1) Didn't anyone else notice the "Pocket PC" marking on the bottom of the device? That reeks "composite image".
2) It doesn't matter if there's a smudge on the screen or not. It'd be easy enough to take an image of a real Palm and combine it with the fictitious parts.
3) The button in the middle of the device (whether it's a jog wheel, or whatever) is contrary to the design specifications that Palm uses. It's simply not the simple device that Palm has been famous for (and quite successful with).
Re:Artistic and Theft are not mutually exclusive
on
Mashed-Up Music
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· Score: 1
Now, I submit that, if borrowing text is theft, then so is borrowing musical samples.
I don't think what we're talking about here is directly comparable to plagiarism. If you take two dissimilar musical works and "mash" them together, such that the original works are indistinguishable in the music, that doesn't strike me as the same thing as plagiarism. A better analogy would be taking each word from "Carrie", and each word from "The Hunt For Red October" and mixing the two together in no particular order, possibly even at the character level.
Now, if the two works are distinguishable, that's an entirely different thing. Obviously, if you've blatantly taken two works and simply put them over each other in some way, such that each can still be heard, that's seriously bad karma.
At best, video games are commercial speech, which has historically (IIRC) been more controlled by the courts than artistic or political speech. What were the developers of Quake trying to express? Nothing. They were simply developing a piece of software for people to use as they saw fit. Take the analogy out of games and into any other kind of software, and it becomes obvious. What were Microsoft's developers trying to express when they created Word? A piece of software is not an artistic creation in itself, although it can produce artistic creations (screenshots from games, for example).
The bigger (and more thorny) issue is whether video games should be barred from being sold to children if the games are violent. I answer that with a firm "it depends". I think that below a certain age, children are not able to cognitively tell the difference between reality and fantasy. While that age may be different from child to child, there's a certain baseline that people can agree to, I think, and psychologists would certainly have an idea what that age was, statistically. Now, that won't stop bad people from doing bad things. A teenager that shoots up a school is doing it because he/she is mentally ill and/or just an ass, rather than because they played too much Half-Life. All playing these games probably does for an older child is improve their eye-hand coordination for shooting purposes.
I think some people are missing the point. The point is not that there's something different being bandied about on the P2P network. It's all bits, as many posters have said. The question is, how fast are those bits travelling? And if you're dealing with 56K modems, the answer is, "very slowly". I don't see any logical way around that conclusion. Anyone who's used Napster or Gnutella knows you can't go any faster than the person you're connected to. It's just a fact. However, I don't see that as the main problem with P2P (if indeed there is a "main problem"). The difficulty is with the well-documented leaching phenomenon. If you've got a large number of users downloading from a smaller number of users, you get bottlenecks. And in the end, it doesn't matter if you're dealing with 56K, cable, or DSL. The end result is a degredation of performance, well below what a user is used to. That's what makes the current form of P2P unacceptable. (If you really doubt this, think back to the day after the Napster decision. I was on Gnutella that day, and it was unbearably slow and shaky.) What might help is the advent of distributed computing. If files can be spread over a larger area (in terms of the network) bottlenecks might be reduced, as requests get more evenly spread. If you think about it, 100 people serving 100,000 users just isn't going to work, long-term. (I realize that that's not the real ratio, but the principle is the same. Home computers aren't made to handle that kind of traffic.)
Still, I think calling for the "death" of P2P is an over-exaggeration. One-to-one transfer of data is quite viable, and even small-scale one-to-many relationships (think Groove) is quite useful. It's when you get to the scale of Napster and Gnutella that the cracks start to show.
But what the hell do I know?;)
Okay, here's the thing: Are video games speech? Maybe. Is violence free speech? Um, no. If violence was free speech, shooting someone would be an acceptable way of disagreeing with them.
As far as the smaller issue (whether children should be allowed to play violent video games), it's a much more sticky question. Yes, parents should be able to control their children's activities. However, what if some parent doesn't exercise reasonable control, and allows his or her child to play violent video games which the child (for whatever reason) cannot distinguish from reality? That child could subsequently blast your child away. So I think there are limits to what should be allowable. Possibly something like what we have with movies right now: Under a certain age, children don't get access. Period. At another age (say, 13), a child gets such access with parental consent. This would keep idiot parents from giving Quake to their 5 year old and expecting the child to have a grasp on the abstract concept of play violence.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several things that bug me about this:
1) Didn't anyone else notice the "Pocket PC" marking on the bottom of the device? That reeks "composite image".
2) It doesn't matter if there's a smudge on the screen or not. It'd be easy enough to take an image of a real Palm and combine it with the fictitious parts.
3) The button in the middle of the device (whether it's a jog wheel, or whatever) is contrary to the design specifications that Palm uses. It's simply not the simple device that Palm has been famous for (and quite successful with).
Now, I submit that, if borrowing text is theft, then so is borrowing musical samples. I don't think what we're talking about here is directly comparable to plagiarism. If you take two dissimilar musical works and "mash" them together, such that the original works are indistinguishable in the music, that doesn't strike me as the same thing as plagiarism. A better analogy would be taking each word from "Carrie", and each word from "The Hunt For Red October" and mixing the two together in no particular order, possibly even at the character level. Now, if the two works are distinguishable, that's an entirely different thing. Obviously, if you've blatantly taken two works and simply put them over each other in some way, such that each can still be heard, that's seriously bad karma.
At best, video games are commercial speech, which has historically (IIRC) been more controlled by the courts than artistic or political speech. What were the developers of Quake trying to express? Nothing. They were simply developing a piece of software for people to use as they saw fit. Take the analogy out of games and into any other kind of software, and it becomes obvious. What were Microsoft's developers trying to express when they created Word? A piece of software is not an artistic creation in itself, although it can produce artistic creations (screenshots from games, for example).
The bigger (and more thorny) issue is whether video games should be barred from being sold to children if the games are violent. I answer that with a firm "it depends". I think that below a certain age, children are not able to cognitively tell the difference between reality and fantasy. While that age may be different from child to child, there's a certain baseline that people can agree to, I think, and psychologists would certainly have an idea what that age was, statistically. Now, that won't stop bad people from doing bad things. A teenager that shoots up a school is doing it because he/she is mentally ill and/or just an ass, rather than because they played too much Half-Life. All playing these games probably does for an older child is improve their eye-hand coordination for shooting purposes.
I think some people are missing the point. The point is not that there's something different being bandied about on the P2P network. It's all bits, as many posters have said. The question is, how fast are those bits travelling? And if you're dealing with 56K modems, the answer is, "very slowly". I don't see any logical way around that conclusion. Anyone who's used Napster or Gnutella knows you can't go any faster than the person you're connected to. It's just a fact. However, I don't see that as the main problem with P2P (if indeed there is a "main problem"). The difficulty is with the well-documented leaching phenomenon. If you've got a large number of users downloading from a smaller number of users, you get bottlenecks. And in the end, it doesn't matter if you're dealing with 56K, cable, or DSL. The end result is a degredation of performance, well below what a user is used to. That's what makes the current form of P2P unacceptable. (If you really doubt this, think back to the day after the Napster decision. I was on Gnutella that day, and it was unbearably slow and shaky.) What might help is the advent of distributed computing. If files can be spread over a larger area (in terms of the network) bottlenecks might be reduced, as requests get more evenly spread. If you think about it, 100 people serving 100,000 users just isn't going to work, long-term. (I realize that that's not the real ratio, but the principle is the same. Home computers aren't made to handle that kind of traffic.) Still, I think calling for the "death" of P2P is an over-exaggeration. One-to-one transfer of data is quite viable, and even small-scale one-to-many relationships (think Groove) is quite useful. It's when you get to the scale of Napster and Gnutella that the cracks start to show. But what the hell do I know? ;)
Okay, here's the thing: Are video games speech? Maybe. Is violence free speech? Um, no. If violence was free speech, shooting someone would be an acceptable way of disagreeing with them. As far as the smaller issue (whether children should be allowed to play violent video games), it's a much more sticky question. Yes, parents should be able to control their children's activities. However, what if some parent doesn't exercise reasonable control, and allows his or her child to play violent video games which the child (for whatever reason) cannot distinguish from reality? That child could subsequently blast your child away. So I think there are limits to what should be allowable. Possibly something like what we have with movies right now: Under a certain age, children don't get access. Period. At another age (say, 13), a child gets such access with parental consent. This would keep idiot parents from giving Quake to their 5 year old and expecting the child to have a grasp on the abstract concept of play violence.