[AP Washington, D.C.] - The passage of an anti-spam bill has been blamed for the worst inflation seen in the whole of human history.
"We never realized the consequences of making each unsolicited "spam" email cost $500," said Rep. Heather Wilson. "Everyone in America with an email address suddenly and instantaneously saw their income magnify over a thousand-fold overnight."
The well-intentioned Anti-Spam bill, when passed into law, caused email-accounts to become an instant gold mine. The average user, who gets between 10 and 25 unsolicited, or "spam" emails per day, resulting in a net income of between $5000 and $12,500 per day.
But many internet users hold multiple e-mail accounts, and each could be a potential boon in the new economy, which replaces traditional manufacturing and service jobs as the primary means of income with civil suit legislation.
"This is better than being Bill Gates," said John Q. Public. "Finally all those promises I've been seeing about becoming an internet millionaire by doing nothing have started to come through. I have an AOL address that's been active since 1992 -- that baby's generating over $200 million a day for me."
The resulting inflation, however, has sent the world economy into a steep downward spiral which few, if any economists predict will reverse any time soon.
If this doesn't sound like vaporware I don't know what does...
On the other hand, I often solve problems by procrastinating so long that there's no point in doing the task any longer. This may in fact be an optimal solution for many problems. Way to go, scientists, for figuring out something I knew instinctively when I was 12.
I like being able to sit and actually read court transcripts, assuming they're not too dry and technical. Whether you agree with the argumentation or not, this is the way democracy should work -- at least in a democracy where, increasingly, the law seems to be defined by the courts as much as by the legislature. Far better than an out-of-court settlement with undisclosed terms and sealed documents.
Knowing the current trends in IP law, I'm very surprized that the scientists didn't modify the babies so that they would be *unable* to reproduce. Unauthorized reproduction would be a violation of their IP rights, after all.
Scientists have confirmed that the first genetically altered humans have been born and are healthy.
[Bold emphasis mine.]
Why no announcement of this experiment before the babies were conceived? Why no "Genetically Modified Pregnancy Continues On Schedule" articles? Why no "Genetically Modified Babies Planned. 'Race of Supermen Possible,' Claim Scientists"?
I wonder if the births would have ever been reported at all if the GM humans had not been born healthy? I'm guessing the scientists would only want to bring attention to a successful story, and bury news about a failure so that the media wouldn't crucify them for trying to "play god."
But still, I have to wonder how many times they might have tried this and been unsuccessful?
Is there a website where you can order these? I'd like to have maybe 5-6 of these modified girls done right now so that they can be available to provide entertainment for my retirement party in about 20 years.
I'd like red hair and freckles, perky breast gene set to "on", and hold the fertility.
I dunno, maybe it's a dumb question, but how does anyone *know* if GPL'ed code is being used by these people if all they're distributing is the binaries? Please forgive if I'm totally clueless in this regard, I'm genuinely curious...
Maybe it'd be better to "seed" the Third World with inexpensive, minimalistic computers with the approximate capabilities of, say, an 8086 PC, or an Apple II, or a Commodore 64, but an architecture which is intuitively easy to program for. Price it at, say, $1.50 USD or so.
Let the people teach themselves to use these computers; they'll be forced to teach themselves how to program in order to do anything useful with the machines, (and it's a lot easier to learn to program on a computer that only has around 64k of RAM and, say, 512kb of storage space.) In about 20 years or so, the Third World will be a nation of budding hackers, cleverly designing their own IT infrastructure.
Incidentally, I notice that Merriam-Webster has (genuinely) added this to their definition of piracy:
3 : the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright
Dictionaries only report the way people are commonly using words. They don't make a value judgment as to whether that usage is "correct" or not. The appearance of that definition of "piracy" in the dictionary is thus unsurprising and means basically nothing as far as the issue of whether copying and sharing is piracy or theft or being a good neighbor.
----
Self-healing is OK, I guess, but how about self-replicating servers? This would be a sweet deal... buy one, and let it breed into a population of servers that grow with your network. Talk about scalability... In the background let it run a program that auto-designs the next-generation processor. You'll never have an obsolete architecture. And, oh yeah, have it write its own software apps, compiled to be optimized for its most recently-evolved specs. And then have AI agents running inside that will use the software for [productivity/gaming/pr0n/whatever].
It is being said that "Some teenagers are so deeply entrapped by such internet cafes that their minds are severely distorted."
I wonder if any non-/. readers will notice how much this sounds like the rhetoric that the pro-censorship crowd uses to get people in this country to support legislation that would attempt to censor the internet. Compare it to W.'s "hearts going dark" quote from the presidential debates.
Why is it that when China tries to control free speech, we can see it as oppression and tyranny, but when our leaders try to do the same exact thing we applaud them for trying to be moral, clean up smut, and save the children?
If cloning is illegal, then you've got illegal people to deal with. A clone will probably not be allowed to have rights or citizenship, or seek legal protections against human rights violations, and thus will be completely unable to participate in civilization or society. If enough of these illegals are created, we'll see a permanent underclass without any rights.
This is wrong. We must be sure that if we do make human cloning illegal that we punish the cloners, not the clones. The clones are innocent.
I'm not sure how you disagree since your suggestions mesh very well with what I had envisioned...
However, I don't think Golf is not the closest analogy to deathmatch that I can think of... Paintball is. And I've seen paintball televised. And it can be done even better when the action takes place virtually. I'll explain again why:
You're absolutely right about the need for multiple camera placements and angles. That's what I was calling for. By creating the input log and recording all relevant info, you can run that info through the game engine and recreate the game in its totality. Then you can re-play this as much as you want, putting a free-roaming ghost in the map who can film a sequence from the game from one angle, then "rewind" the action and put the camera in another location and film the same action from a different angle... or simultaneous events on a different area of the map.
In fact, if you wanted, you could run this script on a computer with the graphics and sound configurations set to the highest possible quality, which woudl have resulted in too much lag during the actual playing. Render it on a super-computer, taking your time with the animation to achieve super-realistic quality.
Then you put your color commentary voice-over in, and you've got a polished, finished product ready for mass consumption and advertising and endorsement dollars.
As someone who enjoys FPS-type games and who is dismayed at the bad rap they get from "concerned" parents types, I think it would be great if FPS tournaments could receive the same kind of promotional attention that other sports get. This could help get gamers some well-deserved legitimacy in the eyes of the mainstream public.
As an example, skateboarding has done well for itself as a pastime by marketing itself as an "X-treme" sport. Skateboarders had suffered under an undeserved reputation as being vandals, delinquents, etc. Amateur skaters had nowhere to go to practice their skills and ended up in places where they weren't wanted, like parking lots, where they were persecuted and harassed. But once skateboarding started to get itself organized and began to televise professional events, things slowly started to change. Now, many cities have skate parks where kids can go practice, and they aren't automatically looked at as criminals.
I see this possibility emerging for FPS enthusiasts as well. But I don't think that FPS lends itself well to a live multicast. Without having some kind of announcer/moderator giving a play-by-play to explain what's going on, who's in the lead, and what's happening, a multicast is bound to be hard to follow.
One of the biggest problems facing the creation of a cohesive documentation of a multiplayer tourney is the need for ubiquitous "cameras".
Ideally, what I think should happen should be this: The multiplayer game takes place, and each players' moves are logged and saved, along with their health status and weapons inventories, etc.
This log can then be used to re-create the events in the actual game, with the added benefit that any part of the map can be rendered from any angle at any time.
Once the game is over, have a video animation guy go through the replay over and over, generating video clips from various angles and carefully editing them into a cohesive video narrative.
Then, have some announcers do a voice-over to put it all together.
Save the result as an MPEG and put it on a server, or better yet, put it on television and promote the new sport of multiplayer deathmatching to the general public. Have interviews with start players and turn them into money-grubbing celebrities.
Oops, first time I tried to post this I screwed up a HTML tag and it caused part of a sentence to not appear in the body. Here's the v1.1 patch...
This seems like a nice thing on the surface, and I guess if any artists actually decide that they want to use the (o) instead of the (c) they're welcome to do so.
But I think this can be twisted in its interpretation until it amounts to a concession on the part of the EFF that copyright allows the holder to reserve "fair use" rights. If this is taken to be such a concession, then it may in fact be a step backward: (o) will secure freedom but won't be used, and (c) will take all the freedom away, and when people complain about it, the copyright people will say, "Look, if the artist wanted you to make copies for personal use, he would have released this under the (o) license."
The EFF should concentrate on preserving existing freedom, and not coming up with a new terminology to replace the eroding freedoms under the old terminology.
This seems like a nice thing on the surface, and I guess if any artists actually decide that they want to use the (o) instead of the (c) they're welcome to do so.
But I think this can be twisted in its interpretation until it amounts to a If this is taken to be such a concession, then it may in fact be a step backward: (o) will secure freedom but won't be used, and (c) will take all the freedom away, and when people complain about it, the copyright people will say, "Look, if the artist wanted you to make copies for personal use, he would have released this under the (o) license."
The EFF should concentrate on preserving existing freedom, and not coming up with a new terminology to replace the eroding freedoms under the old terminology.
Does being allowed to settle such a suit with rebates worth less than the cost of a zipdrive strike anyone as a little odd?
Does anyone else remember the class-action lawsuit brought againt Nintendo of America for unfair competetive practices? They got off with the same basic deal. They were supposed to reimburse game owners $5, but what you actually got was a coupon good for $5 off the next game you bought, or roughly 10% of the cost of a new game. And of course, the prices were just as high as they'd always been. And you only got one coupon, regardless of how many NES games you had bought... That hardly seems adequate...
So I'm ignorant of the workings of the legal system in a country on the other side of the world. Sorry. I didn't mean to offend; only to ask a question. That's what you're supposed to do when you don't know, right?
OK, so Taiwan won't be publicly flogging civil disobedient copyright violators. But it is nevertheless interesting to see whether the recording industry will seek to have these laws enforced in countries where copyright violators may be facing corporal or even capital punishment. If they do, it could mean very bad press for them.
Slashdot Mirror
TWAOL employees will now have so much spam to sort through that they won't be able to get any work done. I bet their stock drops.
Senate Causes Economic Disaster
[AP Washington, D.C.] - The passage of an anti-spam bill has been blamed for the worst inflation seen in the whole of human history.
"We never realized the consequences of making each unsolicited "spam" email cost $500," said Rep. Heather Wilson. "Everyone in America with an email address suddenly and instantaneously saw their income magnify over a thousand-fold overnight."
The well-intentioned Anti-Spam bill, when passed into law, caused email-accounts to become an instant gold mine. The average user, who gets between 10 and 25 unsolicited, or "spam" emails per day, resulting in a net income of between $5000 and $12,500 per day.
But many internet users hold multiple e-mail accounts, and each could be a potential boon in the new economy, which replaces traditional manufacturing and service jobs as the primary means of income with civil suit legislation.
"This is better than being Bill Gates," said John Q. Public. "Finally all those promises I've been seeing about becoming an internet millionaire by doing nothing have started to come through. I have an AOL address that's been active since 1992 -- that baby's generating over $200 million a day for me."
The resulting inflation, however, has sent the world economy into a steep downward spiral which few, if any economists predict will reverse any time soon.
If this doesn't sound like vaporware I don't know what does...
On the other hand, I often solve problems by procrastinating so long that there's no point in doing the task any longer. This may in fact be an optimal solution for many problems. Way to go, scientists, for figuring out something I knew instinctively when I was 12.
I like being able to sit and actually read court transcripts, assuming they're not too dry and technical. Whether you agree with the argumentation or not, this is the way democracy should work -- at least in a democracy where, increasingly, the law seems to be defined by the courts as much as by the legislature. Far better than an out-of-court settlement with undisclosed terms and sealed documents.
I guess MAME people really do only play the ROMs for games which they actually own the hardware...
Yeah, but until the patent expired, during those fertile adolescent years the kid would be in possession of a circumvention device...
Knowing the current trends in IP law, I'm very surprized that the scientists didn't modify the babies so that they would be *unable* to reproduce. Unauthorized reproduction would be a violation of their IP rights, after all.
So is humanity 1.1b compatible with 1.0? So far they're stable, but they haven't had a lot of uptime thus far to brag about.
[Bold emphasis mine.]
Why no announcement of this experiment before the babies were conceived? Why no "Genetically Modified Pregnancy Continues On Schedule" articles? Why no "Genetically Modified Babies Planned. 'Race of Supermen Possible,' Claim Scientists"?
I wonder if the births would have ever been reported at all if the GM humans had not been born healthy? I'm guessing the scientists would only want to bring attention to a successful story, and bury news about a failure so that the media wouldn't crucify them for trying to "play god."
But still, I have to wonder how many times they might have tried this and been unsuccessful?
----
Is there a website where you can order these? I'd like to have maybe 5-6 of these modified girls done right now so that they can be available to provide entertainment for my retirement party in about 20 years.
I'd like red hair and freckles, perky breast gene set to "on", and hold the fertility.
you're going to see some serious shit.
I dunno, maybe it's a dumb question, but how does anyone *know* if GPL'ed code is being used by these people if all they're distributing is the binaries? Please forgive if I'm totally clueless in this regard, I'm genuinely curious...
Maybe it'd be better to "seed" the Third World with inexpensive, minimalistic computers with the approximate capabilities of, say, an 8086 PC, or an Apple II, or a Commodore 64, but an architecture which is intuitively easy to program for. Price it at, say, $1.50 USD or so.
Let the people teach themselves to use these computers; they'll be forced to teach themselves how to program in order to do anything useful with the machines, (and it's a lot easier to learn to program on a computer that only has around 64k of RAM and, say, 512kb of storage space.) In about 20 years or so, the Third World will be a nation of budding hackers, cleverly designing their own IT infrastructure.
My sig is quite appropos to this situation.
----
"So I sez to the guy, I sez, that ain't no fish, that's my sig!"
----
Dictionaries only report the way people are commonly using words. They don't make a value judgment as to whether that usage is "correct" or not. The appearance of that definition of "piracy" in the dictionary is thus unsurprising and means basically nothing as far as the issue of whether copying and sharing is piracy or theft or being a good neighbor. ----
Self-healing is OK, I guess, but how about self-replicating servers? This would be a sweet deal... buy one, and let it breed into a population of servers that grow with your network. Talk about scalability... In the background let it run a program that auto-designs the next-generation processor. You'll never have an obsolete architecture. And, oh yeah, have it write its own software apps, compiled to be optimized for its most recently-evolved specs. And then have AI agents running inside that will use the software for [productivity/gaming/pr0n/whatever].
I wonder if any non-/. readers will notice how much this sounds like the rhetoric that the pro-censorship crowd uses to get people in this country to support legislation that would attempt to censor the internet. Compare it to W.'s "hearts going dark" quote from the presidential debates.
Why is it that when China tries to control free speech, we can see it as oppression and tyranny, but when our leaders try to do the same exact thing we applaud them for trying to be moral, clean up smut, and save the children?
now if only I could read my /. comments from two months ago... I'd be happy.
----
If cloning is illegal, then you've got illegal people to deal with. A clone will probably not be allowed to have rights or citizenship, or seek legal protections against human rights violations, and thus will be completely unable to participate in civilization or society. If enough of these illegals are created, we'll see a permanent underclass without any rights.
This is wrong. We must be sure that if we do make human cloning illegal that we punish the cloners, not the clones. The clones are innocent.
I'm not sure how you disagree since your suggestions mesh very well with what I had envisioned...
However, I don't think Golf is not the closest analogy to deathmatch that I can think of... Paintball is. And I've seen paintball televised. And it can be done even better when the action takes place virtually. I'll explain again why:
You're absolutely right about the need for multiple camera placements and angles. That's what I was calling for. By creating the input log and recording all relevant info, you can run that info through the game engine and recreate the game in its totality. Then you can re-play this as much as you want, putting a free-roaming ghost in the map who can film a sequence from the game from one angle, then "rewind" the action and put the camera in another location and film the same action from a different angle... or simultaneous events on a different area of the map.
In fact, if you wanted, you could run this script on a computer with the graphics and sound configurations set to the highest possible quality, which woudl have resulted in too much lag during the actual playing. Render it on a super-computer, taking your time with the animation to achieve super-realistic quality.
Then you put your color commentary voice-over in, and you've got a polished, finished product ready for mass consumption and advertising and endorsement dollars.
As someone who enjoys FPS-type games and who is dismayed at the bad rap they get from "concerned" parents types, I think it would be great if FPS tournaments could receive the same kind of promotional attention that other sports get. This could help get gamers some well-deserved legitimacy in the eyes of the mainstream public.
As an example, skateboarding has done well for itself as a pastime by marketing itself as an "X-treme" sport. Skateboarders had suffered under an undeserved reputation as being vandals, delinquents, etc. Amateur skaters had nowhere to go to practice their skills and ended up in places where they weren't wanted, like parking lots, where they were persecuted and harassed. But once skateboarding started to get itself organized and began to televise professional events, things slowly started to change. Now, many cities have skate parks where kids can go practice, and they aren't automatically looked at as criminals.
I see this possibility emerging for FPS enthusiasts as well. But I don't think that FPS lends itself well to a live multicast. Without having some kind of announcer/moderator giving a play-by-play to explain what's going on, who's in the lead, and what's happening, a multicast is bound to be hard to follow.
One of the biggest problems facing the creation of a cohesive documentation of a multiplayer tourney is the need for ubiquitous "cameras".
Ideally, what I think should happen should be this: The multiplayer game takes place, and each players' moves are logged and saved, along with their health status and weapons inventories, etc.
This log can then be used to re-create the events in the actual game, with the added benefit that any part of the map can be rendered from any angle at any time.
Once the game is over, have a video animation guy go through the replay over and over, generating video clips from various angles and carefully editing them into a cohesive video narrative.
Then, have some announcers do a voice-over to put it all together.
Save the result as an MPEG and put it on a server, or better yet, put it on television and promote the new sport of multiplayer deathmatching to the general public. Have interviews with start players and turn them into money-grubbing celebrities.
--------
Oops, first time I tried to post this I screwed up a HTML tag and it caused part of a sentence to not appear in the body. Here's the v1.1 patch...
This seems like a nice thing on the surface, and I guess if any artists actually decide that they want to use the (o) instead of the (c) they're welcome to do so.
But I think this can be twisted in its interpretation until it amounts to a concession on the part of the EFF that copyright allows the holder to reserve "fair use" rights. If this is taken to be such a concession, then it may in fact be a step backward: (o) will secure freedom but won't be used, and (c) will take all the freedom away, and when people complain about it, the copyright people will say, "Look, if the artist wanted you to make copies for personal use, he would have released this under the (o) license."
The EFF should concentrate on preserving existing freedom, and not coming up with a new terminology to replace the eroding freedoms under the old terminology.
This seems like a nice thing on the surface, and I guess if any artists actually decide that they want to use the (o) instead of the (c) they're welcome to do so.
But I think this can be twisted in its interpretation until it amounts to a If this is taken to be such a concession, then it may in fact be a step backward: (o) will secure freedom but won't be used, and (c) will take all the freedom away, and when people complain about it, the copyright people will say, "Look, if the artist wanted you to make copies for personal use, he would have released this under the (o) license."
The EFF should concentrate on preserving existing freedom, and not coming up with a new terminology to replace the eroding freedoms under the old terminology.
Does anyone else remember the class-action lawsuit brought againt Nintendo of America for unfair competetive practices? They got off with the same basic deal. They were supposed to reimburse game owners $5, but what you actually got was a coupon good for $5 off the next game you bought, or roughly 10% of the cost of a new game. And of course, the prices were just as high as they'd always been. And you only got one coupon, regardless of how many NES games you had bought... That hardly seems adequate...
OK, so Taiwan won't be publicly flogging civil disobedient copyright violators. But it is nevertheless interesting to see whether the recording industry will seek to have these laws enforced in countries where copyright violators may be facing corporal or even capital punishment. If they do, it could mean very bad press for them.