Slashdot Mirror

asdasd?

I'd consider making my own Tetris game if only to avoid paying $60cdn for shitty Tetris Worlds.

No, you can't make your own Tetris® game because Blue Planet Software aka The Tetris Company owns a trademark on the name "Tetris". You can make a falling tetramino game, but you'll just have to call it something different such as Quadra or freepuzzlearena.

And what's so bad about Worlds? It has Tetris, The New Tetris, The Next Tetris, a clone of Quadra, and two new variations all in one cartridge. That is, other than the fact that speed levels 13 through 15 are practically unplayable.

You want profit? Then create it! Create it, pay for it or slag off!

That may be true for movies, but eventually, it'll become impossible to create new music. U.S. courts have defined copyright infringement on a musical work as the use of at least four consecutive notes that are substantially similar to the melody of a copyrighted work. Given that there are only 27,000 possible runs of four notes under the "substantially similar" standard (transpose melodies to start on middle C, fold rests into previous note, fold notes outside an 11-note range inward an octave, quantize durations to short/medium/long), I'm afraid that the day will come when composers will no longer be able to write new music that doesn't infringe a copyright.

Of course, doing this would only further extend the Clear Channel monopoly.

I also don't watch TV anymore, but now I waste my time on the net, including reading slashdot. Can't have a poll on that one heh? "Do you find not reading slashdot saves you time?" I sometimes think I should edit /etc/hosts and redirect slashdot.org and everything2.com to some webpage that would yell at me to go studying, but alas, I'm still here!

Why don't y'all get in a huff when the money is going the other way around? It can't be morally offensive for MS to do it, and then just fine for the anybody else.

For anyone wondering about the 'dept' line of this story, here's the missing [?]

Ok, teach me to respond when I'm tired. :) The everything2 node that I originally refered to was basically a definition of an OC-1 that you are suppose to multiply by 3. Didn't see that part.

Since I have no expericene working with ATM or traffice shaping, I might be talking out my ass (wouldn't be the first time :) ), but traffic shaping doesn't increase the available bandwithd, just makes a more fair use of it. Correct? So instead of a small porportion of the network sucking most of the available bandwidth, many people have equal amounts of bandwidth, but with quite reduced speeds.

Either way, the bottleneck is still there somewhere between the wall jack and the internet. It's finite and can/will reach capacity at some point in time.

While I think your comparison is ultimately correct, it costs a lot more than $20 for Blockbuster to get the movie, thanks to the wonderful people at the MPAA. If you read the copyright notice at the beginning of practically every DVD/VHS, I'm nearly positive that it forbids you from renting out a regularly priced copy. Instead, Blockbuster et al. have to buy a very price-inflated (I don't know how much, exactly, but I believe it to be >$100) copy of the DVD to be able to legally rent it out to customers.

Because of the high cost, the read-limited CDs may interest the smaller rental chains: it may be more profitable, and certainly more profitable in the short run, to sell the defective DVDs.

Of course, I really doubt this will get far. We all know the legacy of DivX (which is a better comparison than nothing), and judging by how people react when told about the DMCA and friends in plain terms, the MPAA and RIAA are already getting away with a lot more than J. Random Consumer would like. If they aren't sneaky about it (and I don't know how they could be here), I doubt people are going to go for it.

When I said a couple, I didn't mean 2 or 3 people total. I should have said more approprately a small percentage of the DSL subscribers. The CO serving my house has a single OC-3 connection (at least as reported by DSLreports.com). Since an OC-3 is approximately 51.84 megabits/sec, it would take 69 people running at 768up/128down to completely saturate the line. This particular CO serves the NE corner of my city, approximately 10,000 holmes maybe and numerous business that probably would bring down the number of people further.

The phone company hopes that there will not be a large number of people sucking 768 kbs consistantly for very long periods of time, just as a cable company bets that not everyone in a neighborhood gets online all at once. But my original point is still valid. There is a limited total capacity of either system's pipes. There is still a bottle neck somewhere between the "Internet" the wall jack. The bottle neck just moves from the neighborhood to the CO.

"I've been presented with the opportunity to design ... any sort of project with a technological/learning/experimental bent ... involving on the order of 3000 children as participants, drawing from a multi-million dollar budget. ... I'm interested in gauging the thoughts of the Slashdot community."

Well, duh.

This is an excellent opportunity to implement Professor Hodgson's KIDs experiment from Lain. ;)

Excuse me for being cynical, but how is getting 3000 young children together and giving them PDAs somehow "innovative" or "world-changing"?

Certainly, that alone would not be world-changing. However, getting 3000 kids to expand their world views will probably result in some change in their thinking. At the very least, I'd hope that the kids from "western" centers will become less culturally imperialist in their thinking towards lesser-developed nations, if they remember how their kids in those countries feel. At the same time, it should give them the impetus to want to change the living conditions of their friends where appropriate, such as improving sanitation, health care, and other quality of life issues.

Remember, we hardly ever reach out to "the other" like we do to people we know. The more I know you and see you're like me, the closer my affinity for you is, and the more I want to help you. There's some interesting exploration of this idea in Orson Scott Card's Ender series.

I'm sorry, but I don't see why this is deserving of the millions of dollars you're putting into it. I'd much rather see that money go towards feeding the hundreds of millions of people starving all around the world, and not to some corporate PR department trying to spin this as world-changing.

Certainly, there is a great emergency, and we should be giving lots of support to organizations like Mercy Corps, who can go where we cannot, to intervene directly and keep people from starving. But while these organizations also do great things to improve living conditions and try to foster lasting changes within individual communities, it is mostly up to organizations like Bread For the World to seek policy changes that will help whole economic classes of people. But how do we get kids (and ourselves) to become (and remain) committed to supporting these efforts if there is no personal connection to what is going on?

Hunger comes in many forms. Filling their bellies is only a temporary and stop-gap solution. Try viewing this as seed money that will plant ideas in their minds - and ours.

best of all - it's not your money being invested in this - put your money where your ideologies are, and give to a relief organization. Remember that there's starvation and homelessness in the United States as well as abroad, and that even if "all" you can do is donate time to help kids learn to read or to build homes for families, you are needed to make the practical miracle happen. Feel free to exploit as many corporations as necessary to make it happen, by letting them put logos on the promo literature and at the press conferences in exchange for working capital... you will remember faces, not logos, anyway.

Excuse me for being cynical, but how is getting 3000 young children together and giving them PDAs somehow "innovative" or "world-changing"?

Certainly, that alone would not be world-changing. However, getting 3000 kids to expand their world views will probably result in some change in their thinking. At the very least, I'd hope that the kids from "western" centers will become less culturally imperialist in their thinking towards lesser-developed nations, if they remember how their kids in those countries feel. At the same time, it should give them the impetus to want to change the living conditions of their friends where appropriate, such as improving sanitation, health care, and other quality of life issues.

Remember, we hardly ever reach out to "the other" like we do to people we know. The more I know you and see you're like me, the closer my affinity for you is, and the more I want to help you. There's some interesting exploration of this idea in Orson Scott Card's Ender series.

I'm sorry, but I don't see why this is deserving of the millions of dollars you're putting into it. I'd much rather see that money go towards feeding the hundreds of millions of people starving all around the world, and not to some corporate PR department trying to spin this as world-changing.

Certainly, there is a great emergency, and we should be giving lots of support to organizations like Mercy Corps, who can go where we cannot, to intervene directly and keep people from starving. But while these organizations also do great things to improve living conditions and try to foster lasting changes within individual communities, it is mostly up to organizations like Bread For the World to seek policy changes that will help whole economic classes of people. But how do we get kids (and ourselves) to become (and remain) committed to supporting these efforts if there is no personal connection to what is going on?

Hunger comes in many forms. Filling their bellies is only a temporary and stop-gap solution. Try viewing this as seed money that will plant ideas in their minds - and ours.

best of all - it's not your money being invested in this - put your money where your ideologies are, and give to a relief organization. Remember that there's starvation and homelessness in the United States as well as abroad, and that even if "all" you can do is donate time to help kids learn to read or to build homes for families, you are needed to make the practical miracle happen. Feel free to exploit as many corporations as necessary to make it happen, by letting them put logos on the promo literature and at the press conferences in exchange for working capital... you will remember faces, not logos, anyway.

Excuse me for being cynical, but how is getting 3000 young children together and giving them PDAs somehow "innovative" or "world-changing"?

Certainly, that alone would not be world-changing. However, getting 3000 kids to expand their world views will probably result in some change in their thinking. At the very least, I'd hope that the kids from "western" centers will become less culturally imperialist in their thinking towards lesser-developed nations, if they remember how their kids in those countries feel. At the same time, it should give them the impetus to want to change the living conditions of their friends where appropriate, such as improving sanitation, health care, and other quality of life issues.

Remember, we hardly ever reach out to "the other" like we do to people we know. The more I know you and see you're like me, the closer my affinity for you is, and the more I want to help you. There's some interesting exploration of this idea in Orson Scott Card's Ender series.

I'm sorry, but I don't see why this is deserving of the millions of dollars you're putting into it. I'd much rather see that money go towards feeding the hundreds of millions of people starving all around the world, and not to some corporate PR department trying to spin this as world-changing.

Certainly, there is a great emergency, and we should be giving lots of support to organizations like Mercy Corps, who can go where we cannot, to intervene directly and keep people from starving. But while these organizations also do great things to improve living conditions and try to foster lasting changes within individual communities, it is mostly up to organizations like Bread For the World to seek policy changes that will help whole economic classes of people. But how do we get kids (and ourselves) to become (and remain) committed to supporting these efforts if there is no personal connection to what is going on?

Hunger comes in many forms. Filling their bellies is only a temporary and stop-gap solution. Try viewing this as seed money that will plant ideas in their minds - and ours.

best of all - it's not your money being invested in this - put your money where your ideologies are, and give to a relief organization. Remember that there's starvation and homelessness in the United States as well as abroad, and that even if "all" you can do is donate time to help kids learn to read or to build homes for families, you are needed to make the practical miracle happen. Feel free to exploit as many corporations as necessary to make it happen, by letting them put logos on the promo literature and at the press conferences in exchange for working capital... you will remember faces, not logos, anyway.

Excuse me for being cynical, but how is getting 3000 young children together and giving them PDAs somehow "innovative" or "world-changing"?

Certainly, that alone would not be world-changing. However, getting 3000 kids to expand their world views will probably result in some change in their thinking. At the very least, I'd hope that the kids from "western" centers will become less culturally imperialist in their thinking towards lesser-developed nations, if they remember how their kids in those countries feel. At the same time, it should give them the impetus to want to change the living conditions of their friends where appropriate, such as improving sanitation, health care, and other quality of life issues.

Remember, we hardly ever reach out to "the other" like we do to people we know. The more I know you and see you're like me, the closer my affinity for you is, and the more I want to help you. There's some interesting exploration of this idea in Orson Scott Card's Ender series.

I'm sorry, but I don't see why this is deserving of the millions of dollars you're putting into it. I'd much rather see that money go towards feeding the hundreds of millions of people starving all around the world, and not to some corporate PR department trying to spin this as world-changing.

Certainly, there is a great emergency, and we should be giving lots of support to organizations like Mercy Corps, who can go where we cannot, to intervene directly and keep people from starving. But while these organizations also do great things to improve living conditions and try to foster lasting changes within individual communities, it is mostly up to organizations like Bread For the World to seek policy changes that will help whole economic classes of people. But how do we get kids (and ourselves) to become (and remain) committed to supporting these efforts if there is no personal connection to what is going on?

Hunger comes in many forms. Filling their bellies is only a temporary and stop-gap solution. Try viewing this as seed money that will plant ideas in their minds - and ours.

best of all - it's not your money being invested in this - put your money where your ideologies are, and give to a relief organization. Remember that there's starvation and homelessness in the United States as well as abroad, and that even if "all" you can do is donate time to help kids learn to read or to build homes for families, you are needed to make the practical miracle happen. Feel free to exploit as many corporations as necessary to make it happen, by letting them put logos on the promo literature and at the press conferences in exchange for working capital... you will remember faces, not logos, anyway.

Excuse me for being cynical, but how is getting 3000 young children together and giving them PDAs somehow "innovative" or "world-changing"?

Certainly, that alone would not be world-changing. However, getting 3000 kids to expand their world views will probably result in some change in their thinking. At the very least, I'd hope that the kids from "western" centers will become less culturally imperialist in their thinking towards lesser-developed nations, if they remember how their kids in those countries feel. At the same time, it should give them the impetus to want to change the living conditions of their friends where appropriate, such as improving sanitation, health care, and other quality of life issues.

Remember, we hardly ever reach out to "the other" like we do to people we know. The more I know you and see you're like me, the closer my affinity for you is, and the more I want to help you. There's some interesting exploration of this idea in Orson Scott Card's Ender series.

I'm sorry, but I don't see why this is deserving of the millions of dollars you're putting into it. I'd much rather see that money go towards feeding the hundreds of millions of people starving all around the world, and not to some corporate PR department trying to spin this as world-changing.

Certainly, there is a great emergency, and we should be giving lots of support to organizations like Mercy Corps, who can go where we cannot, to intervene directly and keep people from starving. But while these organizations also do great things to improve living conditions and try to foster lasting changes within individual communities, it is mostly up to organizations like Bread For the World to seek policy changes that will help whole economic classes of people. But how do we get kids (and ourselves) to become (and remain) committed to supporting these efforts if there is no personal connection to what is going on?

Hunger comes in many forms. Filling their bellies is only a temporary and stop-gap solution. Try viewing this as seed money that will plant ideas in their minds - and ours.

best of all - it's not your money being invested in this - put your money where your ideologies are, and give to a relief organization. Remember that there's starvation and homelessness in the United States as well as abroad, and that even if "all" you can do is donate time to help kids learn to read or to build homes for families, you are needed to make the practical miracle happen. Feel free to exploit as many corporations as necessary to make it happen, by letting them put logos on the promo literature and at the press conferences in exchange for working capital... you will remember faces, not logos, anyway.

Excuse me for being cynical, but how is getting 3000 young children together and giving them PDAs somehow "innovative" or "world-changing"?

Certainly, that alone would not be world-changing. However, getting 3000 kids to expand their world views will probably result in some change in their thinking. At the very least, I'd hope that the kids from "western" centers will become less culturally imperialist in their thinking towards lesser-developed nations, if they remember how their kids in those countries feel. At the same time, it should give them the impetus to want to change the living conditions of their friends where appropriate, such as improving sanitation, health care, and other quality of life issues.

Remember, we hardly ever reach out to "the other" like we do to people we know. The more I know you and see you're like me, the closer my affinity for you is, and the more I want to help you. There's some interesting exploration of this idea in Orson Scott Card's Ender series.

I'm sorry, but I don't see why this is deserving of the millions of dollars you're putting into it. I'd much rather see that money go towards feeding the hundreds of millions of people starving all around the world, and not to some corporate PR department trying to spin this as world-changing.

Certainly, there is a great emergency, and we should be giving lots of support to organizations like Mercy Corps, who can go where we cannot, to intervene directly and keep people from starving. But while these organizations also do great things to improve living conditions and try to foster lasting changes within individual communities, it is mostly up to organizations like Bread For the World to seek policy changes that will help whole economic classes of people. But how do we get kids (and ourselves) to become (and remain) committed to supporting these efforts if there is no personal connection to what is going on?

Hunger comes in many forms. Filling their bellies is only a temporary and stop-gap solution. Try viewing this as seed money that will plant ideas in their minds - and ours.

best of all - it's not your money being invested in this - put your money where your ideologies are, and give to a relief organization. Remember that there's starvation and homelessness in the United States as well as abroad, and that even if "all" you can do is donate time to help kids learn to read or to build homes for families, you are needed to make the practical miracle happen. Feel free to exploit as many corporations as necessary to make it happen, by letting them put logos on the promo literature and at the press conferences in exchange for working capital... you will remember faces, not logos, anyway.

Excuse me for being cynical, but how is getting 3000 young children together and giving them PDAs somehow "innovative" or "world-changing"?

Certainly, that alone would not be world-changing. However, getting 3000 kids to expand their world views will probably result in some change in their thinking. At the very least, I'd hope that the kids from "western" centers will become less culturally imperialist in their thinking towards lesser-developed nations, if they remember how their kids in those countries feel. At the same time, it should give them the impetus to want to change the living conditions of their friends where appropriate, such as improving sanitation, health care, and other quality of life issues.

Remember, we hardly ever reach out to "the other" like we do to people we know. The more I know you and see you're like me, the closer my affinity for you is, and the more I want to help you. There's some interesting exploration of this idea in Orson Scott Card's Ender series.

I'm sorry, but I don't see why this is deserving of the millions of dollars you're putting into it. I'd much rather see that money go towards feeding the hundreds of millions of people starving all around the world, and not to some corporate PR department trying to spin this as world-changing.

Certainly, there is a great emergency, and we should be giving lots of support to organizations like Mercy Corps, who can go where we cannot, to intervene directly and keep people from starving. But while these organizations also do great things to improve living conditions and try to foster lasting changes within individual communities, it is mostly up to organizations like Bread For the World to seek policy changes that will help whole economic classes of people. But how do we get kids (and ourselves) to become (and remain) committed to supporting these efforts if there is no personal connection to what is going on?

Hunger comes in many forms. Filling their bellies is only a temporary and stop-gap solution. Try viewing this as seed money that will plant ideas in their minds - and ours.

best of all - it's not your money being invested in this - put your money where your ideologies are, and give to a relief organization. Remember that there's starvation and homelessness in the United States as well as abroad, and that even if "all" you can do is donate time to help kids learn to read or to build homes for families, you are needed to make the practical miracle happen. Feel free to exploit as many corporations as necessary to make it happen, by letting them put logos on the promo literature and at the press conferences in exchange for working capital... you will remember faces, not logos, anyway.

Excuse me for being cynical, but how is getting 3000 young children together and giving them PDAs somehow "innovative" or "world-changing"?

Certainly, that alone would not be world-changing. However, getting 3000 kids to expand their world views will probably result in some change in their thinking. At the very least, I'd hope that the kids from "western" centers will become less culturally imperialist in their thinking towards lesser-developed nations, if they remember how their kids in those countries feel. At the same time, it should give them the impetus to want to change the living conditions of their friends where appropriate, such as improving sanitation, health care, and other quality of life issues.

Remember, we hardly ever reach out to "the other" like we do to people we know. The more I know you and see you're like me, the closer my affinity for you is, and the more I want to help you. There's some interesting exploration of this idea in Orson Scott Card's Ender series.

I'm sorry, but I don't see why this is deserving of the millions of dollars you're putting into it. I'd much rather see that money go towards feeding the hundreds of millions of people starving all around the world, and not to some corporate PR department trying to spin this as world-changing.

Certainly, there is a great emergency, and we should be giving lots of support to organizations like Mercy Corps, who can go where we cannot, to intervene directly and keep people from starving. But while these organizations also do great things to improve living conditions and try to foster lasting changes within individual communities, it is mostly up to organizations like Bread For the World to seek policy changes that will help whole economic classes of people. But how do we get kids (and ourselves) to become (and remain) committed to supporting these efforts if there is no personal connection to what is going on?

Hunger comes in many forms. Filling their bellies is only a temporary and stop-gap solution. Try viewing this as seed money that will plant ideas in their minds - and ours.

best of all - it's not your money being invested in this - put your money where your ideologies are, and give to a relief organization. Remember that there's starvation and homelessness in the United States as well as abroad, and that even if "all" you can do is donate time to help kids learn to read or to build homes for families, you are needed to make the practical miracle happen. Feel free to exploit as many corporations as necessary to make it happen, by letting them put logos on the promo literature and at the press conferences in exchange for working capital... you will remember faces, not logos, anyway.

From now on, schools should teach creationism and evolution at the same time. Included in the classwork: [a half-dozen-plus creation mythologies]

You forgot the halflings' creation myth. But seriously, I wonder why school literature classes don't teach comparative mythology. At the high school I attended, the mythological curriculum was restricted to the Greek myths, presumably so they could lead from that into Homer's epics.

To get you started, there's:

functional language
and imperative language.

The soft links here are somewhat more explanatory than the nodes themselves -- others who reply on this thread should consider this an open invitation to write up something more useful.

To get you started, there's:

functional language
and imperative language.

The soft links here are somewhat more explanatory than the nodes themselves -- others who reply on this thread should consider this an open invitation to write up something more useful.

"you can read BSI's press release..."

Perhaps I've wasted too much time here and at E2, but am I the only person that saw 'BSI', and though:

"What does Block Stackers Intergalactic have to do with this?

Followed by: "Hell, since when have they released press releases?!"

I guess I'm odd...

Too late ...

But people, get a grip !! Seriously !!

Ever heard of occam's razor ?
RMS is simply asking Miguel what he ment by :

"I'd like to see Gnome applications written in .NET in version 4.0 - no, version 3.0. But Gnome 4.0 should be based on .NET,"

Nothing more.

I wonder if geeks will evolve into a different sub-species of Homo Sapiens, maybe Homo Sapiens Sapiens++ ?

It's all codswallop this morning ... where's my goddamned newspaper!!??!!

One of my first questions after finishing Cryptonomicon was whether Enoch Root was indeed human or wasn't some sort of angelic presence sent to meddle in human affairs. Since Cryptonomicon depicts Enoch as seeming to not age very fast, and this book is set almost 300 years ago, it will be interesting to see whether Enoch is still alive and the same age at that time.

For more about the Enoch Root, click here to read a little essay written by my colleague, e2 Glowing Fish.

Back around August 2001, that famous MSTD, the CodeRed worm was swarming across the Internet. One side effect of it's probing behavior was to trigger a bug in certain models of Cisco DSL modems. The result was a crashed modem.

The user could power cycle the modem, but it would die again shortly when their neighbor's infected system probed them. This was a catastrophe for the ISP's involved.

This effected many people, more than a million I believe.

Cisco put out a corrective CD-ROM that reflashed the CPE with fixed firmware. If this had not been possible, Cisco would probably have ended up paying to replace all those modems. Running off some CD-ROMs was a lot cheaper.

thetruth.com comercial's make me want to smoke

thanks lameness filter ... less than signs could never be useful).

< > < > < > < > < > < > < > < > < > < > < > < >

For more tricks: HTML Symbol reference

Your post has to be modded down as a troll.

Now, the problem is that you can't claim to be of public utility if you create proprietary stuff from which you'll get money by preventing public organisations not only to use them but also to learn and teach pothers to use them.

IMHO only public international organization should be involved in such researches and thus *not* make a life out of it.

We're not dealing with some home luxury device here but with a communication standard and if such standard accessibility is hindered by a royalty-hog patent, then it should no more be considered as a communication standard.

Now, you can see the obvious problem with patents when handled by multinational profit-seeking entities if you consider these bio-piracy exemples from the real world.

The exemptions in the DMCA are useless ... "Summary judgement for plaintiff" overrides [the right to a jury trial] ...

We'll see what the Supremes have to say about that. They can't just deny cert to every single copyright-related case that comes up in the United States court system.

Besides, I have another attack on the 17 USC 1201 that exploits the exemption for works that don't entirely fall into its "work protected under this title" scope. If even one of Charlie Chaplin's silent films (pre-1923 so it doesn't fall under perpetual copyright) is sold on DVD with CSS encryption, it may be possible to make a CSS decryptor that's marketed only for purposes of decrypting public domain content from a DVD (even though the rest of the DVD may be copyrighted under the compilation provisions).

"Marge, fetch me my telephone hat, it's tax filin' time ..." (obscure Simpsons reference that no one gets)

Microsoft thinks it can. If someone did to windows what Linus did to Unix, they'd get their pants sued off, even though it's not illegal.

Then why isn't Microsoft suing CodeWeavers, the company that funds development of a popular free Windows API layer for UNIX workalikes? Yes, I know that Microsoft is suing Lindows, but that's trademark law, easily fixable by changing a name, as demonstrated in Tetrisgate.

The idea to combine wikis and weblogs is very promising. The sequential nature of weblogs is great for news, but not for acting on these news in a sustained fashion. If Slashdot writes about some political issue, if actions are taken they are usually short-lived, or move to other mailing lists. Similarly, wikis can combine sites which host both a lot of persistent knowledge (e.g. papers, essays) with the dynamic, community-creating nature of a weblog. I plan to eventually run violence.de as a wiki-weblog, with the wiki (access-restricted) storing the papers, film pages etc., and the weblog reporting about current issues (sexual repression, censorship, new studies etc.) -- mail me if you want to help.

Wikis, when properly deployed, are the missing component to make weblogs truly useful. With properly deployed, I mean that typical wiki idiosyncrasies need to be avoided: Nobody really wants to use WikiStyleLinks, they make text harder to read and are difficult to get rid of once you have decided to use them. Choose E2 or Wikipedia style links instead. Also, access restrictions are necessary in many contexts. See the article for some further design details.

And what happens when the machine gets old and you want to make way for new games? Video cabinets can be re-used. Slap a new mobo in there and put a new marquee up and you're good to go. Not so with pinball machines. There's no practical way to gut one and upgrade it to a new machine. You can do it, but it costs way more in labor than just buying the new machine outright.

That was one of the goals of Williams' Pinball 2000 system. You could swap out all of the parts easily, to turn it from one pinball to another in just a few minutes. The entire playfield came out as one piece, and the processor and ROMs were on cards, and could also be changed rapidly.

Gargoyles anyone?

You can get the text of almost any book at Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg/)

Yeah, but they won't take anything first published on or after 1923 because of the Bono Act. You'll have to request it in one of the alt.binaries.e-book groups.

Wouldn't it be more efficient to provide a couple of different binary packages for each package a'la mandrake (i586 and i486) ?

That would cost more for the CDs and for download bandwidth, especially when you take into account Alpha, Sparc, MIPS, and all the other PC-class-or-higher architectures that Linux runs on. See also my Everything 2 article about making Linux distributions smaller.

Without the experience I had with 6502 assembly language on the Apple II trying to get a gambling game suite called "Place Your Bets" to respond to keypresses and draw graphics faster than Applesoft Molasses Basic, I never would have had the knowledge of the 6502 processor necessary for NES development.

That's funny... the last computer I owned that I didn't write a Tetris clone for was an Apple II.

More and more people are ousted from their jobs by smart technologies.

Although I am no longer the fan of Robert Anton Wilson that I once was (despite the fact that I killed him), he spoke about this phenomenon in (IIRC) "Prometheus Rising". He felt that the increased automization of menial tasks would lead to a more educated society. Since all the "dumb jobs" would be taken over by computers, robots, etc., in order to survive people would have to educate themselves on tasks that cannot be performed by automatons.

This seems to be happening, at least to a degree, although there is another factor at work as well: cheap (nonunionized) international labor. There seems to be a point at which exploiting overseas workers is about as cheap as building a robot, sometimes cheaper.

I recall someone actually studied "toon-town" physics

Other than the widely circulated Cartoon Laws of Physics from a 1994 IEEE journal, got any links?

I find AOL/TW less scary than MS, at least on a personal level.

At least Microsoft didn't spend millions lobbying both political parties to pass the Bono Act and DMCA like AOL(tw) did back when it was just Time Warner.

If I want to avoid their media conglomeration entirely, I can. And if I do, it doesn't affect me.

It does in the United States, where you can go to jail merely for watching a DVD.

Microsoft, on the other hand, by trying to extend its monopolies

Except AOL(tw) doesn't try; it succeeds in extending its monopolies.

It's true--I took the grad-level PLP (COP 5535, IIRC) course last summer. Dr. Bermudez announced in class that around ten students (out of ~100) had suspiciously similar code. I was shocked, since these were all graduate students.

The software compares parse trees, rendering most obfuscation techniques ineffective. Perhaps it also analyzes the machine code, counting jumps and performing statistical analysis of procedure calls. The more industrious cheater can probably resort to #inline directives and nested function calls to beat the detector, but anybody who goes to that length should just do the damn assignment instead.

I'm very grateful for any and all cheating detectors. You missed the point, Taco: collaboration is extremely important, but someone who can't produce code is useless in a production environment

a single company controlling something like: AOL ... Time Warner ... ESPN

No. ESPN is Disney, the other company we love to hate thanks in no small part to the late Sonny Bono, and ESPN.go.com is Disney and Microsoft.

"PC processors", not processors in general.

PC
The generic term for an x86 box with a BIOS roughly compatible with the original 1981 Personal Computer from IBM.

I checked my box of Total Annihilation. Copyright 1997. That means 4-5 years old

Five is less than ninety-five. A company that Infogrames bought created the code; therefore, <sarcasm>Infogrames deserves the right to it for ninety-five years, and the public benefits immensely from receiving the source code at the end of this copyright term</sarcasm>. If you disagree, do something about it: vote those eresponsible out of office.

Assuming that you're a United States citizen who voted in the 1996 elections, the representative and senators that you elected voted for the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. It was a voice vote, and nobody objected enough to demand even a mere head count. Next time, vote for leaders that won't take away Americans' right to a rich public domain. In the meantime, fax your representatives in whatever national government you happen to be under. To paraphrase U.S. President Bush, if you're not for copyright reform, you're against it.

you're trusting everything2 for accurate data [on the Bono Act]?

You mean like this?

Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act (idea) by yerricde
Wikipedia article covering the Bono Act to which I contributed heavily

Yes. I'm trusting myself and my sources (which include the Library of Congress web site and Open Secrets) for accurate data.

Can't patents be renewed

Patents last three and a half years after being granted but can renewed to 7 1/2 after grant, 11 1/2 after grant, and 20 after filing by paying maintenance fees.

Copyrights last 95 years unless you're a freelancer creating works on or after 1 Jan 1978, in which case they last life plus 70. (To renew a copyright for 20 years, simply stuff millions of dollars into the pockets of both parties in the United States and all major parties in the European Union.) Either way, they last additionally until December 31.

A registered trademark lasts five years. After that, the owner files an affidavit of continued use, which buys another five years; then the trademark can be renewed for ten years at a time until a court decides that the trademark has become too generic to maintain.

All your Spoony Bard Are Belong To Us !!

And now for something completely different.