Indeed, I'm sure those who live in mansions are often devastated that they can't safely walk through the ghettos. Then they go back to swimming in money and the mood soon passes.
The problem is the people who own the media are the same ones buying these ridiculous laws. How much airtime are they going to give you to argue against something they've spent a lot of time and money lobbying for? At best some liberal media might pick this up and then get shouted down as commies. Even if you could get your point across, the second it became clear you knew what you were talking about, they'd drop the charges and claim that as proof the system works - there are plenty of people who don't understand the issues that they can go after instead.
It depends what "work" is. If you're making or selling physical goods of any kind then it almost certainly makes sense to have them out of town so that you eliminate the issue of goods lorries coming into the town. If you're wholly a service industry then it's less of an issue so long as out of town employees can also make use of good inbound public transport, otherwise you still have the issue of their cars clogging the streets. Of course the ideal would be a lot more people telecommuting.
The first instance of them hovering in the TV show was Revelation of the Daleks, in 1985 - I had to look this up as the first one I clearly remembered was Remembrance of the Daleks as well, but in any event they've had the ability for just over 25 of their nearly 50 years. I still like the classic response that they don't need to climb stairs when they can just level buildings - nobody mocks a Challenger tank's inability to climb ladders:)
Plus, they're going to need a spare Doctor for space-suit guy* to going to has** killed, so presumably, we haven't seen the last of the "ganger" Doctor, either...
Exactly this - they even make some comment about there being some way the essence of the "flesh" doctor might survive the disintegration. If that's not telegraphing the end of that particular story arc, I don't know what is.
What I think works particularly well with the sonic is the fact that it's used so much, but much of the time appears to do little or nothing. The doctor will quite often point it at people or things and take a "reading" that he doesn't do anything with or about, which is a nice way of saying "this tool is always here but it's not always useful" - they've made mention in the past of how flaky it can be. The doctor uses it almost as an extension of his sense to probe situations in the same way as a human might use smell and sound to augment sight (and still sometimes come up with the wrong answer). Conversely using it less but only using it in situations where it always works to save the day would turn it from a tool into a miracle device. What we need is more of the screwdriver but not always more of it saving the day.
Looking at it another way, some people might consider a couple of years community service paying back the debt to the society they cheated along with the possibility of then legitimately passing the test and having a rewarding career to be more lenient than blacklisting them and forcing them into some menial job they'd hate for the rest of their lives. It depends on whether you look at a sentence as a punishment or as a chance at reformation, I guess (and yes, I'm playing devil's advocate here, I know the chances of any school admitting them after a criminal charge for cheating would be pretty much zero).
I can't speak to that Daily Mail article, but it's of an entirely different calibre than your other evidence.
The fact that it's from the Daily Mail speaks for itself. The... I'm loathe to call it a "newspaper"... has a certain reputation for panic-inducing sensationalist right-wing stories and a political agenda which lends itself nicely to criticism of the National Health Service. I'm not saying their story was definitely wrong, but I'd give it a lot more credence if it was cited from practically any other source.
Islam, like Christianity, has been hijacked in the press by the vocal minority with their own anti-change agenda. You don't have to look far in the West to see religious leaders who would gladly see their country return to some theoretical glorious heyday and who blame technology for the ills of society. The biggest flaw of religion across the board is that it attracts people looking for answers at the same time as it attracts bigots who think they have all the answers. Put the two together and you're just creating a recipe for trouble.
You only need look at Lybia to see what it takes to try and remove an entrenched government. Words aren't enough. And the more competent the government, the harder they are to remove - imagine something like Lybia in the west, the governments are much better organised and supplied to prevent a popular uprising. Here in the UK at the outbreak of the fighting in Lybia we had the prime minister talking about how we supported their struggle and would help them every step of the way in establishing a democracy while the police here were out on the streets beating on teenagers who were demonstrating against being sold down the river on university fees. Every government, once it gains power, sees the people as a force it must protect itself from, it's just that some are better at putting a polished spin on the fact.
Just what I was thinking - I can see their predicament, what with the "Arab spring" effect at the moment, they're scared of this uncontrollable source of information and networking, but they're very short sighted if they can't see that trying to suppress this is just the sort of act that will trigger a rebellion, rather than quell one.
The points you mention in your first paragraph are addressed in the PA article - the comic is exaggerated for comedic effect (the first game was similar, you could run around and fight things and always run away if they were too powerful, but the unavoidable fight at the end of the first village was tough if you went into it underpowered, and unavoidable if you went into it too early, it was a "point of no return" situation).
As for dying 47 times, he does also mention that he was trying to do something that the developers didn't intend him to do because he was curious. If you're a regular PA reader you'd probably not have such a hard time understanding how "Tycho" could die 47 times in that case:)
Depends on the game - the strategy we're starting to see more of now is DLC content free with pre-orders, paid for everyone else. I suspect it's things like that that drive a lot of day one sales for most games (aside from the odd anomalous "Triple A" title that everyone wants to play right away). If you know you'll be getting the game anyway, and the price of the DLC is greater than what you expect the price drop to be in six months, it still makes sense to buy it early.
And paying the support costs for all the legitimate customers who are getting screwed over by the DRM that's failing to do what it's there for (unless the company comes up with DRM that is hassle free, but as far as I can see, if they ever managed that they'd probably make more money selling the DRM than the game).
Seriously, when will companies acknowledge that if DRM is failing to stop people cracking the game AND it's costing money to develop/implement AND it's costing money to support AND potentially losing you a bunch of frustrated customers AND spoiling the overall experience (using space and resources that could be better used delivering a better game or more of it - I don't know how many CPU cycles DRM eats but I'm sure it's non-zero) then it's in everybody's interests to ditch the DRM...
There are already other models out there for delivering games without charging an up front fee - subscription models, free games with a built in market to sell in-game content, ad sponsored games, games where you pay a subscription to a third party for an all you can eat rental affair, community developed free games. Claiming that games wouldn't exist if people weren't paying up front for them is just the kind of short sighted behaviour the companies behind those games are demonstrating, and it doesn't change GP's point, if your old business model doesn't stand up to a sea change in technology, you can either try and force your customers down the path you want or you can look for a new model - I suspect, given time, the latter will be the approach that succeeds, albeit after several years of enduring the DRM death rattle.
If the game has DRM then it would be a gross misrepresentation not to put DRM on the demo, in my opinion. Considering how many installation/runtime errors DRM seems to be behind, it would be incredibly misleading to demo the product DRM-free and then sell an encumbered version - that totally fails to demonstrate to me that the game will run on my system. It was this kind of garbage that convinced me to leave the PC gaming scene and switch to console several years ago (aside from one or two games that either weren't on console or that I knew I'd prefer on the PC like DoW2, Witcher and Orange Box) - I know DRM also exists on console games but at least it's transparent to me as a user. Anything that stands between me and content I have paid for is worse than inconvenient, it should be criminal.
Indeed, it seems to me Gates has spent the last few years trying to distance himself from his role at MS as much as possible. I'm sure he much prefers the title of international philanthropist to international monopolist. We know he doesn't need the money, I can't think of anything else MS could offer him to return at this point.
If by "catch up" you mean "buy out". The biggest problem MS now face is that their competitors are no longer the little guys with great ideas but insufficient capital to own the market, easily bought out or out-marketed, they're the very big guys and they're already reasonably entrenched in their own market segments.
I suspect it's not the dev team that are behind decisions like these. After all, they have an interest in keeping the franchise alive, not milking it for short term gain.
If only Google had taken the decision to bypass carriers and enable me to force an update. Unfortunately I'm still on 2.2 and wholly relient on my carrier passing any update down the line to me (or I hack the phone and lose any warranty/support). In my opinion this was the biggest mistake of Android, giving the power over updates to companies who have no interest in keeping me on my existing phone longer when they really want to sell me a phone with the latest version. I understand why this is good for carriers, I understand why Google accepted the situation (to encourage uptake of the OS and to move the issue of hardware fragmentation onto the providers), but it's still a bad deal for the user when there are unpatched exploits out there. Apple manage to push through updates (and they've got less incentive to do so than Google, since they sell the hardware), I wish Google could have been more forceful and at least given users the ability to decide if they want to update or wait for their carrier's update.
From what I can tell, this isn't about filtering or ranking your results, it's just about sharing virtual word of mouth about sites, if you will. So you search for a particular TV and you get the exact same page of results you would have got before, but one of the sites you've not heard of has a few recommendations from people in your friends list. You can rely on their "liking" the site, or maybe go talk to them about their experience before you risk parting with money. From that point of view it sounds like it might be reasonably useful to those people who are already churning all their data into the Facebook machine. If it ever did start affecting rankings then I agree it would be more of a worry.
I assume MS sees an ally in putting Google in their place. As a business tactic you're right, it seems incredibly short sighted (given all the rumblings over the past year that FB might just replace conventional search). It's like someone buying a lion to help them deal with a wolf in their garden - all well and good until the wolf is gone and the lion gets hungry.
So what's new? Search engines have been abused since day 1 (in fact since day zero - even before dearch engines existed, when you basically got a list of links, people paid to rank higher). Google managed to bring some common sense back to proceedings for a while, but it seems like it gets gamed as much as anyone else today. I'm not sure how spammers could abuse this, though, other than asking a bunch of users to like their pages (which companies already do, and if it's so overt they should be easily filtered out).
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Indeed, I'm sure those who live in mansions are often devastated that they can't safely walk through the ghettos. Then they go back to swimming in money and the mood soon passes.
The problem is the people who own the media are the same ones buying these ridiculous laws. How much airtime are they going to give you to argue against something they've spent a lot of time and money lobbying for? At best some liberal media might pick this up and then get shouted down as commies. Even if you could get your point across, the second it became clear you knew what you were talking about, they'd drop the charges and claim that as proof the system works - there are plenty of people who don't understand the issues that they can go after instead.
My first thought when I read the headline was that they were building Eureka.
It depends what "work" is. If you're making or selling physical goods of any kind then it almost certainly makes sense to have them out of town so that you eliminate the issue of goods lorries coming into the town. If you're wholly a service industry then it's less of an issue so long as out of town employees can also make use of good inbound public transport, otherwise you still have the issue of their cars clogging the streets. Of course the ideal would be a lot more people telecommuting.
The first instance of them hovering in the TV show was Revelation of the Daleks, in 1985 - I had to look this up as the first one I clearly remembered was Remembrance of the Daleks as well, but in any event they've had the ability for just over 25 of their nearly 50 years. I still like the classic response that they don't need to climb stairs when they can just level buildings - nobody mocks a Challenger tank's inability to climb ladders :)
Please, please for the love of all that is sacred, don't give them ideas!
Plus, they're going to need a spare Doctor for space-suit guy* to going to has** killed, so presumably, we haven't seen the last of the "ganger" Doctor, either...
Exactly this - they even make some comment about there being some way the essence of the "flesh" doctor might survive the disintegration. If that's not telegraphing the end of that particular story arc, I don't know what is.
What I think works particularly well with the sonic is the fact that it's used so much, but much of the time appears to do little or nothing. The doctor will quite often point it at people or things and take a "reading" that he doesn't do anything with or about, which is a nice way of saying "this tool is always here but it's not always useful" - they've made mention in the past of how flaky it can be. The doctor uses it almost as an extension of his sense to probe situations in the same way as a human might use smell and sound to augment sight (and still sometimes come up with the wrong answer). Conversely using it less but only using it in situations where it always works to save the day would turn it from a tool into a miracle device. What we need is more of the screwdriver but not always more of it saving the day.
Looking at it another way, some people might consider a couple of years community service paying back the debt to the society they cheated along with the possibility of then legitimately passing the test and having a rewarding career to be more lenient than blacklisting them and forcing them into some menial job they'd hate for the rest of their lives. It depends on whether you look at a sentence as a punishment or as a chance at reformation, I guess (and yes, I'm playing devil's advocate here, I know the chances of any school admitting them after a criminal charge for cheating would be pretty much zero).
I can't speak to that Daily Mail article, but it's of an entirely different calibre than your other evidence.
The fact that it's from the Daily Mail speaks for itself. The ... I'm loathe to call it a "newspaper" ... has a certain reputation for panic-inducing sensationalist right-wing stories and a political agenda which lends itself nicely to criticism of the National Health Service. I'm not saying their story was definitely wrong, but I'd give it a lot more credence if it was cited from practically any other source.
Islam, like Christianity, has been hijacked in the press by the vocal minority with their own anti-change agenda. You don't have to look far in the West to see religious leaders who would gladly see their country return to some theoretical glorious heyday and who blame technology for the ills of society. The biggest flaw of religion across the board is that it attracts people looking for answers at the same time as it attracts bigots who think they have all the answers. Put the two together and you're just creating a recipe for trouble.
You only need look at Lybia to see what it takes to try and remove an entrenched government. Words aren't enough. And the more competent the government, the harder they are to remove - imagine something like Lybia in the west, the governments are much better organised and supplied to prevent a popular uprising. Here in the UK at the outbreak of the fighting in Lybia we had the prime minister talking about how we supported their struggle and would help them every step of the way in establishing a democracy while the police here were out on the streets beating on teenagers who were demonstrating against being sold down the river on university fees. Every government, once it gains power, sees the people as a force it must protect itself from, it's just that some are better at putting a polished spin on the fact.
Just what I was thinking - I can see their predicament, what with the "Arab spring" effect at the moment, they're scared of this uncontrollable source of information and networking, but they're very short sighted if they can't see that trying to suppress this is just the sort of act that will trigger a rebellion, rather than quell one.
The points you mention in your first paragraph are addressed in the PA article - the comic is exaggerated for comedic effect (the first game was similar, you could run around and fight things and always run away if they were too powerful, but the unavoidable fight at the end of the first village was tough if you went into it underpowered, and unavoidable if you went into it too early, it was a "point of no return" situation).
As for dying 47 times, he does also mention that he was trying to do something that the developers didn't intend him to do because he was curious. If you're a regular PA reader you'd probably not have such a hard time understanding how "Tycho" could die 47 times in that case :)
Depends on the game - the strategy we're starting to see more of now is DLC content free with pre-orders, paid for everyone else. I suspect it's things like that that drive a lot of day one sales for most games (aside from the odd anomalous "Triple A" title that everyone wants to play right away). If you know you'll be getting the game anyway, and the price of the DLC is greater than what you expect the price drop to be in six months, it still makes sense to buy it early.
And paying the support costs for all the legitimate customers who are getting screwed over by the DRM that's failing to do what it's there for (unless the company comes up with DRM that is hassle free, but as far as I can see, if they ever managed that they'd probably make more money selling the DRM than the game).
Seriously, when will companies acknowledge that if DRM is failing to stop people cracking the game AND it's costing money to develop/implement AND it's costing money to support AND potentially losing you a bunch of frustrated customers AND spoiling the overall experience (using space and resources that could be better used delivering a better game or more of it - I don't know how many CPU cycles DRM eats but I'm sure it's non-zero) then it's in everybody's interests to ditch the DRM...
There are already other models out there for delivering games without charging an up front fee - subscription models, free games with a built in market to sell in-game content, ad sponsored games, games where you pay a subscription to a third party for an all you can eat rental affair, community developed free games. Claiming that games wouldn't exist if people weren't paying up front for them is just the kind of short sighted behaviour the companies behind those games are demonstrating, and it doesn't change GP's point, if your old business model doesn't stand up to a sea change in technology, you can either try and force your customers down the path you want or you can look for a new model - I suspect, given time, the latter will be the approach that succeeds, albeit after several years of enduring the DRM death rattle.
If the game has DRM then it would be a gross misrepresentation not to put DRM on the demo, in my opinion. Considering how many installation/runtime errors DRM seems to be behind, it would be incredibly misleading to demo the product DRM-free and then sell an encumbered version - that totally fails to demonstrate to me that the game will run on my system. It was this kind of garbage that convinced me to leave the PC gaming scene and switch to console several years ago (aside from one or two games that either weren't on console or that I knew I'd prefer on the PC like DoW2, Witcher and Orange Box) - I know DRM also exists on console games but at least it's transparent to me as a user. Anything that stands between me and content I have paid for is worse than inconvenient, it should be criminal.
Indeed, it seems to me Gates has spent the last few years trying to distance himself from his role at MS as much as possible. I'm sure he much prefers the title of international philanthropist to international monopolist. We know he doesn't need the money, I can't think of anything else MS could offer him to return at this point.
If by "catch up" you mean "buy out". The biggest problem MS now face is that their competitors are no longer the little guys with great ideas but insufficient capital to own the market, easily bought out or out-marketed, they're the very big guys and they're already reasonably entrenched in their own market segments.
I suspect it's not the dev team that are behind decisions like these. After all, they have an interest in keeping the franchise alive, not milking it for short term gain.
If only Google had taken the decision to bypass carriers and enable me to force an update. Unfortunately I'm still on 2.2 and wholly relient on my carrier passing any update down the line to me (or I hack the phone and lose any warranty/support). In my opinion this was the biggest mistake of Android, giving the power over updates to companies who have no interest in keeping me on my existing phone longer when they really want to sell me a phone with the latest version. I understand why this is good for carriers, I understand why Google accepted the situation (to encourage uptake of the OS and to move the issue of hardware fragmentation onto the providers), but it's still a bad deal for the user when there are unpatched exploits out there. Apple manage to push through updates (and they've got less incentive to do so than Google, since they sell the hardware), I wish Google could have been more forceful and at least given users the ability to decide if they want to update or wait for their carrier's update.
From what I can tell, this isn't about filtering or ranking your results, it's just about sharing virtual word of mouth about sites, if you will. So you search for a particular TV and you get the exact same page of results you would have got before, but one of the sites you've not heard of has a few recommendations from people in your friends list. You can rely on their "liking" the site, or maybe go talk to them about their experience before you risk parting with money. From that point of view it sounds like it might be reasonably useful to those people who are already churning all their data into the Facebook machine. If it ever did start affecting rankings then I agree it would be more of a worry.
I assume MS sees an ally in putting Google in their place. As a business tactic you're right, it seems incredibly short sighted (given all the rumblings over the past year that FB might just replace conventional search). It's like someone buying a lion to help them deal with a wolf in their garden - all well and good until the wolf is gone and the lion gets hungry.
So what's new? Search engines have been abused since day 1 (in fact since day zero - even before dearch engines existed, when you basically got a list of links, people paid to rank higher). Google managed to bring some common sense back to proceedings for a while, but it seems like it gets gamed as much as anyone else today. I'm not sure how spammers could abuse this, though, other than asking a bunch of users to like their pages (which companies already do, and if it's so overt they should be easily filtered out).