Uhh... if you lose everything related to Valve's software, all you have to do is download steam, enter your password, download the software, and play.
I suspect that's why he said "buy a new box, enter your username and password, and download everything or borrow a backup from a friend." (emphasis mine)
You're both saying the same thing. You can either download it all from Valve, or install off a backup CD that you made, or that you borrow from a friend.
I would suggest another tier be added to the copyright system to address your need for privacy-- works that an individual does not want to be published can be "privaterighted," meaning that they will never be published, and that no one else has the right to publish them either. If they decide to publish later, they can apply for a copyright.
I agree with you on the pricing issue with the copyright office, as well. Skip the mandatory licensing, unless the copyright owner has let the work sit for more than a decade unavailable to the public. If they didn't want it published, they should have "privaterighted" it instead.
Maybe three tiers:
1. Works are privaterighted by default. Nobody can copy and use them, and you're not going to publish or sell them. 2. If you intend to sell, copyright works like it does today. Automatic protection from date of creation, no registration or escrow required. 3. If you sell more than a certain number of copies or a certain dollar amount of a work, THEN it must be registered and a copy placed in escrow.
There are definitely problems, but I don't see an issue with discouraging overuse of copyright, and it addresses the (to me) larger problem of orphaned works. I'm open to other solutions.
You'll kindly note that my post was a suggestion, not a reflection of the way things are. I was suggesting that we *change* the current way we do things to require registration and submission of a copy to obtain a copyright.
My intent is to force people into guaranteeing that their work enters the public domain at the end of the copyright period in exchange for the temporary monopoly of copyright.
I'll go one tiny bit further and suggest "no cooling fans on the motherboard." Seriously... it's just one less thing to fail. Why put fans on the northbridge, etc... when a nice passive heatsink does the job?
I've lost two mobos and a PSU to crappy blown capacitors.
While we're dreaming, can we get a company to make a product like that in every category? I'm tired of sifting through flaky shit to find The One Best Value That Won't Die In A Year.
To get a copyright for a work, you should have to register a highest-possible-quality unencrypted digital copy of the work with the copyright office.
At a minimum, this guarantees that works don't vanish from existence before their copyright expires, denying the public domain their content.
Additionally, you could add criteria to address abandonware-- if a work is not produced or sold for a period of 10 years, it becomes available from the copyright office for a small copying fee, and has becomes part of the public domain.
Alternatively, this could act as a form of "mandatory licensing," where you can purchase the work for a nominal fee from the copyright office, and the proceeds are split between the office (for maintaining this library of works) and the copyright holder. This way, even people who are no longer able to sell their works could make a modest sum from the sale until the copyright expires, and people would have access to works that would have otherwise disappeared.
This is a common misunderstanding. Ford developed their own hybrid drivetrain, and discovered after it was done that parts of it were mighty close to infringing on some of Toyota's hybrid-car patents (particularly related to system controls). They paid the license fee (and traded some patent licensing of their own) to avoid the inevitable lawsuits, but they are still using their own design. I can't find the original article, but this press release indicates as much.
That said, I'm still more likely to buy a Toyota. Ford could win me back, but it takes a LONG time to prove your cars are consistently reliable again.
Good point. Mixed-mode video is the worst-- mostly TV shows that are shot on film with mixed-in scenes shot on video cameras. The stargate DVDs were full of mixed content like that.
He's right. The labelling in the stream is gone, and we're down to just raw image data. A deinterlacer at the TV level is doing it by literally looking at the frame it's got, and making an assessment via some complex formula as to whether or not it's interlaced. If you or I were given the job of the deinterlacer, we'd just look at it and say "hey, that frame's all comb-y, i'll bet it's interlaced." Then it has to guess the frame pattern, and try to reconstruct if it thinks it is a 24p source, or interpolate if it's 480i. This is a messy heuristic process, but if done well, I still think it could come close to the DVD player. It'll never be perfect, though, so the DVD player is likely to continue to win, and much, much more easily and cheaply.
yay for not previewing. The end of that post should read "would probably be able to fool the deinterlacer into thinking a frame was interlaced when it was not."
It's possible to guess what type of data is coming in at the TV's end of the process, but it's not going to be as accurate as it is at the DVD player's end of things. If I had to guess, I'd think most televisions use a "dumb" deinterlacer that just attempts to apply the 480i field interpolation technique to everything. Smarter hardware like the Faroudja chips most likely gets this right close to as often as the DVD player does.
You can see the telecine pattern on most DVDs made from film movies if your DVD player has a frame-by-frame mode. You'll see clear-clear-clear-combed-combed when you step through the frames. There is a good pictorial example at wikipedia. Deinterlacers at the TV end will be trying to detect that combing pattern to figure out what they're supposed to be doing. Scenes with just the right sort of picture
Most of the time, a progressive DVD player is just removing the telecine process, since the original source was actually a 24fps progressive movie. Telecined movies run three progressive frames followed by two interlaced frames. The fields contain all of the information needed to reassemble the original 24fps progressive video with no interpolation.
For video filmed in 480i, then yes, a deinterlacer like you described is used.
The codec is hardware. The HR10-250 uses hardware mpeg decoders. The phone rep is mistaken. Yes, it's a Linux machine, but one with a very slow CPU and some very fast specialty hardware.
Options are always good. I would guess that part of the reason your rush hour traffic is so uncongested is because some of the people in your area do take the train to work. I'm sure a large portion of them find it cheaper, or don't own cars. Another set probably finds the additional delay a convenient tradeoff for not having to drive-- ie, they get time to read, etc...
But without that train, all those people would have to get where they're going somehow, and it will either be in a car, or in a bus that's even slower than the train that stops every 400 yards to block the road while it loads and unloads.
And yes, that train is slow. I've taken it from the airport to a couple of places when I was in town, and MAN does it creep along.
I already said it once-- doesn't the quantity here mean anything? If he had sent a single unsolicited email, we could compare the punishment to any other single crime, and see if the sentencing made sense.
As it is, he was committing 10 million violations of this law a day for two solid weeks. If you commit that many rapes, get that many parking tickets, or kill that many people-- I guarantee the punishment will be higher than the amount of time he's doing for spam.
His punishment is on the order of 2 seconds of jail time per violation, which doesn't seem unreasonably long at all to me. He just did a lot of it.
You get a harsher punishment for sending TEN MILLION spam messages per day than you get for committing one murder. I suspect the penalty for committing ten million murders per day is still, in fact, higher.
If you set his penalty at a whopping one second of jail time per violation, which seems fairly reasonable, you'd have 4.4 years of jail time. That 4.8 years includes only the two weeks of emails he sent after the laws were past.
14 days of violations * 10,000,000 emails per day = 140,000,000 emails
Yeah, and we've got handy tools like DOSBox and ScummVM to make it easy for us. With any luck, down the road, somebody will get bored and write a Steam emulator that runs the game in a VM that fakes network traffic to a fake virtual Steam server or something.
I will be spectacularly pissed if they don't just unlock the games for non-steam play when they eventually go out of business, but we'll just have to wait and see on that.
Not true. Offline play requires a token to be set on your machine, which expires. You occasionally need to reconnect to play offline.
Also, while I was playing the game, there was a fairly severe bug in the process-- the order of events in authentication went like this:
1. check for network connection 2. if present, delete offline token 3. get new token from server
If the server happened to be down, but you left the ethernet cable plugged in, you'd lose your offline token and be unable to play. It locked me out for a solid weekend, and all I wanted to play was a singleplayer physics mod.
This bug may be fixed now-- I haven't played in several months after finishing the game and getting too busy with other things.
Yep. Which is why you'll notice the blinky lights on the ethernet port light up even when the machine is off when you plug a "live" ethernet cable in.
I use it on my HTPC so that the machine can be "off" (and silent) unless I need to use it or access content stored on it remotely. The BIOS also supports scheduled wakeups, which gets used to schedule TV recordings by the software that came with the tuner card.
"off" is only in quotes because no PC is truly not using any power until the power supply is turned off. They all run some small amount of power even when off, much like your TV waiting for signals from the remote.
Unfortunately, because we use gas tax to pay for the roads, we're going the other direction. Oregon, for example, is taxing hybrid cars because they don't use enough gas to pay for their share of road use.
Taxing gasoline to cover road use doesn't make sense anyway. We should tax based on how much you use the roads and how much wear your particular type of vehicle does per mile. Of course, that's hard, and involves more than just checking your odometer since roads in different places are paid for by different groups, even in the same state. So we just keep doing it the same old dumb way we have been, and end up with conflicting efforts like this gem I just saw:
Oregon taxes hybrid cars because they don't use enough gas to cover their share of road usage. Of course, the federal government goes ahead and gives big tax credits for hybrid cars to encourage the conservation of gasoline. "Let's encourage fuel efficiency! Oh, crap... we based our road tax on fuel usage! Quick, discourage fuel efficiency by raising gas taxes for efficient vehicles!" Hooray for the government.
Yeah, no kidding. Here in good ol' backwards indiana, we don't use it, and it seems to work fine. There's a bill in our state legislature to change that, though-- the given reason being that it's hurting our state businesses because people can't figure out what time to phone here from other states.
My vote is for eliminating it altogether. While I'm dreaming-- if we can slow the earth down to, say, 25 hours a day, that would be super, too.
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Uhh... if you lose everything related to Valve's software, all you have to do is download steam, enter your password, download the software, and play.
I suspect that's why he said "buy a new box, enter your username and password, and download everything or borrow a backup from a friend." (emphasis mine)
You're both saying the same thing. You can either download it all from Valve, or install off a backup CD that you made, or that you borrow from a friend.
You make some excellent points.
I would suggest another tier be added to the copyright system to address your need for privacy-- works that an individual does not want to be published can be "privaterighted," meaning that they will never be published, and that no one else has the right to publish them either. If they decide to publish later, they can apply for a copyright.
I agree with you on the pricing issue with the copyright office, as well. Skip the mandatory licensing, unless the copyright owner has let the work sit for more than a decade unavailable to the public. If they didn't want it published, they should have "privaterighted" it instead.
Maybe three tiers:
1. Works are privaterighted by default. Nobody can copy and use them, and you're not going to publish or sell them.
2. If you intend to sell, copyright works like it does today. Automatic protection from date of creation, no registration or escrow required.
3. If you sell more than a certain number of copies or a certain dollar amount of a work, THEN it must be registered and a copy placed in escrow.
There are definitely problems, but I don't see an issue with discouraging overuse of copyright, and it addresses the (to me) larger problem of orphaned works. I'm open to other solutions.
You'll kindly note that my post was a suggestion, not a reflection of the way things are. I was suggesting that we *change* the current way we do things to require registration and submission of a copy to obtain a copyright.
My intent is to force people into guaranteeing that their work enters the public domain at the end of the copyright period in exchange for the temporary monopoly of copyright.
I'll go one tiny bit further and suggest "no cooling fans on the motherboard." Seriously... it's just one less thing to fail. Why put fans on the northbridge, etc... when a nice passive heatsink does the job?
I've lost two mobos and a PSU to crappy blown capacitors.
While we're dreaming, can we get a company to make a product like that in every category? I'm tired of sifting through flaky shit to find The One Best Value That Won't Die In A Year.
To get a copyright for a work, you should have to register a highest-possible-quality unencrypted digital copy of the work with the copyright office.
At a minimum, this guarantees that works don't vanish from existence before their copyright expires, denying the public domain their content.
Additionally, you could add criteria to address abandonware-- if a work is not produced or sold for a period of 10 years, it becomes available from the copyright office for a small copying fee, and has becomes part of the public domain.
Alternatively, this could act as a form of "mandatory licensing," where you can purchase the work for a nominal fee from the copyright office, and the proceeds are split between the office (for maintaining this library of works) and the copyright holder. This way, even people who are no longer able to sell their works could make a modest sum from the sale until the copyright expires, and people would have access to works that would have otherwise disappeared.
This is a common misunderstanding. Ford developed their own hybrid drivetrain, and discovered after it was done that parts of it were mighty close to infringing on some of Toyota's hybrid-car patents (particularly related to system controls). They paid the license fee (and traded some patent licensing of their own) to avoid the inevitable lawsuits, but they are still using their own design. I can't find the original article, but this press release indicates as much.
.
That said, I'm still more likely to buy a Toyota. Ford could win me back, but it takes a LONG time to prove your cars are consistently reliable again
Good point. Mixed-mode video is the worst-- mostly TV shows that are shot on film with mixed-in scenes shot on video cameras. The stargate DVDs were full of mixed content like that.
He's right. The labelling in the stream is gone, and we're down to just raw image data. A deinterlacer at the TV level is doing it by literally looking at the frame it's got, and making an assessment via some complex formula as to whether or not it's interlaced. If you or I were given the job of the deinterlacer, we'd just look at it and say "hey, that frame's all comb-y, i'll bet it's interlaced." Then it has to guess the frame pattern, and try to reconstruct if it thinks it is a 24p source, or interpolate if it's 480i. This is a messy heuristic process, but if done well, I still think it could come close to the DVD player. It'll never be perfect, though, so the DVD player is likely to continue to win, and much, much more easily and cheaply.
yay for not previewing. The end of that post should read "would probably be able to fool the deinterlacer into thinking a frame was interlaced when it was not."
It's possible to guess what type of data is coming in at the TV's end of the process, but it's not going to be as accurate as it is at the DVD player's end of things. If I had to guess, I'd think most televisions use a "dumb" deinterlacer that just attempts to apply the 480i field interpolation technique to everything. Smarter hardware like the Faroudja chips most likely gets this right close to as often as the DVD player does.
You can see the telecine pattern on most DVDs made from film movies if your DVD player has a frame-by-frame mode. You'll see clear-clear-clear-combed-combed when you step through the frames. There is a good pictorial example at wikipedia. Deinterlacers at the TV end will be trying to detect that combing pattern to figure out what they're supposed to be doing. Scenes with just the right sort of picture
Most of the time, a progressive DVD player is just removing the telecine process, since the original source was actually a 24fps progressive movie. Telecined movies run three progressive frames followed by two interlaced frames. The fields contain all of the information needed to reassemble the original 24fps progressive video with no interpolation.
For video filmed in 480i, then yes, a deinterlacer like you described is used.
The codec is hardware. The HR10-250 uses hardware mpeg decoders. The phone rep is mistaken. Yes, it's a Linux machine, but one with a very slow CPU and some very fast specialty hardware.
Options are always good. I would guess that part of the reason your rush hour traffic is so uncongested is because some of the people in your area do take the train to work. I'm sure a large portion of them find it cheaper, or don't own cars. Another set probably finds the additional delay a convenient tradeoff for not having to drive-- ie, they get time to read, etc...
But without that train, all those people would have to get where they're going somehow, and it will either be in a car, or in a bus that's even slower than the train that stops every 400 yards to block the road while it loads and unloads.
And yes, that train is slow. I've taken it from the airport to a couple of places when I was in town, and MAN does it creep along.
I already said it once-- doesn't the quantity here mean anything? If he had sent a single unsolicited email, we could compare the punishment to any other single crime, and see if the sentencing made sense.
As it is, he was committing 10 million violations of this law a day for two solid weeks. If you commit that many rapes, get that many parking tickets, or kill that many people-- I guarantee the punishment will be higher than the amount of time he's doing for spam.
His punishment is on the order of 2 seconds of jail time per violation, which doesn't seem unreasonably long at all to me. He just did a lot of it.
That second 4.8 is a typo. It should be 4.4... sorry for the mixup.
You get a harsher punishment for sending TEN MILLION spam messages per day than you get for committing one murder. I suspect the penalty for committing ten million murders per day is still, in fact, higher.
If you set his penalty at a whopping one second of jail time per violation, which seems fairly reasonable, you'd have 4.4 years of jail time. That 4.8 years includes only the two weeks of emails he sent after the laws were past.
14 days of violations
* 10,000,000 emails per day = 140,000,000 emails
= 140,000,000 seconds in jail = 4.4 years.
And until your offline registration expires, errors out, or is unintentionally cleared for renewal but the authentication servers are down.
I'd use one of your fingers. Or just have your pet monkey do it-- whichever is most convenient.
Yeah, and we've got handy tools like DOSBox and ScummVM to make it easy for us. With any luck, down the road, somebody will get bored and write a Steam emulator that runs the game in a VM that fakes network traffic to a fake virtual Steam server or something.
I will be spectacularly pissed if they don't just unlock the games for non-steam play when they eventually go out of business, but we'll just have to wait and see on that.
Not true. Offline play requires a token to be set on your machine, which expires. You occasionally need to reconnect to play offline.
Also, while I was playing the game, there was a fairly severe bug in the process-- the order of events in authentication went like this:
1. check for network connection
2. if present, delete offline token
3. get new token from server
If the server happened to be down, but you left the ethernet cable plugged in, you'd lose your offline token and be unable to play. It locked me out for a solid weekend, and all I wanted to play was a singleplayer physics mod.
This bug may be fixed now-- I haven't played in several months after finishing the game and getting too busy with other things.
Yep. Which is why you'll notice the blinky lights on the ethernet port light up even when the machine is off when you plug a "live" ethernet cable in.
I use it on my HTPC so that the machine can be "off" (and silent) unless I need to use it or access content stored on it remotely. The BIOS also supports scheduled wakeups, which gets used to schedule TV recordings by the software that came with the tuner card.
"off" is only in quotes because no PC is truly not using any power until the power supply is turned off. They all run some small amount of power even when off, much like your TV waiting for signals from the remote.
I believe you are mistaken. A quick google on it turned up the following:
Wisconsin's gas tax goes into a transportation fund.
In 1997, we switched from general fund to an infrastructure fund (the Highway Trust Fund) for the federal gas tax
Indiana's gas tax is the primary fund source for local road work.
This is just a quick top-of-google sample-- I'll let you do the rest of the states.
Unfortunately, because we use gas tax to pay for the roads, we're going the other direction. Oregon, for example, is taxing hybrid cars because they don't use enough gas to pay for their share of road use.
How's that for encouraging efficiency?
Taxing gasoline to cover road use doesn't make sense anyway. We should tax based on how much you use the roads and how much wear your particular type of vehicle does per mile. Of course, that's hard, and involves more than just checking your odometer since roads in different places are paid for by different groups, even in the same state. So we just keep doing it the same old dumb way we have been, and end up with conflicting efforts like this gem I just saw:
Oregon taxes hybrid cars because they don't use enough gas to cover their share of road usage. Of course, the federal government goes ahead and gives big tax credits for hybrid cars to encourage the conservation of gasoline. "Let's encourage fuel efficiency! Oh, crap... we based our road tax on fuel usage! Quick, discourage fuel efficiency by raising gas taxes for efficient vehicles!" Hooray for the government.
Yeah, no kidding. Here in good ol' backwards indiana, we don't use it, and it seems to work fine. There's a bill in our state legislature to change that, though-- the given reason being that it's hurting our state businesses because people can't figure out what time to phone here from other states.
My vote is for eliminating it altogether. While I'm dreaming-- if we can slow the earth down to, say, 25 hours a day, that would be super, too.