So I could take this to a store, wrap an rfid tagged item in it and steal it? So you are saying that a new technology can easilly be circumvented by criminals and therefore only serves to annoy and monitor law abiding citizens? That's umpossible!
Leo Laporte has a question and answer call-in show that he archives at the blog for the radio show. The downloads can be found at the bottom of the show notes.
I thought the same thing last time I went golfing (the kind with the balls) and we spend so much time wandering around in the woods looking for our balls. But then I came home from the course with 5 more balls than a went with and I realized that I couldn't do that if they rfid in the balls.
I think the appeal for me is certainly limited almost exclusively to blogs that are related to my academic/professional pursuits. I'm getting my phd and I figure if I can update my blog on a regular basis with interesting things related to my phd work, in a few years when I graduate, maybe one of my readers will be in a position to hire me. Similarly, 99% of the blogs I read are by people in the same field. I think certainly for my field, videogame studies/new media, blogs are where the new ideas get bounced around. I know that if I'm reading a book for a class and a passage seems really intersting I'll write about it on my blog.
Very very few of the blogs I read are personal, and the ones I do read are people I knew in my masters program, so reading their blog is a way of keeping in touch with them. Now I know there are people that go around and read personal blogs of people they've never met that aren't professional in any way shape or form, but I couldn't tell you why people do that.
It's the same thing as with movies. Here in my department some fellow grad students have started up a film series and they have to get permissions to show these obscure art films. I know that one of the films they wanted to show they decided wasn't worth it becaue the rights owner wanted a rediculous sum of money to show the movie (to a croud of probably less than 20 people). They weren't even charging admission. So I would assume that since this is a for profit buisness, there would be similar legal restictions.
The weakness of this method is that the game companies won't know why people stoped buying the games. They will just see sales decline and say "Well, the pc is dead" and stop making pc games. Either that or they will continue to plame piracy like the music industry does (our sales are down so it must be piracy, not that people don't want our product any more). So if people are going to stop buying games because of copy protection, make sure that the game companies know that is why you aren't buying their games.
It depends on how we want to define videogame, because if any old thing on a screen will do, then the guys who made that game with the oscilliscope "invented" videogames. If we want to make it digital, then that rules out Baer because as I understand it, the Odyssey was analog, not digital, so he isn't on those grounds either. The father of home videogames? Maybe. But again, if I am remembering correctly and the Odyssey was analog, then I think there is a difference there.
Well that would all work but ofr one thing and that is the fact that the laws of the FCC already curtail freedoms. Namely the freedom of the individuals. I do not have the freedom to just go buy the equipment and start my own station. If I don't like what a store sells, I am always free to start my own store. But you can't do that with broadcast radio because even if you could afford to pay for a licence, many areas don't have any more room on the dial anyway. So because the radio stations have access to a limited and restricted resource, the are regulations on what they can do with it.
I wonder why he didn't name names? I don't see much threat of a lawsuit because he is just reporting what happened. Indeed, since he didn't do a very big test, it would be nice to know who failed the test.
It seems odd that the CEO of Viacom is the one buying the stock rather than the company of Viacom itself. I don't know a whole lot about such matters, but it would seem that the CEO buying enough of a company to take it private and then sell it to the company that he already owns seems either a bit of a round-about way of doing it or just downright illegal (He buys it cheap and then sells it to the company he already runs for a lot more? Wish I could do that). I wonder if it might be something more like a fall back job for when he inevitably gets fired from Viacom (as all CEOs seem to eventually do).
I think there is a way that a bittorrent-style distribution system could be used to facilitate the free distribution of articles. The problem with just hosting an article on your own site is that with out the peer review system (as flawed as it may be) there's now way of knowing if the article that someone finds is any good unless you are an expert yourself. But I can invision a deal where an online peer reviewed journal could use a system in which they say, ok your article is good enough for us to publish but instead of paying us, or us charging readers, you have to host the paper and all the other papers in this issue in a bittorrent, distributed system and if you could make it seemless enough (which would be the big problem) you could also make the readers "host" the files they read in that way instead of charging them, after all these are mostly read by academics and other professionals who have office computers that could be put to work in a SETI@home style fashion serving the article out to people and thus distributing the bandwith among everyone who reads it. Of course to do this, it would have to be pretty transparent for the enduser because if it is a pain in the butt to do, then people wouldn't do it, which means it is a ways off, but if someone could code up a program like that, it would be an elegant solution to the bandwith problem.
Now maybe some of these people who responded to you know something I don't, but a couple weeks on PBS there was an episode of Scientific American (I think that's the name, starts the guy from MASH) about alternative fuels and on that they mentioned the new diesels and said that they are more fuel efficient but still have higher NOx emmissions. If that is true, since California has some of the strictest emmision laws, that would probably be the reason.
Even worse than used games is what is going on in the book industry! There's this building downtown that lets people borrow books for free! Just think of how many copies of books they could have sold if they would shut down these "libraries!" Seriously though, the outcry on used games and piracy often assumes that if these options to get a game/cd/book at lower or no cost did not exist, then people would pay full price, which is a fallacy. I know that when I buy a used game, it is almost always because it is cheap. If it was full price, I would not buy it. Maybe I'm just cheap, but if I really want a game, I'll buy it when it first comes out, otherwise, for 90% of the games I buy I just wait untill they are around $19.95. I imagine that I'm not entirely alone on this. So when I buy a used game, the manufacturers aren't losing out on anything because I wouldn't buy it at full price anyway.
I've read a book where the guy quoted an earlier chapter of the same book!
In this particular instance, it was posted on a web site, and at least with MLA (which I am familiar with) there are ways to do cite web sites.
But certainly, if someone used their brain, they would have cut this guy some slack. If I publish something on my blog and then use it again in a paper, I'm not sure if I would have thought to cite it before now.
I'm not sure about that, but I remember reading that with their XNA announcement they said that in the future consoles and pcs would have the same controllers. Now if that means an xbox controller or a nextgeneration controller, or even if that was a seperate announcement, I don't know.
Well, the founders of valve did used to work at Microsoft, so they probably either felt loyalty to their old employer, or had used it at MS and were used to it.
Its interestig that they say it is the worms that cause extra work rather than the security holes. After all, if the security holes weren't there then the worms wouldn't work.
That missing element is of course, quality. Game Over was horrible horrible horrible. I barely made it through one episode. The videogame review shows have their place. They have the advantage over magazines and websites becaseu they can actually show the game being played while they talk about it. Also, I think that interviews with creators and other behind the scenes type of material work very well for television. So there is a place for it, but it needs that element of quality and to offer something you can't get as well from a magazine or a web site.
Slashdot Mirror
I know many have already said this but, dude, it already isn't working, it can't not work any more, so leave the firewall on. It can't hurt to try.
So I could take this to a store, wrap an rfid tagged item in it and steal it? So you are saying that a new technology can easilly be circumvented by criminals and therefore only serves to annoy and monitor law abiding citizens? That's umpossible!
per year
So you mean that $11,700 I'm making a year as a graduate assistant isn't good pay?
Leo Laporte has a question and answer call-in show that he archives at the blog for the radio show. The downloads can be found at the bottom of the show notes.
I thought the same thing last time I went golfing (the kind with the balls) and we spend so much time wandering around in the woods looking for our balls.
But then I came home from the course with 5 more balls than a went with and I realized that I couldn't do that if they rfid in the balls.
I think the appeal for me is certainly limited almost exclusively to blogs that are related to my academic/professional pursuits. I'm getting my phd and I figure if I can update my blog on a regular basis with interesting things related to my phd work, in a few years when I graduate, maybe one of my readers will be in a position to hire me. Similarly, 99% of the blogs I read are by people in the same field. I think certainly for my field, videogame studies/new media, blogs are where the new ideas get bounced around. I know that if I'm reading a book for a class and a passage seems really intersting I'll write about it on my blog.
Very very few of the blogs I read are personal, and the ones I do read are people I knew in my masters program, so reading their blog is a way of keeping in touch with them. Now I know there are people that go around and read personal blogs of people they've never met that aren't professional in any way shape or form, but I couldn't tell you why people do that.
It's the same thing as with movies. Here in my department some fellow grad students have started up a film series and they have to get permissions to show these obscure art films. I know that one of the films they wanted to show they decided wasn't worth it becaue the rights owner wanted a rediculous sum of money to show the movie (to a croud of probably less than 20 people). They weren't even charging admission. So I would assume that since this is a for profit buisness, there would be similar legal restictions.
The weakness of this method is that the game companies won't know why people stoped buying the games. They will just see sales decline and say "Well, the pc is dead" and stop making pc games. Either that or they will continue to plame piracy like the music industry does (our sales are down so it must be piracy, not that people don't want our product any more).
So if people are going to stop buying games because of copy protection, make sure that the game companies know that is why you aren't buying their games.
It depends on how we want to define videogame, because if any old thing on a screen will do, then the guys who made that game with the oscilliscope "invented" videogames.
If we want to make it digital, then that rules out Baer because as I understand it, the Odyssey was analog, not digital, so he isn't on those grounds either. The father of home videogames? Maybe. But again, if I am remembering correctly and the Odyssey was analog, then I think there is a difference there.
Well that would all work but ofr one thing and that is the fact that the laws of the FCC already curtail freedoms. Namely the freedom of the individuals. I do not have the freedom to just go buy the equipment and start my own station. If I don't like what a store sells, I am always free to start my own store. But you can't do that with broadcast radio because even if you could afford to pay for a licence, many areas don't have any more room on the dial anyway.
So because the radio stations have access to a limited and restricted resource, the are regulations on what they can do with it.
I wonder why he didn't name names? I don't see much threat of a lawsuit because he is just reporting what happened. Indeed, since he didn't do a very big test, it would be nice to know who failed the test.
It seems odd that the CEO of Viacom is the one buying the stock rather than the company of Viacom itself. I don't know a whole lot about such matters, but it would seem that the CEO buying enough of a company to take it private and then sell it to the company that he already owns seems either a bit of a round-about way of doing it or just downright illegal (He buys it cheap and then sells it to the company he already runs for a lot more? Wish I could do that). I wonder if it might be something more like a fall back job for when he inevitably gets fired from Viacom (as all CEOs seem to eventually do).
I think there is a way that a bittorrent-style distribution system could be used to facilitate the free distribution of articles. The problem with just hosting an article on your own site is that with out the peer review system (as flawed as it may be) there's now way of knowing if the article that someone finds is any good unless you are an expert yourself. But I can invision a deal where an online peer reviewed journal could use a system in which they say, ok your article is good enough for us to publish but instead of paying us, or us charging readers, you have to host the paper and all the other papers in this issue in a bittorrent, distributed system and if you could make it seemless enough (which would be the big problem) you could also make the readers "host" the files they read in that way instead of charging them, after all these are mostly read by academics and other professionals who have office computers that could be put to work in a SETI@home style fashion serving the article out to people and thus distributing the bandwith among everyone who reads it. Of course to do this, it would have to be pretty transparent for the enduser because if it is a pain in the butt to do, then people wouldn't do it, which means it is a ways off, but if someone could code up a program like that, it would be an elegant solution to the bandwith problem.
Now maybe some of these people who responded to you know something I don't, but a couple weeks on PBS there was an episode of Scientific American (I think that's the name, starts the guy from MASH) about alternative fuels and on that they mentioned the new diesels and said that they are more fuel efficient but still have higher NOx emmissions. If that is true, since California has some of the strictest emmision laws, that would probably be the reason.
Even worse than used games is what is going on in the book industry! There's this building downtown that lets people borrow books for free! Just think of how many copies of books they could have sold if they would shut down these "libraries!"
Seriously though, the outcry on used games and piracy often assumes that if these options to get a game/cd/book at lower or no cost did not exist, then people would pay full price, which is a fallacy. I know that when I buy a used game, it is almost always because it is cheap. If it was full price, I would not buy it. Maybe I'm just cheap, but if I really want a game, I'll buy it when it first comes out, otherwise, for 90% of the games I buy I just wait untill they are around $19.95. I imagine that I'm not entirely alone on this. So when I buy a used game, the manufacturers aren't losing out on anything because I wouldn't buy it at full price anyway.
His second book, "How to make love the bruce campbell way" is going to be out by the end of the year.
I've read a book where the guy quoted an earlier chapter of the same book!
In this particular instance, it was posted on a web site, and at least with MLA (which I am familiar with) there are ways to do cite web sites.
But certainly, if someone used their brain, they would have cut this guy some slack. If I publish something on my blog and then use it again in a paper, I'm not sure if I would have thought to cite it before now.
I've read several articles where people quote themselves. I've actually done it a time or two. I tell my students when in doubt, cite it.
Now, certainly, the above AC shouldn't have been penalized for it and it certainly points out the risks of automated systems.
But we should learn from his case, it never hurts to cite something, even if it is just one sentence.
I'm not sure about that, but I remember reading that with their XNA announcement they said that in the future consoles and pcs would have the same controllers. Now if that means an xbox controller or a nextgeneration controller, or even if that was a seperate announcement, I don't know.
Well, the founders of valve did used to work at Microsoft, so they probably either felt loyalty to their old employer, or had used it at MS and were used to it.
Nearly a year ago it was announced that Thrent Reznor was no longer involved with Doom 3.
Its interestig that they say it is the worms that cause extra work rather than the security holes. After all, if the security holes weren't there then the worms wouldn't work.
Finally, we have a sequal to Contract Jack!
That missing element is of course, quality. Game Over was horrible horrible horrible. I barely made it through one episode.
The videogame review shows have their place. They have the advantage over magazines and websites becaseu they can actually show the game being played while they talk about it.
Also, I think that interviews with creators and other behind the scenes type of material work very well for television. So there is a place for it, but it needs that element of quality and to offer something you can't get as well from a magazine or a web site.