Honestly, in my oppinion, the gameplay is fun (though it's gone downhill since 7 IMO)
Everybody always seems to say "the gameplay has gone downhill since X", but nobody ever agrees on the value of X. My observation? Everybody who says that has grown older since they first played X. That probably has more to do with it. This effect is not specific to Final Fantasy, you see it happening everywhere.
I've had drivers pass me on the shoulder where there is no shoulder (I literally mean a two lane road with big, scary ditches on the sides) because they couldn't stand to see a gap in front of me. I've had drivers pull out of line, swerve in front of me, then watch their mirror as I idled up from behind and slam on the brakes as I approached, attempting to cause an accident that would be my fault.
Wow, US drivers must be insane. Here in the UK, if anybody tried things like that that and the police spotted them, or several witnesses reported them, they would be banned from driving for life and probably sent to jail. Deliberate dangerous driving (which both those things are) is a crime on a par with manslaughter (since that's what it usually results in, if those people aren't kept off the roads).
People are idiots. No wonder researchers tend to look for technological solutions to human problems.
The solution is to remember that driving a large dangerous weapon is a privilege, not a right. If they can't or won't stop being idiots, then they can be idiots on bicycles.
Extradition treaties usually require that a crime be committed in another country, and that the crime committed is also a crime in your country, and that the crime be reasonably serious, and that there is some reasonable evidence that you did it.
The new extradition treaties that the US has been pushing through (like the one with Australia) don't do any of these things.
You get shipped to the US for trial.
They don't do that either. You only have a right to a trial if you're a US citizen standing on US soil - if you're foreign, or if they ship you to a US jail not located within the US, then you'll only get a trial if they want to give you one.
Actually, extradition proceedings typically involve agreements that specify exactly how the person will be treated, and generally speaking the right to a fair trial, a guarantee that he will not be subject to cruel and unusual punishment and similar items are part of that agreement. They don't just throw the person on a plane and hope for the best. It's a very complex, expensive, time-consuming process.
This statement is entirely correct. This is the typical process for extradition. However, the US is not typical and doesn't do any of this.
Frankly, I'm glad the bloke was extradited and will be tried by a court in the country of the injured party.
Foreign citizens extradited to the US do not have the right to a trial. He may get one, but there's no guarantee of it. You don't know that it will happen. They can simply lock him up and throw away the key, if they want to.
Now, the guy violated copyright law - Australian copyright law, as mentioned in TFA,
Hrngh. No.
The guy has been accused of violating copyright law by certain people in the US. He has not been convicted. The question of his guilt has not even been examined by a court. He has been extradited not for violating copyright law, but for being accused of violating copyright law.
If somebody in the US accused you of violating copyright law, you can be extradited too. It does not matter whether you did it. The US extradition treaties do not operate on the principle of "innocent until proven guilty", they operate on the principle of "everybody is guilty" - proof is not required, requested, or considered. A bureaucrat signs a form and you get shipped into a US jail. (At their option, this can be a US jail that isn't located on US soil, like Gitmo, so they aren't obliged to ever examine whether you are guilty of anything)
What if there was an organized crime boss, living in the US, ordering the deaths of Australian citizens? Would you want the US to extradite him to face justice or would you want them to say "Well he wasn't committing any crimes here, and since he's not in Australia you can't have him, sorry."
Quite aside from the question of what you want, the US does not permit extradition requests from foreign countries (although they may deport non-citizens at the request of their home country). Extradition with the US is entirely one-sided. They expect everybody else to do it for them, but they refuse to reciprocate. So your example isn't really relevant.
Yes, this is stupid and wrong, and yes, the Australian government got a lot of bad press for signing that treaty. They don't appear to care.
No civilized country would ever extradite their own citizens. I'm pretty sure the US wouldn't.
The US won't extradite anybody - they only bring people in, they don't send them out. It's got nothing to do with being civilised, it's about being a bully.
But why do so many Slashdotters seem to be in favor of ripping off artists, programmers, writers, directors, and so forth?
I for one am firmly opposed to the ripping off of artists, programmers, writers, directors, and so forth. And the best way to end that is to download everything you can get off the internet, because it won't stop until the RIAA and MPAA are out of business. Anything you can do that hurts their bottom line is ultimately in the best interests of the people who produce the stuff you're downloading - and it can't possibly make their lives any worse, most of them are already in debt up to their eyeballs (thanks to the fraudulent accounting practices of the media industry). I'm normally averse to blanket good/evil generalisations - but really, these cartels do nothing good for anybody but themselves.
Buy it if it's independent. Copy it if it's *AA. It's the right thing to do. They've got to be stopped. The governments have failed, and the courts have failed. It falls to us now, and there is only one way to kill a corporation.
This isn't just the Bush administration. If you vote for either of the Big Two, the person you voted for has been bought and paid for by the MAFIAA, and they are in full support of sending the copyright Gestapo after law-breakers worldwide.
This is very true - however, the Bush administration is notable in their "every other country must do what we say" attitude. Even for the US, their arrogance is astounding. Most past administrations have been rather less willing to spend what little diplomatic advantages they have on matters like this.
I cannot imagine why they think that issuing public orders to China is going to get them anything other than a lot of very pissed off Chinese. This little stunt has probably ensured that China will not be doing anything about copyright complaints from US corporations, just so that the Chinese leaders can show they don't take orders from the US.
So while the source code itself wasn't theifed, it was the secrecy that was essentially stolen. That is, it was a finite aspect of the source code that was solely limited to the developer, but due to the actions of these former employees, the developer no longer possesses that secrecy. There is an actual deprivation taking place.
So if I were to put a brick through your window, depriving you of that window, this is theft? Pretty bizarre definition...
Can't we just agree to say "illegally copied" across the board?
"Illegal" is a decision for a judge to make, after examining all the facts - we are neither qualified nor in possession of those facts, so we cannot say it was definitely illegal. Making a factual statement, rather than a prejudiced one, requires you say it was merely "copied" - or, if you insist on stating all the details, "copied without the explicit permission of the company".
It is important to realise that not everything is illegal just because it involves software and a company does not like it.
There is no satisfactory way around this basic fact.
There are many, mostly based on one-way hash functions or public-key cryptography. It's quite easy when you realise that the voting authority must already be trusted (or else they could simply lift fingerprints from the ballot papers and identify them that way) - you're only trying to arrange anonymity against third parties, the voting authority is assumed to know who you are.
The problem is that all of the known methods require less stupid voters. If we could disenfranchise the stupid, we would not have a problem.
You cannot make online voting both secure and anonymous.
Actually you can, but there are no known methods which do not require intelligent voters who can follow non-trivial instructions. If you can assume that all your voters have passed math at the GCSE level or higher, and can follow the operating instructions for a VCR, it's easy.
Rhenium is very expensive. Pure boron isn't cheap either. This stuff could end up costing as much as diamond.
Almost anything useful costs more than diamond. Of the materials used in industry today, diamond falls firmly into the "common and cheap" section. Subject anything with carbon in it to the temperatures and pressures common in geology, and you end up with diamond in it somewhere.
Those prices you see in jewellers? They are on the order of a thousand times larger than the actual value of diamond. Some of that pays for the expertise to cut diamonds into decorative shapes (which isn't easy), most of it is just an insanely huge markup.
We don't have a need for cheaper alternatives to diamond - it would be like searching for a cheaper alternative to sea water. Most likely the whole diamond angle is just a bogus press spin on the story.
If no one is consulting these patent records for how to solve a problem, we're not achieving a lot of the intended goal.
The requirement to submit proper documentation for how to solve a problem has been waived by all the major patent offices, in favour of a vague description of some parts of a possible method to solve something that might be a problem. You cannot learn how to solve a problem by consulting modern patent records, even if you wanted to.
Yes, this is pure corruption and abuse of the original concept for the personal gain of lawyers and patent office executives. What are you going to do about it?
Why would anybody bother coming up with new ideas if anybody else could just copy them the next day?
I can only presume from this statement that you have never had a new idea, so here's a description of what it's like, to show how silly this question is:
You don't "bother" to come up with an idea. You can't do it deliberately. You can't even try to do it. It just happens - one moment you're doing something, and the next moment you have an idea. There is no effort involved, and the process cannot be controlled. We don't even know what causes them, or if anything you can do might cause them to come more often.
People will continue to come up with ideas at precisely the same rate, and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. The patent system has absolutely no impact on this.
You get a patent for (a) having an idea, and then (b) paying a lawyer. Since nothing can be done to control ideas, the only thing that patents encourage is lawyers. Don't confuse patents with the development of an idea into a product - that has got nothing to do with it. You get the patent merely for having the idea; most patented ideas are never developed.
And therein lies the gaping flaw in the concept of patents. They don't work. If you got a patent for developing ideas into products, then they would work - but that is not what patents are. Patents encourage people with ideas to sit on them and not develop them, in the hope that somebody else will develop the idea for them and then fork over the money.
Stop being the employers who provide the awful working conditions. The worst offenders aren't the locals trying to make something on the cheap, it's the international megacorps who have an entire staff dedicated to grinding out every last penny of "unnecessary" cost.
I don't happen to agree that, just because I worked to obtain or discover something, every other person in the world who didn't suddenly gets an ownership right to it.
So you deny both positions - that the RIAA is entitled to some 'ownership' rights over things obtained or discovered by other people, and that other random individuals are entitled to them. That is consistent with what I said.
Either both the RIAA and their targets are morally reprehensible, or neither is. That's the whole point. It doesn't matter which way you happen to pick. The important thing is that you can't have one without the other.
It's close enough to theft for practical purposes. The essence of theft is depriving the legal owner of the benefits of possessing the item.
Which is why "property is theft" - any private property is depriving all other people of the benefits of the item in question. This is particularly true for items with a near-zero cost of reproduction. "Intellectual property" is stealing from the public.
The essential thing about this concept is not its objective validity, but that it is equally as valid as the RIAA's position. Both of them are kinda weak, but you can't reasonably admit one without admitting the possibility of the other.
Have you ever visited south east asia? Have you ever experienced the smog cloud that exists there from the constant burning of the rain forests in places like Java? Have you visited East Africa recently where they are experiencing long term droughts? Have you visited a place that once used to be a fertile forest and is now a man made desert devoid of life?
These are all real problems, and they're happening in far more places than just these. And you know what? Not one of them has got a damn thing to do with climate change. We're all fussing over something that might or might not happen in a hundred years, and putting all this energy into campaigning for more fuss to be made over it - and not doing anything about any of these real problems.
Take a look at the number of Islands that have *disappeared* due to rising water levels.
There are no recorded instances of islands disappearing due to water level changes caused by climate change (at least in modern times, we probably know about it happening a few times in the prehistoric eras). The water level change caused by climate change in the past couple of centuries is a few centimetres - less than the normal tidal variation. It is entirely insignificant, and even the most sky-is-falling projections don't say it will become significant for at least another century. Seas are large, and it takes immense amounts of time for them to change size.
Islands appear and disappear all the time, always have, and always will do so, because the surface of the planet is constantly changing shape due to tectonic plate activity. This affects both the height of land and the depth of seas far more than the climate.
Water levels are not the problem. If a problem exists in the near future, it will be changing weather patterns.
Curiously enough, this is far more reasonable than the entire "global warming" noise. We can argue all day about whether or not the presence of specific portions of specific chemicals in our industrial output are going to cause the planet to explode sometime in the next ten/hundred/thousand/million years, and get nowhere.
Or we could go do something about real problems, like dumping poisonous chemicals in rivers and coating cities in smog, which we know are bad things and we also know how to solve. Why are we wasting energy on unknowns when there are so many knowns that could be solved more cheaply and generate real benefits?
Hint: politics. Global warming is the new gay marriage.
I said this in another thread.. but your plant argument also points back to human activity, in order to get materials to burn and produce "things" we engage in worldwide deforestation, and the fact that we also continue to burn things means we're putting an even greater stress on regenerative capabilities.. so really that makes the case for both reducing emissions AND conserving/replanting forests. : P
Assume for a moment that we can only afford to do one (because they're both extremely expensive) and only one of them would make any major difference. Which do you do?
This is an oversimplification, but all the real-world problems take this form: limited budget and little information on what you could spend it on that would accomplish anything. (The real-world problems differ in that they comprise hundreds of choices, instead of just one)
If *I* were head of Microsoft games division, I'd be offering Squeenix a deal, FFXIII goes cross platform, or 360 exclusive, and they get a blank check on which to write the biggest number they can think of. The rushing sound heard immediately afterward would be Sony's future swirling down the proverbial toilet bowl.
And that might work if Square-Enix was an American company. But it's not. It's a Japanese company run by Japanese businessmen. And you know what one thing Japanese businessmen hate the most?
Suggesting that they might break a deal.
If Microsoft even approached Square with an offer like that, they would find that Square never spoke a word to them again. In American terms, it's as if somebody came to you asking to partner with you, and said "it's because your mother is a really fat whore, and I had such a great time with her that I wanted to work with you". An offer like that, implying that they would break faith with their current partner, would be taken as a direct and personal insult. No Square title would run on a Microsoft platform, ever.
FF13 is sold. It won't be un-sold for any amount of money.
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody always seems to say "the gameplay has gone downhill since X", but nobody ever agrees on the value of X. My observation? Everybody who says that has grown older since they first played X. That probably has more to do with it. This effect is not specific to Final Fantasy, you see it happening everywhere.
Wow, US drivers must be insane. Here in the UK, if anybody tried things like that that and the police spotted them, or several witnesses reported them, they would be banned from driving for life and probably sent to jail. Deliberate dangerous driving (which both those things are) is a crime on a par with manslaughter (since that's what it usually results in, if those people aren't kept off the roads).
The solution is to remember that driving a large dangerous weapon is a privilege, not a right. If they can't or won't stop being idiots, then they can be idiots on bicycles.
The new extradition treaties that the US has been pushing through (like the one with Australia) don't do any of these things.
They don't do that either. You only have a right to a trial if you're a US citizen standing on US soil - if you're foreign, or if they ship you to a US jail not located within the US, then you'll only get a trial if they want to give you one.
This statement is entirely correct. This is the typical process for extradition. However, the US is not typical and doesn't do any of this.
Foreign citizens extradited to the US do not have the right to a trial. He may get one, but there's no guarantee of it. You don't know that it will happen. They can simply lock him up and throw away the key, if they want to.
Hrngh. No.
The guy has been accused of violating copyright law by certain people in the US. He has not been convicted. The question of his guilt has not even been examined by a court. He has been extradited not for violating copyright law, but for being accused of violating copyright law.
If somebody in the US accused you of violating copyright law, you can be extradited too. It does not matter whether you did it. The US extradition treaties do not operate on the principle of "innocent until proven guilty", they operate on the principle of "everybody is guilty" - proof is not required, requested, or considered. A bureaucrat signs a form and you get shipped into a US jail. (At their option, this can be a US jail that isn't located on US soil, like Gitmo, so they aren't obliged to ever examine whether you are guilty of anything)
Quite aside from the question of what you want, the US does not permit extradition requests from foreign countries (although they may deport non-citizens at the request of their home country). Extradition with the US is entirely one-sided. They expect everybody else to do it for them, but they refuse to reciprocate. So your example isn't really relevant.
Yes, this is stupid and wrong, and yes, the Australian government got a lot of bad press for signing that treaty. They don't appear to care.
The US won't extradite anybody - they only bring people in, they don't send them out. It's got nothing to do with being civilised, it's about being a bully.
I for one am firmly opposed to the ripping off of artists, programmers, writers, directors, and so forth. And the best way to end that is to download everything you can get off the internet, because it won't stop until the RIAA and MPAA are out of business. Anything you can do that hurts their bottom line is ultimately in the best interests of the people who produce the stuff you're downloading - and it can't possibly make their lives any worse, most of them are already in debt up to their eyeballs (thanks to the fraudulent accounting practices of the media industry). I'm normally averse to blanket good/evil generalisations - but really, these cartels do nothing good for anybody but themselves.
Buy it if it's independent. Copy it if it's *AA. It's the right thing to do. They've got to be stopped. The governments have failed, and the courts have failed. It falls to us now, and there is only one way to kill a corporation.
This is very true - however, the Bush administration is notable in their "every other country must do what we say" attitude. Even for the US, their arrogance is astounding. Most past administrations have been rather less willing to spend what little diplomatic advantages they have on matters like this.
I cannot imagine why they think that issuing public orders to China is going to get them anything other than a lot of very pissed off Chinese. This little stunt has probably ensured that China will not be doing anything about copyright complaints from US corporations, just so that the Chinese leaders can show they don't take orders from the US.
So if I were to put a brick through your window, depriving you of that window, this is theft? Pretty bizarre definition...
"Illegal" is a decision for a judge to make, after examining all the facts - we are neither qualified nor in possession of those facts, so we cannot say it was definitely illegal. Making a factual statement, rather than a prejudiced one, requires you say it was merely "copied" - or, if you insist on stating all the details, "copied without the explicit permission of the company".
It is important to realise that not everything is illegal just because it involves software and a company does not like it.
There are many, mostly based on one-way hash functions or public-key cryptography. It's quite easy when you realise that the voting authority must already be trusted (or else they could simply lift fingerprints from the ballot papers and identify them that way) - you're only trying to arrange anonymity against third parties, the voting authority is assumed to know who you are.
The problem is that all of the known methods require less stupid voters. If we could disenfranchise the stupid, we would not have a problem.
Actually you can, but there are no known methods which do not require intelligent voters who can follow non-trivial instructions. If you can assume that all your voters have passed math at the GCSE level or higher, and can follow the operating instructions for a VCR, it's easy.
Naturally, the voters are too stupid for this.
Almost anything useful costs more than diamond. Of the materials used in industry today, diamond falls firmly into the "common and cheap" section. Subject anything with carbon in it to the temperatures and pressures common in geology, and you end up with diamond in it somewhere.
Those prices you see in jewellers? They are on the order of a thousand times larger than the actual value of diamond. Some of that pays for the expertise to cut diamonds into decorative shapes (which isn't easy), most of it is just an insanely huge markup.
We don't have a need for cheaper alternatives to diamond - it would be like searching for a cheaper alternative to sea water. Most likely the whole diamond angle is just a bogus press spin on the story.
The requirement to submit proper documentation for how to solve a problem has been waived by all the major patent offices, in favour of a vague description of some parts of a possible method to solve something that might be a problem. You cannot learn how to solve a problem by consulting modern patent records, even if you wanted to.
Yes, this is pure corruption and abuse of the original concept for the personal gain of lawyers and patent office executives. What are you going to do about it?
I can only presume from this statement that you have never had a new idea, so here's a description of what it's like, to show how silly this question is:
You don't "bother" to come up with an idea. You can't do it deliberately. You can't even try to do it. It just happens - one moment you're doing something, and the next moment you have an idea. There is no effort involved, and the process cannot be controlled. We don't even know what causes them, or if anything you can do might cause them to come more often.
People will continue to come up with ideas at precisely the same rate, and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. The patent system has absolutely no impact on this.
You get a patent for (a) having an idea, and then (b) paying a lawyer. Since nothing can be done to control ideas, the only thing that patents encourage is lawyers. Don't confuse patents with the development of an idea into a product - that has got nothing to do with it. You get the patent merely for having the idea; most patented ideas are never developed.
And therein lies the gaping flaw in the concept of patents. They don't work. If you got a patent for developing ideas into products, then they would work - but that is not what patents are. Patents encourage people with ideas to sit on them and not develop them, in the hope that somebody else will develop the idea for them and then fork over the money.
Stop being the employers who provide the awful working conditions. The worst offenders aren't the locals trying to make something on the cheap, it's the international megacorps who have an entire staff dedicated to grinding out every last penny of "unnecessary" cost.
So you deny both positions - that the RIAA is entitled to some 'ownership' rights over things obtained or discovered by other people, and that other random individuals are entitled to them. That is consistent with what I said.
Either both the RIAA and their targets are morally reprehensible, or neither is. That's the whole point. It doesn't matter which way you happen to pick. The important thing is that you can't have one without the other.
Which is why "property is theft" - any private property is depriving all other people of the benefits of the item in question. This is particularly true for items with a near-zero cost of reproduction. "Intellectual property" is stealing from the public.
The essential thing about this concept is not its objective validity, but that it is equally as valid as the RIAA's position. Both of them are kinda weak, but you can't reasonably admit one without admitting the possibility of the other.
These are all real problems, and they're happening in far more places than just these. And you know what? Not one of them has got a damn thing to do with climate change. We're all fussing over something that might or might not happen in a hundred years, and putting all this energy into campaigning for more fuss to be made over it - and not doing anything about any of these real problems.
Kinda puts the whole thing into perspective.
There are no recorded instances of islands disappearing due to water level changes caused by climate change (at least in modern times, we probably know about it happening a few times in the prehistoric eras). The water level change caused by climate change in the past couple of centuries is a few centimetres - less than the normal tidal variation. It is entirely insignificant, and even the most sky-is-falling projections don't say it will become significant for at least another century. Seas are large, and it takes immense amounts of time for them to change size.
Islands appear and disappear all the time, always have, and always will do so, because the surface of the planet is constantly changing shape due to tectonic plate activity. This affects both the height of land and the depth of seas far more than the climate.
Water levels are not the problem. If a problem exists in the near future, it will be changing weather patterns.
Curiously enough, this is far more reasonable than the entire "global warming" noise. We can argue all day about whether or not the presence of specific portions of specific chemicals in our industrial output are going to cause the planet to explode sometime in the next ten/hundred/thousand/million years, and get nowhere.
Or we could go do something about real problems, like dumping poisonous chemicals in rivers and coating cities in smog, which we know are bad things and we also know how to solve. Why are we wasting energy on unknowns when there are so many knowns that could be solved more cheaply and generate real benefits?
Hint: politics. Global warming is the new gay marriage.
Assume for a moment that we can only afford to do one (because they're both extremely expensive) and only one of them would make any major difference. Which do you do?
This is an oversimplification, but all the real-world problems take this form: limited budget and little information on what you could spend it on that would accomplish anything. (The real-world problems differ in that they comprise hundreds of choices, instead of just one)
And that might work if Square-Enix was an American company. But it's not. It's a Japanese company run by Japanese businessmen. And you know what one thing Japanese businessmen hate the most?
Suggesting that they might break a deal.
If Microsoft even approached Square with an offer like that, they would find that Square never spoke a word to them again. In American terms, it's as if somebody came to you asking to partner with you, and said "it's because your mother is a really fat whore, and I had such a great time with her that I wanted to work with you". An offer like that, implying that they would break faith with their current partner, would be taken as a direct and personal insult. No Square title would run on a Microsoft platform, ever.
FF13 is sold. It won't be un-sold for any amount of money.