I know it's a hoax too, and I'm sorry to nitpick, but they don't claim the device has 1Tb of RAM, they say 256Mb of RAM and 1Tb of solid-state mass storage (shown in the screenshots as disk space). This wouldn't violate the Windows RAM limit.
Haven't read the debunking yet, but what made me doubtful was the Photoshopped look of the component labeling.
In another article on this, a record company spokesman is quoted: "We're disappointed they won't accept the umpire's decision. It can't be fair to build a business on somebody else's work," he said.
I'm not a doctor and I don't play one on TV, but I know Unbelievably Blatant Hypocrisy when I hear it.
The Vanport Flood of 1948 provides a more recent example of a lost city. Vanport was the second largest city in Oregon at that time, with 50,000 residents. The entire town was washed away when a dike holding back the Columbia River broke. The town was never rebuilt but eventually became an industrial area.
My bet is that most of the totally devastated parts of New Orleans will go the same route. According to CNN last night, 90% of the evacuees they talked to in Houston said they did not intend to return home. Sometimes there's no point.
Fools! They fail to understand that a supernova is caused by shock waves emitted when the turtle at the bottom of the stack of turtles that make up the universe is squashed by all the turtles above it. As new turtles come into being at the top of the stack, their weight eventually crushes the bottom turtle, causing the whole stack to drop jarringly. The resulting compression wave is felt by all the turtles, and sometimes causes the familiar flash of light mistakenly interpreted as a stellar explosion. Stars can't "explode" because they are merely holes in the firmament. Whoever heard of a hole exploding! Such foolishness!
Instead of defending systems like Kazaa by arguing whether they breach copyright law, I would like to see more direct attacks on the law itself. Modern copyright law is "right" only because it is the law, not because it inherently has any real moral footing. That's what I think should be attacked.
I personally download and share a lot of old time radio shows from the 1940s and earlier. Most of these shows were never intended for rebroadcast or resale, let alone 60 years later, and were not preserved by any conscious effort on the part of the creators or the copyright holders. Most of the material has survived through the efforts of people like radio station engineers and hobbyists, who saved the transcription discs because of personal interest. They have kept the entertainment of that era alive for decades by making, trading, and often selling copies (illegally!!).
The 1998 Bono Act, which retroactively restored copyright protection to all audio recordings made before 1972, makes "pirates" of these people. Paradoxically, it gives the current copyright holders, who often did nothing whatsoever to preserve the material, the legal grounds to swoop in and attack those who did. Even the earliest wax cylinder recordings made by Thomas Edison in the 1890s will remain under copyright until the year 2067. This isn't right, and I think it would be better in the long run to attack the legislation by refusing to obey it, rather than by concocting elaborate technical arguments. The best argument I can think of is that copyright law can't be valid in cases where it simply doesn't produce justice. I doubt whether that would fly in court, but there might be someone out there who could present it in different terms. For example, could a case be made that by arbitrarily removing material from the public domain Congress breached a contract with the citizens when it passed the Bono Act, and therefore the law itself is void?
How's this for perspective? What kind of company do you think Microsoft would be today if Gates and Ballmer had been born and educated in India or China? What kind of computer geek hiring pool would they have had available to build the company up during their boom years? Do they owe the U.S. anything more than corporate taxes? I say yes, they do. They owe their very existence to the place and culture they grew up in. Instead of copping out with the Everybody-Does-It argument they should be using their business and innovation skills to find ways to keep as many jobs in America as possible, instead of selling them to the lowest bidder.
Their earlier DMCA attempt was bad enough, but this is too much. I own one Lexmark printer and three HPs. The Lexmark is now in a Hefty bag in my garbage can, and will be replaced tomorrow by another HP. I will NEVER buy another Lexmark product for the rest of my life.
They probably had plans to test these things somewhere like Iraq, but this situation is even better. Since the feds have fallen down on their job of handling this sort of large-scale problem, they're getting ready to perform the charade of blaming looters and rioters for everything that went wrong, just like they've been blaming terrorists for everything else. Going in waving a big stick is part of that performance, and using it on a few civilians is the perfect "shock and awe" gesture. Bush's zero-tolerance right-wing supporters will be cheering, and ordinary citizens will have one more reason to shy away from any sort of political action that the government might not approve.
Things like water cannons and riot gear are comprehensible threats to protesters, but when the government starts using spooky technology to bring a whole crowd to its knees, genuine sixties-like political unrest will cease to be possible in this country, no matter how appropriate it might eventually become. That's when America will cease to be a "free" country. Because if people are afraid to use their supposed freedoms then they no longer really have them.
Buried in all the ranting are some practical ideas:
If you develop games the right way, the fearless way, the independent way, your costs are drastically smaller. A few thousand unit sales will pay the bills.
develop for open platforms, not proprietary consoles.
work in small, committed teams
find our market...through the excellence of our own product, through guerilla marketing and rabble-rousing manifestoes.
Sounds good, but people are already doing these things. The problem seems to be that gamers still buy most of their games from big distributors. In other words, mass marketing Works, just like in any other industry. So I think a realistic attitude would be to accept this as a fact of life, write better quality games for the discerning few who will buy them, get used to making less money and having more freedom, and quit whining about what the majority does.
A couple months ago on Slashdot there was a story about a concrete and steel house in Florida whose owner claimed it was hurricane-proof. I wonder if he had a chance to find out?
Measles? Is this the same planet I grew up on? I had the measles when I was a kid. So did my sister. So did just about every kid we knew. Maybe this is a more dangerous strain, I don't know, but raising an alarm for something that has killed 5 people in Indonesia seems kind of idiotic when you stop and consider everyday life. In the USA about 50 people a day get killed by drunk drivers, 10 drown, 5 are accidentally shot, and 1 gets killed by farm machinery, to name but a few deadly events that happen so often they aren't news.
Too bad the guy with measles didn't disappear in Aruba, or pretend to be kidnapped to get out of his wedding. Then we'd be talking hot story!
I have to laugh when people talk about treating virtual game items as property. Even law professors are venturing into this lunacy. Reduced to its fundamentals, virtual "property" in a game world is just an elaborate method of scoring. Your game character has 12 million gold pieces, a +3 Flaming Sword and a Ring of Invisibility. The Dallas Cowboys have 18 points, 11 first downs and 96 yards rushing. They are all just measurements of game state and game events. They aren't "property" and nobody "owns" them.
The fact that somebody is willing to pay someone else to play a game doesn't turn the results into property. For more than a century professional athletes have been paid to produce game scores, and the scores themselves have never been treated as property. Why start now?
Maybe the problem is that game world scoring is metaphorical. If the word "cows" were used instead of "points" in football, would people in the legal profession actually be trying to treat football scores like herds of cattle? I would expect that someone with the brains to get through law school would be able to get past a metaphor and see it for what it is. Or maybe I'm the one living in a fantasy world.
I wonder the same thing. On the surface it looks like all he did was cheat in a game. The article uses words like "unscrupulous" and "unfair," but doesn't anything about criminal charges.
How well I remember my own homegrown BBS, Tomb of the Unknown Modem. Written in scratch from Turbo Pascal, it had 10 user-administered message boards and online games. It automatically reused disk space from deleted messages -- a necessity because the 2MHz machine it ran on had two 360K floppies and NO HARD DRIVE. Ran it for 2 years.
The headline could read, "Music Copyrights a Threat to Recordable Media and P2P Networks." It all depends on what you take as a given. Music copyrights were a good way for some people to make money from 20th Century technology, but that doesn't mean they should determine the evolution of 21st Century technology.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been growing a Mystery Bulge for years. No matter how much I sit in front of my computer drinking pop, it just keeps getting bigger.
I know it's a hoax too, and I'm sorry to nitpick, but they don't claim the device has 1Tb of RAM, they say 256Mb of RAM and 1Tb of solid-state mass storage (shown in the screenshots as disk space). This wouldn't violate the Windows RAM limit.
Haven't read the debunking yet, but what made me doubtful was the Photoshopped look of the component labeling.
In another article on this, a record company spokesman is quoted:
"We're disappointed they won't accept the umpire's decision. It can't be fair to build a business on somebody else's work," he said.
I'm not a doctor and I don't play one on TV, but I know Unbelievably Blatant Hypocrisy when I hear it.
The Vanport Flood of 1948 provides a more recent example of a lost city. Vanport was the second largest city in Oregon at that time, with 50,000 residents. The entire town was washed away when a dike holding back the Columbia River broke. The town was never rebuilt but eventually became an industrial area.
My bet is that most of the totally devastated parts of New Orleans will go the same route. According to CNN last night, 90% of the evacuees they talked to in Houston said they did not intend to return home. Sometimes there's no point.
Fools! They fail to understand that a supernova is caused by shock waves emitted when the turtle at the bottom of the stack of turtles that make up the universe is squashed by all the turtles above it. As new turtles come into being at the top of the stack, their weight eventually crushes the bottom turtle, causing the whole stack to drop jarringly. The resulting compression wave is felt by all the turtles, and sometimes causes the familiar flash of light mistakenly interpreted as a stellar explosion. Stars can't "explode" because they are merely holes in the firmament. Whoever heard of a hole exploding! Such foolishness!
Instead of defending systems like Kazaa by arguing whether they breach copyright law, I would like to see more direct attacks on the law itself. Modern copyright law is "right" only because it is the law, not because it inherently has any real moral footing. That's what I think should be attacked.
I personally download and share a lot of old time radio shows from the 1940s and earlier. Most of these shows were never intended for rebroadcast or resale, let alone 60 years later, and were not preserved by any conscious effort on the part of the creators or the copyright holders. Most of the material has survived through the efforts of people like radio station engineers and hobbyists, who saved the transcription discs because of personal interest. They have kept the entertainment of that era alive for decades by making, trading, and often selling copies (illegally!!).
The 1998 Bono Act, which retroactively restored copyright protection to all audio recordings made before 1972, makes "pirates" of these people. Paradoxically, it gives the current copyright holders, who often did nothing whatsoever to preserve the material, the legal grounds to swoop in and attack those who did. Even the earliest wax cylinder recordings made by Thomas Edison in the 1890s will remain under copyright until the year 2067. This isn't right, and I think it would be better in the long run to attack the legislation by refusing to obey it, rather than by concocting elaborate technical arguments. The best argument I can think of is that copyright law can't be valid in cases where it simply doesn't produce justice. I doubt whether that would fly in court, but there might be someone out there who could present it in different terms. For example, could a case be made that by arbitrarily removing material from the public domain Congress breached a contract with the citizens when it passed the Bono Act, and therefore the law itself is void?
How's this for perspective? What kind of company do you think Microsoft would be today if Gates and Ballmer had been born and educated in India or China? What kind of computer geek hiring pool would they have had available to build the company up during their boom years? Do they owe the U.S. anything more than corporate taxes? I say yes, they do. They owe their very existence to the place and culture they grew up in. Instead of copping out with the Everybody-Does-It argument they should be using their business and innovation skills to find ways to keep as many jobs in America as possible, instead of selling them to the lowest bidder.
Their earlier DMCA attempt was bad enough, but this is too much. I own one Lexmark printer and three HPs. The Lexmark is now in a Hefty bag in my garbage can, and will be replaced tomorrow by another HP. I will NEVER buy another Lexmark product for the rest of my life.
For getting a Fark headline accepted on a Slashdot story!
They probably had plans to test these things somewhere like Iraq, but this situation is even better. Since the feds have fallen down on their job of handling this sort of large-scale problem, they're getting ready to perform the charade of blaming looters and rioters for everything that went wrong, just like they've been blaming terrorists for everything else. Going in waving a big stick is part of that performance, and using it on a few civilians is the perfect "shock and awe" gesture. Bush's zero-tolerance right-wing supporters will be cheering, and ordinary citizens will have one more reason to shy away from any sort of political action that the government might not approve.
Things like water cannons and riot gear are comprehensible threats to protesters, but when the government starts using spooky technology to bring a whole crowd to its knees, genuine sixties-like political unrest will cease to be possible in this country, no matter how appropriate it might eventually become. That's when America will cease to be a "free" country. Because if people are afraid to use their supposed freedoms then they no longer really have them.
The point is, the current administration can do nothing right
Wait, I think you've put your finger on it.
Balan noted that the application helps to "level the playing field" for small and medium-sized businesses
Because nobody knows the "level playing field" concept like Microsoft!
I read the article but I still don't get what it means to launch something in a particular country if it's on the Web.
Jeez, we gotta get a cooler name for our galaxy. The Zornax Spiral or something. Anything.
Sounds good, but people are already doing these things. The problem seems to be that gamers still buy most of their games from big distributors. In other words, mass marketing Works, just like in any other industry. So I think a realistic attitude would be to accept this as a fact of life, write better quality games for the discerning few who will buy them, get used to making less money and having more freedom, and quit whining about what the majority does.
A couple months ago on Slashdot there was a story about a concrete and steel house in Florida whose owner claimed it was hurricane-proof. I wonder if he had a chance to find out?
Diabl0 says his worms "spread only for money"
If he ends up in prison he'll be spreading for different reasons.
Measles? Is this the same planet I grew up on? I had the measles when I was a kid. So did my sister. So did just about every kid we knew. Maybe this is a more dangerous strain, I don't know, but raising an alarm for something that has killed 5 people in Indonesia seems kind of idiotic when you stop and consider everyday life. In the USA about 50 people a day get killed by drunk drivers, 10 drown, 5 are accidentally shot, and 1 gets killed by farm machinery, to name but a few deadly events that happen so often they aren't news.
Too bad the guy with measles didn't disappear in Aruba, or pretend to be kidnapped to get out of his wedding. Then we'd be talking hot story!
I wonder if they will be tried in Morocco or Turkey, and whether either country will demonstrate the "ChopYour" and "HandsOff" worms on them.
I have to laugh when people talk about treating virtual game items as property. Even law professors are venturing into this lunacy. Reduced to its fundamentals, virtual "property" in a game world is just an elaborate method of scoring. Your game character has 12 million gold pieces, a +3 Flaming Sword and a Ring of Invisibility. The Dallas Cowboys have 18 points, 11 first downs and 96 yards rushing. They are all just measurements of game state and game events. They aren't "property" and nobody "owns" them.
The fact that somebody is willing to pay someone else to play a game doesn't turn the results into property. For more than a century professional athletes have been paid to produce game scores, and the scores themselves have never been treated as property. Why start now?
Maybe the problem is that game world scoring is metaphorical. If the word "cows" were used instead of "points" in football, would people in the legal profession actually be trying to treat football scores like herds of cattle? I would expect that someone with the brains to get through law school would be able to get past a metaphor and see it for what it is. Or maybe I'm the one living in a fantasy world.
I wonder the same thing. On the surface it looks like all he did was cheat in a game. The article uses words like "unscrupulous" and "unfair," but doesn't anything about criminal charges.
How well I remember my own homegrown BBS, Tomb of the Unknown Modem. Written in scratch from Turbo Pascal, it had 10 user-administered message boards and online games. It automatically reused disk space from deleted messages -- a necessity because the 2MHz machine it ran on had two 360K floppies and NO HARD DRIVE. Ran it for 2 years.
With so many tech companies giving their employees free beverages, it was inevitable.
The headline could read, "Music Copyrights a Threat to Recordable Media and P2P Networks." It all depends on what you take as a given. Music copyrights were a good way for some people to make money from 20th Century technology, but that doesn't mean they should determine the evolution of 21st Century technology.
But the whole concept of IP seems like legalizing assault and battery to create a market for bodyguards.