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Tough luck. Dump the cable and get a DSL line instead.

Most people can't afford DSL's $200,000 installation fee, which includes the cost of moving the family to an area within 3.5km of the telco's switch.

More recently they put 32bit processors in the palm of your hand

Ironic that you use "palm". Palm had a 32-bit handheld before Nintendo did, but you correctly point out that GBA outsells any PDA platform unit-for-unit, if only because the GBA plus a game costs less than the magic $100 psychological price point.

It is a fact Nintendo squashes misfires such as as the virtual boy, superscopre, power pad

Power Pad may have been a misfire, but the idea behind it has rebounded tremendously since then. Had Konami developed for the Power Pad, the revolution might have come much sooner, possibly back when DDR was still a country.

If it looks fun, then buy a GameCube, some controllers, and Kart Fighter III . All the Kart Fighter playable characters have returned, and they're all playable except for Toad (which has become one of Peach's attacks) and Nokonoko (which is an enemy in the 1 player adventure mode).

Warning: avoid anything that looks like this. It's a fake.

Then why was there not enough dissent within the ranks to prevent this?

If your sound card has S/PDIF out and in

Then it will play silence. Windows Media Player's digital restrictions management infrastructure requires sound card drivers to turn off digital outputs when playing WMA files that demand analog output only.

gamers don't want to sacrifice their smooth 60 fps framerates

Most LAN games don't update themselves every frame; instead, they predict what happens in one frame based on the velocities of the avatars. A racing game such as F-Zero, Mario Kart, or possibly Kirby's Air Ride (which I've been following since it was supposed to be an early N64 title but got back-burnered in favor of Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards) can probably use much stronger prediction than some twitch game like Super Smash Bros. Melee.

We're not evil like Microsoft, so as long as they aren't pirating stuff, we won't really care.

So why did Nintendo sue the flash cart makers even when the devices had a substantial non-infringing use?

I'm not very sure you really work for Nintendo.

The proper way for U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents to screw the Bono estate is to sign a petition to pass a law to take a bite out of the Bono Act.

To prevent further Nemo incidents, don't feed your children food that causes disturbing dreams.

Yes, to me, "Nemo" is still Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay and not some Disney/Pixar movie.

I'm not waiting for a genetically engineered clownfish.

If someone goes through the trouble of modchipping their console, then they're going to want a return on their investment in the form of free games.

"Free games"? I'd be happy with free as in speech, as has happened on the PS2 and on the Xbox. I play a lot of freely redistributable games on my GBA, and I've written a couple GPL'd GBA games of my own.

This is because you are DELIBERATELY choosing the MISUNDERSTAND.

What makes you think it's deliberate?

You have never produced a single creative work in your life.

Prove it. I write for my web site.

Either that, or you're a fucking idiot.

I'm not exactly an idiot, but a psychologist once told me that I have Asperger syndrome.

You do not create

I would create, but I do not publish for fear of being sued for accidentally copying a copyrighted work.

Produce something.

What evidence do you have that I haven't?

Because you've squandered away all you ever had with this talk of "NDA" and the other bullshit

I mentioned the NDA because I thought that such an agreement was standard practice when showing an unpublished work to another party. Is this not the case? The part about running the song past people than one's agent came from page 78 of Songwriting FOR DUMMIES® by Peterik, Austin, and Bickford, published by Wiley in 2002; I was looking for confirmation.

This is because you are DELIBERATELY choosing the MISUNDERSTAND.

What makes you think it's deliberate?

You have never produced a single creative work in your life.

Prove it. I write for my web site.

Either that, or you're a fucking idiot.

I'm not exactly an idiot, but a psychologist once told me that I have Asperger syndrome.

You do not create

I would create, but I do not publish for fear of being sued for accidentally copying a copyrighted work.

Produce something.

What evidence do you have that I haven't?

Because you've squandered away all you ever had with this talk of "NDA" and the other bullshit

I mentioned the NDA because I thought that such an agreement was standard practice when showing an unpublished work to another party. Is this not the case? The part about running the song past people than one's agent came from page 78 of Songwriting FOR DUMMIES® by Peterik, Austin, and Bickford, published by Wiley in 2002; I was looking for confirmation.

However, society decides which laws are just and unjust. You'd better get convincing society.

Unfortunately, the big copyright owners control what American society decides because American society seems to base its mores on the content of news and entertainment programs broadcast by big copyright owners. For example, I don't think ABC (a division of DisneyCo, which led lobbying for the Bono Act) would let me advertise an anti-Disney activist site such as Losing Nemo. Heck, I don't think I could even mention Eldred.cc on ABC.

I can't believe that they are advocating Shrek as an alternative to Disney movies.

What alternatives would you suggest? I know the webmaster of losingnemo.com, and perhaps I could give him some better alternatives.

Hello...Lord Farquaad...

I think Shrek portrayed Eisner quite accurately.

Also, what is so ridiculous about wanting to copyright something that you have done

I agree that copyright is the lesser of n evils, but don't you think 95 years is excessive? Do you not see the value of the public domain?

What about playing Tetris while pretending to "medicate" yourself?

I thought it was already settled that the only thing Blue Planet Software/The Tetris Company actually owned was the trademark on the word TETRIS, not a patent or copyright on the game of falling tetraminoes. If you disagree, and you represent BPS/TTC, please send cease and desist letters to the address listed on this page.

Oh, and Tetris Worlds is shit.

I use Total Recorder to "creatively cache" the songs to my iPod.

Which may not work because Total Recorder is anything but a signed driver.

Now, where's did I misplace that HijackAudio2MP3 applet.....

"The file 'David Bowie - I'm Afraid of Americans' could not be played, because your audio driver is not signed by Microsoft." Of course, this won't stop you if you're tunneling audio through an analog hole.

When the other guy already has a copy

The crypto primitives for preventing the other guy from getting an unauthorized perfect digital copy already exist. They're called signed audio output drivers and signed codecs, and Microsoft has assembled them into a Secure Audio Path. All decryption is done in kernel space by components signed by Microsoft.

Anything less than a perfect digital copy is likely to qualify as time-shifting, which American courts consider fair use. (Australian courts say otherwise, but that's beside the point because Warner, Sony, Uni, BMG, Apple Computer, and Microsoft do quite a bit of business in the States.)

Unfortunately, all that you can find on the Game Cube are mario and zelda.

No. Titles in the Mario and Zelda series are not the only Nintendo-exclusive titles that run on GCN. Look at Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 2 and 3, Star Fox Adventures, Animal Crossing, Metroid Prime (and II and Fusion for Game Boy Player), Pikmin 1 and 2 and Resident Evil 0 and 4. But even if you're tired of the Zelda series, what again makes you think Link's fighting games (Super Smash Bros. Melee and Link vs. Soul Calibur 2) are any worse than the fighting games on Xbox?

Characters that have been around since the NES.

There are Disney-licensed games for the Xbox starring characters that have been around since before the electronic computer was invented. In fact, those characters have been around since the dawn of the perpetual copyright era.

I like your site, but I didn't see any transparent-background (shaped) pngs. Last time I checked, the major browsers rendered them with a gray background. That's a show-stopper for many sites using shaped images. As I said, I don't see any major web sites using png's yet. Google, Amazon, etc. are using gif. Even bigcharts, which is dynamically generating pictures and so must be paying a painful royalty to Unisys, is using gif.

Also, on http://www.pineight.com/gba/, when viewed with Netscape, the image covers up the first word(s) of some paragraphs. For example, I see this: t (.mb) programs into one ROM for. I'm not blaming PNG rendering for this, just pointing out that on a hobby site minor bugs are common and people don't usually report them. So if you did use some shaped PNG's, and some users saw gray corners, they probably wouldn't tell you.

I believe a fair legal system would uphold your ability to do so, but this sounds suspiciously like the very kind of thing the DMCA is used to prevent. Coincidentally enough, the ability (or not) to modify cars is used as an illustration in The DMCA in plain English:

Imagine if all the major automobile makers required all buyers of their products to accept a contract along the following lines:

• 1. You may not open the hood of this vehicle.
• 2. You may not make the minor modifications necessary to operate this vehicle in any country other than the United States.
• 3. If you find a safety defect in this vehicle, you may not report it to any third party.
• 4. If you violate any of terms 1 through 3, you can be sent to prison for up to ten years.

This contract is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.

And anyone designing a public web site and willing to discard 10% of customers [by abandoning GIF for PNG] is also a fringe player.

Ten percent? I haven't had a single complaint about people not being able to view the images of my PNG-based site. The fact is that Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 and later, Netscape 4.5 and later, and all versions of Mozilla and Konqueror can display PNG images at least as well as they display still GIF images. The biggest thing I can see that keeps PNG from replacing GIF is that IE does not support PNG's animated cousin out of the box, making it unsuitable for animated advertisements.

You're addicted to Tetris, and Tetris is a gateway drug. Ever tried hard drugs?

A Web Page created by a person is usually created for a task in mind - Showing off a project ... A Blog is usually created as a online journal or diary, often for a group of friends.

What about one hostname whose HTTP space contains both a project web page and a related online journal? Such as my site or Forgotten's site or a random SourceForge.net project?

[Legalizing slavery] is an extreme example, of course, but so is the 'Happy Birthday' thing.

The means are delineated by the extremes.

If you ask them whether an artist should have any control over his or her music after it leaves his or her mouth, most of them will say yes.

If you ask them whether an artist should have any control over his or her music after he or she dies, what will most of them say? My argument isn't against copyright, which I consider a useful tool, but rather against excess and abuse.

You never did answer the 'theft of services' point

Thanks for reminding me to address the issue. I have done so. And about sneaking into a concert: For one thing, additional labor is needed to clean up after those who fill empty seats.

"Belonging" means ... To have exclusive rights over.

Do you believe that such exclusive rights, as they are currently defined by law, match prevailing moral standards? Including the ban on singing "Happy Birthday to You" in public without the permission of AOL? Most people I ask are surprised that some older works are still under copyright, which can only mean that the exclusive rights in those works exist only in the legal code, not the moral code.

If you're using "theft" in a moral sense, match it up with a moral code. For rights such as the Bono Act and the DMCA that exist only in the legal code, only the legal definition of "theft" (the taking of physical property, such as larceny, automobile theft, robbery, and embezzlement) makes sense. Mixing legal and colloquial senses of a given word willy-nilly would in Microsoft executives getting life sentences for "killing" the competition. Though many Slashdotters would like to see that happen, I don't believe such a punishment would remotely fit the crime, morally or legally.

"Belonging" means ... To have exclusive rights over.

Do you believe that such exclusive rights, as they are currently defined by law, match prevailing moral standards? Including the ban on singing "Happy Birthday to You" in public without the permission of AOL? Most people I ask are surprised that some older works are still under copyright, which can only mean that the exclusive rights in those works exist only in the legal code, not the moral code.

If you're using "theft" in a moral sense, match it up with a moral code. For rights such as the Bono Act and the DMCA that exist only in the legal code, only the legal definition of "theft" (the taking of physical property, such as larceny, automobile theft, robbery, and embezzlement) makes sense. Mixing legal and colloquial senses of a given word willy-nilly would in Microsoft executives getting life sentences for "killing" the competition. Though many Slashdotters would like to see that happen, I don't believe such a punishment would remotely fit the crime, morally or legally.

The atmosphere around a DDR machine is something you simply can't get at home.

Perhaps not in a single-family residence, but at the school I went to, there was a weekly meeting of the DDR club, complete with region-modded PS1 systems, and that was full of atmosphere.

DDR had the first new control scheme (used in more than a couple of games) since the light gun.

Sorry, but Nintendo beat Konami to it: Power Pad. (This cartridge is fake.)

In many areas, high-speed Internet access comes with a $200,000 setup fee.

the evil 2x2 block

Better yet, a Tetris movie with Tetris representing drug abuse.

This is Disney's second crack at adapting Lewis Carroll's Alice books to the big screen. The film adaptation of American McGee's Alice (in turn a video game adaption of Carroll's books) will be produced by Dimension Films, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company.

If you're boycotting Disney, such as if you're a Southern Baptist or you just disapprove of Disney-sponsored copyright legislation, don't see Alice.

so that when a .aa file is encoded as .aiff and then re-ripped as a trueblood mp3 a good deal of signal is lost.

I know you're thinking about transcoding. But you don't need to rip to MP3. If you burn and then rip as .wav or .flac, you don't have a generation loss.

on the mac side, there're programs (like Audio Hijack) that intercept sound from a specific application on its way to the audio controllers

There exists an equivalent piece of software on Windows called "Total Recorder", but it doesn't work on restrictions-managed files because of the Secure Audio Path.

My problem? Tetris keeps sucking me back in.

Maybe you don't need to quit. Maybe you just need to switch to so-called "hard" drugs.

If they would only go one generation without it I might have a chance.

The official Tetris Worlds release for GB Color sucked, but that didn't stop the homebrewers from releasing both unpolished ("Bobbletris"; "Tetvis") and polished ("Tet*is Advance"; "Tetanus On Drugs") Tetris clones.

You can just find a different ISP

Yeah, and pay the six-figure setup fee including relocation of subscriber's family.

Yes, but then you're forced to have your GBA on at all times, which wastes battery life.

In case you're unclear on what "sleep mode" is, it's a GBA BIOS call that some games can trigger that turns off pretty much everything on the GBA board except the interrupt controller, which is needed to wake the GBA on a keypress.

Heck, what if my g/f decides she wants to play Tetris while I've got a game of SMB in progress?

If you switch from SMB to Tetris Worlds by turning the machine off and on, you'll lose your progress in SMB anyway. If you're at home, launch TOD in an emulator, and now your gf is playing tetraminoes and getting high at the same time. If you're on the road, switch PocketNES from SMB to either Tengen Tetyais or Nintendo Tetris. Or give her your other Game Boy. What? You don't have another Game Boy? You're missing out on two-player.

Sorry, but a flash cart is, IMHO, the only way to go. Get one

I have one, but I'm the only person I know who has one because they're still three figures, which is expensive for a neighbor who's still in high school.

Plus, then you can write your own stuff for the GBA! :)

I already do. No, before you criticize me for mentioning sleep mode and not having already implemented it in my public releases, I have implemented sleep mode in my own tree, but there are a few bugs blocking the next TOD milestone.

Yes, but then you're forced to have your GBA on at all times, which wastes battery life.

In case you're unclear on what "sleep mode" is, it's a GBA BIOS call that some games can trigger that turns off pretty much everything on the GBA board except the interrupt controller, which is needed to wake the GBA on a keypress.

Heck, what if my g/f decides she wants to play Tetris while I've got a game of SMB in progress?

If you switch from SMB to Tetris Worlds by turning the machine off and on, you'll lose your progress in SMB anyway. If you're at home, launch TOD in an emulator, and now your gf is playing tetraminoes and getting high at the same time. If you're on the road, switch PocketNES from SMB to either Tengen Tetyais or Nintendo Tetris. Or give her your other Game Boy. What? You don't have another Game Boy? You're missing out on two-player.

Sorry, but a flash cart is, IMHO, the only way to go. Get one

I have one, but I'm the only person I know who has one because they're still three figures, which is expensive for a neighbor who's still in high school.

Plus, then you can write your own stuff for the GBA! :)

I already do. No, before you criticize me for mentioning sleep mode and not having already implemented it in my public releases, I have implemented sleep mode in my own tree, but there are a few bugs blocking the next TOD milestone.

You know full damn well the primary purpose of this product will be to play illegally-downloaded roms.

How again is it an infringement of copyright to download GPL'd or otherwise freely redistributable ROM images?

I'm quite happy with the tetris on my cellphone

Tetramino games on cellphones look tame once you've played TOD. Imagine for a moment what a tetramino game would look like on LSD.

it makes a perfect recording, why should i screw around with a patch cable.

Creative's What-U-Hear feature also turns itself off when you play a DRM'd file through the Secure Audio Path in Windows Media Player. It has to; otherwise the driver wouldn't get signed by Microsoft and wouldn't be allowed to play music through the Secure Audio Path.

I think breaking the DMCA, in a number of forms (other than fair use) is theivery.

But almost any "DMCA violation" that has shown up on Slashdot is a fair use[1] issue; otherwise, Slashdot's house style would consider it a "copyright violation" rather than a "DMCA violation".

[1] Fair use taken in the more general sense of any use of a copyrighted work that, notwithstanding 17 USC chapter 12, does not require permission of the copyright owner, especially those uses listed in 17 USC sections 107 to 122.

Civil Disobediance, (and this is IMHO only) is when you are doing it to make a point

Would this count?

To get your 6 months experience, do like I have been doing since late 1997. I have written my own video games, acting as lead coder and lead tester.

But does anybody know if the present Berne Convention makes it possible to drop works that are still protected in the U.S. into the public domain in other countries.?

Unfortunately, I couldn't get my game done in time for the GBAX.com deadline, but here it is: Vitamins, a GPL'd clone of Dr. Mario for GBA. From the looks of things, it appears CmdrTaco would want to play this.

I have dr mario on gba as well as a hundred other classic NES games.

How could you afford to purchase genuine copies of "a hundred other classic NES games" without being independently wealthy?

And how did you build your NES cartridge dumper?

but playing mario 1 on a handheld is priceless

You don't need PocketNES to do that because all Super Mario Bros. games except SMB 3 have been ported natively to a Game Boy platform (SMB 1 and The Lost Levels to GBC; SMB2, SMW, and Yoshi's Island to GBA).

In fact, here's a GPL'd homebrew port of Dr. Mario to GBA.

Five dollars? Try free and Free. Milestone 1 of Vitamins, a clone of Dr. Mario on the GBA platform, is released under the GPL.

CmdrTaco wants Dr. Mario for GBA.

CmdrTaco gets open-source Dr. Mario for GBA.

So you owe them.

Really? With all the lobbying DisneyCo did to get the Bono Act passed?

So this strategy [of copying one's competitor's user interface] got MS on the top, and it can as well work work again.

Though this is legal in the United States as of this writing (Lotus v. Borland), it won't be if Microsoft manages to close the door behind itself. That's a common corporate tactic with respect to copyrights: Disney adapted stories immediately after they had fallen into worldwide PD (Pinocchio, The Jungle Book, etc) and then closed the door behind itself by lobbying for the Bono Act. Likewise, Microsoft could copy user interfaces and then close the door behind itself by lobbying for copyright restrictions on user interfaces.

You're paying the artist for their time and talent, which has a value.

If I'm paying the author of the work, then why does the copyright last for several decades after the author has died?

There are exceptions to every rule, including this one.

Amazon Exec 1: "This customer buys Precious Moments figurines."
Amazon Exec 2: "They must be some middle-aged soccer mom."

I'm in the minority. I'm a 22-year-old man, fresh out of college, and I like PM figurines partly because I liked The Time Machine, a novel by H. G. Wells. (The 2002 movie wasn't even close.) I see too many parallels between the PM characters and the Eloi for it to even be funny.

Amazon Exec 2: Charge them double for new releases, and half price for Disney."

Pfft. A simple web search on the e-mail address I provided would lead them straight to my anti-Bono Act page and my anti-Finding Nemo page.

Amazon Exec 1: "What about customers who buy How to Make a Million Dollars a Second?
Amazon Exec 2: "Charge double for everything. They'll be able to afford it eventually..."

Do you imply that Amazon sells books containing offers pitched in spam? Now I remember why Amazon was once called Spamazon.