Even the $50 cheap wireless routers can isolate the wireless connections from the wired ports, or you get a second cheap wireless router for your customers, plug your business wireless (or wired) router/firewall/NAT into one of the ports on that, and you're isolated.
Doing computing at home will never become practical. The machines are too expensive, and if they are able to bring the prices down some, it will still be less expensive to do it on a big centralized computer with trained professionals.
Saying that one-off fabrication can never become practical is about as short-sighted as saying the world market for computers is 4 or 5. It isn't that fabricators need to be able to crank out a million identical parts for less than a factory could, it's that a fabricator will be able to crank out 100 special-order parts for much less than just the setup cost at one of those factories and with no loss of quality. When fabricators can reproduce themselves (as several projects appear to be close to doing, other than a few very inexpensive components), the price of a fabricator will come down to raw material. Expect to see the remainder of the processing (including creating electronic components and actuators) within 10-25 years (depending on how complete you want it to be - in 25 years I believe you'll be able to dump in some iron nails, a few pennies, dirt, water, air, some aluminum cans, an old mercury thermometer and some old NiMH and Li-Ion batteries, add a bunch of energy, and have it pop out just about anything you want - maybe in 50 years you can connect it all to Mr Fusion which runs off of water, old beer and banana peels).
I often see products that I really like go out of production and the replacement has added features I don't want and taken away features I want. If I had a personal fabricator, I'd be able to replace broken parts or recreate the whole damned thing if I needed to, and not have to rely on that part or product still being available (at any price) from the manufacturer.
I often see products that are perfect except for ONE thing; I'd love to be able to re-make one little part to bring it to perfection, but often that part is just too difficult to fabricate using what I have available. A home fabricator would be perfect for that, even if it takes a couple hours to crank out a part, and costs 10 times what a factory would cost (though the cost to me would probably not be any more than what I pay for the factory part, given distribution costs and markup).
With the advent of molecular manufacturing, even the very chemical compositions will be able to be replicated. The shampoo you really like changes their formula and now it sucks? Just make your own, screw them. I see it as the equivalent of FOSS, there will be vast libraries of stuff you can download and manufacture yourself - when the chemical composition, the physical form, and the controlling software is all available as freely modifiable source code, things will really be different. I see a future in which the very concept of a shopping mall or grocery store is ridiculous. Lowes or Home Depot? Radio Shack? Furniture and hardware stores? Going someplace to buy things that were manufactured somewhere else? Why?
Wealth in the future will be: energy, raw materials, real estate, human creativity (e.g. entertainment), human services (e.g. concierge services), attention (e.g. youtube), and for a while control of force (as in government). If you really want to be rich in the future, start buying used-up landfills and worthless real estate out in the middle of nowhere and start building a political base. Even after we get off this planet, land will still be valuable, people will want to be here for a long time to come.
I've suggested a re-registration (say every 10 years) with an increasing registration fee every 10 years (free the first 5 years, $100 for the next 10, $10,000 for the next 10, $1,000,000 for the next 10, and so on). No limit on the number of times you can re-register.
Another alternative would be to have the fee based on how much value you put on each copy; anyone would be able to make a copy with the payment of whatever price you put on it, but your re-registration fee would be based on what that value is (say, that $100 for the years 5-15 would be for a per-copy fee of $.01). You could increase the per-copy rate by paying up the NEXT period's fee rate, less what you already paid, but no refunds for dropping the rate.
If something isn't important enough to sell 100,000,000 copies or more after 30 years, I don't see why you should be able to protect it for that long. Get cracking on producing something NEW.
Seems to me to be easier to calculate a moving/decaying average than it is to examine packets to determine that there is an illegal movie in it. If all you do is look at port numbers, then it is obvious that the way around all of this is for everyone to just use port 80, so to be effective you need to track connections, see how long a connection is active and how much traffic has been transferred (which can be defeated by closing and re-opening connections on a regular basis, and causes problems for persistent HTTP connections anyway if you just look at how long a connection has been open), look at HTTP headers to verify that it is actually using HTTP over port 80 (which also isn't of much use), etc. To be effective, analyzing traffic content/protocol in order to determine how "important" it is will either be very expensive or very ineffective.
Calculating a decaying average can be done by storing only a couple of variables per IP address, and doing a simple calculation each time a packet is sent on. Send packets on when they've been waiting for a time based on their average and the current throttle level. Adjust the current throttle level once a second (many ways to do that, simply moving it up or down so that when a packet is ready to be sent (per the above), it can be sent with no waiting, with a bit of fiddling to add some hysteresis). Note that the averaging should be done based on the subscriber's IP address, not on a per-connection basis, which makes it even easier to do, and a heck of a lot easier than tracking each connection's state. It also directly addresses the issue, which is excessive demand on bandwidth, gives very fast response for even very high bandwidth demands as long as they are short bursts, fairly throttles down bandwidth hogs so that the only people they affect are other bandwidth hogs, and can be tweaked to allow people to pay more for higher priority. It can also be tweaked to support QOS, so that a high-priority packet is sent on faster, but counts more against your average.
So slow down the kid when the bandwidth usage requires it (but based on his bandwidth, available bandwidth, and current total demand, rather than how important you think his network activity is). Argue about legality somewhere else. If what you're doing is more "important", then pay more for your connection.
The only exception I could see is for emergency services, and for that you BOOST the emergency service packet priority, not drop everyone else. Of course, you need to figure out a way to reliably determine what legitimately should have priority boosted, probably based on IP address of one end of the exchange).
Why should different types of traffic be charged different amounts or go different speeds? There are QOS solutions for low-latency requirements like VOIP/video chat, and it would certainly be reasonable to throttle bandwidth differently for such "high priority" packets, but there's no reason that they should even be trying to distinguish between a torrent of an illegal movie distribution and one of a legal open source program or whatever, nor any reason to distinguish between HTTP, FTP, SSH/SCP, VPN traffic, IMAP/SMTP or whatever. If they want to throttle based SOLELY on bandwidth usage, and do it in a fair manner, that's one thing. Do it by delaying packets (then dropping them if the underlying protocol doesn't throttle itself based on the delay, for example). Don't do it by injecting counterfeit packets into the stream.
Bandwidth throttling could be done using a quickly decaying average bandwidth usage figure, that could allow someone to quickly download a web page and not see any delay, yet slow down someone using a lot of bandwidth for more than a short period of time (but ONLY when the overall bandwidth demand requires it, it does not make sense to throttle traffic when there is plenty of spare available during non-peak times, and the throttle level should be the same for everyone, at whatever level is necessary to allow all the bandwidth to be used equally and fairly).
Seems to me that it makes more sense to do two things: first, throttle bandwidth dynamically (i.e. based on usage over the last minute or five minutes or so, a decaying average), based on available bandwidth vs. demand. If no one else is using the bandwidth, then it should be made available on a fair-share basis to everyone who wants it. Anyone using less than the current cap would see NO degradation until their average made it up to the current level, and after that point everyone would be treated the same.
Second, on top of that, it would then be possible to add in a "tiered" service in the sense of allowing you to pay for a higher priority. This could be most easily done by adding a multiplier to your throttle level - pay twice as much, get twice as much bandwidth as the next person (although if you're using less than the base throttle level, you'd get NO advantage, so it probably shouldn't cost twice as much). Set the lowest level so that Mom checking her e-mail will get it very fast, and typical Mom-type web browsing never hits the throttle level even at peak demand. That would be the "super-saver" level. Normal level should make things like iTunes, VOIP, streaming video, and low-lag gaming possible and reasonably fast, possibly only hitting the throttle level at peak demand time (and even then, shouldn't slow you down too much). High-usage level would be for someone who runs BitTorrent 24 hours/day downloading new Linux distributions every day and wants it to be fast all the time, even at peak.
Cumulative bandwidth caps are ridiculous. How much I used an hour ago, much less 3 weeks ago, should have no bearing on how much I should be able to get right now. Unused bandwidth doesn't actually cost any less, they have to build out the network to handle peak demand, and it is dumb to let that unused capacity go idle by adding in an artificial throttle based on historical usage of capacity rather than current demands on capacity.
Note that this kind of throttling can be handled in a hierarchical fashion, if each level is given information about available bandwidth from the next level down.
I have a version of Empire from the PLATO system from 1977. I first played an earlier version of Empire in 1974-75. Empire is the game that Netrek is descended from. At the very least, it had on-line rankings (both for the current month and "all-time"). The copy I have, in fact, shows the records as they were in 1977!
By the early '80s we were also running tournaments; I think we usually did it as round-robin, then a championship and an "All Stars" game. The scheduling was not done automatically, but doing so was obvious even then; it was merely more effort to code than it was to do it by hand given the number of teams. Records (including a history of several of the more memorable games) are still available on-line as well.
We're still doing tournaments, btw. There's a big Federation vs. everyone else tournament coming up next Sunday. The Federation will lose.
Yup, if I had tons of excess cash available, I'd be buying up landiflls right now, waiting for the technology to cheaply separate out all the metals and convert the hydrocarbons to become cheap and reliable (quite a few such processes exist already, but they don't seem to be common yet).
I think it is safe to say that in the next 100 years, hundreds of millions of people will die. Heck, if life spans aren't significantly extended, over 6 billion people will die in the next 100 years (though I'm also pretty sure life spans will be extended, quite likely to "indefinite"; fortunately, that capability will also likely go hand in hand with a significant decrease in birth rate, the ability to clean up the environment, produce enough energy, water, food, make currently unusable land (and oceans!) habitable, and ultimately get off this planet; I plan to be around in 100 years to say "See? Told ya so").
Spending as a percent of GDP and enlistment as a percent of population are both useless statistics when claiming that the military is "in decline". My food costs and the number of siblings and parents I have are also "in decline" by that standard (and none of them have died, and I'm not starving).
What's fair about someone else having a say in how often I do something that doesn't affect them in the least? If they want to keep what they've done private, I have no problem with that. Once they release it into the wild, for whatever reason, they have lost control of it.
Should the worker in the plate factory be able to tell you what you can or can't eat off of "his" plates?
Ok, so you spend a day installing a beautiful new bathroom for me, and plan to recoup your time investment every time I use the toilet, wash my hands, take a shower (do I have to pay extra if their are two people in the shower? Do you get to watch?)... what if I decide I don't like it after a week, so I get someone else to come in, knock it all out and put in a different one. Guess you're going out of business!
Per-use charges only make sense when each use actually "costs" something, and even then is inefficient if the costs of tracking and collecting the per-use charges are more than a very small fraction of the actual cost. The people who complain about "having to pay for" cable channels they don't watch are foolish - for most people, they'll end up paying MORE for the channels they do watch, even if the cable company doesn't make any more money. Making it pay-per-view would be even worse, at least from the standpoint of quality and creativity.
The ONLY reason we have the artificial concept of "Intellectual Property" is that the ability to be copied at much lower cost than the effort to originally create something causes problems in a scarcity-based economy, which is truly unfortunate since that ability is also what makes it so damned useful, and society could be so much more effective if there were no such restrictions necessary. Thus, the absolute bare minimum such restrictions is all that should be acceptable. If there are enough authors writing books under the current system, there's no need to give them further incentive by adding further restrictions. Contrary to some people's opinions, "monetizing" everything does not improve the way we live.
Setting a price on something is a way to fairly distribute SCARCE (rivalrous) resources. With "Intellectual Property", the only scarcity is in the creation, NOT the reproduction and distribution. Inherent, then, is that a reward system is (at some level) going to be indirect. We pay a price per copy as a poor substitute for how useful the original creation was, because there's no other good way to set a price on how much the original work was worth.
There's nothing inherently right about someone getting continued payments for doing absolutely nothing. Should you have to pay your plumber for the toilet he installed every time you flush it?
Another, less helpful reason for having long terms of protection on such works is to reduce supply so as to increase demand for NEW creations. To the extent that this reduces the amount of previously existing material that is available, it could actually be a net loss (except, of course, for those new creators, but that's the old broken windows fallacy).
Your understanding of the GPL is flawed. You owe nothing to the copyright owner, at all. Depending on what you do with the code, you don't owe anything to anyone else, either. Nothing. IF you distribute a binary version of the program AND you didn't give a copy of the source code to any person to whom you distributed the binary, THEN you have an obligation to provide a copy of the source code to (interpretations seem to vary: anyone who asks; anyone who has received a copy of the binary code; anyone who has received a copy of the written offer you were required to provide) for no more than the actual cost to provide such a copy. But that's ONLY if you choose that particular method of distribution, and it makes no reference to the original copyright owner.
If you make changes, you have an obligation to document that you made changes in any copy of the source code you distribute. If you distribute ONLY source code, you have no other obligations. If you distribute source and binary together, you have no other obligations. In all cases, you can use it for yourself, without distributing it, in any way you see fit, whether changed or unmodified. You never have an obligation to the original copyright owner (unless, of course, you distribute a copy to the original copyright owner!), only restrictions on how you can further distribute it (including not adding additional restrictions).
Those portions of the code that you wrote yourself can be distributed separately under any terms you want, as long as you've removed anyone else's code. So you don't even have to give that up, all you lose is exclusivity for that code which you chose to distribute co-mingled with other people's GPL code.
Uh, no. A contract is mutually agreed-upon terms and consideration from both sides. If you can take a piece of software, do something with it, and never have any contact with the owner of the copyright, how can it be a contract? You don't have to send the owner anything, no money, no source code, no notification, nothing. You can even make changes and distribute the resulting work without ever contacting the owner of the original work. You don't have to send them source code, you don't have to do anything except give a copy of the source code to anyone you give the binary to; if you don't give the binary to anyone, you have no obligations whatsoever other than to properly mark any changes you make, certainly no obligations to the owner of the copyright (other than what the law already gives the owner, which is that you need permission to make any copies at all).
It is certainly the case that merely making a copy of a GPL program and using it, never distributing it, does not mean you have agreed to any contract, yet the GPL still allows you to have made that original copy. You don't have to agree with any of the GPL, the mere existence of the GPL means you haven't violated copyright. So how can it be a contract? No agreement, no "meeting of the minds", no offer/acceptance, no consideration, no obligation.
You're right, they don't have to do anything, BUT they may still be liable for damages. One way of satisfying the copyright owner may be to release full sources under the GPL; if potential damages are high enough, and Sony has rights to everything else in the program, they may choose to do that, or they may choose to simply pay up.
However, Sony does NOT lose their copyright to the rest of the work; simply because a part of the program isn't theirs and they didn't have permission to distribute it doesn't mean that it is now legal to make additional copies of it. Running a legitimate copy of the software on an emulator would still be allowed (though, ironically, the owner of libarc could demand that end users not be allowed to run the program at all, emulator or not, since that portion of the program is not an authorized copy, and thus intermediate copies necessary to run the program are not allowed).
Except copyright law allows the owner of an authorized copy of a computer program the right to make intermediate copies that are necessary to run the program. Note that is the owner of a COPY of a program, not the copyright owner. That would be redundant, since the copyright owner doesn't NEED permission to make copies.
This part of copyright law was changed specifically to take away the right of a copyright owner to control use of a computer program in this way.
IF it is interpreted as a contract, then breaking the terms of the contract voids your permission to use the copyright material, thus you are violating copyright. The owner of the copyright can demand that you stop using the material and pay damages, OR can agree to other terms such as allowing the use if the terms of the GPL are met. An argument that you never accepted such a contract means you never had permission to use the material in the first place, and are violating copyright.
It can also be looked at as a license - you have permission to use the material under certain conditions, if you meet those conditions then you are automatically not violating copyright, if you don't then you are, no contractual terms involved. If you want to call that a "grant", fine - it is giving you more rights to the copyright material than you would have otherwise, but that doesn't mean it gives you ALL rights that the copyright owner has. Not meeting the conditions means you are exceeding the granted rights, thus you are violating copyright and again, the owner can demand that you stop using it and pay damages, OR agree to allow it under other mutually acceptable terms.
The FSF doesn't sue for contract violation, they sue for copyright violation. That's because the GPL is a license, not a contract. You have NO obligation to the owner of the copyright IF you meet the terms of the license, there is no reciprocity, it is not a contract. You still have an obligation under copyright law to not violate the owner's rights without permission. The owner has granted permission under certain conditions, any other use requires a different agreement, use without such permission violates copyright law.
Well, I don't know what was wrong with those Apple Genius people, but it is easy enough to boot into the installation DVD, start up a Terminal window, and delete the old System and Library folders, leaving the User folder alone. Then do a fresh install. The only things you lose there are network settings, Energy Saver preferences and the like.
You'll need to re-install any additional applications, printer drivers and such that you had added, but that's about it. When you go to create your first user after the re-install, just use the same short name as it was originally, and it should leave the old home directory alone. I'm not sure if it will warn you that the directory already exists, but that's how it works when creating a new account from System Preferences (it says it already exists, asks if you want to use that or use a different "short name".
No, making it so that one single choice kills you would be bad, I'm saying that you prune a tree when a player makes several bad choices. What, you want a world where there are no consequences?
It's also possible to make choices that affect the future game play, but not the main story line. Such choices can change the state of things in the future in ways that make it easier or more difficult (but not impossible) to accomplish something.
My real preference is for emergent behavior, with some sort of monitor process to herd the resultant state so that it is consistent with (the/a) story line. There are plenty of ways to do that without building everything totally scripted.
There are lots of ways to prune the tree, though. Make ones where you are inconsistent just end up killing you or stranding you somewhere (in an obvious way), forcing you to go back to an earlier level (e.g. you make some "evil" choices, you make some "good" choices, both sides are now pissed at you and you die). Perhaps even auto-save your status at each decision point in the tree so it is always available to undo, even if you didn't save it as a "save game".
You can also merge branches; figure out 16 different ways you can get to the same major game point, and give 4 intermediate choices (where only 2 of the choices at each one advance you, others kill you or strand you or move you into a different minor or major branch, or skip a decision point). The auto-save points for the intermediate branches could be dropped as soon as you get to the next major branch point. You can nest this type of sub-branch pruning to many levels, thus giving lots of choices and lots of potential reasonable paths through the decision points.
The only thing the game designers really need to make sure of is that you can't get WAY past a decision point where you screwed up and didn't get some item or ability or cause some event to happen that is critical at some future point. Make sure you can return (even if it is difficult) to an earlier point if you allow the player to advance much beyond that point without making it obvious that they screwed up and will have to restore from an earlier saved game status; nothing worse than pointlessly replaying a a large chunk because you didn't realize you'd need to do something for later. If the player DOES need to return, make sure that getting back AND returning to the current point is actually a new fun sequence just for screw-ups like yourself (if you make it so you can ONLY go through that sequence if you didn't take the previous action, you've now added a new way to progress through the game!)...
Oh, you mean the way Unix has done it for close to 1,200,000,000 seconds? Of course, the timezone handling, including leap seconds, is much more sophisticated now than it was then, but the leap second is a solved problem. Eliminating it won't even make any code simpler, since the libraries still need to handle the leap seconds we've already encountered.
Any device that needs to do accurate timing AND be exactly consistent with the official time needs to use something pretty much exactly the way Unix does it, and there's absolutely no reason why it can't. A majority of devices that keep time drift more than a second a day anyway, so a leap second gets subsumed in periodic corrections of that time, whether done automatically (NTP or WWV or GPS or whatever) or manually. Anything using "wall clock" for timing is already confused twice a year by the DST shift. In addition, using a good time library completely eliminates any other silly Y2K-like scenarios in the future (e.g. 2100 is going to be a similar problem).
It isn't that hard to have a fail-safe bootstrap that has just enough in it to load a new image from an inserted disc or an internet connection (perhaps with a minimal user interface to allow setting up a connection and to inform of status/progress). In addition, loading a new image shouldn't burn anything to flash until the entire image has been received and authenticated; and even if the new image completely fails, there should be a way to force the fail-safe to run again. Ideally, you'd have enough flash to keep the previous version around as well, and be able to retreat to it or load a new version without wiping out the original.
A cool way to do a bootstrap is to have a minimal link-loader and update the firmware by updating the equivalent of.o files in a file system; that way you don't have to blitz everything to change one byte in a routine, just replace the one.o file and reload.
We had a system with a welcome page that normally said "xx users on the system"; for holidays itwas spruced up abit, e.g. on Halloween it would say "45goblins" or whatever. We got complaints about "xx spooks", as a racial slur. Spies are so sensitive!
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Even the $50 cheap wireless routers can isolate the wireless connections from the wired ports, or you get a second cheap wireless router for your customers, plug your business wireless (or wired) router/firewall/NAT into one of the ports on that, and you're isolated.
Doing computing at home will never become practical. The machines are too expensive, and if they are able to bring the prices down some, it will still be less expensive to do it on a big centralized computer with trained professionals.
Saying that one-off fabrication can never become practical is about as short-sighted as saying the world market for computers is 4 or 5. It isn't that fabricators need to be able to crank out a million identical parts for less than a factory could, it's that a fabricator will be able to crank out 100 special-order parts for much less than just the setup cost at one of those factories and with no loss of quality. When fabricators can reproduce themselves (as several projects appear to be close to doing, other than a few very inexpensive components), the price of a fabricator will come down to raw material. Expect to see the remainder of the processing (including creating electronic components and actuators) within 10-25 years (depending on how complete you want it to be - in 25 years I believe you'll be able to dump in some iron nails, a few pennies, dirt, water, air, some aluminum cans, an old mercury thermometer and some old NiMH and Li-Ion batteries, add a bunch of energy, and have it pop out just about anything you want - maybe in 50 years you can connect it all to Mr Fusion which runs off of water, old beer and banana peels).
I often see products that I really like go out of production and the replacement has added features I don't want and taken away features I want. If I had a personal fabricator, I'd be able to replace broken parts or recreate the whole damned thing if I needed to, and not have to rely on that part or product still being available (at any price) from the manufacturer.
I often see products that are perfect except for ONE thing; I'd love to be able to re-make one little part to bring it to perfection, but often that part is just too difficult to fabricate using what I have available. A home fabricator would be perfect for that, even if it takes a couple hours to crank out a part, and costs 10 times what a factory would cost (though the cost to me would probably not be any more than what I pay for the factory part, given distribution costs and markup).
With the advent of molecular manufacturing, even the very chemical compositions will be able to be replicated. The shampoo you really like changes their formula and now it sucks? Just make your own, screw them. I see it as the equivalent of FOSS, there will be vast libraries of stuff you can download and manufacture yourself - when the chemical composition, the physical form, and the controlling software is all available as freely modifiable source code, things will really be different. I see a future in which the very concept of a shopping mall or grocery store is ridiculous. Lowes or Home Depot? Radio Shack? Furniture and hardware stores? Going someplace to buy things that were manufactured somewhere else? Why?
Wealth in the future will be: energy, raw materials, real estate, human creativity (e.g. entertainment), human services (e.g. concierge services), attention (e.g. youtube), and for a while control of force (as in government). If you really want to be rich in the future, start buying used-up landfills and worthless real estate out in the middle of nowhere and start building a political base. Even after we get off this planet, land will still be valuable, people will want to be here for a long time to come.
I've suggested a re-registration (say every 10 years) with an increasing registration fee every 10 years (free the first 5 years, $100 for the next 10, $10,000 for the next 10, $1,000,000 for the next 10, and so on). No limit on the number of times you can re-register.
Another alternative would be to have the fee based on how much value you put on each copy; anyone would be able to make a copy with the payment of whatever price you put on it, but your re-registration fee would be based on what that value is (say, that $100 for the years 5-15 would be for a per-copy fee of $.01). You could increase the per-copy rate by paying up the NEXT period's fee rate, less what you already paid, but no refunds for dropping the rate.
If something isn't important enough to sell 100,000,000 copies or more after 30 years, I don't see why you should be able to protect it for that long. Get cracking on producing something NEW.
Seems to me to be easier to calculate a moving/decaying average than it is to examine packets to determine that there is an illegal movie in it. If all you do is look at port numbers, then it is obvious that the way around all of this is for everyone to just use port 80, so to be effective you need to track connections, see how long a connection is active and how much traffic has been transferred (which can be defeated by closing and re-opening connections on a regular basis, and causes problems for persistent HTTP connections anyway if you just look at how long a connection has been open), look at HTTP headers to verify that it is actually using HTTP over port 80 (which also isn't of much use), etc. To be effective, analyzing traffic content/protocol in order to determine how "important" it is will either be very expensive or very ineffective.
Calculating a decaying average can be done by storing only a couple of variables per IP address, and doing a simple calculation each time a packet is sent on. Send packets on when they've been waiting for a time based on their average and the current throttle level. Adjust the current throttle level once a second (many ways to do that, simply moving it up or down so that when a packet is ready to be sent (per the above), it can be sent with no waiting, with a bit of fiddling to add some hysteresis). Note that the averaging should be done based on the subscriber's IP address, not on a per-connection basis, which makes it even easier to do, and a heck of a lot easier than tracking each connection's state. It also directly addresses the issue, which is excessive demand on bandwidth, gives very fast response for even very high bandwidth demands as long as they are short bursts, fairly throttles down bandwidth hogs so that the only people they affect are other bandwidth hogs, and can be tweaked to allow people to pay more for higher priority. It can also be tweaked to support QOS, so that a high-priority packet is sent on faster, but counts more against your average.
So slow down the kid when the bandwidth usage requires it (but based on his bandwidth, available bandwidth, and current total demand, rather than how important you think his network activity is). Argue about legality somewhere else. If what you're doing is more "important", then pay more for your connection.
The only exception I could see is for emergency services, and for that you BOOST the emergency service packet priority, not drop everyone else. Of course, you need to figure out a way to reliably determine what legitimately should have priority boosted, probably based on IP address of one end of the exchange).
Why should different types of traffic be charged different amounts or go different speeds? There are QOS solutions for low-latency requirements like VOIP/video chat, and it would certainly be reasonable to throttle bandwidth differently for such "high priority" packets, but there's no reason that they should even be trying to distinguish between a torrent of an illegal movie distribution and one of a legal open source program or whatever, nor any reason to distinguish between HTTP, FTP, SSH/SCP, VPN traffic, IMAP/SMTP or whatever. If they want to throttle based SOLELY on bandwidth usage, and do it in a fair manner, that's one thing. Do it by delaying packets (then dropping them if the underlying protocol doesn't throttle itself based on the delay, for example). Don't do it by injecting counterfeit packets into the stream.
Bandwidth throttling could be done using a quickly decaying average bandwidth usage figure, that could allow someone to quickly download a web page and not see any delay, yet slow down someone using a lot of bandwidth for more than a short period of time (but ONLY when the overall bandwidth demand requires it, it does not make sense to throttle traffic when there is plenty of spare available during non-peak times, and the throttle level should be the same for everyone, at whatever level is necessary to allow all the bandwidth to be used equally and fairly).
Seems to me that it makes more sense to do two things: first, throttle bandwidth dynamically (i.e. based on usage over the last minute or five minutes or so, a decaying average), based on available bandwidth vs. demand. If no one else is using the bandwidth, then it should be made available on a fair-share basis to everyone who wants it. Anyone using less than the current cap would see NO degradation until their average made it up to the current level, and after that point everyone would be treated the same.
Second, on top of that, it would then be possible to add in a "tiered" service in the sense of allowing you to pay for a higher priority. This could be most easily done by adding a multiplier to your throttle level - pay twice as much, get twice as much bandwidth as the next person (although if you're using less than the base throttle level, you'd get NO advantage, so it probably shouldn't cost twice as much). Set the lowest level so that Mom checking her e-mail will get it very fast, and typical Mom-type web browsing never hits the throttle level even at peak demand. That would be the "super-saver" level. Normal level should make things like iTunes, VOIP, streaming video, and low-lag gaming possible and reasonably fast, possibly only hitting the throttle level at peak demand time (and even then, shouldn't slow you down too much). High-usage level would be for someone who runs BitTorrent 24 hours/day downloading new Linux distributions every day and wants it to be fast all the time, even at peak.
Cumulative bandwidth caps are ridiculous. How much I used an hour ago, much less 3 weeks ago, should have no bearing on how much I should be able to get right now. Unused bandwidth doesn't actually cost any less, they have to build out the network to handle peak demand, and it is dumb to let that unused capacity go idle by adding in an artificial throttle based on historical usage of capacity rather than current demands on capacity.
Note that this kind of throttling can be handled in a hierarchical fashion, if each level is given information about available bandwidth from the next level down.
I have a version of Empire from the PLATO system from 1977. I first played an earlier version of Empire in 1974-75. Empire is the game that Netrek is descended from. At the very least, it had on-line rankings (both for the current month and "all-time"). The copy I have, in fact, shows the records as they were in 1977!
By the early '80s we were also running tournaments; I think we usually did it as round-robin, then a championship and an "All Stars" game. The scheduling was not done automatically, but doing so was obvious even then; it was merely more effort to code than it was to do it by hand given the number of teams. Records (including a history of several of the more memorable games) are still available on-line as well.
We're still doing tournaments, btw. There's a big Federation vs. everyone else tournament coming up next Sunday. The Federation will lose.
Yup, if I had tons of excess cash available, I'd be buying up landiflls right now, waiting for the technology to cheaply separate out all the metals and convert the hydrocarbons to become cheap and reliable (quite a few such processes exist already, but they don't seem to be common yet).
I think it is safe to say that in the next 100 years, hundreds of millions of people will die. Heck, if life spans aren't significantly extended, over 6 billion people will die in the next 100 years (though I'm also pretty sure life spans will be extended, quite likely to "indefinite"; fortunately, that capability will also likely go hand in hand with a significant decrease in birth rate, the ability to clean up the environment, produce enough energy, water, food, make currently unusable land (and oceans!) habitable, and ultimately get off this planet; I plan to be around in 100 years to say "See? Told ya so").
I am continually amazed at how many people don't understand how something that has "fallen 100%" is now zero, much less "fallen over 100%"...
Spending as a percent of GDP and enlistment as a percent of population are both useless statistics when claiming that the military is "in decline". My food costs and the number of siblings and parents I have are also "in decline" by that standard (and none of them have died, and I'm not starving).
What's fair about someone else having a say in how often I do something that doesn't affect them in the least? If they want to keep what they've done private, I have no problem with that. Once they release it into the wild, for whatever reason, they have lost control of it.
Should the worker in the plate factory be able to tell you what you can or can't eat off of "his" plates?
Ok, so you spend a day installing a beautiful new bathroom for me, and plan to recoup your time investment every time I use the toilet, wash my hands, take a shower (do I have to pay extra if their are two people in the shower? Do you get to watch?) ... what if I decide I don't like it after a week, so I get someone else to come in, knock it all out and put in a different one. Guess you're going out of business!
Per-use charges only make sense when each use actually "costs" something, and even then is inefficient if the costs of tracking and collecting the per-use charges are more than a very small fraction of the actual cost. The people who complain about "having to pay for" cable channels they don't watch are foolish - for most people, they'll end up paying MORE for the channels they do watch, even if the cable company doesn't make any more money. Making it pay-per-view would be even worse, at least from the standpoint of quality and creativity.
The ONLY reason we have the artificial concept of "Intellectual Property" is that the ability to be copied at much lower cost than the effort to originally create something causes problems in a scarcity-based economy, which is truly unfortunate since that ability is also what makes it so damned useful, and society could be so much more effective if there were no such restrictions necessary. Thus, the absolute bare minimum such restrictions is all that should be acceptable. If there are enough authors writing books under the current system, there's no need to give them further incentive by adding further restrictions. Contrary to some people's opinions, "monetizing" everything does not improve the way we live.
Setting a price on something is a way to fairly distribute SCARCE (rivalrous) resources. With "Intellectual Property", the only scarcity is in the creation, NOT the reproduction and distribution. Inherent, then, is that a reward system is (at some level) going to be indirect. We pay a price per copy as a poor substitute for how useful the original creation was, because there's no other good way to set a price on how much the original work was worth.
There's nothing inherently right about someone getting continued payments for doing absolutely nothing. Should you have to pay your plumber for the toilet he installed every time you flush it?
Another, less helpful reason for having long terms of protection on such works is to reduce supply so as to increase demand for NEW creations. To the extent that this reduces the amount of previously existing material that is available, it could actually be a net loss (except, of course, for those new creators, but that's the old broken windows fallacy).
Your understanding of the GPL is flawed. You owe nothing to the copyright owner, at all. Depending on what you do with the code, you don't owe anything to anyone else, either. Nothing. IF you distribute a binary version of the program AND you didn't give a copy of the source code to any person to whom you distributed the binary, THEN you have an obligation to provide a copy of the source code to (interpretations seem to vary: anyone who asks; anyone who has received a copy of the binary code; anyone who has received a copy of the written offer you were required to provide) for no more than the actual cost to provide such a copy. But that's ONLY if you choose that particular method of distribution, and it makes no reference to the original copyright owner.
If you make changes, you have an obligation to document that you made changes in any copy of the source code you distribute. If you distribute ONLY source code, you have no other obligations. If you distribute source and binary together, you have no other obligations. In all cases, you can use it for yourself, without distributing it, in any way you see fit, whether changed or unmodified. You never have an obligation to the original copyright owner (unless, of course, you distribute a copy to the original copyright owner!), only restrictions on how you can further distribute it (including not adding additional restrictions).
Those portions of the code that you wrote yourself can be distributed separately under any terms you want, as long as you've removed anyone else's code. So you don't even have to give that up, all you lose is exclusivity for that code which you chose to distribute co-mingled with other people's GPL code.
Uh, no. A contract is mutually agreed-upon terms and consideration from both sides. If you can take a piece of software, do something with it, and never have any contact with the owner of the copyright, how can it be a contract? You don't have to send the owner anything, no money, no source code, no notification, nothing. You can even make changes and distribute the resulting work without ever contacting the owner of the original work. You don't have to send them source code, you don't have to do anything except give a copy of the source code to anyone you give the binary to; if you don't give the binary to anyone, you have no obligations whatsoever other than to properly mark any changes you make, certainly no obligations to the owner of the copyright (other than what the law already gives the owner, which is that you need permission to make any copies at all).
It is certainly the case that merely making a copy of a GPL program and using it, never distributing it, does not mean you have agreed to any contract, yet the GPL still allows you to have made that original copy. You don't have to agree with any of the GPL, the mere existence of the GPL means you haven't violated copyright. So how can it be a contract? No agreement, no "meeting of the minds", no offer/acceptance, no consideration, no obligation.
You're right, they don't have to do anything, BUT they may still be liable for damages. One way of satisfying the copyright owner may be to release full sources under the GPL; if potential damages are high enough, and Sony has rights to everything else in the program, they may choose to do that, or they may choose to simply pay up.
However, Sony does NOT lose their copyright to the rest of the work; simply because a part of the program isn't theirs and they didn't have permission to distribute it doesn't mean that it is now legal to make additional copies of it. Running a legitimate copy of the software on an emulator would still be allowed (though, ironically, the owner of libarc could demand that end users not be allowed to run the program at all, emulator or not, since that portion of the program is not an authorized copy, and thus intermediate copies necessary to run the program are not allowed).
Except copyright law allows the owner of an authorized copy of a computer program the right to make intermediate copies that are necessary to run the program. Note that is the owner of a COPY of a program, not the copyright owner. That would be redundant, since the copyright owner doesn't NEED permission to make copies.
This part of copyright law was changed specifically to take away the right of a copyright owner to control use of a computer program in this way.
IF it is interpreted as a contract, then breaking the terms of the contract voids your permission to use the copyright material, thus you are violating copyright. The owner of the copyright can demand that you stop using the material and pay damages, OR can agree to other terms such as allowing the use if the terms of the GPL are met. An argument that you never accepted such a contract means you never had permission to use the material in the first place, and are violating copyright.
It can also be looked at as a license - you have permission to use the material under certain conditions, if you meet those conditions then you are automatically not violating copyright, if you don't then you are, no contractual terms involved. If you want to call that a "grant", fine - it is giving you more rights to the copyright material than you would have otherwise, but that doesn't mean it gives you ALL rights that the copyright owner has. Not meeting the conditions means you are exceeding the granted rights, thus you are violating copyright and again, the owner can demand that you stop using it and pay damages, OR agree to allow it under other mutually acceptable terms.
The FSF doesn't sue for contract violation, they sue for copyright violation. That's because the GPL is a license, not a contract. You have NO obligation to the owner of the copyright IF you meet the terms of the license, there is no reciprocity, it is not a contract. You still have an obligation under copyright law to not violate the owner's rights without permission. The owner has granted permission under certain conditions, any other use requires a different agreement, use without such permission violates copyright law.
Well, I don't know what was wrong with those Apple Genius people, but it is easy enough to boot into the installation DVD, start up a Terminal window, and delete the old System and Library folders, leaving the User folder alone. Then do a fresh install. The only things you lose there are network settings, Energy Saver preferences and the like.
You'll need to re-install any additional applications, printer drivers and such that you had added, but that's about it. When you go to create your first user after the re-install, just use the same short name as it was originally, and it should leave the old home directory alone. I'm not sure if it will warn you that the directory already exists, but that's how it works when creating a new account from System Preferences (it says it already exists, asks if you want to use that or use a different "short name".
No, making it so that one single choice kills you would be bad, I'm saying that you prune a tree when a player makes several bad choices. What, you want a world where there are no consequences?
It's also possible to make choices that affect the future game play, but not the main story line. Such choices can change the state of things in the future in ways that make it easier or more difficult (but not impossible) to accomplish something.
My real preference is for emergent behavior, with some sort of monitor process to herd the resultant state so that it is consistent with (the/a) story line. There are plenty of ways to do that without building everything totally scripted.
There are lots of ways to prune the tree, though. Make ones where you are inconsistent just end up killing you or stranding you somewhere (in an obvious way), forcing you to go back to an earlier level (e.g. you make some "evil" choices, you make some "good" choices, both sides are now pissed at you and you die). Perhaps even auto-save your status at each decision point in the tree so it is always available to undo, even if you didn't save it as a "save game".
You can also merge branches; figure out 16 different ways you can get to the same major game point, and give 4 intermediate choices (where only 2 of the choices at each one advance you, others kill you or strand you or move you into a different minor or major branch, or skip a decision point). The auto-save points for the intermediate branches could be dropped as soon as you get to the next major branch point. You can nest this type of sub-branch pruning to many levels, thus giving lots of choices and lots of potential reasonable paths through the decision points.
The only thing the game designers really need to make sure of is that you can't get WAY past a decision point where you screwed up and didn't get some item or ability or cause some event to happen that is critical at some future point. Make sure you can return (even if it is difficult) to an earlier point if you allow the player to advance much beyond that point without making it obvious that they screwed up and will have to restore from an earlier saved game status; nothing worse than pointlessly replaying a a large chunk because you didn't realize you'd need to do something for later. If the player DOES need to return, make sure that getting back AND returning to the current point is actually a new fun sequence just for screw-ups like yourself (if you make it so you can ONLY go through that sequence if you didn't take the previous action, you've now added a new way to progress through the game!)...
Oh, you mean the way Unix has done it for close to 1,200,000,000 seconds? Of course, the timezone handling, including leap seconds, is much more sophisticated now than it was then, but the leap second is a solved problem. Eliminating it won't even make any code simpler, since the libraries still need to handle the leap seconds we've already encountered.
Any device that needs to do accurate timing AND be exactly consistent with the official time needs to use something pretty much exactly the way Unix does it, and there's absolutely no reason why it can't. A majority of devices that keep time drift more than a second a day anyway, so a leap second gets subsumed in periodic corrections of that time, whether done automatically (NTP or WWV or GPS or whatever) or manually. Anything using "wall clock" for timing is already confused twice a year by the DST shift. In addition, using a good time library completely eliminates any other silly Y2K-like scenarios in the future (e.g. 2100 is going to be a similar problem).
Anyway, the time base you're looking for is called TAI, and is currently 33 leap seconds ahead of UTC.
It isn't that hard to have a fail-safe bootstrap that has just enough in it to load a new image from an inserted disc or an internet connection (perhaps with a minimal user interface to allow setting up a connection and to inform of status/progress). In addition, loading a new image shouldn't burn anything to flash until the entire image has been received and authenticated; and even if the new image completely fails, there should be a way to force the fail-safe to run again. Ideally, you'd have enough flash to keep the previous version around as well, and be able to retreat to it or load a new version without wiping out the original.
A cool way to do a bootstrap is to have a minimal link-loader and update the firmware by updating the equivalent of .o files in a file system; that way you don't have to blitz everything to change one byte in a routine, just replace the one .o file and reload.
We had a system with a welcome page that normally said "xx users on the system"; for holidays itwas spruced up abit, e.g. on Halloween it would say "45goblins" or whatever. We got complaints about "xx spooks", as a racial slur. Spies are so sensitive!