And what happens when we get there, whether there are stranglehold laws or not? I think Faust might have something to say about the idea of perniciously retroactive litigation, but how does that apply to mesh-based internet?
Moreover, knowing little about how exactly such a system would work, how would you feel if someone whose node you happened to jump through accused you of violating his personal ToS? Or worse, some crass idiot hijacks your personal node for his own benefit? I have to agree with PJ here, Wild West lawlessness is far easier to understand than current-world motto of sue-them-and-legislate-later. But guess which one is winning?
Stepping on egos is one thing, and horrible, but Wikipedia does still need server space, does it not? While I agree that biased editing is an epidemic, the phrase "as if there was a lack of space in wikipedia" is a bit falicious.
That's almost as frightening as the gross conversion from capitalist (as in, I am how much money I have) to consumerist (I am how much I have/can/will buy/own). Prevalent bulk of the populaton sinking from middle class to working poor reflects this, I'd expect, already, as life expectancy even in the last hundred years has jumped from perhaps 80 to perhaps 100? Im not familiar with the exact numbers as per census, but I'd love to see them for the sake of comparisson.
Re:2nd derivative of plot
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I wonder if anyone's put together a Fame-to-Wordcount algorithm? When I started writing, I could get through about two pages a day. Now, if I'm on my game, I can easily write 10k in a night and had my record set at nearly 20k - which amounts to about 15-25 pages.
I imagine should I ever get published and suddenly have ALL my time free, I may begin to aim for the Rober J Sawyer law of 8 pages per day. However, when you're really in the groove, it's easy to get overextended. If your deadlines are roughly one book per year, and success means more liesure time in which to produce, the deadline and the volume produced cease to match up pretty swiftly. Editting your own work is all well and good, but I hate cutting scenes I'm proud of, and the better I get, the more I've got to be proud of. Publishers have their own work to decide whether what excites me realy belongs in mass market.
Re:Halfway through the book, and ...
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Touche! As a writer, I find it hard to avoid making up vocabulary. Especially being a student of etymology, some words are so rooted in the cultures and it's easy to forget that no one other than yourself -cares- if their history is removed because you're not writing about earth.
Similarly, it's simple enough to find analogous cultures here on earth and mutate their languages to suit. A decidedly oriental-type culture may include permutated Mandarin or Canton words, whereas an exceptionally Norse culture may end up looking like something out of Tolkien. It's a very useful trick that not enough ficton writers use.
Unfortunately, long windedness is also a common mistake in writers, whether you're new to the business or experienced. Having competed in NaNoWriMo this year for the first time, I can certainly appreciate the need to meet certain benchmarks for word-count, but if it's fluff, there's no way around it; it's still fluff. I've known writers to intentionally blast the backs out of their typewriters just to get to the next 10k mark in their word count, because of payment arrangements with publishers as well. It's uncommon, but perhaps good ol' Neal is labouring under his paycheck a bit too much.
So how exactly do you find out if you get to keep your IP if it's not in the policies? I'm certain this isn't something they want to advertise: "GammaGaming Collegiate; We'll Steal Your Ideas!"
Sure. Don't go if they're going to take your ideas, simple and straightforward. Except it's impractical, and there are a number of ways either party can get around such a stupilation; the studant claiming IP, the school claiming financed development and use of resources.
If anything, profit-sharing would be one of the few fair ways to escape the hassle of looking for a school with best practices it actually sticks to, or schools not alienating their own business base.
It's all well and good to say they're driving away their studants, but how many just-out-of-secondary school kids actually give two winks to IP rights discussions? No one lacking personal experience is that smart - unless they're incredibly well informed, or interested, in which case they're likely better of being an IP lawyer than a game designer.
Ben Browder? Perhaps. Although he'd be a better Jack Harkness than Doctor. Now Alec Newman, on the other hand. Who's more aloof than Paul fracking Muad'Dib?
Validity, in my view, is more important than obfuscation, in this case. I've been tagged and bagged relentlessly, so I may as well take control. Privacy isn't invisibility, it's control over who gets to know what.
An interesting argument, if flawed. Before joining Facebook, I read the entire eula and all its associated links, front to back - twice, a week apart. I decided it was worth it to join; I've refused MySpace, LinkedIn and others by the same process. I'm an informed consumer - and there's not a lot more dangerous to a company. I do something others don't. I pick my products with CARE.
That said, I meant to say; not slander as in defamation, because that's inevitable. More like, the more public you are, the harder you are to replicate or impersonate. It's a lot easier to convince someone you're Joe Blow than it is to prove you're the real Elvis. I may be putting myself out there, but if I involve myself in my own image, I know more about my image is being used. I'm a fairly public person to begin with, but if I know what's out there, I have a much better chance of dealing with it. By limiting my exposure, and still ensuring I'm exposed, I make fraud harder. By no means impossible, I'm not naive. But harder.
Or the real opposite. My presense on the web is fairly transparent - Facebook, my domain - and because of this and my perspective on involvement, I'm not anonymous, but it is very hard to slander me. This, in my experience, is better than letting my image run unchecked because of my opting out.
If they do employ a third-party, there will be a sheet to sign with a disclosure agreement citing a list of records they are allowed to check. Usually credit score, past employers, criminal records, etc. I've yet to see internet social networks appear on any of these agreements - which essentially means that they're not permitted to place that in consideration. I'm sure the lawsuits will begin any day now, if they haven't already. I do know that in Canada, in most if not all provinces have legislation regarding what past employers can say about you (time worked, wage, position, etc - no personal opinions or reviews as it may be considered slander/lible). Google-mining will, too, be regulated eventually.
Impractical. No company in their right mind is going to lay off or fire so many workers that they cease to function. Enforcability on an individual scale is frightening; any thought of mass enforcement of any like policy is laughable.
While possibly not enforcable, in most cases these people have enough money to hound you until the end of your days (read: until you agree and shut up). While bordering on illegal, this kind of harrassment in most cases (according to media coverage) ruins lives more effectively than a swift legal proceeding.
Her actions also led to a death that has been placed in her hands as a result of her use of MySpace. A non-culpable offence, for which there was only third-party blame on her. Most bullies can't be blamed for suicides - someone found a way to blame her for one. Unfortunately for the rest of us, unless someone at Facebook gets harmed for using peoples' pictures, this is completely unrelated.
I'm a retailer AND a gamer. You download. Nice for you. Good luck trying to return your download for full refund. Good luck making sure your system can handle the game - in fact, if the version you downloaded was corrupt (the equivalent of a bad disc) and you don't notice, and never re-download (replace the disc) good luck getting any help from customer support.
Retail might be going down the tubes. I understand that. But hard-copy support is still (so far) easier than unresolved download issues. Game didn't install? replace the disc. 99% of the time that's all that's needed. You can't get that kind of definitive answer from a download.
For "Right to return" - FUCK THAT! I'm a retailer. The amount of games we'd get back without the open-and-its-yours policy is nuts! This is unenforcable from a pirating standpoint.
For "Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state." First someone needs to define finished state. Even a single patch can be construed as correction for an unfinished game. Does this ban patches? Or day-one error correcting? If my hardware doesn't conform to their tests, but still runs the game with errors, is the game finished if there's a patch to adjust for my (previously untested) hardware profile?
"Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game's release." Conflict with definitions of rule 2
Rule four I agree with. It's called ftp, people, or self-extractors. Get into the nineties for SFM's sake.
Treat 5 "Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will adequately play on that computer." with the grain of salt law. Minimum requirements are a ballpark for optimum function. Go buy a set of walkie talkies and just TRY to use them at the rated range. See what happens. It's a tenet called "optimum conditions" and it's everywhere, gamers are not alone in this, why expect special treatment?
Six and Eight come to me as the same - clarity and open information is very important, on both sides. If I know what I'm buying, I'm less likely to hack it to make sure it does what you say it does.
Seven. "Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time." Keep your discs. Re-install. It's better for everyone that way.
I've never run into a "single-player game (which forced me) to be connected to the Internet." If it does, I imagine live content updates might be useful. New content on the fly intrigues me.
No-Disc play is a very big issue. Even from a load-time perspective, the option should be there, for the sake of storage space if nothing else. Demanding this unilaterally is like most others - the option would be gold. The demand will not satisfy everyone.
Stuff like this gets my brain knotted. Developers respond to demands from many sources, the customer is one of many voices, and unfortunately, the customer sounds like a gnat against the rush of shareholders - and even other developers. If you believe one way, but the game architect is a righteous ass who thinks his way is best, no customer response line can help you. Forcing industry standards that don't necessarily reflect the state of the consumer is also a bad idea - lots of developers have proprietary processes out of necessity, and others are forced OUT of using some of those processes because others got their first. Do we fix this by abolishing software patents? No. We adjust the market and the provider slowly toward each other. This isn't a "I'm taking my money and buying from not-you" situation. That gets us nowhere. This is more compromise than we'd like to admit. As much as DRM and CD-locking, patching and constant connection annoys us, they're there for a reason. No dev team in their right mind wastes time on something they believe will NOT benefit the experience in some way. Maybe we just don't get it yet. Maybe I'm on crack.
In short: this is an all-or-nothing approach to a very gray problem. Vinegar for flies. We need more honey, less vinegar.
Slashdot Mirror
And what happens when we get there, whether there are stranglehold laws or not? I think Faust might have something to say about the idea of perniciously retroactive litigation, but how does that apply to mesh-based internet?
Moreover, knowing little about how exactly such a system would work, how would you feel if someone whose node you happened to jump through accused you of violating his personal ToS? Or worse, some crass idiot hijacks your personal node for his own benefit? I have to agree with PJ here, Wild West lawlessness is far easier to understand than current-world motto of sue-them-and-legislate-later. But guess which one is winning?
He's Pagan and you've just committed a hate crime!
Stepping on egos is one thing, and horrible, but Wikipedia does still need server space, does it not? While I agree that biased editing is an epidemic, the phrase "as if there was a lack of space in wikipedia" is a bit falicious.
That's almost as frightening as the gross conversion from capitalist (as in, I am how much money I have) to consumerist (I am how much I have/can/will buy/own). Prevalent bulk of the populaton sinking from middle class to working poor reflects this, I'd expect, already, as life expectancy even in the last hundred years has jumped from perhaps 80 to perhaps 100? Im not familiar with the exact numbers as per census, but I'd love to see them for the sake of comparisson.
Stay in the tarp! This is bath country!
Unfortunately, lack of comprehension, more often than malice, attributes to the consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity.
I wonder if anyone's put together a Fame-to-Wordcount algorithm? When I started writing, I could get through about two pages a day. Now, if I'm on my game, I can easily write 10k in a night and had my record set at nearly 20k - which amounts to about 15-25 pages.
I imagine should I ever get published and suddenly have ALL my time free, I may begin to aim for the Rober J Sawyer law of 8 pages per day. However, when you're really in the groove, it's easy to get overextended. If your deadlines are roughly one book per year, and success means more liesure time in which to produce, the deadline and the volume produced cease to match up pretty swiftly. Editting your own work is all well and good, but I hate cutting scenes I'm proud of, and the better I get, the more I've got to be proud of. Publishers have their own work to decide whether what excites me realy belongs in mass market.
Touche! As a writer, I find it hard to avoid making up vocabulary. Especially being a student of etymology, some words are so rooted in the cultures and it's easy to forget that no one other than yourself -cares- if their history is removed because you're not writing about earth.
Similarly, it's simple enough to find analogous cultures here on earth and mutate their languages to suit. A decidedly oriental-type culture may include permutated Mandarin or Canton words, whereas an exceptionally Norse culture may end up looking like something out of Tolkien. It's a very useful trick that not enough ficton writers use.
Unfortunately, long windedness is also a common mistake in writers, whether you're new to the business or experienced. Having competed in NaNoWriMo this year for the first time, I can certainly appreciate the need to meet certain benchmarks for word-count, but if it's fluff, there's no way around it; it's still fluff. I've known writers to intentionally blast the backs out of their typewriters just to get to the next 10k mark in their word count, because of payment arrangements with publishers as well. It's uncommon, but perhaps good ol' Neal is labouring under his paycheck a bit too much.
Never having gone to market still means it didn't exist. Concept devices and mockups don't count for most people.
But at least you've got a cool keyboard.
So how exactly do you find out if you get to keep your IP if it's not in the policies? I'm certain this isn't something they want to advertise: "GammaGaming Collegiate; We'll Steal Your Ideas!"
Sure. Don't go if they're going to take your ideas, simple and straightforward. Except it's impractical, and there are a number of ways either party can get around such a stupilation; the studant claiming IP, the school claiming financed development and use of resources.
If anything, profit-sharing would be one of the few fair ways to escape the hassle of looking for a school with best practices it actually sticks to, or schools not alienating their own business base.
It's all well and good to say they're driving away their studants, but how many just-out-of-secondary school kids actually give two winks to IP rights discussions? No one lacking personal experience is that smart - unless they're incredibly well informed, or interested, in which case they're likely better of being an IP lawyer than a game designer.
It's a solid state laser weapon.
It doesn't get much more aloof than sacrificing yourself and your family for the greater good.
Ben Browder? Perhaps. Although he'd be a better Jack Harkness than Doctor. Now Alec Newman, on the other hand. Who's more aloof than Paul fracking Muad'Dib?
Validity, in my view, is more important than obfuscation, in this case. I've been tagged and bagged relentlessly, so I may as well take control. Privacy isn't invisibility, it's control over who gets to know what.
An interesting argument, if flawed. Before joining Facebook, I read the entire eula and all its associated links, front to back - twice, a week apart. I decided it was worth it to join; I've refused MySpace, LinkedIn and others by the same process. I'm an informed consumer - and there's not a lot more dangerous to a company. I do something others don't. I pick my products with CARE. That said, I meant to say; not slander as in defamation, because that's inevitable. More like, the more public you are, the harder you are to replicate or impersonate. It's a lot easier to convince someone you're Joe Blow than it is to prove you're the real Elvis. I may be putting myself out there, but if I involve myself in my own image, I know more about my image is being used. I'm a fairly public person to begin with, but if I know what's out there, I have a much better chance of dealing with it. By limiting my exposure, and still ensuring I'm exposed, I make fraud harder. By no means impossible, I'm not naive. But harder.
Or the real opposite. My presense on the web is fairly transparent - Facebook, my domain - and because of this and my perspective on involvement, I'm not anonymous, but it is very hard to slander me. This, in my experience, is better than letting my image run unchecked because of my opting out.
Get owned!
If they do employ a third-party, there will be a sheet to sign with a disclosure agreement citing a list of records they are allowed to check. Usually credit score, past employers, criminal records, etc. I've yet to see internet social networks appear on any of these agreements - which essentially means that they're not permitted to place that in consideration. I'm sure the lawsuits will begin any day now, if they haven't already. I do know that in Canada, in most if not all provinces have legislation regarding what past employers can say about you (time worked, wage, position, etc - no personal opinions or reviews as it may be considered slander/lible). Google-mining will, too, be regulated eventually.
That's been going on for a long time. The problem is worse lately because people are being actively FIRED for online behavior.
Impractical. No company in their right mind is going to lay off or fire so many workers that they cease to function. Enforcability on an individual scale is frightening; any thought of mass enforcement of any like policy is laughable.
While possibly not enforcable, in most cases these people have enough money to hound you until the end of your days (read: until you agree and shut up). While bordering on illegal, this kind of harrassment in most cases (according to media coverage) ruins lives more effectively than a swift legal proceeding.
Her actions also led to a death that has been placed in her hands as a result of her use of MySpace. A non-culpable offence, for which there was only third-party blame on her. Most bullies can't be blamed for suicides - someone found a way to blame her for one. Unfortunately for the rest of us, unless someone at Facebook gets harmed for using peoples' pictures, this is completely unrelated.
I hope Mass Effect is a good enough game to make the connection worth it. What if I'm on the road and want to play? Jackasses.
I'm a retailer AND a gamer. You download. Nice for you. Good luck trying to return your download for full refund. Good luck making sure your system can handle the game - in fact, if the version you downloaded was corrupt (the equivalent of a bad disc) and you don't notice, and never re-download (replace the disc) good luck getting any help from customer support.
Retail might be going down the tubes. I understand that. But hard-copy support is still (so far) easier than unresolved download issues. Game didn't install? replace the disc. 99% of the time that's all that's needed. You can't get that kind of definitive answer from a download.
For "Right to return" - FUCK THAT! I'm a retailer. The amount of games we'd get back without the open-and-its-yours policy is nuts! This is unenforcable from a pirating standpoint.
For "Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state." First someone needs to define finished state. Even a single patch can be construed as correction for an unfinished game. Does this ban patches? Or day-one error correcting? If my hardware doesn't conform to their tests, but still runs the game with errors, is the game finished if there's a patch to adjust for my (previously untested) hardware profile?
"Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game's release." Conflict with definitions of rule 2
Rule four I agree with. It's called ftp, people, or self-extractors. Get into the nineties for SFM's sake.
Treat 5 "Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will adequately play on that computer." with the grain of salt law. Minimum requirements are a ballpark for optimum function. Go buy a set of walkie talkies and just TRY to use them at the rated range. See what happens. It's a tenet called "optimum conditions" and it's everywhere, gamers are not alone in this, why expect special treatment?
Six and Eight come to me as the same - clarity and open information is very important, on both sides. If I know what I'm buying, I'm less likely to hack it to make sure it does what you say it does.
Seven. "Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time." Keep your discs. Re-install. It's better for everyone that way.
I've never run into a "single-player game (which forced me) to be connected to the Internet." If it does, I imagine live content updates might be useful. New content on the fly intrigues me.
No-Disc play is a very big issue. Even from a load-time perspective, the option should be there, for the sake of storage space if nothing else. Demanding this unilaterally is like most others - the option would be gold. The demand will not satisfy everyone.
Stuff like this gets my brain knotted. Developers respond to demands from many sources, the customer is one of many voices, and unfortunately, the customer sounds like a gnat against the rush of shareholders - and even other developers. If you believe one way, but the game architect is a righteous ass who thinks his way is best, no customer response line can help you. Forcing industry standards that don't necessarily reflect the state of the consumer is also a bad idea - lots of developers have proprietary processes out of necessity, and others are forced OUT of using some of those processes because others got their first. Do we fix this by abolishing software patents? No. We adjust the market and the provider slowly toward each other. This isn't a "I'm taking my money and buying from not-you" situation. That gets us nowhere. This is more compromise than we'd like to admit. As much as DRM and CD-locking, patching and constant connection annoys us, they're there for a reason. No dev team in their right mind wastes time on something they believe will NOT benefit the experience in some way. Maybe we just don't get it yet. Maybe I'm on crack.
In short: this is an all-or-nothing approach to a very gray problem. Vinegar for flies. We need more honey, less vinegar.