You see the problem isn't fascism, its corporatism.
That's what 'fascism' is, dude. The corporations and the government, working together. The corporations do what the 'government isn't allow to' (Like find people guilty of crimes without due process), and the government makes sure the corporations stay well feed, and invulnerable to any sort of lawsuits or prosecutions.
Don't go around inventing another word. It already exists, it's 'fascism'.
I pointed this out back when the government asserted the right to immunize the telecoms for the telecoms' illegal spying at the government's request. In short, the government hired corporations to commit felonies, and then forgave those felonies, and classified their end of it so they couldn't be prosecuted either.
We're not in some hypothetical hysteria people making up stuff...we're in actual, literal, dictionary-definition fascism. Sadly, people seem to think fascism requires concentration camps or something....it doesn't, ask the Italians.
We are also, I feel I should point out, in a dictionary-definition police state. Because of Gitmo. The executive claiming the power to imprison and hold people without charging them with crimes is the definition of a police state.
Why do you guys keep electing these people to be your leaders then? I've never heard Britons speak highly of their US-ass-kissing PMs, yet they keep electing them. (Yes, I know PMs aren't directly elected like our Presidents, but they're elected by the legislature, right? You elect your legislators.)
While I'm an American, I can guess.
Imagine the US didn't have primaries. Imagine, instead, that you voted for which party had the presidency...and then they picked the guy. It's like an inverted primary system.
Basically, they have even less direct control than we do, and somehow we keep electing people that do things the majority of people don't like, like continue the war on drugs. They can't even ask questions of the candidates. All they can do is pick a party platform. (And then half the time it's a coalition government, meaning that the party they voted for compromises their platform with some other party.)
I admire the fact that the UK has a system in which more than two parties have some say so. I don't admire the fact they can't really pick their leadership at all because of that.
What he means is that the Post Office doesn't cost the government anything.(1)
Which rather makes exactly the opposite point than he intended. The Post office not only can do that, it's not using taxpayer money to do it.
1) Technically, the Post Office does get some money from the government, for charity work like mailing things to the blind, and for the 'free' postal that the governments gets. But that's just the government paying for the costs it added to the post office.
I volunteer at a local community theatre, and we would love to have a bunch of people come see a show, even if they were only giving us 1/4th the normal amount of the money to us. (And another 1/4th to groupon.)
We have the exact same operation expenses whether or not someone is there. High fixed costs, almost nill per-customer costs. As long as they aren't crowding out full-price paying customers, we win.
And live theatre is something that many people don't even consider as entertainment. But get them in the door once, get a schedule in their hand, and they might come back.
So I'm going to recommend some stuff like groupon. I don't know what exactly, but we're going to be looking at it.
But I can see how it would be disastrous to any business with expenses, because it looks like groupon wants to have each business make only 25%, and most businesses don't have anywhere near that profit margin.
It is entirely reasonable to produce coupons that give you negative profits in small, careful amounts, but not to people like the deal-hunters on groupon.
According to the books, lightsabers don't actually use much energy. It take a fairly large jolt to fire them up, but the way they work is that the light goes out, reaches the end of the blade, and then comes back into the handle, where it goes out again. It's a closed loop. When you turn them off, all the power goes back into the battery.
So a lightsaber only uses power when it's cutting stuff. Cutting stuff means it doesn't get everything back. (Specifically, it loses some power as heat.)
So if you were to operate them in a total vacuum, you could run them almost forever. (They've never said, but the light production presumably uses some power. But it isn't a very bright light.)
In most circumstances, of course, it's constantly cutting the air, (hence the hum) so some power is used, but not very much.
Third, it doesn't explain the part where lightsabers are incredibly difficult to wield, due to weird gyroscopic effects, such that only someone with force-sensitive reflexes should be able to wield them properly. Ok, Han Solo can cut open a tauntaun, but that's a pretty crude motion -- try to swing it around, and if you're not careful, you could end up cutting yourself as easily as your opponent.
I've never heard of any 'gyroscopic effects'. Lightsabers would be hard to wield in the real world, simply because they have no momentum on the blade. Hence the 'blade' jerks around all over the place, it wouldn't look anything like the movies.(In fact, gyroscopes might help if they keep it from jerking everywhere.)
Now that we've got computers fast enough to do it and sensors accurate enough, it might be informative to put someone in goggle-VR and hand them a lightsaber handle with sensors in it and see how well they actually do with it. I suspect most people would manage to cut off a limb,and that's without it being in a fight. Once it starts bouncing off someone else's blade, all bets are off.
There sorta are 'real' lightsabers on the Wii, it's close enough to a 'real' lightsaber handle, and I believe I read somewhere that they were considering letting you hurt yourself if you mis-handled your lightsaber, but it was much too common and annoyed people. And they have to 'fake' the smoothness of the movies, because people would just twist their wrist and jerk the lightsaber 180 degrees in a quarter second, which according to 'lightsaber physics' is possible, but looks stupid and is a gamebreaker. (Not to mention would be damn dangerous with a real lightsaber.)
The biggest problem with lightsabers isn't even the science of them.
It's that they're insane weapons.
Look, if you have something that can cut through anything, you shoot it at people. Imagine a dual-lightsaber that's 3 inches long, operates for five seconds, and is shot, spinning, at people. Hell, forget shot, you could put a release timer on them and throw them at people, having them spring into action a quarter second after release.
Perhaps there could be spinning death frisbees. Can you curve a light blade around the edge?;)
Or perhaps you could just fire the 'blade' itself, leave the generator behind. But I think that's disallowed under the 'rules' of lightsabers, which says the light blade goes out and then comes back, which also has the benefit of saying that lightsabers don't use power unless they're actually cutting something, otherwise, they're 100% efficient. (Except that they're always cutting the air, hence the hum, so always use a tiny amount of power.)
All I really know is waving it around near your body is a good way to lose parts of your body.
But, even stupider, there appears to be no reason you can't slide your blade down the other guy's blade and cut off his fingers. Unlike traditional swords, there's no guard, nor can there be one.
Likewise, as they're weightless, there's no reason to not have very long ones. Lightpikes, you just aim them at the enemy, push a button, and the blade extends twenty feet out, straight through their torso. You jerk it upward, slicing them in half. Then cut off the blade and go to the next guy, or just wave it back in forth in an arch if they're all coming at once. (Hell, you wouldn't even need to be a Jedi to safely use one of those!)
Granted, you couldn't block blaster fire with one, but there's no reason you couldn't have short and long setting, or at least a duel-weapon with a short and long side.
You don't understand what 'disclosed' means. Anything that has been handed out to the public in any form is disclosed. The options are 'disclosed' or 'trade secret'. Things that disclosed are no longer secret, and things that are secret must not be disclosed or you lose any protection, you can't sue people that steal it from you. (Even if they did get it illegally, oddly. If they can demonstrate it was legally out in the world, it is no longer a trade secret and the thieves aren't subject to the large-ish fines and cease and desist orders even if they actually broke the law to get it. Although they still might be on the hook for breaking the law.)
The courts have already addressed this issue, with companies that attempted to claim 'trade secret' protection over stuff they handed out and people disassembled. The courts said 'no'. That does not work. If you hand someone a device that does a specific method, that method is now disclosed. Even if that method is disguised and well-hidden.
It's the same with software. It doesn't matter if the source isn't out there. If the software itself(1) does something, and you hand that software to some third party who hasn't signed an NDA(2), you have now disclosed all methods in that software, you cannot claim any trade secrets on it.
So, as to the original point: The entire point of patents is to keep companies from locking things up in trade secrets forever.
So we offer them an alternative: Tell everyone, and for 20 years, no one else can use that thing without paying you, even if they invent it themselves.
This, as I said, renders software patents mostly pointless, at least software patents on methods in commercial software. Those aren't trade secrets. They can't be. If you sell me something that does your super-secret method, you just disclosed that method to me legally, even if it requires disassemble, software or otherwise, for me to figure out.
If software methods can't be kept as trade secrets, I'm confused as what we're 'encouraging' people to do with letting them patent them.
1) Not to be confused with a method to develop the software. If you have some super optimization process, that's still possibly a secret if you only give out the result of it.
2) And the court, as a bonus, have found that software license agreements that claim to bring you under a trade secret agreement do not do so. While the validity of EULAs is still under debate, trade secret law has pretty specific rules. You can't just casually hand out trade secrets willy-nilly and hope that random agreements that people might agree to will keep them secret. You have to, at the very least, check to make sure the people you're giving it to don't blatantly work for your competitors, or aren't children who wouldn't be bound by contracts anyway. Trade secret law requires a minimum level of effort keeping the secret.
Bush wasn't dumb. He can't speak very well, and he is extremely incurious and let Cheney lead him around by the nose. But he's not stupid. He's probably above average, in fact.
That doesn't mean that he was smart enough to be president, which requires an incredibly intelligent person. In fact, he's exactly the wrong sort of person to manage anything, the sort of manager who will be lead around by his subordinates because he just doesn't care about what's going on. Which, on top of his speaking problem, makes him a rather...odd...person to have as president. But not 'stupid', per se.
With regard to Palin...she's a moron. Really stupid. I mean, those notes on her hand pretty much prove it.
Not because she had notes on her hand, I can see someone smart doing that...with actual notes. If she had the tax rate and unemployment in 1980 vs those in 1987 written there, if she had some obscure fact to pull out, it would be be a 'ha ha, she's pretending to remember obscure facts' moment. We'd laugh and discuss the ethics of 'cheating' on your 'prepared speech' time allocation by using your 'extemporaneous speech' time.
But because she couldn't remember basic Republican talking points. "Energy", "Budget^WTax Cuts" and "Lift American Spirits"?
Seriously? She couldn't remember to talk about energy? It's not like that's some obscure political concept.
She couldn't remember that she's in favor of budget^Wtax cuts? (Who here thinks crossing out 'budget' was hilariously meaningful WRT how Republicans behave? They say budget cuts, they mean tax cuts.)
And, finally, she couldn't remember the country she was in? Actually, that last line might be forgivable, if it was intended as a slogan she was supposed to get in. But, grammatically, it's a rather strange slogan. Logically, a slogan would be something like 'Lifting America's Spirits', or at least 'Lift American's Spirits'. There's not really such a thing as 'American Spirits', unless we're haunted or something.
The only reason to write a slogan down is to get it exactly right. I'm not going to complain about grammar on personal notes to oneself, that sentence is (grammatically) fine as a casual note, but it doesn't appear to have been a slogan.
Which means that, if it's just a note...she for some reason thought it important to write down 'American', like she might forget who she was talking to. Perhaps she was used to saying 'Alaskan'?
Seriously, Palin is a total idiot. I don't mean idiot in the 'I disagree with her' sense. I do, but that's not the issue. I disagree with a lot of the Republicans on pretty much everything, I think their beliefs and politics are stupid...but not them.
Palin is the only one I honestly think is just outright dumb. And strangely unprepared to be in the public eye, and she doesn't seem to be able to learn how to be in the public eye, which is why she refuses to actually give interviews.
You can repay debt using pennies, or whatever legal tender you want. However, people do not pay for things by having 'debt'. Food and gasoline, sometimes, as you consume those and then pay, but that's about it. (And even they can set terms as long as they make you aware before you consume those things.)
When purchasing something, the seller can require the purchaser pay in whatever format they want, barring various legal exceptions. (For example, it often is illegal to ask for, or offer, payment in sex. As is offering criminal activities.)
Other than those somewhat unique exceptions, they can demand you give them whatever they want in exchange for their goods. And vis versa, of course. They can demand no pennies, they can demand only pennies, they can demand you pay in confederate money.
No, that's simply not true. The original point of a patent is to encourage public disclosure to increase economic efficiency. Say an invention takes 100 man-hours to come up with. Well, that's not very much, so we shouldn't reward it? But what if it's done by a thousand companies? If all of them keep it a trade secret, you're now talking about 100,000 man-hours spent, of which 99,900 were a waste.
When you think about this, it makes software patents utterly pointless.
Almost all software patents are publicly disclosed. They're in software that people sell to the public! It would be trivial to figure out.
So, based on the original concept of patents, we don't need to let people patent software at all, because we have no need to 'encourage' them to disclose anything..they're going to have to disclose the damn thing when they sell the software!
Of course, there is the software that the companies use internally, which a company could hide as trade secrets. I don't think anyone thinks the amount of stuff we give up for software patents is worth 'encouraging' them to disclose and patent that.
I'm with you most of the way, but I think most of the objections can be answered, like I said in my other post, if you give people a very short-term automatic copyright, and then, after a few years, require a token fee for it.
The problem with non-automatic copyrights is that people often failed to follow the rules. Quite a lot of stuff has randomly fallen into the public domain because of that, like the original Night of the Living Dead. An argument can be made that a movie from 1968 should be in the public domain by now anyway, but it certainly shouldn't have been in the public domain in 1968 simply because someone forgot to affix a copyright notice correctly!
Which is why they came out with automatic copyrights, which is a fine idea for temporarily protecting works that the paperwork was incorrectly done, or for someone who recorded a viral YouTube video and probably should get the ad revenue from it, instead of people just copying it and taking it.
So give a few years free and automatic, and then require them to renew, and most of the original problems that resulted in 'automatic copyright' are solved, along with the problems that automatic copyright itself has caused.
And an added bonus of requiring renewals is that works that have disappeared into some legal gray area without an owner also get released.
I say we give everything five years automatic copyright. Then 10 years more free (Or $20 processing fee, whatever.) renewal, but you have to actually file, which will result in 99% of stuff falling into the public domain. Aka, forum posts and random drawings and stuff, all that stuff no one actually meant to copyright, but got an automatic copyright never the less.
Basically, it has all the advantages of 'automatic copyright' in that mislabeled works don't become public domain, and it doesn't cost anything to publish something and see if it's successful. But then, if it is, if you want to keep it, you have to file the paperwork.
After 15 years, the fees become something along the lines of $1000 every decade for two more decades, and that's it, that's all they get.
*sigh* It is not my job to define things. It is, quite possibly, your job to look things up before of making up shit.
Here is the definition of an adventure game from Wikipedia:
The term "Adventure game" originates from the 1970s computer game Adventure,[5][6] which pioneered a style of gameplay that was widely imitated and became a genre in its own right. The video game genre is therefore defined by its gameplay, unlike the literary genre, which is defined by the subject it addresses, the activity of adventure.[1]
Essential elements of the genre include storytelling, exploration, and puzzle solving.[1] Adventure games have been described as puzzles embedded in a narrative framework,[7] where games involve "narrative content that a player unlocks piece by piece over time".[12] While the puzzles that players encounter through the story can be arbitrary, those that do not draw the player out of the narrative are considered examples of good design.[13]
Here is adventure vs other genres from Wikipedia:
Combat and action challenges are limited or absent in adventure games,[1] thus distinguishing them from action games.[7] In the book Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design, the authors state that "this [reduced emphasis on combat] doesn't mean that there is no conflict in adventure games... only that combat is not the primary activity."[5] Some adventure games will include a minigame from another video game genre, which are not always appreciated by adventure game purists.[1] Of course, there are some games that blend action and adventure throughout the game experience.[14] These hybrid action-adventure games involve more physical challenges than pure adventure games, as well as a faster pace. This definition is hard to apply, however, with some debate among designers about which games are action games and which involve enough non-physical challenges to be considered action-adventures.[1]
Adventure games are also distinct from role-playing video games that involve action, team-building, and points management.[7] Adventure games lack the numeric rules or relationships seen in role-playing games, and seldom have an internal economy.[1] These games lack any skill system, combat, or "an opponent to be defeated through strategy and tactics."[5] However, some hybrid games exist here, where role-playing games with strong narrative and puzzle elements are considered RPG-adventures.[15] Finally, adventure games are classified separately from puzzle games.[7] Although an adventure game may involve puzzle-solving, they typically involve a player-controlled avatar in an interactive story.[1]
ADVENT and the Adventure on Atari are both adventure games, one graphical, and one text.
However, Blackmoor isn't an adventure game because it's not a fucking computer game, you nimrod.
The term has been used in so many ways that it might be a good idea to generalize.
I.e., 'I don't know what I means, so I'll just make shit up.'
Adventure games are actually very well defined.
There is not a line or RPG - adventure - action. That is not how it works.
RPGs and adventures are both non-action, at least originally. Strangely for your claim, at this point, RPGs tend to be more 'action' than adventure games.
The difference is that an RPG has a character that evolves over time in a manner you choose, solving some random problems in random manner, usually by fighting, using skills that you have 'earned' over time. Often there is an open world.
An adventure game, meanwhile, has a character you cannot change, solving specific problems with specific tools, usually ones found in the environment. There's a very specific path though the game. There are often full-screen puzzles.
Both of those started as turn-based, where events didn't happen until you moved. Nowadays, RPGs tend to not be that. Some purists call those 'action RPGs' or 'real-time RPGs'. Likewise, with adventure games, if they have enough action to actually make the game difficult, they are called action adventure. Now, you can argue the 'action' boundary all you want. Fahrenheit is certainly action adventure, Monkey Island, probably not, The Long Journey 2, possibly.
But the boundary isn't important, the important fact is that it's not some sort of idiotic scale of RPG-adventure-action. RPG and adventure are different styles of games, that have nothing to do with how much action they have. And, as I said, at this point RPGs have a fuckload more action than adventure games. Have you actually played a modern RPG and a modern adventure game?
And, of course, there are mixed RPG/adventure games, also. Almost all RPGs have adventure aspects mixed in somewhere...the entire 'dialogue tree' concept is straight from adventure games. And some adventure games veer into RPG territory by letting you choose different things about your character, although there's a lot less choices. (For example, the Bureau 13 adventure game didn't let you evolve your characters, but it let you pick a team of two pre-built ones out of many, so you had to solve problems in different ways using their skills. It's about as RPG-ish as an adventure game gets, which makes sense, considering it's from the Bureau 13 RPG.)
As for what we're talking about, Nethack is a type of roguelike, which is a subset of turn-based RPG.
As for story, adventure games probably have the most story of any genre, although a lot of that is because they are the most linear of any genre. The idea that The Pandora Directive or Fahrenheit has less emphasis on story than Neverwinter Nights is idiotic.
Yeah, the poster seems a bit confused as to what 'adventure games' are.
Diablo isn't one of them. Diablo is a 'action roguelike', which is a specific sort of action RPG. (From what I understand, I've never played it.)
And there are basically no such thing as multi-player adventure games.
So, thanks to the inability to use terms correctly, everyone's basically recommending the classic adventure games, which are utterly unlike Diablo at all.
While felony murder laws technically read like that, in actual case law they do not get applied that way. (Incidentally, I've never heard of felony 'assault' laws like you describe, although I guess they're possible. Usually, it requires a death.)
You can no more get charged with killing a bystander from shock because you're committing a crime than you can with killing someone from shock because you are wearing a flashing neon hat. (This is because having people die from shock is actually extremely unlikely.)
Despite what the law says, felony murder case law requires that in some way you have to be able to predict the harm, and the harm has to have something to do with the crime.
Now, that doesn't mean you have to 'cause' the death. For example, if you kidnap someone, and they leap out a window to escape and die, yeah, that's felony murder on your part. You should have been able to to predict they might try to escape and could get hurt doing so.
If, OTOH, you kidnap them than and the building you're keeping them in gets struck by a crashing airplane, and they get killed, that's not felony murder. Getting hit by an airplane is not a predictable result of kidnapping.
The courts say you can't be punished for sheer random chance, and the purpose of felony murder law is to encourage criminals to be careful of human life, and if it starts getting applied to any random death at all, it makes the law meaningless. Plus, crime requires intent, or at least negligence, and no one can be punished for things they couldn't possibly foresee.
Yes, the actual law says something different, the law says basically any death that can be even vaguely linked to a crime is felony murder, but the courts have generally held that there has to be some hypothetically-predictable causal connection between the death and the crime.
However, having the police attempt to stop a crime in progress is entirely causal and entirely predictable, so if innocent bystanders get hurt, yeah, it's the criminals fault in the sense they can be charged with murder. That does not, however, let the police off the hook if they acted carelessly. (As they clearly did here.)
Speaking of that sort of thing, how about DIY media centers? Start selling entertainment form-factor PC cases, and even whole PCs. Along with video capture cards. Build your own DVR.
And NAS, and remote display and audio tech, etc, etc. And hand out Ubuntu CDs that boot into XBMC, or whatever, along with selling Windows Media Center editions.
DIY at the electronic level is probably a lost cause. There's not a lot of margin on transistors. And trying to compete in general computer components requires too much inventory, although at the very least they should have the most common memory and upper-end video cards. The non-bulky, but expensive, stuff.
But the specialized computers, those they could carry, or at least carry the stuff that differs from normal computers.
Weird form factors, battery-power cases with a display built in to build your own tablet, whatever. Routers you can replace the OS on. How about that level of DIY?
Of course, they'd also have to regain some knowledgeable staff.
Not 'How do they make money'...I understand that cell phones are a lucrative business.
I just don't understand who goes to Radio Shack to buy one.
If you want a cell plan, you go to the one of the stores or kiosks that are for that. This is especially strange as so many Radio Shacks are in a mall, where you can literally walk 200 feet and, hey, there's the AT&T kiosk.
I mean, it's interesting that Radio Shack has them all in one place and you can comparison shop, but seriously.
And if you're a poor person and looking for a prepaid cellphone, not a plan, wouldn't you buy it from, I dunno, Walmart?
It's less that it doesn't 'require' a computer, it's that it works even if the computer is off, or playing a game, or running Linux, or is flakey, or is running a Windows 8 beta, or whatever.
A telephone that is an independent piece of hardware is inherently less prone to issues than one that is a computer program.
Plus, with a small amount of work, you can disconnect existing phone wiring from the phone company, or use an extra secondary line of wiring, and get it all over a house, like with POTS.
I've never had an 'Ooma', but I did have Vonage. Which had a cheaper device, but higher monthly fees.
I don't actually understand how Ooma can work at the their current rates, and $200 is really expensive for a device like that.
Slashdot Mirror
You are entirely right, except:
You see the problem isn't fascism, its corporatism.
That's what 'fascism' is, dude. The corporations and the government, working together. The corporations do what the 'government isn't allow to' (Like find people guilty of crimes without due process), and the government makes sure the corporations stay well feed, and invulnerable to any sort of lawsuits or prosecutions.
Don't go around inventing another word. It already exists, it's 'fascism'.
I pointed this out back when the government asserted the right to immunize the telecoms for the telecoms' illegal spying at the government's request. In short, the government hired corporations to commit felonies, and then forgave those felonies, and classified their end of it so they couldn't be prosecuted either.
We're not in some hypothetical hysteria people making up stuff...we're in actual, literal, dictionary-definition fascism. Sadly, people seem to think fascism requires concentration camps or something....it doesn't, ask the Italians.
We are also, I feel I should point out, in a dictionary-definition police state. Because of Gitmo. The executive claiming the power to imprison and hold people without charging them with crimes is the definition of a police state.
Why do you guys keep electing these people to be your leaders then? I've never heard Britons speak highly of their US-ass-kissing PMs, yet they keep electing them. (Yes, I know PMs aren't directly elected like our Presidents, but they're elected by the legislature, right? You elect your legislators.)
While I'm an American, I can guess.
Imagine the US didn't have primaries. Imagine, instead, that you voted for which party had the presidency...and then they picked the guy. It's like an inverted primary system.
Basically, they have even less direct control than we do, and somehow we keep electing people that do things the majority of people don't like, like continue the war on drugs. They can't even ask questions of the candidates. All they can do is pick a party platform. (And then half the time it's a coalition government, meaning that the party they voted for compromises their platform with some other party.)
I admire the fact that the UK has a system in which more than two parties have some say so. I don't admire the fact they can't really pick their leadership at all because of that.
What he means is that the Post Office doesn't cost the government anything.(1)
Which rather makes exactly the opposite point than he intended. The Post office not only can do that, it's not using taxpayer money to do it.
1) Technically, the Post Office does get some money from the government, for charity work like mailing things to the blind, and for the 'free' postal that the governments gets. But that's just the government paying for the costs it added to the post office.
Exactly.
I volunteer at a local community theatre, and we would love to have a bunch of people come see a show, even if they were only giving us 1/4th the normal amount of the money to us. (And another 1/4th to groupon.)
We have the exact same operation expenses whether or not someone is there. High fixed costs, almost nill per-customer costs. As long as they aren't crowding out full-price paying customers, we win.
And live theatre is something that many people don't even consider as entertainment. But get them in the door once, get a schedule in their hand, and they might come back.
So I'm going to recommend some stuff like groupon. I don't know what exactly, but we're going to be looking at it.
But I can see how it would be disastrous to any business with expenses, because it looks like groupon wants to have each business make only 25%, and most businesses don't have anywhere near that profit margin.
It is entirely reasonable to produce coupons that give you negative profits in small, careful amounts, but not to people like the deal-hunters on groupon.
I'm in favor of it being closer to $10,000, myself.
The problem is, trying to 'adjust' it is nonsense. There's no way we can do any of this.
We can't even stop them retroactively extending copyrights, which is utter nonsense under any theory of 'incentive'...
According to the books, lightsabers don't actually use much energy. It take a fairly large jolt to fire them up, but the way they work is that the light goes out, reaches the end of the blade, and then comes back into the handle, where it goes out again. It's a closed loop. When you turn them off, all the power goes back into the battery.
So a lightsaber only uses power when it's cutting stuff. Cutting stuff means it doesn't get everything back. (Specifically, it loses some power as heat.)
So if you were to operate them in a total vacuum, you could run them almost forever. (They've never said, but the light production presumably uses some power. But it isn't a very bright light.)
In most circumstances, of course, it's constantly cutting the air, (hence the hum) so some power is used, but not very much.
Third, it doesn't explain the part where lightsabers are incredibly difficult to wield, due to weird gyroscopic effects, such that only someone with force-sensitive reflexes should be able to wield them properly. Ok, Han Solo can cut open a tauntaun, but that's a pretty crude motion -- try to swing it around, and if you're not careful, you could end up cutting yourself as easily as your opponent.
I've never heard of any 'gyroscopic effects'. Lightsabers would be hard to wield in the real world, simply because they have no momentum on the blade. Hence the 'blade' jerks around all over the place, it wouldn't look anything like the movies.(In fact, gyroscopes might help if they keep it from jerking everywhere.)
Now that we've got computers fast enough to do it and sensors accurate enough, it might be informative to put someone in goggle-VR and hand them a lightsaber handle with sensors in it and see how well they actually do with it. I suspect most people would manage to cut off a limb,and that's without it being in a fight. Once it starts bouncing off someone else's blade, all bets are off.
There sorta are 'real' lightsabers on the Wii, it's close enough to a 'real' lightsaber handle, and I believe I read somewhere that they were considering letting you hurt yourself if you mis-handled your lightsaber, but it was much too common and annoyed people. And they have to 'fake' the smoothness of the movies, because people would just twist their wrist and jerk the lightsaber 180 degrees in a quarter second, which according to 'lightsaber physics' is possible, but looks stupid and is a gamebreaker. (Not to mention would be damn dangerous with a real lightsaber.)
The biggest problem with lightsabers isn't even the science of them.
It's that they're insane weapons.
Look, if you have something that can cut through anything, you shoot it at people. Imagine a dual-lightsaber that's 3 inches long, operates for five seconds, and is shot, spinning, at people. Hell, forget shot, you could put a release timer on them and throw them at people, having them spring into action a quarter second after release.
Perhaps there could be spinning death frisbees. Can you curve a light blade around the edge? ;)
Or perhaps you could just fire the 'blade' itself, leave the generator behind. But I think that's disallowed under the 'rules' of lightsabers, which says the light blade goes out and then comes back, which also has the benefit of saying that lightsabers don't use power unless they're actually cutting something, otherwise, they're 100% efficient. (Except that they're always cutting the air, hence the hum, so always use a tiny amount of power.)
All I really know is waving it around near your body is a good way to lose parts of your body.
But, even stupider, there appears to be no reason you can't slide your blade down the other guy's blade and cut off his fingers. Unlike traditional swords, there's no guard, nor can there be one.
Likewise, as they're weightless, there's no reason to not have very long ones. Lightpikes, you just aim them at the enemy, push a button, and the blade extends twenty feet out, straight through their torso. You jerk it upward, slicing them in half. Then cut off the blade and go to the next guy, or just wave it back in forth in an arch if they're all coming at once. (Hell, you wouldn't even need to be a Jedi to safely use one of those!)
Granted, you couldn't block blaster fire with one, but there's no reason you couldn't have short and long setting, or at least a duel-weapon with a short and long side.
You don't understand what 'disclosed' means. Anything that has been handed out to the public in any form is disclosed. The options are 'disclosed' or 'trade secret'. Things that disclosed are no longer secret, and things that are secret must not be disclosed or you lose any protection, you can't sue people that steal it from you. (Even if they did get it illegally, oddly. If they can demonstrate it was legally out in the world, it is no longer a trade secret and the thieves aren't subject to the large-ish fines and cease and desist orders even if they actually broke the law to get it. Although they still might be on the hook for breaking the law.)
The courts have already addressed this issue, with companies that attempted to claim 'trade secret' protection over stuff they handed out and people disassembled. The courts said 'no'. That does not work. If you hand someone a device that does a specific method, that method is now disclosed. Even if that method is disguised and well-hidden.
It's the same with software. It doesn't matter if the source isn't out there. If the software itself(1) does something, and you hand that software to some third party who hasn't signed an NDA(2), you have now disclosed all methods in that software, you cannot claim any trade secrets on it.
So, as to the original point: The entire point of patents is to keep companies from locking things up in trade secrets forever.
So we offer them an alternative: Tell everyone, and for 20 years, no one else can use that thing without paying you, even if they invent it themselves.
This, as I said, renders software patents mostly pointless, at least software patents on methods in commercial software. Those aren't trade secrets. They can't be. If you sell me something that does your super-secret method, you just disclosed that method to me legally, even if it requires disassemble, software or otherwise, for me to figure out.
If software methods can't be kept as trade secrets, I'm confused as what we're 'encouraging' people to do with letting them patent them.
1) Not to be confused with a method to develop the software. If you have some super optimization process, that's still possibly a secret if you only give out the result of it.
2) And the court, as a bonus, have found that software license agreements that claim to bring you under a trade secret agreement do not do so. While the validity of EULAs is still under debate, trade secret law has pretty specific rules. You can't just casually hand out trade secrets willy-nilly and hope that random agreements that people might agree to will keep them secret. You have to, at the very least, check to make sure the people you're giving it to don't blatantly work for your competitors, or aren't children who wouldn't be bound by contracts anyway. Trade secret law requires a minimum level of effort keeping the secret.
Bush wasn't dumb. He can't speak very well, and he is extremely incurious and let Cheney lead him around by the nose. But he's not stupid. He's probably above average, in fact.
That doesn't mean that he was smart enough to be president, which requires an incredibly intelligent person. In fact, he's exactly the wrong sort of person to manage anything, the sort of manager who will be lead around by his subordinates because he just doesn't care about what's going on. Which, on top of his speaking problem, makes him a rather...odd...person to have as president. But not 'stupid', per se.
With regard to Palin...she's a moron. Really stupid. I mean, those notes on her hand pretty much prove it.
Not because she had notes on her hand, I can see someone smart doing that...with actual notes. If she had the tax rate and unemployment in 1980 vs those in 1987 written there, if she had some obscure fact to pull out, it would be be a 'ha ha, she's pretending to remember obscure facts' moment. We'd laugh and discuss the ethics of 'cheating' on your 'prepared speech' time allocation by using your 'extemporaneous speech' time.
But because she couldn't remember basic Republican talking points. "Energy", "Budget^WTax Cuts" and "Lift American Spirits"?
Seriously? She couldn't remember to talk about energy? It's not like that's some obscure political concept.
She couldn't remember that she's in favor of budget^Wtax cuts? (Who here thinks crossing out 'budget' was hilariously meaningful WRT how Republicans behave? They say budget cuts, they mean tax cuts.)
And, finally, she couldn't remember the country she was in? Actually, that last line might be forgivable, if it was intended as a slogan she was supposed to get in. But, grammatically, it's a rather strange slogan. Logically, a slogan would be something like 'Lifting America's Spirits', or at least 'Lift American's Spirits'. There's not really such a thing as 'American Spirits', unless we're haunted or something.
The only reason to write a slogan down is to get it exactly right. I'm not going to complain about grammar on personal notes to oneself, that sentence is (grammatically) fine as a casual note, but it doesn't appear to have been a slogan.
Which means that, if it's just a note...she for some reason thought it important to write down 'American', like she might forget who she was talking to. Perhaps she was used to saying 'Alaskan'?
Seriously, Palin is a total idiot. I don't mean idiot in the 'I disagree with her' sense. I do, but that's not the issue. I disagree with a lot of the Republicans on pretty much everything, I think their beliefs and politics are stupid...but not them.
Palin is the only one I honestly think is just outright dumb. And strangely unprepared to be in the public eye, and she doesn't seem to be able to learn how to be in the public eye, which is why she refuses to actually give interviews.
Please stop making stuff up.
You can repay debt using pennies, or whatever legal tender you want. However, people do not pay for things by having 'debt'. Food and gasoline, sometimes, as you consume those and then pay, but that's about it. (And even they can set terms as long as they make you aware before you consume those things.)
When purchasing something, the seller can require the purchaser pay in whatever format they want, barring various legal exceptions. (For example, it often is illegal to ask for, or offer, payment in sex. As is offering criminal activities.)
Other than those somewhat unique exceptions, they can demand you give them whatever they want in exchange for their goods. And vis versa, of course. They can demand no pennies, they can demand only pennies, they can demand you pay in confederate money.
No, that's simply not true. The original point of a patent is to encourage public disclosure to increase economic efficiency. Say an invention takes 100 man-hours to come up with. Well, that's not very much, so we shouldn't reward it? But what if it's done by a thousand companies? If all of them keep it a trade secret, you're now talking about 100,000 man-hours spent, of which 99,900 were a waste.
When you think about this, it makes software patents utterly pointless.
Almost all software patents are publicly disclosed. They're in software that people sell to the public! It would be trivial to figure out.
So, based on the original concept of patents, we don't need to let people patent software at all, because we have no need to 'encourage' them to disclose anything..they're going to have to disclose the damn thing when they sell the software!
Of course, there is the software that the companies use internally, which a company could hide as trade secrets. I don't think anyone thinks the amount of stuff we give up for software patents is worth 'encouraging' them to disclose and patent that.
I'm with you most of the way, but I think most of the objections can be answered, like I said in my other post, if you give people a very short-term automatic copyright, and then, after a few years, require a token fee for it.
The problem with non-automatic copyrights is that people often failed to follow the rules. Quite a lot of stuff has randomly fallen into the public domain because of that, like the original Night of the Living Dead. An argument can be made that a movie from 1968 should be in the public domain by now anyway, but it certainly shouldn't have been in the public domain in 1968 simply because someone forgot to affix a copyright notice correctly!
Which is why they came out with automatic copyrights, which is a fine idea for temporarily protecting works that the paperwork was incorrectly done, or for someone who recorded a viral YouTube video and probably should get the ad revenue from it, instead of people just copying it and taking it.
So give a few years free and automatic, and then require them to renew, and most of the original problems that resulted in 'automatic copyright' are solved, along with the problems that automatic copyright itself has caused.
And an added bonus of requiring renewals is that works that have disappeared into some legal gray area without an owner also get released.
I say we give everything five years automatic copyright. Then 10 years more free (Or $20 processing fee, whatever.) renewal, but you have to actually file, which will result in 99% of stuff falling into the public domain. Aka, forum posts and random drawings and stuff, all that stuff no one actually meant to copyright, but got an automatic copyright never the less.
Basically, it has all the advantages of 'automatic copyright' in that mislabeled works don't become public domain, and it doesn't cost anything to publish something and see if it's successful. But then, if it is, if you want to keep it, you have to file the paperwork.
After 15 years, the fees become something along the lines of $1000 every decade for two more decades, and that's it, that's all they get.
*sigh* It is not my job to define things. It is, quite possibly, your job to look things up before of making up shit.
Here is the definition of an adventure game from Wikipedia:
The term "Adventure game" originates from the 1970s computer game Adventure,[5][6] which pioneered a style of gameplay that was widely imitated and became a genre in its own right. The video game genre is therefore defined by its gameplay, unlike the literary genre, which is defined by the subject it addresses, the activity of adventure.[1]
Essential elements of the genre include storytelling, exploration, and puzzle solving.[1] Adventure games have been described as puzzles embedded in a narrative framework,[7] where games involve "narrative content that a player unlocks piece by piece over time".[12] While the puzzles that players encounter through the story can be arbitrary, those that do not draw the player out of the narrative are considered examples of good design.[13]
Here is adventure vs other genres from Wikipedia:
Combat and action challenges are limited or absent in adventure games,[1] thus distinguishing them from action games.[7] In the book Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design, the authors state that "this [reduced emphasis on combat] doesn't mean that there is no conflict in adventure games ... only that combat is not the primary activity."[5] Some adventure games will include a minigame from another video game genre, which are not always appreciated by adventure game purists.[1] Of course, there are some games that blend action and adventure throughout the game experience.[14] These hybrid action-adventure games involve more physical challenges than pure adventure games, as well as a faster pace. This definition is hard to apply, however, with some debate among designers about which games are action games and which involve enough non-physical challenges to be considered action-adventures.[1]
Adventure games are also distinct from role-playing video games that involve action, team-building, and points management.[7] Adventure games lack the numeric rules or relationships seen in role-playing games, and seldom have an internal economy.[1] These games lack any skill system, combat, or "an opponent to be defeated through strategy and tactics."[5] However, some hybrid games exist here, where role-playing games with strong narrative and puzzle elements are considered RPG-adventures.[15] Finally, adventure games are classified separately from puzzle games.[7] Although an adventure game may involve puzzle-solving, they typically involve a player-controlled avatar in an interactive story.[1]
ADVENT and the Adventure on Atari are both adventure games, one graphical, and one text. However, Blackmoor isn't an adventure game because it's not a fucking computer game, you nimrod.
Zelda is what I would consider one of the first action-adventure games.
Although at this point, as people tend to mean 'adventure games with action sequences', I'd probably call such a game 'Zelda-like'. ;)
The term has been used in so many ways that it might be a good idea to generalize.
I.e., 'I don't know what I means, so I'll just make shit up.'
Adventure games are actually very well defined. There is not a line or RPG - adventure - action. That is not how it works.
RPGs and adventures are both non-action, at least originally. Strangely for your claim, at this point, RPGs tend to be more 'action' than adventure games.
The difference is that an RPG has a character that evolves over time in a manner you choose, solving some random problems in random manner, usually by fighting, using skills that you have 'earned' over time. Often there is an open world.
An adventure game, meanwhile, has a character you cannot change, solving specific problems with specific tools, usually ones found in the environment. There's a very specific path though the game. There are often full-screen puzzles.
Both of those started as turn-based, where events didn't happen until you moved. Nowadays, RPGs tend to not be that. Some purists call those 'action RPGs' or 'real-time RPGs'. Likewise, with adventure games, if they have enough action to actually make the game difficult, they are called action adventure. Now, you can argue the 'action' boundary all you want. Fahrenheit is certainly action adventure, Monkey Island, probably not, The Long Journey 2, possibly.
But the boundary isn't important, the important fact is that it's not some sort of idiotic scale of RPG-adventure-action. RPG and adventure are different styles of games, that have nothing to do with how much action they have. And, as I said, at this point RPGs have a fuckload more action than adventure games. Have you actually played a modern RPG and a modern adventure game?
And, of course, there are mixed RPG/adventure games, also. Almost all RPGs have adventure aspects mixed in somewhere...the entire 'dialogue tree' concept is straight from adventure games. And some adventure games veer into RPG territory by letting you choose different things about your character, although there's a lot less choices. (For example, the Bureau 13 adventure game didn't let you evolve your characters, but it let you pick a team of two pre-built ones out of many, so you had to solve problems in different ways using their skills. It's about as RPG-ish as an adventure game gets, which makes sense, considering it's from the Bureau 13 RPG.)
As for what we're talking about, Nethack is a type of roguelike, which is a subset of turn-based RPG.
As for story, adventure games probably have the most story of any genre, although a lot of that is because they are the most linear of any genre. The idea that The Pandora Directive or Fahrenheit has less emphasis on story than Neverwinter Nights is idiotic.
Yeah, the poster seems a bit confused as to what 'adventure games' are.
Diablo isn't one of them. Diablo is a 'action roguelike', which is a specific sort of action RPG. (From what I understand, I've never played it.)
And there are basically no such thing as multi-player adventure games.
So, thanks to the inability to use terms correctly, everyone's basically recommending the classic adventure games, which are utterly unlike Diablo at all.
While felony murder laws technically read like that, in actual case law they do not get applied that way. (Incidentally, I've never heard of felony 'assault' laws like you describe, although I guess they're possible. Usually, it requires a death.)
You can no more get charged with killing a bystander from shock because you're committing a crime than you can with killing someone from shock because you are wearing a flashing neon hat. (This is because having people die from shock is actually extremely unlikely.)
Despite what the law says, felony murder case law requires that in some way you have to be able to predict the harm, and the harm has to have something to do with the crime.
Now, that doesn't mean you have to 'cause' the death. For example, if you kidnap someone, and they leap out a window to escape and die, yeah, that's felony murder on your part. You should have been able to to predict they might try to escape and could get hurt doing so.
If, OTOH, you kidnap them than and the building you're keeping them in gets struck by a crashing airplane, and they get killed, that's not felony murder. Getting hit by an airplane is not a predictable result of kidnapping.
The courts say you can't be punished for sheer random chance, and the purpose of felony murder law is to encourage criminals to be careful of human life, and if it starts getting applied to any random death at all, it makes the law meaningless. Plus, crime requires intent, or at least negligence, and no one can be punished for things they couldn't possibly foresee.
Yes, the actual law says something different, the law says basically any death that can be even vaguely linked to a crime is felony murder, but the courts have generally held that there has to be some hypothetically-predictable causal connection between the death and the crime.
However, having the police attempt to stop a crime in progress is entirely causal and entirely predictable, so if innocent bystanders get hurt, yeah, it's the criminals fault in the sense they can be charged with murder. That does not, however, let the police off the hook if they acted carelessly. (As they clearly did here.)
Speaking of that sort of thing, how about DIY media centers? Start selling entertainment form-factor PC cases, and even whole PCs. Along with video capture cards. Build your own DVR.
And NAS, and remote display and audio tech, etc, etc. And hand out Ubuntu CDs that boot into XBMC, or whatever, along with selling Windows Media Center editions.
DIY at the electronic level is probably a lost cause. There's not a lot of margin on transistors. And trying to compete in general computer components requires too much inventory, although at the very least they should have the most common memory and upper-end video cards. The non-bulky, but expensive, stuff.
But the specialized computers, those they could carry, or at least carry the stuff that differs from normal computers.
Weird form factors, battery-power cases with a display built in to build your own tablet, whatever. Routers you can replace the OS on. How about that level of DIY?
Of course, they'd also have to regain some knowledgeable staff.
Radio Shack once sold some of the highest quality affordable home audio (yes, it did) and look where it went: RCA and other "brand name" CRAP.
Oh, let's be fair. It also started selling overpriced Monster crap also.
The whole cell phone thing confuses me.
Not 'How do they make money'...I understand that cell phones are a lucrative business.
I just don't understand who goes to Radio Shack to buy one.
If you want a cell plan, you go to the one of the stores or kiosks that are for that. This is especially strange as so many Radio Shacks are in a mall, where you can literally walk 200 feet and, hey, there's the AT&T kiosk.
I mean, it's interesting that Radio Shack has them all in one place and you can comparison shop, but seriously.
And if you're a poor person and looking for a prepaid cellphone, not a plan, wouldn't you buy it from, I dunno, Walmart?
I'd go to a Radio Shack if I need some cable now that Wal-Mart wouldn't have it.
I'd go to a Best Buy if I was on fire and needed a fire extinguisher.
I'm frankly a little baffled as to on exactly what grounds there was an injunction in the first place.
In the US, this is the sort of shit only the US government would try, making some sort of idiotic national security claim.
But apparently, in England, sports players can stop people from spreading gossip about them!
Why can they do that? Under what grounds can they do that?
It's less that it doesn't 'require' a computer, it's that it works even if the computer is off, or playing a game, or running Linux, or is flakey, or is running a Windows 8 beta, or whatever.
A telephone that is an independent piece of hardware is inherently less prone to issues than one that is a computer program.
Plus, with a small amount of work, you can disconnect existing phone wiring from the phone company, or use an extra secondary line of wiring, and get it all over a house, like with POTS.
I've never had an 'Ooma', but I did have Vonage. Which had a cheaper device, but higher monthly fees.
I don't actually understand how Ooma can work at the their current rates, and $200 is really expensive for a device like that.