Wow, that seems pretty harsh. It's one thing to destroy in-game things that took time to build, and call that a loss of the real-world assets that you had to spend in order to build those objects. But to create a game such that your future assets are vulnerable to in-game attack is really too harsh.
Future assets? What future assets?
OK, maybe not the best choice of words.
It's as though in Street Fighter II you could execute a special move that would decrement your opponents' Credits, instead of their health meter.
In SF2 you fight until defeated. If you are a good player, and remain undefeated, you can keep playing all day long. If somebody better than you comes along and defeats you, your game is over and you must pay more to continue.
If you're playing against folks who are worse than you, $0.25 == 3 hours of playtime.
If you're playing against folks who are better than you, $0.25 == 5 minutes of playtime.
Isn't that pretty much exactly what you just described?
No, it's not at all what I just described. What I described is, if you put extra quarters into an arcade game, but then someone in-game blows up your quarters, before you have the chance to play them. Each credit represents future playtime, which is what I meant by "future assets".
Your version of it is, "If you suck, you lose faster." That's completely fine and fair.
Wow, that seems pretty harsh. It's one thing to destroy in-game things that took time to build, and call that a loss of the real-world assets that you had to spend in order to build those objects. But to create a game such that your future assets are vulnerable to in-game attack is really too harsh. It's as though in Street Fighter II you could execute a special move that would decrement your opponents' Credits, instead of their health meter.
Does this mean that file sharing and sites like Wikileaks could just pull up anchor and go to the next country if being pressured by local law enforcement? Interesting the possibilities that this could have. Can think either bad or good, maybe even both.
No; as soon as they hit international water, they'd be a free target for anyone who hated them.
I'm not exactly sure how maritime law works, but I'd imagine they'd also be under the jurisdiction of whatever flag they happened to fly on their ship.
IF, however, they were able to set up a datacenter in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, they should be able to operate as they please, as there is no law there.
Libraries in my area are pretty well locked down. You can't log into the computer without your library card number (tied to your state ID and SSN), and you can't browse in private mode or delete your browsing history. Despite many librarians being champions of intellectual freedom and privacy, libraries are ultimately part of the Establishment.
As for internet cafes, it's a lot easier to get anonymous access to the network, but your browser will betray you. Browser fingerprinting can uniquely identify nearly everyone. Not only that, but regardless of whether you block cookies and flash and javascript or not, your activities can be logged on the server side, and server logs can be shared. Facebook already knows who you are on many non-facebook.com domains that you access.
Your ISP knows where you go. The destinations you reach know where you go. It's fairly easy to track and trace back to your real, legal ID. Neither your ISP or the web sites you visit have any obligation to protect you or act in your interest.
From a privacy standpoint, we're all screwed.
The only way I can see to respond to this state of affairs is for everyone to be completely open about who they are, and what they do. If there are millions of people standing up and stating publicly that they do (whatever -- smoking pot, violating copyright, criticising the government or corporations) it's going to be a lot harder to single out individuals to make examples of them, and a lot more likely that these large classes of people will be treated as voting blocs rather than as criminals or undesirables.
This is an awesome hack, but I would imagine it's nearly impossible to play a videogame by moving your eyes like that. Your eyes are already busy, dedicated to seeing stuff. And usually you probably are staring at the thing you need to avoid/shoot, not looking to where your game avatar needs to go. And even if you are looking where you're supposed to go next, probably this doesn't involve large-scale eyeball motion like "look up at the ceiling" to go up when you really just need to move a few sprite blocks up.
You look at our history pre WWII and we pretty much tried to stay out of everyone else's business for the most part.
Not true; we spent that period extending and securing the homeland -- pushing out the Spanish and Native Americans.
Anyway, after WWII, technology had made the world so small that it was no longer feasible to stay out of everyone's business. It's an era of dominate or be dominated, now.
I used to notice this with websites. About the time that the AdBlock extension for Firefox came out, I had developed an inability to see any content in a web page that was placed in the region I was accustomed to ignoring banner advertisements. It took me a while to reprogram my eyes to actually look in that region again after I started blocking ads.
Why don't you save a personal copy of the story as you saw it (fair use)?
Oh, I do that too.
I only blog about stuff I have something to say about. I also put a url to go back to the original story, as a way of crediting the source. Hopefully readers click through and give them ad revenue.
It's worthwhile to them, because I capture only text, not any images, and I don't capture links to related stories, etc.
Of course, since I run AdBlock/NoScript/FlashBlock, I never see their ads. I guess I'm double stealing, in their eyes. But honestly, I'm only protecting my resources. Their ads take up space and cpu cycles on my computer, I have a right to block if I want to.
Then, if the story changes, you can revise your own article to point out the changes, quoting both the relevant portions of the old and new text (also fair use).
I could do that, but I don't always go back and check articles to see if they've been modified; I am only interested in the article at the time that I found it, and am preserving it in its own state as though I clipped it out of the newspaper.
Posting it on a blog is like if I owned a store with a bulletin board, and posted articles on it that I felt were important, with my comments, and allowed others to comment as well. As I see it, it's completely fair use, analogous to something that is perfectly legal to do with a physical copy.
Yes, sometimes articles can be corrected to fix errors. Sometimes they are corrected to fix the reporting with respect to the official truth. We used to have a trail of tangible copies that would help us to establish this in the past. We're in danger of losing that now.
If it were guaranteed to be true then you have no reason to use anything other than when.
"It" *could* be broken now, but if it's not, then it's a veritable certainty that it will eventually break, so we say "if and when".
N00bs who see an "if" standing alone will think to themselves, "I'll take my chances, maybe it won't happen." More experienced people throw the "and when" in there to emphasize that the less ideal branch of the conditional must be handled robustly.
It has less to do with defining the logic and more to do with emphasis on the eventual case so that it will be adequately handled.
The person who issues the "when" statement might be overstating their certainty about it, in some cases, but they do mean to imply that the conditional will at some point eventually return true. A naked "if" leaves open "maybe it never will happen" as a possibility.
I copy and paste entire articles in my blog. I started doing this when I realized that the news changes the stories. Post-publishing editing is an Orwellian fact of life. I like to preserve what I know I saw at one point, so I have something I can point back to in order to prove I'm not crazy. I consider it a mild form of saving the world.
You miss the point of "if and when" completely. "If" might not ever be true. When implies that it certainly will, but when is not known. If is all you really need to say but "and when" adds to it the certainty that the conditional will eventually be true, at some point.
Steven Rambam mentioned this (and showed a cool video of it) at his "Privacy is Dead: Get Over It" talk at The Next HOPE. It's too bad there wasn't any coverage of The Next HOPE on/.
Ok, bear with me for the analogy I'm about to make, because I understand that not all copyright violation is piracy, and piracy isn't theft... but this is like asking if any businesses have failed due to theft.
What I mean by that is: If the business failed, probably you never heard about it. It's rare that a business would fail due to theft after becoming well known. Real, successful businesses experience theft, and it harms them, but they can account for it in their business model and control it to a degree that the theft does not cause them to fail. But if they don't control adequately, they can certainly fail due to theft. But it's a known, solved problem and so well-known businesses generally do not fail due to inability to control theft.
On the other hand, if something is pirated a lot of something, probably you have heard of it. Because things are pirated a lot because they're popular. You don't pirate things you've never heard of, because you've never heard of it to know about it in order to think about pirating it in the first place.
So piracy won't cause something to fail. It sucking will cause it to fail.
The real question is will piracy have a net positive or a net negative effect on the revenue generated by a popular, successful product. Something can be harmful without causing it to fail. And a secondary question is, is a net negative harm caused by piracy something that cannot be accounted for in the business model, such that the business can succeed despite the harm.
My guess is that completely unchecked piracy can be harmful, but that there seems to be no way possible to adequately control it. Thus, the business model needs to change from one of selling copies of something, to something else.
What that is, no one has any clear idea of, and what works for some may not work universally. Thus, the collective constant shitting and re-shitting of the industry's collective pants.
Shouldn't every flashlight company in the world be able to sue for a share of Star Wars royalties, then? A light saber looks basically like a fancy flashlight.
I hope Lucas also got a patent on a process for establishing "prior art" through the use of a non-functional prop, imagination, and delusions of grandeur.
People with very common names will not be impacted in the same way that people with less common names. Real names are non-unique. How does this help? cf. TSA "no-fly" list.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that seems pretty harsh. It's one thing to destroy in-game things that took time to build, and call that a loss of the real-world assets that you had to spend in order to build those objects. But to create a game such that your future assets are vulnerable to in-game attack is really too harsh.
Future assets? What future assets?
OK, maybe not the best choice of words.
It's as though in Street Fighter II you could execute a special move that would decrement your opponents' Credits, instead of their health meter.
In SF2 you fight until defeated. If you are a good player, and remain undefeated, you can keep playing all day long. If somebody better than you comes along and defeats you, your game is over and you must pay more to continue.
If you're playing against folks who are worse than you, $0.25 == 3 hours of playtime.
If you're playing against folks who are better than you, $0.25 == 5 minutes of playtime.
Isn't that pretty much exactly what you just described?
No, it's not at all what I just described. What I described is, if you put extra quarters into an arcade game, but then someone in-game blows up your quarters, before you have the chance to play them. Each credit represents future playtime, which is what I meant by "future assets".
Your version of it is, "If you suck, you lose faster." That's completely fine and fair.
Wow, that seems pretty harsh. It's one thing to destroy in-game things that took time to build, and call that a loss of the real-world assets that you had to spend in order to build those objects. But to create a game such that your future assets are vulnerable to in-game attack is really too harsh. It's as though in Street Fighter II you could execute a special move that would decrement your opponents' Credits, instead of their health meter.
Does this mean that file sharing and sites like Wikileaks could just pull up anchor and go to the next country if being pressured by local law enforcement? Interesting the possibilities that this could have. Can think either bad or good, maybe even both.
No; as soon as they hit international water, they'd be a free target for anyone who hated them.
I'm not exactly sure how maritime law works, but I'd imagine they'd also be under the jurisdiction of whatever flag they happened to fly on their ship.
IF, however, they were able to set up a datacenter in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, they should be able to operate as they please, as there is no law there.
# sudo take it off
Your verb tense implies that there is only one "sane". I think *that* is the problem.
Also, nice Shatner comma after "this".
Wii reed lotz of buq'z, tank ewe berry mooch. Sum ov use jist kant speel gud.
Libraries in my area are pretty well locked down. You can't log into the computer without your library card number (tied to your state ID and SSN), and you can't browse in private mode or delete your browsing history. Despite many librarians being champions of intellectual freedom and privacy, libraries are ultimately part of the Establishment.
As for internet cafes, it's a lot easier to get anonymous access to the network, but your browser will betray you. Browser fingerprinting can uniquely identify nearly everyone. Not only that, but regardless of whether you block cookies and flash and javascript or not, your activities can be logged on the server side, and server logs can be shared. Facebook already knows who you are on many non-facebook.com domains that you access.
Your ISP knows where you go. The destinations you reach know where you go. It's fairly easy to track and trace back to your real, legal ID. Neither your ISP or the web sites you visit have any obligation to protect you or act in your interest.
From a privacy standpoint, we're all screwed.
The only way I can see to respond to this state of affairs is for everyone to be completely open about who they are, and what they do. If there are millions of people standing up and stating publicly that they do (whatever -- smoking pot, violating copyright, criticising the government or corporations) it's going to be a lot harder to single out individuals to make examples of them, and a lot more likely that these large classes of people will be treated as voting blocs rather than as criminals or undesirables.
This is an awesome hack, but I would imagine it's nearly impossible to play a videogame by moving your eyes like that. Your eyes are already busy, dedicated to seeing stuff. And usually you probably are staring at the thing you need to avoid/shoot, not looking to where your game avatar needs to go. And even if you are looking where you're supposed to go next, probably this doesn't involve large-scale eyeball motion like "look up at the ceiling" to go up when you really just need to move a few sprite blocks up.
Pro tip: If the router is "yours", you might want to set a password for it that only you know.
Has there ever been a dumber article on /.? I think this is a strong candidate for winning the contest.
Thanks for clearing that up ;-)
http://pixelatedgeek.com/2009/09/steve-ballmer-as-dk/
I really want someone to make a Donkey Kong rom hack with chairs instead of barrels and Ballmer instead of DK.
I'm not sure I'd want organs from someone who has ALS. Wouldn't that become a problem for me in time?
You look at our history pre WWII and we pretty much tried to stay out of everyone else's business for the most part.
Not true; we spent that period extending and securing the homeland -- pushing out the Spanish and Native Americans.
Anyway, after WWII, technology had made the world so small that it was no longer feasible to stay out of everyone's business. It's an era of dominate or be dominated, now.
I used to notice this with websites. About the time that the AdBlock extension for Firefox came out, I had developed an inability to see any content in a web page that was placed in the region I was accustomed to ignoring banner advertisements. It took me a while to reprogram my eyes to actually look in that region again after I started blocking ads.
Why don't you save a personal copy of the story as you saw it (fair use)?
Oh, I do that too.
I only blog about stuff I have something to say about. I also put a url to go back to the original story, as a way of crediting the source. Hopefully readers click through and give them ad revenue.
It's worthwhile to them, because I capture only text, not any images, and I don't capture links to related stories, etc.
Of course, since I run AdBlock/NoScript/FlashBlock, I never see their ads. I guess I'm double stealing, in their eyes. But honestly, I'm only protecting my resources. Their ads take up space and cpu cycles on my computer, I have a right to block if I want to.
Then, if the story changes, you can revise your own article to point out the changes, quoting both the relevant portions of the old and new text (also fair use).
I could do that, but I don't always go back and check articles to see if they've been modified; I am only interested in the article at the time that I found it, and am preserving it in its own state as though I clipped it out of the newspaper.
Posting it on a blog is like if I owned a store with a bulletin board, and posted articles on it that I felt were important, with my comments, and allowed others to comment as well. As I see it, it's completely fair use, analogous to something that is perfectly legal to do with a physical copy.
Yes, sometimes articles can be corrected to fix errors. Sometimes they are corrected to fix the reporting with respect to the official truth. We used to have a trail of tangible copies that would help us to establish this in the past. We're in danger of losing that now.
If it were guaranteed to be true then you have no reason to use anything other than when.
"It" *could* be broken now, but if it's not, then it's a veritable certainty that it will eventually break, so we say "if and when".
N00bs who see an "if" standing alone will think to themselves, "I'll take my chances, maybe it won't happen." More experienced people throw the "and when" in there to emphasize that the less ideal branch of the conditional must be handled robustly.
It has less to do with defining the logic and more to do with emphasis on the eventual case so that it will be adequately handled.
The person who issues the "when" statement might be overstating their certainty about it, in some cases, but they do mean to imply that the conditional will at some point eventually return true. A naked "if" leaves open "maybe it never will happen" as a possibility.
I copy and paste entire articles in my blog. I started doing this when I realized that the news changes the stories. Post-publishing editing is an Orwellian fact of life. I like to preserve what I know I saw at one point, so I have something I can point back to in order to prove I'm not crazy. I consider it a mild form of saving the world.
You miss the point of "if and when" completely. "If" might not ever be true. When implies that it certainly will, but when is not known. If is all you really need to say but "and when" adds to it the certainty that the conditional will eventually be true, at some point.
Steven Rambam mentioned this (and showed a cool video of it) at his "Privacy is Dead: Get Over It" talk at The Next HOPE. It's too bad there wasn't any coverage of The Next HOPE on /.
Ok, bear with me for the analogy I'm about to make, because I understand that not all copyright violation is piracy, and piracy isn't theft... but this is like asking if any businesses have failed due to theft.
What I mean by that is: If the business failed, probably you never heard about it. It's rare that a business would fail due to theft after becoming well known. Real, successful businesses experience theft, and it harms them, but they can account for it in their business model and control it to a degree that the theft does not cause them to fail. But if they don't control adequately, they can certainly fail due to theft. But it's a known, solved problem and so well-known businesses generally do not fail due to inability to control theft.
On the other hand, if something is pirated a lot of something, probably you have heard of it. Because things are pirated a lot because they're popular. You don't pirate things you've never heard of, because you've never heard of it to know about it in order to think about pirating it in the first place.
So piracy won't cause something to fail. It sucking will cause it to fail.
The real question is will piracy have a net positive or a net negative effect on the revenue generated by a popular, successful product. Something can be harmful without causing it to fail. And a secondary question is, is a net negative harm caused by piracy something that cannot be accounted for in the business model, such that the business can succeed despite the harm.
My guess is that completely unchecked piracy can be harmful, but that there seems to be no way possible to adequately control it. Thus, the business model needs to change from one of selling copies of something, to something else.
What that is, no one has any clear idea of, and what works for some may not work universally. Thus, the collective constant shitting and re-shitting of the industry's collective pants.
Shouldn't every flashlight company in the world be able to sue for a share of Star Wars royalties, then? A light saber looks basically like a fancy flashlight.
I hope Lucas also got a patent on a process for establishing "prior art" through the use of a non-functional prop, imagination, and delusions of grandeur.
Also, I bet a lot of WoW freaks will legally change their name to their avatar's name. That should be fun.
People with very common names will not be impacted in the same way that people with less common names. Real names are non-unique. How does this help? cf. TSA "no-fly" list.