Re:MS is actually the freedom choice
on
CPRM Lecture
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· Score: 2
So tell me, who has the "proprietary and restricted" format?
?!?
Your basic assumption (that most people here are OK with Real but not with WMP) is, AFAIK completely wrong. Real are every bit the bastards M$ are, possibly moreso (for reasons you point out).
Saying WMP is bad is not saying that Real is Ok, it's saying that WMP is bad. If the format was Real, I'm pretty confident the no-save remark would have been made just the same - when you try to save and are denied, that pisses you off a lot more than any MS-but-only-MS-hating agenda would.
No-one has said that the shit Real pulls is acceptable. It isn't. But just because Real pulls it doesn't mean that MS should be exempt from criticism when they do the same.
If the excuse "don't blame us - we're not the only ones doing it" had any validity, the world would noticably be even worse off than already is.
The RIAA has been screwing the consumer for years, and doing so with open contempt, retailers are complaining that the music cartel preventing them in bad faith from selling online so that it could build its own online retailing empire first and be free of any pesky competition, and now Sen. Hatch is saying that they should be given tax incentives to put their wares online?!? WTF?
I'm sorry, I want blood. And a bit of justice wouldn't hurt either.
The RIAA has abused their copyrights, to the detriment of the consumer, artists, and society, thei abuse is possibly to the point where the law indicates the correct penalty is the invalidation of those copyrights and release of the material to the public domain. At the very least, lets see someone prosecute them and let the courts decide, not some Senator acting on his economic ideology, (especially considering how well his ideology served the country when he brought us the DMCA).
But I forget - the RIAA, for most intents and purposes owns Washington. It makes me want to go and abuse the Napster service.
Whatever happened to all of those people who were crying to mommy because Napster was in trouble for wholesale distribution of copyrighted material in violation of the licenses on the albums?
Since when did napster distribute copies of anything? Napster was convicted of contributory infringement because it profited off the illegal actions of others, not because it was itself making illegal copies of anything.
That said, I think you've missed the point a bit - this is not/. trying to have it's cake and eat it too, this is/. complaining that big business does have its cake and eat it too - copyright can be used against the little guy (Napster) but it can't be used for the little guy. It seems to me that Slashdot wants the same law to apply equally to all, which isn't hypocritical at all.
On the topic, the impression I get is that most people on/. agree that Napster is doing wrong, but are simply far more concerned with the much greater wrongs of the RIAA, and are also concerned by the shortcomings of currant IP law. Things are a lot grayer than the simplistic "we like stealing but don't like being stolen from" picture you paint:-)
His legal advice is that the software needed to be registered _before_ the infringment took place, therefore he has no recourse - contingency doesn't help because without a registered copyright, he won't be able to demonstrate damages even a fraction of the legal fees. It doesn't matter that he would be likely to win, the award won't be enough to interest any contingency lawyers:(
How much it would cost for the people to have some rights, too?
According to the industry lobby, any form of privacy legislation will cost the economy "hundreds of billions of dollars". What utter, cynically manipulative horseshit.
(Most other countries have decent privacy legislation and haven't fallen over dead - their only "loss" in fact seems to be that they lack the telemarketers that plague the lives of US citizens, so with a bit of luck in a few years after privacy became a civil right, there would be more workers actually adding to the economy rather than wasting their workhours on non-productive unwanted invasive psuedo-jobs).
But with people lying through their teeth about the costs of basic human dignaity ("hundreds of billions of dollars"), I'm not expecting to see much any time soon:-)
What registration gives you is extra protections, such as the ability to collect statuatory damages up to $100,000 if the infringement is judged to be willful.
This is the crux of the matter - GPL software by it's freely distributable nature would make proving damages almost impossible when we have Judges like Kaplan who don't grasp free software. So in the real world, GPL is only meaningful if the copyright is registered.
My question: On what grounds does the judge decide what the damages are? In the example given by the article, $100,000 would be excessive given the limited distribution and low price of the CD, yet if the judge tries to decide by estimating monetary damages, GPL is screwed again. Is the value of the damages set by the amount that would create a suitable slap on the wrist? What factors decide the damages when registered copyright is breached?
I think the RIAA would use the same argument they used against Napster - you may not be directly violating the law, but you're deliberately trying to help people break it. And we all know how successful Napster was at defending itself.
That's I was talking about when I said contributory infringement - Napster very obviously made millions of $$$ from the infringement, thus the court found it to be a contributory infringer. But a Napster user on the other hand, makes little or nothing, and it is not obvious that they are doing anything that Betamax wouldn't allow, so the RIAA would have a much tougher case ahead of them, if they could make one at all.
Damn, there are so many consumer rights issues and questions that need to be resolved by the courts, and having them resolved by cases run by a team of MPAA and RIAA lawyers isn't a pretty thing to watch:-(
The copyright infringer in Napster use is person downloading music they do not have the right to download. So while the RIAA surveillance sounds threatening, they're really counting on no-one calling their bluff. Consider:
They must either show that I downloaded music (more difficult), and then show that I did not have the right to do this (more difficult again - especially if I own the CD, and for all their snooping, they don't know what music I own).
Merely showing that I have files available is not enough, but unlike Napster (the company), showing that I benefited from someone downloading a file from machine (and thus allowing me to be caught as a contributory infringer) will be quite difficult.
If I own the CD, do I have the right to download the music (space shift)? (I'm guessing the MP3 case suggests otherwise). If the case can be made that I do have the right, (perhaps via the betamax decision, which should still apply to individuals), can we launch a class-action against the RIAA for unjustified (or perjerous) complaints to our ISPs and intimidation tactics?
Napster users may be walking a fine line, but so is the RIAA - their threats are based on some very contentious and unresolved interpretations of the law, and I don't think the law gives them the green light to do these things.
While it's nice to think that the childishly simple 40bit encryption on DVDs means that the secure formats being developed will likewise be simplicity to break (conventiently ignoring changes to US encryption export law since then), the reality is that mistakes are being learned from (albiet slowly). More to the point however, I don't think it matters in the slightest if some boffin can assemble a system that does not restrict his rights - if joe average off the street can't do it, the war is lost almost as badly as if no-one can.
I estimate that in less than 10 years time, I could tell a random selection of people about my new custom-built HDTV recorder box*, saying "and it will even record the movies that come up with the 'record access denied' message when you try to tape them with a consumer recorder". And the predominant reaction amongst the people listening will be "Isn't that illegal?".
(Actually, if this were in the USA, it could conceivably be illegal under the DMCA, but I don't live in the USA), and so my point is that people will have lost their rights - not because their rights have been erased in law (though that's allready happened in the USA), but because the industry wants them to believe they have no such right. This is already the case when demonstrating Minidiscs. Imagine - the people believing that it is illegal to record a free-to-air broadcast for later personal viewing. That is a defeat that cracking the new media formats can't touch. As I said, I estimate less than 10 years. Probably more like 5.
It doesn't matter what a boffin can do. Even assuming Linux experts manage to break the new hardware-based formats with software, it only matters if non-experts can do it too - otherwise for all intents and purposes, the MS OS can play media that linux can't.
*haven't built one yet, it's part of the example:)
I know this isn't exactly what you meant, but your reply to the effect of "But linux can play DVDs" seems to me to be overlooking a bigger picture.
Of course, what's stopping you from plugging your line out into the line in of another computer is beyond me...
Reducing us to analogue dubbing with the resulting loss in quality is the whole point - it's discouraged, but it's a decades old technology that they are well used to. If they can reduce our computers to old fashioned lossy dubbing, they have triumphed utterly over everything we seek to protect.
Surely this should be obvious? This whole mess is about digital copying. No-one gives a shit about people using computers the way they once used cassette decks, the fight is about things like the elimination of scarcity, the ability to have a maximal quality copy for the car without buying a second CD, that sort of thing.
Nonstandard web pages that could only read read with proprietary web browsers, happened years ago. People simply stopped going to those pages.
Excuse me? I use Netscape, and it's pretty obvious from browsing with it that IE compatibility is more than sufficient for many sites. MS has already succeeded in facilitating widespread creation of non-standard (IE-only) pages, and the number of people who have stopped going to those sites has been largely inconsequential.
It's already happened, and you claim it wouldn't? I disagree:-)
Only a fool would make their products, software or webpages, only work on a few computers.
You're thinking inside the box. I regularly run into galleries where flash or javascript is used to disable the right-click, the purpose being so that you can look at an image, but not keep a copy it - even in cases where I have every right to a copy of said image, it's just not in the interests of the website owner. Obviously, this is easy for someone like me to circumvent, however I imagine it is successful against more users than not.
Now imagine the same trick being pulled with using the access-control "features" now built into my HDD, RAM, CPU, etc. And what if (even worse) the open source OS is unable to handle the calls of the hardware, because those functions need to be licensed (like CSS), and open-source violates the terms of license. MS would love to contribute to such a scenario - Linux hoist by its own petard. Those Famous Last Words of "Freedom or Death!":-)
Ok, the scenerio I just painted isn't realistic for the near future anyway, but you seem to think that consumers will have a choice. One of the main points of the article was that the industry now recognises that the only way to make this work is to ensure consumers have no choice. They believe they can achieve this, and only a fool would sit back and say "sure - go ahead. Make my day" on the assumption that previous failure guarentees future failure. It's doesn't. They may be learning from their mistakes slowly, but they are learning. The game is changing, and if we are too blase and arrogant to notice this, we will lose.
On a related note, you seem to think that MS OS functionality is being limited by access-control, and thus less desirable. Technically, this may be true, but to the consumer (aided by billions in marketing), the opposite may be apparent - the MS OS is more functional because it can play the polished Hollywood media that Linux can't. That it can't copy the media is neither here nor there, as Linux can't even display the stuff to begin with.
How people can determine that it's people causing this?
You've got it backwards. Studies predicted that our contribution to the atmosphere would, if continued, lead to a global warming.
It is not a case of "look - the earth is warming - let's determine what causes it".
It is not a case of "look - non-manmade causes can change the climate too, so clearly we were wrong when we said man-made causes can also cause warming". (I don't understand this reasoning, but much of the USA seems to swear by it)
Is might even end up a case of "current warming seems to be the result of non-manmade causes, we still haven't done anything to limit greenhouse effects, so we're now looking at greenhouse warming joining forces with non-manmade warming and creating warming of a magnitude that we hoped was just a worst-case scenario"
Cows put off more methane than the entirety of the human race. This is one of the primary ingredients of 'greenhouse gases' yet no one wants to admit that at least part of this is perfectly natural.
?!? Where are you coming from?
Rudiment methane production is by no stretch of the imagination "natural". And even if it was, it certainly isn't relevant if the goal is to avoid the problems of warming. "Natural" warming is just as bad for us as "artifical" warming and both (in this example) are preventable. You seem to be in the thrall of misconceptions promoted by the US-industrial lobby - are you aware that many farming countries think that adding "low methane production" to the list of desirable breeding traits in farming can create livestock that help a country meet emission guidelines cheaply and effectively? Or are you sold on the US lobby that claims any curbs on pollution is a disaster that will blow us back to the dark ages? (They're currently also claiming that giving US citizens any rights to privacy will cost the country "hundreds of billions of dollars". Good thing no-one told the rest of the world, or their economies would sink overnight under the weight of the terrible civil rights they already have in place! (My own observation would be that privacy frees up all the workers tied up in non-productive telemarketing and the like to work in productive industries. But I digress...:-))
The skin cancer story is often used by well-meaning environmentalists to scare people. In fact, the increase in ultraviolet radiation from moving a hundred miles closer to the equator is much greater than the maximum increase anticipated by the worst-case ozone depletion scenarios.
Look a bit closer at your "facts" and you'll find that they come from sources probably a lot like the UK study on the effects of the ozone problem on the UK population - which is fine and accurate if you live in the UK (which has no ozone problem and is on the other side of the world from the ozone problem), but quite false if, as you have done, you make blanket statements about what the effects of the ozone thinning are.
The real facts include the obvious, such as if you live in, say, the USA, the effects are quite different from when you live under the hole. I do not live in the USA, and I have lived under the hole, and I think your misinformation is as bad as that which you were trying to correct.
There's still no firm evidence that climatic change has been caused by us and polution although we may have altered the rate of change slightly.
I'm worried by the misconceptions inferred here.
Climate change theory is not a case of "Oh look - the earth is getting warmer. What could be causing this?" and then enviromentalists painting pollution as the bad guy. Rather it's a case of "Um guys - my studies suggest that the pollutants in the atmosphere are nearly at levels where they could start changing the climate. If we don't change, we can expect climate changes in the future".
In other words, recent climate change need not have significant (or any) greenhouse causes and this is simply not relevant to whether we face a greenhouse warming problem or not.
By all means, keep a close eye on the climate, but it is insane to assume that if another contributor is currently affecting the climate, then greenhouse gases obviously can't. Quite the contrary - possible future greenhouse warming plus possible future say, solar warming, equals an even greater problem. (Not, as many would like us to unquestionably believe, a negation of the problem, or a disproving of greenhouse effects.:)
Of course, this asks the question: "If absence of solid evidence is not yet evidence of absence, and acting to contain a virtually-proven (but not quite) threat is expensive, how long should we continue to act in absence of further evidence?". Well, I guess that question became a whole lot less important today:-)
There is quite some debate going on between the two main theories on global warming, namely the well-known Greenhouse Effect theory vs. the Solar Activity theory, i.e. the idea that Earth's temperature is much more correlated to solar activity than to anything else, making human activity a negligible factor.
I think you've missed the debate entirely and so come to a conclusion that is easily dismissed as incorrect. The Solar Activity theory predicts changes to the Earth's climate due to solar activity, the Greenhouse theory predicts changes due to human activity.
You give the impression of having fallen into the trap of thinking that since climate chanegs can be caused by non greenhouse means, they can clearly only be caused by non greenhouse means - a conclusion that dangeriously defies logic. Bear in mind that most greenhouse theory suggests that it is a little early for pronounced greenhouse climate changes, therefore finding only changes that could conceivably be attributed to solar activity in no way refutes greenhouse warming
The reality is that if solar-warming coincides with greenhouse-warming, we are in a far nastier situation than the already considerable nastiness of greenhouse warming or solar warming on their own.
Perhaps you think greenhouse theories are based on observation of climate change, and thus alternative explanations for those observations refutes the theory? If so, this is not the case - the theories _predicted_ climate change, and the Solar Activity theories do not refute a single thing on which that prediction is based[1]. Climate change is the conclusion, not the premises, of greenhouse theory. Possible alternative explanations for current climate observations are simply not relevant to a prediction of future warming effects.
In other words, if you think the Solar Activity theories hold water, you have twice the reason to reduce greenhouse gases as the people who see greenhouse warming as the only threat.
I just don't understand the idea that since warming can be caused by different things, we shouldn't worry, and even worse - that since it can be caused by different things, it clearly can't be caused by us!?!
I simply can't grasp the logic. It really does seem to be a case of believing something simply because you want to. Is there something I'm missing?
[1] Take enough varients of each theory and I'm sure I could find something, but you know what I mean:-)
Why the fuck a government attempt to screw it's citizens (unless, of course, it's been totally subverted) ???? And why citizens instead of ranting about that would actually do something about it, like vote them out of office????
Ok, I can't be bothered explaining this all in detail, so I'll be brief and over-simplify. Apologies for any innacuracies that result.
In the Real World, the government is elected, but it is not the government that does the dirty work. It's the various secret agencies charged with protecting National Interests (and any dirty laundry the government would prefer the voters not know about:-) and are granted immense powers with which to carry out this important duty.
Now the people who work in these agencies are NOT elected, and do not lose their jobs every time a government changes. They live in a world where secrecy is paramount, everyone is hiding something, and spies regularly turn up where you least expect them. The culture and atmosphere inside such an isolated group whose duty is to be paranoid, can get _very_ fucked up. (eg, such isolation that at least one agent thought that people who wore jeans were potential subversives.)
An example closer to (my) home: A person who campaigned against the New Right Economic theories (which were held to be completely above question at the time) had his house invaded by the SIS. Only by accident did he have any reason to suspect it was not a normal burglary, and only by several court trails did he even manage to get the SIS to cease their denials and admit they did it. Another man here was placed under survelience for 12 years (ending in a house search for spurious reasons) because he has writen some articles for a peace magazine. Back then, "peace" meant people who didn't like nuclear weapons, and surely the only people who could possibly have any reason to dislike nukes would be the commies. Ergo peace campaigners were the Red Commie Threat. And they were treated as such, dispite of their civil rights to free thought, speech, and association. (Only Decent Folk should have rights. It's ok to violate a Crim's rights in order to catch them and thus make society safer). So they had their rights abused regularly by enforcement agencies as a result. Nothing to do with the government, (though the government, like much of the public, would have had very little sympathy and considerable suspicion for such "peace" advocates.) People who were NOT criminal, but people who disagreed with the ideology of the day (and the twisted ideology of the agencies). That, and the fact that there is virtually always no recourse and no justice, is what is so scary.
In other words, the reason people are paranoid is because misdirected uses and abuses of power happen and happen regularly. If you know people who campaign on issues, or who are in activist circles, or who are protestors for a cause, then finding first-hand accounts of such abuses is unlikely to be difficult - agency activities are not even remotely as exotic as they seem to most citizens. And that's a huge part of the problem - the idiotically niave "Haha, she's obviously got an inflated sense of self importance to think the secret service is interested in her", thus denying victims even recognition of their injustice, and replacing sympathy with scorn.
It's a real problem, and if you can't be bothered contacting people who have been injustly targeted by agencies, at the very least do not scoff about it.
As to your questions, even the democratically elected governments have great restrictions on the information they can get on the activities of certain agencies, and more to the point, it's in both parties interests that the difficult questions simply don't get asked. So they don't.
I don't normally encrypt my e-mail. Most of the time it really doesn't matter. I'd expect that many people are the same way.
I encrypt email when I can, partly because it doesn't matter and there is nothing special in the email - call me an asshole, but I feel that as long as crypto is only used for things that people want kept secret, it's use will remain a red flaq to privacy and rights abusing agencies and the like.
I find it morally offensive that putting your email in an envelope should tag you for "special treatment", and I suspect the only way to make the use of envelopes acceptable is for them to be in everyday use as a matter of habit, much like the extra hassle we go to in sealing our smail-mail letters in envelopes. It's interesting - we're so used to the envelope proceedure IRL, that it doesn't seem like it takes any extra effort, and yet the biggest reason I haven't written anyone a personal snail-mail letter for probably a year now is that e-mail is so much quicker, largely because I don't have to mess around with envelopes and the like. Bit of a double standard for me to complain about the CTRL-C, ALT-CTRL-E, Passphrase, CTRL-V key sequence needed to encrypt my email then!:-)
The problem needs to be solved, and jammers would help solve it, but with several drawbacks. In addition, it could create a market for unjammable phones (or at least, phones that diminish the effective jammed area produced by a jammer).
We've seen many examples of cell phones sellers incorporating new technology standards (eg the next generation is apparently required to have location tracking tech, so emergency services can find people via their phone), so perhaps a "Silent Mode/Off Mode" signal detector couldbe added (ie instead of a jammer, you use a transmitter in the theatre, which tells all phones in the area to switch to silent mode (if you're lenient about phone use in your theatre) or to switch off (if you're hardline about it).
The obvious shortfall in such a system is not implementing it (I don't consider cost much of a factor - these days in this industry it ain't a high tech solution), but complacency - people will assume that it's no-longer their responsibility to turn the phone off - "if the proprietor doesn't want phones going off, he can damn well buy a phone silencer for his premises" sorta thing.
Actually - that does make jamming sound good precisely because of it's drawbacks - it's saying to people "start using your phones responsibly NOW or you WILL lose their capabilities". Of course, while few will listen, everyone will bitch when they get their just rewards...
And social etiquette does not seem to be working. Much like smoking, it only takes a few inconsiderate people to make the considerate behaviour of others meaningless. Smoking in public is more stigmitised than cell-phones will be in the forseeable future, yet social etiquette hasn't solved that problem, so what hope for success against rude cellphone use?
Are there any solutions, or have we just added yet another permanent irritation to our lives?
I don't think it's trolling to note Apple's crippling of the first consumer DVD writer. It might not be entirely on topic, but I think it is VERY important that this kind of crippleware shit doesn't become acceptable practise in the industry. And the first step to preventing acceptance of hardware designed to erode civil rights is having people know what the glossy brochures won't tell you.
The cripples are going beyond what is necessary for "piracy prevention". The drive in question is designed to prevent its owners and users from doing things they have every right to do - legally and morally - but which would not be in the interests of major content owners.
I'm starting to fear the day when court-confirmed consumer rights of timeshifting, fair use, etc, mean nothing because the devices on the market are designed to restrict such activities when not in the interests of content owners. This drive is by no means the first step taken on this road, but as the first consumer DVD writer, it is an important step, and any true Apple fan should be nervous (if not utterly disgusted) that Apple has decided that its user's artistic and creative freedoms are less important than wooing MPAA members and the like.
Sure, movies on my computer are nice, but the reason I buy computers is to create, and I don't like the smell of a future where my own creations are deemed pirated by my own hardware.
(Which brings with it a whiff of conspiracy theory: if you're the MPAA and want to maintain your captive buyers (rather than have to compete with free (or low cost) home-grown broadband-distributed content 5 years from now, a bit like M$ now having to compete with Linux), then having consumer gear automatically deem amature productions as "pirated" and so impede their reproduction might be killing two birds with one stone. It doesn't exactly seem all that accidental...)
A couple of years back a friend almost had me beleiving that audio surveillance was the key to succesful relationship with women...
I'm intrigued - can you repeat his thinking/reasoning for this? (I could guess at a few possible reasons, but now I'm curious:-)
Very small, could transmit audio and video AND haptic feedback. Could fly anywhere, and I beleive it was solar powered
There is something like this in (early) development at Berkely. It seems a fairly ambitious project to me and I don't really expect it to reach useful completion, but even so, that their feasibility studies suggested it was possible is quite interesting. Info on it here:
http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ronf/mfi.html
For some other fascinating biorobotics links, check out:
http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/~moeller/biorobotics.htm l# www
My idea, games should be about fun, not technology. No, I don't run around with my DEC PDP-1 saying "Spacewar is it, all other games are just derivitave trash", but gameplay must come first. Look at the store shelves sometime, most games are "Foo II" or "Bar 3 Ultra" or some such jazz, same gameplay, rehashed graphics. The last new genre that I can remember is the real-time stragety, and it has been published to death.
It sounds like you're talking about Hollywood movies, and in a sense you are because the problem is largely the same - There is no limit to the number of directors with clever, deep, new, experimental ideas for film, and with the talent to make them. But they'll never get the funding they need to make those films because Hollywood is not about entertainment, it's about money. And since cringe-comedy "there's something about Mary" films are cheap to make and earn lots at the box-office, that's the type of film that the corporations will fund.
In the game industry, it does not matter if your game is good if you can't get the shelf space to sell it, and getting that shelf space is a game of intrigue and back-room deals that usually requires millions in marketing just for the up-front entry fee - regardless of eventual success. That's assuming you've got a great game. Getting there itself requires that you find funding, and that usually means going to investors. And investors are not usually interested in trying out something new because something untried is likely to fail in this industry.
The solution? I don't know. Everyone thought that Doom was the solution - it was a bestseller that bypassed the shelves alltogether. A new era was dawning in which the games availible to buy would nolonger be limited to the shelf space (and associated politics) of retailers. But it seems Doom was a once-off and we're back to square one, despite the new ubiquity of the net.
The film industry has been around longer than the game industry. How have they solved the problem?
Well OK, they haven't, but they seem to have made a little more progress towards alternative systems. Unfortunately, I suspect some of this is due to film being considered "culture" and thus more ameniable to things like government aid, while games are "youth timewasters" and thus entirely at the mercy of the largest/lowest-common-denominator tendancies of unfettered capitalism.
It's so stupid - we have a huge alternative distribution channel sitting unused, but the whole games market is locked into a vicious cycle that doesn't look like it can be broken any time soon.
The ones below with more cartoony subject matter look more cartoony, but that's the point - I think you're confusing the engine with the way the artists use it. The Quake2 engine rendering looks a lot more cartoony to me than Q3 does, though the art, design, lighting, etc, are more cartoony in Q3A.
Or maybe we just grew up watching different styles of cartoon:-)
Not any more, it's been vastly improved. In my experience, when someone says "the quality is crap", what they're actually saying is "I haven't actually listened to a modern high quality MD recording - just the older stuff".
For some types of sound, 256kbps at a higher sample rate can exceed CD quality. Of course, you won't be looking at that on a consumer portable device, but the fallacy of assuming that compression is a bad thing while ignoring whether or not file sizes are restricted, annoys me. (ie, an uncompressed BMP image might require 100kb. Think of this as uncompressed CD music. A jpeg of the same image can be merely 20kb (ie MD relative to CD), yet be at a higher resolution despite the filesize, and depending on the type of image, that gain in resolution can offer more additional visual detail than the loss from the introduction of subtle compression artefacts.
This isn't a real-world issue however, because the kind and quality of sound reproduction gear you need to be able to hear the difference between a good, modern MD and a CD, is not what you'll be using anyway - the whole point of MD is portable sound, and if you've got the unit in your pocket, listening to your music through earphones, then you're imagining any loss of quality - MD delivers much better than your earphones do.
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So tell me, who has the "proprietary and restricted" format?
?!?
Your basic assumption (that most people here are OK with Real but not with WMP) is, AFAIK completely wrong. Real are every bit the bastards M$ are, possibly moreso (for reasons you point out).
Saying WMP is bad is not saying that Real is Ok, it's saying that WMP is bad. If the format was Real, I'm pretty confident the no-save remark would have been made just the same - when you try to save and are denied, that pisses you off a lot more than any MS-but-only-MS-hating agenda would.
No-one has said that the shit Real pulls is acceptable. It isn't. But just because Real pulls it doesn't mean that MS should be exempt from criticism when they do the same.
If the excuse "don't blame us - we're not the only ones doing it" had any validity, the world would noticably be even worse off than already is.
The RIAA has been screwing the consumer for years, and doing so with open contempt, retailers are complaining that the music cartel preventing them in bad faith from selling online so that it could build its own online retailing empire first and be free of any pesky competition, and now Sen. Hatch is saying that they should be given tax incentives to put their wares online?!? WTF?
I'm sorry, I want blood. And a bit of justice wouldn't hurt either.
The RIAA has abused their copyrights, to the detriment of the consumer, artists, and society, thei abuse is possibly to the point where the law indicates the correct penalty is the invalidation of those copyrights and release of the material to the public domain. At the very least, lets see someone prosecute them and let the courts decide, not some Senator acting on his economic ideology, (especially considering how well his ideology served the country when he brought us the DMCA).
But I forget - the RIAA, for most intents and purposes owns Washington. It makes me want to go and abuse the Napster service.
Whatever happened to all of those people who were crying to mommy because Napster was in trouble for wholesale distribution of copyrighted material in violation of the licenses on the albums?
/. trying to have it's cake and eat it too, this is /. complaining that big business does have its cake and eat it too - copyright can be used against the little guy (Napster) but it can't be used for the little guy. It seems to me that Slashdot wants the same law to apply equally to all, which isn't hypocritical at all.
/. agree that Napster is doing wrong, but are simply far more concerned with the much greater wrongs of the RIAA, and are also concerned by the shortcomings of currant IP law. Things are a lot grayer than the simplistic "we like stealing but don't like being stolen from" picture you paint :-)
Since when did napster distribute copies of anything? Napster was convicted of contributory infringement because it profited off the illegal actions of others, not because it was itself making illegal copies of anything.
That said, I think you've missed the point a bit - this is not
On the topic, the impression I get is that most people on
A search engine doesn't hype a program then charge you $$$ for the link to it. They're not really as analogous as you seem to think.
His legal advice is that the software needed to be registered _before_ the infringment took place, therefore he has no recourse - contingency doesn't help because without a registered copyright, he won't be able to demonstrate damages even a fraction of the legal fees. It doesn't matter that he would be likely to win, the award won't be enough to interest any contingency lawyers :(
How much it would cost for the people to have some rights, too?
:-)
According to the industry lobby, any form of privacy legislation will cost the economy "hundreds of billions of dollars". What utter, cynically manipulative horseshit.
(Most other countries have decent privacy legislation and haven't fallen over dead - their only "loss" in fact seems to be that they lack the telemarketers that plague the lives of US citizens, so with a bit of luck in a few years after privacy became a civil right, there would be more workers actually adding to the economy rather than wasting their workhours on non-productive unwanted invasive psuedo-jobs).
But with people lying through their teeth about the costs of basic human dignaity ("hundreds of billions of dollars"), I'm not expecting to see much any time soon
What registration gives you is extra protections, such as the ability to collect statuatory damages up to $100,000 if the infringement is judged to be willful.
This is the crux of the matter - GPL software by it's freely distributable nature would make proving damages almost impossible when we have Judges like Kaplan who don't grasp free software. So in the real world, GPL is only meaningful if the copyright is registered.
My question: On what grounds does the judge decide what the damages are? In the example given by the article, $100,000 would be excessive given the limited distribution and low price of the CD, yet if the judge tries to decide by estimating monetary damages, GPL is screwed again. Is the value of the damages set by the amount that would create a suitable slap on the wrist? What factors decide the damages when registered copyright is breached?
I think the RIAA would use the same argument they used against Napster - you may not be directly violating the law, but you're deliberately trying to help people break it. And we all know how successful Napster was at defending itself.
:-(
That's I was talking about when I said contributory infringement - Napster very obviously made millions of $$$ from the infringement, thus the court found it to be a contributory infringer. But a Napster user on the other hand, makes little or nothing, and it is not obvious that they are doing anything that Betamax wouldn't allow, so the RIAA would have a much tougher case ahead of them, if they could make one at all.
Damn, there are so many consumer rights issues and questions that need to be resolved by the courts, and having them resolved by cases run by a team of MPAA and RIAA lawyers isn't a pretty thing to watch
The copyright infringer in Napster use is person downloading music they do not have the right to download. So while the RIAA surveillance sounds threatening, they're really counting on no-one calling their bluff. Consider:
They must either show that I downloaded music (more difficult), and then show that I did not have the right to do this (more difficult again - especially if I own the CD, and for all their snooping, they don't know what music I own).
Merely showing that I have files available is not enough, but unlike Napster (the company), showing that I benefited from someone downloading a file from machine (and thus allowing me to be caught as a contributory infringer) will be quite difficult.
If I own the CD, do I have the right to download the music (space shift)? (I'm guessing the MP3 case suggests otherwise). If the case can be made that I do have the right, (perhaps via the betamax decision, which should still apply to individuals), can we launch a class-action against the RIAA for unjustified (or perjerous) complaints to our ISPs and intimidation tactics?
Napster users may be walking a fine line, but so is the RIAA - their threats are based on some very contentious and unresolved interpretations of the law, and I don't think the law gives them the green light to do these things.
Linux can't even display the stuff to begin with.
:)
Sure it can...
While it's nice to think that the childishly simple 40bit encryption on DVDs means that the secure formats being developed will likewise be simplicity to break (conventiently ignoring changes to US encryption export law since then), the reality is that mistakes are being learned from (albiet slowly). More to the point however, I don't think it matters in the slightest if some boffin can assemble a system that does not restrict his rights - if joe average off the street can't do it, the war is lost almost as badly as if no-one can.
I estimate that in less than 10 years time, I could tell a random selection of people about my new custom-built HDTV recorder box*, saying "and it will even record the movies that come up with the 'record access denied' message when you try to tape them with a consumer recorder". And the predominant reaction amongst the people listening will be "Isn't that illegal?".
(Actually, if this were in the USA, it could conceivably be illegal under the DMCA, but I don't live in the USA), and so my point is that people will have lost their rights - not because their rights have been erased in law (though that's allready happened in the USA), but because the industry wants them to believe they have no such right. This is already the case when demonstrating Minidiscs. Imagine - the people believing that it is illegal to record a free-to-air broadcast for later personal viewing. That is a defeat that cracking the new media formats can't touch. As I said, I estimate less than 10 years. Probably more like 5.
It doesn't matter what a boffin can do. Even assuming Linux experts manage to break the new hardware-based formats with software, it only matters if non-experts can do it too - otherwise for all intents and purposes, the MS OS can play media that linux can't.
*haven't built one yet, it's part of the example
I know this isn't exactly what you meant, but your reply to the effect of "But linux can play DVDs" seems to me to be overlooking a bigger picture.
Of course, what's stopping you from plugging your line out into the line in of another computer is beyond me...
Reducing us to analogue dubbing with the resulting loss in quality is the whole point - it's discouraged, but it's a decades old technology that they are well used to. If they can reduce our computers to old fashioned lossy dubbing, they have triumphed utterly over everything we seek to protect.
Surely this should be obvious? This whole mess is about digital copying. No-one gives a shit about people using computers the way they once used cassette decks, the fight is about things like the elimination of scarcity, the ability to have a maximal quality copy for the car without buying a second CD, that sort of thing.
Nonstandard web pages that could only read read with proprietary web browsers, happened years ago. People simply stopped going to those pages.
:-)
Excuse me? I use Netscape, and it's pretty obvious from browsing with it that IE compatibility is more than sufficient for many sites. MS has already succeeded in facilitating widespread creation of non-standard (IE-only) pages, and the number of people who have stopped going to those sites has been largely inconsequential.
It's already happened, and you claim it wouldn't? I disagree
Only a fool would make their products, software or webpages, only work on a few computers.
:-)
You're thinking inside the box. I regularly run into galleries where flash or javascript is used to disable the right-click, the purpose being so that you can look at an image, but not keep a copy it - even in cases where I have every right to a copy of said image, it's just not in the interests of the website owner. Obviously, this is easy for someone like me to circumvent, however I imagine it is successful against more users than not.
Now imagine the same trick being pulled with using the access-control "features" now built into my HDD, RAM, CPU, etc. And what if (even worse) the open source OS is unable to handle the calls of the hardware, because those functions need to be licensed (like CSS), and open-source violates the terms of license. MS would love to contribute to such a scenario - Linux hoist by its own petard. Those Famous Last Words of "Freedom or Death!"
Ok, the scenerio I just painted isn't realistic for the near future anyway, but you seem to think that consumers will have a choice. One of the main points of the article was that the industry now recognises that the only way to make this work is to ensure consumers have no choice. They believe they can achieve this, and only a fool would sit back and say "sure - go ahead. Make my day" on the assumption that previous failure guarentees future failure. It's doesn't. They may be learning from their mistakes slowly, but they are learning. The game is changing, and if we are too blase and arrogant to notice this, we will lose.
On a related note, you seem to think that MS OS functionality is being limited by access-control, and thus less desirable. Technically, this may be true, but to the consumer (aided by billions in marketing), the opposite may be apparent - the MS OS is more functional because it can play the polished Hollywood media that Linux can't. That it can't copy the media is neither here nor there, as Linux can't even display the stuff to begin with.
How people can determine that it's people causing this?
:-))
You've got it backwards. Studies predicted that our contribution to the atmosphere would, if continued, lead to a global warming.
It is not a case of "look - the earth is warming - let's determine what causes it".
It is not a case of "look - non-manmade causes can change the climate too, so clearly we were wrong when we said man-made causes can also cause warming". (I don't understand this reasoning, but much of the USA seems to swear by it)
Is might even end up a case of "current warming seems to be the result of non-manmade causes, we still haven't done anything to limit greenhouse effects, so we're now looking at greenhouse warming joining forces with non-manmade warming and creating warming of a magnitude that we hoped was just a worst-case scenario"
Cows put off more methane than the entirety of the human race. This is one of the primary ingredients of 'greenhouse gases' yet no one wants to admit that at least part of this is perfectly natural.
?!? Where are you coming from?
Rudiment methane production is by no stretch of the imagination "natural". And even if it was, it certainly isn't relevant if the goal is to avoid the problems of warming. "Natural" warming is just as bad for us as "artifical" warming and both (in this example) are preventable. You seem to be in the thrall of misconceptions promoted by the US-industrial lobby - are you aware that many farming countries think that adding "low methane production" to the list of desirable breeding traits in farming can create livestock that help a country meet emission guidelines cheaply and effectively? Or are you sold on the US lobby that claims any curbs on pollution is a disaster that will blow us back to the dark ages? (They're currently also claiming that giving US citizens any rights to privacy will cost the country "hundreds of billions of dollars". Good thing no-one told the rest of the world, or their economies would sink overnight under the weight of the terrible civil rights they already have in place! (My own observation would be that privacy frees up all the workers tied up in non-productive telemarketing and the like to work in productive industries. But I digress...
The skin cancer story is often used by well-meaning environmentalists to scare people. In fact, the increase in ultraviolet radiation from moving a hundred miles closer to the equator is much greater than the maximum increase anticipated by the worst-case ozone depletion scenarios.
Look a bit closer at your "facts" and you'll find that they come from sources probably a lot like the UK study on the effects of the ozone problem on the UK population - which is fine and accurate if you live in the UK (which has no ozone problem and is on the other side of the world from the ozone problem), but quite false if, as you have done, you make blanket statements about what the effects of the ozone thinning are.
The real facts include the obvious, such as if you live in, say, the USA, the effects are quite different from when you live under the hole. I do not live in the USA, and I have lived under the hole, and I think your misinformation is as bad as that which you were trying to correct.
I agree with the rest of what you said though.
There's still no firm evidence that climatic change has been caused by us and polution although we may have altered the rate of change slightly.
:)
:-)
I'm worried by the misconceptions inferred here.
Climate change theory is not a case of "Oh look - the earth is getting warmer. What could be causing this?" and then enviromentalists painting pollution as the bad guy. Rather it's a case of "Um guys - my studies suggest that the pollutants in the atmosphere are nearly at levels where they could start changing the climate. If we don't change, we can expect climate changes in the future".
In other words, recent climate change need not have significant (or any) greenhouse causes and this is simply not relevant to whether we face a greenhouse warming problem or not.
By all means, keep a close eye on the climate, but it is insane to assume that if another contributor is currently affecting the climate, then greenhouse gases obviously can't. Quite the contrary - possible future greenhouse warming plus possible future say, solar warming, equals an even greater problem. (Not, as many would like us to unquestionably believe, a negation of the problem, or a disproving of greenhouse effects.
Of course, this asks the question: "If absence of solid evidence is not yet evidence of absence, and acting to contain a virtually-proven (but not quite) threat is expensive, how long should we continue to act in absence of further evidence?". Well, I guess that question became a whole lot less important today
There is quite some debate going on between the two main theories on global warming, namely the well-known Greenhouse Effect theory vs. the Solar Activity theory, i.e. the idea that Earth's temperature is much more correlated to solar activity than to anything else, making human activity a negligible factor.
:-)
I think you've missed the debate entirely and so come to a conclusion that is easily dismissed as incorrect. The Solar Activity theory predicts changes to the Earth's climate due to solar activity, the Greenhouse theory predicts changes due to human activity.
You give the impression of having fallen into the trap of thinking that since climate chanegs can be caused by non greenhouse means, they can clearly only be caused by non greenhouse means - a conclusion that dangeriously defies logic. Bear in mind that most greenhouse theory suggests that it is a little early for pronounced greenhouse climate changes, therefore finding only changes that could conceivably be attributed to solar activity in no way refutes greenhouse warming
The reality is that if solar-warming coincides with greenhouse-warming, we are in a far nastier situation than the already considerable nastiness of greenhouse warming or solar warming on their own.
Perhaps you think greenhouse theories are based on observation of climate change, and thus alternative explanations for those observations refutes the theory? If so, this is not the case - the theories _predicted_ climate change, and the Solar Activity theories do not refute a single thing on which that prediction is based[1]. Climate change is the conclusion, not the premises, of greenhouse theory. Possible alternative explanations for current climate observations are simply not relevant to a prediction of future warming effects.
In other words, if you think the Solar Activity theories hold water, you have twice the reason to reduce greenhouse gases as the people who see greenhouse warming as the only threat.
I just don't understand the idea that since warming can be caused by different things, we shouldn't worry, and even worse - that since it can be caused by different things, it clearly can't be caused by us!?!
I simply can't grasp the logic. It really does seem to be a case of believing something simply because you want to. Is there something I'm missing?
[1] Take enough varients of each theory and I'm sure I could find something, but you know what I mean
Why the fuck a government attempt to screw it's citizens (unless, of course, it's been totally subverted) ???? And why citizens instead of ranting about that would actually do something about it, like vote them out of office????
:-) and are granted immense powers with which to carry out this important duty.
Ok, I can't be bothered explaining this all in detail, so I'll be brief and over-simplify. Apologies for any innacuracies that result.
In the Real World, the government is elected, but it is not the government that does the dirty work. It's the various secret agencies charged with protecting National Interests (and any dirty laundry the government would prefer the voters not know about
Now the people who work in these agencies are NOT elected, and do not lose their jobs every time a government changes. They live in a world where secrecy is paramount, everyone is hiding something, and spies regularly turn up where you least expect them. The culture and atmosphere inside such an isolated group whose duty is to be paranoid, can get _very_ fucked up. (eg, such isolation that at least one agent thought that people who wore jeans were potential subversives.)
An example closer to (my) home: A person who campaigned against the New Right Economic theories (which were held to be completely above question at the time) had his house invaded by the SIS. Only by accident did he have any reason to suspect it was not a normal burglary, and only by several court trails did he even manage to get the SIS to cease their denials and admit they did it. Another man here was placed under survelience for 12 years (ending in a house search for spurious reasons) because he has writen some articles for a peace magazine. Back then, "peace" meant people who didn't like nuclear weapons, and surely the only people who could possibly have any reason to dislike nukes would be the commies. Ergo peace campaigners were the Red Commie Threat. And they were treated as such, dispite of their civil rights to free thought, speech, and association. (Only Decent Folk should have rights. It's ok to violate a Crim's rights in order to catch them and thus make society safer). So they had their rights abused regularly by enforcement agencies as a result. Nothing to do with the government, (though the government, like much of the public, would have had very little sympathy and considerable suspicion for such "peace" advocates.) People who were NOT criminal, but people who disagreed with the ideology of the day (and the twisted ideology of the agencies). That, and the fact that there is virtually always no recourse and no justice, is what is so scary.
In other words, the reason people are paranoid is because misdirected uses and abuses of power happen and happen regularly. If you know people who campaign on issues, or who are in activist circles, or who are protestors for a cause, then finding first-hand accounts of such abuses is unlikely to be difficult - agency activities are not even remotely as exotic as they seem to most citizens. And that's a huge part of the problem - the idiotically niave "Haha, she's obviously got an inflated sense of self importance to think the secret service is interested in her", thus denying victims even recognition of their injustice, and replacing sympathy with scorn.
It's a real problem, and if you can't be bothered contacting people who have been injustly targeted by agencies, at the very least do not scoff about it.
As to your questions, even the democratically elected governments have great restrictions on the information they can get on the activities of certain agencies, and more to the point, it's in both parties interests that the difficult questions simply don't get asked. So they don't.
I don't normally encrypt my e-mail. Most of the time it really doesn't matter. I'd expect that many people are the same way.
:-)
I encrypt email when I can, partly because it doesn't matter and there is nothing special in the email - call me an asshole, but I feel that as long as crypto is only used for things that people want kept secret, it's use will remain a red flaq to privacy and rights abusing agencies and the like.
I find it morally offensive that putting your email in an envelope should tag you for "special treatment", and I suspect the only way to make the use of envelopes acceptable is for them to be in everyday use as a matter of habit, much like the extra hassle we go to in sealing our smail-mail letters in envelopes. It's interesting - we're so used to the envelope proceedure IRL, that it doesn't seem like it takes any extra effort, and yet the biggest reason I haven't written anyone a personal snail-mail letter for probably a year now is that e-mail is so much quicker, largely because I don't have to mess around with envelopes and the like. Bit of a double standard for me to complain about the CTRL-C, ALT-CTRL-E, Passphrase, CTRL-V key sequence needed to encrypt my email then!
The problem needs to be solved, and jammers would help solve it, but with several drawbacks. In addition, it could create a market for unjammable phones (or at least, phones that diminish the effective jammed area produced by a jammer).
We've seen many examples of cell phones sellers incorporating new technology standards (eg the next generation is apparently required to have location tracking tech, so emergency services can find people via their phone), so perhaps a "Silent Mode/Off Mode" signal detector couldbe added (ie instead of a jammer, you use a transmitter in the theatre, which tells all phones in the area to switch to silent mode (if you're lenient about phone use in your theatre) or to switch off (if you're hardline about it).
The obvious shortfall in such a system is not implementing it (I don't consider cost much of a factor - these days in this industry it ain't a high tech solution), but complacency - people will assume that it's no-longer their responsibility to turn the phone off - "if the proprietor doesn't want phones going off, he can damn well buy a phone silencer for his premises" sorta thing.
Actually - that does make jamming sound good precisely because of it's drawbacks - it's saying to people "start using your phones responsibly NOW or you WILL lose their capabilities". Of course, while few will listen, everyone will bitch when they get their just rewards...
And social etiquette does not seem to be working. Much like smoking, it only takes a few inconsiderate people to make the considerate behaviour of others meaningless. Smoking in public is more stigmitised than cell-phones will be in the forseeable future, yet social etiquette hasn't solved that problem, so what hope for success against rude cellphone use?
Are there any solutions, or have we just added yet another permanent irritation to our lives?
Fuck off troll.
I don't think it's trolling to note Apple's crippling of the first consumer DVD writer. It might not be entirely on topic, but I think it is VERY important that this kind of crippleware shit doesn't become acceptable practise in the industry. And the first step to preventing acceptance of hardware designed to erode civil rights is having people know what the glossy brochures won't tell you.
The cripples are going beyond what is necessary for "piracy prevention". The drive in question is designed to prevent its owners and users from doing things they have every right to do - legally and morally - but which would not be in the interests of major content owners.
I'm starting to fear the day when court-confirmed consumer rights of timeshifting, fair use, etc, mean nothing because the devices on the market are designed to restrict such activities when not in the interests of content owners. This drive is by no means the first step taken on this road, but as the first consumer DVD writer, it is an important step, and any true Apple fan should be nervous (if not utterly disgusted) that Apple has decided that its user's artistic and creative freedoms are less important than wooing MPAA members and the like.
Sure, movies on my computer are nice, but the reason I buy computers is to create, and I don't like the smell of a future where my own creations are deemed pirated by my own hardware.
(Which brings with it a whiff of conspiracy theory: if you're the MPAA and want to maintain your captive buyers (rather than have to compete with free (or low cost) home-grown broadband-distributed content 5 years from now, a bit like M$ now having to compete with Linux), then having consumer gear automatically deem amature productions as "pirated" and so impede their reproduction might be killing two birds with one stone. It doesn't exactly seem all that accidental...)
A couple of years back a friend almost had me beleiving that audio surveillance was the key to succesful relationship with women...
:-)
l
m l# www
I'm intrigued - can you repeat his thinking/reasoning for this? (I could guess at a few possible reasons, but now I'm curious
Very small, could transmit audio and video AND haptic feedback. Could fly anywhere, and I beleive it was solar powered
There is something like this in (early) development at Berkely. It seems a fairly ambitious project to me and I don't really expect it to reach useful completion, but even so, that their feasibility studies suggested it was possible is quite interesting. Info on it here:
http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ronf/mfi.htm
For some other fascinating biorobotics links, check out:
http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/~moeller/biorobotics.ht
My idea, games should be about fun, not technology. No, I don't run around with my DEC PDP-1 saying "Spacewar is it, all other games are just derivitave trash", but gameplay must come first. Look at the store shelves sometime, most games are "Foo II" or "Bar 3 Ultra" or some such jazz, same gameplay, rehashed graphics. The last new genre that I can remember is the real-time stragety, and it has been published to death.
It sounds like you're talking about Hollywood movies, and in a sense you are because the problem is largely the same - There is no limit to the number of directors with clever, deep, new, experimental ideas for film, and with the talent to make them. But they'll never get the funding they need to make those films because Hollywood is not about entertainment, it's about money. And since cringe-comedy "there's something about Mary" films are cheap to make and earn lots at the box-office, that's the type of film that the corporations will fund.
In the game industry, it does not matter if your game is good if you can't get the shelf space to sell it, and getting that shelf space is a game of intrigue and back-room deals that usually requires millions in marketing just for the up-front entry fee - regardless of eventual success. That's assuming you've got a great game. Getting there itself requires that you find funding, and that usually means going to investors. And investors are not usually interested in trying out something new because something untried is likely to fail in this industry.
The solution? I don't know. Everyone thought that Doom was the solution - it was a bestseller that bypassed the shelves alltogether. A new era was dawning in which the games availible to buy would nolonger be limited to the shelf space (and associated politics) of retailers. But it seems Doom was a once-off and we're back to square one, despite the new ubiquity of the net.
The film industry has been around longer than the game industry. How have they solved the problem?
Well OK, they haven't, but they seem to have made a little more progress towards alternative systems. Unfortunately, I suspect some of this is due to film being considered "culture" and thus more ameniable to things like government aid, while games are "youth timewasters" and thus entirely at the mercy of the largest/lowest-common-denominator tendancies of unfettered capitalism.
It's so stupid - we have a huge alternative distribution channel sitting unused, but the whole games market is locked into a vicious cycle that doesn't look like it can be broken any time soon.
The top three screenshots look pretty good - I don't think they look very cartoonish:
s /p hoto/index.asp
:-)
http://www.3dactionplanet.com/wolfenstein/image
The ones below with more cartoony subject matter look more cartoony, but that's the point - I think you're confusing the engine with the way the artists use it. The Quake2 engine rendering looks a lot more cartoony to me than Q3 does, though the art, design, lighting, etc, are more cartoony in Q3A.
Or maybe we just grew up watching different styles of cartoon
>Too bad the quality is crap.
Not any more, it's been vastly improved. In my experience, when someone says "the quality is crap", what they're actually saying is "I haven't actually listened to a modern high quality MD recording - just the older stuff".
For some types of sound, 256kbps at a higher sample rate can exceed CD quality. Of course, you won't be looking at that on a consumer portable device, but the fallacy of assuming that compression is a bad thing while ignoring whether or not file sizes are restricted, annoys me. (ie, an uncompressed BMP image might require 100kb. Think of this as uncompressed CD music. A jpeg of the same image can be merely 20kb (ie MD relative to CD), yet be at a higher resolution despite the filesize, and depending on the type of image, that gain in resolution can offer more additional visual detail than the loss from the introduction of subtle compression artefacts.
This isn't a real-world issue however, because the kind and quality of sound reproduction gear you need to be able to hear the difference between a good, modern MD and a CD, is not what you'll be using anyway - the whole point of MD is portable sound, and if you've got the unit in your pocket, listening to your music through earphones, then you're imagining any loss of quality - MD delivers much better than your earphones do.