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Not only has the rampant Tetris-playing caused my students to stop paying attention in class

Then don't allow your students to bring Game Boy units to class. The only handheld units that can run Tetris® brand products are Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance. No TI, HP, or Casio calculator has a Tetris product available. The closest equivalents to "Tetris" on TI-89 are Jetris, Queue, etc. Of course, there are also Nibbles, SameGame, Dr. M****, and P*c-M*n.

but the ability to store "notes" in the calculator is a major source of cheating on tests

Bull. If your students (like supabeast!) use their calcs as a mnemonic aid for formulas, the problem lies not necessarily in the calcs but perhaps in the tests themselves. Design the tests to require a higher level of thought than simple recall (such as the ability to comprehend, apply, or analyze the underlying mathematics), and don't let them use cable or IR links during the test.

The last few weeks I have noticed the quality of Slashdot's postings has deteriorated. Alot of duplicate postings etc... I don't know maybe I'm just too critical... any thoughts along these lines?

The problem really is the slashdot editorship. Let's be honest, we've all submitted stories that were denied, then accepted from someone else who has stories accepted all the damn time, two days later. It's obviously completely farcical. Not to mention that the people who are allowed to successfully submit stories are usually some kind of zealot (but, I hasten to add, not always.)

The answer, of course, is to not rely on slashdot for news; If you need information on exploits, follow bugtraq. Et cetera. Slashdot is nothing more for me at this point than a way to waste some time. When I'm not doing anything else, I sometimes visit slashdot to show off my biting wit and my clever ability to stockpile karma. Of course, since the karma kap went into effect RIGHT before I got 50 karma, that sort of blunts that effect too.

For those of you who are wondering what to do with the time you longer spend on slashdot due to the abject lack of quality, I suggest everything2, a peer-reviewed user-supported encyclopedia. Sure, sometimes it's slower than slashdot, and the database is cleverly taken down every night during the west coast's peak geek web browsing time, but it's a really amazingly useful and interesting way to spend your time. Mind you, it's not a news site, and bears basically no resemblance to slashdot, so if you're looking for a /. replacement, that's not it. If you are looking for a way to utilize your brainpower in a way that will help others find information, but without being pissed on by the editorship like you are on slashdot, then check it out.

Ok, so who's up for creating a perl-driven database site where we can all go and type in OUR favorite words and their definitions.

Do you mean like this?

Rather than have "(Free Reg. Req., blah blah)" appended to every freaking NYTimes link, why don't you just use an acronym like (FRR) linking to an everything2 node that explains it for the 3 people who have never visited NYTimes and have never seen a slashdot reference to a NYTimes article.

...haven't these folks been to Everything2 yet?

Oh, these dictionary folks could just hook onto E2 and saturate themselves.

• I think just about every school with a Computer Science program has a machine named "turing". It's kind of like naming schools after famous people, but in a geeky way :-)
  

It could be they are naming it after the famous Computer Scientist, or it could be a joke on the Turing Machine. You know, like so they can say "and this, is the Turing Machine".

Kind of like how ILM used to have a computer named Dagobah.... "and this, is the Dagobah System".

• Wikipedia article to which I contributed
• Everything 2 article that I wrote
• Eldred v. Ashcroft, a lawsuit to overturn the Bono Act
• House directory and Senate directory: whom to fax if you want this law repealed. Yes, fax. E-mail is assumed to be spam, while paper mail is assumed to carry anthrax.

In a Communist model, copyright would be used to prevent branching and ensure the development stays with the main project. The copyright owners ultimately being the government.

In a capitalist Proprietary Corporate Oligopoly model, on the other hand, copyright would be used to prevent branching and ensure the development stays with the main project. The copyright owners ultimately effectively becoming the government. See also the Bono Act and the DMCA.

In a Communist model, copyright would be used to prevent branching and ensure the development stays with the main project. The copyright owners ultimately being the government.

In a capitalist Proprietary Corporate Oligopoly model, on the other hand, copyright would be used to prevent branching and ensure the development stays with the main project. The copyright owners ultimately effectively becoming the government. See also the Bono Act and the DMCA.

There are 2 things that will help him - the quality of the work ie will people enjoy it, and his copyright over the work. If the work is good, and people enjoy it, there may be a return. However, if the copyright is reduced and after a few years he has no rights on it at all ( ie anyone can copy it ) then the chances of making a return are reduced.

If he hasn't made a return by ten years, the chance of making a return after that period is further reduced by market demand for the latest and greatest.

Now, how does that help with increasing the number of authors / books? Simple, it doesn't! In fact it is the exact opposite!

Not always. We need to maximize the total utility function (i.e. utility of work in copyright + utility of work in public domain), somewhere between "no copyprivilege" and "perpetual copyprivilege." I don't see how a 95-year copyright term is closer to this maximum than the 28-year term of the Copyright Act of 1790. In fact, long-term copyprivileges make it harder to create a musical work without accidentally stepping on somebody else's privileges (see also the short story "Melancholy Elephants" and the Yes! We have no bananas! case).

You propose to limit the financial reward to authors.

Patent law already limits the financial reward to inventors. I propose consistency in the limits.

The simple economics of the western world ... means that perhaps, some authors will not be able to write full time, and it will be far more difficult for new authors to be published at all, whether self published or not. So, you argue that reducing copyright will increase the number of authors / books, when you argument supports the opposite.

Justify this. What percent of books published nowadays do not make 90% of their total gross revenue within ten years after first publication? What percent of Hollywood motion pictures (not counting remakes that add significant original content) make any significant amount of money after even two years on the market?

Why don't you just admit it. You do not want to pay for it that's it, something for nothing. Simple!

Or I can't afford to pay for it. Or the author's estate refuses to license it at any price. Or I accidentally independently created it, and I can't afford an attorney to convince a judge of this.

There are 2 things that will help him - the quality of the work ie will people enjoy it, and his copyright over the work. If the work is good, and people enjoy it, there may be a return. However, if the copyright is reduced and after a few years he has no rights on it at all ( ie anyone can copy it ) then the chances of making a return are reduced.

If he hasn't made a return by ten years, the chance of making a return after that period is further reduced by market demand for the latest and greatest.

Now, how does that help with increasing the number of authors / books? Simple, it doesn't! In fact it is the exact opposite!

Not always. We need to maximize the total utility function (i.e. utility of work in copyright + utility of work in public domain), somewhere between "no copyprivilege" and "perpetual copyprivilege." I don't see how a 95-year copyright term is closer to this maximum than the 28-year term of the Copyright Act of 1790. In fact, long-term copyprivileges make it harder to create a musical work without accidentally stepping on somebody else's privileges (see also the short story "Melancholy Elephants" and the Yes! We have no bananas! case).

You propose to limit the financial reward to authors.

Patent law already limits the financial reward to inventors. I propose consistency in the limits.

The simple economics of the western world ... means that perhaps, some authors will not be able to write full time, and it will be far more difficult for new authors to be published at all, whether self published or not. So, you argue that reducing copyright will increase the number of authors / books, when you argument supports the opposite.

Justify this. What percent of books published nowadays do not make 90% of their total gross revenue within ten years after first publication? What percent of Hollywood motion pictures (not counting remakes that add significant original content) make any significant amount of money after even two years on the market?

Why don't you just admit it. You do not want to pay for it that's it, something for nothing. Simple!

Or I can't afford to pay for it. Or the author's estate refuses to license it at any price. Or I accidentally independently created it, and I can't afford an attorney to convince a judge of this.

Encouragement is done by giving them exclusive copyrights to the work they create, protected by law, for a limited time.

Limited? Every 20 years, the US Congress accepts $6 million from Disney employees and amends copyright law to extend all terms by 20 more years. They get away with this because courts currently consider "the lifetime of the universe less one day" a valid limit because they don't consider the preamble "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" to limit the power of Congress in any way. For more info, see Eldred v. Ashcroft.

Distributing a work over the internet without the author's permission or even knowledge isn't just illegal, it's immoral.

How is an author morally entitled to royalties 50 years after the author is dead and buried in the ground?

libraries do not republish material, they lend a specific copy.

What is the digital equivalent of such an action?

(of course, having the 'limited time' being shorter than a human lifespan would be nice)

Nice, but unless you have more than $6 million to bribe Congress to repeal the Bono Act, it's not gonna happen.

Hopefully this will spark something in the community that will help get something going.

Except in Shangai, or Ventiane, or Hanoi, or New Delhi, or Kabhul, or Algiers

So far, you've been very careful to pick cities in countries that have little disregard for United States GGM law but happen not to be embargoed.

or Moscow

Two words: Dmitry Sklyarov. If you sell to USA customers, you break USA law, and if you don't sell to USA customers, you have very little market and no way to move enough units to make profit. This makes USA GGM law effectively extraterritorial.

2 people were developing the telephone, bell patented it mere hours before the other guy.

That's not the whole story. Mr. Bell submitted his final patent a couple hours before Mr. Gray submitted his first draft.

However, as the population of the United States increases, assuming the proportion of inventors in the population remains constant, the number of inventors will increase, and the probability of two inventors inventing the same invention independently increases approximately as the square of the number of inventors. Your attorney may be able to use independent invention as evidence of obviousness to disprove the validity of a patent.

So certainly since at least 1984 or so Microsoft has basically had a monopoly position in OSes."

In the late 1980's platforms from Apple and Commodore(and even Atari to some extent) were very viable

The Apple II Plus and later II models had Applesoft BASIC, written by Microsoft, in ROM.

http://www.everything2.com/?node=boiler%20room

Build a good site, update it regularly, and offer visible community features. But DON'T let the community be the entire site.

The real key is that last part. Personally, I think sites like Wikipedia are poorly designed because the community is the entire website. That's just plain stupid, and it takes several years or a bizarre miracle to work. The real way to build a community is to create a regularly updated site with both news and content, tethered to a broad but somewhat specific subject. In other words, you want Slashdot. Slashdot news and articles centered around the topic of technology, with a community built up around it via comments/talkback.

But I think the real key, in the end, is not to look like you're really trying to build a community. If you just build a good site and offer community features, that community will build up and eventually it will be large enough that it can either become a main feature of the site or 90% of the site itself, creating its own content off-shoots like Ask Slashdot.

Look it up yourself, if you don't believe me.

Besides, if I wanted to contribute to entropy through my language, this like write would I. Yoda I am not.

And why must you disparage Eris? Someone had to put all that chaos there!

If one believes that humans are different from animals

Homo erectus. We're a member of the animal kingdom, specifically mammals. So if you don't believe this, well, you're deluding yourself.

...we contain a spirit and an awareness of God, then should a cross between a human and an animal be considered an animal or a spiritual being.

Is your implication here that because they have a spirit that killing them (to get the organs, etc) would be murder?

Well, let me respond as such:

Humans have been killing humans for as long as we have existed. This is prior to current notions of god (no uppercase "G") and religion. Don't expect this to change. Animals do this as well. None of this is new.

Murder is an interesting term. Yes, there is malice and intent. But is it murder if I kill a chimp? They're pretty damn close to humans genetically, and molecularly there is no difference. I could build a chimp out of the exact same elements and molecules (adding or removing specific combinations where necessary) that I used to build a human.

So when assembled into a human that chunk of molecules generates a spirit/soul?

The problem with science and research such as this, is that those indoctrinated in the ways of a religion and close-mindedness will never be able to be part of a society who practices such science. It simply goes against their beliefs, and challenges their beliefs to the point of breaking, simply by the very existence of such scientific possibilities.

Don't ask yourself if a human/non-human cross would have a spirit/god. Ask yourself why you do. There is nothing to fear but the truth.

----

To those reading this, ask yourself: are you afraid of death? Why do you need a soul while on "Earth" (Earth in the religious sense -- as opposed to your next life or heaven, etc.)?

I'm not suggesting everyone go on a wild killing spree -- just think about why some religions have a notion of a soul or karma.

I'll give you a hint: Kohlberg -- how far can you get with religion?

"I'm looking forward to when bioengineering moves from technology to handicraft: biotech on the other side of necessity, where it enters the realm of nose piercing. People with tiny little goldfish swimming in one eye or feathers growing out of their backs. I'd love to be in a world where women grow penises because it is fashionable, or you can have an eye replacement of a different color or from a different species. All the adults will say, "Tut, tut, tut, girls never had penises in my day. We used to pierce our noses and lip s. Why don't you do that?" And the kids will say, "Mom, you're so old-fashioned." All good technology should be used to piss off people's parents."

-- Neil Gaiman

And it might be possible to "create" creatures which also have souls. But I wonder what they will feel, if they get to know they were "created", "produced" in some labors. I wonder if they will be able to lead a satisfied happy life.

Pinocchio never bitched when he learned that his "father" had created him.

Hail Eris!

Check out this essay by Jaron Lanier

Ewww.... that looks like Earse.cx. Did that illustrator get his idea from some goat site?

But then I scrolled down to the bottom and noticed the irony: a publication of The Walt Disney Company, known in political circles as the biggest corporate sponsor of the Slippery Slope Towards Perpetual Copyright Establishment Act (commonly called the Bono Act), just endorsed Napster.

Yup, unfortunately. It depends on where the jurisdiction of the law is, but it requires some court (usually the Supreme Court) to overturn it before its actually invalid.

According to the United States Constitution, section 6.2, "This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof ... shall be the supreme law of the land." Unconstitutional statutes are not "laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof." Furthermore, "the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." Thus, as a matter of law, any judge (not just the Supremes) must reject any unconstitutional statute or regulation.

Mario Kart64 does, but that's because the piece of shit game cheats.

All the Mario Kart series games cheat:

• Super Mario Kart gives computers more items per lap than there are sets of item boxes and also gives computers items that players cannot get (notably the shrinking mushroom).
• Mario Kart 64 doesn't cheat as much; it would give the same powerups to human players who fall into the same back-of-the-pack position as it gives to the computers.
• In Mario Kart Super Circuit, when you damage a computer opponent, it does not lose coins. Thus, a computer opponent will (and, in 150cc, usually does) kamikaze you to damage your kart without taking damage to its own kart.

Adding one new feature, namely the ability to replay the race from the point of view of any Grand Prix computer player, would force the developers to concentrate on making the computer follow the same rules as human players.

( Read More... )

Complete and utter FUD.

You keep using that word. I do not think it meanms what you think it means. :)

The E2 node on it says "Essentially propaganda used by certain groups, companies, nations and/or people in order to invoke F.ear, U.ncertainty, and D.oubt about something." I find that perfectly applicable to what you are doing (spreading unjustified fear) when you try to say that the DMCA will affect the free dissemination of public domain works.

How are you supposed to distribute an unencrypted version of the work, if you are prohibited from using tools that decrypt the work? Or will it become the responsibility of each person to write his/her own version of deCSS -- without ever discussing any aspect of it with any other person -- so that he/she can decrypt works and allow the perfectly legitimate public domain usage of them?

It only takes one person to decrypt the work. After that it can be freely distributed without anyone having to do any further decryption. I have my copy of DeCSS (and no, possession is not illegal), so if no one else will do it, I will offer to decrypt any public domain work protected by CSS for you. Besides, distributing DeCSS to someone for the sole purpose of decrypting public domain works would not be a criminal act, and since no one would be injured, no one would have grounds for a civil suit either. Even in the highly unlikely case that you got caught, someone had some ridiculous grounds for saying they were injured, and you lost the case (all three of which are extremely unlikely), you would have to pay a maximum of $2500 in statutory damages. BFD.

Neither the government nor any corporation is going to waste its time chasing around people doing this. And that's why your statement is FUD.

BTW, nice nested blockquote method, I've decided to "steal" it (I wonder if it works on most browsers) :).

Complete and utter FUD.

You keep using that word. I do not think it meanms what you think it means. :)

The E2 node on it says "Essentially propaganda used by certain groups, companies, nations and/or people in order to invoke F.ear, U.ncertainty, and D.oubt about something." I find that perfectly applicable to what you are doing (spreading unjustified fear) when you try to say that the DMCA will affect the free dissemination of public domain works.

How are you supposed to distribute an unencrypted version of the work, if you are prohibited from using tools that decrypt the work? Or will it become the responsibility of each person to write his/her own version of deCSS -- without ever discussing any aspect of it with any other person -- so that he/she can decrypt works and allow the perfectly legitimate public domain usage of them?

It only takes one person to decrypt the work. After that it can be freely distributed without anyone having to do any further decryption. I have my copy of DeCSS (and no, possession is not illegal), so if no one else will do it, I will offer to decrypt any public domain work protected by CSS for you. Besides, distributing DeCSS to someone for the sole purpose of decrypting public domain works would not be a criminal act, and since no one would be injured, no one would have grounds for a civil suit either. Even in the highly unlikely case that you got caught, someone had some ridiculous grounds for saying they were injured, and you lost the case (all three of which are extremely unlikely), you would have to pay a maximum of $2500 in statutory damages. BFD.

Neither the government nor any corporation is going to waste its time chasing around people doing this. And that's why your statement is FUD.

BTW, nice nested blockquote method, I've decided to "steal" it (I wonder if it works on most browsers) :).

Thank you.

Actually no that's not just his opinion, but the actual definition of a 'crime' is clearly defined in the Constitution and basically requires violence and/or harm to another person to be a crime. All the non-violent 'crimes' that people are currently being jailed or held in prison for are technically illegal according to the constitution.

Where did you find this? The U.S. Constitution mentions "crime" or "criminal" in 2.4 (impeachment of President), 3.2.3 (trial by jury in the same state), 4.2.2 (interstate rendition), 5.5 (grand jury; double jeopardy; self-incrimination; due process), 5.6 (speedy and public trial by jury, etc.), 5.13 (slavery can be a punishment for crime), and 5.14 (states can take away voting privileges of convicted criminals). Nowhere does the document mention that crimes have to have a victim. Can you quote article and section?

First of all, there is no federal law which so states, rather it is a doctrine, which is a court interpretation which sets a precedent.

First sale is explicitly protected by 17 USC 109 (Limitations on exclusive rights: Effect of transfer of particular copy or phonorecord), and computer software not stored on a semiconductor is also subject to 17 USC 117 (Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs).

aw, beat me to it...

This is known to some as "One Instruction Set Computing".

Even the people who put them in the US constitution realised that - which is why copyrights have an expiration date.

Copyrights have an expiration date, all right: the heat death of the universe. Every 20 years, DisneyCo donates millions of dollars of soft money to both major parties and seems to require employees to donate to candidates or get fired, in order to get sh*t like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act passed. It extends the copyright term from 75 to 95 years (or from life+50 to life+70 for works created after 1 Jan 1978 by individual authors). How does such a term extension "promote the progress of science and useful arts" as required by U.S. Const. 1.8.8?

Being intelligent, they will no doubt farm us as we farm cows.

You mean like the ant people that farm the Precious Moments people in the year 802,701?

Dude:

You watch too much TV (image: detectives hunched over a reel-to-reel recorder). The phone system is digital. There's nothing about the tap you can see, let alone remove, unless you have the skillz to hack into your telco's 5ESS.

However, the file-cabinet view of the desktop have lots of nice alternatives. I really want a system that treats my desktop like a giant mind-map. Every project that I work on, and all the little notes that I find myself writing all the time would fit great in a mindmap structure. Also having the entire map in a zoomable format would be a better way to use the background than just putting the standard Manga/Astronomy/Softcore/Whatever-floats-your-boat pic there. Furthermore such a desktop would interface nicely with remembrance agents. Imagine having an interactive system (perhaps integrated in emacs, like the one in MIT) that monitors what you write and suggests related nodes, that you have written before.

And it doesn't stop there! If you have a little checkbox for 'public' on each node/note, a mindmap maps well to a html-site (like MindMan does), so you could easily transform a set of loose thoughts on a subject to something that the entire world can benefit from. The RA could perhaps also interface with something like Everything and the mindmap desktop could have an easy function for uploading nodes/groups of nodes to the community. The entire hivemind of such a network would have an enormous potential.

Got interesting incoming mail? Tag it with a few keywords and give it a place in the hierarchy and the RA will pop it up when you need it again. The mindmap structure is immensely powerful. Got a whole slew of files in a programming project? Using the same system as you do for all the rest of your documents, you could easily arrange them so as to get a nice visual overview of their interdependence.

Can you tell that I've been thinking about implementing a desktop (probably in scheme for that schweet scriptability) that does something like this, for a while? ;)

requiring Compression adds a substanial amount of work

I don't think we're likely to see V.42bis compression support in free software for several years, as the V.42bis standard requires the use of patented LZW technology, and Unisys refuses to license LZW for use in free software. Feel glad that patents last only 20 years after filing and not forever like copyrights.

Not the N64, not the SNES, but the original 8 bit NES, and that was due to mapper support. No NES emulator that I know of has full mapper support

It's possible for 20 different cartridges to contain 20 different mappers. In order for an emulator to support every single mapper made, every ROM image would need a complete description of the logical structure of the circuit board and all parts on that board in some machine-readable language such as Verilog.

That said, the vast majority of games released in North America used one of these five well-supported mappers: NROM, CNROM, UNROM, MMC1, or MMC3. Some other mappers exist such as MMC2 for Punch-Out!!, Sunsoft 4 for Return of the Joker, MMC5 for Castlevania 3, etc. Most games that use obscure mappers (90, etc.) were released only in Japan or in Hong Kong for the Japanese Famicom console.

Anything with a copyrighted BIOS (such as Apple II, Mac, Amiga, or GBA) that came from a single source (unlike PC BIOS) is harder to emulate, as software often relies on undocumented behavior (hard to reimplement), exact timing behavior (really hard to reimplement), and even patented behavior (impossible to reimplement in software libre) of a BIOS.

Not the N64, not the SNES, but the original 8 bit NES, and that was due to mapper support. No NES emulator that I know of has full mapper support

It's possible for 20 different cartridges to contain 20 different mappers. In order for an emulator to support every single mapper made, every ROM image would need a complete description of the logical structure of the circuit board and all parts on that board in some machine-readable language such as Verilog.

That said, the vast majority of games released in North America used one of these five well-supported mappers: NROM, CNROM, UNROM, MMC1, or MMC3. Some other mappers exist such as MMC2 for Punch-Out!!, Sunsoft 4 for Return of the Joker, MMC5 for Castlevania 3, etc. Most games that use obscure mappers (90, etc.) were released only in Japan or in Hong Kong for the Japanese Famicom console.

Anything with a copyrighted BIOS (such as Apple II, Mac, Amiga, or GBA) that came from a single source (unlike PC BIOS) is harder to emulate, as software often relies on undocumented behavior (hard to reimplement), exact timing behavior (really hard to reimplement), and even patented behavior (impossible to reimplement in software libre) of a BIOS.

Not the N64, not the SNES, but the original 8 bit NES, and that was due to mapper support. No NES emulator that I know of has full mapper support

It's possible for 20 different cartridges to contain 20 different mappers. In order for an emulator to support every single mapper made, every ROM image would need a complete description of the logical structure of the circuit board and all parts on that board in some machine-readable language such as Verilog.

That said, the vast majority of games released in North America used one of these five well-supported mappers: NROM, CNROM, UNROM, MMC1, or MMC3. Some other mappers exist such as MMC2 for Punch-Out!!, Sunsoft 4 for Return of the Joker, MMC5 for Castlevania 3, etc. Most games that use obscure mappers (90, etc.) were released only in Japan or in Hong Kong for the Japanese Famicom console.

Anything with a copyrighted BIOS (such as Apple II, Mac, Amiga, or GBA) that came from a single source (unlike PC BIOS) is harder to emulate, as software often relies on undocumented behavior (hard to reimplement), exact timing behavior (really hard to reimplement), and even patented behavior (impossible to reimplement in software libre) of a BIOS.

Not the N64, not the SNES, but the original 8 bit NES, and that was due to mapper support. No NES emulator that I know of has full mapper support

It's possible for 20 different cartridges to contain 20 different mappers. In order for an emulator to support every single mapper made, every ROM image would need a complete description of the logical structure of the circuit board and all parts on that board in some machine-readable language such as Verilog.

That said, the vast majority of games released in North America used one of these five well-supported mappers: NROM, CNROM, UNROM, MMC1, or MMC3. Some other mappers exist such as MMC2 for Punch-Out!!, Sunsoft 4 for Return of the Joker, MMC5 for Castlevania 3, etc. Most games that use obscure mappers (90, etc.) were released only in Japan or in Hong Kong for the Japanese Famicom console.

Anything with a copyrighted BIOS (such as Apple II, Mac, Amiga, or GBA) that came from a single source (unlike PC BIOS) is harder to emulate, as software often relies on undocumented behavior (hard to reimplement), exact timing behavior (really hard to reimplement), and even patented behavior (impossible to reimplement in software libre) of a BIOS.

Not the N64, not the SNES, but the original 8 bit NES, and that was due to mapper support. No NES emulator that I know of has full mapper support

It's possible for 20 different cartridges to contain 20 different mappers. In order for an emulator to support every single mapper made, every ROM image would need a complete description of the logical structure of the circuit board and all parts on that board in some machine-readable language such as Verilog.

That said, the vast majority of games released in North America used one of these five well-supported mappers: NROM, CNROM, UNROM, MMC1, or MMC3. Some other mappers exist such as MMC2 for Punch-Out!!, Sunsoft 4 for Return of the Joker, MMC5 for Castlevania 3, etc. Most games that use obscure mappers (90, etc.) were released only in Japan or in Hong Kong for the Japanese Famicom console.

Anything with a copyrighted BIOS (such as Apple II, Mac, Amiga, or GBA) that came from a single source (unlike PC BIOS) is harder to emulate, as software often relies on undocumented behavior (hard to reimplement), exact timing behavior (really hard to reimplement), and even patented behavior (impossible to reimplement in software libre) of a BIOS.

The link to sprouts mentioned in the original query seems to have an error in attribution.

"Sprouts is an interesting paper and pencil game for two players. It was invented in Cambridge in the 1970's."

There's a bunch more info on game play, theory, and mathematical background on the game at that link, as well as this link: http://www.forum.swarthmore.edu/news.archives/geom etry.research/article399.html to a strategy by John Conway on a strategy for game play.

As an aside, I knew a guy at RPI who in 1981 or so wrote a program to play the game and graphically display the results... if you wanted it to, it would show all the possibilities as it tried different moves, too! Pretty amazing feat considering the capabilities of the computers we had available at the time.

Once again, I'd like to refer to what Neil Gaiman wrote in his journal once he heard of Douglas' death: I hope that his death isn't followed by the publishing of all the stuff he hadn't wanted to see print. (the Saturday, May 12, 2001 entry).

I've got some reading for you.

are the amusement companies going to just strut the robot around as is for that much money? or are they going to put their character costumes over it.

i can see it now, "Mickey, take a picture with me."

"What did you say?" while picking up it's arm and twiddling its fingers.

The flash goes off and it fritzes out circa Itchy and Scratchy land.

And are Asimov's laws really what the developers are going to follow presently or in the future? The major funding comes from the military and giant corporations, and we all know they want killing machines or mindless drones. So we have soldiers and slaves, it just doesn't seem like a good future.

also, a mini-discussion @ e2 about the laws: here

xavii aka bob

Read more about Serbo-Croatian.

It does matter to me. Heck, I use NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux daily, but a Troll is defined as: usenet term for an obvious attempt at drawing flames. Also "flame-bait". That's a pretty nice description of your post.

To best observe the Leonids wear appropriate clothing for the weather. Lie outside in a reclining lawn chair with your feet pointing towards the east (the general direction of the radiant). Do not look directly at the radiant, but at the area above and around it. The Leonids can be observed into morning twilight. Other minor meteor showers will be going on at the time and stray meteors, more commonly called sporadics, will frequently be seen that do not belong to a meteor shower. When you see a meteor mentally trace it backwards and if you arrive at the "sickle" of Leo it is probably a Leonid.