Humodour

And, not to spam, but one has to wonder why the media industry (which includes all the big-name American media companies as well as Australian ones - don't think they wouldn't do it there) would bring such a clearly unfair case before the court? "There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Heinlein, Life Line, 1939 And, not to get off-topic, but this applies just as much to the auto-industry or banks as it does the media industry.

This bit is interesting, worth a read: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/04/2810520.htm Note: the 'repeat infringers' mentioned are those who are legally proven by courts and police, not merely suspected by the various media lobbies. This is important considering that the media lobbies often accidentally accuse things like network printers of copyright infringement.

The first thing I do when I buy a new CD is burn it to FLAC. It's lossless, open (no patents or IP infringement to worry about) and awesome. How can you go wrong?

So what? Oh no, we'll have to use the immense reserves of Thorium, Plutonium, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, biofuel algae, natural gas, or coal. However will we survive?! You do realize that almost all plastic we use today is oil based, right? Try to imagine a world without plastic for a second. When we run out of oil, there's more than transportation that needs to be altered. Don't even bother bringing it up. Every chemistry class I've done since 2004 has in some way covered plastics and polymers. For a start, only something like 2% of all oil is used to manufacture plastics. Moreover, even with oil being uneconomical to use as a fuel source (which is what we're REALLY talking about here), I've read that that will barely interefere with plastic manufacture prices, and that even if it should, we have lower-grade hydrocarbons we cen resort to. And that's ignoring biological polymers which plastics are starting to be made from (I know my shampoo and some food containers are, and you can't tell the difference). The most common one is probably polylactic acid (PLA), trailing that is I guess polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB). Not to mention that it's trivial to convert ethanol into the the polyethylene (plastic bags) monomer, ethylene.

Late 2009, the media industry lobby here in Australia pissed off a lot of people (especially the Internet and ommunications industries and consumers) by taking one of Australia's biggest and most well-liked ISPs to court over the copyright infringements of its users. Their argument was basically that ISPs had to become police and judges and cut off users they suspect of copyright infringement. Obviously this is a blatant disregard for due process (and indeed iiNet forwarded all copyright infringement alerts it received onto the police - it couldn't take any action directly without court approval, warrants, and that was what the media lobbies took issue with). http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technolog...00204-ne1w.html Well today the court ruled that the media lobby has no right or grounds to demand that service providers take on the extra duties of (basically three strikes rules) that the media lobby wanted, and furthemore the media lobby has to pay iiNet full court fees to compensate them for time and money wasted defending themselves. http://www.smh.com.au/business/iinet-slays...00204-nedw.html Choice quotes from the judge: “In the law of authorization there is a distinction to be drawn of the means of copyright infringement… the mere provision of access to the Internet [does] not authorize infringement.” “iiNet has no control of the BitTorrent system and is not responsible for its use by users…iiNet is not responsible if an iiNet user uses that system to bring about copyright infringement … the law recognizes no positive obligation on any person to protect the copyright of another.” tl;dr version: Internet providers are no more responsible for what their users download than the post office is for what somebody writes or sends in a letter.

Half-Life had aliens.

Taylor Swift has beautiful music.

Explain. What's different today?

Unfortunately I have never actually played these games! But I've been told they're good, and they got good ratings, so at the price they were on GOG it seemed a steal. It's just about one of the best games you will ever play.

Games I own on GOG (and I mean 'own' - they're DRM free): The Longest Journey Jagged Alliance 2 Spellforce Platinum Sacrifice Gorky 17 Haegemonia Cletic Kings Septerra Core Warlords Battlecry 3 Original War Gothic Gothic 2 Empire Earth Gold Divine Divinity UFO Aftershock Myst Riven Sanitarium Bloodrayne Psychonauts Advent Rising The Disciples The Disciples 2 Broken Sword 3 Freespace 1 Freespace 2 Descent 1 & 2 Descent 3 Fallout 1 Fallout 2 Fallou: Tactics Giants: Citizen Kabuto M.A.X. 1 & 2 Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising Beyond Good & Evil Arx Fatalis Earthworm Jim 1 & 2 Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Incoming Far Cry

HTML5 will likely be superior to Flash but it's experimental and not the standard. Apple should be suporting Flash concurrently. There's no excuse.

It's every bit near as relevant and it's absolutely disingenuous to make statements like that. The PC gaming market is bigger than the market of any single console (especially if we consider the whole international community and not just America), and I'm not even talking flash games or MMOs. Sure, PC gaming is dead in America - whatever, let's roll with that. The Europeans make better games anyway. Heck, if PC gaming is dead, somebody forgot to tell every single dormie or uni student I know who is into gaming (of any kind, on any platform). I constantly see jocks playing computer games (and girls seem to be pretty fond of WoW). I constantly get called out to de-virus their computers and whatnot so they can play their computer games. Maybe this is a biased sample, because it's pretty much guaranteed that every uni student in Australia has a computer, but within this little sample at least, people are happy to use that computer to play games. Mainstream Linux distributions (e.g. not Slackware or many of the dead ones) haven't placed an emphasis on the command line in perhaps 10 years you uninformed git. Gosh it's sad that you're in the games industry now. What's more disturbing is that you've adopted the bog standard publisher line of "second-hand games are evil". Oh go on!

I'm sure Beijing would become at least as progressive as Canberra once Tibetans count for less than 3% of the total population in their homeland. No. China doesn't have the 'excuse' of history. It's happening now, in an era of civilisation that's otherwise defined by human rights advances and individual liberties, and the Chinese government is actively perpetrating it.

Confirm crates. That will suffice for now. This.

Personally I would suggest strongly AGAINST people buying this device from Apple until they show some moves of good faith. A big step in the right direction would be Flash support, instead of trying to lock us into Apple's own proprietary (and not at all widely used) formats, another would be USB ports. Another would be the world-wide industry standard SIM card size, instead of their own proprietary micro-SIM format which doesn't actually take up less space component-wise and uses exactly the same size chip and electrical contacts (this move really makes me want to say "**** you Apple"). Everything I have seen about this device says to me "lockdown" and "control". They have zero regard for the consumer.

No, actually I full support Native Title, and you just made one of your more idiotic post just then with that pathetic attempt at analogy. The issues of Kosovo or Taiwan's independence are not related to Native Title. At all. Edit: And indeed, it is ironic that you should bring it up, because I would be surprised to see China enact anything near as progressive as Native Title for its indigenous populations. C.f. Uyghurs, Tibetans. All I see is oppression and population displacement/replacement, and China doesn't have the excuse of history.

So what? Oh no, we'll have to use the immense reserves of Thorium, Plutonium, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, biofuel algae, natural gas, or coal. However will we survive?! We wont. Of course dear.

Today I sent an email to my manager explaining all the reasons why I think the incident management system we use (LANDesk) was coded by 14 year olds. Number one on that list is the fact that the software sends a new database query for every single change you make to any of the interactive fields. Want to put in a username to log the job under? Database query! Want to change that username? Database query! Want to search all jobs by user? Database query! Want to sort the list in alphabetical order? ANOTHER DATABASE QUERY. It's like the idea of caching the data set client-side and manipulating it there is completely foreign. THIS DATA IS NOT GOING TO CHANGE EVERY SECOND. Consequently, as users of this software on an enterprise level, we experience massive slowdown and latency when logging jobs, opening jobs, adding notes to jobs, anything. And by 'massive' slowdown, I've counted mini-freezes in the software of up to a minute just to change a username or escalation category (which hints to me that the database used is also poorly built), which is completely unacceptable when you have to meet SLAs on calls with other departmants. And to top it off, some genius had the bright idea of coding the ****ing programme in .NET.

Alt+enter is a well-known windows function for switching between fullscreen and windowed. It's not a GOG thing, it's not a DosBox thing. They can be forgiven for not mentioning it. But if you care, you should notify them so they can update their support information. They can't read your mind.

That's not all there is to it. There's the aspect that Taiwan has been independent (de facto) from China for more than 50 years, has a completely different political system, government, and has also evolved because of this a distinct cultural attitude (similar as they are on other matters culturally). Then again, I'm guessing you think Kosovo 'belongs' to the Serbs, right? Pfft.

So what? Oh no, we'll have to use the immense reserves of Thorium, Plutonium, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, biofuel algae, natural gas, or coal. However will we survive?!

I doubt you'll ever see nuclear fusion in cars. Likely the electricity produced by fusion will be stored in hydrogen fuel cells which are in turn used by cars. Not that you were serious.

It has problems GOG can't fix: video and audio mess up, desynchronise on multi-core systems. Fiddling with processor affinity can help, but not completely mitigate problems.

You were implying that if Nightshape says downloading copyright content is theft, then we should listen to him because he works on games (he's been hired by someone now has he? Good for him). Not so, and the law doesn't actually define copyright infringement as theft. Perhaps that is how you roll down under, but in the US we have the NET act. 5 years in prison and $25,000. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NET_Act Of course a geeky kid sitting in his basement downloading a couple games isn't going to be much of a target for law enforcement. The resources it takes to track down every bit of piracy isn't considered worth it, but that does not make it legal or put it in a moral gray area. It's wrong and there is no justifying it. You don't seem to understand a very basic point: illegal or not, copyright infringement isn't the same as theft, it isn't physical, and it certainly doesn't occur on the high seas, and I can guarantee you that is true in American law as well as Australian law. It really annoys me when people mix up technical terms like that, and it misrepresents the offence (although I am sure the media industry is perfectly happy to be disingenuous).