Unfortunately, since energy resources bestow both military and economic advantages to nation states, it is hard to see how consumption cn be reduced in a competitive global environment.
Efficiency, of course.
Consider the U.S. military. It relies to a great extent on oil-derived fuels. The length of time a unit can operate independently is constrained by (a) how much fuel it has, and (b) how quickly it consumes it. Clearly, the more efficient its use of the fuel, the longer it can continue to operate without needing more supplies.
In a case where a unit is cut off from supply lines, that extra endurance could be the difference between defeat or victory. Does that not count as a military advantage?
I suspect the NSA, (who I seem to recall left a few stray tags lying around in a previous version of Windows' code)
Yes and no.
True, there was a tag in one version of Windows NT 4 that had the name "_NSAKEY". However, it has never been linked to the NSA in any way whatsoever, except by conspiracy theorists.
You might as well claim that USER32.DLL is proof of a conspiracy to turn American back into a British colony (U.S. obviously stands for United States, and E.R. = Elizabeth Regina = the queen of England! OMG BILL GATES HATES AMERICA!)
I'm still waiting for the "don't use 300MB of memory" extension.
That's easily solved. Simply remove all but 256MB of RAM from your computer, and disable any swap space you had configured, and Firefox's memory usage will fall by at least 15%.
In the sense that Morrowind was? Sure, it'll probably have balance issues you can take advantage of to make it trivially easy. I'm sure you've seen the video of Morrowind's main quest being beaten in about 10 minutes. Games that give you any degree of freedom tend to be unbalanced, because it gets exponentially harder to balance things as the player is given more and more options. This is why most online games feature endless rounds of nerfing.
On the other hand, playing Morrowind without cheating, and without using alchemy exploits, and without knowing how to get away with stealing anything easily, and without knowing about the mudcrab merchant, and without knowing how to get into the vaults, and without knowing which powerful artefacts could be acquired with least risk... that was not quite so trivially easy. I started a new game recently with Tribunal installed, and I got my arse handed to me on a platter by a Dark Brotherhood assassin before I'd even made it out of Seyda Neen.
I'm going to buy Oblivion fully conscious that it is likely to share many of Morrowind's flaws - the performance issues, the balance issues, the bugginess. And I bet I still lose months of my life to it. Morrowind was a flawed masterpiece, and the fact that it was flawed didn't cancel out the fact that it was a masterpiece. Here's hoping Oblivion's no worse.
People have been saying that for as long as I can remember. There was a time when it was possible to describe Doom as "realistic" with a straight face. But even last year's games look artificial. Even Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 are starting to look dated. Trust me... there's plenty of scope for improvement.
Games cost a lot to produce now so no one will want to risk anything too off the wall.
A-list games have cost a lot to produce ever since people found out that spending a lot on a game boosted your profits. And we're still getting off-the-wall titles. Katamari Damacy. Nintendogs. Lumines. None of them sequels, none of them based on expensive licenses, all of them original and addictive. I fail to see the problem.
And hard core gamers are pushing for games that are too complex.
You seriously think games are getting MORE complex? You should go back and replay some of the stuff from the 80s and 90s. Try something like Falcon 4.0, where you literally had to read a brick-like manual just to figure out how to get your plane to take off. Or the Police Quest series, where you had to follow real-life police procedures down to the last form. Or classic text adventures, where you had to wrestle with defective natural-language parsers and draw up your own multi-page maps of worlds that only existed as words.
But there was always Space Invaders too. In other words, there have always been simple games that you can pick up and play, and there have always been complex games that take roughly the same amount of commitment as a full-time degree course to master. Nothing new here. Nothing's changed.
Combine that with the cost of the new consoles......which is pretty much the same as (or cheaper than) the price of the old consoles, when you adjust for inflation? Right. Big problem there, clearly.
Sorry, but I don't see a single valid complaint in anything you've said. It's all always been that way. Nothing's changed. Nothing will change. Just carry on choosing the games you like from the vast range available, sit back, and enjoy yourself. Because gaming's always been good, and it's going to stay that way.
Video games can come later. First we must tackle the same problems in the real world.
For example, there is a game played in the real world called "American Football". This game involves teams of highly-trained thugs engaging in brutal pitched battles for the amusement of crowds. So violent is this game that players wear extensive body armour, and injuries are still common. But it's not just about violence: apparently this game also celebrates the sexual objectification of women, through a convention known as "cheerleading". Cheerleading involves scantily-clad females dancing for the pleasure of the crowd and combatants. In a further blow to any hope society had of promoting sexual equality, it is worth noting that the lucrative player positions are reserved for men only, with women being relegated to the sidelines.
What message does this hideous "game" send to American children? That men should be violent thugs, and women should be sexual objects. And yet this "game" is so entrenched in U.S. culture that major matches are considered events of national importance, and children with an unhealthy interest in this miasma of sex and violence are actually encouraged to train to participate!
This is an absolute disgrace. It is clearly a greater threat to society than mere videogames, for a child trained in the use of violence by the evil men known as "football coaches" has actually both learned to apply violence with his bare hands, and also has acquired a greater level of physical strength which will help him rape cheerleaders and murder spectators with much greater ease. In comparison to this, a videogamer has merely put on weight and learned to push buttons with his thumbs, which is clearly harmless by comparison with the horrors of football.
Furthermore, it is fundamentally discriminatory. Videogames are equally accessible to every human, of whatever creed or race. Even people with disabilities are able to excel at videogames. Whereas "sport" is devoted to a postively Nazi-like celebration of "the strong", and frequently encourages the exclusion and ridiculing of the weak or disabled.
Why is this abomination not only permitted to continue, but forced on kids in schools and paid for with public money? Please, won't somebody think of the children?
Japanese and nearly all asian languages sans Thai are read right to left.
Um, no. Actually right-to-left writing is incredibly rare: it's basically restricted to Hebrew and languages using Arabic-derived scripts (Arabic itself, Urdu, Farsi, and so forth). Most Asian scripts are read left-to-right, including all Indic scripts (not just Thai), and also including Chinese and Japanese when written horizontally.
Pretty much any Japanese website you visit, such as this one, will be written in exactly the same left-to-right order as English.
Now, in the specific case of printed literature, manga, and newspapers, Chinese-derived scripts like Japanese will still usually be written vertically, in columns progressing right-to-left. And horizontal right-to-left writing is occasionally seen on old signposts. But that's very much a traditional special case. Left-to-right is the rule in computing.
Right, so if I'm selling MP3s of a song for $2 (and I'm the rightful owner), and you copy the MP3 without paying, you've intentionally deprived me of $2. How is this not theft again?
Well, let's think about it.
By definition, the thing which is stolen must be the thing which you have been deprived of. Therefore, the MP3 cannot have been stolen, because you still have it. So it must be the $2 which has been stolen. However, you never had that $2 in your possession. Depriving you of it has not involved removing anything from your possession. So it can't have been stolen.
So if the MP3 wasn't stolen (because you still have it in your possession), and the $2 wasn't stolen (because you never had it in your possession), then what was stolen?
Boy, this is tough. I wish we could have a special law that covered the unauthorised copying of intangible assets - it would make it a lot easier to consider cases like this if there was a law which actually applied to them directly. We could call it "copyright law" or something, and we could call breaking it "copyright infringement". Then we could even introduce different punishments that actually fit the crime, instead of having to shoehorn it into the theft laws!
This is something I've never really got either. Everytime people try and talk about how downloading copyrighted material is OK it seems that they always start talking about new media or some buzzword like that, or how you can't damn all of file sharing because of some illegal activity, or how evil the MPAA/RIAA is, or pull out some weak and non-relevant analogy.
Straw-man alert!
People don't say "downloading all copyrighted material is always OK". They say "downloading copyrighted material is often OK, because a lot of copyrighted material is legal to download". Which is true.
It's people who say "downloading copyrighted material is illegal!", who are making sweeping and obviously false claims.
Let's keep it simple. Spiderman 3 is released in theatres. Instead of paying the asking price of $10 at my local movie theatre I download it from some website, who does not have the copyright holders permission to distribute it to me for free. How is this not illegal? How is this not wrong? Convince me.
Who says it's not illegal? Who says it's not wrong? How is that example at all relevant to the point in hand, which is that the claim that "downloading copyrighted material is illegal" is a lie?
Of course downloading unlicensed material is illegal. But that's not the problem. The problem is that people are saying "copyrighted" when they mean "unlicensed". And there are only two possible outcomes if that ever becomes true: either it becomes illegal to download any copyrighted material, and suddenly browsing Slashdot is a crime, or billions of people are stripped of their copyrights because they allowed their copyrighted material to be downloaded. Neither of these outcomes is acceptable. Therefore, it is essential that the lie be fought at every opportunity.
Where in that article does it say that the printing press was condemned by the Church as a "tool of Satan"? I can find plenty of mentions of it being useful for spreading information and supporting the Reformation, but I don't actually see anything relevant to the point in question.
If people's lives aren't worth freedom, just why did our forefathers fight for it?
They didn't. They fought for independence.
And that's a totally different kettle of fish. National independence merely means that the top layer is sliced off your government and the next layer down gets to rule instead. It has nothing to do with "freedom", except insofar as the promise of freedom is a nice fairytale that the leaders of the revolution can use to sucker people into fighting for them.
Right, but in a four minute news piece it's a lot easier to say "copyrighted material" than "copyright material for which the copyright holder has not authorised redistribution".;)
For this reason I prefer "unlicensed material", which is actually shorter than "copyrighted material", but captures the essential detail: if you have a license to download the material, it's legal, and if you need one but don't have it, it's illegal.
That's very nice that your Stinkpads need help to do that.
Your rhetorical expertise stuns me. Your ability to argue a rational case without resorting to childish insults is truly exemplary.
My Powerbook does automatically it without any help.
Whoa, you mean it magically works out which of the several wireless networks in range is the one you want to connect to, and telepathically plucks any passwords or keys you need from the administrator's brain?! I knew Apple hardware had supernatural capabilities, but this is incredible!
By the way, if your laptop is automatically connecting to any network it finds without asking, you could accidentally be committing computer trespass and theft of service. You need to make sure you aren't using people's internet connections without permission. I suggest you check up on that.
Replying to myself, but the content really isn't as great as I thought it would be from the executive summary section.
For example, they assert that the output of GPL programs will be covered by the GPL - a point of view expressedly disavowed by most legal experts and by the authors of the GPL itself! I quote:
The GPL expressly provides that software compiled with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is not infected by the GPL. Presumably the Free Software Foundation considers other GPL compilers will infect the compiled software.
Which is utter BS. The FSF's opinion on the matter is clearly stated here: that not only is program output not covered by the GPL, but that it would probably impossible to arrange for it to be even if you wanted it to be.
Then on the subject of writing GUIs, network clients, and the like, which interact with GPL'd programs without actually deriving any code from them or linking directly to the GPL'd code, the authors of this report say:
It has been argued that if these programs are written with specific open source software in mind, they will be infected by the relevant open source licence . . . The legal position is unsettled.
It "has been argued" by whom, we wonder? No answer is forthcoming. This is classic weaselling. Again, the FSF explicitly state here that the intent of the license is that if two programs are separate executables, the license of the one does not affect the other. So if even the very creators of the GPL do not argue that such programs are "infected", where IS this alleged controversy coming from?
Seriously, either New Zealand law is very different from US law and the GPL has a very different meaning in New Zealand, or this is FUD, or it's merely poorly researched. But my opinion of this report is falling fast the more of it I read.
It's not FUD, it is simply "OSS for the uninitiated - be warned that if you're developing software, you might want to actually read the license of anything else you or your contractors plan to use rather than just ignoring it like you usually do". The general tone is "You can use OSS, but be careful".
Yes, the actual content is reasonable and sensible. It even specifically identifies the GPL as an appropriate license that has been approved for use in the case where software will either only be distributed internally, or can be distributed in compliance with the license. Which is exactly the advice anyone considering using GPL software needs to hear.
But the use of "infected" is FUD. The deliberately emotive language does create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the reader's mind: it leaves you in no doubt whatsoever that the authors considered such licenses to be negative. And describing it in terms of "software that has been infected by an open source license", as though the software was just minding its own business when a nasty license crept up and attacked it, when in fact it's "software that the developers have chosen to offer you under an open source license", all out in the open and carefully thought out, is utterly ludicrous.
Great content, horrible language. I only hope the NZ government agencies that read this document employ people who are smart enough to filter out the FUD and benefit from the facts.
Re:It may function but will be fatter than ever
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Why Vista Won't Suck
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At least sony isn't trying to FORCE you to spend money, only hoping you do...
Huh? Sony are going to stop releasing new PS2 games, just as Microsoft are going to stop releasing new XBox and DX9 games. So if you want to play new games on a Sony console, you're going to be "forced" to buy a PS3, just as if you want to play new games on a Microsoft platform, you're going to be "forced" to buy Vista or an XBox360.
But I don't quite see where forcing comes into it. You always have the choice of going and playing some old games instead, don't you? Or are Microsoft actually going to send thugs round to every gamer's house and beat them up till they spend money or something? Or has Sony announced that all PS3 games will also magically run at full speed and full quality on a PS2? Or what?
Sorry, genuinely puzzled here... I'm not arguing with your conclusion that those who want to play new PC games will have to buy Vista, but please, explain to me how on earth you think this is worse than Sony discontinuing their old consoles?
It's an interesting idea, but I can see a number of flaws.
For example, it seems to me that it's likely to reward popularity rather than innovation. There's a very great risk that unscrupulous characters might decide to target specific portions of the general public, like the young, who may prove easily swayed by peer pressure and heavy advertising into giving away all their reward tokens to people who aren't actually innovating at all, but are merely repackaging the same tired old ideas over and over again, and just using attractive people to promote them. Genuine innovation might end up being starved of rewards because new innovators won't have an existing base of reward tokens that they can use on massive marketing campaigns, and the people who do acquire many reward tokens will no longer have any further incentive to innovate.
Of course, you could argue that as long as people are being entertained by this drivel, it doesn't matter that real innovation is stifled. You could argue that truly creative people will continue to innovate even if they're not being rewarded for it. But then why keep your system in place once it's stopped doing what it was meant to do? If your system of reward tokens doesn't actually end up rewarding innovation, then what purpose does it serve, and how is it superior to a standard system of either government funding, or relying on private patronage to reward innovators?
for the majority of the world, Google is the clear leader. US-only coverage is a sign of immaturity
For aerial photos, yes, Google is the best I've seen.
On the other hand, for actual map data, MS's offering seems to be considerably better than Google. Last time I checked, Google Maps only covered the US, Canada, UK, Japan, and the area of Italy around Turin. I've only glanced at the MS clone, but it seems to have detailed maps of all of Europe, at least. Which places it considerably higher up the "maturity" list than Google, by your standards...
I do know the track record of each company's consoles over the last few iterations. I know which company has put out the family-fun games, and which company has put out the "mature" games.
Precisely. Revolution is going to be all about gritty adult titles like Eternal Darkness, Killer7, and Resident Evil 4, while the PS3 will be packed with bright and cheerful family fun like Katamari Damacy and Ape Escape.
Er... wait, did you mean them the other way round? I think you need a reality check, your sweeping and inaccurate generalisations are showing.
Is the US government about to access all of Google's logs? I so, isn't there a potential legal issue here? I mean, privacy laws could be different from one country to another. ... Which brings in the "but logs are in the US so it's legal" issue.
This is the last straw! I'm going to stop using Google and every other US-based search engine, because I just can't trust them to keep their logs away from the US government.
The iPod/iTunes/iTMS trinity has evolved as a natural "standard," and it's a good one.
Can something be called a "standard" if the people who make it refuse to license it to anyone else, and indeed do everything they can to stop other people (e.g. Real) from interoperating with it?
Sounds more like a monopoly than a standard to me.
Apple's winning the digital music war because of good engineering
Yeah. Sure. And not at all because their initial marketing advantage enabled them to lock in a huge customer base, who are now unable to switch away from Apple even if they want to, because their iTunes music won't work anywhere else.*
When Microsoft pulls this kind of trick, they rightly get demonised. But apparently vendor lock-in is absolutely fine, as long as the vendor you get locked into is Apple?
* Yes, I know all about burning it to a CD and re-ripping it to whatever format you like. Now, would you like to have to do that for a collection of 2,000-odd tracks? I thought not.
I also was unaware that being captured on a battlefied while practicing warfare in violation of the Geneva conventions was now considered kidnapping.
And I was unaware that being arrested while going about one's peaceful business in Pakistan, hundreds of miles from the nearest battlefield, and illegally handed over to the US military, was now considered "being captured on a battlefied (sic) while practicing warfare in violation of the Geneva conventions".
(FYI, while there are no official figures, it is widely believed that fewer than 10% of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay were captured on a battlefield by Coalition forces.)
I also find bizarre your apparent belief that the US should not have to obey the Geneva Convention if the enemy wasn't obeying the Geneva Convention. By that argument, the police should be allowed to break the law because criminals break the law. That wouldn't lead to a society I'd particularly want to live in...
MS has hinted at various "intellectual property" around the.NET platform. They have flat out said that they intend to vigorously defend their intellectual property (both gates and ballmer have said it). When asked outright whether they intend to hold the mono project harmless from patent litigation they have refused to give them blanket immunity.
Funny how logic goes out of the window when a zealot looks at MS.
MS are going to defend their IP vigorously. To sit back and let someone infringe your IP would not be defending it vigorously. Therefore, MS will sue anyone they discover infringing their IP.
Right? Well, I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this...
MS will sue anyone who infringes their IP. MS has not sued Mono. Therefore, Mono does not infringe MS IP, QED.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, since energy resources bestow both military and economic advantages to nation states, it is hard to see how consumption cn be reduced in a competitive global environment.
Efficiency, of course.
Consider the U.S. military. It relies to a great extent on oil-derived fuels. The length of time a unit can operate independently is constrained by (a) how much fuel it has, and (b) how quickly it consumes it. Clearly, the more efficient its use of the fuel, the longer it can continue to operate without needing more supplies.
In a case where a unit is cut off from supply lines, that extra endurance could be the difference between defeat or victory. Does that not count as a military advantage?
I suspect the NSA, (who I seem to recall left a few stray tags lying around in a previous version of Windows' code)
Yes and no.
True, there was a tag in one version of Windows NT 4 that had the name "_NSAKEY". However, it has never been linked to the NSA in any way whatsoever, except by conspiracy theorists.
You might as well claim that USER32.DLL is proof of a conspiracy to turn American back into a British colony (U.S. obviously stands for United States, and E.R. = Elizabeth Regina = the queen of England! OMG BILL GATES HATES AMERICA!)
Here is Bruce Schneier's take on the matter.
I'm still waiting for the "don't use 300MB of memory" extension.
That's easily solved. Simply remove all but 256MB of RAM from your computer, and disable any swap space you had configured, and Firefox's memory usage will fall by at least 15%.
Will the game still be trivially easy?
In the sense that Morrowind was? Sure, it'll probably have balance issues you can take advantage of to make it trivially easy. I'm sure you've seen the video of Morrowind's main quest being beaten in about 10 minutes. Games that give you any degree of freedom tend to be unbalanced, because it gets exponentially harder to balance things as the player is given more and more options. This is why most online games feature endless rounds of nerfing.
On the other hand, playing Morrowind without cheating, and without using alchemy exploits, and without knowing how to get away with stealing anything easily, and without knowing about the mudcrab merchant, and without knowing how to get into the vaults, and without knowing which powerful artefacts could be acquired with least risk... that was not quite so trivially easy. I started a new game recently with Tribunal installed, and I got my arse handed to me on a platter by a Dark Brotherhood assassin before I'd even made it out of Seyda Neen.
I'm going to buy Oblivion fully conscious that it is likely to share many of Morrowind's flaws - the performance issues, the balance issues, the bugginess. And I bet I still lose months of my life to it. Morrowind was a flawed masterpiece, and the fact that it was flawed didn't cancel out the fact that it was a masterpiece. Here's hoping Oblivion's no worse.
Improvement in graphics will be relatively minor.
...which is pretty much the same as (or cheaper than) the price of the old consoles, when you adjust for inflation? Right. Big problem there, clearly.
People have been saying that for as long as I can remember. There was a time when it was possible to describe Doom as "realistic" with a straight face. But even last year's games look artificial. Even Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 are starting to look dated. Trust me... there's plenty of scope for improvement.
Games cost a lot to produce now so no one will want to risk anything too off the wall.
A-list games have cost a lot to produce ever since people found out that spending a lot on a game boosted your profits. And we're still getting off-the-wall titles. Katamari Damacy. Nintendogs. Lumines. None of them sequels, none of them based on expensive licenses, all of them original and addictive. I fail to see the problem.
And hard core gamers are pushing for games that are too complex.
You seriously think games are getting MORE complex? You should go back and replay some of the stuff from the 80s and 90s. Try something like Falcon 4.0, where you literally had to read a brick-like manual just to figure out how to get your plane to take off. Or the Police Quest series, where you had to follow real-life police procedures down to the last form. Or classic text adventures, where you had to wrestle with defective natural-language parsers and draw up your own multi-page maps of worlds that only existed as words.
But there was always Space Invaders too. In other words, there have always been simple games that you can pick up and play, and there have always been complex games that take roughly the same amount of commitment as a full-time degree course to master. Nothing new here. Nothing's changed.
Combine that with the cost of the new consoles...
Sorry, but I don't see a single valid complaint in anything you've said. It's all always been that way. Nothing's changed. Nothing will change. Just carry on choosing the games you like from the vast range available, sit back, and enjoy yourself. Because gaming's always been good, and it's going to stay that way.
Video games can come later. First we must tackle the same problems in the real world.
For example, there is a game played in the real world called "American Football". This game involves teams of highly-trained thugs engaging in brutal pitched battles for the amusement of crowds. So violent is this game that players wear extensive body armour, and injuries are still common. But it's not just about violence: apparently this game also celebrates the sexual objectification of women, through a convention known as "cheerleading". Cheerleading involves scantily-clad females dancing for the pleasure of the crowd and combatants. In a further blow to any hope society had of promoting sexual equality, it is worth noting that the lucrative player positions are reserved for men only, with women being relegated to the sidelines.
What message does this hideous "game" send to American children? That men should be violent thugs, and women should be sexual objects. And yet this "game" is so entrenched in U.S. culture that major matches are considered events of national importance, and children with an unhealthy interest in this miasma of sex and violence are actually encouraged to train to participate!
This is an absolute disgrace. It is clearly a greater threat to society than mere videogames, for a child trained in the use of violence by the evil men known as "football coaches" has actually both learned to apply violence with his bare hands, and also has acquired a greater level of physical strength which will help him rape cheerleaders and murder spectators with much greater ease. In comparison to this, a videogamer has merely put on weight and learned to push buttons with his thumbs, which is clearly harmless by comparison with the horrors of football.
Furthermore, it is fundamentally discriminatory. Videogames are equally accessible to every human, of whatever creed or race. Even people with disabilities are able to excel at videogames. Whereas "sport" is devoted to a postively Nazi-like celebration of "the strong", and frequently encourages the exclusion and ridiculing of the weak or disabled.
Why is this abomination not only permitted to continue, but forced on kids in schools and paid for with public money? Please, won't somebody think of the children?
Japanese and nearly all asian languages sans Thai are read right to left.
Um, no. Actually right-to-left writing is incredibly rare: it's basically restricted to Hebrew and languages using Arabic-derived scripts (Arabic itself, Urdu, Farsi, and so forth). Most Asian scripts are read left-to-right, including all Indic scripts (not just Thai), and also including Chinese and Japanese when written horizontally.
Pretty much any Japanese website you visit, such as this one, will be written in exactly the same left-to-right order as English.
Now, in the specific case of printed literature, manga, and newspapers, Chinese-derived scripts like Japanese will still usually be written vertically, in columns progressing right-to-left. And horizontal right-to-left writing is occasionally seen on old signposts. But that's very much a traditional special case. Left-to-right is the rule in computing.
Right, so if I'm selling MP3s of a song for $2 (and I'm the rightful owner), and you copy the MP3 without paying, you've intentionally deprived me of $2. How is this not theft again?
Well, let's think about it.
By definition, the thing which is stolen must be the thing which you have been deprived of. Therefore, the MP3 cannot have been stolen, because you still have it. So it must be the $2 which has been stolen. However, you never had that $2 in your possession. Depriving you of it has not involved removing anything from your possession. So it can't have been stolen.
So if the MP3 wasn't stolen (because you still have it in your possession), and the $2 wasn't stolen (because you never had it in your possession), then what was stolen?
Boy, this is tough. I wish we could have a special law that covered the unauthorised copying of intangible assets - it would make it a lot easier to consider cases like this if there was a law which actually applied to them directly. We could call it "copyright law" or something, and we could call breaking it "copyright infringement". Then we could even introduce different punishments that actually fit the crime, instead of having to shoehorn it into the theft laws!
This is something I've never really got either. Everytime people try and talk about how downloading copyrighted material is OK it seems that they always start talking about new media or some buzzword like that, or how you can't damn all of file sharing because of some illegal activity, or how evil the MPAA/RIAA is, or pull out some weak and non-relevant analogy.
Straw-man alert!
People don't say "downloading all copyrighted material is always OK". They say "downloading copyrighted material is often OK, because a lot of copyrighted material is legal to download". Which is true.
It's people who say "downloading copyrighted material is illegal!", who are making sweeping and obviously false claims.
Let's keep it simple. Spiderman 3 is released in theatres. Instead of paying the asking price of $10 at my local movie theatre I download it from some website, who does not have the copyright holders permission to distribute it to me for free. How is this not illegal? How is this not wrong? Convince me.
Who says it's not illegal? Who says it's not wrong? How is that example at all relevant to the point in hand, which is that the claim that "downloading copyrighted material is illegal" is a lie?
Of course downloading unlicensed material is illegal. But that's not the problem. The problem is that people are saying "copyrighted" when they mean "unlicensed". And there are only two possible outcomes if that ever becomes true: either it becomes illegal to download any copyrighted material, and suddenly browsing Slashdot is a crime, or billions of people are stripped of their copyrights because they allowed their copyrighted material to be downloaded. Neither of these outcomes is acceptable. Therefore, it is essential that the lie be fought at every opportunity.
Where in that article does it say that the printing press was condemned by the Church as a "tool of Satan"? I can find plenty of mentions of it being useful for spreading information and supporting the Reformation, but I don't actually see anything relevant to the point in question.
If people's lives aren't worth freedom, just why did our forefathers fight for it?
They didn't. They fought for independence.
And that's a totally different kettle of fish. National independence merely means that the top layer is sliced off your government and the next layer down gets to rule instead. It has nothing to do with "freedom", except insofar as the promise of freedom is a nice fairytale that the leaders of the revolution can use to sucker people into fighting for them.
Right, but in a four minute news piece it's a lot easier to say "copyrighted material" than "copyright material for which the copyright holder has not authorised redistribution". ;)
For this reason I prefer "unlicensed material", which is actually shorter than "copyrighted material", but captures the essential detail: if you have a license to download the material, it's legal, and if you need one but don't have it, it's illegal.
That's very nice that your Stinkpads need help to do that.
Your rhetorical expertise stuns me. Your ability to argue a rational case without resorting to childish insults is truly exemplary.
My Powerbook does automatically it without any help.
Whoa, you mean it magically works out which of the several wireless networks in range is the one you want to connect to, and telepathically plucks any passwords or keys you need from the administrator's brain?! I knew Apple hardware had supernatural capabilities, but this is incredible!
By the way, if your laptop is automatically connecting to any network it finds without asking, you could accidentally be committing computer trespass and theft of service. You need to make sure you aren't using people's internet connections without permission. I suggest you check up on that.
Replying to myself, but the content really isn't as great as I thought it would be from the executive summary section.
For example, they assert that the output of GPL programs will be covered by the GPL - a point of view expressedly disavowed by most legal experts and by the authors of the GPL itself! I quote:
The GPL expressly provides that software compiled with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is not infected by the GPL. Presumably the Free Software Foundation considers other GPL compilers will infect the compiled software.
Which is utter BS. The FSF's opinion on the matter is clearly stated here: that not only is program output not covered by the GPL, but that it would probably impossible to arrange for it to be even if you wanted it to be.
Then on the subject of writing GUIs, network clients, and the like, which interact with GPL'd programs without actually deriving any code from them or linking directly to the GPL'd code, the authors of this report say:
It has been argued that if these programs are written with specific open source software in mind, they will be infected by the relevant open source licence . . . The legal position is unsettled.
It "has been argued" by whom, we wonder? No answer is forthcoming. This is classic weaselling. Again, the FSF explicitly state here that the intent of the license is that if two programs are separate executables, the license of the one does not affect the other. So if even the very creators of the GPL do not argue that such programs are "infected", where IS this alleged controversy coming from?
Seriously, either New Zealand law is very different from US law and the GPL has a very different meaning in New Zealand, or this is FUD, or it's merely poorly researched. But my opinion of this report is falling fast the more of it I read.
It's not FUD, it is simply "OSS for the uninitiated - be warned that if you're developing software, you might want to actually read the license of anything else you or your contractors plan to use rather than just ignoring it like you usually do". The general tone is "You can use OSS, but be careful".
Yes, the actual content is reasonable and sensible. It even specifically identifies the GPL as an appropriate license that has been approved for use in the case where software will either only be distributed internally, or can be distributed in compliance with the license. Which is exactly the advice anyone considering using GPL software needs to hear.
But the use of "infected" is FUD. The deliberately emotive language does create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the reader's mind: it leaves you in no doubt whatsoever that the authors considered such licenses to be negative. And describing it in terms of "software that has been infected by an open source license", as though the software was just minding its own business when a nasty license crept up and attacked it, when in fact it's "software that the developers have chosen to offer you under an open source license", all out in the open and carefully thought out, is utterly ludicrous.
Great content, horrible language. I only hope the NZ government agencies that read this document employ people who are smart enough to filter out the FUD and benefit from the facts.
At least sony isn't trying to FORCE you to spend money, only hoping you do...
Huh? Sony are going to stop releasing new PS2 games, just as Microsoft are going to stop releasing new XBox and DX9 games. So if you want to play new games on a Sony console, you're going to be "forced" to buy a PS3, just as if you want to play new games on a Microsoft platform, you're going to be "forced" to buy Vista or an XBox360.
But I don't quite see where forcing comes into it. You always have the choice of going and playing some old games instead, don't you? Or are Microsoft actually going to send thugs round to every gamer's house and beat them up till they spend money or something? Or has Sony announced that all PS3 games will also magically run at full speed and full quality on a PS2? Or what?
Sorry, genuinely puzzled here... I'm not arguing with your conclusion that those who want to play new PC games will have to buy Vista, but please, explain to me how on earth you think this is worse than Sony discontinuing their old consoles?
It's an interesting idea, but I can see a number of flaws.
For example, it seems to me that it's likely to reward popularity rather than innovation. There's a very great risk that unscrupulous characters might decide to target specific portions of the general public, like the young, who may prove easily swayed by peer pressure and heavy advertising into giving away all their reward tokens to people who aren't actually innovating at all, but are merely repackaging the same tired old ideas over and over again, and just using attractive people to promote them. Genuine innovation might end up being starved of rewards because new innovators won't have an existing base of reward tokens that they can use on massive marketing campaigns, and the people who do acquire many reward tokens will no longer have any further incentive to innovate.
Of course, you could argue that as long as people are being entertained by this drivel, it doesn't matter that real innovation is stifled. You could argue that truly creative people will continue to innovate even if they're not being rewarded for it. But then why keep your system in place once it's stopped doing what it was meant to do? If your system of reward tokens doesn't actually end up rewarding innovation, then what purpose does it serve, and how is it superior to a standard system of either government funding, or relying on private patronage to reward innovators?
for the majority of the world, Google is the clear leader. US-only coverage is a sign of immaturity
For aerial photos, yes, Google is the best I've seen.
On the other hand, for actual map data, MS's offering seems to be considerably better than Google. Last time I checked, Google Maps only covered the US, Canada, UK, Japan, and the area of Italy around Turin. I've only glanced at the MS clone, but it seems to have detailed maps of all of Europe, at least. Which places it considerably higher up the "maturity" list than Google, by your standards...
I do know the track record of each company's consoles over the last few iterations. I know which company has put out the family-fun games, and which company has put out the "mature" games.
Precisely. Revolution is going to be all about gritty adult titles like Eternal Darkness, Killer7, and Resident Evil 4, while the PS3 will be packed with bright and cheerful family fun like Katamari Damacy and Ape Escape.
Er... wait, did you mean them the other way round? I think you need a reality check, your sweeping and inaccurate generalisations are showing.
Is the US government about to access all of Google's logs? I so, isn't there a potential legal issue here? I mean, privacy laws could be different from one country to another.
...
...oh, wait...
Which brings in the "but logs are in the US so it's legal" issue.
This is the last straw! I'm going to stop using Google and every other US-based search engine, because I just can't trust them to keep their logs away from the US government.
Baidu, here I come!
The iPod/iTunes/iTMS trinity has evolved as a natural "standard," and it's a good one.
Can something be called a "standard" if the people who make it refuse to license it to anyone else, and indeed do everything they can to stop other people (e.g. Real) from interoperating with it?
Sounds more like a monopoly than a standard to me.
Apple's winning the digital music war because of good engineering
Yeah. Sure. And not at all because their initial marketing advantage enabled them to lock in a huge customer base, who are now unable to switch away from Apple even if they want to, because their iTunes music won't work anywhere else.*
When Microsoft pulls this kind of trick, they rightly get demonised. But apparently vendor lock-in is absolutely fine, as long as the vendor you get locked into is Apple?
* Yes, I know all about burning it to a CD and re-ripping it to whatever format you like. Now, would you like to have to do that for a collection of 2,000-odd tracks? I thought not.
I also was unaware that being captured on a battlefied while practicing warfare in violation of the Geneva conventions was now considered kidnapping.
And I was unaware that being arrested while going about one's peaceful business in Pakistan, hundreds of miles from the nearest battlefield, and illegally handed over to the US military, was now considered "being captured on a battlefied (sic) while practicing warfare in violation of the Geneva conventions".
(FYI, while there are no official figures, it is widely believed that fewer than 10% of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay were captured on a battlefield by Coalition forces.)
I also find bizarre your apparent belief that the US should not have to obey the Geneva Convention if the enemy wasn't obeying the Geneva Convention. By that argument, the police should be allowed to break the law because criminals break the law. That wouldn't lead to a society I'd particularly want to live in...
MS has hinted at various "intellectual property" around the .NET platform. They have flat out said that they intend to vigorously defend their intellectual property (both gates and ballmer have said it). When asked outright whether they intend to hold the mono project harmless from patent litigation they have refused to give them blanket immunity.
Funny how logic goes out of the window when a zealot looks at MS.
MS are going to defend their IP vigorously.
To sit back and let someone infringe your IP would not be defending it vigorously.
Therefore, MS will sue anyone they discover infringing their IP.
Right? Well, I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this...
MS will sue anyone who infringes their IP.
MS has not sued Mono.
Therefore, Mono does not infringe MS IP, QED.
No, they're planning to sell individual sentences, just like Google Book Search displays.
At just 10 cents a sentence, reading books on your mobile phone is going to be even more popular than getting the latest ringtones!
PUNCH THE MONKEY AND WIN A BUFFALO CHICKEN SANDWICH!
Don't use so many caps. It's like yelling. Don't use so many caps. It's like yelling. Don't use so many caps. It's like yelling.