The court has an obligation to ALLOW non-infringing uses of Napster that will prevent this from happening. You have to identify infringing uses, and block them. Not block everything, and then decide what is non-infringing and allow it.
Remember the last court order Napster was ordered to take their service down completely. It was then that napster said oh wait we'll put up filters if we can stay open. The courts have already decided that the non-infinging uses of Napster are expendable.
There is nothing wrong with it but it's not what I (we) want. I want to use a search engine that returns the most relevant and diversified articles... which may or may not be the sites that pay the most money.
Does this desire of mine some how morally obligate the search engine not to accept payment for links? Ofcourse not; they are in their legal - and moral - rights to run what ever bussiness model they desire. It just makes it a service I don't want to use; again not because I am ethically opposed to them not listing certain sites - I just would find it more useful to know those sites existed and know how to find them.
When I'm using the Yellow pages I'm looking for someone to do a service for me which I will pay them for and I know that by looking in the yellow pages I will find some people who can do that. But I don't rely on the yellow pages when I'm looking for someone who can do the service the best. I know that the best person to do this job may or may not be in there. When using a search engine I may just be looking for anyone to answer my question / provide me a service, in which case I don't care if I don't see the little guy. But if I want to use a search engine to answer a very specific question or find the best paper to match my query I will want to use the search engine that is rating pages without outside influence.
Many companies will frequently release the exact same product under a different name and advertise the two products seperatly to see what is more successful (I said MANY companies... I know most companies don't do this;) or market a product one way in one region of the country and differently in another region with similar characteristics. The industry feels comfortable that advertising works - not as a leap of faith but due to experimentation. A lot of strategies in life can't be seen directly as successful that's why we have a controlled experiment procedure. I can't see antibiotics actually killing bacteria (maybe you can with the right equipment) but when I see the people that take antibiotics get better and those that don't tend not to get better I can start to come up with a theory. There are more things on earth than exist in your philosophy.
In 1997 the physicists Isaac L. Chuang of the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, Neil A. Gershenfeld of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and Mark G. Kubinec of the University of California, Berkeley, built a simple two-qubit NMR quantum computer made of liquid chloroform. The "program" the computer ran was my search algorithm, applied to a list of four items. More recently, a group at the University of Oxford built a similar device out of two hydrogen nuclei in the organic chemical cytosine. Three-qubit NMR quantum computers running Shor's and Steane's error-correction routine were demonstrated in 1998 by Raymond Laflamme and his coworkers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Hardcopy The Sciences, July/August 1999, pp. 24-30. I think this pretty explicitly says that in fact a quantum computer has run these programs. Am I interpreting the article incorrectly. If I am please inform me.
this article was posted on slashdot before; that where I learned 'bout it. It's well written and covers the theory and a bit of the mechanics. Worth a read (and a re-read) if you're interested.
And no one has EVER gotten an Ion-Trap quantum computer to do ANYTHING. Not add two numbers. Not factor a number. Not multiply two numbers. The potential is there - the qubits - its just no one has ever tapped it in a feasible way.
I'm confused; what sort of quantum system ran Shor's system or the basic quantum search algorithm?
from my understanding the superposition is both true and false (we partially) so your statements should be if x != true then print "false"... etc. or else
I do tend to agree that a rating system is a good idea but to suggest that it won't affect anything except for giving parents more control is naive. Producers are constantly cutting scenes from movies so they escape the dreaded R rating. Not only do kids not see these scenes but no-one does. Same would happen in video games but to a higher degree if an enforced rating system were to be put in place. Since kids are such an important money making market there will be more preasure from the publishers to get games just under the illicit rating. And I assume that games designers aren't as defensive about the purity of their work as directors are (I might be wrong; I've never met a game designer.) The insanly violent games will probably continue to stay violent but the moderatly violent ones will probably pull back a touch. This might be a good thing. It would mean less violence in video games without actually censoring any one (except for those who censor themselves)
Encryption is good if your trying to get around technology. If the system said "only the text that you actually send is open to out scrutiny" then you're right pgp is great. But what the system says is ALL electronic correspondances are open to our scrutiny. Unless his message could encrypted in such way that the cyphertext looks like plain text encryption is useless. Or he could try to convince everyone that he enjoys sending his friends droves of random characters.
He does generally support spoofs... he has the "star wars fan film network" link on his starwars page... and I swear I remember seeing him interviewed in saying that he encourages young film makers to do their independant projects. I'm just not sure that the original parkwars idea is really so much a spoof as just a funny alternate video track. I'd be pretty choked if I was selling a movie in video and someone were to overdub the audio with the dialogue done in cockny accents and start giving away the new video claiming it was a "parody." I think this crosses the same line.
The earth doesn't fall to the same darwinistic preasures that an organism does. The earth has not evolved it simply is... just like the ozone and atmosphere simply is. It doesn't have any compitition for survival. Even our survival or the earths temperature doesn't affect the earths survival. The only reasoning behind the earth combatting the onset of an ice age is if billions of years ago there were lots of earths and only this one with it's ability to combat ice ages didn't crumble under the cold. Planets do not have generations.
Wow it sounds like someone has read some Simon Singh. But generally that concept is credited to Von Neumann specifically about not being able discover anything new in math after 30. It should be pointed out that Von Neumann said this because he was a cocky ass 20 year old and as he got closer to be a cocky ass 30 year old this magic age tended to get higher. To my knowledge there isn't any actual data to support Von Neumann's claim but mathmatician tend to like to continue concept just because Von Neumann was such a cool guy (how could the inventor of the computer and game theory not be a cool guy)
There is an easy solution to this inflation quible; take a look at the actual amount sold (jamie does site the link so you can check the numbers.) There was a gain in number of cds sold (although a small gain compared to 99-00... but if you work in the front lines of retail you know that it is always difficult to have large gains following large gain because you are competeing against last year's numbers.) Also there have been actual losses (96-97) before so obviously there are a lot of factors involved other than napster (sorry I had to bring this back to the story topic)
I agree that it is unfair but I think the legallaty of the issuechanges.
Without approval from the big 5 the main use of Napster was to assist users in an illegal activity. If someone shares an independant recording using napster software then that user is breaking the law. But since napster's main intent is to share big 5 recordings then how can they be blamed if someone uses it to share other recordings; someone is simply using the tool in an inappropriate manor.
But does the situation become fair if a pay per download system is put in to place. Not really. Napster is then dictating the value of the song. The independant, as owner of the song, should have the right to decide for what amount he would like to sell a copy of his song; here napster is saying "hey, someone used napster to copy your song. Here's ten bucks. Now sit down and be happy you're getting something." Don't we have the right to ask for more than simply the value of our property.
The way this thread is going it seems that everyone is convinced that linux based companies can't make money in the mainstream market(or you can't use the windows business model for linux as one person said). It seems to me (I should note that these comments are based on observations and not on any studies I've read) that most people know the linux name these days (mainstream media talks about it enough) but a lot of these people don't actually know anything about it. A high percentage of these people are curious and these are the sort of people who, when they are looking at magazines, will actually "buy" a linux mag on an impulse. They may even go on to buy a beginer's guide to linux. Remember Maximum Linux was making a profit but their parent company needed money. Since they couldn't close their flagship (probably out of embarressment) they had to get operating income from somewhere.
I'm not saying that magazines and such will have any connection to the amount of people who actually use linux (growth in readership may not correlate to growth in use.) But if Maximum Linux was making money then there are still gold left in them there hills.
I don't quite understand your logic; can you please explain. You seem to be saying that the value of "busting a kid" is equal to the amount of illegally gain profit that will be prevented. For example a drug bust that cost $10,000 is only worth while if you beleive that the drugs were going to be sold for more than that amount. Honestly I don't see the relation (which doesn't mean there isn't one... I just don't get it). Shouldn't the cost of an operation be compared to the value to society and not the possible value to the criminal (and doesn't enforcement of law have its own inate value to society; see Socrates). Please reply
Do you seriously not see a difference. The FBI as a publicly run body must kneel to the limitations that we, the people, set for them. Yet we the people do not have to limit ourselves to anything exept the rule of man. We give the FBI certain powers but those powers must be constantly policed in order to prevent corruption; corruption of power is intolerable. Since the corruption of man is equivilant to social evolution it is not held to the same restrictions; any attempt to limit social evolution can lead to revolution. These arguments are therefore not contradictions.
Salinger sights R. H. Blyth's definition of sentimentallity as "when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it." Salinger's example is then given as "God undoubtedly loves kittens, but not, in all probability, with Technicolor booties on their paws."
(try not to get too caught up in the word God... this does not have to be a religious statement) Basicly all I'm trying to say with Salinger's words (because he does have the ability to be a lot more straight forward than myself) is that when it comes to kittens many people lose the ability to observe things rationally. But before you judge these people too hard think if you do the same thing yourself. Did Pay it Forward "move" you? Or did you believe that Traffic was a "powerful" movie?
If so then you have fallen for the same crime. Pay it Forward seemed to move you because it kills a child in the last 5 minutes which the audience responds to with sentiment. And Traffic associates itself with a very important argument but in itself does not have a strong plot, characters, or pasing but because we see strength in the argument we see strengths in the movie which simply aren't there. All I'm trying to point out is that we all show a lack of objectivity at times when it comes to sentiment but that doesn't mean we should be chastized for it. Ofcourse there are those who will over react to images of kittens so lets point out their error and move on. And maybe we can even learn from their mistakes.
Ofcourse if they try to defend themselves then we can flame them.
One of the major factors of any engineering design is resource management; in these case how to accomplish their goal with as little work as possible.
So what was their goal? To safely hang a VW from a bridge in a manor that would receive media attention. To do this they would have to choose a bridge that was seen by the world. This means they had very little access to the bridge and very little time to accomplish their task. Also they had to design a system that was difficult to undo or the authorities would have quickly pulled the car back up the way it went down.
If any hick could do this why don't you tell us of a system that meets all of these criteria. Remember that how their hang was implemented is still a mystery; even to those who could directly observe the results. If you can't understand the skill that went into successfully pulling off such a caper then you aren't the type of person that engineers are trying to impress.
I hate to break it to you but you've allowed yourself to be deceved by another (perhaps a little more subtle) simplicity.
The first problem with your scenario is game theory is completely dependant on all player being completely logical. Your kids were not because being completely logical is close to impossible for anyone or anything (it takes too long to consider all posibilities except for very simple games like tic tac toe.) If your best 2 kids were close to completely logical at least one of them would have defected on the last iteration and gained an extra skittle or 2. Then the system false apart due to reverse iteration logic (I'm not going to explain this because I think you know what it is).
The next problem is that the kids are only impressed by the 2 kids who got 30 each because that was more than everybody else; since 30 is only good because it is the most and to have the title of the most the title must be taken from someone else so technically your kids are still perceiving this as a zero sum game (everything gained is lost by another). In other words you win be getting more than everybody else where the non-zero summer would say you win by getting the most you could have gotton given the enviromental conditions present.
But you have pointed out something important that this discussion has not touched upon. The point is that to win a zero sum game in multiple iterations with more than 2 players each player is best off thinking of this game as a non-zero sum game. Let me try to be a little clearer. A player trying to get more points than everybody else ussually wants to use the stratigy that offers him/her the most points he/she can attain personally. Obviously a completely logical and infinite being would consider only how to get more points than everybody else but since we do not know how to ask such a being what to do we must make short cuts in logic ie use non-zero sum logic in zero sum circumstances.
If someone is using non-zero sum logic on a zero sum game (just like your winning kids) then why does the game have to be non-zero sum to teach kids the value of non-zero sum thinking.
One more thing I want to remind people is that game theory does demand that all players be looking out for their own best interests; this is true in both non-zero and zero sum games. Although there are non-zero sum games that cooperation can lead to greater success there are also non-zero sum games where defection leads to greater success. And vice-versa I can create a multiplayer non-zero sum game where players will have a better chance of winning if they cooperate.
All I'm trying to point out is non-zero sum does not necessarily mean nicer.
only problem with your argument is in my experience the cheapo dvd players (konka, apex, low-end panasonics) all support cd-rs - where as the expensive models (the sonys) tend not to support them. One would think a higher end model would be less concerned with cost. My personal opinion is it's the snob factor that's to blame. Sony is basicly saying that their model is so superior that they don't have to bother with cd-r support. Sony is like the cool kid - he doesn't have to offer you a bunch of neat tricks to get your attention. A lot of people will buy sony just because it is sony. I used to be a sales man and would compile lists of selling points of all our products and a lot of sony products only selling point was "well it's a sony." Funny how some people prefer to spend more money for "it's a sony" than to spend less money for "a dvd/vcd/cd/cd-r/mp3 player." The world clearly needs more geeks.
If the PS2 can read CD-Rs - and can play PS1 games - can it then play a copied PS1 game without modifications made to the system... thought you may have tried
Slashdot Mirror
The court has an obligation to ALLOW non-infringing uses of Napster that will prevent this from happening. You have to identify infringing uses, and block them. Not block everything, and then decide what is non-infringing and allow it.
Remember the last court order Napster was ordered to take their service down completely. It was then that napster said oh wait we'll put up filters if we can stay open. The courts have already decided that the non-infinging uses of Napster are expendable.
There is nothing wrong with it but it's not what I (we) want. I want to use a search engine that returns the most relevant and diversified articles... which may or may not be the sites that pay the most money.
Does this desire of mine some how morally obligate the search engine not to accept payment for links? Ofcourse not; they are in their legal - and moral - rights to run what ever bussiness model they desire. It just makes it a service I don't want to use; again not because I am ethically opposed to them not listing certain sites - I just would find it more useful to know those sites existed and know how to find them.
When I'm using the Yellow pages I'm looking for someone to do a service for me which I will pay them for and I know that by looking in the yellow pages I will find some people who can do that. But I don't rely on the yellow pages when I'm looking for someone who can do the service the best. I know that the best person to do this job may or may not be in there. When using a search engine I may just be looking for anyone to answer my question / provide me a service, in which case I don't care if I don't see the little guy. But if I want to use a search engine to answer a very specific question or find the best paper to match my query I will want to use the search engine that is rating pages without outside influence.
Two jews are sitting at a bar.
One says to the other "How did that interview for Radio Show host go?"
"Th-th-they di-di-didn't hi-hire mu-me... da-damn anit se-semites"
Many companies will frequently release the exact same product under a different name and advertise the two products seperatly to see what is more successful (I said MANY companies... I know most companies don't do this;) or market a product one way in one region of the country and differently in another region with similar characteristics.
The industry feels comfortable that advertising works - not as a leap of faith but due to experimentation. A lot of strategies in life can't be seen directly as successful that's why we have a controlled experiment procedure. I can't see antibiotics actually killing bacteria (maybe you can with the right equipment) but when I see the people that take antibiotics get better and those that don't tend not to get better I can start to come up with a theory. There are more things on earth than exist in your philosophy.
In 1997 the physicists Isaac L. Chuang of the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, Neil A. Gershenfeld of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and Mark G. Kubinec of the University of California, Berkeley, built a simple two-qubit NMR quantum computer made of liquid chloroform. The "program" the computer ran was my search algorithm, applied to a list of four items. More recently, a group at the University of Oxford built a similar device out of two hydrogen nuclei in the organic chemical cytosine. Three-qubit NMR quantum computers running Shor's and Steane's error-correction routine were demonstrated in 1998 by Raymond Laflamme and his coworkers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Hardcopy The Sciences, July/August 1999, pp. 24-30.
I think this pretty explicitly says that in fact a quantum computer has run these programs. Am I interpreting the article incorrectly. If I am please inform me.
this article was posted on slashdot before; that where I learned 'bout it. It's well written and covers the theory and a bit of the mechanics. Worth a read (and a re-read) if you're interested.
And no one has EVER gotten an Ion-Trap quantum computer to do ANYTHING. Not add two numbers. Not factor a number. Not multiply two numbers. The potential is there - the qubits - its just no one has ever tapped it in a feasible way.
I'm confused; what sort of quantum system ran Shor's system or the basic quantum search algorithm?
from my understanding the superposition is both true and false (we partially) so your statements should be if x != true then print "false"... etc. or else
forget AOL for Linux CD's... What about tons of AOL distro linux cds period. everybody will get linux sent to them in the mail...
I do tend to agree that a rating system is a good idea but to suggest that it won't affect anything except for giving parents more control is naive. Producers are constantly cutting scenes from movies so they escape the dreaded R rating. Not only do kids not see these scenes but no-one does. Same would happen in video games but to a higher degree if an enforced rating system were to be put in place. Since kids are such an important money making market there will be more preasure from the publishers to get games just under the illicit rating. And I assume that games designers aren't as defensive about the purity of their work as directors are (I might be wrong; I've never met a game designer.) The insanly violent games will probably continue to stay violent but the moderatly violent ones will probably pull back a touch. This might be a good thing. It would mean less violence in video games without actually censoring any one (except for those who censor themselves)
Encryption is good if your trying to get around technology. If the system said "only the text that you actually send is open to out scrutiny" then you're right pgp is great. But what the system says is ALL electronic correspondances are open to our scrutiny. Unless his message could encrypted in such way that the cyphertext looks like plain text encryption is useless. Or he could try to convince everyone that he enjoys sending his friends droves of random characters.
He does generally support spoofs... he has the "star wars fan film network" link on his starwars page... and I swear I remember seeing him interviewed in saying that he encourages young film makers to do their independant projects. I'm just not sure that the original parkwars idea is really so much a spoof as just a funny alternate video track. I'd be pretty choked if I was selling a movie in video and someone were to overdub the audio with the dialogue done in cockny accents and start giving away the new video claiming it was a "parody." I think this crosses the same line.
The earth doesn't fall to the same darwinistic preasures that an organism does. The earth has not evolved it simply is... just like the ozone and atmosphere simply is. It doesn't have any compitition for survival. Even our survival or the earths temperature doesn't affect the earths survival. The only reasoning behind the earth combatting the onset of an ice age is if billions of years ago there were lots of earths and only this one with it's ability to combat ice ages didn't crumble under the cold. Planets do not have generations.
Wow it sounds like someone has read some Simon Singh. But generally that concept is credited to Von Neumann specifically about not being able discover anything new in math after 30. It should be pointed out that Von Neumann said this because he was a cocky ass 20 year old and as he got closer to be a cocky ass 30 year old this magic age tended to get higher. To my knowledge there isn't any actual data to support Von Neumann's claim but mathmatician tend to like to continue concept just because Von Neumann was such a cool guy (how could the inventor of the computer and game theory not be a cool guy)
There is an easy solution to this inflation quible; take a look at the actual amount sold (jamie does site the link so you can check the numbers.) There was a gain in number of cds sold (although a small gain compared to 99-00... but if you work in the front lines of retail you know that it is always difficult to have large gains following large gain because you are competeing against last year's numbers.) Also there have been actual losses (96-97) before so obviously there are a lot of factors involved other than napster (sorry I had to bring this back to the story topic)
state your thought and then systematically layout the logic to support/explain your thought. Don't see a lot of that on /.
I agree that it is unfair but I think the legallaty of the issuechanges.
Without approval from the big 5 the main use of Napster was to assist users in an illegal activity. If someone shares an independant recording using napster software then that user is breaking the law. But since napster's main intent is to share big 5 recordings then how can they be blamed if someone uses it to share other recordings; someone is simply using the tool in an inappropriate manor.
But does the situation become fair if a pay per download system is put in to place. Not really. Napster is then dictating the value of the song. The independant, as owner of the song, should have the right to decide for what amount he would like to sell a copy of his song; here napster is saying "hey, someone used napster to copy your song. Here's ten bucks. Now sit down and be happy you're getting something." Don't we have the right to ask for more than simply the value of our property.
The way this thread is going it seems that everyone is convinced that linux based companies can't make money in the mainstream market(or you can't use the windows business model for linux as one person said). It seems to me (I should note that these comments are based on observations and not on any studies I've read) that most people know the linux name these days (mainstream media talks about it enough) but a lot of these people don't actually know anything about it. A high percentage of these people are curious and these are the sort of people who, when they are looking at magazines, will actually "buy" a linux mag on an impulse. They may even go on to buy a beginer's guide to linux. Remember Maximum Linux was making a profit but their parent company needed money. Since they couldn't close their flagship (probably out of embarressment) they had to get operating income from somewhere.
I'm not saying that magazines and such will have any connection to the amount of people who actually use linux (growth in readership may not correlate to growth in use.) But if Maximum Linux was making money then there are still gold left in them there hills.
I don't quite understand your logic; can you please explain. You seem to be saying that the value of "busting a kid" is equal to the amount of illegally gain profit that will be prevented. For example a drug bust that cost $10,000 is only worth while if you beleive that the drugs were going to be sold for more than that amount. Honestly I don't see the relation (which doesn't mean there isn't one... I just don't get it). Shouldn't the cost of an operation be compared to the value to society and not the possible value to the criminal (and doesn't enforcement of law have its own inate value to society; see Socrates). Please reply
Do you seriously not see a difference. The FBI as a publicly run body must kneel to the limitations that we, the people, set for them. Yet we the people do not have to limit ourselves to anything exept the rule of man. We give the FBI certain powers but those powers must be constantly policed in order to prevent corruption; corruption of power is intolerable. Since the corruption of man is equivilant to social evolution it is not held to the same restrictions; any attempt to limit social evolution can lead to revolution. These arguments are therefore not contradictions.
Salinger sights R. H. Blyth's definition of sentimentallity as "when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it." Salinger's example is then given as "God undoubtedly loves kittens, but not, in all probability, with Technicolor booties on their paws."
(try not to get too caught up in the word God... this does not have to be a religious statement) Basicly all I'm trying to say with Salinger's words (because he does have the ability to be a lot more straight forward than myself) is that when it comes to kittens many people lose the ability to observe things rationally. But before you judge these people too hard think if you do the same thing yourself. Did Pay it Forward "move" you? Or did you believe that Traffic was a "powerful" movie?
If so then you have fallen for the same crime. Pay it Forward seemed to move you because it kills a child in the last 5 minutes which the audience responds to with sentiment. And Traffic associates itself with a very important argument but in itself does not have a strong plot, characters, or pasing but because we see strength in the argument we see strengths in the movie which simply aren't there. All I'm trying to point out is that we all show a lack of objectivity at times when it comes to sentiment but that doesn't mean we should be chastized for it. Ofcourse there are those who will over react to images of kittens so lets point out their error and move on. And maybe we can even learn from their mistakes.
Ofcourse if they try to defend themselves then we can flame them.
One of the major factors of any engineering design is resource management; in these case how to accomplish their goal with as little work as possible.
So what was their goal? To safely hang a VW from a bridge in a manor that would receive media attention. To do this they would have to choose a bridge that was seen by the world. This means they had very little access to the bridge and very little time to accomplish their task. Also they had to design a system that was difficult to undo or the authorities would have quickly pulled the car back up the way it went down.
If any hick could do this why don't you tell us of a system that meets all of these criteria. Remember that how their hang was implemented is still a mystery; even to those who could directly observe the results. If you can't understand the skill that went into successfully pulling off such a caper then you aren't the type of person that engineers are trying to impress.
I hate to break it to you but you've allowed yourself to be deceved by another (perhaps a little more subtle) simplicity.
The first problem with your scenario is game theory is completely dependant on all player being completely logical. Your kids were not because being completely logical is close to impossible for anyone or anything (it takes too long to consider all posibilities except for very simple games like tic tac toe.) If your best 2 kids were close to completely logical at least one of them would have defected on the last iteration and gained an extra skittle or 2. Then the system false apart due to reverse iteration logic (I'm not going to explain this because I think you know what it is).
The next problem is that the kids are only impressed by the 2 kids who got 30 each because that was more than everybody else; since 30 is only good because it is the most and to have the title of the most the title must be taken from someone else so technically your kids are still perceiving this as a zero sum game (everything gained is lost by another). In other words you win be getting more than everybody else where the non-zero summer would say you win by getting the most you could have gotton given the enviromental conditions present.
But you have pointed out something important that this discussion has not touched upon. The point is that to win a zero sum game in multiple iterations with more than 2 players each player is best off thinking of this game as a non-zero sum game. Let me try to be a little clearer. A player trying to get more points than everybody else ussually wants to use the stratigy that offers him/her the most points he/she can attain personally. Obviously a completely logical and infinite being would consider only how to get more points than everybody else but since we do not know how to ask such a being what to do we must make short cuts in logic ie use non-zero sum logic in zero sum circumstances.
If someone is using non-zero sum logic on a zero sum game (just like your winning kids) then why does the game have to be non-zero sum to teach kids the value of non-zero sum thinking.
One more thing I want to remind people is that game theory does demand that all players be looking out for their own best interests; this is true in both non-zero and zero sum games. Although there are non-zero sum games that cooperation can lead to greater success there are also non-zero sum games where defection leads to greater success. And vice-versa I can create a multiplayer non-zero sum game where players will have a better chance of winning if they cooperate.
All I'm trying to point out is non-zero sum does not necessarily mean nicer.
only problem with your argument is in my experience the cheapo dvd players (konka, apex, low-end panasonics) all support cd-rs - where as the expensive models (the sonys) tend not to support them. One would think a higher end model would be less concerned with cost. My personal opinion is it's the snob factor that's to blame. Sony is basicly saying that their model is so superior that they don't have to bother with cd-r support. Sony is like the cool kid - he doesn't have to offer you a bunch of neat tricks to get your attention. A lot of people will buy sony just because it is sony. I used to be a sales man and would compile lists of selling points of all our products and a lot of sony products only selling point was "well it's a sony." Funny how some people prefer to spend more money for "it's a sony" than to spend less money for "a dvd/vcd/cd/cd-r/mp3 player." The world clearly needs more geeks.
If the PS2 can read CD-Rs - and can play PS1 games - can it then play a copied PS1 game without modifications made to the system... thought you may have tried