Are you sure that wasn't a link to the ordinance-dismissal advocate's case? The thing read like a rampaging Slashdot reply, except it actually stuck to the points of the case. Amazing.
This could get entra interesting if third parties can fund the renewal of copyrights in this way. After all, one can't expect the copyright office to keep track of which family member/friend of a long-dead artist held what right, especially when the vast majority of copyrights aren't registered in any way.
So what if third parties, seeing that a potentially competing work might enter the public domain, decides to renew a copyright? Will there be a way to dispute a renewal? Will the draw of the public domain hold any weight outside of an accidental "gotcha"?
Using the huge infrastructure and bandwidth muscle to eliminate satellite TV from the urban and suburban areas by adding more content-rich and interactive features beyond the bandwidth that satellite TV is capable of handling.
Lines like these might perk the interest of regulators.
Given the description of how it works, I wonder if it will be inherently less durable against electric shock than current hardware. We've heard the advantages, it'll be interesting to hear what the disadvantages might be. Things like failure rate and recovery methods come to mind. Definetly worth watching though!
You must not have ever worked for a government agency. I used to work for the US Federal Government. In my experience, Government Agencies and their employees are not inerested in minimizing costs. They are more interested in maintaining the status quo, and increasing budgets if possible.
That's why I said that the goal of the government itself was to reduce costs. As in at the highest levels - that's what the politicians try for. The unfortunately competing goals of it's agencies are to increase their own budget, as you say. But the goal of the elected government is still to give an effective return on taxes and instilled power. Even if by structure they cannot do this.
A major goal of most governments is to spend as little as possible, while still providing all their minimal requirements. These new rules _should_ be something that matches quite well with open souce software, as they better allow the use of outside help in making a better product, and even better allows other agencies to help pool software resources to create something better for all the public.
Unfortunately, the way appropriations work, right along with the philosophy of spending as little as possible - those agencies that do not spend the resources allotted to them stand a large chance of having their budgets cut, based on the perception that they don't *need* all the resources they were given last time. Those that spend slightly more than was allotted to them stand a larger chance of having their budgets raised rahter than be reformed.
The cliche is, "the squeeky wheel gets the grease", and it is percieved as true by the heads of many government agencies, trying to communicate their need, while staying within the guidelines that permit their actions.
So, even though it IS more beurocracy, and it does stand to take some choice away in some circumsances, this IS a set of rules that makes sense for what the goals of government are. Those agencies that want to spend the resources still will be able to... but they might just be able to find a better way to spend those resources this way, for the sake of everyone.
From it's loose concept of "virtues" to it's world simulation, most of the Ultimas have been worlds apart from the fictions most games take place in.
Ultima IV was an amazing concept for it's time, and remains revolutionary as far as a game plot goes. There is no big "Foozle" to kill, you just have the archtypical midieval land to fight through... but the goal is to make a respectable character out of yourself. Sure, you could cheat the system like anything else (See Doug the Eagles page for many examples in the Ultima series), but it actually offered a somewhat meaningful system of judgements about your actions in the game. Sure, you could steal and cheat others in deals, but you would not be walking the path to Avatarhood... it was a pretty large impact in an age when games were so private an experience on home computers.
The later games left a VERY minor aspect of such karma in the game, but the effect lingered, as gamers continued to think of themselves as the Avatar. In a sense, the lack of judgement improved later games. Having concepts like Humility being important, not for religious reasons, but because you are role-playing a character who went to such pains to represend himself one way... 'tis a very unique thing.
Of course, beyond Virtues, the Ultime series is as historic as a game series can get. Ultima Underworld was pretty much the first fully-fleshed out first person simulation game out there - from the deep interaction of objects in the world, to many factions of creatures in the Underworld... when it all came into existence BEFORE Wolfenstein 3d... it was truly an awesome thing to behold. And still to this day, the mixture of plot and characters (after you get past the kidnapped-princess thing) makes the game worth re-playing just for the entertainment of the writing.
And of course, on the same lines, Ultima 5 through 7 revolutionized games in ways that have yet to be matched even in other RPGs. The deeply pervasive NPC schedules, the complex mixture of dialogues and plots, the wide variety of dynamic object interactions, and of course the humor and the unique technicalities that come from exploring the absolutely huge acts of creation that went into these games... it's truly amazing....Just a ending note: If you're thinking of playing the Ultima Series though, I'd definetly suggest you ignore 1-3, and 8 and ESPECIALLY 9. Each of them, while not absolutely bad games (alright, 9 is just bad), are pretty much just average games, dramatically separate in quality from the others. Other than that, find them where you can, check them out, and have fun!
Really - why do you think vendors place the "this software is not meant for any purpose, express or implied" language in licence agreements? Because if the vendor promises something, and that thing is blatantly not promised, then the customer can still generally get their money back en mass, thanks to resellers demands, and if it goes far enough, the legal system will generally enforce contract law with regard to purchases and false advertising.
Similarly, if a company were to go insane, and actually make a clear promise on people's lives with their software, down to the legal writing, with no one signing any waivers, and someone got killed as a direct result of the very design of the software, then under existing laws, at least someone in that software company would be legally brought up on charges for that death.
To add any extra levels of "blame" on top of that seems to me to be as superfluous as, well, the DMCA.
The moment anyone starts "getting away" with what otherwise would be crimes just because a computer was used (not because of encryption, which can be done without computers also) - then I'll agree that new laws might help... but to add special liability for sofware companies seems more an act of hysteria than anything else.
Instead of having plentiful places for birds to rest in urbanized areas, we get partially cooked ones occasionally falling from the sky! Allright, not really - but it would be oddly funny to see a bird or insect perch in one area up high, enjoying unexpected warmth, then suddenly move away due to sudden discomfort or unexpected smell.
I can't imagine that microwaves would end up anywhere near as efficient as wire transmission, but it is a nice idea for when you have a source of energy you otherwise couldn't capitalize on (like extra-planetory solar radiation in the recent Sim City games), and just want to siphon as much in a direction where you can't use more efficent methods.
"Of the people, for the people, by the people" is great and all... but some of those people just might be terrorists! Therefore, it must be a reasonable idea to remove the people's abilty to review the actions of their government, in this best of all possible worlds.
Those are the same responses one would expect with any audience coming to attend an experimental performance. Some would slowly get angry as they began to feel that their time had been wasted. Some would feel amused at watching the rest of the audience. Some would feel conspiritorial as they thought they realized the intent of what was happening - most Music 101 courses have a lecture mentioning experiments where a minute of silence is considered a work of art, where the "music" is the audiences reaction itself.
Don't expect any radical advancements into generalized knowledge about human emotional reaction based on this evidence.
So, Microsoft is found to have unfairly leveraged their monopoly, so the request is: "Um, hey, can we have some more of that software 'ya got there? It's just the best darn thing we could thing we could use."
Just imagine if this form of punishment were applied to other organizations acting in a criminal manner:
A mob being asked to offer it's "protection services" at no cost for one year.
Politicians found to have taken bribes being asked to serve without their official pay for the remainder of their term.
A drug cartel being asked to provide half it's crop to the state for free the next year.
A corporate polluter punished by being forced to create more product next year....I really don't hate Microsoft, but once again, feel our nation's justice system has fallen into insanity with it's treatment of that company.
If you've ever followed the popular system computer simulators known as emulators, you've likely seen savestates. It's effectively saving all the variables of a system en bulk, to be leaded back again later so another approach might be taken. They have been very useful to emulator developers who often need to return to an exact point where a virtual machine breaks down, without having to re-run to a certain point.
It would be nice if debuggers could automate the process of saving the state of functions (and everything they immediately touch), so you could go "back in time" rather than need to restart a program in order to return to a non-bugged state. On small programs, it would also be very convenient to be able to save the state of the entire program.
Possible extentions of this idea would be a breakpoint-like auto-savestate at a certain line, and a "step back" feature to be able to rollback one line.
Of course, there would be many possible complications involved in using savestates - but I believe the potential dangers are far outweighed by the opportunities for quicker and more comprehensive testing and code-observation.
This is the movie from whence the line "Droppo, you're the laziest man on mars!" sprang forth into the world. It's a very entertainingly bad movie, and was featured in Mystery science theater 3000 episode 321.
With so many similar topics appearing all across the IP landscape, here's the trend I'm seeing:
The simple capatalistic need to own and be given various forms of credit for ideas has taken precidence over the need to actually solve and understand problems.
That's not to say that capitolism is at all bad, but this aspect of our modern version of it is something that appears can lead to eventual deadlock in societies' and individuals' ability to get anything done. Scientists need to work on something they can own, so many ignore many otherwise important topics. Inventors need to avoid anything in the commercial market, so many find their ability to improve things is greatly hampered. Writers and archivists must carefully avoid soemtimes broad concepts that are claimed by powerful interests, so must limit their imagination as important ideas rot en mass.
Completely new ideas are a powerful thing, and should of course be encouraged - but the ideas that are actually useful to people are not often completely new. Our encouragement of new ideas should not be at the cost of the very usefulness of ideas in general! Exploitation of ideas is the overall idea behind copyright and the like, but one does not have to own the very core concepts themselves to exploit the ideas - to own the core concepts themselves ends up exploiting people rather than exploiting ideas, keeping everyone else from being able to bring many new ideas to society. New ideas don't often just spring from nowhere - people have to be able to combine concepts, using existing ideas.
We just needed it for research! It's just for personal use! We have a right to privacy with our own files! We deleted it within 24 hours - so it's legal! It didn't hurt anyone - we weren't going to be buying the book anyway! Mentioning them in our lawsuit is like free advertising! Potentially infringing material wants to be free!;^)
"Opponents claim the DMCA is being used to give copyright holders greater rights in cyberspace than they have in the real world, where people can legally copy videotapes for their personal use and record music."
I'm nitpicking... but in that sentence, shouldn't "cyberspace" and "real world" should be reversed? I mean, complaints about the DMCA are that it limits copying and use of "cyberspace" digital media above and beyond "real world" analog copying and use. Normally I wouldn't complain - but this is Reuters, the source from where so many other news sources flow.
I wonder where the etymology happened to change that word so much. Still more, I wonder if the original taker of that name really wanted to be known as the master of happyness at the time or not.
If I put a forum in the.kids.us domain, and didn't have a filter for certain words, would I lose my domain for lack of censorship?
I guess technically not the government enforcing moral law, because it hands off the actual rule making to the private company managing of the domain... but that's also a large part of why I'm very uncomfortable with many right-wing legislation proposals recently, because they ammount to government support of moral rules by giving more and more power to private organizations.
Having space in genetic code not used by anything would not be a huge disadvantage. If life was formed by random chance and evolution, it just means that the circumstances that brought about man were made off of a large slate, with different parts that happened to connect well across that genetic slate. It also makes sense that removing or altering seemingly meaningless parts of that slate would mess up indexing methods (skip ahead X number of A's, start reading, etc.)
Having a very large set of non-referenced entries in a genetic set would also be an advantage in itself. You have a large set of potential mutiations that can be subtly linked to to find advantages, and plenty of room to sort things out genetically. You can also have things like children who are genetically designed to be born to die to save their siblings.
Large-scale life itself is built on the idea that gross inneficiency is acceptable if it allows food and access to mates to be found at the larger scale. So simple bacteria has tight genetic code, fruit flies have fast-mutating genetic code, and large animals have inneficient code with different portions that mutate at varying rates. It's life competing with itself to explore all corners of possibility. Semmingly inneficient aspects are just another legitimate part of the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure that wasn't a link to the ordinance-dismissal advocate's case? The thing read like a rampaging Slashdot reply, except it actually stuck to the points of the case. Amazing.
Ryan Fenton
This could get entra interesting if third parties can fund the renewal of copyrights in this way. After all, one can't expect the copyright office to keep track of which family member/friend of a long-dead artist held what right, especially when the vast majority of copyrights aren't registered in any way.
So what if third parties, seeing that a potentially competing work might enter the public domain, decides to renew a copyright? Will there be a way to dispute a renewal? Will the draw of the public domain hold any weight outside of an accidental "gotcha"?
Ryan Fenton
Lines like these might perk the interest of regulators.
Ryan Fenton
Given the description of how it works, I wonder if it will be inherently less durable against electric shock than current hardware. We've heard the advantages, it'll be interesting to hear what the disadvantages might be. Things like failure rate and recovery methods come to mind. Definetly worth watching though!
Ryan Fenton
That's why I said that the goal of the government itself was to reduce costs. As in at the highest levels - that's what the politicians try for. The unfortunately competing goals of it's agencies are to increase their own budget, as you say. But the goal of the elected government is still to give an effective return on taxes and instilled power. Even if by structure they cannot do this.
Ryan Fenton
A major goal of most governments is to spend as little as possible, while still providing all their minimal requirements. These new rules _should_ be something that matches quite well with open souce software, as they better allow the use of outside help in making a better product, and even better allows other agencies to help pool software resources to create something better for all the public.
Unfortunately, the way appropriations work, right along with the philosophy of spending as little as possible - those agencies that do not spend the resources allotted to them stand a large chance of having their budgets cut, based on the perception that they don't *need* all the resources they were given last time. Those that spend slightly more than was allotted to them stand a larger chance of having their budgets raised rahter than be reformed.
The cliche is, "the squeeky wheel gets the grease", and it is percieved as true by the heads of many government agencies, trying to communicate their need, while staying within the guidelines that permit their actions.
So, even though it IS more beurocracy, and it does stand to take some choice away in some circumsances, this IS a set of rules that makes sense for what the goals of government are. Those agencies that want to spend the resources still will be able to... but they might just be able to find a better way to spend those resources this way, for the sake of everyone.
Ryan Fenton
From it's loose concept of "virtues" to it's world simulation, most of the Ultimas have been worlds apart from the fictions most games take place in.
Ultima IV was an amazing concept for it's time, and remains revolutionary as far as a game plot goes. There is no big "Foozle" to kill, you just have the archtypical midieval land to fight through... but the goal is to make a respectable character out of yourself. Sure, you could cheat the system like anything else (See Doug the Eagles page for many examples in the Ultima series), but it actually offered a somewhat meaningful system of judgements about your actions in the game. Sure, you could steal and cheat others in deals, but you would not be walking the path to Avatarhood... it was a pretty large impact in an age when games were so private an experience on home computers.
The later games left a VERY minor aspect of such karma in the game, but the effect lingered, as gamers continued to think of themselves as the Avatar. In a sense, the lack of judgement improved later games. Having concepts like Humility being important, not for religious reasons, but because you are role-playing a character who went to such pains to represend himself one way... 'tis a very unique thing.
Of course, beyond Virtues, the Ultime series is as historic as a game series can get. Ultima Underworld was pretty much the first fully-fleshed out first person simulation game out there - from the deep interaction of objects in the world, to many factions of creatures in the Underworld... when it all came into existence BEFORE Wolfenstein 3d... it was truly an awesome thing to behold. And still to this day, the mixture of plot and characters (after you get past the kidnapped-princess thing) makes the game worth re-playing just for the entertainment of the writing.
And of course, on the same lines, Ultima 5 through 7 revolutionized games in ways that have yet to be matched even in other RPGs. The deeply pervasive NPC schedules, the complex mixture of dialogues and plots, the wide variety of dynamic object interactions, and of course the humor and the unique technicalities that come from exploring the absolutely huge acts of creation that went into these games... it's truly amazing.
Ryan Fenton
Eek. Wrong thread. I... dislike it when that happens. :^)
Ryan Fenton
Really - why do you think vendors place the "this software is not meant for any purpose, express or implied" language in licence agreements? Because if the vendor promises something, and that thing is blatantly not promised, then the customer can still generally get their money back en mass, thanks to resellers demands, and if it goes far enough, the legal system will generally enforce contract law with regard to purchases and false advertising.
Similarly, if a company were to go insane, and actually make a clear promise on people's lives with their software, down to the legal writing, with no one signing any waivers, and someone got killed as a direct result of the very design of the software, then under existing laws, at least someone in that software company would be legally brought up on charges for that death.
To add any extra levels of "blame" on top of that seems to me to be as superfluous as, well, the DMCA.
The moment anyone starts "getting away" with what otherwise would be crimes just because a computer was used (not because of encryption, which can be done without computers also) - then I'll agree that new laws might help... but to add special liability for sofware companies seems more an act of hysteria than anything else.
Ryan Fenton
Instead of having plentiful places for birds to rest in urbanized areas, we get partially cooked ones occasionally falling from the sky! Allright, not really - but it would be oddly funny to see a bird or insect perch in one area up high, enjoying unexpected warmth, then suddenly move away due to sudden discomfort or unexpected smell.
I can't imagine that microwaves would end up anywhere near as efficient as wire transmission, but it is a nice idea for when you have a source of energy you otherwise couldn't capitalize on (like extra-planetory solar radiation in the recent Sim City games), and just want to siphon as much in a direction where you can't use more efficent methods.
Ryan Fenton
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/01/02182
Likely, this is already a repost ABOUT the repost. Still, it's always fun to pile on!
Ryan Fenton
So long as it's defined in terms of a "process by which fire is made", it'd likely be patentable by modern laywers.
Ryan Fenton
"Of the people, for the people, by the people" is great and all... but some of those people just might be terrorists! Therefore, it must be a reasonable idea to remove the people's abilty to review the actions of their government, in this best of all possible worlds.
Ryan Fenton
Those are the same responses one would expect with any audience coming to attend an experimental performance. Some would slowly get angry as they began to feel that their time had been wasted. Some would feel amused at watching the rest of the audience. Some would feel conspiritorial as they thought they realized the intent of what was happening - most Music 101 courses have a lecture mentioning experiments where a minute of silence is considered a work of art, where the "music" is the audiences reaction itself.
Don't expect any radical advancements into generalized knowledge about human emotional reaction based on this evidence.
Ryan Fenton
So, Microsoft is found to have unfairly leveraged their monopoly, so the request is: "Um, hey, can we have some more of that software 'ya got there? It's just the best darn thing we could thing we could use."
Just imagine if this form of punishment were applied to other organizations acting in a criminal manner:
A mob being asked to offer it's "protection services" at no cost for one year.
Politicians found to have taken bribes being asked to serve without their official pay for the remainder of their term.
A drug cartel being asked to provide half it's crop to the state for free the next year.
A corporate polluter punished by being forced to create more product next year.
Ryan Fenton
Pricewatch is nice, but next to useless without or similar methods of checking out resellers.
Always remember to check out anyone offering the "best" prices, especially their history with returns.
Ryan Fenton
If you've ever followed the popular system computer simulators known as emulators, you've likely seen savestates. It's effectively saving all the variables of a system en bulk, to be leaded back again later so another approach might be taken. They have been very useful to emulator developers who often need to return to an exact point where a virtual machine breaks down, without having to re-run to a certain point.
It would be nice if debuggers could automate the process of saving the state of functions (and everything they immediately touch), so you could go "back in time" rather than need to restart a program in order to return to a non-bugged state. On small programs, it would also be very convenient to be able to save the state of the entire program.
Possible extentions of this idea would be a breakpoint-like auto-savestate at a certain line, and a "step back" feature to be able to rollback one line.
Of course, there would be many possible complications involved in using savestates - but I believe the potential dangers are far outweighed by the opportunities for quicker and more comprehensive testing and code-observation.
Ryan Fenton
That title reminds me of the old movie "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians", which, surprisingly enough, is aparantly being remade!
This is the movie from whence the line "Droppo, you're the laziest man on mars!" sprang forth into the world. It's a very entertainingly bad movie, and was featured in Mystery science theater 3000 episode 321.
Ryan Fenton
If this keeps up "Mickey Mouse" might end up meaning cheap and unreliable. Wouldn't want that to happen! ;^)
Ryan Fenton
With so many similar topics appearing all across the IP landscape, here's the trend I'm seeing:
The simple capatalistic need to own and be given various forms of credit for ideas has taken precidence over the need to actually solve and understand problems.
That's not to say that capitolism is at all bad, but this aspect of our modern version of it is something that appears can lead to eventual deadlock in societies' and individuals' ability to get anything done. Scientists need to work on something they can own, so many ignore many otherwise important topics. Inventors need to avoid anything in the commercial market, so many find their ability to improve things is greatly hampered. Writers and archivists must carefully avoid soemtimes broad concepts that are claimed by powerful interests, so must limit their imagination as important ideas rot en mass.
Completely new ideas are a powerful thing, and should of course be encouraged - but the ideas that are actually useful to people are not often completely new. Our encouragement of new ideas should not be at the cost of the very usefulness of ideas in general! Exploitation of ideas is the overall idea behind copyright and the like, but one does not have to own the very core concepts themselves to exploit the ideas - to own the core concepts themselves ends up exploiting people rather than exploiting ideas, keeping everyone else from being able to bring many new ideas to society. New ideas don't often just spring from nowhere - people have to be able to combine concepts, using existing ideas.
Ryan Fenton
Especially if their excuses were:
;^)
We just needed it for research! It's just for personal use! We have a right to privacy with our own files! We deleted it within 24 hours - so it's legal! It didn't hurt anyone - we weren't going to be buying the book anyway! Mentioning them in our lawsuit is like free advertising! Potentially infringing material wants to be free!
Ryan Fenton
"Opponents claim the DMCA is being used to give copyright holders greater rights in cyberspace than they have in the real world, where people can legally copy videotapes for their personal use and record music."
I'm nitpicking... but in that sentence, shouldn't "cyberspace" and "real world" should be reversed? I mean, complaints about the DMCA are that it limits copying and use of "cyberspace" digital media above and beyond "real world" analog copying and use. Normally I wouldn't complain - but this is Reuters, the source from where so many other news sources flow.
Ryan Fenton
Gaylord, the pup
I wonder where the etymology happened to change that word so much. Still more, I wonder if the original taker of that name really wanted to be known as the master of happyness at the time or not.
Ryan Fenton
If I put a forum in the
I guess technically not the government enforcing moral law, because it hands off the actual rule making to the private company managing of the domain... but that's also a large part of why I'm very uncomfortable with many right-wing legislation proposals recently, because they ammount to government support of moral rules by giving more and more power to private organizations.
Who decides what is safe for kids?
Ryan Fenton
Having space in genetic code not used by anything would not be a huge disadvantage. If life was formed by random chance and evolution, it just means that the circumstances that brought about man were made off of a large slate, with different parts that happened to connect well across that genetic slate. It also makes sense that removing or altering seemingly meaningless parts of that slate would mess up indexing methods (skip ahead X number of A's, start reading, etc.)
Having a very large set of non-referenced entries in a genetic set would also be an advantage in itself. You have a large set of potential mutiations that can be subtly linked to to find advantages, and plenty of room to sort things out genetically. You can also have things like children who are genetically designed to be born to die to save their siblings.
Large-scale life itself is built on the idea that gross inneficiency is acceptable if it allows food and access to mates to be found at the larger scale. So simple bacteria has tight genetic code, fruit flies have fast-mutating genetic code, and large animals have inneficient code with different portions that mutate at varying rates. It's life competing with itself to explore all corners of possibility. Semmingly inneficient aspects are just another legitimate part of the process.
Ryan Fenton