My -2 "flamebait" (-2 it's so bad?!?!?) that started this is a bit terse, but a well-reasoned description of what's going on. This nonsentient reply is given a plus one?!?!?
Some of those posters are right. When you disagree with the prevailing "wisdom" of poverty-stricken, theft-oriented students who run the show around here, they do nail you. And there is nothing in this paragraph that is inaccurate or not applicable to this topic, either. Go figure.
I envision some 19 year old sitting in his college dorm thinking he's some intellectual king of the world, unable to separate his emotional attachment to an issue (pweeze don't take away my hundreds of dollars of fwee music) and converts it into an auto-adaption mental kit bearing no resemblence to good, or even functional understanding of actual reasoned discourse.
> "Burn-Proof CDs" is NOT illegal. However, it
> also is not illegal to publish programs to get
> around these protections.
"Publish"? For cable descramblers, it is illegal to sell them but it is not illegal to make one yourself. Are you sure it woldn't be illegal to publish one, as opposed to write one yourself?
> Already we see NDAs, restrictive service
> agreements, and secrets creeping into mainstream activities.
Been around for a long time in other industries.
> Commercial law that overrules the common law
> practices of accepted usage ignores the fact
> that business is only a means to achieve social
> outcomes and not just a scam to siphon money
> from silly sharemarket speculators.
Business, contrary to popular socialist belief, does not exist as a means to achieve social outcomes. It is the consensual activities of groups of people, using only their own property, thus deriving directly from freedom of person, freedom of association, and freedom to own property (not just nominally, but to do with it what you wish.)
These associations (businesses) are the livelihood of the people involved. As such, stealing their product is no less a crime than stealing bread.
Philosophers have long talked about the morality of stealing a loaf of bread if you're starving. You'll have a very hard time arguing some poor person in a third world country is in imminent danger of dying if they don't get their fix of Britney for their CD player, and soon.
I'll never forget when I stepped off the plane in the Netherlands. Full frontal nudity of women AND men on broadcast, government-owned channels. Porn of every type. Drugs legal or quasi-legal.
But on the TV, they would chop out violence that would easily make it into broadcast TV in the US. Like when Arnie grabs that innocent cop in t2 in the parking structure and throws him into the post, knocking him out with a crack. Or when the T1000 slams that heavy hanging thing into his head again and again. Not chopped in US broadcast, chopped there.
Can the US, or if it can, does it extradite people to other countries for "crimes" that could not be "crimes" in the US due to constitutional protection?
What about crimes that could be made illegal here, but are currently legal?
Sorry, Mr. Null (of Null modem fame.) Prior art goes back to the Post Office. Message packets, routing nodes, booster relays (fresh horses on the Pony Express), node and path breakdown rerouting tolerance, scalability. It's all in there.
"Yup," said Gus. "That same little brother of mine threw away his blue key card in Might and Magic six-hundred-and-twelve, and couldn't get into the space ship. Hadda reverse-engineer the backpack storage codes until I found the right one so he could get into the spaceship for the endgame. Change one thing in the backpack, save, compare files for deltas, then start plugging in different numbers and see what popped up in the backpack, until the right thing appeared. Leather whip or sonic tiara, anyone?"
If someone were to rush into the houses of any of you and scan your computers and CD's you've burned, how many songs were ones you legitimately "fair used", and how many were thefts over the Internet, or from someone else's CD burner at work or school?
I rest my case. "Fair use" is and always has been far more of a cover for stealing songs than it has been for legitimate copying. All of a sudden, all these people are making CD copies for work. Uhhh, ok.
> . I think there's a version called the SpaceWriter.
An earlier version of something like this didn't move itself. You would turn your head, sweeping your gaze by it, and you would see a message stamped out in the air.
A first person shooter wouldn't gain much, but adventure games would be fantastic on such a thing.
Imagine D&D with characters about the relative size of a pewter^H^H^H^H^H^Hcheap plastic casting standing in the foyer of a castle, with stone stairs going everywhere....
Many video game systems, especially older ones, had custom hardware to handle the movement of sprites. They were not a purely software phenomnenameneomenon. You had your background, and you had your sprites, and HW handled them. Modern ones based on a normal PC architecture with a 3D card probably don't have this.
Texas Instruments had a rotating mirror system similar to this ten years ago. Is this derived from that, or did TI just drop the ball?
Ehh, TI also has that high-res little TV device with a million miniature mirros on it, that projects a beautiful, clear picture on a wall, viewable from any angle because it's just a projection, no funky screen required.
"Ehh, I remember those days," says Gus, the old prospector. "Back then, my little brother had a special floppy drive that allowed him to duplicate Atari 400 and 800 games. See, those official Apple floppies could read from some sectors, but couldn't write to them."
Gus spit a chaw of tobbaccy at the fire, but it missed, and by an embarrassingly large margin, too. He noticed a scorpion and flipped it into the fire with his boot. "That allowed copy protection. Even worse, some companies manufactured floppies with a certain portion of the floppy damaged. Programs would try to write to that portion, and if they could change the value, the program knew it was a copy and not the original."
Gus leaned back on his log and sighed. Ahh, those were the days. Suddenly, someone warped in next to him. "I'm a from a slashdot article from three weeks in the future. What's all this efficient sorting stuff?"
"Well, let me tell you," started Gus. "Back in my day, we couldn't just load every name in the US into a RAM array and bubble sort it in a fraction of a second. We couldn't just load the complete works of Shakespeare into Word and control-F to find out just what a piece of work man is."
Gus pinched another load of shred. "You analyze the search string, see? And create this jump-ahead table based on each character in it, see? You know, a Napster programming punk asked me about this just last week. Said his servers were crushed under the load of stopping certain search strings. What a great return to the Golden Age for a brief moment, if you ask me."
My god! All of $9.95 for the whole season! MY GOD! The evils of capitalism! They are ripping us off!
And to pay another $20+ for the full version of Real Player, maybe, OMFG! NO! Jesus H. Christ! I haven't been this depressed since Chris Farley died. I haven't been this sad since Loni Anderson had breast implant removal^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^ Hbreast reduction surgery.
Nah, then in short order, recalcitrant hw manufacturere would sell server lite's at normal PC prices, like "home user" SGI workstations, Sun workstations, LISP workstations, etc. etc. etc.
Of course, even that is thinking too much. It will just be a normal PC without the copy protection.
Anybody who doesn't want to live that way can continue in their current, vastly limited form. I have no problem with that; that is their business. I am no democrat, republican, or religious believer; I wouldn't force my views on them. Would you?
Exactly! The reason I gave up my Mac and bought a PC was games -- I can do surfing, word processing, spreadsheets equally as well on either.
I have no intention of going to Linux because it doesn't have the games.
It should be interesting to see if Microsoft tries to squash this either through legal action, or by rapid changing of their direct x stuff combined with payments to game companies to get them to quickly adopt the new standards.
...not that they try to maintain control over the market by creating and changing API's all the time to make porting to different platforms difficult. No, I am sure that is just a side effect of their constant attention to being leaders in technical development. In fact, I think I must be imagining it. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.
Slashdot Mirror
My -2 "flamebait" (-2 it's so bad?!?!?) that started this is a bit terse, but a well-reasoned description of what's going on. This nonsentient reply is given a plus one?!?!?
Some of those posters are right. When you disagree with the prevailing "wisdom" of poverty-stricken, theft-oriented students who run the show around here, they do nail you. And there is nothing in this paragraph that is inaccurate or not applicable to this topic, either. Go figure.
I envision some 19 year old sitting in his college dorm thinking he's some intellectual king of the world, unable to separate his emotional attachment to an issue (pweeze don't take away my hundreds of dollars of fwee music) and converts it into an auto-adaption mental kit bearing no resemblence to good, or even functional understanding of actual reasoned discourse.
> "Burn-Proof CDs" is NOT illegal. However, it
> also is not illegal to publish programs to get
> around these protections.
"Publish"? For cable descramblers, it is illegal to sell them but it is not illegal to make one yourself. Are you sure it woldn't be illegal to publish one, as opposed to write one yourself?
> Already we see NDAs, restrictive service
> agreements, and secrets creeping into mainstream activities.
Been around for a long time in other industries.
> Commercial law that overrules the common law
> practices of accepted usage ignores the fact
> that business is only a means to achieve social
> outcomes and not just a scam to siphon money
> from silly sharemarket speculators.
Business, contrary to popular socialist belief, does not exist as a means to achieve social outcomes. It is the consensual activities of groups of people, using only their own property, thus deriving directly from freedom of person, freedom of association, and freedom to own property (not just nominally, but to do with it what you wish.)
These associations (businesses) are the livelihood of the people involved. As such, stealing their product is no less a crime than stealing bread.
Philosophers have long talked about the morality of stealing a loaf of bread if you're starving. You'll have a very hard time arguing some poor person in a third world country is in imminent danger of dying if they don't get their fix of Britney for their CD player, and soon.
> Most countries are anal about certain things.
I'll never forget when I stepped off the plane in the Netherlands. Full frontal nudity of women AND men on broadcast, government-owned channels. Porn of every type. Drugs legal or quasi-legal.
But on the TV, they would chop out violence that would easily make it into broadcast TV in the US. Like when Arnie grabs that innocent cop in t2 in the parking structure and throws him into the post, knocking him out with a crack. Or when the T1000 slams that heavy hanging thing into his head again and again. Not chopped in US broadcast, chopped there.
Whoo hoo! I live in the land of the, umm, free.
Can the US, or if it can, does it extradite people to other countries for "crimes" that could not be "crimes" in the US due to constitutional protection?
What about crimes that could be made illegal here, but are currently legal?
Sorry, Mr. Null (of Null modem fame.) Prior art goes back to the Post Office. Message packets, routing nodes, booster relays (fresh horses on the Pony Express), node and path breakdown rerouting tolerance, scalability. It's all in there.
Actually, it's probably 8-10,000 years old.
> hacking game save files
"Yup," said Gus. "That same little brother of mine threw away his blue key card in Might and Magic six-hundred-and-twelve, and couldn't get into the space ship. Hadda reverse-engineer the backpack storage codes until I found the right one so he could get into the spaceship for the endgame. Change one thing in the backpack, save, compare files for deltas, then start plugging in different numbers and see what popped up in the backpack, until the right thing appeared. Leather whip or sonic tiara, anyone?"
And uploading them via Napster is not.
If someone were to rush into the houses of any of you and scan your computers and CD's you've burned, how many songs were ones you legitimately "fair used", and how many were thefts over the Internet, or from someone else's CD burner at work or school?
I rest my case. "Fair use" is and always has been far more of a cover for stealing songs than it has been for legitimate copying. All of a sudden, all these people are making CD copies for work. Uhhh, ok.
I'm glad I chose not to go to the Colorado School of Paperwork.
Ugh, all that high tech just to play an illogical air-flight simulator in space?!?!?
> . I think there's a version called the SpaceWriter.
An earlier version of something like this didn't move itself. You would turn your head, sweeping your gaze by it, and you would see a message stamped out in the air.
A first person shooter wouldn't gain much, but adventure games would be fantastic on such a thing.
Imagine D&D with characters about the relative size of a pewter^H^H^H^H^H^Hcheap plastic casting standing in the foyer of a castle, with stone stairs going everywhere....
Many video game systems, especially older ones, had custom hardware to handle the movement of sprites. They were not a purely software phenomnenameneomenon. You had your background, and you had your sprites, and HW handled them. Modern ones based on a normal PC architecture with a 3D card probably don't have this.
Ehh, keep your pants on. Remember that the images are insubstantial.
You're still going to need a 3D video recorder, i.e. a thousand cameras in a sphere around the fuc^H^H^Hactors.
Peeking around the corner by looking in the other side of this device, instead of peeking your marine around the corner.
Checking what monster is just beyond the door in single player mode.
Shame on you! For shame!
Texas Instruments had a rotating mirror system similar to this ten years ago. Is this derived from that, or did TI just drop the ball?
Ehh, TI also has that high-res little TV device with a million miniature mirros on it, that projects a beautiful, clear picture on a wall, viewable from any angle because it's just a projection, no funky screen required.
Is that ever going to happen?
> ...Anonymously keeping spelling and grammar
> nazis honest for over 3 years
Shouldn't "nazis" be capitalized?
"Ehh, I remember those days," says Gus, the old prospector. "Back then, my little brother had a special floppy drive that allowed him to duplicate Atari 400 and 800 games. See, those official Apple floppies could read from some sectors, but couldn't write to them."
Gus spit a chaw of tobbaccy at the fire, but it missed, and by an embarrassingly large margin, too. He noticed a scorpion and flipped it into the fire with his boot. "That allowed copy protection. Even worse, some companies manufactured floppies with a certain portion of the floppy damaged. Programs would try to write to that portion, and if they could change the value, the program knew it was a copy and not the original."
Gus leaned back on his log and sighed. Ahh, those were the days. Suddenly, someone warped in next to him. "I'm a from a slashdot article from three weeks in the future. What's all this efficient sorting stuff?"
"Well, let me tell you," started Gus. "Back in my day, we couldn't just load every name in the US into a RAM array and bubble sort it in a fraction of a second. We couldn't just load the complete works of Shakespeare into Word and control-F to find out just what a piece of work man is."
Gus pinched another load of shred. "You analyze the search string, see? And create this jump-ahead table based on each character in it, see? You know, a Napster programming punk asked me about this just last week. Said his servers were crushed under the load of stopping certain search strings. What a great return to the Golden Age for a brief moment, if you ask me."
> ...the consumers have chosen to use Windows
> because it is the easiest consumer OS to use
Actually, it's still pretty hideous compared to a Mac, and I'm a Mac die-hard who died a couple of years ago and bought Wintel at home for the games.
What you meant to say was that it's acceptably easy to use and much cheaper than a Mac, and has lots more games than a Mac.
My god! All of $9.95 for the whole season! MY GOD! The evils of capitalism! They are ripping us off!
^ Hbreast reduction surgery.
And to pay another $20+ for the full version of Real Player, maybe, OMFG! NO! Jesus H. Christ! I haven't been this depressed since Chris Farley died. I haven't been this sad since Loni Anderson had breast implant removal^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
Nah, then in short order, recalcitrant hw manufacturere would sell server lite's at normal PC prices, like "home user" SGI workstations, Sun workstations, LISP workstations, etc. etc. etc.
Of course, even that is thinking too much. It will just be a normal PC without the copy protection.
My point was, of course, that plugging this stuff into computers gave much better understanding of these things than "hand analysis" would do.
Anybody who doesn't want to live that way can continue in their current, vastly limited form. I have no problem with that; that is their business. I am no democrat, republican, or religious believer; I wouldn't force my views on them. Would you?
Exactly! The reason I gave up my Mac and bought a PC was games -- I can do surfing, word processing, spreadsheets equally as well on either.
I have no intention of going to Linux because it doesn't have the games.
It should be interesting to see if Microsoft tries to squash this either through legal action, or by rapid changing of their direct x stuff combined with payments to game companies to get them to quickly adopt the new standards.
...not that they try to maintain control over the market by creating and changing API's all the time to make porting to different platforms difficult. No, I am sure that is just a side effect of their constant attention to being leaders in technical development. In fact, I think I must be imagining it. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.