The GPL is a compromise that is made to achieve the desired outcomes under the copyright system. It's a concession to the reality that is copyright law.
Objection to copyright law is derived from the realisation that copyright law is fundamentally incompatible with our world and our economy. Art has massive initial cost and 0 incremental cost. You can't just pretend it has an incremental cost - it cannot and will not ever work as desired.
I'm putting the photo together in photoshop. I load up the porn image, and the child's face.
I position the child's face above the porn image and then hold the down arrow. At what point is it illegal? 5cm away? 10 cm away? What if I just used the child's eyes? Or one eye? Or a pupil? Or an....
It seems that most of the outrage over copyright is over the length of the term.
But would shortening it really help? The main reasons for downloading music because
(a) it's convenient! - don't have to physically visit the shop (I'm sitting here in my underwear and I just heard an Iron Maiden song, 3 clicks later I have every single Iron Maiden song ever written), don't have to rip the music yourself, it's already tagged/organised etc. (b) it's free!
Neither of these have anything to do with copyright terms.
I think that arguing about the length of copyright is really irrelevant compared to the real issue - trying to enforce scarcity on a good (via copyright) when the good is infinitely available (via the Internet) does not and cannot work. It has worked in the past - that's because the goods WEREN'T infinitely available. Copying a record was practically impossible for home users, copying tapes required you to have a physical copy of the tape, so in the majority of cases not an easy option.
We need to come up with alternatives to copyright, and I haven't seen a good proposal yet. Some form of "arts levy" citizen's pay to have access to the arts that everyone desires would be a rather obvious system, but the implementation seems impossible - how do you decide who get's what money? Quality - no objective measure. Quantity - just encourages people to push out shit. Some form of voting, through a mechanic like website hits or radio requests - seems impossible to implement in an un-gameable fashion. Some form of "arts council" that divides up the money with strict rules and regulations to prevent abuse is about the best I can come up with, but I can still see several huge and obvious flaws to it.
I'd really like to see someone come up with a good idea that I could stand behind - right now, the whole system just seems untenable.
I would be surprised if the sole reason for the difference in rates was due to the ability to see/play out encounters in a fictional environment. Japan's culture and attitude towards these issues is very different to that in America.
PS. As a personal sidenote: I think that, eventually, intelligence of our type, one that is well on its way to harness power over genes, is quite short, quite transitory stage towards intelligence that is fully aware, harnesses and embraces...memes.
That's all well and good, but good luck finding a multiplayer community for an old game, and the community you do find will be so far ahead of you that you'll get roflstomped every time you play.
Because if you could do that, anyone could have anything they wanted whenever they want it, and that's what makes a game shitty.
But gold doesn't get you everything you want, even now. MMO's almost never let you just buy the best items from gear. The only 2 avenues to getting the best gear in WoW are raiding and PvP - there are really no good items you can just buy. If you dumped 500,000 gold on my WoW character now, the only thing that would change is I would stop having to farm gold. My character wouldn't be better, no-one else would be affected - I'd just have more fun. Imagine if no-one needed to farm gold - you could just log on and start doing what you wanted to do.
PS - Get auctioneer and put in 10 minutes when you log on, you'll have plenty of money in no time. It's not like it takes any real effort.
I don't want to put in 10 unfun minutes when I log in. I don't want to NOT have fun when I play a GAME. I want to log in, have fun and then log off. Why do we need to do unfun things before fun things in MMO's? I do things I don't like in order to get things I do like in my everyday job. There's no boring, unfun grind in FPS or RTS games before you can start having fun.
That's fine, if playing the market is the "game" you're after.
My experience is WoW, and the problem is that the majority of people play MMOs for the PvP and the raids, and farming gold is just a necessary evil to do that. Accept that not everyone likes playing the market - I personally loathe it and find it intensely boring.
It's weird - I want to log on after work, go into a dungeon for 3-4 hours and want to just have fun killing things but I can't do that. For some reason, MMO's have a requirement to grind for things (in WoW's case; enchants, consumables and repairs).
*THAT* grind is what people are paying to avoid when they buy gold. I don't care if playing the market is fun for some people - I don't like it, and I don't like that every player is forced to take part in this "gold acquistion" game regardless of what they actually want to do. I don't force auction-house players to come do dungeons with me, nor are the forced to do PvP to get gold. Why should I have to get gold to goto dungeons? Why is partaking in the game's economy so necessary? Why can't I just go about my own game without having to go repeatedly kill things to earn money?
Check out Brett Stewart, the latest abomination in "Guilty until proven innocent".
A girl accused him of assaulting her and he got suspended for 5 matches and got edited out of the NRL promotion campaign he was in at the time.
It's absolutely disgusting that someone should stand to lose so much of their income on the basis of some girl accusing him of an assault .
Note: I'm not saying it did/did not happen, I don't know all the facts, but I do know he's pleading not guilty and therefore should still be presumed innocent of the crime, not publicly shamed and ridiculed on the strength of some girl's word.
Yet, despite being an Australian university student, if I for some reason wanted to go on a mad shooting spree through my campus... I wouldn't have the first idea how to go about getting a gun.
In Australia, gun control laws have been effective. I'd argue the vast majority of the Australian population has no access at all to weapons unless they go through legal channels, which is kind of the point.
Well, if Steam goes down and doesn't get all the restrictions removed, I'd say there'd be many thousand bored computer-savvy people with nothing to do but reverse-engineer the restrictions... Though, I'd be amazed if the Steam DRM hasn't already been cracked (haven't checked though because the servers are still up and I have a net connection) - really? If it has, what are you all bitching about!
Take Steam for what it is - a very convenient, cheap way of discovering, purchasing, obtaining, maintaining and ultimately PLAYING games. They're all good things.. right? None of the "limitations" have thus far stopped any of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh thank you my government from saving me from myself!
I'll just go start bashing my head into a wall - the government hasn't banned it, so it must be ok!
The GPL is a compromise that is made to achieve the desired outcomes under the copyright system. It's a concession to the reality that is copyright law.
Objection to copyright law is derived from the realisation that copyright law is fundamentally incompatible with our world and our economy. Art has massive initial cost and 0 incremental cost. You can't just pretend it has an incremental cost - it cannot and will not ever work as desired.
And what about this:
I'm putting the photo together in photoshop. I load up the porn image, and the child's face.
I position the child's face above the porn image and then hold the down arrow. At what point is it illegal? 5cm away? 10 cm away? What if I just used the child's eyes? Or one eye? Or a pupil? Or an ....
No exploitation of children = no crime.
It seems that most of the outrage over copyright is over the length of the term.
But would shortening it really help? The main reasons for downloading music because
(a) it's convenient! - don't have to physically visit the shop (I'm sitting here in my underwear and I just heard an Iron Maiden song, 3 clicks later I have every single Iron Maiden song ever written), don't have to rip the music yourself, it's already tagged/organised etc.
(b) it's free!
Neither of these have anything to do with copyright terms.
I think that arguing about the length of copyright is really irrelevant compared to the real issue - trying to enforce scarcity on a good (via copyright) when the good is infinitely available (via the Internet) does not and cannot work. It has worked in the past - that's because the goods WEREN'T infinitely available. Copying a record was practically impossible for home users, copying tapes required you to have a physical copy of the tape, so in the majority of cases not an easy option.
We need to come up with alternatives to copyright, and I haven't seen a good proposal yet. Some form of "arts levy" citizen's pay to have access to the arts that everyone desires would be a rather obvious system, but the implementation seems impossible - how do you decide who get's what money? Quality - no objective measure. Quantity - just encourages people to push out shit. Some form of voting, through a mechanic like website hits or radio requests - seems impossible to implement in an un-gameable fashion. Some form of "arts council" that divides up the money with strict rules and regulations to prevent abuse is about the best I can come up with, but I can still see several huge and obvious flaws to it.
I'd really like to see someone come up with a good idea that I could stand behind - right now, the whole system just seems untenable.
Correlation/causation etc.
I would be surprised if the sole reason for the difference in rates was due to the ability to see/play out encounters in a fictional environment. Japan's culture and attitude towards these issues is very different to that in America.
PS. As a personal sidenote: I think that, eventually, intelligence of our type, one that is well on its way to harness power over genes, is quite short, quite transitory stage towards intelligence that is fully aware, harnesses and embraces...memes.
We're further than you think.
I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER?!
Give me back those 2 hours! That was awesome
That's all well and good, but good luck finding a multiplayer community for an old game, and the community you do find will be so far ahead of you that you'll get roflstomped every time you play.
Hah! Not likely.
I've done MANY simulations, and Madagascar ALWAYS survives.
Because if you could do that, anyone could have anything they wanted whenever they want it, and that's what makes a game shitty.
But gold doesn't get you everything you want, even now. MMO's almost never let you just buy the best items from gear. The only 2 avenues to getting the best gear in WoW are raiding and PvP - there are really no good items you can just buy. If you dumped 500,000 gold on my WoW character now, the only thing that would change is I would stop having to farm gold. My character wouldn't be better, no-one else would be affected - I'd just have more fun. Imagine if no-one needed to farm gold - you could just log on and start doing what you wanted to do.
PS - Get auctioneer and put in 10 minutes when you log on, you'll have plenty of money in no time. It's not like it takes any real effort.
I don't want to put in 10 unfun minutes when I log in. I don't want to NOT have fun when I play a GAME. I want to log in, have fun and then log off. Why do we need to do unfun things before fun things in MMO's? I do things I don't like in order to get things I do like in my everyday job. There's no boring, unfun grind in FPS or RTS games before you can start having fun.
That's fine, if playing the market is the "game" you're after.
My experience is WoW, and the problem is that the majority of people play MMOs for the PvP and the raids, and farming gold is just a necessary evil to do that. Accept that not everyone likes playing the market - I personally loathe it and find it intensely boring.
It's weird - I want to log on after work, go into a dungeon for 3-4 hours and want to just have fun killing things but I can't do that. For some reason, MMO's have a requirement to grind for things (in WoW's case; enchants, consumables and repairs).
*THAT* grind is what people are paying to avoid when they buy gold. I don't care if playing the market is fun for some people - I don't like it, and I don't like that every player is forced to take part in this "gold acquistion" game regardless of what they actually want to do. I don't force auction-house players to come do dungeons with me, nor are the forced to do PvP to get gold. Why should I have to get gold to goto dungeons? Why is partaking in the game's economy so necessary? Why can't I just go about my own game without having to go repeatedly kill things to earn money?
Check out Brett Stewart, the latest abomination in "Guilty until proven innocent".
A girl accused him of assaulting her and he got suspended for 5 matches and got edited out of the NRL promotion campaign he was in at the time.
It's absolutely disgusting that someone should stand to lose so much of their income on the basis of some girl accusing him of an assault .
Note: I'm not saying it did/did not happen, I don't know all the facts, but I do know he's pleading not guilty and therefore should still be presumed innocent of the crime, not publicly shamed and ridiculed on the strength of some girl's word.
Yet, despite being an Australian university student, if I for some reason wanted to go on a mad shooting spree through my campus ... I wouldn't have the first idea how to go about getting a gun.
In Australia, gun control laws have been effective. I'd argue the vast majority of the Australian population has no access at all to weapons unless they go through legal channels, which is kind of the point.
The best/worst thing about all the April Fool's I've seen from Blizz is that every one makes me laugh, then think "That would actually be crazy fun!"
2headed ogre in WoW? Yes please!
Well, if Steam goes down and doesn't get all the restrictions removed, I'd say there'd be many thousand bored computer-savvy people with nothing to do but reverse-engineer the restrictions... Though, I'd be amazed if the Steam DRM hasn't already been cracked (haven't checked though because the servers are still up and I have a net connection) - really? If it has, what are you all bitching about!
Take Steam for what it is - a very convenient, cheap way of discovering, purchasing, obtaining, maintaining and ultimately PLAYING games. They're all good things .. right? None of the "limitations" have thus far stopped any of that.
Whenever you read "nuclear power plant", just replace that with "weapon of mass destruction". Now decide who should be in control of it.