Why do they insist on ripping out the heart of Japanese games?
I don't like excessive localization as much as the next overly obsessed geek, but at least they had input from the original staff, and it sounds like their own staff was overly obsessed on their own.
That said, if you have to localize the hell out of a game, you should at least localize it awesome. Even if the game ends up having nothing to do with the original, I'd accept it on its own rights if what you have still makes a great game.
Don't the users have some responsibility for their own private data?
How? By never giving it to anyone? Never getting a loan, insurance, or a magazine subscription? Always working for cash under the table and never filing taxes? Any one of those things releases your address, phone number, billing information, etc. out of your control. At some point you have to say the data has changed hands and so has the responsibility to protect it.
Sure it was dumb (was it really dumb at the time though, or are we only saying this in hindsight, knowing now that the data would be given to whoever wanted it? Being able to find things near me is quite useful, I'd hate to always dine two cities over just to "throw off the trail") to have put in your own ssn or home address into the search engine, but saying that it's the users' fault that the data got released is like saying that it's my fault if someone breaks into my house and shoots me in the face with my own gun, just because I kept it loaded. Philosophers have debated the nature of "fault" for millenia, leading to concepts such as "attractive nuisance", however generally speaking blame is assigned to the person who committed the act, and only slightly shared with people who set up the environment for the act to occur.
Well, we're trying to catch up to Japan. We're not quite there yet, but hopefully we've learned enough that by the time New Orleans is destroyed again we'll be able to build New Orleans-3 overnight.
We already do random searches of people waiting to board.
There's a difference between selecting people at random and having a machine say "A BOMB! A BOMB! THIS GUY HAS A BOMB!". After the first 5 or so people to set it off have been shot 9 times in the head, you'll have to consider the "crying wolf" factor too. After the alarm goes off 19 times, is anyone really going to take it seriously on the 20th?
Wow, it's the "if you have nothing to hide" argument all over again!
I can think of several ways it can become a problem, starting with RIAA whining (read: paying for congresscritters' re-election) to Congress.
Then, Congress can pass laws requiring applications to not play back files that lack DRM at all. But that won't be a problem, right? You didn't really need those God Ate my Homework or Minibosses mp3s you downloaded from their websites, or the Creedence Clearwater Revival mp3 collection you bought legally from emusic.com, or the Jim's Big Ego music you bought from slabster.
Or maybe, Congress can pass a law requiring that all audio files capable of transmission over the internet require that they be cleared and signed by an appropriate institution in order to prove that they aren't actually recordings of the Beatles or Metallica. Of course, someone will have to be in charge of this, and naturally the RIAA already has plenty of experience in handling money for artists, their Soundexchange company is perfect for the job. About $5 per minute for a lackey to listen to your podcast to make sure you aren't infringing any copyrights sound about right?
Should I keep going? Or is it clear now that if the RIAA runs to Congress (or hell, runs for Congress, after all, Sonny Bono did a good enough job) that even if you're not warezing or buying RIAA products, it can be a problem.
Only because the government wants it to be. Waste would be vastly reduced if only the government would allow it to be recycled in breeder reactors, but oh noes it might be used for teh bombz!!1!1
That the rich have made possible for you.
Ah of course, the rich did it all. How about the rich go to some distant island with their capital, and see what they can do? I suspect all they'll get from waving their wads of cash at the local monkeys is a coconut to the head. Until the rich realize they need to keep a working class, the world will continue to suck for the vast majority of its inhabitants.
That turns his "signing key" into an "embedded key".
But it's not an embedded key of the software, it's an embedded key of the hardware. Modified software will run just fine... on any other equipment.
Now, the real question is whether this kind of "entanglement" would require the hardware to be GPL'd itself, including that key, just like linking to a GPL program or library would require the software to be GPL'd.
In light of this explanation, on what basis can you claim unions achieve, over the long term, better compensation for workers? See if you can answer without changing the topic.
Well, given that compensation is more than monetary and that it's fairly clear that employment conditions now are superior to employment conditions before unions started, that unions have (either directly through contract negotiation or indirectly through lobbying government for various laws) at least partially responsible for a net increase in benefits for employees over the years.
Now, given the question of whether the unions are helping right this very instant, that's a harder one to crack, as it pretty much relies on what any given union is doing at the moment in combination with how the industry/employer they deal with is doing, which I don't have the resources to map out every combination. Are airline employees being overcompensated? Southwest Airlines workers are unionized, and the company is doing quite well. What are they (the airline and the union) doing differently from other airlines who are courting bankruptcy (being paid $0 would definitely be a drop in benefits, but is it the union's fault?) But airlines are just the tip of the iceberg...
I think that if anyone worked it out, they would find that some unions are beneficial (say, teachers unions pushing for higher pay so that increased competition will improve the pool of teachers; police unions pushing for body armor for all patrol units) while others are not (say, teachers unions pushing for higher pay while pursuing rules that would limit competition; police unions suing to undo suspensions for misbehaving cops).
Why? Because if I want to move a 2MB file from here to there, sending it slowly is going to keep the ISP from dropping every other packet? Fast or slow, the ISP gets to charge me for the 2MB file plus 2MB of retransmitting retransmitted retransmits. The internet can fix a lot of things, route around damage and whatnot, but it can't fix malicious behavior at the first or last hop.
There are open source apps you still have to pay to use, aren't there?
Not strictly, no. If you had an open source app that you charged for, all someone would have to do is pay you then give it away for free. Sure, you might end up with a client base that is 100% "like hell I'm giving away this thing I paid for for free", but someone ripped those millions of mp3s floating around p2p.
The only people who will actually suffer from the reintroduction of bandwidth and differentiated charging
And hey, the best part of the whole thing is that your ISP just has to drop every other TCP packet in order to charge you double! Half the work for twice the price is a great deal no matter how you slice it!
You're thinking small. Clearly the next breakthrough will be the saint-bernard-on-a-chip which will pave the way for the ultimate: the english-mastiff-on-a-chip.
If you can't make a hotspot viable, how can you ever expect county wide access to be viable.
Thats easy, I wouldn't pay to go to the park to download pr0n, but I'd pay to be able to download my pr0n from the privacy of my own home.
The idea of commercial "hotspots" assumed that people who have had the internet come to them for years and years would suddenly change their habits and go out of their way to get to the internet. The vast majority of the "successful" ones are the ones in cafes and the like, where people were already going anyway.
As for the equipment, I assume that the company doing this knows what they're doing. If not, then they'll go bankrupt. Aren't we all glad that it's not taxpayer-funded?
It's a word used to name-call someone as a way of dismissing an opinion you disagree with
The problem is that the Republican party needs a new label for their position on whatever political spectrum, since they've given up fiscal responsibility, little government, and minimal interference in daily life. They still like to pretend they're conservative despite this, and most of them would headgib if we called them "liberal" (maybe thats not a bad thing after all...) so we need a new term for them. You have a suggestion?
so much for liberal tolerance
Of course, the way many of the Republicans use the word as an epithet means that the same could have been said for "liberal", except that the Democrats still stand for big government and the nanny state, so a new word isn't needed for them.
Firefox doesn't do any weird stuff to the OS and can therefore be installed, run, and upgraded as a user. I just created a Limited User account on XP, dowloaded 1.5.0.6, and installed it to that user's Documents directory, and pulled up slashdot. Worked fine for me.
If I can make X dollars running plant A or X+Y running B and not A; guess what I'd do?
risk overbuilding and driving down prices as a result - not a smart business move.
And herein lies the problem. Neither regulation nor the free market will change this fundamental mathematical equation. Regulation or not, if nobody wants to break the gravy train and build more plants so that people can get the electricity they need, then I'm out of ideas. You got any?
They weren't permitted to own and operate plants
At least part of that's explained, though corporations have had centuries of experience flaunting regulations. Why didn't the board of directors of California Transmission, Inc. simply erect California Generation, Inc? It worked well enough for Custer Battles, who even made their new companies operate out of the same address when the military banned them from contracting with them.
They were forces to pay market rates and could not control demand via blackouts
If you're proposing that simply turning off service to paying customers is a viable method of "controlling demand" then I'd hate to live in your little world. If demand for airline flights got too high, would you rather drop a few out of the sky or build more airplanes? Maybe if too many people were shipping packages for Christmas, a few could wind up in some ditch somewhere without a problem?
Now clearly, capping consumer prices to prevent using price to control demand didn't help matters. But even if the government had not done so, I fail to see how that would have stopped Enron from faking supply shortages or shutting down generating plants in order to drive up the price of electricity. It probably would have prolonged the situation, since they'd have been able to soak the entire population of California instead of just driving the transmitters bankrupt. In this, we can see the parallels with the current gasoline situation here. Despite record profits, the oil companies just can't seem to afford to build refineries that don't poison the neighborhood or blow up and kill everyone, not that the regulations they whine about seem to be stopping them from doing either at their existing plants. Why should they, anyways? If they spend their money to increase supply, the gravy train stops since by limiting supply, they make the most money for doing the least amount of work.
If you want a real solution, you should ask why the transmitters chose to go out of business instead of building their own power plants to replace the plants that Enron was running incompetently. Faced with losing business entirely to plants that weren't being shut down at random, they'd have shaped up pretty quick. Looking around online, I could get 7 acres of land in california for under a million dollars, put a plant square in the middle and have a nice little buffer zone around the edge. Buy land from a farmer and you could probably get it cheaper, with a bonus for your liability insurance if the only thing your plant can kill is a handful of cows and chickens, but then you'd be facing transmission issues to get the power into town.
If you really want to do anything, provide incentives for companies to expand their networks, by say, giving tax breaks on new lines for a limited time. But remember, you'd be doing the same thing for every company, since you're not just encouraging Company A to move into Company B's territory, but also encouraging Company B and C to move into Company A's.
It's hard to say. I really want to say "if you do nothing, nothing will happen" and that Cablevision will advertise service in new markets: "Setup fee only $50,000,000 for the first house, $50 for everyone else!"
But perhaps simply the threat of competition will get things moving again. Maybe Cablevision won't ever move into a new market, but if they think someone will move in on their market, they'll beef up what they've got. Consumers win, even if they're still stuck with Cablevision or whatever.
However, If ATT wants to compete with vonage by putting a VoIP service on it's own expensive infrastructure, with the added bonus that it WILL work better because they have access to low latency QoS on the ATT network, how is that anti-competative?
So do you have a problem with accessing google right now? Vonage? Amazon? If there is no problem, then why would Google, Vonage or Amazon pay for "better" access? You're missing out the strongly implied threat that if Google, Vonage, and Amazon do NOT pay up, then "something will happen" to make them wish they had. It wasn't a legal or ethical business practice when the Mafia did it, and it's still not ethical today.
Vonage still has access to the same infrastructure, if they chose to.
No, they have access to their ISP's infrastructure, with the assumption that their ISP is supposed to manage their connection to the other networks.
If I traceroute the path from here to Google, I go through Covad (our ISP), BBnPlanet, L3, and finally Google's network. So according to you, in addition to Covad charging me as a customer, BBnPlanet, L3 and Google's own network have the right to charge me as well? If I go to a Kinko's and pay them to ship a box via FedEx, I should expect to get a bill from FedEx in the mail?
The rights in this case are held by the copyright owner; copyright allows them to dictate how, where, and when their content is distributed, not you.
And? If he goes to Japan and buys a fully white market copy of the game in the market it is to be distributed for, is the magic fairy going to come and let him play it on his Xbox? Distribution is a completely different beast than "access control" which did not legally exist until the DMCA added it to the lawbooks, and then only by protecting the methods of access control, not stating that access control is a copy right.
And herein lies the rub. What are you going to do when your mini-ISP's ISP kills all your clients' connections to Google? Switch to another ISP who... suprise! ultimately gets their internet connection from the same place you did and is currently having the same problem?
Regulation or no regulation, once the telcos and cable companies have crossed this line, it will be VERY expensive to fix it if they can't be forced to retreat on their own (and seriously, now that the statement of intent has been made, how will one ever know that they have retreated, or that they haven't already crossed the line?). In the meantime, we might as well go back to the old uucp days. I hear the telcos offer reasonably priced flat rate long distance these days...
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Why do they insist on ripping out the heart of Japanese games?
I don't like excessive localization as much as the next overly obsessed geek, but at least they had input from the original staff, and it sounds like their own staff was overly obsessed on their own.
That said, if you have to localize the hell out of a game, you should at least localize it awesome . Even if the game ends up having nothing to do with the original, I'd accept it on its own rights if what you have still makes a great game.
In Korea only old people catch phrases.
Don't the users have some responsibility for their own private data?
How? By never giving it to anyone? Never getting a loan, insurance, or a magazine subscription? Always working for cash under the table and never filing taxes? Any one of those things releases your address, phone number, billing information, etc. out of your control. At some point you have to say the data has changed hands and so has the responsibility to protect it.
Sure it was dumb (was it really dumb at the time though, or are we only saying this in hindsight, knowing now that the data would be given to whoever wanted it? Being able to find things near me is quite useful, I'd hate to always dine two cities over just to "throw off the trail") to have put in your own ssn or home address into the search engine, but saying that it's the users' fault that the data got released is like saying that it's my fault if someone breaks into my house and shoots me in the face with my own gun, just because I kept it loaded. Philosophers have debated the nature of "fault" for millenia, leading to concepts such as "attractive nuisance", however generally speaking blame is assigned to the person who committed the act, and only slightly shared with people who set up the environment for the act to occur.
Well, we're trying to catch up to Japan. We're not quite there yet, but hopefully we've learned enough that by the time New Orleans is destroyed again we'll be able to build New Orleans-3 overnight.
We already do random searches of people waiting to board.
There's a difference between selecting people at random and having a machine say "A BOMB! A BOMB! THIS GUY HAS A BOMB!". After the first 5 or so people to set it off have been shot 9 times in the head, you'll have to consider the "crying wolf" factor too. After the alarm goes off 19 times, is anyone really going to take it seriously on the 20th?
Ah, and if they get another Sonny Bono elected that won't give them a "driving" force?
Oh I guess that's just speculation, it's not like actors and musicians ever get elected to public office in reality huh?
it still shouldn't be a problem, then, right?
Wow, it's the "if you have nothing to hide" argument all over again!
I can think of several ways it can become a problem, starting with RIAA whining (read: paying for congresscritters' re-election) to Congress.
Then, Congress can pass laws requiring applications to not play back files that lack DRM at all. But that won't be a problem, right? You didn't really need those God Ate my Homework or Minibosses mp3s you downloaded from their websites, or the Creedence Clearwater Revival mp3 collection you bought legally from emusic.com, or the Jim's Big Ego music you bought from slabster.
Or maybe, Congress can pass a law requiring that all audio files capable of transmission over the internet require that they be cleared and signed by an appropriate institution in order to prove that they aren't actually recordings of the Beatles or Metallica. Of course, someone will have to be in charge of this, and naturally the RIAA already has plenty of experience in handling money for artists, their Soundexchange company is perfect for the job. About $5 per minute for a lackey to listen to your podcast to make sure you aren't infringing any copyrights sound about right?
Should I keep going? Or is it clear now that if the RIAA runs to Congress (or hell, runs for Congress, after all, Sonny Bono did a good enough job) that even if you're not warezing or buying RIAA products, it can be a problem.
What about the nuclear waste, not very clean.
Only because the government wants it to be. Waste would be vastly reduced if only the government would allow it to be recycled in breeder reactors, but oh noes it might be used for teh bombz!!1!1
That the rich have made possible for you.
Ah of course, the rich did it all. How about the rich go to some distant island with their capital, and see what they can do? I suspect all they'll get from waving their wads of cash at the local monkeys is a coconut to the head. Until the rich realize they need to keep a working class, the world will continue to suck for the vast majority of its inhabitants.
The US System isn't perfect -> We have no right to judge any human rights situation. Logically, that doesn't follow.
Absolutely correct. Hypocrisy doesn't make you wrong, it just makes you a hypocrite.
I suspect the more-tame ones would be killed off by the more-vicious ones before the more-vicious ones themselves die.
That turns his "signing key" into an "embedded key".
But it's not an embedded key of the software, it's an embedded key of the hardware. Modified software will run just fine... on any other equipment.
Now, the real question is whether this kind of "entanglement" would require the hardware to be GPL'd itself, including that key, just like linking to a GPL program or library would require the software to be GPL'd.
In light of this explanation, on what basis can you claim unions achieve, over the long term, better compensation for workers? See if you can answer without changing the topic.
Well, given that compensation is more than monetary and that it's fairly clear that employment conditions now are superior to employment conditions before unions started, that unions have (either directly through contract negotiation or indirectly through lobbying government for various laws) at least partially responsible for a net increase in benefits for employees over the years.
Now, given the question of whether the unions are helping right this very instant, that's a harder one to crack, as it pretty much relies on what any given union is doing at the moment in combination with how the industry/employer they deal with is doing, which I don't have the resources to map out every combination. Are airline employees being overcompensated? Southwest Airlines workers are unionized, and the company is doing quite well. What are they (the airline and the union) doing differently from other airlines who are courting bankruptcy (being paid $0 would definitely be a drop in benefits, but is it the union's fault?) But airlines are just the tip of the iceberg...
I think that if anyone worked it out, they would find that some unions are beneficial (say, teachers unions pushing for higher pay so that increased competition will improve the pool of teachers; police unions pushing for body armor for all patrol units) while others are not (say, teachers unions pushing for higher pay while pursuing rules that would limit competition; police unions suing to undo suspensions for misbehaving cops).
You really need to go read RFC 2001.
Why? Because if I want to move a 2MB file from here to there, sending it slowly is going to keep the ISP from dropping every other packet? Fast or slow, the ISP gets to charge me for the 2MB file plus 2MB of retransmitting retransmitted retransmits. The internet can fix a lot of things, route around damage and whatnot, but it can't fix malicious behavior at the first or last hop.
There are open source apps you still have to pay to use, aren't there?
Not strictly, no. If you had an open source app that you charged for, all someone would have to do is pay you then give it away for free. Sure, you might end up with a client base that is 100% "like hell I'm giving away this thing I paid for for free", but someone ripped those millions of mp3s floating around p2p.
The only people who will actually suffer from the reintroduction of bandwidth and differentiated charging
And hey, the best part of the whole thing is that your ISP just has to drop every other TCP packet in order to charge you double! Half the work for twice the price is a great deal no matter how you slice it!
Poodle-on-a-chip
You're thinking small. Clearly the next breakthrough will be the saint-bernard-on-a-chip which will pave the way for the ultimate: the english-mastiff-on-a-chip.
If you can't make a hotspot viable, how can you ever expect county wide access to be viable.
Thats easy, I wouldn't pay to go to the park to download pr0n, but I'd pay to be able to download my pr0n from the privacy of my own home.
The idea of commercial "hotspots" assumed that people who have had the internet come to them for years and years would suddenly change their habits and go out of their way to get to the internet. The vast majority of the "successful" ones are the ones in cafes and the like, where people were already going anyway.
As for the equipment, I assume that the company doing this knows what they're doing. If not, then they'll go bankrupt. Aren't we all glad that it's not taxpayer-funded?
Do you disregard your own post then? ;)
It's a word used to name-call someone as a way of dismissing an opinion you disagree with
The problem is that the Republican party needs a new label for their position on whatever political spectrum, since they've given up fiscal responsibility, little government, and minimal interference in daily life. They still like to pretend they're conservative despite this, and most of them would headgib if we called them "liberal" (maybe thats not a bad thing after all...) so we need a new term for them. You have a suggestion?
so much for liberal tolerance
Of course, the way many of the Republicans use the word as an epithet means that the same could have been said for "liberal", except that the Democrats still stand for big government and the nanny state, so a new word isn't needed for them.
Firefox doesn't do any weird stuff to the OS and can therefore be installed, run, and upgraded as a user. I just created a Limited User account on XP, dowloaded 1.5.0.6, and installed it to that user's Documents directory, and pulled up slashdot. Worked fine for me.
If I can make X dollars running plant A or X+Y running B and not A; guess what I'd do?
risk overbuilding and driving down prices as a result - not a smart business move.
And herein lies the problem. Neither regulation nor the free market will change this fundamental mathematical equation. Regulation or not, if nobody wants to break the gravy train and build more plants so that people can get the electricity they need, then I'm out of ideas. You got any?
They weren't permitted to own and operate plants
At least part of that's explained, though corporations have had centuries of experience flaunting regulations. Why didn't the board of directors of California Transmission, Inc. simply erect California Generation, Inc? It worked well enough for Custer Battles, who even made their new companies operate out of the same address when the military banned them from contracting with them.
They were forces to pay market rates and could not control demand via blackouts
If you're proposing that simply turning off service to paying customers is a viable method of "controlling demand" then I'd hate to live in your little world. If demand for airline flights got too high, would you rather drop a few out of the sky or build more airplanes? Maybe if too many people were shipping packages for Christmas, a few could wind up in some ditch somewhere without a problem?
Now clearly, capping consumer prices to prevent using price to control demand didn't help matters. But even if the government had not done so, I fail to see how that would have stopped Enron from faking supply shortages or shutting down generating plants in order to drive up the price of electricity. It probably would have prolonged the situation, since they'd have been able to soak the entire population of California instead of just driving the transmitters bankrupt. In this, we can see the parallels with the current gasoline situation here. Despite record profits, the oil companies just can't seem to afford to build refineries that don't poison the neighborhood or blow up and kill everyone, not that the regulations they whine about seem to be stopping them from doing either at their existing plants. Why should they, anyways? If they spend their money to increase supply, the gravy train stops since by limiting supply, they make the most money for doing the least amount of work.
If you want a real solution, you should ask why the transmitters chose to go out of business instead of building their own power plants to replace the plants that Enron was running incompetently. Faced with losing business entirely to plants that weren't being shut down at random, they'd have shaped up pretty quick. Looking around online, I could get 7 acres of land in california for under a million dollars, put a plant square in the middle and have a nice little buffer zone around the edge. Buy land from a farmer and you could probably get it cheaper, with a bonus for your liability insurance if the only thing your plant can kill is a handful of cows and chickens, but then you'd be facing transmission issues to get the power into town.
If you really want to do anything, provide incentives for companies to expand their networks, by say, giving tax breaks on new lines for a limited time. But remember, you'd be doing the same thing for every company, since you're not just encouraging Company A to move into Company B's territory, but also encouraging Company B and C to move into Company A's.
It's hard to say. I really want to say "if you do nothing, nothing will happen" and that Cablevision will advertise service in new markets: "Setup fee only $50,000,000 for the first house, $50 for everyone else!"
But perhaps simply the threat of competition will get things moving again. Maybe Cablevision won't ever move into a new market, but if they think someone will move in on their market, they'll beef up what they've got. Consumers win, even if they're still stuck with Cablevision or whatever.
However, If ATT wants to compete with vonage by putting a VoIP service on it's own expensive infrastructure, with the added bonus that it WILL work better because they have access to low latency QoS on the ATT network, how is that anti-competative?
So do you have a problem with accessing google right now? Vonage? Amazon? If there is no problem, then why would Google, Vonage or Amazon pay for "better" access? You're missing out the strongly implied threat that if Google, Vonage, and Amazon do NOT pay up, then "something will happen" to make them wish they had. It wasn't a legal or ethical business practice when the Mafia did it, and it's still not ethical today.
Vonage still has access to the same infrastructure, if they chose to.
No, they have access to their ISP's infrastructure, with the assumption that their ISP is supposed to manage their connection to the other networks.
If I traceroute the path from here to Google, I go through Covad (our ISP), BBnPlanet, L3, and finally Google's network. So according to you, in addition to Covad charging me as a customer, BBnPlanet, L3 and Google's own network have the right to charge me as well? If I go to a Kinko's and pay them to ship a box via FedEx, I should expect to get a bill from FedEx in the mail?
The rights in this case are held by the copyright owner; copyright allows them to dictate how, where, and when their content is distributed, not you.
And? If he goes to Japan and buys a fully white market copy of the game in the market it is to be distributed for, is the magic fairy going to come and let him play it on his Xbox? Distribution is a completely different beast than "access control" which did not legally exist until the DMCA added it to the lawbooks, and then only by protecting the methods of access control, not stating that access control is a copy right.
with my ISP
And herein lies the rub. What are you going to do when your mini-ISP's ISP kills all your clients' connections to Google? Switch to another ISP who... suprise! ultimately gets their internet connection from the same place you did and is currently having the same problem?
Regulation or no regulation, once the telcos and cable companies have crossed this line, it will be VERY expensive to fix it if they can't be forced to retreat on their own (and seriously, now that the statement of intent has been made, how will one ever know that they have retreated, or that they haven't already crossed the line?). In the meantime, we might as well go back to the old uucp days. I hear the telcos offer reasonably priced flat rate long distance these days...