Often the fan-produced versions have superior translation and disc layout compared to professional work.
I see you've apparently stopped watching fansubs this past season. This past season has mostly consisted of a new variation on the same dick-waving theme that has been around since the beginning. And thats the "Look! We can make up random translations and post our bittorrent of the episode 24 hours after it was broadcast!" variation, which has come up with such superior professional work as the ever-memorable "Mass naked child events" of stand alone complex. I think most professionals would also agree that leaving japanese terms in would be fine for an educational video, but is otherwise a cop-out. Sure, there are puns and such that don't come out right, but take a look at how ADV has handled this with Neo Ranga.
I prescribe the following: Watch (in no particular order)
His and Her Circumstances (kareshi kanojo no jijou) Boogiepop Phantom Serial Experiments Lain Vampire Princess Miyu (either tv series or OAV)
Bonus points for Cardcaptor Sakura (not "cardcaptors", which was vetted by nelvana to change the series from a female lead to a male lead). (Its a very long series, the US run will be 20 DVDs including both movies)
These are shows which have strong female leads that are not very sexualized. It did take me a disappointingly long time of staring at my DVD collection to come up with these titles, but I had to determine my own abstract cut-off point for an acceptible amount of sexuality (If I set it to zero, there would be nothing left in the world but androgynous sterile creatures who shun any kind of contact with one another). If you wanted to turn it up a little, you could add shows that specifically address sexism, like Princess Nine (a fictionalized story of the first women's baseball team in Japan) or shows which include some nudity like Rayearth or Arjuna.
Depending on what you find acceptable, you can always find shows that match your taste, which is probably what I like the most about anime as a media..
Watch more anime aimed at girls instead of guys and you'll see the opposite. Start with Revolutionary Girl Utena or Descendants of Darkness. Of course, there are completely neutral shows too, like Spirited Away.
Don't hold your breath - DVDs cost less than a dollar to press. The price of a DVD has nothing to do with the cost of production.
Don't forget that that production includes the cost of encoding the material, developing additional material (menus, extras, etc) mastering the disc, creating checkdiscs, testing checkdiscs in each of the dozens of spec-incompatible DVD players, re-encoding because frame 34b at 1:43:23.87 succumbed to the bugginess that is the color red in mpeg. Making the glass master for the dvd pressing. Discovering that you made a spelling error on the menu and never noticed it. Making a new glass master. Taking returns because someone's cheap no-name dvd player glitches on the layer change and freezes hard.
Yes, there is still room for profit in there, but I'd wager its not much. Of course, all those costs except for the returns are up-front costs. Once you've sold enough to make up for that its all profits, less royalties and the pressing cost. A lot of these costs can be outsourced (which is still expensive) or managed with experience (catch errors early!), but it can still be quite expensive, especially if you dont have a digital source for the material you're encoding, in which case you need to remaster it digitally first, then continue with the encoding. And thats if you're using a fairly modern source, the expenses for restoring aging film can get pretty high.
There are four complex anime plotlines that are generally understandable by Westerners:
1) Social Observation. Peer into the inner workings of society and interaction between humans in unusual situations or in the wake of a major social shift. Watch Serial Experiments Lain (can mankind make the shift to an online society? Should it?) or Evangelion (children are put into machines and ordered to kill, maim, and destroy. What is life like for those children?).
2) Coming of Age story: Typically a young female either in or approaching the early teens experiences an adventure, learns to rely on her self and her own skills, as well as to trust her friends around her, and emerges at the end an older, stronger, and wiser person. See Spirited Away (or almost any Miyazaki movie).
3) Tragic Romance (in the shakespearian vein). Sometimes its just not going to work out. Japanese seem to love watching people writhe in emotional agony. Especially same-sex parings. See Revolutionary Girl Utena (series first, then movie). See also just about every show targeted at older girls or young women in Japan.
4) Weird Shit Happens. Sit back and enjoy the ride. See FLCL (Fooly Cooly), Excel Saga, and just about anything you buy in R2 without English translations if you don't understand Japanese.
Hm, someone already warned you about solar cell folks swarming you, so here it is: Hook up a few electricity producing solar cells, drop the leads in a bowl of water, and voila, clean H2 and O2.
The cost should pretty much be in the pumps and whatever coupler you're using to connect the storage tank to the fuel tank. Of those, I wonder how well a standard compressor (relatively cheap) would do with Hydrogen. I expect that the pressure in the fuel tank is likely higher than an average compressor can reach.
The coupler will be the big thing. It has to be strong enough to maintain the connection, it has to close on disconnect so that your tanks don't leak and you don't wind up getting your skull crushed when the hose recoils (think uncontrolled fire hose here).
Hydrogen generation is just water+electricity, although I'm not sure what goes into seperating the H2 from the O2 in the air. I've never bothered, since my goal in generating hydrogen was to make a test tube explode. (there are also chemical reactions which generate only H2, however these require something else to be added to the water... like aluminumm, which forms aluminum oxide and H2.)
I agree with you 100%. The house has value. If my character destroys your virtual house, your character should sue my character in a virtual court to recover virtual damages. Perhaps my character should even be sent to a virtual jail!
Finally! someone who understands the nature of the beast.
Work done on Virutal Objects (something with no material state), can only be measured in terms of the Perceived Value of such a creation. Thus the argument does not give a 1:1 correlation between "Book" and "Virtual Book" even though the language definition seems to compare just the content.
I argue that the Cost of Materials of the virtual house is the cost of the time invested in obtaining it, plus the associated costs of playing the game for that time.
The values of any object need not be financial. Possession of X may grant powers or priveleges or esteem from peers.
So, now... if you desired Object X, which you estimate will take 20 hours of game time to obtain, and you value your time at $20/hour, and someone is willing to sell you Object X for $100, what do you do?
Depending on how much you value your game experience (maybe you value your game time at $20 an hour as well!) and the nature of Object X (maybe everyone gets it automatically after 20 hours?) you buy Object X because this is cheaper than actually spending several days looking for it. This doesn't make you mentally ill like some here have suggested, it makes you logical and is an economically sound decision.
No no no, if I attack everquest and take the servers down or just take god status and screw the game up, and the players demand refunds, then I have caused financial harm to the company running everquest. Am I not responsible for that damage?
It is not so cut and dry is it. If we incrementally go up from 1, 1 at a time where is the division. If it doesn't exist at any given point then I must surely be able to pull hair at will without concern for recourse.
True, but in my case I argue that there IS no division because both ends of the argument are on the same side. Instead of how many hairs, try "If I give George Bush $100 to pardon me, is that bribery?" and start counting up from there. No matter how high you go, there is no division between bribery and not-bribery. This is not a Sorites Paradox.
I have three sets of questions that determine a domain for "things that have value" using two variables: realness and trivialness. While I should have asked about authoring a book on the trivialness scale (The first set of questions) I believed that most people (the audience for this argument anyway) would indicate that yes, a real book has value.
Once establishing that the domain of things-with-value includes non-trivial and trivial objects, and real and non-real objects, I ask if there was a discontinuity in this domain for a virtual house, and why.
if EA shuts down those servers tomorrow, they don't owe you anything
This is codified in the EULA. But what about systems where items in the game are expressly given value which can be exchanged for "real" money. (What was that one game that showed up on/. a while back, before "There"... all I remember about them is that they were planning on making items decay over time and that you could pay to get better items. I wonder what happened with it? Or There for that matter...)
In this case, if some hacker sank your belongings to the bottom of the sea, or Hiro Protagonist himself came and cut off your head and hid it so you couldn't log back in, there would be clearly be value lost.
However, in this case, you didn't build the house. You interacted with a game engine which flipped bits on EA's servers.
How much interaction would be required to claim I built the house? What if the game engine allowed me to import a building I drew in autocad (or whatever architects use to design houses... I'm an engineer:P)? How about if the engine allowed me to cut down trees, hew the logs into planks, and assemble the house using nails I hammered out on a forge myself? These would all be "bit flipping" operations.
The thing is, this idea may determine a lot more than whether some little brat has to remunerate each player individually as well as the owner of the servers they hacked or not. Any legal decision on this subject will determine how virtual worlds are developed for a long time to come.
Personally I think it would be cool to create Stephenson's Metaverse. Which won't happen if we can't have companies or individuals develop objects or avatars or events for the Metaverse, because of a lack of value. Individuals working for fun can only go so far.
If so, then every day I work, I lose something (nothing) by coming in to work when I could be at home doing nothing (something).
As someone who has taken an introduction to economics class, I am fully qualified to say Exactly. This is known as an opportunity cost, what you gave up to receive what you got. You evaluated the value of "nothing", and perceived it to be less than the value of your job (paycheck, esteem/prestige, skills gained), and so you took the job.
Why is it worth nothing? Lets take a look at a progression here.
If I were to build a house in Missouri, would you deny that it has value?
If I were to spend hours building bird houses, would you deny that they have value?
If I were to spend hours making paper roses to sell on a street corner, would you deny that they have value?
- Now that we have identified that objects I produce have value, regardless of the triviality, lets move on.
If I were an author and wrote a book, would you deny that it has value?
If I wrote a book and sold it on a street corner, would you deny that it has value?
If I wrote a book and sold it online, would you deny that it has value?
If I wrote a book and only sold it online, would you deny that it has value?
If I wrote a book and only sold it online, in an electronic format which you downloaded, would you deny that it has value? (in case you're not understanding, this book has no physical manifestation aside from a series of bits in various places.)
-- If you've said No so far, then we've established that lack of a physical manifestation of what I have produced does not prevent it from having value. So, one last question:
If I build a house online, would you deny it has value? If so, why?
Now, lets assume that you said that you denied me my value. At what point was that? Was it the roses? (I have seen a number of nonprofits that employ blind or otherwise handicapped people to produce and sell these or other small trinkets) Was it the electronic version of the book? Even if you did not receive a physical object with "bookness", you obtained the output of many days of the labor of multiple people (the author, the editor(s), and so on...).
If the customer is unable to use the service (e.g. due to unavailability), the customer gets his/her money back....
In context with the hackers ruining the virtual world, doesn't this mean that the company has a financial loss due to the actions of the hackers and the hackers should be liable for that?
I did think of a possible solution to this. Go to whoever handles acquisitions for your lab, and tell them to write their sales contact at NI. Tell them to write something along the lines of the following letter: "Hello, my name is ______, and I am the purchasing director for _______. Our budget this year is tight, so we are abandoning the windows platform in favor of cheaper alternatives. It has come to my attention from some of our top researchers here that your equipment only supports the windows platform, and that your company is ingoring their requests for the information required to produce our own support. Our conversion is expected to take about 3 months to complete. If you do not have Linux support or are unwilling to release to our team of developers the information required to produce Linux drivers, then I will regretfully have to terminate our long customer relationship at this time, and begin purchasing equipment from ______." (pick a competitor from that list supported by Comedi)
Now, have that person send this to the salesperson, the VP of sales at NI, and what the heck, the president of the company too. Let them all know their choices are costing them the patronage of an entire research lab. It will probably be a bluff (from the sound of it, just buying a supported card is out of your budget), but depending on the size of your research lab, they might not risk calling it.
Also, don't waste your time in wine, vmware, and the like. Wine won't inteface with any hardware Linux doesn't know about, and the system emulators won't emulate anything as unusual as a stepper motor card (and if it did, it would still require linux support to use the real card...)
Re:Things that I like after 40 years of reading Sc
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A Good Summer Read?
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Left Hand of Darkness - IMHO the 2nd best scifi novel ever written after only Dune.
I find Ursula K. LeGuin to be one of the underappreciated authors around here. Her novels are good (and I really enjoyed Left Hand of Darkness), but she really shines in her short stories and parables. Her stories and parables convey the moral of the story without being overly cryptic or completely unsubtle most of the time, and she regularly challenges the standard stereotypes.
Lets take a look: Fantavision, a puzzle game which lets you create firework shows... Mr. Mosquito, where you fly about and try to suck blood without getting swatted. Xenosaga, which continues Xenogears's trend of being a deep multilayered RPG in a market mostly dominated by Final Fantasy N+1. Lets not forget ICO, which proved that eyecandy can count for a lot when it is well executed..hack (the US market's first attempt at multi-volume games) uses a very intriguing (and imho well executed) concept of simulating an MMORPG environment, without actually being MM or O. And these are just the games I've played.
Other innovative games abound, like Dance Dance Revolution. The DDR craze has gone on far too many sequels and spinoffs to maintain much of its originality status, but it was once a new and daring idea. Just like the other original ideas, once it proved popular it became copied.
Perhaps the solution is that developers need to quit re-inventing the wheel. If developers began to create their applications using these assorted libraries, then the purpose of having dynamic versions of these libraries would be met.
Requiring a very specific version of a library is rare. Almost never happens unless development of the library forks seperately from the program, which usually means that something else is using that library anyway. (see the Gimp ToolKit, GTK).
As for modern-day distribution of these libraries, dependencies are enough if the user is provided with a system for automatically resolving these dependencies. Modern day Red Hat and Mandrake distributions have tools for this. (Debian has had this for a long time). Otherwise, what happens when Developer X takes a liking to libfoo, which Developer Y wrote as part of ThisAppIsForDrawingSquaresOnTheScreen (descriptive enough name?)? Does Developer X copy all of libfoo for his own RPM? Does Developer X require that you install ThisAppIs... in order to use his/her app?
Looking at my own library collection, I have a number of libs which appear to be part of a single app, at least at first glance. I have several libraries which are part of BIND... but they are also used for the bindutils set of name resolution programs. I have a number of libraries that are used exclusively by about 5 window maker programs. Imagine the memory overhead incurred if I ran wmconf, wmsetbg, and wmaker all at once using static libraries? I have a number of libraries that are used by only one application, but closer inspection shows that thats because I only have one application installed. Take, for example, libcdaudio. The only app that relies on it is cdcd, my console CD player. However, I find that its required for a number of other packages too, such as kcd (KDE's CD player), which I just don't use.
If you're using Debian, deborphan is a very useful program for managing the entire mess of libraries, since it allows you to search your depencencies list to let you know if you have libraries you don't need installed.
Ah, but thats part of the wonder of lpd. Ever since the old days, people have had the power to monitor and drop items from the queue if they're given permission to do so. Check out lpq and lprm.
I can see this as being a powerful tool used either for good or for evil. Imagine blind people being able to know how much they are carrying without having to read each bill individually (currently they have little portable scanners they can feed the bills through to identify the denomination). Or knowing when a cashier has been slipping cash into their pockets.
Now, imagine tracking every purchase you make and arresting you because you bought a bottle of superglue on one day, and on the next day bought a bottle of something else that can be mixed with superglue to make toxic gas. If there is no oversight, this could quickly be abused to create a police state. Other posts include muggers knowing whether or not you're a good target, and the like. Deactivating them wouldn't be such a good plan since the transaction trail would point straight to you as the last recipient before the rfid died.
Now, for what reason relevant to the principles at play here is it permissible to patent the internal workings of the machine implemented as hardware, while it is impermissible to patent the internal workings of the machine implemented as software.
I don't know what such a reason might be.
Why? Its simple. Show me the inner workings of your cotton gin.
Thats easy, just open the hood.
Now, show me the inner workings of Microsoft Word... you can do that right? No?
So, in one case, its obvious and straightforward to know that you've built a device that infringes on the cotton gin. In the other case, three years later you get a lawsuit from Microsoft, where you don't get to review the evidence (it will be revealed to "selected" expert witnesses under strict NDA)
Well, can you show me the inner workings of Amazon's "One-Click Shopping"? Are there inner workings? How about the inner workings of the patent on a method of swinging sideways on a swing by pulling on the chains?
No? Having problems yet? We haven't gotten to the best part, the companies who "advance science" by patenting ideas, and lying in wait for someone else to develop them, because their business model can be summed up in one word: "Sue". These companies never produce a product, never contribute to the economy (except in the millions given over to lawyers), generally employ no-one but lawyers (see PanIP).
To patent your mechanical device, you are required to have produced a functional prototype. No such prototype requirement exists for software patents.
Aside from these major differences, there are still others. Machinery tends to have a longer life cycle than software. Imagine what would have happened if someone patented the word processor! For 20 years, either there would be only one word processor available, or everyone would have to pay this individual on whatever terms the individual wanted.
Not only that, but licensing works differently, too. Assuming that the patent holder sticks to a traditional per-implementation license fee, its simple to calculate licensing fees for your cotton gin, simply count the number of copies you made. For software though, do you count the number of CDs you pressed? The number you sold? The number of computers the people installed their product on? The number of people who warezed your product and never paid you a cent?
Why don't we simply say that we don't want to play their game anymore?
Thats called a boycott. And history has shown that it won't work. Not enough people are educated about this topic to even come close to the number needed to even consider an organized boycott. And who would we target?
It is we the people who are supposed to control this nation
Face it: We the People lost the country long ago. Witness the repeated failed half-hearted attempts to pass campaign reform. Why do we expect our politicians to cut off their cash flow? So what should we do, vote them out? Who do we vote in, then, the Republicans, who have all been bought out? The Democrats, who have all been bought out too? Or an Independent, who sold out so he could raise enough cash to get his campaign far enough to get listed on the ballot?
If anything, I say its time for a new Constitutional amendment to the US Constitution. The state ratification process will make it very expensive for corporations to buy out even a quarter of the states.
please don't hold back, let's do away with patents altogether
As problematic as the current situation is, I doubt you will ever find enough support for this. Instead, I propose creating a new class of patents specifically for software (rather than the current "business process" patent class). Patents in this class will last for 3 years, renewable for 2 more (this roughly corresponds to the lifespan of the windows 95 core, which was used for 95, 98, and ME). In order for the patent to be granted, the inventor must
A good admin/coder can pick up mainframe stuff when he needs to.
Yeah, sure, I've got spare Big Iron laying around my basement, some day I'll fire it up and learn how to run it....
Yeah, right.
I'm sure I could pick it up in a flash. Too bad that employers don't want someone who can pick it up in a flash, they want someone with at least several years experience. Most of these positions I've seen in the local paper are for Senior Admin positions, where they want a lifetime of experience running these things.
Because of the economy, assistant admin positions are rare. Companies want to find one guy capable of doing the work, alone, so low-experience junior admins are a thing of the past. The old-school style of passing knowledge down from generation to generation is gone, since a new hire generally starts after the previous hire has retired/quit/been fired. (Been there, done that, the "documentation" typically left behind is usually pretty shoddy, since the author doesn't care... they're not working there anymore by the time it gets read)
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Often the fan-produced versions have superior translation and disc layout compared to professional work.
I see you've apparently stopped watching fansubs this past season. This past season has mostly consisted of a new variation on the same dick-waving theme that has been around since the beginning. And thats the "Look! We can make up random translations and post our bittorrent of the episode 24 hours after it was broadcast!" variation, which has come up with such superior professional work as the ever-memorable "Mass naked child events" of stand alone complex. I think most professionals would also agree that leaving japanese terms in would be fine for an educational video, but is otherwise a cop-out. Sure, there are puns and such that don't come out right, but take a look at how ADV has handled this with Neo Ranga.
I prescribe the following:
Watch (in no particular order)
His and Her Circumstances (kareshi kanojo no jijou)
Boogiepop Phantom
Serial Experiments Lain
Vampire Princess Miyu (either tv series or OAV)
Bonus points for Cardcaptor Sakura (not "cardcaptors", which was vetted by nelvana to change the series from a female lead to a male lead). (Its a very long series, the US run will be 20 DVDs including both movies)
These are shows which have strong female leads that are not very sexualized. It did take me a disappointingly long time of staring at my DVD collection to come up with these titles, but I had to determine my own abstract cut-off point for an acceptible amount of sexuality (If I set it to zero, there would be nothing left in the world but androgynous sterile creatures who shun any kind of contact with one another). If you wanted to turn it up a little, you could add shows that specifically address sexism, like Princess Nine (a fictionalized story of the first women's baseball team in Japan) or shows which include some nudity like Rayearth or Arjuna.
Depending on what you find acceptable, you can always find shows that match your taste, which is probably what I like the most about anime as a media..
Watch more anime aimed at girls instead of guys and you'll see the opposite. Start with Revolutionary Girl Utena or Descendants of Darkness. Of course, there are completely neutral shows too, like Spirited Away.
Don't hold your breath - DVDs cost less than a dollar to press. The price of a DVD has nothing to do with the cost of production.
Don't forget that that production includes the cost of encoding the material, developing additional material (menus, extras, etc) mastering the disc, creating checkdiscs, testing checkdiscs in each of the dozens of spec-incompatible DVD players, re-encoding because frame 34b at 1:43:23.87 succumbed to the bugginess that is the color red in mpeg. Making the glass master for the dvd pressing. Discovering that you made a spelling error on the menu and never noticed it. Making a new glass master. Taking returns because someone's cheap no-name dvd player glitches on the layer change and freezes hard.
Yes, there is still room for profit in there, but I'd wager its not much. Of course, all those costs except for the returns are up-front costs. Once you've sold enough to make up for that its all profits, less royalties and the pressing cost. A lot of these costs can be outsourced (which is still expensive) or managed with experience (catch errors early!), but it can still be quite expensive, especially if you dont have a digital source for the material you're encoding, in which case you need to remaster it digitally first, then continue with the encoding. And thats if you're using a fairly modern source, the expenses for restoring aging film can get pretty high.
There are four complex anime plotlines that are generally understandable by Westerners:
1) Social Observation. Peer into the inner workings of society and interaction between humans in unusual situations or in the wake of a major social shift. Watch Serial Experiments Lain (can mankind make the shift to an online society? Should it?) or Evangelion (children are put into machines and ordered to kill, maim, and destroy. What is life like for those children?).
2) Coming of Age story: Typically a young female either in or approaching the early teens experiences an adventure, learns to rely on her self and her own skills, as well as to trust her friends around her, and emerges at the end an older, stronger, and wiser person. See Spirited Away (or almost any Miyazaki movie).
3) Tragic Romance (in the shakespearian vein). Sometimes its just not going to work out. Japanese seem to love watching people writhe in emotional agony. Especially same-sex parings. See Revolutionary Girl Utena (series first, then movie). See also just about every show targeted at older girls or young women in Japan.
4) Weird Shit Happens. Sit back and enjoy the ride. See FLCL (Fooly Cooly), Excel Saga, and just about anything you buy in R2 without English translations if you don't understand Japanese.
Hm, someone already warned you about solar cell folks swarming you, so here it is: Hook up a few electricity producing solar cells, drop the leads in a bowl of water, and voila, clean H2 and O2.
The cost should pretty much be in the pumps and whatever coupler you're using to connect the storage tank to the fuel tank. Of those, I wonder how well a standard compressor (relatively cheap) would do with Hydrogen. I expect that the pressure in the fuel tank is likely higher than an average compressor can reach.
The coupler will be the big thing. It has to be strong enough to maintain the connection, it has to close on disconnect so that your tanks don't leak and you don't wind up getting your skull crushed when the hose recoils (think uncontrolled fire hose here).
Hydrogen generation is just water+electricity, although I'm not sure what goes into seperating the H2 from the O2 in the air. I've never bothered, since my goal in generating hydrogen was to make a test tube explode. (there are also chemical reactions which generate only H2, however these require something else to be added to the water... like aluminumm, which forms aluminum oxide and H2.)
I agree with you 100%. The house has value. If my character destroys your virtual house, your character should sue my character in a virtual court to recover virtual damages. Perhaps my character should even be sent to a virtual jail!
Finally! someone who understands the nature of the beast.
Work done on Virutal Objects (something with no material state), can only be measured in terms of the Perceived Value of such a creation. Thus the argument does not give a 1:1 correlation between "Book" and "Virtual Book" even though the language definition seems to compare just the content.
I argue that the Cost of Materials of the virtual house is the cost of the time invested in obtaining it, plus the associated costs of playing the game for that time.
The values of any object need not be financial. Possession of X may grant powers or priveleges or esteem from peers.
So, now... if you desired Object X, which you estimate will take 20 hours of game time to obtain, and you value your time at $20/hour, and someone is willing to sell you Object X for $100, what do you do?
Depending on how much you value your game experience (maybe you value your game time at $20 an hour as well!) and the nature of Object X (maybe everyone gets it automatically after 20 hours?) you buy Object X because this is cheaper than actually spending several days looking for it. This doesn't make you mentally ill like some here have suggested, it makes you logical and is an economically sound decision.
If I donate money to someone does that mean that nothing is worth something?
It means that this person's welfare is worth $x to you.
No no no, if I attack everquest and take the servers down or just take god status and screw the game up, and the players demand refunds, then I have caused financial harm to the company running everquest. Am I not responsible for that damage?
It is not so cut and dry is it. If we incrementally go up from 1, 1 at a time where is the division. If it doesn't exist at any given point then I must surely be able to pull hair at will without concern for recourse.
True, but in my case I argue that there IS no division because both ends of the argument are on the same side. Instead of how many hairs, try "If I give George Bush $100 to pardon me, is that bribery?" and start counting up from there. No matter how high you go, there is no division between bribery and not-bribery. This is not a Sorites Paradox.
I have three sets of questions that determine a domain for "things that have value" using two variables: realness and trivialness. While I should have asked about authoring a book on the trivialness scale (The first set of questions) I believed that most people (the audience for this argument anyway) would indicate that yes, a real book has value.
Once establishing that the domain of things-with-value includes non-trivial and trivial objects, and real and non-real objects, I ask if there was a discontinuity in this domain for a virtual house, and why.
if EA shuts down those servers tomorrow, they don't owe you anything
/. a while back, before "There"... all I remember about them is that they were planning on making items decay over time and that you could pay to get better items. I wonder what happened with it? Or There for that matter...)
:P)? How about if the engine allowed me to cut down trees, hew the logs into planks, and assemble the house using nails I hammered out on a forge myself? These would all be "bit flipping" operations.
This is codified in the EULA. But what about systems where items in the game are expressly given value which can be exchanged for "real" money. (What was that one game that showed up on
In this case, if some hacker sank your belongings to the bottom of the sea, or Hiro Protagonist himself came and cut off your head and hid it so you couldn't log back in, there would be clearly be value lost.
However, in this case, you didn't build the house. You interacted with a game engine which flipped bits on EA's servers.
How much interaction would be required to claim I built the house? What if the game engine allowed me to import a building I drew in autocad (or whatever architects use to design houses... I'm an engineer
The thing is, this idea may determine a lot more than whether some little brat has to remunerate each player individually as well as the owner of the servers they hacked or not. Any legal decision on this subject will determine how virtual worlds are developed for a long time to come.
Personally I think it would be cool to create Stephenson's Metaverse. Which won't happen if we can't have companies or individuals develop objects or avatars or events for the Metaverse, because of a lack of value. Individuals working for fun can only go so far.
If so, then every day I work, I lose something (nothing) by coming in to work when I could be at home doing nothing (something).
As someone who has taken an introduction to economics class, I am fully qualified to say Exactly. This is known as an opportunity cost, what you gave up to receive what you got. You evaluated the value of "nothing", and perceived it to be less than the value of your job (paycheck, esteem/prestige, skills gained), and so you took the job.
Your virtual house in the Sims is worth nothing.
Why is it worth nothing? Lets take a look at a progression here.
If I were to build a house in Missouri, would you deny that it has value?
If I were to spend hours building bird houses, would you deny that they have value?
If I were to spend hours making paper roses to sell on a street corner, would you deny that they have value?
- Now that we have identified that objects I produce have value, regardless of the triviality, lets move on.
If I were an author and wrote a book, would you deny that it has value?
If I wrote a book and sold it on a street corner, would you deny that it has value?
If I wrote a book and sold it online, would you deny that it has value?
If I wrote a book and only sold it online, would you deny that it has value?
If I wrote a book and only sold it online, in an electronic format which you downloaded, would you deny that it has value? (in case you're not understanding, this book has no physical manifestation aside from a series of bits in various places.)
-- If you've said No so far, then we've established that lack of a physical manifestation of what I have produced does not prevent it from having value. So, one last question:
If I build a house online, would you deny it has value? If so, why?
Now, lets assume that you said that you denied me my value. At what point was that? Was it the roses? (I have seen a number of nonprofits that employ blind or otherwise handicapped people to produce and sell these or other small trinkets) Was it the electronic version of the book? Even if you did not receive a physical object with "bookness", you obtained the output of many days of the labor of multiple people (the author, the editor(s), and so on...).
Ok, the short form.
Once upon a time there was a crime in a MOO. The people in charge said "let the punishment fit the crime". And so it did.
If the customer is unable to use the service (e.g. due to unavailability), the customer gets his/her money back....
In context with the hackers ruining the virtual world, doesn't this mean that the company has a financial loss due to the actions of the hackers and the hackers should be liable for that?
I did think of a possible solution to this. Go to whoever handles acquisitions for your lab, and tell them to write their sales contact at NI. Tell them to write something along the lines of the following letter:
"Hello, my name is ______, and I am the purchasing director for _______. Our budget this year is tight, so we are abandoning the windows platform in favor of cheaper alternatives. It has come to my attention from some of our top researchers here that your equipment only supports the windows platform, and that your company is ingoring their requests for the information required to produce our own support. Our conversion is expected to take about 3 months to complete. If you do not have Linux support or are unwilling to release to our team of developers the information required to produce Linux drivers, then I will regretfully have to terminate our long customer relationship at this time, and begin purchasing equipment from ______." (pick a competitor from that list supported by Comedi)
Now, have that person send this to the salesperson, the VP of sales at NI, and what the heck, the president of the company too. Let them all know their choices are costing them the patronage of an entire research lab. It will probably be a bluff (from the sound of it, just buying a supported card is out of your budget), but depending on the size of your research lab, they might not risk calling it.
Also, don't waste your time in wine, vmware, and the like. Wine won't inteface with any hardware Linux doesn't know about, and the system emulators won't emulate anything as unusual as a stepper motor card (and if it did, it would still require linux support to use the real card...)
Left Hand of Darkness - IMHO the 2nd best scifi novel ever written after only Dune.
I find Ursula K. LeGuin to be one of the underappreciated authors around here. Her novels are good (and I really enjoyed Left Hand of Darkness), but she really shines in her short stories and parables. Her stories and parables convey the moral of the story without being overly cryptic or completely unsubtle most of the time, and she regularly challenges the standard stereotypes.
Lets take a look: Fantavision, a puzzle game which lets you create firework shows... Mr. Mosquito, where you fly about and try to suck blood without getting swatted. Xenosaga, which continues Xenogears's trend of being a deep multilayered RPG in a market mostly dominated by Final Fantasy N+1. Lets not forget ICO, which proved that eyecandy can count for a lot when it is well executed. .hack (the US market's first attempt at multi-volume games) uses a very intriguing (and imho well executed) concept of simulating an MMORPG environment, without actually being MM or O. And these are just the games I've played.
Other innovative games abound, like Dance Dance Revolution. The DDR craze has gone on far too many sequels and spinoffs to maintain much of its originality status, but it was once a new and daring idea. Just like the other original ideas, once it proved popular it became copied.
Perhaps the solution is that developers need to quit re-inventing the wheel. If developers began to create their applications using these assorted libraries, then the purpose of having dynamic versions of these libraries would be met.
Requiring a very specific version of a library is rare. Almost never happens unless development of the library forks seperately from the program, which usually means that something else is using that library anyway. (see the Gimp ToolKit, GTK).
As for modern-day distribution of these libraries, dependencies are enough if the user is provided with a system for automatically resolving these dependencies. Modern day Red Hat and Mandrake distributions have tools for this. (Debian has had this for a long time). Otherwise, what happens when Developer X takes a liking to libfoo, which Developer Y wrote as part of ThisAppIsForDrawingSquaresOnTheScreen (descriptive enough name?)? Does Developer X copy all of libfoo for his own RPM? Does Developer X require that you install ThisAppIs... in order to use his/her app?
Looking at my own library collection, I have a number of libs which appear to be part of a single app, at least at first glance. I have several libraries which are part of BIND... but they are also used for the bindutils set of name resolution programs. I have a number of libraries that are used exclusively by about 5 window maker programs. Imagine the memory overhead incurred if I ran wmconf, wmsetbg, and wmaker all at once using static libraries? I have a number of libraries that are used by only one application, but closer inspection shows that thats because I only have one application installed. Take, for example, libcdaudio. The only app that relies on it is cdcd, my console CD player. However, I find that its required for a number of other packages too, such as kcd (KDE's CD player), which I just don't use.
If you're using Debian, deborphan is a very useful program for managing the entire mess of libraries, since it allows you to search your depencencies list to let you know if you have libraries you don't need installed.
Ah, but thats part of the wonder of lpd. Ever since the old days, people have had the power to monitor and drop items from the queue if they're given permission to do so. Check out lpq and lprm.
I can see this as being a powerful tool used either for good or for evil. Imagine blind people being able to know how much they are carrying without having to read each bill individually (currently they have little portable scanners they can feed the bills through to identify the denomination). Or knowing when a cashier has been slipping cash into their pockets.
Now, imagine tracking every purchase you make and arresting you because you bought a bottle of superglue on one day, and on the next day bought a bottle of something else that can be mixed with superglue to make toxic gas. If there is no oversight, this could quickly be abused to create a police state. Other posts include muggers knowing whether or not you're a good target, and the like. Deactivating them wouldn't be such a good plan since the transaction trail would point straight to you as the last recipient before the rfid died.
Now, for what reason relevant to the principles at play here is it permissible to patent the internal workings of the machine implemented as hardware, while it is impermissible to patent the internal workings of the machine implemented as software.
I don't know what such a reason might be.
Why? Its simple. Show me the inner workings of your cotton gin.
Thats easy, just open the hood.
Now, show me the inner workings of Microsoft Word... you can do that right? No?
So, in one case, its obvious and straightforward to know that you've built a device that infringes on the cotton gin. In the other case, three years later you get a lawsuit from Microsoft, where you don't get to review the evidence (it will be revealed to "selected" expert witnesses under strict NDA)
Well, can you show me the inner workings of Amazon's "One-Click Shopping"? Are there inner workings? How about the inner workings of the patent on a method of swinging sideways on a swing by pulling on the chains?
No? Having problems yet? We haven't gotten to the best part, the companies who "advance science" by patenting ideas, and lying in wait for someone else to develop them, because their business model can be summed up in one word: "Sue". These companies never produce a product, never contribute to the economy (except in the millions given over to lawyers), generally employ no-one but lawyers (see PanIP).
To patent your mechanical device, you are required to have produced a functional prototype. No such prototype requirement exists for software patents.
Aside from these major differences, there are still others. Machinery tends to have a longer life cycle than software. Imagine what would have happened if someone patented the word processor! For 20 years, either there would be only one word processor available, or everyone would have to pay this individual on whatever terms the individual wanted.
Not only that, but licensing works differently, too. Assuming that the patent holder sticks to a traditional per-implementation license fee, its simple to calculate licensing fees for your cotton gin, simply count the number of copies you made. For software though, do you count the number of CDs you pressed? The number you sold? The number of computers the people installed their product on? The number of people who warezed your product and never paid you a cent?
Why don't we simply say that we don't want to play their game anymore?
Thats called a boycott. And history has shown that it won't work. Not enough people are educated about this topic to even come close to the number needed to even consider an organized boycott. And who would we target?
It is we the people who are supposed to control this nation
Face it: We the People lost the country long ago. Witness the repeated failed half-hearted attempts to pass campaign reform. Why do we expect our politicians to cut off their cash flow? So what should we do, vote them out? Who do we vote in, then, the Republicans, who have all been bought out? The Democrats, who have all been bought out too? Or an Independent, who sold out so he could raise enough cash to get his campaign far enough to get listed on the ballot?
If anything, I say its time for a new Constitutional amendment to the US Constitution. The state ratification process will make it very expensive for corporations to buy out even a quarter of the states.
please don't hold back, let's do away with patents altogether
As problematic as the current situation is, I doubt you will ever find enough support for this. Instead, I propose creating a new class of patents specifically for software (rather than the current "business process" patent class). Patents in this class will last for 3 years, renewable for 2 more (this roughly corresponds to the lifespan of the windows 95 core, which was used for 95, 98, and ME). In order for the patent to be granted, the inventor must
A good admin/coder can pick up mainframe stuff when he needs to.
Yeah, sure, I've got spare Big Iron laying around my basement, some day I'll fire it up and learn how to run it....
Yeah, right.
I'm sure I could pick it up in a flash. Too bad that employers don't want someone who can pick it up in a flash, they want someone with at least several years experience. Most of these positions I've seen in the local paper are for Senior Admin positions, where they want a lifetime of experience running these things.
Because of the economy, assistant admin positions are rare. Companies want to find one guy capable of doing the work, alone, so low-experience junior admins are a thing of the past. The old-school style of passing knowledge down from generation to generation is gone, since a new hire generally starts after the previous hire has retired/quit/been fired. (Been there, done that, the "documentation" typically left behind is usually pretty shoddy, since the author doesn't care... they're not working there anymore by the time it gets read)