Your grandmother bakes cakes that are sturdy enough to survive being hit short distances with a baseball bat? Watch for IP addresses from Goodyear and B.F. Goodrich, and the Michelin Man would like to subscribe to her newsletter.
Mordok-DestroyerOfWo: My question is how do they prove that the person in the picture is a minor (yes I know that in extreme cases it's easy).
They don't. The way they apply the law, if the person in the picture could in any way possibly be a minor they go ahead and prosecute. Then it becomes the responsibility of the person who had the picture to provide the affadavit or other proof that the model was legal at the time the work was created.
What's more, such an affadavit might not help any more, since the application of the law has so widened that if the model looks young enough, whether or not he or she actually is, bang goes the gavel. And it's no help when there is no model in the first place (digital art, painting, etc).
It's a subtle, clever erosion of that whole concept of "innocent until proven guilty" that people like to wave around when they're obviously guilty of something.
Once I almost got started on a MMORPG project with a few friends. The ostensible leader of the project offered me:
1) no creative control whatsoever (imagine being micromanaged by the very duck that's trying to nibble you to death), and
2) no money. At least until the project started making money. Or as the saying goes, "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a MMO today."
When I seemed less than grateful at the terms, I was out of there so fast I left a contrail. Haven't talked to those friends in a very long time either.
Is NASA screwing themselves royally in the deal as they fish for cheap labor? Almost certainly. But it could happen that they find an excited cadre of people who are willing to work on an open-sourced MMO system of some type. For instance, I really don't think the MUSH codebase has achieved its full potential. Of course, that "limited exclusivity" line item kind of defecates in that plan's bed.
dws90: If this lawsuit succeeds, does that mean students won't have to take notes anymore?
Worse, how much credit does a student get if he completely blanks on a test, thereby demonstrating that he's done his civic duty by not remembering someone else's intellectual property?
It's not just about an 11-year-old who took over a network admin job. Note the parts of the story about updating the computers, updating the (much needed) virus protection, and getting a gateway appliance to make sure that didn't happen again.
It's about an 11-year-old who took over a network admin job and immediately started off doing a better job than his predecessor. Kind of makes you wonder who that sad sack was, doesn't it?
erlehmann: Kind of bothered some of them, but instead of learning crypto basics, they yelled at me. I do not understand this behaviour, can Slashdot explain ?
Easily.
They were relying on "Security Through Apathy" as their primary defense. And you, you nasty, naughty person, blew through it as if it wasn't there at all.
That they're relying on bad people to just look the other way is, in their minds, not a problem at all. Which obviously is a problem, but not to them. From here, it's turtles all the way down.
Okay, I doubt I cleared up anything, but at least for a moment, it was fun mocking them.
That's part of the great joke of the internet's existence. It started as a military network designed with multiple connections and redundancy to ensure it remains functional despite damage. Private enterprise is now predominantly in charge of it, and looking to profit off of it. Greed is on the rise as a source of net damage -- imagine a beowulf cluster of toll roads.
Maybe, but can government really afford to be as independent of science as possible?
Government is, ideally, about decision-making and allocation of resources. Therefore, the government has (or at least should have) a very strong vested interest in making educated decisions and allocating its limited resources as smartly as possible, in order to get the most bang for its buck and not lead the country into any silly pitfalls like health crises or dubiously justified wars.
What we have instead currently is a system so politically charged the repulsing forces are close to tearing it apart. It invests its resources in carefully selected areas which agree a priori with its beliefs, and throttles any research that turns up results that fly in the face of those beliefs. The beliefs are themselves not the problem, it's the slavish devotion to them, and their preference over any facts, where the trouble starts.
Let's put it this way: If it were a single person, cherry-picking things he reads or hears for facts that agree with the way his mind is already made up, and then making decisions based on those beliefs, most people would call him a "flatulating butthead."
QuantumFTL: I think a lot of folks are just getting tired of the same stale dungeon-crawling that D&D has been pushing for the last 25 years, moving on to bigger and better things (like GURPS, as mentioned in the tags).
I don't know GURPS being the "bigger" thing, and between 3rd and 4th editions I have enough books to choke a donkey. Each system has its own philosophy of character growth. I differentiate the two saying that D&D is designed to get characters moving relatively quickly up through power levels. Even though characters only beef up their skills when they pass that invisible "level" limit, it is the "epic" system in which characters will more quickly change their role within their environment.
Meanwhile, GURPS character growth tends to be much slower, and the bolting on of brand new abilities ("feats," if you will) is a rarity. GURPS is the "flat" system, which is better suited to characters who may improve more slowly over time, and who occasionally change their station significantly (when they get enough points saved up for a major purchase).
I won't say they're apples and oranges, but each is suited to its own style of play, which makes comparison less meaningful. Personally, I prefer GURPS too, but that may just be my prejudice against level-based systems talking. It is possible for both systems to coexist because they fill different niches.
As for play style, the "dungeon crawl" is a stereotype. Some people are realizing that it's as much fun fighting on the way to the fortified underground complex as it is fighting within it. And other pastimes are available. That was one of my complaints about Traveller, originally: some gamers wouldn't think past ship-to-ship combat, shipboard combat, and working starports looking for cargo. Then I realized: it's not the game's problem, it's an issue the players have. Same with the "dungeon crawl:" it's not the game that fences them into it, it's just what many players do with it.
And there are other systems, too; D&D and GURPS only take up two bookshelves of the seven or so I need to hold all my gaming books. Many do enough differently that direct comparison between them is futile.
If you live in the Greater Boston area, you should check us out. It's one of the few places you'll find roleplayers willing to try just about anything.
I'm nowhere near Greater Boston, but that sounds refreshing. My current group is getting a bit hidebound, and I've no other places to turn.
cheesyfru: Granted, I'm barely breaking even financially when you factor in the cost of my gear, but why is everyone obsessed with measuring success with dollars?
Because to many, money is the ultimate quantifier of success. "If you're rich," the common but tragically flawed logic goes, "you're doing something right." The more money you make from your endeavor, the more right it must be. Some of it is "keeping up with the Joneses" or "getting ahead" or "living in style," and some of it is "high score syndrome" and the belief that bigger numbers are better than smaller ones.
Money does have its uses. Better equipment, server costs, an upgraded home studio built in your basement, a shed, or a home office, etc. are all good things to have if you need them, but a lot of people don't care for subsistence. They want extremes to show they're doing better than "good enough."
And that's why some people scratch their heads at trying to make a go of it through something like the RPM Challenge instead of hitching your wagon to a siphon star like the RIAA, and why it's so important: "If it's free," the common but tragically flawed logic goes, "how good could it possibly be?" So they never try it, and they never find out. It's not just their loss, either; everyone they convince with that logic becomes a loss as well.
The RPM Challenge becomes not just the gathering of victims, but hopefully the refutation-by-example of that logic.
Aggrav8d: Gaming experts gaming the system? They have way too much experience, they'll run circles around their competitors!
I know. So I'm expecting a bloodbath. (Hey, pass the popcorn, would you? Oh, a large bucket please.)
Aggrav8d: At the very least lobbyists should have to get past some kind of jumping puzzle to reach the senate, only to be told their congressman is in another office.
Why not? I mean, that's almost how it works for everyone else now anyway. There's no jumping puzzle per se, but that last clause is spot on.
Cider: Because handwaving away complaints of crappy performance through emulation is easier than forcing your developers to learn Objective-C and Core Framework API calls.
I got Geometry Wars: Galaxies for the Wii first, then picked up the DS version for the unlocks (and yeah, I guess for the portable play). It turns out you only get one system and seven planets out of it, so I don't feel it was quite worth it.
(Oh, and the unlock is mutual -- introduce GW:G on the Wii to GW:G on the DS, and you get the bonus levels on both editions. This would otherwise be seriously interesting, but more on that later.)
And it doesn't share high scores because the game experience between the two is so radically different that the scores just don't convert over properly -- not just the way it plays (lots of enemies slow the DS down), but the layouts of some of the play spaces are different.
That said, there is a big heaping chunk of potential here. GW:G demonstrated it with the "Retro Evolved" demo download to the DS. And then they demonstrated a twist on it with the mutual unlock of special levels.
Imagine a free download through the Shop Channel to turn your Wii into a demo kiosk on steroids. Not just two or three but twenty game demos. Right there in the comfort of your home, Nintendo could give you the first hit--er, sample of bunches of software. Consumers see what's out there and develop the want, stores are set to provide, let the stampede begin.
Imagine a download ($20 or so) which turns the Wii into a DS game server -- something that'll serve up individual levels or stages on demand to a large number of DSes, and when a round of play is done with it would collect and store the results for comparison or competition. Yes, the DS can do some of this already (Mario Kart DS does networked play), but only one person would need to own the "original game" and that would be on the Wii. 1 Wii + this software + 20 DSes with no games in them = DS LAN Party.
Or how about a free download for the Wii that will allow it to connect to the DS and download content from it? You'd buy a DS game marked "Wii-Enhanced," take it home, and use the loader to get bonus content from the DS that you could play on the Wii?
Disclaimer: I have no idea they'll ever attempt anything like these. I'm just saying it could be cool if they did.
KlaymenDK: Um, feeling like Ender? That's the only one I can come up with...
Sadly, there's a way such a "feature" could possibly be implemented: the school administrators could load up the locker system with "cool content" that makes most of the kids want to use their locker solution. Peer pressure and ostracism would follow as a matter of course if their system achieved a critical mass of users. (Dare I say it? "Schoolyard brownshirts")
And where it backfires--mercifully, beautifully--is that we're talking about school administrators loading a computer system with "cool content" for the students. Think about that one for a moment or two. The kids that can work outside the system will get all sorts of friends looking to find out how they get to the good stuff rather than the school admin shovelware.
Colin Smith: These places are the dinosaurs. They get eaten.
If they get eaten, it's by bigger dinosaurs. Meanwhile, they're crushing the tiny little herbivores under their enormous stump-like feet by the dozens.
Even if they're slow, the only things that can really take down the biggest dinosaurs are old age, starvation, and lightning.
Write-up: Why do so many nerds seem to lean toward the Libertarian end of the spectrum?
j00r0m4nc3r: Can you cite your source for this data? Or are you just assuming this because some of your friends are libertarians?
Yes, please. I would love to see the source(s) for this data as well, but for different reasons. I'm primarily interested in seeing the procedures, metrics, and previous test results for the scientific test for nerdulence.
Slashdot Mirror
Your grandmother bakes cakes that are sturdy enough to survive being hit short distances with a baseball bat? Watch for IP addresses from Goodyear and B.F. Goodrich, and the Michelin Man would like to subscribe to her newsletter.
They don't. The way they apply the law, if the person in the picture could in any way possibly be a minor they go ahead and prosecute. Then it becomes the responsibility of the person who had the picture to provide the affadavit or other proof that the model was legal at the time the work was created.
What's more, such an affadavit might not help any more, since the application of the law has so widened that if the model looks young enough, whether or not he or she actually is, bang goes the gavel. And it's no help when there is no model in the first place (digital art, painting, etc).
It's a subtle, clever erosion of that whole concept of "innocent until proven guilty" that people like to wave around when they're obviously guilty of something.
Once I almost got started on a MMORPG project with a few friends. The ostensible leader of the project offered me:
When I seemed less than grateful at the terms, I was out of there so fast I left a contrail. Haven't talked to those friends in a very long time either.
Is NASA screwing themselves royally in the deal as they fish for cheap labor? Almost certainly. But it could happen that they find an excited cadre of people who are willing to work on an open-sourced MMO system of some type. For instance, I really don't think the MUSH codebase has achieved its full potential. Of course, that "limited exclusivity" line item kind of defecates in that plan's bed.
"Roll to see if I'm getting geeky!"
I can rebut that statement with two words...
Personally I'd like to see another tag: mineminemineallmine
Yes! It's CrapCastic High-Speed Disconnect!!
Worse, how much credit does a student get if he completely blanks on a test, thereby demonstrating that he's done his civic duty by not remembering someone else's intellectual property?
It's not just about an 11-year-old who took over a network admin job. Note the parts of the story about updating the computers, updating the (much needed) virus protection, and getting a gateway appliance to make sure that didn't happen again.
It's about an 11-year-old who took over a network admin job and immediately started off doing a better job than his predecessor. Kind of makes you wonder who that sad sack was, doesn't it?
Easily.
They were relying on "Security Through Apathy" as their primary defense. And you, you nasty, naughty person, blew through it as if it wasn't there at all.
That they're relying on bad people to just look the other way is, in their minds, not a problem at all. Which obviously is a problem, but not to them. From here, it's turtles all the way down.
Okay, I doubt I cleared up anything, but at least for a moment, it was fun mocking them.
That's part of the great joke of the internet's existence. It started as a military network designed with multiple connections and redundancy to ensure it remains functional despite damage. Private enterprise is now predominantly in charge of it, and looking to profit off of it. Greed is on the rise as a source of net damage -- imagine a beowulf cluster of toll roads.
Maybe, but can government really afford to be as independent of science as possible?
Government is, ideally, about decision-making and allocation of resources. Therefore, the government has (or at least should have) a very strong vested interest in making educated decisions and allocating its limited resources as smartly as possible, in order to get the most bang for its buck and not lead the country into any silly pitfalls like health crises or dubiously justified wars.
What we have instead currently is a system so politically charged the repulsing forces are close to tearing it apart. It invests its resources in carefully selected areas which agree a priori with its beliefs, and throttles any research that turns up results that fly in the face of those beliefs. The beliefs are themselves not the problem, it's the slavish devotion to them, and their preference over any facts, where the trouble starts.
Let's put it this way: If it were a single person, cherry-picking things he reads or hears for facts that agree with the way his mind is already made up, and then making decisions based on those beliefs, most people would call him a "flatulating butthead."
I don't know GURPS being the "bigger" thing, and between 3rd and 4th editions I have enough books to choke a donkey. Each system has its own philosophy of character growth. I differentiate the two saying that D&D is designed to get characters moving relatively quickly up through power levels. Even though characters only beef up their skills when they pass that invisible "level" limit, it is the "epic" system in which characters will more quickly change their role within their environment.
Meanwhile, GURPS character growth tends to be much slower, and the bolting on of brand new abilities ("feats," if you will) is a rarity. GURPS is the "flat" system, which is better suited to characters who may improve more slowly over time, and who occasionally change their station significantly (when they get enough points saved up for a major purchase).
I won't say they're apples and oranges, but each is suited to its own style of play, which makes comparison less meaningful. Personally, I prefer GURPS too, but that may just be my prejudice against level-based systems talking. It is possible for both systems to coexist because they fill different niches.
As for play style, the "dungeon crawl" is a stereotype. Some people are realizing that it's as much fun fighting on the way to the fortified underground complex as it is fighting within it. And other pastimes are available. That was one of my complaints about Traveller, originally: some gamers wouldn't think past ship-to-ship combat, shipboard combat, and working starports looking for cargo. Then I realized: it's not the game's problem, it's an issue the players have. Same with the "dungeon crawl:" it's not the game that fences them into it, it's just what many players do with it.
And there are other systems, too; D&D and GURPS only take up two bookshelves of the seven or so I need to hold all my gaming books. Many do enough differently that direct comparison between them is futile.
I'm nowhere near Greater Boston, but that sounds refreshing. My current group is getting a bit hidebound, and I've no other places to turn.
Because to many, money is the ultimate quantifier of success. "If you're rich," the common but tragically flawed logic goes, "you're doing something right." The more money you make from your endeavor, the more right it must be. Some of it is "keeping up with the Joneses" or "getting ahead" or "living in style," and some of it is "high score syndrome" and the belief that bigger numbers are better than smaller ones.
Money does have its uses. Better equipment, server costs, an upgraded home studio built in your basement, a shed, or a home office, etc. are all good things to have if you need them, but a lot of people don't care for subsistence. They want extremes to show they're doing better than "good enough."
And that's why some people scratch their heads at trying to make a go of it through something like the RPM Challenge instead of hitching your wagon to a siphon star like the RIAA, and why it's so important: "If it's free," the common but tragically flawed logic goes, "how good could it possibly be?" So they never try it, and they never find out. It's not just their loss, either; everyone they convince with that logic becomes a loss as well.
The RPM Challenge becomes not just the gathering of victims, but hopefully the refutation-by-example of that logic.
I know. So I'm expecting a bloodbath. (Hey, pass the popcorn, would you? Oh, a large bucket please.)
Why not? I mean, that's almost how it works for everyone else now anyway. There's no jumping puzzle per se, but that last clause is spot on.
Sadly, it sounds reasonable on every level.
Cider: Because handwaving away complaints of crappy performance through emulation is easier than forcing your developers to learn Objective-C and Core Framework API calls.
I got Geometry Wars: Galaxies for the Wii first, then picked up the DS version for the unlocks (and yeah, I guess for the portable play). It turns out you only get one system and seven planets out of it, so I don't feel it was quite worth it.
(Oh, and the unlock is mutual -- introduce GW:G on the Wii to GW:G on the DS, and you get the bonus levels on both editions. This would otherwise be seriously interesting, but more on that later.)
And it doesn't share high scores because the game experience between the two is so radically different that the scores just don't convert over properly -- not just the way it plays (lots of enemies slow the DS down), but the layouts of some of the play spaces are different.
That said, there is a big heaping chunk of potential here. GW:G demonstrated it with the "Retro Evolved" demo download to the DS. And then they demonstrated a twist on it with the mutual unlock of special levels.
Disclaimer: I have no idea they'll ever attempt anything like these. I'm just saying it could be cool if they did.
As many as it takes, until it stops getting upmods.
Ideally, we are. In reality, thinking that we're the good guys is a lot easier and more profitable than living up to the expectation.
Cool. Er, where does the Wii come into this again and when do you find the time to play it?
Well, stick to it. You'll get better with time.
Sadly, there's a way such a "feature" could possibly be implemented: the school administrators could load up the locker system with "cool content" that makes most of the kids want to use their locker solution. Peer pressure and ostracism would follow as a matter of course if their system achieved a critical mass of users. (Dare I say it? "Schoolyard brownshirts")
And where it backfires--mercifully, beautifully--is that we're talking about school administrators loading a computer system with "cool content" for the students. Think about that one for a moment or two. The kids that can work outside the system will get all sorts of friends looking to find out how they get to the good stuff rather than the school admin shovelware.
If they get eaten, it's by bigger dinosaurs. Meanwhile, they're crushing the tiny little herbivores under their enormous stump-like feet by the dozens.
Even if they're slow, the only things that can really take down the biggest dinosaurs are old age, starvation, and lightning.
Yes, please. I would love to see the source(s) for this data as well, but for different reasons. I'm primarily interested in seeing the procedures, metrics, and previous test results for the scientific test for nerdulence.
Nerditude...
Nerdacity?
But for some strange reason, all it can play is zombie-shoot-'em-ups. Weird.