Why do you want the ability to watch WMV from Linux? Because some people don't use more open standards. If you like random moview like Flash makes possible, you'll probably get Silverlight when everyone and his brother who wanted to make Flash but couldn't afford it downloads this and gets to work.
> He was praising VB and ASP as being superior to Java (no lie, look it up in the archives at ZDNet) back when the whole.Net circus was still a wet fart in BillG's pants.
VB and ASP don't have the cross-platform compatibility that was supposed to make Java awesome, but they were much faster to pick up and learn. The different layouts for an applet vs a Java app and annoyances with having to get the name "just right" on files for them to compile properly left a lot of people unwilling to mess with it if they were hopping between notepad and ie at the time.
With VB, hit F5 and you're running. A built in debugging system that allowed you to jump around ramdomly, peeking and seting variables on the fly was a far friendlier system for learning on.
With ASP, leave IE up and type in notepad or InterDev. Make a change, ctrl-s, alt-tab, ctrl-r, viola.
Java may be better for speed and promise, but it was not as accessable.
> Does anyone really expect Microsoft to continue development of Silverlight for Mac and/or Linux after Silverlight has killed Flash?
No, it's possibly expected Mono (or an offshoot of them) will do so.
MS may not be the most powerful system, but it has been an easy-to-play-with system. The command line extensions in 2000 and XP have gotten much more powerful. Type FOR/? from a DOS BOX and prepare to be disgusted.
Before the $10-$20 books with the control creation edition of VB or VB6 everywhere, DOS came with random basics culminating in QBASIC. With the intro of dot net the free SDK came with a command line compiler for C#. This was a step back for MS, in that you have to download it and it's not as friendly, but with the power of a web page fewer people probably care.
Before the computer itself was the object to master, now it's the net, and most people don't care about making the computer do cool random things. MySpace, chat and gaming is enough.
> In case you don't know, COM is the mid-90's ugly-hack programming "standard" that Microsoft pushed for library (dll) programming.
I heard this was ugly for VC++, but it served a purpose. COM Components were easy as pie to play with in VB. Want to play with voice recognition? Download the sdk, a few lines of code had it talking. Databases practically flew together.
> Right now, Flash is a cross-platform delivery system for highly interactive content. (READ: unstable piece of shit that is not a real standard.)
This isn't the real threat. Flash represents a chance at doing what Java wanted to do. Java would make Windows irrelavent. While Flash is (at the moment) perhaps nowhere NEAR ready to do what Java wanted to do, it is also made BY ADOBE who won't let MS make a broken version to destroy write-once run-anywhere once Flash gets extended.
This is nipping a future threat in the bud.
For consumers, we'll see what wins.
Flash: expensive but "safe".
Silverlight: free but probably another IE / Outlook / Word (ie the whole thing is one GIANT security hole), if not in reality it will still have to fight this perception
IE beat out the competition in large part because it was pre-installed. (Not completely, but early versions of IE did stink... badly.) Silverlight is supposed to be programmable in Dot Net, right? This means anyone with a freely downloadable (and advertised as such) developmen kit from MS will be able to make Silverlight apps. The.net sdk is supposed to come with a command line c$ compiler iirc.
There may be an equivalent easy to use, free system for people to make their own flash files, but if so it won't have the same coverage as the dot net sdk used to on the MS web page.
Chess is belived solvable. When we crunch through every possible state of the board, we'll know. Quantum computing (as recently considered for solving the travelling salesman problem) may be able to handle this in a few years or decades. It could be that no matter what first move is made, there's a sequence of moves for the 2nd player to force the 1st into stalemate.
Does the possibility of a perfect checkers playing machine mean that there's no market for checkers games on PCs? There's still a market, although most people will want a flawed AI. (A deliberately flawed one) Ideally many people would want a system that simualtes how WE think of chess and checkers, but without the pre-filled database of moves. An AI that looked at the same sorts of patterns we looked at on the board (and if it wasn't quite as good supplemented with a small database) but filled the database as it watched us and how we played, but making the occasional error to keep it beatable would be ideal.
A well designed (to intentionally periodically fail, several times per game) AI that consitently played well and adjusted slowly to your style so that it improved your game by learning from you, but not quickly enough to deny you the ability to win would beat a human player.
If these chess or checkers programs could send each other databases over the net, randomly swapping with each other, you could occasionally play someone else's created opponent, based on how they play for a suitably difficult game against a less familiar move-set.
Adding capability in no way kills a well-designed system. In scorched Earth, Tank Wars, Gorilla or Worms, there's no excuse for the AI, with the ability to perfectly calculate everything, to ever miss. Scorched Earth and / or Tank Wars deliberately let you choose between a variety of intentionally flawed AI opponents.
"...the idea that Deep Blue has a mind is absurd. How can an object that wants nothing, fears nothing, enjoys nothing, needs nothing and cares about nothing have a mind?"
This is by design. A basic computer has 2 simple wants.
1: There is a register that tells the computer what the next instruction is. The computer wants to load that next instruction.
2: The computer wants to execute that next instruction.
(repeat)
Our neurons are the same way. One neuron doesn't want to remember how chedder smells. It wants to send a spike of current out when enough other neurons send it a signal. (There are many other variables, but that's irrelevant here)
1. If humans can be said to be intelligent, without invoking a soul to explain that intelligence. (ie Purely biological)
2. If we can understand and perfectly model the required biological processes.
3. We can completely model how we work, and the results of asking you, and the fake you the same question may always yield the same answer with carefully (probably impossibly so) controlled conditions.
Look up the difference between simulation and emulation.
Anything using a simple set of rules to imitate us may not be intelligent, but if we are intelligent and can be perfectly copied, the copy is intelligent too.
If the copy isn't intelligent because the CPU is blindly simulating biology instead of doing anything "smart" than neither are we because we aren't even smartly simulating life, we're an ACTUAL biologicla accident that happens to have been mistaken for intelligence.
The answer could be that the biology, chemical compounds, computers and simulated compounds are dumb, but that the sum of our parts is intelligent through an emergent effect, as is the sum of the virtual parts. Is the text of a Shakespeare play any less Shakespear'ish for being in a computer vs on a book, when both were typed by people born long after Shakespeare was dead? Intelligence isn't a thing, but a quality. Once we define what we consider that quality to be, whatever matches it, is.
> It can win at chess, but not because it wants to. It isn't happy when it wins or sad when it loses. What are its apres-match plans if it beats Kasparov?
After Quake and Halo with people who don't seem to know what manners are, I'll happily take the calm machine that's willing to play quietly.
> It doesn't care about chess or anything else. It plays the game for the same reason a calculator adds or a toaster toasts: because it is a machine designed for that purpose."
Fair enough. In this case all the computer cares about is operating the program. All the program cares about is taking the opponents king (and maybe a secondary goal of not losing its own)
That said, what is the purpose of a human?
Is our purpose to be intelligent? To survive? To worship? If our only purpose is to worship or survive, does that mean (since intelligence isn't our primary purpose) that we can't be? Intelligence is also a means to an end, making survival more likely (with the creation of shotguns) and worship more meaningful (compare the ego boost of a kid you impressed telling you so vs a tape player on endless loop that sings your praises... which you recorded.)
> I can imagine that a person might someday have a computer for a best friend. That will be sad--like having a dog for your best friend but even sadder.
If the computer is every bit as capable as a human friend, how is this sad? If anything the blind preference for a human over an equivalent machine seems racist.
"Computers might one day be capable of expressing themselves in vivid prose or fluent poetry, but unfortunately they will still be computers and have nothing to say." This depends on whether the poetry is from a computer following basic rules blindly to create poetry, or whether there is a consciousness inside that feels emotions and wants to express itself.
> My point is that every time some AI people actually manage to out-do humans, humans tend to re-define what intelligence is.
This is because we don't have a good definition for what intelligence is. Like ancient doctors who prescribed remedies for "fever" with no knowledge of what was causing it, we're mentioning syptoms / effects instead of the root cause / process.
The REAL reason we don't have an "intelligent" computer is that we can't put intelligence in explicit basic steps. Everything we do (get water) is so abstract and full of other steps (get glass, get to sink, learn sink interface, use sink) that we can't write the steps behind intelligence on a completely base level that can be understood and expressed in terms of how hardware currently works, or the capabilities of a Turing Complete language.
I have no doubt that if we can learn what intelligence is (we still don't know I believe) we can make a computer copy it.
In the past we'd have said a chess winning computer was intelligent, because only smart people can win at chess, right? Things like seeing Checkers reduced to a finite series of patterns means that anyone, followng a list can win at Checkers without understanding why. This doesn't mean the approach is unintelligent. In this case, the computer, following the series of lists is dumb, but there is definately intelligence behind the recognition of the lists and how to link them together. Given Checkers is simpler than Chess, this COULD be done with NOTHING but straight crunching positions, but intelligence sped it up.
Checkers is much easier to crunch (only 2 types of pieces, half the board used, fewer # of pieces, fewer ways of moving, left, right, jump left, jump right, add backwards for king, maybe have repeated jumps)
If we don't have a massive war or disaster before this happens, watch the riots as everyone and their brother is fired (robots possibly cheaper than outsourcing over time) by ultra-competitive businesses seeking to undercut each other. Who will own the robots? Business and the rich. Who needs poor / middle-class? Oops, no new goodies without a mass audience to make them affordable. Having robots for every possible thing could bankrupt someone quickly.
What would an all-work-by-robots society be like? Would we all have everything we want? Would each person get so many "good points" per month to use towards desired goods the robots can make and services they can perform? Perhaps there'd be one job, repairman, with these people getting more points.
Would robots be running government, or just be slave labor, capable enough to understand a job, but without the drive to become discontent with doing it?
Perhaps this is how lost civilizations disappear. Their mythologies were real, and once the priests thought they could get rid of the peasents, society collapsed in fighting between the laid off workers and the killed in the scuffle priesthood. The remaining workers died off when they couldn't farm the fields protected by the spirits even after the priest's death per whatever binding spell was on the demon.
I think either Star Trek or Doctor Who had an episode with two planets that had been at war so long no one remembered why. To minimize interruption to daily life it was handled by computers, and a lottery system like the draft occasionally called people up to step into a death chamber. The hero destroys the system forcing the humans to negotiage a truce.
Consider the song "99 Red Balloons" With increased capability comes the chance for massive disaster. ("I, Robot", "The Matrix") We're a long way off, but when we get there, we'd better be careful.
Of course they are. There's too much involved with human life, too many subtleties to get the entire base of human knowledge into a machine that can't "learn" directly by experience. A computer can collect data automatically, but has no idea what it means. Projects like Wikipedia, Everything2, Slashdot and Hitchikers help by consolidating knowledge in potentially useful ways, but it's still encoded data, like a book in ROT13 until a base system comes out with a large enough core of understanding of human life to understand the rest.
> They are good at logic puzzles, things like factoring large number or memorizing the phone books.
We don't program little incapable people, we make the equivalent of flowcharts (gross oversimplification of programming). Whether a computer follows the steps or a human, the results are the same. A computer can only do the things it has programs for, as a human can only speak langauges they have been exposed to. Since computers can't program themselves, computers will tend to be savants, doing a few things really well, until we move to a new system with an OS that can determine needs and automatically download and install software as needed to provide a seemless experiance. Kindof like Firefox automatically downloading updates as needed, but universal and completely unprompted. The bulk of random software on a Linux install CD is a step in the right direction, as is the growing bulk of Windows.
> What kind of intelligence do you need to understand the concepts of 'a party' or 'dressing up'?
You need to know what kind of party is being talked about,
Social semi-required (company), Personal-required (b-day), Pleasurable (costume), Political, Tea (The original flash mob?)?
You need a cost analysis of going vs not going. (Will not attending the management xmas party hurt your chances at promotion? Do you care if you really don't like that sort of social gathering and personally don't care for the idea of being management?) Some social people consider the invite to attend a party to be a good, and need no further prompting. Others consider it a neccasary evil. To a child birthday parties are the canonical parties, they tend to look at all parties as good things.
Once you decide to go, you need to understand how to dress for the party. For a b-day, casual. For business, formal. For random pleasurable, all the creativity behind sitting down to draw a random picture. Look at some pictures of anime conventions and note some of the oddifities, giant boxes of candy, a guy in an army uniform with a cardboard box on his head, someone with a generic shirt reading "henchman".
Understanding formal dress is a considerable endevor in itself. Understanding "business casual" is a struggle to the geek/nerd. (Innate definitions: casual is what I wear on weekends, formal is what I wear at work, what do they mean I can't wear jeans w/ holes in them and a naughty t-shirt on casual day? My company allows jeans, but not tennis shoes on casual day. Do they think we're all cowboy-wannabes?) What if you are a world-traveler? Do you need to adopt different conventions as you move around? Even between American families the differences in how events are handled varies greatly.
At the party, should you arrive at an approximate time or random time? How much are you allowed to drink? Is it ok to hang around with people you know, or are you expected to make cursory greetings and conversation with everyone? How much are you supposed to overlook from someone who has had a few too many?
For a costume party, what is / isn't appropriate for the group you're in? For a civil war re-enactment group, perhaps dressing like you're from KISS isn't appropriate. Regardless, you want to be clever, which requires knowledge of who will be there and what is likely to be selected by other participants.
This is all assuming you understand speech well enough to recognize the word "party"
Isn't the information itself supposed to be uncopyright-able, but the article is? How much a year to hire an official new re-phraser / in-his-own-words'er to read the article, re-write it (probably summarized) and mass-mail it within the company?
Of course, if you're dealing with the associtated press, or a similar organization to gather info, you're probably in a legal agreement with them that specifically allows you to pass around the AP stories within your company to those who need them. Someone has to look at them to choose article X over Y and to format it to fit around the ads.
I used to work for a dot-com'ish company best described as a e-mail mailing list for phone calls. If you had a little league game to cancel, one call blasted the info (and an ad) to all the parents, trying up to 3 times with a wait between attempts.
The company grew from home use (paid the bills) to phone spam (wildly profitable, at least at the time) racked up quite a bill while sending any message (within the owner's discretion) for a fee.
We had line item billing... UPS or FedEx delivered our bills, which came in 6 or 7 large boxes about the size that you used to get dot-matrix-rip-off-the-page-when-you're-done paper in. Given we were a small fish, I'd hate to see what bigger players got.
"Does anyone find it strange that no caveman decided to draw a HUGE monstrous death machine roaming the lands? I mean, not ONE SINGLE MENTION anywhere in all of human culture until we discovered their bones?"
"That's because they were scared shitless"
MAYNARD He must have died while carving it. BEDEVERE
Oh, come on. BROTHER MAYNARD
That's what it says. ARTHUR
But if he was dying, he wouldn't bother to carve "Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh".
He'd just say it. BROTHER MAYNARD
It's down there carved in stone. GALAHAD
Perhaps he was dictating. ARTHUR
Shut up.
If they were moved to draw pictures of prey, I'm sure they'ed also draw pictures of predators, but they'ed wait until after the predator had passed (or carried off uncle Ug) before doing it.
You have to wonder though, was the art MEANT as art, or as a playbook. The drawing could indicate the initial layout of people surrounding the animal, then then perhaps the chief would trace patterns for each person with his finger to show people how to move rather than everyone moving is a straight line towards the animal.
Then again, if that's the case, there's no T. Rex or other predators if the chief didn't think the odds of getting them were enough to justify drawing them.
Buying virtual goods has existed and been taxed long before Everqust or Ultima Onlne. Al you may have in your hands for stock is a sheet of paper, but you get certain benefits, voting and dividends. This lasts as long as the company does.
Items on an MMORPG are an exception. While companies do fold, this is something they try to avoid. MMORPGs (while their owners might like to keep people on them for 20 years) are seen as temporary. Not only is the game itself temporary, will it last 5 years? 10? There's the issue that individual players may typically last 1 month, 1 year or 2 years before moving to the next or going back to offline games.
Online goods aren't viewed as a permanent investment. What do people typically do as they quit a game? Some let the items cease to exist as they logout. Some give them all away. Some sell the items for in-game gold and give the gold away, in-game. Often the items may go to in-game friends, but often they are just... gone.
Also, how would the mechanics of this work? Is it just the sale of goods? Is it the earning of money? YOU GOT 3 GOLD FROM THAT RABBIT, YOU OWE US 1 GOLD! Ideally, this would be handled by as someone else posted, given the government it's fee in the same in-game currency they're taxing. The company could then raise the gold each rabbit gives, still give the player 3 gold and send 1-2 gold to the government account.
What is the exchange rate? Ix 1 gold worth 1 dollar? For all the companies that forbid real-world gold sales, can you use the current exchange rate at gold-farming shops, given this price is not recognized (and in fact actively condemned) by the owners? Is this possibly the only real reasion MMORPGs really care about these operations, that they define an exchange rate, helping the government tax this?
When you log out, will the "gift" of your items to friends be taxed? Will there be a flat "death tax"? If you didn't have much gold, will you be required to earn some (or pony up actual cash) before being allowed to quit the game?
If there is an exchange rate, where and how is this defined? Will there be a standard, legally acceptable point of exchange that *has* to accept in-game currency for cash? Sounds like a chinese gold-farmer's dream come true. This could also hurt the gold-farming business. As they flood this mythical exchange place with gold, the exchange rate veers wildly until you hae to deal with millions of gold to rack up a debt of a few pennies.
This also allows for a new kind of harassment. Someone leaving the game could, TO BE MEAN, send all their gold at once to a character they didn't like. If this came all at once, and all tax had to be paid in cash as the income is recieved, wanted or not, you could force real life tax damages against others.
Any safeguards put in place to stabilize the gold/dollar exchange rate will probably make the taxes such that on-line gamers will quit in droves, again causing a loss of revanue. When this happens, the taxes will be raised to make up lost money, which will further knock people off these games until the loss is enough to make them fold.
What happens when people find a way to hack the server and change their inventory from having 50 gold to 10,000, then sell it? Are they just kicked out by the company, or are they charged with counterfeiting.?
When you sell an item on say, Final Fantasy 11, where ownership of all in-game items is claimed by Square-Enix. (What you work for, they "own", but they don't take it way from you) does this mean when you sell the item, that Square has to pay for what you did? Does this mean two bad apples at World of Warcraft can log onto Final Fantasy 11 and sell items back and forth repeatedly to crush Square out of business with insane taxes? Consider GeoCities' one-time (do they still have it?) claim of owning what you put on your page. Should you be able to get GeoCities people tossed in jail for "owning" child porn by uploading it? This tax begs for abuse. I can see the
> This is very true. Games can evoke emotion in the player. However, each and every person may have a different reaction.
The same is true of a movie. What makes a game different is that by participating, whatever effect you get from playing is magnified.
> See why this is troubling if you're playing as the hero? How is the hero supposed to grow and change, if YOU are the hero, and the game designers have no control over your thoughts and feelings?
The author does have control though. Most games are not generic do-anything-you-want MMORPGs, GTAs or Shenmues. Most games lead you through a specific series of events, so the stimulus, like a movie is controlled. If the player / movie-goer reacts differently... oh well, hopefully they'll like the gratuitous explosions / skin tossed in for those who miss the main point.
> Good stories involve characters who change and make tough moral decisions. That's sort of difficult when each time the game is played, the 'main character' i.e. you, has a different set of motivations and morals.
Admittedly that's not most games, but there are those that focus on morality. Some Ultimas, Fable, even Sonic Adventure if you play through as Amy and Gamma. (You see Gamma's growth and indecision, but you don't get to participate in the indecision)
> So either you make a boring hero with no motivations (the silent protagonist), or you give the hero a personality and risk having it clash with the priorities of the player.
For the most part I think players will tend to either fall in line, like watches in a movie, or be snarky. Possibly having the same line of thought as I did, pretty much every conversation in the recent Bard's Tale features snarky and nice options to let you play as you wish.
> Of course, you could always have the player NOT play the main character, so maybe there is yet a way to do it.
Would the player recognize what's going on? Was Zero the main hero in Mega Man X? He starts off stronger, rescuing your character, and is recognized by the manual as far stronger. The gameplay revolves around X, so X will be seen as the star. If the hero outclasses the played character, players will be jealous.
Choice actually has made some games much more than they'ed be without it.
One Ultima had a series of choices to determing what drove you, to create a character appropriate to your view of what was most important. Making the player decide what they truly valued in this manner was more powerful that most morals added to movies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_IV
The mechanics of how you play Mega Man X4 differ greatly based on which character you choose to play as.
Nothing is easier than to condemn the evildoer, nothing is harder than to understand him.
When you can play through as both the "good" and the "evil" character in some games (or the same character making different choices, ie Fable) you get a better picture. A story can be segmented to show both sides, as can a movie, but playing through really drives it home.
> From the perspective of storytelling, videogames are in fact a poor medium for doing it, for reasons Ebert describes.
True or false, storytelling isn't required to be art, or to be high art. I disagree. As a composite medium, a game can do EACH AND EVERY THING a novel, a painting and a movie can do. A game is a superset that includes the capabilities of each of these other three mediums. If a movie can be art, or high art and the maker of a game can limit the functionality of a game to that of a movie, the game can be every bit as much art as the movie. A game takes nothing FROM what a movie can do, but ADDS to it, so how can the potential be lesser? More Less.
>The physical interactivity with a game world that videogames provide add nothing to a story,
Again, I must disagree. Games have better emotional control of the audience. A series of action-ish segments climaxing in a difficult boss gives a player a feeling of exhaustion a movie can't match. How about the upswing in emotion when the harassed hero happens upon a cache of weapons / power-ups? The impact is magnified because it's not just Ash Ketchum who suddenly got a new psychic pokemon that can turn the tables, it's the player as well. A movie, being passive can't give the same feeling of triumph because the movie-goer is always on the outside looking in. Perhaps the best feeling is the "door-opening" feeling you get when Link stumbles across the hook-shot, feather or bombs, as a whole new world opens in front of you. Theoretically the story may be the same, experienced from afar (movie) or directly (game), but the immersion increases. How often are you surprised in movies? How often in games? Once you're brought into the character's mindset the story gains freshness and life. What's more, the gameplay allows a choice, which outside of DVDs and choose-your-own-adventure books is non-existant. A well balanced choice can bring the agony of a character's choice to life, but more importantly allows the choice which isn't even a possibility in the theater.
If a movie faces a viewer with a moral dilemma, who is right and who is wrong, does that make it not art because no side is chosen? Isn't it a higher artistic calling to explore both sides?
The biggest difference I see between chaff and "high art" is rarity. You can't stare at THE Mona Lisa *in person* from anywhere in the world. You can't watch a Shakespear play being run by Shakespear himself anymore. It's no coincidence that being "high art" often involves a dead author. I think what makes art "high art" is that it can be posessed, while Harry Potter, be it trash or treasure is in the grubby hands of, gasp, EVERYONE! I'm fairly sure there was a book or movie a while back about a famous painter who came back to life, only to see the value of his works plummet, wish I could remember what it was called.
What makes the Mona Lisa special? There have been many portraits with more detail, less detail, more vivid colors, more people depicted, less of a person depicted (only a face) etc. What makes THIS PAINTING more special than any other portrait? Does the reason behind why this painting was made matter? The value seems to come from a combination of scarcity, actual quality / effort put in and who the artist was. "Pouring yourself into" a work seems to make it higher art. The Sistene Chapel, painstakingly crafted will rightfully gather more praise than graphitti, which due to the legality tends to be (when it's actually OF something) more visual poetry than a full treatment of anything.
Art is not beauty, (and much that is ugly can be called art) but merely recording beauty can transform it (or the recreation in any part) to art. In the most basic sense what we call art IS art, BECAUSE we assign it that value. Art seems to be that which we deem note-worthy *for its own sake*, collected in such a form (written in a book, captured on a photo) to be passed on.
To an extent, games could be considered "not art" BECAUSE they are ma
So a company buys a product for x and can't sell it for x + $1, then tries to sell for $x or $x - $1 so it's not a 100% loss. They get sued. This discourages high-volume sales models. The more of any protected item you have, the more risk you have. It seems any contract with a minimum price should also have a date attached to that price. If I can't clear out at least 500 Gizmo 5000s in a month, ths is clearly a flop and you must buy these back for no less than 80% of what I payed for them, or the minimum price is dropped.
I wonder if this is in part pushed through to give a bit of negotiating power to some of the larger companies dealing with Wal-Mart or other large retailers who can usually dictate terms in a one-sided fashion. Will large retailers demand personal exemptions, or perhaps move to "renting" shelf space to suppliers. We're not buying the item from you, but we'll hold it in the store for you. If it sells we demand x% of the price, if it doesn't sell in a certain amount of time you have to claim it or we'll consider it abandoned trash and dispose of it as we see fit.
> This slide was led (again IMHO) by the Democratic leaders of the 80s & 90s, who insisted that crime and other problems were the failure of the system, the failure of the society - individuals were not to blame.
Did the Democratic party make this claim, or did self-help book authors sell what people wanted to hear and lawyers repeat, hoping to ride the wave of green?
> The outcome of this is an increase in frivolous lawsuits.
One way or another, I agree. There's far too many merit-less lawsuits, which again comes down to responsibility and ethics. I'd be ashamed to sue for massive sums I didn't earn, and should any word reach the press, be ashamed to be seen in public for fear of being known as the local lawsuit-jerk.
> Another problem seems to be an increase in "syndromes", where people blame hastily invented, acronymic illnesses or syndromes for the problems cause by poor parenting or minor behavioral deviations. "Oh, you'll have to make special allowances for my son.
Somehow, the term "road rage" apparently made people think "I'm not being a jack-*** endangering the lives of others for little to no personal gain (maybe 5 minutes less travel), I'm just reacting normally to all the REAL jerks on the road!" You either are or are not mentally fit to drive a car. If someone cutting in front of you makes you fly into a rage, leading to, tailgating them, shooting at them, bumping their car, trying to squeeze them off the road, speeding ahead and cutting them off etc, that means that you have all the maturity of a three year old and NO BUSINESS BEHIND THE WHEEL. No matter how much the other person deserves what they get, all the others you endanger by driving wildly to "get even" did nothing to deserve the risk you put them at. If you pull in front and slam your breaks, the pile-up involves far more than them.
> People do weird things, theres no need to create a disease for every little tick. I do not mean to discount or diminish actual mental health issues like ADHD, but hey folks, life is tough, get over it.
There may be something to ADHD, but what gets CALLED ADHD is (with how often you hear about it) either natural and normal (in which case the PROPER solution is learning to live with it, to overcome it) or else looking for an excuse to give you kid medication to "calm them down" so you can get back to ignoring them instead of being a parent.
> Sony is... They're the first, they won't be the last.
Sony is not nearly the 1st. They may be the 1st major company to buy and distribute a root-kit, but they aren't even close to the 1st major company to commit major wrong-doing. There's a reason anti-trust laws were created. The theory behind America is that intelligent people consider more than cost, they deal with businesses based on cost, trust and quality. In the early days of our country, where most (all?) anything you needed was produced locally this was great. When corporations got large enough that they could crush out local business and those running them gained personal near immunity from serious legal consequences on anything, the companies knew they had the ring through your nose and no credible threats. If you couldn't crush the competition, price-fix. You don't get all the profit, but no nasty price-wars.
This was inevitable. Many companies seek to grow. Greedy people tend to rise to the top in companies, since that's where the big profit is. (Not in being a grunt laborer) The people who best apply their personal greedy behavior to the company's interests, in an era of consmers who make no effort to be informed, lead their companies to victory. Once a company headed by the unethical
No... it's not OUR fault for seeking to compromise the security of countless PCs without telling the people what we're doing... it's THEIR fault for not selling us a good enough product to get away with it without people noticing!
If this tool worked PERFECTLY, it would be found. As soon as a pirate was unable to copy a disc, knowing that DRM existed they'ed post about it on the sorts of sites where people like to fight said DRM. Through trial and error, these people would go through all their disks, (using an OS that wasn't affected) and finding what caused their friend's Windows machine to grow a conscience. If there was a delayed activation, this would be harder to track, but would still be found.
To do anything at all besides their absolute best to sweep this under the rug and hope people will forget about this shows that Sony feels no shame in their actions.
If Sony has been particularly public in announcing this, it's like an extra bird shot in our general direction,
Having deliberately sought to gain unauthorized access to thousands / millions of PCs, steal CPU time and disk space (mainframes and supercomputers sell time, so computer time is a resource, and not one willingly yielded by the root-kitted consumers. PC time isnt as valuable, given a single PC can't do as much, but given that no price was negotiated with the people running the software, ridiculous sums could be demanded.)
Selling anything that runs unauthorized software unannounced on a person's PC is like randomly shipping someone a box of food from a rat-infested ship. There might be a nasty (and hard to control) surprise inside.
A thought on this root-kit. Did the kit install with autorun.inf (legitimately in terms of Windows machines) or by hacking the machine. If this installed via autorun.inf I'd think most pirates would be immune from having this turned off long ago. Since the autorun is THE proper way to install software from a CD and this is SUPPOSED to be able to be turned off, does bypassing this mean that any user who had this run can sue under the DMCA for bypassing explicit protections? Given that turning off autoplay is supposed to control copying (from disc to RAM) of (presumably copyrighted) software on the CD, it seems it could squeak into yet another charge.
Is this root-kit secure? Does it add a vulnerability to the system?
If Sony didn't really inspect and test this, how did it know the root-kit wasn't searching for bank info and passing it back to the original authors who meant to play Sony for fools, using them as a massive distribution method. Consider the damage this makes possible. Any CD with an autorun.inf could do all sorts of nasty things. Sony did not think they were dealing with a reputable company, reputable company sells tools for breaking and entering or electronic trespass. (Exception: locksmithing tools, which *supposed* to be sold only to licensed locksmiths)
If Sony is willing to deal with questionable companies to achieve their goals in questionable manners, should they be trusted in any court case? If Sony supports suing people for Napster-ish stealing of songs and any presence of an mp3 is seen as evidence of theft, (are you excused if you can show the CD it was ripped from and an MP3 player you listened to it on in court?) can we be assured that Sony wouldn't plant evidence to make lawsuits easier? Hiding a few MP3s (or just files with suspicious names) where the user can't find them to hurriedly delete them (given many sued aren't exactly computer experts) wouldn't be out of character. Sony could then claim the user was being sneaky, but not sneaky enough. By making somewhat randomized locations for hiding and hopping between courts, they could keep this going for a long time.
As I understand if, if you steal 5 songs from a Napsterish source, you are liable for far more in damages than even 5 full CDs worth. The offense is considered to be distribution, despite that the user's actual intention is flat theft (with the dist
Scientific consensus means that several scientists working on the same problem agree with each other. If there's no reasonable majority behind any one theory, you can safely consider the theory to be mostly conjecture.
The kicker on global warming is that we seem to have the majority of scientists saying one thing, while the majority of politicians say something else.
The scientists have nothing to gain/lose other than their reputations / employability. It won't look good to doggedly predict the climate will change year after year as it doesn't, or predict it won't as it does. Scientists don't work in a vacuum though. The researchers for tobacco repeatedly found no serious problems from smoking, so merely being a scientist doesn't give you a halo.
Politicians don't need to be right to keep being employed. Oftentimes, being on the right team is enough. (Republican vs Democrat, while the country swings, many regions do not.) All a politician needs to do is to keep their bosses happy. The bosses are the people who pay the politician on a per issue basis.
Scientists and politicians can both be bought. It could be argued that many scientists are willing to be bought because of trouble finding employment. It could be argued that politicians solicit being bought. That said, why would you buy a scientist or a politician for this issue?
First, if you were an individual, you wouldn't. You could try, but you (unless you were quite rich) wouldn't have the money to throw at buying a large number of people.
Buy a scientist / politician to tell the world global warming is real:
You would do this if your company would profit from increased environmental regulations. Companies that produce alternative fuels might do this. Also, if your business is inherently polluting, but you have much better emissions control than your competition, this would be a short-term advantage over them. How many companies are in one of these two positions? Did I miss situations here? How many startup alternative fuel companies can out lobby established fuel companies raking in obscene profits? Perhaps there's a secret lobby of corn farmers... even if so I doubt they could compete with oil's lobbying power.
Buy a scientist / politician to tell the world global warming is wrong:
Your business is inherently polluting, cleaning equipment and changing production methods is expensive. If you convince people there is no problem, there's no need to change.
Why would you buy a scientist?
If unbiased scientific data pointed one way, you almost have to buy a handful of scientists to disagree so you can claim that you didn't "know" the truth. Think cigarette companies. Once you have a handful of reports, you're good.
Why would you buy a politician?
Politicians make laws, which could force expensive changes. Paying off a few scientists isn't going to change the views of many people, especially if most scientists disagree. Buying a politician guarentees favorable results no matter what the public thinks. Consider how many people hate out-sourcing. Consider that both parties support it, despite the public's obvious hatred of the idea. (Also consider how few people actually make the effort to buy American)
An additional benefit to buying politicians. People are pack animals with a gang mentality. Once you choose your gangs (Yankees / Braves! Democrats / Republicans! Toilet seat up / down!) you tend to blindly follow them, no matter how divorced from reality they may get. (Will the Cubs do well? They finally did, but the loyalty well before that point was amazing) No matter how many scientists say X is bad, if Bush says X is good a disturbing number of people will follow Bush because they take politics as us vs them. If Bush is on one side, the other side is wrong. The same was true with Clinton. People selectively (and I'm convinced, unconciously) filter their perceptions to fit the view of the world they want to have. Political lines are sad
I thought extortion was "supposed" to be illegal. Even if someone wants to use bogus patents to sue you into oblivion, they are supposed to make the claim that they're really shocked and horrified that said patent was infringed. This sounds like an open declaration of intent to commit a crime.
Also, if reverse-engineering is illegal per the contract, wouldn't trying this be declaring yourself guilty of breach of contract? Or conspiracy to do so?
Also, what reserves of cash will this company draw on to survive in such a lawsuit against a company with "deep pockets"?
> Stealing is bad, except when you're stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, right? Obviously the group that is being stolen from (the rich) still think it's bad, but since the vast majority of people are not rich, historically it's been considered good.
In this case there's a little more going on. Rich vs Poor isn't any generic person A vs any generic person B. The poor will claim that what Robin Hood stole and gave to them was in fact already theirs, that the rich had stolen it from the poor with improper taxes, scams etc. They'll probably be justified in claiming this, since whoever ends up on top tends to abuse power. This will motivate the rich to increase their plundering (decreasing wages, increasing taxes or demands for labor from peasents) to make up for what was stolen from them.
Essentially in Robin Hood as it's meant to be taken, the "Rich (tm)" are a bunch of evil do-ers kicking the good/poor man down whenever he gets up, so they got what they deserved. This isn't meant as relative morals, but as "crime doesn't pay, even if you are in charge and give it another name".
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you want the ability to watch WMV from Linux? Because some people don't use more open standards. If you like random moview like Flash makes possible, you'll probably get Silverlight when everyone and his brother who wanted to make Flash but couldn't afford it downloads this and gets to work.
> He was praising VB and ASP as being superior to Java (no lie, look it up in the archives at ZDNet) back when the whole .Net circus was still a wet fart in BillG's pants.
/? from a DOS BOX and prepare to be disgusted.
VB and ASP don't have the cross-platform compatibility that was supposed to make Java awesome, but they were much faster to pick up and learn. The different layouts for an applet vs a Java app and annoyances with having to get the name "just right" on files for them to compile properly left a lot of people unwilling to mess with it if they were hopping between notepad and ie at the time.
With VB, hit F5 and you're running. A built in debugging system that allowed you to jump around ramdomly, peeking and seting variables on the fly was a far friendlier system for learning on.
With ASP, leave IE up and type in notepad or InterDev. Make a change, ctrl-s, alt-tab, ctrl-r, viola.
Java may be better for speed and promise, but it was not as accessable.
> Does anyone really expect Microsoft to continue development of Silverlight for Mac and/or Linux after Silverlight has killed Flash?
No, it's possibly expected Mono (or an offshoot of them) will do so.
MS may not be the most powerful system, but it has been an easy-to-play-with system. The command line extensions in 2000 and XP have gotten much more powerful. Type FOR
Before the $10-$20 books with the control creation edition of VB or VB6 everywhere, DOS came with random basics culminating in QBASIC. With the intro of dot net the free SDK came with a command line compiler for C#. This was a step back for MS, in that you have to download it and it's not as friendly, but with the power of a web page fewer people probably care.
Before the computer itself was the object to master, now it's the net, and most people don't care about making the computer do cool random things. MySpace, chat and gaming is enough.
> In case you don't know, COM is the mid-90's ugly-hack programming "standard" that Microsoft pushed for library (dll) programming.
I heard this was ugly for VC++, but it served a purpose. COM Components were easy as pie to play with in VB. Want to play with voice recognition? Download the sdk, a few lines of code had it talking. Databases practically flew together.
> Right now, Flash is a cross-platform delivery system for highly interactive content. (READ: unstable piece of shit that is not a real standard.)
This isn't the real threat. Flash represents a chance at doing what Java wanted to do. Java would make Windows irrelavent. While Flash is (at the moment) perhaps nowhere NEAR ready to do what Java wanted to do, it is also made BY ADOBE who won't let MS make a broken version to destroy write-once run-anywhere once Flash gets extended.
This is nipping a future threat in the bud.
For consumers, we'll see what wins.
Flash: expensive but "safe".
Silverlight: free but probably another IE / Outlook / Word (ie the whole thing is one GIANT security hole), if not in reality it will still have to fight this perception
IE beat out the competition in large part because it was pre-installed. (Not completely, but early versions of IE did stink... badly.) Silverlight is supposed to be programmable in Dot Net, right? This means anyone with a freely downloadable (and advertised as such) developmen kit from MS will be able to make Silverlight apps. The .net sdk is supposed to come with a command line c$ compiler iirc.
There may be an equivalent easy to use, free system for people to make their own flash files, but if so it won't have the same coverage as the dot net sdk used to on the MS web page.
> Chess is said to be "solvable".
Chess is belived solvable. When we crunch through every possible state of the board, we'll know. Quantum computing (as recently considered for solving the travelling salesman problem) may be able to handle this in a few years or decades. It could be that no matter what first move is made, there's a sequence of moves for the 2nd player to force the 1st into stalemate.
Does the possibility of a perfect checkers playing machine mean that there's no market for checkers games on PCs? There's still a market, although most people will want a flawed AI. (A deliberately flawed one) Ideally many people would want a system that simualtes how WE think of chess and checkers, but without the pre-filled database of moves. An AI that looked at the same sorts of patterns we looked at on the board (and if it wasn't quite as good supplemented with a small database) but filled the database as it watched us and how we played, but making the occasional error to keep it beatable would be ideal.
A well designed (to intentionally periodically fail, several times per game) AI that consitently played well and adjusted slowly to your style so that it improved your game by learning from you, but not quickly enough to deny you the ability to win would beat a human player.
If these chess or checkers programs could send each other databases over the net, randomly swapping with each other, you could occasionally play someone else's created opponent, based on how they play for a suitably difficult game against a less familiar move-set.
Adding capability in no way kills a well-designed system. In scorched Earth, Tank Wars, Gorilla or Worms, there's no excuse for the AI, with the ability to perfectly calculate everything, to ever miss. Scorched Earth and / or Tank Wars deliberately let you choose between a variety of intentionally flawed AI opponents.
"...the idea that Deep Blue has a mind is absurd. How can an object that wants nothing, fears nothing, enjoys nothing, needs nothing and cares about nothing have a mind?"
This is by design. A basic computer has 2 simple wants.
1: There is a register that tells the computer what the next instruction is. The computer wants to load that next instruction.
2: The computer wants to execute that next instruction.
(repeat)
Our neurons are the same way. One neuron doesn't want to remember how chedder smells. It wants to send a spike of current out when enough other neurons send it a signal. (There are many other variables, but that's irrelevant here)
1. If humans can be said to be intelligent, without invoking a soul to explain that intelligence. (ie Purely biological)
2. If we can understand and perfectly model the required biological processes.
3. We can completely model how we work, and the results of asking you, and the fake you the same question may always yield the same answer with carefully (probably impossibly so) controlled conditions.
Look up the difference between simulation and emulation.
Anything using a simple set of rules to imitate us may not be intelligent, but if we are intelligent and can be perfectly copied, the copy is intelligent too.
If the copy isn't intelligent because the CPU is blindly simulating biology instead of doing anything "smart" than neither are we because we aren't even smartly simulating life, we're an ACTUAL biologicla accident that happens to have been mistaken for intelligence.
The answer could be that the biology, chemical compounds, computers and simulated compounds are dumb, but that the sum of our parts is intelligent through an emergent effect, as is the sum of the virtual parts. Is the text of a Shakespeare play any less Shakespear'ish for being in a computer vs on a book, when both were typed by people born long after Shakespeare was dead? Intelligence isn't a thing, but a quality. Once we define what we consider that quality to be, whatever matches it, is.
> It can win at chess, but not because it wants to. It isn't happy when it wins or sad when it loses. What are its apres-match plans if it beats Kasparov?
After Quake and Halo with people who don't seem to know what manners are, I'll happily take the calm machine that's willing to play quietly.
> It doesn't care about chess or anything else. It plays the game for the same reason a calculator adds or a toaster toasts: because it is a machine designed for that purpose."
Fair enough. In this case all the computer cares about is operating the program. All the program cares about is taking the opponents king (and maybe a secondary goal of not losing its own)
That said, what is the purpose of a human?
Is our purpose to be intelligent? To survive? To worship? If our only purpose is to worship or survive, does that mean (since intelligence isn't our primary purpose) that we can't be? Intelligence is also a means to an end, making survival more likely (with the creation of shotguns) and worship more meaningful (compare the ego boost of a kid you impressed telling you so vs a tape player on endless loop that sings your praises... which you recorded.)
> I can imagine that a person might someday have a computer for a best friend. That will be sad--like having a dog for your best friend but even sadder.
If the computer is every bit as capable as a human friend, how is this sad? If anything the blind preference for a human over an equivalent machine seems racist.
"Computers might one day be capable of expressing themselves in vivid prose or fluent poetry, but unfortunately they will still be computers and have nothing to say."
This depends on whether the poetry is from a computer following basic rules blindly to create poetry, or whether there is a consciousness inside that feels emotions and wants to express itself.
> The gap between human and surrogate is perma
> My point is that every time some AI people actually manage to out-do humans, humans tend to re-define what intelligence is.
This is because we don't have a good definition for what intelligence is. Like ancient doctors who prescribed remedies for "fever" with no knowledge of what was causing it, we're mentioning syptoms / effects instead of the root cause / process.
The REAL reason we don't have an "intelligent" computer is that we can't put intelligence in explicit basic steps. Everything we do (get water) is so abstract and full of other steps (get glass, get to sink, learn sink interface, use sink) that we can't write the steps behind intelligence on a completely base level that can be understood and expressed in terms of how hardware currently works, or the capabilities of a Turing Complete language.
I have no doubt that if we can learn what intelligence is (we still don't know I believe) we can make a computer copy it.
In the past we'd have said a chess winning computer was intelligent, because only smart people can win at chess, right? Things like seeing Checkers reduced to a finite series of patterns means that anyone, followng a list can win at Checkers without understanding why. This doesn't mean the approach is unintelligent. In this case, the computer, following the series of lists is dumb, but there is definately intelligence behind the recognition of the lists and how to link them together. Given Checkers is simpler than Chess, this COULD be done with NOTHING but straight crunching positions, but intelligence sped it up.
Checkers is much easier to crunch (only 2 types of pieces, half the board used, fewer # of pieces, fewer ways of moving, left, right, jump left, jump right, add backwards for king, maybe have repeated jumps)
If we don't have a massive war or disaster before this happens, watch the riots as everyone and their brother is fired (robots possibly cheaper than outsourcing over time) by ultra-competitive businesses seeking to undercut each other. Who will own the robots? Business and the rich. Who needs poor / middle-class? Oops, no new goodies without a mass audience to make them affordable. Having robots for every possible thing could bankrupt someone quickly.
What would an all-work-by-robots society be like? Would we all have everything we want? Would each person get so many "good points" per month to use towards desired goods the robots can make and services they can perform? Perhaps there'd be one job, repairman, with these people getting more points.
Would robots be running government, or just be slave labor, capable enough to understand a job, but without the drive to become discontent with doing it?
Perhaps this is how lost civilizations disappear. Their mythologies were real, and once the priests thought they could get rid of the peasents, society collapsed in fighting between the laid off workers and the killed in the scuffle priesthood. The remaining workers died off when they couldn't farm the fields protected by the spirits even after the priest's death per whatever binding spell was on the demon.
I think either Star Trek or Doctor Who had an episode with two planets that had been at war so long no one remembered why. To minimize interruption to daily life it was handled by computers, and a lottery system like the draft occasionally called people up to step into a death chamber. The hero destroys the system forcing the humans to negotiage a truce.
Consider the song "99 Red Balloons" With increased capability comes the chance for massive disaster. ("I, Robot", "The Matrix") We're a long way off, but when we get there, we'd better be careful.
> Computers seem to be like idiot savants.
Of course they are. There's too much involved with human life, too many subtleties to get the entire base of human knowledge into a machine that can't "learn" directly by experience. A computer can collect data automatically, but has no idea what it means. Projects like Wikipedia, Everything2, Slashdot and Hitchikers help by consolidating knowledge in potentially useful ways, but it's still encoded data, like a book in ROT13 until a base system comes out with a large enough core of understanding of human life to understand the rest.
> They are good at logic puzzles, things like factoring large number or memorizing the phone books.
We don't program little incapable people, we make the equivalent of flowcharts (gross oversimplification of programming). Whether a computer follows the steps or a human, the results are the same. A computer can only do the things it has programs for, as a human can only speak langauges they have been exposed to. Since computers can't program themselves, computers will tend to be savants, doing a few things really well, until we move to a new system with an OS that can determine needs and automatically download and install software as needed to provide a seemless experiance. Kindof like Firefox automatically downloading updates as needed, but universal and completely unprompted. The bulk of random software on a Linux install CD is a step in the right direction, as is the growing bulk of Windows.
> What kind of intelligence do you need to understand the concepts of 'a party' or 'dressing up'?
You need to know what kind of party is being talked about,
Social semi-required (company), Personal-required (b-day), Pleasurable (costume), Political, Tea (The original flash mob?)?
You need a cost analysis of going vs not going. (Will not attending the management xmas party hurt your chances at promotion? Do you care if you really don't like that sort of social gathering and personally don't care for the idea of being management?) Some social people consider the invite to attend a party to be a good, and need no further prompting. Others consider it a neccasary evil. To a child birthday parties are the canonical parties, they tend to look at all parties as good things.
Once you decide to go, you need to understand how to dress for the party. For a b-day, casual. For business, formal. For random pleasurable, all the creativity behind sitting down to draw a random picture. Look at some pictures of anime conventions and note some of the oddifities, giant boxes of candy, a guy in an army uniform with a cardboard box on his head, someone with a generic shirt reading "henchman".
Understanding formal dress is a considerable endevor in itself. Understanding "business casual" is a struggle to the geek/nerd. (Innate definitions: casual is what I wear on weekends, formal is what I wear at work, what do they mean I can't wear jeans w/ holes in them and a naughty t-shirt on casual day? My company allows jeans, but not tennis shoes on casual day. Do they think we're all cowboy-wannabes?) What if you are a world-traveler? Do you need to adopt different conventions as you move around? Even between American families the differences in how events are handled varies greatly.
At the party, should you arrive at an approximate time or random time? How much are you allowed to drink? Is it ok to hang around with people you know, or are you expected to make cursory greetings and conversation with everyone? How much are you supposed to overlook from someone who has had a few too many?
For a costume party, what is / isn't appropriate for the group you're in? For a civil war re-enactment group, perhaps dressing like you're from KISS isn't appropriate. Regardless, you want to be clever, which requires knowledge of who will be there and what is likely to be selected by other participants.
This is all assuming you understand speech well enough to recognize the word "party"
Isn't the information itself supposed to be uncopyright-able, but the article is? How much a year to hire an official new re-phraser / in-his-own-words'er to read the article, re-write it (probably summarized) and mass-mail it within the company?
Of course, if you're dealing with the associtated press, or a similar organization to gather info, you're probably in a legal agreement with them that specifically allows you to pass around the AP stories within your company to those who need them. Someone has to look at them to choose article X over Y and to format it to fit around the ads.
Try the Cyberiad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad
Search for
Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal
and read from there.
I used to work for a dot-com'ish company best described as a e-mail mailing list for phone calls. If you had a little league game to cancel, one call blasted the info (and an ad) to all the parents, trying up to 3 times with a wait between attempts.
The company grew from home use (paid the bills) to phone spam (wildly profitable, at least at the time) racked up quite a bill while sending any message (within the owner's discretion) for a fee.
We had line item billing... UPS or FedEx delivered our bills, which came in 6 or 7 large boxes about the size that you used to get dot-matrix-rip-off-the-page-when-you're-done paper in. Given we were a small fish, I'd hate to see what bigger players got.
"Does anyone find it strange that no caveman decided to draw a HUGE monstrous death machine roaming the lands? I mean, not ONE SINGLE MENTION anywhere in all of human culture until we discovered their bones?"
"That's because they were scared shitless"
MAYNARD
He must have died while carving it.
BEDEVERE
Oh, come on.
BROTHER MAYNARD
That's what it says.
ARTHUR
But if he was dying, he wouldn't bother to carve "Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh".
He'd just say it.
BROTHER MAYNARD
It's down there carved in stone.
GALAHAD
Perhaps he was dictating.
ARTHUR
Shut up.
http://www.intriguing.com/mp/_scripts/mp-holy.asp
If they were moved to draw pictures of prey, I'm sure they'ed also draw pictures of predators, but they'ed wait until after the predator had passed (or carried off uncle Ug) before doing it.
You have to wonder though, was the art MEANT as art, or as a playbook. The drawing could indicate the initial layout of people surrounding the animal, then then perhaps the chief would trace patterns for each person with his finger to show people how to move rather than everyone moving is a straight line towards the animal.
Then again, if that's the case, there's no T. Rex or other predators if the chief didn't think the odds of getting them were enough to justify drawing them.
Buying virtual goods has existed and been taxed long before Everqust or Ultima Onlne. Al you may have in your hands for stock is a sheet of paper, but you get certain benefits, voting and dividends. This lasts as long as the company does.
Items on an MMORPG are an exception. While companies do fold, this is something they try to avoid. MMORPGs (while their owners might like to keep people on them for 20 years) are seen as temporary. Not only is the game itself temporary, will it last 5 years? 10? There's the issue that individual players may typically last 1 month, 1 year or 2 years before moving to the next or going back to offline games.
Online goods aren't viewed as a permanent investment. What do people typically do as they quit a game? Some let the items cease to exist as they logout. Some give them all away. Some sell the items for in-game gold and give the gold away, in-game. Often the items may go to in-game friends, but often they are just... gone.
Also, how would the mechanics of this work? Is it just the sale of goods? Is it the earning of money? YOU GOT 3 GOLD FROM THAT RABBIT, YOU OWE US 1 GOLD! Ideally, this would be handled by as someone else posted, given the government it's fee in the same in-game currency they're taxing. The company could then raise the gold each rabbit gives, still give the player 3 gold and send 1-2 gold to the government account.
What is the exchange rate? Ix 1 gold worth 1 dollar? For all the companies that forbid real-world gold sales, can you use the current exchange rate at gold-farming shops, given this price is not recognized (and in fact actively condemned) by the owners? Is this possibly the only real reasion MMORPGs really care about these operations, that they define an exchange rate, helping the government tax this?
When you log out, will the "gift" of your items to friends be taxed? Will there be a flat "death tax"? If you didn't have much gold, will you be required to earn some (or pony up actual cash) before being allowed to quit the game?
If there is an exchange rate, where and how is this defined? Will there be a standard, legally acceptable point of exchange that *has* to accept in-game currency for cash? Sounds like a chinese gold-farmer's dream come true. This could also hurt the gold-farming business. As they flood this mythical exchange place with gold, the exchange rate veers wildly until you hae to deal with millions of gold to rack up a debt of a few pennies.
This also allows for a new kind of harassment. Someone leaving the game could, TO BE MEAN, send all their gold at once to a character they didn't like. If this came all at once, and all tax had to be paid in cash as the income is recieved, wanted or not, you could force real life tax damages against others.
Any safeguards put in place to stabilize the gold/dollar exchange rate will probably make the taxes such that on-line gamers will quit in droves, again causing a loss of revanue. When this happens, the taxes will be raised to make up lost money, which will further knock people off these games until the loss is enough to make them fold.
What happens when people find a way to hack the server and change their inventory from having 50 gold to 10,000, then sell it? Are they just kicked out by the company, or are they charged with counterfeiting.?
When you sell an item on say, Final Fantasy 11, where ownership of all in-game items is claimed by Square-Enix. (What you work for, they "own", but they don't take it way from you) does this mean when you sell the item, that Square has to pay for what you did? Does this mean two bad apples at World of Warcraft can log onto Final Fantasy 11 and sell items back and forth repeatedly to crush Square out of business with insane taxes? Consider GeoCities' one-time (do they still have it?) claim of owning what you put on your page. Should you be able to get GeoCities people tossed in jail for "owning" child porn by uploading it? This tax begs for abuse. I can see the
> This is very true. Games can evoke emotion in the player. However, each and every person may have a different reaction.
The same is true of a movie. What makes a game different is that by participating, whatever effect you get from playing is magnified.
> See why this is troubling if you're playing as the hero? How is the hero supposed to grow and change, if YOU are the hero, and the game designers have no control over your thoughts and feelings?
The author does have control though. Most games are not generic do-anything-you-want MMORPGs, GTAs or Shenmues. Most games lead you through a specific series of events, so the stimulus, like a movie is controlled. If the player / movie-goer reacts differently... oh well, hopefully they'll like the gratuitous explosions / skin tossed in for those who miss the main point.
> Good stories involve characters who change and make tough moral decisions. That's sort of difficult when each time the game is played, the 'main character' i.e. you, has a different set of motivations and morals.
Admittedly that's not most games, but there are those that focus on morality. Some Ultimas, Fable, even Sonic Adventure if you play through as Amy and Gamma. (You see Gamma's growth and indecision, but you don't get to participate in the indecision)
> So either you make a boring hero with no motivations (the silent protagonist), or you give the hero a personality and risk having it clash with the priorities of the player.
For the most part I think players will tend to either fall in line, like watches in a movie, or be snarky. Possibly having the same line of thought as I did, pretty much every conversation in the recent Bard's Tale features snarky and nice options to let you play as you wish.
> Of course, you could always have the player NOT play the main character, so maybe there is yet a way to do it.
Would the player recognize what's going on? Was Zero the main hero in Mega Man X? He starts off stronger, rescuing your character, and is recognized by the manual as far stronger. The gameplay revolves around X, so X will be seen as the star. If the hero outclasses the played character, players will be jealous.
Another fun game for decisions was Guardian Heroes on the Saturn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_heroes
Choice actually has made some games much more than they'ed be without it.
One Ultima had a series of choices to determing what drove you, to create a character appropriate to your view of what was most important. Making the player decide what they truly valued in this manner was more powerful that most morals added to movies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_IV
The mechanics of how you play Mega Man X4 differ greatly based on which character you choose to play as.
Nothing is easier than to condemn the evildoer, nothing is harder than to understand him.
When you can play through as both the "good" and the "evil" character in some games (or the same character making different choices, ie Fable) you get a better picture. A story can be segmented to show both sides, as can a movie, but playing through really drives it home.
> From the perspective of storytelling, videogames are in fact a poor medium for doing it, for reasons Ebert describes.
True or false, storytelling isn't required to be art, or to be high art. I disagree. As a composite medium, a game can do EACH AND EVERY THING a novel, a painting and a movie can do. A game is a superset that includes the capabilities of each of these other three mediums. If a movie can be art, or high art and the maker of a game can limit the functionality of a game to that of a movie, the game can be every bit as much art as the movie. A game takes nothing FROM what a movie can do, but ADDS to it, so how can the potential be lesser? More Less.
>The physical interactivity with a game world that videogames provide add nothing to a story,
Again, I must disagree. Games have better emotional control of the audience. A series of action-ish segments climaxing in a difficult boss gives a player a feeling of exhaustion a movie can't match. How about the upswing in emotion when the harassed hero happens upon a cache of weapons / power-ups? The impact is magnified because it's not just Ash Ketchum who suddenly got a new psychic pokemon that can turn the tables, it's the player as well. A movie, being passive can't give the same feeling of triumph because the movie-goer is always on the outside looking in. Perhaps the best feeling is the "door-opening" feeling you get when Link stumbles across the hook-shot, feather or bombs, as a whole new world opens in front of you. Theoretically the story may be the same, experienced from afar (movie) or directly (game), but the immersion increases. How often are you surprised in movies? How often in games? Once you're brought into the character's mindset the story gains freshness and life. What's more, the gameplay allows a choice, which outside of DVDs and choose-your-own-adventure books is non-existant. A well balanced choice can bring the agony of a character's choice to life, but more importantly allows the choice which isn't even a possibility in the theater.
If a movie faces a viewer with a moral dilemma, who is right and who is wrong, does that make it not art because no side is chosen? Isn't it a higher artistic calling to explore both sides?
The biggest difference I see between chaff and "high art" is rarity. You can't stare at THE Mona Lisa *in person* from anywhere in the world. You can't watch a Shakespear play being run by Shakespear himself anymore. It's no coincidence that being "high art" often involves a dead author. I think what makes art "high art" is that it can be posessed, while Harry Potter, be it trash or treasure is in the grubby hands of, gasp, EVERYONE! I'm fairly sure there was a book or movie a while back about a famous painter who came back to life, only to see the value of his works plummet, wish I could remember what it was called.
What makes the Mona Lisa special? There have been many portraits with more detail, less detail, more vivid colors, more people depicted, less of a person depicted (only a face) etc. What makes THIS PAINTING more special than any other portrait? Does the reason behind why this painting was made matter? The value seems to come from a combination of scarcity, actual quality / effort put in and who the artist was. "Pouring yourself into" a work seems to make it higher art. The Sistene Chapel, painstakingly crafted will rightfully gather more praise than graphitti, which due to the legality tends to be (when it's actually OF something) more visual poetry than a full treatment of anything.
Art is not beauty, (and much that is ugly can be called art) but merely recording beauty can transform it (or the recreation in any part) to art. In the most basic sense what we call art IS art, BECAUSE we assign it that value. Art seems to be that which we deem note-worthy *for its own sake*, collected in such a form (written in a book, captured on a photo) to be passed on.
To an extent, games could be considered "not art" BECAUSE they are ma
So a company buys a product for x and can't sell it for x + $1, then tries to sell for $x or $x - $1 so it's not a 100% loss. They get sued. This discourages high-volume sales models. The more of any protected item you have, the more risk you have. It seems any contract with a minimum price should also have a date attached to that price. If I can't clear out at least 500 Gizmo 5000s in a month, ths is clearly a flop and you must buy these back for no less than 80% of what I payed for them, or the minimum price is dropped.
I wonder if this is in part pushed through to give a bit of negotiating power to some of the larger companies dealing with Wal-Mart or other large retailers who can usually dictate terms in a one-sided fashion. Will large retailers demand personal exemptions, or perhaps move to "renting" shelf space to suppliers. We're not buying the item from you, but we'll hold it in the store for you. If it sells we demand x% of the price, if it doesn't sell in a certain amount of time you have to claim it or we'll consider it abandoned trash and dispose of it as we see fit.
> This slide was led (again IMHO) by the Democratic leaders of the 80s & 90s, who insisted that crime and other problems were the failure of the system, the failure of the society - individuals were not to blame.
... They're the first, they won't be the last.
Did the Democratic party make this claim, or did self-help book authors sell what people wanted to hear and lawyers repeat, hoping to ride the wave of green?
> The outcome of this is an increase in frivolous lawsuits.
One way or another, I agree. There's far too many merit-less lawsuits, which again comes down to responsibility and ethics. I'd be ashamed to sue for massive sums I didn't earn, and should any word reach the press, be ashamed to be seen in public for fear of being known as the local lawsuit-jerk.
That said:
http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp
> Another problem seems to be an increase in "syndromes", where people blame hastily invented, acronymic illnesses or syndromes for the problems cause by poor parenting or minor behavioral deviations. "Oh, you'll have to make special allowances for my son.
Somehow, the term "road rage" apparently made people think "I'm not being a jack-*** endangering the lives of others for little to no personal gain (maybe 5 minutes less travel), I'm just reacting normally to all the REAL jerks on the road!" You either are or are not mentally fit to drive a car. If someone cutting in front of you makes you fly into a rage, leading to, tailgating them, shooting at them, bumping their car, trying to squeeze them off the road, speeding ahead and cutting them off etc, that means that you have all the maturity of a three year old and NO BUSINESS BEHIND THE WHEEL. No matter how much the other person deserves what they get, all the others you endanger by driving wildly to "get even" did nothing to deserve the risk you put them at. If you pull in front and slam your breaks, the pile-up involves far more than them.
> People do weird things, theres no need to create a disease for every little tick. I do not mean to discount or diminish actual mental health issues like ADHD, but hey folks, life is tough, get over it.
There may be something to ADHD, but what gets CALLED ADHD is (with how often you hear about it) either natural and normal (in which case the PROPER solution is learning to live with it, to overcome it) or else looking for an excuse to give you kid medication to "calm them down" so you can get back to ignoring them instead of being a parent.
> Sony is
Sony is not nearly the 1st. They may be the 1st major company to buy and distribute a root-kit, but they aren't even close to the 1st major company to commit major wrong-doing. There's a reason anti-trust laws were created. The theory behind America is that intelligent people consider more than cost, they deal with businesses based on cost, trust and quality. In the early days of our country, where most (all?) anything you needed was produced locally this was great. When corporations got large enough that they could crush out local business and those running them gained personal near immunity from serious legal consequences on anything, the companies knew they had the ring through your nose and no credible threats. If you couldn't crush the competition, price-fix. You don't get all the profit, but no nasty price-wars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust
This was inevitable. Many companies seek to grow. Greedy people tend to rise to the top in companies, since that's where the big profit is. (Not in being a grunt laborer) The people who best apply their personal greedy behavior to the company's interests, in an era of consmers who make no effort to be informed, lead their companies to victory. Once a company headed by the unethical
No... it's not OUR fault for seeking to compromise the security of countless PCs without telling the people what we're doing... it's THEIR fault for not selling us a good enough product to get away with it without people noticing!
If this tool worked PERFECTLY, it would be found. As soon as a pirate was unable to copy a disc, knowing that DRM existed they'ed post about it on the sorts of sites where people like to fight said DRM. Through trial and error, these people would go through all their disks, (using an OS that wasn't affected) and finding what caused their friend's Windows machine to grow a conscience. If there was a delayed activation, this would be harder to track, but would still be found.
To do anything at all besides their absolute best to sweep this under the rug and hope people will forget about this shows that Sony feels no shame in their actions.
If Sony has been particularly public in announcing this, it's like an extra bird shot in our general direction,
Having deliberately sought to gain unauthorized access to thousands / millions of PCs, steal CPU time and disk space (mainframes and supercomputers sell time, so computer time is a resource, and not one willingly yielded by the root-kitted consumers. PC time isnt as valuable, given a single PC can't do as much, but given that no price was negotiated with the people running the software, ridiculous sums could be demanded.)
Selling anything that runs unauthorized software unannounced on a person's PC is like randomly shipping someone a box of food from a rat-infested ship. There might be a nasty (and hard to control) surprise inside.
A thought on this root-kit. Did the kit install with autorun.inf (legitimately in terms of Windows machines) or by hacking the machine. If this installed via autorun.inf I'd think most pirates would be immune from having this turned off long ago. Since the autorun is THE proper way to install software from a CD and this is SUPPOSED to be able to be turned off, does bypassing this mean that any user who had this run can sue under the DMCA for bypassing explicit protections? Given that turning off autoplay is supposed to control copying (from disc to RAM) of (presumably copyrighted) software on the CD, it seems it could squeak into yet another charge.
Is this root-kit secure? Does it add a vulnerability to the system?
If Sony didn't really inspect and test this, how did it know the root-kit wasn't searching for bank info and passing it back to the original authors who meant to play Sony for fools, using them as a massive distribution method. Consider the damage this makes possible. Any CD with an autorun.inf could do all sorts of nasty things. Sony did not think they were dealing with a reputable company, reputable company sells tools for breaking and entering or electronic trespass. (Exception: locksmithing tools, which *supposed* to be sold only to licensed locksmiths)
If Sony is willing to deal with questionable companies to achieve their goals in questionable manners, should they be trusted in any court case? If Sony supports suing people for Napster-ish stealing of songs and any presence of an mp3 is seen as evidence of theft, (are you excused if you can show the CD it was ripped from and an MP3 player you listened to it on in court?) can we be assured that Sony wouldn't plant evidence to make lawsuits easier? Hiding a few MP3s (or just files with suspicious names) where the user can't find them to hurriedly delete them (given many sued aren't exactly computer experts) wouldn't be out of character. Sony could then claim the user was being sneaky, but not sneaky enough. By making somewhat randomized locations for hiding and hopping between courts, they could keep this going for a long time.
As I understand if, if you steal 5 songs from a Napsterish source, you are liable for far more in damages than even 5 full CDs worth. The offense is considered to be distribution, despite that the user's actual intention is flat theft (with the dist
Scientific consensus means that several scientists working on the same problem agree with each other. If there's no reasonable majority behind any one theory, you can safely consider the theory to be mostly conjecture.
The kicker on global warming is that we seem to have the majority of scientists saying one thing, while the majority of politicians say something else.
The scientists have nothing to gain/lose other than their reputations / employability. It won't look good to doggedly predict the climate will change year after year as it doesn't, or predict it won't as it does. Scientists don't work in a vacuum though. The researchers for tobacco repeatedly found no serious problems from smoking, so merely being a scientist doesn't give you a halo.
Politicians don't need to be right to keep being employed. Oftentimes, being on the right team is enough. (Republican vs Democrat, while the country swings, many regions do not.) All a politician needs to do is to keep their bosses happy. The bosses are the people who pay the politician on a per issue basis.
Scientists and politicians can both be bought. It could be argued that many scientists are willing to be bought because of trouble finding employment. It could be argued that politicians solicit being bought. That said, why would you buy a scientist or a politician for this issue?
First, if you were an individual, you wouldn't. You could try, but you (unless you were quite rich) wouldn't have the money to throw at buying a large number of people.
Buy a scientist / politician to tell the world global warming is real:
You would do this if your company would profit from increased environmental regulations. Companies that produce alternative fuels might do this. Also, if your business is inherently polluting, but you have much better emissions control than your competition, this would be a short-term advantage over them. How many companies are in one of these two positions? Did I miss situations here? How many startup alternative fuel companies can out lobby established fuel companies raking in obscene profits? Perhaps there's a secret lobby of corn farmers... even if so I doubt they could compete with oil's lobbying power.
Buy a scientist / politician to tell the world global warming is wrong:
Your business is inherently polluting, cleaning equipment and changing production methods is expensive. If you convince people there is no problem, there's no need to change.
Why would you buy a scientist?
If unbiased scientific data pointed one way, you almost have to buy a handful of scientists to disagree so you can claim that you didn't "know" the truth. Think cigarette companies. Once you have a handful of reports, you're good.
Why would you buy a politician?
Politicians make laws, which could force expensive changes. Paying off a few scientists isn't going to change the views of many people, especially if most scientists disagree. Buying a politician guarentees favorable results no matter what the public thinks. Consider how many people hate out-sourcing. Consider that both parties support it, despite the public's obvious hatred of the idea. (Also consider how few people actually make the effort to buy American)
An additional benefit to buying politicians. People are pack animals with a gang mentality. Once you choose your gangs (Yankees / Braves! Democrats / Republicans! Toilet seat up / down!) you tend to blindly follow them, no matter how divorced from reality they may get. (Will the Cubs do well? They finally did, but the loyalty well before that point was amazing) No matter how many scientists say X is bad, if Bush says X is good a disturbing number of people will follow Bush because they take politics as us vs them. If Bush is on one side, the other side is wrong. The same was true with Clinton. People selectively (and I'm convinced, unconciously) filter their perceptions to fit the view of the world they want to have. Political lines are sad
I thought extortion was "supposed" to be illegal. Even if someone wants to use bogus patents to sue you into oblivion, they are supposed to make the claim that they're really shocked and horrified that said patent was infringed. This sounds like an open declaration of intent to commit a crime.
Also, if reverse-engineering is illegal per the contract, wouldn't trying this be declaring yourself guilty of breach of contract? Or conspiracy to do so?
Also, what reserves of cash will this company draw on to survive in such a lawsuit against a company with "deep pockets"?
> Stealing is bad, except when you're stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, right? Obviously the group that is being stolen from (the rich) still think it's bad, but since the vast majority of people are not rich, historically it's been considered good.
In this case there's a little more going on. Rich vs Poor isn't any generic person A vs any generic person B. The poor will claim that what Robin Hood stole and gave to them was in fact already theirs, that the rich had stolen it from the poor with improper taxes, scams etc. They'll probably be justified in claiming this, since whoever ends up on top tends to abuse power. This will motivate the rich to increase their plundering (decreasing wages, increasing taxes or demands for labor from peasents) to make up for what was stolen from them.
Essentially in Robin Hood as it's meant to be taken, the "Rich (tm)" are a bunch of evil do-ers kicking the good/poor man down whenever he gets up, so they got what they deserved. This isn't meant as relative morals, but as "crime doesn't pay, even if you are in charge and give it another name".