Meh, that's a matter of opinion.;) I read up to Path of Daggers and gave up after finally admitting to myself that Jordan had mired himself into an overly convoluted, meandering plot that I suspect he could barely keep track of, let alone me, a mere reader. Heck, I should've kept notes, just to keep track of all the characters, settings, and their relationships with one another... it really got quite ridiculous, IMHO.
You *must* be joking. Sony is doing it's best to eliminate any possibility for piracy, and as a side effect, homebrew on the PSP. The only option for PSP owners is to downgrade their BIOS, and then never play a new game, for fear that their BIOS would be involuntarily upgraded.
Meanwhile, you can get a simple passthrough card and a slot-2 storage device for the DS for under $100, these days. You can then grab devkitarm and hack away. And you'll love it... the DS hardware is very simple and easy to work with. Heck, the 3D registers are practically a direct mapping from OpenGL.
I seem to recall Dreamcast did not require a modchip to play pirated games. You only needed a special boot disk of some kind which makes pirating way easier.
Oh, no no, it wasn't that hard. All you have to do is burn a CD. That's all. Granted, the format is *slightly* unusual, but you can burn a working DC disc using cdrecord quite easily. This is one of the reasons why it's such a fantastic homebrew platform (I picked up a used one just for that reason).
However, the DC also supported a weird hybrid CD which had a low density component and a high density component. These can't be burned using regular CD burners, AFAIK. OTOH, most games could be fit on a single regular CD.
Yes, going from #1 to barely tied for second is just fine... Honestly, where do you people come from? I own a DS, I love the titles, and I like Nintendo, but I can accept that they were soundly beaten by Sony, and then MS, a complete newcomer, proceeded to suck away half of the remaining market from right underneath their feet.
Of course, your statements about the portable market are simply a non-sequitor. We're talking about the console industry here... the portable market is a completely different beast, and one in which, at this point, Nintendo would have to *seriously* misstep in order for a competitor to catch up to them. Wait... that sounds familiar...
There's a reason I specifically mentioned marketshare.:) Yes, they were profitable, but they lost the hearts and minds of gamers, and that's the kind of success that's difficult to recover.
It's weird simply because Nintendo got trounced in the last two generations, and it's not terribly common for the losing company (not in terms of profit, but market share) to come back so strongly (or the remaining competitors to stumble so significantly). It's particularly interesting considering that Nintendo isn't even targeting the same market segment that the other two are, and thus it is, in a sense, looking to redefine the industry in terms of the "casual gamer"... and it might actually succeed.
And Firefox takes this feature one step further! If the text you copied wasn't a valid URL, Firefox will perform an I'm Feeling Lucky Search for you. This is especially fun when the first search result happens to be hardcore porn. And you're at work.
Other than that, if you want the best treatment, you by-and-large come to the US.
Assuming you have the money to do so. 'course, that also applies to US citizens, so at least it's all fair...
It's fashionable to bash the US, and fashionable to bash "Western Medicine", and bashing US Medicine gets you two for the price of one. But that's all it is: fashionable, built on anecdotes. Not terribly well grounded in data.
And for some, it's fashionable to ignore problems right in front of them, despite any data to the contrary. For example, the unfortunately high (and rising) percentage of Americans without healthcare (45 million, as of 2004) might suggest that there's something wrong with the system (the steadily rising increase of premiums, for example, which makes it prohibitively expensive for small businesses to provide coverage). But many would rather plug their ears while chanting "America basher!", rather than admitting there's a problem and working toward a solution.
Well, my experience here in Edmonton Alberta (Canada's northernmost major city) is that RWD is rarely a good thing when you get a big dump of snow... this past winter we got a good meter in the span of a couple days, and every stuck vehicle I saw as a RWD. As for handling, on slick surfaces, the torque generated by the spinning rear tires can make them very difficult to drive safely, as they tend to cause the vehicle to swerve. But, in this case, I suppose YMMV...;)
Handhelds have been a good refuge from 3D graphics in recent years, and I'm almost sad to see the advent of 3D graphics on the DS and PSP.
I agree regarding the PSP (which is a console geared entirely to 3D games). However the DS is still very much a hybrid platform, and as such, there's a healthy dose of 2D and 3D games. This means you'll still get your standard puzzlers, side-scrollers, top-down RPGs, and so forth, while at the same time being able to enjoy games like Mario Kart DS, which are actually better games when done with real 3D hardware. It's really the best of both worlds, IMHO.
And every single reason you cite (gameplay > graphics, 3D obsession, low cost) is why the only games I play regularly are on my DS. And you know what? I regularly buy games that are newly launched, because the price is below my "think-twice" threshold, and I know that they're more likely to match my tastes. Mario Kart, Tetris DS, Advance Wars DS... I bought them all a few weeks after they debuted, and I've yet to feel like I've been ripped off.
TBH, I don't think I'll ever go back to console or PC gaming... portable platforms like the DS force restrictions on the developers that, ironically, result in games that better suit my tastes. Because they can't rely on eye candy to attract gamers, they're forced to provide quality (and unique) gameplay. Additionally, the games on something like the DS aren't likely to require hundreds of hours of investment on my part... Advance Wars is probably the most time consuming game I own, and a single battle only takes an hour or two (more like two, if you're as bad at the game as I am). Of course, even for those two hour epic battles, I can simply close my DS part way through and pick it up later on...
They want the PS3 to sell like the PS2, but at a new, higher price point. However, they're not stupid. Really. I believe that what they want to do is take advantage of the early adopters. Early adopters always help fund R&D, but with the new systems, I think we're going to see this become even more blatant.
Hmm... soak early adopters in an attempt to recover R&D costs (which, BTW, they won't... there's no way they'll get enough early adopters at that price point to make up for even a small amount of the R&D costs), while reducing early market penetration in an environment with an already semi-established competitor, or debut with a competitive price point in order to increase the rate of adoption in the market to establish a base (and garner additional good will from the more casual gaming market). And Sony chooses number 1. You know why? Hubris. They believe that, because they've been so successful in the past, it simply goes without saying that they're trounce the 360 in the next round, and so they don't *need* to attack on price. It's a big mistake, IMHO... just look at the performance of the 360, which is at a similar price point. Lackluster is probably a fair description. So, unless the PS3 has some absolutely killer titles to pull people to it (one of the problems with the 360, and the PSP, interestingly), I don't see why it will fare any better.
Yeah... unfortunately, IMHO, the net neutrality issue has caused not a small amount of cognitive dissonance amongst many Slashdotters. On the one had, they're wannabe libertarians, and so government regulation is bad and the free market is god... err, good. But they also want free internets, which is precisely what net neutrality legislation is trying to protect.
Actually, the tech is quite right. There's a reason RAID-0 is considered an extremely bad idea... your overall failure rate goes up because you are now relying on 0 failures amongst n drives instead of just 1.
However, in the case of servers, this is only really relevant if the servers all depend on one another. Think a database backend, a web server, and, say, a middleware server of some kind. In this case, any one failure breaks the system. So assuming that each server has a 1/10 chance of failing, by consolidating, you go from a 3/10 chance that the system breaks to a 1/10 chance. On the other hand, if you have multiple servers each running independant services (say, email, web server, and DNS), then you go from a 3/10 chance that any one service could go down to a 1/10 change that *all* of them could go down simultaneously. Thus, one would probably opt for a distributed approach, in this case.
But I find it odd that they could misplace all the boxes. The check-in/ check-out procedure used at the archives is fairly regimented- to screw something that large up requires a deliberate effort to delete or mis-file the boxes.
Hmm, I smell a conspiracy! Whaddaya wanna bet, with the higher quality, you can see a boom mic on one of those tapes...
What I'm suggesting is that, just like contents labelling on food and the intrinsic reverse-engineering-ability of a house, a purchaser of software should have some means of determining whether the product they've purchased does everything the supplier claims it does.
ROFL. Yes, people do that all the time. I know when I buy a DVD player, I rip it apart to make sure it works the way the manufacturers claim. I'm sorry, but if the customers cared about this, open source would have blown commercial software out of the water a long LONG time ago.
BTW, comparing a complex software project to food labels or even a house is, frankly, laughable. The idea that any consumer would be able to sufficiently understand the code for a reasonably large software project is downright silly... heck, the companies producing these products rarely have a single individual who understands the product as a whole.
A free market depends totally on transparency and communication
Really! Do you know the secret formula for Coca Cola? What about the details of how nVidia implements it's graphics chips? Or the secret recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken (other than grease)?
I bring these up because these are all examples of trade secrets, without which many companies would not exist. Heck, we even have laws to protect trade secrets. If you force software developers to release their source, they won't have similar protection, as their inventions are directly embodied in the software they create. The only other alternative is to continue to allow patents on software... something that I know I'm not in favour of.
If you think supplying source is bad idea how would you, as government, go about insuring that software, now DMCA protected, is not doing malicious things?
The same could be asked of any black box device. How do I know my car isn't phoning home when I'm not looking? Or that the settop box under my TV isn't monitoring my viewing habits and reporting them to the cable operator? Etc, etc, etc. The only real answer is reverse engineering, which is equally possible with software as it is with hardware. Is it more difficult? Maybe. But it's still possible, if you're that worried.
Oh, and BTW, reverse engineering is explicitely listed as an exception to the DMCA, so enough of that fearmongering.
Alternatively, you do as many corporations and often the government do: hire a company to write custom software, to which you are given the source.
Everything from phoning home personal information
Firewalls.
to making competitors products die
The competitors will quickly figure that out and either sue (in the case of monopoly) or notify their customers, who can then start a class action.
to dying on command when a new version comes out
Yes, I'm sure any company that does this will keep their customers...
to blocking competitors marketing to etc
See number 2.
Incidentally, I love the way certain people around here like to claim that anything that doesn't fit their rather narrow ideology is "socialist".
I know, which is why I brought it up. The prevailing views regarding socialism/communism (and, more generally, leftist socioeconomic policies) around here are rarely accurate. However, those traits stereotypically assigned to such positions, the ones highlighted as faults by so-called libertarians, etc, such as excessive government control, reduced personal freedoms, and so forth, happen to be the very same traits in play here. Specifically, such laws would increase government control over software authors by removing their freedom to choose whether or not to release their source code. Yet, it's those very same individuals who would demand such policies... hence what I consider to be significant cognitive dissonance amongst wanna-be randroids around here. Specifically, they would like an ultra-free market, as long as people do what they want. But they minute they want to close their source code, encrypt their media, or what have you, suddenly they need to be stopped!
Am I the only one who finds it completely ridiculous that using the software by a single user on a single machine could ever require multiple licenses?
Actually, this doesn't surprise me at all. From MS's point of view, one license == one installation. Period. It doesn't matter how many users are using it, or how many pieces of hardware it's deployed on. Each installation requires a separate license. MS's WGA program only makes this more explicit, since you need a unique activation code (and thus license) for each VM you're running.
TBH, I'm surprised you *didn't* think this was the case.
Personally, amongst other changes, one law I'd like to see is that all software sales must include the source.
So you support exactly what I proposed: "You could throw away copyright law and replace it with a law which forced everyone to release the source to their projects whether they liked it or not."
Put another way, you support taking away an authors rights to control what happens to the things they create. That's certainly one point of view. Personally, as a software developer (who releases the source to anything he creates), I believe the authors should be allowed to make that decision. But, hey, I guess you know better than them, eh?
It's so bizarre... so many on Slashdot label themselves libertarians, classical conservatives, etc, and yet this position appears to be the prevailing one, which is really quite antithetical to personal freedoms (in this case, those of the author). And why? Because they believe the rights of the people (to source code, in this case) outweight those of the individual... which sounds an awful lot like the much maligned liberal/socialist point of view.
So you support a person's right to control how their creative works are used (in the case of the GPL, forcing people to release the source of their derivative works) as long as they do what you want?
Yes, it's inconsistent. The only way the GPL is possible is via the rights granted through copyright laws. Without it, people could take your work, modify it, and refuse to release the source, and you'd have no legal recourse. However, because of copyright law, your right to control distribution of derivative works allows you to force a license agreement on the individual (in this case, the GPL). So, you either support the GPL, and by proxy the laws that underpin it, or you don't. Take your pick.
Okay, that's not really true. You could throw away copyright law and replace it with a law which forced everyone to release the source to their projects whether they liked it or not... though IMHO that's even worse, from an individual rights standpoint.
Or just fix the technology and have, built into players, ClearPlay-like functionality. Allow a person to insert a separate memory card or something that provides an edit list which can be used, along with the original content, to provide a modified viewing experience. Users could then purchase EDLs from a third party, or better yet, create EDLs themselves and post them online. Voila, problem solved without having to modify copyright law, which, IMHO, doesn't need to be tinkered with for this one special circumstance.
Umm... that's quite the randroidian rant, you have there, but I fail to see how it answers my question. You stated that copyright doesn't work. Why?
And before you start, I should point out that the copyright system, as it exists *today*, is buggered up not because it's enacted by the government, or that it's a federal law, but because the US democratic system itself is broken, thanks to the acceptance of institutionalized bribary by it's citizenry. Quit equating money with speech and make bribary illegal, and I guarantee you, the US will be better off.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like Jordan has been modifying and incorporating stuff from Wicca, specifically the three-fold law.
Meh, that's a matter of opinion. ;) I read up to Path of Daggers and gave up after finally admitting to myself that Jordan had mired himself into an overly convoluted, meandering plot that I suspect he could barely keep track of, let alone me, a mere reader. Heck, I should've kept notes, just to keep track of all the characters, settings, and their relationships with one another... it really got quite ridiculous, IMHO.
You *must* be joking. Sony is doing it's best to eliminate any possibility for piracy, and as a side effect, homebrew on the PSP. The only option for PSP owners is to downgrade their BIOS, and then never play a new game, for fear that their BIOS would be involuntarily upgraded.
Meanwhile, you can get a simple passthrough card and a slot-2 storage device for the DS for under $100, these days. You can then grab devkitarm and hack away. And you'll love it... the DS hardware is very simple and easy to work with. Heck, the 3D registers are practically a direct mapping from OpenGL.
I seem to recall Dreamcast did not require a modchip to play pirated games. You only needed a special boot disk of some kind which makes pirating way easier.
Oh, no no, it wasn't that hard. All you have to do is burn a CD. That's all. Granted, the format is *slightly* unusual, but you can burn a working DC disc using cdrecord quite easily. This is one of the reasons why it's such a fantastic homebrew platform (I picked up a used one just for that reason).
However, the DC also supported a weird hybrid CD which had a low density component and a high density component. These can't be burned using regular CD burners, AFAIK. OTOH, most games could be fit on a single regular CD.
Yes, going from #1 to barely tied for second is just fine... Honestly, where do you people come from? I own a DS, I love the titles, and I like Nintendo, but I can accept that they were soundly beaten by Sony, and then MS, a complete newcomer, proceeded to suck away half of the remaining market from right underneath their feet.
Of course, your statements about the portable market are simply a non-sequitor. We're talking about the console industry here... the portable market is a completely different beast, and one in which, at this point, Nintendo would have to *seriously* misstep in order for a competitor to catch up to them. Wait... that sounds familiar...
How does going from the number one player in the biz to being matched or beaten by a complete newcomer to the industry *not* count as being trounced?
There's a reason I specifically mentioned marketshare. :) Yes, they were profitable, but they lost the hearts and minds of gamers, and that's the kind of success that's difficult to recover.
It's weird simply because Nintendo got trounced in the last two generations, and it's not terribly common for the losing company (not in terms of profit, but market share) to come back so strongly (or the remaining competitors to stumble so significantly). It's particularly interesting considering that Nintendo isn't even targeting the same market segment that the other two are, and thus it is, in a sense, looking to redefine the industry in terms of the "casual gamer"... and it might actually succeed.
And Firefox takes this feature one step further! If the text you copied wasn't a valid URL, Firefox will perform an I'm Feeling Lucky Search for you. This is especially fun when the first search result happens to be hardcore porn. And you're at work.
Other than that, if you want the best treatment, you by-and-large come to the US.
Assuming you have the money to do so. 'course, that also applies to US citizens, so at least it's all fair...
It's fashionable to bash the US, and fashionable to bash "Western Medicine", and bashing US Medicine gets you two for the price of one. But that's all it is: fashionable, built on anecdotes. Not terribly well grounded in data.
And for some, it's fashionable to ignore problems right in front of them, despite any data to the contrary. For example, the unfortunately high (and rising) percentage of Americans without healthcare (45 million, as of 2004) might suggest that there's something wrong with the system (the steadily rising increase of premiums, for example, which makes it prohibitively expensive for small businesses to provide coverage). But many would rather plug their ears while chanting "America basher!", rather than admitting there's a problem and working toward a solution.
How old is your brother, if you don't mind me asking?
Well, my experience here in Edmonton Alberta (Canada's northernmost major city) is that RWD is rarely a good thing when you get a big dump of snow... this past winter we got a good meter in the span of a couple days, and every stuck vehicle I saw as a RWD. As for handling, on slick surfaces, the torque generated by the spinning rear tires can make them very difficult to drive safely, as they tend to cause the vehicle to swerve. But, in this case, I suppose YMMV... ;)
Handhelds have been a good refuge from 3D graphics in recent years, and I'm almost sad to see the advent of 3D graphics on the DS and PSP.
I agree regarding the PSP (which is a console geared entirely to 3D games). However the DS is still very much a hybrid platform, and as such, there's a healthy dose of 2D and 3D games. This means you'll still get your standard puzzlers, side-scrollers, top-down RPGs, and so forth, while at the same time being able to enjoy games like Mario Kart DS, which are actually better games when done with real 3D hardware. It's really the best of both worlds, IMHO.
And every single reason you cite (gameplay > graphics, 3D obsession, low cost) is why the only games I play regularly are on my DS. And you know what? I regularly buy games that are newly launched, because the price is below my "think-twice" threshold, and I know that they're more likely to match my tastes. Mario Kart, Tetris DS, Advance Wars DS... I bought them all a few weeks after they debuted, and I've yet to feel like I've been ripped off.
TBH, I don't think I'll ever go back to console or PC gaming... portable platforms like the DS force restrictions on the developers that, ironically, result in games that better suit my tastes. Because they can't rely on eye candy to attract gamers, they're forced to provide quality (and unique) gameplay. Additionally, the games on something like the DS aren't likely to require hundreds of hours of investment on my part... Advance Wars is probably the most time consuming game I own, and a single battle only takes an hour or two (more like two, if you're as bad at the game as I am). Of course, even for those two hour epic battles, I can simply close my DS part way through and pick it up later on...
They want the PS3 to sell like the PS2, but at a new, higher price point. However, they're not stupid. Really. I believe that what they want to do is take advantage of the early adopters. Early adopters always help fund R&D, but with the new systems, I think we're going to see this become even more blatant.
Hmm... soak early adopters in an attempt to recover R&D costs (which, BTW, they won't... there's no way they'll get enough early adopters at that price point to make up for even a small amount of the R&D costs), while reducing early market penetration in an environment with an already semi-established competitor, or debut with a competitive price point in order to increase the rate of adoption in the market to establish a base (and garner additional good will from the more casual gaming market). And Sony chooses number 1. You know why? Hubris. They believe that, because they've been so successful in the past, it simply goes without saying that they're trounce the 360 in the next round, and so they don't *need* to attack on price. It's a big mistake, IMHO... just look at the performance of the 360, which is at a similar price point. Lackluster is probably a fair description. So, unless the PS3 has some absolutely killer titles to pull people to it (one of the problems with the 360, and the PSP, interestingly), I don't see why it will fare any better.
Yeah... unfortunately, IMHO, the net neutrality issue has caused not a small amount of cognitive dissonance amongst many Slashdotters. On the one had, they're wannabe libertarians, and so government regulation is bad and the free market is god... err, good. But they also want free internets, which is precisely what net neutrality legislation is trying to protect.
Actually, the tech is quite right. There's a reason RAID-0 is considered an extremely bad idea... your overall failure rate goes up because you are now relying on 0 failures amongst n drives instead of just 1.
However, in the case of servers, this is only really relevant if the servers all depend on one another. Think a database backend, a web server, and, say, a middleware server of some kind. In this case, any one failure breaks the system. So assuming that each server has a 1/10 chance of failing, by consolidating, you go from a 3/10 chance that the system breaks to a 1/10 chance. On the other hand, if you have multiple servers each running independant services (say, email, web server, and DNS), then you go from a 3/10 chance that any one service could go down to a 1/10 change that *all* of them could go down simultaneously. Thus, one would probably opt for a distributed approach, in this case.
But I find it odd that they could misplace all the boxes. The check-in/ check-out procedure used at the archives is fairly regimented- to screw something that large up requires a deliberate effort to delete or mis-file the boxes.
Hmm, I smell a conspiracy! Whaddaya wanna bet, with the higher quality, you can see a boom mic on one of those tapes...
What I'm suggesting is that, just like contents labelling on food and the intrinsic reverse-engineering-ability of a house, a purchaser of software should have some means of determining whether the product they've purchased does everything the supplier claims it does.
ROFL. Yes, people do that all the time. I know when I buy a DVD player, I rip it apart to make sure it works the way the manufacturers claim. I'm sorry, but if the customers cared about this, open source would have blown commercial software out of the water a long LONG time ago.
BTW, comparing a complex software project to food labels or even a house is, frankly, laughable. The idea that any consumer would be able to sufficiently understand the code for a reasonably large software project is downright silly... heck, the companies producing these products rarely have a single individual who understands the product as a whole.
A free market depends totally on transparency and communication
Really! Do you know the secret formula for Coca Cola? What about the details of how nVidia implements it's graphics chips? Or the secret recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken (other than grease)?
I bring these up because these are all examples of trade secrets, without which many companies would not exist. Heck, we even have laws to protect trade secrets. If you force software developers to release their source, they won't have similar protection, as their inventions are directly embodied in the software they create. The only other alternative is to continue to allow patents on software... something that I know I'm not in favour of.
If you think supplying source is bad idea how would you, as government, go about insuring that software, now DMCA protected, is not doing malicious things?
The same could be asked of any black box device. How do I know my car isn't phoning home when I'm not looking? Or that the settop box under my TV isn't monitoring my viewing habits and reporting them to the cable operator? Etc, etc, etc. The only real answer is reverse engineering, which is equally possible with software as it is with hardware. Is it more difficult? Maybe. But it's still possible, if you're that worried.
Oh, and BTW, reverse engineering is explicitely listed as an exception to the DMCA, so enough of that fearmongering.
Alternatively, you do as many corporations and often the government do: hire a company to write custom software, to which you are given the source.
Everything from phoning home personal information
Firewalls.
to making competitors products die
The competitors will quickly figure that out and either sue (in the case of monopoly) or notify their customers, who can then start a class action.
to dying on command when a new version comes out
Yes, I'm sure any company that does this will keep their customers...
to blocking competitors marketing to etc
See number 2.
Incidentally, I love the way certain people around here like to claim that anything that doesn't fit their rather narrow ideology is "socialist".
I know, which is why I brought it up. The prevailing views regarding socialism/communism (and, more generally, leftist socioeconomic policies) around here are rarely accurate. However, those traits stereotypically assigned to such positions, the ones highlighted as faults by so-called libertarians, etc, such as excessive government control, reduced personal freedoms, and so forth, happen to be the very same traits in play here. Specifically, such laws would increase government control over software authors by removing their freedom to choose whether or not to release their source code. Yet, it's those very same individuals who would demand such policies... hence what I consider to be significant cognitive dissonance amongst wanna-be randroids around here. Specifically, they would like an ultra-free market, as long as people do what they want. But they minute they want to close their source code, encrypt their media, or what have you, suddenly they need to be stopped!
Am I the only one who finds it completely ridiculous that using the software by a single user on a single machine could ever require multiple licenses?
Actually, this doesn't surprise me at all. From MS's point of view, one license == one installation. Period. It doesn't matter how many users are using it, or how many pieces of hardware it's deployed on. Each installation requires a separate license. MS's WGA program only makes this more explicit, since you need a unique activation code (and thus license) for each VM you're running.
TBH, I'm surprised you *didn't* think this was the case.
Personally, amongst other changes, one law I'd like to see is that all software sales must include the source.
So you support exactly what I proposed: "You could throw away copyright law and replace it with a law which forced everyone to release the source to their projects whether they liked it or not."
Put another way, you support taking away an authors rights to control what happens to the things they create. That's certainly one point of view. Personally, as a software developer (who releases the source to anything he creates), I believe the authors should be allowed to make that decision. But, hey, I guess you know better than them, eh?
It's so bizarre... so many on Slashdot label themselves libertarians, classical conservatives, etc, and yet this position appears to be the prevailing one, which is really quite antithetical to personal freedoms (in this case, those of the author). And why? Because they believe the rights of the people (to source code, in this case) outweight those of the individual... which sounds an awful lot like the much maligned liberal/socialist point of view.
So you support a person's right to control how their creative works are used (in the case of the GPL, forcing people to release the source of their derivative works) as long as they do what you want?
Yes, it's inconsistent. The only way the GPL is possible is via the rights granted through copyright laws. Without it, people could take your work, modify it, and refuse to release the source, and you'd have no legal recourse. However, because of copyright law, your right to control distribution of derivative works allows you to force a license agreement on the individual (in this case, the GPL). So, you either support the GPL, and by proxy the laws that underpin it, or you don't. Take your pick.
Okay, that's not really true. You could throw away copyright law and replace it with a law which forced everyone to release the source to their projects whether they liked it or not... though IMHO that's even worse, from an individual rights standpoint.
Or just fix the technology and have, built into players, ClearPlay-like functionality. Allow a person to insert a separate memory card or something that provides an edit list which can be used, along with the original content, to provide a modified viewing experience. Users could then purchase EDLs from a third party, or better yet, create EDLs themselves and post them online. Voila, problem solved without having to modify copyright law, which, IMHO, doesn't need to be tinkered with for this one special circumstance.
Umm... that's quite the randroidian rant, you have there, but I fail to see how it answers my question. You stated that copyright doesn't work. Why?
And before you start, I should point out that the copyright system, as it exists *today*, is buggered up not because it's enacted by the government, or that it's a federal law, but because the US democratic system itself is broken, thanks to the acceptance of institutionalized bribary by it's citizenry. Quit equating money with speech and make bribary illegal, and I guarantee you, the US will be better off.