In your example, the officer "network" of people in uniform on streetcorners isn't expandable into a highly abusive system.
Facial recognition from public cameras is VERY expandable. Both by adding new cameras to the system, and by tying in feeds from existing non-government security cameras.
That system can then be used to track movements of individuals on as large a scale as one would like to build (local, regional, national, global).
Officers with notebooks don't have that same danger.
Actually, the fine print says that Garage Games will be your online publisher, and they'll decide if people should pay for it or not. If its worth paying for, they split the money with you 50/50. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a better deal, what with not having to run the servers and do advertising and suchlike.
And if your game is good enough to be boxed, they have the right of first refusal. No big deal for what is easily $500,000 of code there. (think what the Quake licenses go for)
The airbag's deployance (is that a word?) triggers some extra info to be sent somewhere, notifying that the airbag went off. This is apparently a bit of electronics to send this signal, why not just include the GPS info with it, rather than send it ALL THE TIME?
We're also speculating that a loss of signal is NOT interpreted as an accident, otherwise the 911 folks would show up at a lot of parking garages.
I consider myself a builder, a builder of programs. Just as a seamstress expresses herself by deciding which stiches to use and how to vary from her pattern, I too express myself in the choices I make while building my program.
The fact that two coders with the same background will often solve the same problem in two different ways implies that there exists some expression in the process.
I've always understood the spin to be somehow changeable, like you could change the spin from up to down (top to bottom? I don't really know these terms) and the person on the other side would see the new spin. Communication would be just s/top/0/g and s/bottom/1/g.
The big question I have is how long is 'after a while'? Does this quantum entanglement last however far you can run in the next five minutes, or is this something that lasts a few months? The timeperiod would definitely impact its usefulness as a communications medium.
Despite many posts here to the contrary, Amtrak is a separate private entity. What's confusing folks here is that Amtrak currently receives piles of cash from the federal government, in order to keep it running. Currently, with the competition of planes and automobiles, it isn't easy to have commuter train service here in the USA.
In fact, the 1997 Amtrak Accountability and Reform Act requires Amtrak to be self sufficient (or out of business) by 2002. DEA 'kickbacks' are almost surely attractive because they replace the lost income from federal grants.
This is a scary prescident. A paranoid person could paint a picture of a large ISP in money woes selling information about browsing patterns, etc. to the DEA or others .
This person appears to be, but I'd like to point out that there are people out there that believe in the Bible, and in Christ, that also believe in evolution and science. We're even open and affirming to gay & lesbian people, recognizing that its not a 'choice', etc.
There's nothing that can be said to change Hubbard (the original poster)'s mind, but wanted to let people know that his is not the only view of Christians.
--Zipwow
A liberal Christian. Not an endangered species, just hiding.
Its really about the sound data in the file. Hence the name 'watermark'.
If I put a watermark on a piece of paper, and you use a (high-quality) copier on it, the watermark will still exist. The same sort of thing applies if you re-record the music, even if you switch it to analog and back to digital, or so I'm told.
The point here, as I understand it, is not to prevent piracy, but to be able to detect it.
Each song, then, would have a unique 'ID', which would be associated with your name when you buy it. If it shows up on napster, they come after you for the royalties.
If I'm right, hope this helps. If I'm incorrect, please correct me.
Are today's games any better than 10 years ago? Maybe, maybe not. But they're not worse, certainly. Today's games are today's games. And people want to play today's games. Even when one section of people says "Yawn... another fps. (First Person Shooter)" another section says, "Sure, but this one is true 3D with real shadows and physics!" And what many of us want most is to play today's games.
I don't understand those that say, "Its all about graphics today, nothing about gameplay, bah." As the author of this article points out, how many 'jump off of stuff' games were there 'back in the day'? Or how many 'fly around and shoot stuff' games? Every generation of games has had both better graphics and new concepts. If you're feeling stuck in a rut, switch genres!
That said, I think the author missed an important feature of Virtual Reality, or at least the Snowcrash-esque VR I imagine. The users are the level designers. That's what really has me excited about TOMORROW's games is that we're giving the players the tools to build their own world and their own games within ours.
I'm a big fan of ORPGs (Online Roleplaying Games), obviously. Multiplayer interaction, be it gibs or buffs or ebolts to the heads, is where I want to be, and VR is what I want to take me there.
Zipwow
aka Smythe Skepfen, Cap & Dagger Casino Director, Great Lakes, Ultima Online.
This ZDNet interview should be rated -1 Troll
on
RIAA CEO Speaks
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· Score: 2
It seems to be the standard "protecting the artists" "don't steal the music" "no, we really like online music" drivel that we've seen before.
And then we see them redefining fair use and standing in the way of systems that clearly pay the artists for their music. (spaceshifting services)
Do we believe it? No.
Do they believe it? No.
Does this change anything? No.
When I complete the orbital space lasers, the RIAA will be one of the first to go.
"broadcast", according to the Merriam-Webster collegiate dictionary (not a legal dictionary I realize) is "to make public by means of radio or television". Assuming we'll extend it to the internet, the point is clear: broadcasting is making something public. mp3.com did NOT make the streams and music public, clearly something else other than broadcasting. Lets call it narrowcasting.
Next, you're assuming that narrowcasting = distribution. All our distribution laws and legal precidents are written with the assumption that the distribution is of new material.
'Distributing' to people who already own the material is a legally grey area, though I personally believe it to be a very clear moral one.
And finally, mp3.com was not sued for rebroadcasting or narrowcasting or distributing music in any fashion. They were sued and now fined for creating a database (or catalog) of music and profiting from it.
... the streaming of the CD wasn't illegal (or at least it wasn't challenged). It was the creation of the database of CDs that was declared illegal, and so its the number of CDs in that database that defines the fine.
Of course, if you take the number of CDs in that database (10,000) and multiply it by the apparent damage to the label (0) you'll reach the number that I think is reasonable...
There's a difference, you know. No matter how many times you see it on television, no matter how many triangles are in the polygons you're blasting, its not the same as the real thing.
The woman you describe is not desensitized to violence from playing video games, she's desensitized to violence because she lives in a violent place.
Can you really see someone (who isn't mentally disturbed) being witness to a shooting and thinking, "Hey, this is just like quake, its not so bad."
Video exposure just isn't the same, and doesn't have a causal relationship with actual violence. As another poster pointed out, the violence on Japanese television and games is above even that of the US, and I understand violent crimes are lower there.
Everyone wants a simple scapegoat to why our kids are shooting other kids and why some of our adults are shooting other adults. People are more complex than that. Our motivations aren't from one source that we can point at and say, "SEE! DEM DE BAD GUYZ!". Its a mixture of social pressures, economic pressures, race pressure, age pressure, and ten others I haven't even listed.
If we want to really solve this problem, we should look beyond video games to the deeper problems of poverty and feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness that are typical of violent crimes.
Granted, the original poster should have been more specific. There are, as you point out, non-commercial activities that are not acceptable (ripping a pile of mp3s and letting any person download them), but there are also VERY legitimate non-commercial reasons to link and copy music. Obviously, I'm talking about fair use.
Fair use includes making backup copies of music you own (wherever you locate the backup), sampling music for use in other works or just as a descriptive technique (here's 3 seconds from the song I'm talking about), as well as a myriad of other uses.
I'll agree that the responsibility for the tremendous publishing power rests squarely on the consumer, but I agree with the original poster that we need to be sure that our rights to use copies that we own in fair and acceptable ways needs to be protected.
I really feel that Applets are the way things are going to have to go. Thin clients running with limited permissions in a secure environment, this lets you do what you need to do.
Sure, there's "everything you need" in HTML constructs, but you either have to have every step go through your server, which doesn't let you do dynamic things like updating the list of stated based on the country selection, or you have to use some *other* client-side language, all of which have horrible problems in my experience.
Sure, you could say that applets have bushels of their own problems currently, but in the end, isn't this how we want applications to work on the net?
These two statements seem at least a little contradictory:
Rakoff disagreed with MP3.com's argument that its music service is the "functional equivalent" of storing CDs that had already been purchased.
He said the company [...] "simply repackages" the recordings so they can be transmitted through another medium.
The part removed is the statement about not adding any creative content, which is true enough.
So, do they 'repackage' it and send it to people who already own it (who can own copies of it) or don't they?
Furthermore, he seems to miss part of the point in this statement:
In actuality defendant is replaying for the subscribers converted versions of the recordings it copied, without authorization, from plaintiffs' copyrighted CDs,
I wish he (or the article) would have addressed the fact that the 'subscribers' in question here already OWN the recordings that are being replayed to them.
Almost the whole article can be summed up in one sentence:
"Because MySQL doesn't have transactions or journalling"
The rest of it is just the author making the assumption that *everyone* needs these things. I don't think that's particularly true. Decide for yourself.
There's a bit at the end about "oh yeah, and no subqueries, stored procedures, triggers, foreign key constraints, and only table locking" These are the things I'd like to see discussed myself. They seem like reasonable features that could be added without changing the purpose of MySQL: to be blindingly fast on a lot of data.
MySQL is like driving your car at 150MPH. Yeah, it goes fast, but accident protection is small. Sometimes you need that, though.
Zipwow
You can get these for MySQL.
on
Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 2
Just because it doesn't have a 'vendor' doesn't mean its not supported. There are people who are just as knowledgeable about MySQL as others are about MS SQL Server or Oracle. Get your %99.999999 uptime contracts from them.
Major industry support? Like thousands of sites using it? I don't think that it can realistically be argued that MySQL is anything but fast and stable.
The big question is: Do you need transactions? If you do (and granted, most systems that involve money are going to want them) then MySQL won't work for you. If you don't, it will be fast, flexible, and free.
It must be at least transferrable, or the Disc-go-round down on the corner would be illegal (and I think they already tried to shut them down).
And, like torpor, I'm just trying to get my head around this issue too.
MP3.com isn't really distributing copies of the music, any more than the radio station is distributing copies of the music. But unlike the radio stations, they're not broadcasting musice, either, they're narrowcasting it.
I think this is pretty grey, though in principle this seems to be good for everyone, with the possible exception that MPIAA feels like it should be the only one allowed to narrowcast its member's music.
Zipwow
It came from the copy of the CD that MP3.com owns
on
MP3.com Loses In Court
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· Score: 1
MP3.com, in order to populate that database, bought thousands of CDs. That gives them one (1) license to them, which is why they can have them in a database.
Now, if they were blasting them out on the internet to just anyone, that would obviously be a problem. But that's not what they're doing.
MP3.com sends a stream to only those people who already have their own license to the material. This is not distribution. How can you distribute something to me I already own? That's the main point. Its not broadcast, its narrowcast.
anonymizer.com works well for avoiding those silly firewalls. Or, if it is blocked as well, there are other sites that you can usually find via a search.
Slashdot Mirror
In your example, the officer "network" of people in uniform on streetcorners isn't expandable into a highly abusive system.
Facial recognition from public cameras is VERY expandable. Both by adding new cameras to the system, and by tying in feeds from existing non-government security cameras.
That system can then be used to track movements of individuals on as large a scale as one would like to build (local, regional, national, global).
Officers with notebooks don't have that same danger.
Zipwow
Actually, the fine print says that Garage Games will be your online publisher, and they'll decide if people should pay for it or not. If its worth paying for, they split the money with you 50/50. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a better deal, what with not having to run the servers and do advertising and suchlike.
And if your game is good enough to be boxed, they have the right of first refusal. No big deal for what is easily $500,000 of code there. (think what the Quake licenses go for)
Zipwow
The airbag's deployance (is that a word?) triggers some extra info to be sent somewhere, notifying that the airbag went off. This is apparently a bit of electronics to send this signal, why not just include the GPS info with it, rather than send it ALL THE TIME?
We're also speculating that a loss of signal is NOT interpreted as an accident, otherwise the 911 folks would show up at a lot of parking garages.
I consider myself a builder, a builder of programs. Just as a seamstress expresses herself by deciding which stiches to use and how to vary from her pattern, I too express myself in the choices I make while building my program.
The fact that two coders with the same background will often solve the same problem in two different ways implies that there exists some expression in the process.
Zipwow "the codesmith"
I've always understood the spin to be somehow changeable, like you could change the spin from up to down (top to bottom? I don't really know these terms) and the person on the other side would see the new spin. Communication would be just s/top/0/g and s/bottom/1/g.
The big question I have is how long is 'after a while'? Does this quantum entanglement last however far you can run in the next five minutes, or is this something that lasts a few months? The timeperiod would definitely impact its usefulness as a communications medium.
Zipwow
Despite many posts here to the contrary, Amtrak is a separate private entity. What's confusing folks here is that Amtrak currently receives piles of cash from the federal government, in order to keep it running. Currently, with the competition of planes and automobiles, it isn't easy to have commuter train service here in the USA.
3 .h tm
In fact, the 1997 Amtrak Accountability and Reform Act requires Amtrak to be self sufficient (or out of business) by 2002. DEA 'kickbacks' are almost surely attractive because they replace the lost income from federal grants.
This is a scary prescident. A paranoid person could paint a picture of a large ISP in money woes selling information about browsing patterns, etc. to the DEA or others .
Zipwow
Amtrak profitability link:
http://www.bergen.com/morenews/amtrak2720000227
This person appears to be, but I'd like to point out that there are people out there that believe in the Bible, and in Christ, that also believe in evolution and science. We're even open and affirming to gay & lesbian people, recognizing that its not a 'choice', etc.
There's nothing that can be said to change Hubbard (the original poster)'s mind, but wanted to let people know that his is not the only view of Christians.
--Zipwow
A liberal Christian. Not an endangered species, just hiding.
Its really about the sound data in the file. Hence the name 'watermark'.
If I put a watermark on a piece of paper, and you use a (high-quality) copier on it, the watermark will still exist. The same sort of thing applies if you re-record the music, even if you switch it to analog and back to digital, or so I'm told.
The point here, as I understand it, is not to prevent piracy, but to be able to detect it.
Each song, then, would have a unique 'ID', which would be associated with your name when you buy it. If it shows up on napster, they come after you for the royalties.
If I'm right, hope this helps. If I'm incorrect, please correct me.
Zipwow
Are today's games any better than 10 years ago? Maybe, maybe not. But they're not worse, certainly. Today's games are today's games. And people want to play today's games. Even when one section of people says "Yawn... another fps. (First Person Shooter)" another section says, "Sure, but this one is true 3D with real shadows and physics!" And what many of us want most is to play today's games.
I don't understand those that say, "Its all about graphics today, nothing about gameplay, bah." As the author of this article points out, how many 'jump off of stuff' games were there 'back in the day'? Or how many 'fly around and shoot stuff' games? Every generation of games has had both better graphics and new concepts. If you're feeling stuck in a rut, switch genres!
That said, I think the author missed an important feature of Virtual Reality, or at least the Snowcrash-esque VR I imagine. The users are the level designers. That's what really has me excited about TOMORROW's games is that we're giving the players the tools to build their own world and their own games within ours.
I'm a big fan of ORPGs (Online Roleplaying Games), obviously. Multiplayer interaction, be it gibs or buffs or ebolts to the heads, is where I want to be, and VR is what I want to take me there.
Zipwow
aka Smythe Skepfen, Cap & Dagger Casino Director, Great Lakes, Ultima Online.
It seems to be the standard "protecting the artists" "don't steal the music" "no, we really like online music" drivel that we've seen before.
And then we see them redefining fair use and standing in the way of systems that clearly pay the artists for their music. (spaceshifting services)
Do we believe it? No.
Do they believe it? No.
Does this change anything? No.
When I complete the orbital space lasers, the RIAA will be one of the first to go.
Zipwow
Okay, nice article, interesting stuff. But here's something I noticed:
"images of three stars to measure their acceleration -- or how fast the stars were speeding up--" [emphasis mine]
Was it really necessary to define acceleration? Are people in general really this illiterate?
Zipwow
"broadcast", according to the Merriam-Webster collegiate dictionary (not a legal dictionary I realize) is "to make public by means of radio or television". Assuming we'll extend it to the internet, the point is clear: broadcasting is making something public. mp3.com did NOT make the streams and music public, clearly something else other than broadcasting. Lets call it narrowcasting.
Next, you're assuming that narrowcasting = distribution. All our distribution laws and legal precidents are written with the assumption that the distribution is of new material.
'Distributing' to people who already own the material is a legally grey area, though I personally believe it to be a very clear moral one.
And finally, mp3.com was not sued for rebroadcasting or narrowcasting or distributing music in any fashion. They were sued and now fined for creating a database (or catalog) of music and profiting from it.
Zipwow
Of course, if you take the number of CDs in that database (10,000) and multiply it by the apparent damage to the label (0) you'll reach the number that I think is reasonable...
Zipwow
There's a difference, you know. No matter how many times you see it on television, no matter how many triangles are in the polygons you're blasting, its not the same as the real thing.
The woman you describe is not desensitized to violence from playing video games, she's desensitized to violence because she lives in a violent place.
Can you really see someone (who isn't mentally disturbed) being witness to a shooting and thinking, "Hey, this is just like quake, its not so bad."
Video exposure just isn't the same, and doesn't have a causal relationship with actual violence. As another poster pointed out, the violence on Japanese television and games is above even that of the US, and I understand violent crimes are lower there.
Everyone wants a simple scapegoat to why our kids are shooting other kids and why some of our adults are shooting other adults. People are more complex than that. Our motivations aren't from one source that we can point at and say, "SEE! DEM DE BAD GUYZ!". Its a mixture of social pressures, economic pressures, race pressure, age pressure, and ten others I haven't even listed.
If we want to really solve this problem, we should look beyond video games to the deeper problems of poverty and feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness that are typical of violent crimes.
Zipwow
As the article mentions, Honda guarantees the batteries for 8 years....
Zipwow
And pointless? "Getting rid of posts no one knows about" is like pirating music nobody listens to, or running a website that is never visited.
The post linked to above is THE important post, since its the focus of the MS lawsuit.
Zipwow
Granted, the original poster should have been more specific. There are, as you point out, non-commercial activities that are not acceptable (ripping a pile of mp3s and letting any person download them), but there are also VERY legitimate non-commercial reasons to link and copy music. Obviously, I'm talking about fair use.
Fair use includes making backup copies of music you own (wherever you locate the backup), sampling music for use in other works or just as a descriptive technique (here's 3 seconds from the song I'm talking about), as well as a myriad of other uses.
I'll agree that the responsibility for the tremendous publishing power rests squarely on the consumer, but I agree with the original poster that we need to be sure that our rights to use copies that we own in fair and acceptable ways needs to be protected.
Zipwow
I really feel that Applets are the way things are going to have to go. Thin clients running with limited permissions in a secure environment, this lets you do what you need to do.
Sure, there's "everything you need" in HTML constructs, but you either have to have every step go through your server, which doesn't let you do dynamic things like updating the list of stated based on the country selection, or you have to use some *other* client-side language, all of which have horrible problems in my experience.
Sure, you could say that applets have bushels of their own problems currently, but in the end, isn't this how we want applications to work on the net?
Zipwow
"She neglected to mention which company was Goliath"
Hah! I loved that part. Preach on, uh, person!
Zipwow
These two statements seem at least a little contradictory:
Rakoff disagreed with MP3.com's argument that its music service is the "functional equivalent" of storing CDs that had already been purchased.
He said the company [...] "simply repackages" the recordings so they can be transmitted through another medium.
The part removed is the statement about not adding any creative content, which is true enough.
So, do they 'repackage' it and send it to people who already own it (who can own copies of it) or don't they?
Furthermore, he seems to miss part of the point in this statement:
In actuality defendant is replaying for the subscribers converted versions of the recordings it copied, without authorization, from plaintiffs' copyrighted CDs,
I wish he (or the article) would have addressed the fact that the 'subscribers' in question here already OWN the recordings that are being replayed to them.
Zipwow
Almost the whole article can be summed up in one sentence:
"Because MySQL doesn't have transactions or journalling"
The rest of it is just the author making the assumption that *everyone* needs these things. I don't think that's particularly true. Decide for yourself.
There's a bit at the end about "oh yeah, and no subqueries, stored procedures, triggers, foreign key constraints, and only table locking" These are the things I'd like to see discussed myself. They seem like reasonable features that could be added without changing the purpose of MySQL: to be blindingly fast on a lot of data.
MySQL is like driving your car at 150MPH. Yeah, it goes fast, but accident protection is small. Sometimes you need that, though.
Zipwow
Just because it doesn't have a 'vendor' doesn't mean its not supported. There are people who are just as knowledgeable about MySQL as others are about MS SQL Server or Oracle. Get your %99.999999 uptime contracts from them.
Major industry support? Like thousands of sites using it? I don't think that it can realistically be argued that MySQL is anything but fast and stable.
The big question is: Do you need transactions? If you do (and granted, most systems that involve money are going to want them) then MySQL won't work for you. If you don't, it will be fast, flexible, and free.
Zipwow
It must be at least transferrable, or the Disc-go-round down on the corner would be illegal (and I think they already tried to shut them down).
And, like torpor, I'm just trying to get my head around this issue too.
MP3.com isn't really distributing copies of the music, any more than the radio station is distributing copies of the music. But unlike the radio stations, they're not broadcasting musice, either, they're narrowcasting it.
I think this is pretty grey, though in principle this seems to be good for everyone, with the possible exception that MPIAA feels like it should be the only one allowed to narrowcast its member's music.
Zipwow
MP3.com, in order to populate that database, bought thousands of CDs. That gives them one (1) license to them, which is why they can have them in a database.
Now, if they were blasting them out on the internet to just anyone, that would obviously be a problem. But that's not what they're doing.
MP3.com sends a stream to only those people who already have their own license to the material. This is not distribution. How can you distribute something to me I already own? That's the main point. Its not broadcast, its narrowcast.
Zipwow
Firewall blocking is a waste of time, imho.
Zipwow