You see, I'd love to be playing this, but at 60 for the game and 15 a month, that's just too rich for my tastes.

I fall into the camp of someone who will simply never pay a monthly fee for a game. I'm a casual gamer at best, and I've long since been outpaced by video games and can't work most of them.

By making it on-line only, and charging for that, they've pretty much assured that people like me will never even try it. Which, they're probably fine with.

The guys who made Portal, however, can likely count on my support for future titles. Portal 2 is the first game I've played for hours on end in years. I may ponder getting the original once I've worked through this one.

By your logic, we should be able to throw children in jail because a drug dealer gave them some "candy" to share with their friends.

No, I merely pointed out that the analogy for the stolen radio didn't work in such a way as to absolve the recipient of any wrong-doing, which may or may not have been the point of the poster I replied to.

I didn't specifically advocate anything, but as an AC, I don't expect your reading comprehension to be complete. Certainly the logical fallacy you attribute to me isn't based on anything I said.

But, hey, don't let any of that get in the way of the random assertions you felt like making.

"The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface"

Zzzzzzz??? Really??

Twenty five years ago, finding an exoplanet was considered to be some forward looking science that might not ever happen, and the belief then was that planets were likely quite rare. Ten years ago we'd found some planets, but they were all gas giants.

Now, we find a planet which is close to Earth in size, in a solar system with 5 planets in it, 1000 light years away That's some heavy stuff.

If you're incapable of understanding that this is actually pretty significant, maybe you should go back to your coloring books ... the estimate of the number of planets there are likely to be in our galaxy alone has likely gone up by several orders of magnitude in the last 20 years or so.

We're quickly changing from "oh there's likely not many planets" to "the universe is full of them" ... it's hard not to think that even if it's not what we'd call intelligent life, there's likely more than a few places that have evolved some form of life.

The more we see stuff like this, the more we see just how vast and astounding the universe around us actually is.

When stars used to be named after important scientists, and not machinery.

Ummm ... as much as Kepler is the name of the device, Johannes Kepler laid out the mathematics of orbits. You know, Kepler's Laws.

Naming stars Kepler-20 (or whatever) is naming them after important scientists ... and since it's looking for things which orbit, it's quite apt.

i think the logic would be more akin to the guy who bought your stereo from the guy who bought your stereo, from the guy who bought your stolen stereo from the guy who broke into your house and took your stereo, shouldn't be held responsible for breaking into your house.

Except in this case, he still received stolen goods, which is illegal. He's not responsible for the break-in, but it doesn't make it legal for him to have your stereo.

Not sure that helps your analogy or not. :-P

Jokes aside, it's interesting how among all the different types of intellectual property, only copyright is settled in criminal courts.

And are policed by the FBI and ICE and Homeland Security ... pretty sweet deal, make the government responsible for policing your profits, and at their expense.

The police (and the government) now officially work for the corporations. It's amazing the laws you can buy.

Majel is named after Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who was the voice of most of the Star Trek on-board computers, as well as playing Nurse Christine Chapel in the first series and being Gene Roddenberry's wife.

OK, anybody who didn't immediately think of Majel Barrett without being told who she was, please leave -- you're obviously in the wrong place. ;-)

I keed, I keed. Well, mostly.

LOL ...

The first cat mission was eavesdropping on two men in a park outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and killed by a taxi almost immediately. Subsequent tests also failed

That is truly hilarious.

Modern corporations seem to have devalued older scientists. They are all to happy to have their veteran employees, scientists included, take an early retirement so that they can be replaced by younger people who expect fewer benefits and will work for lower pay.

One of the reason the older scientists are still productive is they can spell and use grammar correctly.

If Slashdot is any indication, modern science must be full of mis-uses of "their, there, and they're" and other lovely bits of broken grammar people don't seem to learn in school any more.

Damned kids, get off my lawn.

Penalizing all stockholders for the crimes of others is hardly fair.

Oh, heaven forbid we penalize the stock-holders ... oh no, that would be horrible.

Look, if the only way to punish a corporation is to hurt their bottom line, then I'm all for it. Because otherwise companies will just keep doing anything they want with no consequences whatsoever.

If you can't slap a company with a huge fine which hurts their bottom line, what can you do to punish them? A stern talking to won't work.

Criminals should not be able to avoid consequences by hiding behind legal incorporation.

Why not? That's practically what legal incorporation means ... it's a separate legal entity, which apparently now is a person with free speech, and which limits individual liability.

So except for the most egregious stuff (which is usually financial shenanigans -- again, it's all about the stockholder) there is almost no chance of someone being held criminally responsible for the actions of a corporation.

If a bunch of individuals decide to do something criminal on behalf of the company, you pretty much need to punish the corporation so there is an understanding that they need to play by the rules as well.

In some extreme cases you might be able to hold individuals criminally responsible, but letting the stockholders and the company off without any punishment only encourages them to act like assholes -- something they already do much of the time anyway.

I'm sorry, but if a company decides to use ground, rabid squirrel as an additive to their pepperoni, I fail to see why the corporation shouldn't be penalized; and if that means the stockholders get penalized, well, then they can tell the people who run the company they're not happy.

If you want to get paid for the company successes, you also own a share in their wrongdoings and misfortunes.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

I'm sure people will come up with all of the ways in which the 4th Amendment couldn't possibly apply here (ZOMG, you're out of your house, how could you possibly expect privacy), but really I've always assumed that this is exactly where it should be applied.

This whole "oh well, this technology bypasses the strict wording of that" is just moving the goalposts to sat that if it wasn't specifically prohibited, it must be OK.

No warrant, no probably cause ... no dragnet and broad automated surveillance. The US isn't supposed to allow domestic spying without probable cause and judicial oversight. This record everybody and figure it out later is pretty much the opposite of a free society.

Sadly, terrorism, protecting the children, and copyright all seem to more or less allow one to circumvent these things.

Just because any number of representatives of media are doing bad journalism, doesn't alter what journalism should be.

Should be doesn't necessarily define what journalism is.

As often happens on Slashdot, people on Slashdot are defining what it is based on what they think it should be.

The reality is, in its current state, 'journalism' covers a lot of things which doesn't necessarily live up to the level of rigor and independent verification which is being implied here. So, I completely fail to see how using Wikileaks to corroborate the stuff for your investigative journalism fails to be journalism.

Journalism sometimes takes the form of publishing someone's press release in the guise of an article or just taking a story off the wire and re-publishing it ... which, sadly, is similar to how the people who pass laws just put forth copy provided by the people paying for those laws.

Arbitrarily saying "one of these is real journalism and the other isn't" doesn't really serve any purpose as long as you don't hold the 'real' ones to any meaningful standard either. Unless you're holding the 'traditional' ones to account, what's the point in saying the others aren't really journalists either?

Your reply is what's known as "irony".

Actually, I think it was more akin to "mind your own fucking business" ... no irony whatsoever.

Another advantage is that this allows the complete control of the users desktop, meaning my users don't have the ability to install any software that's not authorized/needed/licensed and all of their work is backed up properly.

Ah, one size fits nobody. What an annoying model.

In my experience, the fully locked down desktop which nobody has any ability to install applications they use/need makes for a desktop that makes IT happy ... but is generally useless for the rest of the company unless your industry is predicated on a large number of people effectively doing clerical work.

I'm glad that at my current employer IT understand that they're there to serve the actual business users. Everyone gets a dual monitor machine by default, users are local admins on their machine ... they've mostly done away with the mindset of Mordac the Preventer in IT. IT is there to help you get your job done, not to tell you what you're allowed to do.

The department I'm in is the Information Services for the rest of the company (we're the DBAs, web team, storage, backup and all of the enterprise software ... a few step up from the desktop), and most of our clients are in charge of things worth tens or hundreds millions of dollars in revenue. The culture is much more about ensuring the business users have what they need ... we're there to keep everything going so the people who generate the actual revenue don't have any unnecessary hurdles. The last thing I need is for the guys that provision desktops to tell me that I can't install a tool that I need to meet a client obligation.

At the desktop level, that's just the most basic plumbing that connects you to everything else. That doesn't dictate to business what they "need" or are "allowed" to do ... It's just the starting point to connect to the mission critical stuff.

Companies that allow the guys who roll out desktops to dictate policy to people who generate millions in revenue suffer in the end. IT departments who treat the actual business users as secondary to their wishes ... well, they need a shorter leash in many cases.

Now, there may be some industries where the standardized, locked down desktop makes sense. But, in many, it's a model which just simply doesn't work -- you just end up with self important people in IT who think that they're in charge and seem to take some pleasure in telling you that you're not 'allowed' to do something.