Where the entry cost is low, competition works well (joe's computer shop, asmet's sweatshirt shop, even beverages). Where barriers to entry are very high (telecom, drugs, automobiles) regulation is needed to prevent monopoly powers.
Regulation itself is often the greatest barrier to entry and promotes monopoly. Really, in most of the products and services you might be able to cite the barriers to entry are high as a result of regulation, not regulated because the barriers to entry are high. Especially in the two other product areas you cite, automobiles and drugs, regulation has created artificial barriers to entry. Usually it is safety as the justification, but also regulation of business practices and legal requirements to pay for insurance, licenses, permits, hire certain people to perform certain tasks, requirements on those people, etc etc are what actually create the real barrier to entry. Anyone could physically make cars or a drugs of high quality with just the capital necessary to start a sandwich shop. Yet society has made a choice that it is easier to manage some risks if we have fewer companies doing those sorts of things. Or maybe they were so necessary and valuable that it was just easier to collect taxes from fewer companies? Maybe it has been for good, maybe for bad. Certainly some risks have been reduced, but others have been introduced. Old sayings about eggs in a basket aside, there are real risks to reduced choice and centralized decision making. With centralization, the effects of mistakes and flaws become magnified. Civilizations fall in such ways.
All that said, telecom is different. Telecom is really a local monopoly where finite public resources are used. The only thing that matters is who is allowed to put their wires on the telephone pole or who is allowed to use the public radio frequencies. Here regulation is not a barrier to entry, but necessary to ensure that the public space is used for the public's good. It is no less appropriate than a line painted down the middle of the road, or a speed limit on your local road. The virtue of the government's authority to regulate telecoms comes strictly from the use of truly common public resources. To that end, rules for peering should be dictated and attempts to overcharge for quality of service should be regulated away. Just as we should not accept so called Lexus lanes on our highways, we should neither accept Lexus lanes on our Information Superhighway. Differentiated services, is a scam. A way to get more money from those who have it, by purposefully providing lesser service to those that don't. The practice should have no place on our public roads or on networks that use our public spaces.
Hmm I think political stability is the wrong phrase. Dictatorships have political stability, while western democracies can change their political leaders every couple years. What I think you meant by that is a government with less corruption. A government that works for the people and is made up of the people in a truly representative way. But the term "political stability" is an oxymoron, because the more political "stability" there is, the less stable that society will become through corruption.
In this context, a $100 laptop can truly help solve the problem of political corruption when politicians or dictators are confronted with a free flow of information and ideas at a pace they can not control. Even well meaning and less self serving governments will be confronted with a society that can respond to its own needs faster than a central government made up of a small elite ever could.
Knowledge can allow people to do more with less, which is what people with less need to know. But you are right, eventually that knowledge needs to be translated into stable laws that protect equally so that people know that what they create and build for themselves will not be taken away by others.
I do agree that circumstantial evidence seems to suggest he's a bit more tech savvy than one might think, but on the other hand, a tech-savvy person can also get their network broken into or their password stolen.
I'd say that you'd have to be pretty ignorant to think that your home wireless network couldn't be broken into even if you have the security settings turned on. Like assuming your house can't be broken into just because you locked the door. The guy may or may not have done it, but they had better need to get more evidence than just the log that the content was posted from his network.
Re:Java programmers are more expensive
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 1
Then why is it that Java is the most used language on Sourceforge, an open source development site?
Go compare the number of web apps written in php and java respectively. Because that is what the article was talking about: web apps. And after you compare the numbers, go ahead and see when the last time anyone worked on them, or if they are still in beta. Maybe my impression is wrong, but I am a java developer and I have always looked on sourceforge for open source web apps to use in lieu of developing something from scratch and have found very little and what I did find was old and not actively being developed. I've looked at webmail, j2ee slashcode, basic discussion board software, portal apps, but it was mostly beta/pre-beta and old and not following any standard design patterns.
I intend to contribute back at some point, but for the most part my code is the property of whomever I am working for, so I will have to write code from scratch in order to contribute. Which is my point. People working for the Enterprise usually have specific contracts which assign intelectual property rights of the code they write for the company they are being paid to write it for.
Re:Java programmers are more expensive
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 1
Java applications are almost always built on top of mature, free, open source APIs.
And then deployed in the Enterprise or sold. The point is that the actual java applications (ecommerce, message board, webmail , etc, etc) are not out there as open source, like they are for php. Plenty of good solid robust java frameworks, toolsets, APIs, just that all the actual applications seem to get developed for enterprise use or for commercial sale.
Not saying it is good or bad, we are talking about a lot of paychecks, but it does mean that php has gained wider adoption.
Re:Java programmers are more expensive
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 1
You haven't checked jakarta.apache.org lately, have you? Perhaps actual applications using Java aren't as prolific, but the building blocks for them are very much out there, widely used, and actively worked on.
I think you are making my point, java has plenty of tools, but where is the meat? The actual open source WAR files that you can just drop into a webapps directory and autodeply and configure a few settings throught the web app itself? Where are the slew of open source message boards? Like PHP has. Where are the open source portal, content management, ecommerce, etc etc? PHP has many more mature open source, free software projects in each of those categories. Sure Java has a bunch of great tools and frameworks, but php has gotten wider adoption through open source applications that work, not through robust frameworks that can be made to work. Java is prevalent in the Enterprise because it is robust, PHP has become prevalent everywhere else because the applications themselves have been made free and they do the job well enough.
But the situation would easily change with a few good fully functional open source java web apps.
Java programmers are more expensive
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Problem is that Java programmers have been bought up by big companies deploying enterprise applications and they really haven't been contributing to open source projects. With all the PHP projects out there that you can just download and deploy and tinker with it is no wonder why php is all over the web now. Java should be easier to deploy as.wars and just as easy to tinker with. But it just seems like every open source J2ee app out there dies on the vine, probably because the java developers got real jobs or else they decided they could sell their software as an "enterprise" product.
A power user like Linus Torvalds can take care of himself.
So who in there right mind will take Linus's word as gospel on user interface design? He is a kernel hacker for god sake!
I was a ximian gnome desktop user for a while (it was the nicest linux desktop I had ever seen when it came out) and now I use KDE and feel like I took a step backwards.
It would be good to see easier and consistent user configuration in both desktops, it still feels far to much like when you are changing some setting that may or may not be persisted to the file system when using gui controls.
I think that HD-DVD will win the end, simply because it is the inferior format. Which is usually is the one that wins in the end.
Funny, but not neccessarily a bad thing. If HD-DVD is truly inferior, then it might get discounted first which might lead to greater market adoption or find a use for which it wasn't intended.
The quality and attributes of a technology are meaningless unless people can afford it.
The good thing for the Japanese: the barrier of entry for cheap Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturer will be high. There will be the need to put in place "secure" production lines , making sure that keys are not leaked and that no clone are produced. The huge liabilities that the OEM will face if they screw up will be enough to give Pioneer, Sony etc.. time to make a buck on BluRay.
So, there will never be cheap BluRay players like there are cheap DVD players. That should help market penetration. I only bought a DVD player when it dropped under a $100. And I don't expect to spend more for bluray, because of all this DRM crap that cripples functionality.
I have gotten hundreds of letters from companies offering corporate credit cards and other services that are clearly the result of the information available through whois. This has been going on ever since 1997 or 1998 when I first had my name associated with domain registrations.
Although, they all still use an old address that was updated several years ago. So, maybe some of the anti data mining measures that whois has put in place are now working.
Hard to believe, but most Americans didn't brush their teeth until soldiers brought the Army's enforced habit back home from World War II.
How about another choice quote from your source:
"Dental floss is an ancient invention. Researchers have found dental floss and toothpick grooves in the teeth of prehistoric humans."
Presumably they did not have such an invasive Big Brother government telling them what to do, yet still they practice hygiene. Perhaps, self interest is a more powerful motivator than you say?
Just felt the desire to comment on the theoretics. Regarding Themed World, you simply wouldn't connect them, obviously one would only want to connect world that have similar rules.
Actually I was thinking it would be more fun and interesting the more exotic the differences and if sometimes you could have arrangements between differently themed worlds to allow migration of items and characters with all their traits across worlds. Likely such linking could only be done across trusted servers, so that you would likely start seeing networks of trusted servers evolve. But ideally you could retain your original avatars identity similar to email you could just be known by your "full name" when you leave your home world. Really, there is a lot that can be drawn from the way that people travel from one country to another with different systems of laws and currency.
But the key is to make it easy enough to set up that people with very little prior knowledge can set up servers. Say on the level of setting up apache with PHP or some other type of application server.
I started working on the Varium MUD server with a couple other guys over 5 years ago, but frankly I wasn't a very good programmer at the time and I was supposed to implement the distributed stuff. It was written in Python, but we never got the distributed part working (my fault). But I had thought that we could put a graphical layer on top of the underlying game engine, to make a distributed MMORPG.
The goal was to have a server that could be distributed, so that say you direct your avatar to go through portals which would transfer your avatar and any compatible objects you were carrying to the linked server. Really the idea was to make the equivalent of hyperlinks, but that the servers would negotiate a transfer of the avatar and in game objects.
Some of the issues that came up (all solvable)
*security - ensuring that game objects could be transferred from one server to another without violating any rules of the local server.
- we looked at parsing the incoming python for undesirable code in the same way that "Wizard" created code would be validated on the local server.
- also having several levels of trust available between servers. (ie peered servers, trusted servers, unknown servers, banned servers and the ability to specify what individual privileges would transfer and correlate between servers)
*saving game state - assuming what if the remote server crashes, would we save any game state in the client (but what about cheats?) Probably just leave reliability up to the local admin and have a inactive copy of the avatar left on recently visited world servers so that you could just reconnect and pick up where you left off (more or less)
*also, game experience. What would you do about themed world servers? So, that if I was say on a Star Wars themed virtual world, and then went through a portal to a Barney themed world server, would my Chewy avatar suddenly turn into a Purple dinosour or would there be some sort of "Customs" border process where by you went through and specified preferences the first time you visited someplace. But that might really interfere with game play...
Anyway, those are a few of the things we talked about. The project is dead, codebase didn't include any distributable elements. Seems like distributed MMORPGs are wide open for an open licensed and non proprietary standard for connecting MMORPGs together to really create a workable metaverse.
As much as I find what Marquette is doing disgusting, it is NOT illegal.
Right, totally agree. But if the action of the University was outside of the agreement between the student and the University, then they should return his money or let him return without damage. This is more about contract law not about the US constitutional free speech protection. The professional conduct clause that was cited in the article seemed either too vague or specific to conduct when dealing with patients and coleagues directly, not just talking about them behind their back.
We are at a point of hypocrisy though if you can't criticize anyone without getting thrown out of a University. People need to get a little backbone. Sure you are supposed to be struggling over ideas at a University not over personality, but how many times do substantive arguments turn a bit personal? Shouldn't there be a wide degree of latitude at a University that should include allowing ad hominem attacks as long as they are not of a physically threatening nature? How was what the student wrote any different than the thousands of petty and stupid things we might say about someone we know when we don't think they will find out?
The student was likely to suffer from embarrassment, be ostracized, and the professor would be hard pressed to treat them fairly after this. But this does not seem to have specifically violated some rule in their code of conduct.
Like the dihydrogen oxide fun, I think it would be funny if a town actually banned crt televisions under the auspices of banning "particle accelerators".
While obviously a cyclotron can't compare to a commercial nuclear power plant, I wouldn't want my neighbor building one. Aside from self-electrocution, they can release high energy photons which could reach other people, if improperly shielded. There is also the issue with any radioactive waste he may produce. The risk may be miniscule, but people generally shy away from non-controllable risks. While the guy is a civil-engineer, TFA doesn't say whether he has training or experience in nuclear technology or health physics either.
The fact that he actually sought a permit should be a good indication that he is looking to play by the rules, seems that such concerns could be easily handled with some sort of inspection by appropriate authorities. I had a neighbor who kept exotic pets in his backyard, he had a license and every once in a while a state inspector would stop by and check out his backyard to make sure the animals were being well cared for. The risks seem comprable.
If you're looking for a toothless government where private interests rule, there are plenty of countries on the planet that can be of service to you. Just remember to bring your toothbrush, because it just isn't all that profitable to sell toothbrushes in a country where the government isn't strong enough to educate the population in the value of personal health and hygine.
come on now, that is a rediculous leap. Government regulation should extend to those so called "natural monopolies", ie those that make exclusive use of a common and limited resource. But to make the leap that nobody would go around brushing their teath or investing in their personal hygiene if Big Brother wasn't their to educate the unwashed masses is really stupid and scary thing to hear said.
I don't know where you learned to brush your teeth and wash your hands, but it was from my parents not public schools where I learned hygiene. Certainly it helps to have an open society where we share our knowledge as freely as possible and one way to do that is through government funded studies and published and promoted results, which is what I assume you are referring to. But to assume that science, culture and a sense of personal hygiene are derived solely from a strong central government then your perspective is disordered.
What I see is that civilization is not created by law, but rather law is derived from the needs of a civilization. Yes it is important for civilization to create property laws in order to regulate agreements for the exchange of goods and services. Otherwise, the strong could prey upon the weak. But government cannot protect the ignorant from themselves regardless of its "strength"
I don't think anyone could argue against hasbro's use of the trademark. He just can't call it risk. Although, just doing a simple trademark search comes up with thousands of other trademarks that incorporate the word "risk", so hasbro's trademark would be very limited in scope.
Really if the game is fun and well done, then it should stand on its own without needing to infringe on the trademark. And the rules need only be rewritten, if in fact they were taken word for word from the original. It might be good to throw in some variations just for fun.
While I sympathise with his outrage, you would think that a man who takes such pride in founding the "Freedom Forum First Amendment Center" might be a little slower to try to bring his legal people to bear on this issue.
While I sympathise with his outrage, he went far beyond bringing his legal people in. The Founder of the "First Amendment Center" suggested that Congress make web sites liable for the content that posted on them and ISPs liable for the content that is generated by their customers. Which might make sense from his perspective, because newspapers are responsible for their content in such a way. So for instance, USA Today could be sued for damages if an article it published was found to be libelous. But the standard determinant of liability has been that of editorial control. Websites are not liable precisely when they do not exercise editorial control over content posted to them. Newspapers on the other hand actively approve of articles for publication, it is that act of approval over the specific libelous statements which makes them liable.
Imagine if you will, a world where the paper mill was liable for the content of the words written on its pages, or telephone companies were liable for the content of our conversations, or websites liable for the content of their messageboards. It is a world which would necessitate ever greater controls on content. Creative control would be relagated to fewer and fewer, not because the government would put prior restraint on free speech, but because individuals and corporations would not be able to assume the cummulative costs of the threat of liability.
Liability should be reserved for those who knowingly spread a libelous statement, not those that facilitate expression unknowing of the content.
So, with this new feature, will windows be ready for the desktop? Because it is years now that we hear "this year is THE year, it is ready for the desktop !"
Maybe for corporate use, but for your joe average user who doesn't know a kernel from "The Colonel", Windows is probably many years from being ready for prime time. I mean the support requirements alone make wider adoption impracticle.
As this is not Wikipedia, you have no point. That is to say, you are pointless. That you entirely avoid the question speaks volumes!
The point is that Slashdot's contribution model is very much like wikipedia's, and that you can write feedback about registered users on wikipedia. And even though asshole anonymous users, like yourself, can come in and say stupid shit, there is a fairly practical way of dealing with their contributions. Slashdot has moderation and a moderation threshold which controls how such contributions are displayed and wikipedia can just discard bad content, but can still allow their recall later through the history.
Even attribution would be a step in the right direction. Why for example can't we see who wrote what, and why doesn't Wikipedia require editing to be attached to an account with each account receiving feedback for the quality of its contributor's input
Thank you again, Anonymous Coward, as always I value your feedback.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the piece about barriers to entry.
Where the entry cost is low, competition works well (joe's computer shop, asmet's sweatshirt shop, even beverages). Where barriers to entry are very high (telecom, drugs, automobiles) regulation is needed to prevent monopoly powers.
Regulation itself is often the greatest barrier to entry and promotes monopoly. Really, in most of the products and services you might be able to cite the barriers to entry are high as a result of regulation, not regulated because the barriers to entry are high. Especially in the two other product areas you cite, automobiles and drugs, regulation has created artificial barriers to entry. Usually it is safety as the justification, but also regulation of business practices and legal requirements to pay for insurance, licenses, permits, hire certain people to perform certain tasks, requirements on those people, etc etc are what actually create the real barrier to entry. Anyone could physically make cars or a drugs of high quality with just the capital necessary to start a sandwich shop. Yet society has made a choice that it is easier to manage some risks if we have fewer companies doing those sorts of things. Or maybe they were so necessary and valuable that it was just easier to collect taxes from fewer companies? Maybe it has been for good, maybe for bad. Certainly some risks have been reduced, but others have been introduced. Old sayings about eggs in a basket aside, there are real risks to reduced choice and centralized decision making. With centralization, the effects of mistakes and flaws become magnified. Civilizations fall in such ways.
All that said, telecom is different. Telecom is really a local monopoly where finite public resources are used. The only thing that matters is who is allowed to put their wires on the telephone pole or who is allowed to use the public radio frequencies. Here regulation is not a barrier to entry, but necessary to ensure that the public space is used for the public's good. It is no less appropriate than a line painted down the middle of the road, or a speed limit on your local road. The virtue of the government's authority to regulate telecoms comes strictly from the use of truly common public resources. To that end, rules for peering should be dictated and attempts to overcharge for quality of service should be regulated away. Just as we should not accept so called Lexus lanes on our highways, we should neither accept Lexus lanes on our Information Superhighway. Differentiated services, is a scam. A way to get more money from those who have it, by purposefully providing lesser service to those that don't. The practice should have no place on our public roads or on networks that use our public spaces.
Not the way some company wants to force me to pay Dollars extra for things they get for literaly pennies.
Almost right, they want to charge you dollars for things you already bought for pennies.
political stability
Hmm I think political stability is the wrong phrase. Dictatorships have political stability, while western democracies can change their political leaders every couple years. What I think you meant by that is a government with less corruption. A government that works for the people and is made up of the people in a truly representative way. But the term "political stability" is an oxymoron, because the more political "stability" there is, the less stable that society will become through corruption.
In this context, a $100 laptop can truly help solve the problem of political corruption when politicians or dictators are confronted with a free flow of information and ideas at a pace they can not control. Even well meaning and less self serving governments will be confronted with a society that can respond to its own needs faster than a central government made up of a small elite ever could.
Knowledge can allow people to do more with less, which is what people with less need to know. But you are right, eventually that knowledge needs to be translated into stable laws that protect equally so that people know that what they create and build for themselves will not be taken away by others.
I do agree that circumstantial evidence seems to suggest he's a bit more tech savvy than one might think, but on the other hand, a tech-savvy person can also get their network broken into or their password stolen.
I'd say that you'd have to be pretty ignorant to think that your home wireless network couldn't be broken into even if you have the security settings turned on. Like assuming your house can't be broken into just because you locked the door. The guy may or may not have done it, but they had better need to get more evidence than just the log that the content was posted from his network.
Then why is it that Java is the most used language on Sourceforge, an open source development site?
Go compare the number of web apps written in php and java respectively. Because that is what the article was talking about: web apps. And after you compare the numbers, go ahead and see when the last time anyone worked on them, or if they are still in beta. Maybe my impression is wrong, but I am a java developer and I have always looked on sourceforge for open source web apps to use in lieu of developing something from scratch and have found very little and what I did find was old and not actively being developed. I've looked at webmail, j2ee slashcode, basic discussion board software, portal apps, but it was mostly beta/pre-beta and old and not following any standard design patterns.
I intend to contribute back at some point, but for the most part my code is the property of whomever I am working for, so I will have to write code from scratch in order to contribute. Which is my point. People working for the Enterprise usually have specific contracts which assign intelectual property rights of the code they write for the company they are being paid to write it for.
Java applications are almost always built on top of mature, free, open source APIs.
And then deployed in the Enterprise or sold. The point is that the actual java applications (ecommerce, message board, webmail , etc, etc) are not out there as open source, like they are for php. Plenty of good solid robust java frameworks, toolsets, APIs, just that all the actual applications seem to get developed for enterprise use or for commercial sale.
Not saying it is good or bad, we are talking about a lot of paychecks, but it does mean that php has gained wider adoption.
You haven't checked jakarta.apache.org lately, have you? Perhaps actual applications using Java aren't as prolific, but the building blocks for them are very much out there, widely used, and actively worked on.
I think you are making my point, java has plenty of tools, but where is the meat? The actual open source WAR files that you can just drop into a webapps directory and autodeply and configure a few settings throught the web app itself? Where are the slew of open source message boards? Like PHP has. Where are the open source portal, content management, ecommerce, etc etc? PHP has many more mature open source, free software projects in each of those categories. Sure Java has a bunch of great tools and frameworks, but php has gotten wider adoption through open source applications that work, not through robust frameworks that can be made to work. Java is prevalent in the Enterprise because it is robust, PHP has become prevalent everywhere else because the applications themselves have been made free and they do the job well enough.
But the situation would easily change with a few good fully functional open source java web apps.
Problem is that Java programmers have been bought up by big companies deploying enterprise applications and they really haven't been contributing to open source projects. With all the PHP projects out there that you can just download and deploy and tinker with it is no wonder why php is all over the web now. Java should be easier to deploy as .wars and just as easy to tinker with. But it just seems like every open source J2ee app out there dies on the vine, probably because the java developers got real jobs or else they decided they could sell their software as an "enterprise" product.
A power user like Linus Torvalds can take care of himself.
So who in there right mind will take Linus's word as gospel on user interface design? He is a kernel hacker for god sake!
I was a ximian gnome desktop user for a while (it was the nicest linux desktop I had ever seen when it came out) and now I use KDE and feel like I took a step backwards.
It would be good to see easier and consistent user configuration in both desktops, it still feels far to much like when you are changing some setting that may or may not be persisted to the file system when using gui controls.
I think that HD-DVD will win the end, simply because it is the inferior format. Which is usually is the one that wins in the end.
Funny, but not neccessarily a bad thing. If HD-DVD is truly inferior, then it might get discounted first which might lead to greater market adoption or find a use for which it wasn't intended.
The quality and attributes of a technology are meaningless unless people can afford it.
The good thing for the Japanese: the barrier of entry for cheap Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturer will be high. There will be the need to put in place "secure" production lines , making sure that keys are not leaked and that no clone are produced. The huge liabilities that the OEM will face if they screw up will be enough to give Pioneer, Sony etc.. time to make a buck on BluRay.
So, there will never be cheap BluRay players like there are cheap DVD players. That should help market penetration. I only bought a DVD player when it dropped under a $100. And I don't expect to spend more for bluray, because of all this DRM crap that cripples functionality.
I have gotten hundreds of letters from companies offering corporate credit cards and other services that are clearly the result of the information available through whois. This has been going on ever since 1997 or 1998 when I first had my name associated with domain registrations.
Although, they all still use an old address that was updated several years ago. So, maybe some of the anti data mining measures that whois has put in place are now working.
A choice quote:
Hard to believe, but most Americans didn't brush their teeth until soldiers brought the Army's enforced habit back home from World War II.
How about another choice quote from your source:
"Dental floss is an ancient invention. Researchers have found dental floss and toothpick grooves in the teeth of prehistoric humans."
Presumably they did not have such an invasive Big Brother government telling them what to do, yet still they practice hygiene. Perhaps, self interest is a more powerful motivator than you say?
Just felt the desire to comment on the theoretics. Regarding Themed World, you simply wouldn't connect them, obviously one would only want to connect world that have similar rules.
Actually I was thinking it would be more fun and interesting the more exotic the differences and if sometimes you could have arrangements between differently themed worlds to allow migration of items and characters with all their traits across worlds. Likely such linking could only be done across trusted servers, so that you would likely start seeing networks of trusted servers evolve. But ideally you could retain your original avatars identity similar to email you could just be known by your "full name" when you leave your home world. Really, there is a lot that can be drawn from the way that people travel from one country to another with different systems of laws and currency.
But the key is to make it easy enough to set up that people with very little prior knowledge can set up servers. Say on the level of setting up apache with PHP or some other type of application server.
I started working on the Varium MUD server with a couple other guys over 5 years ago, but frankly I wasn't a very good programmer at the time and I was supposed to implement the distributed stuff. It was written in Python, but we never got the distributed part working (my fault). But I had thought that we could put a graphical layer on top of the underlying game engine, to make a distributed MMORPG.
The goal was to have a server that could be distributed, so that say you direct your avatar to go through portals which would transfer your avatar and any compatible objects you were carrying to the linked server. Really the idea was to make the equivalent of hyperlinks, but that the servers would negotiate a transfer of the avatar and in game objects.
Some of the issues that came up (all solvable)
*security - ensuring that game objects could be transferred from one server to another without violating any rules of the local server.
- we looked at parsing the incoming python for undesirable code in the same way that "Wizard" created code would be validated on the local server.
- also having several levels of trust available between servers. (ie peered servers, trusted servers, unknown servers, banned servers and the ability to specify what individual privileges would transfer and correlate between servers)
*saving game state - assuming what if the remote server crashes, would we save any game state in the client (but what about cheats?) Probably just leave reliability up to the local admin and have a inactive copy of the avatar left on recently visited world servers so that you could just reconnect and pick up where you left off (more or less)
*also, game experience. What would you do about themed world servers? So, that if I was say on a Star Wars themed virtual world, and then went through a portal to a Barney themed world server, would my Chewy avatar suddenly turn into a Purple dinosour or would there be some sort of "Customs" border process where by you went through and specified preferences the first time you visited someplace. But that might really interfere with game play...
Anyway, those are a few of the things we talked about. The project is dead, codebase didn't include any distributable elements. Seems like distributed MMORPGs are wide open for an open licensed and non proprietary standard for connecting MMORPGs together to really create a workable metaverse.
As much as I find what Marquette is doing disgusting, it is NOT illegal.
Right, totally agree. But if the action of the University was outside of the agreement between the student and the University, then they should return his money or let him return without damage. This is more about contract law not about the US constitutional free speech protection. The professional conduct clause that was cited in the article seemed either too vague or specific to conduct when dealing with patients and coleagues directly, not just talking about them behind their back.
We are at a point of hypocrisy though if you can't criticize anyone without getting thrown out of a University. People need to get a little backbone. Sure you are supposed to be struggling over ideas at a University not over personality, but how many times do substantive arguments turn a bit personal? Shouldn't there be a wide degree of latitude at a University that should include allowing ad hominem attacks as long as they are not of a physically threatening nature? How was what the student wrote any different than the thousands of petty and stupid things we might say about someone we know when we don't think they will find out?
The student was likely to suffer from embarrassment, be ostracized, and the professor would be hard pressed to treat them fairly after this. But this does not seem to have specifically violated some rule in their code of conduct.
Like the dihydrogen oxide fun, I think it would be funny if a town actually banned crt televisions under the auspices of banning "particle accelerators".
Welcome to life by permission only.
While obviously a cyclotron can't compare to a commercial nuclear power plant, I wouldn't want my neighbor building one. Aside from self-electrocution, they can release high energy photons which could reach other people, if improperly shielded. There is also the issue with any radioactive waste he may produce. The risk may be miniscule, but people generally shy away from non-controllable risks. While the guy is a civil-engineer, TFA doesn't say whether he has training or experience in nuclear technology or health physics either.
The fact that he actually sought a permit should be a good indication that he is looking to play by the rules, seems that such concerns could be easily handled with some sort of inspection by appropriate authorities. I had a neighbor who kept exotic pets in his backyard, he had a license and every once in a while a state inspector would stop by and check out his backyard to make sure the animals were being well cared for. The risks seem comprable.
If you're looking for a toothless government where private interests rule, there are plenty of countries on the planet that can be of service to you. Just remember to bring your toothbrush, because it just isn't all that profitable to sell toothbrushes in a country where the government isn't strong enough to educate the population in the value of personal health and hygine.
come on now, that is a rediculous leap. Government regulation should extend to those so called "natural monopolies", ie those that make exclusive use of a common and limited resource. But to make the leap that nobody would go around brushing their teath or investing in their personal hygiene if Big Brother wasn't their to educate the unwashed masses is really stupid and scary thing to hear said.
I don't know where you learned to brush your teeth and wash your hands, but it was from my parents not public schools where I learned hygiene. Certainly it helps to have an open society where we share our knowledge as freely as possible and one way to do that is through government funded studies and published and promoted results, which is what I assume you are referring to. But to assume that science, culture and a sense of personal hygiene are derived solely from a strong central government then your perspective is disordered.
What I see is that civilization is not created by law, but rather law is derived from the needs of a civilization. Yes it is important for civilization to create property laws in order to regulate agreements for the exchange of goods and services. Otherwise, the strong could prey upon the weak. But government cannot protect the ignorant from themselves regardless of its "strength"
I don't think anyone could argue against hasbro's use of the trademark. He just can't call it risk. Although, just doing a simple trademark search comes up with thousands of other trademarks that incorporate the word "risk", so hasbro's trademark would be very limited in scope.
Really if the game is fun and well done, then it should stand on its own without needing to infringe on the trademark. And the rules need only be rewritten, if in fact they were taken word for word from the original. It might be good to throw in some variations just for fun.
While I sympathise with his outrage, you would think that a man who takes such pride in founding the "Freedom Forum First Amendment Center" might be a little slower to try to bring his legal people to bear on this issue.
While I sympathise with his outrage, he went far beyond bringing his legal people in. The Founder of the "First Amendment Center" suggested that Congress make web sites liable for the content that posted on them and ISPs liable for the content that is generated by their customers. Which might make sense from his perspective, because newspapers are responsible for their content in such a way. So for instance, USA Today could be sued for damages if an article it published was found to be libelous. But the standard determinant of liability has been that of editorial control. Websites are not liable precisely when they do not exercise editorial control over content posted to them. Newspapers on the other hand actively approve of articles for publication, it is that act of approval over the specific libelous statements which makes them liable.
Imagine if you will, a world where the paper mill was liable for the content of the words written on its pages, or telephone companies were liable for the content of our conversations, or websites liable for the content of their messageboards. It is a world which would necessitate ever greater controls on content. Creative control would be relagated to fewer and fewer, not because the government would put prior restraint on free speech, but because individuals and corporations would not be able to assume the cummulative costs of the threat of liability.
Liability should be reserved for those who knowingly spread a libelous statement, not those that facilitate expression unknowing of the content.
So, with this new feature, will windows be ready for the desktop? Because it is years now that we hear "this year is THE year, it is ready for the desktop !"
Maybe for corporate use, but for your joe average user who doesn't know a kernel from "The Colonel", Windows is probably many years from being ready for prime time. I mean the support requirements alone make wider adoption impracticle.
I'm not so sure. Let's face it, we wont defeat the DMCA by continuing to say it's "illegitimate."
Yes we will. You can't compromise a fundamental value. People have a fundamental right to circumvent copy prevention technology.
As this is not Wikipedia, you have no point. That is to say, you are pointless. That you entirely avoid the question speaks volumes!
The point is that Slashdot's contribution model is very much like wikipedia's, and that you can write feedback about registered users on wikipedia. And even though asshole anonymous users, like yourself, can come in and say stupid shit, there is a fairly practical way of dealing with their contributions. Slashdot has moderation and a moderation threshold which controls how such contributions are displayed and wikipedia can just discard bad content, but can still allow their recall later through the history.
Even attribution would be a step in the right direction. Why for example can't we see who wrote what, and why doesn't Wikipedia require editing to be attached to an account with each account receiving feedback for the quality of its contributor's input
Thank you again, Anonymous Coward, as always I value your feedback.