Entropia reminds me of a casino. Every activity has a certain chance of a payout. E.g, manufacturing clothes, mining, hunting, everything. When you perform an action, you can produce an item which exceeds the costs of your efforts. Normally, the result is less than the costs of your efforts.
I last played a couple years ago. Back then, actions by people with no money, like "sweating", literally pay out pennies for hours and hours of effort. The only reason they seem to exist is to entice people to put money into the game.
The house seems to tweak the system to statistically profit from the transactions. People gain skill in the system, making a "big payout" more and more likely the more they play, but ultimately, unless you're playing their internal stock markets and taking advantage of poor decisions of other players, I don't think there is a big payout to be had.
All of this wouldn't be so sucky if it weren't for the fact that it's not tweaked as well as a Casino and it ignores that the participants are bringing content to the game. It could be so much better. As it is, you go hunting, blow your cash on ammunition and you have very little to show for it. Ditto for mining etc. This makes the casino model very transparent to me.
Finally, Entropia locked my account without explanation. It was inactive for a while. I did request an email change, for which they requested a certified copy of my passport(!).
The system is expressive though, and has pretty remarkable avatars. I can't help but to think there's potential as a machima platform built around a "real" economy of "actors".
...you have a choice of paying a small misdemeanor fine...
Where is that?
Around here in Canada you're either charged or you're not. If you're convicted, you have a criminal record. Your punishment might include imprisonment, community service or something. But you can't pay a "misdemeanor fine"... what on earth is that?
After several years, you can apply for a pardon, but it will still reflect poorly upon you in international travel as the pardon may not be recognized overseas. Until you obtain the pardon, you will be barred from entry into many countries, including the U.S..
No, if you're caught stealing, charges are laid and you're convicted, then you're branded for life. In practice, if you look like a reasonable person, you have a clean record, and you have a nice lawyer, the police are probably going to just drag you through red tape and give you a stern warning, but shoplifting is theft, and theft is a *very* serious crime.
I'd much rather pay a several thousand dollar civil settlement.
I could be wrong, but I would be very surprised if it were different in any U.S. state.
K&R were trying not to smoke 8-bit CPUs and exhausting kilobytes of RAM with your inefficient programming. Strings can come from a lot of places other than user input, and most programs out there were tools for the end-users to do their jobs, not websites or even telecom apps.
Sure, you could do a buffer overflow on your handy-dandy EBCDIC converter, or crash your line editor by inserting null characters. But why would you want to? You could also stuff pencils into the power supply and fold floppies. What's your point?
If you want protection for modern programming, try C++.
Dozens of kids in highschool from all over the country have written me, pleading with me to stop Taco from introducing this "tagging" concept. One, who I'll call "Jamie" from Demoine, Washington writes:
"Jon, I'm really afraid of what Taco is doing. Tagging? This is like profiling. Soon our user profiles will be picked up by our highschools and used to evaluate us. I mean what if my UID were tagged with Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Dungeons and Dragons? I'd be doubly punished. Please don't let him do it!"
Could it be true that our very national treasure, our children might be victims of such an oversight? Is it worth the convenience which tagging gives us?
I was a kid once, and I remember what it was like in 1998. Kids can be cruel.
We're at the cusp of a new world and a great Internet. Modern tagging represents a shift in the zeitgeist away from the fine literature of Slashdot, towards a cheapened economy of elitism. Don't do it. Don't let it happen to you. First they tag your submissions. Then they tag you a geek. They brand you a victim.
(ok, I don't have the energy to continue this for another 12 paragraphs)
It's very hard to define what exactly is Mickey Mouse.
I don't think Mickey Mouse should be able to be trademarked. The three circles, sure. They've got a clear proportion, a clear set of industries. The same might be true for a given instance of Mickey Mouse used in signs, logos etc, but using trademark to protect a character is kind of absurd because as I understand it, trademark requires active use.
Mickey Mouse looks different today than he did in the 1930s. Could you use the 1930s image in porn? if not, why not? He has a new voice, a new look, new animators, a new personality, etc. How does the new image protect the old one?
It perverts Trademark law to extend it to characters. But searching Google a bit, I think you're right, it's exactly what they've done.
So here's a question, what protects actors and actresses from impersonators being used to replace them in film and recordings? This could be very similar.
Exactly. Although I think it should hit a maximum and track inflation afterwards. That way Disney wouldn't have reason to lobby to protect Steamboat Mickey, but less profitable/sensitive works would fall into public domain when they break the multi-million dollar price tags.
I actually think there needs to be a new kind of IP for stuff like Mickey Mouse. The Disney Corporation is *actively* using the character. No matter how old it is. Something which would protect the image of Mickey Mouse even if Steamboat Mickey fell into the public domain could make things a bit sane.
Kind of like a trademark on a character. Retain a right to parody, but protect Disney from Mickey Mouse knockoff lead toys, colouring books, pornography, etc. Those things would only be popular because of the active work by Disney, and Disney should be able to protect that.
The OP said "...know it sounds bad, but we figure that if we ever got a notice from one of these organizations that we could simply say that there's no way to know who downloaded these things, our wireless is open!"
They replied: "Not to shit on your parade or anything, but I think that defense has been tried and failed."
Somebody trollishly scoffed: " I call bullshit. Or a RIAA troll.... Prove me wrong. Provide the cases where this has been tested. The one's which match his situation."
The article describes somebody who tried to use that defense. "...her defense that a hacker lurking outside her apartment window with a laptop might have framed her"
I'm not even going to talk about trying to destroy evidence to defend yourself. That wouldn't even work on a bad TV show.
"Expert testimony from an RIAA witness also showed that a wireless router was not used, casting doubt on her defense that a hacker lurking outside her apartment window with a laptop might have framed her, he said."
Yeah, sending this guy to jail does nothing to curb the damage from those 8.4M comsumer records. It doesn't even stop them from being used for direct marketing.
Demand the records be destroyed, open a case for possession of stolen property, and fire up a class action on the part of 8.4 million plaintiffs.
I had a PC XT with CGA when all my friends had C=64 systems. The XT was horrible for games, CGA + PC speaker really sucked.
The C=64 did so much more for games on so much less, it was incredible.
... but when it came to any real work, it was shocking how much I took for granted. I did not envy people swapping floppies while editing documents, submitting assignments with 7pin printouts with nines instead of the letter "g". Spending heaps of cash to replace power supplies or drives in the middle of the night. Just having an RS232 port, a reliable power supply, reliable floppy drive, an OS which was miles above the basic interpreter.
It wasn't until I patched together a 286 with EGA and a sound card that games started to beat out the C=64. The C=64 still had more creative titles though:-)
I don't think the government speaks the same language as the people. They only speak in terms of dollars. Big companies line up at their door and say "we're profitable enterprises who employ hundreds of thousands of people throughout your country, listen to us and help them!". Meanwhile thousands of people write and complain about civil liberties about privacy, about intangible things like freedom and growth of our society.
Who do they listen to?
Maybe now is the time to strike back on the industry using terms the government understands. Intellectual property tax. Require registration of copyright. Require that all DRM laws only apply to registered copyrighted works... else they're hackable and communication of circumvention of their non-copyrighted works is legit.
DRM should also have a requirement for a government back door. Failure to release a work into the public domain after accepting the bennefits of government protection should be a criminal offense.
Intellectual property tax should increase exponentially after the 17th year until the 90th year. The tax will pay for the registration. The tax will pay for enforcement. The tax will create an incentive to release the works to the public domain. Finally the tax will make it clear which works have fallen into the public domain.
This way Disney can keep Steam Boat Micky for some maximum rate of copyright registration. Some tens or hundreds of millions of dollars/year. The Beatles albums would probably still be worth paying for rights on, but early television broadcasts, flim strips, newscasts and newsreels would be freely redistributable.
Holding the IP out-of-country simply means that the enforcment of the IP will be out-of-country.
Does anyone see any problem with the concept of IP tax? Really? It's an imperfect solution to a problem which I don't think is ever going to favour personal liberties, but I think it could achieve a balance between the interest of corporations and the interests of citizens.
..UNPROTECTED WIRELESS NETWORKS... A MOST DUMB IDEA WITH UNPRECEDENTED EXPOSURE OF SENSITIVE DATA... RIVALING THE STUPIDITY OF MARTHA STEWART WITH NO POTENTIAL FOR PROFIT
MOST OF THE BUILDINGS IN THE AREA WILL HAVE OPEN ACCESS TO ALL PATIENT DATA. ONCE EXPOSED, PATIENT DATA MAY BE RECORDED AND HAVE LONG TERM LAWSUIT POTENTIAL. THIS MAY GO BEYOND NEGLIGENCE AND MAY INVOKE GROSS NEGLIGENCE LEADING TO NOT MERELY CORPORATE, BUT PERSONAL LIABILITY.
YOU WILL HAVE TO SELL YOUR PORSCHE TO PAY YOUR LAWYERS. YOUR DAUGHTER WILL NOT HAVE BRACES. YOU WILL EITHER BE LIVING FROM A CARDBOARD BOX OR YOU WILL GO TO JAIL.
You get the idea...
La la, now I'm going to write up lots of stuff to get past the lameless filter. Lameness filters, while they might be lame, get us past the ascii goatse trolls. Alhtough I woudl think that the ecode tag could let us get past the whole uppercase lameness thing. Now I'm going to repeat this a few times. La la, now I'm going to write up lots of stuff to get past the lameless filter. Lameness filters, while they might be lame, get us past the ascii goatse trolls. Alhtough I woudl think that the ecode tag could let us get past the whole uppercase lameness thing. Now I'm going to repeat this a few times. La la, now I'm going to write up lots of stuff to get past the lameless filter. Lameness filters, while they might be lame, get us past the ascii goatse trolls. Alhtough I woudl think that the ecode tag could let us get past the whole uppercase lameness thing. Now I'm going to repeat this a few times.
OMG. 500 Physicists, 12 years of work, 1.5 Billion? I'm outraged! The biggest boondoggle in the history of the ISS could have paid for an extra week of war in Iraq!
Slashdot Mirror
What's your point?
http://enterprise.kde.org/faq/#WhatcostsareinvolvedinusingKDEasacommercialdevelopmentplatform
"However, the KDE libraries rely on the Qt library. Thus you will probably need to obtain a license of Qt from Trolltech."
There's a third option. Use Gnome.
This means that it hurts the community by fragmenting the desktop.
Selling WoW gold is against game policy. Blizzard can take it all away from you if they want to.
It'd make a risky day job.
I hate to break it to you, but most people spend 40 years working and don't have $2M to show for it.
Some people make $20M. More people die of natural causes long before that.
I'd hesitate, but I'd probably chop off my legs.
Or you could not let the thermostat installation team in through the door.
This isn't the East German government. You don't have to let them in. They're not going to report you to the Stasi.
Entropia reminds me of a casino. Every activity has a certain chance of a payout. E.g, manufacturing clothes, mining, hunting, everything. When you perform an action, you can produce an item which exceeds the costs of your efforts. Normally, the result is less than the costs of your efforts.
I last played a couple years ago. Back then, actions by people with no money, like "sweating", literally pay out pennies for hours and hours of effort. The only reason they seem to exist is to entice people to put money into the game.
The house seems to tweak the system to statistically profit from the transactions. People gain skill in the system, making a "big payout" more and more likely the more they play, but ultimately, unless you're playing their internal stock markets and taking advantage of poor decisions of other players, I don't think there is a big payout to be had.
All of this wouldn't be so sucky if it weren't for the fact that it's not tweaked as well as a Casino and it ignores that the participants are bringing content to the game. It could be so much better. As it is, you go hunting, blow your cash on ammunition and you have very little to show for it. Ditto for mining etc. This makes the casino model very transparent to me.
Finally, Entropia locked my account without explanation. It was inactive for a while. I did request an email change, for which they requested a certified copy of my passport(!).
The system is expressive though, and has pretty remarkable avatars. I can't help but to think there's potential as a machima platform built around a "real" economy of "actors".
Canada does it too. I'm not really sure what the connection is between being ignorant and being American, ignorance comes in every nationality.
Where is that?
Around here in Canada you're either charged or you're not. If you're convicted, you have a criminal record. Your punishment might include imprisonment, community service or something. But you can't pay a "misdemeanor fine"... what on earth is that?
After several years, you can apply for a pardon, but it will still reflect poorly upon you in international travel as the pardon may not be recognized overseas. Until you obtain the pardon, you will be barred from entry into many countries, including the U.S..
No, if you're caught stealing, charges are laid and you're convicted, then you're branded for life. In practice, if you look like a reasonable person, you have a clean record, and you have a nice lawyer, the police are probably going to just drag you through red tape and give you a stern warning, but shoplifting is theft, and theft is a *very* serious crime.
I'd much rather pay a several thousand dollar civil settlement.
I could be wrong, but I would be very surprised if it were different in any U.S. state.
K&R were trying not to smoke 8-bit CPUs and exhausting kilobytes of RAM with your inefficient programming. Strings can come from a lot of places other than user input, and most programs out there were tools for the end-users to do their jobs, not websites or even telecom apps.
Sure, you could do a buffer overflow on your handy-dandy EBCDIC converter, or crash your line editor by inserting null characters. But why would you want to? You could also stuff pencils into the power supply and fold floppies. What's your point?
If you want protection for modern programming, try C++.
Around here, Bill's money is Microsoft money, the same way as a drug dealer's money is drug money.
Dozens of kids in highschool from all over the country have written me, pleading with me to stop Taco from introducing this "tagging" concept. One, who I'll call "Jamie" from Demoine, Washington writes:
"Jon, I'm really afraid of what Taco is doing. Tagging? This is like profiling. Soon our user profiles will be picked up by our highschools and used to evaluate us. I mean what if my UID were tagged with Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Dungeons and Dragons? I'd be doubly punished. Please don't let him do it!"
Could it be true that our very national treasure, our children might be victims of such an oversight? Is it worth the convenience which tagging gives us?
I was a kid once, and I remember what it was like in 1998. Kids can be cruel.
We're at the cusp of a new world and a great Internet. Modern tagging represents a shift in the zeitgeist away from the fine literature of Slashdot, towards a cheapened economy of elitism. Don't do it. Don't let it happen to you. First they tag your submissions. Then they tag you a geek. They brand you a victim.
(ok, I don't have the energy to continue this for another 12 paragraphs)
It's very hard to define what exactly is Mickey Mouse.
I don't think Mickey Mouse should be able to be trademarked. The three circles, sure. They've got a clear proportion, a clear set of industries. The same might be true for a given instance of Mickey Mouse used in signs, logos etc, but using trademark to protect a character is kind of absurd because as I understand it, trademark requires active use.
Mickey Mouse looks different today than he did in the 1930s. Could you use the 1930s image in porn? if not, why not? He has a new voice, a new look, new animators, a new personality, etc. How does the new image protect the old one?
It perverts Trademark law to extend it to characters. But searching Google a bit, I think you're right, it's exactly what they've done.
So here's a question, what protects actors and actresses from impersonators being used to replace them in film and recordings? This could be very similar.
Exactly. Although I think it should hit a maximum and track inflation afterwards. That way Disney wouldn't have reason to lobby to protect Steamboat Mickey, but less profitable/sensitive works would fall into public domain when they break the multi-million dollar price tags.
I actually think there needs to be a new kind of IP for stuff like Mickey Mouse. The Disney Corporation is *actively* using the character. No matter how old it is. Something which would protect the image of Mickey Mouse even if Steamboat Mickey fell into the public domain could make things a bit sane.
Kind of like a trademark on a character. Retain a right to parody, but protect Disney from Mickey Mouse knockoff lead toys, colouring books, pornography, etc. Those things would only be popular because of the active work by Disney, and Disney should be able to protect that.
You just broadly communicated a method to circumvent a copy protection device.
Don't be so quick to judge. The difficultly of replacing the HDD in the iBook G4 is a design flaw. It's all labour.
Here's how you do it yourself: http://www.faqintosh.com/risorse/en/guides/hw/ibook/g4hd/
Yeah, his argument is irrational. My landlord just added a fifth dimension to our curb the other day.
Cutting out the wheelchair ramp was quite the trick.
The OP said "...know it sounds bad, but we figure that if we ever got a notice from one of these organizations that we could simply say that there's no way to know who downloaded these things, our wireless is open!"
They replied: "Not to shit on your parade or anything, but I think that defense has been tried and failed."
Somebody trollishly scoffed: " I call bullshit. Or a RIAA troll.... Prove me wrong. Provide the cases where this has been tested. The one's which match his situation."
The article describes somebody who tried to use that defense. "...her defense that a hacker lurking outside her apartment window with a laptop might have framed her"
I'm not even going to talk about trying to destroy evidence to defend yourself. That wouldn't even work on a bad TV show.
"Expert testimony from an RIAA witness also showed that a wireless router was not used, casting doubt on her defense that a hacker lurking outside her apartment window with a laptop might have framed her, he said."
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/riaa-juror-we-w.html
380kbps is pretty impressive. If the source is better than 44.1kHz, then it could beat a typical CD FLAC for quality and still be a tiny bit smaller.
Yeah, sending this guy to jail does nothing to curb the damage from those 8.4M comsumer records. It doesn't even stop them from being used for direct marketing.
Demand the records be destroyed, open a case for possession of stolen property, and fire up a class action on the part of 8.4 million plaintiffs.
I had a PC XT with CGA when all my friends had C=64 systems. The XT was horrible for games, CGA + PC speaker really sucked.
The C=64 did so much more for games on so much less, it was incredible.
... but when it came to any real work, it was shocking how much I took for granted. I did not envy people swapping floppies while editing documents, submitting assignments with 7pin printouts with nines instead of the letter "g". Spending heaps of cash to replace power supplies or drives in the middle of the night. Just having an RS232 port, a reliable power supply, reliable floppy drive, an OS which was miles above the basic interpreter.
It wasn't until I patched together a 286 with EGA and a sound card that games started to beat out the C=64. The C=64 still had more creative titles though :-)
I don't think the government speaks the same language as the people. They only speak in terms of dollars. Big companies line up at their door and say "we're profitable enterprises who employ hundreds of thousands of people throughout your country, listen to us and help them!". Meanwhile thousands of people write and complain about civil liberties about privacy, about intangible things like freedom and growth of our society.
Who do they listen to?
Maybe now is the time to strike back on the industry using terms the government understands. Intellectual property tax. Require registration of copyright. Require that all DRM laws only apply to registered copyrighted works... else they're hackable and communication of circumvention of their non-copyrighted works is legit.
DRM should also have a requirement for a government back door. Failure to release a work into the public domain after accepting the bennefits of government protection should be a criminal offense.
Intellectual property tax should increase exponentially after the 17th year until the 90th year. The tax will pay for the registration. The tax will pay for enforcement. The tax will create an incentive to release the works to the public domain. Finally the tax will make it clear which works have fallen into the public domain.
This way Disney can keep Steam Boat Micky for some maximum rate of copyright registration. Some tens or hundreds of millions of dollars/year. The Beatles albums would probably still be worth paying for rights on, but early television broadcasts, flim strips, newscasts and newsreels would be freely redistributable.
Holding the IP out-of-country simply means that the enforcment of the IP will be out-of-country.
Does anyone see any problem with the concept of IP tax? Really? It's an imperfect solution to a problem which I don't think is ever going to favour personal liberties, but I think it could achieve a balance between the interest of corporations and the interests of citizens.
I've started using Hurricane Katrina's advisories as an example of how to explain this to management:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service_bulletin_for_New_Orleans_region
E.g.
You get the idea...
La la, now I'm going to write up lots of stuff to get past the lameless filter. Lameness filters, while they might be lame, get us past the ascii goatse trolls. Alhtough I woudl think that the ecode tag could let us get past the whole uppercase lameness thing. Now I'm going to repeat this a few times. La la, now I'm going to write up lots of stuff to get past the lameless filter. Lameness filters, while they might be lame, get us past the ascii goatse trolls. Alhtough I woudl think that the ecode tag could let us get past the whole uppercase lameness thing. Now I'm going to repeat this a few times. La la, now I'm going to write up lots of stuff to get past the lameless filter. Lameness filters, while they might be lame, get us past the ascii goatse trolls. Alhtough I woudl think that the ecode tag could let us get past the whole uppercase lameness thing. Now I'm going to repeat this a few times.
OMG. 500 Physicists, 12 years of work, 1.5 Billion? I'm outraged! The biggest boondoggle in the history of the ISS could have paid for an extra week of war in Iraq!
HAHAHAHAHA
Intellectual property laws don't apply to big corporations!, they only apply to the little guy.
I think it's more likely that a developer is an idiot and Sony's going to take a "wait until we get a letter from a lawyer" attitude.