As broadband gets adopted, the entry to provide service for it becomes lower in term of hardware. However, the wiring de-regulation efforts here in the US (telco and cable) are still a bit crazy. Sadly, those fights come in small waves.
If deregulation ever *does* open the door, I predict we're going to have another round of ISP start-ups, this time with broadband. Then, all kinds of tweaks are going to appear. This kind of competition is good for everyone, IMO. Customers have to be arena of what works and what doesn't. Ok, so I'm not saying anything new. Caps, Rates up and down, etc, should be on those menu.
For now, try getting most (DSL) ISPs to solve a line problem (they need to use the telco, who denies anything is wrong). Cable agreements are little better, but splitting the carrier and provider can be a headache anywhere.
But if the public knew the cost of broadband at the higher levels, they may not complain at 3.0Mbs for $50/month (my current Comcast agreement). Trying upping your agreement to a "business" service. What a whopper.
This question seems almost filler nonsense. People appreciate choice in the media they use for news and entertainment, communication/connection, etc. Every technology invented to deliver it is still alive in some way, public houses, books, newspapers, HAM, Radio, TV. The internet is just another in the long line on methods to connect. Need it or not, the world will have it and use it.
BoxMod! Simulates all the fun and adventure of modding your PC into a translucent glowing overclocked liquid cooled bios burner!
Ring Designer! Practice that fine art of finding the perfect stone, alloy and maker for the best price and see if she'll marry you! Bonus points for knowing when to haggle each merchant down without dropping the deal!
Code Freak! Given a large pile of command line tools, solve ever-more increasing problems against the clock. Reap the benefits of abstracting prior works at the right level to make utilities useful in later levels!
Seriously, I think car mods are a dumb way to get a race car. HOWEVER, if someone wants to glue every piece of aftermarket plastic to their car and pretend, SO BE IT. Mods are a part of life at many levels, and part of people's (quite futile) Yearning To Be Different. So what?
Sure, selling a game about it is even dumber, but for fans of the concept, they'll get it for kids. I bet it took less time to develop than the manhours that'll fill up these slashdot comments.
dollars to dogshit that every day, that 1 minute of time is sucked into a big vortex of Doing Nothing (pouring coffee, checking web/mail/phone, hellos, tidying up).
No, officially means according to the company accounting, which means you were officially working 30 minutes overtime. You were simply complaining about the lie fed to you, no guilt. The manager was simply taking your complaint to his level. He should have told you the truth, and thats what separates a good boss from a great one.
7AM, sure. True enough, then when 5PM hits the mark - BAM - you should be outta there. Lunches are yours, no interruptions. Nobody is given both "flex" time and "clocking in/out" - they are mutually exclusive. Frankly, you should let them fire you for this and take them to court.
I don't want it to. I don't play games much, don't care about HDTV, and my equipment lives in a closet, form factor doesn't matter much. However, to each his own. I just need to point out that sometimes chasing the technology has a limit.
Thats interesting, I'll look into it. However, not out of pacifist but boredom, I'm a little against having a "kill" capability in a game easily. It kinda cheapens the aspect of the immersion. If, then again, once you died all your saved games of that story were erased, we'd see a little more mutual relationship between player and nonplayer characters. I'm sure that game would last about 15 minutes in a reviewer's post.
Somehow though, I'd like a game to focus more on "equal levels" of NPCs. If they die, then yes, your story us FUBAR. I ask too much of today's AI surely, and maybe too much of a simple game genre. I'd love it if your play was unique because of the cooporation or conflict you had, permanently. Starting anew would generate other random goals, etc. Creating such a metaengine would be a study in itself I believe. Oh well.
Black and White had a bit of this, a few plays where the "pet" aspect was nurtured, then an "evil/good" ruler concept. However, the game eventually required all aspects of your capability be honed, and it was a linear at tictactoe.
They also erroneously claim that Sinix was the input to the Minix project (where dotted green dives for the first time). Ironically, they left in the tip of the original line showing the actual V7 origins.
Examining both graphics, this is the only claim to the Minix origins, which is going to reduce their credibility in court once that area is expanded and the truth told.
But remember, this isn't about copyright, its about licensing to IBM (and now SGI). Yawn.
Well, just getting into console is a suckers game anyway. the PC was supposed to be a generic computer for multiple purposes. You can configure such a box towards any level of sophistication, including game speed.
However, by pumping NTSC polygons at higher rates than ever, consoles are a fools enticement, IMO. 2 years down the road, one has to drop such hardware for the newer. Also, consoles are now adding on telephony/networking to mimic the components PC have already enjoyed. And nary a higher resolution than "across the room" pretty. Play an older engine on a newer machine. I loaded up Thief recently and played on a high res/depth and was just amazed (again) from 12inches away.
Don't get me wrong, I love games and gaming. I'm just resolved to not pumping those 2-300 every two years into a new console and games. I'll upgrade the PC, especially when sweet video cards are coming out each year. Plus, I can enjoy that memory/speed for other applications.
Game Houses need to keep in mind that the market is wide, but for sheer beauty, >= 1200x1024 32bit >=30fps screens are going to make game immersion much stronger than blowing up 320x240 60htz into a 52inch blurbox. I know some have tried sticking to PC and missed a huge market, but spend the money there on quality and they'll find my wallet.
This is actually one of the biggest potentials for FPS/RPG/MultiPlayer that I can think of. Not exactly random, but a form of optimization in mapping (i.e. ungenerated unless visited by *anyone* in game). Problem is, I think it would get tremendously big before some sort of forced wrap would have to occur.
For single player, I'd love to see a game that employed this concept into a mapping concept. Imagine an Unreal world that didn't force paths, but you could wander. Dead zones and "overbearing" zones (enemy town, etc) could be discovered and left, giving a player an option to break the linear concept.
Linear storytelling could still be employed via meetings with objects/NPCs that hinted at a puzzle solution. Or one could just drop a mallet on the user via "goal" lists. Since the advent of in-game mappers and note-takers, this has been a bit more fun.
Anything to remove the monotany, although "worlds" with even a few hundred objects would quickly become uninteresting. "Oh, another enemy camp. sigh."
Overall, random walls/objects/enemies - even done with style, wear a player out. The story is what compells me to keep running/shooting/solving.
Comparisons should do an exact match, with preprocessors for generalization beforehand. Functions and variables can be auto-named, for example. Even conditionals can be ripped apart and rebuilt in a standard way to check for simple hacks to these. Ignoring whitespace and using C preprocessor output may be good defaults.
Because it's there. My sources of new music, in order of volume:
80% - Friends / Coworkers who let me borrow/trade.
7% - P2P systems
3% - Radio Scan Button
3% - Live streaming audio (mostly electronica)
2% - The library system (did i mention that good music has no age)
2% - Captured streaming audio (i have a multibox setup at home)
1% - Random web searches for unsigned crap (i have a lot of time at work to screen)
1% - Bootleg trader websites / bootleg clubs
0.8% - Garage Sales
0.2% - Stuff found walking the dog (really) 0% - stores (used or not)
Discovering Great New music is like finding treasures in some of these avenues. It doesn't consume all my free time, just something I snap up when I get curious. I consider all the time to listen to this stuff one of the best perks of a programmer's desk job.
[scroll overlay against dark space to Pink Floyd's "Signs Of Life"]
And so, with the passage of time, we find the landscape changing in the outer worlds. The heyday of digital smuggling began to change as the RIAA overloads rachetted up the penalties for those caught. Eventually, entire square parsecs were left empty, encircled by only the empty hulls of caught offenders. Husks of empty steel that once held a fortune in content formed a warning sign to those entering the fray.
But the rebels of the age were smart. They turned to deeper methods, encrypting their content, running private servers, and WAR driving. The random element of physical contact reduced the smuggler's domain to a fraction of his former, but the overlap of these small circles kept fresh booty flowing. Content was still open to move, simply the transfer couldn't be without extra steps to know the receiver and secure the path.
Meanwhile, the RIAA replaced the existing law enforcement for tracking and penalizing those still foolish to appear on the public channels. No judge, no jury was required as the cost for including them in your defense were too high for all but the wealthiest. Given that smuggling was done on the cheap, for the masses, suffice it to say no one could pay for such accutrements. Although the Creators approved of the tactics, they continued to fight for slimmer traditional channels.
As the Age Of FAIB (Free As In Beer) came to a wane, the inner worlds continued to bustle with mass marketing and pop culture. The outer worlds succumbed to the MPAA/RIAA stormtroopers' patrols. Surprise searches and constant paranoia crept up on those who stayed too long in the toughest zones. Eventually, the smuggling became "wiped out" publicly, and the inner worlds no longer sent the curious making the journey to grab a piece of the action along the rim. But for those who knew the newest tricks, adventure and discovery continued to be the drug that filled their libraries with the Creators' best output...
This oversimplifies the case. First, even SCO FUD claims this is "not about copyright, but about licensing" between them and IBM. So either the article or the FUD is wrong. Probably both.
Also, this doesn't mention the concept of "public domain", of which the code they supposedly own is an implementation of such an algorithm. If the text is a copy/paste but the concept is directly school textbook, IANAL to determine how much value there is in their stuff anymore.
The details of the releases have been posted and reposted in the SCO news articles so often I tire of the discussion. Suffice it to say however, that SCO has to prove quite a large number of dubious claims before we get to this simplified concept of "code here...code here...pay up!"
Example: The design of the System V code that they own is based on a legacy design that Linux also borrwed from. The four sections of kernel code that differ are possibly identical implementations of the same public concepts. IBM may or may not have injected the code into the tree, but BSD's implementation suggests Linux borrowed from this instead of SCO. BSD code is exempt due to the ATT fiasco predating SCO's Unixware. Also, the modules can be built in *almost identical* fashion by reading any grad-level OS text book sold readily at your local campus of higher education.
SCO sits on very shakey ground when making any claim that Linux has valuable components that would not exist without their effort, created or bought. And also (as has been said) SCO itself cannot survive without the efforts of BSD and Linux being integrated into their own products. The irony is scathing. The SCO convention was full of statements that made your head spin about the GPL (its good, its bad, its not how we do business, its what we rely on, it make code worthless, it how we recommend developing)
True enough, but just because something "has always been" doesn't mean its going to stay the same. The fact of the matter point towards one thing: Human Nature is like water, it takes the path of least resistance. If music *can* be acquired for free with little risk of consequences, that path will be flooded. From highway speeding to parking meters, people take calculated risks.
The shift I'm talking about though is that digital information has essentially become trivial to copy. Combined with the fact that almost everything can be moved into and out of this medium, we stuck at a crossroads:
We can retrofit implement a check & balance system to impose consequences on "wrong" behavior. This is the DMCA stick with the RIAA's spyglass on you. The "punish the few harshly" is a takeoff from the old IRS theme of making audits their own punishment. Avoid the punishment meant avoiding the audit. So, people pay their taxes. However, the deductions fall into the "calculated risk" category for most people. The devil will be that this system always has a little abuse to play with.
Today, we have private trading outside of P2P, which will grow. Remember the swap meets at the old computer shows. I would trade C64 games back and forth until everyone there was saturated with the same library. Didn't take long. This happens now in any technically-savvy gathering for music. So fighting P2P is useless.
OR
We can rebuild the model to take advantage of the new system. Getting specific, content creators need to be paid based how popular their creation is. For investment, distribution (even digitally), storage, catelogging and other meta-activities, an umbrella company would form somehow. It would also look out for its own income channels, but accepting the nature of the new system. So something akin to the RIAA will always need to exist.
However, it can think long and hard about what's going on and collaborate on a exploiting the new technology. Let's start with some axioms:
Once on the internet, information is free for personal use. It cannot be resold commercially, but distributed for free with no limits. Take it or leave it, this is the truth today
Creators need to make a living wage and it should roughly scale to the "popularity" of their output. Popularity would be hard to measure everywhere, but metrics need to be formed somehow
The only solution I can think of is that a top-down tax be formed that imposes a bandwidth-style fee on all ISPs. Then this escrow pool builds. By sampling certain channels - and this would be technically challenging, a weighed listed it built of who's content is moved most. Then the pool is paid to the creators based on these ratios. Determining the true content, true movement seems very hard to get right, I think.
However, all types of digital information could be passed through these scanners.. Not unlike the FBI own snooper idea, with much of the same privacy problems. Sampling need not be at 100% and could spend some time checking unknown patterns against a growing database of known encryption schemes for content. It wouldn't need to be real time, just fast enough to make some sort of rolyalty pay period effect.
This idea may not work, but it's the only one I can think of. Others?
So let me think this through... you are trying to store small amount of data on individual items. Why? Once in storage, are they kept apart fro one another?
I think a RAID will suffice. Locally. If you need to keep it on the cheap, pump your small amount of data to 3 other simple boxen offsite. I mean, for small amounts of data, there's no reason to muck around juggling the physical medium. One can duplicate that data faster and more reliably than boxes of little memory cards with scribble on them.
Wow - what a job! I know what we can put in there! All the modifications from BSD and Linux that have taken place. Darl will be *real proud* of the amazing improvements. With that much good stuff to add, and they're paying - where do I sign up?!
When we're done, we'll have something you can get for free! Yea...
Oh wait.
*crash* I just through my business plan binder out into the street...WTF!
The Lindows loss is that MS could not get the injuction stopped. They ship now under that name. The full trial will be another story.
Having a book at the top of bestseller's list is hardly obscurity. Someone dropping their suit against you typically means they realize they have no case. Perhaps you should read the judge's remarks as well - and the book.
Why would the engine functionality mean anything? Games seem to repeat models quite often. Perhaps if there was an official list of the unique aspects of WC that people cannot copy without infringing on Blizzard's copyrighted/patented/trademarked IP (notice, IANAL). Without that, its kinda vaporous. Even if they could produce such a list, its questionable if those aspects alone make WC a unique game, and repeating them or any part of them "confuses" a game player into thinking they are playing a Blizzard game.
MS has lost to "Lindows" and Fox just lost to "Fair and Balanced". I've never heard of any law that says you can't imitate an existing behavior by writing it yourself, unless there's a unique algorithm involved, the GIF compression. Did WC employ a unique algorithm that had a patent?
Slashdot Mirror
As broadband gets adopted, the entry to provide service for it becomes lower in term of hardware. However, the wiring de-regulation efforts here in the US (telco and cable) are still a bit crazy. Sadly, those fights come in small waves.
If deregulation ever *does* open the door, I predict we're going to have another round of ISP start-ups, this time with broadband. Then, all kinds of tweaks are going to appear. This kind of competition is good for everyone, IMO. Customers have to be arena of what works and what doesn't. Ok, so I'm not saying anything new. Caps, Rates up and down, etc, should be on those menu.
For now, try getting most (DSL) ISPs to solve a line problem (they need to use the telco, who denies anything is wrong). Cable agreements are little better, but splitting the carrier and provider can be a headache anywhere.
But if the public knew the cost of broadband at the higher levels, they may not complain at 3.0Mbs for $50/month (my current Comcast agreement). Trying upping your agreement to a "business" service. What a whopper.
This question seems almost filler nonsense. People appreciate choice in the media they use for news and entertainment, communication/connection, etc. Every technology invented to deliver it is still alive in some way, public houses, books, newspapers, HAM, Radio, TV. The internet is just another in the long line on methods to connect. Need it or not, the world will have it and use it.
mug
BoxMod! Simulates all the fun and adventure of modding your PC into a translucent glowing overclocked liquid cooled bios burner!
Ring Designer! Practice that fine art of finding the perfect stone, alloy and maker for the best price and see if she'll marry you! Bonus points for knowing when to haggle each merchant down without dropping the deal!
Code Freak! Given a large pile of command line tools, solve ever-more increasing problems against the clock. Reap the benefits of abstracting prior works at the right level to make utilities useful in later levels!
Seriously, I think car mods are a dumb way to get a race car. HOWEVER, if someone wants to glue every piece of aftermarket plastic to their car and pretend, SO BE IT. Mods are a part of life at many levels, and part of people's (quite futile) Yearning To Be Different. So what?
Sure, selling a game about it is even dumber, but for fans of the concept, they'll get it for kids. I bet it took less time to develop than the manhours that'll fill up these slashdot comments.
mug
I see. Thats paints a better picture for me. Thanks. Sounds like he had some tight conditions to fulfill and did his best. Glad you got paid!
dollars to dogshit that every day, that 1 minute of time is sucked into a big vortex of Doing Nothing (pouring coffee, checking web/mail/phone, hellos, tidying up).
No, officially means according to the company accounting, which means you were officially working 30 minutes overtime. You were simply complaining about the lie fed to you, no guilt. The manager was simply taking your complaint to his level. He should have told you the truth, and thats what separates a good boss from a great one.
7AM, sure. True enough, then when 5PM hits the mark - BAM - you should be outta there. Lunches are yours, no interruptions. Nobody is given both "flex" time and "clocking in/out" - they are mutually exclusive. Frankly, you should let them fire you for this and take them to court.
I don't want it to. I don't play games much, don't care about HDTV, and my equipment lives in a closet, form factor doesn't matter much. However, to each his own. I just need to point out that sometimes chasing the technology has a limit.
Sounds like you shoulda bought a video card with NTSC output. I can an emulate gameboxen, stream net blather and play DVDs with just the PC already.
Thats interesting, I'll look into it. However, not out of pacifist but boredom, I'm a little against having a "kill" capability in a game easily. It kinda cheapens the aspect of the immersion. If, then again, once you died all your saved games of that story were erased, we'd see a little more mutual relationship between player and nonplayer characters. I'm sure that game would last about 15 minutes in a reviewer's post.
Somehow though, I'd like a game to focus more on "equal levels" of NPCs. If they die, then yes, your story us FUBAR. I ask too much of today's AI surely, and maybe too much of a simple game genre. I'd love it if your play was unique because of the cooporation or conflict you had, permanently. Starting anew would generate other random goals, etc. Creating such a metaengine would be a study in itself I believe. Oh well.
Black and White had a bit of this, a few plays where the "pet" aspect was nurtured, then an "evil/good" ruler concept. However, the game eventually required all aspects of your capability be honed, and it was a linear at tictactoe.
They also erroneously claim that Sinix was the input to the Minix project (where dotted green dives for the first time). Ironically, they left in the tip of the original line showing the actual V7 origins.
Examining both graphics, this is the only claim to the Minix origins, which is going to reduce their credibility in court once that area is expanded and the truth told.
But remember, this isn't about copyright, its about licensing to IBM (and now SGI). Yawn.
Well, just getting into console is a suckers game anyway. the PC was supposed to be a generic computer for multiple purposes. You can configure such a box towards any level of sophistication, including game speed.
However, by pumping NTSC polygons at higher rates than ever, consoles are a fools enticement, IMO. 2 years down the road, one has to drop such hardware for the newer. Also, consoles are now adding on telephony/networking to mimic the components PC have already enjoyed. And nary a higher resolution than "across the room" pretty. Play an older engine on a newer machine. I loaded up Thief recently and played on a high res/depth and was just amazed (again) from 12inches away.
Don't get me wrong, I love games and gaming. I'm just resolved to not pumping those 2-300 every two years into a new console and games. I'll upgrade the PC, especially when sweet video cards are coming out each year. Plus, I can enjoy that memory/speed for other applications.
Game Houses need to keep in mind that the market is wide, but for sheer beauty, >= 1200x1024 32bit >=30fps screens are going to make game immersion much stronger than blowing up 320x240 60htz into a 52inch blurbox. I know some have tried sticking to PC and missed a huge market, but spend the money there on quality and they'll find my wallet.
mug
This is actually one of the biggest potentials for FPS/RPG/MultiPlayer that I can think of. Not exactly random, but a form of optimization in mapping (i.e. ungenerated unless visited by *anyone* in game). Problem is, I think it would get tremendously big before some sort of forced wrap would have to occur.
For single player, I'd love to see a game that employed this concept into a mapping concept. Imagine an Unreal world that didn't force paths, but you could wander. Dead zones and "overbearing" zones (enemy town, etc) could be discovered and left, giving a player an option to break the linear concept.
Linear storytelling could still be employed via meetings with objects/NPCs that hinted at a puzzle solution. Or one could just drop a mallet on the user via "goal" lists. Since the advent of in-game mappers and note-takers, this has been a bit more fun.
Anything to remove the monotany, although "worlds" with even a few hundred objects would quickly become uninteresting. "Oh, another enemy camp. sigh."
Overall, random walls/objects/enemies - even done with style, wear a player out. The story is what compells me to keep running/shooting/solving.
mug
Comparisons should do an exact match, with preprocessors for generalization beforehand. Functions and variables can be auto-named, for example. Even conditionals can be ripped apart and rebuilt in a standard way to check for simple hacks to these. Ignoring whitespace and using C preprocessor output may be good defaults.
Because it's there. My sources of new music, in order of volume:
80% - Friends / Coworkers who let me borrow/trade.
7% - P2P systems
3% - Radio Scan Button
3% - Live streaming audio (mostly electronica)
2% - The library system (did i mention that good music has no age)
2% - Captured streaming audio (i have a multibox setup at home)
1% - Random web searches for unsigned crap (i have a lot of time at work to screen)
1% - Bootleg trader websites / bootleg clubs
0.8% - Garage Sales
0.2% - Stuff found walking the dog (really)
0% - stores (used or not)
Discovering Great New music is like finding treasures in some of these avenues. It doesn't consume all my free time, just something I snap up when I get curious. I consider all the time to listen to this stuff one of the best perks of a programmer's desk job.
mug
[scroll overlay against dark space to Pink Floyd's "Signs Of Life"]
And so, with the passage of time, we find the landscape changing in the outer worlds. The heyday of digital smuggling began to change as the RIAA overloads rachetted up the penalties for those caught. Eventually, entire square parsecs were left empty, encircled by only the empty hulls of caught offenders. Husks of empty steel that once held a fortune in content formed a warning sign to those entering the fray.
But the rebels of the age were smart. They turned to deeper methods, encrypting their content, running private servers, and WAR driving. The random element of physical contact reduced the smuggler's domain to a fraction of his former, but the overlap of these small circles kept fresh booty flowing. Content was still open to move, simply the transfer couldn't be without extra steps to know the receiver and secure the path.
Meanwhile, the RIAA replaced the existing law enforcement for tracking and penalizing those still foolish to appear on the public channels. No judge, no jury was required as the cost for including them in your defense were too high for all but the wealthiest. Given that smuggling was done on the cheap, for the masses, suffice it to say no one could pay for such accutrements. Although the Creators approved of the tactics, they continued to fight for slimmer traditional channels.
As the Age Of FAIB (Free As In Beer) came to a wane, the inner worlds continued to bustle with mass marketing and pop culture. The outer worlds succumbed to the MPAA/RIAA stormtroopers' patrols. Surprise searches and constant paranoia crept up on those who stayed too long in the toughest zones. Eventually, the smuggling became "wiped out" publicly, and the inner worlds no longer sent the curious making the journey to grab a piece of the action along the rim. But for those who knew the newest tricks, adventure and discovery continued to be the drug that filled their libraries with the Creators' best output...
[fade to black]
Compile it into an easy-to-read website with minimal reliance on anything more than JPG and HTML.
Find a moderate web host that can scale when you need it
Submit this page with a fully relevant meta/title tag to the leading search engines.
Sit back and watch sites mirror yours and the content appears zipped up on the P2Ps. Branched/Appended version will flower everywhere.
Congratulations! You've just provided valuable content to the world without imposing any new barriers of entry.
mug
This oversimplifies the case. First, even SCO FUD claims this is "not about copyright, but about licensing" between them and IBM. So either the article or the FUD is wrong. Probably both.
Also, this doesn't mention the concept of "public domain", of which the code they supposedly own is an implementation of such an algorithm. If the text is a copy/paste but the concept is directly school textbook, IANAL to determine how much value there is in their stuff anymore.
The details of the releases have been posted and reposted in the SCO news articles so often I tire of the discussion. Suffice it to say however, that SCO has to prove quite a large number of dubious claims before we get to this simplified concept of "code here...code here...pay up!"
Example:
The design of the System V code that they own is based on a legacy design that Linux also borrwed from. The four sections of kernel code that differ are possibly identical implementations of the same public concepts. IBM may or may not have injected the code into the tree, but BSD's implementation suggests Linux borrowed from this instead of SCO. BSD code is exempt due to the ATT fiasco predating SCO's Unixware. Also, the modules can be built in *almost identical* fashion by reading any grad-level OS text book sold readily at your local campus of higher education.
SCO sits on very shakey ground when making any claim that Linux has valuable components that would not exist without their effort, created or bought. And also (as has been said) SCO itself cannot survive without the efforts of BSD and Linux being integrated into their own products. The irony is scathing. The SCO convention was full of statements that made your head spin about the GPL (its good, its bad, its not how we do business, its what we rely on, it make code worthless, it how we recommend developing)
mug
The shift I'm talking about though is that digital information has essentially become trivial to copy. Combined with the fact that almost everything can be moved into and out of this medium, we stuck at a crossroads:
We can retrofit implement a check & balance system to impose consequences on "wrong" behavior. This is the DMCA stick with the RIAA's spyglass on you. The "punish the few harshly" is a takeoff from the old IRS theme of making audits their own punishment. Avoid the punishment meant avoiding the audit. So, people pay their taxes. However, the deductions fall into the "calculated risk" category for most people. The devil will be that this system always has a little abuse to play with.
Today, we have private trading outside of P2P, which will grow. Remember the swap meets at the old computer shows. I would trade C64 games back and forth until everyone there was saturated with the same library. Didn't take long. This happens now in any technically-savvy gathering for music. So fighting P2P is useless.
OR
We can rebuild the model to take advantage of the new system. Getting specific, content creators need to be paid based how popular their creation is. For investment, distribution (even digitally), storage, catelogging and other meta-activities, an umbrella company would form somehow. It would also look out for its own income channels, but accepting the nature of the new system. So something akin to the RIAA will always need to exist.
However, it can think long and hard about what's going on and collaborate on a exploiting the new technology. Let's start with some axioms:
Once on the internet, information is free for personal use. It cannot be resold commercially, but distributed for free with no limits. Take it or leave it, this is the truth today
Creators need to make a living wage and it should roughly scale to the "popularity" of their output. Popularity would be hard to measure everywhere, but metrics need to be formed somehow
The only solution I can think of is that a top-down tax be formed that imposes a bandwidth-style fee on all ISPs. Then this escrow pool builds. By sampling certain channels - and this would be technically challenging, a weighed listed it built of who's content is moved most. Then the pool is paid to the creators based on these ratios. Determining the true content, true movement seems very hard to get right, I think.
However, all types of digital information could be passed through these scanners.. Not unlike the FBI own snooper idea, with much of the same privacy problems. Sampling need not be at 100% and could spend some time checking unknown patterns against a growing database of known encryption schemes for content. It wouldn't need to be real time, just fast enough to make some sort of rolyalty pay period effect.
This idea may not work, but it's the only one I can think of. Others?
mug
I understand, but implementing a network seems quite cheap than building a management system for endless memory cards.
So let me think this through... you are trying to store small amount of data on individual items. Why? Once in storage, are they kept apart fro one another?
I think a RAID will suffice. Locally. If you need to keep it on the cheap, pump your small amount of data to 3 other simple boxen offsite. I mean, for small amounts of data, there's no reason to muck around juggling the physical medium. One can duplicate that data faster and more reliably than boxes of little memory cards with scribble on them.
If you need to go cheaper, try floppies! W00T!
mug
They should come to me for translation. I know a little German. He sits over there ->
ThankYooThankYooIllBeHereAllWeek
Wow - what a job! I know what we can put in there! All the modifications from BSD and Linux that have taken place. Darl will be *real proud* of the amazing improvements. With that much good stuff to add, and they're paying - where do I sign up?!
When we're done, we'll have something you can get for free! Yea...
Oh wait.
*crash* I just through my business plan binder out into the street...WTF!
The Lindows loss is that MS could not get the injuction stopped. They ship now under that name. The full trial will be another story.
Having a book at the top of bestseller's list is hardly obscurity. Someone dropping their suit against you typically means they realize they have no case. Perhaps you should read the judge's remarks as well - and the book.
Why would the engine functionality mean anything? Games seem to repeat models quite often. Perhaps if there was an official list of the unique aspects of WC that people cannot copy without infringing on Blizzard's copyrighted/patented/trademarked IP (notice, IANAL). Without that, its kinda vaporous. Even if they could produce such a list, its questionable if those aspects alone make WC a unique game, and repeating them or any part of them "confuses" a game player into thinking they are playing a Blizzard game.
MS has lost to "Lindows" and Fox just lost to "Fair and Balanced". I've never heard of any law that says you can't imitate an existing behavior by writing it yourself, unless there's a unique algorithm involved, the GIF compression. Did WC employ a unique algorithm that had a patent?
mug