Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Mods, Books, Checkmate
Quick, Danny, write faster! Danny Yee has written additional reviews of Jessica Litman's Digital Copyright , Naomi Klein's No Logo , and John Sundman's Acts of the Apostles . (You might want to flashback to earlier reviews of these by Michael Sims and Jon Katz, Warren A. Layton, and Hemos.)
From the Persian for "King" Frederic Friedel of Chessbase contributed some links which are especially interesting in light of the recently announced match between Deep Fritz and Vladimir Kramnik. He points to this link and this other link, saying "The latter has some nice quotes from Kramnik."
In addition, Frederic has links with more on Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, and Fritz in Space.
But the name is already perfect for a MAD parody ... RFINN writes: "If you haven't heard by now, Lucasfilm announced the name of Episode II. It's going to be called 'Attack of the Clones.' If you're like me, this stirs up pictures of Jedi running from giant red tomatoes and such. Do your civic duty and help change the name that has become the laughing stock of the sci-fi movie going community (and some of the actors themselves) by signing a petition to be sent to George Lucas."
Sold! to the man with the large contingent of lawyers!
ncmusic writes "For all of you readers that have been following Bid For Power the DragonballZ Q3 mod. Funimation has issued a cease and desist order to the group. Funimation has excluse rights to DBZ in the US (and EU I think) and has sold exclusive video game rights to Infograms. Below is the announcement made on the site about the order. My question to the slashdot community is do you think this is fair? BFP is a FREE mod to an already existing game. Have their been any other precedence set for making mods based on characters from copyrighted work? And what advice do you have for the Bid For Power group?
'As many of you know Funimation owns the copyrights to Dragonball Z in the USA and has sold the exclusive rights to publish video games to Infogrames. On December 1st, 2000, the Bid For Power team received a cease and desist order from Funimation.
However, they seemed receptive to the notion of allowing Bid For Power to be released so long as certain conditions were met. We were put in touch with Infogrames who asked us, among other things, to recreate Bid For Power on Wild Tangent, a java-based engine, which would then be posted on the Dragonball Z website for people to play. This engine is incapable of running something as detailed as Bid For Power and we would have had to start work from scratch. Most of the team rejected the idea and talks went downhill from there. Without contact with Infogrames or Funimation the progress of Bid For Power slowed down even though we were sitting on a finished product and had been for some time.
We began dealing with Funimation directly in April when they asked us to send videos of gameplay to them so that they could have TOEI Japan review it. We sent the videos and heard nothing until we emailed them in July asking that we be allowed to release in August, since no objections had be made from TOEI Japan that we knew of. We were then sent another Cease and Desist order by way of Funimation.'"
So the confirmed-as-rumor rumor has become real? This is the sort of thing that would be best kept in the realm of rumor.
Has anyone thought to use something like distributed.net as a huge chess computer? I'd bet it would be several times more powerful than deep blue, even without chess ASICs.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The Phantom Menace refers to the underlying theme of the SW films: evil lies within. It showed its characters embracing violence (Amidala), deceit (Qui-Gon) and anger (Obi-Wan) in order to do what they considered to be the right thing. Intelligent film-watchers who have seen ROTJ should be aware of this. It is only when Luke renounces violence at the end of ROTJ that the tables turn and the "good" side wins. Coincidence???
Consider the end of TPM. All three contingents are effectively "disarmed" (sometimes forcibly) before they achieve victory. And the moment they give up their weaponry -- they win.
But what does this all have to do with clones? Thematically, TPM is full of "doubled images" (handmaidens, Sidious/Palpatine, droids) which are associated with order falling apart. Even the planet Naboo is split into two halves (the ego and the id - diplomats and warriors), etc. And so if you actually bother to reflect on it, the new title makes perfect sense. These bad decisions our "protagonists" will make (out of - no doubt - a desire to do good) will begin to backfire on them badly.
As much as people may dislike Jar Jar (I found his presence objectionable myself), doing idiotic things like signing this petition is just foolish.
This may be a little bit before some of you, but Lucas refered to Return of the Jedi as Revenge of the Jedi to the press as to make it more dificult to find out info on it, and He has a long history of Misinformation, Misdirection, and Tentative Title names to keep people on thier toes.
I expect this to be no differant.
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
Can my character have DBZ hair? Can my character have DBZ clothing? Can my character shoot big fireballs? Can my character have DBZ naming?
You draw that line in the sand and I'll find some way to split it in half. Copyright laws were designed to focus on intent, not specifics.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Whatever your opinion on whether it was right or wrong, I don't think it's outrageous for Infogrames or Funimation to think it might cause competition to them; I mean, you're basically creating a game based on a story you don't own. And anyone who doesn't consider a mod a real game must not have hit the computer game store lately. Look how many mods have hit the shelves as retail games (and are presumably making money). Personally I think Infogrames was acting pretty cool in offering the developers a chance to get involved in legit, paid work.
http://www.wildtangent.com/developer/downloads/ove rviews/WebDriverOverview/index.html
Bypasses all the marketing fluff and explains what the product actually is.
-- Welcome to nowhere fast / nothing here ever lasts.
This is the RC3, so it says on the page where I found it
two links!
BOSTON SUCKS!