In the case of screenshots, it's explicit fair use to document that which you are discussing. If you want to say a game looks great, or horrible, you are allowed to prove it. You aren't allowed to take a bunch of screenshots and make a book out of the cutscenes of the latest Final Fantasy, but if you are going to say a game looks like ****, you'd better have some proof posted so they can't sue you for making up nonsense about their game.
The video on it's own... I'm not sure where that stands, but if you were to make a documentary of the compulsive need of some parents to record and push out every little thing a child does, you'd probably be within your rights to include a few seconds of this video.
> when she could have just as easily sent a copy to her friends/family privately she chose to post it on a public high volume internet video site like youtube that in all likliness will be seen by thousands of people at the least.
What if she put it on GeoCities? On a personally owned web site? That the video is on YouTube is pretty much meaningless. Sure, it's AVAILABLE for viewing, but so is everything you do in your front yard. How many people will ever look? do you browse YouTube for "cute baby pictures"? Do you know anyone who would? The value of kid video isn't in the work, but the subject matter. If you don't know the kids, the video is worthless filler eating YouTube's disk space. With the sheer volume on YouTube, merely posting isn't the same as explicit general public publishing. While "available" the video is safely considered mostly anonymous unless there's substantial objective merit (usually comic) to make the video spread.
> Strangely enough there are no laws forcing people to keep paying me until 90 years after I'm dead for the work I do every day.
Yes, but that law isn't to help the ARTIST get paid that way. (Even if it's worded to suggest that.) The law is to keep the COPYRIGHT OWNER in control.
I wonder if, given that the copyright was signed over with that knowledge that copyright law extends X years and the company only controls it for that length of time, after which the artist would t hen be able to work with their own creation again, can it be taken as an attempted breach of contract to extend the copyright period, depriving the artist of the rightful return of the ability to build off his own work without seeking permission?
Should an extended copyright term be considered the property of the music companies, or revert back to the families once the length of the copyright at the time of the signing of the deal has passed?
If she e-mails it to the family... then thinks of another person who should see it, she has to deal with the upload again. Many e-mail providers won't allow the upload of too large attachments, which could be a problem for video.
If she puts it on YouTibe, all she has to hand out is a URL. She probably plastered the URL to several times as many people as originally watched it, who were tired of hearing about how "cute" the latest thing her baby did was.
To what extent should she go to avoid infrigement? Is it ok if she mutes the video? What if she has a Dell computer in the background? Does she have to cover their name with something?
If you're going to complain about music where it doesn't belong, go after the people blasting their car stereos between midnight and 2am past your home, with the volume up high enough that your walls shake. (Then again maybe I just had a VERY badly built apartment, but it shouldn't have been that loud OUTSIDE the car, especially past the noise ordinance cut-off)
If you want to complain about this video, do so for the right reason. The video is child abuse of a sort. How? This video is going to be played to every date the poor kid gets, plus whoever they marry, to their repeated embarrasment, against every threat and bout of begging of the child to PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD delete that forsaken video! The same is true of pictures of babies in "cute" animal costumes. The child made to dress up as a bee, who has to endure the pictures handed out to everyone they know has EVERY right to be ticked. While your baby is your RESPONSIBILITY it is not your TOY and not your PRIVATE PROPERTY to be used in any degrading manner you wish.
Is storm REALLY an evil criminal network? Or are we just being told this by THOSE WHO KNOW BETTER (tm)? Perhaps it's the world's biggest game of core wars, open to all comers, with the "waning" because no one currently has a credible (not immediately beaten down) challenge. Darn those video-game-hating supposed know-betters trying to stop anyone from having a good time! Why I ought to... wait a minute, when did my palms get this hairy? CRAP, THEY'RE RIGHT ABOUT THE PORN!
And for the conspiracy twist, the current winner is... JACK THOMPSON! His lawsuits are all a scam so when he's uncovered as the one who caused so much downtime, people will think he was framed! And he would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you meddling... kids... at Nintendo, who are so afraid of a self-copying game they're hiring the Russian mob to wipe him out, the Viagra spammer was a test run! Next Nintendo and the RIAA join forces to sue MS over a little something nasty they found in cmd.com, something about COPY.
In Communist Russia, our new game-playing overlords welcome you, for one?
Or could the real source and purpose be our favorite search engine? Perhaps this is the only way to get the results we've come to expect at the speed we demand.
In does-no-evil Russia, Google searches you!
(Apologies if I've ripped off a Russia / overlord or conspiracy theory from someone else)
If we had a single console, people would make "mistakes" putting it together, and you'd occasionally have to swap to another model to play a game not supported on yours. (Sega CD BIOS and Lunar for an example of what can happen) Given MS and Java, I wouldn't want them designing one of these.
3 companies currently have a taste for the money involved with being the console provider. Which is going to willingly give it up? Whether your game rocks or tanks, you pay them for the privledge of releasing it for their console. With one console, prices would skyrocket. As it is, the greed of individual companies is somewhat countered by the fear of driving a hit to the competition. This is part of why Sony WON'T back down from Blu-Ray. Forgetting the players, owning the standard is fairly profitable. (And a powerful tool negotiation-wise, at least until it's so broken with DRM that consumers CAN'T use it and give up.)
Also, would you want Nintendo owning it, perhaps making all the games for 6 months nearly unplayable from insisting they rely on the latest gimmick? Would you like Sony to control everything, blocking series you like (Working Designs, 2D games for a while when trying to push 3D), making nasty decisions (DRM breaking consoles, going ahead with the only plays on one console game-disc).
If a system like this was incrementally upgraded like PCs, it would have the standard PC problem of inconsistent play between consoles. Remember popping DOS games on Win95-98 class PCs and watching the on-screen blur? Even little timing mismatches could be nasty for twitch games.
Competition as some have noted above means companies will take more chances on off-beat games, always a plus. Staggered releases also force a bit more exposure for well-timed games. Most anything around the release of a new console will get tried. It may be crap, but an early game will get plenty of sales form parents who don't know better just because it's there, and their kid doesn't already have it. While it pushes crap, it also pushes potentially good games that might have gone unnoticed otherwise.
We need multiple consoles to keep the console fanboys arguing. A generic system is quickly forgotten about. When's the last time you argued about which brand of TV or DVD player was best? HDTV type perhaps (lcd, plasma...) How about sound systems? Your friends might have a few compliments for your new system, but it's for most, too generic to pay much attention too. The debate over what's best keeps the buzz going, and the systems fresh in people's minds.
While Sega certainly met the demand for their mascot (Sonic 1-3, Sonic and Knuckles and as many or more of the same on the Game Gear, disregarding kart racers and other spin-offs) early on, the Sega CD had one good Sonic game. The 32X was a disappointment all around. (Also the 1st game system that ever blue-screened on me, ironically playing a port of a PC game, Wolfenstein or Doom) The Saturn was a nice system, but had no proper Sonic games, just the Sonic Jam rerelease of previous games. The Dreamcast brought Sonic back in 2 games many love to hate (~ 50/50 here)
Did you like Shining Force 1 and 2, and the one on the Game Gear? Sorry, afterwards the Shining series became action games. Did you like Phantasy Star? Sorry, it dropped off the face of the Earth. (For a while.)
Nintendo dropped the ball as well, after Super Mario World 1 traditional Mario died for a while. Metroid was loved but in far too short supply. Zelda kicked butt and took names. Mega Man slowed for a while before hopping to Sony and kicking out a few more X games and letting the original series die.)
Final Fantasy never graced Sega's systems, it could have moved a few units. It definately sold a few 360s. (FF11)
I found a number of games on just about every Sega system that I loved (excepting the Master System (only 4-5) and 32X (1), but Sega wasn't good at having something they could point to and say "You know and love this, come back and get some more of it!".
(Shining Force 3 epiosodes 2 and 3 being a no-show didn't help either)
One cool thing about the Saturn, many of the discs had several of the games music tracks available to play on any normal CD player. I think the Sega CD did this too. Some Dreamcast games had goodies on the discs if you popped them into a PC. PSO was one.
> but I know Nintendo has been on the innovative path, you would have never seen a pointer in a game controller or a touch screen on a portable, it would be the standard controller and buttons galore, not much else.
> Having multiple consoles allows us the power of choice. Standards do not drive the console industry, competition does.
That may not be the best argument for... several DS games have left me wishing I could use the full set of controls over the stylus. The stylus is a perfect fit for some games, but Nintendo doesn't seem to realize which games they are and doesn't always offer a choice of normal controls only. (The touch screen is a 50% annoyance, the microphone I've yet to find a good use for. I haven't played the lawyer game yet, but so far EVERY time I've seen the mic used, it's been a pain)
I'd say the market for offbeat random junk is fairly huge. Look at Southpark. Why the heck was Beavis and Butthead allowed to go on so long with crappy animation and the show repeatedly interrupted by 5-10 seconds of watching the main characters head bang?
Never underestimate the market for trash. There's no end to the cute/funny collection of picture sites on the net.
> And how long before such clips require written consent of all parties before they become legal?
This wouldn't be that big an issue. 1st the same people who upload Star Wars now will continue to do so, with faked signatures. Secondly, as far as home-grown content, the burning urge for kids to get on TV (or YouTube) will have a ready supply of willing-to-sign free actors for any movie you might care to make.
Consider the Internet tax ban. I see that being repealed 1st, as much as the RIAA and MPAA may be drooling over the thought of suing more people, the federal government, state and local governments are drooling far worse at the opportunity to tax the net. It's VERY unlike Congress to hold back taxes like this. I believe the net is seen as the goose that lays the golden egg, and Congress is trying to be careful not to kill it, although it's hard to tell how good their grasp on what they can/can't get away with is.
The same people who watch Jackass, visit Consumption Junction etc.
Also people who think adolescent pranks are more entertaining than what's on tv.
What's more, if you like the prank, you can send the YouTube link to your friend, and it's there to view tomorrow if you want to see it again, no DVR or VCR needed.
> it's up to google to keep copyrighted content off youtube.
How? If you write an article about something, it's automatically copyrighted. This happens whether you officially register for a copyright or not. Registering has benefits in terms of legal actions later, but I'm still not allowed to take your article and put it online myself without your permission.
Given that EVERYTHING is copyrighted, what CAN YouTube display?
You tell YouTube when you upload a video, that you own the copyright to that video, and are granting them permission to show it. If you post something that isn't yours, YOU posted it, YouTube didn't break into your pc and rip it off your hard drive.
How is YouTube supposed to know whether something is copyrighted BY SOMEONE OTHER THAN YOU when you upload it? Two ways:
Passive: Leave it up under the assumption that you did no wrong until you have reason to believe otherwise. If you post Star Wars online, George Lucas can then say, "HEY! That's mine!" and request that it be removed. As I understand it, the DMCA explicitly authorizes this. If I don't like YouTube, should I be allowed to post Star Wars anonymously, report it to the MPAA and kep posting mutated versions of it as YouTube deletes them to feed an MPAA lawsuit against them? On the other hand, this lets the pirates stay a step ahead.
Active: Don't let anything be posted until you verify the owner owns it. You either have to compare the work against every single movie registered with the copyright office (pretty much impossible, even for PCs, are you going to make a database of checksums-of-a-sort of every frame of every copyrighted work to compare frame by frame against the uploaded video? Hollywood has how many hours/years/canturies of content created, to protect both audio and video of? This completely ignores the much largr problem of unregistered copyrighted work. Perhaps a panel could be formed of all the big IP holders, and they'ed have to approve something before it can be posted... except that they've already sent takedown notices on works they don't own, so they might well claim EVERYTHING submitted to them is copyrighted. Even if they took their job seriously though, and only said no on the things they actually owned, what about all the lesser IP holders who then don't get protection?
We can be passive, favor the smalltime pirates and have videos show quickly after posting or active and favor abuse by companies who have demonstrated they'll perform said abuse while greatly increasing the time before anything appears.
The real problem of YouTube is that it's competition. TV execs don't want the competition, and they don't need a legal precedent that allows them to strongarm something off the net that exists for a good purpose.
Should you, if given a CD from a friend (of his band's music) have to have it submitted to a committee to determine that none of it is owned by the RIAA and get an approval patch code to put in your CD player to make it work?
The thought may be that if the phone companies keep their mouths shut until the next big crisis appears to shift the public's focus elsewhere (there does seem to be another major blowup every 1-2 months at least lately) that they'll recieve a presidential pardon once the heat from the public is off and no one is looking.
Many pardons have been controversial;... One of the more famous recent pardons was granted by President Gerald Ford to former President Richard Nixon... Andrew Johnson's sweeping pardons of thousands of former Confederate officials and military personnel after the American Civil War, Jimmy Carter's grant of amnesty to Vietnam-era draft evaders, George H. W. Bush's pardons of 75 people, including six Reagan administration officials accused and/or convicted in connection with the Iran-Contra affair, Bill Clinton's pardons of convicted FALN terrorists and 140 people on his last day in office - including billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, and George W. Bush's commutation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison term.
Of course, Congress could in a fit of anger start regulating the heck out of the phone companies... but what then? Who doesn't want to comply with Congress? Top executives make the decision to not cooperate until THEY can receive pardons. I AT&T is completely shut down after? They're still wildly rich, and being pardoned, untouchable. If they cave, they might have to go to jail.
Forget loyalty to the grunt employee or vice-versa, as long as the top executives of companies have golden parachutes they'll have no qualms about selling the company out. Unless an executive's well-being is linked to their company's performance, why should they care about it?
> But for a sentient AI, it would be unethical to enslave it, i.e. to have it be someone's property. It'd be a person, after all.
I agree, but in the case of finding an illegally made sex-bot that someone already built to want to do it non-stop, which is worse. leaving it "enslaved", or changing it's mind from the initial configuration, which in a way is the real / original it. Perhaps you have to leave an urge there, but make it no longer overpowering, such that it can choose self-preservation over spreading.
> Anyway, this whole discussion is rather pointless. Most are, but this is at least more interesting than most I see at work or around family. "Nooo!!! The whole floor doesn't need to know that Jim and Sally have broken up again, they'll make up before nightfall anyway... as they always do. Talk about something new or go back to work!"
> It is a really big can of worms, but it'll probably stay firmly shut for the forseeable future. The life as property issue is already open, with the patenting of some one-celled organisms and of genes. We haven't yet patented intelligent life, but the way things are going, even assuming AI never happens, I expect in a generation or so humans will find themselves patented, and having to pay royalties to a medical company that "subsidizes" impossibly high fees to merely absurdly high fees in return for the intellectual property rights on your own design.
> Once every few years there's someone who says we'll be having sex with robots in the future.
Per one definition of robot:
A mechanical device that sometimes resembles a human and is capable of performing a variety of often complex human tasks on command or by being programmed in advance.
According to dictionary.com, this hails from the American Heritage Dictionary
So depending on how you define sex and robot, a doll that has a circuit to turn on / off a vibrator, heating coil and a few motors should be enough to qualify as "having sex with robots". I thought the dolls were at least that advanced already, to squirm just a little bit and perform 1 to 2 extra "features".
If we're not there, we're darn close, but until a sentient AI is involved, it's not a moral issue. (Although on whether the AIs will be abused, of course they will, just look at the human on human track record.)
> Wow, you certainly take such a stupid topic seriously.
The article this is from could be considered stupid, but it touches on what will become real issues when we learn enough about how we work to treat each other like we're planning to treat the robots. Is it ok in an interview session for your prospective employer to keep resetting you and redoing negotiations over and over until they find the maximum amount they can squeeze you, with you having no memory of what the previous yous have been through?
I think we'll achieve good enough AI to raise questions long before we'll learn to rebuild ourselves, but this is a fun topic to argue over, especially in light of recent disturbing trends, such as the patenting of genes.
> (No offence, but this topic needs Futurama jokes. This researcher just wants attention, or a sex robot, or both.
Well, he probably wants both. Attention = book sales, Vroomfondel, Majikthise and Deep Thought handle this angle fairly well. (Hitchhiker's Guide). Sex robot = cool toy. Mostly though, this is a fun topic to play with, on a Futurama level, or on a what-if serious sci-fi level. (Artificial mates are also clearly a topic with huge appeal, given all the movies / anime out about it, Bride of Frankenstein, Weird Science, Armitage the 3rd, My Dear Marie etc)
> A clone is a different person with the same DNA. The brain and mind are different, so it's a different person. Same for an identical twin. The DNA might be identical, but it's a different person.
> An intelligent robot could make backup copies of its mind, so if it got killed, it could be restored from the most recent backup, reducing the effect of death to some memory loss, similar to being knocked out.
What is the difference in the minds of the identical twins? The difference is largely in what experiences each have had.
> Shutting down a hypothetical sentient AI with possibility of restoration would be like cryogenic sleep for humans.
From this way of looking at it, your memory is a good bit of you, so is it ok to kill me, so long as when you clone me you can infuse a backup of my memories to the clone? (Assuming some incredible insta-clone process that creates an appropriately old clone)
> Putting a sentient AI inside a sex doll would seem to be unethical to me, similar to sex slavery today. You'd have to let them roam free, which means all the current problems Slashdotters face would remain unsolved.
But this depends... we have drives, such as the drive to not starve. (Eat when hungry) If there's a similar drive put in the dolls (Want sex from the 1st person I see, and they're shipped blindfolded) is it wrong for the doll to do what it wants to do? Exactly how much mind-tampering is allowed? Is it then ok for 2 human consenting adults to request an over-riding loyalty drive installed into each other upon marriage? Will one partner be able to demand it of the other over their dissent? Will it be state required someday?
What drives are ok to give an AI? Self preservation 1st? Asimov's 3 laws 1st? (Should it be ok to be able to order a robot to leap off a building to its death?) Is any request made of a robot ok, so long as we program them to enjoy fulfilling it? (Again Hitchhiker's, the cow bred to want to be eaten at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe has the best humorous spin on this I've seen)
> I think sentient AIs should have much the same rights as humans, since the fact that they're sentient makes them people. One exception might be the right to vote, since articifial beings can easily abuse that by making copies of themselves, and swamping the voting booths and putting Nixon in charge again.
Well, there's copying themselves, then there's the hackability. What if there's a secret command in them to always vote for a certain party? As for copying themselves, that will be limited by resources. (Although to a lesser degree than with humans, who generally can't afford to raise more than 2-
It seems if the robot is intelligent enough to be considered alive (and thus able to decide for itself whether IT wants marriage) that programming it to want its owner (or anything other than going out into society to build a life for itself) would be considered a criminal act.
For the most part, marriage exists to guarantee fidelity, each side swears off other partners in exchange for the same from their spouse. With a robot that can be programmed not to fool around, marriage is irrelavent. If a robot has enough free will that it can choose to cheat on you, it's smart enough to demand marriage and be recognized as mentally competant to request it.
> Oh yes, there are learning algorithms and some surprisingly dynamic image recognition systems and neural networks and all that. But have you ever tried conversing with a bot? They throw back canned responses and also tonkinize words you say and spit them back to you.
Yes, straight out if-then programming will create this sort of output. Trying to come up with a set of rules for how to recognize letters (OCR) will also be darn near impossible. (Serifs, italics, fonts, letter o vs zero, capital i vs lowercase L vs one) If you want to pay for a good OCR system, you can get some decent results. The difference? The good system is a learning algorithm, probably neural-net based that is fed with ungodly amounts of sample text, then the program, plus the collected result of the data of thousands (millions?) of pages of text is in the OCR toolkit you buy.
What does the conversing bot have to work with? Eliza looks like mad libs because that's what it is. Eliza doesn't know what you're saying, but it is expected that the parsing routine will generally do a good enough job that a reasonable coherent conversation can be carried out for a short while.
Per Wikipedia:
It is sometimes inaccurately said that ELIZA "simulates" (or worse, "emulates") a therapist. Weizenbaum said that ELIZA provided a "parody" of "the responses of a non-directional psychotherapist in an initial psychiatric interview." He chose the context of psychotherapy to "sidestep the problem of giving the program a data base of real-world knowledge", the therapeutic situation being one of the few real human situations in which a human being can reply to a statement with a question that indicates very little specific knowledge of the topic under discussion. For example, it is a context in which the question "Who is your favorite composer?" can be answered acceptably with responses such as "What about your own favorite composer?" or "Does that question interest you?" | Eliza worked by simple parsing and substitution of key words into canned phrases. Depending upon the initial entries by the user the illusion of a human writer could be instantly dispelled, or could continue through several interchanges. It was sometimes so convincing that there are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally caught up in dealing with ELIZA for several minutes until the machine's true lack of understanding became apparent. This was likely due to people's tendency to attach meanings to words which the computer never put there. | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
There is no database of general human context for most AIs. Such a thing would be HUGE. Until we have it though, we won't have an all around intelligent robot. We'll be able to make robots that are knowledgable about a certain field, but jargon, dialect and small talk will confuse them. (Just as talk about sex would confuse most 5 year olds.)
We'll eventually create such a database that will have all the data needed for a 3 year level of functionality with a limited vocabulary. Within that small subset of words, the ai will have mastery of language. (It's do-able for a small enough set of words.) From a small set of words, conceived of objects and ideas (basic animal-ness, emotions, colors etc) we could create a system for how to integrate new words, by relating them to known words. The system would be able to learn through exposure to the text (and scanned graphics) of one children's book after another, with a bit of help in the form of explanations by those feeding in the data. The machine's understanding could be tested by having it paraphrase what it "read". Eventually the AI could be set loose on the net at large, teaching itself.
The above, using a simple database with definitions of words based on other words based on other words could conceivably work, but would not be efficient, and would likely be a recipe for thrashing. To create shortcuts we'd want to instead of referencing each
> Why would a mighty robot want to marry a puny human? Because the mighty robot was built by a puny human, or by unintelligent / puny robots working for the puny human who created a robot whose mind is programmed to want to marry the puny human who buys it.
> Now, perhaps you think it would be wrong to marry a dog or a 16 year old girl. But I don't see why.
Dog: because you probably can't explain "marriage" to a dog to get informed consent. If you have no problem with arranged marriages, you're good to go. (Of course, if you want to talk marriage, you have to consider giving away puppies to be child kidnapping of sorts.
As for the 16 year old girl, she CAN give clear consent. A 5 year old could! Below a certain age, you're not considered to be able to (or to have likely done so if you are capable of it) understand the implications of marriage sufficiently to be allowed to make that decision. I don't see a significant difference between a 16 and 18 year old in terms of making this decision. I do see a significant difference between a loner / geek vs a person with a mix of married and unmarried friends they regularly visit, or someone living in their parent's house vs someone who has experienced life on their own, supporting themselves.
Maybe we need some documentaries of working and non-working families, ranging from the famously getting along to the merely not getting along to the outright abusive. Force kids to watch videos detailing how children will complicate their lives, the sorts of sacrifices that will be needed based on income level. Perhaps require people to at least live a year on their own before committing to marriage, so that they don't marry just to escape their parents once they have confidence that they can support themselves.
From the maturity angle, perhaps devise a mental maturity test, and those that don't pass can't marry? That wouldn't go over well. (I suspect we'd have an alarming % of failures)
> The hypothetical human-equivalent AI program would be able to save its state regularly, so your hypothetical 12 year old daughter flipping the power switch would result in a small amount of "memory loss", equivalent to knocking out a human. A violent act, but not murder. --
This is debatable. If you chop my head off, and clone me from my DNA, is the new creature the real me, and you're off the hook? The code on disk loaded as the thing boots could be considered the DNA. The actual mind woule be the bits flitting through RAM as it runs. Paging makes this somewhat ambiguous. You'd probably have to define something things as more and less important, declaring a certain kernal of functionality the "official brain", the unloading of which would be a murder.
The shut down robot could be considered either dead or asleep. What if you copied the OS to a virtual server and ran 3 instances, giving them different made-up, fed-in experiences. If you shut down one, and never re-started it, would that be murder? Is killing my identical twin still murder if I live on?
If you had one sex doll, then shut it down permanently when you got an upgraded model, would that be murder? Should causing a permanent coma be accepted?
A critical question is whether the AI has a will to live. If the AI WANTS to live, destroying the sex toy is murder. If the AI wants to be destroyed, destroying it is assisted suicide. With humans, a will to live can be assumed. With a non-self-determining robot, it can't. Is killing a nihilist wrong?
Trees produce much fruit, despite that most of it probably won't take root, although the child-from-conception camp in the abortion debate should have to consider how a tree works, randomly tossing around babies in the hopes that some will live to be a murderous enterprise.
As long as there's a good backup, and a destroyed doll can be replaced, and restored from the last doll's backup, I don't think too many people will complain about the "death". Death is the permanent removal of a person from our life. Anyone who moves away and won't keep in touch (and will die before they can be reached) is dead to us. Given that the death of an identical twin would be considered murder, it could be said that "you" is not just your hardware and OS, but the 2 of these plus (at least the majority of) your accumulated data. A reset of a 10 year old unit should be considered a murder.
> Marriage exists for one reason, and one reason only - Succession of property rights.
If that's all it's good for, who needs it? I'll just put my robot in my will!
And here I thought the purpose of marriage was to get my family to shut up about all this "living in sin" nonsense, and somewhere in the mists of time when it started perhaps it was just an excuse for a party.
More seriously, marriage is a little more than just a default will.
Legally: not needed. Just start living together and doing whatever you want. Eventually, if you don't move oout you'll probably end up in a common-law marriage, but maybe temporarily moving out to an apartment every now and then would keep this from happening. In legal terms this may mean that your spouse, in the absence of a will has a claim against what you leave behind. I think it also means (or once did) that if you cheat on your spouse, they can sue over it. (For divorce, possible financial support and mental anguish)
Religiously: if your religion says sex w/o marriage is bad, you need it for moral purposes.
Marriage is an oath / promise made before your country / deity(ies) of choice to do something. When you get married, you're declaring that you love someone so much, that you'll forever forsake all other possible mates. It's not so much a guarentee of assets after death, as before death. You're declaring a permanent legal representitive of yourself, authorized to take care of your business on your behalf. You become an alternate point of contact for all matters regarding that other person, and vice-versa.
Some people marry because they have to. Marriage represents stability. You may be fine with just heading over to Susie's house for a good time 1-2 times a week, but until you marry her, she can at any point legally tell you to quit coming over and start doing it with someone else. Once you get married, Susie is expected not to change the lock, kicking you out and starting in on "Fred".
A big purpose of marriage is to change how others view you having sex. Before marriage, you're sleeping around, sowing wild oats, being a slut. After marriage, "When are you having some grandkids for me?". Sex outside marriage is taboo. As such, marriage now exists (for some) solely for the purpose of shutting up those grumbling about who you're sleeping with. (Or at least about the fact that you're doing it the wrong way, they may still find much else to gripe about)
Another purpose of marriage is defining family. If I sleep with a lady down the street, when I pass, she's probably on her own for anything she needs. If I married her before passing, she'd be "family" and my extended family would be looking out for her, trying to cheer her up. Admittedly she still has her own family either way, but it's an extra resource. How much this matters depends on the family in question, but it is in some places an issue.
With marrying robots, a few questions have to be answered before we can decide whether to marry them. Are the robots intelligent, sentient beings, or just very rich featured toys? If the robots are throw-away items, without feelings or a specific will to live, there's not much point legally in marrying them. Religiously, your deity would probably prefer you find an approved (originally created by them) mate, producing heirs who will go on to spread the religion of said deity, bringing "Truth" to the world by outbreeding the infidels. (Of course this only works if you actually FOLLOW the religion, but that part is often ignored.)
> 1) A beginner option would be a very bad idea, since the user can't really predict what "beginner" actually means
Beginner wouldn't mean "to games" but "to people who have played this game through once already". Everyone would start in beginner, but those who knew how to play could turn it off.
> 2) RE1 came before the analogstick, so its control scheme is understandable
Even with the NES you could move in 8 directions. (up, up-left, left etc) Being able to move at 30 degrees clockwise of straight up isn't a benefit worthy of tossing away intuitive controls. If the paths are wide enough 45 degree increments are fine. This is a case where even if you want to show off your "great new idea" in controls you should also offer the standard method. Sure these controls were fine for Combat on the 2600, that was against another similarly restricted human. Cylinder controls are a great fit for Doom, with a 1st person perspective. If I could look out my character's eyes in RE I wouldn't mind the controls at all. RE2 on the 64 fixed this, and I greatly enjoyed it. The controls are there to put you into the game, not distract you from it.
> most annoyingly you could only aim up, down or straight, not half up or half down, thus making proper aiming not hard, but simply impossible.
There's no excuse for not putting in the 45 degree angles. Even if you can't shoot from where you are, you could take a step to the side, putting the enemy in a line of fire, like we all had to for Contra, which is probably faster than waiting for your character to slowly turn in the direction you want.
> This really should be another rule every game should follow: If you use the analogstick, then use it properly, not as dpad emulation (almost all 2D shoot'em ups suffer from this).
> 3)... at least for consoles.... overly configurable controls will only mean that the player will end up with non working controls.
So long as they're required to leave one button mapped back to the menu to change things back, they're fine.
> Say you have a game where you have to sneak and you have mapped the dpad to walk, woops, can no longer access sneaking and game gets impossible.
It's pretty much a given that if a game has a sneak option, you'll have to use it at some point. The same is true of lesser used special items. There's no issue with swapping functions in/out as needed, like Zelda items.
> The balance would of course also be totally ruined by stuff like that, since dpad controls work quite differently then analog ones.
Genrally I'm either running full speed or walking slowly to not run off the edge of a platform. One run button is all I need for "good enough" d-pad control. As for avoiding an enemy's line of sight, perhaps I can't walk at the same speed the searchlight is moving, but I can run faster, wait for it to move up again, then dash a bit more.
> When it comes to touch screen vs dpad it depends, in some games like Advanced Wars it really makes no difference and both are allowed. In other you really can do it only one way, i.e. Kirby wouldn't work without the touchscreen.
I haven't played Kirby or Advanced Wars to know. I can definately see the advantage of a touch screen for any strategy game, or point & click type adventure. (If Shadowgate gets ported to the DS, it better not be d-pad only... mice faked with d-pads are pretty painful too.)
> Some developers feel the need to force the touchscreen and mic on you even where it totally isn't up for the job, the solution here is to just not buy those games, since they are really broken by design, not by accident.
The latest Zelda? Countless occasions where you want to use the boomerang while running and can't do both at once? In Nintendo's favor, they seem to have made this version a bit easier than normal. Rolling was darn near mpossible to pull of on demand but I kept doing it accidentally while running. The A
This can be good or bad. It's annoying for the pro perhaps, but for the novice who may not have saved for the past hour, about to go into a tough battle, it could save a lot of frustration. In-game tutorials the 30th time around are annoying too. Perhaps the triggering of both can be linked to a "beginner" switch in the options menu, on by default, but which you can turn on/off anytime.
Saving fills 2 purposes: keeping you from slipping too far back and allowing you to return directly to a particularly fun section later. Perhaps there should be the normal save system, plus one auto-save to save your bacon in case you were lazy and you could choose which to load at start-up. One problem with Enchanted Arms on the 360, each and every save requires navigating menus.. yes I want to save on the hard drive agan, yes I want to use the same file again etc. Any involved save process should be coupled with a quicksave option using the same choices as the last save.
Also, SAVE ANYWHERE. The DS close lid to save function needs to be on everything in some way. Life happens. If the end of a game is 4 back to back boss fights and you've beaten 3 (one of them just barely after MANY retries) you shouldn't have to go through it again after unexpected company (parents, S.O.) stopped you because someone thought it was "more challenging" to not allow saves between these points. Sure it's more challenging. So is randomly remapping keys between levels. It's also stupid and annoying. I didn't pay $60 for a game because I was LOOKING to be in a bad mood... We don't play games in theaters. Interruptions happen.
2. Always say "press any button" to start a game.
Yes. A game is something the user is buying to enjoy, not be maddened by. Maddening challenge you overcome with skill is one thing. Maddeningly bad design doesn't give you a feeling of accomplishment when you overcome it. Like or hate Resident Evil's cylinder control scheme, to most casual players, if you don't move in the direction you press without a DARN good reason, the game is broken.
3. Always let players remap controller buttons to suit their preferences.
Yes. The more complex controllers get, the more this is needed. On the NES this wasn't needed, because seemingly 90% of all games used A for jump and B for shoot. Since almost all games had the same functions, there was no need to move things around. On the Playstation, different games use different buttons for block, attack, magic, menu (no longer just the start button!) etc.
REALLY useful remap options would be, swap any analog stick with the d-pad. Some of us prefer it. Swap the face buttons as a unit with a d-pad / stick. It may reduce control of the player's speed, but that's the players decision. (If they do go from an analog to digital, offer a run/slow button to be mapped in and give them the choice of which is the default) Allow the user to customize the "run" speed in RPGs.
Phantasy Star Online had a WONDERFUL idea letting you use a shoulder button as a shift key to change the functions of face buttons. This should be standard practice. This would be a HUGE improvement to Zelda, keeping more items easily usable at once without forcing the user to keep bringing up the menu to swap items where there's 2 item buttons and 3 items needed.
Non-standard controls NEED an alternative. DS programmers, we're all glaring at YOU! We understand you love the touch screen and mic. We don't love having our screen roughed up, an inerface that blocks our view when our fat hand is in the way of the action, an interface that with one point of contact doesn't allow the control of a gamepad (you may be using 2-3 functions on a gamepad at once) and we don't want to have to keep cleaning spit from the screen as every other game makes us hiss and scream into our DSes. Games requiring screaming are also a bad idea in public... If you want to OFFER an alternative interface, fine. Just don't lock us int
OLPC's purpose isn't to promote socialism over capitalism as a political philosophy, but to help educate children by giving them a tool to become well educated enough to be a capable worker and participate in world congress, rather than continuing on as they've been doing.
This is similar to public schools. Public schools are justified here in the us by noting that while capitalistically, only the child or parent should pay for the child's schooling, having an educated workforce (and something better than completely uneducated morons surrounding you) is a benefit to everyone.
Public roads come from tax dollars you pay, regardless of whether YOU will use a particular road or not. Per strict Capitalism, all roads should be toll roads. Still, whether you use a road or not, it benefits you to have the server at your favorite restaurant able to get there to serve you.
The US isn't purely capitalistic, nor should it be. The US is about 1 thing: promoting the good of the majority of the people of the US above all else, with a hamstrung government unable to act seriously against its people (consider why we split off from England / exist as a country). While too often it doesn't work that way these days, the government is supposed to be FOR THE PEOPLE. Not for Capitalism and not for Socialism. We are largely Capitalistic, and should be, because it allows us to enjoy the fruit of our own labor. Not all things are best handled this way though. It's better to have a single army, than to have all 50 states privately contract out defense squads as needed.
We recognize that libraries, while socialistic in nature serve a useful purpose.
OLPC isn't about undermining the idea that people should work for what they want, and that the best idea should win through competition (which we've seen doesn't always work that way in the US, due to patent / lawsuit craziness). OLPC is meant to take groups of people too far down to join into the global market, building them up to be capable of taking their part in it. The strict Capatilistic thing to do is to loan them $, forclose on their land and kick them off to die pennilessly. Welfare was meant as a hand up, not a hand out.
Essentially, OLPC is a good idea. It may or may not be the idea needed at the moment by the countries it's going to, but if it works as it's supposed to it will increase the number of players in the global market. For the most part these PCs aren't being just "given" away either. The government of whatever country they are for is buying them, just like they would schoolbooks. Do you disagree with desktop computers in our schools? I'm not sure, but I expect when the child graduates, these PCs are expected to be returned to the school to be sent home with the next child. Since these are still government bought (like Uncle Sam buying jets to keep you safe on your behalf) I'd say this is no more / less Socialistic than our military. Let's also consider that this isn't robbing Gateway of any laptop sales. The people who will be using these PCs are not in a position where they could buy a laptop.
If for no other reason, OLPC deserves a nod for promoting R&D. The current computer industry scoffs as efficiency (or at least the major OS market) preferring to use raw computing power as the answer to everything. In a working Capitalistic system, OSes would be FORCED to compete on efficiency. That this isn't happening suggests we don't have a PROPERLY WORKING Capitalistic system applying to the OS market. Increasing Internet speeds and Google's ambitions will probably eventually remedy this, but having a system built on efficiency out there is a step in the right direction for promoting Capitalism / competition.
Socialism isn't inherently evil, but left unchecked doesn't work well. The same can be said about Capitalism, which taken to an extreme isn't much better. Socialism and Capitalism don't exist in a vacuum, they're two ends of a scale, and while it seems to pay off to favor the Capitalism side, goi
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of screenshots, it's explicit fair use to document that which you are discussing. If you want to say a game looks great, or horrible, you are allowed to prove it. You aren't allowed to take a bunch of screenshots and make a book out of the cutscenes of the latest Final Fantasy, but if you are going to say a game looks like ****, you'd better have some proof posted so they can't sue you for making up nonsense about their game.
The video on it's own... I'm not sure where that stands, but if you were to make a documentary of the compulsive need of some parents to record and push out every little thing a child does, you'd probably be within your rights to include a few seconds of this video.
> when she could have just as easily sent a copy to her friends/family privately she chose to post it on a public high volume internet video site like youtube that in all likliness will be seen by thousands of people at the least.
What if she put it on GeoCities? On a personally owned web site? That the video is on YouTube is pretty much meaningless. Sure, it's AVAILABLE for viewing, but so is everything you do in your front yard. How many people will ever look? do you browse YouTube for "cute baby pictures"? Do you know anyone who would? The value of kid video isn't in the work, but the subject matter. If you don't know the kids, the video is worthless filler eating YouTube's disk space. With the sheer volume on YouTube, merely posting isn't the same as explicit general public publishing. While "available" the video is safely considered mostly anonymous unless there's substantial objective merit (usually comic) to make the video spread.
> Strangely enough there are no laws forcing people to keep paying me until 90 years after I'm dead for the work I do every day.
Yes, but that law isn't to help the ARTIST get paid that way. (Even if it's worded to suggest that.) The law is to keep the COPYRIGHT OWNER in control.
I wonder if, given that the copyright was signed over with that knowledge that copyright law extends X years and the company only controls it for that length of time, after which the artist would t hen be able to work with their own creation again, can it be taken as an attempted breach of contract to extend the copyright period, depriving the artist of the rightful return of the ability to build off his own work without seeking permission?
Should an extended copyright term be considered the property of the music companies, or revert back to the families once the length of the copyright at the time of the signing of the deal has passed?
If she e-mails it to the family... then thinks of another person who should see it, she has to deal with the upload again. Many e-mail providers won't allow the upload of too large attachments, which could be a problem for video.
If she puts it on YouTibe, all she has to hand out is a URL. She probably plastered the URL to several times as many people as originally watched it, who were tired of hearing about how "cute" the latest thing her baby did was.
To what extent should she go to avoid infrigement? Is it ok if she mutes the video? What if she has a Dell computer in the background? Does she have to cover their name with something?
If you're going to complain about music where it doesn't belong, go after the people blasting their car stereos between midnight and 2am past your home, with the volume up high enough that your walls shake. (Then again maybe I just had a VERY badly built apartment, but it shouldn't have been that loud OUTSIDE the car, especially past the noise ordinance cut-off)
If you want to complain about this video, do so for the right reason. The video is child abuse of a sort. How? This video is going to be played to every date the poor kid gets, plus whoever they marry, to their repeated embarrasment, against every threat and bout of begging of the child to PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD delete that forsaken video! The same is true of pictures of babies in "cute" animal costumes. The child made to dress up as a bee, who has to endure the pictures handed out to everyone they know has EVERY right to be ticked. While your baby is your RESPONSIBILITY it is not your TOY and not your PRIVATE PROPERTY to be used in any degrading manner you wish.
Help ban "cute" child videos, for great justice!
Modchips that have a FUD campaign against them, and will probably be officially declared illegal soon. (If they aren't already)
Is storm REALLY an evil criminal network? Or are we just being told this by THOSE WHO KNOW BETTER (tm)? Perhaps it's the world's biggest game of core wars, open to all comers, with the "waning" because no one currently has a credible (not immediately beaten down) challenge. Darn those video-game-hating supposed know-betters trying to stop anyone from having a good time! Why I ought to... wait a minute, when did my palms get this hairy? CRAP, THEY'RE RIGHT ABOUT THE PORN!
And for the conspiracy twist, the current winner is... JACK THOMPSON! His lawsuits are all a scam so when he's uncovered as the one who caused so much downtime, people will think he was framed! And he would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you meddling... kids... at Nintendo, who are so afraid of a self-copying game they're hiring the Russian mob to wipe him out, the Viagra spammer was a test run! Next Nintendo and the RIAA join forces to sue MS over a little something nasty they found in cmd.com, something about COPY.
In Communist Russia, our new game-playing overlords welcome you, for one?
Or could the real source and purpose be our favorite search engine? Perhaps this is the only way to get the results we've come to expect at the speed we demand.
In does-no-evil Russia, Google searches you!
(Apologies if I've ripped off a Russia / overlord or conspiracy theory from someone else)
> Unless EA decides to boot strap the damn thing into existence, it will just not happen., it will just not happen.
If EA decides to boot strap the damn thing into existence, we'll have 4 consoles competing instead of 3.
If we had a single console, people would make "mistakes" putting it together, and you'd occasionally have to swap to another model to play a game not supported on yours. (Sega CD BIOS and Lunar for an example of what can happen) Given MS and Java, I wouldn't want them designing one of these.
3 companies currently have a taste for the money involved with being the console provider. Which is going to willingly give it up? Whether your game rocks or tanks, you pay them for the privledge of releasing it for their console. With one console, prices would skyrocket. As it is, the greed of individual companies is somewhat countered by the fear of driving a hit to the competition. This is part of why Sony WON'T back down from Blu-Ray. Forgetting the players, owning the standard is fairly profitable. (And a powerful tool negotiation-wise, at least until it's so broken with DRM that consumers CAN'T use it and give up.)
Also, would you want Nintendo owning it, perhaps making all the games for 6 months nearly unplayable from insisting they rely on the latest gimmick? Would you like Sony to control everything, blocking series you like (Working Designs, 2D games for a while when trying to push 3D), making nasty decisions (DRM breaking consoles, going ahead with the only plays on one console game-disc).
If a system like this was incrementally upgraded like PCs, it would have the standard PC problem of inconsistent play between consoles. Remember popping DOS games on Win95-98 class PCs and watching the on-screen blur? Even little timing mismatches could be nasty for twitch games.
Competition as some have noted above means companies will take more chances on off-beat games, always a plus. Staggered releases also force a bit more exposure for well-timed games. Most anything around the release of a new console will get tried. It may be crap, but an early game will get plenty of sales form parents who don't know better just because it's there, and their kid doesn't already have it. While it pushes crap, it also pushes potentially good games that might have gone unnoticed otherwise.
We need multiple consoles to keep the console fanboys arguing. A generic system is quickly forgotten about. When's the last time you argued about which brand of TV or DVD player was best? HDTV type perhaps (lcd, plasma...) How about sound systems? Your friends might have a few compliments for your new system, but it's for most, too generic to pay much attention too. The debate over what's best keeps the buzz going, and the systems fresh in people's minds.
Sega was killing itself for a while.
While Sega certainly met the demand for their mascot (Sonic 1-3, Sonic and Knuckles and as many or more of the same on the Game Gear, disregarding kart racers and other spin-offs) early on, the Sega CD had one good Sonic game. The 32X was a disappointment all around. (Also the 1st game system that ever blue-screened on me, ironically playing a port of a PC game, Wolfenstein or Doom) The Saturn was a nice system, but had no proper Sonic games, just the Sonic Jam rerelease of previous games. The Dreamcast brought Sonic back in 2 games many love to hate (~ 50/50 here)
Did you like Shining Force 1 and 2, and the one on the Game Gear? Sorry, afterwards the Shining series became action games. Did you like Phantasy Star? Sorry, it dropped off the face of the Earth. (For a while.)
Nintendo dropped the ball as well, after Super Mario World 1 traditional Mario died for a while. Metroid was loved but in far too short supply. Zelda kicked butt and took names. Mega Man slowed for a while before hopping to Sony and kicking out a few more X games and letting the original series die.)
Final Fantasy never graced Sega's systems, it could have moved a few units. It definately sold a few 360s. (FF11)
I found a number of games on just about every Sega system that I loved (excepting the Master System (only 4-5) and 32X (1), but Sega wasn't good at having something they could point to and say "You know and love this, come back and get some more of it!".
(Shining Force 3 epiosodes 2 and 3 being a no-show didn't help either)
One cool thing about the Saturn, many of the discs had several of the games music tracks available to play on any normal CD player. I think the Sega CD did this too. Some Dreamcast games had goodies on the discs if you popped them into a PC. PSO was one.
> but I know Nintendo has been on the innovative path, you would have never seen a pointer in a game controller or a touch screen on a portable, it would be the standard controller and buttons galore, not much else.
> Having multiple consoles allows us the power of choice. Standards do not drive the console industry, competition does.
That may not be the best argument for... several DS games have left me wishing I could use the full set of controls over the stylus. The stylus is a perfect fit for some games, but Nintendo doesn't seem to realize which games they are and doesn't always offer a choice of normal controls only. (The touch screen is a 50% annoyance, the microphone I've yet to find a good use for. I haven't played the lawyer game yet, but so far EVERY time I've seen the mic used, it's been a pain)
> But overall, how many people is that?
I'd say the market for offbeat random junk is fairly huge. Look at Southpark. Why the heck was Beavis and Butthead allowed to go on so long with crappy animation and the show repeatedly interrupted by 5-10 seconds of watching the main characters head bang?
Never underestimate the market for trash. There's no end to the cute/funny collection of picture sites on the net.
> And how long before such clips require written consent of all parties before they become legal?
This wouldn't be that big an issue. 1st the same people who upload Star Wars now will continue to do so, with faked signatures. Secondly, as far as home-grown content, the burning urge for kids to get on TV (or YouTube) will have a ready supply of willing-to-sign free actors for any movie you might care to make.
Consider the Internet tax ban. I see that being repealed 1st, as much as the RIAA and MPAA may be drooling over the thought of suing more people, the federal government, state and local governments are drooling far worse at the opportunity to tax the net. It's VERY unlike Congress to hold back taxes like this. I believe the net is seen as the goose that lays the golden egg, and Congress is trying to be careful not to kill it, although it's hard to tell how good their grasp on what they can/can't get away with is.
The same people who watch Jackass, visit Consumption Junction etc.
Also people who think adolescent pranks are more entertaining than what's on tv.
What's more, if you like the prank, you can send the YouTube link to your friend, and it's there to view tomorrow if you want to see it again, no DVR or VCR needed.
> it's up to google to keep copyrighted content off youtube.
How? If you write an article about something, it's automatically copyrighted. This happens whether you officially register for a copyright or not. Registering has benefits in terms of legal actions later, but I'm still not allowed to take your article and put it online myself without your permission.
Given that EVERYTHING is copyrighted, what CAN YouTube display?
You tell YouTube when you upload a video, that you own the copyright to that video, and are granting them permission to show it. If you post something that isn't yours, YOU posted it, YouTube didn't break into your pc and rip it off your hard drive.
How is YouTube supposed to know whether something is copyrighted BY SOMEONE OTHER THAN YOU when you upload it? Two ways:
Passive: Leave it up under the assumption that you did no wrong until you have reason to believe otherwise. If you post Star Wars online, George Lucas can then say, "HEY! That's mine!" and request that it be removed. As I understand it, the DMCA explicitly authorizes this. If I don't like YouTube, should I be allowed to post Star Wars anonymously, report it to the MPAA and kep posting mutated versions of it as YouTube deletes them to feed an MPAA lawsuit against them? On the other hand, this lets the pirates stay a step ahead.
Active: Don't let anything be posted until you verify the owner owns it. You either have to compare the work against every single movie registered with the copyright office (pretty much impossible, even for PCs, are you going to make a database of checksums-of-a-sort of every frame of every copyrighted work to compare frame by frame against the uploaded video? Hollywood has how many hours/years/canturies of content created, to protect both audio and video of? This completely ignores the much largr problem of unregistered copyrighted work. Perhaps a panel could be formed of all the big IP holders, and they'ed have to approve something before it can be posted... except that they've already sent takedown notices on works they don't own, so they might well claim EVERYTHING submitted to them is copyrighted. Even if they took their job seriously though, and only said no on the things they actually owned, what about all the lesser IP holders who then don't get protection?
We can be passive, favor the smalltime pirates and have videos show quickly after posting or active and favor abuse by companies who have demonstrated they'll perform said abuse while greatly increasing the time before anything appears.
The real problem of YouTube is that it's competition. TV execs don't want the competition, and they don't need a legal precedent that allows them to strongarm something off the net that exists for a good purpose.
Should you, if given a CD from a friend (of his band's music) have to have it submitted to a committee to determine that none of it is owned by the RIAA and get an approval patch code to put in your CD player to make it work?
The thought may be that if the phone companies keep their mouths shut until the next big crisis appears to shift the public's focus elsewhere (there does seem to be another major blowup every 1-2 months at least lately) that they'll recieve a presidential pardon once the heat from the public is off and no one is looking.
... ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon#Pardons_and_clemency_in_the_United_States
Many pardons have been controversial;
One of the more famous recent pardons was granted by President Gerald Ford to former President Richard Nixon
Andrew Johnson's sweeping pardons of thousands of former Confederate officials and military personnel after the American Civil War, Jimmy Carter's grant of amnesty to Vietnam-era draft evaders, George H. W. Bush's pardons of 75 people, including six Reagan administration officials accused and/or convicted in connection with the Iran-Contra affair, Bill Clinton's pardons of convicted FALN terrorists and 140 people on his last day in office - including billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, and George W. Bush's commutation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison term.
Of course, Congress could in a fit of anger start regulating the heck out of the phone companies... but what then? Who doesn't want to comply with Congress? Top executives make the decision to not cooperate until THEY can receive pardons. I AT&T is completely shut down after? They're still wildly rich, and being pardoned, untouchable. If they cave, they might have to go to jail.
Forget loyalty to the grunt employee or vice-versa, as long as the top executives of companies have golden parachutes they'll have no qualms about selling the company out. Unless an executive's well-being is linked to their company's performance, why should they care about it?
> But for a sentient AI, it would be unethical to enslave it, i.e. to have it be someone's property. It'd be a person, after all.
I agree, but in the case of finding an illegally made sex-bot that someone already built to want to do it non-stop, which is worse. leaving it "enslaved", or changing it's mind from the initial configuration, which in a way is the real / original it. Perhaps you have to leave an urge there, but make it no longer overpowering, such that it can choose self-preservation over spreading.
> Anyway, this whole discussion is rather pointless.
Most are, but this is at least more interesting than most I see at work or around family. "Nooo!!! The whole floor doesn't need to know that Jim and Sally have broken up again, they'll make up before nightfall anyway... as they always do. Talk about something new or go back to work!"
> It is a really big can of worms, but it'll probably stay firmly shut for the forseeable future.
The life as property issue is already open, with the patenting of some one-celled organisms and of genes. We haven't yet patented intelligent life, but the way things are going, even assuming AI never happens, I expect in a generation or so humans will find themselves patented, and having to pay royalties to a medical company that "subsidizes" impossibly high fees to merely absurdly high fees in return for the intellectual property rights on your own design.
> Once every few years there's someone who says we'll be having sex with robots in the future.
Per one definition of robot:
A mechanical device that sometimes resembles a human and is capable of performing a variety of often complex human tasks on command or by being programmed in advance.
According to dictionary.com, this hails from the American Heritage Dictionary
So depending on how you define sex and robot, a doll that has a circuit to turn on / off a vibrator, heating coil and a few motors should be enough to qualify as "having sex with robots". I thought the dolls were at least that advanced already, to squirm just a little bit and perform 1 to 2 extra "features".
If we're not there, we're darn close, but until a sentient AI is involved, it's not a moral issue. (Although on whether the AIs will be abused, of course they will, just look at the human on human track record.)
> Wow, you certainly take such a stupid topic seriously.
The article this is from could be considered stupid, but it touches on what will become real issues when we learn enough about how we work to treat each other like we're planning to treat the robots. Is it ok in an interview session for your prospective employer to keep resetting you and redoing negotiations over and over until they find the maximum amount they can squeeze you, with you having no memory of what the previous yous have been through?
I think we'll achieve good enough AI to raise questions long before we'll learn to rebuild ourselves, but this is a fun topic to argue over, especially in light of recent disturbing trends, such as the patenting of genes.
> (No offence, but this topic needs Futurama jokes. This researcher just wants attention, or a sex robot, or both.
Well, he probably wants both. Attention = book sales, Vroomfondel, Majikthise and Deep Thought handle this angle fairly well. (Hitchhiker's Guide). Sex robot = cool toy. Mostly though, this is a fun topic to play with, on a Futurama level, or on a what-if serious sci-fi level. (Artificial mates are also clearly a topic with huge appeal, given all the movies / anime out about it, Bride of Frankenstein, Weird Science, Armitage the 3rd, My Dear Marie etc)
> A clone is a different person with the same DNA. The brain and mind are different, so it's a different person. Same for an identical twin. The DNA might be identical, but it's a different person.
> An intelligent robot could make backup copies of its mind, so if it got killed, it could be restored from the most recent backup, reducing the effect of death to some memory loss, similar to being knocked out.
What is the difference in the minds of the identical twins? The difference is largely in what experiences each have had.
> Shutting down a hypothetical sentient AI with possibility of restoration would be like cryogenic sleep for humans.
From this way of looking at it, your memory is a good bit of you, so is it ok to kill me, so long as when you clone me you can infuse a backup of my memories to the clone? (Assuming some incredible insta-clone process that creates an appropriately old clone)
> Putting a sentient AI inside a sex doll would seem to be unethical to me, similar to sex slavery today. You'd have to let them roam free, which means all the current problems Slashdotters face would remain unsolved.
But this depends... we have drives, such as the drive to not starve. (Eat when hungry) If there's a similar drive put in the dolls (Want sex from the 1st person I see, and they're shipped blindfolded) is it wrong for the doll to do what it wants to do? Exactly how much mind-tampering is allowed? Is it then ok for 2 human consenting adults to request an over-riding loyalty drive installed into each other upon marriage? Will one partner be able to demand it of the other over their dissent? Will it be state required someday?
What drives are ok to give an AI? Self preservation 1st? Asimov's 3 laws 1st? (Should it be ok to be able to order a robot to leap off a building to its death?) Is any request made of a robot ok, so long as we program them to enjoy fulfilling it? (Again Hitchhiker's, the cow bred to want to be eaten at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe has the best humorous spin on this I've seen)
> I think sentient AIs should have much the same rights as humans, since the fact that they're sentient makes them people. One exception might be the right to vote, since articifial beings can easily abuse that by making copies of themselves, and swamping the voting booths and putting Nixon in charge again.
Well, there's copying themselves, then there's the hackability. What if there's a secret command in them to always vote for a certain party? As for copying themselves, that will be limited by resources. (Although to a lesser degree than with humans, who generally can't afford to raise more than 2-
It seems if the robot is intelligent enough to be considered alive (and thus able to decide for itself whether IT wants marriage) that programming it to want its owner (or anything other than going out into society to build a life for itself) would be considered a criminal act.
For the most part, marriage exists to guarantee fidelity, each side swears off other partners in exchange for the same from their spouse. With a robot that can be programmed not to fool around, marriage is irrelavent. If a robot has enough free will that it can choose to cheat on you, it's smart enough to demand marriage and be recognized as mentally competant to request it.
> Oh yes, there are learning algorithms and some surprisingly dynamic image recognition systems and neural networks and all that. But have you ever tried conversing with a bot? They throw back canned responses and also tonkinize words you say and spit them back to you.
Yes, straight out if-then programming will create this sort of output. Trying to come up with a set of rules for how to recognize letters (OCR) will also be darn near impossible. (Serifs, italics, fonts, letter o vs zero, capital i vs lowercase L vs one) If you want to pay for a good OCR system, you can get some decent results. The difference? The good system is a learning algorithm, probably neural-net based that is fed with ungodly amounts of sample text, then the program, plus the collected result of the data of thousands (millions?) of pages of text is in the OCR toolkit you buy.
What does the conversing bot have to work with? Eliza looks like mad libs because that's what it is. Eliza doesn't know what you're saying, but it is expected that the parsing routine will generally do a good enough job that a reasonable coherent conversation can be carried out for a short while.
Per Wikipedia:
It is sometimes inaccurately said that ELIZA "simulates" (or worse, "emulates") a therapist. Weizenbaum said that ELIZA provided a "parody" of "the responses of a non-directional psychotherapist in an initial psychiatric interview." He chose the context of psychotherapy to "sidestep the problem of giving the program a data base of real-world knowledge", the therapeutic situation being one of the few real human situations in which a human being can reply to a statement with a question that indicates very little specific knowledge of the topic under discussion. For example, it is a context in which the question "Who is your favorite composer?" can be answered acceptably with responses such as "What about your own favorite composer?" or "Does that question interest you?"
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Eliza worked by simple parsing and substitution of key words into canned phrases. Depending upon the initial entries by the user the illusion of a human writer could be instantly dispelled, or could continue through several interchanges. It was sometimes so convincing that there are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally caught up in dealing with ELIZA for several minutes until the machine's true lack of understanding became apparent. This was likely due to people's tendency to attach meanings to words which the computer never put there.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
There is no database of general human context for most AIs. Such a thing would be HUGE. Until we have it though, we won't have an all around intelligent robot. We'll be able to make robots that are knowledgable about a certain field, but jargon, dialect and small talk will confuse them. (Just as talk about sex would confuse most 5 year olds.)
We'll eventually create such a database that will have all the data needed for a 3 year level of functionality with a limited vocabulary. Within that small subset of words, the ai will have mastery of language. (It's do-able for a small enough set of words.) From a small set of words, conceived of objects and ideas (basic animal-ness, emotions, colors etc) we could create a system for how to integrate new words, by relating them to known words. The system would be able to learn through exposure to the text (and scanned graphics) of one children's book after another, with a bit of help in the form of explanations by those feeding in the data. The machine's understanding could be tested by having it paraphrase what it "read". Eventually the AI could be set loose on the net at large, teaching itself.
The above, using a simple database with definitions of words based on other words based on other words could conceivably work, but would not be efficient, and would likely be a recipe for thrashing. To create shortcuts we'd want to instead of referencing each
> Why would a mighty robot want to marry a puny human?
Because the mighty robot was built by a puny human, or by unintelligent / puny robots working for the puny human who created a robot whose mind is programmed to want to marry the puny human who buys it.
> Now, perhaps you think it would be wrong to marry a dog or a 16 year old girl. But I don't see why.
Dog: because you probably can't explain "marriage" to a dog to get informed consent. If you have no problem with arranged marriages, you're good to go. (Of course, if you want to talk marriage, you have to consider giving away puppies to be child kidnapping of sorts.
As for the 16 year old girl, she CAN give clear consent. A 5 year old could! Below a certain age, you're not considered to be able to (or to have likely done so if you are capable of it) understand the implications of marriage sufficiently to be allowed to make that decision. I don't see a significant difference between a 16 and 18 year old in terms of making this decision. I do see a significant difference between a loner / geek vs a person with a mix of married and unmarried friends they regularly visit, or someone living in their parent's house vs someone who has experienced life on their own, supporting themselves.
Maybe we need some documentaries of working and non-working families, ranging from the famously getting along to the merely not getting along to the outright abusive. Force kids to watch videos detailing how children will complicate their lives, the sorts of sacrifices that will be needed based on income level. Perhaps require people to at least live a year on their own before committing to marriage, so that they don't marry just to escape their parents once they have confidence that they can support themselves.
From the maturity angle, perhaps devise a mental maturity test, and those that don't pass can't marry? That wouldn't go over well. (I suspect we'd have an alarming % of failures)
> The hypothetical human-equivalent AI program would be able to save its state regularly, so your hypothetical 12 year old daughter flipping the power switch would result in a small amount of "memory loss", equivalent to knocking out a human. A violent act, but not murder.
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This is debatable. If you chop my head off, and clone me from my DNA, is the new creature the real me, and you're off the hook? The code on disk loaded as the thing boots could be considered the DNA. The actual mind woule be the bits flitting through RAM as it runs. Paging makes this somewhat ambiguous. You'd probably have to define something things as more and less important, declaring a certain kernal of functionality the "official brain", the unloading of which would be a murder.
The shut down robot could be considered either dead or asleep. What if you copied the OS to a virtual server and ran 3 instances, giving them different made-up, fed-in experiences. If you shut down one, and never re-started it, would that be murder? Is killing my identical twin still murder if I live on?
If you had one sex doll, then shut it down permanently when you got an upgraded model, would that be murder? Should causing a permanent coma be accepted?
A critical question is whether the AI has a will to live. If the AI WANTS to live, destroying the sex toy is murder. If the AI wants to be destroyed, destroying it is assisted suicide. With humans, a will to live can be assumed. With a non-self-determining robot, it can't. Is killing a nihilist wrong?
Trees produce much fruit, despite that most of it probably won't take root, although the child-from-conception camp in the abortion debate should have to consider how a tree works, randomly tossing around babies in the hopes that some will live to be a murderous enterprise.
As long as there's a good backup, and a destroyed doll can be replaced, and restored from the last doll's backup, I don't think too many people will complain about the "death". Death is the permanent removal of a person from our life. Anyone who moves away and won't keep in touch (and will die before they can be reached) is dead to us. Given that the death of an identical twin would be considered murder, it could be said that "you" is not just your hardware and OS, but the 2 of these plus (at least the majority of) your accumulated data. A reset of a 10 year old unit should be considered a murder.
> Marriage exists for one reason, and one reason only - Succession of property rights.
If that's all it's good for, who needs it? I'll just put my robot in my will!
And here I thought the purpose of marriage was to get my family to shut up about all this "living in sin" nonsense, and somewhere in the mists of time when it started perhaps it was just an excuse for a party.
More seriously, marriage is a little more than just a default will.
Legally: not needed. Just start living together and doing whatever you want. Eventually, if you don't move oout you'll probably end up in a common-law marriage, but maybe temporarily moving out to an apartment every now and then would keep this from happening. In legal terms this may mean that your spouse, in the absence of a will has a claim against what you leave behind. I think it also means (or once did) that if you cheat on your spouse, they can sue over it. (For divorce, possible financial support and mental anguish)
Religiously: if your religion says sex w/o marriage is bad, you need it for moral purposes.
Marriage is an oath / promise made before your country / deity(ies) of choice to do something. When you get married, you're declaring that you love someone so much, that you'll forever forsake all other possible mates. It's not so much a guarentee of assets after death, as before death. You're declaring a permanent legal representitive of yourself, authorized to take care of your business on your behalf. You become an alternate point of contact for all matters regarding that other person, and vice-versa.
Some people marry because they have to. Marriage represents stability. You may be fine with just heading over to Susie's house for a good time 1-2 times a week, but until you marry her, she can at any point legally tell you to quit coming over and start doing it with someone else. Once you get married, Susie is expected not to change the lock, kicking you out and starting in on "Fred".
A big purpose of marriage is to change how others view you having sex. Before marriage, you're sleeping around, sowing wild oats, being a slut. After marriage, "When are you having some grandkids for me?". Sex outside marriage is taboo. As such, marriage now exists (for some) solely for the purpose of shutting up those grumbling about who you're sleeping with. (Or at least about the fact that you're doing it the wrong way, they may still find much else to gripe about)
Another purpose of marriage is defining family. If I sleep with a lady down the street, when I pass, she's probably on her own for anything she needs. If I married her before passing, she'd be "family" and my extended family would be looking out for her, trying to cheer her up. Admittedly she still has her own family either way, but it's an extra resource. How much this matters depends on the family in question, but it is in some places an issue.
With marrying robots, a few questions have to be answered before we can decide whether to marry them. Are the robots intelligent, sentient beings, or just very rich featured toys? If the robots are throw-away items, without feelings or a specific will to live, there's not much point legally in marrying them. Religiously, your deity would probably prefer you find an approved (originally created by them) mate, producing heirs who will go on to spread the religion of said deity, bringing "Truth" to the world by outbreeding the infidels. (Of course this only works if you actually FOLLOW the religion, but that part is often ignored.)
> 1) A beginner option would be a very bad idea, since the user can't really predict what "beginner" actually means
... at least for consoles. ... overly configurable controls will only mean that the player will end up with non working controls.
Beginner wouldn't mean "to games" but "to people who have played this game through once already". Everyone would start in beginner, but those who knew how to play could turn it off.
> 2) RE1 came before the analogstick, so its control scheme is understandable
Even with the NES you could move in 8 directions. (up, up-left, left etc) Being able to move at 30 degrees clockwise of straight up isn't a benefit worthy of tossing away intuitive controls. If the paths are wide enough 45 degree increments are fine. This is a case where even if you want to show off your "great new idea" in controls you should also offer the standard method. Sure these controls were fine for Combat on the 2600, that was against another similarly restricted human. Cylinder controls are a great fit for Doom, with a 1st person perspective. If I could look out my character's eyes in RE I wouldn't mind the controls at all. RE2 on the 64 fixed this, and I greatly enjoyed it. The controls are there to put you into the game, not distract you from it.
> most annoyingly you could only aim up, down or straight, not half up or half down, thus making proper aiming not hard, but simply impossible.
There's no excuse for not putting in the 45 degree angles. Even if you can't shoot from where you are, you could take a step to the side, putting the enemy in a line of fire, like we all had to for Contra, which is probably faster than waiting for your character to slowly turn in the direction you want.
> This really should be another rule every game should follow: If you use the analogstick, then use it properly, not as dpad emulation (almost all 2D shoot'em ups suffer from this).
> 3)
So long as they're required to leave one button mapped back to the menu to change things back, they're fine.
> Say you have a game where you have to sneak and you have mapped the dpad to walk, woops, can no longer access sneaking and game gets impossible.
It's pretty much a given that if a game has a sneak option, you'll have to use it at some point. The same is true of lesser used special items. There's no issue with swapping functions in/out as needed, like Zelda items.
> The balance would of course also be totally ruined by stuff like that, since dpad controls work quite differently then analog ones.
Genrally I'm either running full speed or walking slowly to not run off the edge of a platform. One run button is all I need for "good enough" d-pad control. As for avoiding an enemy's line of sight, perhaps I can't walk at the same speed the searchlight is moving, but I can run faster, wait for it to move up again, then dash a bit more.
> When it comes to touch screen vs dpad it depends, in some games like Advanced Wars it really makes no difference and both are allowed. In other you really can do it only one way, i.e. Kirby wouldn't work without the touchscreen.
I haven't played Kirby or Advanced Wars to know. I can definately see the advantage of a touch screen for any strategy game, or point & click type adventure. (If Shadowgate gets ported to the DS, it better not be d-pad only... mice faked with d-pads are pretty painful too.)
> Some developers feel the need to force the touchscreen and mic on you even where it totally isn't up for the job, the solution here is to just not buy those games, since they are really broken by design, not by accident.
The latest Zelda? Countless occasions where you want to use the boomerang while running and can't do both at once? In Nintendo's favor, they seem to have made this version a bit easier than normal. Rolling was darn near mpossible to pull of on demand but I kept doing it accidentally while running. The A
1. Never ask the player if he wants to save.
This can be good or bad. It's annoying for the pro perhaps, but for the novice who may not have saved for the past hour, about to go into a tough battle, it could save a lot of frustration. In-game tutorials the 30th time around are annoying too. Perhaps the triggering of both can be linked to a "beginner" switch in the options menu, on by default, but which you can turn on/off anytime.
Saving fills 2 purposes: keeping you from slipping too far back and allowing you to return directly to a particularly fun section later. Perhaps there should be the normal save system, plus one auto-save to save your bacon in case you were lazy and you could choose which to load at start-up. One problem with Enchanted Arms on the 360, each and every save requires navigating menus.. yes I want to save on the hard drive agan, yes I want to use the same file again etc. Any involved save process should be coupled with a quicksave option using the same choices as the last save.
Also, SAVE ANYWHERE. The DS close lid to save function needs to be on everything in some way. Life happens. If the end of a game is 4 back to back boss fights and you've beaten 3 (one of them just barely after MANY retries) you shouldn't have to go through it again after unexpected company (parents, S.O.) stopped you because someone thought it was "more challenging" to not allow saves between these points. Sure it's more challenging. So is randomly remapping keys between levels. It's also stupid and annoying. I didn't pay $60 for a game because I was LOOKING to be in a bad mood... We don't play games in theaters. Interruptions happen.
2. Always say "press any button" to start a game.
Yes. A game is something the user is buying to enjoy, not be maddened by. Maddening challenge you overcome with skill is one thing. Maddeningly bad design doesn't give you a feeling of accomplishment when you overcome it. Like or hate Resident Evil's cylinder control scheme, to most casual players, if you don't move in the direction you press without a DARN good reason, the game is broken.
3. Always let players remap controller buttons to suit their preferences.
Yes. The more complex controllers get, the more this is needed. On the NES this wasn't needed, because seemingly 90% of all games used A for jump and B for shoot. Since almost all games had the same functions, there was no need to move things around. On the Playstation, different games use different buttons for block, attack, magic, menu (no longer just the start button!) etc.
REALLY useful remap options would be, swap any analog stick with the d-pad. Some of us prefer it. Swap the face buttons as a unit with a d-pad / stick. It may reduce control of the player's speed, but that's the players decision. (If they do go from an analog to digital, offer a run/slow button to be mapped in and give them the choice of which is the default) Allow the user to customize the "run" speed in RPGs.
Phantasy Star Online had a WONDERFUL idea letting you use a shoulder button as a shift key to change the functions of face buttons. This should be standard practice. This would be a HUGE improvement to Zelda, keeping more items easily usable at once without forcing the user to keep bringing up the menu to swap items where there's 2 item buttons and 3 items needed.
Non-standard controls NEED an alternative. DS programmers, we're all glaring at YOU! We understand you love the touch screen and mic. We don't love having our screen roughed up, an inerface that blocks our view when our fat hand is in the way of the action, an interface that with one point of contact doesn't allow the control of a gamepad (you may be using 2-3 functions on a gamepad at once) and we don't want to have to keep cleaning spit from the screen as every other game makes us hiss and scream into our DSes. Games requiring screaming are also a bad idea in public... If you want to OFFER an alternative interface, fine. Just don't lock us int
OLPC's purpose isn't to promote socialism over capitalism as a political philosophy, but to help educate children by giving them a tool to become well educated enough to be a capable worker and participate in world congress, rather than continuing on as they've been doing.
This is similar to public schools. Public schools are justified here in the us by noting that while capitalistically, only the child or parent should pay for the child's schooling, having an educated workforce (and something better than completely uneducated morons surrounding you) is a benefit to everyone.
Public roads come from tax dollars you pay, regardless of whether YOU will use a particular road or not. Per strict Capitalism, all roads should be toll roads. Still, whether you use a road or not, it benefits you to have the server at your favorite restaurant able to get there to serve you.
The US isn't purely capitalistic, nor should it be. The US is about 1 thing: promoting the good of the majority of the people of the US above all else, with a hamstrung government unable to act seriously against its people (consider why we split off from England / exist as a country). While too often it doesn't work that way these days, the government is supposed to be FOR THE PEOPLE. Not for Capitalism and not for Socialism. We are largely Capitalistic, and should be, because it allows us to enjoy the fruit of our own labor. Not all things are best handled this way though. It's better to have a single army, than to have all 50 states privately contract out defense squads as needed.
We recognize that libraries, while socialistic in nature serve a useful purpose.
OLPC isn't about undermining the idea that people should work for what they want, and that the best idea should win through competition (which we've seen doesn't always work that way in the US, due to patent / lawsuit craziness). OLPC is meant to take groups of people too far down to join into the global market, building them up to be capable of taking their part in it. The strict Capatilistic thing to do is to loan them $, forclose on their land and kick them off to die pennilessly. Welfare was meant as a hand up, not a hand out.
Essentially, OLPC is a good idea. It may or may not be the idea needed at the moment by the countries it's going to, but if it works as it's supposed to it will increase the number of players in the global market. For the most part these PCs aren't being just "given" away either. The government of whatever country they are for is buying them, just like they would schoolbooks. Do you disagree with desktop computers in our schools? I'm not sure, but I expect when the child graduates, these PCs are expected to be returned to the school to be sent home with the next child. Since these are still government bought (like Uncle Sam buying jets to keep you safe on your behalf) I'd say this is no more / less Socialistic than our military. Let's also consider that this isn't robbing Gateway of any laptop sales. The people who will be using these PCs are not in a position where they could buy a laptop.
If for no other reason, OLPC deserves a nod for promoting R&D. The current computer industry scoffs as efficiency (or at least the major OS market) preferring to use raw computing power as the answer to everything. In a working Capitalistic system, OSes would be FORCED to compete on efficiency. That this isn't happening suggests we don't have a PROPERLY WORKING Capitalistic system applying to the OS market. Increasing Internet speeds and Google's ambitions will probably eventually remedy this, but having a system built on efficiency out there is a step in the right direction for promoting Capitalism / competition.
Socialism isn't inherently evil, but left unchecked doesn't work well. The same can be said about Capitalism, which taken to an extreme isn't much better. Socialism and Capitalism don't exist in a vacuum, they're two ends of a scale, and while it seems to pay off to favor the Capitalism side, goi