The problem is in trying to stage events. Events shouldn't be staged, they should just happen. You stage events, and you have to worry about who shows up and when. You have to worry about what happens. Events should be part of the quest system and rigged directly into the living environment of the game world.
That quest for a spy character to discover when and where the new shipment of resources is leaving isn't a throw away quest. That shipment really is a pile of resources sitting in a freighter somewhere. And that shipment is going to do something, regardless of if our spy is successful. And our spy character is just part of the chain. If the spy completes his quest, that information gets passed into the queue for other characters. The sith characters might get missions to protect the shipment. The rebels to intercept the shipment. Random bounty hunters to merely rob the shipment. It's a real event, and it's going to happen, and the players can find out about it, and react as they wish.
And this is just one minor event going on in the universe at any given time. Events like this need to be going on all the time, and how the players react to them needs to matter. It needs to change things. The resources don't arrive means the empire won't be able to get certain weapons/equipment/missions out at the output. Continued missed shipments might require the output be abandoned. Maybe the rebels get a chance to destroy it or take it over.
Say you have a random NPC rebel giving out missions on some other random outpost trying to disrupt the local sith activities. If those missions continue successfully, maybe the entire imperial presence is eventually forced from the planet. Maybe if the missions fail utterly, the NPC gets captured by the empire. And if players can't free the NPC, he gets shuttled off to some prison planet and/or executed. Maybe that NPC is a player.
And then none of that should 'just happen' either. The reasons the resources are ready to ship out happened for a reason. The reason there is a freighter ready to ship those resources didn't just happen. That NPC didn't just burst into existence on that outpost. Everything triggers everything else in a massive chain of events that make up your game world.
The Turing Test is way past it's prime by this point. The original thought of experiment of how to tell if a machine can think has merely become a test to see if a program can fool a human. Mostly it's building up a simplistic way to parse responses to match your massive yet limited supply of answers. We're certainly getting close to having programs able to pass the Test, and I can't see many who would try and claim any of them actually 'think'.
That said, it's still an interesting exercise. The raw amount of data that a program requires to mimic the knowledge of a person is an important challenge by itself. And you might be surprised by either how much... or how little it actually requires. Yet there are other bits that are less clever. In order to pass the Test you really want to create a fake persona so the program can share life experiences it's never had, or else cleverly camouflaged 'experiences' that seem human. "Q: Do you enjoy the outdoors at all? A: Not really, I spend a lot of time in the lab." But then you have to place limits on what the program can do, such as not crunching out math problems on the fly. You'd want it to make mistakes, such as typos or forgetting things or only vaguely remembering things. Acting like it needs to take a break, or has been interrupted.
And then you need to dive into the deeper questions of what it really means to be human, or to be able to think. What would we want an AI to be like? Would we want them to have traits so they seem more human, or would we prefer they be merely efficient thinking machines without our 'limitations'?
Er... yes. Special classes of people do have special rights and responsibilities. I don't think that has anything to do with how such people were created, or if any equality might have been used in their creation.
We empower agents of the public trust more than the common man. I don't think that makes them better people. But with great power... should come great oversight. The greater responsibilities should come at the price of some privacy. I'm not saying we should place cameras in anyone's home, but I wouldn't necessarily be against cameras in their public workplaces.
I believe strongly in the idea of free speech, and don't much care for censorship or other speech restrictions. That said, on some level I think I can agree with the idea that lawyers are part of our legal justice system, and therefore to be held to a higher standard of conduct than we mere mortals. I mean, I have no problem saying the same thing about judges or police officers. I certainly believe they should be held to higher standards.
But the idea that the RIAA would say of Ray's blog, "Such vexatious conduct demeans the integrity of these judicial proceedings and warrants this imposition of sanctions." is completely beyond absurd.
The RIAA has been conducting a multimillion dollar ad campaign in an attempt to paint copyright infringement as a crime in the same class or worse as theft, and further attempting to equate their inflated 'losses' due to 'piracy'. Ray might joke and jab more than is 'proper' or 'expected' as a lawyer, but in my mind, that makes him a better agent of the court, not worse. And I fail to see how this lawsuit is anything other than a legal attack upon Ray in an attempt to smear his good name and discredit him as a lawyer.
Fuck a new political party. Nothing personal and I don't mean it as a shot at you. But this system is done. It is broken beyond repair. At least the type of repair that doesn't require an overthrow.
Maybe you're right, and I won't even try to directly disagree with you. The 'system' contains many 'broken' parts, and if you start with the voters they're probably the worst of the bunch. Imagine if voters didn't respond to emotionally charged rhetoric and cheap sound bites. Suddenly campaign finance would be far less of an issue, which means the corporate stranglehold on Washington is lessoned.
Even so, it's a lot less work to start new political parties than it is to start a revolution. Considering how close many political races today are, it wouldn't take a huge upsurge in third party voting to upset the current balance of power in many voting districts. Of course, you'd also have to do away with the bizarre stigma behind "wasted" votes, and find some way to reach at least some of the many disenfranchised voters. I know there hasn't been more than a tiny handful of candidates I've ever voted for that I personally felt would represent my interests if elected. Meh, maybe a revolution would be easier.
Even so, once you figure out how to get registered and then when and where to vote, it's pretty easy to go out and vote for some (any!) third party candidate. Which is at least the start of a small revolution.
My advice would be, don't hold back. I had a voracious appetite for books as a teenager which crossed many demographics and genres. But the most memorable to me are the ones with more of an adult edge that really made me think. Personally, I think we spend too much time holding children back and looking to make their lives better than our own. Not every novel I've read was a classic, but there are very few I would say I didn't at least enjoy. Let them read everything you can get your hands on that looks interesting.
As far as I'm aware, anyone who does commercial color printing uses CMYK. The only jump away from CMYK I know of is CcMmYK... which is still based on CMYK images.
My point was merely that you shouldn't find any examples of sites shut down for legitimate reasons in the EFF case list, not that no site had ever been shut down legitimately. Which was ultimately included to expand the list of reasons why a poll about sites being shut down by the government could be interesting with fear mongering. And while I doubt this would be the correct forum to point out purely criminal websites, there should be some exciting examples out there of more nebulous legal concerns, or even ones where the laws of the host country different from our own... which even further expands the scope of the list. To say nothing of the ones which would just be funny to include, like the Republican Nation Committee. Which I find even more funny, as they're currently leading their site with some dubious news smears against Obama. Think the DNC could get a judge to temporarily shut down the RNC web site, or vice versa?
I'm aware of the evolution MUDs have taken over the years. Unfortunately the creative space seems to have been largely usurped since the release of Meridian 59, Ultima Online, and Everquest. No longer are there hordes of new and unsuspecting college kids eagerly waiting to play test your new idea. New (and old) MUDs and their ilk seem to only attract the detritus of the internet these days, (very) young kids, those too cheap to afford the pay for play content, and drifters just sampling the waters before moving on to move evolved game space.
So what's left are the few MUDs who have survived over the years, such as BatMUD which have become very cool, but also have a small and deeply entrenched player base. This makes breaking into such games rather difficult for new players. And this is possibly a fault with the game model itself. When you allow players to greatly control the game world, they seem to become very possessive of the game space they control which leads to a Darwinian battle where only the most die-hard and fanatical groups rise to the top.
I've seen a few game designs over the years which suggest newer and better things are on the horizon, but none of the ones I've been interested in have evolved into a playable state, or else have grown in directions other than I was looking for. So if anyone knows of games with dynamic/evolving content engines, I'd be greatly interested.
Well, that's one way to look at it. I personally can't think of a lot of web sites that have been shut down 'by the government' although there have certainly been a handful of good examples. Mostly raids where internet equipment was confiscated, and such equipment seems to have a poor track record of getting back into the hands of its owners (if at all!) The most important might have been the raids around the 'E911' document which included storming the game company Steve Jackson Games and lead to the creation of the EFF which still operates today.
You can look over the EFF case history on their site to find a nice list of cases, some more dubious than others, where internet sites were shut down and/or censored. Of course, what you (hopefully!) won't find in their case history are perfectly legitimate shut downs of sites engaged in dully prosecuted criminal acts.
So, this might just be liberal fear mongering. It might also be an attempt to highlight the good work of watch dog groups who publish messages the government might not want released, even if such groups aren't in real danger of being shut down. Considering the size and scope of the/. crowd, it might even just be an attempt to highlight cool web sites, with the 'shut down by the government' meme part of our wacky hacker humor.
Or, it might just be an attempt to scare up some web hits by trying to tap into some internet controversy among geeks. Hanlon's razor, etc.
I still recall feeling a little crestfallen way back in the day when I first completed a major MUD quest. I had dethroned the pretender, restored the rightful price to power, and put the spirit fo the former king to rest... only to have everything undone when the area reset. Since then I've been waiting for a MUD (or MMORPG, as the kids call them today) to incorporate more of the player actions into the game world. This seems like a step in that direction, with a large dose of Dreampark thrown into the mix.
The novels were about an uber-geek style LARP, where a large mix of special effects allowed the players to have their game filmed in front of cameras and then turned into movies... which would then help fund the expensive LARP theme park. This looks to be different, in that they will be filming the TV show completely outside the game world, but they would incorporate the ongoing events of the game world into the episodes.
My short rebuttal is merely that the world presently spends a vast amount of money for the creation of new art, and that demand is not going to magically vanish if you abolish copyright law. The counter-point is that yes, people want new art, but they would stop paying for it if they can get it for free. But, of course, you can't really get new art for free. Someone needs to support the artists, even if that means they all need to get day jobs to fund their craft.
A complete repeal of copyright *would* devastate the copyright cartels, which presently own a massive amount of intellectual property. It might not be a direct death sentence, but it would require a massive restructuring of such businesses if there were to try and survive in a post-copyright world.
Obviously, without copyright, new systems would need to rise up to meet the demand for new art. I find it unlikely that these new markets would create the handful of massive superstar artists we have today, but this should mean the possibility of supporting a larger number of sub-superstar artists. Your example of a rich patron supporting a pet artist is merely one example of the possibilities. With if, for example, the record labels went back to their original roots, and merely signed, supported, and marketed artists, rather than trying to control their art?
You're not asking for something you want in the file system. In order to 'undelete' something, you need to have not actually deleted it in the first place. Once you 'really' delete something, you want that free space to become immediately available. If you want to keep around 'deleted' files for awhile, before you actually remove them from disk, you just want the "trash can" style functions, where you move 'deleted' files off to a trash can directory where they will eventually be 'really deleted' after a specific period of time. Which, if you really want, you could add by creating a simple shell script to sub out your rm command, and a cron entry. Or you could just use whatever similar functionality already exists for your distro.
A quick bit of searching online reveals the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab website which contains links to a variety of information on the project. Here's a PDF of the paper in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the topic. And although it has a flash video, here's another Stanford article on the same topic.
And on that topic, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" is a novel by Cory Doctorow that has been featured on/. before because it's available as a free download and contains such topics as brain backups and growing new bodies to load them. I found it a fun read.
The Origin of Consciousness is from back in 1976, so it's not exactly cutting edge these days. Julian Jaynes was a controversial psychologist, and his book made him even more controversial. He had planned to write a follow up on the book to address the many complaints, but died (in 1997) before he could complete it.
And (from an Amazon review) his theory IS that:
He also posits that many sophisticated civilizations were created by men and women who were all directed by these godlike voices. What is not very clearly explained (a serious gap in his theory) is how all the voices in these "bicameral civilizations," as he calls them, worked in harmony. But his theory is that ancient Greece, Babylon, Assyria, Egpyt, and less ancient but similar Mayan and Incan kingdoms were all built by people who were not "conscious" in our modern sense.
You're right to be critical of his theories, but I don't think he's quite the crank you seem to suggest. Last year a new book "Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited" came out which included some of his work before his death, as well as ideas and articles from others in the field which more critically examine his ideas.
The answer is a bit more complex than that. If you don't want to be in the business of being a copyright cop, then reject the premise that what you're trying to do is prevent cheating. Plagiarism can certainly be a problem, but if your goal is merely to measure academic progress, there's a rather simple way to discover what your students know. Ask them.
And if the problem then becomes that it would be much more work to individually schedule and quiz your students, then you've successfully transitioned the problem from being one of controlling ideas, to one of getting funding to actually teach your students.
Alternatively, assign different assignments to your students. The biggest problem with plagiarism is that schools tend to recycle the same curriculum over and over again. If you want your students to learn/experience the joy of academic research, give them real research projects. And if the problem then becomes that it would cost more to assign and grade individual research assignments, you've successfully transitioned the problem from being one of controlling ideas, to one of getting funding to actually teach your students.
I realize that the educational system is fraught with other problems, and if you can't get the funds to teach, then discovering the best ways to teach then becomes... merely academic. I further realize most teachers are heavily restricted by their school/school board/government regarding their course material and teaching methods. And I certainly wouldn't recommend becoming a One Man Teaching Rebellion. Unless... of course... you wanted to.
The [criminal] trial lasted seven days. After the jurors deliberated for three and a quarter hours, Peairs was acquitted under Louisiana's "Kill the burglar" statute.
If you post it on the 'net, it's public information, no matter how secure or private the application is. One must treat his or her information on social networks this way, no exceptions.
So what restrictions, if any, does this mean those who handle our information on the 'net are under to keep our information private? Does this free pass to treat our information as public only apply to 'social networking sites' and what then qualifies as a social networking site? If I do my taxes online, does that become public information? If someone digs in my trash, finds some interesting documents and posts them on a social networking site, do they become public? What about my online bill payments or banking?
Or does your assertion only apply to information to a 'public' site on the 'net? Or is the act of 'posting' the information online what makes it public? And if that is the case, what qualifies as a 'public' site? If you need a username and password to see my posted information, is it still public? If a username and password aren't enough protection, what would be required to place something online that isn't public? Is it still public if it's on a website which requires an RSA smart card which is kept at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of Leopard'?
Your are neglecting the cost of replication. That is one of the factors in the article.
What happens when a company goes bust and their codecs are not updated?
This is a cost of their own manufacture. By keeping digital information locked up under proprietary third party protocols, you're forever at the mercy of their market whims. I'm certainly not going to claim that open standards would eliminate hardware/software obsolesce, but it would definitely help mitigate the problem. I, for one, will not be feeling sorry for them having painted themselves into an expensive corner.
Actually, the only senator to vote against the Patriot ACT was Russ Feingold (D-WI). Kucinich is in the House, where there was quite a few votes in addition to his own that voted against it.
If you've never owned a cell phone, you don't know what you're missing. I'm not saying that you would learn to love it, I'm just saying you're criticizing something you've never reviewed.
My own anecdotal story was that I came in late to the cell phone game, and I originally cited similar reasons to your own. As someone who used to have to carry a pager for work, I used to call cell phones the new 'digital leash' and swore I had no use for them. And, perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, I don't really need one, seeing as how I was able to function without one for so many years. But now that I have one, I find it damn convenient.
Although I do know too many people who feel obligated to answer their phone every time it rings. The 'trick' for me is that I control the tool, rather than the other way around. Turn the ringer off, and set it for wiggle mode on specific numbers who don't abuse the privilege of being able to contact you directly.
Certainly a cell phone is a tool that's not for everyone, but I find both the ability to communicate with who I want when I want, and easy access to information (operator, I need an exit) are new abilities that have increased the quality of my life. Even simple pleasures, like being able to call the pizza place while on the way home from work. The more pedantic will claim that I could have merely called before I left work, and they're certainly correct. But, for me, the ability to be more spontaneous is entirely the point.
You're just scratching the surface of the evil that lays beneath the surface of every credit institution, so don't think this is merely limited to BoA.
Here in the US, a good chunk of your credit score (maintained by the real axis of evil) is a measure of the percentage (not the amount!) of available credit you have available to you. Opening a credit card you won't use will increase your credit score. And if you carry any debt, canceling an unused credit card will decrease your credit score. The sad truth is that your credit score isn't really designed to measure your 'credit risk' to potential lenders. It's almost entirely designed to measure how dependant you are on debt. The thinking being that those who need debt more, can be safely charged more interest since they have less places to turn to finance their debt.
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The problem is in trying to stage events. Events shouldn't be staged, they should just happen. You stage events, and you have to worry about who shows up and when. You have to worry about what happens. Events should be part of the quest system and rigged directly into the living environment of the game world.
That quest for a spy character to discover when and where the new shipment of resources is leaving isn't a throw away quest. That shipment really is a pile of resources sitting in a freighter somewhere. And that shipment is going to do something, regardless of if our spy is successful. And our spy character is just part of the chain. If the spy completes his quest, that information gets passed into the queue for other characters. The sith characters might get missions to protect the shipment. The rebels to intercept the shipment. Random bounty hunters to merely rob the shipment. It's a real event, and it's going to happen, and the players can find out about it, and react as they wish.
And this is just one minor event going on in the universe at any given time. Events like this need to be going on all the time, and how the players react to them needs to matter. It needs to change things. The resources don't arrive means the empire won't be able to get certain weapons/equipment/missions out at the output. Continued missed shipments might require the output be abandoned. Maybe the rebels get a chance to destroy it or take it over.
Say you have a random NPC rebel giving out missions on some other random outpost trying to disrupt the local sith activities. If those missions continue successfully, maybe the entire imperial presence is eventually forced from the planet. Maybe if the missions fail utterly, the NPC gets captured by the empire. And if players can't free the NPC, he gets shuttled off to some prison planet and/or executed. Maybe that NPC is a player.
And then none of that should 'just happen' either. The reasons the resources are ready to ship out happened for a reason. The reason there is a freighter ready to ship those resources didn't just happen. That NPC didn't just burst into existence on that outpost. Everything triggers everything else in a massive chain of events that make up your game world.
The Turing Test is way past it's prime by this point. The original thought of experiment of how to tell if a machine can think has merely become a test to see if a program can fool a human. Mostly it's building up a simplistic way to parse responses to match your massive yet limited supply of answers. We're certainly getting close to having programs able to pass the Test, and I can't see many who would try and claim any of them actually 'think'.
That said, it's still an interesting exercise. The raw amount of data that a program requires to mimic the knowledge of a person is an important challenge by itself. And you might be surprised by either how much... or how little it actually requires. Yet there are other bits that are less clever. In order to pass the Test you really want to create a fake persona so the program can share life experiences it's never had, or else cleverly camouflaged 'experiences' that seem human. "Q: Do you enjoy the outdoors at all? A: Not really, I spend a lot of time in the lab." But then you have to place limits on what the program can do, such as not crunching out math problems on the fly. You'd want it to make mistakes, such as typos or forgetting things or only vaguely remembering things. Acting like it needs to take a break, or has been interrupted.
And then you need to dive into the deeper questions of what it really means to be human, or to be able to think. What would we want an AI to be like? Would we want them to have traits so they seem more human, or would we prefer they be merely efficient thinking machines without our 'limitations'?
Er... yes. Special classes of people do have special rights and responsibilities. I don't think that has anything to do with how such people were created, or if any equality might have been used in their creation.
We empower agents of the public trust more than the common man. I don't think that makes them better people. But with great power... should come great oversight. The greater responsibilities should come at the price of some privacy. I'm not saying we should place cameras in anyone's home, but I wouldn't necessarily be against cameras in their public workplaces.
I believe strongly in the idea of free speech, and don't much care for censorship or other speech restrictions. That said, on some level I think I can agree with the idea that lawyers are part of our legal justice system, and therefore to be held to a higher standard of conduct than we mere mortals. I mean, I have no problem saying the same thing about judges or police officers. I certainly believe they should be held to higher standards.
But the idea that the RIAA would say of Ray's blog, "Such vexatious conduct demeans the integrity of these judicial proceedings and warrants this imposition of sanctions." is completely beyond absurd.
The RIAA has been conducting a multimillion dollar ad campaign in an attempt to paint copyright infringement as a crime in the same class or worse as theft, and further attempting to equate their inflated 'losses' due to 'piracy'. Ray might joke and jab more than is 'proper' or 'expected' as a lawyer, but in my mind, that makes him a better agent of the court, not worse. And I fail to see how this lawsuit is anything other than a legal attack upon Ray in an attempt to smear his good name and discredit him as a lawyer.
There are two bits. Turn them both on. I.e, this one goes to 11.
Maybe you're right, and I won't even try to directly disagree with you. The 'system' contains many 'broken' parts, and if you start with the voters they're probably the worst of the bunch. Imagine if voters didn't respond to emotionally charged rhetoric and cheap sound bites. Suddenly campaign finance would be far less of an issue, which means the corporate stranglehold on Washington is lessoned.
Even so, it's a lot less work to start new political parties than it is to start a revolution. Considering how close many political races today are, it wouldn't take a huge upsurge in third party voting to upset the current balance of power in many voting districts. Of course, you'd also have to do away with the bizarre stigma behind "wasted" votes, and find some way to reach at least some of the many disenfranchised voters. I know there hasn't been more than a tiny handful of candidates I've ever voted for that I personally felt would represent my interests if elected. Meh, maybe a revolution would be easier.
Even so, once you figure out how to get registered and then when and where to vote, it's pretty easy to go out and vote for some (any!) third party candidate. Which is at least the start of a small revolution.
My advice would be, don't hold back. I had a voracious appetite for books as a teenager which crossed many demographics and genres. But the most memorable to me are the ones with more of an adult edge that really made me think. Personally, I think we spend too much time holding children back and looking to make their lives better than our own. Not every novel I've read was a classic, but there are very few I would say I didn't at least enjoy. Let them read everything you can get your hands on that looks interesting.
As far as I'm aware, anyone who does commercial color printing uses CMYK. The only jump away from CMYK I know of is CcMmYK... which is still based on CMYK images.
My point was merely that you shouldn't find any examples of sites shut down for legitimate reasons in the EFF case list, not that no site had ever been shut down legitimately. Which was ultimately included to expand the list of reasons why a poll about sites being shut down by the government could be interesting with fear mongering. And while I doubt this would be the correct forum to point out purely criminal websites, there should be some exciting examples out there of more nebulous legal concerns, or even ones where the laws of the host country different from our own... which even further expands the scope of the list. To say nothing of the ones which would just be funny to include, like the Republican Nation Committee. Which I find even more funny, as they're currently leading their site with some dubious news smears against Obama. Think the DNC could get a judge to temporarily shut down the RNC web site, or vice versa?
I'm aware of the evolution MUDs have taken over the years. Unfortunately the creative space seems to have been largely usurped since the release of Meridian 59, Ultima Online, and Everquest. No longer are there hordes of new and unsuspecting college kids eagerly waiting to play test your new idea. New (and old) MUDs and their ilk seem to only attract the detritus of the internet these days, (very) young kids, those too cheap to afford the pay for play content, and drifters just sampling the waters before moving on to move evolved game space.
So what's left are the few MUDs who have survived over the years, such as BatMUD which have become very cool, but also have a small and deeply entrenched player base. This makes breaking into such games rather difficult for new players. And this is possibly a fault with the game model itself. When you allow players to greatly control the game world, they seem to become very possessive of the game space they control which leads to a Darwinian battle where only the most die-hard and fanatical groups rise to the top.
I've seen a few game designs over the years which suggest newer and better things are on the horizon, but none of the ones I've been interested in have evolved into a playable state, or else have grown in directions other than I was looking for. So if anyone knows of games with dynamic/evolving content engines, I'd be greatly interested.
Well, that's one way to look at it. I personally can't think of a lot of web sites that have been shut down 'by the government' although there have certainly been a handful of good examples. Mostly raids where internet equipment was confiscated, and such equipment seems to have a poor track record of getting back into the hands of its owners (if at all!) The most important might have been the raids around the 'E911' document which included storming the game company Steve Jackson Games and lead to the creation of the EFF which still operates today.
/. crowd, it might even just be an attempt to highlight cool web sites, with the 'shut down by the government' meme part of our wacky hacker humor.
You can look over the EFF case history on their site to find a nice list of cases, some more dubious than others, where internet sites were shut down and/or censored. Of course, what you (hopefully!) won't find in their case history are perfectly legitimate shut downs of sites engaged in dully prosecuted criminal acts.
So, this might just be liberal fear mongering. It might also be an attempt to highlight the good work of watch dog groups who publish messages the government might not want released, even if such groups aren't in real danger of being shut down. Considering the size and scope of the
Or, it might just be an attempt to scare up some web hits by trying to tap into some internet controversy among geeks. Hanlon's razor, etc.
I still recall feeling a little crestfallen way back in the day when I first completed a major MUD quest. I had dethroned the pretender, restored the rightful price to power, and put the spirit fo the former king to rest... only to have everything undone when the area reset. Since then I've been waiting for a MUD (or MMORPG, as the kids call them today) to incorporate more of the player actions into the game world. This seems like a step in that direction, with a large dose of Dreampark thrown into the mix.
The novels were about an uber-geek style LARP, where a large mix of special effects allowed the players to have their game filmed in front of cameras and then turned into movies... which would then help fund the expensive LARP theme park. This looks to be different, in that they will be filming the TV show completely outside the game world, but they would incorporate the ongoing events of the game world into the episodes.
My short rebuttal is merely that the world presently spends a vast amount of money for the creation of new art, and that demand is not going to magically vanish if you abolish copyright law. The counter-point is that yes, people want new art, but they would stop paying for it if they can get it for free. But, of course, you can't really get new art for free. Someone needs to support the artists, even if that means they all need to get day jobs to fund their craft.
A complete repeal of copyright *would* devastate the copyright cartels, which presently own a massive amount of intellectual property. It might not be a direct death sentence, but it would require a massive restructuring of such businesses if there were to try and survive in a post-copyright world.
Obviously, without copyright, new systems would need to rise up to meet the demand for new art. I find it unlikely that these new markets would create the handful of massive superstar artists we have today, but this should mean the possibility of supporting a larger number of sub-superstar artists. Your example of a rich patron supporting a pet artist is merely one example of the possibilities. With if, for example, the record labels went back to their original roots, and merely signed, supported, and marketed artists, rather than trying to control their art?
You're not asking for something you want in the file system. In order to 'undelete' something, you need to have not actually deleted it in the first place. Once you 'really' delete something, you want that free space to become immediately available. If you want to keep around 'deleted' files for awhile, before you actually remove them from disk, you just want the "trash can" style functions, where you move 'deleted' files off to a trash can directory where they will eventually be 'really deleted' after a specific period of time. Which, if you really want, you could add by creating a simple shell script to sub out your rm command, and a cron entry. Or you could just use whatever similar functionality already exists for your distro.
A quick bit of searching online reveals the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab website which contains links to a variety of information on the project. Here's a PDF of the paper in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the topic. And although it has a flash video, here's another Stanford article on the same topic.
And on that topic, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" is a novel by Cory Doctorow that has been featured on /. before because it's available as a free download and contains such topics as brain backups and growing new bodies to load them. I found it a fun read.
The answer is a bit more complex than that. If you don't want to be in the business of being a copyright cop, then reject the premise that what you're trying to do is prevent cheating. Plagiarism can certainly be a problem, but if your goal is merely to measure academic progress, there's a rather simple way to discover what your students know. Ask them.
And if the problem then becomes that it would be much more work to individually schedule and quiz your students, then you've successfully transitioned the problem from being one of controlling ideas, to one of getting funding to actually teach your students.
Alternatively, assign different assignments to your students. The biggest problem with plagiarism is that schools tend to recycle the same curriculum over and over again. If you want your students to learn/experience the joy of academic research, give them real research projects. And if the problem then becomes that it would cost more to assign and grade individual research assignments, you've successfully transitioned the problem from being one of controlling ideas, to one of getting funding to actually teach your students.
I realize that the educational system is fraught with other problems, and if you can't get the funds to teach, then discovering the best ways to teach then becomes... merely academic. I further realize most teachers are heavily restricted by their school/school board/government regarding their course material and teaching methods. And I certainly wouldn't recommend becoming a One Man Teaching Rebellion. Unless... of course... you wanted to.
So what restrictions, if any, does this mean those who handle our information on the 'net are under to keep our information private? Does this free pass to treat our information as public only apply to 'social networking sites' and what then qualifies as a social networking site? If I do my taxes online, does that become public information? If someone digs in my trash, finds some interesting documents and posts them on a social networking site, do they become public? What about my online bill payments or banking?
Or does your assertion only apply to information to a 'public' site on the 'net? Or is the act of 'posting' the information online what makes it public? And if that is the case, what qualifies as a 'public' site? If you need a username and password to see my posted information, is it still public? If a username and password aren't enough protection, what would be required to place something online that isn't public? Is it still public if it's on a website which requires an RSA smart card which is kept at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of Leopard'?
This is a cost of their own manufacture. By keeping digital information locked up under proprietary third party protocols, you're forever at the mercy of their market whims. I'm certainly not going to claim that open standards would eliminate hardware/software obsolesce, but it would definitely help mitigate the problem. I, for one, will not be feeling sorry for them having painted themselves into an expensive corner.
Actually, the only senator to vote against the Patriot ACT was Russ Feingold (D-WI). Kucinich is in the House, where there was quite a few votes in addition to his own that voted against it.
My own anecdotal story was that I came in late to the cell phone game, and I originally cited similar reasons to your own. As someone who used to have to carry a pager for work, I used to call cell phones the new 'digital leash' and swore I had no use for them. And, perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, I don't really need one, seeing as how I was able to function without one for so many years. But now that I have one, I find it damn convenient.
Although I do know too many people who feel obligated to answer their phone every time it rings. The 'trick' for me is that I control the tool, rather than the other way around. Turn the ringer off, and set it for wiggle mode on specific numbers who don't abuse the privilege of being able to contact you directly.
Certainly a cell phone is a tool that's not for everyone, but I find both the ability to communicate with who I want when I want, and easy access to information (operator, I need an exit) are new abilities that have increased the quality of my life. Even simple pleasures, like being able to call the pizza place while on the way home from work. The more pedantic will claim that I could have merely called before I left work, and they're certainly correct. But, for me, the ability to be more spontaneous is entirely the point.
So now we got a huge guy theory, and a serial crusher theory. Top notch.
Here in the US, a good chunk of your credit score (maintained by the real axis of evil) is a measure of the percentage (not the amount!) of available credit you have available to you. Opening a credit card you won't use will increase your credit score. And if you carry any debt, canceling an unused credit card will decrease your credit score. The sad truth is that your credit score isn't really designed to measure your 'credit risk' to potential lenders. It's almost entirely designed to measure how dependant you are on debt. The thinking being that those who need debt more, can be safely charged more interest since they have less places to turn to finance their debt.