"If you decide to nuke the nut's city to get the nut, how does that make you different from the nut?"
One big difference between the two is that the US's target would have some form of warning. Heck, I'm willing to bet they'd be dropping pamphlets and making radio broadcasts 24 hours before the launch.
"Simply because America happens to be the self-proclaimed "leader of the free world"?"
If it were only self-appointed then it wouldn't have lasted this long. Other countries (Europe especially comes to mind) are more than capable of building up their own military and taking some of the burden of being a world power, but they have time and again shown themselves quite content to let the US do all the dirty work.
We've proven our willingess not to use them. In the 1950's and early 1960's, there was a bomb/missile gap between the US and USSR heavily in our favor. Eisenhower knew that thanks to U-2 overflights. We still didn't launch.
By the same token, the USSR had the gap in their favor in the late 60's and early 70's (we were too busy spending money on Vietnam). They didn't launch.
You know, Phantasy Star Online ver. 2 will also be available on all three consoles...
As far as I'm concerned, FF XI is a red herring. What I'm dying to know is if FFI, FFII, and FFIII will be ported over to the GBA so I'll have a snowball's chance in hell of seeing those remakes.
And speaking of remakes, I seem to recall Square tossing about the idea of next-gen remakes of VII, VIII and IX. What's up with that? Can I play FFVII with a real soundtrack instead of MIDIs?
And while the PSX releases of VI, V and VI were OK, they really didn't add much more to the Super Famicom versions. How about giving those games a 32-bit make-over like what was done to I, II and III for the WonderSwan Color? After all, the GBA is God's gift to 2-D...
I just want to get this off my chest now so I can get a big "I told you so!" out a year from now.
Final Fantasy XI is going to be a flop.
Different RPGs rely on different things for their success. Phantasy Star has the Algol system. Mother/EarthBound has its aesthetics. Dragon Quest/Warrior has the whole medieval feel.
Final Fantasy relies on story and character development, focusing on group dynamics and such as the small party of heroes goes to save the world from some great cataclysm.
That cannot be translated to an MMORPG. MMORPGs rely entirely on the players for character development, and their very nature requires a lot of little quests for all the players to try out instead of one big quest that Final Fantasy is known for.
The things that make an MMORPG a success (namely the universe) doesn't really exist in the Final Fantasy series. There is no game universe, there are ten game universes to date. There are no common characters between the games, each game introduces new characters. There are few if any monsters common to all the games. The only real constants in the games are chocobos, moogles, spells, and some guy named Cid (who may or may not be a party member, depending on the game).
Final Fantasy XI will be a flop because it will be a Final Fantasy game in name only. There will be some nifty new mechanic for character development (the shiney new job/esper/materia/GF/whatever system), familar spells, chocobos, moogles, and... not much more.
About the only way I could see this working is if they take the universes of all the ten previous games and somehow connect them. Have a student from Balamb Garden explore Baron. A character born and raised in Coneria seeing the sights of Midgar. But even that would be a big departure from the previous games because they were never meant to be connected.
I can think of one big limitation that kept me playing Final Fantasy games when all my friends were playing EQ: no story. Sure, there's a fully fleshed-out universe and some minor little quests you can go on, but you simply can't get the "we few out to save/conquer the world" feeling when "we few" numbers around half a million.
"Combine that with the incredible success fo the FF series,"
A success that relies almost exclusively on drama and character development, something you just can't get in an MMORPG...
If this were Dragon Quest/Warrior we were talking about, then I'd believe it'd be a major success. But there is no one Final Fantasy universe, no one underlying myth, and any two Final Fantasy games only have some vague themes in common at best. The only thing I can think of that's been more or less a constant in all the games has been the spells. Even the Dragon Quest/Warrior games have more in common with each other than that. I can't see this as anything but Square shooting themselves in the foot.
"Nintendo has announced their GameCube modem, but has yet to say anything about its specs,"
A 56k modem that plugs into one of the ports on the bottom, just like in the pictures on Nintendo's website. I believe the modem will have a black housing while the Ethernet adapter will have a white housing.
"what games will support it,"
Phantasy Star Online ver. 2 at the very least.
"Nintendo also has a history for announcing hardware, even giving it specific details, and then cancelling it."
In the US perhaps. The only thing I can think of that Nintendo talked about that didn't come about is the SNES CD drive (which mutated into the PlayStation and CD-I). Even the 64DD eventually came out.
"They've committed to making the modem and NIC add-ons, but that means that we'll see it, at minimum, in six months or more."
You're forgetting that Nintendo has a habit of keeping hush-hush about their projects until about three seconds before it launches. Look at how soon after we all first heard the phrase "GameCube" that it hit store shelves.
"Unless "Umm... we're working on it" (the classic Nintendo blow-off phrase) somehow means that they're deeply committed to making these add-ons.;)"
Nintendo is so good at keeping a secret that folks like IGN accuse their PR people of using Jedi mind tricks. Their silence on the matter is no reason to believe Nintendo won't release this hardware in the very near future. If anything, the fact that they won't say a flat-out "no" means that it's on the way.
Nintendo's history with communication hardware for their systems goes back almost as far as Sega. The SNES had a satellite modem. The N64 had a 56k modem. Game Boy Color has a cell adapter. Why shouldn't we believe that we won't see a communications device for the GCN any time soon, especially since they were announced at the same time as the GameCube?
We've seen pictures of the hardware. We know of several games that will use the hardware. Just because Nintendo tends not to talk about future activities is no reason to believe they won't bring out the hardware in question. By your logic Nintendo has no intention of releasing any new games for the GameCube, since we've seen no release dates for the new Mario, Zelda, or Metroid games.
"Nintendo can say what they want, but after the fiasco that was the N64, and the pressure from Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo needs Square a lot more than they'll let on."
Um... hello? Did you pay any attention to the last half-decade at all?
If anything, the "N64 fiasco" you refer to has shown that Nintendo DOESN'T need Squaresoft. While it may not be very enjoyable or as profitable as it could be, Nintendo has shown that they are quite capable of surviving on nearly no third party support at all. This is something that not even Sega has been able to pull off. I seem to recall the N64 outselling the PlayStation in the US. And how much more money did Ocarina of Time make than FF VII again?
Nintendo doesn't need Square. Square doesn't need Nintendo. Both could make a killing with a new relationship (think "Final Fantasy on Game Boy Advance"), but there is no need anywhere between the two. About the only people that have a real need here is Sony. With third-party game developers being so platform agnostic, this current console battle will be won by first- and second-party games. Nintendo is the world's best game developer hands down. Microsoft has made a few notable successes in the field of games. Sony, on the other hand...
If anything, Sqaresoft was a prosthetic first-party development house for the PSX, trying to release games in non-RPG genres on top of their usual fare. Square pretended they could be another Nintendo, Sega, or even Capcom (with games like Chocobo Racing and Brave Fencer Musashi) instead of the one-trick pony they generally tend to be. What Sony will do without exclusive Square games is hard to see.
"They need third-party games; first-party games just aren't enough (as the N64 showed)."
No, that's what the Dreamcast showed. The N64 showed that that rule doesn't apply when you have Mario, Zelda and Pokemon.
"Square leads the majority of buyers"
Only in Japan. It's only in recent years that Square has become mainstream outside of Japan, and I think that FF games being available on the PC has much to do with that.
IMO, if there are going to be any nails driven into coffins in the near future it will be when Metroid Prime hits the shelf. Especially because nobody seems to realize this.
It's interesting to see how Final Fantasy got started on Nintendo systems and will ultimately make a return appearance on a Nintendo system in its death knell.
I honestly can't see how Final Fantasy can survive FF XI. While other RPGs focus on nifty game play mecahnics (Chrono series) or an immersive universe (Dragon Quest/Warrior, Phantasy Star), Final Fantasy games really have only one thing to rely on: story. The games are so story-driven that you might as well be playing on rails. People sure as hell didn't play VIII for the unending GF sequences. They didn't play VII for the stale JPG backgrounds. They sure as hell aren't still playing because they love the random battle engine left over from the 8-bit days. People play Final Fantasy for the characters, story, and in recent years the cut-scenes.
So what in God's name makes them think they can translate any of this into an on-line game in any meaningful way? If half a million people are on the same quest of epic proportions, it ain't exactly epic any more. They can't make the entire game world on rails so there goes the concept of cut scenes. They can't just use the universe the game series is set in because there is next to nothing in common between any two Final Fantasy games.
I think Final Fantasy XI will end up being known as Square's version of Episode I.
Either the world is coming to an end or Yamauchi will be going postal tomorrow when he finds out about this. I can see him now, a katana in one hand and an Uzi in the other, shouting unintelligible things about molesting chocobos...
"but its really flashing on and off faster than you can see."
Fluorecents, yes, but not incandecent bulbs. The cycle of the AC going into the bulb is too fast to allow the filament to cool and stop emitting light. The intensity may waver ever-so-slightly (and that may or may not be detectable to sensitive equipment), but it doesn't go on-and-off.
"That quote from the FAQ covers the reverse application of the GPL - how the GPL exerts control over the original author when somebody besides the original author contributes changes, counter to your original argument that the original author had complete control over the all derivate works."
I never said the original author had complete control. I said the original author has more control over it than anybody else. The original author was the one that was able to dictate not only the license for their own work but also the work of anybody else that uses it.
"code everything themselves & release under a license of their choice"
What part of "derived work" are you having trouble with? If you only think of making a shiney new program after looking at a GPLed example, it is a derived work and must be GPLed.
Simple example: Elements of Star Wars (ANH through ROTJ) were inspired by Le Morte d'Arthur. Nobody in the movie is named Arthur. The Merlin figure isn't named Merlin. The roles of the father and the son are reversed. But the fact remains that those three movies are a derived work of Le Morte d'Arthur (as well as all the other mythologies Lucas borrowed from). If Le Morte d'Arthur were GPLed, Star Wars would have to be GPLed.
"The laws are there to protect the powerful and the monied. As long as the laws do that, they are "good laws". The moment something happens which prevents the powerful from getting their money, something legal has to be done, and there are armies of greedy short-sighted fools willing to step in and help to right any injustice against the monied and the powerful."
You're a little too short-sighted here. As I rant about in the journal entry my sig links to, a senator's main goal is to continue being a senator. The reason the rich hold sway in the senate is because they need campaign contributions to stay in office. To this end senators will make laws that make the rich and powerful happy.
However they will only do this up to a point. Ultimately they want to get the majority of their constituants to vote for them next election, and if they go too far no amount of money will help them get re-elected. So they'll make laws that help the rich and powerful only so long as it doesn't piss off most of the people in their district (or at the very least the laws don't get noticed).
Too bad for us that they only really have to start sweating the voters once every six years...
"Natural laws don't obey false frameworks, like the Constitution; no matter how nicely written and fawned over."
Um... the whole point of the federal constitution was to both set competing interests against each other as well as to make sure that it was very hard for it to get changed to serve either private or short-term interests. This is why it's the oldest functioning legal document in the world. A rich party could spend as much money as they want on Congress, it still takes majorities in at least 38 states to pass an amendment. Welcome to the federal republic.
I really should finish that manifesto I'm working on...
"What makes him think that these places - some of the poor and rebellious even internally - will co-operate with the US in matters of security? He's not even suggesting bipartisan sharing, which doesn't even approach what true open-source would be."
We're not talking about GPLed software here. "Open source intelligence" means newspapers, news broadcasts and other sources of publicly-available information. This isn't about letting the US set up surveilance cameras here, it's about letting the US a buy a subscription to the local newspaper.
"Open source" means just that: the source is open and easily accessable. If you associate the phrase with a political movement, the sharing of information derived from analisys, or anything else but "easily-gathered information," you need to lay off RMS for a while.
"This is another example of how US-centric his ideas are - the most remote corner of the world he can think of is "rural areas in America"..."
Have you taken a look at what is part of the US?
First and foremost we have Alaska: A state whose capital is pretty much only accessable from the air. And let us not forget about Point Barrow.
Then we have the deserts out west. Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and many other states that consist of a whole lot of square miles of nothing. The only reason there are cities out there is because of boku irrigation.
Further east there's the Appalacia region, a place as poor and as remote as many third world countries. Have you ever been to West Virginia?
And I almost forgot to mention the rain forrests of Hawaii.
For most of the United States, if you're more than a few miles away from an airport, interstate or railway, you're nowhere.
"If the creation of nuclear technology became this simple, it not only gives terrorists an easier method to attain nuclear energy, but a way to actually create it themselves."
People like you are going to drive me prematurely bald...
Fusion reactors != fusion bombs
Fustion reactors are so damned far removed from fusion bombs that it's been about 50 years since we developed the second and we still haven't figured out the first. I'm willing to bet it will take at least another 50 years after the development of fusion reactors before we can make a fusion bomb that doesn't require a fission bomb to actually get the thing to go off.
"While it's true that a nuclear explosive based on this current method wouldn't spread as much harmful radiation as a uranium based explosive,"
You're right about that, but you have no idea how right you are.
First and foremost, the act of fission frees neutrons from their parent atoms. A lot of neutrons. Enough neutrons to set off the fission reaction. Fusion generates far fewer free neutrons (if at all, depending on your fuel) because it's busy trying to form atoms instead of breaking them apart.
Secondly, when people think of "radiation" from a bomb they think of the fallout (since the actual radiation from the explosion lasts as long as the actual explosion). Fusion in and of itself has no fallout. The fallout from modern hydrogen bombs is from the fission bomb that's used to set it off. No fission bomb, no fallout.
"it's potential damage far outweighs that of a dirty bomb."
Now here is where you need to lay off the crack pipe.
Getting a fission reaction to start is pretty easy: get a neutron-producer close to a clump of unstable atoms. Getting a fusion reaction to start, on the other hand, requires a LOT of input heat in the beginning in order to generate the plasma the reactions takes place in. So much heat that the pressure at the heart of Jupiter isn't enough to start a sustainable reaction. In the past 50 years the only way we've been able to pull it off is with a fission bomb.
But let's pretend that a pure fusion bomb is possible in the short term. Although it's possible to squeeze a fission bomb into something the size of a suitcase, your average 20 megaton device is more or less a cubic meter in size. But it's only that small because the heat generator is a tiny little suitcase-sized fission bomb. If we try to use a fusion reactor to generate the heat instead of a fission bomb, I don't see the device being small enough to fit into a cargo container (probably the largest possible size for a device to be useful to terrorists).
But what if they try to blow up a fusion power plant? Fission reactors are heavily shielded to keep the inside in. Probable fusion reactors would be heavily shielded to keep the outside out. If a tokomak loses magnetic containment, the plasma expands, cools, and reverts back to a gas. If it loses its physical containment, air gets in, conducts/convects away heat from the plasma, the plasma cools and reverts back to a gas. If you try to blow it up you just end up with a negligible amount of hot gas on top of the explosive.
Personally, I'd be a hell of a lot more frightened of an attack at a coal-fired plant. Have you ever seen what a spark can make coal dust do? Or what about popping off the fuel tanks at a natural gas power plant? And while I'm on the subject of boiling liquid-vapor explosions, oil refineries look awfully unprotected...
"You can make fair use of the code without complying with the GPL."
Fair use includes such things as making a derived work. The GPL restricts derived works. The GPL is more restrictive than copyright law.
"he lost the right to unilaterally change his mind, and he'll have to rip out everyone else's code to get that right back."
He has the ability to both ask permission from others to change the license and/or rip out all that other code. However, he still has the ability to change his mind. Nobody else has that ability. They can't rip out Linus' code because it will always be a derived work. They can't ask for Linus' permission because he already said "no" by applying the GPL in the first place.
" Note that anyone else could do the same by ripping Linus' code out of their fork--he really has no special legal standing"
They can fork it all they want, but it must always be GPLed. Even if they do rip out all of Linus' work, the fork is still a derived work from the original. Again, GPL is more restrictive than copyright.
"Who cares? I hardly see how that changes whether it's libel or not."
If he hasn't dealt with any other managements he's deliberately misrepresenting himself.
"But what a man would be doing if it did not have his current job is impossible to know, and hence merely an opinion, and not libel."
It all depends on whether what was written was a statement of opinion or to suggest an analysis of facts. For example, there's a world of difference between "I think he's a child molester" and "He's a child molester."
Of course, since neither of us seem to know Whatley's URL or Xybernaut's take on the whole thing, we may never know.
"Even if some of the factual information is wrong, there's a serious about whether it was maliciously wrong and hence libel, or if he just went off on a rant and didn't bother checking all his assumptions."
When last I looked at libel law (the last time I was threatened with a lawsuit), there was no mention of intent. The author is ultimately responsible for what was written and the burden of fact-checking rests on the author. The only thing the plaintiff has to prove is that the speech in question is untrue.
"So many people have contributed so much to Linux that Linus only holds the copyright to a portion of the overall codebase"
The GPL is more restrictive than copyright so the copyrights are moot.
"If he tried to ship a proprietary Linux kernel binary, he'd have to request a special license to do so from every contributor or remove their code lest he violate hundreds of copyright holders' right to the code in "his" kernel."
Linus was the only person who had the ability to choose what kind of license (if any) to release his code under. Everybody else afterward had their options limited to "GPL or don't code" by Linus' decision.
And while Linus may have to ask permission to release the kernel under a different license, only Linus has the right to change his mind in the first place. The act of choosing the GPL over some other license is telling everybody else afterwards that they cannot release the code under a different license.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you decide to nuke the nut's city to get the nut, how does that make you different from the nut?"
One big difference between the two is that the US's target would have some form of warning. Heck, I'm willing to bet they'd be dropping pamphlets and making radio broadcasts 24 hours before the launch.
"Simply because America happens to be the self-proclaimed "leader of the free world"?"
If it were only self-appointed then it wouldn't have lasted this long. Other countries (Europe especially comes to mind) are more than capable of building up their own military and taking some of the burden of being a world power, but they have time and again shown themselves quite content to let the US do all the dirty work.
"He's quite pragmatic,"
One would think that if he were that pragmatic he wouldn't be in this situation to begin with.
"We've proven our willingness to use them,"
We've proven our willingess not to use them. In the 1950's and early 1960's, there was a bomb/missile gap between the US and USSR heavily in our favor. Eisenhower knew that thanks to U-2 overflights. We still didn't launch.
By the same token, the USSR had the gap in their favor in the late 60's and early 70's (we were too busy spending money on Vietnam). They didn't launch.
"The next expected supernova is nearly 500,000 light-years away"
That's a neat trick, considering that the Milky Way is only about 100,000 light-years across...
"Why is the story moving so fast?"
Because we're using a time machine!
*rim shot*
You know, Phantasy Star Online ver. 2 will also be available on all three consoles...
As far as I'm concerned, FF XI is a red herring. What I'm dying to know is if FFI, FFII, and FFIII will be ported over to the GBA so I'll have a snowball's chance in hell of seeing those remakes.
And speaking of remakes, I seem to recall Square tossing about the idea of next-gen remakes of VII, VIII and IX. What's up with that? Can I play FFVII with a real soundtrack instead of MIDIs?
And while the PSX releases of VI, V and VI were OK, they really didn't add much more to the Super Famicom versions. How about giving those games a 32-bit make-over like what was done to I, II and III for the WonderSwan Color? After all, the GBA is God's gift to 2-D...
I just want to get this off my chest now so I can get a big "I told you so!" out a year from now.
Final Fantasy XI is going to be a flop.
Different RPGs rely on different things for their success. Phantasy Star has the Algol system. Mother/EarthBound has its aesthetics. Dragon Quest/Warrior has the whole medieval feel.
Final Fantasy relies on story and character development, focusing on group dynamics and such as the small party of heroes goes to save the world from some great cataclysm.
That cannot be translated to an MMORPG. MMORPGs rely entirely on the players for character development, and their very nature requires a lot of little quests for all the players to try out instead of one big quest that Final Fantasy is known for.
The things that make an MMORPG a success (namely the universe) doesn't really exist in the Final Fantasy series. There is no game universe, there are ten game universes to date. There are no common characters between the games, each game introduces new characters. There are few if any monsters common to all the games. The only real constants in the games are chocobos, moogles, spells, and some guy named Cid (who may or may not be a party member, depending on the game).
Final Fantasy XI will be a flop because it will be a Final Fantasy game in name only. There will be some nifty new mechanic for character development (the shiney new job/esper/materia/GF/whatever system), familar spells, chocobos, moogles, and... not much more.
About the only way I could see this working is if they take the universes of all the ten previous games and somehow connect them. Have a student from Balamb Garden explore Baron. A character born and raised in Coneria seeing the sights of Midgar. But even that would be a big departure from the previous games because they were never meant to be connected.
So don't say I didn't warn you.
"has suffered no limitations."
I can think of one big limitation that kept me playing Final Fantasy games when all my friends were playing EQ: no story. Sure, there's a fully fleshed-out universe and some minor little quests you can go on, but you simply can't get the "we few out to save/conquer the world" feeling when "we few" numbers around half a million.
"Combine that with the incredible success fo the FF series,"
A success that relies almost exclusively on drama and character development, something you just can't get in an MMORPG...
If this were Dragon Quest/Warrior we were talking about, then I'd believe it'd be a major success. But there is no one Final Fantasy universe, no one underlying myth, and any two Final Fantasy games only have some vague themes in common at best. The only thing I can think of that's been more or less a constant in all the games has been the spells. Even the Dragon Quest/Warrior games have more in common with each other than that. I can't see this as anything but Square shooting themselves in the foot.
"Nintendo has announced their GameCube modem, but has yet to say anything about its specs,"
;)"
A 56k modem that plugs into one of the ports on the bottom, just like in the pictures on Nintendo's website. I believe the modem will have a black housing while the Ethernet adapter will have a white housing.
"what games will support it,"
Phantasy Star Online ver. 2 at the very least.
"Nintendo also has a history for announcing hardware, even giving it specific details, and then cancelling it."
In the US perhaps. The only thing I can think of that Nintendo talked about that didn't come about is the SNES CD drive (which mutated into the PlayStation and CD-I). Even the 64DD eventually came out.
"They've committed to making the modem and NIC add-ons, but that means that we'll see it, at minimum, in six months or more."
You're forgetting that Nintendo has a habit of keeping hush-hush about their projects until about three seconds before it launches. Look at how soon after we all first heard the phrase "GameCube" that it hit store shelves.
"Unless "Umm... we're working on it" (the classic Nintendo blow-off phrase) somehow means that they're deeply committed to making these add-ons.
Nintendo is so good at keeping a secret that folks like IGN accuse their PR people of using Jedi mind tricks. Their silence on the matter is no reason to believe Nintendo won't release this hardware in the very near future. If anything, the fact that they won't say a flat-out "no" means that it's on the way.
Nintendo's history with communication hardware for their systems goes back almost as far as Sega. The SNES had a satellite modem. The N64 had a 56k modem. Game Boy Color has a cell adapter. Why shouldn't we believe that we won't see a communications device for the GCN any time soon, especially since they were announced at the same time as the GameCube?
We've seen pictures of the hardware. We know of several games that will use the hardware. Just because Nintendo tends not to talk about future activities is no reason to believe they won't bring out the hardware in question. By your logic Nintendo has no intention of releasing any new games for the GameCube, since we've seen no release dates for the new Mario, Zelda, or Metroid games.
"Nintendo can say what they want, but after the fiasco that was the N64, and the pressure from Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo needs Square a lot more than they'll let on."
Um... hello? Did you pay any attention to the last half-decade at all?
If anything, the "N64 fiasco" you refer to has shown that Nintendo DOESN'T need Squaresoft. While it may not be very enjoyable or as profitable as it could be, Nintendo has shown that they are quite capable of surviving on nearly no third party support at all. This is something that not even Sega has been able to pull off. I seem to recall the N64 outselling the PlayStation in the US. And how much more money did Ocarina of Time make than FF VII again?
Nintendo doesn't need Square. Square doesn't need Nintendo. Both could make a killing with a new relationship (think "Final Fantasy on Game Boy Advance"), but there is no need anywhere between the two. About the only people that have a real need here is Sony. With third-party game developers being so platform agnostic, this current console battle will be won by first- and second-party games. Nintendo is the world's best game developer hands down. Microsoft has made a few notable successes in the field of games. Sony, on the other hand...
If anything, Sqaresoft was a prosthetic first-party development house for the PSX, trying to release games in non-RPG genres on top of their usual fare. Square pretended they could be another Nintendo, Sega, or even Capcom (with games like Chocobo Racing and Brave Fencer Musashi) instead of the one-trick pony they generally tend to be. What Sony will do without exclusive Square games is hard to see.
"They need third-party games; first-party games just aren't enough (as the N64 showed)."
No, that's what the Dreamcast showed. The N64 showed that that rule doesn't apply when you have Mario, Zelda and Pokemon.
"Square leads the majority of buyers"
Only in Japan. It's only in recent years that Square has become mainstream outside of Japan, and I think that FF games being available on the PC has much to do with that.
IMO, if there are going to be any nails driven into coffins in the near future it will be when Metroid Prime hits the shelf. Especially because nobody seems to realize this.
So the Chinese discovered the New World and continued their proud tradition of making innovative discoveries and not doing a damned thing with 'em.
It's interesting to see how Final Fantasy got started on Nintendo systems and will ultimately make a return appearance on a Nintendo system in its death knell.
I honestly can't see how Final Fantasy can survive FF XI. While other RPGs focus on nifty game play mecahnics (Chrono series) or an immersive universe (Dragon Quest/Warrior, Phantasy Star), Final Fantasy games really have only one thing to rely on: story. The games are so story-driven that you might as well be playing on rails. People sure as hell didn't play VIII for the unending GF sequences. They didn't play VII for the stale JPG backgrounds. They sure as hell aren't still playing because they love the random battle engine left over from the 8-bit days. People play Final Fantasy for the characters, story, and in recent years the cut-scenes.
So what in God's name makes them think they can translate any of this into an on-line game in any meaningful way? If half a million people are on the same quest of epic proportions, it ain't exactly epic any more. They can't make the entire game world on rails so there goes the concept of cut scenes. They can't just use the universe the game series is set in because there is next to nothing in common between any two Final Fantasy games.
I think Final Fantasy XI will end up being known as Square's version of Episode I.
Either the world is coming to an end or Yamauchi will be going postal tomorrow when he finds out about this. I can see him now, a katana in one hand and an Uzi in the other, shouting unintelligible things about molesting chocobos...
"but its really flashing on and off faster than you can see."
Fluorecents, yes, but not incandecent bulbs. The cycle of the AC going into the bulb is too fast to allow the filament to cool and stop emitting light. The intensity may waver ever-so-slightly (and that may or may not be detectable to sensitive equipment), but it doesn't go on-and-off.
"That quote from the FAQ covers the reverse application of the GPL - how the GPL exerts control over the original author when somebody besides the original author contributes changes, counter to your original argument that the original author had complete control over the all derivate works."
I never said the original author had complete control. I said the original author has more control over it than anybody else. The original author was the one that was able to dictate not only the license for their own work but also the work of anybody else that uses it.
"code everything themselves & release under a license of their choice"
What part of "derived work" are you having trouble with? If you only think of making a shiney new program after looking at a GPLed example, it is a derived work and must be GPLed.
Simple example: Elements of Star Wars (ANH through ROTJ) were inspired by Le Morte d'Arthur. Nobody in the movie is named Arthur. The Merlin figure isn't named Merlin. The roles of the father and the son are reversed. But the fact remains that those three movies are a derived work of Le Morte d'Arthur (as well as all the other mythologies Lucas borrowed from). If Le Morte d'Arthur were GPLed, Star Wars would have to be GPLed.
"The laws are there to protect the powerful and the monied. As long as the laws do that, they are "good laws". The moment something happens which prevents the powerful from getting their money, something legal has to be done, and there are armies of greedy short-sighted fools willing to step in and help to right any injustice against the monied and the powerful."
You're a little too short-sighted here. As I rant about in the journal entry my sig links to, a senator's main goal is to continue being a senator. The reason the rich hold sway in the senate is because they need campaign contributions to stay in office. To this end senators will make laws that make the rich and powerful happy.
However they will only do this up to a point. Ultimately they want to get the majority of their constituants to vote for them next election, and if they go too far no amount of money will help them get re-elected. So they'll make laws that help the rich and powerful only so long as it doesn't piss off most of the people in their district (or at the very least the laws don't get noticed).
Too bad for us that they only really have to start sweating the voters once every six years...
"Natural laws don't obey false frameworks, like the Constitution; no matter how nicely written and fawned over."
Um... the whole point of the federal constitution was to both set competing interests against each other as well as to make sure that it was very hard for it to get changed to serve either private or short-term interests. This is why it's the oldest functioning legal document in the world. A rich party could spend as much money as they want on Congress, it still takes majorities in at least 38 states to pass an amendment. Welcome to the federal republic.
I really should finish that manifesto I'm working on...
"The gov't rigged its missle tests (and those still failed!)."
Actually they've only missed once out of four or five tests.
Am I the only one that thought of Star Trek when they saw that acronym?
"What makes him think that these places - some of the poor and rebellious even internally - will co-operate with the US in matters of security? He's not even suggesting bipartisan sharing, which doesn't even approach what true open-source would be."
We're not talking about GPLed software here. "Open source intelligence" means newspapers, news broadcasts and other sources of publicly-available information. This isn't about letting the US set up surveilance cameras here, it's about letting the US a buy a subscription to the local newspaper.
"Open source" means just that: the source is open and easily accessable. If you associate the phrase with a political movement, the sharing of information derived from analisys, or anything else but "easily-gathered information," you need to lay off RMS for a while.
"This is another example of how US-centric his ideas are - the most remote corner of the world he can think of is "rural areas in America"..."
Have you taken a look at what is part of the US?
First and foremost we have Alaska: A state whose capital is pretty much only accessable from the air. And let us not forget about Point Barrow.
Then we have the deserts out west. Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and many other states that consist of a whole lot of square miles of nothing. The only reason there are cities out there is because of boku irrigation.
Further east there's the Appalacia region, a place as poor and as remote as many third world countries. Have you ever been to West Virginia?
And I almost forgot to mention the rain forrests of Hawaii.
For most of the United States, if you're more than a few miles away from an airport, interstate or railway, you're nowhere.
"If the creation of nuclear technology became this simple, it not only gives terrorists an easier method to attain nuclear energy, but a way to actually create it themselves."
People like you are going to drive me prematurely bald...
Fusion reactors != fusion bombs
Fustion reactors are so damned far removed from fusion bombs that it's been about 50 years since we developed the second and we still haven't figured out the first. I'm willing to bet it will take at least another 50 years after the development of fusion reactors before we can make a fusion bomb that doesn't require a fission bomb to actually get the thing to go off.
"While it's true that a nuclear explosive based on this current method wouldn't spread as much harmful radiation as a uranium based explosive,"
You're right about that, but you have no idea how right you are.
First and foremost, the act of fission frees neutrons from their parent atoms. A lot of neutrons. Enough neutrons to set off the fission reaction. Fusion generates far fewer free neutrons (if at all, depending on your fuel) because it's busy trying to form atoms instead of breaking them apart.
Secondly, when people think of "radiation" from a bomb they think of the fallout (since the actual radiation from the explosion lasts as long as the actual explosion). Fusion in and of itself has no fallout. The fallout from modern hydrogen bombs is from the fission bomb that's used to set it off. No fission bomb, no fallout.
"it's potential damage far outweighs that of a dirty bomb."
Now here is where you need to lay off the crack pipe.
Getting a fission reaction to start is pretty easy: get a neutron-producer close to a clump of unstable atoms. Getting a fusion reaction to start, on the other hand, requires a LOT of input heat in the beginning in order to generate the plasma the reactions takes place in. So much heat that the pressure at the heart of Jupiter isn't enough to start a sustainable reaction. In the past 50 years the only way we've been able to pull it off is with a fission bomb.
But let's pretend that a pure fusion bomb is possible in the short term. Although it's possible to squeeze a fission bomb into something the size of a suitcase, your average 20 megaton device is more or less a cubic meter in size. But it's only that small because the heat generator is a tiny little suitcase-sized fission bomb. If we try to use a fusion reactor to generate the heat instead of a fission bomb, I don't see the device being small enough to fit into a cargo container (probably the largest possible size for a device to be useful to terrorists).
But what if they try to blow up a fusion power plant? Fission reactors are heavily shielded to keep the inside in. Probable fusion reactors would be heavily shielded to keep the outside out. If a tokomak loses magnetic containment, the plasma expands, cools, and reverts back to a gas. If it loses its physical containment, air gets in, conducts/convects away heat from the plasma, the plasma cools and reverts back to a gas. If you try to blow it up you just end up with a negligible amount of hot gas on top of the explosive.
Personally, I'd be a hell of a lot more frightened of an attack at a coal-fired plant. Have you ever seen what a spark can make coal dust do? Or what about popping off the fuel tanks at a natural gas power plant? And while I'm on the subject of boiling liquid-vapor explosions, oil refineries look awfully unprotected...
"Ain't nothing better than all the powers of the universe right on your tabletop."
You're confusing fusion with zero-point energy.
... which is already in your tabletop, so I guess that still counts...
What, those billions in campaign contributions don't count?
"You can make fair use of the code without complying with the GPL."
Fair use includes such things as making a derived work. The GPL restricts derived works. The GPL is more restrictive than copyright law.
"he lost the right to unilaterally change his mind, and he'll have to rip out everyone else's code to get that right back."
He has the ability to both ask permission from others to change the license and/or rip out all that other code. However, he still has the ability to change his mind. Nobody else has that ability. They can't rip out Linus' code because it will always be a derived work. They can't ask for Linus' permission because he already said "no" by applying the GPL in the first place.
" Note that anyone else could do the same by ripping Linus' code out of their fork--he really has no special legal standing"
They can fork it all they want, but it must always be GPLed. Even if they do rip out all of Linus' work, the fork is still a derived work from the original. Again, GPL is more restrictive than copyright.
"Who cares? I hardly see how that changes whether it's libel or not."
If he hasn't dealt with any other managements he's deliberately misrepresenting himself.
"But what a man would be doing if it did not have his current job is impossible to know, and hence merely an opinion, and not libel."
It all depends on whether what was written was a statement of opinion or to suggest an analysis of facts. For example, there's a world of difference between "I think he's a child molester" and "He's a child molester."
Of course, since neither of us seem to know Whatley's URL or Xybernaut's take on the whole thing, we may never know.
"Even if some of the factual information is wrong, there's a serious about whether it was maliciously wrong and hence libel, or if he just went off on a rant and didn't bother checking all his assumptions."
When last I looked at libel law (the last time I was threatened with a lawsuit), there was no mention of intent. The author is ultimately responsible for what was written and the burden of fact-checking rests on the author. The only thing the plaintiff has to prove is that the speech in question is untrue.
"So many people have contributed so much to Linux that Linus only holds the copyright to a portion of the overall codebase"
The GPL is more restrictive than copyright so the copyrights are moot.
"If he tried to ship a proprietary Linux kernel binary, he'd have to request a special license to do so from every contributor or remove their code lest he violate hundreds of copyright holders' right to the code in "his" kernel."
Linus was the only person who had the ability to choose what kind of license (if any) to release his code under. Everybody else afterward had their options limited to "GPL or don't code" by Linus' decision.
And while Linus may have to ask permission to release the kernel under a different license, only Linus has the right to change his mind in the first place. The act of choosing the GPL over some other license is telling everybody else afterwards that they cannot release the code under a different license.