I agree, the animation was good and the rest was lacking. I hope that it's poor performance does't scare off anyone who might have been going to make a simliar, but more complete film. There is something about the potential that animation has for story telling that makes me sad to see it wasted.
Re:WRONG: Corporations Have NO *Right* to Make Mon
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 1
You make a good point. I was more pirate friendly until I started thinking along those lines myself. Piracy actually takes away the ability of other companies to compete to make a better product or charge less. If people say it's too much to pay, but then pirate it and use it anyway, other software platforms are the real losers. The Wintel monopoly wouldn't exist anyway if it hadn't been for IBM clones and people pirating DOS and Windows.
It also hurts the movement towards open standards. Is there a completely non-proprietary format out there for word processed documents? A lot of the Word documents floating around out there could have been done in rich text, but I'd prefer it if there was an open standard like HTML to create documents and spreadsheets in.
The company that I work for at present has tried to maintain MS Office 95 as their standard office suite. Slowly it is being chiseled away at by demand for Office 97. It starts with people who claim they need to work with documents from outside the company. And then they thoughtlessly create documents in 97 format and email them out to 20 people inside the company. Those 20 then claim that they can't do their jobs unless they are upgraded to 97. You can try to reason with them, but it is hard to overcome the mentality. Most of them are using Office 97 at home (they probably pirated it), they like it better, or they just feel like they are being cheated because they don't have the newest software. Every day I get asked by users why they can't be upgraded to Office 97, or why the company standard is not Office 97 or Office 2K not the company standard.
What they think they are missing I don't know. Most of them barely know how to use what they have. I've seen the work that most of these people do. It could be done with a 15 year old word processor. And most of them only spend a portion of their day in front of their pc anyway. I am constantly wondering how much product we have to sell to buy a license (we actually pay for the Office2K licenses)so that someone can hack out a memo once or twice a week (or less). I'm convinced that most of them only need Word and Excel readers, but that will not answer, politics being what they are.
They don't even consider the logistics of a wholesale upgrade of 1000 users (the cost and time involved). Most of them consider M$ the defacto standard and act as though the IS department is impeding business by not granting them the latest software. It's actually a management decision. The President asked our manager to submit a report on the cost of upgrading the whole company to Win2K/Office2K. He did, and he hasn't heard from him since on the issue.
Well, I've droned on too long already.
-tta
Re:Sounds interesting but...
on
Orbitsville
·
· Score: 1
Spinneret by Timothy Zahn had a Dyson sphere. It was good too.
Geeks are good for the net, and will hopefully be around for a long time to keep it free and honest. Geeks are looked at by the business suits as people who want everything to be free of charge, and by the government suits as people who want anarchy. Geeks are the wild element on the Internet. Business are trying to develop (and exploit) it, and governments are trying to bring order to it because they can't stand disorder.
People are not going to like this analogy, but it is almost like the early United States. Geeks are the Native Americans. They have a primitive way of living in harmony with the land (medium). They have a problem with the concept of people owning it. They use it and live off of it, but leave it relatively unharmed. Business suits are like industrialist. They see natural resources to make money off of. They do believe that people should be able to own the land, and that the people should be them. Pretty soon they are running railroads, mining, and eventually polluting (advertising). Then you have the feds, who play pretty much the same role in both situations. They want to tame the wild frontier, make it safe for those industrialist because they are good for the economy, and basically push the Indians out of the way to make room for progress and bring order to the land.
It it a flawed analogy. People will point out that the government and modern business are responsible for the Internet's infrastructure, so it's not at all like taking land from Native Americans, and then trashing it. The point of the analogy was the show a pattern.
The Internet belongs to everyone, not just geeks, business, or government. But the geeks are the ones who will get trampled on. Business, especially established media types, believe that they should still be the content providers, like they always have been. They don't want anyone finding ways around them, and they especially don't want anything interfering with business operations. The government want's to instill order, so that the nation may prosper and be safe from wild people. Some geeks push back, like hackers. Some just want to be allowed to go about their lives and make their way just like they always did before business and government decided to start infringing.
Freedom is the most important issue at stake here. It is probably one of the few potentially negative side affects to having everyone wired to the net 24/7. As Micheal pointed out, many people are willing to give up freedom for safety. How many people would be willing to inplant a harmless tracking device on their children if it ment that no one could ever kidnap them, rape or abuse them, or that they could never get lost or run away. There are already people would would do this now. In fifty or a hundred years, I'll bet most people will. The idea will eventually cease to seem strange. People who didn't put monitoring devices on their children would be viewed as neglectful. The law might eventually require it. It could be used to fight crime. They may start with people who commit a crime. Eventually surveillance technology may eliminate the need to have an sort of implant.
I've always considered George Orwell a genius because he wrote 1984 well before the technology actually existed to realistically implement such a society. It was actually pretty low tech, except for the two way televisions (telescreens I think he called them). I remember once thinking that people would never allow such a thing in their house. Sure every house has at least one television, but they are only one way. I knew I would never allow it. Now I have a cable modem. Sure, no one can see what I'm doing in my living room. But if someone wanted to they could read my email (since I can't convince any of my email buddies to use encryption), they can see that I down load MP3's, visit porn sites, and post comments about the dangers of a surveillance society.
What were people thinking a hundred or two hundred years ago. Do you think they could even conceive of our society with all of it's technology? What do you think they would have thought of the notion of sacrificing liberties one by one to large powerful governments in the name of safety? Most of them would have considered our laws and dependence on technology a danger to personal liberty. Look how far we've come. Now imagine one or two hundred years into the future.
Chaos ----------------------- Order
Freedom ----------------------- Safety
We must be vigilant in maintaining a balance here. If we ever achieve perfect order, then it will be very difficult to regain freedom. Technology will be so advanced (in surveillance and perhaps even mind control), laws will be so restrictive, that it will be nearly impossible stage a resistance.
What bearing does the DMCA or any other U.S. law have on other countries with citizens on the Internet? If our technologically shortsighted lawmakers ban or cripple file sharing technology, what's to keep the nation of Elbonia from saying that it is OK and letting people locate servers there and allowing it's citizens to blatantly pirate anything and everything digital? If this happens, does Elbonia not have a competitive edge? Would we have to nuke Elbonia to appease the RIAA, MPAA, and commercial software publishers?
That's exactly the point. It is reasonable to protect a piece of software that you are selling from piracy. If you stopped selling it, but only had only one copy, it would be reasonable to protect that one copy from actually be physically stolen. It is even reasonable to not allow someone else to make money off of a product that you have given up on. It is not reasonable to prevent people from possessing a replica of something that you no longer make available.
As far as laws are concerned, since the current copyright laws exist are we suppose to just shut up and live with them? I don't think so. We are suppose to get on the web and complain about them. It may turn out to be a form of power. Corporations already have power, most notably in the form of money. Maybe most people do not like the current laws. Maybe most people think that we as a society have the right to re-examine the definition of whether or not "the shirt or game is abandoned."
The truth is, most people don't care. They will take whatever is given to them, and will not even think of other possibilities. And even fewer would care if not for the efforts of nerds who have enough free time and expertise to salvage lost arts. That is why their actions should be protected. Who came up with these laws? I seriously doubt that you would find much support in the public for criminalizing the salvage of outdated, off the market video games. What are these companies afraid of? That you will have sufficient entertainment with the old games that you will not buy the new ones? Probably not, that would be about ridiculous. It sound's like corporate assholeism.
"You can't buy it, because there's not enough demand, but you can't have it for free either. If you would like to play the game, then you must be willing to pay for it. Therefore, if you play it for free then we are losing potential revenue. Still can't justify bringing it back to market, though. Sorry. How about a nice new game?"
You make some good points about everyday language usage. There would still be some advantages, however, to one of those simplified artificial languages being an Internet standard or perhaps creating a new language from scratch.
When the whole world gets on the Internet and starts trying to communicate, something will have to give. Either the majority of the world's population will have to learn English as a second language (and I agree that if it is a natural language it will be English), or everyone will have to learn a standard language.
There will definitely be a lot of political resistance to learning English in some countries. The learning curve would also be steeper than with a simple and logically defined language. Americans (and probably other English speaking nations) will be the last to adopt such a language, because we already have the benefit of a virtually universal Internet language. We have access to all of the content that we desire, e-commerce, etc. But when e-commerce businesses and content providers really begin marketing their products globally, they will not be able to get away with working exclusively in English. It would be poor marketing and poor politics. On the other hand, translating web content into dozens of languages isn't going to be all that appealing either.
I believe that one day there will be a standard-universal language primarily used for conducting business and basic communication for broad audiences. Day to day conversations, literature, quality entertainment, etc. will still go on in traditional languages for the reasons that you stated about the richness of expression that they allow.
And another thing. Voice recognition. When settling on a new universal standard language, it should also be designed to make computer voice recognition easier to achieve. No homonyms, or difficult pronunciations and the sounds of the word should be distinctive. This may make the language even more dry, but it should be designed for function rather than form.
And another thing. Support for legacy languages should be built in. If there is not a word in the standard language for something and you must use an English word, for example, then (for written purposes) you should insert the word and there should be a tag that marks the word or phrase as English. Then, non-English speaking readers could click on the word and an electronic dictionary of some kind would define the word in their language. It could also define it in standard.
And one last thing. The language should eliminate words that represent thoughts and ideas that people shouldn't have.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, the animation was good and the rest was lacking. I hope that it's poor performance does't scare off anyone who might have been going to make a simliar, but more complete film. There is something about the potential that animation has for story telling that makes me sad to see it wasted.
You make a good point. I was more pirate friendly until I started thinking along those lines myself. Piracy actually takes away the ability of other companies to compete to make a better product or charge less. If people say it's too much to pay, but then pirate it and use it anyway, other software platforms are the real losers. The Wintel monopoly wouldn't exist anyway if it hadn't been for IBM clones and people pirating DOS and Windows.
It also hurts the movement towards open standards. Is there a completely non-proprietary format out there for word processed documents? A lot of the Word documents floating around out there could have been done in rich text, but I'd prefer it if there was an open standard like HTML to create documents and spreadsheets in.
The company that I work for at present has tried to maintain MS Office 95 as their standard office suite. Slowly it is being chiseled away at by demand for Office 97. It starts with people who claim they need to work with documents from outside the company. And then they thoughtlessly create documents in 97 format and email them out to 20 people inside the company. Those 20 then claim that they can't do their jobs unless they are upgraded to 97. You can try to reason with them, but it is hard to overcome the mentality. Most of them are using Office 97 at home (they probably pirated it), they like it better, or they just feel like they are being cheated because they don't have the newest software. Every day I get asked by users why they can't be upgraded to Office 97, or why the company standard is not Office 97 or Office 2K not the company standard.
What they think they are missing I don't know. Most of them barely know how to use what they have. I've seen the work that most of these people do. It could be done with a 15 year old word processor. And most of them only spend a portion of their day in front of their pc anyway. I am constantly wondering how much product we have to sell to buy a license (we actually pay for the Office2K licenses)so that someone can hack out a memo once or twice a week (or less). I'm convinced that most of them only need Word and Excel readers, but that will not answer, politics being what they are.
They don't even consider the logistics of a wholesale upgrade of 1000 users (the cost and time involved). Most of them consider M$ the defacto standard and act as though the IS department is impeding business by not granting them the latest software. It's actually a management decision. The President asked our manager to submit a report on the cost of upgrading the whole company to Win2K/Office2K. He did, and he hasn't heard from him since on the issue.
Well, I've droned on too long already.
-tta
Spinneret by Timothy Zahn had a Dyson sphere. It was good too.
>But anonymity also has you loose your identity: anybody can become you, just by saying that they are.
If lack of anonymity becomes standard and some hacker then steals you identity, it will be even harder to convince people that it wasn't you.
Geeks are good for the net, and will hopefully be around for a long time to keep it free and honest. Geeks are looked at by the business suits as people who want everything to be free of charge, and by the government suits as people who want anarchy. Geeks are the wild element on the Internet. Business are trying to develop (and exploit) it, and governments are trying to bring order to it because they can't stand disorder.
People are not going to like this analogy, but it is almost like the early United States. Geeks are the Native Americans. They have a primitive way of living in harmony with the land (medium). They have a problem with the concept of people owning it. They use it and live off of it, but leave it relatively unharmed. Business suits are like industrialist. They see natural resources to make money off of. They do believe that people should be able to own the land, and that the people should be them. Pretty soon they are running railroads, mining, and eventually polluting (advertising). Then you have the feds, who play pretty much the same role in both situations. They want to tame the wild frontier, make it safe for those industrialist because they are good for the economy, and basically push the Indians out of the way to make room for progress and bring order to the land.
It it a flawed analogy. People will point out that the government and modern business are responsible for the Internet's infrastructure, so it's not at all like taking land from Native Americans, and then trashing it. The point of the analogy was the show a pattern.
The Internet belongs to everyone, not just geeks, business, or government. But the geeks are the ones who will get trampled on. Business, especially established media types, believe that they should still be the content providers, like they always have been. They don't want anyone finding ways around them, and they especially don't want anything interfering with business operations. The government want's to instill order, so that the nation may prosper and be safe from wild people. Some geeks push back, like hackers. Some just want to be allowed to go about their lives and make their way just like they always did before business and government decided to start infringing.
-tta
Freedom is the most important issue at stake here. It is probably one of the few potentially negative side affects to having everyone wired to the net 24/7. As Micheal pointed out, many people are willing to give up freedom for safety. How many people would be willing to inplant a harmless tracking device on their children if it ment that no one could ever kidnap them, rape or abuse them, or that they could never get lost or run away. There are already people would would do this now. In fifty or a hundred years, I'll bet most people will. The idea will eventually cease to seem strange. People who didn't put monitoring devices on their children would be viewed as neglectful. The law might eventually require it. It could be used to fight crime. They may start with people who commit a crime. Eventually surveillance technology may eliminate the need to have an sort of implant.
I've always considered George Orwell a genius because he wrote 1984 well before the technology actually existed to realistically implement such a society. It was actually pretty low tech, except for the two way televisions (telescreens I think he called them). I remember once thinking that people would never allow such a thing in their house. Sure every house has at least one television, but they are only one way. I knew I would never allow it. Now I have a cable modem. Sure, no one can see what I'm doing in my living room. But if someone wanted to they could read my email (since I can't convince any of my email buddies to use encryption), they can see that I down load MP3's, visit porn sites, and post comments about the dangers of a surveillance society.
What were people thinking a hundred or two hundred years ago. Do you think they could even conceive of our society with all of it's technology? What do you think they would have thought of the notion of sacrificing liberties one by one to large powerful governments in the name of safety? Most of them would have considered our laws and dependence on technology a danger to personal liberty. Look how far we've come. Now imagine one or two hundred years into the future.
Chaos ----------------------- Order
Freedom ----------------------- Safety
We must be vigilant in maintaining a balance here. If we ever achieve perfect order, then it will be very difficult to regain freedom. Technology will be so advanced (in surveillance and perhaps even mind control), laws will be so restrictive, that it will be nearly impossible stage a resistance.
-tta
Question:
What bearing does the DMCA or any other U.S. law have on other countries with citizens on the Internet? If our technologically shortsighted lawmakers ban or cripple file sharing technology, what's to keep the nation of Elbonia from saying that it is OK and letting people locate servers there and allowing it's citizens to blatantly pirate anything and everything digital? If this happens, does Elbonia not have a competitive edge? Would we have to nuke Elbonia to appease the RIAA, MPAA, and commercial software publishers?
-tta
That's exactly the point. It is reasonable to protect a piece of software that you are selling from piracy. If you stopped selling it, but only had only one copy, it would be reasonable to protect that one copy from actually be physically stolen. It is even reasonable to not allow someone else to make money off of a product that you have given up on. It is not reasonable to prevent people from possessing a replica of something that you no longer make available.
As far as laws are concerned, since the current copyright laws exist are we suppose to just shut up and live with them? I don't think so. We are suppose to get on the web and complain about them. It may turn out to be a form of power. Corporations already have power, most notably in the form of money. Maybe most people do not like the current laws. Maybe most people think that we as a society have the right to re-examine the definition of whether or not "the shirt or game is abandoned."
The truth is, most people don't care. They will take whatever is given to them, and will not even think of other possibilities. And even fewer would care if not for the efforts of nerds who have enough free time and expertise to salvage lost arts. That is why their actions should be protected. Who came up with these laws? I seriously doubt that you would find much support in the public for criminalizing the salvage of outdated, off the market video games. What are these companies afraid of? That you will have sufficient entertainment with the old games that you will not buy the new ones? Probably not, that would be about ridiculous. It sound's like corporate assholeism.
"You can't buy it, because there's not enough demand, but you can't have it for free either. If you would like to play the game, then you must be willing to pay for it. Therefore, if you play it for free then we are losing potential revenue. Still can't justify bringing it back to market, though. Sorry. How about a nice new game?"
Is that the mentality?
-tta
You make some good points about everyday language usage. There would still be some advantages, however, to one of those simplified artificial languages being an Internet standard or perhaps creating a new language from scratch.
When the whole world gets on the Internet and starts trying to communicate, something will have to give. Either the majority of the world's population will have to learn English as a second language (and I agree that if it is a natural language it will be English), or everyone will have to learn a standard language.
There will definitely be a lot of political resistance to learning English in some countries. The learning curve would also be steeper than with a simple and logically defined language. Americans (and probably other English speaking nations) will be the last to adopt such a language, because we already have the benefit of a virtually universal Internet language. We have access to all of the content that we desire, e-commerce, etc. But when e-commerce businesses and content providers really begin marketing their products globally, they will not be able to get away with working exclusively in English. It would be poor marketing and poor politics. On the other hand, translating web content into dozens of languages isn't going to be all that appealing either.
I believe that one day there will be a standard-universal language primarily used for conducting business and basic communication for broad audiences. Day to day conversations, literature, quality entertainment, etc. will still go on in traditional languages for the reasons that you stated about the richness of expression that they allow.
And another thing. Voice recognition. When settling on a new universal standard language, it should also be designed to make computer voice recognition easier to achieve. No homonyms, or difficult pronunciations and the sounds of the word should be distinctive. This may make the language even more dry, but it should be designed for function rather than form.
And another thing. Support for legacy languages should be built in. If there is not a word in the standard language for something and you must use an English word, for example, then (for written purposes) you should insert the word and there should be a tag that marks the word or phrase as English. Then, non-English speaking readers could click on the word and an electronic dictionary of some kind would define the word in their language. It could also define it in standard.
And one last thing. The language should eliminate words that represent thoughts and ideas that people shouldn't have.
Ok, maybe not.
-TTA