simply over. That's completely understandable-- Glasses fall off, they fog, they skew perception. Contacts tend to fall out at inopportune times (like when the wind is in your face) and have to be taken out and cleaned, which would be less than convenient in a combat situation. They can get the surgery and continue to fly, or they can fret about the risks and go fly 747s for Delta.
Look at it from the Navy's perspective, too-- it takes years, if not a decade to train a "Top Gun", as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars. These guys are difficult to replace, to say the least. If minor and routine surgery will extend a pilot's usefulness you can damn well bet they're going to push for it.
Finally-- these guys are more than willing to take risks and even lay down their life for their country. What's the chance eye surgery will go wrong, versus the chance of sustaining a more serious injury (or worse) in a combat situation, or due to equiptment failure?
Creators do benefit from copyright, actually. When the laws were enacted way back when it was common practice to reprint author's works without permission or compensation. Often the original author's name would be be removed entirely, or abridged to the point where the original meaning was ruined. The laws today continue to protect creators from seeing their works misapproriated-- and it's pretty much the only power a creator has to protect himself.
I'm not saying copyright law isn't broken in many ways, and that public domain shouldn't come much sooner (if anything, there should be a differentiation between copyrights held by an individual and a corporation), but at the same time it does serve its original intent in protecting, say, the author who doesn't want Uwe Boll to turn his book into a hack movie, or a band who doesn't want Nike to use their song to sell shoes.
For one thing, police helicopters are loud and obvious. They're watching you, yes (in fact they have a crystal clear, high resolution view of the ground, even at night) but at least you know they're there. It's also easy to tell if their surveillance powers are being abused; if a helicopter was hovering over the same house for hours or returning night after night the object of the surveillance would know and be able to question why.
"Drones" are pretty much invisible. There's no accountability, because you don't even know they're there. That's where the paranoia comes in-- it's one thing to be watched some times if you know who's doing it (the cop on the beat), it's another to be potentially watched at all times by an invisible "eye in the sky". Not that I think they're going to be trailing average citizens for criticizing the government any time soon, but there can and will be abuses. Los Angeles and Orange County politicians are notorious for fighting dirty, and that includes the upper ranks of the LAPD.
Oh, and it's not just your activities in public (or your backyard) you should be worried about, those cameras are good at peering in windows too. Unless you keep your window shades down at all times (or covered in tin foil, of course.)
It is pretty shortsighted of you to think that there could not possibly have been another decent, free web browser.
Perhaps your memory is fuzzy, but back in the mid-nineties it was still very unclear where this Internet thing was going (and how to profit from it) and there was absolutely no guarantee that browsers would always be free. Or at least full-featured browsers.
When Netscape was the "king" they were most definitely testing the waters as to whether or not they could charge money... We probably would have seen something either like Opera's model (free with ads, pay to make them go away) or a tiered product where basic surfing was free, but additional features cost money to unlock. In fact they did do this with some features with their "Gold" edition and would probably have taken it to a further extreme with 5. Hell, they were selling boxed Netscape CDs in stores like CompUSA and Best Buy. We do have Microsoft IE to thank for nipping that idea in the bud... Yeah, they did it in an underhanded way, but that did ensure that browsers would be free.
Yes, someone would likely have come up with a free alternative-- but the Mozilla source would not have been there, which would have been a setback at the very least, and the public may have gotten accustomed to paying for their browser upgrades like they do with every other application.
PlayStation 2: Sony tries to make the PlayStation into a generic computer with a keyboard/mouse attachment
The primary purpose of the keyboard/mouse was for FPS games, not to turn the PS2 into a computer. They were trying to court hardcore PC gamers.
As far as the examples from the 80's go-- you're missing a big piece of the puzzle as to why they failed... Computers like the ADAM didn't really do anything. Even the home computers like the Commodore 64 and Atari 400 were not much more than game machines for everyone but tinkering geeks. There was no internet, word processing was limited at best, serious business applications were for IBM compatibles running DOS.
It does not require Windows XP and Windows Media Player 10, although it does work with that combo.
You're right, but Sandisk's site explicitly lists XP as a requirement. Which seems to be the norm with the iPod competitors, even the ones that work with any system just by dragging and dropping music files into folders. Do they just assume no OSX user would ever consider buying anything but an iPod?
Yay! Just like dogs! In case they get lost, any vet could read the RFID chip of your favorite immigrant/guest worker, and you could have him or her home in a matter of minutes!
I wonder why we bother with immigrants at all, when we could be enslaving those damn dirty apes.
They can't, of course, start cutting down trees or breaking things, but you're not allowed to prevent them from doing reasonable things such as traversing it or picking berries/mushrooms.
The question that comes to mind is, who's responsible when some nature n00b dies from eating a poison berry or mushroom picked on your territory?
Do you really swap out hard drives so often that you need a quick swap feature like that?
It's not about the frequency. It's that a) hard drive crashes are common, and it should be trivial to replace or upgrade; b) the average person does not know how to remove a drive before selling the computer or taking it in for repair.
Yeah, towers are easy, though still intimidating for many "average" users. But notebooks drives are often incredibly difficult to get to. It made sense for the drive to be heavily enclosed when it was one of the more expensive components of the computer. Now it's one of the cheapest as well as most frequently upgraded. And obviously it's the one part of the computer you don't want to fall into the wrong hands, and the wrong hands are sometimes even the repair guys themselves-- who knows what the $8 an hour guy at Best Buy is doing with your data?
I think it's high time manufacturers made hard drives as easy to insert and remove as a Nintendo cartridge. There's really no reason for them to be designed so that the average user can't swap it out himself, or remove it before selling the computer or taking it in for repair.
I don't think we should be applauding this...
on
Online Revenge
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The buyer seems to be in the right in this case and it seems the seller is getting what he deserves. But I would be hesitant to applaud the buyer too much and encourage copycats... For example, quite a few stolen laptops show up on eBay. I'd hate to see someone doubly victimized, both by getting their laptop stolen and by a pissed off buyer plastering their personal information and photos all over the internet.
"Branding" has as much to do with the retailer as the consumer. A separate brand will have it's own display and section at a store like Best Buy. More important, since the target audience is different the brand could be sold in stores that cater to a mature crowd-- and even stores that wouldn't otherwise carry games. Nintendo wants to reach the people making decisions in these stores, and "re-branding" certain games is an excellent way to do that (and to raise awareness that these games are to be sold to adults.)
On the consumer side, of course, the purpose is to try to remove the stigma of buying games. A 40-year old salesman may be embarrassed to play a DS on a plane right now because it's perceived as a product for kids. He might also shy away from the DS section of Target because it's mobbed with teenagers, and he knows he wants a puzzle game but doesn't know how to pick it out of the sea of flashy and cartoony packages. But if the DS and puzzle games are packaged in a more mature style and are available in a less kid-centric part of the store (like next to the iPods or PDAs) that stigma is removed.
I'd argue there was a generation between the 2600 (and Odyssey, which you failed to mention, though it was quite popular) and NES. The Atari 5200 (which, again, you failed to mention) and Colecovision were released a good five years after the 2600 and the systems were roughly as much of an improvement (if not more) as the 360 is to the original X-Box. They certainly considered them to be "next generation" systems back then.
That one seemed to be more Microsoft fulfilling a promise than anything.
Halo's not the only Microsoft affiliated game to be ported to the Mac platform. Offhand I can name Rise of Nations and Dungeon Siege, and I'm sure there are a few more.
Really... Microsoft and Apple are not the mortal enemies people make them out to be.
If you shell out $500-$1,500 today for an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player, then I think you're going to be pretty pissed to only get 540p when a $50 DVD player can put out 480p.
If you shell out $1000 for a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player today you'd better have money to burn, because they're going to be in Target for $79 in three or four years.
That might sound like a long time- but keep in mind, how long will it take the studios to really adopt HD-DVD on a grand scale? I'm not talking about the top ten current new releases, most of which will go straight to HD-DVD, or the next "Lord of the Rings Special Edition Box", but the tens of thousands of films in their back catalog? DVDs have been around for what, ten years now and there are still a LOT of movies from the 90's and earlier that are still only available on VHS. Not just obscure indie films, either.
Judging by this article, I'm not certain that this collaboration is such a good thing. It's nice that Spielberg likes games. But if you go to any major game development forum, such as gamedev, you'll see lots newbies who think that they already know how to make games just because they know how to play them.
Actually, Spielberg was a (if not "the") creative force behind Medal of Honor when it was first released on the Playstation. To be fair, I can't say with certainty his involvement wasn't much more than saying "Dreamworks should do a WW2 first person shooter" while filming Saving Private Ryan. Still, he's hardly a 'newbie.'
This is probably a troll, despite your claims otherwise, but in case it's not--
You are under no obligation to publish a blog, and that goes doubly so for posting pictures of your underage kids. You're the one putting your private life and your daughter's image out there for anyone to see. There are plenty of ways to make a subscriber-only blog or password protected photo albums. Hell, it's pretty easy to keep your site out of search engines in the first place. How can you genuinely claim concern over what traffic Google brings to your site, when you're the one who created the content? And what does this have to do with government agencies pressing corporations for private information anyway?
I could be wrong, but isn't the Airport card proprietary and not supported by Linux (which is one of his main concerns?) For that matter, is the Airport card even supported by Windows on the Macbook?
Not to be a dick, but I'm not sure you really paid attention to his concerns before suggesting the Macbook. He's looking for real world experience from people who've used Linux on notebooks extensively. He seems to be well aware of the existence of OSX and the Mac, but wants a machine that will run Linux with minimal hassle-- and there's no evidence right now that the Macbook will do so. Considering the machine was released yesterday I can't imagine you or anyone else can argue otherwise. I'm not bashing the Mac, but it's comments like this (gushing without substance) that get Apple users labels like "fanboy" and "zealot."
From what I most recently heard, they use a basic system where a copyright owner can object to a particular movie, and it's manually taken down by someone on their team. When a movie is taken down, their system also fingerprints the movie and automatically rejects any further submissions of movies with the same fingerprint.
If this is the case I can't imagine this system will last-- it's certainly not the copyright holder's responsibility to cruise YouTube to make sure no one is appropriating their works, and sooner or later an irate infringee will not be happy with a simple "sorry, we'll take it down" and sue for damages (I would imagine an example could be a scene from a movie still in production.)
I mean, you are essentially getting your moneys worth when buying a PS3, considering the price of a standalone next-gen DVD player.
Possibly, however, you certainly are NOT getting your money's worth if you don't give a shit about having the next gen DVD player, and that's where most of the population stands right about now.
Slashdot Mirror
Laser eye surgery, from my perspective, amounts to _elective_ surgery on what I consider to be an irreplaceable part of my anatomy.
The article's not about you. You presumably work in a field where contacts or glasses are an option. If you're a fighter pilot and your vision is failing your career is simply over. That's completely understandable-- Glasses fall off, they fog, they skew perception. Contacts tend to fall out at inopportune times (like when the wind is in your face) and have to be taken out and cleaned, which would be less than convenient in a combat situation. They can get the surgery and continue to fly, or they can fret about the risks and go fly 747s for Delta.
Look at it from the Navy's perspective, too-- it takes years, if not a decade to train a "Top Gun", as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars. These guys are difficult to replace, to say the least. If minor and routine surgery will extend a pilot's usefulness you can damn well bet they're going to push for it.
Finally-- these guys are more than willing to take risks and even lay down their life for their country. What's the chance eye surgery will go wrong, versus the chance of sustaining a more serious injury (or worse) in a combat situation, or due to equiptment failure?
Creators do benefit from copyright, actually. When the laws were enacted way back when it was common practice to reprint author's works without permission or compensation. Often the original author's name would be be removed entirely, or abridged to the point where the original meaning was ruined. The laws today continue to protect creators from seeing their works misapproriated-- and it's pretty much the only power a creator has to protect himself.
I'm not saying copyright law isn't broken in many ways, and that public domain shouldn't come much sooner (if anything, there should be a differentiation between copyrights held by an individual and a corporation), but at the same time it does serve its original intent in protecting, say, the author who doesn't want Uwe Boll to turn his book into a hack movie, or a band who doesn't want Nike to use their song to sell shoes.
For one thing, police helicopters are loud and obvious. They're watching you, yes (in fact they have a crystal clear, high resolution view of the ground, even at night) but at least you know they're there. It's also easy to tell if their surveillance powers are being abused; if a helicopter was hovering over the same house for hours or returning night after night the object of the surveillance would know and be able to question why.
"Drones" are pretty much invisible. There's no accountability, because you don't even know they're there. That's where the paranoia comes in-- it's one thing to be watched some times if you know who's doing it (the cop on the beat), it's another to be potentially watched at all times by an invisible "eye in the sky". Not that I think they're going to be trailing average citizens for criticizing the government any time soon, but there can and will be abuses. Los Angeles and Orange County politicians are notorious for fighting dirty, and that includes the upper ranks of the LAPD.
Oh, and it's not just your activities in public (or your backyard) you should be worried about, those cameras are good at peering in windows too. Unless you keep your window shades down at all times (or covered in tin foil, of course.)
It is pretty shortsighted of you to think that there could not possibly have been another decent, free web browser.
Perhaps your memory is fuzzy, but back in the mid-nineties it was still very unclear where this Internet thing was going (and how to profit from it) and there was absolutely no guarantee that browsers would always be free. Or at least full-featured browsers.
When Netscape was the "king" they were most definitely testing the waters as to whether or not they could charge money... We probably would have seen something either like Opera's model (free with ads, pay to make them go away) or a tiered product where basic surfing was free, but additional features cost money to unlock. In fact they did do this with some features with their "Gold" edition and would probably have taken it to a further extreme with 5. Hell, they were selling boxed Netscape CDs in stores like CompUSA and Best Buy. We do have Microsoft IE to thank for nipping that idea in the bud... Yeah, they did it in an underhanded way, but that did ensure that browsers would be free.
Yes, someone would likely have come up with a free alternative-- but the Mozilla source would not have been there, which would have been a setback at the very least, and the public may have gotten accustomed to paying for their browser upgrades like they do with every other application.
rotfl! ;)
rotfl! ;)
PlayStation 2: Sony tries to make the PlayStation into a generic computer with a keyboard/mouse attachment
The primary purpose of the keyboard/mouse was for FPS games, not to turn the PS2 into a computer. They were trying to court hardcore PC gamers.
As far as the examples from the 80's go-- you're missing a big piece of the puzzle as to why they failed... Computers like the ADAM didn't really do anything. Even the home computers like the Commodore 64 and Atari 400 were not much more than game machines for everyone but tinkering geeks. There was no internet, word processing was limited at best, serious business applications were for IBM compatibles running DOS.
Let's see, the top grossing computer games of 2005 were:
What I found most interesting about that list is that almost all of those games (except Guild Wars, AOE 3 and Battlefield 2) are available on the Mac.
It does not require Windows XP and Windows Media Player 10, although it does work with that combo.
You're right, but Sandisk's site explicitly lists XP as a requirement. Which seems to be the norm with the iPod competitors, even the ones that work with any system just by dragging and dropping music files into folders. Do they just assume no OSX user would ever consider buying anything but an iPod?
Yay! Just like dogs! In case they get lost, any vet could read the RFID chip of your favorite immigrant/guest worker, and you could have him or her home in a matter of minutes!
I wonder why we bother with immigrants at all, when we could be enslaving those damn dirty apes.
They can't, of course, start cutting down trees or breaking things, but you're not allowed to prevent them from doing reasonable things such as traversing it or picking berries/mushrooms.
The question that comes to mind is, who's responsible when some nature n00b dies from eating a poison berry or mushroom picked on your territory?
Do you really swap out hard drives so often that you need a quick swap feature like that?
It's not about the frequency. It's that a) hard drive crashes are common, and it should be trivial to replace or upgrade; b) the average person does not know how to remove a drive before selling the computer or taking it in for repair.
Yeah, towers are easy, though still intimidating for many "average" users. But notebooks drives are often incredibly difficult to get to. It made sense for the drive to be heavily enclosed when it was one of the more expensive components of the computer. Now it's one of the cheapest as well as most frequently upgraded. And obviously it's the one part of the computer you don't want to fall into the wrong hands, and the wrong hands are sometimes even the repair guys themselves-- who knows what the $8 an hour guy at Best Buy is doing with your data?
I think it's high time manufacturers made hard drives as easy to insert and remove as a Nintendo cartridge. There's really no reason for them to be designed so that the average user can't swap it out himself, or remove it before selling the computer or taking it in for repair.
The buyer seems to be in the right in this case and it seems the seller is getting what he deserves. But I would be hesitant to applaud the buyer too much and encourage copycats... For example, quite a few stolen laptops show up on eBay. I'd hate to see someone doubly victimized, both by getting their laptop stolen and by a pissed off buyer plastering their personal information and photos all over the internet.
"Branding" has as much to do with the retailer as the consumer. A separate brand will have it's own display and section at a store like Best Buy. More important, since the target audience is different the brand could be sold in stores that cater to a mature crowd-- and even stores that wouldn't otherwise carry games. Nintendo wants to reach the people making decisions in these stores, and "re-branding" certain games is an excellent way to do that (and to raise awareness that these games are to be sold to adults.)
On the consumer side, of course, the purpose is to try to remove the stigma of buying games. A 40-year old salesman may be embarrassed to play a DS on a plane right now because it's perceived as a product for kids. He might also shy away from the DS section of Target because it's mobbed with teenagers, and he knows he wants a puzzle game but doesn't know how to pick it out of the sea of flashy and cartoony packages. But if the DS and puzzle games are packaged in a more mature style and are available in a less kid-centric part of the store (like next to the iPods or PDAs) that stigma is removed.
I'd argue there was a generation between the 2600 (and Odyssey, which you failed to mention, though it was quite popular) and NES. The Atari 5200 (which, again, you failed to mention) and Colecovision were released a good five years after the 2600 and the systems were roughly as much of an improvement (if not more) as the 360 is to the original X-Box. They certainly considered them to be "next generation" systems back then.
That one seemed to be more Microsoft fulfilling a promise than anything.
Halo's not the only Microsoft affiliated game to be ported to the Mac platform. Offhand I can name Rise of Nations and Dungeon Siege, and I'm sure there are a few more.
Really... Microsoft and Apple are not the mortal enemies people make them out to be.
If you shell out $500-$1,500 today for an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player, then I think you're going to be pretty pissed to only get 540p when a $50 DVD player can put out 480p.
If you shell out $1000 for a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player today you'd better have money to burn, because they're going to be in Target for $79 in three or four years.
That might sound like a long time- but keep in mind, how long will it take the studios to really adopt HD-DVD on a grand scale? I'm not talking about the top ten current new releases, most of which will go straight to HD-DVD, or the next "Lord of the Rings Special Edition Box", but the tens of thousands of films in their back catalog? DVDs have been around for what, ten years now and there are still a LOT of movies from the 90's and earlier that are still only available on VHS. Not just obscure indie films, either.
Judging by this article, I'm not certain that this collaboration is such a good thing. It's nice that Spielberg likes games. But if you go to any major game development forum, such as gamedev, you'll see lots newbies who think that they already know how to make games just because they know how to play them.
Actually, Spielberg was a (if not "the") creative force behind Medal of Honor when it was first released on the Playstation. To be fair, I can't say with certainty his involvement wasn't much more than saying "Dreamworks should do a WW2 first person shooter" while filming Saving Private Ryan. Still, he's hardly a 'newbie.'
The foot means it's a joke.
This is probably a troll, despite your claims otherwise, but in case it's not--
You are under no obligation to publish a blog, and that goes doubly so for posting pictures of your underage kids. You're the one putting your private life and your daughter's image out there for anyone to see. There are plenty of ways to make a subscriber-only blog or password protected photo albums. Hell, it's pretty easy to keep your site out of search engines in the first place. How can you genuinely claim concern over what traffic Google brings to your site, when you're the one who created the content? And what does this have to do with government agencies pressing corporations for private information anyway?
I could be wrong, but isn't the Airport card proprietary and not supported by Linux (which is one of his main concerns?) For that matter, is the Airport card even supported by Windows on the Macbook?
Not to be a dick, but I'm not sure you really paid attention to his concerns before suggesting the Macbook. He's looking for real world experience from people who've used Linux on notebooks extensively. He seems to be well aware of the existence of OSX and the Mac, but wants a machine that will run Linux with minimal hassle-- and there's no evidence right now that the Macbook will do so. Considering the machine was released yesterday I can't imagine you or anyone else can argue otherwise. I'm not bashing the Mac, but it's comments like this (gushing without substance) that get Apple users labels like "fanboy" and "zealot."
Neat. Of course these "Old Men" you speak of were your age once, and you will be one of them one day, so, you know, there you go.
From what I most recently heard, they use a basic system where a copyright owner can object to a particular movie, and it's manually taken down by someone on their team. When a movie is taken down, their system also fingerprints the movie and automatically rejects any further submissions of movies with the same fingerprint.
If this is the case I can't imagine this system will last-- it's certainly not the copyright holder's responsibility to cruise YouTube to make sure no one is appropriating their works, and sooner or later an irate infringee will not be happy with a simple "sorry, we'll take it down" and sue for damages (I would imagine an example could be a scene from a movie still in production.)
I mean, you are essentially getting your moneys worth when buying a PS3, considering the price of a standalone next-gen DVD player.
Possibly, however, you certainly are NOT getting your money's worth if you don't give a shit about having the next gen DVD player, and that's where most of the population stands right about now.