I don't mean to sound too flippant about this, but isn't this around the time in the movie that a Morgan Freeman type of character says "People were not meant to play at god!"?
When you start globalizing and opening yourself up to competition with countries that have no labour or environmental laws to speak of, you by default undercut your own industries to the point where they are not competitive.
Free trade with developing countries is a horrendously bad idea for this reason. Tarriffs can be a mitigating factor - to a point, of course.
I have only flown through Seattle and never really spent more than about 6 hours in the city proper (outside the airport), yet I was creeped out by their police as early as 2000 - long before the stories of abuse came out. Here's why:
I'm coming off my flight in Seattle for the first time and waiting for another, when all of a sudden, interrupting the normal announcements, the speakers across the airport are blaring out "DO NOT WORRY, CITIZENS! THE POLICE AND FIRE DEPARTMENTS ARE HERE TO ASSIST YOU." This was over a year before 9/11 so it never occurred to me that some sort of terrorist attack had happened, and as far as I knew, the police in Seattle had done nothing notable to rile up the citizenry. Yet the fact that they felt the need to reassure me every 10 minutes (for 3 hours...) that they're here to help me was the weirdest thing ever.
This isn't a left vs right pissing match. This is an example of how a great mass of uninformed voters shot themselves in their collective foot by freezing property taxes until the property has been sold.
Unfortunately it's not so much a matter of the ID itself as the onerous conditions that the Republican party wants to put on getting voter ID. Poor people don't always have a residence they've been at for a year along with three bills and other forms of ID.
I was thinking something along the lines of the disaster that is the California proposition system (yay, no more tax hikes! that worked out great...), but I think you hit the spot better.
Is the biggest problem truly voter identification, rather than voter education?
On another note, once people don't have leaders to blame, will we see increased societal polarization? Right now, hippie liberal wiener in Boston isn't blamed for abortion laws, just as frothing at the mouth nutjob conservative in New Mexico isn't blamed for gun laws. What sort of societal conflict would we see if neighbours, or at least neighbouring states, disagree on divisive issues?
As a Canadian resident, I wouldn't count on our privacy laws remaining strong, or - above all - being strongly enforced - with the Conservative party in power. They should have gone with Sweden or Switzerland.
Proof: the guy who dismembered that Chinese dude in Montreal and sent the body parts to the political parties, he was shown in videos killing kittens. Users online, including redditors, identified him and warned police about him. They did sweet fuck all.
The only thing police would do with these kinds of privacy-snooping powers is to target people who are a threat to the status quo (for good or ill.)
I don't think I intended this to be funny. It was a few hours ago, so I admit my perspective may be skewed, but I think I was highlighting the fact that "unhackable" had the same veracity as "unsinkable" w.r.t. the Titanic. It's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to take control with a hack.
Why the emphasis on "unauthorized repairer"? If I become an Apple "genius", does that mean all screws automatically go in their right spots? Am I immune to mistakes?
Am I the only one who thinks animals evolved with "bad fat" for a reason, other than clogging your cardiovascular system?
Perhaps this "bad fat" isn't so bad? Remember when eggs were really bad for you, because they contained cholesterol, and now they're really good for you, because they contain good cholesterol?
Hi, I'm the author. Please calm yourself and read this post with a clear mind.
First, to clear up some confusion regarding the interview:
I simply provided StarForce with an opportunity to voice their own opinions. I don't take their side, I do ask them tougher questions about how legitimate PC gamers feel it's unfair to not only to have to pay for the copy protection indirectly by purchasing the game, but to put up with the hassles. They gave their answers, that's all.
Then I look at this thread and I realize to my disappointment that most of you just don't you get it. It's all the same panicked, self-entitled, I'm-my-own-little-god-don't-step-in-my-universe whining. God forbid a publisher protect his investment on your PC. How dare he?
I'm sure most of you are conveniently forgetting the number of times you've pirated games - whether it's downloading warez, copying from a friend or copying FOR a friend.
Any arguments I've seen "for" the right to crack/warez games fall apart. Simple fact: you benefited from the hard work of the developer and publisher without due compensation. Price too high? Game sucked? Misleading system requirements? Too bad: caveat emptor.
How hypocritical Slashdotters are. When stories are posted of stupid lawsuits because someone was careless in purchasing or using a product and did themselves/their family harm, you jump all over them. High and mighty. Superior, intelligent, all-knowing.
Where are those attitudes when it comes to bragging to your friends about how you pirated a game because it was too expensive for what you'd get, or because it was buggy and you don't "feel" like paying for it. Then you complain when copy protection gets more intrusive and controlling. You made your bed, you sleep in it.
Fact is, we have this copy protection because we don't stop ourselves from pirating. Pure and simple. The culture of the PC gamer is disgustingly self-indulgent. Worse, it's spreading to console games.
Piracy has been accepted on the PC much longer because it's been around much longer. The first games weren't even commercial, they were sent across networks and transferred with disks. This acceptance of piracy has persisted through the years, every new gamer learning from the ones before him. "Oh everyone else does it." Well it's WRONG.
It's not like publishers are making billions off you by overcharing - and if they were, you could simply say "no, I'm not going to buy this." Yes, you want it, but that doesn't mean you deserve it for free.
I've gotten some of the most ridiculous pro-piracy arguments ever in email over the last day.
"Sometimes cracking copy protection is the only way to get it to run on Windows emulators on Linux"... er... just where did the publisher state that they support Linux? And how does this give you the right to steal their game?
"Game companies run out of CDs, so if you break/lose yours, you can't get new ones. Plus, you have to pay for shipping!" Right, and if I lose my car or smash it around the tree, the car manufacturer owes me one for free. No, I get it through insurance, which usually costs me more over the lifetime of the car than the car did itself.
"Game companies *GO OUT OF BUSINESS* sometimes. Try getting your original System Shock 2 CD's replaced." Right, this sucks. Part of the reason game companies go out of business is piracy. But moreover, I still fail to see how this entitles you to a new copy of System Shock 2 if YOU lost or broke your own. It's your property, be responsible for it. Your kid lost it or dog chewed it? I can't quite understand how this is the publisher's fault.
"When games get really old, usually one is forced to turn to emulation. However, *COPY PROTECTION MAKES EMULATION DIFFICULT*. This can lead to games being lost forever; this is happening to arcade machine games already." This is called obsolescence. Things become so old it's not worth supporting them. You don't see IBM supporting
Who's talking college? I mean high school. And frankly, there's a big difference between a rich Taiwanese, Indian, Arab or European sending his kid to Yale than some sorry excuse for a school. I'd also like to see where that 64% figure comes from, if you don't mind.
Barrett does have a point about the K-12 education in the US. Not only are schools passing flunky kids because the parents don't want their kids to fall behind (lawsuits being expensive and all), the US government itself seems determined to push a "faith" rather than "fact" educational agenda. It's not like the citizenry is helping either, what with creationist theme parks springing up.
Amusing anecdotes aside, the fact of the matter is that Americans simply don't value education as much as other nationalities. I'm sure I'm not the only one who came here from Europe, Asia or India as a kid and realized he was three grades ahead of his peers in math and science. It goes without saying, if a child is unaware of basic physics and chemistry, he'll never wonder, marvel at and be curious about just how we went from light bulbs to transistors to microchips. While not everyone needs to be like that, at least we should provide the knowledge required to roughly understand how technology works, to spur those individuals who really want to know just how a processor decides what "transistor" of the millions it has on board is switched.
After all, Georgie-boy waited a long time for the technology to be "mature" (ie, in enough homes to sell to), and for him to be able to take advantage of all the DVD features (now with more Gungans and extra footage of Jake Lloyd being the best starfighter pilot in the Galaxy.)
Who am I kidding, I shouldn't be so cynical. I'll hold out until noon on the day the movies are released on DVD, before I break down and rush to Best Buy during lunch hour.
At least they're being pro-active about this and are creating a legal way to download. I think they'll also need to lower prices relative to DVDs, but that's beside the point.
Rather than joking about Microsoft security or Disney's financial situation and friendship with certain Senators, why not discuss the possible viability of the online movie market. Will people really download these legally, rather than get DVD rips off Kazaa and BitTorrent links? Or worse, when the DRM technology gets cracked, will the movies spread for free?
Personally I believe that this won't stop online piracy or make up for the lost sales, but the legality and conveniece will make the downloadable movies an attractive alternative. The revenues will never be the same but it'll be better than trying to prevent online distribution at all.
If you'd read more closely you'd realize that he specialized his system for raw FPU performance - that means Athlon. HyperThreading is totally not an issue. He had a budget in which he was constrained, and high-speed ECC DDR and a SCSI hard drive were both cut out.
I'm no expert on Linux/Open Source, this is purely my curiosity at work. But it seems like many of the smallest projects, or those with large teams don't get documentation well after release. Or this is a misconception of mine?
Slashdot Mirror
"Duh".
I don't mean to sound too flippant about this, but isn't this around the time in the movie that a Morgan Freeman type of character says "People were not meant to play at god!"?
Why would someone do this? I presume it's to give the defense time to prepare a better case or review evidence?
I'm afraid you're exactly right.
When you start globalizing and opening yourself up to competition with countries that have no labour or environmental laws to speak of, you by default undercut your own industries to the point where they are not competitive.
Free trade with developing countries is a horrendously bad idea for this reason. Tarriffs can be a mitigating factor - to a point, of course.
I have only flown through Seattle and never really spent more than about 6 hours in the city proper (outside the airport), yet I was creeped out by their police as early as 2000 - long before the stories of abuse came out. Here's why:
I'm coming off my flight in Seattle for the first time and waiting for another, when all of a sudden, interrupting the normal announcements, the speakers across the airport are blaring out "DO NOT WORRY, CITIZENS! THE POLICE AND FIRE DEPARTMENTS ARE HERE TO ASSIST YOU." This was over a year before 9/11 so it never occurred to me that some sort of terrorist attack had happened, and as far as I knew, the police in Seattle had done nothing notable to rile up the citizenry. Yet the fact that they felt the need to reassure me every 10 minutes (for 3 hours...) that they're here to help me was the weirdest thing ever.
That is all.
You do realize that the rate of penile cancer among men is almost zero, period?
Penile cancer is incredibly rare and linked to an infection that results from bad hygiene.
You're just adding to my point about uneducated voters =/
This isn't a left vs right pissing match. This is an example of how a great mass of uninformed voters shot themselves in their collective foot by freezing property taxes until the property has been sold.
Unfortunately it's not so much a matter of the ID itself as the onerous conditions that the Republican party wants to put on getting voter ID. Poor people don't always have a residence they've been at for a year along with three bills and other forms of ID.
Great point.
I was thinking something along the lines of the disaster that is the California proposition system (yay, no more tax hikes! that worked out great...), but I think you hit the spot better.
Is the biggest problem truly voter identification, rather than voter education?
On another note, once people don't have leaders to blame, will we see increased societal polarization? Right now, hippie liberal wiener in Boston isn't blamed for abortion laws, just as frothing at the mouth nutjob conservative in New Mexico isn't blamed for gun laws. What sort of societal conflict would we see if neighbours, or at least neighbouring states, disagree on divisive issues?
As a Canadian resident, I wouldn't count on our privacy laws remaining strong, or - above all - being strongly enforced - with the Conservative party in power. They should have gone with Sweden or Switzerland.
Proof: the guy who dismembered that Chinese dude in Montreal and sent the body parts to the political parties, he was shown in videos killing kittens. Users online, including redditors, identified him and warned police about him. They did sweet fuck all.
The only thing police would do with these kinds of privacy-snooping powers is to target people who are a threat to the status quo (for good or ill.)
To the mods:
I don't think I intended this to be funny. It was a few hours ago, so I admit my perspective may be skewed, but I think I was highlighting the fact that "unhackable" had the same veracity as "unsinkable" w.r.t. the Titanic. It's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to take control with a hack.
It will also be a great way to take out some hacker's ex-girlfriend's house in Nevada. Damn bitch left him for a cop.
Why the emphasis on "unauthorized repairer"? If I become an Apple "genius", does that mean all screws automatically go in their right spots? Am I immune to mistakes?
I think you may be wrong. Nuts and avocados are the most common plants to contain fats, but others do as well. Like olives.
Unless you think you're frying your chicken on olive carbs, rather than olive oil?
Am I the only one who thinks animals evolved with "bad fat" for a reason, other than clogging your cardiovascular system?
Perhaps this "bad fat" isn't so bad? Remember when eggs were really bad for you, because they contained cholesterol, and now they're really good for you, because they contain good cholesterol?
Hi, I'm the author. Please calm yourself and read this post with a clear mind.
First, to clear up some confusion regarding the interview:
I simply provided StarForce with an opportunity to voice their own opinions. I don't take their side, I do ask them tougher questions about how legitimate PC gamers feel it's unfair to not only to have to pay for the copy protection indirectly by purchasing the game, but to put up with the hassles. They gave their answers, that's all.
Then I look at this thread and I realize to my disappointment that most of you just don't you get it. It's all the same panicked, self-entitled, I'm-my-own-little-god-don't-step-in-my-universe whining. God forbid a publisher protect his investment on your PC. How dare he?
I'm sure most of you are conveniently forgetting the number of times you've pirated games - whether it's downloading warez, copying from a friend or copying FOR a friend.
Any arguments I've seen "for" the right to crack/warez games fall apart. Simple fact: you benefited from the hard work of the developer and publisher without due compensation. Price too high? Game sucked? Misleading system requirements? Too bad: caveat emptor.
How hypocritical Slashdotters are. When stories are posted of stupid lawsuits because someone was careless in purchasing or using a product and did themselves/their family harm, you jump all over them. High and mighty. Superior, intelligent, all-knowing.
Where are those attitudes when it comes to bragging to your friends about how you pirated a game because it was too expensive for what you'd get, or because it was buggy and you don't "feel" like paying for it. Then you complain when copy protection gets more intrusive and controlling. You made your bed, you sleep in it.
Fact is, we have this copy protection because we don't stop ourselves from pirating. Pure and simple. The culture of the PC gamer is disgustingly self-indulgent. Worse, it's spreading to console games.
Piracy has been accepted on the PC much longer because it's been around much longer. The first games weren't even commercial, they were sent across networks and transferred with disks. This acceptance of piracy has persisted through the years, every new gamer learning from the ones before him. "Oh everyone else does it." Well it's WRONG.
It's not like publishers are making billions off you by overcharing - and if they were, you could simply say "no, I'm not going to buy this." Yes, you want it, but that doesn't mean you deserve it for free.
I've gotten some of the most ridiculous pro-piracy arguments ever in email over the last day.
"Sometimes cracking copy protection is the only way to get it to run on Windows emulators on Linux"... er... just where did the publisher state that they support Linux? And how does this give you the right to steal their game?
"Game companies run out of CDs, so if you break/lose yours, you can't get new ones. Plus, you have to pay for shipping!" Right, and if I lose my car or smash it around the tree, the car manufacturer owes me one for free. No, I get it through insurance, which usually costs me more over the lifetime of the car than the car did itself.
"Game companies *GO OUT OF BUSINESS* sometimes. Try getting your original System Shock 2 CD's replaced." Right, this sucks. Part of the reason game companies go out of business is piracy. But moreover, I still fail to see how this entitles you to a new copy of System Shock 2 if YOU lost or broke your own. It's your property, be responsible for it. Your kid lost it or dog chewed it? I can't quite understand how this is the publisher's fault.
"When games get really old, usually one is forced to turn to emulation. However, *COPY PROTECTION MAKES EMULATION DIFFICULT*. This can lead to games being lost forever; this is happening to arcade machine games already." This is called obsolescence. Things become so old it's not worth supporting them. You don't see IBM supporting
Who's talking college? I mean high school. And frankly, there's a big difference between a rich Taiwanese, Indian, Arab or European sending his kid to Yale than some sorry excuse for a school. I'd also like to see where that 64% figure comes from, if you don't mind.
Amusing anecdotes aside, the fact of the matter is that Americans simply don't value education as much as other nationalities. I'm sure I'm not the only one who came here from Europe, Asia or India as a kid and realized he was three grades ahead of his peers in math and science. It goes without saying, if a child is unaware of basic physics and chemistry, he'll never wonder, marvel at and be curious about just how we went from light bulbs to transistors to microchips. While not everyone needs to be like that, at least we should provide the knowledge required to roughly understand how technology works, to spur those individuals who really want to know just how a processor decides what "transistor" of the millions it has on board is switched.
After all, Georgie-boy waited a long time for the technology to be "mature" (ie, in enough homes to sell to), and for him to be able to take advantage of all the DVD features (now with more Gungans and extra footage of Jake Lloyd being the best starfighter pilot in the Galaxy.)
Who am I kidding, I shouldn't be so cynical. I'll hold out until noon on the day the movies are released on DVD, before I break down and rush to Best Buy during lunch hour.
At least they're being pro-active about this and are creating a legal way to download. I think they'll also need to lower prices relative to DVDs, but that's beside the point.
Rather than joking about Microsoft security or Disney's financial situation and friendship with certain Senators, why not discuss the possible viability of the online movie market. Will people really download these legally, rather than get DVD rips off Kazaa and BitTorrent links? Or worse, when the DRM technology gets cracked, will the movies spread for free?
Personally I believe that this won't stop online piracy or make up for the lost sales, but the legality and conveniece will make the downloadable movies an attractive alternative. The revenues will never be the same but it'll be better than trying to prevent online distribution at all.
If you'd read more closely you'd realize that he specialized his system for raw FPU performance - that means Athlon. HyperThreading is totally not an issue. He had a budget in which he was constrained, and high-speed ECC DDR and a SCSI hard drive were both cut out.
I'm no expert on Linux/Open Source, this is purely my curiosity at work. But it seems like many of the smallest projects, or those with large teams don't get documentation well after release. Or this is a misconception of mine?