Given the Elder Scrolls 3&4 and Fallout 3 experience... virtually 0.
Of course, also judging by those experiences, and unless they uncharacteristically gimp modding, I'd guess that the probability of somebody doing it is hovering at 3... and not percent, I'm talking statistics: I predict that not only is the likelihood of that to be certain, but I further predict that it will be done at least 3 times over.
Last I checked there were still psychotic diehards out there modding and patching Morrowind.
Because they turn around and BAAWWWW to the general public, government, and anyone else who will listen, and make life harder for everyone. They can't really whine about people buying second hand, because there is a baseline assumption that you can and should be able to do so... but piracy is another story.
So basically, by pirating a game, you cause injury to a legitimate activity which the game publishers actually wish to squelch. That's the real problem.
"Isn't any draconian law antithetical to prosperity?"
No, not really. You could pretty easily make a draconian law to that effect, but you can't possibly say that a law which (for example) allows suspected drunk drivers to be executed on the side of the road (extremely draconian) would realistically prevent everyone from being prosperous.
"I think the interesting question in this case is where the line is between "draconian" and "impotent". You'd think there would be a huge area in between, but we don't seem to be able to find it: a few people are getting penalised absurdly for relatively minor infractions, while millions of people continue to break the law at the expense of legal rightsholders and get away with it."
There is, and we used to have it, but people complained about the costs (which is ironic, because the solution is so very much more expensive in the long run) and "unfairness" (to be fair, there was a lot of it, but since there still is, so perhaps the flaw lies elsewhere...): we actually used to empower fairly low-level government officials and bureaucrats to use their god-given brains and make decisions. The upside was that rather than having one official with the ability to half-make decisions and 200 lackeys who serve to shuffle around paperwork in triplicate, we could have 3 or 4 officials with 1 or 2 secretaries each and spend a fraction as much (though far more per person... decision makers are expensive) to get far more done. The downside was that these people had huge amounts of discretionary power to abuse, and did so, blatantly. So now we pay a whole bunch more, have a lot more people involved, are less able to actually get anything done, and still have massive iniquities and waste. Go us.
"It's as if the objective is to criticize the government and the arguments vary according to the discussion."
No "as if" needed... that is precisely the objective. Government is universally bad, private sector is universally good, prove the point truthily by whatever means necessary. They've been calling this a culture war all along, how is anyone surprised that they are acting appropriately?
Presumably the advantage is that what they have now doesn't work well and that they are concerned it will continue to work less and less until some arbitrary point in the future where they would have to declare it no longer works at all, and that what they're changing to seems to resolve the issue.
Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure that somebody at Digg is aware of that particular catchphrase.
Because while that sounds all well and good, it isn't actually a feasible plan at all. It's one of those things that stops making sense once you apply real, finite, numbers of students and dollars to the equation.
The real reason Conservatives are so Gung-Ho about private education is that it short circuits universal accessibility, quality control, and most of all any real public influence on the content of what is taught: the corporate overlords want their serfs to be uneducated and highly propagandized. By the way, you're a serf.
He would. Because he's a Communist. And a Nazi. And that's what communists/Nazis do. Somebody yelled it on TV, then broke down crying, then berated somebody else for being gay... which by Internet rules makes it the absolute gospel truth.
Fun fact: everywhere has serious problems, nothing is perfect. Of course, if you don't pretend that an improvement must lead to perfection in order to be meaningful, you start to see where maybe our system could be better.
The important question isn't "does the alternative have problems?", much more useful to ask "would we rather have the set of problems belonging to the alternative, or the set of problems belonging to the status quo?"
It was a shotgun, and this was a 3 year old. The kind of hole that blows in a person, had this been a direct hit on the head or torso there probably wouldn't be much left.
As for who shoots themselves with a Wii controller... again, this was a 3 year old. I doubt she intended to "shoot" herself, but have no doubt that she pulled the trigger while the business end just happened to be pointed her way.
Speaking of which... how long was this shotgun barrel that a 3 year old could actually pull the trigger with it pointed at them? I have the funny feeling that this was either a sawed-off (which is a stupid thing to do, and also completely illegal in most states), or that maybe this had as much to do with the Wii as it did with suicide... as in, nothing at all.
As a bank employee, I have absolutely no reason to believe that I would ever be given 2-weeks' notice. In fact, I know of a few people who were shit-canned for whatever reason, and none of them were given any notice at all... an e-mail is sent out to the effect that they are not to be spoken of, and they never show up again.
I've seen the same happen in retail, not with regular grunts who couldn't do any serious damage if they wanted to, but anyone with access to keys or confidential information (ie. management) has their credentials revoked, any company property confiscated, and are escorted from the premises by security.
And no, I'm not talking about anywhere with serious security clearance or anything... this is a small local bank, and mass-market retailers. I'm sure that once you get into serious corporate roles or other high-security fields, things get even more paranoid. I'm stunned that the TSA agent in question was ever given such an opportunity.
While I agree that it has some problems, I still think that's the best solution.
One idea would even be creating the framework such that when a program is installed, it adds the appropriate update repository and is updated through the interface, but not by Microsoft, or even with their direct corporate consent.
Yes, this might kill InstallShield, but who honestly cares? Nobody seems to be griping at the destruction of the floppy disk drive market, what's so magical about the application installation and update management software market?
Seriously? The GTA parody products are hilarious. Easily the second best thing about playing them (behind, of course, banging a hooker then beating her to death with your bare hands to get your money back... in a playground... after you've amassed a fortune so vast that getting your money back is clearly pointless).
Besides... do you really think that any mainstream companies will want to be associated with that franchise? Can you imagine what that would do to whatever "family-friendly" image they might have or want?
YES. This is exactly what MS needs to do. OSX and Linux have been doing this for years, and it's obviously the most sane and user-friendly way of doing something that nobody likes but everybody needs.
I know for a fact that I have software installed that needs to be updated, and I also know that updating it is a pain in my ass, because I can't just go to one place and hit 'check for updates"... I need to run each individual updater, often requiring that I run the actual application, just to find out if an update is necessary in the first place. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Supposedly they were planning to do something similar with drivers for 7, but dropped the feature before public beta. That would have been a terrific start. I just don't get what's taking them so long to build this basic functionality, when clearly they have the talent and resources to continually find new and pointless ways to change their UIs around so that the current user base gets annoyed.
Re:Another Sign of the Impending Apocalypse
on
The LHC Is Back Online
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Thank you, sir, for killing the joke. That was some mighty efficient humor destruction you did there. Bully good show.
"Alcoholism is the only example required, here is a non-addictive substance"
I'm going to stop you right there. Alcohol is absolutely an addictive substance, there is a known and well-documented (if not entirely understood) physiological component to alcohol addiction. Alcohol is also fairly easy to consume in lethal quantities through normal usage, and it is quite common for people to do so, particularly people in their teens and 20s. Neither of those are even remotely true for marijuana (psychological addiction has been reported, but there is no credible evidence suggesting a physiologically addictive property, overdose is theoretically possible, but would require consuming such a vast quantity of the substance that it is considered practically impossible).
Alcohol is, by all rational measures, FAR more dangerous than marijuana. They aren't even in the same league.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the Elder Scrolls 3&4 and Fallout 3 experience... virtually 0.
Of course, also judging by those experiences, and unless they uncharacteristically gimp modding, I'd guess that the probability of somebody doing it is hovering at 3... and not percent, I'm talking statistics: I predict that not only is the likelihood of that to be certain, but I further predict that it will be done at least 3 times over.
Last I checked there were still psychotic diehards out there modding and patching Morrowind.
Because they turn around and BAAWWWW to the general public, government, and anyone else who will listen, and make life harder for everyone. They can't really whine about people buying second hand, because there is a baseline assumption that you can and should be able to do so... but piracy is another story.
So basically, by pirating a game, you cause injury to a legitimate activity which the game publishers actually wish to squelch. That's the real problem.
"Isn't any draconian law antithetical to prosperity?"
No, not really. You could pretty easily make a draconian law to that effect, but you can't possibly say that a law which (for example) allows suspected drunk drivers to be executed on the side of the road (extremely draconian) would realistically prevent everyone from being prosperous.
"I think the interesting question in this case is where the line is between "draconian" and "impotent". You'd think there would be a huge area in between, but we don't seem to be able to find it: a few people are getting penalised absurdly for relatively minor infractions, while millions of people continue to break the law at the expense of legal rightsholders and get away with it."
There is, and we used to have it, but people complained about the costs (which is ironic, because the solution is so very much more expensive in the long run) and "unfairness" (to be fair, there was a lot of it, but since there still is, so perhaps the flaw lies elsewhere...): we actually used to empower fairly low-level government officials and bureaucrats to use their god-given brains and make decisions. The upside was that rather than having one official with the ability to half-make decisions and 200 lackeys who serve to shuffle around paperwork in triplicate, we could have 3 or 4 officials with 1 or 2 secretaries each and spend a fraction as much (though far more per person... decision makers are expensive) to get far more done. The downside was that these people had huge amounts of discretionary power to abuse, and did so, blatantly. So now we pay a whole bunch more, have a lot more people involved, are less able to actually get anything done, and still have massive iniquities and waste. Go us.
"It's as if the objective is to criticize the government and the arguments vary according to the discussion."
No "as if" needed... that is precisely the objective. Government is universally bad, private sector is universally good, prove the point truthily by whatever means necessary. They've been calling this a culture war all along, how is anyone surprised that they are acting appropriately?
And porn. Mustn't forget the porn.
Oddly, no... but somebody rated me "insightful". Never ceases to amaze.
Mea Culpa, I didn't rtfa (c'mon, this IS /.). Some other posters referred to it as a shotgun, so I went with it.
Yes, a S&W .38 is clearly not a shotgun. My bad.
Presumably the advantage is that what they have now doesn't work well and that they are concerned it will continue to work less and less until some arbitrary point in the future where they would have to declare it no longer works at all, and that what they're changing to seems to resolve the issue.
Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure that somebody at Digg is aware of that particular catchphrase.
Because while that sounds all well and good, it isn't actually a feasible plan at all. It's one of those things that stops making sense once you apply real, finite, numbers of students and dollars to the equation.
The real reason Conservatives are so Gung-Ho about private education is that it short circuits universal accessibility, quality control, and most of all any real public influence on the content of what is taught: the corporate overlords want their serfs to be uneducated and highly propagandized. By the way, you're a serf.
He would. Because he's a Communist. And a Nazi. And that's what communists/Nazis do. Somebody yelled it on TV, then broke down crying, then berated somebody else for being gay... which by Internet rules makes it the absolute gospel truth.
Yep.
Fun fact: everywhere has serious problems, nothing is perfect. Of course, if you don't pretend that an improvement must lead to perfection in order to be meaningful, you start to see where maybe our system could be better.
The important question isn't "does the alternative have problems?", much more useful to ask "would we rather have the set of problems belonging to the alternative, or the set of problems belonging to the status quo?"
Capitalism sucks too.
It was a shotgun, and this was a 3 year old. The kind of hole that blows in a person, had this been a direct hit on the head or torso there probably wouldn't be much left.
As for who shoots themselves with a Wii controller... again, this was a 3 year old. I doubt she intended to "shoot" herself, but have no doubt that she pulled the trigger while the business end just happened to be pointed her way.
Speaking of which... how long was this shotgun barrel that a 3 year old could actually pull the trigger with it pointed at them? I have the funny feeling that this was either a sawed-off (which is a stupid thing to do, and also completely illegal in most states), or that maybe this had as much to do with the Wii as it did with suicide... as in, nothing at all.
As a bank employee, I have absolutely no reason to believe that I would ever be given 2-weeks' notice. In fact, I know of a few people who were shit-canned for whatever reason, and none of them were given any notice at all... an e-mail is sent out to the effect that they are not to be spoken of, and they never show up again.
I've seen the same happen in retail, not with regular grunts who couldn't do any serious damage if they wanted to, but anyone with access to keys or confidential information (ie. management) has their credentials revoked, any company property confiscated, and are escorted from the premises by security.
And no, I'm not talking about anywhere with serious security clearance or anything... this is a small local bank, and mass-market retailers. I'm sure that once you get into serious corporate roles or other high-security fields, things get even more paranoid. I'm stunned that the TSA agent in question was ever given such an opportunity.
The brunette in the middle is kinda cute too, in an "officer, she told me she's 19, I swear!" kind of way.
He clearly attended an American public school. Have mercy, and be glad it was more intelligent at least than "hurk durk football Budweiser muh dick".
Full disclosure: I am a product of American public education. I mean... hurk durk football Budweiser muh dick.
While I agree that it has some problems, I still think that's the best solution.
One idea would even be creating the framework such that when a program is installed, it adds the appropriate update repository and is updated through the interface, but not by Microsoft, or even with their direct corporate consent.
Yes, this might kill InstallShield, but who honestly cares? Nobody seems to be griping at the destruction of the floppy disk drive market, what's so magical about the application installation and update management software market?
Don't worry, if it ever comes to a vote, neither he nor any other Republican will vote for it because it doesn't have enough bipartisanship.
There are hundreds of Republican amendments to the current health care bill. Clearly they weren't allowed in the room.
Seriously? The GTA parody products are hilarious. Easily the second best thing about playing them (behind, of course, banging a hooker then beating her to death with your bare hands to get your money back... in a playground... after you've amassed a fortune so vast that getting your money back is clearly pointless).
Besides... do you really think that any mainstream companies will want to be associated with that franchise? Can you imagine what that would do to whatever "family-friendly" image they might have or want?
According to George Carlin, it's a big brown dick.
YES. This is exactly what MS needs to do. OSX and Linux have been doing this for years, and it's obviously the most sane and user-friendly way of doing something that nobody likes but everybody needs.
I know for a fact that I have software installed that needs to be updated, and I also know that updating it is a pain in my ass, because I can't just go to one place and hit 'check for updates"... I need to run each individual updater, often requiring that I run the actual application, just to find out if an update is necessary in the first place. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Supposedly they were planning to do something similar with drivers for 7, but dropped the feature before public beta. That would have been a terrific start. I just don't get what's taking them so long to build this basic functionality, when clearly they have the talent and resources to continually find new and pointless ways to change their UIs around so that the current user base gets annoyed.
Thank you, sir, for killing the joke. That was some mighty efficient humor destruction you did there. Bully good show.
Given the state Palestinian foreign relations prior to the creation of Israel... I'd not classify Iran exterminating them as "accidental".
They were pretty much considered to be a bunch of degenerate screw-ups barely worthy of using for target practice.
"Alcoholism is the only example required, here is a non-addictive substance"
I'm going to stop you right there. Alcohol is absolutely an addictive substance, there is a known and well-documented (if not entirely understood) physiological component to alcohol addiction. Alcohol is also fairly easy to consume in lethal quantities through normal usage, and it is quite common for people to do so, particularly people in their teens and 20s. Neither of those are even remotely true for marijuana (psychological addiction has been reported, but there is no credible evidence suggesting a physiologically addictive property, overdose is theoretically possible, but would require consuming such a vast quantity of the substance that it is considered practically impossible).
Alcohol is, by all rational measures, FAR more dangerous than marijuana. They aren't even in the same league.
You appear not to have any UID. I guess that makes your 31 first posts even more impressive?
And you can play those new, high-tech Multi-User Dungeon games, too!