What a horrible ruling. Or rather, a horrible prescident. Up until this point the "distribution" clause in copyright disputes has been a non-issue. Who goes after a distributer of legally produced goods? Why care? The first sale doctorine effectively makes this a non-issue, as once you've sold it once it is legally out of the copyright holder's hands. The copywrited work becomes an object which is owned and treated as usual with the exception of a lack of duplication rights.
But imports? Aha! If you own the copyright to a movie, and you sell it in a different territory, legally that movie can't be imported into the US and sold because the person in the US does not have distribution rights. Furthermore, if a company were so inclined, the primary company could make the copy overseas (legally) and import it (legally) but have legal sheilding from the first sale doctorine (I.E. no reselling that movie on Ebay). This overseas manufacturing is not only common, but totally normal. Under this interpretation of the law, NO used sales should be legal.
On the other hand, a physical PSP should not fall under copyright laws at all. There is basically no expressive quality in the unit, as it is merely a player of other media. Where does IP law fit at all?
IP law isn't just "the creators get to say whatever happens to something." There are specific rights. Know which rights the content creators actually have, and you know which rights you have as a consumer.
Voting with your wallet is exactly what the companies have convinced the government to restrict. They're intentionally segmenting the market, allowing them to price discriminate upon ability to pay. You've got the money, so you should pay a lot more. In this case, more than what would be charged if someone bought it somewhere else, and sold it again in your territory at a profit for them. A free market restricts this sort of gouging to reasonable levels, but an artificially segmented market, especially when segmented by the force of government guns, offers no protection and choice to the consumer.
When the government says you can't do something, it's time to stop voting with your wallets and start voting with your votes.
Re:This guy has staying power!
on
An Ode To Al
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"A local boy kicked me in the butt last week. I just smiled at him and I turned the other cheek. I really don't care in fact I wish him well. Because I'll be laughing my head off while he's burning in hell." - Amish Paradise
"I just can't understand it Why won't you return my phone calls Are you still mad I gave a Mohawk to your cat If you'd just say the word I'm certain that our love would last forever and ever Or are you too dumb to realize that" - Melanie
"Since you've been gone Well, it feels like I'm getting tetanus shots every day Since you've been gone It's like I've got an ice cream headache that won't go away Ever since that day you left me I've been so miserable, my dear I feel almost as bad as I did When you were still here" - Since You've Been Gone
"Well, it's Christmas at Ground Zero There's panic in the crowd We can dodge debris while we trim the tree Underneath a mushroom cloud
Oh, it's Christmas at Ground Zero And if the radiation level's okay I'll go out with you and see the all new Mutations on New Year's Day" - Christmas at ground zero
"You make me wanna hang out in a trailer park Then take my hamster to the beach You make me wanna do my laundry in the dark And use a recommended bleach When I'm with you I don't know whether I should study neurosurgery or go to see the Care Bears movie" - You Make Me
And, of course, no discussion of Weird Al would be complete without bringing up Tom Leher, so a few quotes from Al's pop culture predescessor
"Oh, soon we'll be out amid the cold world's strife. Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life. " - Bright College Days
"On Christmas Day you can't get sore, Your fellow man you must adore, There's time to rob him all the more The other three hundred and sixty-four." - A Christmas Carol
"Our captain has a handicap to cope with, sad to tell. He's from Georgia, and he doesn't speak the language very well." - It makes a fella proud to be a Soldier
"And we will all bake together when we bake. There'll be nobody present at the wake. With complete participation In that grand incineration, Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak." - We Will All Go Together When We Go
"Egypt's gonna get one too, Just to use on you know who. So Israel's getting tense. Wants one in self defense. "The Lord's our shepherd," says the psalm, But just in case, we better get a bomb." - Who's next?
Hmm... giving publishers the "flexibility" to create their own achievements systems, which none of the launch titles will feature.
In other words, it's all up to the developers what they want to do, because Sony isn't going to provide any help. The nice thing about 360 achievements is that you can figure out your trigger conditions, call an API once, and be done. Anyone can add achievements to their game with relatively little effort (a huge improvement from Xbox 1).
On the other end, you have the completely open ended system. You decide the trigger conditions, as usual. You implement their storage. You implement their display. You manage any sort of in-game rewards for these. You add more screens and menu options to your flow. You debug. Not Easy. And even then, other players won't be able to see it.
I can't imagine most game developers seeing the tradeoff and deciding that it is worth it. They'll just keep whatever in-game rewards system they have deemed useful over the years.
Microsoft really learned one thing from the Xbox 1... and that is if you want something from the developer, you have to make it really, really simple to do. Or else it isn't worth their development dollars to do it. MS gets this now. We'll see about Sony.
The problem isn't that games lack intricate plot. The fact of the matter is that interesting story developments come unexpectedly, and unexpected behaviors have a habit of making games unpredictable and therefore unplayable. Likewise, the most gripping of plot elements revolve around tortured interpersonal decision making. Unfortunatley, not only can you not enforce those decisions on the player, most of those decisions are completely impossible to simulate on a d-pad.
When working with games, you have to work within the medium. You wouldn't go to a stage production and complain that the special effects are weak.
That having been said, it is possible to translate a property from one medium to the other. They may not have enough plot right out of the box, but that's why you pay writers. Halo is essentially an amalgomation of Ridley Scott and Paul Verhoeven movies: Aliens, Starship Troopers, a little Robocop. They took what would work in the medium, stripped out the rest, filled in all of the holes with gameplay goodness, and polished, polished, polished. Just make Master Chief some sort of tortured semi robotic slave hero, out to save the universe because he's being forced to. Throw in a bunch of conflicted compatriots, a callously killing race of aliens which they're in some strange way saving from The Flood (which, in turn, is being saved from the Halo destruction of all things), and you have the basis for a plot.
So far most game movies have been turds. But considering the plot they had decided to shoot, and the skill with which they were shot, I'd be surprised if any of those directors could create something that wasn't terrible.
You can still get Indy et all cases at computer swap meets for around 50 bucks. Unfortunately, they come with some useless chips and circuit boards inside that you'll have to remove.
Hi Slashdot. A friend of mine has been hitting on me for a few weeks now. And while I like him, his advances makes me uncomfortable. How do I tell him that I don't want a relationship, without damaging the friendship that we share?
Yo Slashdot. I've got this yellowish reddish spot. It's about the size of a quarter, and it's getting bigger. And it's all puffy and stuff. It's right on the back of my knee, but it doesn't really hurt. Should I be worried?
Hello. I'm going to Bill's house for a party, so I thought I'd bring a bottle of Castello di Borghese 71. But dear Muffy says that Bill just returned form the Promise clinic, and has to stay clean. What else should I bring to a party instead of wine? A dog or something?
I have a 1989 chevy K2500 that has a vacuum problem. truck runs very rough at idle. has a new egr valve that is working properly, new egr solenoid, all vacuum lines are good, everything is working like it is supposed to except that i am getting almost twice the vacuum to the egr than it is supposed to get. has anyone seen this problem before or any tips? thanks alot!
There is an interesting fact that people seem to forget. Cars are the clean option. Let me explain. At the end of the 19th century, all major cities were covered in horse shit. It was everywhere. You couldn't step on the street without stepping in maneure. It was a health nightmare, and was responsible for a good amount of the lower life expectancy back then.
Then cars came along. Cars did not eat or poop. They didn't chew through street lamp poles while idle or spread disease amongst eachother. Cars, in fact, were one of the most environmentally sound technologies to come out of the time.
Fast forward 100 years, and we have asthma epidemics. The global temperature is rising little by little. The ice caps are melting. But we don't have to worry about massive disease pandemics spread by animal feces and the rats that live off of it. We have a transportation source that produces less C02 (and a lot less methane) per trip than having one horse per person would, and it doesn't impinge burden on the world's food supply. Again, cars are the clean option.
If we manage our technology like farmers, rotating the impact we have on the environment with every new technological generation, there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to continue indefinitely. Or at least there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to continue for long enough to learn how to clean up this rock.
All environmental projections assume we're going to continue doing exactly what we're doing indefinitely. And, of course, under those circumstances we'll eventually drain the resources, build up a mountain of a particular toxin, and die. In the 1900's it was biologically active fly bait. At the end of 2000 it is C02. 100 years from now (hopefully) it will be something else. As long as we keep looking for that something else, and keep giving the damaged parts of the environment time to recover, we should be OK.
While something like that would be cool I suspect the percentage of people who'd make use of a 'roaming profile' is very small. I think the existing system works really well and everyone seems happy with it.
While the number of users who would make use of a roamable profile is slim, Microsoft seems committed to the idea. Hence, how you can bring your profile with you on a 50 dollar memory card. MS also seems married to the idea of tying a profile to a controller, as they tried to do with the memory cards on the Xbox 1 and the per-controller profile logins on the Xbox 360. Unfortunately, on an implementation side the per-controller profile logins is really messy, with all sorts of special cases to deal with. While the average end-user may be ok with the experience, that part of the system seems like a disproportionate amount of work for the developer.
What if the profile and storage space were built into the controller, taking advantage of the USB chain? You could bring your profile with you by simply bringing your controller. No need to log in... The controller is your login and game saves (downloads would go to your hard drive). And with 1GB USB memory cards as low as 15 dollars retail, it shouldn't add much to the cost of an already well-padded controller.
As for network storage, this seems close enough to be viable, especially with local mirroring. System outages like the one that Live experienced are not endemic to all service providers. Though as a gamer I too wouldn't want to be in the first batch of guinea pigs.
The current system on the 360 is already as good as it's going to get - if the battery is flat the game auto-pauses, and plugging in the cord allows you continue playing and re-charges the controller while you play. Something like induction mat charging for PDA's and phones is worth while exploring, but it makes no sense for a controller as then you wouldn't be able to use it while it's charging.
I don't know if I agree here. If your charging system was invisible enough that you're recharging by default, you shouldn't get to the low battery point of needing to plug it in. Not plugging it in, and therefore running out of juice, is exactly the problem this would be trying to address. The Wii is operating on this principle... we'll see how well that goes.
If it's going to be wireless, we shouldn't have to keep plugging it in. I've switched back to wired controllers for most of my activities simply because the wireless ones always seem to be either plugged in anyway, or out of batteries and in need of plugging in.
I wouldn't recommend a charging mat now, as they're insanely expensive and deliver a low power curve. But in 5 or 6 years, maybe they will be worthwile options.
But what does the registration even have to do with foul language if you know the source? You HAVE the DNS registration information. The internet, being a large computer network, is completely tracable as to the source of transmissions. So you can write all of the rules that you want currently. Adding the burden of a pre-registration won't help catch anyone.
The original justification for a broadcast license is that the spectrum was sorely limited. When the spectrum was unlicensed, people broadcasted over eachother, tried jamming rival stations, etc. Online, there are no such limitations. And such, licensing makes no sense.
You can still regulate online content in your country through traditional legislation about what is morally applicable in the circumstance, etc. It may not work that well for pornography, but it has been OK on the most eggregious copyright infringement. If your country feels that none of your citizens should spread hate speech, put up a penalty for spreading hate speech. Don't force everyone to register as a non-hate speecher. That will lock your citizens out of the discourse without having a appreciable impact on what you're trying to ban.
Hardware HDR. Just give us a really broad palette to work with, and handle the HDR on-chip.
Profile login on a Sim card in the controller. The Xbox 1 had the right idea, but they milked the memory card price too much. Register your controller on the network by popping in a tiny / cheap sim card.
Network Storage. My web host offers 400 GB of storage and a ridiculous amount of bandwidth for not much more than a Live Gold account. Drop the hassle of memory cards, jump to Sim cards, and store the basic game info remotely.
Pad-based controller recharging.
Game Modding and user-created content. I don't know how this would happen, but it needs to happen.
Physics co-processor. There is enough particles bouncing these days that we should have some special purpose iron to help with the load.
If W3C wrote Internet Explorer and pushed it at you at every available opportunity, I would blame them for the whole kit and kaboodle.
The end-user experience for PDF's is that the PDF readers and writers are terrible. If the standards are usurped, we'll see different readers and writers. Hence, throw the bums out.
Not to harp on this too much, but clients of mine have used the official PDF creators in the past, and have had no end of trouble with them. They install funny, they upgrade incorrectly. The inline browser sometimes views correctly and sometimes does not. They always, always take up a ton of room. They slime all over everywhere in your system, like Real player.
We can make a better standard. If that standard winds up coming from Microsoft, then so be it. Adobe had their chance, and they've been doing a second rate job of it for years.
The one thing I really miss about Linux (besides Grep... and skill... and alt-get... and perl that works) is Kmail. I remember hearing from a developer a while back that the port to QT 4 on the 2.0 branch was going to allow for a Windows compatible version.
Does anybody know if this is still the plan? I'd love to move back to Koffice.
But you're looking at 200 million for the nuclear reactors on a barge. The estimated cost on a Nimitz class ACC is 4.5 billion. So for the cost of one of the listed aircraft carriers, you're getting 2,700 MW of power, rather than 200.
Of course, an aircraft carrier does a heck of a lot more than just generate power. But for the job of just generating power, I'd take a few of these.
The other reason why MySpace is popular is because the utility of the service is directly proportional to the number of people on it. I met a co-worker's sister the other day, and that night she sent me a MySpace friend request. I didn't hear anything through Tribe or Orkut because she wasn't on tribe and her brother (whom she found me through) wasn't on Orkut. So now that MySpace is dominant, it's nearly impossible for anyone else to break in. You don't go to another service because it has the features you're looking for, you'd go because all of your friends were on it.
It's like Instant Messaging. Jabber is clearly the superior standard on nearly every axis. But everyone you know is on AIM or Messenger. So you use the service that your friends are on, because the people on the service are the largest feature provided.
A vehicle can be super efficient when designed to take one person from point A to point B over smooth terrain. When you start adding requirements like carrying a family of people with 50 cubic feet of junk and an attached trailer over both smooth terrain and off road, your efficiency drops tremendously. [/obligatory car metaphor]
The more specifically you can narrow down the problem set you're trying to solve, the faster you can solve it. The more specific your tool, the better it will work on that problem.
Why is a high-end computer gaming rig thousands more than a comparable next-gen console? Because it's a lot less specific than a console. Why are GPU's so insanely good at crunching linear streams of parallel floating point operations? Because that's all they do.
Generally speaking, in business when you figure out in advance where the market is heading, you get a head start on all of your competitors putting yourself in a much better position to take advantage of the change. You do not, however, generally get to tax all transactions. I knew that online purchasing was going to take off years ago. Does that mean that I deserve to get paid once everyone else figured this out too?
Cisco figured this out ahead of time and positioned their product line to take advantage of the burgeoning communications infrastructure market. They deserve the financial success they've seen from this shrewd business accumen. They don't, however, deserve 5 dollars of every 50 I send to Comcast simply because they realized the obvious first.
Slashdot Mirror
What a horrible ruling. Or rather, a horrible prescident. Up until this point the "distribution" clause in copyright disputes has been a non-issue. Who goes after a distributer of legally produced goods? Why care? The first sale doctorine effectively makes this a non-issue, as once you've sold it once it is legally out of the copyright holder's hands. The copywrited work becomes an object which is owned and treated as usual with the exception of a lack of duplication rights.
But imports? Aha! If you own the copyright to a movie, and you sell it in a different territory, legally that movie can't be imported into the US and sold because the person in the US does not have distribution rights. Furthermore, if a company were so inclined, the primary company could make the copy overseas (legally) and import it (legally) but have legal sheilding from the first sale doctorine (I.E. no reselling that movie on Ebay). This overseas manufacturing is not only common, but totally normal. Under this interpretation of the law, NO used sales should be legal.
On the other hand, a physical PSP should not fall under copyright laws at all. There is basically no expressive quality in the unit, as it is merely a player of other media. Where does IP law fit at all?
IP law isn't just "the creators get to say whatever happens to something." There are specific rights. Know which rights the content creators actually have, and you know which rights you have as a consumer.
Voting with your wallet is exactly what the companies have convinced the government to restrict. They're intentionally segmenting the market, allowing them to price discriminate upon ability to pay. You've got the money, so you should pay a lot more. In this case, more than what would be charged if someone bought it somewhere else, and sold it again in your territory at a profit for them. A free market restricts this sort of gouging to reasonable levels, but an artificially segmented market, especially when segmented by the force of government guns, offers no protection and choice to the consumer.
When the government says you can't do something, it's time to stop voting with your wallets and start voting with your votes.
Let's see if you can tell where these are from:
fud, no, yes, rms, notfud
scam, slownewsday
yay, spam, spamhaus, haha
wikipedia, copyright
fud, notfud, monopoly
'glad to see the system is working well.
"A local boy kicked me in the butt last week.
I just smiled at him and I turned the other cheek.
I really don't care in fact I wish him well.
Because I'll be laughing my head off while he's burning in hell." - Amish Paradise
"I just can't understand it
Why won't you return my phone calls
Are you still mad I gave a Mohawk to your cat
If you'd just say the word
I'm certain that our love would last forever and ever
Or are you too dumb to realize that" - Melanie
"Since you've been gone
Well, it feels like I'm getting tetanus shots every day
Since you've been gone
It's like I've got an ice cream headache that won't go away
Ever since that day you left me
I've been so miserable, my dear
I feel almost as bad as I did
When you were still here" - Since You've Been Gone
"Well, it's Christmas at Ground Zero
There's panic in the crowd
We can dodge debris while we trim the tree
Underneath a mushroom cloud
Oh, it's Christmas at Ground Zero
And if the radiation level's okay
I'll go out with you and see the all new
Mutations on New Year's Day" - Christmas at ground zero
"You make me wanna hang out in a trailer park
Then take my hamster to the beach
You make me wanna do my laundry in the dark
And use a recommended bleach
When I'm with you I don't know whether I should study neurosurgery or go to see the Care Bears movie" - You Make Me
And, of course, no discussion of Weird Al would be complete without bringing up Tom Leher, so a few quotes from Al's pop culture predescessor
"Oh, soon we'll be out amid the cold world's strife.
Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life. " - Bright College Days
"On Christmas Day you can't get sore,
Your fellow man you must adore,
There's time to rob him all the more
The other three hundred and sixty-four." - A Christmas Carol
"Our captain has a handicap to cope with, sad to tell.
He's from Georgia, and he doesn't speak the language very well." - It makes a fella proud to be a Soldier
"And we will all bake together when we bake.
There'll be nobody present at the wake.
With complete participation
In that grand incineration,
Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak." - We Will All Go Together When We Go
"Egypt's gonna get one too,
Just to use on you know who.
So Israel's getting tense.
Wants one in self defense.
"The Lord's our shepherd," says the psalm,
But just in case, we better get a bomb." - Who's next?
Hmm... giving publishers the "flexibility" to create their own achievements systems, which none of the launch titles will feature.
In other words, it's all up to the developers what they want to do, because Sony isn't going to provide any help. The nice thing about 360 achievements is that you can figure out your trigger conditions, call an API once, and be done. Anyone can add achievements to their game with relatively little effort (a huge improvement from Xbox 1).
On the other end, you have the completely open ended system. You decide the trigger conditions, as usual. You implement their storage. You implement their display. You manage any sort of in-game rewards for these. You add more screens and menu options to your flow. You debug. Not Easy. And even then, other players won't be able to see it.
I can't imagine most game developers seeing the tradeoff and deciding that it is worth it. They'll just keep whatever in-game rewards system they have deemed useful over the years.
Microsoft really learned one thing from the Xbox 1... and that is if you want something from the developer, you have to make it really, really simple to do. Or else it isn't worth their development dollars to do it. MS gets this now. We'll see about Sony.
The problem isn't that games lack intricate plot. The fact of the matter is that interesting story developments come unexpectedly, and unexpected behaviors have a habit of making games unpredictable and therefore unplayable. Likewise, the most gripping of plot elements revolve around tortured interpersonal decision making. Unfortunatley, not only can you not enforce those decisions on the player, most of those decisions are completely impossible to simulate on a d-pad.
When working with games, you have to work within the medium. You wouldn't go to a stage production and complain that the special effects are weak.
That having been said, it is possible to translate a property from one medium to the other. They may not have enough plot right out of the box, but that's why you pay writers. Halo is essentially an amalgomation of Ridley Scott and Paul Verhoeven movies: Aliens, Starship Troopers, a little Robocop. They took what would work in the medium, stripped out the rest, filled in all of the holes with gameplay goodness, and polished, polished, polished. Just make Master Chief some sort of tortured semi robotic slave hero, out to save the universe because he's being forced to. Throw in a bunch of conflicted compatriots, a callously killing race of aliens which they're in some strange way saving from The Flood (which, in turn, is being saved from the Halo destruction of all things), and you have the basis for a plot.
So far most game movies have been turds. But considering the plot they had decided to shoot, and the skill with which they were shot, I'd be surprised if any of those directors could create something that wasn't terrible.
You can still get Indy et all cases at computer swap meets for around 50 bucks. Unfortunately, they come with some useless chips and circuit boards inside that you'll have to remove.
Hi Slashdot. A friend of mine has been hitting on me for a few weeks now. And while I like him, his advances makes me uncomfortable. How do I tell him that I don't want a relationship, without damaging the friendship that we share?
Yo Slashdot. I've got this yellowish reddish spot. It's about the size of a quarter, and it's getting bigger. And it's all puffy and stuff. It's right on the back of my knee, but it doesn't really hurt. Should I be worried?
Hello. I'm going to Bill's house for a party, so I thought I'd bring a bottle of Castello di Borghese 71. But dear Muffy says that Bill just returned form the Promise clinic, and has to stay clean. What else should I bring to a party instead of wine? A dog or something?
I have a 1989 chevy K2500 that has a vacuum problem. truck runs very rough at idle. has a new egr valve that is working properly, new egr solenoid, all vacuum lines are good, everything is working like it is supposed to except that i am getting almost twice the vacuum to the egr than it is supposed to get. has anyone seen this problem before or any tips? thanks alot!
There is an interesting fact that people seem to forget. Cars are the clean option. Let me explain. At the end of the 19th century, all major cities were covered in horse shit. It was everywhere. You couldn't step on the street without stepping in maneure. It was a health nightmare, and was responsible for a good amount of the lower life expectancy back then.
Then cars came along. Cars did not eat or poop. They didn't chew through street lamp poles while idle or spread disease amongst eachother. Cars, in fact, were one of the most environmentally sound technologies to come out of the time.
Fast forward 100 years, and we have asthma epidemics. The global temperature is rising little by little. The ice caps are melting. But we don't have to worry about massive disease pandemics spread by animal feces and the rats that live off of it. We have a transportation source that produces less C02 (and a lot less methane) per trip than having one horse per person would, and it doesn't impinge burden on the world's food supply. Again, cars are the clean option.
If we manage our technology like farmers, rotating the impact we have on the environment with every new technological generation, there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to continue indefinitely. Or at least there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to continue for long enough to learn how to clean up this rock.
All environmental projections assume we're going to continue doing exactly what we're doing indefinitely. And, of course, under those circumstances we'll eventually drain the resources, build up a mountain of a particular toxin, and die. In the 1900's it was biologically active fly bait. At the end of 2000 it is C02. 100 years from now (hopefully) it will be something else. As long as we keep looking for that something else, and keep giving the damaged parts of the environment time to recover, we should be OK.
In other words, cheer up emo kid.
You bring up some very good points.
While something like that would be cool I suspect the percentage of people who'd make use of a 'roaming profile' is very small. I think the existing system works really well and everyone seems happy with it.
While the number of users who would make use of a roamable profile is slim, Microsoft seems committed to the idea. Hence, how you can bring your profile with you on a 50 dollar memory card. MS also seems married to the idea of tying a profile to a controller, as they tried to do with the memory cards on the Xbox 1 and the per-controller profile logins on the Xbox 360. Unfortunately, on an implementation side the per-controller profile logins is really messy, with all sorts of special cases to deal with. While the average end-user may be ok with the experience, that part of the system seems like a disproportionate amount of work for the developer.
What if the profile and storage space were built into the controller, taking advantage of the USB chain? You could bring your profile with you by simply bringing your controller. No need to log in... The controller is your login and game saves (downloads would go to your hard drive). And with 1GB USB memory cards as low as 15 dollars retail, it shouldn't add much to the cost of an already well-padded controller.
As for network storage, this seems close enough to be viable, especially with local mirroring. System outages like the one that Live experienced are not endemic to all service providers. Though as a gamer I too wouldn't want to be in the first batch of guinea pigs.
The current system on the 360 is already as good as it's going to get - if the battery is flat the game auto-pauses, and plugging in the cord allows you continue playing and re-charges the controller while you play. Something like induction mat charging for PDA's and phones is worth while exploring, but it makes no sense for a controller as then you wouldn't be able to use it while it's charging.
I don't know if I agree here. If your charging system was invisible enough that you're recharging by default, you shouldn't get to the low battery point of needing to plug it in. Not plugging it in, and therefore running out of juice, is exactly the problem this would be trying to address. The Wii is operating on this principle... we'll see how well that goes.
If it's going to be wireless, we shouldn't have to keep plugging it in. I've switched back to wired controllers for most of my activities simply because the wireless ones always seem to be either plugged in anyway, or out of batteries and in need of plugging in.
I wouldn't recommend a charging mat now, as they're insanely expensive and deliver a low power curve. But in 5 or 6 years, maybe they will be worthwile options.
Is this the same German television that deified David Hasselhoff?
But what does the registration even have to do with foul language if you know the source? You HAVE the DNS registration information. The internet, being a large computer network, is completely tracable as to the source of transmissions. So you can write all of the rules that you want currently. Adding the burden of a pre-registration won't help catch anyone.
It's called a DNS registration. It clearly identifies you, your site, and (by domain choice) the broad purpose of the site.
And that should be good enough for anybody.
The original justification for a broadcast license is that the spectrum was sorely limited. When the spectrum was unlicensed, people broadcasted over eachother, tried jamming rival stations, etc. Online, there are no such limitations. And such, licensing makes no sense.
You can still regulate online content in your country through traditional legislation about what is morally applicable in the circumstance, etc. It may not work that well for pornography, but it has been OK on the most eggregious copyright infringement. If your country feels that none of your citizens should spread hate speech, put up a penalty for spreading hate speech. Don't force everyone to register as a non-hate speecher. That will lock your citizens out of the discourse without having a appreciable impact on what you're trying to ban.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. Not an HDR display, but HDR rendering tricks for traditional displays.
More details on Wikipedia.
Hardware HDR. Just give us a really broad palette to work with, and handle the HDR on-chip.
Profile login on a Sim card in the controller. The Xbox 1 had the right idea, but they milked the memory card price too much. Register your controller on the network by popping in a tiny / cheap sim card.
Network Storage. My web host offers 400 GB of storage and a ridiculous amount of bandwidth for not much more than a Live Gold account. Drop the hassle of memory cards, jump to Sim cards, and store the basic game info remotely.
Pad-based controller recharging.
Game Modding and user-created content. I don't know how this would happen, but it needs to happen.
Physics co-processor. There is enough particles bouncing these days that we should have some special purpose iron to help with the load.
If W3C wrote Internet Explorer and pushed it at you at every available opportunity, I would blame them for the whole kit and kaboodle.
The end-user experience for PDF's is that the PDF readers and writers are terrible. If the standards are usurped, we'll see different readers and writers. Hence, throw the bums out.
Not to harp on this too much, but clients of mine have used the official PDF creators in the past, and have had no end of trouble with them. They install funny, they upgrade incorrectly. The inline browser sometimes views correctly and sometimes does not. They always, always take up a ton of room. They slime all over everywhere in your system, like Real player.
We can make a better standard. If that standard winds up coming from Microsoft, then so be it. Adobe had their chance, and they've been doing a second rate job of it for years.
The one thing I really miss about Linux (besides Grep... and skill... and alt-get... and perl that works) is Kmail. I remember hearing from a developer a while back that the port to QT 4 on the 2.0 branch was going to allow for a Windows compatible version.
Does anybody know if this is still the plan? I'd love to move back to Koffice.
But you're looking at 200 million for the nuclear reactors on a barge. The estimated cost on a Nimitz class ACC is 4.5 billion. So for the cost of one of the listed aircraft carriers, you're getting 2,700 MW of power, rather than 200.
Of course, an aircraft carrier does a heck of a lot more than just generate power. But for the job of just generating power, I'd take a few of these.
E-mail? Video gaming? Movies? Drugs? Raving? Star Wars? AIM?
The other reason why MySpace is popular is because the utility of the service is directly proportional to the number of people on it. I met a co-worker's sister the other day, and that night she sent me a MySpace friend request. I didn't hear anything through Tribe or Orkut because she wasn't on tribe and her brother (whom she found me through) wasn't on Orkut. So now that MySpace is dominant, it's nearly impossible for anyone else to break in. You don't go to another service because it has the features you're looking for, you'd go because all of your friends were on it.
It's like Instant Messaging. Jabber is clearly the superior standard on nearly every axis. But everyone you know is on AIM or Messenger. So you use the service that your friends are on, because the people on the service are the largest feature provided.
A vehicle can be super efficient when designed to take one person from point A to point B over smooth terrain. When you start adding requirements like carrying a family of people with 50 cubic feet of junk and an attached trailer over both smooth terrain and off road, your efficiency drops tremendously. [/obligatory car metaphor]
The more specifically you can narrow down the problem set you're trying to solve, the faster you can solve it. The more specific your tool, the better it will work on that problem.
Why is a high-end computer gaming rig thousands more than a comparable next-gen console? Because it's a lot less specific than a console. Why are GPU's so insanely good at crunching linear streams of parallel floating point operations? Because that's all they do.
Generally speaking, in business when you figure out in advance where the market is heading, you get a head start on all of your competitors putting yourself in a much better position to take advantage of the change. You do not, however, generally get to tax all transactions. I knew that online purchasing was going to take off years ago. Does that mean that I deserve to get paid once everyone else figured this out too?
Cisco figured this out ahead of time and positioned their product line to take advantage of the burgeoning communications infrastructure market. They deserve the financial success they've seen from this shrewd business accumen. They don't, however, deserve 5 dollars of every 50 I send to Comcast simply because they realized the obvious first.
Linden Labs has actually found that, to help stabilize the exchange rate, they have to sell L$ on their currency market themselves.
I'm sure that was purely accidental.