There has, but it isn't really related to the methods described in the patent. Commercial skipping is more aimed at content detection than the details of the transport or video encodings. Some of those methods including looking for watermarks, video/audio blanking before / after ads, background encoding 'noise' of the movie vs the ads, comparing multiple regional stations with localised ads via differential comparisons, etc.
The patent is about things related to the low level stream. Things that are regularly discussed (or considered) in detail by anyone implementing decoders/encoders in the presence of stream corruption. It basically takes a common discussion and says lets put the bad shit in there as a matter of course and on a level that would overwhelm the typical minimalist decoder. And while we're at it, we'll mark the start point with a cue just for shits and giggles so a DRM friendly frontend won't misbehave if someone presses fast forward during the period of stream 'corruption'. The exact details are unimportant as a large number of equivalent methods are easily derivable from that generic statement.
If a video codec dev was asked to produce "a scheme that would stop user's of third party equipment from fast forwarding a stream", they would come up with a similar (or identical solution). And it would serve them no advantage or purpose to first look at the aforementioned patent for implementation ideas or methods. This is pretty much the definition of 'obvious'. And this solution is as obvious as a bubble sort algorithm is to the first time programmer. Thus my beef with the fact that this patent was granted at all.
This is of course all philosophical, as it really is just a 'negative' concept that no sane developer would implement anyway. However, if the patent can be construed to extend to the reciprocal action of a decoder that could be used to overcome said corruption; then we get a first hand probing with the great rubber glove that is the legal system wielded by corporate greed. And all because the patent office chose to grant protection on a method that is obvious to developers who haven't even read the patent.
As obvious it seems to be able to work around this, it still irks me that somehow this method was considered non-obvious and novel by the patent office and granted patent protection.
The point of patents is theoretically to advance the state of the art. This type of patent is in no way clever, or anything that couldn't have been thought up by anyone working in that field (and by quite a few people not skilled in the field of video compression and transport). Yes, I agree that in detail it may not "have been done before" and thus not subject to prior art, but the "obviousness" clause is meant to protect the patent pool from accumulating with patents that do nothing but hinder progress. ie. If a patent doesn't provide useful non-obvious information (or information that wouldn't naturally be derived with a trivial amount of calculation or tinkering), then allowing it to be used to extort others that come up with a similar or the same concepts can only harm an industry as a whole.
That being said, I'm pretty sure there isn't a single person on Slashdot who wouldn't celebrate any injunctory action taken by the holder of this particular patent. But, IMO, the patent should have never been granted in the first place. (Which is also true for far too many patents that are granted these days.)
Like many people whose minds are stuck in the prior millenium, you're confusing "copies" with "access."
I'll address this line directly as the sibling posters have covered the rest of your post.
From the quoted line above, you're assuming that there has been some legal shift during the last 15 years in the scope of what defines intellectual property. With the exception of some far reaching lower court copyright rulings regarding things (eg. 'likenesses' in photographic elements and techniques) that should properly not be the domain of copyright at all, I haven't seen any changes.
And your post emphasises my thesis that there seem to be more people out there desiring (or assuming) that anything that financially impacts someone else is somehow (or should be) protected (eg. your concept of 'access') and must be outlawed. Yet, taken to it's conclusion, you'd end up preventing competition in just about every field of endeavour. And this attitude creep is what I was referring to in my original post.
I love how some people are 'miffed' that a Chinese company has copied their city down to the finest details "without asking". What if they said no? Would the Chinese company have just shut down their project? Maybe as a courtesy, but why risk a 'no', when you fully intend to ignore it anyway.
And 'piracy' (as posted above) is the wrong term. These buildings and the landscape are so old that even if they ever existed under some sort of copyright or patent protection, they would no longer be covered now.
It's not even like the Chinese company isn't saying that it's a direct copy, so the original is still being credited as being the 'original'.
What this does show is that there are a whole bunch of people around that think that 'copyright' or 'intellectual property' are some sort of super-rights that preclude anyone from doing anything that the creators don't expressly allow; whether or not any reasonable period of protection has elapsed. And sadly, many others think it's justified, while ignoring the consequences, where pretty much anything created would end up infringing on something somewhere at some time in the past.
"My goodness, this person said something rude to me, so I shall brood menacingly and later whine about it to some other fuck who will pat me on the back as we sob together about how terrible that rude person is like a bunch of teenage girls".
Nobody fucking acts like that in real life, and if they do, if you do find someone like that -- nobody fucking likes them. But hey, great TV, aint?
What are you talking about? You've just described every second water cooler discussion that goes on in our office. We have employees that I think are kept around for that backstabbing entertainment value alone.
ie. So he was there long enough to stop, not be able to see along the cross street due to the occluding vehicle at the intersection, but then drove off anyway? This is even more dangerous than not stopping at a visibly clear intersection - and right up there with overtaking someone that is stopping at a pedestrian crossing.
If the stop sign is legitimately placed, then it will be because there is very little or no visibility prior to reaching the intersection.
Besides, my response was a generic rebuttal to the parent as opposed to a comment on specific nature as described in the article.
But, even then, the probability that a human can reliably recognise an unfamiliar face based on a Facebook photo would be quite low. From Facebook profile photos, I have trouble working out which 'Mike Smith' on Facebook is the one that I've known for years. In some cases it might be easier if the person was very unusual looking, and the photos were very good.
Given a large enough 'database' and/or a high enough false positive likelihood, any system of trawling is guaranteed to produce statistically unreliable results. This includes the example in the article, along with any similar method whether it be computerised or manual.
The only thing it may be useful for is to give an investigator a non-admissable lead as to where they might look for real evidence. At worst, it may produce a 'fruit of the poisoned tree' argument that causes all further evidence gathered to also become inadmissible. For conviction purposes, eye-witness testimony needs to be rock-solid.
Not just "I think that's the guy I saw blow away my mate Joe."
But, "Yeah, I saw my neighbour Dave standing on his front lawn pull out a shotgun and pump two cartridges into my mate Joe." Then they find Dave's shotgun has been fired with Dave's fingerprints still on it, and that Dave hated Joe ever since Joe ran over his dog. Now you have a case.
Could he not have just pushed down Zimmerman's forehead every time Zimmerman tried to lift his head off the ground? Or lifted Zimmerman's head with his hands underneath, and then moved them back to his forehead and pushed his head back down.
If Zimmerman had multiple bruise points on the back of his head, then would that not corroborate his version of events?
What's the problem? An assault victim has been identified the suspect by a photograph. Further investigation will include the victim confirming or denying this suspect by direct view. If confirmed, the suspect will get their day in court.
It's assault -- it's a very serious crime. They have to arrest the suspect unless an air-tight alibi is presented. It wasn't, so they did. Case now moves to next step.
This is not "bad police work". This is what they're supposed to do.
It depends on how they got the photo. If for example, the photo came about because [prior to finding the photo] the person of interest was known to be in that area at the time, the perpetrator was already known to the victim, or was tracked down because she'd dropped some identifying information, then the photo is valid.
If, however, the photo was obtained after trawling a large number of online photos of people that live 'in the area', using automatic 'face recognition'. And assuming at best the face recognition was as good as 99% reliable (which is better than the average person would be at recognising an unfamiliar person). Then there would be a huge number of false positives. If the person is identified by this type of system, then statistically speaking, the match should never be used as evidence. And if the resulting match is then used to obtain corroborating evidence that is itself related to the search (eg. a police lineup using a human to verify the recognition), then the corroborative evidence is statistically useless.
The same failure applies to DNA database trawling, followed by matching something directly derivable from the search result - eg. someone's DNA matches a sample from the crime scene (again with a huge false positive rate across a large (or incomplete) enough database). And the corroborating evidence is that the guy also had red hair, freckles and light skin - must be him! Fail.
Similar thing happened a couple of years ago to a friend here in Australia. Ambulance came, picked him up and he went straight to emergency. He was there overnight after running the full gamut of tests. Cost him a few hundred bucks for the Ambulance (of which he could claim it all back anyway), everything else was covered by the country's UHC system.
They never found the car/driver. If they did, the driver would have found himself in a holding cell after being arrested for a hit-and-run.
The design claims may be laughable taken individually, but a design patent is explicitly there to protect the totality of the claimed design elements taken as a whole. You can reduce any design to a subset of laughable 'things that came before', just as you can a work of literature. The theory is that infringement takes place when someone comes too close to the design when taken as a whole.
In the case of the iPad/Galaxy, this includes many things that are part of the software interface - in addition, and not necessarily separate, to the industrial design of the physical product.
I'm absolutely not a fan of vague 'look and feel' copyrights, vaguely 'derivative work' copyright decisions, or broad sweeping patents. And I'm not even sure I agree with any level of copyright or patent protection. For a sane system to work at all, patents, copyrights and trademarks should be protected as a whole work, and not just an umbrella covering every subordinate aspect of the work. They should also only cover whole works (or 95%+ of a whole) that could never have been created coincidentally. Anything less stifles innovation as people are too scared to create something that might vaguely infringe some aspect of a pre-existing patent/copyright, or get financially crushed trying to fight a legal challenge that has but a scintilla of validity - as happens now in many fields.
Trademarks and brand protection is necessary, but should be clearly limited to properly specified logos and names. Again, taken as a whole and not just a sub-element such as the 'font', 'colour', 'shape', etc.
It is obvious that the Galaxy is attempting to copy many aspects of the iPad, the question is whether or not they've gone too far as defined by current legal doctrine (whether or not we agree with it). IMO, the Samsung product is different enough to be clearly distinguished. But, my wife still calls my brother's Galaxy Tab an iPad. This is where the courts step in - as a whole, does it, or does it not infringe on the enumerated claims of Apple's design patent.
This is a fight that could never take place if not for the silliness that is the current state of 'IP' law (in many countries and not just the USA).
I still have the full collection of AD&D 1st Edition books on my shelf.
The first three books were pretty much necessary to get things going: Player's Handbook, DMG, & Monster Manual.
Then came the Monster Manual 2, Deities & Demigods (original version with Cthulhu & Melnibonean mythos), Unearthed Arcana, Fiend Folio, Oriental Adventures, the Dungeoneer's & Wilderness Survival Guides, and Manual of the Planes.
Of course there were all the world based boxed sets like World of Greyhawk, Dragonlance Adventures and Forgotten Realms. And that doesn't include all the dungeon modules. I won't start listing them because I have hundreds.
I'd say I easily spent a couple of thousand dollars (and that's 1980s dollars) on TSR products before the 2nd Edition was ever released.
That's my big gripe as well.... It's especially maddening. Having not played any of the other editions, are the encounters really much shorter in any other edition?
Yeah, it sucks big time when you're fully immersed in an exciting campaign plot and then some unexciting but non-insurmountable creature was blocking the way forward. That was usually my cue to go and pick up the pizzas.
This was IMO the worst aspect of most of the common RPGs when I first started playing in the early eighties. Every time the rules were revised I got excited at the opportunity for them to have streamlined the fight encounters. Unfortunately, that never happened. I honestly used to think that the R in RPG stood for 'roll', not 'role'.
After a few years we started playing 'abbreviated rule' games where we'd used most of the material, but when it came to fight scenes, they'd be heavily optimised. In the end it's far better to let the GM handle the encounters and outcomes in an interactive story style (with maybe the occasional roll of a die) rather than spend half an hour rolling dice until the proverbial 'band of orcs' has finally been dispatched.
The best gaming sessions we ever had were mini-freeforms where we'd go somewhere and wander around as a group and let our GM (a brilliant story teller) describe the scenes, act as NPCs and referee the interactions. Awesome stuff. One Friday night our group went to see Star Trek IV (opening night) for someones birthday, and ended up spending the rest of the weekend immersed in a time travel universe set in historical earth (but we got to carry around cool Star Trek equipment and capabilities).
But the new 'Civic' isn't really a Civic. It's a bigger car with the same name as an older smaller car. The Jazz is closer to what used to be a Civic.
This is true for all manufacturers, however it's nothing to do with 'safety standards' and everything to do with marketing and sales.
There is a truism in car design that the 'updated' model must be larger than the old. At the same time a new smaller series is introduced with a different name to capture the market for smaller lower priced vehicles.
Look at the VW Lupo, Polo, Golf/Rabbit. The Lupo is smaller than the Polo which is smaller than the Golf. But, when photographed side by side, the newest Lupo is the same size as the original Golf/Rabbit.
The corollary of that is that I don't want to have to sift through a crap load of potentially hazardous garbage to find an add-on. You may think your utility is the bees knees, but that does me no favours. If I trust you for some reason, then I can always override the Firefox 'app store' and download it directly from your web site.
But, why shouldn't I be able to place some degree of trust in the Firefox "app store" to filter out the dangerous and useless waffle tuft. If your add-on survives the test of time and review, then let it be 'upgraded' from your website to the central repository.
Imagine if everyone spent 2 minutes a day creating and 2 hours consuming. Simply due to the replicable nature of digital data, there would be so much 'content' that with 7 billion people on the planet it would be impossible for anyone to consume more than 0.000001% of the total created content at any measured interval.
Maybe you're alluding to a type of 'active entertainment' where everyone provides simultaneous 'creative input' as they consume. And even in that situation people would still be drawn to exemplary contributions by experts and artists above and beyond the banality of the overwhelming morass.
So I put forward that their is no creation without consumption. And the amount of 'man time' put into any creation is far outweighed by the totality of 'man time' put into what that same creator would consume in the process.
The US model defeats the whole purpose of privatising the telecoms system. What's the point of setting up little mini monopolies that can just as effectively abuse their client base as could a single larger one?
In Australia, there are at least three (Optus/Telstra/AGC and maybe more?) wholesale backbone providers that are required to allow all ISPs to lease copper line bandwidth/services/endpoints/etc. Those ISPs then retail their services and DSL connectivity to individual customers. There are also a couple of cable TV / internet services from Optus and Telstra, but they are not mutually exclusive with DSL accessibility.
Not it this sense. If the government uses a private contractor, either directly or through extension of policy. Any evidence gathered or action taken is considered an act by government.
You've probably heard of the 'fruit of the poisoned tree' concept that appears on police TV dramas all the time. This means that evidence obtained due to a previously illegal action, becomes itself inadmissible. ie. if a search is conducted without a warrant then anything found becomes inadmissible, but so can further legally obtained evidence that might have been discovered based on something uncovered during the first illegal search (even though the second search was legal).
The same applies (or at least is supposed to apply) to actions taken by the government. In some circumstances even just the knowledge of something happening can extend the action into government condoned action (e.g. certain types of entrapment followed by arrest when the officer knew in advance of the entrapping actions).
Slashdot Mirror
There has, but it isn't really related to the methods described in the patent. Commercial skipping is more aimed at content detection than the details of the transport or video encodings. Some of those methods including looking for watermarks, video/audio blanking before / after ads, background encoding 'noise' of the movie vs the ads, comparing multiple regional stations with localised ads via differential comparisons, etc.
The patent is about things related to the low level stream. Things that are regularly discussed (or considered) in detail by anyone implementing decoders/encoders in the presence of stream corruption. It basically takes a common discussion and says lets put the bad shit in there as a matter of course and on a level that would overwhelm the typical minimalist decoder. And while we're at it, we'll mark the start point with a cue just for shits and giggles so a DRM friendly frontend won't misbehave if someone presses fast forward during the period of stream 'corruption'. The exact details are unimportant as a large number of equivalent methods are easily derivable from that generic statement.
If a video codec dev was asked to produce "a scheme that would stop user's of third party equipment from fast forwarding a stream", they would come up with a similar (or identical solution). And it would serve them no advantage or purpose to first look at the aforementioned patent for implementation ideas or methods. This is pretty much the definition of 'obvious'. And this solution is as obvious as a bubble sort algorithm is to the first time programmer. Thus my beef with the fact that this patent was granted at all.
This is of course all philosophical, as it really is just a 'negative' concept that no sane developer would implement anyway. However, if the patent can be construed to extend to the reciprocal action of a decoder that could be used to overcome said corruption; then we get a first hand probing with the great rubber glove that is the legal system wielded by corporate greed. And all because the patent office chose to grant protection on a method that is obvious to developers who haven't even read the patent.
As obvious it seems to be able to work around this, it still irks me that somehow this method was considered non-obvious and novel by the patent office and granted patent protection.
The point of patents is theoretically to advance the state of the art. This type of patent is in no way clever, or anything that couldn't have been thought up by anyone working in that field (and by quite a few people not skilled in the field of video compression and transport). Yes, I agree that in detail it may not "have been done before" and thus not subject to prior art, but the "obviousness" clause is meant to protect the patent pool from accumulating with patents that do nothing but hinder progress. ie. If a patent doesn't provide useful non-obvious information (or information that wouldn't naturally be derived with a trivial amount of calculation or tinkering), then allowing it to be used to extort others that come up with a similar or the same concepts can only harm an industry as a whole.
That being said, I'm pretty sure there isn't a single person on Slashdot who wouldn't celebrate any injunctory action taken by the holder of this particular patent. But, IMO, the patent should have never been granted in the first place. (Which is also true for far too many patents that are granted these days.)
I'm just pointing out why people in Halstatt are legitimately pissed. The value of their unique resource has been diluted.
Fair enough. Just as a local suburban Café owner would be pissed if Starbucks moved in next door. The value of their unique resource has been diluted.
Like many people whose minds are stuck in the prior millenium, you're confusing "copies" with "access."
I'll address this line directly as the sibling posters have covered the rest of your post.
From the quoted line above, you're assuming that there has been some legal shift during the last 15 years in the scope of what defines intellectual property. With the exception of some far reaching lower court copyright rulings regarding things (eg. 'likenesses' in photographic elements and techniques) that should properly not be the domain of copyright at all, I haven't seen any changes.
And your post emphasises my thesis that there seem to be more people out there desiring (or assuming) that anything that financially impacts someone else is somehow (or should be) protected (eg. your concept of 'access') and must be outlawed. Yet, taken to it's conclusion, you'd end up preventing competition in just about every field of endeavour. And this attitude creep is what I was referring to in my original post.
I love how some people are 'miffed' that a Chinese company has copied their city down to the finest details "without asking". What if they said no? Would the Chinese company have just shut down their project? Maybe as a courtesy, but why risk a 'no', when you fully intend to ignore it anyway.
And 'piracy' (as posted above) is the wrong term. These buildings and the landscape are so old that even if they ever existed under some sort of copyright or patent protection, they would no longer be covered now.
It's not even like the Chinese company isn't saying that it's a direct copy, so the original is still being credited as being the 'original'.
What this does show is that there are a whole bunch of people around that think that 'copyright' or 'intellectual property' are some sort of super-rights that preclude anyone from doing anything that the creators don't expressly allow; whether or not any reasonable period of protection has elapsed. And sadly, many others think it's justified, while ignoring the consequences, where pretty much anything created would end up infringing on something somewhere at some time in the past.
"My goodness, this person said something rude to me, so I shall brood menacingly and later whine about it to some other fuck who will pat me on the back as we sob together about how terrible that rude person is like a bunch of teenage girls".
Nobody fucking acts like that in real life, and if they do, if you do find someone like that -- nobody fucking likes them. But hey, great TV, aint?
What are you talking about? You've just described every second water cooler discussion that goes on in our office. We have employees that I think are kept around for that backstabbing entertainment value alone.
ie. So he was there long enough to stop, not be able to see along the cross street due to the occluding vehicle at the intersection, but then drove off anyway? This is even more dangerous than not stopping at a visibly clear intersection - and right up there with overtaking someone that is stopping at a pedestrian crossing.
If the stop sign is legitimately placed, then it will be because there is very little or no visibility prior to reaching the intersection.
How about call it a "rolling stop" instead of a "California stop" as if people from California are special or something.
I thought it was called a 'California Roll', playing off the name of the Japanese restaurant staple.
You're thinking about the USA. In fact, you don't even have to write it, just say it into a mobile phone, email it, or just text it.
Read the article? Dude, this is Slashdot.
Besides, my response was a generic rebuttal to the parent as opposed to a comment on specific nature as described in the article.
But, even then, the probability that a human can reliably recognise an unfamiliar face based on a Facebook photo would be quite low. From Facebook profile photos, I have trouble working out which 'Mike Smith' on Facebook is the one that I've known for years. In some cases it might be easier if the person was very unusual looking, and the photos were very good.
Given a large enough 'database' and/or a high enough false positive likelihood, any system of trawling is guaranteed to produce statistically unreliable results. This includes the example in the article, along with any similar method whether it be computerised or manual.
The only thing it may be useful for is to give an investigator a non-admissable lead as to where they might look for real evidence. At worst, it may produce a 'fruit of the poisoned tree' argument that causes all further evidence gathered to also become inadmissible. For conviction purposes, eye-witness testimony needs to be rock-solid.
Not just "I think that's the guy I saw blow away my mate Joe."
But, "Yeah, I saw my neighbour Dave standing on his front lawn pull out a shotgun and pump two cartridges into my mate Joe." Then they find Dave's shotgun has been fired with Dave's fingerprints still on it, and that Dave hated Joe ever since Joe ran over his dog. Now you have a case.
Could he not have just pushed down Zimmerman's forehead every time Zimmerman tried to lift his head off the ground? Or lifted Zimmerman's head with his hands underneath, and then moved them back to his forehead and pushed his head back down.
If Zimmerman had multiple bruise points on the back of his head, then would that not corroborate his version of events?
What's the problem? An assault victim has been identified the suspect by a photograph. Further investigation will include the victim confirming or denying this suspect by direct view. If confirmed, the suspect will get their day in court.
It's assault -- it's a very serious crime. They have to arrest the suspect unless an air-tight alibi is presented. It wasn't, so they did. Case now moves to next step.
This is not "bad police work". This is what they're supposed to do.
It depends on how they got the photo. If for example, the photo came about because [prior to finding the photo] the person of interest was known to be in that area at the time, the perpetrator was already known to the victim, or was tracked down because she'd dropped some identifying information, then the photo is valid.
If, however, the photo was obtained after trawling a large number of online photos of people that live 'in the area', using automatic 'face recognition'. And assuming at best the face recognition was as good as 99% reliable (which is better than the average person would be at recognising an unfamiliar person). Then there would be a huge number of false positives. If the person is identified by this type of system, then statistically speaking, the match should never be used as evidence. And if the resulting match is then used to obtain corroborating evidence that is itself related to the search (eg. a police lineup using a human to verify the recognition), then the corroborative evidence is statistically useless.
The same failure applies to DNA database trawling, followed by matching something directly derivable from the search result - eg. someone's DNA matches a sample from the crime scene (again with a huge false positive rate across a large (or incomplete) enough database). And the corroborating evidence is that the guy also had red hair, freckles and light skin - must be him! Fail.
Similar thing happened a couple of years ago to a friend here in Australia. Ambulance came, picked him up and he went straight to emergency. He was there overnight after running the full gamut of tests. Cost him a few hundred bucks for the Ambulance (of which he could claim it all back anyway), everything else was covered by the country's UHC system.
They never found the car/driver. If they did, the driver would have found himself in a holding cell after being arrested for a hit-and-run.
Yeah, he's glad to be alive and not in debt.
The design claims may be laughable taken individually, but a design patent is explicitly there to protect the totality of the claimed design elements taken as a whole. You can reduce any design to a subset of laughable 'things that came before', just as you can a work of literature. The theory is that infringement takes place when someone comes too close to the design when taken as a whole.
In the case of the iPad/Galaxy, this includes many things that are part of the software interface - in addition, and not necessarily separate, to the industrial design of the physical product.
I'm absolutely not a fan of vague 'look and feel' copyrights, vaguely 'derivative work' copyright decisions, or broad sweeping patents. And I'm not even sure I agree with any level of copyright or patent protection. For a sane system to work at all, patents, copyrights and trademarks should be protected as a whole work, and not just an umbrella covering every subordinate aspect of the work. They should also only cover whole works (or 95%+ of a whole) that could never have been created coincidentally. Anything less stifles innovation as people are too scared to create something that might vaguely infringe some aspect of a pre-existing patent/copyright, or get financially crushed trying to fight a legal challenge that has but a scintilla of validity - as happens now in many fields.
Trademarks and brand protection is necessary, but should be clearly limited to properly specified logos and names. Again, taken as a whole and not just a sub-element such as the 'font', 'colour', 'shape', etc.
It is obvious that the Galaxy is attempting to copy many aspects of the iPad, the question is whether or not they've gone too far as defined by current legal doctrine (whether or not we agree with it). IMO, the Samsung product is different enough to be clearly distinguished. But, my wife still calls my brother's Galaxy Tab an iPad. This is where the courts step in - as a whole, does it, or does it not infringe on the enumerated claims of Apple's design patent.
This is a fight that could never take place if not for the silliness that is the current state of 'IP' law (in many countries and not just the USA).
I'm guessing the iPad 3 looks kind of like a rectangle with rounded corners and a screen on one face?
Along with, I guess, 25 other distinguishing features that people conveniently forget to mention every time they beat this dead horse.
If you don't understand something, go and read a book about it after the lecture.
Even better, go and read the book before the lecture.
I still have the full collection of AD&D 1st Edition books on my shelf.
The first three books were pretty much necessary to get things going: Player's Handbook, DMG, & Monster Manual.
Then came the Monster Manual 2, Deities & Demigods (original version with Cthulhu & Melnibonean mythos), Unearthed Arcana, Fiend Folio, Oriental Adventures, the Dungeoneer's & Wilderness Survival Guides, and Manual of the Planes.
Of course there were all the world based boxed sets like World of Greyhawk, Dragonlance Adventures and Forgotten Realms. And that doesn't include all the dungeon modules. I won't start listing them because I have hundreds.
I'd say I easily spent a couple of thousand dollars (and that's 1980s dollars) on TSR products before the 2nd Edition was ever released.
That's my big gripe as well.... It's especially maddening. Having not played any of the other editions, are the encounters really much shorter in any other edition?
Yeah, it sucks big time when you're fully immersed in an exciting campaign plot and then some unexciting but non-insurmountable creature was blocking the way forward. That was usually my cue to go and pick up the pizzas.
This was IMO the worst aspect of most of the common RPGs when I first started playing in the early eighties. Every time the rules were revised I got excited at the opportunity for them to have streamlined the fight encounters. Unfortunately, that never happened. I honestly used to think that the R in RPG stood for 'roll', not 'role'.
After a few years we started playing 'abbreviated rule' games where we'd used most of the material, but when it came to fight scenes, they'd be heavily optimised. In the end it's far better to let the GM handle the encounters and outcomes in an interactive story style (with maybe the occasional roll of a die) rather than spend half an hour rolling dice until the proverbial 'band of orcs' has finally been dispatched.
The best gaming sessions we ever had were mini-freeforms where we'd go somewhere and wander around as a group and let our GM (a brilliant story teller) describe the scenes, act as NPCs and referee the interactions. Awesome stuff. One Friday night our group went to see Star Trek IV (opening night) for someones birthday, and ended up spending the rest of the weekend immersed in a time travel universe set in historical earth (but we got to carry around cool Star Trek equipment and capabilities).
But the new 'Civic' isn't really a Civic. It's a bigger car with the same name as an older smaller car. The Jazz is closer to what used to be a Civic.
This is true for all manufacturers, however it's nothing to do with 'safety standards' and everything to do with marketing and sales.
There is a truism in car design that the 'updated' model must be larger than the old. At the same time a new smaller series is introduced with a different name to capture the market for smaller lower priced vehicles.
Look at the VW Lupo, Polo, Golf/Rabbit. The Lupo is smaller than the Polo which is smaller than the Golf. But, when photographed side by side, the newest Lupo is the same size as the original Golf/Rabbit.
Easy. Do it outside of the USA first.
The corollary of that is that I don't want to have to sift through a crap load of potentially hazardous garbage to find an add-on. You may think your utility is the bees knees, but that does me no favours. If I trust you for some reason, then I can always override the Firefox 'app store' and download it directly from your web site.
But, why shouldn't I be able to place some degree of trust in the Firefox "app store" to filter out the dangerous and useless waffle tuft. If your add-on survives the test of time and review, then let it be 'upgraded' from your website to the central repository.
Imagine if everyone spent 2 minutes a day creating and 2 hours consuming. Simply due to the replicable nature of digital data, there would be so much 'content' that with 7 billion people on the planet it would be impossible for anyone to consume more than 0.000001% of the total created content at any measured interval.
Maybe you're alluding to a type of 'active entertainment' where everyone provides simultaneous 'creative input' as they consume. And even in that situation people would still be drawn to exemplary contributions by experts and artists above and beyond the banality of the overwhelming morass.
So I put forward that their is no creation without consumption. And the amount of 'man time' put into any creation is far outweighed by the totality of 'man time' put into what that same creator would consume in the process.
The black-hats might have it, but the question is do you really want to release it to all the script-kiddies?
The US model defeats the whole purpose of privatising the telecoms system. What's the point of setting up little mini monopolies that can just as effectively abuse their client base as could a single larger one?
In Australia, there are at least three (Optus/Telstra/AGC and maybe more?) wholesale backbone providers that are required to allow all ISPs to lease copper line bandwidth/services/endpoints/etc. Those ISPs then retail their services and DSL connectivity to individual customers. There are also a couple of cable TV / internet services from Optus and Telstra, but they are not mutually exclusive with DSL accessibility.
Not it this sense. If the government uses a private contractor, either directly or through extension of policy. Any evidence gathered or action taken is considered an act by government.
You've probably heard of the 'fruit of the poisoned tree' concept that appears on police TV dramas all the time. This means that evidence obtained due to a previously illegal action, becomes itself inadmissible. ie. if a search is conducted without a warrant then anything found becomes inadmissible, but so can further legally obtained evidence that might have been discovered based on something uncovered during the first illegal search (even though the second search was legal).
The same applies (or at least is supposed to apply) to actions taken by the government. In some circumstances even just the knowledge of something happening can extend the action into government condoned action (e.g. certain types of entrapment followed by arrest when the officer knew in advance of the entrapping actions).