Ok, what _exactly_ about the the Wolfenstien rippoffs?
Before you answer, let's recap:
We are talking about what I will, for the lack of a better name, call "second person shooters" where we follow the development of _specific_ (thats singular for you ESL people) character. This is a kind of interactive literature sort of game. I bring up the literary uninterestingness of such a game centered around an accountant who is living an uneventful law-abiding life. Said game being uninteresting for the same reasons that nobody writes novels where nothing new happens to a nobody (or at least when they do it doesn't sell). And point out that such a game wouldn't sell and wouldn't be played.
Then someone (triumphantly?) counters that the "Populous" ripoff/reenvisioning/technically realistic re-envisioning (whatever) game "The SIMS" basically disproves my point about the literary value of a following an uninteresting character because The SIMS "has accountants with boring lives in it", which, frankly has no bearing on the discussion. (If this is too complex, understand that The SIMS isn't "about" some specific accountant lovingly wrought into cut-scenes, plots, and dialog, its about your ability to, at your whim, do things like starve that accountant to death or drive him insane by "accidentally" locking him in a room with no doors.)
And so now, to counter my "second person shooter/character game" argument you wantonly toss in a throw-away line about the "third person shooter" and all its variations which _nobody_ can honestly say is "about" anything much other than BFGs and body counts. If the Wolfenstien guy "happens to be an accountant" he certainly isn't leading the uneventful "good role model" life previously alluded to.
So I get it... you had _not_ point but you knew how to post... sure... consider this response the yummy cookie that your "but hay" post so richly deserves... 8-)
Now, given all that... what about the 5000 Wolfenstien rippofs again and how do they have bearing on the concept that the GTA games should replace their lead characters with good role models for the black youth of America?
Animal crossing is "covariant" as opposed to "non-covariant". That is, according to your position, they took The SIMS and added things. Which is fine.
My immediate point was that nobody could make another "The SIMS" (particularly to model the boring life of some accountant.)
My larger point implicit in the thread as a whole is that a "first person" game about some random law abiding person would not sell.
As a matter of fact, not all The SIMS are "law abiding" and for that matter "The SIMS" doesn't follow any one character.
The SIMS itself, is largely based on the "god-view tweaking environment affecting only partially controllable independent entities" that you could follow all the way back to the game Populous.
But see the "second person shooters" (GTA etc) are a fundamentally different kind of game that The SIMS. You are not supposed to self-identify with some individual SIM the way you are supposed to take droopy-mac-gangsta-pants' personal plight to heart.
You (metaphorically) have the "well what about my cat!" response to my _original_ statement that "metal is hard". Fluffy being fluffy isn't material to the discussion.
When people make statements _ALL_ the words count. So does the _Topic_. The fact that The SIMS is centered around SIMS that have boring virtual lives in no way furthers the conversation as to whether or not people would buy a game _CENTERED_ around _A_ (singular) suburban nobody doing nothing in particular. See how those things are not even _SORT_ _OF_ the same?
That makes the meta-meta-issue of enumerating the progression of the third-person god-controller games moot when discussing games "about" "characters".
Please learn to include context in your arguments.
Actually a lot of people hated The SIMS, myself included. But even if they hadn't, the game was made, and made by a competitor, so the slot for "that video game plot" was "used up". There isn't enough room in the market place for non-covariant repetition. Yea we keep making variations of stories by Shakespeare and The Bible, but they _are_ variations. We don't just keep making Gone With The Wind from the same script, we at least tweak it between iterations.
E.G. once someone made "The SIMS" so nobody else needed to, or really could, not at least without taking at most a minuscule fraction of the market and a whole lot of grief for being a copycat.
Meanwhile, "Middle Class Accountant: The First-Person Actuarial" would sell to _nobody_ 8-).
It still just boils down to this:
White guy with white slacks and Hawaiian shirt and gun => campy 80 reference to those wacky Italians.
Black guy with baggy pants and a do-rag and gun => ethnic crime against our otherwise untarnished black youth.
Muslim with beard and a turban and a gun => "oh well, Achmed is a bad guy and we all know it."
Its a double standard that boils down to "represent someone I identify with and, plus or minus some lip-service, it is evil. Everybody else is fair game."
Divisiveness in the name of selective unity is a form of willful ignorance, and willful ignorance is the root of all stupid evil.
It's a good thing that the first four GTA games weren't about some white guy....
Oh wait...
And of course the Arabs and Persians and Jews all get off scott-free because they control the media...
Of course the gay characters are _never_ stereotypes...
And the "sex workers" of the world are always portrayed in the most positive and even-handed light possible...
And the "spics" and "rice burners" were perfectly valid and even-handed portrayals of racial norms as well...
(And we all know that cops are just corrupt dealers and killers with legal enforcement powers that can be convinced to leave you alone if you change your clothes or drive your bike through just the right spot in the local mall parking lot.)
I don't hear this guy protesting the treatment of and message presented to the youth of any _other_ "minority".
ENOUGH WITH THE EMOTIONAL STUBBED TOES ALREADY!
The sad fact of the matter is that GTA wasn't portraying "black people" as anything, it was portraying the "black gansta stereotype" and it was _even_ somewhat even-handed since the main character was "acting against type" by trying to straighten out a mess as much as make one.
And before you re-stub your emotional toe on the word "stereotype", please keep in mind that every non-proper noun _IS_ a stereotype. Teacher. Cop. Politician. Meter Maid. Brother. Sister. Nun. Clerk. Priest. (etc od nausium). Every single damn one of those words come with a precompiled message and set of expectations. That's all a "stereotype" is. "Baseless racial stereotype" is a different concept all together.
The actual problem is that the "gangsta" movement has deliberately manufactured a stereotype that someone doesn't like, but this is being hoist on their own petard. Heck, the members of that self-created group probably thought the portrayal was totally cool.
You cannot save people from their own damn selves, nor should people who make a bad image for themselves garner sympathy.
As far as the "game makers", well, they know that a game based on the law-abiding middle-income family guy from suburbia, who goes to work and pays bills on time and attends a baseline church and plays a friendly game of poker once a month with "the guys" WOUDL MAKE A TERRIBLY BORING VIDEOGAME.
I'd say "They tried to make a good game, so sue them" but I am sure somebody somewhere with a bruised medula would do just that.
And P.S. I didn't like or play the game when my roommate brought it home because _NONE_ of those stereo types interested me. I kind-of liked Vice City because the soundtrack was interesting and the action wasn't skewed beyond the empty plot of Miami Vice. But I didn't whine about the game much either, except when it was interfering with me using the TV for something valuable. (I'd say "like NASCAR or Pro Wrestling" but I fear the irony would be lost on the stupid and someone would take that seriously and dub me "raciest" without regarding context, so let me put "watching firefly" here instead.)
Hold your horses a moment. Isn't it the _JOB_ and _PURPOSE_ of participating companies to sink bad "standards" when they are part of the standards setting process?
The world of politics has basically poisoned the mindset in this planet. In politics it is business as usual to suggest something horrid and be "negotiated back down" to merely squalid and grotesque. We call this "compromise". But it isn't the compromise your great grand (progenitor) had in mind.
See, we are only supposed to compromise the "somewhat overreaching but still reasonably based on ideas that are workable or understandable" into something that is "workable".
Once something is not "workable" "understandable" or "reasonable" it isn't supposed to get any slice of any pie anywhere.
But in politics it does...
And since Microsoft's #1 products are now "political perceptions" and "lobbyists" they think their "technology" "ought to be" given a "politically fair treatment."
But technology still remembers what politics has forgotten. Everything that passes into law/standards has to actually be implemented by someone somewhere to have any meaning.
See... Bad law still at least gets good press in a target audience within the unvarnished popularity contest that is politics... Bad standards get people killed in the real world that is medical software and defense software and legal software and embedded systems software (and so on).
You can ignore bad law, and even our enforcers do so every day.
You can not ignore bad software because when you turn your back on it, it eats your data, and sometimes your children.
So standards setting isn't supposed to be fair, it's supposed to be "kill the malicious, weak and stupid" lest they kill us all.
So to translate TFA, Microsoft whines that IBM did its job by trying to kill the malicious, weak, and stupid Office XML anti-standard.
Let's face it. Back when you had to submit a working thing in order to get a patent the system more-or-less worked. The "inventor" had to actually invent the damn thing before it could be patented.
We also have the precedent that just putting two things together without changing their basic function was not a patentable practice. (This is the "conveyor belt plus cash register" ruling.)
Since software is _solely_ the practice of putting existing things together (those things are called "instructions", or if that is too fine grained, then APIs and SystemCalls, or even "features" like "client" and "server" and "database" and "GUI" and "button" and "field" etc, this "mere aggregation" is evident at every level of software).
So now, even if the weasel-words are unclear, if there isn't a "reasonably working prototype" there isn't a patent.
That should make a lot of the obvious things obvious and prevent "idea patents".
Then, just for good measure, stick with the actual legal precedent which says that the "software element of an invention is patentable." This is _FAR_ different from "software is patentable". In short, nothing in precedent says that _pure_ software is patentable.
Mere aggregation, not being patentable, should infer to the non-brain-damaged, that pure separation should not be patentable. That will get rid of all the "but this is a client doing part and a server doing part". Besides the "division of labor" wasn't particularly patentable anyway, if it were, you could make anything that someone else had a patent on just by making sure you made it with more steps or more people. (etc.)
And context was _never_ patentable. That is, if you cannot patent "sewing a pretty flower pattern into a cloth" you cannot patent "sewing a pretty flower pattern into a cloth to make people more happy".
So:
No physical invention, no patent. Mere aggregation, no patent. Pure Software, no patent. Pure Methodology, no patent. No functioning prototype, no patent.
I would add a "percent of life cycle" limit to the patent. If any one instance of the patented invention would, on the average, have a life cycle of X, the patent should be valuable for no more that 1/2x. So if you invent a new breaking system for a car that has an expected life cycle of 10 years before replacement, the patent would be good for five years. I would have disposable parts (break shoes etc) not count to that life cycle if they weren't the entirety of the invention (new breaking system). Basically, if you _invent_ a thing, you get to own the market until the point where the after market would come into life. That way you get the prime cut of the money but you don't get to prevent incremental innovation that invariably arises from the after market.
So the inventor gets one long turn of the crank, but they don't get to force the crank turners into indenture.
Next, publication, by anyone, anywhere, before the date of filing for the patent provides prior art. By one day, not one year. To be a valid patent it must first be a trade secret. This prevents squatting on or stealing from the commons. It also prevents marketing scams. You don't get to convince people to invest in the possibility of your patentable invention by open market manipulation. You also don't get to overhear something interesting on a chat board and race to the patent office to steal the thing from the commons the real conceiver (sp?) donated it into.
Finally, it should be pretty easy to remove the presumption of correctness of a patent. No more of this guilty until you prove yourself innocent bull.
Oh wait!
FINALLY: If something is copyrighted, it cannot be patented, if patented, it cannot be copyrighted. If trade secret it can be promoted to patent or copyright but not both. You have to chose. You only get _ONE_ dip from _ONE_ bucket (except where you are promoting a trade secret which you get to do once, like castling in chess 8-). That means that if you publish s
First off, while the "cut scenes" of a game could be said to have "footage", the whole rest of the game (typically) have no such thing. Even if you checked every single character skin and setting, there would be no way to _know_ there wasn't an easter-egg or something.
The fact of the matter is that "objectionable content" is entirely in the eye of the beholder.
And what of "patches" and "mods"?
Heck take some of the "dance moves" from WOW and line them up and you have simulated sex, at least within the limits within the minds of people who think that some of these other things were "objectionable".
The Nanny State cannot hope to get closure over this, and trying to is just more waste of my taxpayer dollar.
Note to you regulation-happy people out there: Your "precious bundle" is neither as fragile as you imagine, nor as important as you dream. Neither are you. If janet jackson's saggy boobie and the gyrations of a pair of 100 polygon figures are enough to undermine your sense of moral turpitude, then you are a mindless chode; and might I suggest that the world is much safer if you put an opaque polyethylene bag over your head. (But it only _really_ works if you cinch it snuggly. Assist your child before yourself.)
Now if you can get truth in ratings for suckage, then we can talk.
The thing is, when you shout "it must have SOME impact" you conflate the idea of "impact" with "negative impact", and more-so you conflate "negative impact" for a high profile artist with "negative impact" for all artists, and similarly "negative impact" to a production house with "negative impact" to artists.
Worse, you conflate "business impact" with, "monetary impact", and with "artistic impact".
In honest truth there is no reason to even suspect that the net effect of free music on the net is negative at all. It is more likely to add listeners than remove them. It is also almost certain to add musicians (or at least re-mixers).
I would agree that one near-certain impact will be a reduction in the concentration of money flowing to any one pocket. That is, if there are more artists, and more music is being heard, and the amount of money flowing through the system is constrained by real-world economics involving discretionary income; then it is a systemic certainty that the peak concentration of cash will not be as, well, concentrated.
On the other hand, the current financial model, in particularly the way the on-air play is sampled to determine who is getting played how often, means that many artists are being undervalued.
If free music on the internet has no other impact, it will eventually lead to including the music movement metrics of that free movement in the calculation of which artists get paid. The height of super stardom will be somewhat diminished, but the depth of obscurity will be mediated far more fairly. Which will lead to more music, which, even if music quality were a random function, would lead to more "high quality" music.
Consider the power to tax is the power to destroy. Likewise the power to concentrate is the power to filter. Television programing is "highly concentrated" and the filters suck, so we get "wicked wicked games" instead of "firefly" (in principle) because the filter was essentially one guy with an axe to grind.
So what is the "artistic impact" of a less concentrated financial flow? Is it greater than the "business impact" of a less concentrated flow of control?
See, its all Apples and Polar-Bears. The comparisons have been deliberately conflated because the people asking the questions are invariably asking the questions in terms of the flow through the tiny opening that leads into _their_ _particular_ pocket.
So the question, as framed, is invalid. The "values" involved have been confused and improperly combined then artificially separated back into "stock positions".
That being said, the real questions, IMHO, are things like: is "Illegal Prior Restraint implemented as Unregulated Technologies" (often misspelled 'DRM') going to fail immediately while the cost is bounded, or much later after economies have been trashed and people have been jailed?
"We must hurry to create the prison cell we think is comfortable for fear that someone else will create a prison cell we don't."
This is a false dichotomy, as in both cases we end up prisoners.
Instead of "rushing" to create or accept a single form of Illegal Prior Restraint (often misspelled "DRM") we need to rush to prevent any such Illegal Prior Restraint.
A side effect of this Prior Restraint is that, when combined with the DMCA (in the U.S. and its puppet regimes), is that even as we speak "technologists" can create untested, arbitrary technologies which, at them moment of their initiation have the force of law. That is, if you read the law it basically says "anything created within [these bounds] immediately functions to create a new body of criminal estate, and in so doing may immediately and retroactively reclassify existing technologies and inventions as illegal."
Consider, I produce a tool that does stenographic analysis on images; this tool specifically analyzes an arbitrary image to identify the best ways that the picture _can_ _be_ used to store hidden information. (That is, it identifies the best places and means to encode information. e.g. it tells you that you _could_ fit 2kbits in the sky-part, while you could put 8kbits in the ocean part of a given image before the image is degraded enough to start showing visible signs of manipulation.) This application is completely legal. Then some guy produces an "effective content protection mechanism" that uses the "album cover" image as a Illegal Public Restraint key vector. When he does that, my existing program is "automagically" reclassified as a criminal-grade circumvention tool. It's legal magic!
So, again, here we are being encouraged in a race to the bottom, fueled by technologists who think that just because a thing can be done (half-assed-ly at best) it really ought to be done.
Just say NO to Illegal Prior Restraint and any technology that is being sold to you as a "kinder, gentler" IPR.
Whenever someone proposes something outlandish they are just hoping you will fight them back to "a reasonable compromise", which will seem "not so bad" but which if you mentally went back to before the whole debacle you would see for what it was. A Really Bad Idea.
Enough Already. The continuous questions of the "what if we make it shaped like a bird? What if we make it taste like pancakes?" form are just telling them how to focus their marketing while lulling you into a sense that there _simply_ _must_ be a configuration that you could live with. It's emotional manipulation. You begin to feel unreasonable because you don't want IPR "even if" thy go to the trouble to make it strawberry shortcake IPR with medical care attached lovingly by your grandmother.
You don't want it. You really don't. No matter how palatable they try to make it.
How bout this? I'll cut off your leg and use it to beat your children to death. But I'll give you ice cream... how about that?
IPR is just as self defeating.
The ONLY REASONABLE ANSWER is NO Illegal Prior Restraint.
It's like that thing were people propose a truly horrific law because they know they will be "forced to settle" for a merely terrible law.
No Digital Restriction Management is good. NONE of it.
I am not anti-encryption. I am not anti-artist.
But any scheme that involves someone "selling" or "giving" me something so provisionally that they can then just take it back is simply a BAD IDEA.
The next step down this road is the one where some Bad Actor gets to send people threatening letters and blackmail that is "unprintable", "read only once", "no screen shot", "read only for 1 minute", watermarked to prevent your camera from taking a picture of the screen. Leaving you, in turn, with no proof for a complaint and then leaving the police with no clues while they are pondering over your corpse.
Eh, so what, at least some music executive is *sure* to get to split the full 99-cents that he ripped off the consumer for, in the name of an artist who got a bill for overages in production.
Oh, wait... which kind of Illegal Prior Restraint (commonly misspelled DRM) was good again?
It is _NEVER_ helpful to repeat the artificially biased question as if it represents something worth answering.
The question, as stated, presumes facts not in evidence, namely that the DRM that is harder to break is in any possible way "Better".
See my "snowball" post later in this topic. Getting rid of space junk should be _really_ easy. I didn't do the math there, but the technology to do this exists today and it should be super cheap as well. You just have to think more practically. You have only one goal: junk is gone. The best place for it to go is "down" (back to earth) because that is nearly free.
Now combine that with basic orbital mechanics (lower faster, higher slower; sparse atmospherics; A + -A = 0; etc) and stop trying to match orbits when all you have to do is intersect them without making a mess...
Create the following package and send it into retrograde orbit: 1) Take a very thin membrane material (mylar etc) and make a _HUGE_ balloon. 2) Prepare an "inflater" it with a material that will harden into a very sparse, somewhat resilient foam (think "fix a flat" meets sparse Styrofoam) [what is silly string made of? That would be just about the right consistency... 8-)].
Include enough material in item 2 to fill item 1. The resulting matrix should not "pressurize" the membrane, it should just fill it out to its final volume.
When the package is in orbit you do the deed and inflate it. The membrane exists to (A) define the size of the resultant object and (B) offer the object a modicum of structural support as/after the foam hardens and (C) keep the whole thing together if the foam is "shattered". (e.g. debris is _supposed_ to penetrate the membrane and it is most desirable for the debris to then become embedded in the matrix.)
Every impact between the retrograde snowball and the invariably non-retrograde orbiting debris decelerates BOTH objects. The snowball will tend to pick up and retain the impossibly annoying little pieces (a bolt here, a washer there, etc). Larger objects will tend to hole-through the snowball entirely. In both cases energy will be exchanged and both the object and the snowball will drop to lower orbits. The snowball's orbit must decay quickly because the very large surface area needs must interact with even the exceptionally sparse atmosphere in LEO even if it doesn't impact anything. So each gram of mass it picks up will add a negative vector compared to its original orbit.
Meanwhile, every large object that encounters the snowball will be deflected to a lower less stable orbit, or in a worst case into a less circular orbit which must then have a lower altitude at its closest approach and so which must then be slowed by the atmosphere more effectively (etc).
To deorbit _VERY_ large pieces of debris, you deploy the snowball in a non-retrograde, eccentric orbit set so that the desired object overtakes the snowball from behind, or more correctly "in the side". So the snowball is going down \ and the object is going across "-". The desired net effect is to embed the target object in the larger snowball while achieving a much less stable composite orbit "-\". The new composite object has a very large surface area, a more elliptical orbit, and a lower more friction-filled perigee, and game over. These single object killers would generally be more massive and more tuned to their target.
Gravity and friction do the rest.
Given that we track all this stuff anyway, we know where most of the important problematic bits are. We can make several different snowball materials in order to catch different grades/weights of debris. The right starting vectors and materials could "deorbit" all sorts of goodies in a matter of hours.
Since the snowballs themselves are sparse materials with a lot of surface area you get guaranteed burn-up on reentry of the snowball.
Any impact hard/fast enough to shatter a snowball will produce a sparse scattering of material which MUST be greatly decelerated since each fragment had to overcome the tensile strength holding it to the whole, and the whole was in stable orbit and the shattering force was opposing the orbital velocity. So shattered snowballs would fall to earth virtually directly.
There is a tiny probability that a whole-through would punch out a chunk of the snowball which would then be moving at the same velocity as the _new_ speed of the penetrating object. Both the penetrating object and the "chad" would drop immediately to a new (lower) orbit and the drag etc would take over as previously mentioned.
And in the worst case, the filling foam could be made from something with "excellent" sublimation characteristics so that fragments that find peculiar orbits would "evaporate" in a matter of weeks.
The only material challenge is the balloon. You want something has re
About three weeks ago a guy walked up my private driveway, took a picture of my house, and then walked away. My house is on a "recessed lot" so the driveway is 170 feet of my private property. You cannot make out any reasonable details of my hose from the public roadway because of intervening cover including shrubs, trees, and the guy who lives in front of me is overly fond of temporary buildings and bad landscaping.
I wonder if this is what he was doing? I had just stepped out of the shower so, while I saw him through a window, I didn't have a chance to ask him what the hell he was doing before he got away.
If I find a picture of my hose on this service and find it was taken from my private driveway, do I have recourse? It was clearly a trespass and the angle and content of the picture would prove that...
Did anybody notice that even the summary is a quick lesson in "how to make a straw man".
It is _almost_ more insulting that someone is getting good money to tell corporations how to make "bad arguments" (that apparently stick), than it is that corporations are trying to make obviously self-serving arguments against things.
I mean you have to at least try to make your business model work, but seriously people...
Oh, and, "free information" == "government censorship"? Minitrue would be proud.
Yep, not "real treason", e.g. "high treason", but it is some kind of low treason or something. We don't really have a word or phrase standing ready for this case.
So what word would you use to express someone subverting clear intent and establishing a body of law that is in direct opposition to the clearly divine-able (word for that too?) intent of the constitution.
They aren't _technically_ overthrowing the constitution by means of force. They simply control the force(s) that should be stopping them from creatively instituting precedent that effectively overthrows the government.
If someone walked in to congress, held them at threat of violence, and coerced them all to pass a bunch of laws that went against the constitution then someone would rush in and put down that (technically terrorist) threat.
Right now we have a a conspiracy to subvert the constitution by means, not of direct threat of immediate violence, but by simply claiming that it is partly or wholly in abeyance and then _threatening_ every body who complains with "investigation" and "detention" and TORTURE.
So we have "subvert" and we largely have "overthrow" and we _clearly_ have "violence".
So it isn't high treason, but it is clearly _something_.
If only the congressional panel had arrested the AG on "contempt of congress", or perhaps "contempt of constitution" and plain old criminal malfeasance in the performance of his office....
Clearly that sneering claim not to see Habeas Corpus was sneering contempt for _HUMAN_ _DIGNITY_ and _FREEDOM_ and was clearly a form of calling all of us, including congress, just plain _that_ _stupid_...
How about life in a federal detainment facility for first degree asshattery.
If we ever oust the current terrorist(*) regime and return to a constitutional state I wonder how the principle players will feel about entering the "justice system" they are now in the process of construction from whole cloth?
If you catch my drift. 8-)
(*) The original meaning of "terrorism" dates back to "the reign of terror" in the French revolution when the government, such as it was, used all sorts of (these same tactics) to control the people of France. As such, our government is pretty much going along this same route... "...a result of Robespierre's insistence on associating Terror with Virtue..." etc. It is only by artifact of press that the term has come to refer to idiot _individuals_ who cannot speak well trying to speak loudly by means of force.
The state of our union is "screwed" for the foreseeable future, don't kid yourself.
Isn't _EVERY_ _SINGE_ member of the armed services individually sworn to "protect and defend the constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic"? Or is it just the president?
Shouldn't _someone_ be arresting these people by now...? Who does the arresting when the person who is _supposed_ to be doing the arresting is the one that should be arrested?
Yea, I know, slippery slope and all that, but damn, this is sounding a _lot_ like treason (by "pun" or by "confabulation" or some such perversion of the language and with some deliberate mendacity apparent, since nobody can be _THAT_ stupid can they?) executed by or on the behalf of our "elected" leaders.
Isn't _EVERY_ _SINGE_ member of the armed services individually sworn to "protect and defend the constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic"? Or is it just the president?
Shouldn't _someone_ be arresting these people by now...? Who does the arresting when the person who is _supposed_ to be doing the arresting is the one that should be arrested?
Yea, I know, slippery slope and all that, but damn, this is sounding a _lot_ like treason (by "pun" or by "confabulation" or some such perversion of the language and with some deliberate mendacity apparent, since nobody can be _THAT_ stupid can they?) executed by or on the behalf of our "elected" leaders.
There is an important difference between these laws that needs to be drawn perpendicular to your current logic.
I could give a rats ass about Motorcycle Helmets or Trans Fats, and laws for those are dumb attempts by the government to protect people from themselves against their will. That's just the nanny state.
On the other hand, Smoking and Car Seatbelt laws have a direct and immediate impact on me as the non-regulated party.
Smoking bans are, essentially, a way for the non-smokers to enforce their RIGHT NOT TO SMOKE. Smokers claim infringement on their rights, but they don't seem to give a rat's ass about my right NOT to breathe their toxic off-gas. The laws would have been unnecessary if the smokers had, as a group, volunteered to _automatically_ take their debase fumery into purely private domains.
The Car Seatbelt laws are just like the "secure your load" rules. In an emergency maneuvering circumstance (screeching tires and fleeing pedestrians etc) I, as the person _outside_ your car have a vested (social) interest in you being fastened behind the wheel so that you can do your best to drive the car. I also have a vested interest in your passenger(s) and child(ren) being fastened down so that they don't become projectiles WITHING THE CAR that could interfere with your ability to drive. That is, if you swerve left, and your are not belted in, then you have a real tendency to end up in the passenger seat; conversely if you swerve right there is a tendency for your passenger to end up in the drivers lap. In either case, as the pedestrian or passenger in another car, or for that matter a passenger in your car; there is a high probability that _I_ will _need_ you to swerve back before too long.
(This is different than a Helmet law situation, because by the time the helmet comes into play, the driver is _FAR_ beyond recovering the attitude of the bike.)
None of the above represent the "official" reason these laws were passed, but they represent the reasons that I, IMHO, know these laws have been _RIGHTFULLY_ passed.
I am most amused by this debate. I find it amazing that the whole country rolled over like a good dog when the knife, sword, and club were criminalized despite their clear existence as "arms". If I have common sporting equipment (baseball bat, eppe[sword variant], knife [e.g. dive knife, hunting knife, etc) I can be declared "armed and dangerous" and yet I am somehow not protected by my right to "keep and bare arms".
Am I just being obtuse?
Not really.
Mos forms of legal erosion start way out in the conceptual boondocks. The water of compromise and common consent is forced under the foundation to rip away the necessary supports. One concession at a time we go from "defenders of democracy" to the modern inquisition at Gitmo. We slip gently from "free expression" to "free speech zones". The right to keep and bare arms to getting strip-searched for having nail-clippers or hair-gel in some allegedly sacrosanct setting.
Rome didn't "fall" it "settled". It was poisoned from within by fear, petty weaknesses, and the inexorable force that is "shifting public policies".
After careful consideration I would say that the second amendment can be translated into the following modern english:
Each member of society has the right to be, individually, _at_ _least_ as well armed as any member of the government that claimes to govern them.
Explicit in that concept is the simple fact that it is fundamentally in line with the founding fathers intent that I, or any other citizen, full well deserve to be able to "out-gun the local police" and so on.
Lets face it, the "hunting" facade is bull. The automatic weapon exists to facilitate killing a number of people in quick succession. That is it's purpose, and that is _why_ it should be legal.
In the criminal context, gun violence is an act of cowardliness. These people who go out into public and go "people hunting" or whatever invariably pick environments where there is little-to-no chance of taking return fire. They don't go people hunting at the police station, nor at the local gun-shop. They go to the MacKiddies fast food joint, and they don't do it in Texas. You walk into your local Old People's Buffet in Texas and start shooting, and Gran will haul her hog-leg out of her Granny Great-Purse and school you in manners. The simple logic of cowardliness says that "random" gun violence (as opposed to specific-cause-we're-feuding gun violence) is more likely as the gun carry prohibitions become more strict. It's safer for the gunman, and he knows it.
In the political sense, the right to keep and bare arms is explicable just from casual perusal of a junior High American History book. When "The Red-Coats" were an occupying force they did a lot of crappy things to the locals, just like we are doing a lot of crappy things to the locals out there in the territory we are occupying. Those crappy things included arresting people for gathering together, or having guns, or printing leaflets; and breaking into people's houses and generally wrecking the place while fishing for _anything_ that might seem suspicious. (etc) Those abuses directly translate into the Bill of Rights.
The bill of rights _Largely_ exists as a body of law that serves a _SINGLE_ unified purpose: to prevent "American Soil" from ever suffering another Occupying force, be that force Foreign or Domestic. That last word, "Domestic", doesn't just mean your neighbor, it most strenuously and explicitly includes "your president" and "those generals" and "the local sheriff" and "those DEA guys" and "the FBI/CIA/Homeland Security jack-booted thugs."
If a community is pushed so far as to need to say "Enough!", the constitution exists to make sure that they can do so in whatever language and to whatever degree of stridency they find necessary.
Which is as it is, because that is as it _should_ be.
But we have not learned from the past, and so we are beginning to suffer the classically prescribed doom of repetition.
Scientists announced today that they not only detected the oldest radio signal in the universe, but that that signal may predate the Big Bang itself by several seconds. There has been great success in translating the semantic content. The complete transcript has been made available to the public:
"Hello? Tech Support? Yea, the box you sent me says 'Gravity Stabilizer' but inside there is just a ball with a little switch. It says 'consult manual before operation' but I presume I should just flip the switch... right?"
The XBox that _YOU_ _BUY_ is no longer _THEIR_ (Microsoft's) Hardware.
They _SOLD_ you the hardware. It is _YOURS_ now.
See, you evidence in your position, damage from the mind-screw that so many have fallen for of late. You somehow have fallen into the belief that people who sell you things still somehow retain some intrinsic right to those things.
They don't.
Look around your house. All of that stuff (barring the possibility that you rent your appliances and such), each and every piece, actually _belongs_ to you.
If I were a representative of Sears Inc, and I barged into your house and tried to repossess your (craftsman) screw drivers and your (kenmore) refrigerator, because I didn't approve of some fact of their use [e.g. you used the screw driver to pry the kenmore logo off the front of the refrigerator] you would not spring to my defence and trumpet to all here on slashdot that it was OK because that was "my (sears') hardware". You would most likely sock me in the mouth and then go looking for a lawyer.
Given that obvious truth, why, oh why, would you think that somehow, after (some guy) paid ($600 or so) for his (XBox or PS3) that (Microsoft or Nintendo) had the first moment of a "right" to say that (some guy) had "no right" to run (Linux) on "their (Microsoft's or Nintendo's) hardware".
I call bullshit to all of that.
_HOWEVER_
If Nintenrosfot (etc) were to have hardware signing checks in the box, and they were to give me the keys to that sign-to-run system so that I could run whatever I want; I would have _NO_ _OBJECTION_ to the concept that if I wanted to run a given game as part of their online service, that I would have to run a copy of that game as signed by them.
See, when the software that I run is part of the software that they/we all run as part of that distributed service of the game (q.v. WoW or Everquest or any other MMORPG or head-to-head or common-scoreboard facility) having all the parties agree to a level playing field, and having the hardware and software system possess and use a way to verify that level-ness would be (implicitly) part of the agreement necessary to play. That "agreement" is way different than, and separate from, the hardware purchase.
For instance, TiVO is welcome to their hardware signing IF AND ONLY IF I can sign as well. It is _MY_ TiVO after all. However, they are also welcome to deny me access to their program listing service (and refund me that service fee) if I am not using their software. If they were _reasonable_, they would only do that denial if my modifications were abusing their service in some way.
But as it exists, TiVO can play Darth Vader with _MY_ box (q.v. "I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it any further") by removing features I bought (30 second skip) and adding features I didn't buy (playing adverts on pause, and downloading programs I didn't ask for) after our deal was struck.
This is why I _don't_ own a TiVO. (See Myth TV 8-)
Oddly enough, they shot their own selves in the foot with all this. If they _HADN'T_ put in all that draconian control, they could never have been _REQUIRED_ to take out the 30 second skip. They were over a barrel on the issue because they _did_ have the control, but if the source had been truly open, they could have argued that they couldn't remove the feature for the existing customers, and they couldn't keep the feature out of the hands of new customers. They would have been able to plead "go argue with the users, we aren't the boss of them" to the various industry complainers.
(Remember all you corporate control freaks, "with great control comes great liability". 8-)
I bought a Sansa, and I really like it. And now they are moving into a _second_ pile of DRM bull.
Well, I for one will continue to not sign up for any of these evil DRM sites and services. I do all my access in MSC mode (just plain USB disk installation mode) via linux.
What's funny is that the player has to be in the no-drm plain transfer mode to do automatic firmware updates.
Someone somewhere isn't thinking.
And no, I don't even _care_ what the details of Helix DNA are. The concept is flawed so the implementation is uninteresting.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, what _exactly_ about the the Wolfenstien rippoffs?
Before you answer, let's recap:
We are talking about what I will, for the lack of a better name, call "second person shooters" where we follow the development of _specific_ (thats singular for you ESL people) character. This is a kind of interactive literature sort of game. I bring up the literary uninterestingness of such a game centered around an accountant who is living an uneventful law-abiding life. Said game being uninteresting for the same reasons that nobody writes novels where nothing new happens to a nobody (or at least when they do it doesn't sell). And point out that such a game wouldn't sell and wouldn't be played.
Then someone (triumphantly?) counters that the "Populous" ripoff/reenvisioning/technically realistic re-envisioning (whatever) game "The SIMS" basically disproves my point about the literary value of a following an uninteresting character because The SIMS "has accountants with boring lives in it", which, frankly has no bearing on the discussion. (If this is too complex, understand that The SIMS isn't "about" some specific accountant lovingly wrought into cut-scenes, plots, and dialog, its about your ability to, at your whim, do things like starve that accountant to death or drive him insane by "accidentally" locking him in a room with no doors.)
And so now, to counter my "second person shooter/character game" argument you wantonly toss in a throw-away line about the "third person shooter" and all its variations which _nobody_ can honestly say is "about" anything much other than BFGs and body counts. If the Wolfenstien guy "happens to be an accountant" he certainly isn't leading the uneventful "good role model" life previously alluded to.
So I get it... you had _not_ point but you knew how to post... sure... consider this response the yummy cookie that your "but hay" post so richly deserves... 8-)
Now, given all that... what about the 5000 Wolfenstien rippofs again and how do they have bearing on the concept that the GTA games should replace their lead characters with good role models for the black youth of America?
Animal crossing is "covariant" as opposed to "non-covariant". That is, according to your position, they took The SIMS and added things. Which is fine.
My immediate point was that nobody could make another "The SIMS" (particularly to model the boring life of some accountant.)
My larger point implicit in the thread as a whole is that a "first person" game about some random law abiding person would not sell.
As a matter of fact, not all The SIMS are "law abiding" and for that matter "The SIMS" doesn't follow any one character.
The SIMS itself, is largely based on the "god-view tweaking environment affecting only partially controllable independent entities" that you could follow all the way back to the game Populous.
But see the "second person shooters" (GTA etc) are a fundamentally different kind of game that The SIMS. You are not supposed to self-identify with some individual SIM the way you are supposed to take droopy-mac-gangsta-pants' personal plight to heart.
You (metaphorically) have the "well what about my cat!" response to my _original_ statement that "metal is hard". Fluffy being fluffy isn't material to the discussion.
When people make statements _ALL_ the words count. So does the _Topic_. The fact that The SIMS is centered around SIMS that have boring virtual lives in no way furthers the conversation as to whether or not people would buy a game _CENTERED_ around _A_ (singular) suburban nobody doing nothing in particular. See how those things are not even _SORT_ _OF_ the same?
That makes the meta-meta-issue of enumerating the progression of the third-person god-controller games moot when discussing games "about" "characters".
Please learn to include context in your arguments.
Actually a lot of people hated The SIMS, myself included. But even if they hadn't, the game was made, and made by a competitor, so the slot for "that video game plot" was "used up". There isn't enough room in the market place for non-covariant repetition. Yea we keep making variations of stories by Shakespeare and The Bible, but they _are_ variations. We don't just keep making Gone With The Wind from the same script, we at least tweak it between iterations.
E.G. once someone made "The SIMS" so nobody else needed to, or really could, not at least without taking at most a minuscule fraction of the market and a whole lot of grief for being a copycat.
Meanwhile, "Middle Class Accountant: The First-Person Actuarial" would sell to _nobody_ 8-).
It still just boils down to this:
White guy with white slacks and Hawaiian shirt and gun => campy 80 reference to those wacky Italians.
Black guy with baggy pants and a do-rag and gun => ethnic crime against our otherwise untarnished black youth.
Muslim with beard and a turban and a gun => "oh well, Achmed is a bad guy and we all know it."
Its a double standard that boils down to "represent someone I identify with and, plus or minus some lip-service, it is evil. Everybody else is fair game."
Divisiveness in the name of selective unity is a form of willful ignorance, and willful ignorance is the root of all stupid evil.
It's a good thing that the first four GTA games weren't about some white guy....
Oh wait...
And of course the Arabs and Persians and Jews all get off scott-free because they control the media...
Of course the gay characters are _never_ stereotypes...
And the "sex workers" of the world are always portrayed in the most positive and even-handed light possible...
And the "spics" and "rice burners" were perfectly valid and even-handed portrayals of racial norms as well...
(And we all know that cops are just corrupt dealers and killers with legal enforcement powers that can be convinced to leave you alone if you change your clothes or drive your bike through just the right spot in the local mall parking lot.)
I don't hear this guy protesting the treatment of and message presented to the youth of any _other_ "minority".
ENOUGH WITH THE EMOTIONAL STUBBED TOES ALREADY!
The sad fact of the matter is that GTA wasn't portraying "black people" as anything, it was portraying the "black gansta stereotype" and it was _even_ somewhat even-handed since the main character was "acting against type" by trying to straighten out a mess as much as make one.
And before you re-stub your emotional toe on the word "stereotype", please keep in mind that every non-proper noun _IS_ a stereotype. Teacher. Cop. Politician. Meter Maid. Brother. Sister. Nun. Clerk. Priest. (etc od nausium). Every single damn one of those words come with a precompiled message and set of expectations. That's all a "stereotype" is. "Baseless racial stereotype" is a different concept all together.
The actual problem is that the "gangsta" movement has deliberately manufactured a stereotype that someone doesn't like, but this is being hoist on their own petard. Heck, the members of that self-created group probably thought the portrayal was totally cool.
You cannot save people from their own damn selves, nor should people who make a bad image for themselves garner sympathy.
As far as the "game makers", well, they know that a game based on the law-abiding middle-income family guy from suburbia, who goes to work and pays bills on time and attends a baseline church and plays a friendly game of poker once a month with "the guys" WOUDL MAKE A TERRIBLY BORING VIDEOGAME.
I'd say "They tried to make a good game, so sue them" but I am sure somebody somewhere with a bruised medula would do just that.
And P.S. I didn't like or play the game when my roommate brought it home because _NONE_ of those stereo types interested me. I kind-of liked Vice City because the soundtrack was interesting and the action wasn't skewed beyond the empty plot of Miami Vice. But I didn't whine about the game much either, except when it was interfering with me using the TV for something valuable. (I'd say "like NASCAR or Pro Wrestling" but I fear the irony would be lost on the stupid and someone would take that seriously and dub me "raciest" without regarding context, so let me put "watching firefly" here instead.)
Hold your horses a moment. Isn't it the _JOB_ and _PURPOSE_ of participating companies to sink bad "standards" when they are part of the standards setting process?
The world of politics has basically poisoned the mindset in this planet. In politics it is business as usual to suggest something horrid and be "negotiated back down" to merely squalid and grotesque. We call this "compromise". But it isn't the compromise your great grand (progenitor) had in mind.
See, we are only supposed to compromise the "somewhat overreaching but still reasonably based on ideas that are workable or understandable" into something that is "workable".
Once something is not "workable" "understandable" or "reasonable" it isn't supposed to get any slice of any pie anywhere.
But in politics it does...
And since Microsoft's #1 products are now "political perceptions" and "lobbyists" they think their "technology" "ought to be" given a "politically fair treatment."
But technology still remembers what politics has forgotten. Everything that passes into law/standards has to actually be implemented by someone somewhere to have any meaning.
See... Bad law still at least gets good press in a target audience within the unvarnished popularity contest that is politics... Bad standards get people killed in the real world that is medical software and defense software and legal software and embedded systems software (and so on).
You can ignore bad law, and even our enforcers do so every day.
You can not ignore bad software because when you turn your back on it, it eats your data, and sometimes your children.
So standards setting isn't supposed to be fair, it's supposed to be "kill the malicious, weak and stupid" lest they kill us all.
So to translate TFA, Microsoft whines that IBM did its job by trying to kill the malicious, weak, and stupid Office XML anti-standard.
Let's face it. Back when you had to submit a working thing in order to get a patent the system more-or-less worked. The "inventor" had to actually invent the damn thing before it could be patented.
We also have the precedent that just putting two things together without changing their basic function was not a patentable practice. (This is the "conveyor belt plus cash register" ruling.)
Since software is _solely_ the practice of putting existing things together (those things are called "instructions", or if that is too fine grained, then APIs and SystemCalls, or even "features" like "client" and "server" and "database" and "GUI" and "button" and "field" etc, this "mere aggregation" is evident at every level of software).
So now, even if the weasel-words are unclear, if there isn't a "reasonably working prototype" there isn't a patent.
That should make a lot of the obvious things obvious and prevent "idea patents".
Then, just for good measure, stick with the actual legal precedent which says that the "software element of an invention is patentable." This is _FAR_ different from "software is patentable". In short, nothing in precedent says that _pure_ software is patentable.
Mere aggregation, not being patentable, should infer to the non-brain-damaged, that pure separation should not be patentable. That will get rid of all the "but this is a client doing part and a server doing part". Besides the "division of labor" wasn't particularly patentable anyway, if it were, you could make anything that someone else had a patent on just by making sure you made it with more steps or more people. (etc.)
And context was _never_ patentable. That is, if you cannot patent "sewing a pretty flower pattern into a cloth" you cannot patent "sewing a pretty flower pattern into a cloth to make people more happy".
So:
No physical invention, no patent.
Mere aggregation, no patent.
Pure Software, no patent.
Pure Methodology, no patent.
No functioning prototype, no patent.
I would add a "percent of life cycle" limit to the patent. If any one instance of the patented invention would, on the average, have a life cycle of X, the patent should be valuable for no more that 1/2x. So if you invent a new breaking system for a car that has an expected life cycle of 10 years before replacement, the patent would be good for five years. I would have disposable parts (break shoes etc) not count to that life cycle if they weren't the entirety of the invention (new breaking system). Basically, if you _invent_ a thing, you get to own the market until the point where the after market would come into life. That way you get the prime cut of the money but you don't get to prevent incremental innovation that invariably arises from the after market.
So the inventor gets one long turn of the crank, but they don't get to force the crank turners into indenture.
Next, publication, by anyone, anywhere, before the date of filing for the patent provides prior art. By one day, not one year. To be a valid patent it must first be a trade secret. This prevents squatting on or stealing from the commons. It also prevents marketing scams. You don't get to convince people to invest in the possibility of your patentable invention by open market manipulation. You also don't get to overhear something interesting on a chat board and race to the patent office to steal the thing from the commons the real conceiver (sp?) donated it into.
Finally, it should be pretty easy to remove the presumption of correctness of a patent. No more of this guilty until you prove yourself innocent bull.
Oh wait!
FINALLY: If something is copyrighted, it cannot be patented, if patented, it cannot be copyrighted. If trade secret it can be promoted to patent or copyright but not both. You have to chose. You only get _ONE_ dip from _ONE_ bucket (except where you are promoting a trade secret which you get to do once, like castling in chess 8-). That means that if you publish s
First off, while the "cut scenes" of a game could be said to have "footage", the whole rest of the game (typically) have no such thing. Even if you checked every single character skin and setting, there would be no way to _know_ there wasn't an easter-egg or something.
The fact of the matter is that "objectionable content" is entirely in the eye of the beholder.
And what of "patches" and "mods"?
Heck take some of the "dance moves" from WOW and line them up and you have simulated sex, at least within the limits within the minds of people who think that some of these other things were "objectionable".
The Nanny State cannot hope to get closure over this, and trying to is just more waste of my taxpayer dollar.
Note to you regulation-happy people out there: Your "precious bundle" is neither as fragile as you imagine, nor as important as you dream. Neither are you. If janet jackson's saggy boobie and the gyrations of a pair of 100 polygon figures are enough to undermine your sense of moral turpitude, then you are a mindless chode; and might I suggest that the world is much safer if you put an opaque polyethylene bag over your head. (But it only _really_ works if you cinch it snuggly. Assist your child before yourself.)
Now if you can get truth in ratings for suckage, then we can talk.
The thing is, when you shout "it must have SOME impact" you conflate the idea of "impact" with "negative impact", and more-so you conflate "negative impact" for a high profile artist with "negative impact" for all artists, and similarly "negative impact" to a production house with "negative impact" to artists.
Worse, you conflate "business impact" with, "monetary impact", and with "artistic impact".
In honest truth there is no reason to even suspect that the net effect of free music on the net is negative at all. It is more likely to add listeners than remove them. It is also almost certain to add musicians (or at least re-mixers).
I would agree that one near-certain impact will be a reduction in the concentration of money flowing to any one pocket. That is, if there are more artists, and more music is being heard, and the amount of money flowing through the system is constrained by real-world economics involving discretionary income; then it is a systemic certainty that the peak concentration of cash will not be as, well, concentrated.
On the other hand, the current financial model, in particularly the way the on-air play is sampled to determine who is getting played how often, means that many artists are being undervalued.
If free music on the internet has no other impact, it will eventually lead to including the music movement metrics of that free movement in the calculation of which artists get paid. The height of super stardom will be somewhat diminished, but the depth of obscurity will be mediated far more fairly. Which will lead to more music, which, even if music quality were a random function, would lead to more "high quality" music.
Consider the power to tax is the power to destroy. Likewise the power to concentrate is the power to filter. Television programing is "highly concentrated" and the filters suck, so we get "wicked wicked games" instead of "firefly" (in principle) because the filter was essentially one guy with an axe to grind.
So what is the "artistic impact" of a less concentrated financial flow?
Is it greater than the "business impact" of a less concentrated flow of control?
See, its all Apples and Polar-Bears. The comparisons have been deliberately conflated because the people asking the questions are invariably asking the questions in terms of the flow through the tiny opening that leads into _their_ _particular_ pocket.
So the question, as framed, is invalid. The "values" involved have been confused and improperly combined then artificially separated back into "stock positions".
That being said, the real questions, IMHO, are things like: is "Illegal Prior Restraint implemented as Unregulated Technologies" (often misspelled 'DRM') going to fail immediately while the cost is bounded, or much later after economies have been trashed and people have been jailed?
8-)
"We must hurry to create the prison cell we think is comfortable for fear that someone else will create a prison cell we don't."
This is a false dichotomy, as in both cases we end up prisoners.
Instead of "rushing" to create or accept a single form of Illegal Prior Restraint (often misspelled "DRM") we need to rush to prevent any such Illegal Prior Restraint.
A side effect of this Prior Restraint is that, when combined with the DMCA (in the U.S. and its puppet regimes), is that even as we speak "technologists" can create untested, arbitrary technologies which, at them moment of their initiation have the force of law. That is, if you read the law it basically says "anything created within [these bounds] immediately functions to create a new body of criminal estate, and in so doing may immediately and retroactively reclassify existing technologies and inventions as illegal."
Consider, I produce a tool that does stenographic analysis on images; this tool specifically analyzes an arbitrary image to identify the best ways that the picture _can_ _be_ used to store hidden information. (That is, it identifies the best places and means to encode information. e.g. it tells you that you _could_ fit 2kbits in the sky-part, while you could put 8kbits in the ocean part of a given image before the image is degraded enough to start showing visible signs of manipulation.) This application is completely legal. Then some guy produces an "effective content protection mechanism" that uses the "album cover" image as a Illegal Public Restraint key vector. When he does that, my existing program is "automagically" reclassified as a criminal-grade circumvention tool. It's legal magic!
So, again, here we are being encouraged in a race to the bottom, fueled by technologists who think that just because a thing can be done (half-assed-ly at best) it really ought to be done.
Just say NO to Illegal Prior Restraint and any technology that is being sold to you as a "kinder, gentler" IPR.
Whenever someone proposes something outlandish they are just hoping you will fight them back to "a reasonable compromise", which will seem "not so bad" but which if you mentally went back to before the whole debacle you would see for what it was. A Really Bad Idea.
Enough Already. The continuous questions of the "what if we make it shaped like a bird? What if we make it taste like pancakes?" form are just telling them how to focus their marketing while lulling you into a sense that there _simply_ _must_ be a configuration that you could live with. It's emotional manipulation. You begin to feel unreasonable because you don't want IPR "even if" thy go to the trouble to make it strawberry shortcake IPR with medical care attached lovingly by your grandmother.
You don't want it. You really don't. No matter how palatable they try to make it.
How bout this? I'll cut off your leg and use it to beat your children to death. But I'll give you ice cream... how about that?
IPR is just as self defeating.
The ONLY REASONABLE ANSWER is NO Illegal Prior Restraint.
It's like that thing were people propose a truly horrific law because they know they will be "forced to settle" for a merely terrible law.
No Digital Restriction Management is good. NONE of it.
I am not anti-encryption.
I am not anti-artist.
But any scheme that involves someone "selling" or "giving" me something so provisionally that they can then just take it back is simply a BAD IDEA.
The next step down this road is the one where some Bad Actor gets to send people threatening letters and blackmail that is "unprintable", "read only once", "no screen shot", "read only for 1 minute", watermarked to prevent your camera from taking a picture of the screen. Leaving you, in turn, with no proof for a complaint and then leaving the police with no clues while they are pondering over your corpse.
Eh, so what, at least some music executive is *sure* to get to split the full 99-cents that he ripped off the consumer for, in the name of an artist who got a bill for overages in production.
Oh, wait... which kind of Illegal Prior Restraint (commonly misspelled DRM) was good again?
It is _NEVER_ helpful to repeat the artificially biased question as if it represents something worth answering.
The question, as stated, presumes facts not in evidence, namely that the DRM that is harder to break is in any possible way "Better".
See my "snowball" post later in this topic. Getting rid of space junk should be _really_ easy. I didn't do the math there, but the technology to do this exists today and it should be super cheap as well. You just have to think more practically. You have only one goal: junk is gone. The best place for it to go is "down" (back to earth) because that is nearly free.
1 2&cid=17915694
Now combine that with basic orbital mechanics (lower faster, higher slower; sparse atmospherics; A + -A = 0; etc) and stop trying to match orbits when all you have to do is intersect them without making a mess...
Take a guess, then read this/my other post: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2209
Create the following package and send it into retrograde orbit:
1) Take a very thin membrane material (mylar etc) and make a _HUGE_ balloon.
2) Prepare an "inflater" it with a material that will harden into a very sparse, somewhat resilient foam (think "fix a flat" meets sparse Styrofoam) [what is silly string made of? That would be just about the right consistency... 8-)].
Include enough material in item 2 to fill item 1. The resulting matrix should not "pressurize" the membrane, it should just fill it out to its final volume.
When the package is in orbit you do the deed and inflate it. The membrane exists to (A) define the size of the resultant object and (B) offer the object a modicum of structural support as/after the foam hardens and (C) keep the whole thing together if the foam is "shattered". (e.g. debris is _supposed_ to penetrate the membrane and it is most desirable for the debris to then become embedded in the matrix.)
Every impact between the retrograde snowball and the invariably non-retrograde orbiting debris decelerates BOTH objects. The snowball will tend to pick up and retain the impossibly annoying little pieces (a bolt here, a washer there, etc). Larger objects will tend to hole-through the snowball entirely. In both cases energy will be exchanged and both the object and the snowball will drop to lower orbits. The snowball's orbit must decay quickly because the very large surface area needs must interact with even the exceptionally sparse atmosphere in LEO even if it doesn't impact anything. So each gram of mass it picks up will add a negative vector compared to its original orbit.
Meanwhile, every large object that encounters the snowball will be deflected to a lower less stable orbit, or in a worst case into a less circular orbit which must then have a lower altitude at its closest approach and so which must then be slowed by the atmosphere more effectively (etc).
To deorbit _VERY_ large pieces of debris, you deploy the snowball in a non-retrograde, eccentric orbit set so that the desired object overtakes the snowball from behind, or more correctly "in the side". So the snowball is going down \ and the object is going across "-". The desired net effect is to embed the target object in the larger snowball while achieving a much less stable composite orbit "-\". The new composite object has a very large surface area, a more elliptical orbit, and a lower more friction-filled perigee, and game over. These single object killers would generally be more massive and more tuned to their target.
Gravity and friction do the rest.
Given that we track all this stuff anyway, we know where most of the important problematic bits are. We can make several different snowball materials in order to catch different grades/weights of debris. The right starting vectors and materials could "deorbit" all sorts of goodies in a matter of hours.
Since the snowballs themselves are sparse materials with a lot of surface area you get guaranteed burn-up on reentry of the snowball.
Any impact hard/fast enough to shatter a snowball will produce a sparse scattering of material which MUST be greatly decelerated since each fragment had to overcome the tensile strength holding it to the whole, and the whole was in stable orbit and the shattering force was opposing the orbital velocity. So shattered snowballs would fall to earth virtually directly.
There is a tiny probability that a whole-through would punch out a chunk of the snowball which would then be moving at the same velocity as the _new_ speed of the penetrating object. Both the penetrating object and the "chad" would drop immediately to a new (lower) orbit and the drag etc would take over as previously mentioned.
And in the worst case, the filling foam could be made from something with "excellent" sublimation characteristics so that fragments that find peculiar orbits would "evaporate" in a matter of weeks.
The only material challenge is the balloon. You want something has re
About three weeks ago a guy walked up my private driveway, took a picture of my house, and then walked away. My house is on a "recessed lot" so the driveway is 170 feet of my private property. You cannot make out any reasonable details of my hose from the public roadway because of intervening cover including shrubs, trees, and the guy who lives in front of me is overly fond of temporary buildings and bad landscaping.
I wonder if this is what he was doing? I had just stepped out of the shower so, while I saw him through a window, I didn't have a chance to ask him what the hell he was doing before he got away.
If I find a picture of my hose on this service and find it was taken from my private driveway, do I have recourse? It was clearly a trespass and the angle and content of the picture would prove that...
Did anybody notice that even the summary is a quick lesson in "how to make a straw man".
It is _almost_ more insulting that someone is getting good money to tell corporations how to make "bad arguments" (that apparently stick), than it is that corporations are trying to make obviously self-serving arguments against things.
I mean you have to at least try to make your business model work, but seriously people...
Oh, and, "free information" == "government censorship"? Minitrue would be proud.
after all...
War is Peace!
Cue Carl Sagan....
Yep, not "real treason", e.g. "high treason", but it is some kind of low treason or something. We don't really have a word or phrase standing ready for this case.
So what word would you use to express someone subverting clear intent and establishing a body of law that is in direct opposition to the clearly divine-able (word for that too?) intent of the constitution.
They aren't _technically_ overthrowing the constitution by means of force. They simply control the force(s) that should be stopping them from creatively instituting precedent that effectively overthrows the government.
If someone walked in to congress, held them at threat of violence, and coerced them all to pass a bunch of laws that went against the constitution then someone would rush in and put down that (technically terrorist) threat.
Right now we have a a conspiracy to subvert the constitution by means, not of direct threat of immediate violence, but by simply claiming that it is partly or wholly in abeyance and then _threatening_ every body who complains with "investigation" and "detention" and TORTURE.
So we have "subvert" and we largely have "overthrow" and we _clearly_ have "violence".
So it isn't high treason, but it is clearly _something_.
If only the congressional panel had arrested the AG on "contempt of congress", or perhaps "contempt of constitution" and plain old criminal malfeasance in the performance of his office....
Clearly that sneering claim not to see Habeas Corpus was sneering contempt for _HUMAN_ _DIGNITY_ and _FREEDOM_ and was clearly a form of calling all of us, including congress, just plain _that_ _stupid_...
How about life in a federal detainment facility for first degree asshattery.
If we ever oust the current terrorist(*) regime and return to a constitutional state I wonder how the principle players will feel about entering the "justice system" they are now in the process of construction from whole cloth?
If you catch my drift. 8-)
(*) The original meaning of "terrorism" dates back to "the reign of terror" in the French revolution when the government, such as it was, used all sorts of (these same tactics) to control the people of France. As such, our government is pretty much going along this same route... "...a result of Robespierre's insistence on associating Terror with Virtue..." etc. It is only by artifact of press that the term has come to refer to idiot _individuals_ who cannot speak well trying to speak loudly by means of force.
The state of our union is "screwed" for the foreseeable future, don't kid yourself.
Mentally transcribe the parent article into the correct thread and read in context... 8-)
Isn't _EVERY_ _SINGE_ member of the armed services individually sworn to "protect and defend the constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic"? Or is it just the president?
Shouldn't _someone_ be arresting these people by now...? Who does the arresting when the person who is _supposed_ to be doing the arresting is the one that should be arrested?
Yea, I know, slippery slope and all that, but damn, this is sounding a _lot_ like treason (by "pun" or by "confabulation" or some such perversion of the language and with some deliberate mendacity apparent, since nobody can be _THAT_ stupid can they?) executed by or on the behalf of our "elected" leaders.
Isn't _EVERY_ _SINGE_ member of the armed services individually sworn to "protect and defend the constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic"? Or is it just the president?
Shouldn't _someone_ be arresting these people by now...? Who does the arresting when the person who is _supposed_ to be doing the arresting is the one that should be arrested?
Yea, I know, slippery slope and all that, but damn, this is sounding a _lot_ like treason (by "pun" or by "confabulation" or some such perversion of the language and with some deliberate mendacity apparent, since nobody can be _THAT_ stupid can they?) executed by or on the behalf of our "elected" leaders.
...they don't know the difference between a "DOS Attack" and a simple slashdotting... 8-)
There is an important difference between these laws that needs to be drawn perpendicular to your current logic.
I could give a rats ass about Motorcycle Helmets or Trans Fats, and laws for those are dumb attempts by the government to protect people from themselves against their will. That's just the nanny state.
On the other hand, Smoking and Car Seatbelt laws have a direct and immediate impact on me as the non-regulated party.
Smoking bans are, essentially, a way for the non-smokers to enforce their RIGHT NOT TO SMOKE. Smokers claim infringement on their rights, but they don't seem to give a rat's ass about my right NOT to breathe their toxic off-gas. The laws would have been unnecessary if the smokers had, as a group, volunteered to _automatically_ take their debase fumery into purely private domains.
The Car Seatbelt laws are just like the "secure your load" rules. In an emergency maneuvering circumstance (screeching tires and fleeing pedestrians etc) I, as the person _outside_ your car have a vested (social) interest in you being fastened behind the wheel so that you can do your best to drive the car. I also have a vested interest in your passenger(s) and child(ren) being fastened down so that they don't become projectiles WITHING THE CAR that could interfere with your ability to drive. That is, if you swerve left, and your are not belted in, then you have a real tendency to end up in the passenger seat; conversely if you swerve right there is a tendency for your passenger to end up in the drivers lap. In either case, as the pedestrian or passenger in another car, or for that matter a passenger in your car; there is a high probability that _I_ will _need_ you to swerve back before too long.
(This is different than a Helmet law situation, because by the time the helmet comes into play, the driver is _FAR_ beyond recovering the attitude of the bike.)
None of the above represent the "official" reason these laws were passed, but they represent the reasons that I, IMHO, know these laws have been _RIGHTFULLY_ passed.
I am most amused by this debate. I find it amazing that the whole country rolled over like a good dog when the knife, sword, and club were criminalized despite their clear existence as "arms". If I have common sporting equipment (baseball bat, eppe[sword variant], knife [e.g. dive knife, hunting knife, etc) I can be declared "armed and dangerous" and yet I am somehow not protected by my right to "keep and bare arms".
Am I just being obtuse?
Not really.
Mos forms of legal erosion start way out in the conceptual boondocks. The water of compromise and common consent is forced under the foundation to rip away the necessary supports. One concession at a time we go from "defenders of democracy" to the modern inquisition at Gitmo. We slip gently from "free expression" to "free speech zones". The right to keep and bare arms to getting strip-searched for having nail-clippers or hair-gel in some allegedly sacrosanct setting.
Rome didn't "fall" it "settled". It was poisoned from within by fear, petty weaknesses, and the inexorable force that is "shifting public policies".
After careful consideration I would say that the second amendment can be translated into the following modern english:
Each member of society has the right to be, individually, _at_ _least_ as well armed as any member of the government that claimes to govern them.
Explicit in that concept is the simple fact that it is fundamentally in line with the founding fathers intent that I, or any other citizen, full well deserve to be able to "out-gun the local police" and so on.
Lets face it, the "hunting" facade is bull. The automatic weapon exists to facilitate killing a number of people in quick succession. That is it's purpose, and that is _why_ it should be legal.
In the criminal context, gun violence is an act of cowardliness. These people who go out into public and go "people hunting" or whatever invariably pick environments where there is little-to-no chance of taking return fire. They don't go people hunting at the police station, nor at the local gun-shop. They go to the MacKiddies fast food joint, and they don't do it in Texas. You walk into your local Old People's Buffet in Texas and start shooting, and Gran will haul her hog-leg out of her Granny Great-Purse and school you in manners. The simple logic of cowardliness says that "random" gun violence (as opposed to specific-cause-we're-feuding gun violence) is more likely as the gun carry prohibitions become more strict. It's safer for the gunman, and he knows it.
In the political sense, the right to keep and bare arms is explicable just from casual perusal of a junior High American History book. When "The Red-Coats" were an occupying force they did a lot of crappy things to the locals, just like we are doing a lot of crappy things to the locals out there in the territory we are occupying. Those crappy things included arresting people for gathering together, or having guns, or printing leaflets; and breaking into people's houses and generally wrecking the place while fishing for _anything_ that might seem suspicious. (etc) Those abuses directly translate into the Bill of Rights.
The bill of rights _Largely_ exists as a body of law that serves a _SINGLE_ unified purpose: to prevent "American Soil" from ever suffering another Occupying force, be that force Foreign or Domestic. That last word, "Domestic", doesn't just mean your neighbor, it most strenuously and explicitly includes "your president" and "those generals" and "the local sheriff" and "those DEA guys" and "the FBI/CIA/Homeland Security jack-booted thugs."
If a community is pushed so far as to need to say "Enough!", the constitution exists to make sure that they can do so in whatever language and to whatever degree of stridency they find necessary.
Which is as it is, because that is as it _should_ be.
But we have not learned from the past, and so we are beginning to suffer the classically prescribed doom of repetition.
Scientists announced today that they not only detected the oldest radio signal in the universe, but that that signal may predate the Big Bang itself by several seconds. There has been great success in translating the semantic content. The complete transcript has been made available to the public:
"Hello? Tech Support? Yea, the box you sent me says 'Gravity Stabilizer' but inside there is just a ball with a little switch. It says 'consult manual before operation' but I presume I should just flip the switch... right?"
So, if you do
fortune -m 'bits in'
on any modern linux with fortune installed you will get the following,
(along with usually at least one other tidbit)
#define BITCOUNT(x) (((BX_(x)+(BX_(x)>>4)) & 0x0F0F0F0F) % 255)
#define BX_(x) ((x) - (((x)>>1)&0x77777777) \
- (((x)>>2)&0x33333333) \
- (((x)>>3)&0x11111111))
It works, and I have used it to good advantage in circumstances where
nothing else would _quite_ do...
What, you ask, does it do? It gives you the number of bits which are set in a
given byte/word/dword...
So BITCOUNT(0x81) == 2
and so on.
The XBox that _YOU_ _BUY_ is no longer _THEIR_ (Microsoft's) Hardware.
They _SOLD_ you the hardware. It is _YOURS_ now.
See, you evidence in your position, damage from the mind-screw that so many have fallen for of late. You somehow have fallen into the belief that people who sell you things still somehow retain some intrinsic right to those things.
They don't.
Look around your house. All of that stuff (barring the possibility that you rent your appliances and such), each and every piece, actually _belongs_ to you.
If I were a representative of Sears Inc, and I barged into your house and tried to repossess your (craftsman) screw drivers and your (kenmore) refrigerator, because I didn't approve of some fact of their use [e.g. you used the screw driver to pry the kenmore logo off the front of the refrigerator] you would not spring to my defence and trumpet to all here on slashdot that it was OK because that was "my (sears') hardware". You would most likely sock me in the mouth and then go looking for a lawyer.
Given that obvious truth, why, oh why, would you think that somehow, after (some guy) paid ($600 or so) for his (XBox or PS3) that (Microsoft or Nintendo) had the first moment of a "right" to say that (some guy) had "no right" to run (Linux) on "their (Microsoft's or Nintendo's) hardware".
I call bullshit to all of that.
_HOWEVER_
If Nintenrosfot (etc) were to have hardware signing checks in the box, and they were to give me the keys to that sign-to-run system so that I could run whatever I want; I would have _NO_ _OBJECTION_ to the concept that if I wanted to run a given game as part of their online service, that I would have to run a copy of that game as signed by them.
See, when the software that I run is part of the software that they/we all run as part of that distributed service of the game (q.v. WoW or Everquest or any other MMORPG or head-to-head or common-scoreboard facility) having all the parties agree to a level playing field, and having the hardware and software system possess and use a way to verify that level-ness would be (implicitly) part of the agreement necessary to play. That "agreement" is way different than, and separate from, the hardware purchase.
For instance, TiVO is welcome to their hardware signing IF AND ONLY IF I can sign as well. It is _MY_ TiVO after all. However, they are also welcome to deny me access to their program listing service (and refund me that service fee) if I am not using their software. If they were _reasonable_, they would only do that denial if my modifications were abusing their service in some way.
But as it exists, TiVO can play Darth Vader with _MY_ box (q.v. "I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it any further") by removing features I bought (30 second skip) and adding features I didn't buy (playing adverts on pause, and downloading programs I didn't ask for) after our deal was struck.
This is why I _don't_ own a TiVO. (See Myth TV 8-)
Oddly enough, they shot their own selves in the foot with all this. If they _HADN'T_ put in all that draconian control, they could never have been _REQUIRED_ to take out the 30 second skip. They were over a barrel on the issue because they _did_ have the control, but if the source had been truly open, they could have argued that they couldn't remove the feature for the existing customers, and they couldn't keep the feature out of the hands of new customers. They would have been able to plead "go argue with the users, we aren't the boss of them" to the various industry complainers.
(Remember all you corporate control freaks, "with great control comes great liability". 8-)
I bought a Sansa, and I really like it. And now they are moving into a _second_ pile of DRM bull.
Well, I for one will continue to not sign up for any of these evil DRM sites and services. I do all my access in MSC mode (just plain USB disk installation mode) via linux.
What's funny is that the player has to be in the no-drm plain transfer mode to do automatic firmware updates.
Someone somewhere isn't thinking.
And no, I don't even _care_ what the details of Helix DNA are. The concept is flawed so the implementation is uninteresting.