I can think of a lot of answers, but they all involve high market penetration.
Who would have guess that computers would someday be used for Instant Messaging in the 1970's? First computers have to be cheap, then penetrate the market, then get hooked up, then the software be developed, etc. I can imagine immersive setups or MMORPGs or really useful collaboration tools or all kinds of other things that require a lot of people to own the hardware or a lot more bandwidth.
Basically, if you imagine technology as a tree, CAVE is probably a dead-end stub, where a nearby branch will end up taking off and strangling the CAVE approach, probably a branch that has a much lower hardware cost. (Think digital glasses that track movement and virtually project a room; much cheaper, much easier to make useable by the 'common man' since it doesn't eat cubic feet for lunch, easier to make useful intermediate steps.)
It is not useless but until there's one in a few million homes the commercial apps aren't going to take off, and fully enclosed environments are just prohibitive in so many ways for so many people. CAVE is a great research project, don't think I'm "knocking" it, but, well, I can't think of any killer app that came from a lab. (Xerox PARC developments subsequently used by Apple don't damage that claim, they re-inforce it; until Apple repackaged it out of a lab environment GUIs were dead. Not to mention GUI isn't really intrinsically a killer app, desktop-publishing was.) Part of the reason is the fact that until we use it, we don't recognize the killer app, and few people if any can guess it in advance (which, incidentally, does mean the Ask Slashdot as asked is basically unanswerable, historically speaking).
Until we have hackers (old sense of the word) hacking on it, the killer app won't happen.
I played today Super Monkey Ball and Tomb Raider... SMB isn't all evil, even if the field of view is too tight and controlling the ball is sometimes quite difficult,
I can't speak for the GameCube version but IMHO "Super Monkey Ball" is a control disaster and the fact that more people didn't notice is a testament to how thoroughly people think inside the box.
The reason is simple: Controls are camera relative and the camera perspective is constantly changing. The Gameboy's digital controls exaggerate this but it must be bad even on the Gamecube. At least 80%-90% of the times I fail in that game it's not me, it's the GD'ed camera shifting perspective. Especially when I'm trying to go uphill.
I guess people don't realize how the game should be because so few modern folk have played Marble Madness, an old 1980's game that didn't have the technology to swing the camera around violently. You can tell how much better the Marble Madness control by the fact that the third or fourth level is immensely more challenging then any but the hardest SMB levels. In fact, the Marble Madness levels rapidly become impossible with the SMB control scheme, but are still easy when the directions aren't wildly oscillating.
Contrariwise, even very challenging SMB levels would be very, very easy with a Marble Madness control scheme.
Basically, SMB was one of the last games that should have used the third-person camera that always swings to be "behind" you, with directions relative to the camera. (Heck, I'd take the camera swinging but leaving my directions constant over the current system!) But we've all gotten so stuck in the "third-person camera" box that few people see how crappy this other-wise hit game is. The challenge isn't supposed to come from fighting the game's engine.
Measuring the N-Gage by SMB is probably a bad plan; the Nokia merely amplifies the already bad SMB experience. (Then again, it says a lot about the company's priorities that it chose that to port.)
Look at the reviews. It's consistant that all major publisher games NEVER score below 70%, all others can get as low as 50%.
One of the important things you must do when reading a review is calibrate the scale they are using. As you observe, you can even get different scales for different things.
Gamespy claims to rate on a 100 point scale (using percentage points), but clearly, they rate on either a 50 or 30 point range, depending.
Now, when I rate things on a 1 to 10 scale, "10's" make up roughly 1% of my ratings, and a 1 about 13%, with the difference smearing up to about 6. This is important to know when I'm rating things, that I'm relatively brutal. (Though I don't rate often.)
Gamefaqs allows users to rate games on a ten-point scale but the users only really use "8", "9", "10", and "bad". (With an excessive bias towards 10.) In fact the numbers are crappy and I'll frequently see things like "This game was OK at best, there's a lot of things I didn't like, only rent this if you like this genre" attached to a "9/10". The reviews themselves aren't too bad, if you know how to read reviews.
My point? I wouldn't necessarily read conspiracy into the review numbers; as long as there is a positive and consistent correlation between review value and quality, it's OK. At least, it seems to be accepted practice; as I noted above when I'm on a ten-point scale I'm not afraid to rate things as a 1 or a 4 at all, but most people seem to feel obliged to never rate things less then a 5 or 6, unless it's abject, unmitigated, total crap.
Perhaps surprisingly for a humor columnist, Dave Barry actually does his research, so this probably wouldn't work. (He jokes a lot about how easy being a humor columnist is but a big part of his success is how much work he puts into it.)
This is a surprisingly change over a lot of people punditing about world events, who's "research" seems to consist of skimming over one biased source of news like CNN and then misinterpreting that to fit their biases even more. It's almost a pity Dave Barry is a humor columnist in a way.
I just "topped up my minutes" with my Virgin Mobile phone. The front page isn't too bad but dig down into site and it starts making me feel nauseous. I saved the page I got when I finished registering the phone (it had some useful data), and here are some choice quotes:
When was the last time you got full service like this? And your mom doing your laundry doesn't count.
Wow, that's one hip joke. I sure will be sure to emulate that wit in the future, so I will be the life of the party.
Here's a good one... real numbers replaced by letters but they're the same number!:
Your Virgin Mobile Phone Number: (ABC) DEF-GHIJ Your Phone's Network ID: 00ABCDEFGHIJ
Give your friends your phone number, but keep the super secret Network ID to yourself, you might need it to program your phone...this message may self-destruct.
Yes, really super secret, because otherwise bad things might happen. Fortunately, nobody is smart enough to crack the Super Secret code and thereby screw up your service or use your minutes or anything.
Go forth and make joyous calls to friends and family.
NOW your phone is fully programmed. Celebrate by calling a few friends and telling them how accomplished you feel.
"Hey, Sally!"
"What?"
"I got my phone programmed!"
"So? I saved on car insurance with Geico!"
"And I lowered my cholesterol!"
(What is it with this crap lately? Do they want to call attention to how much they're exagerrating the value of their products?)
If your phone is acting funky, or it just won't work, try going through the steps over again. You may have entered a number incorrectly or something. If you're still having problems, call 1-888-322-1122 and a Central Intelligence Advisor will help you out.
That's all off of one single page. Makes me nauseous.
I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.
(Incidentally, this message proves that even with TiVo I still get commercials, otherwise I wouldn't know about "I lowered my cholesterol!" or Geico, either.)
What's with the rancor that show generates? (Seriously.) I enjoyed it, I know it's not a piece of art that will stand for the ages but it's hardly any worse then any of the other tripe that's on TV every season. What's unique about D&G that makes it come up so frequently in this context? (Again, I mean this question seriously.)
My apologies. I thought you were sarcastically claiming that the RIAA had not yet sued anyone. I see that you were actually claiming the RIAA had already not lived up to their bargin. (Going back and re-reading it, I still find it ambiguous, so I don't feel too guilty;-) )
Do you have any sort of link you can give me about that? I don't remember seeing it (you'd think it would make it to Slashdot), and I'm searching but I'm getting swamped with stories about the amnesty itself, not someone who claimed it and was subsequently sued.
Actually, no, you made the claim "Saying [the music distribution system is outdated] over and over ad nauseum does not make it true." I know this to be false. Since you want us to "shut the fuck up", and by implication you want us to change our opinions, the onus is on you to provide me a reason to believe you. I already know you're wrong.
With "put your money where your mouth is" you imply that nobody has created a music distribution system. Again, I know you're wrong. Unless you can provide me evidence that nobody is doing anything with new distribution models, which is to say, unless you can provide evidence that iTunes and EMusic don't exist (good "fucking" luck!), I'm not going to change my mind.
The responsibility for evidence lies not with the person making a positive or negative claim in this sort of situation, but with the person trying to change minds. Since the evidence is overwhelmingly against the strong statement you made, you're toasted. (Now, you could argue that it's not good yet, but the difference between "I think iTunes is doing OK" and "I don't think iTunes is doing OK" is hardly worthy of the rancor you seem to have.)
Just like they did when they sued people who called them & voluntarily gave contact information during the amnesty period?
Patience. The "RIAA" certainly won't sue but that does not guarentee that there will not be lawsuits yet filed as a direct result. It would be stupid but it might happen precisely because the RIAA is not fully in control.
I'm not claiming this is a certainty, I'd personally give it 60-40 against (which is a pretty weak opinion), but if it is going to happen it wouldn't have happened yet. If it hasn't happened in a year then you can probably safely make your claim.
If you have something better than put your money where your mouth is otherwise shut the fuck up.
Ironic.
If you'd snail-mailed me this post it might have made sense. But using the very type of distribution system you claim doesn't exist to propogate your claim it doesn't exist ranks right up there with "This sentence is not in English." (The difference between this post and a music file is merely one of scale, and not much of it.)
As for people actually doing it, it's not my responsibility or anybody else's to show them to you. All I know is I intend to sign up with EMusic soon. And that's just one example.
Someone who doesn't understand sorting and indexing by multiple keys at the same time probably shouldn't be lecturing somebody else on what is possible and impossible, mm'kay?
Go ahead and laugh; I regret to inform you that you're not in the know, you're in the peanut gallery.
There was a short on NPR that explained it the best: Imagine looking for a person when only knowing their phone number. Today we look through the phonebook one name at a time, but with quantum computing, we'd look at the entire phonebook at once.
Cute, but wrong. Phone books are invariably in sorted order and a simple binary search scales well past anything we'll ever need to worry about.
And the quantum computer has be large enough to hold the entire phonebook at once while remaining in an entangled state to work its magic, something I'd lay money on never happening in a practical way. (Not a life crippling amount of money if I'm wrong... but I seriously don't see this application coming around, ever. Maintaining entanglement is just too impossible in this universe for any reasonably sized system.)
Speaking as a certifiable Python lover... I hope they're just using Python as a development langauge with the intent to switch to compiled C later, once the design solidifies.
Other people have already observed this locks out embedded applications; if this is the intent then eventually the C version would be available to all, in a shorter period of time.
Also, just as a general feeling, that seems like a very heavyweight startup procedure for something that ought to be done as files dumped somewhere with a simpler interpreter for booting. A complicated interface can later be implemented on top of that for remote management or whatever while the system is already on and running, but the stuff needed to actually boot up should be as stripped down as possible, and I just don't see why all that other stuff should be there at bootup. (This would allow other motivated developers to create other methods of manipulating this data, instead of locking it away in a monolithic, non-UNIXy, inaccessible format.)
I don't know any more about the system then what I see on the gnome.org page, but that's my call: Head for C and keep the data firmly seperated from the manipulation so others can play too.
Yeah, gotta love it. These are the same people who snort at "intelligent design" but then join SETI@Home because they think they can empirically identify intelligence...
The entrophy value for your message is much, much lower then the maximum it can have for that length. The probability of that occurring by natural chance is very low.
When you figure out how those two sentences are related to your post, you'll understand the SETA@Home people. Enjoy learning. Warning: May be mind expanding.
So even though the probability of the mirror hitting any gas molecules is low, how reliable are their results?
All experiments have a reliability less then 100%. Techniques to handle that have been around for a long time.
Rest assured the experiment will be performed many, many more times then just "once". (It seems to me you have that as part of your mental image.) Supercollider experiments are run into the hundreds or thousands of times (not certain, not part of that community, could easily be millions for all I know; corrections welcomed).
What you don't know is always easy. (One of the many implications of the fascinating paper.) Or if you prefer, "it is scientifically verifiable that the more you know about a subject, the more you realize you don't know, true all the way up to the extreme that someone who doesn't know anything/much about a subject will think they know everything." (That's a little long for a link target, though.)
A similar, but by no means identical, feature is available for TiVos now, and may work with ReplayTV as well since I don't think TiVo had to explicitly implement it. If you use TiVo at the first fast-forward speed, which IIRC is 3x, the close captioning still works. Thus, if you are watching a close-captioned show and it's bogging down, you can zip things up to 3x, which is a good reading speed, and still know what's going on.
(There are backdoors to tweak whether it's exactly 3x or not, but I don't know if they are still in the latest TiVo software and use at your own risk. I don't know anything about how they interact with this "feature".)
It's actually a little faster then my TV can handle it; sometimes the CC starts to lag and you need to slow down to normal speed briefly to allow the TV to catch up. If it happens to you, you'll understand what I mean when you see it.
I'm sure you can do the math as to how much TV you can watch in an hour at 3x, but more importantly in my experience is zipping through the middle of boring things without actually missing what's being said. (As mentioned in the parent post, I sometimes watch the entire local news, except weather which my wife wants to see, this way though; when the news is dumbed down to an elementary school level accelerating it by 3x is about right. Plus the psychological impact of the continuously and unrepresentatively negative stories is greatly reduced which still transferring the information. I prefer it to reading local newspapers, which is not saying much.)
You may be able to negotiate with this company for more rights. Licenses can always be changed with the consent of licensor and licensee.
The reason most large open source projects are GPL and it essentially can't be changed isn't an inherent unchangability of licenses, it's the impossibility of obtaining consent from all copyright stakeholders.
It is also possible the company only has the right to sell what they are selling in which case you are SOL and I wish people wouldn't hold ancient copyrighted material quite so close to their bosoms, sometimes... the "machine in a bar" market is likely to grow the market for emulation of these things on home consoles and computers, not shrink it. Their reflexive thinking is costing them some income.
I disagree with the law expert. MMORPG items and money may look like property but they fail a critical test: They require no effort from the MMORPG company to create or destroy.
Property does not exist in a world where the president of the MMORPG company can wave his hand and become a "billionaire", or strip people of their possessions solely for the sake of plot. Or heck, just for fun for the programmers. For instance, when the Beta of an MMORPG ends, and all the chars are reset for the production release, if someone sued to get their Flaming Sword of Main Antagonist +34,532 back, would we think they had a case? (No.) What if in the new production version there was no Flaming Sword of Main Antagonist +34,532?
Even "intellectual property", which I also think is a misnomer (though unfortunately I haven't yet published the part where I explain how we should think of it), at least requires effort to create. (It fails to be property in other ways, but not this one.)
Moreover, I'm not aware of any property that can be legitimately destroyed legally by a simple server glitch. You can create "IP" and even if you do it on a computer and the computer crashes, you still theoretically have the rights to it (although you may not be able to exercise them); the crash destroyed your only copy of the work but not your rights, which is all you actually be said to "own". A computer glitch may convince the bank or the government you don't own your house when you do, but we still behave as if there is a higher "property"-ness, beyond just what records say; you'd have the right to correct these records, even government records. Also see squatting laws. For MMORPGs, if the property is destroyed via glitch, you have no recourse, not even in theory.
Basically, it may look like property, and it may walk like property, but it does not quack like property. Therefore, it is not a duck. I mean, therefore, it is not property.
It's a good thought but it falls down on the basis of the article Slashdot posted a few days ago but I can't find: The reason guards will never truly form in a successful MMORPG is that the guards have no weapons.
Don't let the profusion of "swords", "guns", "spells" or other "HP damaging" items fool you. "HP" is meaningless. There's nothing you can do to truly harm an antisocial person on an MMORPG, because the only weapons you have are social.
How long would you be willing to be a guard, if "being a guard" entailed killing the same theif, over and over again, with nothing to show for it but maybe some equipment loss for the theif and maybe some XP loss for the theif, bearing in mind that both are just numbers on a server somewhere? After you answer that, you'll understand why there are no player guards.
Sure, capilitalism is good, but as with most things it has been taken to the extreme here in the US.
I really don't think "capatalism" is the problem with our current system. How much of that $14,500 bill did you choose to receive, and how much consisted of services simply foisted upon you? The latter category includes a lot of things that wouldn't be included even in a detailed itemization necessarily, nor that you would recognize, such as unnecessary drugs, unnecessarily high doses, use of brand-name when generic would do, etc.
These are not profit concerns, these are lawsuit concerns. There may be and probably are other problems with our medical system, but the lawsuits are the apparent proximate cause of the majority of the expense. Remember the IIRC West Virginia doctors, when they threatened to strike when their malpractice insurance premiums rose so high that they managed to reduce a "$200,000 a year" doctor to working for less then minimum wage? (Numbers may not be precise but I am certain about that last clause.) That's one of those stories I rather wish hadn't disappeared into the ether. Perhaps I should engage in a bit of investigative journalism myself...
Re:Privacy advocates are going overboard...
on
NYT on RFID
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· Score: 1
Consumers aren't stupid; they'll steer clear of retailers that keep track of too much of their personal information.
You gloss over one of the major problems with the privacy debate here. How do you propose customers do this? No "privacy market" like you imply can develop in the current environment, because none of the prerequisites for a market has developed. People don't know what is being done with their data, don't realize how much value is being stolen from them (privacy-sensitive data is economically valuable or nobody would bother collecting it) and thus have no knowlege to base their decisions on, and no effective recourse if they choose poorly.
Your whole argument seems to be a "benefits outweigh the costs" argument (which is at least the right form to be using), but I think you've seriously underestimated the costs in the environment we actually live in, rather then the one we theoretically live in.
Moreover, isolated cases of fraud shouldn't be used to push through potentially damaging policies.
We must replace the venerated 12 bit barcode with a technology that can insure the integrity of each retail transaction.
RFID tags aren't even the best solution to your problem from a business perspective, because it's an expensive one. Simple diligence will do much better, and will still be necessary because if you think the RFID equivalent of that fraud will be impossible, I've got a bridge to sell you. If stores are currently running bar codes too quickly, A: they may have to train their cashiers to slow down a bit and B: they'll run through RFID transactions even faster and more carelessly. (In fact I'd even go so far as to hazard a guess RFID fruad may be even easier since the human never looks at the RFID tag at all, and there's plenty of tags to switch in the store.)
How does this RFID technology magically solve the problem of verifying transactions? It's not like the tag can "digitally sign" the contents like we can in the digital world. Your proposed solution doesn't even address your overblown problem! (Or if it does you didn't even try to show how RFID will be immune or even resistent to fraud.)
So you grievously underestimate the costs and overestimate the benefits; kudos to using the right argument form but I think you do not have a good analysis.
Slashdot Mirror
I can think of a lot of answers, but they all involve high market penetration.
Who would have guess that computers would someday be used for Instant Messaging in the 1970's? First computers have to be cheap, then penetrate the market, then get hooked up, then the software be developed, etc. I can imagine immersive setups or MMORPGs or really useful collaboration tools or all kinds of other things that require a lot of people to own the hardware or a lot more bandwidth.
Basically, if you imagine technology as a tree, CAVE is probably a dead-end stub, where a nearby branch will end up taking off and strangling the CAVE approach, probably a branch that has a much lower hardware cost. (Think digital glasses that track movement and virtually project a room; much cheaper, much easier to make useable by the 'common man' since it doesn't eat cubic feet for lunch, easier to make useful intermediate steps.)
It is not useless but until there's one in a few million homes the commercial apps aren't going to take off, and fully enclosed environments are just prohibitive in so many ways for so many people. CAVE is a great research project, don't think I'm "knocking" it, but, well, I can't think of any killer app that came from a lab. (Xerox PARC developments subsequently used by Apple don't damage that claim, they re-inforce it; until Apple repackaged it out of a lab environment GUIs were dead. Not to mention GUI isn't really intrinsically a killer app, desktop-publishing was.) Part of the reason is the fact that until we use it, we don't recognize the killer app, and few people if any can guess it in advance (which, incidentally, does mean the Ask Slashdot as asked is basically unanswerable, historically speaking).
Until we have hackers (old sense of the word) hacking on it, the killer app won't happen.
I played today Super Monkey Ball and Tomb Raider... SMB isn't all evil, even if the field of view is too tight and controlling the ball is sometimes quite difficult,
I can't speak for the GameCube version but IMHO "Super Monkey Ball" is a control disaster and the fact that more people didn't notice is a testament to how thoroughly people think inside the box.
The reason is simple: Controls are camera relative and the camera perspective is constantly changing. The Gameboy's digital controls exaggerate this but it must be bad even on the Gamecube. At least 80%-90% of the times I fail in that game it's not me, it's the GD'ed camera shifting perspective. Especially when I'm trying to go uphill.
I guess people don't realize how the game should be because so few modern folk have played Marble Madness, an old 1980's game that didn't have the technology to swing the camera around violently. You can tell how much better the Marble Madness control by the fact that the third or fourth level is immensely more challenging then any but the hardest SMB levels. In fact, the Marble Madness levels rapidly become impossible with the SMB control scheme, but are still easy when the directions aren't wildly oscillating.
Contrariwise, even very challenging SMB levels would be very, very easy with a Marble Madness control scheme.
Basically, SMB was one of the last games that should have used the third-person camera that always swings to be "behind" you, with directions relative to the camera. (Heck, I'd take the camera swinging but leaving my directions constant over the current system!) But we've all gotten so stuck in the "third-person camera" box that few people see how crappy this other-wise hit game is. The challenge isn't supposed to come from fighting the game's engine.
Measuring the N-Gage by SMB is probably a bad plan; the Nokia merely amplifies the already bad SMB experience. (Then again, it says a lot about the company's priorities that it chose that to port.)
Look at the reviews. It's consistant that all major publisher games NEVER score below 70%, all others can get as low as 50%.
One of the important things you must do when reading a review is calibrate the scale they are using. As you observe, you can even get different scales for different things.
Gamespy claims to rate on a 100 point scale (using percentage points), but clearly, they rate on either a 50 or 30 point range, depending.
Now, when I rate things on a 1 to 10 scale, "10's" make up roughly 1% of my ratings, and a 1 about 13%, with the difference smearing up to about 6. This is important to know when I'm rating things, that I'm relatively brutal. (Though I don't rate often.)
Gamefaqs allows users to rate games on a ten-point scale but the users only really use "8", "9", "10", and "bad". (With an excessive bias towards 10.) In fact the numbers are crappy and I'll frequently see things like "This game was OK at best, there's a lot of things I didn't like, only rent this if you like this genre" attached to a "9/10". The reviews themselves aren't too bad, if you know how to read reviews.
My point? I wouldn't necessarily read conspiracy into the review numbers; as long as there is a positive and consistent correlation between review value and quality, it's OK. At least, it seems to be accepted practice; as I noted above when I'm on a ten-point scale I'm not afraid to rate things as a 1 or a 4 at all, but most people seem to feel obliged to never rate things less then a 5 or 6, unless it's abject, unmitigated, total crap.
Perhaps surprisingly for a humor columnist, Dave Barry actually does his research, so this probably wouldn't work. (He jokes a lot about how easy being a humor columnist is but a big part of his success is how much work he puts into it.)
This is a surprisingly change over a lot of people punditing about world events, who's "research" seems to consist of skimming over one biased source of news like CNN and then misinterpreting that to fit their biases even more. It's almost a pity Dave Barry is a humor columnist in a way.
I just "topped up my minutes" with my Virgin Mobile phone. The front page isn't too bad but dig down into site and it starts making me feel nauseous. I saved the page I got when I finished registering the phone (it had some useful data), and here are some choice quotes:Wow, that's one hip joke. I sure will be sure to emulate that wit in the future, so I will be the life of the party.
Here's a good one... real numbers replaced by letters but they're the same number!:
Yes, really super secret, because otherwise bad things might happen. Fortunately, nobody is smart enough to crack the Super Secret code and thereby screw up your service or use your minutes or anything."Hey, Sally!"
"What?"
"I got my phone programmed!"
"So? I saved on car insurance with Geico!"
"And I lowered my cholesterol!"
(What is it with this crap lately? Do they want to call attention to how much they're exagerrating the value of their products?)That's all off of one single page. Makes me nauseous.
I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.
(Incidentally, this message proves that even with TiVo I still get commercials, otherwise I wouldn't know about "I lowered my cholesterol!" or Geico, either.)
What's with the rancor that show generates? (Seriously.) I enjoyed it, I know it's not a piece of art that will stand for the ages but it's hardly any worse then any of the other tripe that's on TV every season. What's unique about D&G that makes it come up so frequently in this context? (Again, I mean this question seriously.)
My apologies. I thought you were sarcastically claiming that the RIAA had not yet sued anyone. I see that you were actually claiming the RIAA had already not lived up to their bargin. (Going back and re-reading it, I still find it ambiguous, so I don't feel too guilty ;-) )
Do you have any sort of link you can give me about that? I don't remember seeing it (you'd think it would make it to Slashdot), and I'm searching but I'm getting swamped with stories about the amnesty itself, not someone who claimed it and was subsequently sued.
Actually, no, you made the claim "Saying [the music distribution system is outdated] over and over ad nauseum does not make it true." I know this to be false. Since you want us to "shut the fuck up", and by implication you want us to change our opinions, the onus is on you to provide me a reason to believe you. I already know you're wrong.
With "put your money where your mouth is" you imply that nobody has created a music distribution system. Again, I know you're wrong. Unless you can provide me evidence that nobody is doing anything with new distribution models, which is to say, unless you can provide evidence that iTunes and EMusic don't exist (good "fucking" luck!), I'm not going to change my mind.
The responsibility for evidence lies not with the person making a positive or negative claim in this sort of situation, but with the person trying to change minds. Since the evidence is overwhelmingly against the strong statement you made, you're toasted. (Now, you could argue that it's not good yet, but the difference between "I think iTunes is doing OK" and "I don't think iTunes is doing OK" is hardly worthy of the rancor you seem to have.)
Just like they did when they sued people who called them & voluntarily gave contact information during the amnesty period?
Patience. The "RIAA" certainly won't sue but that does not guarentee that there will not be lawsuits yet filed as a direct result. It would be stupid but it might happen precisely because the RIAA is not fully in control.
I'm not claiming this is a certainty, I'd personally give it 60-40 against (which is a pretty weak opinion), but if it is going to happen it wouldn't have happened yet. If it hasn't happened in a year then you can probably safely make your claim.
If you have something better than put your money where your mouth is otherwise shut the fuck up.
Ironic.
If you'd snail-mailed me this post it might have made sense. But using the very type of distribution system you claim doesn't exist to propogate your claim it doesn't exist ranks right up there with "This sentence is not in English." (The difference between this post and a music file is merely one of scale, and not much of it.)
As for people actually doing it, it's not my responsibility or anybody else's to show them to you. All I know is I intend to sign up with EMusic soon. And that's just one example.
Hmm. Like the low entrophy value of a pulsar maybe?
You may find this enlightening.
Uh.. He's searching by phone number not by name.
Someone who doesn't understand sorting and indexing by multiple keys at the same time probably shouldn't be lecturing somebody else on what is possible and impossible, mm'kay?
Go ahead and laugh; I regret to inform you that you're not in the know, you're in the peanut gallery.
Shit. Good catch.
There was a short on NPR that explained it the best: Imagine looking for a person when only knowing their phone number. Today we look through the phonebook one name at a time, but with quantum computing, we'd look at the entire phonebook at once.
Cute, but wrong. Phone books are invariably in sorted order and a simple binary search scales well past anything we'll ever need to worry about.
And the quantum computer has be large enough to hold the entire phonebook at once while remaining in an entangled state to work its magic, something I'd lay money on never happening in a practical way. (Not a life crippling amount of money if I'm wrong... but I seriously don't see this application coming around, ever. Maintaining entanglement is just too impossible in this universe for any reasonably sized system.)
Speaking as a certifiable Python lover... I hope they're just using Python as a development langauge with the intent to switch to compiled C later, once the design solidifies.
Other people have already observed this locks out embedded applications; if this is the intent then eventually the C version would be available to all, in a shorter period of time.
Also, just as a general feeling, that seems like a very heavyweight startup procedure for something that ought to be done as files dumped somewhere with a simpler interpreter for booting. A complicated interface can later be implemented on top of that for remote management or whatever while the system is already on and running, but the stuff needed to actually boot up should be as stripped down as possible, and I just don't see why all that other stuff should be there at bootup. (This would allow other motivated developers to create other methods of manipulating this data, instead of locking it away in a monolithic, non-UNIXy, inaccessible format.)
I don't know any more about the system then what I see on the gnome.org page, but that's my call: Head for C and keep the data firmly seperated from the manipulation so others can play too.
Yeah, gotta love it. These are the same people who snort at "intelligent design" but then join SETI@Home because they think they can empirically identify intelligence...
The entrophy value for your message is much, much lower then the maximum it can have for that length. The probability of that occurring by natural chance is very low.
When you figure out how those two sentences are related to your post, you'll understand the SETA@Home people. Enjoy learning. Warning: May be mind expanding.
So even though the probability of the mirror hitting any gas molecules is low, how reliable are their results?
All experiments have a reliability less then 100%. Techniques to handle that have been around for a long time.
Rest assured the experiment will be performed many, many more times then just "once". (It seems to me you have that as part of your mental image.) Supercollider experiments are run into the hundreds or thousands of times (not certain, not part of that community, could easily be millions for all I know; corrections welcomed).
What you don't know is always easy. (One of the many implications of the fascinating paper.) Or if you prefer, "it is scientifically verifiable that the more you know about a subject, the more you realize you don't know, true all the way up to the extreme that someone who doesn't know anything/much about a subject will think they know everything." (That's a little long for a link target, though.)
A similar, but by no means identical, feature is available for TiVos now, and may work with ReplayTV as well since I don't think TiVo had to explicitly implement it. If you use TiVo at the first fast-forward speed, which IIRC is 3x, the close captioning still works. Thus, if you are watching a close-captioned show and it's bogging down, you can zip things up to 3x, which is a good reading speed, and still know what's going on.
(There are backdoors to tweak whether it's exactly 3x or not, but I don't know if they are still in the latest TiVo software and use at your own risk. I don't know anything about how they interact with this "feature".)
It's actually a little faster then my TV can handle it; sometimes the CC starts to lag and you need to slow down to normal speed briefly to allow the TV to catch up. If it happens to you, you'll understand what I mean when you see it.
I'm sure you can do the math as to how much TV you can watch in an hour at 3x, but more importantly in my experience is zipping through the middle of boring things without actually missing what's being said. (As mentioned in the parent post, I sometimes watch the entire local news, except weather which my wife wants to see, this way though; when the news is dumbed down to an elementary school level accelerating it by 3x is about right. Plus the psychological impact of the continuously and unrepresentatively negative stories is greatly reduced which still transferring the information. I prefer it to reading local newspapers, which is not saying much.)
You may be able to negotiate with this company for more rights. Licenses can always be changed with the consent of licensor and licensee.
The reason most large open source projects are GPL and it essentially can't be changed isn't an inherent unchangability of licenses, it's the impossibility of obtaining consent from all copyright stakeholders.
It is also possible the company only has the right to sell what they are selling in which case you are SOL and I wish people wouldn't hold ancient copyrighted material quite so close to their bosoms, sometimes... the "machine in a bar" market is likely to grow the market for emulation of these things on home consoles and computers, not shrink it. Their reflexive thinking is costing them some income.
I disagree with the law expert. MMORPG items and money may look like property but they fail a critical test: They require no effort from the MMORPG company to create or destroy.
Property does not exist in a world where the president of the MMORPG company can wave his hand and become a "billionaire", or strip people of their possessions solely for the sake of plot. Or heck, just for fun for the programmers. For instance, when the Beta of an MMORPG ends, and all the chars are reset for the production release, if someone sued to get their Flaming Sword of Main Antagonist +34,532 back, would we think they had a case? (No.) What if in the new production version there was no Flaming Sword of Main Antagonist +34,532?
Even "intellectual property", which I also think is a misnomer (though unfortunately I haven't yet published the part where I explain how we should think of it), at least requires effort to create. (It fails to be property in other ways, but not this one.)
Moreover, I'm not aware of any property that can be legitimately destroyed legally by a simple server glitch. You can create "IP" and even if you do it on a computer and the computer crashes, you still theoretically have the rights to it (although you may not be able to exercise them); the crash destroyed your only copy of the work but not your rights, which is all you actually be said to "own". A computer glitch may convince the bank or the government you don't own your house when you do, but we still behave as if there is a higher "property"-ness, beyond just what records say; you'd have the right to correct these records, even government records. Also see squatting laws. For MMORPGs, if the property is destroyed via glitch, you have no recourse, not even in theory.
Basically, it may look like property, and it may walk like property, but it does not quack like property. Therefore, it is not a duck. I mean, therefore, it is not property.
It's a good thought but it falls down on the basis of the article Slashdot posted a few days ago but I can't find: The reason guards will never truly form in a successful MMORPG is that the guards have no weapons.
Don't let the profusion of "swords", "guns", "spells" or other "HP damaging" items fool you. "HP" is meaningless. There's nothing you can do to truly harm an antisocial person on an MMORPG, because the only weapons you have are social.
How long would you be willing to be a guard, if "being a guard" entailed killing the same theif, over and over again, with nothing to show for it but maybe some equipment loss for the theif and maybe some XP loss for the theif, bearing in mind that both are just numbers on a server somewhere? After you answer that, you'll understand why there are no player guards.
Sure, capilitalism is good, but as with most things it has been taken to the extreme here in the US.
I really don't think "capatalism" is the problem with our current system. How much of that $14,500 bill did you choose to receive, and how much consisted of services simply foisted upon you? The latter category includes a lot of things that wouldn't be included even in a detailed itemization necessarily, nor that you would recognize, such as unnecessary drugs, unnecessarily high doses, use of brand-name when generic would do, etc.
These are not profit concerns, these are lawsuit concerns. There may be and probably are other problems with our medical system, but the lawsuits are the apparent proximate cause of the majority of the expense. Remember the IIRC West Virginia doctors, when they threatened to strike when their malpractice insurance premiums rose so high that they managed to reduce a "$200,000 a year" doctor to working for less then minimum wage? (Numbers may not be precise but I am certain about that last clause.) That's one of those stories I rather wish hadn't disappeared into the ether. Perhaps I should engage in a bit of investigative journalism myself...
Consumers aren't stupid; they'll steer clear of retailers that keep track of too much of their personal information.
You gloss over one of the major problems with the privacy debate here. How do you propose customers do this? No "privacy market" like you imply can develop in the current environment, because none of the prerequisites for a market has developed. People don't know what is being done with their data, don't realize how much value is being stolen from them (privacy-sensitive data is economically valuable or nobody would bother collecting it) and thus have no knowlege to base their decisions on, and no effective recourse if they choose poorly.
Your whole argument seems to be a "benefits outweigh the costs" argument (which is at least the right form to be using), but I think you've seriously underestimated the costs in the environment we actually live in, rather then the one we theoretically live in.
Moreover, isolated cases of fraud shouldn't be used to push through potentially damaging policies.
We must replace the venerated 12 bit barcode with a technology that can insure the integrity of each retail transaction.
RFID tags aren't even the best solution to your problem from a business perspective, because it's an expensive one. Simple diligence will do much better, and will still be necessary because if you think the RFID equivalent of that fraud will be impossible, I've got a bridge to sell you. If stores are currently running bar codes too quickly, A: they may have to train their cashiers to slow down a bit and B: they'll run through RFID transactions even faster and more carelessly. (In fact I'd even go so far as to hazard a guess RFID fruad may be even easier since the human never looks at the RFID tag at all, and there's plenty of tags to switch in the store.)
How does this RFID technology magically solve the problem of verifying transactions? It's not like the tag can "digitally sign" the contents like we can in the digital world. Your proposed solution doesn't even address your overblown problem! (Or if it does you didn't even try to show how RFID will be immune or even resistent to fraud.)
So you grievously underestimate the costs and overestimate the benefits; kudos to using the right argument form but I think you do not have a good analysis.
Oh of freaking course privacy violations can be good sometimes.
So what?
Sometimes when I give money to the poor it gets embezzled. I once saw a television story about a corrupt cop. Sometimes, parents beat their children.
What conclusions should I draw about these anecdotes, including your own?