And people needing passwords reset. And people needing things plugged back in. And people who open attachments from spam. And people who refuse to update from IE5 but still complain that "the Internet is broken!". And....
I say start it immediately, at $1. Then double it each year. Math so simple, even Congress can understand it.
In a decade, it'll cost just over a grand a year. By two decades, it'll be costing over a million. Even 30+-year copyrights would be possible, if they were worth billions of dollars to whoever owned them.
This would also allow for near-immediate entry into the public domain of works by extinct companies. Abandonware would flourish - when a company goes bankrupt, unless their copyrights get bought up, their products would enter the public domain within a year.
They have. The character is protected by trademark, not copyright. Only the films themselves require copyright - and for some reason, Disney wants the original, pre-WW2 cartoons kept out of public domain. It's not like they're making much, if any, money off them right now... I'm not even sure they're not in the Vault.
In fiction, you see a few different ideas of what space combat is like, almost always based on some sort of modern-day metaphor. You'll see stuff that's all carriers and small one-man fighters (Star Wars), stuff that's just huge capital ships (Star Trek).
Real-life, I think it would be more like submarine combat, based on a few simple facts:
1) Spaceships are *fragile*. A sub can be taken out by one depth charge a few hundred meters away. You wouldn't even need to be that close to take out the ISS - a fragment the size of a baseball could probably damage it enough to evacuate it. And it would be torpedo-type weaponry - you can't adjust your aim fast enough to trust in a direct hit, so you'd use warheads of some sort set to explode when close enough. Those would either be old-school explosives with fragmentation casing, or nuclear.
2) Space battle would be a long-range, stealth battle. You're dealing, literally, with astronomical distances. Even lasers would take seconds to hours to hit. It's not too hard to hide in space, if you're small and aren't actively making EM noise. I can imagine it would involve a lot of drifting with engines off, a lot of radio silence, and definitely a lot of sneak attacks and ambushes.
No, I'm still on 9.0.1 on my secondary backup desktop (primary desktop's in the shop). The 10 update's been downloaded, I just can't be assed to restart. Problem is, anything after 3.0 seems to run very poorly on low-end devices. The new ones (post 4.0 - the 3.0 series was terrible for me) improve performance on high-end devices, but seem to use more than 384MB of memory.
To put it simply, new_machine(2.0) old_machine(9.0).
I actually use WindowMaker on my personal dev-server-slash-tertiary-backup-desktop. It's an old piece of junk - Athlon 900 FTW! - but it still runs, and I don't have to worry about breaking anything important.
I've tried various window managers and desktop environments. KDE, even a 2.x release, is too slow. Same for GNOME. Most of the rest are too capability-light for me to seriously use. But WindowMaker hits the sweet spot of "runs fast on old crap" and "is actually usable".
This is the same machine I keep a copy of Firefox 2 on, since anything after that doesn't so much "run" as "walk".
I was given a Droid 1. Completely mine - Verizon didn't even know I had it until I went in to have my number transferred from my old dumbphone.
They flat-out *would* *not* *let* *me* use it as "dumb phone with an integrated wifi computer". I was forced to upgrade to the bare-minimum 3G plan. And then they told me that if I had done the number transfer myself, they would have *automatically* added 3G charges to my bill (without telling me), even if I never used 3G.
I imagine AT&T is just as despicably evil as Verizon in this matter.
Hence the "in recent history". American politics today is vastly different to American politics of the 1800s and earlier. I'd argue that "modern" American politics only really formed after WW2, but I'm sure *someone* will try to disagree with me.
There was the '92 Bush-Clinton race, which was unusual because it was an actual three-way race. Before that was the 1980 Carter-Reagan race. That's all the times an incumbent has lost since WW2. Now look at the ones who were re-elected: Eisenhower. Johnson. Nixon. Reagan. Clinton. Bush. Two out of seven is "very difficult" in my book.
[1] I'm counting Johnson as an incumbent, as he was President when he was elected, even though he was not elected to the post at the time.
In the US, it's very difficult for an incumbent President to lose an election. Freaking Dubya got re-elected - that alone should say plenty. If it weren't for the two-term limit, we'd probably have Presidents-for-life.
Further, in the US, once you've lost a Presidential election, you pretty much never run again (at least in recent history). No idea why, but it's true. Gore never ran again. Kerry never ran again. McCain isn't running again.
Add those two facts together, and you get why most of the intelligent Republican candidates are sitting this election out. They know any of them stand a very low chance of winning this year. They know their odds are much better in 2016. So all the candidates that are rational, logical people aren't running, leaving only the dregs of the party. The nutjobs, the demagogues, the morons. Honestly, I'm thinking Stephen Colbert might actually be the best candidate.
<ianal> You are correct, the producer wouldn't have any obligation to make transfers easy or even possible. And, while this ruling does not in any way rule on other digital products like DLC, it does provide some amount of precedence another judge may wish to use. Most likely, DLC would be defined as an addition to another physical product - the game proper. So you would probably only be able to transfer DLC if you transferred ownership of the rest of the game as well. At least, that's the ruling I would make. Anti-circumvention exemptions may or may not apply - depends too much on the judge, and how much he's been bribed by *IAA. My guess is that they'll rule that they still apply. </ianal>
You could. If you deleted all of your copies, and if only one person was able to download them.
The main reason for this ruling was that it obeyed the first law of economic thermodynamics - products were neither created nor destroyed, only transferred.
First, there's no history of violence against lawyers. There's never been (to my knowledge) a lawyer genocide, or a lawyer slavery. Remarks about racial discrimination, even in jest, are at best uncomfortable because there was once some sincerity to it.
Second, people cannot choose their race. I did not choose to be Caucasian. But people can, with very few exceptions, choose their profession - I chose to become a programmer, lawyers chose to become lawyers.
That's why it's funny. Because there's none of the uncomfortable realness that comes with race-based jokes.
I've been working on a game project for over a year now. I'd open-sourced it quite some time ago, but I'm currently in the process of moving it from "my project that has GPL'd source" to "an open-source project". I've put it up on Sourceforge, although I'm not yet using SVN/Git or have the downloads there. I've kept community involvement to a minimum and kept the project pretty low-publicity, since it's not quite ready for wide release. The next release, 0.1.0, is supposed to change that, but I've had some rather extreme delays due to personal and personnel problems.
I'm about a quarter through this book now, and while much of it so far has been stuff I already know, even just putting it all together is enlightening. And if the later chapters are more in-depth, it might be a lifesaver.
I've always thought it was odd that those games that literally copied Counter-Strike were allowed on the Google Market.
I know, you're about to say "copying gameplay, while unethical, is completely legal". Problem is, they didn't copy the gameplay - they're boring rail shooters. The copied stuff is the art - the textures, models, even some of the maps. And that's blatant copyright infringement. It's obvious even from the previews, if you've played the game enough. And since, at one point, people playing cs_italy were responsible for more bandwidth usage than actual people in Italy, I'm pretty sure I'm not the first to notice it.
I figured Valve, being pretty savvy about this sort of thing, figured that suing them would give them too much publicity - Streisand Effect and all that, not worth the huge amount of publicity that anything Valve does. Now, I'm thinking that iApps7 was just ignoring the cease-and-desists, because when you're already distributing malware and committing actual, commercial copyright theft, you're probably not too afraid of lawyers.
2) Are we really that proud that something we built lasted 8 years? that's like the breaking in period for a diesel Mercedes with far more (actual, not shipping) miles on it
Eight years, in an extremely inhospitable environment (extreme dust, an average temperature of -60C), with absolutely zero maintenance. Yeah, let's see that Mercedes run for 8 years with no oil change.
At the very least, it could be used for agriculture. Plants don't exactly care how water tastes. It could probably be used in soft drinks as well. Plus making cooling water that doesn't corrode stuff or build up residue - I can imagine this being used in nuclear reactors.
If it really is as simple as "run water through graphene sheets, get 100% pure hydrogen oxide", there's no limit to how many places it could be used.
Slashdot Mirror
And people needing passwords reset. And people needing things plugged back in. And people who open attachments from spam. And people who refuse to update from IE5 but still complain that "the Internet is broken!". And....
I say start it immediately, at $1. Then double it each year. Math so simple, even Congress can understand it.
In a decade, it'll cost just over a grand a year. By two decades, it'll be costing over a million. Even 30+-year copyrights would be possible, if they were worth billions of dollars to whoever owned them.
This would also allow for near-immediate entry into the public domain of works by extinct companies. Abandonware would flourish - when a company goes bankrupt, unless their copyrights get bought up, their products would enter the public domain within a year.
They have. The character is protected by trademark, not copyright. Only the films themselves require copyright - and for some reason, Disney wants the original, pre-WW2 cartoons kept out of public domain. It's not like they're making much, if any, money off them right now... I'm not even sure they're not in the Vault.
In fiction, you see a few different ideas of what space combat is like, almost always based on some sort of modern-day metaphor. You'll see stuff that's all carriers and small one-man fighters (Star Wars), stuff that's just huge capital ships (Star Trek).
Real-life, I think it would be more like submarine combat, based on a few simple facts:
1) Spaceships are *fragile*. A sub can be taken out by one depth charge a few hundred meters away. You wouldn't even need to be that close to take out the ISS - a fragment the size of a baseball could probably damage it enough to evacuate it. And it would be torpedo-type weaponry - you can't adjust your aim fast enough to trust in a direct hit, so you'd use warheads of some sort set to explode when close enough. Those would either be old-school explosives with fragmentation casing, or nuclear.
2) Space battle would be a long-range, stealth battle. You're dealing, literally, with astronomical distances. Even lasers would take seconds to hours to hit. It's not too hard to hide in space, if you're small and aren't actively making EM noise. I can imagine it would involve a lot of drifting with engines off, a lot of radio silence, and definitely a lot of sneak attacks and ambushes.
Yeah, but the SNR on drums is even worse. Plus, noise pollution.
No, I'm still on 9.0.1 on my secondary backup desktop (primary desktop's in the shop). The 10 update's been downloaded, I just can't be assed to restart. Problem is, anything after 3.0 seems to run very poorly on low-end devices. The new ones (post 4.0 - the 3.0 series was terrible for me) improve performance on high-end devices, but seem to use more than 384MB of memory.
To put it simply, new_machine(2.0) old_machine(9.0).
I actually use WindowMaker on my personal dev-server-slash-tertiary-backup-desktop. It's an old piece of junk - Athlon 900 FTW! - but it still runs, and I don't have to worry about breaking anything important.
I've tried various window managers and desktop environments. KDE, even a 2.x release, is too slow. Same for GNOME. Most of the rest are too capability-light for me to seriously use. But WindowMaker hits the sweet spot of "runs fast on old crap" and "is actually usable".
This is the same machine I keep a copy of Firefox 2 on, since anything after that doesn't so much "run" as "walk".
Nope.
I was given a Droid 1. Completely mine - Verizon didn't even know I had it until I went in to have my number transferred from my old dumbphone.
They flat-out *would* *not* *let* *me* use it as "dumb phone with an integrated wifi computer". I was forced to upgrade to the bare-minimum 3G plan. And then they told me that if I had done the number transfer myself, they would have *automatically* added 3G charges to my bill (without telling me), even if I never used 3G.
I imagine AT&T is just as despicably evil as Verizon in this matter.
My bad.
Hence the "in recent history". American politics today is vastly different to American politics of the 1800s and earlier. I'd argue that "modern" American politics only really formed after WW2, but I'm sure *someone* will try to disagree with me.
There was the '92 Bush-Clinton race, which was unusual because it was an actual three-way race. Before that was the 1980 Carter-Reagan race. That's all the times an incumbent has lost since WW2. Now look at the ones who were re-elected: Eisenhower. Johnson. Nixon. Reagan. Clinton. Bush. Two out of seven is "very difficult" in my book.
[1] I'm counting Johnson as an incumbent, as he was President when he was elected, even though he was not elected to the post at the time.
In the US, it's very difficult for an incumbent President to lose an election. Freaking Dubya got re-elected - that alone should say plenty. If it weren't for the two-term limit, we'd probably have Presidents-for-life.
Further, in the US, once you've lost a Presidential election, you pretty much never run again (at least in recent history). No idea why, but it's true. Gore never ran again. Kerry never ran again. McCain isn't running again.
Add those two facts together, and you get why most of the intelligent Republican candidates are sitting this election out. They know any of them stand a very low chance of winning this year. They know their odds are much better in 2016. So all the candidates that are rational, logical people aren't running, leaving only the dregs of the party. The nutjobs, the demagogues, the morons. Honestly, I'm thinking Stephen Colbert might actually be the best candidate.
<ianal>
You are correct, the producer wouldn't have any obligation to make transfers easy or even possible. And, while this ruling does not in any way rule on other digital products like DLC, it does provide some amount of precedence another judge may wish to use.
Most likely, DLC would be defined as an addition to another physical product - the game proper. So you would probably only be able to transfer DLC if you transferred ownership of the rest of the game as well. At least, that's the ruling I would make.
Anti-circumvention exemptions may or may not apply - depends too much on the judge, and how much he's been bribed by *IAA. My guess is that they'll rule that they still apply.
</ianal>
You could. If you deleted all of your copies, and if only one person was able to download them.
The main reason for this ruling was that it obeyed the first law of economic thermodynamics - products were neither created nor destroyed, only transferred.
Who in the hell would want to hire someone exposed to that to work on their software? You would be living in fear of the MS lawsuit.
People who will never have to write an OS, or anything similar to an OS, as part of their job.
The differences, of course.
First, there's no history of violence against lawyers. There's never been (to my knowledge) a lawyer genocide, or a lawyer slavery. Remarks about racial discrimination, even in jest, are at best uncomfortable because there was once some sincerity to it.
Second, people cannot choose their race. I did not choose to be Caucasian. But people can, with very few exceptions, choose their profession - I chose to become a programmer, lawyers chose to become lawyers.
That's why it's funny. Because there's none of the uncomfortable realness that comes with race-based jokes.
I've been working on a game project for over a year now. I'd open-sourced it quite some time ago, but I'm currently in the process of moving it from "my project that has GPL'd source" to "an open-source project". I've put it up on Sourceforge, although I'm not yet using SVN/Git or have the downloads there. I've kept community involvement to a minimum and kept the project pretty low-publicity, since it's not quite ready for wide release. The next release, 0.1.0, is supposed to change that, but I've had some rather extreme delays due to personal and personnel problems.
I'm about a quarter through this book now, and while much of it so far has been stuff I already know, even just putting it all together is enlightening. And if the later chapters are more in-depth, it might be a lifesaver.
I knew it.
VINDICATION!
With today's electronics, MacGyver would just do it all in software.
Sure. The Nazis had funnier accents (citation: Hogan's Heroes).
I've always thought it was odd that those games that literally copied Counter-Strike were allowed on the Google Market.
I know, you're about to say "copying gameplay, while unethical, is completely legal". Problem is, they didn't copy the gameplay - they're boring rail shooters. The copied stuff is the art - the textures, models, even some of the maps. And that's blatant copyright infringement. It's obvious even from the previews, if you've played the game enough. And since, at one point, people playing cs_italy were responsible for more bandwidth usage than actual people in Italy, I'm pretty sure I'm not the first to notice it.
I figured Valve, being pretty savvy about this sort of thing, figured that suing them would give them too much publicity - Streisand Effect and all that, not worth the huge amount of publicity that anything Valve does. Now, I'm thinking that iApps7 was just ignoring the cease-and-desists, because when you're already distributing malware and committing actual, commercial copyright theft, you're probably not too afraid of lawyers.
2) Are we really that proud that something we built lasted 8 years? that's like the breaking in period for a diesel Mercedes with far more (actual, not shipping) miles on it
Eight years, in an extremely inhospitable environment (extreme dust, an average temperature of -60C), with absolutely zero maintenance. Yeah, let's see that Mercedes run for 8 years with no oil change.
At the very least, it could be used for agriculture. Plants don't exactly care how water tastes. It could probably be used in soft drinks as well. Plus making cooling water that doesn't corrode stuff or build up residue - I can imagine this being used in nuclear reactors.
If it really is as simple as "run water through graphene sheets, get 100% pure hydrogen oxide", there's no limit to how many places it could be used.
See, now you're making the assumption that people have morals.
Businesses have no morals.
ftfy