I'm not quite sure they'd be "overlords" as such. They'd be more like disgruntled, unpaid footmen who answer to a group of meatbag overlords. The meatbag overlords probably wouldn't even know how to use their stereo, let alone a law enforcement robot.
I know I'll be taking an unpopular stance on Slashdot in saying this, but I think it needs to be said (not to say I'm correct, but rather that it's another view point).
I don't believe in imaginary property, but I do believe in virtual property. The distinction is, imaginary property is infinitely reproducible, like an mp3 file. When you can sell the infinitely reproducible, you have a license to print money. It probably would have much larger implications for the economy if all movies and music were suddenly digitally distributed. No physical media costs, no transport costs, no staff costs in shops. All of those people suddenly get cut out of the chain and have to find a new source of income. I'm not an economists, so I can't see the full effect of this ripple effect.
On the other hand, in an online game, you use a currency, and the items you possess have value. An admin of a game could infinitely reproduce these items, but to the player they still have a quantifiable cost and amount of work that went into obtaining or producing it.
This isn't a simple case of in-game theft; I think the lion's share of the verdict was more to do with the assault than the theft. The thing that bothers me most about this though isn't that it recognizes virtual property as real, but that it sets a very small precedent (I say small because the verdict wasn't entirely about the theft, but the assault) for national laws extending into online games. What next? Animal cruelty laws begin to extend to in-game creatures? People being charged with assault in the real world for attacking in a PvP area?
For legal purposes, I think online games should be defined as a foreign nation. No actual property or currency crosses the border into your real country of residence, since it all exists in game, and the Rules of Conduct or Terms of Service or whatever the game wants to call them should contain some clear-cut "laws" for that "nation".
Indeed it did, that's what I thought when I saw this. We watched it in my IT class, and I muttered to the one next to me something like "well, we know he reads it for the articles". That might have been a few seconds before something similar was said in the movie; I can't remember that clearly.
I follow the Mass Effect way of thinking. A handful of civilizations, each with dramatically polarized stereotypical traits, and who speak English with perfect North American accents, regardless of the structure of their mouth(s) and/or vocal cords (assuming they have them...).
No mention of species less advanced than us, but there are apparently 37,964 more advanced. I wonder why that is... Other civilizations must look at this backwater hick-world and laugh.
Seriously, how many science-realities do we have today that were science-fiction a few years (or decades) ago? Did the film writers or book authors get any royalties when corporations suddenly took out patents on their ideas?
Any technology will be abused in the wrong (i.e 'human') hands, so I'm just not going to bother complaining about the huge privacy concerns (I'm sure others will do enough of that, it's Slashdot afterall), instead, I'm going to say it's interesting to see another science-fiction technology become science-reality.
My thoughts exactly. People seem to get all pissy when I say something like "if you don't have the balls to protect your freedoms, you don't deserve them". I'm not a regular protester at any events or anything like that, but I'd rather be shot for defending my freedom than live to see it gone. Not that I believe privacy exists anymore. The whole world was too slow to act in learning about and defending their privacy in a new technological age. Sure, there were a few technologically aware people with a small voice that was easy to push aside. Too late, privacy's gone. Only way to get it back is to lay your own global network in secret and hope the governments of the world never hear about it.
What's wrong with this post? It's not that bad. Not like the usual first post trolling, actually refers to the article in some way, and is a pun on first post! Some mods are probably just modding first post down as a matter of habit by now.
I was hoping I could get to the civilization stage without leaving the sea. Sure, the lack of fire might have caused problems, but I'm sure a smart enough sea creature can find away around that. If your mind isn't set on needing fire for everything, then you'll find other ways to do it:P. I was hoping I could, in the civ stage, start to dominate the land by building giant snow-globe cities. A spaceship full of water would be nice too.
Nice to know I'm not alone here. Software gets a very tiny part of the media's attention in Australia. I've only seen two of those "I'm a Mac" ads, and one ad for Vista in the past few years. And I mean I saw them once, not regularly running. All three were in late night ad spots, so not exactly targeted at the painfully common user who still uses Outlook Express with no security patches.
We're the victim of a lot of monopolies and duopolies, here (Telstra owns most of the telecommunications infrastructure, satellite TV provider Austar and the only competitor Foxtel; Coles and Woolworths own most supermarkets, and they almost certainly price-fix), and Microsoft basically seem to have so much market share and mind share that you almost never hear of alternatives. Unless you happen to be from the internet, like me.
During his campaign to be elected, he announced this plan, but never really elaborated on it. I took it with a barge-load of salt, as you should anything a politician said, but I still sent him (or rather his office) an email asking him if he was considering open source, and gave rough figures per student of the licensing associated with giving every student a copy of Windows, MS Office, Photoshop; for music students, something like Reason. My figures were retail price ones, as I said in the email, since I'm not aware of the bulk licensing prices companies offer for education, but even a 90% discount doesn't beat free. If he'd spent just $100 on software licensing on each student, it would quickly become a ridiculously large figure to throw around. The Labor government is a little wary of overspending, I would think, since the previous Labor Prime Minister, Paul Keating, plunged the country into recession. In his words "a recession we had to have".
Anyway, I doubt he read my email, or any of the other emails Australian open source fans could have sent. It's pretty much common sense, and if he has a brain, he's probably asked his IT department (not his IT minister:P).
My birthday is the 18th of February, considering the time difference between Australia and America, my birthday present will be the bewilderment of millions of old and/or technologically inept Americans; and the subsequent tech support and abuse phone calls. Anyone got popcorn?
As if that question makes an appreciable difference. Encrypted or not, data loss is data loss. It's bad security practice. Having the data encrypted will do just a tiny bit to save face, but it will hardly stop anyone who wants in.
My knowledge of genetics is almost as distorted as it's portrayal in the Metal Gear series of games, but that's not what I'm getting at. I think one of his founding assumptions is wrong: He claims people are reproducing earlier. Most animals reproduce at a happy medium between sexual maturity and the physical strength to bludgeon the alpha male. That can be quite early, and older animals can't hold their position as alpha male indefinitely. Today, thanks to contraception, and the desire to have a better financial position are probably causing people to reproduce later. Of course, there are exceptions, but there seem to be a lot of 40 or 50 somethings having their first children these days. If anything, the number of people reproducing later must have risen, and the number reproducing early could have fallen. I did RTFA, but I have a pretty bad headache at the moment so maybe I'm not remembering this clearly, but he cites marriage patterns! Can someone remind me when marriage became a physically necessary part of reproduction?
Sounds to me like just another scientist posing a questionable (questionable in the sense it will get people talking, not that it's outright shaky) theory to get his name spread further out of his immediate academic circle.
Some artists may not be able to get moving without funding from their nation's specific arm of the RIAA. That's actually good though - some of the most popular artists today are just the same crap being foisted on us year after year because the recording industry has decided that's what we want. If singers and songwriters start getting directly paid for their work, we'll probably see a lot of new styles emerging.
I hereby declare this age "The Renaissance of the Troubadour"! It's a weird title, but I hope it sticks, because it's catchy:P
With the focus on cooperative play in Diablo III, How much bandwidth will it consume? In Australia, we have very restrict usage caps; the same thing is slowly being introduced to the US. This means the total data used by games in Australia (both up stream and down) becomes a very important commodity.
Again, I would like to point out an acronym I suggested a while back: OFFSALRTFS! - "Oh For Fuck's Sake At Least Read The Fucking Summary!" The logical progression from RTFA.
Re:how do they refill it?
on
Vend-A-Goat
·
· Score: 1
The secret is actually the most compelling scientific achievement in years: the vending machine is a mechanical womb that automatically genetically engineers a new goat, and accelerates it's aging any time someone buys the goat that's in there!
I doubt the terms of use of any software would hold up as such an absolute rule of law in court. Sure, most of them have reasonable conditions; I guess those would hold up. But what if I wrote a program and the EULA said that all users had to wear a funny looking hat with a feather in it and stand on one leg whenever they use the software? I know it's a ridiculous example, but I'm just saying that a EULA can't absolutely override the law. Unless circumventing CAPTCHA is seen as circumventing a security measure, there really would be no case.
All of the tourist information centers in Australian cities (as far as I know) are indicated by an italic i in some serif font or other. Useful for tourists if they ever bother to find out what that funny i thing means.
Slashdot Mirror
Would damaging a police robot count as assaulting a police officer, or damaging government property?
I'm not quite sure they'd be "overlords" as such. They'd be more like disgruntled, unpaid footmen who answer to a group of meatbag overlords. The meatbag overlords probably wouldn't even know how to use their stereo, let alone a law enforcement robot.
Human experimentation. To quote Walter in Fringe "The only thing better than a cow is a human. Unless you want milk; THEN you want a cow!"
We're in need of test subjects no ethics group will complain about.
I know I'll be taking an unpopular stance on Slashdot in saying this, but I think it needs to be said (not to say I'm correct, but rather that it's another view point).
I don't believe in imaginary property, but I do believe in virtual property. The distinction is, imaginary property is infinitely reproducible, like an mp3 file. When you can sell the infinitely reproducible, you have a license to print money. It probably would have much larger implications for the economy if all movies and music were suddenly digitally distributed. No physical media costs, no transport costs, no staff costs in shops. All of those people suddenly get cut out of the chain and have to find a new source of income. I'm not an economists, so I can't see the full effect of this ripple effect.
On the other hand, in an online game, you use a currency, and the items you possess have value. An admin of a game could infinitely reproduce these items, but to the player they still have a quantifiable cost and amount of work that went into obtaining or producing it.
This isn't a simple case of in-game theft; I think the lion's share of the verdict was more to do with the assault than the theft. The thing that bothers me most about this though isn't that it recognizes virtual property as real, but that it sets a very small precedent (I say small because the verdict wasn't entirely about the theft, but the assault) for national laws extending into online games. What next? Animal cruelty laws begin to extend to in-game creatures? People being charged with assault in the real world for attacking in a PvP area?
For legal purposes, I think online games should be defined as a foreign nation. No actual property or currency crosses the border into your real country of residence, since it all exists in game, and the Rules of Conduct or Terms of Service or whatever the game wants to call them should contain some clear-cut "laws" for that "nation".
It was part of our IT ethics module, not as an example of real-world IT. Could have been worse, we could have watched Swordfish.
Indeed it did, that's what I thought when I saw this. We watched it in my IT class, and I muttered to the one next to me something like "well, we know he reads it for the articles". That might have been a few seconds before something similar was said in the movie; I can't remember that clearly.
I follow the Mass Effect way of thinking. A handful of civilizations, each with dramatically polarized stereotypical traits, and who speak English with perfect North American accents, regardless of the structure of their mouth(s) and/or vocal cords (assuming they have them...).
No mention of species less advanced than us, but there are apparently 37,964 more advanced. I wonder why that is... Other civilizations must look at this backwater hick-world and laugh.
Seriously, how many science-realities do we have today that were science-fiction a few years (or decades) ago? Did the film writers or book authors get any royalties when corporations suddenly took out patents on their ideas?
Any technology will be abused in the wrong (i.e 'human') hands, so I'm just not going to bother complaining about the huge privacy concerns (I'm sure others will do enough of that, it's Slashdot afterall), instead, I'm going to say it's interesting to see another science-fiction technology become science-reality.
My thoughts exactly. People seem to get all pissy when I say something like "if you don't have the balls to protect your freedoms, you don't deserve them". I'm not a regular protester at any events or anything like that, but I'd rather be shot for defending my freedom than live to see it gone. Not that I believe privacy exists anymore. The whole world was too slow to act in learning about and defending their privacy in a new technological age. Sure, there were a few technologically aware people with a small voice that was easy to push aside. Too late, privacy's gone. Only way to get it back is to lay your own global network in secret and hope the governments of the world never hear about it.
What's wrong with this post? It's not that bad. Not like the usual first post trolling, actually refers to the article in some way, and is a pun on first post! Some mods are probably just modding first post down as a matter of habit by now.
I was hoping I could get to the civilization stage without leaving the sea. Sure, the lack of fire might have caused problems, but I'm sure a smart enough sea creature can find away around that. If your mind isn't set on needing fire for everything, then you'll find other ways to do it :P. I was hoping I could, in the civ stage, start to dominate the land by building giant snow-globe cities. A spaceship full of water would be nice too.
Nice to know I'm not alone here. Software gets a very tiny part of the media's attention in Australia. I've only seen two of those "I'm a Mac" ads, and one ad for Vista in the past few years. And I mean I saw them once, not regularly running. All three were in late night ad spots, so not exactly targeted at the painfully common user who still uses Outlook Express with no security patches.
We're the victim of a lot of monopolies and duopolies, here (Telstra owns most of the telecommunications infrastructure, satellite TV provider Austar and the only competitor Foxtel; Coles and Woolworths own most supermarkets, and they almost certainly price-fix), and Microsoft basically seem to have so much market share and mind share that you almost never hear of alternatives. Unless you happen to be from the internet, like me.
During his campaign to be elected, he announced this plan, but never really elaborated on it. I took it with a barge-load of salt, as you should anything a politician said, but I still sent him (or rather his office) an email asking him if he was considering open source, and gave rough figures per student of the licensing associated with giving every student a copy of Windows, MS Office, Photoshop; for music students, something like Reason. My figures were retail price ones, as I said in the email, since I'm not aware of the bulk licensing prices companies offer for education, but even a 90% discount doesn't beat free. If he'd spent just $100 on software licensing on each student, it would quickly become a ridiculously large figure to throw around. The Labor government is a little wary of overspending, I would think, since the previous Labor Prime Minister, Paul Keating, plunged the country into recession. In his words "a recession we had to have".
Anyway, I doubt he read my email, or any of the other emails Australian open source fans could have sent. It's pretty much common sense, and if he has a brain, he's probably asked his IT department (not his IT minister :P).
My birthday is the 18th of February, considering the time difference between Australia and America, my birthday present will be the bewilderment of millions of old and/or technologically inept Americans; and the subsequent tech support and abuse phone calls. Anyone got popcorn?
As if that question makes an appreciable difference. Encrypted or not, data loss is data loss. It's bad security practice. Having the data encrypted will do just a tiny bit to save face, but it will hardly stop anyone who wants in.
My knowledge of genetics is almost as distorted as it's portrayal in the Metal Gear series of games, but that's not what I'm getting at. I think one of his founding assumptions is wrong: He claims people are reproducing earlier. Most animals reproduce at a happy medium between sexual maturity and the physical strength to bludgeon the alpha male. That can be quite early, and older animals can't hold their position as alpha male indefinitely. Today, thanks to contraception, and the desire to have a better financial position are probably causing people to reproduce later. Of course, there are exceptions, but there seem to be a lot of 40 or 50 somethings having their first children these days. If anything, the number of people reproducing later must have risen, and the number reproducing early could have fallen. I did RTFA, but I have a pretty bad headache at the moment so maybe I'm not remembering this clearly, but he cites marriage patterns! Can someone remind me when marriage became a physically necessary part of reproduction?
Sounds to me like just another scientist posing a questionable (questionable in the sense it will get people talking, not that it's outright shaky) theory to get his name spread further out of his immediate academic circle.
Some artists may not be able to get moving without funding from their nation's specific arm of the RIAA. That's actually good though - some of the most popular artists today are just the same crap being foisted on us year after year because the recording industry has decided that's what we want. If singers and songwriters start getting directly paid for their work, we'll probably see a lot of new styles emerging.
I hereby declare this age "The Renaissance of the Troubadour"! It's a weird title, but I hope it sticks, because it's catchy :P
With the focus on cooperative play in Diablo III, How much bandwidth will it consume? In Australia, we have very restrict usage caps; the same thing is slowly being introduced to the US. This means the total data used by games in Australia (both up stream and down) becomes a very important commodity.
Again, I would like to point out an acronym I suggested a while back: OFFSALRTFS! - "Oh For Fuck's Sake At Least Read The Fucking Summary!" The logical progression from RTFA.
The secret is actually the most compelling scientific achievement in years: the vending machine is a mechanical womb that automatically genetically engineers a new goat, and accelerates it's aging any time someone buys the goat that's in there!
I doubt the terms of use of any software would hold up as such an absolute rule of law in court. Sure, most of them have reasonable conditions; I guess those would hold up. But what if I wrote a program and the EULA said that all users had to wear a funny looking hat with a feather in it and stand on one leg whenever they use the software? I know it's a ridiculous example, but I'm just saying that a EULA can't absolutely override the law. Unless circumventing CAPTCHA is seen as circumventing a security measure, there really would be no case.
Looks like EA have finally decided to cancel their crap games instead of shipping them. I guess they'll go bankrupt soon if they keep this up.
All of the tourist information centers in Australian cities (as far as I know) are indicated by an italic i in some serif font or other. Useful for tourists if they ever bother to find out what that funny i thing means.
That's what happens when I start thinking in a New Zealand accent...