Small inventors who want to work on stuff they can't bring to market by themselves do benefit, because without patents it's very hard for them to get money together in secrecy to get a lead on the market
And without money, it's very hard for them to defend their patents in court, especially with all these other big companies claiming a patent on the same thing.
Let's suppose that down in the bowels of some particular version of some particular toolkit library, there lurks a bug. Let's suppose that the nature of this bug is something relatively obscure: say that it's something like, if you hold down 5 keys on the keyboard for 10 seconds then drag the middle mouse button, the text entry widget gets a SEGV. (In fact, I'm not making this up: I saw this very bug once, years ago.)
Now, that's the sort of bug that is not likely to be noticed or fixed, because it's the sort of thing that people "never" do. If that bug was reported against, say, a web browser, nobody would much care: User: "I can crash my web browser by doing this crazy thing!" Developer: "Uh, don't do that then." And that's not a totally unreasonable response.
However, in the context of security software, it matters, because then it's not merely a cute trick that crashes the program: now it's a backdoor password that unlocks the screen.
First of all, how do we even know that the oil is harmful? Second, let's stop using loaded terms like "pollution." Third, hasn't it occurred to anyone that this oil might prevent the harmful sea surges
Just wait a couple more years, and get a full genome sequence for the same price. We've already got SNPchips that can do almost 2 million genetic tests for about $500. Admittedly, that's for high-volume (96 individuals at least) research-based analysis, but I'm sure it will enter the general public arena in due time.
How appropriate that this appeared just under the 'pay-what-you-want reaches 1M' post. What to do about the piracy is obvious: release software as a 'pay-what-you-want' option, and the piracy rate will drop down to 25% — that's a saving of almost 30 billion dollars!
Lugaru's game engine was GPL'd but they're retaining the art assets, so I'm assuming the others will follow suit.
The blog post about open sourcing Lugaru differs in that interpretation of their actions:
The game assets are included in the snapshot, and can be redistributed for free, but cannot be resold without our permission.
That means the assets aren't (or shouldn't be) distributed under GPL (because GPL permits commercial distribution), but it sounds like something similar to a creative commons attribution, non-commercial, sharealike license.
Even though I want to release my code to the public I don't know whether I have the legal right to do so.
That sounds like "you need to talk to a lawyer" material.
IANAL, but my guess is that if it's in your contract, you'll probably need to demonstrate that you weren't aware of that at the time you signed the contract in order to keep copyright (or control of licensing) on your work. However, given that they hired you to develop a GPL product, it seems silly that any extended code produced is not also GPL licensed.
I don't scroll through "Taylor Series" so I can find a threesome.
I find it interesting that the first picture on the 'threesome' page isn't on the bad list, which means that someone could modify the Taylor Series article to do just that (without administrator approval).
I'm surprised to see an ad where they introduce the product or brand before the actual video, which is the opposite way from which things are normally done. If my psychology learnings are correct, this is actually more likely to get a strong association (through Pavlovian conditioning) than doing things the 'normal' way. I've often wondered why advertisers don't typically show their product in the first few seconds of the ad. Any ideas?
does anyone know of a project that has tried to consolidate all the information in one place, so that it's in one comprehensive and up-to-date document, for either laws or RFCs?
Yes, try here. I don't think that includes any local laws, but it's good for the government's stuff.
Oh, you meant laws in the USA? Sorry, can't help you there.
Hmm, yes, I see. You could then get into working out "normal" damage per second (and healing per second) for all individuals, and any change to that where damage is dealt from/to the monster could be considered a contribution to the battle... but that's getting into the realm of silly.
What about redirecting damage (e.g. away from a weak wizard onto a PC with heaps of hit points), where the damage doesn't change, but the target does?
What about PCs who sit on the outside and play a command role, just issuing orders to people (maybe over voice chat), because they have a better view of the battle?
What about those who manufacture monster-specific items, who you go to when you want to attack a particular monster?
What about the people who make potions, teach spells, obtain gold for equipment,....
FWIW, I think most of these ideas also apply to "give everyone the same EXP", and demonstrate the complexity of support.
And the healer, in whatever shape or form, gets shafted?;-)
Why? Admittedly it makes contribution calculations harder, but you could consider healed damage (including regeneration) in the experience calculation. Damage would need to be named (23 points of damage from X, 18 points of damage from Y) and either cued or stacked depending on what model better fits -- does it make sense to heal old wounds first?
That might encourage people to get a small whack from every monster they encounter, then run away and wait for regeneration (or get a friend to heal), so that they "contribute" to the encounter.
What about pooled experience + extra experience, as I noticed used in 'Valthirian Arc':
50% of the experience gained is put into the shared pool (equal amount to all contributors), and the rest is distributed around based on proportional contributions.
e.g. two PCs, PC1 does a very small amount of damage, PC2 does almost all damage: PC1: 25% total experience, PC2: 75% total experience
I've noticed two things with 3D that irritate me, and they seem to be everywhere.
Jagged/flat/sharp edges on objects, making things look like they were cut from paper and placed on the screen. They're the reason why I prefer the graphics of Doom to the graphics of Quake, things just looked more realistic in Doom. Not just straight lines, but they're the worst at the moment. This might be some sort of aliasing effect, but I'm not quite sure how to define it more precisely.
Using rectilinear projections, rather than some other projection that better matches human vision. Straight lines don't actually look straight when you see them through a lens. Have a look at Figure 5 on this page. I only consciously realised that this was a problem for me after reading that write-up.
Slashdot Mirror
Small inventors who want to work on stuff they can't bring to market by themselves do benefit, because without patents it's very hard for them to get money together in secrecy to get a lead on the market
And without money, it's very hard for them to defend their patents in court, especially with all these other big companies claiming a patent on the same thing.
http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/toolkits.html
My favourite bit (at the moment):
Let's suppose that down in the bowels of some particular version of some particular toolkit library, there lurks a bug. Let's suppose that the nature of this bug is something relatively obscure: say that it's something like, if you hold down 5 keys on the keyboard for 10 seconds then drag the middle mouse button, the text entry widget gets a SEGV. (In fact, I'm not making this up: I saw this very bug once, years ago.)
Now, that's the sort of bug that is not likely to be noticed or fixed, because it's the sort of thing that people "never" do. If that bug was reported against, say, a web browser, nobody would much care: User: "I can crash my web browser by doing this crazy thing!" Developer: "Uh, don't do that then." And that's not a totally unreasonable response.
However, in the context of security software, it matters, because then it's not merely a cute trick that crashes the program: now it's a backdoor password that unlocks the screen.
First of all, how do we even know that the oil is harmful?
Second, let's stop using loaded terms like "pollution."
Third, hasn't it occurred to anyone that this oil might prevent the harmful sea surges
[that's a strong, emphasised "speechless"]
Wikipedia renders bitmaps as equations
That sounds quite difficult. Are the bitmap-derived equations small enough to fit into the margins of the articles?
They already have the money they need to get this off the ground ($10,000). More pledged money is just icing on the cake.
Just wait a couple more years, and get a full genome sequence for the same price. We've already got SNPchips that can do almost 2 million genetic tests for about $500. Admittedly, that's for high-volume (96 individuals at least) research-based analysis, but I'm sure it will enter the general public arena in due time.
Go suck...
Were they the famous last words from the last person to get fragged on the Halo 2 servers?
How appropriate that this appeared just under the 'pay-what-you-want reaches 1M' post. What to do about the piracy is obvious: release software as a 'pay-what-you-want' option, and the piracy rate will drop down to 25% — that's a saving of almost 30 billion dollars!
Lugaru's game engine was GPL'd but they're retaining the art assets, so I'm assuming the others will follow suit.
The blog post about open sourcing Lugaru differs in that interpretation of their actions:
The game assets are included in the snapshot, and can be redistributed for free, but cannot be resold without our permission.
That means the assets aren't (or shouldn't be) distributed under GPL (because GPL permits commercial distribution), but it sounds like something similar to a creative commons attribution, non-commercial, sharealike license.
Even though I want to release my code to the public I don't know whether I have the legal right to do so.
That sounds like "you need to talk to a lawyer" material.
IANAL, but my guess is that if it's in your contract, you'll probably need to demonstrate that you weren't aware of that at the time you signed the contract in order to keep copyright (or control of licensing) on your work. However, given that they hired you to develop a GPL product, it seems silly that any extended code produced is not also GPL licensed.
I don't scroll through "Taylor Series" so I can find a threesome.
I find it interesting that the first picture on the 'threesome' page isn't on the bad list, which means that someone could modify the Taylor Series article to do just that (without administrator approval).
I'm surprised to see an ad where they introduce the product or brand before the actual video, which is the opposite way from which things are normally done. If my psychology learnings are correct, this is actually more likely to get a strong association (through Pavlovian conditioning) than doing things the 'normal' way. I've often wondered why advertisers don't typically show their product in the first few seconds of the ad. Any ideas?
I don't think that includes any local laws
I may be wrong there, Regulations seem to fit the Bill (or Act).
does anyone know of a project that has tried to consolidate all the information in one place, so that it's in one comprehensive and up-to-date document, for either laws or RFCs?
Yes, try here. I don't think that includes any local laws, but it's good for the government's stuff.
Oh, you meant laws in the USA? Sorry, can't help you there.
Why not just use a memory modification tool and set the score to something high (e.g. a few less than milestone scores like 2^31-1)?
640K of memory is enough
-- Bill Gates, Career Opportunities in Computing — and More (1996), as cited in http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1637882&cid=32056488
Here's a graphic to go with the protests about this:
http://user.interface.org.nz/~gringer/pics/censor_blacker.png
Hmm, yes, I see. You could then get into working out "normal" damage per second (and healing per second) for all individuals, and any change to that where damage is dealt from/to the monster could be considered a contribution to the battle... but that's getting into the realm of silly.
What about redirecting damage (e.g. away from a weak wizard onto a PC with heaps of hit points), where the damage doesn't change, but the target does?
What about PCs who sit on the outside and play a command role, just issuing orders to people (maybe over voice chat), because they have a better view of the battle?
What about those who manufacture monster-specific items, who you go to when you want to attack a particular monster?
What about the people who make potions, teach spells, obtain gold for equipment, ....
FWIW, I think most of these ideas also apply to "give everyone the same EXP", and demonstrate the complexity of support.
And the healer, in whatever shape or form, gets shafted? ;-)
Why? Admittedly it makes contribution calculations harder, but you could consider healed damage (including regeneration) in the experience calculation. Damage would need to be named (23 points of damage from X, 18 points of damage from Y) and either cued or stacked depending on what model better fits -- does it make sense to heal old wounds first?
That might encourage people to get a small whack from every monster they encounter, then run away and wait for regeneration (or get a friend to heal), so that they "contribute" to the encounter.
What about pooled experience + extra experience, as I noticed used in 'Valthirian Arc':
50% of the experience gained is put into the shared pool (equal amount to all contributors), and the rest is distributed around based on proportional contributions.
e.g. two PCs, PC1 does a very small amount of damage, PC2 does almost all damage: PC1: 25% total experience, PC2: 75% total experience
Earnest falsehoods left unchallenged risk being accepted as fact
And emphatic denials risk a stronger belief in the denied thing.
Now 2874 has a prime factorization of 3 * 13 * 73
2874 is divisible by 2, so there should be a 2 in there somewhere. I get 2874 = 2*3*479.
referring to Leonardo da Vinci's iconic 1506 portrait of a woman in Florence that remains on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris
How do you know that the displayed shuttle is not a cheap copy made to save on the expense of displaying a real shuttle?
I've noticed two things with 3D that irritate me, and they seem to be everywhere.
If it wasn't used properly, the human surgeon/operator.
If it had a manufacturing defect or programming error, the manufacturer.
What about if there's a power cut? Should a UPS be installed on every critical robot, together with a requirement for a backup generator?