"The fake RFCs as well, tended to be more subtle than an obvious gag."
IP over Avian Carriers?
TELNET RANDOMLY-LOSE Option?
The Naming of Hosts?
And the rest aren't any less obvious. No, you're just nostalgic... or you didn't look in the right places. I thought E2's was pretty cute, and I had fun with TinyTIM's (although there was some animosity that could have been prevented).
REINHARDT, Circuit Judge:
1/ This case presents several difficult questions of first impression involving our copyright and trademark laws. [fo] We are asked to determine, first, whether the Copyright Act permits persons who are neither copyright holders nor
licensees to disassemble a copyrighted computer program in order to gain an understanding of the unprotected functional elements of the program. In light of the
public policies underlying the Act, we conclude that, when the person seeking the understanding has a legitimate reason for doing so and when no other means of
access to the unprotected elements exists, such disassembly is as a matter of law a fair use of the copyrighted work. . . . Accordingly, we reverse the district court's
grant of a preliminary injunction in favor of plaintiff- appellee Sega Enterprises, Ltd. on its claims of copyright and trademark infringement.
...
11/ On November 29, 1991, Sega amended its complaint to include a claim for copyright infringement.
So, yeah, it was a copyright case (could Accolade include the copyrighted TMSS initialization code?)
"As a web designer, I'd love to have this information. I only wish more browsers immediately told me what speed the person was at. Then you could do the high/low quality links for them."
This is bad for two reasons:
1. It's more expensive to design 2 sets of pages. That money should be spent on more content.
2. Sometimes people with slow modems don't mind waiting - maybe they let your site load in the background while they do something else. It's not polite to make these choices for your users.
"This is somewhat more forceful, but if you are going to benefit from the developer's work (remember, if you are coding, you aren't making content, this is for the actual moviemakers themselves), well, I think this isn't a big price to pay either."
Yes, it is. Imagine if you were making a movie on your PC using the Quake engine, the GIMP, OpenFX, Broadcast 2000, and DivX;), and imagine they were all under this shitty license. That would be 5 adverts before users could see your movie. That's ridiculous - nobody gets that kind of branding except movie studios.
Article 5 is also unreasonable - what if some part of MPEG 4 is patented, and you can't afford a patent license for it? I don't know if this is the case, but it happened with MPEG 1 and 2 (the sound format was MP3...) What if you need to modify it to work with a certain streaming server? What if MPEG 4 can't take advantage of some new compression technique you like?
This license does not fit the Open Source Definition, and it's not a Free Software license.
"I am sure there is a way to calculate the probability that a Turing machine will halt on random input, if that is what this problem is really about."
This is an uninformed statement, and an irrelavant one. It is uninformed because the Halting Problem says that it's impossible to know whether a TM will halt for a given input. Since probability is the number of "sucesses" over the total number of trialsm, it can't be computed unless sucesses can be found. It's also irrelavant because Chaitin was talking about random TMs, not random inputs to a given TM.
"The solution might be extremely complex, but I doubt it is impossible. "
I believe Chaitin *proved* it was impossible. You can't just doubt that - you would have to show that his proof is bad. But given that you can't even be bothered to read the article, I don't know how you would manage that.
"You [have] to specify a set by listing its members, not just by stating a property that all its members had, so "the set of all sets which do not contain themselves" became an invalid definition of a set). Small inconsistency, none dead."
So, the integers aren't a set? I guess the integers are countable, but it is still impossible to "list" all of them. The reals aren't even countable...
While yes, you can get around Russell's paradox that way, you've weakened set theory to the point where it can't do everything that old set-theory can do (in fact, it can hardly do anything).
In *real* mathematics, you *can't* get rid of this inconsistency. That's what Godel proved in his Incompleteness Theorem.
"With CISC complex instruction, often 1 long to execute instructive can get into the chip, and halt everything until it finishes."
There are CISC machines with ILP. Pentiums have 2 pipes, and Athlons have (IIRC) 5.
"Either way, the coder is only able to access the 8(AIX,BIX... etc...)"
That's EAX, EBX, etc. But, there are more available: mm0-mm7 (which are really the floating point registers), and xmm0-xmm7, which are 128-bit registers for SSE and SSE2.
"The guy who runs that page, Martin Rebas, offers other number treats, including the -2 club for people who can't even remember 2 digits of pi."
Look carefully at the names on the list. One of them is Simon Plouffe. Here's his web page: http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/plouffe/. Yep, with Bailey (who I just saw on a *random* mailing list) and Borwein, he created an algorithm to compute arbitrary hexadecimal digits of pi (without computing the previous digits). I wonder if there's anyone else famous on there.
"If we start distributing copes that dont pay any attention to copy restrictions then we might start running into issues with trying to support future formats. "
You mean as opposed to now, where we *only* get sued for distributing readers for encrpyted formats like DVDs?
Appeasement doesn't work. We want to *win* the war.
2) I can try to ensure that Betty will have a very difficult time cheating by hiding the source code from her. This is security through obscurity, but I will make it impossible for *most* gamers to create cheating clients. If Debbie does
build a cheating client and share it with Betty, I can release a patch that will break it and make make go back to the
drawing board and release a new one. Since Betty, Beatrice, Bill and Bob aren't all that bright, they will have to play
fair, at least until Debbie builds a new cheating client. This is security through obscurity, but it's workable.
It is *not* workable. Look at alll the Diablo I and Quake cheats out there. Blizzard, which is as closed a company as you can get, gave up on this model for Diablo 2.
"Or maybe the MD5 sum is pre-calculated and embedded in the file header?
As I understand it, that's essentially the situation"
So? Edit the md5sum without changing the file. Sure, it won't check out at the other end, but you're using a hacked client for a reason, right? It's not like MP3s refuse to play if you have a bad checksum - try playing a partially downloaded one some time (works great!).
AC said: "I have done some things before I didn't agree with, but it bites being myself what I just about hate the most. A spammer. I'm sorry folks."
If you e-mail me your snail mail address and agree to sell out your company - that is, take as much proprietary information from them as you can and put it on the web, publish their name, basically be a real whistle-blower, I'll mail you a check for $50. It's not much, but it's what I can do right now.
Just following orders is not an excuse and never has been. You're making a moral choice, and by your own admission, you're making the wrong one. You're not only hurting your company's targets, but your own sanity by doing something you know is wrong. Ghandi said: "Almost everything you do is meaningless, but it is still important that you do it." These are words to live by.
It should be clear from this paragraph that RMS is only interested in his own freedom, not your freedom. In particular, not your freedom to refuse to share.
It is not just his freedom, but the freedom of users everywhere. But, even ignoring this, he *does* respect your freedom to refuse to share. As you know (I know you know because I've seen your comments here before and I'm on your FSB mailing list), you can take a piece of GPL'd software, hack it to hell, and not distribute it. You can use it for whatever. What the GPL prevents, as you well know, is preventing people you give copies to from sharing.
So, your comment should read, "It should be clear from this paragraph that RMS is only interested in his own freedom, not your freedom. In particular, not your freedom to prevent others from sharing" (emphasis added).
Now, proprietary software companies are founded on the basis that this is a true freedom - in particular, Microsoft (or at least Allchin) believes it to be so key to their business that other ways of doing things must be stomped out at all costs. But, RMS does not believe in a freedom to prevent others from sharing. Please don't misrepresent him.
This guy has a paralegal draft a subpoena, and he sends it on to the ISP? Where's the judge in this? You can't just send out subpoenas willy-nilly. IANAL, and I'll be asking one tonight - but this is wrong!
>Spam doesn't bother me, because I don't get any.
>One of my e-mail accounts is avaible to my
>friends, the other can be seen here
>(saeru00@hotmail.com, come on SPAM me, see if I
>care).
My mom uses Hotmail. She never gives out her address online, follows all the usual precaution. Still, she got so much spam in a 3 month (I think) period that her "Block Sender" list (as if that would work, but she used it) got full - 250 blocked senders. This *is* a problem.
>Why not say "the game may not take place in
>fantasy universe" or something like that.
Because there's plenty of fantasy you can do that doesn't involve that stuff. It just wouldn't be traditional fantasy. Although, to be fair, it does ignore transformative uses of these traditional elements (as seen in fantasy novels such as "The Iron Dragon's Daughter").
>3. my mom won't buy me new hardware.
You have no idea who this guy is, do you?
Anyway, the rules are to avoid a reliance on technology. By taking away the tools that a modern game depends on, he hopes to change the way game dev is looked at. He doesn't mean to ban 3d acceleration for all games ever, just for games that choose to take this challenge.
>7. violence is bad, congress says so. it's also >cliche in games.
He never says the first - that's your projection.
He *does* say: "If you spend time on them, you are wasting energy that could be more profitably spent on gameplay or AI."
>9. I think games should be like real life.
He says that this only applies to representational games (the Sims), not abstract games (Tetris). Also, not necessarily like RL, but predictable to one who knows RL. That is, they should *make sense*
>10.random pet peeve / cliche
It's another way to make people shake up expectations. If a guy wanders around looking like Darth Vader, what will players expect? Well, if he turns out to be a good guy, (or totally unimportant), that would be *different*, which is his goal.
> The other interesting one has to do with "no man-made black" except
> for ink. So I looked around my house with the intention of "poofing"
> everything that is man-made and black. Black cat survived, but I lost
> some computer and stereo equipment. Fortunately my car is blue but I
> will use this technique to get a parking space. For a few things I
> had to look very closely -- I mean is black only "000000"?
I replied:
heh. I think this is probably his best rule, despite its
inapplicability in RL. It is hard to draw, shade, and light black
things. Note that you can still use black for shadows (as long as
they are safe or non-fictional shadows). Except for possibly this one
rule, The Sims is a Dogma 2001 game.
Right, but the copyright issues that 76.60 mention are what the section I pointed to is all about (there's more there than just the tiny section I quoted). Overall, tho, you know more about this than I do, and we're generally in agreement.
HydroCarbon10 said: "Netscape did become usable under linux once it got upgraded to 20 MB of RAM though." These had 32. Also, you didn't mention non-Netscape browsers for Windows or Linux, many of which are lighter weight, like Konqueror and Opera.
I am inclined to believe that this is false. I'm not saying it actually is, but I am skeptical. Even if it is true, it doesn't say anything about Linux, but rather about your lack of knowledge (see point 3). Here's why I think it's false:
1. "They had no room for expansion", yet you installed PCI network cards.
2. IE 5.5 has as its lowest recommended config a 486/66. Your machines were half that speed.
3. You didn't do your research on Linux browsers. Both Konqueror (Free) and Opera (not free) are lighter than Netscape or Mozilla. Opera on Win95 is lighter than MSIE on Win95.
Slashdot Mirror
"The fake RFCs as well, tended to be more subtle than an obvious gag."
IP over Avian Carriers?
TELNET RANDOMLY-LOSE Option?
The Naming of Hosts?
And the rest aren't any less obvious. No, you're just nostalgic... or you didn't look in the right places. I thought E2's was pretty cute, and I had fun with TinyTIM's (although there was some animosity that could have been prevented).
"the Everything Engine, the software on which everything2 was built, is freely available and Open Source and nearing an official 1.0 release."
2 0P re-Release%20License&lastnode_id=211
No, it's not. Here's the license:
http://everydevel.com/index.pl?node=Everything%
Here's the Open Source Definition:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html
E2's license violates points 1, 2, 3, and 6 - and, since it doesn't allow redistribution, many of the others don't make sense.
E2 is nothing like Open Source.
REINHARDT, Circuit Judge: 1/ This case presents several difficult questions of first impression involving our copyright and trademark laws. [fo] We are asked to determine, first, whether the Copyright Act permits persons who are neither copyright holders nor licensees to disassemble a copyrighted computer program in order to gain an understanding of the unprotected functional elements of the program. In light of the public policies underlying the Act, we conclude that, when the person seeking the understanding has a legitimate reason for doing so and when no other means of access to the unprotected elements exists, such disassembly is as a matter of law a fair use of the copyrighted work. . . . Accordingly, we reverse the district court's grant of a preliminary injunction in favor of plaintiff- appellee Sega Enterprises, Ltd. on its claims of copyright and trademark infringement.
11/ On November 29, 1991, Sega amended its complaint to include a claim for copyright infringement.
So, yeah, it was a copyright case (could Accolade include the copyrighted TMSS initialization code?)
"As a web designer, I'd love to have this information. I only wish more browsers immediately told me what speed the person was at. Then you could do the high/low quality links for them."
This is bad for two reasons:
1. It's more expensive to design 2 sets of pages. That money should be spent on more content.
2. Sometimes people with slow modems don't mind waiting - maybe they let your site load in the background while they do something else. It's not polite to make these choices for your users.
"This is somewhat more forceful, but if you are going to benefit from the developer's work (remember, if you are coding, you aren't making content, this is for the actual moviemakers themselves), well, I think this isn't a big price to pay either."
;), and imagine they were all under this shitty license. That would be 5 adverts before users could see your movie. That's ridiculous - nobody gets that kind of branding except movie studios.
Yes, it is. Imagine if you were making a movie on your PC using the Quake engine, the GIMP, OpenFX, Broadcast 2000, and DivX
Article 5 is also unreasonable - what if some part of MPEG 4 is patented, and you can't afford a patent license for it? I don't know if this is the case, but it happened with MPEG 1 and 2 (the sound format was MP3...) What if you need to modify it to work with a certain streaming server? What if MPEG 4 can't take advantage of some new compression technique you like?
This license does not fit the Open Source Definition, and it's not a Free Software license.
"I am sure there is a way to calculate the probability that a Turing machine will halt on random input, if that is what this problem is really about."
This is an uninformed statement, and an irrelavant one. It is uninformed because the Halting Problem says that it's impossible to know whether a TM will halt for a given input. Since probability is the number of "sucesses" over the total number of trialsm, it can't be computed unless sucesses can be found. It's also irrelavant because Chaitin was talking about random TMs, not random inputs to a given TM.
"The solution might be extremely complex, but I doubt it is impossible. "
I believe Chaitin *proved* it was impossible. You can't just doubt that - you would have to show that his proof is bad. But given that you can't even be bothered to read the article, I don't know how you would manage that.
"You [have] to specify a set by listing its members, not just by stating a property that all its members had, so "the set of all sets which do not contain themselves" became an invalid definition of a set). Small inconsistency, none dead."
So, the integers aren't a set? I guess the integers are countable, but it is still impossible to "list" all of them. The reals aren't even countable...
While yes, you can get around Russell's paradox that way, you've weakened set theory to the point where it can't do everything that old set-theory can do (in fact, it can hardly do anything).
In *real* mathematics, you *can't* get rid of this inconsistency. That's what Godel proved in his Incompleteness Theorem.
"With CISC complex instruction, often 1 long to execute instructive can get into the chip, and halt everything until it finishes."
There are CISC machines with ILP. Pentiums have 2 pipes, and Athlons have (IIRC) 5.
"Either way, the coder is only able to access the 8(AIX,BIX... etc...)"
That's EAX, EBX, etc. But, there are more available: mm0-mm7 (which are really the floating point registers), and xmm0-xmm7, which are 128-bit registers for SSE and SSE2.
"The guy who runs that page, Martin Rebas, offers other number treats, including the -2 club for people who can't even remember 2 digits of pi."
Look carefully at the names on the list. One of them is Simon Plouffe. Here's his web page: http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/plouffe/. Yep, with Bailey (who I just saw on a *random* mailing list) and Borwein, he created an algorithm to compute arbitrary hexadecimal digits of pi (without computing the previous digits). I wonder if there's anyone else famous on there.
"There is a difference, Adobe is trying to limit how the PDF is modified and copied."
And this is still wrong - they are trying to control things that they have no right to.
"They aren't trying to limit access to the data like the MPAA wants to do with DVDs."
You can't view it on your preferred device if your preferred device is paper or text-to-speech. Just like you can't view DVDs on Linux.
"There is nothing that keeps you from using your PDF wherever, you just need a reader that Adobe hasnt seemed to aggressivly fight."
Unless you're blind, like many users of e-books.
"If we start distributing copes that dont pay any attention to copy restrictions then we might start running into issues with trying to support future formats. "
You mean as opposed to now, where we *only* get sued for distributing readers for encrpyted formats like DVDs?
Appeasement doesn't work. We want to *win* the war.
2) I can try to ensure that Betty will have a very difficult time cheating by hiding the source code from her. This is security through obscurity, but I will make it impossible for *most* gamers to create cheating clients. If Debbie does build a cheating client and share it with Betty, I can release a patch that will break it and make make go back to the drawing board and release a new one. Since Betty, Beatrice, Bill and Bob aren't all that bright, they will have to play fair, at least until Debbie builds a new cheating client. This is security through obscurity, but it's workable.
It is *not* workable. Look at alll the Diablo I and Quake cheats out there. Blizzard, which is as closed a company as you can get, gave up on this model for Diablo 2.
"somebody could commit a CVS change with nobody knowing the difference. "
No, they couldn't. While WF does give wiki accounts out like candy, CVS is read-only until someone contributes something real.
" Make sure that the lawyer you talk to is well versed in IP rights in your state. "
States do not, and may not, make IP laws. Only the federal government can do that.
Around the time of Sony V. Universal, the classic "Time Shifting" copyright case. This was reinforced by the RIAA v. Diamond. Learn some history.
"Or maybe the MD5 sum is pre-calculated and embedded in the file header?
As I understand it, that's essentially the situation"
So? Edit the md5sum without changing the file. Sure, it won't check out at the other end, but you're using a hacked client for a reason, right? It's not like MP3s refuse to play if you have a bad checksum - try playing a partially downloaded one some time (works great!).
AC said: "I have done some things before I didn't agree with, but it bites being myself what I just about hate the most. A spammer. I'm sorry folks."
If you e-mail me your snail mail address and agree to sell out your company - that is, take as much proprietary information from them as you can and put it on the web, publish their name, basically be a real whistle-blower, I'll mail you a check for $50. It's not much, but it's what I can do right now.
Just following orders is not an excuse and never has been. You're making a moral choice, and by your own admission, you're making the wrong one. You're not only hurting your company's targets, but your own sanity by doing something you know is wrong. Ghandi said: "Almost everything you do is meaningless, but it is still important that you do it." These are words to live by.
It should be clear from this paragraph that RMS is only interested in his own freedom, not your freedom. In particular, not your freedom to refuse to share.
It is not just his freedom, but the freedom of users everywhere. But, even ignoring this, he *does* respect your freedom to refuse to share. As you know (I know you know because I've seen your comments here before and I'm on your FSB mailing list), you can take a piece of GPL'd software, hack it to hell, and not distribute it. You can use it for whatever. What the GPL prevents, as you well know, is preventing people you give copies to from sharing.
So, your comment should read, "It should be clear from this paragraph that RMS is only interested in his own freedom, not your freedom. In particular, not your freedom to prevent others from sharing" (emphasis added). Now, proprietary software companies are founded on the basis that this is a true freedom - in particular, Microsoft (or at least Allchin) believes it to be so key to their business that other ways of doing things must be stomped out at all costs. But, RMS does not believe in a freedom to prevent others from sharing. Please don't misrepresent him.
This guy has a paralegal draft a subpoena, and he sends it on to the ISP? Where's the judge in this? You can't just send out subpoenas willy-nilly. IANAL, and I'll be asking one tonight - but this is wrong!
>Spam doesn't bother me, because I don't get any.
>One of my e-mail accounts is avaible to my
>friends, the other can be seen here
>(saeru00@hotmail.com, come on SPAM me, see if I
>care).
My mom uses Hotmail. She never gives out her address online, follows all the usual precaution. Still, she got so much spam in a 3 month (I think) period that her "Block Sender" list (as if that would work, but she used it) got full - 250 blocked senders. This *is* a problem.
>Why not say "the game may not take place in
>fantasy universe" or something like that.
Because there's plenty of fantasy you can do that doesn't involve that stuff. It just wouldn't be traditional fantasy. Although, to be fair, it does ignore transformative uses of these traditional elements (as seen in fantasy novels such as "The Iron Dragon's Daughter").
>3. my mom won't buy me new hardware.
You have no idea who this guy is, do you?
Anyway, the rules are to avoid a reliance on technology. By taking away the tools that a modern game depends on, he hopes to change the way game dev is looked at. He doesn't mean to ban 3d acceleration for all games ever, just for games that choose to take this challenge.
>7. violence is bad, congress says so. it's also >cliche in games.
He never says the first - that's your projection.
He *does* say: "If you spend time on them, you are wasting energy that could be more profitably spent on gameplay or AI."
>9. I think games should be like real life.
He says that this only applies to representational games (the Sims), not abstract games (Tetris). Also, not necessarily like RL, but predictable to one who knows RL. That is, they should *make sense*
>10.random pet peeve / cliche
It's another way to make people shake up expectations. If a guy wanders around looking like Darth Vader, what will players expect? Well, if he turns out to be a good guy, (or totally unimportant), that would be *different*, which is his goal.
This was posted to MUD-Dev a while back.
Frank Crowell wrote:
> The other interesting one has to do with "no man-made black" except
> for ink. So I looked around my house with the intention of "poofing"
> everything that is man-made and black. Black cat survived, but I lost
> some computer and stereo equipment. Fortunately my car is blue but I
> will use this technique to get a parking space. For a few things I
> had to look very closely -- I mean is black only "000000"?
I replied:
heh. I think this is probably his best rule, despite its
inapplicability in RL. It is hard to draw, shade, and light black
things. Note that you can still use black for shadows (as long as
they are safe or non-fictional shadows). Except for possibly this one
rule, The Sims is a Dogma 2001 game.
Right, but the copyright issues that 76.60 mention are what the section I pointed to is all about (there's more there than just the tiny section I quoted). Overall, tho, you know more about this than I do, and we're generally in agreement.
HydroCarbon10 said: "Netscape did become usable under linux once it got upgraded to 20 MB of RAM though." These had 32. Also, you didn't mention non-Netscape browsers for Windows or Linux, many of which are lighter weight, like Konqueror and Opera.
I am inclined to believe that this is false. I'm not saying it actually is, but I am skeptical. Even if it is true, it doesn't say anything about Linux, but rather about your lack of knowledge (see point 3). Here's why I think it's false:
1. "They had no room for expansion", yet you installed PCI network cards.
2. IE 5.5 has as its lowest recommended config a 486/66. Your machines were half that speed.
3. You didn't do your research on Linux browsers. Both Konqueror (Free) and Opera (not free) are lighter than Netscape or Mozilla. Opera on Win95 is lighter than MSIE on Win95.