If by "skill" they mean twitch-based skill, then any game that's too skill-based is going to drive me away.
Yeah, I can play those games, and I can do decently at some of them even on high difficulty settings sometimes (XB360 achievements sometimes prompt me to do this), but the effort-to-fun ratio just isn't there for me, and such games don't keep my interest for long.
But if "skill" means min-maxing, unraveling hidden game mechanics, optimizing progression paths, et cetera, then that's incredibly fun for me.
Basically, think of skill in three areas: strategic, tactical, and execution. I'm a big fan of things that require skill in strategy ("cut off the supply lines before attacking the base", "if a faction controls a resource you need, either build a good relationship with them or destroy them utterly"), and also of things that require skill in tactics ("fight ice-based foes with fire", "attack from stealth where possible", "don't get within arm's reach of the ogre"). But I do not want to be bothered with games that require too much skill in excecution (ie. reflexes, physical coordination, reaction time).
As far as I know (could be wrong), Firefox deliberately refuses to allow H.264 to be used on the basis that it's a patented format and therefore poisonous to the web.
Oh, ick, that's horrible. I've never seen hardware-accelerated Theora playback, but hardware-accelerated H.264 is all over the place.
From my perspective, this seems like Firefox making a boneheaded anti-consumer move that's going to have the practical real-world effect of handing video on the web over to Adobe and Microsoft, regardless of what they might intend. Thanks, Mozilla!
If the way it works out is that some sites work with Firefox, other sites work with every HTML5 browser other than Firefox, and none of them work with Internet Explorer... this isn't good. I fear that this level of fragmentation could keep Flash-based video completely entrenched, and I don't like that. It needs to "just work" across multiple browsers, and today it doesn't.
I'll install x264 and not care about the codec wars as long it "just works".
So far I haven't been able to get this to just work. If I point Safari at the YouTube HTML5 video demo, it all just works. But Firefox 3.5 doesn't have the x264 code, and fails silently, and I can find no mechanism to install that codec.
No, I don't believe in the whole "if you can be seen by a private citizen then it's the same thing." Once that citizen can play back an exact copy of the event in his/her head at a later time without any chance of fault, then I'll consider it the same damn thing.
Let me see if I've got this right.
You have a problem with this, as opposed to a private citizen witness, because you want to preserve the right to accuse a private citizen witness who is telling the truth of lying? You want to preserve the option of lying about someone else who's telling the truth?
If I'm getting you correctly, I think I understand your point of view, but do not personally respect it.
I'm not considering a BluRay player, but am still considering buying a HD-DVD player.
Why?
I'm not going to buy high-def movies on optical media. But if I can burn my own high-def movies to optical media, that's not useless to me, and it looks like HD-DVD might be a very inexpensive way to accommodate that, even today.
(But even for that, maybe I'll just stick with DivX on DVD-ROM. But HD-DVD still tempts me more than BluRay does.)
Also you never know, even if you think the conditions won't be met, maybe they are. Maybe it was more possible than you thought. Like say a user says "I need 50TB of storage on the central NAS." There's not that kind of space, you've got 10GB per user and that's all. Well you go and find out what it would cost to add 50TB to it. Say with the disks, shelf, backup tapes and drives and such it is $200,000. You then tell them "Ok to get that you'll need to get a requisition for $200,000 for us to buy the necessary hardware." Week later they show up with all the necessary stuff. Turns out their project is real important and the funds are there for stuff like that, even though you didn't think so.
Just to add to this: sometimes you don't know what it will cost. So, sometimes what you (cheerfully) say is, "I don't know what it would take to do what you're asking. For me to find out would delay these three projects and consume this much of my time. If it's worth all that, here's how you get my manager to approve the research.".
This way, if it isn't even worth your time to actually answer their real question, that fact is actually exposed.
This is false. There are, especially if you don't limit yourself to human beings (ie. you consider the whole ecosystem).
The article linked above may not mention them at all, and you are probably right that most of the people complaining about this are only angry about aesthetics, but there's a lot of biological activity in a lot of species that's impacted by light, and to say flat out that there are no health hazards to nighttime light, well, that's somewhat analogous to saying there's no such thing as thermal pollution either. I mean, there's no chemicals in warm water that aren't in cold water, and I can drink warm water just as well as cold water, so what's the problem?
(Mind you, I'm not saying we should shut off all the lights. I am saying it's a good idea to make sure there are vast areas where the natural light cycle is preserved, and that it's another factor we should take into account as we continue to recalculate the cost/benefit ratios involved in all our decisions.)
B) When is light 'pollution', and are we okay with (what I assume is) a situational definition of that word? Is light 'pollution' when it comes out of your headlights? Or only when Wal-Mart uses it to light their parking lot? Is there some measurable standard of 'enough' light, and the excess is 'pollution'? Or is it only 'pollution' when you want it to be dark? I'd honestly like to know...
Well, I'd probably call it "light polution" when it started to have measurable negative impact on the ecosystems that it's being poured into.
For example, do you know about the interactions between exposure to light and melatonin (not melanin) production? And how some animals (arguably including humans) use that to regulate their circadian rhytms? And how other animals use differences in that to measure the change of seasons, and undergo metabolic changes based on that measurement? About how that can impact fertility in some species?
Also, do you know about how light interacts with migration instincts? Do you know why Japanese fishermen light up the sea at night?
The "milky way at night" is an aesthetic thing, and I can see folks using it for PR purposes, and also to make what's going on into something people can directly relate to. But don't conclude from that that it's the only argument available, the only reason to think about "light polution". That might be natural to conclude at first, but it's like concluding that the only problem with littering is that styrofoam containers by the roadside are ugly to the eye, just because that's an argument you hear someone making.
1) This is impossible for Apple to block. If according to USB it's an iPod, how can Apple distinguish?
You didn't read all the links in the article.
It's not the case that it's an iPod according to USB. That's not what Palm did.
It's a USB device with an array of sub-devices. The mass storage portion claims to be an iPod mass storage device... but if you look at the whole tree, you can see that it's connected via a Palm device.
The Pre does not pretend to be an iPod instead of a Pre. It pretends to be a Pre with an iPod inside it. Even easier for Apple to block than I had thought, if they care at all.
Nor is it even unsafe, because the code to support older iPods is pretty stable and will not change over time - the older iPods will always be supported.
But iPods can get firmware updates.
The older iPods will always be supported. But do you know what happens if you plug in a first generation iPod right now and don't permit iTunes to update its firmware?
All Apple has to do is put out firmware updates for all the legacy iPods (which they really have done in the past) and require those upgrades for iTunes to continue working. Apple can block this if they want to.
Which is kinda stupid on Palm's part, IMO.
You can use iTunes with other MP3 players -- I have several that still work with it. If iTunes sees a driver for your music player, it'll work with it. Palm could have done whatever they wanted and distributed a driver for their device, or they could have emulated a non-Apple device for which iTunes already had a driver (eg. Diamond Rio), which Apple doesn't have the freedom to require firmware updates for. I can understand why they didn't do the former -- they want users to be able to just plug in the devices and have them work, rather than installing device drivers. But I think it was unnecessarily risky to spoof an Apple device.
Know what's going to happen if Apple can't stop people from selling clones with MacOS on them?
Maybe they'll leave the Intel platform entirely. Maybe they'll switch to ARM, maybe to some other chip.
Or, maybe they'll make sure MacOS requires some sort of "trusted computing platform" nonsense laced throughout the entire software stack, so that it's really impossible to run the software directly on a system without hardware support for DRM (which would mean running it on a VM that emulated that would be a clear case of circumvention as the DMCA discusses).
But they're not going to tolerate this, and if they can't stop it legally, they'll stop it by some other mechanism.
In fact, I encountered what you're describing in Word before I encountered it anywhere else.
I've been using Microsoft Word in one form or another since about 1985 (almost 25 years ago). The reason I bought it and used it back then (I was in high school) was that I could write my documents logically, in its outline mode, and with named styles that made sense, and then separately describe how those logical styles should appear. This let me keep a handle on large documents much more easily than other word processors of the day (WordStar et cetera), because while writing I'd just focus on logical structure, and the tools for manipulating outlines were pretty powerful.
Later, in college, I encountered Scribe, and later TeX and LaTeX, and loved them -- especially when combined with Emacs in outline-processing mode when properly configured for these tools (you've got to try that). But the first place I encountered what you're talking about in a rich and powerful way was actually in Word 2.0 for MS-DOS.
(I can remember writing long papers for my biochemistry and metaphysics classes with Word 2.0. I still have some of those word docs around here somewhere. I should see if modern versions of word can still open them.)
I mean, download it, copy it, ensure that it continues to survive even if YouTube is persuaded somehow to remove it. Help personally ensure that this is impossible to suppress by taking individual action right now to back it up.
My argument rests on people preferring paper to e-books, and I think they do. I sure do.
Some do. Some don't. I prefer e-books, and I have for years now. Just this last week, I bought an e-book edition of a book I already owned on paper, because I vastly prefer the e-book.
(I've never engaged in e-book piracy, and I expect that I never will. I've spent a lot of money with Baen -- they sell DRM-free ebooks in many formats. I've also spent pretty small amounts of money with publishers that encumber their ebooks with DRM. If I don't engage in piracy, why do I care about DRM? Because I've been at this for years, and every few years the device I use to read changes, and I don't expect that to stop, and DRM does interfere with migration from device to device. My own first steps in this direction were around 1995 or so, on Apple Newton, Sony MagicLink, Poqet, Compaq Aero, et cetera. I'm a gadget freak, yes.)
Now, an important question is, over time, will more people become like me? Peoples habits will change, peoples preferences will change, book reader hardware will change. At some point will it be paper that's the niche market, and if so, when? Best to be prepared for it, rather than assume it's a change that won't happen, or fight the change if it does start to happen.
What's interesting to me is, this is almost exactly how the WiiMote works so cheaply!
A lot of people assume that the Wii's sensor bar actually senses, and that it can tell where the WiiMote is. But that ain't so. The sensor bar is just a pair of IR emitters. The front of the WiiMote is an IR camera. The thing you hold in your hand is looking at the external IR sources and using those to try and figure out where it is, and then telling that to the base system, almost exactly as is described in this article.
It's like someone said "hey, let's do motion capture by gluing WiiMotes all over a person's body!".
So, I have been prescribed adderall, strattera, and various forms of methylphenidate HCl (ie. ritalin) for my ADD.
There is no question in my mind that when I'm on these things, I'm less creative. It's a trade-off I'm aware of, and willing to make sometimes.
And that's the thing that makes this great -- I can choose to make the trade-off sometimes. I've discussed this with my doctor, and he's cool with it too.
If I've got a day full of tasks where I need to focus on things I would naturally have a hard time focusing on, but do not need as much creativity, I take the meds. If I've got a day devoid of such tasks, but where I need to brainstorm, I skip the meds that day.
(It's even better with the ritalin, when you're not taking a time-release form of it, because you can make these decisions based on four-hour blocks instead of whole days. But myself, I use a time-release form, because there were too many times when I'd forget to take the extra doses throughout the day, whether I intended to or not.)
In what sense is it daring? Seriously, how many potential buyers would really care about the game's view of objectivism?
Actually, that's exactly the sense in which it's daring.
It's a video game. How many potential buyers expect it to include any kind of analysis of philosophical systems at all? The target market for video games isn't exactly known for having in-depth discussions regarding the differences between the epistemology of Hume and Descartes. So, regardless of which philosophy is under analysis, whether a pro or con stance is taken, what the outcome is, et cetera, the framework of exploring a philosophy via a video game is itself somewhat daring.
The original MacOS didn't have any app-level multitasking, not even "cooperative" multitasking. The first hints of being able to run more than one app at once came with the "Switcher" program by Andy Hertzfeld in 1985, which let you run... two. You could install MultiFinder in MacOS 5, and it was bundled with MacOS 6.
Now, back in the "one or few apps" days on the Macintosh, there was a need for little widget-like mini-apps that could be run without exiting the current app. The calculator was one, and an alarm clock was another one. They were called "desk accessories". I would bet that Windows 7 includes something like this, and that the app limit doesn't apply to them. And as a result, I would bet developers start cramming more and more functionality into them, exactly as occurred under MacOS in the 80s.
When they talk about creating human/animal hybrids, or implanting a human embryo in an animal's womb... you've seen the South Park episode about the elephant and the pig, right?
Technically all retail games have the same restriction.
That's as may be, although that's not as clear as some folks think -- some of the restrictions in an EULA may not be as enforceable in all jurisdictions as the publisher might like. But let's take for granted for the moment that this one really is legally binding.
If that restriction isn't managed, then there isn't a rights management system in use. The terms of an EULA can be renegotiated, or fought in court. If DRM is involved, actual real legal freedoms can be taken away without the standard recourse that was taken for granted when the legal "ecosystem" enabled those restrictions. It puts too much power in the hands of the content provider, and not enough in the hands of the legal system, where that kind of power more correctly belongs (IMO).
And that's assuming there's never any glitches, and the DRM servers are never turned off.
I don't have one single piece of pirated MP3 or video content, or software. Anywhere. I'm pretty anal about this, and have been for many years now. I won't even mail a VHS tape to someone in a different viewing area. None the less, I prefer to avoid DRM where I reasonably can. The DRM in iTunes doesn't actually interfere with me in practice, but I still pay to upgrade to the DRM-free versions of the tracks as Apple makes them available.
Seems I was either partially or completely incorrect on a few points.
Some level of something they're referring to as MMS is going to be supported on some devices. They're claiming there are hardware requirements that prevent it from working at all on the first generation iPhone. They also gave an example of one of the things you could send being Google Map coordinates. So they're setting compatibility expectations very low. Maybe it's only 3G-iPhone-to-3G-iPhone-over-the-same-network? Have to see how it plays out.
There's also some kind of tethering support in there.
It's interesting. Still sorting through the announcement, trying to figure out implications. I'll be grabbing that beta SDK relatively soon, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
If by "skill" they mean twitch-based skill, then any game that's too skill-based is going to drive me away.
Yeah, I can play those games, and I can do decently at some of them even on high difficulty settings sometimes (XB360 achievements sometimes prompt me to do this), but the effort-to-fun ratio just isn't there for me, and such games don't keep my interest for long.
But if "skill" means min-maxing, unraveling hidden game mechanics, optimizing progression paths, et cetera, then that's incredibly fun for me.
Basically, think of skill in three areas: strategic, tactical, and execution. I'm a big fan of things that require skill in strategy ("cut off the supply lines before attacking the base", "if a faction controls a resource you need, either build a good relationship with them or destroy them utterly"), and also of things that require skill in tactics ("fight ice-based foes with fire", "attack from stealth where possible", "don't get within arm's reach of the ogre"). But I do not want to be bothered with games that require too much skill in excecution (ie. reflexes, physical coordination, reaction time).
As far as I know (could be wrong), Firefox deliberately refuses to allow H.264 to be used on the basis that it's a patented format and therefore poisonous to the web.
Oh, ick, that's horrible. I've never seen hardware-accelerated Theora playback, but hardware-accelerated H.264 is all over the place.
From my perspective, this seems like Firefox making a boneheaded anti-consumer move that's going to have the practical real-world effect of handing video on the web over to Adobe and Microsoft, regardless of what they might intend. Thanks, Mozilla!
I also couldn't get Youtube's demo to work, but give Dailymotion's a try:
http://www.dailymotion.com/openvideodemo
I can't get that to work in anything but Firefox!
If the way it works out is that some sites work with Firefox, other sites work with every HTML5 browser other than Firefox, and none of them work with Internet Explorer... this isn't good. I fear that this level of fragmentation could keep Flash-based video completely entrenched, and I don't like that. It needs to "just work" across multiple browsers, and today it doesn't.
I'll install x264 and not care about the codec wars as long it "just works".
So far I haven't been able to get this to just work. If I point Safari at the YouTube HTML5 video demo, it all just works. But Firefox 3.5 doesn't have the x264 code, and fails silently, and I can find no mechanism to install that codec.
So, any pointers?
No, I don't believe in the whole "if you can be seen by a private citizen then it's the same thing." Once that citizen can play back an exact copy of the event in his/her head at a later time without any chance of fault, then I'll consider it the same damn thing.
Let me see if I've got this right.
You have a problem with this, as opposed to a private citizen witness, because you want to preserve the right to accuse a private citizen witness who is telling the truth of lying? You want to preserve the option of lying about someone else who's telling the truth?
If I'm getting you correctly, I think I understand your point of view, but do not personally respect it.
I'm not considering a BluRay player, but am still considering buying a HD-DVD player.
Why?
I'm not going to buy high-def movies on optical media. But if I can burn my own high-def movies to optical media, that's not useless to me, and it looks like HD-DVD might be a very inexpensive way to accommodate that, even today.
(But even for that, maybe I'll just stick with DivX on DVD-ROM. But HD-DVD still tempts me more than BluRay does.)
Also you never know, even if you think the conditions won't be met, maybe they are. Maybe it was more possible than you thought. Like say a user says "I need 50TB of storage on the central NAS." There's not that kind of space, you've got 10GB per user and that's all. Well you go and find out what it would cost to add 50TB to it. Say with the disks, shelf, backup tapes and drives and such it is $200,000. You then tell them "Ok to get that you'll need to get a requisition for $200,000 for us to buy the necessary hardware." Week later they show up with all the necessary stuff. Turns out their project is real important and the funds are there for stuff like that, even though you didn't think so.
Just to add to this: sometimes you don't know what it will cost. So, sometimes what you (cheerfully) say is, "I don't know what it would take to do what you're asking. For me to find out would delay these three projects and consume this much of my time. If it's worth all that, here's how you get my manager to approve the research.".
This way, if it isn't even worth your time to actually answer their real question, that fact is actually exposed.
There are no health hazards to nighttime light.
This is false. There are, especially if you don't limit yourself to human beings (ie. you consider the whole ecosystem).
The article linked above may not mention them at all, and you are probably right that most of the people complaining about this are only angry about aesthetics, but there's a lot of biological activity in a lot of species that's impacted by light, and to say flat out that there are no health hazards to nighttime light, well, that's somewhat analogous to saying there's no such thing as thermal pollution either. I mean, there's no chemicals in warm water that aren't in cold water, and I can drink warm water just as well as cold water, so what's the problem?
(Mind you, I'm not saying we should shut off all the lights. I am saying it's a good idea to make sure there are vast areas where the natural light cycle is preserved, and that it's another factor we should take into account as we continue to recalculate the cost/benefit ratios involved in all our decisions.)
B) When is light 'pollution', and are we okay with (what I assume is) a situational definition of that word? Is light 'pollution' when it comes out of your headlights? Or only when Wal-Mart uses it to light their parking lot? Is there some measurable standard of 'enough' light, and the excess is 'pollution'? Or is it only 'pollution' when you want it to be dark? I'd honestly like to know...
Well, I'd probably call it "light polution" when it started to have measurable negative impact on the ecosystems that it's being poured into.
For example, do you know about the interactions between exposure to light and melatonin (not melanin) production? And how some animals (arguably including humans) use that to regulate their circadian rhytms? And how other animals use differences in that to measure the change of seasons, and undergo metabolic changes based on that measurement? About how that can impact fertility in some species?
Also, do you know about how light interacts with migration instincts? Do you know why Japanese fishermen light up the sea at night?
The "milky way at night" is an aesthetic thing, and I can see folks using it for PR purposes, and also to make what's going on into something people can directly relate to. But don't conclude from that that it's the only argument available, the only reason to think about "light polution". That might be natural to conclude at first, but it's like concluding that the only problem with littering is that styrofoam containers by the roadside are ugly to the eye, just because that's an argument you hear someone making.
You didn't read all the links in the article.
It's not the case that it's an iPod according to USB. That's not what Palm did.
It's a USB device with an array of sub-devices. The mass storage portion claims to be an iPod mass storage device... but if you look at the whole tree, you can see that it's connected via a Palm device.
The Pre does not pretend to be an iPod instead of a Pre. It pretends to be a Pre with an iPod inside it. Even easier for Apple to block than I had thought, if they care at all.
But iPods can get firmware updates.
The older iPods will always be supported. But do you know what happens if you plug in a first generation iPod right now and don't permit iTunes to update its firmware?
All Apple has to do is put out firmware updates for all the legacy iPods (which they really have done in the past) and require those upgrades for iTunes to continue working. Apple can block this if they want to.
Which is kinda stupid on Palm's part, IMO.
You can use iTunes with other MP3 players -- I have several that still work with it. If iTunes sees a driver for your music player, it'll work with it. Palm could have done whatever they wanted and distributed a driver for their device, or they could have emulated a non-Apple device for which iTunes already had a driver (eg. Diamond Rio), which Apple doesn't have the freedom to require firmware updates for. I can understand why they didn't do the former -- they want users to be able to just plug in the devices and have them work, rather than installing device drivers. But I think it was unnecessarily risky to spoof an Apple device.
Know what's going to happen if Apple can't stop people from selling clones with MacOS on them?
Maybe they'll leave the Intel platform entirely. Maybe they'll switch to ARM, maybe to some other chip.
Or, maybe they'll make sure MacOS requires some sort of "trusted computing platform" nonsense laced throughout the entire software stack, so that it's really impossible to run the software directly on a system without hardware support for DRM (which would mean running it on a VM that emulated that would be a clear case of circumvention as the DMCA discusses).
But they're not going to tolerate this, and if they can't stop it legally, they'll stop it by some other mechanism.
In fact, I encountered what you're describing in Word before I encountered it anywhere else.
I've been using Microsoft Word in one form or another since about 1985 (almost 25 years ago). The reason I bought it and used it back then (I was in high school) was that I could write my documents logically, in its outline mode, and with named styles that made sense, and then separately describe how those logical styles should appear. This let me keep a handle on large documents much more easily than other word processors of the day (WordStar et cetera), because while writing I'd just focus on logical structure, and the tools for manipulating outlines were pretty powerful.
Later, in college, I encountered Scribe, and later TeX and LaTeX, and loved them -- especially when combined with Emacs in outline-processing mode when properly configured for these tools (you've got to try that). But the first place I encountered what you're talking about in a rich and powerful way was actually in Word 2.0 for MS-DOS.
(I can remember writing long papers for my biochemistry and metaphysics classes with Word 2.0. I still have some of those word docs around here somewhere. I should see if modern versions of word can still open them.)
By which I do not mean remove it from YouTube.
I mean, download it, copy it, ensure that it continues to survive even if YouTube is persuaded somehow to remove it. Help personally ensure that this is impossible to suppress by taking individual action right now to back it up.
My argument rests on people preferring paper to e-books, and I think they do. I sure do.
Some do. Some don't. I prefer e-books, and I have for years now. Just this last week, I bought an e-book edition of a book I already owned on paper, because I vastly prefer the e-book.
(I've never engaged in e-book piracy, and I expect that I never will. I've spent a lot of money with Baen -- they sell DRM-free ebooks in many formats. I've also spent pretty small amounts of money with publishers that encumber their ebooks with DRM. If I don't engage in piracy, why do I care about DRM? Because I've been at this for years, and every few years the device I use to read changes, and I don't expect that to stop, and DRM does interfere with migration from device to device. My own first steps in this direction were around 1995 or so, on Apple Newton, Sony MagicLink, Poqet, Compaq Aero, et cetera. I'm a gadget freak, yes.)
Now, an important question is, over time, will more people become like me? Peoples habits will change, peoples preferences will change, book reader hardware will change. At some point will it be paper that's the niche market, and if so, when? Best to be prepared for it, rather than assume it's a change that won't happen, or fight the change if it does start to happen.
Well over 60%
Well over 40%.
If the equivalent numbers are "over 6%" and "over 4%" for BitTorrent, I'd be pretty surprised.
Is BitTorrent in and of itself perfectly legal?
Sure.
But what percentage of BitTorrent traffic do you think is non-infringing?
And what percentage of BitTorrent users have never used it for any infringing purpose?
What's interesting to me is, this is almost exactly how the WiiMote works so cheaply!
A lot of people assume that the Wii's sensor bar actually senses, and that it can tell where the WiiMote is. But that ain't so. The sensor bar is just a pair of IR emitters. The front of the WiiMote is an IR camera. The thing you hold in your hand is looking at the external IR sources and using those to try and figure out where it is, and then telling that to the base system, almost exactly as is described in this article.
It's like someone said "hey, let's do motion capture by gluing WiiMotes all over a person's body!".
So, I have been prescribed adderall, strattera, and various forms of methylphenidate HCl (ie. ritalin) for my ADD.
There is no question in my mind that when I'm on these things, I'm less creative. It's a trade-off I'm aware of, and willing to make sometimes.
And that's the thing that makes this great -- I can choose to make the trade-off sometimes. I've discussed this with my doctor, and he's cool with it too.
If I've got a day full of tasks where I need to focus on things I would naturally have a hard time focusing on, but do not need as much creativity, I take the meds. If I've got a day devoid of such tasks, but where I need to brainstorm, I skip the meds that day.
(It's even better with the ritalin, when you're not taking a time-release form of it, because you can make these decisions based on four-hour blocks instead of whole days. But myself, I use a time-release form, because there were too many times when I'd forget to take the extra doses throughout the day, whether I intended to or not.)
Actually, that's exactly the sense in which it's daring.
It's a video game. How many potential buyers expect it to include any kind of analysis of philosophical systems at all? The target market for video games isn't exactly known for having in-depth discussions regarding the differences between the epistemology of Hume and Descartes. So, regardless of which philosophy is under analysis, whether a pro or con stance is taken, what the outcome is, et cetera, the framework of exploring a philosophy via a video game is itself somewhat daring.
You know MacOS started out that way, right?
The original MacOS didn't have any app-level multitasking, not even "cooperative" multitasking. The first hints of being able to run more than one app at once came with the "Switcher" program by Andy Hertzfeld in 1985, which let you run... two. You could install MultiFinder in MacOS 5, and it was bundled with MacOS 6.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiFinder
Now, back in the "one or few apps" days on the Macintosh, there was a need for little widget-like mini-apps that could be run without exiting the current app. The calculator was one, and an alarm clock was another one. They were called "desk accessories". I would bet that Windows 7 includes something like this, and that the app limit doesn't apply to them. And as a result, I would bet developers start cramming more and more functionality into them, exactly as occurred under MacOS in the 80s.
Seriously, remember this is Louisiana.
When they talk about creating human/animal hybrids, or implanting a human embryo in an animal's womb... you've seen the South Park episode about the elephant and the pig, right?
Technically all retail games have the same restriction.
That's as may be, although that's not as clear as some folks think -- some of the restrictions in an EULA may not be as enforceable in all jurisdictions as the publisher might like. But let's take for granted for the moment that this one really is legally binding.
If that restriction isn't managed, then there isn't a rights management system in use. The terms of an EULA can be renegotiated, or fought in court. If DRM is involved, actual real legal freedoms can be taken away without the standard recourse that was taken for granted when the legal "ecosystem" enabled those restrictions. It puts too much power in the hands of the content provider, and not enough in the hands of the legal system, where that kind of power more correctly belongs (IMO).
And that's assuming there's never any glitches, and the DRM servers are never turned off.
I don't have one single piece of pirated MP3 or video content, or software. Anywhere. I'm pretty anal about this, and have been for many years now. I won't even mail a VHS tape to someone in a different viewing area. None the less, I prefer to avoid DRM where I reasonably can. The DRM in iTunes doesn't actually interfere with me in practice, but I still pay to upgrade to the DRM-free versions of the tracks as Apple makes them available.
Just in case it's not clear: restricting how many copies can be played on Steam is restricting what you can do with your copy.
Now, I agree that it's a reasonable restriction, sure. But please don't pretend that it's not a restriction.
WELL!
Seems I was either partially or completely incorrect on a few points.
Some level of something they're referring to as MMS is going to be supported on some devices. They're claiming there are hardware requirements that prevent it from working at all on the first generation iPhone. They also gave an example of one of the things you could send being Google Map coordinates. So they're setting compatibility expectations very low. Maybe it's only 3G-iPhone-to-3G-iPhone-over-the-same-network? Have to see how it plays out.
There's also some kind of tethering support in there.
It's interesting. Still sorting through the announcement, trying to figure out implications. I'll be grabbing that beta SDK relatively soon, I think.