After posting, I realize I colored my comment with a bias towards the government funding of science, and for that I apologize. For the purposes of the story in question, it doesn't really matter where the funding comes from. Certainly, for government funding, public opinion matters more. Yet, even in private industry venture capitalist/CFOs/PHBs are going to be more inclined to green-light speculative research when they have some common culture on which to bias their decisions. For instance, a handful of notables involved in the rise of wireless communication (such as Martin Cooper, father of the handheld mobile phone) remarked on being influenced by the communicators used in Star Trek.
It's not just about inspiring kids to grow up and become scientists. It's also about how much the next generation will care about investment in a new fancy science fiction future. There are plenty of reason to want to cut government spending. And if you care nothing about space exploration and travel, you could easily see the budget of a government organization like NASA or the National Science Foundation as completely superfluous.
Pure science needs pure funding. If your lab is forced to spend more time worried about how to monetize an idea than to explore it's scientific ramifications, you end up in compromising positions of wanting to cut corners and fudge the numbers.
In my ward, there were a total of 9 positions up for vote. Only three positions had names on the ballot there weren't a Republican or Democrat. Two positions were incumbents running unopposed. So when I went to vote today, I only voted on 5 of the positions. Three independents who made it on the ballot, one was an independent running as a write in, and one was a Democrat that I don't dislike.
I do agree that there are a lot of lousy names on the ballot. In the handful of hours I spent looking up the candidates who would be on the ballot in my district and listening to their public radio interviews, there was only one that I genuinely liked. So mostly I'm just voting on candidates I don't hate. On the plus side, when I first started voting, there was some 300 votes cast for independent candidates. Two years ago, my distract had just under 10% of the votes going to independents.
If you want fair multi-play online, you can't let the participants host their own games. Because then, as you say, the host always knows what everyone is doing. What you need is an intermediate network to host the games, a neutral third party service to keep things fair. Something that never sends any information to the client it doesn't need. Of course, this then requires that the host be trusted by the players to do all the heavy lifting on it's side to validate all the inputs being received. Which, again, as you say, would likely suggest a monthly subscription fee to host such a network.
If you don't do this, and instead trust the network to play wack-a-mole and verify that everyone is running a validated copy of the client binary without any untrusted third party software running, you're going to have cheaters.
A lot of the idealists are going to give you shit for holding this position. They have their reasons, and some of them might even be good ones, but let's skip that for now. If you're a realist or a pragmatist, their idealism probably isn't going to do much for you. And I get where you're coming from. Here in the US, we have a large number of disenfranchised voters who feel exactly the same way as you. And the Powers That Be really like it that way, since less voters means less work buying elections.
On the plus side, votes do seem to count. If you look at the ridiculous amounts of money being spent in US politics on campaigns, that should be prime evidence of the power of the vote. The problem, of course, is in who holds that power. Voters cast their votes for a great many reasons, and some of those reasons have been fairly easy to subvert.
The cure for this problem is not simple, and it is not easy, and I don't blame you for not wanting to help. A great many good people will likely need to stand up and serve jail time and worse in acts of civil disobedience to try and change things. Getting people to stand up and take notice to what is going on around them, and not just passively tune out discussions of politics and social justice will be a major challenge by itself. Getting people to believe in change, and to believe in a better way of social governance, and actively participate in politics... that does seem pretty impossible. And if that dream were to ever come true, and we did 'fix' things, it would carry with it a good of different problems.
But I have some good news. It only feels like there is nothing you can do about it. The bad news is that there are powerful forces at work trying to make sure you always feel that way. Of course, it has pretty much always been up to you how you want to feel about that, and what you want to do about that. Rather than passively accepting that things suck and committing yourself to the belief that it will never change, even something simple like trying to engage people in discussions on political issues can help. The more minds like yours that we can even open to the possibility of change can only help.
Of course, change is not without risk, and getting your hopes up is a good way to see them dashed to pieces at your feet. But, you already know how it is. This is the real world.
To answer your first question, you're partially correct that a debugger can do wonders to highlight malicious code. Of course, as you point out, knowing when and where to use a debugger can be a little challenging. And then the realization that unless exceptional care is taken, the code you're stepping though might not even contain or reveal the exploit. (Since the mere act of viewing the byte code in a debugger can change affect it's operation.) There's one story that really opened my eyes to the possibilities. I don't remember where the long beards keep the real link, but this seems to be the story I remember:
This was the first story of real high level obfuscation I learned about in college. As a result of Ken Thompson's little speech here, he caused the DOD to change the way they do code reviews to catch back doors like this. And the obfuscated C challenges have been going on since at least the early 80s. Some of the winners are real treasure troves of high level trickery.
Wow, talk about misrepresenting the facts. I hate the way the MPAA is using copyright law as much as the next digital rights activist. But, for the record, the MPAA didn't take down the network. They just sent their usual infringement notice to the ISP, who then forwarded it on to Coshocton County. The county then made the decision to shut down the wifi service, they weren't ordered to by any judge or MPAA executive/lawyer/asshat.
After getting out of college I got a 'real' job in an Windows-only shop. I was still a Windows guy at the time, so I was still quasi-happy. However, I became less happy as my efforts to deploy Linux in my workplace were consistently rebuffed while my Linux skills at home continued to grow.
So I went job hunting for a work place that would let me use Linux. As you might expect, most places I interviewed either expressed ignorance, or had any of a number of reasons why they didn't use or even allow Linux in their shop. So I had to change my search tactics. I started cold calling likely medium and large sized businesses and socially engineering my way to talk to a system administrator. A handful of them seemed to think I was either doing a pen test, or were otherwise properly paranoid at releasing information about what their developers used in house. The rest were happy to reveal if they allowed and/or encouraged Linux in their shop. Of the 11 places that would share details, 6 admitted to using some flavor of Linux.
Some persistence and a bit of luck later, and I've now been happily employed as a Linux developer for five+ years now. Most of the rest of the company is still Windows only, but we have our little penguin oasis and an IT management staff that is happy to allow us the freedom to try OSS where we think it might work. And I've never been happier.
Right, these are RIAA numbers. Since when did we care what spin doctoring they did to their own numbers to try and justify their war on piracy? The only slant this article gives the numbers is that there are more and growing opportunities to listen to music for free... a fact the RIAA mentioned no where. But, guess what? Since around the 1950s or so, we've all been able to listen to music for free over the radio. And the Boston Strangler aside, the advent of the portable music player has only made music more accessible.
The fact that we're in a fairly serious global recession coupled to the inflation they sprinkle on the numbers might make them look tragic. But last I checked, everyone still wants music. They just don't have as much to spend on it right now. I don't see the music industry going anywhere.
Well, the major labels might vanish. But they stopped being a required piece of the music industry more than 10 years ago. Course, they won't really vanish unless their copyrights actually expire. Or our generation dies out and is replaced by a culture that believes music should be enjoyed rather than owned.
The luxury industry has been linked with reducing the size of the middle class, since it tends to greater a broader disparity between those providing goods and services and those consuming them. You are certainly correct, of course, that spending money will 'stimulate the economy' regardless if it comes from the rich or the poor. The question is the type of economy you want to stimulate. Luxury spending tends to stimulate the segment of industry that sees little return back at the lower end of the wage pools. They reap higher profits, and provide fewer goods and services, thus tending towards increasing the divide in wealth. Spending in the lower end 'consumer grade' market tends to stimulate an industry that will increase growth where more goods and services are produced.
Henry Ford famously paid his employees enough so they could buy the cars they were building. Imagine what might have happened to the auto industry if he had catered only to the rich? Compare also to Walmart, who also wants to pay their employees enough to buy their products.
Don't propagate this myth. Hell, my Atari 400 came with 4 joystick ports. We had a multi-tap for our SNES so you could play 4 player games. That isn't new, and yet once we had our own PCs, we still went to LAN parties.
You can't play all games crowded around the same monitor. For some you really want your own audio/visual source so you're NOT all tied to one another in the same location. Playing games of 8 player X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter or Starcraft or Age of Empires, or 16 player Counter-Strike or Rainbow Six were expressly fun because we could all run off on our assigned tasks without worrying about going off screen or trying to watch our tiny slice of the split-screen. Breaking a LAN party up into two teams, where each team was in a separate room, beat the hell out of any cooperative on-line play I've ever experienced.
Now, granted, lugging around a 30 or even 40 pound monitor was a bit of a pain, even with those handy monitor tote straps. But, in the end, it only took a few minutes for us to tear down a PC, toss the cables in a bag, and pack it all into the car. As we'd have LAN parties every few (extended) weekends, setup was not the major pain. Have LAN party locations with adequate seating, power, ventilation, and ethernet ports was the tricky part. But once we had adequately sized apartments (gamers living in the next unit works fantastic) or homes, we had our gaming mecca.
Once new game consoles came out that have ports for everyone to plug in their own audio/visual head set, then you'll have a case. Until then, for me at least, there is still something to be said for LAN parties.
I find it interesting you say that he 'played the game correctly' since that was the core part of the argument that I thought the professor completely missed in his paper.
Who gets to define the 'correct' way to play? And if we look at the social dynamic of the game world as being larger than merely a 'game', who gets to define the correct way to live life? Can you really do it wrong? Is there anything interesting about that fact that players were put in an environment were they were suppose to compete against one another, and yet collectively choose to cooperate instead?
Certainly, we could make a compelling argument that the game designers and developers are the ones who get to define the 'correct' way to play the game. But I should think an equally compelling argument could also be made that the players also get to make that decision. Or, even, that it is an entirely subjective and personal choice, and not subject to the tyranny of any majority.
I was using 'running to center' to describe how many politicians quickly and easily change their rhetoric to match the perceived political mood of their audience, without actually making any change in their own positions. The two party system makes 'the center' not a platform for compromise, but merely a battle ground for votes, as no party exists there to represent anyone. And the ways in which we try and confirm 'the center' as part of a two dimensional spectrum does a gross insult to the true complexity and nuance of political philosophy.
How the hell can you blame a guy for running for president when it was the *millions* of other people who voted for the guy who was actually elected? Or are people not suppose to vote for the guy who they feel is the most qualified? When did casting a ballot equate to throwing away your vote if your guy doesn't get elected?
What kind of democracy do you expect to have, where any qualified candidate is required to sell their soul for the funding required from one of your two parties, who stand for nothing more than merely getting their own reelected? They've both been running to center trying to grind out the votes necessary to win without any concern for what principles or political values they're even suppose to stand for anymore. Isn't politics suppose to be the art of comprise rather than forcing down your tyranny of the majority as an entitlement program? Shouldn't be have politicians more focused on what is best for all of us, rather than those they are beholden to? Do you really enjoy run on sound bites and highlight reels rather than any meaningful political discourse?
I understand you're bitter. I'm pretty bitter too. But why derisively spit at anyone who wants to try and stand up and thinks they might be able to do a better job than the other guy. Or maybe just because they believe the other guy is wrong. Do you really find that the politicians getting elected actually represent you and your world view?
In March 2008, it was dismissed by a superior-court judge, who ruled that while the dispatchers' conduct was "utterly reprehensible," it hadn't violated the law. "No duty exists between the surviving family and defendant," the opinion reads, because privacy rights don't extend to the dead. "It's an unfortunate situation, and our heart goes out to the family," says R. Rex Parris, the attorney representing O'Donnell. "But this is America, and there's a freedom of information."
There is still an appeal pending, but really, what would you want to see happen? As we blaze forward into the future it's going to becoming increasingly likely that some technology will capture some event most of us would rather not remember. Yet trying to lock up ownership of the past would be even worse than the ridiculous problems copyright laws are causing here in the digital age. You've already acknowledged that once the images have escaped it's basically impossible to put them back in the bottle. Trying to target the original source of their escape seems just as quixotic to me as going after any of the subsequent copies. Certainly, from a legal standpoint it might be easier to discourage and prosecute the source of a 'leak', but towards what end? A sanitized world in which we can all happily only view those events we all agree should be remembered?
In retail you measure unaccounted for inventory as 'shrink'. This will be from shoplifting, employee theft, and just plain clerical errors. The average rate is hard outsiders to measure, because a lot of chains don't like to talk about it. Depending on industry and location, the numbers I've seen are in the 1% to 4% of sales range. Which means that for every 50 items a store (thinks they) purchased from suppliers, they only end up recording sales for 49 of them. Different stores record this shrink on their books differently. Some report it as a loss at cost. Which means they just write off the missing items at the price they paid their suppliers for them. Others report it based on retail sale price, which means they write the items based of what they should have been sold for. It all ends up as accountancy magic, and has to do with how you 'value' your inventory. This has a real and measurable impact on their books. In some industries the retail shrink ends up being larger than their profit margins, yet they still remain in business as it is still ultimately profitable for them.
Of course, these retail stores are buying and selling real physical items. Their 'loss' at the end of the year means inventory they can't sell. This occurs because they need to balance their books at the end of the year, and adjust what assets they thought they still had for sale down to what they actually still possess.
Now, typically, save for original media transit disasters or amazingly catastrophic IT blunders, this will be something that never needs to be done in the virtual world. As long as they still retain a copy of their virtual assets, they can continue to offer it for sale endlessly. There is no 'shrink' to write off, because they're already recorded their magic accountancy numbers. Namely, the Cost of acquiring the virtual asset for sale. Which is what it all comes down to in the end. You take the total cost, and you subtract your sales, and your left with profit. In accountancy, there is no magic formula for recording sales you 'wish' you made, or think you 'deserve' to have made.
I'm really tired of hearing about all the 'losses' due to copyright violations. In business, there is only the money you received. You can play marketing and sales games, as you try and measure the size of the market you're in, and the maximum potential sales for your industry, and from how much of the pie you're getting a slice. But this doesn't go on your accounting books.
What's really happening here, is that the media industries are beating their war drums and proclaiming that they're not making the amount of money they think they deserve. You know what I think? I think they amount of money their customers are willing to give them is exactly the amount of money they deserve. And if they don't like it, they should get out of the buggy whip industry.
All the independent work I've ever done has been because someone knew someone who knew someone. It started with a helping a friend out with some trouble they were having at their work, which lead to helping out more friends of friends, and then other businesses who heard friends of friends talking.
But trying to work a full time job and make time for my side work was sucking the life out of me. I don't like to leave work unfinished, which makes me a hell of a work horse, but only by pulling time away from every else. And once there was no time left to cut I just started sleeping less. So after only a few months I left my steady and well paying job to go solo for awhile.
If I were more motivated, I might still be trying to fly solo, but I really didn't like all the extra work. Not the extra development work, which I loved. It was all the other work. As a corporate drone I spent a lot of my time in development. Working for myself, I also had to be the salesdroid, and the accountant, and the business manager, and health care consultant, and all the rest of the hats that needed wearing. I also could never really enjoy my 'time off' since I was never sure where or when my next paycheck might be coming.
So after a few years I went back to a steady and well paying job. Which, right now, I'm pretty thankful to have. And these days I just actively work to fix some of those annoying bureaucratic problems. Which can certainly involve wearing a few of those extra hats I didn't like... but we all learn to pick and choose which battles are worth fighting. And I guess for me, it's in the corporate trenches.
Whoa, slow down there cowboy. I don't know if you're a troll or not, but since you managed to pick up an Informative mod I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. Shirow is simply a giant in the 'cyperpunk' genre, and greatly influenced many who would come after. Yes, his stuff isn't as ground breaking as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov, I would challenge that it's still quality stuff.
First, to be fair, I will fully admit that GitS is overly flashy and stylized. Shirow has his faults, and if you're not into the fanboi service he caters to I won't fault you for it.
And if you want to just challenge the movies... okay. The first one is good, but does tend to be overhyped. And the second one is just bad. I am actually surprised at how much I disliked Innocence.
That said, I would challenge that the level of depth and detail across the Ghost in the Shell series rivals pretty much all the heavy hitters in that genre. Yes, both movies tend to give you watered down schlock, especially Innocence. But the detail in the manga is, at times, simply phenomenal. The geopolitical history, uses of both covert and extreme violence between super powers, the man/machine dilemma, the quest for consciousness and identity... and even just the raw covert bad-ass espionage is not just window dressing. And I think the Stand Alone Complex series captures a lot of those ideals. Yes, the story arcs in both are a little long and complicated, so if you're not into that I can mostly forgive you. But the individual story episodes mostly stand for themselves and aren't hard to follow at all.
I would also hold up his earlier works as shining examples of real sci-fi. The plot in Black Magic M-66 is nothing special nor is the art very impressive. But I they completely blew me away with how they presented the androids. Rather than the overly anthropomorphized machine used by too many others, here he have raw robotic killing machines without any human mannerisms, traits, or emotions. Watching them move in completely inhuman ways to be more effective combat machines gave me chills back in the day.
Dominion: Tank Police... okay, not so much. But it's suppose to be silly.
And while I don't know that Appleseed covers a lot of ground that isn't also covered in GitS, to be far, it was created back in the 80s. And it also has a lot of detail and depth in how it details the rise of civilization from chaos, and what it means to be human.
I don't know where those quotes come from. I know the Obama camp was making warm gestures towards copyright/patent reform in the beginning of his campaign, but I watched those slowly dry up. Looking at the technology section of their new site, I see a blurg on reforming the patent system, which I think everyone agrees is broken. On copyright... not so much.
Protect American Intellectual Property Abroad: The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that in 2005, more than nine of every 10 DVDs sold in China were illegal copies. The U.S. Trade Representative said 80 percent of all counterfeit products seized at U.S. borders still come from China. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will work to ensure intellectual property is protected in foreign markets, and promote greater cooperation on international standards that allow our technologies to compete everywhere.
Protect American Intellectual Property at Home: Intellectual property is to the digital age what physical goods were to the industrial age. Barack Obama believes we need to update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated.
I keep hearing the terms 'socialism' and 'wealth redistribution' being tossed around like something evil. Did Marx really taint these words so horribly?
Socialism is a rather large set of ideas that reflects a wide range of thoughts on social and economic policy. If you can pull a unifying idea from the mix you might say it represents the many working for the many. You can compare this to the capitalist ideas of the individual working for themself, and the communist idea of everyone working for everyone.
I agree with the precepts of libertarianism and capitalism where the rewards should go to those who created the success. But I think it's short-sighted to claim that all the rewards should only go to them. Or else, overly broad to define only those who directly created the success. In our increasingly global world I should think it has become even more obvious that we're not all in this for ourselves, and what others do can and will directly influence our lives. I mean, unless you're willing to just round up everyone that isn't pulling their weight. In which case you've drifted over to a dictatorship or totalitarianism.
I like the ideas of communism, but the system seems doomed to failure. A point which history seems to agree with. It only seems to work on a very small scale, and even then not very well. And this makes me sad, because my personal philosophy wants to be that cooperation should always win over competition. Yet, alas, competition has proven a remarkable motivator.
Socialism would then seem to be a more balanced view of the world, albeit one more biased towards cooperation than competition. Health care is one place where people seem to fear socialism, and I have heard the phrase "letting a bureaucrat stand between you and your doctor." Yet, what is health insurance if not a bureaucracy?
The theory seems to be that a for-profit company will function more efficiently than one running with the mandate of serving the public good. A theory I can't really disagree with, due to that damned competition/cooperation thing. Yet, isn't the point of the for-profit company is still to serve the public good? Do we really want to competitively price things when we're sick or injured? Heck, do we really want to competitively price things when we're healthy?
And where did this mystical line get drawn between people and government? Aren't they suppose to be one and the same in a democracy? By the people, of the people, for the people? Senator and CEO are merely titles, they don't confer special leadership qualities. They're both just people responsible to others. Is there something special about share holders that makes them better than constituents? Would democracy work better if you had to buy your right to vote? And could buy as many votes as you could afford?
Slashdot Mirror
After posting, I realize I colored my comment with a bias towards the government funding of science, and for that I apologize. For the purposes of the story in question, it doesn't really matter where the funding comes from. Certainly, for government funding, public opinion matters more. Yet, even in private industry venture capitalist/CFOs/PHBs are going to be more inclined to green-light speculative research when they have some common culture on which to bias their decisions. For instance, a handful of notables involved in the rise of wireless communication (such as Martin Cooper, father of the handheld mobile phone) remarked on being influenced by the communicators used in Star Trek.
It's not just about inspiring kids to grow up and become scientists. It's also about how much the next generation will care about investment in a new fancy science fiction future. There are plenty of reason to want to cut government spending. And if you care nothing about space exploration and travel, you could easily see the budget of a government organization like NASA or the National Science Foundation as completely superfluous.
Pure science needs pure funding. If your lab is forced to spend more time worried about how to monetize an idea than to explore it's scientific ramifications, you end up in compromising positions of wanting to cut corners and fudge the numbers.
In my ward, there were a total of 9 positions up for vote. Only three positions had names on the ballot there weren't a Republican or Democrat. Two positions were incumbents running unopposed. So when I went to vote today, I only voted on 5 of the positions. Three independents who made it on the ballot, one was an independent running as a write in, and one was a Democrat that I don't dislike.
I do agree that there are a lot of lousy names on the ballot. In the handful of hours I spent looking up the candidates who would be on the ballot in my district and listening to their public radio interviews, there was only one that I genuinely liked. So mostly I'm just voting on candidates I don't hate. On the plus side, when I first started voting, there was some 300 votes cast for independent candidates. Two years ago, my distract had just under 10% of the votes going to independents.
If you want fair multi-play online, you can't let the participants host their own games. Because then, as you say, the host always knows what everyone is doing. What you need is an intermediate network to host the games, a neutral third party service to keep things fair. Something that never sends any information to the client it doesn't need. Of course, this then requires that the host be trusted by the players to do all the heavy lifting on it's side to validate all the inputs being received. Which, again, as you say, would likely suggest a monthly subscription fee to host such a network.
If you don't do this, and instead trust the network to play wack-a-mole and verify that everyone is running a validated copy of the client binary without any untrusted third party software running, you're going to have cheaters.
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
http://baetzler.de/humor/meat_beings.html
Snake Plissken? I heard he was dead.
A lot of the idealists are going to give you shit for holding this position. They have their reasons, and some of them might even be good ones, but let's skip that for now. If you're a realist or a pragmatist, their idealism probably isn't going to do much for you. And I get where you're coming from. Here in the US, we have a large number of disenfranchised voters who feel exactly the same way as you. And the Powers That Be really like it that way, since less voters means less work buying elections.
On the plus side, votes do seem to count. If you look at the ridiculous amounts of money being spent in US politics on campaigns, that should be prime evidence of the power of the vote. The problem, of course, is in who holds that power. Voters cast their votes for a great many reasons, and some of those reasons have been fairly easy to subvert.
The cure for this problem is not simple, and it is not easy, and I don't blame you for not wanting to help. A great many good people will likely need to stand up and serve jail time and worse in acts of civil disobedience to try and change things. Getting people to stand up and take notice to what is going on around them, and not just passively tune out discussions of politics and social justice will be a major challenge by itself. Getting people to believe in change, and to believe in a better way of social governance, and actively participate in politics... that does seem pretty impossible. And if that dream were to ever come true, and we did 'fix' things, it would carry with it a good of different problems.
But I have some good news. It only feels like there is nothing you can do about it. The bad news is that there are powerful forces at work trying to make sure you always feel that way. Of course, it has pretty much always been up to you how you want to feel about that, and what you want to do about that. Rather than passively accepting that things suck and committing yourself to the belief that it will never change, even something simple like trying to engage people in discussions on political issues can help. The more minds like yours that we can even open to the possibility of change can only help.
Of course, change is not without risk, and getting your hopes up is a good way to see them dashed to pieces at your feet. But, you already know how it is. This is the real world.
To answer your first question, you're partially correct that a debugger can do wonders to highlight malicious code. Of course, as you point out, knowing when and where to use a debugger can be a little challenging. And then the realization that unless exceptional care is taken, the code you're stepping though might not even contain or reveal the exploit. (Since the mere act of viewing the byte code in a debugger can change affect it's operation.) There's one story that really opened my eyes to the possibilities. I don't remember where the long beards keep the real link, but this seems to be the story I remember:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
This was the first story of real high level obfuscation I learned about in college. As a result of Ken Thompson's little speech here, he caused the DOD to change the way they do code reviews to catch back doors like this. And the obfuscated C challenges have been going on since at least the early 80s. Some of the winners are real treasure troves of high level trickery.
http://www.ioccc.org/years.html
Wow, talk about misrepresenting the facts. I hate the way the MPAA is using copyright law as much as the next digital rights activist. But, for the record, the MPAA didn't take down the network. They just sent their usual infringement notice to the ISP, who then forwarded it on to Coshocton County. The county then made the decision to shut down the wifi service, they weren't ordered to by any judge or MPAA executive/lawyer/asshat.
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=117273
Here's a link to the story in question: http://www.herald-review.com/news/local/article_5dae2327-a3cb-5bba-ac4c-14dac3b83327.html
After getting out of college I got a 'real' job in an Windows-only shop. I was still a Windows guy at the time, so I was still quasi-happy. However, I became less happy as my efforts to deploy Linux in my workplace were consistently rebuffed while my Linux skills at home continued to grow.
So I went job hunting for a work place that would let me use Linux. As you might expect, most places I interviewed either expressed ignorance, or had any of a number of reasons why they didn't use or even allow Linux in their shop. So I had to change my search tactics. I started cold calling likely medium and large sized businesses and socially engineering my way to talk to a system administrator. A handful of them seemed to think I was either doing a pen test, or were otherwise properly paranoid at releasing information about what their developers used in house. The rest were happy to reveal if they allowed and/or encouraged Linux in their shop. Of the 11 places that would share details, 6 admitted to using some flavor of Linux.
Some persistence and a bit of luck later, and I've now been happily employed as a Linux developer for five+ years now. Most of the rest of the company is still Windows only, but we have our little penguin oasis and an IT management staff that is happy to allow us the freedom to try OSS where we think it might work. And I've never been happier.
Right, these are RIAA numbers. Since when did we care what spin doctoring they did to their own numbers to try and justify their war on piracy? The only slant this article gives the numbers is that there are more and growing opportunities to listen to music for free... a fact the RIAA mentioned no where. But, guess what? Since around the 1950s or so, we've all been able to listen to music for free over the radio. And the Boston Strangler aside, the advent of the portable music player has only made music more accessible.
The fact that we're in a fairly serious global recession coupled to the inflation they sprinkle on the numbers might make them look tragic. But last I checked, everyone still wants music. They just don't have as much to spend on it right now. I don't see the music industry going anywhere.
Well, the major labels might vanish. But they stopped being a required piece of the music industry more than 10 years ago. Course, they won't really vanish unless their copyrights actually expire. Or our generation dies out and is replaced by a culture that believes music should be enjoyed rather than owned.
The luxury industry has been linked with reducing the size of the middle class, since it tends to greater a broader disparity between those providing goods and services and those consuming them. You are certainly correct, of course, that spending money will 'stimulate the economy' regardless if it comes from the rich or the poor. The question is the type of economy you want to stimulate. Luxury spending tends to stimulate the segment of industry that sees little return back at the lower end of the wage pools. They reap higher profits, and provide fewer goods and services, thus tending towards increasing the divide in wealth. Spending in the lower end 'consumer grade' market tends to stimulate an industry that will increase growth where more goods and services are produced.
Henry Ford famously paid his employees enough so they could buy the cars they were building. Imagine what might have happened to the auto industry if he had catered only to the rich? Compare also to Walmart, who also wants to pay their employees enough to buy their products.
Don't propagate this myth. Hell, my Atari 400 came with 4 joystick ports. We had a multi-tap for our SNES so you could play 4 player games. That isn't new, and yet once we had our own PCs, we still went to LAN parties.
You can't play all games crowded around the same monitor. For some you really want your own audio/visual source so you're NOT all tied to one another in the same location. Playing games of 8 player X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter or Starcraft or Age of Empires, or 16 player Counter-Strike or Rainbow Six were expressly fun because we could all run off on our assigned tasks without worrying about going off screen or trying to watch our tiny slice of the split-screen. Breaking a LAN party up into two teams, where each team was in a separate room, beat the hell out of any cooperative on-line play I've ever experienced.
Now, granted, lugging around a 30 or even 40 pound monitor was a bit of a pain, even with those handy monitor tote straps. But, in the end, it only took a few minutes for us to tear down a PC, toss the cables in a bag, and pack it all into the car. As we'd have LAN parties every few (extended) weekends, setup was not the major pain. Have LAN party locations with adequate seating, power, ventilation, and ethernet ports was the tricky part. But once we had adequately sized apartments (gamers living in the next unit works fantastic) or homes, we had our gaming mecca.
Once new game consoles came out that have ports for everyone to plug in their own audio/visual head set, then you'll have a case. Until then, for me at least, there is still something to be said for LAN parties.
I find it interesting you say that he 'played the game correctly' since that was the core part of the argument that I thought the professor completely missed in his paper.
Who gets to define the 'correct' way to play? And if we look at the social dynamic of the game world as being larger than merely a 'game', who gets to define the correct way to live life? Can you really do it wrong? Is there anything interesting about that fact that players were put in an environment were they were suppose to compete against one another, and yet collectively choose to cooperate instead?
Certainly, we could make a compelling argument that the game designers and developers are the ones who get to define the 'correct' way to play the game. But I should think an equally compelling argument could also be made that the players also get to make that decision. Or, even, that it is an entirely subjective and personal choice, and not subject to the tyranny of any majority.
Snake Pliskin? I heard he was dead.
I was using 'running to center' to describe how many politicians quickly and easily change their rhetoric to match the perceived political mood of their audience, without actually making any change in their own positions. The two party system makes 'the center' not a platform for compromise, but merely a battle ground for votes, as no party exists there to represent anyone. And the ways in which we try and confirm 'the center' as part of a two dimensional spectrum does a gross insult to the true complexity and nuance of political philosophy.
How the hell can you blame a guy for running for president when it was the *millions* of other people who voted for the guy who was actually elected? Or are people not suppose to vote for the guy who they feel is the most qualified? When did casting a ballot equate to throwing away your vote if your guy doesn't get elected?
What kind of democracy do you expect to have, where any qualified candidate is required to sell their soul for the funding required from one of your two parties, who stand for nothing more than merely getting their own reelected? They've both been running to center trying to grind out the votes necessary to win without any concern for what principles or political values they're even suppose to stand for anymore. Isn't politics suppose to be the art of comprise rather than forcing down your tyranny of the majority as an entitlement program? Shouldn't be have politicians more focused on what is best for all of us, rather than those they are beholden to? Do you really enjoy run on sound bites and highlight reels rather than any meaningful political discourse?
I understand you're bitter. I'm pretty bitter too. But why derisively spit at anyone who wants to try and stand up and thinks they might be able to do a better job than the other guy. Or maybe just because they believe the other guy is wrong. Do you really find that the politicians getting elected actually represent you and your world view?
Yeah, that whole 'for a limited time' in the copyright clause in the Constitution seems kinda freaky, doesn't it?
Is this really where we're headed as a society? Idea ownership is normal and ideas being open and free for anyone to use is strange?
They did sue the police department:
There is still an appeal pending, but really, what would you want to see happen? As we blaze forward into the future it's going to becoming increasingly likely that some technology will capture some event most of us would rather not remember. Yet trying to lock up ownership of the past would be even worse than the ridiculous problems copyright laws are causing here in the digital age. You've already acknowledged that once the images have escaped it's basically impossible to put them back in the bottle. Trying to target the original source of their escape seems just as quixotic to me as going after any of the subsequent copies. Certainly, from a legal standpoint it might be easier to discourage and prosecute the source of a 'leak', but towards what end? A sanitized world in which we can all happily only view those events we all agree should be remembered?
In retail you measure unaccounted for inventory as 'shrink'. This will be from shoplifting, employee theft, and just plain clerical errors. The average rate is hard outsiders to measure, because a lot of chains don't like to talk about it. Depending on industry and location, the numbers I've seen are in the 1% to 4% of sales range. Which means that for every 50 items a store (thinks they) purchased from suppliers, they only end up recording sales for 49 of them. Different stores record this shrink on their books differently. Some report it as a loss at cost. Which means they just write off the missing items at the price they paid their suppliers for them. Others report it based on retail sale price, which means they write the items based of what they should have been sold for. It all ends up as accountancy magic, and has to do with how you 'value' your inventory. This has a real and measurable impact on their books. In some industries the retail shrink ends up being larger than their profit margins, yet they still remain in business as it is still ultimately profitable for them.
Of course, these retail stores are buying and selling real physical items. Their 'loss' at the end of the year means inventory they can't sell. This occurs because they need to balance their books at the end of the year, and adjust what assets they thought they still had for sale down to what they actually still possess.
Now, typically, save for original media transit disasters or amazingly catastrophic IT blunders, this will be something that never needs to be done in the virtual world. As long as they still retain a copy of their virtual assets, they can continue to offer it for sale endlessly. There is no 'shrink' to write off, because they're already recorded their magic accountancy numbers. Namely, the Cost of acquiring the virtual asset for sale. Which is what it all comes down to in the end. You take the total cost, and you subtract your sales, and your left with profit. In accountancy, there is no magic formula for recording sales you 'wish' you made, or think you 'deserve' to have made.
I'm really tired of hearing about all the 'losses' due to copyright violations. In business, there is only the money you received. You can play marketing and sales games, as you try and measure the size of the market you're in, and the maximum potential sales for your industry, and from how much of the pie you're getting a slice. But this doesn't go on your accounting books.
What's really happening here, is that the media industries are beating their war drums and proclaiming that they're not making the amount of money they think they deserve. You know what I think? I think they amount of money their customers are willing to give them is exactly the amount of money they deserve. And if they don't like it, they should get out of the buggy whip industry.
All the independent work I've ever done has been because someone knew someone who knew someone. It started with a helping a friend out with some trouble they were having at their work, which lead to helping out more friends of friends, and then other businesses who heard friends of friends talking.
But trying to work a full time job and make time for my side work was sucking the life out of me. I don't like to leave work unfinished, which makes me a hell of a work horse, but only by pulling time away from every else. And once there was no time left to cut I just started sleeping less. So after only a few months I left my steady and well paying job to go solo for awhile.
If I were more motivated, I might still be trying to fly solo, but I really didn't like all the extra work. Not the extra development work, which I loved. It was all the other work. As a corporate drone I spent a lot of my time in development. Working for myself, I also had to be the salesdroid, and the accountant, and the business manager, and health care consultant, and all the rest of the hats that needed wearing. I also could never really enjoy my 'time off' since I was never sure where or when my next paycheck might be coming.
So after a few years I went back to a steady and well paying job. Which, right now, I'm pretty thankful to have. And these days I just actively work to fix some of those annoying bureaucratic problems. Which can certainly involve wearing a few of those extra hats I didn't like... but we all learn to pick and choose which battles are worth fighting. And I guess for me, it's in the corporate trenches.
Whoa, slow down there cowboy. I don't know if you're a troll or not, but since you managed to pick up an Informative mod I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. Shirow is simply a giant in the 'cyperpunk' genre, and greatly influenced many who would come after. Yes, his stuff isn't as ground breaking as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov, I would challenge that it's still quality stuff.
First, to be fair, I will fully admit that GitS is overly flashy and stylized. Shirow has his faults, and if you're not into the fanboi service he caters to I won't fault you for it.
And if you want to just challenge the movies... okay. The first one is good, but does tend to be overhyped. And the second one is just bad. I am actually surprised at how much I disliked Innocence.
That said, I would challenge that the level of depth and detail across the Ghost in the Shell series rivals pretty much all the heavy hitters in that genre. Yes, both movies tend to give you watered down schlock, especially Innocence. But the detail in the manga is, at times, simply phenomenal. The geopolitical history, uses of both covert and extreme violence between super powers, the man/machine dilemma, the quest for consciousness and identity... and even just the raw covert bad-ass espionage is not just window dressing. And I think the Stand Alone Complex series captures a lot of those ideals. Yes, the story arcs in both are a little long and complicated, so if you're not into that I can mostly forgive you. But the individual story episodes mostly stand for themselves and aren't hard to follow at all.
I would also hold up his earlier works as shining examples of real sci-fi. The plot in Black Magic M-66 is nothing special nor is the art very impressive. But I they completely blew me away with how they presented the androids. Rather than the overly anthropomorphized machine used by too many others, here he have raw robotic killing machines without any human mannerisms, traits, or emotions. Watching them move in completely inhuman ways to be more effective combat machines gave me chills back in the day.
Dominion: Tank Police... okay, not so much. But it's suppose to be silly.
And while I don't know that Appleseed covers a lot of ground that isn't also covered in GitS, to be far, it was created back in the 80s. And it also has a lot of detail and depth in how it details the rise of civilization from chaos, and what it means to be human.
From: http://www.change.gov/agenda/technology/
Protect American Intellectual Property Abroad: The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that in 2005, more than nine of every 10 DVDs sold in China were illegal copies. The U.S. Trade Representative said 80 percent of all counterfeit products seized at U.S. borders still come from China. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will work to ensure intellectual property is protected in foreign markets, and promote greater cooperation on international standards that allow our technologies to compete everywhere.
Protect American Intellectual Property at Home: Intellectual property is to the digital age what physical goods were to the industrial age. Barack Obama believes we need to update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated.
I keep hearing the terms 'socialism' and 'wealth redistribution' being tossed around like something evil. Did Marx really taint these words so horribly?
Socialism is a rather large set of ideas that reflects a wide range of thoughts on social and economic policy. If you can pull a unifying idea from the mix you might say it represents the many working for the many. You can compare this to the capitalist ideas of the individual working for themself, and the communist idea of everyone working for everyone.
I agree with the precepts of libertarianism and capitalism where the rewards should go to those who created the success. But I think it's short-sighted to claim that all the rewards should only go to them. Or else, overly broad to define only those who directly created the success. In our increasingly global world I should think it has become even more obvious that we're not all in this for ourselves, and what others do can and will directly influence our lives. I mean, unless you're willing to just round up everyone that isn't pulling their weight. In which case you've drifted over to a dictatorship or totalitarianism.
I like the ideas of communism, but the system seems doomed to failure. A point which history seems to agree with. It only seems to work on a very small scale, and even then not very well. And this makes me sad, because my personal philosophy wants to be that cooperation should always win over competition. Yet, alas, competition has proven a remarkable motivator.
Socialism would then seem to be a more balanced view of the world, albeit one more biased towards cooperation than competition. Health care is one place where people seem to fear socialism, and I have heard the phrase "letting a bureaucrat stand between you and your doctor." Yet, what is health insurance if not a bureaucracy?
The theory seems to be that a for-profit company will function more efficiently than one running with the mandate of serving the public good. A theory I can't really disagree with, due to that damned competition/cooperation thing. Yet, isn't the point of the for-profit company is still to serve the public good? Do we really want to competitively price things when we're sick or injured? Heck, do we really want to competitively price things when we're healthy?
And where did this mystical line get drawn between people and government? Aren't they suppose to be one and the same in a democracy? By the people, of the people, for the people? Senator and CEO are merely titles, they don't confer special leadership qualities. They're both just people responsible to others. Is there something special about share holders that makes them better than constituents? Would democracy work better if you had to buy your right to vote? And could buy as many votes as you could afford?