Just take a look at abandonware to see how copyright helps promote the useful arts by preserving old works. Many arcade games and other software is clearly not being preserved, especially in its original form. There is clearly a demand for it, but copyright holders only seem willing to satisfy that with crappy retreads that have little to do with the original in actual gameplay.
Part of the problem is that much of the gaming press is largely undifferentiated, with "kids" games being covered right along with the mature ones. The rationale to this is that even older game players who play games like Quake can still also enjoy the latest Zelda release. Much of the attitude that typifies computer gaming is centered on "fun", which in America's twisted sense of work ethic and maturity is equated with "kid stuff". naturally anything that's bright, colorful and entertaining is either aimed at children or losers who never grew out of it. "Normal" adults should have no interest in it because they're clearly too old to play with toys, and the people who make these games are clearly just trying to extract money from kids since they couldn't possibly actually want to play such dreck.
No biometric technology is 100% accurate, and the potential for false positives are not non-existant, especially for something that's working in near-real time from data as complex as imaging of faces of people who aren't looking straight into the camera. It's entirely possible for someone, like say, yourself, to be detained when they register as someone they resemble, and that would suck.
Another good example is the steam engine, which WAS patented. The firt steam engines were large and unwieldly, with limited use. They were leased out to people instead of sold. Although there were a number of engineers who had ideas for improvements for size, weight, and efficiency, the patent holders feared that the engines were already at the limits of safety, and anything lighter or smaller would be too fragile and dangerous. Consequently, they withheld liscensing and prevented the development of the steam engines that drove the Industrial Revolution by several years.
In cases like these boycotting just makes it worse. They're already hurting so they're trying to find new revenue streams. Cut off their legitimate revenue even more and they will only get more desperate and tenacious over their precious patents which might be worth something if enough people who can make money lisence them. They aren't going to just quietly fade into the night for lack of your ad money but will go kicking and screaming, destroying and litigating as much as they can in the process.
This is the equivalent of putting locks on a crack house and calling it illegal, i.e. if you do something illegal and you don't leave the door open for the police when they come, you get even more time on your sentence. Ideally, encryption should be as common as locks on your front door, but short sighted nonense like this will forever doom computer security they desire so much
The voodoo3 is what the banshee should have been, but instead they lagged a generation to NVidia, and got caught playing catch up in features, while downplaying them at the same time; "24/32 bit 3D is too slow", T&L doesn't help much". Even when 3dfx matched nvidia in performance at the same settings, NVidia gave more complet features, so you could at least choose between speed and quality. Too bad Nvidia's linux drivers are evil, that was one thing 3dfx got right
That's what Aureal said about their Vortex drivers, just before they went bankrupt and bugs that could only be resolved in the binary portion were found with VIA based Athlon motherboards. They too were bought by their competition, Creative Labs, but inversely creative had released open source drivers for their competing cards. hopefully they'll give the same treatment to the vortex driver once the acquisition's complete, but I gave up waiting and got a SBLive!
We don't want their drivers, we want the specs to their cards so others can make independent drivers. Unfortunately, their driver developers have equated NVidia's driver development with their job security, and don't see releasing specs as welcoming competition (never mind that quite afew of open source projects that were started by companies are still worked on by paid in-house developers).
They appear to be operating under the assumption that if a station plays any of their music, they owe them for all their music you could potentially pay. That's what really bugs me about stuff like this and other things, like taxing CD-Rs on their behalf in some countries, under the assumption that the only stuff worth burning or boadcasting is their own. Even when small independent artists sell cds they burned themselves, the record companies still get a cut.
they'd like to do that, and Carmack has made Q3 to be very portable, but with Christmas approaching, they can't afford not to release the windows version as soon as they can, even if putting a linux binary on the same cd would only take a week more. The plan with Q3 was to release Linux, Mac, and Windows at the same time, but the holidays again forced them to release windows first, and then Linux a couple weeks later. Much quicker than most porting efforts, but not quick enough to stop the dual booting Linux users to get the windows version and wait for the linux binary to be posted for download
few distros come set up for 3d acceleration out of the box, and getting it running requires too much manual configuration. Mesa libraries certainly don't make it easy. Not until XFree86 4 and mature drivers for every major card come standard on most distros will 3d games be easily set up. Stuff like Nvidia's binary only drivers aren't going to make that happen anytime soon.
I would guess that they aren't just cut-and-pasting code, but are using it as a "cheat sheet" for their own code. They're just figuring out the right algorithms and gritty details about certain stuff that Windows and Linux have in common. At least that's what I hope they're doing, if not they are either too stupid or too arrogent for their own good.
The point of this is that digital "signatures" are semantically nothing like what written siganures are and what they represent. A written signature is a verification that the person signing it has touched, and probably read, that paper. All a digital signature says is that someone's computer had touched the file or chunk of data in question. The distinction lies in the fact that while a person has to physically and intentfully sign something, there is no way to prove that some program, possibly malicious, digitally signed something for him or her, without their intent.
Because of this distinction, digital signatures lack the property that gives written signatures their validity. Aside from forgery, there is no possible way that a signature can be made without the person's will. It is that expression of will that matters, and cannot be assured in the context of an automated, albeit user controlled, process.
SkyNet made tactical decisions on what should get fired at. As long as we're still giving the orders of what to fire at, I don't think you have much to worry about.
Assuming everything on a particular battlefield is a clearly marked friendly or enemy asset is a very bad assumption. How do you deal with an occupied territory where you have enemy equipment mingled among occupied cities? Or when both your allies and enemies are using the same type of equipment? Suppose you only have enough payload for one particular objective? Can a computer tell if one target needs to be taken out immediately because it's about to fire on something else? As soon as you have a situation where more discretion than simple friend or foe is required, a completely automated system is of very limited capability. You can't just hit the reset button or send out another drone when it makes those kinds of mistakes.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering the name of the class was Astronomy in Art, History, and Literature, I think it was very appropriate.
That's funny, since for Quake 3 Steed finally broke down and used motion capture.
You haven't used enlightenment, have you (or really mucked around with its theming stuff, anyway)?
All social constructs are imaginary. It's the fact that everyone else shares the delusion that makes them worth something
Just take a look at abandonware to see how copyright helps promote the useful arts by preserving old works. Many arcade games and other software is clearly not being preserved, especially in its original form. There is clearly a demand for it, but copyright holders only seem willing to satisfy that with crappy retreads that have little to do with the original in actual gameplay.
Part of the problem is that much of the gaming press is largely undifferentiated, with "kids" games being covered right along with the mature ones. The rationale to this is that even older game players who play games like Quake can still also enjoy the latest Zelda release. Much of the attitude that typifies computer gaming is centered on "fun", which in America's twisted sense of work ethic and maturity is equated with "kid stuff". naturally anything that's bright, colorful and entertaining is either aimed at children or losers who never grew out of it. "Normal" adults should have no interest in it because they're clearly too old to play with toys, and the people who make these games are clearly just trying to extract money from kids since they couldn't possibly actually want to play such dreck.
No biometric technology is 100% accurate, and the potential for false positives are not non-existant, especially for something that's working in near-real time from data as complex as imaging of faces of people who aren't looking straight into the camera. It's entirely possible for someone, like say, yourself, to be detained when they register as someone they resemble, and that would suck.
Another good example is the steam engine, which WAS patented. The firt steam engines were large and unwieldly, with limited use. They were leased out to people instead of sold. Although there were a number of engineers who had ideas for improvements for size, weight, and efficiency, the patent holders feared that the engines were already at the limits of safety, and anything lighter or smaller would be too fragile and dangerous. Consequently, they withheld liscensing and prevented the development of the steam engines that drove the Industrial Revolution by several years.
In cases like these boycotting just makes it worse. They're already hurting so they're trying to find new revenue streams. Cut off their legitimate revenue even more and they will only get more desperate and tenacious over their precious patents which might be worth something if enough people who can make money lisence them. They aren't going to just quietly fade into the night for lack of your ad money but will go kicking and screaming, destroying and litigating as much as they can in the process.
This is the equivalent of putting locks on a crack house and calling it illegal, i.e. if you do something illegal and you don't leave the door open for the police when they come, you get even more time on your sentence. Ideally, encryption should be as common as locks on your front door, but short sighted nonense like this will forever doom computer security they desire so much
The voodoo3 is what the banshee should have been, but instead they lagged a generation to NVidia, and got caught playing catch up in features, while downplaying them at the same time; "24/32 bit 3D is too slow", T&L doesn't help much". Even when 3dfx matched nvidia in performance at the same settings, NVidia gave more complet features, so you could at least choose between speed and quality. Too bad Nvidia's linux drivers are evil, that was one thing 3dfx got right
That's what Aureal said about their Vortex drivers, just before they went bankrupt and bugs that could only be resolved in the binary portion were found with VIA based Athlon motherboards. They too were bought by their competition, Creative Labs, but inversely creative had released open source drivers for their competing cards. hopefully they'll give the same treatment to the vortex driver once the acquisition's complete, but I gave up waiting and got a SBLive!
...and see releasing specs ...
blah, gotta hit that preview button more often
We don't want their drivers, we want the specs to their cards so others can make independent drivers. Unfortunately, their driver developers have equated NVidia's driver development with their job security, and don't see releasing specs as welcoming competition (never mind that quite afew of open source projects that were started by companies are still worked on by paid in-house developers).
bah, I suck.
Haven't seen links posted yet, so here they are
http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05987525__
http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US06154773__
http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US06061680__
They appear to be operating under the assumption that if a station plays any of their music, they owe them for all their music you could potentially pay. That's what really bugs me about stuff like this and other things, like taxing CD-Rs on their behalf in some countries, under the assumption that the only stuff worth burning or boadcasting is their own. Even when small independent artists sell cds they burned themselves, the record companies still get a cut.
they'd like to do that, and Carmack has made Q3 to be very portable, but with Christmas approaching, they can't afford not to release the windows version as soon as they can, even if putting a linux binary on the same cd would only take a week more. The plan with Q3 was to release Linux, Mac, and Windows at the same time, but the holidays again forced them to release windows first, and then Linux a couple weeks later. Much quicker than most porting efforts, but not quick enough to stop the dual booting Linux users to get the windows version and wait for the linux binary to be posted for download
few distros come set up for 3d acceleration out of the box, and getting it running requires too much manual configuration. Mesa libraries certainly don't make it easy. Not until XFree86 4 and mature drivers for every major card come standard on most distros will 3d games be easily set up. Stuff like Nvidia's binary only drivers aren't going to make that happen anytime soon.
Then we'll never run out of addresses!
I would guess that they aren't just cut-and-pasting code, but are using it as a "cheat sheet" for their own code. They're just figuring out the right algorithms and gritty details about certain stuff that Windows and Linux have in common. At least that's what I hope they're doing, if not they are either too stupid or too arrogent for their own good.
The point of this is that digital "signatures" are semantically nothing like what written siganures are and what they represent. A written signature is a verification that the person signing it has touched, and probably read, that paper. All a digital signature says is that someone's computer had touched the file or chunk of data in question. The distinction lies in the fact that while a person has to physically and intentfully sign something, there is no way to prove that some program, possibly malicious, digitally signed something for him or her, without their intent.
Because of this distinction, digital signatures lack the property that gives written signatures their validity. Aside from forgery, there is no possible way that a signature can be made without the person's will. It is that expression of will that matters, and cannot be assured in the context of an automated, albeit user controlled, process.
They're already using windows on destroyers (or will soon anyway)
9 21.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/13
SkyNet made tactical decisions on what should get fired at. As long as we're still giving the orders of what to fire at, I don't think you have much to worry about.
Assuming everything on a particular battlefield is a clearly marked friendly or enemy asset is a very bad assumption. How do you deal with an occupied territory where you have enemy equipment mingled among occupied cities? Or when both your allies and enemies are using the same type of equipment? Suppose you only have enough payload for one particular objective? Can a computer tell if one target needs to be taken out immediately because it's about to fire on something else? As soon as you have a situation where more discretion than simple friend or foe is required, a completely automated system is of very limited capability. You can't just hit the reset button or send out another drone when it makes those kinds of mistakes.