The specs are much nicer, and the games will obviously be more advanced because of it. But graphically, it looks like they're still finding new tricks with the current Gameboy. Check out these shots of the upcoming Alone in the Dark:
What's even funnier is that the people mentioned often don't even make those statements. A lot of PR people are licensed to make up whatever sounds good, and stick the appropriate person's name on it.
So in response to your wondering about where Colleen was when she made the statement-- there's a good chance she never made that statement at all.
The same thing he would do if you wrote code with that information in it. And therein lies the essence of his argument: he is arguing that code is speech in just the same way books, t-shirts, and the like are.
If the government wants to ban you from publishing his credit card numbers, they will ban you from doing it in all forms. Touretzky was demonstrating that they must do the same thing with the DeCSS code as well, if they choose to ban distribution of DeCSS. By demonstrating this equivalent, it shows that this is a free speech issue, just as publishing his credit card numbers would be. Just because something could, in some cases, be free speech does not mean that it is legal or "right". Some may consider it valuable artistic expression to yell "fire" in a crowded theater, but it is prohibited. The first amendment does not take precedence over the remainder of the U.S. Constitution.
What his argument did NOT do, and did not attempt to do, was show that is fine to print anything you want on a t-shirt and wear it around. He said, "if you can put it on a T-shirt, it's speech". There are many examples in U.S. law where speech is prohibited. If you want to prove Touretzky wrong, you'll have to link his actual statement with your statement of what you believe he said: "anything which can be printed on a t-shirt (regardless of how the information was gathered) can be freely given to the world without consequence".
Nothing like quoting things out of context and ignoring the rest to make your point, no? He wasn't saying computer _should_ be hard. Let's quote a part you didn't deign to quote: If all you want to do is email and write papers, you shouldn't need a whole lot of training.
And another: You don't walk into a seamstress shop and expect to be able to make commercial quality fashions without any training.
Yeah, it'd be great if we could all walk up to a computer for the first time, and have it do exactly what we want with no fuss. But we haven't gotten to that point with any other form of technology, so why expect computers to be there right away as well? Even Macs are still a pain in the ass to use.
How is posting bogus files harmful to Napster's interests unless Napster's purpose is to violate copyrighted materials.
Your entire post is a fallacy. What if Napster were only used for non-copyrighted materials? Then Napster would still want to act against this sort of thing.
Perhaps what you meant to say was: "How is posting bogus files masquerading as copyrighted materials harmful to Napster's interests unless Napster's purpose is to violate copyrighted materials?"
However, even in that case, the principle of the protest is a poor one. That is, posting fake files is harmful to any distribution system like this, even perfectly valid ones. If Napster was used only for free files by up and coming artists, then someone got angry at one of those artists, that someone could do the same thing-- would you support him?
To expand to an example that's not so new, killing people is generally agreed to be a poor form of protest. If you don't like a government official, you don't protest by assassinating him (unless you're a militant nut). Gandhi's civil disobedience is far more respected than, say, the endless rounds of guillotining in France. Why is that? Is that because they didn't kill the right people? No, it's because in principle, killing people is just plain wrong.
To relate that back to the Napster example, I would like to propose that lying to people is also a bad principle. This is far more contentious than killing people. But I think most people would agree with me that performing this sort of trickery on a copyright material-free Napster would be wrong.
Only partially true. I agree that there would be a lot more angry people on these boards if it was Microsoft that did the investigating, which is odd because Oracle is also a monopolistic behemoth.
The other factor is that Oracle found things. Public reaction to this sort of thing is rarely based on a strict ethical standard. If Oracle had hired IGI and found a couple of small and inconsequential things, then people found out about it, they'd be critical of Oracle and their industrial espionage tactics. However, since Oracle uncovered a lot of dirty laundry, it's a lot easier for people to say, "go Oracle! Those dirty MS scum were trying to get away with that, but you caught 'em".
2) There are many laws about the tracking of purchases with credit cards (at least in the U.S., I am not familiar with these laws in other countries), and the selling of that information. Some credit cards have further privacy policies. 3) Nope, no scanned checks. 4) Free e-mail-- that one's laughable. Who puts in their real info? 5) Free registration-- see #4
I agree that there are many insidious ways that people attempt to collect our data. A lot of these are fairly widespread-- i.e., club cards. But there are also enough people out there concerned about privacy providing the information you need to prevent this sort of thing, if you choose to do so. Corporations have always been ruthless. It's always been laissez faire-- now it's just in new and different ways.
Re:What do your examples have to do with anything?
on
Mattel Spyware
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· Score: 1
First off, if your "average e-shopper" is so worried about electronic privacy, then what are they doing e-shopping? Do you have any statistics to back up your statement that they are "so" worried about it?
They ARE worried about it, they're just fairly ignorant. As far as evidence, sorry, but I don't think my company would allow me to post the thousands of e-mails we have asking if our e-commerce transactions are secure. Just about everyone who used it asked; we had to put a lot of messages about it all over so people would stop hitting customer service with it so much, and they still ask many, many times a day.
Constantly? You're kidding, right? If it really bothers you, just go into your options and disable all downloading of plugins, signed or not.
Again, if we're talking about the "average" user, they don't even go in and change their preferences. So is open source going to help the "average" user? Not directly. It all falls to the people who know what they're doing to make the DEFAULT setting correct. For example...
If you get tricked into running something bad, the presence or absence of source isn't going to help you.
By default, Outlook shouldn't have allowed vbs's to do that kind of damage. They finally issued a patch, after months of denial from smaller viruses found earlier. Lots of users aren't going to even install the patch. But sysadmins and such will. And if OUTLOOK was open source (I'm pretty sure you intentionally "mis-heard" him when you decided he was saying only the ILOVEYOU virus should be open source), the patch would have come along sooner, as shown from many a slashdot story on those sorts of studies between patch speed between open source and closed source.
I also read it, just throwing in one more concurring opinion. Very good, and pretty accessible. You have to keep your brain turned on through a lot of the chapters, but I had very little knowledge of anything quantum (a couple days in Freshman Physics-- must have been thorough, right?), and this book caught me up quite well.
It spends a few chapters entertainingly acquanting you with quantum mechanics and all that, then gives you all the superstring theory stuff you know you want.
I w1ll h4x0r their feed and n4pst4r this right away!!!!!!!! Search for t1t4n 43 31337 when this comes out, l4m3rz!!!!!!! But only download it if you have a ph4t gigahertz pr0n pipe and 500 megabyte p3ntium like I do, and not if you use A01!!!!!!!
I didn't see much in the article, and didn't have much success searching around, so here's my question for you more legally sophisticated folks at/..
What exactly are they suing the RIAA for? It says "to keep them from shutting them down". What exactly would this stop the RIAA from doing? The RIAA obviously isn't hosting the site. Would this stop them from threatening mp3board.com's services provider, i.e. AboveNet or Exodus or whoever?
If this ISP is like your typical ISP, then it's a business-- meaning it's there to make money. I'm sure someone's pointed this out already.
Now, if they get DoS attacks against them, they can lose a LOT of paying customers. If they can stop the attacks simply by terminating one user's account, then they'll do so! Most ISP's are not in the game for any idealistic standpoint.
So if you're concerned about this, you're concerned about capitalism and corporatism in general-- because this is how they work. (I'm not calling you a damned commie-- I'm also concerned about this.)
The only way the typical ISP would behave otherwise is if there are laws or incentives. i.e. a law against it, which would probably do more harm than good, or a reward or somesuch for helping shut down the perpetrators of the DoS attack.
I did read it. Here, I'll quote the part where it says Apogee has the right to ban negative reviews for you.
First, they define marks: Trademarks, logos, images and service marks (the "Marks") displayed on the Property are registered and unregistered Marks of Apogee. ...(snip)... Here's a partial list of Apogee trademarks:
Apogee logo 3D Realms logo Duke Nukem
The logo ones, of course, are fine. The problem is when they start listing things as trademarks that aren't logos, such as Duke Nukem. Now, the words "Duke Nukem" are "Marks", and subject to these restrictions:
You are not allowed to vary the spelling, add or delete hyphens (even for normal hyphenation at the end of a line of text), make one word two, or use a possessive or plural form of the Marks.
You may not use the Marks in a derogatory or defamatory manner, or in any negative context. Such use will terminate your license to use the Marks.
Obviously, those aren't legal, and probably weren't intended. And when they say things like you need permission to use an Apogee character's phrases, they obviously can't stop you from using, say, "hail to the king, baby" in a movie, or we'd have to go and destroy all copies of Evil Dead.
So, in the end, the license agreement DOES say they have the right to ban negative reviews. It's entirely absurd, of course, and just sloppy legal wording, so hardly anything worth a slashdot article. Nevertheless, once it became a slashdot article, Miller could have at least paid some attention to it, rather than, well, shrugging it off as mere sensationalism and saying they would never do such a thing.
Jrule? Hrm, were you at E3? Play some UT? Saw someone called JRule there. Anyways.
The politics at Ion Storm were, of course, the reason for many of the delays and screwups. That's because they fired employees like they were going out of style.
With Blizzard, it was primarily the project lead who screwed up Diablo 2. There wasn't much turmoil to speak of. A few employees upset with the things that come with being a bigger company, and all that. But it's mainly that the project lead, who hasn't shipped a game in almost a decade, doesn't seem to have a clue. His plan: write Diablo 2, add networking and multiplayer support when finished.
Internal politics don't necessarily mean a bad product, if it doesn't affect the team working on it, though. Ion Storm's did, so the product sucked and was delayed for years. Looking Glass has had its share of politics, but typically the people who got fired were working on projects that never got released, and so on, so their successful titles such as Thief 2 were unaffected.
Any project that has Carmack on it will have no trouble attracting lots of talent. And since this is all happening at the beginning of the project, rather than midway through the development cycle, it can all get sorted out before it screws things up. If people are gonna get fired, it should happen now-- not a year down the line.
Obviously not at the quality of your post, or else it'd be "-1, Reduntant reduntant redundant, dammit, why do we KEEP getting posts mocking how Lars talks, after a million of them have already been posted, rather than actually making any readable points".
No, today we have the monkeys moderating. Enough computers and enough time, and one of them would eventually come up with a comment worthy of getting read. Unfortunately, this is the dumbest slashdot message thread I've read in weeks. It'd be nice if everyone could GET OVER how Lars talks, and actually agree/disagree with points in the interview, or even *gasp* critique a point or two!
Oops. Nevermind my previous post, quoted below. Apparently, all it really takes to get modded up to 4 is saying "like" a lot of times. But I couldn't have overestimated the intelligence of either the poster or the moderators, so I must just not "get it".
I actually don't mind minimally edited transcripts. Anyone with half a brain knows that's how most people talk, and that most journalists edit it out.
Basically, anyone who posts "oh, Lars is such an idiot, look how he talks" is not only going to get ignored, he's going to get modded down. Well, unless he makes some extraordinarily funny joke involving Chuck D, User Friendly, and fsck.
For the rest of us, who are at least slightly intelligent, we get to read an interview that sounds like it was done with an actual person, not a publicist for the RIAA.
I actually don't mind minimally edited transcripts. Anyone with half a brain knows that's how most people talk, and that most journalists edit it out.
Basically, anyone who posts "oh, Lars is such an idiot, look how he talks" is not only going to get ignored, he's going to get modded down. Well, unless he makes some extraordinarily funny joke involving Chuck D, User Friendly, and fsck.
For the rest of us, who are at least slightly intelligent, we get to read an interview that sounds like it was done with an actual person, not a publicist for the RIAA.
It is most certainly not irrelevant. If code is not protected as free speech, you have only a few fair use statutes to hide under.
If it is protected as free speech, you have to balance in the things you and the article both mentioned, such as does the threat justify the restriction. There are all sorts of issues, such as the huge burden of evidence required to justify prior restraint, and so on and so forth.
Slashdot Mirror
The specs are much nicer, and the games will obviously be more advanced because of it. But graphically, it looks like they're still finding new tricks with the current Gameboy. Check out these shots of the upcoming Alone in the Dark:
What's even funnier is that the people mentioned often don't even make those statements. A lot of PR people are licensed to make up whatever sounds good, and stick the appropriate person's name on it.
So in response to your wondering about where Colleen was when she made the statement-- there's a good chance she never made that statement at all.
The same thing he would do if you wrote code with that information in it. And therein lies the essence of his argument: he is arguing that code is speech in just the same way books, t-shirts, and the like are.
If the government wants to ban you from publishing his credit card numbers, they will ban you from doing it in all forms. Touretzky was demonstrating that they must do the same thing with the DeCSS code as well, if they choose to ban distribution of DeCSS. By demonstrating this equivalent, it shows that this is a free speech issue, just as publishing his credit card numbers would be. Just because something could, in some cases, be free speech does not mean that it is legal or "right". Some may consider it valuable artistic expression to yell "fire" in a crowded theater, but it is prohibited. The first amendment does not take precedence over the remainder of the U.S. Constitution.
What his argument did NOT do, and did not attempt to do, was show that is fine to print anything you want on a t-shirt and wear it around. He said, "if you can put it on a T-shirt, it's speech". There are many examples in U.S. law where speech is prohibited. If you want to prove Touretzky wrong, you'll have to link his actual statement with your statement of what you believe he said: "anything which can be printed on a t-shirt (regardless of how the information was gathered) can be freely given to the world without consequence".
You don't have to ditch caffeine to implement your plan. Here's what I do.
Do something small at least every hour:
I get up and grab a Diet Coke. Problem solved!
*yawn*
Nothing like quoting things out of context and ignoring the rest to make your point, no? He wasn't saying computer _should_ be hard. Let's quote a part you didn't deign to quote:
If all you want to do is email and write papers, you shouldn't need a whole lot of training.
And another:
You don't walk into a seamstress shop and expect to be able to make commercial quality fashions without any training.
Yeah, it'd be great if we could all walk up to a computer for the first time, and have it do exactly what we want with no fuss. But we haven't gotten to that point with any other form of technology, so why expect computers to be there right away as well? Even Macs are still a pain in the ass to use.
Ah, much like anti-sodomy laws. I'll thank the government and the mob to keep their morals to themselves, thanks.
How is posting bogus files harmful to Napster's interests unless Napster's purpose is to violate copyrighted materials.
Your entire post is a fallacy. What if Napster were only used for non-copyrighted materials? Then Napster would still want to act against this sort of thing.
Perhaps what you meant to say was: "How is posting bogus files masquerading as copyrighted materials harmful to Napster's interests unless Napster's purpose is to violate copyrighted materials?"
However, even in that case, the principle of the protest is a poor one. That is, posting fake files is harmful to any distribution system like this, even perfectly valid ones. If Napster was used only for free files by up and coming artists, then someone got angry at one of those artists, that someone could do the same thing-- would you support him?
To expand to an example that's not so new, killing people is generally agreed to be a poor form of protest. If you don't like a government official, you don't protest by assassinating him (unless you're a militant nut). Gandhi's civil disobedience is far more respected than, say, the endless rounds of guillotining in France. Why is that? Is that because they didn't kill the right people? No, it's because in principle, killing people is just plain wrong.
To relate that back to the Napster example, I would like to propose that lying to people is also a bad principle. This is far more contentious than killing people. But I think most people would agree with me that performing this sort of trickery on a copyright material-free Napster would be wrong.
Only partially true. I agree that there would be a lot more angry people on these boards if it was Microsoft that did the investigating, which is odd because Oracle is also a monopolistic behemoth.
The other factor is that Oracle found things. Public reaction to this sort of thing is rarely based on a strict ethical standard. If Oracle had hired IGI and found a couple of small and inconsequential things, then people found out about it, they'd be critical of Oracle and their industrial espionage tactics. However, since Oracle uncovered a lot of dirty laundry, it's a lot easier for people to say, "go Oracle! Those dirty MS scum were trying to get away with that, but you caught 'em".
Do I? Let's see.
1) No, I don't use those damned club cards.
2) There are many laws about the tracking of purchases with credit cards (at least in the U.S., I am not familiar with these laws in other countries), and the selling of that information. Some credit cards have further privacy policies.
3) Nope, no scanned checks.
4) Free e-mail-- that one's laughable. Who puts in their real info?
5) Free registration-- see #4
I agree that there are many insidious ways that people attempt to collect our data. A lot of these are fairly widespread-- i.e., club cards. But there are also enough people out there concerned about privacy providing the information you need to prevent this sort of thing, if you choose to do so. Corporations have always been ruthless. It's always been laissez faire-- now it's just in new and different ways.
First off, if your "average e-shopper" is so worried about electronic privacy, then what are they doing e-shopping? Do you have any statistics to back up your statement that they are "so" worried about it?
They ARE worried about it, they're just fairly ignorant. As far as evidence, sorry, but I don't think my company would allow me to post the thousands of e-mails we have asking if our e-commerce transactions are secure. Just about everyone who used it asked; we had to put a lot of messages about it all over so people would stop hitting customer service with it so much, and they still ask many, many times a day.
Constantly? You're kidding, right? If it really bothers you, just go into your options and disable all downloading of plugins, signed or not.
Again, if we're talking about the "average" user, they don't even go in and change their preferences. So is open source going to help the "average" user? Not directly. It all falls to the people who know what they're doing to make the DEFAULT setting correct. For example...
If you get tricked into running something bad, the presence or absence of source isn't going to help you.
By default, Outlook shouldn't have allowed vbs's to do that kind of damage. They finally issued a patch, after months of denial from smaller viruses found earlier. Lots of users aren't going to even install the patch. But sysadmins and such will. And if OUTLOOK was open source (I'm pretty sure you intentionally "mis-heard" him when you decided he was saying only the ILOVEYOU virus should be open source), the patch would have come along sooner, as shown from many a slashdot story on those sorts of studies between patch speed between open source and closed source.
I also read it, just throwing in one more concurring opinion. Very good, and pretty accessible. You have to keep your brain turned on through a lot of the chapters, but I had very little knowledge of anything quantum (a couple days in Freshman Physics-- must have been thorough, right?), and this book caught me up quite well.
It spends a few chapters entertainingly acquanting you with quantum mechanics and all that, then gives you all the superstring theory stuff you know you want.
I w1ll h4x0r their feed and n4pst4r this right away!!!!!!!! Search for t1t4n 43 31337 when this comes out, l4m3rz!!!!!!! But only download it if you have a ph4t gigahertz pr0n pipe and 500 megabyte p3ntium like I do, and not if you use A01!!!!!!!
I didn't see much in the article, and didn't have much success searching around, so here's my question for you more legally sophisticated folks at /..
What exactly are they suing the RIAA for? It says "to keep them from shutting them down". What exactly would this stop the RIAA from doing? The RIAA obviously isn't hosting the site. Would this stop them from threatening mp3board.com's services provider, i.e. AboveNet or Exodus or whoever?
If this ISP is like your typical ISP, then it's a business-- meaning it's there to make money. I'm sure someone's pointed this out already.
Now, if they get DoS attacks against them, they can lose a LOT of paying customers. If they can stop the attacks simply by terminating one user's account, then they'll do so! Most ISP's are not in the game for any idealistic standpoint.
So if you're concerned about this, you're concerned about capitalism and corporatism in general-- because this is how they work. (I'm not calling you a damned commie-- I'm also concerned about this.)
The only way the typical ISP would behave otherwise is if there are laws or incentives. i.e. a law against it, which would probably do more harm than good, or a reward or somesuch for helping shut down the perpetrators of the DoS attack.
Bad troll. No biscuit!
Well, eject first, hard power down, it will remain open, power up, cd tray will retract, presto.
I did read it. Here, I'll quote the part where it says Apogee has the right to ban negative reviews for you.
First, they define marks:
Trademarks, logos, images and service marks (the "Marks") displayed on the Property are registered and unregistered Marks of Apogee.
...(snip)...
Here's a partial list of Apogee trademarks:
Apogee logo
3D Realms logo
Duke Nukem
The logo ones, of course, are fine. The problem is when they start listing things as trademarks that aren't logos, such as Duke Nukem. Now, the words "Duke Nukem" are "Marks", and subject to these restrictions:
You are not allowed to vary the spelling, add or delete hyphens (even for normal hyphenation at the end of a line of text), make one word two, or use a possessive or plural form of the Marks.
You may not use the Marks in a derogatory or defamatory manner, or in any negative context. Such use will terminate your license to use the Marks.
Obviously, those aren't legal, and probably weren't intended. And when they say things like you need permission to use an Apogee character's phrases, they obviously can't stop you from using, say, "hail to the king, baby" in a movie, or we'd have to go and destroy all copies of Evil Dead.
So, in the end, the license agreement DOES say they have the right to ban negative reviews. It's entirely absurd, of course, and just sloppy legal wording, so hardly anything worth a slashdot article. Nevertheless, once it became a slashdot article, Miller could have at least paid some attention to it, rather than, well, shrugging it off as mere sensationalism and saying they would never do such a thing.
"Design is law"-- John Romero
Jrule? Hrm, were you at E3? Play some UT? Saw someone called JRule there. Anyways.
The politics at Ion Storm were, of course, the reason for many of the delays and screwups. That's because they fired employees like they were going out of style.
With Blizzard, it was primarily the project lead who screwed up Diablo 2. There wasn't much turmoil to speak of. A few employees upset with the things that come with being a bigger company, and all that. But it's mainly that the project lead, who hasn't shipped a game in almost a decade, doesn't seem to have a clue. His plan: write Diablo 2, add networking and multiplayer support when finished.
Internal politics don't necessarily mean a bad product, if it doesn't affect the team working on it, though. Ion Storm's did, so the product sucked and was delayed for years. Looking Glass has had its share of politics, but typically the people who got fired were working on projects that never got released, and so on, so their successful titles such as Thief 2 were unaffected.
Any project that has Carmack on it will have no trouble attracting lots of talent. And since this is all happening at the beginning of the project, rather than midway through the development cycle, it can all get sorted out before it screws things up. If people are gonna get fired, it should happen now-- not a year down the line.
Someone who would rather code than be upper management isn't worth shit? Are you a coder, or a PHB?
Pay attention? If I did that, I might break into double-digit karma. Ack. I try to keep informed comments to Anonymous only.
Obviously not at the quality of your post, or else it'd be "-1, Reduntant reduntant redundant, dammit, why do we KEEP getting posts mocking how Lars talks, after a million of them have already been posted, rather than actually making any readable points".
No, today we have the monkeys moderating. Enough computers and enough time, and one of them would eventually come up with a comment worthy of getting read. Unfortunately, this is the dumbest slashdot message thread I've read in weeks. It'd be nice if everyone could GET OVER how Lars talks, and actually agree/disagree with points in the interview, or even *gasp* critique a point or two!
Oops. Nevermind my previous post, quoted below. Apparently, all it really takes to get modded up to 4 is saying "like" a lot of times. But I couldn't have overestimated the intelligence of either the poster or the moderators, so I must just not "get it".
I actually don't mind minimally edited transcripts. Anyone with half a brain knows that's how most people talk, and that most journalists edit it out.
Basically, anyone who posts "oh, Lars is such an idiot, look how he talks" is not only going to get ignored, he's going to get modded down. Well, unless he makes some extraordinarily funny joke involving Chuck D, User Friendly, and fsck.
For the rest of us, who are at least slightly intelligent, we get to read an interview that sounds like it was done with an actual person, not a publicist for the RIAA.
I actually don't mind minimally edited transcripts. Anyone with half a brain knows that's how most people talk, and that most journalists edit it out.
Basically, anyone who posts "oh, Lars is such an idiot, look how he talks" is not only going to get ignored, he's going to get modded down. Well, unless he makes some extraordinarily funny joke involving Chuck D, User Friendly, and fsck.
For the rest of us, who are at least slightly intelligent, we get to read an interview that sounds like it was done with an actual person, not a publicist for the RIAA.
It is most certainly not irrelevant. If code is not protected as free speech, you have only a few fair use statutes to hide under.
If it is protected as free speech, you have to balance in the things you and the article both mentioned, such as does the threat justify the restriction. There are all sorts of issues, such as the huge burden of evidence required to justify prior restraint, and so on and so forth.