I see what you mean, and I suppose that is a form of memory I hadn't considered. Still, for most purposes the term memory suffices. When getting technical I believe scientists actually do have diffrent words for type of memory, but probabaly in relation to human or animal memory.
actually I think you'll find they don't generally survive the process, but if they do, then they get eaten. For cheese as well as alcohol. One of the reasons it's hard to get high alcohol levels in beer or wine (no distilation allowed) is because the yeast dies. Effectively it poisons it's environment with its own waste. Sort of like never flushing the toilet. Port, for example, is wine with added alcohol.
Survival of the fittest means that whatever survives is fittest. To put that another way, the only way to determine what is fittest is to see what survives. So favoring a similar genetic structure isn't necessarily for survival of the fittest, but those species which practiced it did better. There are species which are active canibals, and they do quite well. Some types of squid for example.
Well one can always get stuck on definitions, but I think cognition is more than responding to stimuli. Merriam webster calls it mental processes, which I don't believe plants have.
if plants have a mechanism which allows them to simulate memory, then isn't that memory? It doesn't have to be our kind of memory, it just has to mean they respond to similar circumstances in the same way due to past experience. Learning behaviour. At least, I can't readily think of another good definition for things which can't communicate.
Altruism goes a little far for me, as I would define it as conscious behavior, but one could see it as a genetic basis for altruism. Still far fetched, but if we are genetically inclined to altruism, then we are more likely to consciously choose it.
Censorship basically means blocking out thing you don't want. So yes, this is censorship. It's not government enforced censorship but it is censorship (which is the act of censoring).
from m-w.com
censor Function:
transitive verb Inflected Form(s):
censored; censoring Listen to the pronunciation of censoring \sen(t)-s-ri, sen(t)s-ri\ Date:
1882
: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable ; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable
So it is censorship. self censorship. Does that make it wrong?
As to the evil of drugs, tobacco and prostitution...that is another discussion. However, one could debate wether or not they should or shouldn't be advertised. In the absence of legal constraints Google will simply choose what ensures it the best revenue form all their advertisers. After all if people avoid you because of sex ad then you also won't be selling them any childrens books (or furniture or whatever). I have no problems with that.
Well, I can agree with that. Still, while I couldn't care less how many naked women are dancing around my desktop (virtual on screen desktop, my real life desktop could use some naked women;) I don't think I'd want young children watching it. Which you would get if they didn't block it. I'm not a prude, I think people should be more open about sex or even just nudity, however that doesn't mean there aren't age related issues. quite frankly monitoring advertising isn't censorship per se.
Those farmer ads, virus ads and thing like that certainly border on the illegal. I think google should block those to. No one likes. No one is helped by them...except !@#%$@@#$#!...not so nice people I mean. They are at least as dubious as the essay services if not more so. However, like spam, it is hard to block everything you don't want without blocking what you do want. So blocking certain major annoyances is good. Just K.I.S.S..
If they were putting morality in, then maybe you would have a point. I am fairly convinced they are motivated purely by capitalistic principles. Not advertising prostitution and drugs etc. is good for their image. Sure they may miss some income from one source, but hom much more do they gain from the rest.
Even if it was morally motivated, I still don't have a problem with it. Drugs should be better controlled, not because you shouldn't use them but because you should go to a real doctor and a real pharmacy. Prostitution I have nothing against, however neither do I think it should be thrown in our faces the whole time (ok, I'm not a big fan of ads at all).
The essay writing thing is the least dubious of all. Those businesses can complain that they are 'legit' but only a deaf, dumb, retarded neanderthal would fail to understand that these businesses exist only so people can plagiarize off of them. Just because they 'warn' students not to use the essays that way doesn't mean anyone believes they won't. It's like giving a book of matches to a pyromaniac and telling him not to play with fire.
First off let me say that having read almost 2 of the author's books I absolutely refuse to read TFA.
I have noticed a trend among mobile phone users. They tend not to know telephone numbers and don't like to be pinned down on time and place (Let's do something tonight, I'll call you when I'm in town). While the first is merely an effect of never using an actual number more than once, the second is just downright annoying.
Still I don't blame the technology. In fact, as computers get more sophisticated, I think they will even help us enhance our mental capacities. Nintendo allready is doing this with their brain training programs. Not that the idea of training your brain is new. Imagine that a computer program (call it AI, call it an expert system, whatever) helps you train your skills. It could do it in your 'idle' time (busstop for example). You're memory could end up better than if you didn't have it, just because the computer helps you do something you could've been doing on your own.
OTOH, yes, you could become dependent on it to the degree that you would be pretty lost without it. If this frightens you should ask yourself that if dropped naked in a forest 200 miles from any other human being, could you survive for a month? a week? a day? We allready are dependent on technology, and the amount of people that can't even cook a meal is shocking. I'm not talking a good meal, I'm talking mac and cheese using basic ingredients. Heck, some people couldn't do it if all the had to was add boiling water. If you don't like that example, how about making fire, building a house, clothing, farming of any type, hunting....
All uses of technology have potential positive and negative sides. Usually it's up to the user to make the right choices.
but is the idea of making predictions based on previous data some kind of breakthrough?
That isn't the breakthrough, nor is it even necesarrily AI. In fact, most things dubbed AI I would call CS. AI is more abstract, while the implementations are definately CS. However that is besides the point. It isn't necesarrily simple to do the predicitons or even clear how to do the predictions. Anyone can say this room is just like the last one (only, mirrrored, or with a wastebasket or some non-trivial difference). How do you get a computer to recognise that and do it in realtime. Ok, humans do it, so its probably possible but that doesn't make it trivial.
My own solution would be to use the brain of a psycho drugbaron who can be controlled through the use of addictive substances.
I for one welcome our Japanese Robot Secretary Terminator overlords.
Well the US is not the World Police. Many people seem to like saying this because they don't like the U.S. now, but 30 years ago people would've said 'yes they are, and a good thing to". Now I don't condone recent U.S. policy, but I also don't condone the constant U.S. bashing which quite often is used to divert attention away form your home countries problems. Especially Europe needs to remember that the U.S. certainly saved our bacon way back. Yes, Europe also helped the U.S. on many occasions, and yes alot of it happened long ago, but we all fared better working together. So stop the bashing and start thinking rationally.
discalimer: IANAL (I am a devoted know it all, so you probably should start ignoring me now)
As for now, this extradition, while worrisome, is not all that shocking..or at least not for the reasons I seem to be reading. The fact that someone is extradited while the offense is punishable under australian law isn't shocking, its a requirement. Most countries won't extradite someone for something they don't consider criminal. The most shocking thing is that the crime wasn't committed on U.S. soil. However, you *can* break laws of a country without being in that country. Some countries consider any crime against humanity their jurisdiction (Belgium for one). I'm sure a real lawyer could give more pertinent examples. The real precedent isn't that he's charged under U.S. law, it's that of his extradition, which is a big shame on Australia. I do think the U.S. gov't should've told the companies involved in the charges to seek punishment under australian law and I do doubt the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts, but apparently Australia doesn't.
Of course, my own country (the netherlands) is also guilty of some highly dubious extraditions to the U.S.. Especially since the U.S. has threatened to invade if any of their citizens end up in the international court (which happens to be here). Considering that I would say rip up all extradition treaties with the U.S., for us anyway. Aside from that we have handed over people without proper assurances that they wouldn't be tortured or unfairly treated. In fact, most people would consider being jailed in the U.S. unfair treatment. Compared to dutch jails, US jails are hellholes.
Oh, just to clarify. As I understand it extradition is to get people who have escaped your justice back to your country. When you get your citizens to serve jail time in their home countries rather than where they were convicted, that isn't extradition but something else.
We do all of the research and development, and they sell it at cost with no reimbursement, thus destroying our system of innovation, and allowing them to turn the world back into the stone age. The Taliban will take us by causing us to put all of our tax payers dollars into ammo. Oh yes, Mickey Mouse. Very original...about 70 years ago. Complain about them stealing somthing modern and we might have something to talk about. We could talk about how we are destroying our own system of innovation by supporting massive monopolistic companies like Disney.
This royally pisses me off. I always wanted to build Quake levels for my high school, because it would have been the perfect multiplayer map. Two or more routes to any given place, wide halways, two floors, balconies, stairs at the end of every hallway...it would have been awesome.
But I never went through with it, because Columbine was still fresh in everyone's memory, and I was afraid that exactly this sort of thing would happen.
Ah heck, in high school me and a couple friends were gonna make a Doom level of our school, complete with secret passages (actual, true to life, not made up secret passages). We got pretty far too, though we never played in it. It may have been another time, but I like to think that we would've done the same in a columbine era high school, or even today. It has nothing to do with violence against the school. It's like going into the forest outback of you house and playing cops and robbers, cowboys and indians or whatever. Only without the ticks.
This kid doesn't deserve to be arrested. He doesn't deserve to be thrust into "Alternative Education". He deserves to have someone ask him why he built the school in a video game. Let a psychologist evaluate him, and then either medicate the kid or let him go back to class.
Pyschologist? I don't think that is anywhere near necesary. The people who arrested him, the people who reported him, *they* should be taken to shrinks and probably need medication. This kid just needs to be left alone.
Security education, maybe not. Overall security...probably. If John Q. with his unsecured wireless internet at home decides he wants to do that new-fangled Fon thingy, then he gets a whole new setup. Now not just anyone can use his connection anymore, it's secured. Seems like a big advantage, since you really can't force education on an unsuspecting public.
Sure, but in this case I interpreted the original post as meaning that apple has already lost the battle and is in trouble. Even so, its also a matter of scale. 20 mill aint notthing, but it also isn't going to hurt Apple alot. Now sue *ME* for 20 mill and I'll be declaring bankruptcy. That is screwed.
Apple's screwed. Not hardly. They can certainly pay the damages if it comes that far. Certainly that is all that the suing party is after. They might be inconvenienced if it forces them to stop selling their OS, but that will be temporary at best(worst).
People bitch about software patents, but in reality they are not that different from any other patents. In any fast growing field, the people on the cutting edge would see applications that are obvious with any hindsight. Unfortunately they need not be that obvious at the time to the USPTO who likely are not that familiar with the material.
IANAL, but even if software patents are just like others this doesn't mean the patents are a good thing. It might just mean the whole patent system is corrupt. I certainly wonder if it achieves the goal it was created for, namely to get people to reveal their techniques while giving them a chance to profit off of it. Also, the fact that the people at the USPTO don't have the qualifications to pass judgement on patents they approve doesn't speak well of the USPTO.
- self destruct, great, so if you want to destroy someones data, just grab their memory stick and intentional use bogus passwords. Now that's brilliant. A MS with a builtin self DOS.
well, built in self destruct isn't so bad. It just shouldn't be the only place the data is stored (unless the point was transporting it to a secure location for storage). Sure it might make it easier for a malicious attack to destroy the data, however that might not weigh in against it being stolen.
Actually, the bigger problem is that so many govt agencies approved of this thing, apparently, without it going through any type of remotely rigorous testing and verification. As much as our US govt agencies get ripped for doing stupid stuff, it's clear that they don't have the market cornered on such activity.
Being Dutch this whole story doesn't surprise me at all. There were a couple of incidents with lost pc's/usb sticks. So a group of 'officials' get together to form a committee. This committee won't allow itself to be confused by knowledge of the subject matter or trivial things like that. After receiving the appropriate advice from companies with a vested interest they will obviously choose the least suitable solution. Unfortunately, in this whole incident someone forgot to do the exact opposite of what was advised. If that was sop when working with advice from committees imagine how much better the world would be.
Seriously though, I never expected the people who manage to leave critical defense/police investigation materials open to the public in so many different ways to come up with a good solution. SecuStick originally started out stealing candy from babies, but they found it easier to sell bogus solutions to the gov't.
I disagree. You can't run around that park if it happens to be private property. You can start your own MMO if you want, just not WoW. So it's not as if you can't do similar things, you just can't do what I do. Even then the content is only protected for so long (ok, thanks to Disney it's longer than most of us will live, but never mind that). The choice of "play WoW on Blizzard's servers or don't play WoW" doesn't strike most people as unfair. If the choice was play WoW or never play a (mmo) computer game again, well that would be unfair.
Probably it isn't fair and I actually might be convinced that something should be done about it. However, I think complaining to the search company should be enough. You see, Google (or whomever) wants their ads to be relevant. If I search Toyota and get Chevrolet, then I am going to be disapointed. Next time I won't search that way again. So by allowing competitors to advertise unde eachothers trademarks they are actually undermining their own system. Of course you can't really expect google (or whomever) to check whether this is the case. You can ask them to take action if it happens.
Drug tests for athletes are most certainly an invasion of privacy. However they are one you agree to. You can also refuse the drug tests, however the sports organisation is free to refuse you entry to the contest.
One could argue the same for Warden. The Eula and ToS most likely mention it somewhere, and it could be argued that you consent to any invasion of privacy to prevent. The problem is that noone reads eula's or tos'. Lawyers know this, and encourage by filling it with legalese. However this also means that in certain countries the Eula and Tos aren't enforcable except in the parts that anyone can be expected to know. You could also slip in something about being allowed to access your online banking service to continue you subscription indefinately (or copying your address book, or just analyzing what games you have installed). This would be illegal no matter if you wrote it in your Eula or Tos. Many jurisdictions (and I'm talking across the world, not necesarily US) do not allow you to abuse human behaviour in this way. It's like the shrink wrap license.
The point is their program looks at info on my computer and sends something about it back to Blizzard. I have to assume that it is harmless and will remain that way. That aint right. They have no right to send info on my computer to themselves except as pertinent to the game. by pertinent I'm talking about the software and data directly related to the game. Thus no third party software or any data on my computer. Anything else is a violoation of my privacy. I don't care if they sent the first bit of every millionth byte. It's my data, stay out of it.
While I don't directly see how haveing a bot level grinding for you ruins the game for others, I can imagine this to be the case. In any case Blizzard has the right to tell their subscribers not to use these programs. This in no way gives them the right to prevent people from running a program that accesses ram on their pc, unless you want to take the personal out of it. There is no copying going on, thus no violation of copyright.
I say to Blizzard, fix the problem on your side. Don't like bots? I imagine they can be identified quite simply based on behaviour. don't like what a program I have is doing to *my* ram. know, what, I don't care.
This whole list is a publicity stunt. There is nothing original about what these people are trying to achieve. I would like to point out that the plethora of abandonware sites out there are there for strict purpose of preserving old games for the future. More generally, you can find whole libraries of programs for the TRS-80 and other systems of yesteryear. There are even exemptions in copyright laws specifically to protect electronic archives.
The article states that the guy thought it would be profesional oblivion to get into the history of computer games. This shows either total cluelessness, an overdosis of (possibly false) modest or outright lying. 1998 VG's were allready outshadowing the rest of the entertainment industry.
I really don't understand the last part of the article:
"We have to be really careful here because the technology is just going to make this harder for us," Mr. Spector said. "The game canon is a way of saying, this is the stuff we have to protect first."
?!? protect in what way? preserving the software? there are allready 1000 sites dedicated to doing just that. Making sure people still know about the history of gaming? well, it doesn't really matter to anyone except history buffs, who will want a more detailed picture than this list. It's much more interesting to note the popularity of the roguelike games, possibly leading up to the modern day crpgs, than the rpg they included in the list...namely none. Super Mario 3, no matter the innovations, still rests upon the popularity of Sup Mar 1.
Of course, taking a (lightning) quick peak at the Stanford U website dedicated to "The History and Culture of Interactive Simulations and Video Games" one does get the idea that the research is actually narrower than just video games, and that the article may not reflect that. In fact looking a little further, it seems to me that the whole list was less scientific and more a bunch of guys sitting around going "oh yeah that game was cool"
While I think any attempt at making a list like this is going to run into...criticism, I do believe they were either entirely clueless or they got messed up making decisions in committee fashion. At the very least they missed dome important titles.
As to where you decide importance...Why should it be number of people that played it. Dune II was the tipping point for rts. It was a popular game that did well at the time. Even if later overshadowed by Warcraft, or preceded by more primitive games, Dune II was very obviously the place where rts took off.
Pong was, as you say, a big commercial success. As such it had, and has great cultural significance. Cultural significance has littel to do with artistic merrit, excellence, gameplay, depth, etc.. It has to do with its impact on the culture, and pong definately had that.
Slashdot Mirror
I see what you mean, and I suppose that is a form of memory I hadn't considered. Still, for most purposes the term memory suffices. When getting technical I believe scientists actually do have diffrent words for type of memory, but probabaly in relation to human or animal memory.
actually I think you'll find they don't generally survive the process, but if they do, then they get eaten. For cheese as well as alcohol. One of the reasons it's hard to get high alcohol levels in beer or wine (no distilation allowed) is because the yeast dies. Effectively it poisons it's environment with its own waste. Sort of like never flushing the toilet. Port, for example, is wine with added alcohol.
Survival of the fittest means that whatever survives is fittest. To put that another way, the only way to determine what is fittest is to see what survives. So favoring a similar genetic structure isn't necessarily for survival of the fittest, but those species which practiced it did better. There are species which are active canibals, and they do quite well. Some types of squid for example.
if plants have a mechanism which allows them to simulate memory, then isn't that memory? It doesn't have to be our kind of memory, it just has to mean they respond to similar circumstances in the same way due to past experience. Learning behaviour. At least, I can't readily think of another good definition for things which can't communicate.
Maybe that *is* recognition.
Altruism goes a little far for me, as I would define it as conscious behavior, but one could see it as a genetic basis for altruism. Still far fetched, but if we are genetically inclined to altruism, then we are more likely to consciously choose it.
Censorship basically means blocking out thing you don't want. So yes, this is censorship. It's not government enforced censorship but it is censorship (which is the act of censoring).
from m-w.com
censor
Function:
transitive verb
Inflected Form(s):
censored; censoring Listen to the pronunciation of censoring \sen(t)-s-ri, sen(t)s-ri\
Date:
1882
: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable ; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable
So it is censorship. self censorship. Does that make it wrong?
As to the evil of drugs, tobacco and prostitution...that is another discussion. However, one could debate wether or not they should or shouldn't be advertised. In the absence of legal constraints Google will simply choose what ensures it the best revenue form all their advertisers. After all if people avoid you because of sex ad then you also won't be selling them any childrens books (or furniture or whatever). I have no problems with that.
Those farmer ads, virus ads and thing like that certainly border on the illegal. I think google should block those to. No one likes. No one is helped by them...except !@#%$@@#$#!...not so nice people I mean. They are at least as dubious as the essay services if not more so. However, like spam, it is hard to block everything you don't want without blocking what you do want. So blocking certain major annoyances is good. Just K.I.S.S..
Even if it was morally motivated, I still don't have a problem with it. Drugs should be better controlled, not because you shouldn't use them but because you should go to a real doctor and a real pharmacy. Prostitution I have nothing against, however neither do I think it should be thrown in our faces the whole time (ok, I'm not a big fan of ads at all).
The essay writing thing is the least dubious of all. Those businesses can complain that they are 'legit' but only a deaf, dumb, retarded neanderthal would fail to understand that these businesses exist only so people can plagiarize off of them. Just because they 'warn' students not to use the essays that way doesn't mean anyone believes they won't. It's like giving a book of matches to a pyromaniac and telling him not to play with fire.
I have noticed a trend among mobile phone users. They tend not to know telephone numbers and don't like to be pinned down on time and place (Let's do something tonight, I'll call you when I'm in town). While the first is merely an effect of never using an actual number more than once, the second is just downright annoying.
Still I don't blame the technology. In fact, as computers get more sophisticated, I think they will even help us enhance our mental capacities. Nintendo allready is doing this with their brain training programs. Not that the idea of training your brain is new. Imagine that a computer program (call it AI, call it an expert system, whatever) helps you train your skills. It could do it in your 'idle' time (busstop for example). You're memory could end up better than if you didn't have it, just because the computer helps you do something you could've been doing on your own.
OTOH, yes, you could become dependent on it to the degree that you would be pretty lost without it. If this frightens you should ask yourself that if dropped naked in a forest 200 miles from any other human being, could you survive for a month? a week? a day? We allready are dependent on technology, and the amount of people that can't even cook a meal is shocking. I'm not talking a good meal, I'm talking mac and cheese using basic ingredients. Heck, some people couldn't do it if all the had to was add boiling water. If you don't like that example, how about making fire, building a house, clothing, farming of any type, hunting....
All uses of technology have potential positive and negative sides. Usually it's up to the user to make the right choices.
That isn't the breakthrough, nor is it even necesarrily AI. In fact, most things dubbed AI I would call CS. AI is more abstract, while the implementations are definately CS. However that is besides the point. It isn't necesarrily simple to do the predicitons or even clear how to do the predictions. Anyone can say this room is just like the last one (only, mirrrored, or with a wastebasket or some non-trivial difference). How do you get a computer to recognise that and do it in realtime. Ok, humans do it, so its probably possible but that doesn't make it trivial.
My own solution would be to use the brain of a psycho drugbaron who can be controlled through the use of addictive substances.
I for one welcome our Japanese Robot Secretary Terminator overlords.
discalimer: IANAL (I am a devoted know it all, so you probably should start ignoring me now)
As for now, this extradition, while worrisome, is not all that shocking..or at least not for the reasons I seem to be reading. The fact that someone is extradited while the offense is punishable under australian law isn't shocking, its a requirement. Most countries won't extradite someone for something they don't consider criminal. The most shocking thing is that the crime wasn't committed on U.S. soil. However, you *can* break laws of a country without being in that country. Some countries consider any crime against humanity their jurisdiction (Belgium for one). I'm sure a real lawyer could give more pertinent examples. The real precedent isn't that he's charged under U.S. law, it's that of his extradition, which is a big shame on Australia. I do think the U.S. gov't should've told the companies involved in the charges to seek punishment under australian law and I do doubt the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts, but apparently Australia doesn't.
Of course, my own country (the netherlands) is also guilty of some highly dubious extraditions to the U.S.. Especially since the U.S. has threatened to invade if any of their citizens end up in the international court (which happens to be here). Considering that I would say rip up all extradition treaties with the U.S., for us anyway. Aside from that we have handed over people without proper assurances that they wouldn't be tortured or unfairly treated. In fact, most people would consider being jailed in the U.S. unfair treatment. Compared to dutch jails, US jails are hellholes.
Oh, just to clarify. As I understand it extradition is to get people who have escaped your justice back to your country. When you get your citizens to serve jail time in their home countries rather than where they were convicted, that isn't extradition but something else.
Ah heck, in high school me and a couple friends were gonna make a Doom level of our school, complete with secret passages (actual, true to life, not made up secret passages). We got pretty far too, though we never played in it. It may have been another time, but I like to think that we would've done the same in a columbine era high school, or even today. It has nothing to do with violence against the school. It's like going into the forest outback of you house and playing cops and robbers, cowboys and indians or whatever. Only without the ticks.
This kid doesn't deserve to be arrested. He doesn't deserve to be thrust into "Alternative Education". He deserves to have someone ask him why he built the school in a video game. Let a psychologist evaluate him, and then either medicate the kid or let him go back to class.
Pyschologist? I don't think that is anywhere near necesary. The people who arrested him, the people who reported him, *they* should be taken to shrinks and probably need medication. This kid just needs to be left alone.
Security education, maybe not. Overall security...probably. If John Q. with his unsecured wireless internet at home decides he wants to do that new-fangled Fon thingy, then he gets a whole new setup. Now not just anyone can use his connection anymore, it's secured. Seems like a big advantage, since you really can't force education on an unsuspecting public.
Sure, but in this case I interpreted the original post as meaning that apple has already lost the battle and is in trouble. Even so, its also a matter of scale. 20 mill aint notthing, but it also isn't going to hurt Apple alot. Now sue *ME* for 20 mill and I'll be declaring bankruptcy. That is screwed.
well, built in self destruct isn't so bad. It just shouldn't be the only place the data is stored (unless the point was transporting it to a secure location for storage). Sure it might make it easier for a malicious attack to destroy the data, however that might not weigh in against it being stolen.
Actually, the bigger problem is that so many govt agencies approved of this thing, apparently, without it going through any type of remotely rigorous testing and verification. As much as our US govt agencies get ripped for doing stupid stuff, it's clear that they don't have the market cornered on such activity.
Being Dutch this whole story doesn't surprise me at all. There were a couple of incidents with lost pc's/usb sticks. So a group of 'officials' get together to form a committee. This committee won't allow itself to be confused by knowledge of the subject matter or trivial things like that. After receiving the appropriate advice from companies with a vested interest they will obviously choose the least suitable solution. Unfortunately, in this whole incident someone forgot to do the exact opposite of what was advised. If that was sop when working with advice from committees imagine how much better the world would be.
Seriously though, I never expected the people who manage to leave critical defense/police investigation materials open to the public in so many different ways to come up with a good solution. SecuStick originally started out stealing candy from babies, but they found it easier to sell bogus solutions to the gov't.
I disagree. You can't run around that park if it happens to be private property. You can start your own MMO if you want, just not WoW. So it's not as if you can't do similar things, you just can't do what I do. Even then the content is only protected for so long (ok, thanks to Disney it's longer than most of us will live, but never mind that). The choice of "play WoW on Blizzard's servers or don't play WoW" doesn't strike most people as unfair. If the choice was play WoW or never play a (mmo) computer game again, well that would be unfair.
Probably it isn't fair and I actually might be convinced that something should be done about it. However, I think complaining to the search company should be enough. You see, Google (or whomever) wants their ads to be relevant. If I search Toyota and get Chevrolet, then I am going to be disapointed. Next time I won't search that way again. So by allowing competitors to advertise unde eachothers trademarks they are actually undermining their own system. Of course you can't really expect google (or whomever) to check whether this is the case. You can ask them to take action if it happens.
Drug tests for athletes are most certainly an invasion of privacy. However they are one you agree to. You can also refuse the drug tests, however the sports organisation is free to refuse you entry to the contest. One could argue the same for Warden. The Eula and ToS most likely mention it somewhere, and it could be argued that you consent to any invasion of privacy to prevent. The problem is that noone reads eula's or tos'. Lawyers know this, and encourage by filling it with legalese. However this also means that in certain countries the Eula and Tos aren't enforcable except in the parts that anyone can be expected to know. You could also slip in something about being allowed to access your online banking service to continue you subscription indefinately (or copying your address book, or just analyzing what games you have installed). This would be illegal no matter if you wrote it in your Eula or Tos. Many jurisdictions (and I'm talking across the world, not necesarily US) do not allow you to abuse human behaviour in this way. It's like the shrink wrap license.
The point is their program looks at info on my computer and sends something about it back to Blizzard. I have to assume that it is harmless and will remain that way. That aint right. They have no right to send info on my computer to themselves except as pertinent to the game. by pertinent I'm talking about the software and data directly related to the game. Thus no third party software or any data on my computer. Anything else is a violoation of my privacy. I don't care if they sent the first bit of every millionth byte. It's my data, stay out of it.
While I don't directly see how haveing a bot level grinding for you ruins the game for others, I can imagine this to be the case. In any case Blizzard has the right to tell their subscribers not to use these programs. This in no way gives them the right to prevent people from running a program that accesses ram on their pc, unless you want to take the personal out of it. There is no copying going on, thus no violation of copyright. I say to Blizzard, fix the problem on your side. Don't like bots? I imagine they can be identified quite simply based on behaviour. don't like what a program I have is doing to *my* ram. know, what, I don't care.
This whole list is a publicity stunt. There is nothing original about what these people are trying to achieve. I would like to point out that the plethora of abandonware sites out there are there for strict purpose of preserving old games for the future. More generally, you can find whole libraries of programs for the TRS-80 and other systems of yesteryear. There are even exemptions in copyright laws specifically to protect electronic archives. The article states that the guy thought it would be profesional oblivion to get into the history of computer games. This shows either total cluelessness, an overdosis of (possibly false) modest or outright lying. 1998 VG's were allready outshadowing the rest of the entertainment industry. I really don't understand the last part of the article: "We have to be really careful here because the technology is just going to make this harder for us," Mr. Spector said. "The game canon is a way of saying, this is the stuff we have to protect first." ?!? protect in what way? preserving the software? there are allready 1000 sites dedicated to doing just that. Making sure people still know about the history of gaming? well, it doesn't really matter to anyone except history buffs, who will want a more detailed picture than this list. It's much more interesting to note the popularity of the roguelike games, possibly leading up to the modern day crpgs, than the rpg they included in the list...namely none. Super Mario 3, no matter the innovations, still rests upon the popularity of Sup Mar 1. Of course, taking a (lightning) quick peak at the Stanford U website dedicated to "The History and Culture of Interactive Simulations and Video Games" one does get the idea that the research is actually narrower than just video games, and that the article may not reflect that. In fact looking a little further, it seems to me that the whole list was less scientific and more a bunch of guys sitting around going "oh yeah that game was cool"
While I think any attempt at making a list like this is going to run into...criticism, I do believe they were either entirely clueless or they got messed up making decisions in committee fashion. At the very least they missed dome important titles. As to where you decide importance...Why should it be number of people that played it. Dune II was the tipping point for rts. It was a popular game that did well at the time. Even if later overshadowed by Warcraft, or preceded by more primitive games, Dune II was very obviously the place where rts took off.
Pong was, as you say, a big commercial success. As such it had, and has great cultural significance. Cultural significance has littel to do with artistic merrit, excellence, gameplay, depth, etc.. It has to do with its impact on the culture, and pong definately had that.