Therefore, Ubisoft will be forced to run a non-trivial portion of the game on their servers. It would basically be like a MMOG scheme but for a non-MMOG.
If this is the case, expect a monthly fee in addition to the cost of the box just to play your game. If it's not, well then it will probably be cracked in a few months at most.
Unless Ubisoft is only going to be making MMO's from now on, this is an absurdly stupid idea.
Do these companies actually want customers? Or what? Because this will piss a lot of people off just from the sheer inconvenience of it.
The cold and wind in places like Antarctica are not quite the same as the cold and wind in any place you have been winter camping. I work at the northern equivalent, and it would take one hell of a sleeping bag to keep you warm out in the open over night. There is no good protection when the wind chill makes it -70+F out there (which is what it was here just last week).
It's also a really, really bad idea to go out anywhere by yourself, especially on foot. When the wind picks up and you get white-out conditions (which can happen in minutes), you often can't see a building even if it's 50 feet in front of you.
It's certainly doable, it's just a really really bad idea. Death at these temperatures can happen in minutes under the right cicumstances. Chances are you're going to have an accident at some point and then that's it, you'll be dead long before anybody finds you. It would be a much better idea to just use the indoor treadmill they almost certainly have.
You people have absolutely no idea what snow is like in places that average -20+ temps and are extremely flat and lifeless.
Snow is fluffy for maybe an hour, after that it has been tossed around by the wind and forms a hard-pack surface that is quite easy to walk on, and after a few days at the most is just fine for driving on.
Go watch a nature video of Emperor Penguins huddling up together in the dead of winter, and when you get to the part where spring comes and the penguins start waddling around, look at just how deep the snow is. I'll go ahead and spoil it for you, it's an inch or two at best, the rest is hard-pack. Penguins don't exactly have snow shoes for feet and they waddle around just fine.
The stuff fuses together when it's cold, and especially after it has been blown around into fine particles. It's like driving on concrete.
I dunno, record temps up here where I work are in the -100+ range (in the wind, -60's and -70's ambient), the area of Antarctica they are in doesn't sound all that cold. We were pushing -40 ambient last week and it hasn't even been that cold of a winter so far.
It's still not that bad, just last week it was pushing -40 ambient with a -70F wind chill where I and about 6,000 other people work. You can't really feel the difference after a certain point, you just get cold faster than usual. I really thought Antarctica would be more extreme.
For a vivid example of how cold it gets, at about -40 wind wind any liquid sitting on top of, say, a styrofoam cup lid will begin freezing in seconds, and in 30-40 seconds the exposed liquid will be frozen. It's pretty neat.
You can also take a full cup of boiling water, throw it into the air, and not a drop will touch the ground - it all evaporates in a big puff of steam.
What you really want to be sure you have are blackout shades and a SAD lamp. In summer there is three months of sunlight, which makes going to sleep a bitch, and in the winter there is three months of darkness which can get depressing.
Forget your gaming rig, bring an Xbox or something instead, chances are your internet will be satellite and totally suck monkey nuts for gaming.
You didn't do well in reading comprehension in school, I'm guessing.
The poster asked about attracting users. MOST of the GP's post was regarding attracting users. Slashdot really doesn't make a very good advertising vehicle for attracting new users, it's a one-shot deal and that's pretty much it. Plus, most Slashdot folks are going to do exactly as he described - they'll say "hey that looks neet, but I don't want to mess with it if it doesn't have a good community", and with only one shot to make an impression you are likely to get pitifully few new users. Getting involved in a general OSS user's forum is a much better idea, as you can build a presence and start attracting users in spite of a lack of community.
For the exact same reasons, Slashdot is probably mediocre at best for attracting developers. However, getting involved in a good sized OSS developer's forum would be a great place to both advertise to try to attract new developers and to get more advice about getting your project out in the open.
Personal Area Network describes the relative distance between each device on the network as it relates to the individuals or groups it is connecting. It does not refer to how those devices actually connect in any way. A PAN is basically a network of one individual's personal devices, which is kept distinct from wider area networks like a LAN or a WAN. The term itself has no relation to any particular technology, it's just a designation for a type of network.
A PAN is one step more intimate than a LAN, which is in turn one step more intimate than a WAN. You can and do have PANs with wired connections instead of wireless. Any time you connect a personal organizer or smartphone to your laptop, for example, you've created a PAN.
As we use more and more of these devices and as more of them use wireless technologies of various kinds, it makes sense to make the "hub", which is usually an ordinary PC, act as a router among among the different personal devices.
An ad-hoc wireless network refers to setting up a peer-to-peer wireless LAN, which by definition is not a PAN.
It won't work, most games only run on a couple cores at best for now, because it's so hard to scale it up properly that they just don't take the time to split things out enough to take advantage of all the available cores. Already a 4 core processor doesn't net you much performance benefit over a 2 core unless you are running many applications at once. Two four cores will see even less benefit.
So it really won't be until we can leap over what is primarily a programming hurdle that we'll start to see three or four processor mobos with two to four cores each.
A $100 video card will get you 1680x1050 at high detail on most games, even new releases, and the difference between medium and high detail is becoming less and less noticeable.
Frankly, the Xbox 360 runs phenomenally detailed video on 3-year old PC hardware. You have more overhead on a PC, but not 3 years worth, not even close. As for resolution, I really doubt you can tell any significant difference between resolutions higher than around 1080p.
In my opinion, beyond a certain point higher resolutions are useful for nothing more than bragging rights, they don't actually look noticeably better and require a lot more expensive gear.
He was only being slightly redundant, FLOPS = Floating Point Operations per Second. FLOP is plural, it just doesn't seem like it should be, thus the slight confusion. It's an odd word.
3 is a bit optimistic if you're calling it bleeding-edge.
High-end, sure, heck even ultra high-end, but as soon as a slightly better version comes out you're not bleeding-edge any more, and that often happens in less than 3 months.
For the vast majority of console games the point stands. Most games are playable on all three major console platforms. Of the games that aren't available for all three platforms, most of those are either Wii/Xbox only, or Xbox/PS3 only. The games that exclude the Xbox are few and far between.
Since the Xbox is simply a specialized PC with an OS created to handle Microsoft's standard graphics API, and since Microsoft's graphics API is far and away the dominant API in the PC market, the line between PC and console is seriously blurred.
It's hard to call it a "console port" when a game that hits 90% of the console market only requires a few minor tweaks and a re-compile to hit 90% of the PC market.
Now, any console game being ported to Linux or Mac is definitely still a "console port", and anything that is not available for Xbox but is being ported to Windows is definitely still a console port. The latter rarely ever happens any more, usually if it wasn't planned for at the start it doesn't happen, and the former I don't know if it has ever happened. Maybe once or twice.
It all boils down to poor project management, and it's always one (or more) of three reasons. The difficulty in coordinating the non-technical management's expectations and what the sales team thinks is possible with what is actually possible at a given price is the reason something like 80% of all IT projects fail. It's always either scope creep, budget creep, or time creep that kills them.
This sounds like a case of scope creep to me, and I'm actually surprised UK law is screwed up enough to award a 700 pound judgement for something that isn't even a breach of contract. Frankly, at least half of the blame lies with BlueSky for constantly changing the scope, and the other half to EDS for constantly agreeing to it. Dumbasses. Of course it is going to fail if you're trying to hit a moving target.
Have you? If they know it was not your fault, and more specifically if they know you were trying to prevent it but were not permitted to do so, they will not be unhappy with you.
However, they may still fry your ass if it saves their job or reputation, so just because they aren't unhappy with your work and they know where the blame belongs doesn't mean you are safe.
That's exactly why you CYA, because even if everybody knows it isn't your fault you could still become the sacrificial lamb.
It depends on the State whether or not an employer can fire you with no justification.
For what its worth, US law essentially treats employment as an open-ended contractual agreement and in states that do not have an at-will clause, termination almost always involves some form of breach of contract by one of the parties. I.e. you were hired to do X, you are not doing X or you are not doing X correctly, therefore you've breached the contract and we are firing you. Conversely, the employer no longer wants or needs the services of the employee, and so decides to terminate him. However, the employee was hired to do X, and was doing X as per their agreement, so the employer breached the contract.
Obviously that is simplistic, and it is such a common type of contract that we have special laws and procedures relating to just this situation, but it's still essentially an open-ended contractual agreement between two parties.
That's because most people don't know how to live within their means.
It's not impossible to live well making less than $25k per year, people just don't know how to manage their money. In fact for most people it's just as hard to do it at $25k as it is at $100k.
As an anecdotal example of this, my parents combined income is less than $60k per year, yet they own a house worth $300k and two four-plexes worth about $400k each. That's over a million dollars worth of property on an income of $30k apiece (and that is the highest it has ever been), in a state with one of the highest costs of living in the US, and at the same time they raised four kids with the last one still in elementary school.
Obviously that took 20+ years, but there are a lot of people who have had incomes in the millions of dollars per year with less to show for it. I grew up happy too, and I think that's largely in part because my parents loved their jobs in spite of the low pay (had they worked elsewhere they each could easilly be making $80-100k instead of $30k).
Worry less about the dollar amount and more about doing something you are interested in and enjoy doing, and regardless of what you end up making exercise discipline in your finances and you will have very little to worry about.
For what it's worth, I'm not a programmer but I do have some duties that involve a little programming, and I make close to $60k. The actual honest to god programmers I work with with 20+ years of experience push $200k. Experience and skill are everything, if you don't have it yet you're going to get the dime-a-dozen jobs until you get some. There's just no way around it, welcome to the real world - your fresh-out-of-college skills just aren't that valuable yet.
Actually, you should read the stated purpose of copyrights and patents in the Constitution. They are specific exemptions to the public's natural right to copy any item they physically own, and to distribute that item however they wish, in order to spur the creation of more works for the betterment of society at large. This is why we have things like fair use provisions. It's not that fair use was added on to copyright, it's just the opposite. Fair use is a natural right that the Copyright exemption restricts, but Copyright only restricts fair use as far as necessary to ensure the author/artist will continue to produce new works. That's also why it is judged on a case by case basis, because there is no way to come up with a set criteria to meet that purpose for every piece out there.
In other words, Copyright is a carrot dangled in front of authors and artists in order to make sure the public has as much literature and art as possible. That's why Copyright had limits, the whole idea was that eventually the works would be publicly available. The limits have been moved up into absurdity, restricting to a great degree the public's consumption of works with little to no further economic value to the artist, which is pretty much the opposite of what Copyright law is intended to produce.
Two lifetimes? Seriously? 90+% of all money made on a copyrighted work is made in the first two years, with most of that being in the first six months, do we really need 130 more years (assuming the author lives to at least 75-ish) to get that last 10%? Is it even worth it?
Do you know what would happen if Micky Mouse went into public domain today? They certainly wouldn't close their doors, there is way too much money to be made. I'll tell you what would happen, Disney would have to come up with a new icon, instead of riding the same icon they have been for the last hundred years. Hey that's funny, that looks awfully close to exactly the kind of thing that Copyright law was originally trying to accomplish! New icons, new culture, new stories, new art, hmmmm...
You've got to remember that copyright is not there for the author or the artist or the publisher, it's there for the PUBLIC. The provisions in copyright law exist to incentivise authors and artists to produce more works for the PUBLIC, it is simply necessary (and fair) that we ensure authors and artists are rewarded for doing so. When you lose sight of the purpose, though, things go crazy, and selfish people with vested interests start pushing for permanent copyrights and tighter restrictions on fair use, which goes against everything copyright law was written for.
As per the Bern Convention, French copyright law doesn't apply in America, the French are simply afforded the same copy protections as a US citizen would have when there is a case of infringement of a Frenchman's work in America, and vice versa and for all signatories of the Bern convention. There are minimums set in the Bern convention, but they were in line with what US copyright law already stated at the time, and they were nowhere near the roughly 140 year terms we have now.
US Copyright law was never significantly altered because of the Bern Convention except to extend the copyright protections to non-citizens (specifically, citizens of signatory countries).
The reason we have the outrageous copyright extensions is because large corporations (Disney being the most adamant) lobbied like hell for them. They were never instated based on another country's laws except as an argument for them. It was more like Disney saying "Look, the French do it, why can't we?" and dumbasses in congress actually listening to them.
The fact is, we've been preparing for the IPv6 switch for years now. The IPv6 spec reserves space for the entire IPv4 network, making translation between the two a snap. Any modern OS less than 5 years old has IPv6 built in, including conversion between v4 and v6. Almost all commercial networking hardware sold in the last 5-10 years is IPv6 capable, and as I already said using IPv4 within IPv6 is a piece of cake.
The only issue here is going to be the fighting between registrars over address blocks, and that's nothing new. Private addressing with NAT doesn't even need to change if you don't want to bother with it, just change your gateway IP's from v4 to v6 and there you go, bandaid applied until you actually truly need to upgrade everything.
The whole uproar over this issue is silly. It has already been taken care of. Hell it was half taken care of in the IPv6 spec itself, and the rest by the router and switch vendors that have been putting the option in their equipment over the last decade. At worst there will be some minor pains to actually enable and configure the IPv6 capable equipment, and those using really old equipment will have to upgrade their gateways. Those like AnoNet who improperly used IPv4 addresses in the first place are going to have to come up with something else until the switch is finally thrown on IPv6, and that's entirely their own fault. By definition they were not supposed to use those addresses, and they've been bitten for it. Sucks to be them.
The IPv4 problem isn't 1/10th the problem people seem to think it is. The only reason it hasn't been done yet is because it is quite a bit cheaper to spend no money at all than it is to spend a little money for no immediate gain. Companies will spend the money to switch when they need to, and not a moment before; as long as we still have 10% of the addresses unassigned or reserved, there is no need to spend the money yet.
I can guarantee you aren't using that $15 ulimited data plan with an iPhone or any other smart phone either.
As far as I know, AT&T's and just about everybody else's smartphone data plan has always been around $30 per month. They reduced it by $10 as a pro-mo for the iPhone. When the 3G came out they did not extend the promo (as the iPhone was apparently really stressing their network, why would they?). If you had bought a Blackberry at any time during the iPhone promo you would have paid $30 per month, because that was their smartphone rate.
There's unlimited data, and there's smartphone unlimited data. They are different, they are sold separately, and it depends one which type of phone you have which plan they will sell you. This has been true for Blackberries and Windows Mobile phones long before the iPhone came out. The typical smartphone data plan is an extra $30 per month compared to $10-15 for a non-smart phone, and I am pretty sure it used to be a lot higher than that. This is because non-smartphones are simply not capable of pulling as much data as a smartphone, regardless of how fast the network itself is.
They also expect you to use the internet much more for things like email and general browsing, which just aren't possible (at least, not easily) on a standard phone. So, they charge more. With my local carrier I can actually get unlimited data for $8 a month (not including texting), but if I switch to a smartphone that jumps up to $30 a month. That's pretty much how it works everywhere, AT&T isn't exactly known for their low prices.
Granted, as soon as you poke a camera out of the field it isn't 100% invisible, it's only 99.99% (or more) invisible. Still that's pretty damn good, do you know how hard it would be to notice a tiny dot floating around in space?
Slashdot Mirror
Therefore, Ubisoft will be forced to run a non-trivial portion of the game on their servers. It would basically be like a MMOG scheme but for a non-MMOG.
If this is the case, expect a monthly fee in addition to the cost of the box just to play your game. If it's not, well then it will probably be cracked in a few months at most.
Unless Ubisoft is only going to be making MMO's from now on, this is an absurdly stupid idea.
Do these companies actually want customers? Or what? Because this will piss a lot of people off just from the sheer inconvenience of it.
The cold and wind in places like Antarctica are not quite the same as the cold and wind in any place you have been winter camping. I work at the northern equivalent, and it would take one hell of a sleeping bag to keep you warm out in the open over night. There is no good protection when the wind chill makes it -70+F out there (which is what it was here just last week).
It's also a really, really bad idea to go out anywhere by yourself, especially on foot. When the wind picks up and you get white-out conditions (which can happen in minutes), you often can't see a building even if it's 50 feet in front of you.
It's certainly doable, it's just a really really bad idea. Death at these temperatures can happen in minutes under the right cicumstances. Chances are you're going to have an accident at some point and then that's it, you'll be dead long before anybody finds you. It would be a much better idea to just use the indoor treadmill they almost certainly have.
You people have absolutely no idea what snow is like in places that average -20+ temps and are extremely flat and lifeless.
Snow is fluffy for maybe an hour, after that it has been tossed around by the wind and forms a hard-pack surface that is quite easy to walk on, and after a few days at the most is just fine for driving on.
Go watch a nature video of Emperor Penguins huddling up together in the dead of winter, and when you get to the part where spring comes and the penguins start waddling around, look at just how deep the snow is. I'll go ahead and spoil it for you, it's an inch or two at best, the rest is hard-pack. Penguins don't exactly have snow shoes for feet and they waddle around just fine.
The stuff fuses together when it's cold, and especially after it has been blown around into fine particles. It's like driving on concrete.
I dunno, record temps up here where I work are in the -100+ range (in the wind, -60's and -70's ambient), the area of Antarctica they are in doesn't sound all that cold. We were pushing -40 ambient last week and it hasn't even been that cold of a winter so far.
It's still not that bad, just last week it was pushing -40 ambient with a -70F wind chill where I and about 6,000 other people work. You can't really feel the difference after a certain point, you just get cold faster than usual. I really thought Antarctica would be more extreme.
For a vivid example of how cold it gets, at about -40 wind wind any liquid sitting on top of, say, a styrofoam cup lid will begin freezing in seconds, and in 30-40 seconds the exposed liquid will be frozen. It's pretty neat.
You can also take a full cup of boiling water, throw it into the air, and not a drop will touch the ground - it all evaporates in a big puff of steam.
What you really want to be sure you have are blackout shades and a SAD lamp. In summer there is three months of sunlight, which makes going to sleep a bitch, and in the winter there is three months of darkness which can get depressing.
Forget your gaming rig, bring an Xbox or something instead, chances are your internet will be satellite and totally suck monkey nuts for gaming.
This project goes to 11?
You didn't do well in reading comprehension in school, I'm guessing.
The poster asked about attracting users. MOST of the GP's post was regarding attracting users. Slashdot really doesn't make a very good advertising vehicle for attracting new users, it's a one-shot deal and that's pretty much it. Plus, most Slashdot folks are going to do exactly as he described - they'll say "hey that looks neet, but I don't want to mess with it if it doesn't have a good community", and with only one shot to make an impression you are likely to get pitifully few new users. Getting involved in a general OSS user's forum is a much better idea, as you can build a presence and start attracting users in spite of a lack of community.
For the exact same reasons, Slashdot is probably mediocre at best for attracting developers. However, getting involved in a good sized OSS developer's forum would be a great place to both advertise to try to attract new developers and to get more advice about getting your project out in the open.
Personal Area Network describes the relative distance between each device on the network as it relates to the individuals or groups it is connecting. It does not refer to how those devices actually connect in any way. A PAN is basically a network of one individual's personal devices, which is kept distinct from wider area networks like a LAN or a WAN. The term itself has no relation to any particular technology, it's just a designation for a type of network.
A PAN is one step more intimate than a LAN, which is in turn one step more intimate than a WAN. You can and do have PANs with wired connections instead of wireless. Any time you connect a personal organizer or smartphone to your laptop, for example, you've created a PAN.
As we use more and more of these devices and as more of them use wireless technologies of various kinds, it makes sense to make the "hub", which is usually an ordinary PC, act as a router among among the different personal devices.
An ad-hoc wireless network refers to setting up a peer-to-peer wireless LAN, which by definition is not a PAN.
It won't work, most games only run on a couple cores at best for now, because it's so hard to scale it up properly that they just don't take the time to split things out enough to take advantage of all the available cores. Already a 4 core processor doesn't net you much performance benefit over a 2 core unless you are running many applications at once. Two four cores will see even less benefit.
So it really won't be until we can leap over what is primarily a programming hurdle that we'll start to see three or four processor mobos with two to four cores each.
A $100 video card will get you 1680x1050 at high detail on most games, even new releases, and the difference between medium and high detail is becoming less and less noticeable.
Frankly, the Xbox 360 runs phenomenally detailed video on 3-year old PC hardware. You have more overhead on a PC, but not 3 years worth, not even close. As for resolution, I really doubt you can tell any significant difference between resolutions higher than around 1080p.
In my opinion, beyond a certain point higher resolutions are useful for nothing more than bragging rights, they don't actually look noticeably better and require a lot more expensive gear.
It's just waste, plain and simple.
Futuremark also does games, apparently.
Their benchmarks are where they make all their money though, anything related to their game offerings were three pages back in a google search.
He was only being slightly redundant, FLOPS = Floating Point Operations per Second. FLOP is plural, it just doesn't seem like it should be, thus the slight confusion. It's an odd word.
A half-height discreet card will fit in that case just fine, and you'd see a nice graphics boost if you like your HTPC to do double duty.
3 is a bit optimistic if you're calling it bleeding-edge.
High-end, sure, heck even ultra high-end, but as soon as a slightly better version comes out you're not bleeding-edge any more, and that often happens in less than 3 months.
For the vast majority of console games the point stands. Most games are playable on all three major console platforms. Of the games that aren't available for all three platforms, most of those are either Wii/Xbox only, or Xbox/PS3 only. The games that exclude the Xbox are few and far between.
Since the Xbox is simply a specialized PC with an OS created to handle Microsoft's standard graphics API, and since Microsoft's graphics API is far and away the dominant API in the PC market, the line between PC and console is seriously blurred.
It's hard to call it a "console port" when a game that hits 90% of the console market only requires a few minor tweaks and a re-compile to hit 90% of the PC market.
Now, any console game being ported to Linux or Mac is definitely still a "console port", and anything that is not available for Xbox but is being ported to Windows is definitely still a console port. The latter rarely ever happens any more, usually if it wasn't planned for at the start it doesn't happen, and the former I don't know if it has ever happened. Maybe once or twice.
You read Darwin's Radio too huh?
It all boils down to poor project management, and it's always one (or more) of three reasons. The difficulty in coordinating the non-technical management's expectations and what the sales team thinks is possible with what is actually possible at a given price is the reason something like 80% of all IT projects fail. It's always either scope creep, budget creep, or time creep that kills them.
This sounds like a case of scope creep to me, and I'm actually surprised UK law is screwed up enough to award a 700 pound judgement for something that isn't even a breach of contract. Frankly, at least half of the blame lies with BlueSky for constantly changing the scope, and the other half to EDS for constantly agreeing to it. Dumbasses. Of course it is going to fail if you're trying to hit a moving target.
Have you ever WORKED for a corporation?
Have you? If they know it was not your fault, and more specifically if they know you were trying to prevent it but were not permitted to do so, they will not be unhappy with you.
However, they may still fry your ass if it saves their job or reputation, so just because they aren't unhappy with your work and they know where the blame belongs doesn't mean you are safe.
That's exactly why you CYA, because even if everybody knows it isn't your fault you could still become the sacrificial lamb.
It depends on the State whether or not an employer can fire you with no justification.
For what its worth, US law essentially treats employment as an open-ended contractual agreement and in states that do not have an at-will clause, termination almost always involves some form of breach of contract by one of the parties. I.e. you were hired to do X, you are not doing X or you are not doing X correctly, therefore you've breached the contract and we are firing you. Conversely, the employer no longer wants or needs the services of the employee, and so decides to terminate him. However, the employee was hired to do X, and was doing X as per their agreement, so the employer breached the contract.
Obviously that is simplistic, and it is such a common type of contract that we have special laws and procedures relating to just this situation, but it's still essentially an open-ended contractual agreement between two parties.
That's because most people don't know how to live within their means.
It's not impossible to live well making less than $25k per year, people just don't know how to manage their money. In fact for most people it's just as hard to do it at $25k as it is at $100k.
As an anecdotal example of this, my parents combined income is less than $60k per year, yet they own a house worth $300k and two four-plexes worth about $400k each. That's over a million dollars worth of property on an income of $30k apiece (and that is the highest it has ever been), in a state with one of the highest costs of living in the US, and at the same time they raised four kids with the last one still in elementary school.
Obviously that took 20+ years, but there are a lot of people who have had incomes in the millions of dollars per year with less to show for it. I grew up happy too, and I think that's largely in part because my parents loved their jobs in spite of the low pay (had they worked elsewhere they each could easilly be making $80-100k instead of $30k).
Worry less about the dollar amount and more about doing something you are interested in and enjoy doing, and regardless of what you end up making exercise discipline in your finances and you will have very little to worry about.
For what it's worth, I'm not a programmer but I do have some duties that involve a little programming, and I make close to $60k. The actual honest to god programmers I work with with 20+ years of experience push $200k. Experience and skill are everything, if you don't have it yet you're going to get the dime-a-dozen jobs until you get some. There's just no way around it, welcome to the real world - your fresh-out-of-college skills just aren't that valuable yet.
Actually, you should read the stated purpose of copyrights and patents in the Constitution. They are specific exemptions to the public's natural right to copy any item they physically own, and to distribute that item however they wish, in order to spur the creation of more works for the betterment of society at large. This is why we have things like fair use provisions. It's not that fair use was added on to copyright, it's just the opposite. Fair use is a natural right that the Copyright exemption restricts, but Copyright only restricts fair use as far as necessary to ensure the author/artist will continue to produce new works. That's also why it is judged on a case by case basis, because there is no way to come up with a set criteria to meet that purpose for every piece out there.
In other words, Copyright is a carrot dangled in front of authors and artists in order to make sure the public has as much literature and art as possible. That's why Copyright had limits, the whole idea was that eventually the works would be publicly available. The limits have been moved up into absurdity, restricting to a great degree the public's consumption of works with little to no further economic value to the artist, which is pretty much the opposite of what Copyright law is intended to produce.
Two lifetimes? Seriously? 90+% of all money made on a copyrighted work is made in the first two years, with most of that being in the first six months, do we really need 130 more years (assuming the author lives to at least 75-ish) to get that last 10%? Is it even worth it?
Do you know what would happen if Micky Mouse went into public domain today? They certainly wouldn't close their doors, there is way too much money to be made. I'll tell you what would happen, Disney would have to come up with a new icon, instead of riding the same icon they have been for the last hundred years. Hey that's funny, that looks awfully close to exactly the kind of thing that Copyright law was originally trying to accomplish! New icons, new culture, new stories, new art, hmmmm...
You've got to remember that copyright is not there for the author or the artist or the publisher, it's there for the PUBLIC. The provisions in copyright law exist to incentivise authors and artists to produce more works for the PUBLIC, it is simply necessary (and fair) that we ensure authors and artists are rewarded for doing so. When you lose sight of the purpose, though, things go crazy, and selfish people with vested interests start pushing for permanent copyrights and tighter restrictions on fair use, which goes against everything copyright law was written for.
As per the Bern Convention, French copyright law doesn't apply in America, the French are simply afforded the same copy protections as a US citizen would have when there is a case of infringement of a Frenchman's work in America, and vice versa and for all signatories of the Bern convention. There are minimums set in the Bern convention, but they were in line with what US copyright law already stated at the time, and they were nowhere near the roughly 140 year terms we have now.
US Copyright law was never significantly altered because of the Bern Convention except to extend the copyright protections to non-citizens (specifically, citizens of signatory countries).
The reason we have the outrageous copyright extensions is because large corporations (Disney being the most adamant) lobbied like hell for them. They were never instated based on another country's laws except as an argument for them. It was more like Disney saying "Look, the French do it, why can't we?" and dumbasses in congress actually listening to them.
Amen to that.
The fact is, we've been preparing for the IPv6 switch for years now. The IPv6 spec reserves space for the entire IPv4 network, making translation between the two a snap. Any modern OS less than 5 years old has IPv6 built in, including conversion between v4 and v6. Almost all commercial networking hardware sold in the last 5-10 years is IPv6 capable, and as I already said using IPv4 within IPv6 is a piece of cake.
The only issue here is going to be the fighting between registrars over address blocks, and that's nothing new. Private addressing with NAT doesn't even need to change if you don't want to bother with it, just change your gateway IP's from v4 to v6 and there you go, bandaid applied until you actually truly need to upgrade everything.
The whole uproar over this issue is silly. It has already been taken care of. Hell it was half taken care of in the IPv6 spec itself, and the rest by the router and switch vendors that have been putting the option in their equipment over the last decade. At worst there will be some minor pains to actually enable and configure the IPv6 capable equipment, and those using really old equipment will have to upgrade their gateways. Those like AnoNet who improperly used IPv4 addresses in the first place are going to have to come up with something else until the switch is finally thrown on IPv6, and that's entirely their own fault. By definition they were not supposed to use those addresses, and they've been bitten for it. Sucks to be them.
The IPv4 problem isn't 1/10th the problem people seem to think it is. The only reason it hasn't been done yet is because it is quite a bit cheaper to spend no money at all than it is to spend a little money for no immediate gain. Companies will spend the money to switch when they need to, and not a moment before; as long as we still have 10% of the addresses unassigned or reserved, there is no need to spend the money yet.
I can guarantee you aren't using that $15 ulimited data plan with an iPhone or any other smart phone either.
As far as I know, AT&T's and just about everybody else's smartphone data plan has always been around $30 per month. They reduced it by $10 as a pro-mo for the iPhone. When the 3G came out they did not extend the promo (as the iPhone was apparently really stressing their network, why would they?). If you had bought a Blackberry at any time during the iPhone promo you would have paid $30 per month, because that was their smartphone rate.
There's unlimited data, and there's smartphone unlimited data. They are different, they are sold separately, and it depends one which type of phone you have which plan they will sell you. This has been true for Blackberries and Windows Mobile phones long before the iPhone came out. The typical smartphone data plan is an extra $30 per month compared to $10-15 for a non-smart phone, and I am pretty sure it used to be a lot higher than that. This is because non-smartphones are simply not capable of pulling as much data as a smartphone, regardless of how fast the network itself is.
They also expect you to use the internet much more for things like email and general browsing, which just aren't possible (at least, not easily) on a standard phone. So, they charge more. With my local carrier I can actually get unlimited data for $8 a month (not including texting), but if I switch to a smartphone that jumps up to $30 a month. That's pretty much how it works everywhere, AT&T isn't exactly known for their low prices.
Why mod this funny? It's insightful!
Granted, as soon as you poke a camera out of the field it isn't 100% invisible, it's only 99.99% (or more) invisible. Still that's pretty damn good, do you know how hard it would be to notice a tiny dot floating around in space?