In a politician?

I thought the first of April was over?

Yup - bought that game twice: once for the PC, second one for the laptop.

Several reasons:

* No DRM.
* I like the game, quite a bit.
* I support the programmers directly, instead of some huge company with moronic managers.
* It's cheap.

I've recommended that game to other people, several of which have bought it.

> We don't have any legitimate targets in Iraq. Afghanistan is arguably a different situation (though whether it will do us any good is another question)

Really? What's your reason for attacking Afghanistan? That a few of the nutcases capturing four planes in the US quite a few years ago came from there? You do realize that most of them came from Saudi Arabia? How come you didn't attack them, too? Or did you just want to bring democratic freedom and peace for all?

And I assume that your attack on Afghanistan has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they didn't want your gouverment to build an oil-pipeline there. Right? Right?

Sorry, chaps. I'll stop posting about warfarce, er, warfare. The cheap excuses help up and actually believed by some people just drive me nuts (or, as you might say: more nuts ;)

Stopping wide-spread violence in that area?

The longer you stay there, the worse it will get. The local population hates your guts with a deep, directly involved passion "My uncle was killed by these bastards! He didn't do anything, was a good man!". They will never, ever stop fighting the strangers who showed up uninvited and started killing people left and right.
Even if you leave today, the hatred will remain for another two generations. Which is a way of breeding terrorists. Congratulations.

Well, at east your industry is making a nice fat profit on this, and can give their managers nice multi-million dollar bonuses for this year as well.

> All trust is gone.

You trusted your state? Your army? Ever?

You do realize that the US-involvement in the first world war was triggered by the industry, right? All that "Freedom for Democracy" were just cheap excuses.
Same with WW2. And every other war you've been involved in since.

Trust? Warfare is primarily a way for the weapon industry to make money, it is very very seldomly that it serves a different purpose...

Holy cow, some of this is simply pure garbage:

* "The problem with that platform is, there's no standards and piracy is rampant, so why would we want to make a video game for that platform unless you had some sort of draconian DRM thing to keep it from being stolen?"

In other words, DRM is what we need, and we need more of it! The current DRM cannot be a possible reason for low sales!

* "If you look at how many guys have high-end graphics cards--well, yeah, all of you do--but the more casual players, the more general audience might not. The percentage is probably pretty low."

Thus, you're forced to allow us options to set graphics options - ranging from very simple all the way up to dual-cards. Which is difficult because... ?

* "If everybody would stop pirating, if everybody would stop doing DRM, it would be a much happier world, wouldn't it? We'd have a lot more PC games sold and a lot more happier customers."

Piracy will never, ever stop. And as we've seen very clearly in the past ten years, DRM is quite worthless, succeeding merely in stopping people from buying the originals, as the pirate copies are so much better.

* "I think you're going to continue to see what we've seen in the past five years, which is just console games ported to the PC..."

Which usually don't sell all that well, as PCs are simply more capable than consoles. High-end PCs, that is - the others can have plenty of graphics options.

* "PC gaming isn't dead, it's just in a partially vegetative state."

Which is why the indies are doing so well - have a look at "Plants vs. Zombies", for example...

* "At some point, there's going to have to be a fundamental paradigm shift in how we interface with the PC. The screen's just not going to do it anymore."

I... see. So, let's not use the monitor. Sounds brilliant

I'm sorry, chaps, but that discussion seemed pretty useless, particularly as the DRM attitude of some of the are idiotic (especially Joe Kreiner, Engine Licensing VP - but what do you expect from a manager anyway?)

Ciao,
Klaus

I quote: "One potential usage for the tech is to create avatars that are not just cartoonesque versions of the computer user but an exact copy. Gamers would then be able to upload their digital double into their favourite games."

Sooooo.... instead of your gaming appearance in the form of a muscular avatar with a shock full of hair, you'll show people that you're in reality a balding fatso?

Perhaps he's merely new to the US workforce?
I haven't seen this kind of problem here in Germany (and believe me, bureaucrazy is held high here...)

If you're good at your job, you can simply leave companies with such moronic ideas - you won't like working for them anyway, as there will be plenty more moronic ideas like this. It won't bother you, as you'll find a new job pretty quickly anyway (if, as I said, you're good at it).

> Start by offering 700MB XVID downloads for about USD$5 from fast servers with fantastic bandwidth.

Good idea

> In the movie file, show one add for an upcoming movie, then show the credit card details and user account information for about 5 seconds. "this copy of $movie is licenced to $name $address $credit_card_number" . The customer will protect your movies with the same level of care as their card information, and will share it at their own risk or have to go to the hassle of editing the information out before putting it on p2p.

Poor idea. This would make very sure that even more people learn how to rip and edit their movies.

Canadians, tell the EU to screw itself over this point.

Keep in mind that the individual states use the EU to force through lousy ideas and laws (usually bought by the industry), which they cannot do locally.
Do it through the EU, though, and they can sob on TV that they hate the idea, but their hands are tied...

...or what else are they babbling this time?

A new entry in Slashdot (a mere six hours later) shows that "The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 passed a Senate panel giving the president unprecedented power to issue a nation-wide blackout or restriction on websites without congressional approval."

To fight the eeeeeeeevil terrarists, obviously. Why else?

Mhm... which "free nation" are you talking about?
The one where the president can have absolutely anybody (incl. his own citizens) arrested, kept for an indefinitive time period without trial, and have them (quite officially) tortured?

Wow, sounds familiar.

My chinese ex-girlfriend (now wife ;) simply insists that I speak german to her. Every time I accidentially switch back into English, she'll remind me again. Works great - in addition to 8 months of very intensive german course training, of course...

I'm sorry, maybe I'm not seeing the forest due to all the trees, but... so what?
I don't care about lawyer-babble. In my eyes, we use Mozilla like this: a) free, b) don't try to sell it. Full stop.

Who cares about some or other minor legal detail, as long as the result stays as we know it?

Well, while Python is definitively an interesting language, the original teaching language (created to teach programming, and taught before the first compiler for it existed) is Pascal. The original Pascal is of course somewhat outdated by now, but the useful version was pushed onto the PC by Borland in the form of 'Turbo Pascal' (dirt cheap, graphics capable, screamingly fast - in '86!).
The language (later called 'Delphi' under Windoze) managed to stay around for a long time despite Borlands best efforts at lousy support. I still use it quite a bit, especially as the compiler is still extremely fast.

These days you'd want something like FreePascal using the Lazarus interface (http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/), which is not only free but runs on Windows, Linux and Mac. A 'Hello World' is done within minutes by an absolute beginner, who can then concentrate on the code itself instead of the interface :)