Before us we have the skills to create some really cool content delivery mechanisms. For example, we have the brains to come up with ways for small artists to completely bypass the MPAA and other middlemen and make rasonable incomes directly from their fans. However, as it stands right now even the tiniest independent artist or software maker's work can be found on, for example, eMule in a pirated state. This encourages even more heavy tactics, ham-fisted laws, and DOES cause, for example, small software producers to go out of business. What should be done about it?
First, the arms race must end. Copyright law must be fixed to bring it back into line with what reasonable people would consider fair. The industry brought this on themselves with their massive overreaching and greed. They turned it into a free-for-all, grab-whatever-you-can situation. They buy legislation giving them more control for longer periods of time, and even screw the public out of works that were already in the public domain. They keep moving the bar on us. So, nobody feels particularly guilty when they ignore copyright law. They feel that if they managed to get past whatever protection there was, then they won that round.
Seriously, who really feels bad about screwing over someone who was trying to screw you over? So, if we bring back a fair bargain between the public and artists, then I think we'd see a lot less infringment than we do now, and it would be much less socially acceptable. Right now, nobody even bats an eye at someone downloading music or movies and burning their own copies of them. It's time for a public sit-down with both sides where things can be worked out and brought back to some semblance of sanity.
I doubt that will happen though. The really believe that the industry won't be willing to give back what it took. So, in the end, we will continue the arms race forever.
With the Republicans in control, we get big oil calling the shots. With the Democrats, we get the entertainment industry and law lobby. Choose your poison.
I'm an independent, but if I had to choose between the two, I'd go with the one that doesn't get us into wars, so Democrats it is. I'd just feel really really dirty though.
I have no connection to this company, other than being a satisfied customer, but what you want to do is to purchase Powerex NiMH batteries, and a MAHA - MH-C204W Smart World Travel Conditioning Battery Charger.
Seconded. I bought these for my camera, and they've been great. The charger is the best I've used.
We've been discussing Windows and PCs, so yes, all of them are binary. Windows doesn't run on any other kind of machine. Name one non-binary computer in common use today. Any that have been developed are simply for experimental purposes and are little more than curiosities. The only practical non-binary machines in development are quantum computers, and they are still very much in their infancy and don't do anything very useful yet.
I said "can" because you "can" do it that way. Jesus christ, go get some counseling.
You implied that there was a choice. You said it can be done that way, but there are consequences, as if there is some other way to do it. Don't get all pissy because you got corrected.
You can represent anything a computer can do using true and false. It'll just be extremely time consuming and error prone.
What do you mean can? That's how a computer works. It's the only way a computer works. Everything is either on or off, true or false, 1 or 0. Everything we do with a computer is done by manipulating those 1s and 0s. We stand on the shoulders of giants when we write programs. Someone did have to do all that extremely time-consuming and error-prone stuff so that we can write in languages that are much easier to understand and a lot less time-consuming.
('n' generally > 20, if I remember my statistics class correctly)
Actually it should be greater than 30, according to most statistics books. I can throw my own data point in. I've got a 300GB Drive that's been running fine for a year and a half now. Just bought a 500GB drive as well, but I've only had it for about a month. There's just no way that more than a small fraction of >120GB drives die within a matter of a few months. Consumer drives or not, they last a lot longer than that.
Unlike new audio formats, HD-DVD et al do offer a genuine improvement in quality. And this could be enough for them to succeed.
As someone else mentioned, HD-DVD's improvements are lost on about 95% of TVs out there today. People buying cheap new HDTVs won't benefit. You actually need a fairly good one that does at least 1080i. I don't see it as a real advantage for HD-DVD.
The studios kept telling us how DVD prices would come down because DVDs are cheaper to manufacture over tapes, but it never happened. The studios just sat on the extra cash and got fat and happy.
Same thing happened with the transition from cassettes to CDs. They lie. That's just the way they are.
I'd be pleased as punch of the rest of the country stopped complaining about not getting their desert when a lot of us still haven't made it through the buffet line.
I'd suggest you start backing the idea of municipalities controlling their own fiber infrastructure and allowing service providers to use it to offer service to end-users. Unless you want to continue to have your service provided (or not) on the whims of the providers. Build the infrastructure and own it yourself (municipally) and they will come.
Adelphia was too busy giving all its money to the founders to spend it on the local digital buildout and it was only the local cable board bringing out the fines for missing the project completion date (which was possible due to franchise agreements) that finally got them off their duff.
It was the franchise agreement that contributed to the problem in the first place though. That's why the infrastructure shouldn't be controlled by the service provider. The city should run the infrastructure, and the service providers should be allowed access to it to provide services to the area. That way there is no way for the service provider to hold the city hostage by limiting access to the fiber. If they don't want to offer service, someone else will. There would be many service providers to choose from, and prices would be lower. Until that happens, we're all going to continue to be at the mercy of the local monopolies. WiMax is the only thing that might improve the situation, aside from a massive change in policies around the country (yeah right).
If it's a good investment, they'll have no trouble getting the money to do it from the capital markets. If it's not a good investment, they shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
So you're saying it's a good idea for every company to lay its own cable in whatever area they are providing service? When are people going to wake up and demand that the infrastructure be run separately from the services?? It's the only sane way to do something like this.
And there is a minimum of two providers (the two satellite companies) available to every American, before considering cable or the telecoms. Hence, no monopoly.
Satellite is definitely not equivalent to cable. Satellite can't offer the same features, synchronous speeds, interactivity (2-way), or latency levels. It's just not even close to the same. So yes, many areas do have to deal with a cable monopoly.
Copyright is good. Protecting it is good. DRM is not inherently evil. Yeah, the media giants are a pain in the ass and generally despicable, but that doesn't make copyright bad and it doesn't mean that they aren't going to be forced to change over time.
Wrong. Copyright refers to copyright law. Copyright law WAS good at one point. It doesn't even remotely resemble what it used to be. So no, copyright is not good. Protecting it is not good. DRM may not be inherently evil, but that doesn't matter a bit since it has only been used to enforce the perversion of copyright law that exists now. Furthermore, the evil media giants will only be forced to change if we stop supporting this crap they're calling copyright law, and stop pretending that it's a good thing and that it deserves to be respected. They got greedy and deserve to be punished for it. Retroactive copyright extensions? Terms longer than a human lifespan? Where the hell did the bargain between artists and the public go? They were supposed to get protection for a limited time, and then the work was supposed to become part of the public domain, and free for all to do whatever they want with. Nothing that was copyrighted has passed into the public domain for decades. We're supposed to be OK with that? I'm certainly not. It's not going to get any better if everyone keeps accepting the status quo either.
THANK YOU for pointing out these errors. Big difference between APM, MPR, NPR. I listen to Wisconsin Public Radio and they get as much as 30% of their funding directly from pledge drives.
I thought most public radio stations would get more than that from their semi-annual pledge drives. Are you including business contributions? I listen to Texas Public Radio, and IIRC, they get more than 70% of their funding from individual and business contributions.
"It's OK to be a bigot if you don't walk around all day claiming NOT to be one (like Christians)"
Just like it's ok to walk around killing people as long as you don't claim to be a pacifict. (sarcasm)
Moral relativism at it's most bankrupt.
True enough. I think the real point is that dissing someone's religion when it promotes bigotry and other harmful things is not the same as being a bigot. Christian bigotry results in vigilante justice, legislation that jails people for something that is really nobody's business and is not harming anyone, and the breakup of families that could otherwise be just as good and happy as any other family. Live and let live and let God be the judge. Homosexuals aren't hurting anyone, with the possible exception of other homosexuals, so why all the rush to judgement and punishment? Why do Christians feel such a burning need to stamp out homosexuality? What exactly is the imminent threat here?
If you think that the Catholics were bad, the reformers were even worse. The Protestant Bible has fewer books than the Catholic Bible.
I wouldn't necessarily consider that a bad thing. It depends on why the Catholic Church chose to include those particular books. It might have been perfectly defensible to remove them if they were only included to serve the purposes of the Catholic Church. That's why all of this makes so very little sense to me. Unless you believe that all of this was directed by God somehow, then how can you follow any of these religions? And if it was directed by God, then what was he smoking at the time?
Now, go pick out some specific books. I'm sure that in a book that you say is nothing but centuries of compounded mistranslations, you could be prepared to discuss one of them.
Leaving a hundred different versions of "your word" laying around, each with hundreds or thousands of "mistranslations" in them, and then expecting people to somehow pick out the "truth" from all that is just retarded. If God exists, he REALLY needs to get a better PR person. Aside from the very basics like the 10 commandments, I really don't know how anyone can pick anything out to believe in. Even those people who've spent years trying to figure out what all the mistranslations are are still just going with their own new interpretation. It just happens, coincidentally of course, to jive with today's Christian values a lot better. Imagine that.
Since most "hardcore" gamers already have pretty beefy machines, the only added investment to play Halo 3 will be for Vista.
First of all, when it comes to the PC, "hardcore gamers" make up about 1% of PC gamers. Yeah, those are the guys that have the $4000 systems with dual $600 video cards. The only DX10 vid cards out right now are priced at $450 and $600. So until those come way down in price, there's going to be a VERY limited number of PC gamers with DX10-capable systems.
Marketing forces will prevail. It is of course inevitable that the time will come, perhaps in a year or two, when all new games are based on DirectX 10 (or higher).
It's possible that in a couple years we'll see Vista become the mainstream. I don't like it, but that's pretty likely to happen. In the meantime, I suspect we'll see a lot of games released that will play on either DX9 or DX10. I suspect that's going to require a fairly significant increase in the amount of development work, but that's the way it goes. Otherwise they'll be cutting out a huge portion of their potential market.
I'm avoiding Vista for a variety of reasons. I'm part of another very small fraction of the PC community. I like to upgrade my box fairly often. According to the Vista EULA, it will only allow me to transfer the license to a new system once. What constitutes a new system is never really defined, and Microsoft won't say for sure either. They just say that they have sophisticated algorithms that will determine when a system has changed enough to be considered a new system. I suspect that swapping out my motherboard and vid card, as I'm about to do tomorrow, would be sufficient to make it a new system. So, if I upgrade more than once, Microsoft wants to make me buy a new copy of Vista. Obviously, I'd much rather just shove the EULA up Steve B's ass (not personally, but I'd pay to watch). So, for that reason, along with DRM issues, and the fact that I don't have DX10 hardware anyway, I simply won't be buying Vista anytime soon. Maybe they'll come up with a crack for it eventually so I can shut off all the DRM and phone-home crap and have a little privacy.
There are lots of places in the world where people don't have cars, electricity, and the rest anyway. This way we have global warming. Which is better?
I'm gonna have to go with the global warming on that one. I love me some electricity...
Even as I write this, three words are forming in my mind which probably answer my own question; "Microsoft", "strong-arm", and "tactics".
In the past, you're correct. OEMs have testified to the nature of the contracts that they had with Microsoft, as well as various threats that were made during "negotiations". Microsoft would basically threaten to disallow them from selling Windows at all if they shipped machines with any other OS installed. Supposedly Microsoft has reformed since then. They did their little 12 step program and claim that they're playing nice now. We've seen more flexibility from OEMs lately, but I'm still not entirely convinced that MS is reformed and not pulling any of their past dirty tricks to shut out competition. Only time will tell I suppose.
That way, they'll see that the IP has legs and will develop more games in that "world".
I've seen this argument made a few dozen times on the MS Shadowrun forums. It really makes no sense. If the game they created sells, then they'll create more of the same. It's what they do. The "world" that they've created with this game bears little resemblance to Shadowrun. Yeah, it's got elves and trolls and technology, but so what? That still doesn't make it Shadowrun. I guarantee that if they'd gotten a group of maybe six or eight Shadowrun players together with the game designers, they could have come up with at least half a dozen game design concepts that would blow this one away, and still remain true to the SR universe. What do they have now? Counter-Strike/UT with elves and stuff. How original... blah.
As single player games on their own, without having a vested interest in Battletech I can see people liking Mech3 over Mech2 but when all is said and done Microsoft screwed Battletech fans.
I guess that's going to be the tradition from Microsoft, as now they're going to screw Shadowrun fans as well. I fucking hate what they're doing to the SR franchise with this retarded Halo/Unreal game that they decided to slap the Shadowrun name on. They call it creative license. I call it bullshit.
And what do you suppose the adoption rate of Vista within the next few months will be? I'm betting 0%, give or take. Hackers would be better off going after OS/2.
With OEMs installing it on new boxes, I'm betting the sales pick up fairly quickly. I sure won't be one of them, but I know plenty of people who wouldn't think twice about getting the latest OS on their new PC.
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First, the arms race must end. Copyright law must be fixed to bring it back into line with what reasonable people would consider fair. The industry brought this on themselves with their massive overreaching and greed. They turned it into a free-for-all, grab-whatever-you-can situation. They buy legislation giving them more control for longer periods of time, and even screw the public out of works that were already in the public domain. They keep moving the bar on us. So, nobody feels particularly guilty when they ignore copyright law. They feel that if they managed to get past whatever protection there was, then they won that round.
Seriously, who really feels bad about screwing over someone who was trying to screw you over? So, if we bring back a fair bargain between the public and artists, then I think we'd see a lot less infringment than we do now, and it would be much less socially acceptable. Right now, nobody even bats an eye at someone downloading music or movies and burning their own copies of them. It's time for a public sit-down with both sides where things can be worked out and brought back to some semblance of sanity.
I doubt that will happen though. The really believe that the industry won't be willing to give back what it took. So, in the end, we will continue the arms race forever.
I'm an independent, but if I had to choose between the two, I'd go with the one that doesn't get us into wars, so Democrats it is. I'd just feel really really dirty though.
Seconded. I bought these for my camera, and they've been great. The charger is the best I've used.
We've been discussing Windows and PCs, so yes, all of them are binary. Windows doesn't run on any other kind of machine. Name one non-binary computer in common use today. Any that have been developed are simply for experimental purposes and are little more than curiosities. The only practical non-binary machines in development are quantum computers, and they are still very much in their infancy and don't do anything very useful yet.
You implied that there was a choice. You said it can be done that way, but there are consequences, as if there is some other way to do it. Don't get all pissy because you got corrected.
What do you mean can? That's how a computer works. It's the only way a computer works. Everything is either on or off, true or false, 1 or 0. Everything we do with a computer is done by manipulating those 1s and 0s. We stand on the shoulders of giants when we write programs. Someone did have to do all that extremely time-consuming and error-prone stuff so that we can write in languages that are much easier to understand and a lot less time-consuming.
Actually it should be greater than 30, according to most statistics books. I can throw my own data point in. I've got a 300GB Drive that's been running fine for a year and a half now. Just bought a 500GB drive as well, but I've only had it for about a month. There's just no way that more than a small fraction of >120GB drives die within a matter of a few months. Consumer drives or not, they last a lot longer than that.
As someone else mentioned, HD-DVD's improvements are lost on about 95% of TVs out there today. People buying cheap new HDTVs won't benefit. You actually need a fairly good one that does at least 1080i. I don't see it as a real advantage for HD-DVD.
Same thing happened with the transition from cassettes to CDs. They lie. That's just the way they are.
No, any congressperson who accepts a bribe should do 20 years minimum in a medium security or better prison. That should help them resist bribes.
I'd suggest you start backing the idea of municipalities controlling their own fiber infrastructure and allowing service providers to use it to offer service to end-users. Unless you want to continue to have your service provided (or not) on the whims of the providers. Build the infrastructure and own it yourself (municipally) and they will come.
It was the franchise agreement that contributed to the problem in the first place though. That's why the infrastructure shouldn't be controlled by the service provider. The city should run the infrastructure, and the service providers should be allowed access to it to provide services to the area. That way there is no way for the service provider to hold the city hostage by limiting access to the fiber. If they don't want to offer service, someone else will. There would be many service providers to choose from, and prices would be lower. Until that happens, we're all going to continue to be at the mercy of the local monopolies. WiMax is the only thing that might improve the situation, aside from a massive change in policies around the country (yeah right).
So you're saying it's a good idea for every company to lay its own cable in whatever area they are providing service? When are people going to wake up and demand that the infrastructure be run separately from the services?? It's the only sane way to do something like this.
Satellite is definitely not equivalent to cable. Satellite can't offer the same features, synchronous speeds, interactivity (2-way), or latency levels. It's just not even close to the same. So yes, many areas do have to deal with a cable monopoly.
Wrong. Copyright refers to copyright law. Copyright law WAS good at one point. It doesn't even remotely resemble what it used to be. So no, copyright is not good. Protecting it is not good. DRM may not be inherently evil, but that doesn't matter a bit since it has only been used to enforce the perversion of copyright law that exists now. Furthermore, the evil media giants will only be forced to change if we stop supporting this crap they're calling copyright law, and stop pretending that it's a good thing and that it deserves to be respected. They got greedy and deserve to be punished for it. Retroactive copyright extensions? Terms longer than a human lifespan? Where the hell did the bargain between artists and the public go? They were supposed to get protection for a limited time, and then the work was supposed to become part of the public domain, and free for all to do whatever they want with. Nothing that was copyrighted has passed into the public domain for decades. We're supposed to be OK with that? I'm certainly not. It's not going to get any better if everyone keeps accepting the status quo either.
I thought most public radio stations would get more than that from their semi-annual pledge drives. Are you including business contributions? I listen to Texas Public Radio, and IIRC, they get more than 70% of their funding from individual and business contributions.
True enough. I think the real point is that dissing someone's religion when it promotes bigotry and other harmful things is not the same as being a bigot. Christian bigotry results in vigilante justice, legislation that jails people for something that is really nobody's business and is not harming anyone, and the breakup of families that could otherwise be just as good and happy as any other family. Live and let live and let God be the judge. Homosexuals aren't hurting anyone, with the possible exception of other homosexuals, so why all the rush to judgement and punishment? Why do Christians feel such a burning need to stamp out homosexuality? What exactly is the imminent threat here?
I wouldn't necessarily consider that a bad thing. It depends on why the Catholic Church chose to include those particular books. It might have been perfectly defensible to remove them if they were only included to serve the purposes of the Catholic Church. That's why all of this makes so very little sense to me. Unless you believe that all of this was directed by God somehow, then how can you follow any of these religions? And if it was directed by God, then what was he smoking at the time?
Leaving a hundred different versions of "your word" laying around, each with hundreds or thousands of "mistranslations" in them, and then expecting people to somehow pick out the "truth" from all that is just retarded. If God exists, he REALLY needs to get a better PR person. Aside from the very basics like the 10 commandments, I really don't know how anyone can pick anything out to believe in. Even those people who've spent years trying to figure out what all the mistranslations are are still just going with their own new interpretation. It just happens, coincidentally of course, to jive with today's Christian values a lot better. Imagine that.
First of all, when it comes to the PC, "hardcore gamers" make up about 1% of PC gamers. Yeah, those are the guys that have the $4000 systems with dual $600 video cards. The only DX10 vid cards out right now are priced at $450 and $600. So until those come way down in price, there's going to be a VERY limited number of PC gamers with DX10-capable systems.
It's possible that in a couple years we'll see Vista become the mainstream. I don't like it, but that's pretty likely to happen. In the meantime, I suspect we'll see a lot of games released that will play on either DX9 or DX10. I suspect that's going to require a fairly significant increase in the amount of development work, but that's the way it goes. Otherwise they'll be cutting out a huge portion of their potential market.
I'm avoiding Vista for a variety of reasons. I'm part of another very small fraction of the PC community. I like to upgrade my box fairly often. According to the Vista EULA, it will only allow me to transfer the license to a new system once. What constitutes a new system is never really defined, and Microsoft won't say for sure either. They just say that they have sophisticated algorithms that will determine when a system has changed enough to be considered a new system. I suspect that swapping out my motherboard and vid card, as I'm about to do tomorrow, would be sufficient to make it a new system. So, if I upgrade more than once, Microsoft wants to make me buy a new copy of Vista. Obviously, I'd much rather just shove the EULA up Steve B's ass (not personally, but I'd pay to watch). So, for that reason, along with DRM issues, and the fact that I don't have DX10 hardware anyway, I simply won't be buying Vista anytime soon. Maybe they'll come up with a crack for it eventually so I can shut off all the DRM and phone-home crap and have a little privacy.
I'm gonna have to go with the global warming on that one. I love me some electricity...
In the past, you're correct. OEMs have testified to the nature of the contracts that they had with Microsoft, as well as various threats that were made during "negotiations". Microsoft would basically threaten to disallow them from selling Windows at all if they shipped machines with any other OS installed. Supposedly Microsoft has reformed since then. They did their little 12 step program and claim that they're playing nice now. We've seen more flexibility from OEMs lately, but I'm still not entirely convinced that MS is reformed and not pulling any of their past dirty tricks to shut out competition. Only time will tell I suppose.
I've seen this argument made a few dozen times on the MS Shadowrun forums. It really makes no sense. If the game they created sells, then they'll create more of the same. It's what they do. The "world" that they've created with this game bears little resemblance to Shadowrun. Yeah, it's got elves and trolls and technology, but so what? That still doesn't make it Shadowrun. I guarantee that if they'd gotten a group of maybe six or eight Shadowrun players together with the game designers, they could have come up with at least half a dozen game design concepts that would blow this one away, and still remain true to the SR universe. What do they have now? Counter-Strike/UT with elves and stuff. How original... blah.
I guess that's going to be the tradition from Microsoft, as now they're going to screw Shadowrun fans as well. I fucking hate what they're doing to the SR franchise with this retarded Halo/Unreal game that they decided to slap the Shadowrun name on. They call it creative license. I call it bullshit.
With OEMs installing it on new boxes, I'm betting the sales pick up fairly quickly. I sure won't be one of them, but I know plenty of people who wouldn't think twice about getting the latest OS on their new PC.