A good place to see dozens of independent game publishers succeeding is www.shrapnelgames.com where you can find good stuff like Runesword (a sharware RPG now gone commercial) and Space Empires (a shareware 4X game also gone commercial). Both are products of small 1 or 2 person developers and both are making a profit. The author of Space Empires has quit his 'day job' and gone to full time work on his game. There are thriving communites for both games on the message boards, as well. These are only the two most successful of Shrapnel Games titles.
The law is supposed to be a reasonable compromise to maintain co-existence and peace among the various interests of society, not a tool for one part of the society to run over the other. By allowing the extreme extension of copyright law the Court has allowed concepts of copyright and patent to be hijacked. They were originally a means for all art and knowledge to be donated to the public domain in exchange for a limited time of exclusive rights to commerical exploitation. Now with this 'retroactive' extension every X years trick being allowed they have been mutated into 'intellectual property' rights, and an idea will be treated like a piece of land, leaving the public as serfs in the world of Feudal Corporate Property. This is just like Feudalism, btw. Extract a 'fee' for everything and keep the serfs in debt.
When the law is unreasonable, people will simply defy it, out of resentment or sometimes out of simple necessity. This leads to loss of respect for the law and further problems in society. We can expect the file traders and other 'pirates' to flourish now. The public now has no hope of any relaxation of this extremism and will simply defy the law. And of course the corporations will run to the government for help curbing the 'pirates'. The Feudal rulers were really annoyed at those peasants and serfs poaching 'their' game just because they were hungry. Funny that the direst punishments could not stop this behavior. People are just not 'smart' enough to become what the law dictates they should be. They have this funny thing called 'self interest' that leads them to try to lead their own lives instead of serve the self-appointed powers over them. I guess we can expect warfare, open and otherwise, between the public and the corporations for the foreseeable future.
I know this is a tad of-topic but... Some astronauts say, and other psycologists theorize, that the human mind struggles to deal with the physical/psycological separation from earth.
It doesn't have to be merely 'psychological'. The only humans who have ever been outside the earth's magnetic field are the apollo astronauts who went to the moon. I don't know the exact tally, there was the mission to orbit it once and then Apollo 11-17 with some people on more than one of those, but it's much less than 30 people. And of those people I have heard that almost all had major psychological problems after their return to earth. Many astronauts were under intense psychiatric care for a while after their missions. Does it seem a little bit odd that the effect would be so universal if it's 'psychological'? Couldn't some of these guys be adventurous 'care not' types who weren't scared by being away from home? In fact you'd expect just that type to be volunteering for the missions. There were plenty of these in the days of exploration of the earth, where you spent years away from home in sailing ships.
It's quite possible that space travel will turn out to be much more difficult than we have been estimating for medical reasons. We don't really know as much as we think about how life works. Biology has only advanced beyond basic taxonomy in the last couple of centuries. Leaving the very delicately balanced environment that supports our physical bodies may be very difficult, or even impossible in the long-term. And this may be true of other life that evolves in other environments. If so, we may have the reason for the lack of contact between civilizations even if they are very common out there. They might be unable to duplicate their 'life support' with sufficient accuracy to go anywhere.
When the process is discovered for creating artificial foods is invented, the discovering coproration (it'll have to be a corporation) will patent all known foods and we'll have to eat generic, tastless goop like the astronauts in the 2001 movie or pay license fees for every meal.
You mean, some great games were turned out by companies that EA syphoned up...e.g. wing commander was produced _before_ EA bought Origin.
Hey, the article does say that EA is the Microsoft of the games industry. Well, that's the method of Microsoft. Sounds like they are describing EA correctly.
The important point is 'knocking' -- as in casting aspersions. There is an a widespread assumption among critics that this is 'bad' with no clear reasons for it.
What's wrong with looking backwards? We do plenty of looking forward in our culture. We live so totally oriented towards the future that most of us have spent several months ahead of our actual earned income. It this a 'good' thing? Maybe we need some perspective?
Many who appreciate these 'backward' looking authors wonder if we haven't over-extended ourselves in other ways, as well. Moral, spiritual, or perhaps 'psychological' if you're too modern to use those old, outdated terms. Maybe we need some perepctive in this area, too. So 'looking backward' does not have to be a denial, it might be an acknowledgement of the changes we have been passing through. But it seems that everyone who bothers to notice anything related or oriented to older culture values automatically assumes it's 'anti-modern', a denial of progress. Hmmm....
Re:Oh, the fees you'll pay!
on
Add-Ons Add Up
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· Score: 1
Are you a UK resident? There were loans issued to the UK by the US as part of 'lend-lease' that are STILL being paid off! Last I heard, they will finally pay off those loans in 2004. Then in the late 2030s the various islans that we got 99 year 'leases' on will start returing to the UK. I wonder if those 'returns' will actually happen or if some new deal with be worked out?
Next up is the discussion of CG Golum vs. CG Yoda.
Not a fair comparison. Lucas has admitted that the CGI Yoda was deliberately 'dumbed down' to look like the puppet Yoda. When they made him 'realistic' he didn't look enough like Yoda. So they stiffened him up and made his ears wiggle like the puppet.:)
Gollum on the other hand is based on motion capture and made as realistic as possible.
For those of you who can stand a game that doesn't include the term "frame rate" in its specs, there's a very nice 'low profile' strategy game called Space Empires IV which doesn't require hacking to be modded. It's designed to be altered by the users with most of the game data in external text files. Check it out, and the community of modders it has accumulated, at www.shrapnelgames.com where you can download a demo.
...and, as revealed in Trial of a Time Lord, has last regeneration is already spoken for and he becomes the evil Valyard (spelling unknown).
Best look after those lives, Doctor. Perhaps he gets an extra life if he scores above 100,000...?
Bah... they found a way to grant a new 'regeneration' to The Master even when he'd used up his lives. If Doctor Who carries on long enough to need a 13th Doctor they'll find a way.
Look again. This is the internal code name not the product name it's going to be marketted under. If this is a leak how is MS going to be in any trouble for an informal use of a trademarked name?
...between claiming an 'exception' merely to be different, or to exploit the fact that this is something new, and making different interpretations because actual use and practice is different than in past cases.
The current exemption from taxes, for example, is simply a 'perk' of being new. It's no more difficult to tax internet business than mail-order business. The mail-order companies are just exploting the disorder of the states. If the states get together or Federal Govt. ever gets its act together and passes a uniform tax code for mail order companies, they will be taxed. Same for internet 'e-tailing' or whatever fancy name you want to invent. International mail-order is also no different from international online transactions.
But there are very real differences in daily life brought on by new technologies. Back when direct telephone connections to homes and businesses was new there was a hue and cry about criminals being able to conduct their nefarious business without being subject to surveillance, very much like the current paranoia about internet fraud and pedophiles, etc... The police used to be heavy practitioners of 'eavesdropping' before the telephone. But there was also recognition of how the technology could be abused to increase police powers in unacceptable ways. So we didn't setup a central phone listening system like some dictatorship, we crafted a reasonable system of requiring police to get evidence that someone needed to be snooped on and get a warrant. We think this is 'routine' now, but it was a very new and strange thing in the early years of the last century.
Re:Anyone notice the inherent similarities
on
Analyzing Palladium
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· Score: 1
It's similar in another way, too. It relies on a 'stability' that does not exist. A great deal of your biometric information can change. The patterns of blood vessels on your retina for example, is NOT constant throughout your life. People are gonna learn this the hard way as we start to rely on biometrics. Biometrics will have to be 'recalibrated' every few years. This will lead to more and more shortcuts being aded to the systems to make adjustments easier, which will make complete bypassing of the system easier. Soon biometric will be just another ineffective bureaucratic hassle of corporate life.
The same problems will apply to Palladum as have alreafy been found with Windows XP 'verification' system. It's a hassle to comply and this creates a huge incentive to hack it. And it IS hackable. End of 'security'. It'll be just another hassle for legitimate users, and another weapon for crackers to use against legitimate users.
How long after the first Palladium Compliant motherboad appears until BIOS 'patches' being appearing, I wonder? A week?
Just a thought... I haven't heard of a law saying that it is illegal to uncap a cable modem. Its certainly against the cable modem provider's policy (obviously), but this doesn't entitle the cable company to get the FBI involved, does it?!? This seems like a gross miscarriage of justice. I don't condone uncapping cable modems (as that would screw up the bandwidth of those that don't uncap, such as myself), but in the same sense, there's a big difference between disconnecting someone's service/banning them from your network (as we've seen reported on slashdot before) and RAIDING a person's house!
They weren't raiding for the cable modem hack, they were raiding for the bandwidth theft. If you got a contemporary equivalent of a bluebox (I presume they fixed the old control tones?:) and started phreaking yourself a lot of free long distance calls, would you claim you weren't 'stealing' anything when the FBI showed up to arrest you? Theft of services is still theft even if you can't produce a box of 'services' as evidence in court.
"Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny." -- Thomas Jefferson
This holds true in politics, finance, and information per se -- like software source code. Something else to point out to people when 'Open Source Software' comes up in conversation. When people have control of vast amounts of power of any sort, financial or otherwise, they are tempted to abuse it. If one guy with control of a corporation's books can do this, what can one guy -- or even a few if you count the team instead of their boss -- with control of nearly all corporations accounting software do?
See, you can change your credit card number, or your email address. You can even move someplace else. But you can't change your biometrics. Hopefully movies like Minority Report will provide some Good FUD about biometrics, so people realize that this information should be kept as private and closely-guarded as their own life.
Warning: The biggest problem with biometrics is this: While it is true that you cannot change your biometric data at will that is not the same thing as saying that it cannot change. Retinal scans use the pattern of blood vessels in your eye for example. THIS CAN CHANGE. No shit. Major physical changs in your body, like going on a major health bender and training (getting a lot of exercise), or for women just getting pregnant, can cause blood vessels to move aorund in your body. Hands (used by some biometric systems), eyes (used by rtinal scans)... anywhere. Of all the current biometric systems I think only fingerprints are known to be farily constant over a lifetime. The layperson thinks their body is in a 'static' state once they reach maturity but this is just not true. Ask medical professionals. All of these biometric technologies are headed for trouble as people start to rely on them for years and the natural changes in their bodies start to occur. One day you'll show up for work after a few weeks vacation at a health spa and your retinal scan will not work. It'll be a real-life version of 'The Net' I guess.
Which is also the equivalent of putting cameras in public places, which makes it easy to track someone's movements throughout the entire day. Therefore, this will not be an effective argument against such monitoring to people who already consider things like cameras in public places to be a good idea.
We do conduct a lot of private business in public, you know. This is more like the equivalent of making the taxis and public transport system (bus, subway, whatever) keep logs of everyone's travels, making all merchants keep logs of things you buy, making newsstands keep logs of things you read, etc... and requiring them all to provide those logs to the police.
Why do you expect NPR, an arm of PBS, to act any differently from any other corporation? It's the same 'survival of the paranoid' environment as any other corporation. The fact that they go on-air and beg openly for your money instead of selling your attention to advertisers changes nothing.
And despite the paranoia about their 'Intellectual Property' they don't even respect anyone elses IP. Remember Mike Nesmith's battle with PBS over their attempt at outright piracy? Check this link if you've forgotten about the Pacific Arts debacle...
He [Nesmith] said: "It's like finding your grandmother stealing your stereo. You're happy to get your stereo back, but it's sad to find out your grandmother is a thief.
PBS and NPR are both in trouble due to the proliferation of new cable channels and other competition. It's likely that neither will exist by the end of this decade. This is just another symptom of a corporation exercising its 'survival instinct'.
It's not a monopoly because there are still many competitors in the market. But yes, it is anti-competitive -- an unfair way to pursue an advantage over those competitors. I guess you could say they've been using unfair practices to keep their uncompetitive RAM manufacturing business afloat.:)
I'm still wondering why Microsoft's trick of forcing the PC manfacturers to collect the tarrif on non-MS operating systems instead of lobbying the govt. to do it was not anti-competitive, myself...
Well, it seems Orwell was an amateur dystopian. Why resort to force to place surveillance devices all over the place when you can just trick people into placing themselves under surveillance with implants? Once it's implanted how do you even know when it's on or off?
On the positive side, this could give new crdibility to the guys with the tin foil helmets, though...
Of the four, my admittedly biased knowledge of the facts leads me to seriously consider Buchanan as the source known as Deep Throat. He's always been a bit of a maverick, hanging out with Hunter S. Thompson while Buchanan was the top Nixon speech-writer and HST was writing Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 and his topsy-turvy relationship to his political parties come to mind as immediate examples.
And wasn't Buchanan also Nixon's Press Secretary for at least as while as well as a speech writer? Being in direct contact with journalists like that implies that he must have had at least some flair for getting along with them i.e. had some sympathies. He was later a commentator on CNN's 'Crossfire' for that matter. This is practically forgotten today. This would seem to be the sort of person who would feel 'the people's right to know' was important and might go to extra-ordinary lengths to insure that cover-ups were not allowed to succeed.
but wouldn't it be funny if the missing minutes were just Nixon concealing from his wife the fact that he'd been yuk-yukking it up with his beer buddies about his latest sexual conquests...?
No, no... you're confusing these with the Clinton tapes, and Hillary isn't as dumb as Dick Nixon -- her tapes were not discovered by the special prosecutors, much to Bill's relief.
Slashdot Mirror
They stole my name! Can I sue?
A good place to see dozens of independent game publishers succeeding is www.shrapnelgames.com where you can find good stuff like Runesword (a sharware RPG now gone commercial) and Space Empires (a shareware 4X game also gone commercial). Both are products of small 1 or 2 person developers and both are making a profit. The author of Space Empires has quit his 'day job' and gone to full time work on his game. There are thriving communites for both games on the message boards, as well. These are only the two most successful of Shrapnel Games titles.
The law is supposed to be a reasonable compromise to maintain co-existence and peace among the various interests of society, not a tool for one part of the society to run over the other. By allowing the extreme extension of copyright law the Court has allowed concepts of copyright and patent to be hijacked. They were originally a means for all art and knowledge to be donated to the public domain in exchange for a limited time of exclusive rights to commerical exploitation. Now with this 'retroactive' extension every X years trick being allowed they have been mutated into 'intellectual property' rights, and an idea will be treated like a piece of land, leaving the public as serfs in the world of Feudal Corporate Property. This is just like Feudalism, btw. Extract a 'fee' for everything and keep the serfs in debt.
When the law is unreasonable, people will simply defy it, out of resentment or sometimes out of simple necessity. This leads to loss of respect for the law and further problems in society. We can expect the file traders and other 'pirates' to flourish now. The public now has no hope of any relaxation of this extremism and will simply defy the law. And of course the corporations will run to the government for help curbing the 'pirates'. The Feudal rulers were really annoyed at those peasants and serfs poaching 'their' game just because they were hungry. Funny that the direst punishments could not stop this behavior. People are just not 'smart' enough to become what the law dictates they should be. They have this funny thing called 'self interest' that leads them to try to lead their own lives instead of serve the self-appointed powers over them. I guess we can expect warfare, open and otherwise, between the public and the corporations for the foreseeable future.
I know this is a tad of-topic but... Some astronauts say, and other psycologists theorize, that the human mind struggles to deal with the physical/psycological separation from earth.
It doesn't have to be merely 'psychological'. The only humans who have ever been outside the earth's magnetic field are the apollo astronauts who went to the moon. I don't know the exact tally, there was the mission to orbit it once and then Apollo 11-17 with some people on more than one of those, but it's much less than 30 people. And of those people I have heard that almost all had major psychological problems after their return to earth. Many astronauts were under intense psychiatric care for a while after their missions. Does it seem a little bit odd that the effect would be so universal if it's 'psychological'? Couldn't some of these guys be adventurous 'care not' types who weren't scared by being away from home? In fact you'd expect just that type to be volunteering for the missions. There were plenty of these in the days of exploration of the earth, where you spent years away from home in sailing ships.
It's quite possible that space travel will turn out to be much more difficult than we have been estimating for medical reasons. We don't really know as much as we think about how life works. Biology has only advanced beyond basic taxonomy in the last couple of centuries. Leaving the very delicately balanced environment that supports our physical bodies may be very difficult, or even impossible in the long-term. And this may be true of other life that evolves in other environments. If so, we may have the reason for the lack of contact between civilizations even if they are very common out there. They might be unable to duplicate their 'life support' with sufficient accuracy to go anywhere.
When the process is discovered for creating artificial foods is invented, the discovering coproration (it'll have to be a corporation) will patent all known foods and we'll have to eat generic, tastless goop like the astronauts in the 2001 movie or pay license fees for every meal.
You mean, some great games were turned out by companies that EA syphoned up...e.g. wing commander was produced _before_ EA bought Origin.
Hey, the article does say that EA is the Microsoft of the games industry. Well, that's the method of Microsoft. Sounds like they are describing EA correctly.
The important point is 'knocking' -- as in casting aspersions. There is an a widespread assumption among critics that this is 'bad' with no clear reasons for it.
What's wrong with looking backwards? We do plenty of looking forward in our culture. We live so totally oriented towards the future that most of us have spent several months ahead of our actual earned income. It this a 'good' thing? Maybe we need some perspective?
Many who appreciate these 'backward' looking authors wonder if we haven't over-extended ourselves in other ways, as well. Moral, spiritual, or perhaps 'psychological' if you're too modern to use those old, outdated terms. Maybe we need some perepctive in this area, too. So 'looking backward' does not have to be a denial, it might be an acknowledgement of the changes we have been passing through. But it seems that everyone who bothers to notice anything related or oriented to older culture values automatically assumes it's 'anti-modern', a denial of progress. Hmmm....
Are you a UK resident? There were loans issued to the UK by the US as part of 'lend-lease' that are STILL being paid off! Last I heard, they will finally pay off those loans in 2004. Then in the late 2030s the various islans that we got 99 year 'leases' on will start returing to the UK. I wonder if those 'returns' will actually happen or if some new deal with be worked out?
Next up is the discussion of CG Golum vs. CG Yoda.
:)
Not a fair comparison. Lucas has admitted that the CGI Yoda was deliberately 'dumbed down' to look like the puppet Yoda. When they made him 'realistic' he didn't look enough like Yoda. So they stiffened him up and made his ears wiggle like the puppet.
Gollum on the other hand is based on motion capture and made as realistic as possible.
For those of you who can stand a game that doesn't include the term "frame rate" in its specs, there's a very nice 'low profile' strategy game called Space Empires IV which doesn't require hacking to be modded. It's designed to be altered by the users with most of the game data in external text files. Check it out, and the community of modders it has accumulated, at www.shrapnelgames.com where you can download a demo.
...and, as revealed in Trial of a Time Lord, has last regeneration is already spoken for and he becomes the evil Valyard (spelling unknown).
Best look after those lives, Doctor. Perhaps he gets an extra life if he scores above 100,000...?
Bah... they found a way to grant a new 'regeneration' to The Master even when he'd used up his lives. If Doctor Who carries on long enough to need a 13th Doctor they'll find a way.
Look again. This is the internal code name not the product name it's going to be marketted under. If this is a leak how is MS going to be in any trouble for an informal use of a trademarked name?
...between claiming an 'exception' merely to be different, or to exploit the fact that this is something new, and making different interpretations because actual use and practice is different than in past cases.
The current exemption from taxes, for example, is simply a 'perk' of being new. It's no more difficult to tax internet business than mail-order business. The mail-order companies are just exploting the disorder of the states. If the states get together or Federal Govt. ever gets its act together and passes a uniform tax code for mail order companies, they will be taxed. Same for internet 'e-tailing' or whatever fancy name you want to invent. International mail-order is also no different from international online transactions.
But there are very real differences in daily life brought on by new technologies. Back when direct telephone connections to homes and businesses was new there was a hue and cry about criminals being able to conduct their nefarious business without being subject to surveillance, very much like the current paranoia about internet fraud and pedophiles, etc... The police used to be heavy practitioners of 'eavesdropping' before the telephone. But there was also recognition of how the technology could be abused to increase police powers in unacceptable ways. So we didn't setup a central phone listening system like some dictatorship, we crafted a reasonable system of requiring police to get evidence that someone needed to be snooped on and get a warrant. We think this is 'routine' now, but it was a very new and strange thing in the early years of the last century.
It's similar in another way, too. It relies on a 'stability' that does not exist. A great deal of your biometric information can change. The patterns of blood vessels on your retina for example, is NOT constant throughout your life. People are gonna learn this the hard way as we start to rely on biometrics. Biometrics will have to be 'recalibrated' every few years. This will lead to more and more shortcuts being aded to the systems to make adjustments easier, which will make complete bypassing of the system easier. Soon biometric will be just another ineffective bureaucratic hassle of corporate life.
The same problems will apply to Palladum as have alreafy been found with Windows XP 'verification' system. It's a hassle to comply and this creates a huge incentive to hack it. And it IS hackable. End of 'security'. It'll be just another hassle for legitimate users, and another weapon for crackers to use against legitimate users.
How long after the first Palladium Compliant motherboad appears until BIOS 'patches' being appearing, I wonder? A week?
Just a thought ... I haven't heard of a law saying that it is illegal to uncap a cable modem. Its certainly against the cable modem provider's policy (obviously), but this doesn't entitle the cable company to get the FBI involved, does it?!? This seems like a gross miscarriage of justice. I don't condone uncapping cable modems (as that would screw up the bandwidth of those that don't uncap, such as myself), but in the same sense, there's a big difference between disconnecting someone's service/banning them from your network (as we've seen reported on slashdot before) and RAIDING a person's house!
:) and started phreaking yourself a lot of free long distance calls, would you claim you weren't 'stealing' anything when the FBI showed up to arrest you? Theft of services is still theft even if you can't produce a box of 'services' as evidence in court.
They weren't raiding for the cable modem hack, they were raiding for the bandwidth theft. If you got a contemporary equivalent of a bluebox (I presume they fixed the old control tones?
"Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny." -- Thomas Jefferson
This holds true in politics, finance, and information per se -- like software source code. Something else to point out to people when 'Open Source Software' comes up in conversation. When people have control of vast amounts of power of any sort, financial or otherwise, they are tempted to abuse it. If one guy with control of a corporation's books can do this, what can one guy -- or even a few if you count the team instead of their boss -- with control of nearly all corporations accounting software do?
See, you can change your credit card number, or your email address. You can even move someplace else. But you can't change your biometrics. Hopefully movies like Minority Report will provide some Good FUD about biometrics, so people realize that this information should be kept as private and closely-guarded as their own life.
Warning:
The biggest problem with biometrics is this: While it is true that you cannot change your biometric data at will that is not the same thing as saying that it cannot change. Retinal scans use the pattern of blood vessels in your eye for example. THIS CAN CHANGE. No shit. Major physical changs in your body, like going on a major health bender and training (getting a lot of exercise), or for women just getting pregnant, can cause blood vessels to move aorund in your body. Hands (used by some biometric systems), eyes (used by rtinal scans)... anywhere. Of all the current biometric systems I think only fingerprints are known to be farily constant over a lifetime. The layperson thinks their body is in a 'static' state once they reach maturity but this is just not true. Ask medical professionals. All of these biometric technologies are headed for trouble as people start to rely on them for years and the natural changes in their bodies start to occur. One day you'll show up for work after a few weeks vacation at a health spa and your retinal scan will not work. It'll be a real-life version of 'The Net' I guess.
Which is also the equivalent of putting cameras in public places, which makes it easy to track someone's movements throughout the entire day. Therefore, this will not be an effective argument against such monitoring to people who already consider things like cameras in public places to be a good idea.
We do conduct a lot of private business in public, you know. This is more like the equivalent of making the taxis and public transport system (bus, subway, whatever) keep logs of everyone's travels, making all merchants keep logs of things you buy, making newsstands keep logs of things you read, etc... and requiring them all to provide those logs to the police.
Why do you expect NPR, an arm of PBS, to act any differently from any other corporation? It's the same 'survival of the paranoid' environment as any other corporation. The fact that they go on-air and beg openly for your money instead of selling your attention to advertisers changes nothing.
And despite the paranoia about their 'Intellectual Property' they don't even respect anyone elses IP. Remember Mike Nesmith's battle with PBS over their attempt at outright piracy? Check this link if you've forgotten about the Pacific Arts debacle...
He [Nesmith] said: "It's like finding your grandmother stealing your stereo. You're happy to get your stereo back, but it's sad to find out your grandmother is a thief.
PBS and NPR are both in trouble due to the proliferation of new cable channels and other competition. It's likely that neither will exist by the end of this decade. This is just another symptom of a corporation exercising its 'survival instinct'.
How is this not a monopoly?
:)
It's not a monopoly because there are still many competitors in the market. But yes, it is anti-competitive -- an unfair way to pursue an advantage over those competitors. I guess you could say they've been using unfair practices to keep their uncompetitive RAM manufacturing business afloat.
I'm still wondering why Microsoft's trick of forcing the PC manfacturers to collect the tarrif on non-MS operating systems instead of lobbying the govt. to do it was not anti-competitive, myself...
Well, it seems Orwell was an amateur dystopian. Why resort to force to place surveillance devices all over the place when you can just trick people into placing themselves under surveillance with implants? Once it's implanted how do you even know when it's on or off?
On the positive side, this could give new crdibility to the guys with the tin foil helmets, though...
Of the four, my admittedly biased knowledge of the facts leads me to seriously consider Buchanan as the source known as Deep Throat. He's always been a bit of a maverick, hanging out with Hunter S. Thompson while Buchanan was the top Nixon speech-writer and HST was writing Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 and his topsy-turvy relationship to his political parties come to mind as immediate examples.
And wasn't Buchanan also Nixon's Press Secretary for at least as while as well as a speech writer? Being in direct contact with journalists like that implies that he must have had at least some flair for getting along with them i.e. had some sympathies. He was later a commentator on CNN's 'Crossfire' for that matter. This is practically forgotten today. This would seem to be the sort of person who would feel 'the people's right to know' was important and might go to extra-ordinary lengths to insure that cover-ups were not allowed to succeed.
but wouldn't it be funny if the missing minutes were just Nixon concealing from his wife the fact that he'd been yuk-yukking it up with his beer buddies about his latest sexual conquests...?
No, no... you're confusing these with the Clinton tapes, and Hillary isn't as dumb as Dick Nixon -- her tapes were not discovered by the special prosecutors, much to Bill's relief.
Next the Onion should run a story about planning to file suit against the Beijing Evening News for stealing their story.
Oh, but they don't know what copyright means, either... so they won't get the joke.
Can you make a Beowulf cluster of them???