Ask Slashdot: Why do your job when you can ask others to do it for you?

esperanto?

Last time I went into a games store, the section dedicated to PC games was a tenth of that dedicated to Xbox 360. Maybe I'd buy more PC games in Game or Gamestation if they actually had a selection. They killed their own sales.

I assume it means the part of the Russian Federation which is part of Europe rather than Asia

I'm not 100% sure about this but in the UK at least I'm fairly sure most, if not all, ISPs are available everywhere in the country* with the exception of virgin media cable internet (since you need to be in a cabled area, and you can still get virgin broadband via phone-line (ADSL/ADSL2+)). I'm no broadband expert but my understanding is that all equipment is owned by BT and then rented by the smaller ISPs (with the exception of some of the other big ISPs who use their own tech in major telephone exchanges). As such, any ISP is available anywhere that is capable of ADSL*. There aren't the regional monopolies that seem to exist in the US since almost everyone uses ADSL(or 2+) and rely on the same pone system. I don't know if the situation is the same in Eire/ROI, but it I suspect it is and that Eircom is their equivalent of BT.

*some very remote areas with no/very poor phone line are obviously n/a

As mentioned in the other thread, I wasn't talking about the interconnects. Being an adapter, rather than an output device, it isn't quite the same thing. To say that something outputs HDMI is not the same as this connects DVI equipment to HDMI equipment.

HDMI port != HDMI cable. The active hardware has to output audio and be HDCP 1.1 compliant to be HDMI. An HDMI-DVI adapter is not active hardware, but a cable (or dongle; but as far as the tech goes they are the same anyway) so is not subject to the same standards. However, I am fairly certain that such adapters cannot be HDMI certified, therefore cannot display the HDMI logo (but can be labelled as HDMI, since saying that it converts DVI->HDMI or vice versa is not false advertising).

Now I think about it, I don't know if HDMI outputs are required to have audio, but certainly all inputs are required to accept at least stereo LPCM (which is why HDMI equipped monitors have audio-outs), so I may have got a little muddled up there.

Actually, all HDMI ports have HDCP - it's a requirement of the spec. Of course there is nothing to stop companies or individuals from buying HDMI ports and just attaching them to DVI pins, but if they did that they wouldn't be legally allowed to advertise it or label it as HDMI (false advertising etc). Likewise, it also has to be able to output audio or it is technically not HDMI.

Every time OpenGL is mentioned, the John Carmack argument is raised too. OpenGL has been playing catch up since this argument was relevant, whilst it will most probably never catch up with D3D, the support for OpenGL ES within OpenGL 4.x has made it a more attractive effort, as porting to and from mobile devices is a lot easier. And on that thought of mobile devices...Mobile games are on the up and up...(they use OGL ES)

I would imagine that the paper example is almost exactly the same as when righties write on the back of a sheet of paper in such a binder or notebook. The only credible differences I see are that a) lefties start the line of text in the awkward position while righties end it in the awkward position (in left-right languages of course) and b) you are slightly more likely to write on on the front side. Both seem like fairly negligible differences to me. Other than that, all the differences that are present are there no matter what you're writing on.

The difference there is that it is generally illegal to possess said drugs, so he would have no right to have them regardless of whether they were on a plane. Then there's smuggling of legal items (i.e. items you are allowed to possess in both countries) which is evasion of taxes, import duty (or whatever it's called in the US) etc. Assuming for a moment that neither is the case, and that it would be legal for the Shurikens to be shipped to the US (which I assume it would be), why should the same not hold for his private transport? If he were going to the UK for example, I could understand it as I'm fairly sure it's illegal to possess them here, but when going to the US, why not?

Just because it is a response to the situation in Russia does not mean or imply that Russia is the only place it will apply. Maybe it applies to all CIS countries, or everywhere that Microsoft deems a similar situation to Russia likely. Also, I didn't say it implied that it applies to all non-US countries, but that it implies that it may apply to all non-US countries.

The New York Times article clearly states (no implication needed) that it doesn't only apply to Russia ("the company indicated that it would apply to other countries as well, though it did not identify them."), while the IT World article makes no implication that it is Russia-only and the part I quoted implies that it would apply worldwide outside of the US (although it's probably just poorly worded).

Ummm, no

From the New Your Times article:

From the IT World article:

Since when does "outside the US" translate to "only if they're in Russia"?

While it may indeed only apply to Russia, there is at least implication that it does not and may apply to everywhere outside of the US.

I don't know if you were simply using it's to spite the troll or not but I'm fairly sure its is correct. Unlike most words the apostrophe is only added when it's a contraction of "it is", "it has" etc, not to indicate "belonging to it" (possessive). The GP was a troll to be sure, but an accurate troll nonetheless.

That is very true, but if "making profit" is a higher priority than "not being a dick", then they will be a dick if it increases profit. It's not that being a dick is required for profit, but if you are willing to do so you will get more.

In almost all situations, being just a little bit of a dick is far more profitable than not being.

The real question is how much of "being a dick" does it take before profit starts to decrease due to customer dissatisfaction? If making a profit is the top priority (which it is for most companies) they will be "dicks" as long as the money saved/gained outweighs the loss caused by dissatisfied customers, like if they can grow a crop they need for a product at a third of the cost by cutting down part of the Amazon, but it loses them a third of their customers. In that example profit is the top priority, but other companies would put the long-term well-being of the planet ahead of profit and so would use sustainable crops etc. What about the law - should it not come above profit? I'm sure we have all heard about companies that have done things illegally to cut costs and later been found out, be it evading taxes, using illegal labour, or simply not conforming to regulations.

Slavery might have been a bit of an extreme example, but it is within the realm of belief that it could happen if the company thought they could keep it hidden from the public. If profit is of the highest priority, then no ethical or legal concerns would override that beyond "How much profit would we lose if we are found out?". I wish it weren't the case, but many companies do this (for lesser things than slavery mind), which is why the rainforest is being destroyed, why millions around the world are paid 50c/hour for 28 hour days in a factory, why farmers who grow crops abroad get 0.1% of the sale cost for their goods and so on.

As you said, "it's all in how you go about it" - that really should be the priority, not the amount of profit made, or at the very least they should be equal, balancing concerns (make as much profit as possible AND be ethical/not a dick), which changes "make as much profit as possible" form the top priority to a top priority.