This latest feature is just one more reason for people to run pirate copies, with that particular "Advantage" disabled.
Microsoft really doesn't get it. The only way to make people buy your software is to make it useful and friendly, not by making it annoying.
This is just a small part of Microsoft's huge misconception about operating systems. No Microsoft, people don't buy operating systems to benefit you, nor to benefit third parties like content providers. People buy operating systems to benefit THEMSELVES.
Such a simple concept, but apparently incomprehensible to Microsoft.
> [as a user] would I be under any obligation to release the source code to the software I wrote?
No, as a user of GPL software, as opposed to a (re)developer or distributor, you do not engage any of the relevant conditions of the GPL with respect to provision of the source code.
As the ex-FSF's Eben Moglen has said on many occasions (paraphrased but close), "The GPL is not a usage license, but a distribution license". That's a very clearcut distinction, and Eben has written the book in this area.
There is a small corner case to watch out for, however, and that's static linking with GPL libraries --- a few people call this "derivation" despite the fact that you're only an end user and are only aggregating the GPL library functions statically with your code, so the issue is slightly grey. However, most linkage with GPL libraries is dynamic, and even Richard Stallman has conceded that legally, dynamic linking cannot ever be derivation but only mere usage. No doubt Eben put him straight on that. "Aggregation is not derivation" appears in the FSF's own explanatory materials.
On the whole then, the answer is "No, you're safe", unless you go out of your way to use static linking, which would open you up to the possibility of occasional arguments within the community, although probably not legal ones.
The article seems to be mainly concerned with recording the history of high-profile global events in virtual worlds, but this technology can go a lot further than that. Every single event can be recorded, and replayed later for our delight, amusement, education, and for less savoury purposes as well (like tracking and stalking people).
Many gaming environments have replay systems available, most commonly associated with their PvP side. Guild Wars provides a good example: with a keystroke you can enter Observer Mode, and choose which tournament or battle to watch from a large selection of recent events of different types. It's quite engrossing to watch the tactics of expert teams pitted against each other, and since you can control the camera yourself to follow a player (or leave it on auto) and monitor the skills that they use during battle, it's very educational for players within the game as well, and a good spectator sport.
If Observer Mode can be used to replay PvP tournaments, then it can also be used to replay every other event occurring in the Guild Wars world and any other virtual world or online game, and in principle this data can be stored forever, much as suggested in TFA. What's more, we're not talking about massive amounts of data either, because no video needs to be stored but only the stream of event data, which is hugely more compact. (And as a bonus it's a lot more flexible than video, since camera control is left to each observer and not decided at the time of recording.)
This event replay technology clearly has huge potential. Indeed, one day it could provide the "new TV", as this approach is not limited to virtual worlds alone. At the present time we can't really display real-world events in this manner photorealistically, but in a few years or decades that ability will come. And with that will come full digitization and replay of all events, in all our worlds. First we'll see virtual events that just look like real-world ones, but it's quite inevitable that there will be a convergence of the two.
It's very early days of course, but it already hints at a very interesting (but somewhat scary) picture of where we're heading in the area of event digitization and recording.
Others have pointed out that Guild Wars has had henchmen for hire from the start, but that idea gained an even more striking boost in the 3rd GW campaign, Nightfall --- Heroes.
In the original two campaigns (Profecies, and Factions), you had a choice of one or two henchmen (both male and female) per profession in the game, which at that time had 8 different professions (now 10). Most professions offered only one henchman for hire per town, but the important professions of monk (healer/protection) and warrier provided two henchmen in most places. So, for example, in a town with a maximum teamsize of 8 members which can be either live players or henchmen, you might build a team with 7 henchmen of various kinds plus yourself, or 7 real people plus a henchman to fill the empty slot, or any other combination.
However, those original henchmen had a fixed skill set and a standard AI behaviour which you could not alter, and you could not control their positions either. They simply followed the human team players around, and fought whatever you fought.
When Nightfall came out, the original henchmen remained available, but to them were added customizable Heroes which you earned by completion of special storyline quests. When you complete such a quest, the corresponding Hero is "unlocked", which means that it is available to you in every town or campaign in the game, forever more, and the level of customization is extremely impressive. (Each human player can add up to 3 Heroes to a team, and the mix of players, Heroes and henchmen can be anything you like.)
Not only can you set up the weapons and shields of each of each of your own Heroes, but you can also set up two properties on each of their 5 pieces of armor (insignias and runes, on each of head/chest/arms/legs/feet). Furthermore, while each Hero has a fixed primary profession, you can change the secondary profession of each one at will, and spread the Hero's available attribute points across any of the Hero's skill attributes. Typically you do this just before heading into a fight zone or dungeon, so that your Heroes are most effectively configured for the battle ahead.
In addition to the above, you can configure up each Hero's skills bar with 8 active skills (the same as human players get), chosen from among any of the skills that any of the characters on your account have acquired, in other words thousands of skills once you've played the game for a while. The combination of skill attribute points allocation and set of skills on the skills bar is called a build in GW parlance, and you can can configure such a build in just a couple of seconds, simply by loading a skill template that you stored away earlier, or which another player has given you.
And, the icing on the cake: each Hero recruited has a "control flag" button on the window decoration surrounding the mini-map/radar of its owner, and with a click of that button you can make the corresponding hero go to any spot on the map or terrain and remain there until the control button is unclicked. There is also a general team control flag which any henchmen in your team will obey, and this is also obeyed by your Heroes unless overridden by their individual flags.
Finally, the UI allows the behavioural AI of heroes to be varied a bit as well, by giving them individual attack targets, and also by setting their fight mode to Fight, Guard, or Avoid Combat. And, for the most part, they will each use their 8 chosen skills quite intelligently, often better than players.:-)
This level of customization and control is very powerful, and the balance between control and complexity is quite good. It sounds complex at first, but it takes only a few hours to become quite expert at using the control interface at high speed during the mayhem of battle. And, since the skills deployed by Heroes are ordinary player skills, the competence you acquire with skills on your own characters i
Because it says something important about the rat bastards that the RIAA has dredged up to handle these cases for them.
Ray, although what you say is true, it should be your 3rd answer, not your first. Here are the first two: 1) Because the defendant's precarious personal situation directly determines the direct damages suffered by the defendant.
2) Because the RIAA campaign of intimidation and extortion relies on the weakness of their targets making them settle under pressure.
These two points are much more important than the fact that the RIAA lawyers are rat bastards. 1) and 2) support the case directly.
Keep on plugging away at them, Ray. They must suffer personally and professionally for this, not just in the form of business losses.
It makes a lot of sense. They were always chasing tail lights when developing chipsets to support Intel + AMD CPUs, whereas now they'll be in exclusive control of their device interface specifications and no longer be competing against chipsets from those other manufacturers.
It's good on all fronts for VIA.
It's less good for customers of Intel and AMD since some competition disappears, but I don't think that that will really matter. Both Intel and AMD make their large profits from CPUs, not from their motherboard chipsets as those are not "sexy" enough to command large margins, so competition from VIA didn't actually have any significant impact on chipset pricing.
The stated approach of "use fine art instead of high poly count" for visual beauty is perfectly true, as you can see in Guild Wars.
I run GW on a modern Core2Duo with 8600GT on a lovely 24" 1920x1200 screen at 80 FPS, and the hi-def beauty is really gorgeous. Yet, the same game runs on my crappy old P4 with 5200 PCI graphics at lower res but still good frame rate, just because the environment and characters are not heavy on polygons but instead are drawn beautifully and quite realistically. ArenaNet know how to do that very well.
Aion seems to be done in that same fashion, although the dumbing down of the skills system compared to GW can't be a good thing. GW requires you to become an expert in applying complex skills and to use tactics, whereas in Aion they seem to have decided that thinking is too hard and so have replaced it with repeated grinding. That doesn't sound like fun, as the "challenge" will not be in gameplay but in keeping your eyelids from closing.
The other techniques have so many uncertainties that it's simply too dangerous to rely on them. We have only one chance to get it right, and that's all.
Landing is fraught with uncertainties (composition, center of gravity, even existence of surface, material rigidity, locking onto surface under such tiny gravity, stability under thrust) and difficulties (rock spinning, danger and ambiguity in landing, thrust vector issues).
Crashing is likewise fraught with uncertainties (center of gravity, composition) and difficulties (waste of kinetic energy of the impactor by conversion into heat and spin, accuracy of high-speed impactor).
In contrast, the gravity tractor method is continuously adaptive and acts on all the material in the rock simultaneously, so it's immune to all the above issues. What's more, ion engines are extremely fuel-efficient, so long-term station keeping just off the rock isn't a massively hard problem.
Given just one shot at this, I would much rather trust the life of the planet to the gravity tractor approach. There's less to go wrong.
I'd send several tractors though, not just one. We simply can't afford to fail.
Sadly, you may be right about this, judging by the vast majority of responses from developers in this article thread so far.
Almost as one, the FOSS developers here seem to have responded (paraphrasing): "Nobody is paying me for this work, so I'll be darned if they're going to tell me how the UI should be designed for usability." And even some non-developers have defended that stance.
This suggests that, indeed, there may be no solution to the problem coming from the community of FOSS developers itself.
But what if we were shamed into it?
What if Microsoft, or Apple, came out with a public statement that "FOSS products have extremely poor usability, because their developers refuse to accept usability input." It would be hard to defend against such an accusation, since we have almost no cases of devs accepting input from non-devs.
This would cause a huge uproar, I'm willing to bet. Maybe that would shake us out of this impasse.
> If a game had no grind, players would lose interest quickly
That is incorrect.
Guild Wars is an example of an online game that has (almost) no grind, and yet is massively popular (millions), and growing.
And GW has (almost) no bots, since there is almost no boring grinding for bots to replace. As a result, the only reason left to run bots in GW is for farming for drops, but it's very rarely done.
So no, you're wrong. WoW (and EverQuest and others) did not need to be designed as time sinks, but they were, simply because that extends the companies' monthly revenues. And now Blizzard deserves to be overrun with Glider-type bots, because the grinding problem is of their own design and making.
The need for grinding is a sign of a very badly designed game. Repetition has no redeeming aspects at all.
> I wonder if you could legally set up landmines on private property.
Definitely not, because emergency services may need to enter your property, and they'd take exception to being blown up.
However, how about mining your property with non-lethal and non-hurting mines, like custard pie launchers and water grenades for example? Would that be legal, as long as there's no possibility of accidental public access?
And if it's still not legal, it begs the question of how free you really are in your own house, on your own property. I bet the real answer is, "You're not".
> one could even "out" symptoms of their friends or speculate which friends made them sick. lots of issues with it, but a different data source for inf disease folks, even if the data was not completely accurate, would be helpful in predictions.
Yeah, right, just what we need, an inaccurate resource for the insurance companies to data-mine. Your premium has now increased by a factor of 5, just because someone with your name (Mike Smith) allegedly made someone else sick. Great.
People's desires to live apart don't trump the laws of physics I'm afraid
[If someone] finds a source of infinite free energy, lots of things become possible including colonising Mars
You're talking total tripe, because we don't need free energy nor wormholes nor warp drives nor any other nonexistent inventions nor any new physics to make travelling to Mars cheap and widely available. All we need is *time* (a lot of it) for our engineering systems to mature.
Travel is a matter of harnessing energy, and energy is plentiful. The earth's surface receives a bit less than 150,000 TW of solar irradiation, of which we harness and use no more than 18-20 TW (that's just 20, not 20,000), so there's no energy shortage at ground level. Add solar energy collection beyond the atmosphere to our capabilities and the available energy becomes effectively infinite. That also means that travel within the solar system will be effectively unlimited in an easily forseeable future. It's a sure bet. The sun isn't going to dim any time soon.
What we do need of course is many centuries of good solid engineering to develop such a capability, because creating an infrastructure for widespread space travel is not something that can be done in just a few decades. But it's coming for sure, because there are no reasons why it shouldn't come and ample reasons why people will want it... no doubt it will be fueled by the lure of profits like everything else.
We certainly do not need a change in the laws of physics nor any magic transports. Stop talking crap.
(New physics will undoubtedly appear over the centuries, but current physics is more than enough as a foundation for universal space travel. Energy is the only hard constraint on space travel given by the laws of physics, which effectively means that we are not constrained at all, at least within the inner solar system.)
> Both government and corporation are flawed structures... We need radical new thinking... and we need it fast.
Although what you say is accurate, unfortunately calling for new thinking as if it could provide a solution is probably pie in the sky as well. The problem is that those in power, who inhabit a fuzzy but integrated political and corporate tier that is self-propagating, will never willingly dismiss themselves from their power and fortune, regardless of any new thinking. Nor is the democratic process able to dismiss them, but only to reshuffle their figureheads a little with nil result.
I doubt that even a civil war or full-scale revolution in the West could dismantle this setup they have running... we'd just end up with yet another bunch of figureheads, while the world continues to march to the tune of those with the resources. What's more, civil unrest and revolutions don't happen without mass discontent, but 95% of Western populations are programmed with the agendas they receive through the media and thus are perfectly happy with the current situation, so there is no dry social tinder ready to catch fire. Mass unrest is not going to happen, the system's too tightly sewn up and life is too comfortable.
By what means could new thinking change anything then? While it's always interesting to dream up new and better schemes to save the planet and humanity, unless you simultaneously come up with an action vector for removing or transforming or sidelining the old crud (against their will), all you have is empty gesturing.
I think there *IS* a solution, but it's of comfort only to those who take a long-term view: just wait until humanity starts migrating off its birth planet, which in time will dilute to zero the old power and resource structures. Of course, the new power structures that replace them might be even worse, but at least it provides an opportunity for change, and an opportunity for choice in the immensity out there.
I don't wish to dampen your thinking, but don't fall into the Libertarian trap: great ideas + no viable action vector == nil result. (Every proposal that is based on the democratic process has no viable action vector for change, because the political route is totally stage-managed and only delivers an illusion of democracy. The powers aren't stupid enough to provide a real means for their removal.)
> I'm pretty knowledgeable about both Linux and Windows, and the weirdnesses of GNOME and KDE still leave me scratching my head.
Well your prior knowledge of Windows leaves you open to accusations of prior mind-shaping, by those who would dispute what you say.
That doesn't apply to me though.
In my case, I'm a 100% Unix/Linux person and I've never used Adobe Photoshop nor MS office apps nor any other such "standards", and yet the wierdness/dumbness/unergonomics of both Gnome and KDE apps leave me speechless, and annoyed. They're both so appallingly bad that I consider them as standing between me and my ability to use my machines, instead of helping. As a result, I frequently remove the bulk of their bloated and unnecessary layers from at least half the distros I use, and run with just a window manager plus some embellishments. I *want* to use higher level apps, but they need to be structured logically and consistently.
Seriously, the bulk of both Gnome and KDE is a disaster, and unergonomic to the extreme. It's as if the apps had been sent to a usability testing center, and then the worst possible app UIs chosen. FFS, it's just appalling. (And that's coming from a complete FOSS fan since I use nothing else, so don't bother with shill theories.)
I know that it's part and parcel of the FOSS environment (which I 100% use, endorse, and support) that developers scratch their own itch rather than working to requirements, but that's no excuse for developing atrociously unusable UIs. The mind just boggles.
I'm not sure where FOSS UIs are going, but I do know that things are seriously out of whack in this area. The situation is far beyond just "poor". I don't know of a solution currently.
Sadly, it's not possible to contribute to FOSS projects from a usability angle, as they're largely ruled by alpha-male elites and a fanboy entourage that dismisses any view counter to theirs.
On the positive side, I *CAN* do everything I want with these almost-unusable apps... but why is such UI suffering necessary?
> There's just no way that there's going to be a 1MW charger (1000V @ 1000A) handy (my whole house can only supply 32kW)
You can deliver energy to your car at home at any rate you like. Only the average power over 24h is limited by your mains supply rating and house wiring, not the instantaneous power. What you can't do is supply higher powers continuously over a 24 hour period, but only for a short burst. Eg. charge up your garage ultracapacitor over 24 hours at 32kW, then connect up the car and squirt the energy over to it at 1MW for 45 minutes through really fat bus bars.
This is bound to be the way it'll be done eventually (assuming that ultracaps become stable and mainstream), since people don't want long charging periods. Instead, your home ultracap in the garage or driveway will charge up your car ultracap at megawatts rate for a short period each day, and then the car ultracap will charge up your car battery more slowly, if it can't run your car directly for some reason. What your 32kW-continuous rating *does* limit is the total amount of energy your car can store each day (and hence your trip lengths), but that's a separate matter from the charging wattage.
Blasting electrical energy across at 1MW from a low-rated mains supply is not a particularly hard problem. The difficulty is in making a temporary storage unit that can take it.
About those alleged "Complications"... well yes sure, if you run out of stored power then you're in trouble. However, this isn't exclusive to electric cars, but applies similarly to liquid-fueled vehicles. If you set out on a voyage of 500 miles with only 200 miles of gasoline and you can't find anywhere to refuel, then you're in trouble too. Fortunately, most people understand power and refueling constraints and know how to plan ahead.
Admittedly, electrical recharging infrastructure is almost non-existent at the moment. However, this isn't a total disaster nor an unforseen "Complication". It's thoroughly forseen, so any early adopter who can add and subtract won't be travelling further than the stored energy allows, minus a safety margin since nobody likes getting stuck. In many cases, it'll be a second car anyway, mainly for short hops around the local area and short office commutes.
But let's look at the worst case scenario as well. When the power runs out in between recharge points, will it be a total disaster? Well, it certainly will be a big annoyance, but that's where the recovery services come in. All it takes is a phone call and some waiting in the comfort of your car while you sulk at your arithmetic incompetence, but soon your vehicle will be sitting snugly on the back of the recovery truck, and remedial transport sorted out. This is normal today in the event of breakdowns, and it will be just as normal when cars go electric, both for breakdowns and for recharging mishaps. (The vehicle recovery industry will certainly boom for a few decades, until vehicle recharging infrastructure is widespread.)
So while "Complications" will exist in the short term, they're not exceptional ones. We already have similar issues today, and solutions to them as well. It's just a matter of degree. For the next few years, trips in EVs will have to be a fair bit shorter on average. We can cope with that.
> Google has just been stupid here about privacy, and now it's coming home to roost in a very public way.
This is true, but it's not the worst of it.
Much, *MUCH* worse is that the judge has imposed on Google a legal ruling that the RIAA must be wetting themselves to obtain. And of course, these records will go straight to the MPAA, despite the contraints placed on their use.
This is either a case of extreme naivete on the part of the judge in ignoring the privacy ramifications in his incredible ruling, or quite possibly a simple case of corruption. Such naivete would be so incredible in a judge that isn't senile, that corruption has to be far more likely.
As for Google, their lawyers should have IMMEDIATELY said to the judge "Our client cannot do that, on privacy grounds. Google's duty to protect the privacy of millions cannot be dismissed by a legal ruling." Judges are not omnipotent, even when some of them think they are.
The RIAA's lawsuits are purely speculative, based on a standard of "evidence" that would be laughed out of court in any other area. When there is no penalty for speculative litigation, litigation becomes a business method instead of an instrument of last resort. This case needs to be dismissed With Prejudice to counteract this misuse of the legal system.
In addition, the RIAA as plaintiffs suffer no discomfort from a failed lawsuit, as it's all just paperwork and their daily office job for them. In contrast, their defendants suffer horribly from the process win or lose, with years of their lives being damaged and unrecoverable, since the litigation process is entirely foreign to their normal lives. This is unbalanced, unfair, and inadequate.
Both areas need redress, starting with dismissal With Prejudice and including compensation to the defendant for harm caused. But really more than that is needed. The RIAA lawyers themselves need to suffer some kind of professional penalty that will stay on their record, or this kind of legal abuse will not stop. Without negative feedback, systems spiral out of control, and that is as true in law as in science.
We obviously have water. CO2 can be reprocessed into O2.
And when you take out the O2, you end up with C, which certainly isn't unwanted waste matter. There is probably a big future for graphene, diamondoid, and carbon nanotubes on Mars. Since locally produced oxygen will be a necessity, there will be a lot of carbon available from the process.
At the current rate of progress, pretty soon there won't be anything we can't make with carbon and carbon composites, from nanocircuits to human habitats. That could be important, not just on Mars but also here on Earth.
You seem to have misunderstood what I wrote entirely, because my point is the same one that you are making, and is directly supported by it: that technology is taking Mankind up an exponential path of directed development.
However, you attribute this to something "magical" which has happened only recently with modern technology ("magical" in the sense of treating only the most recent technology as something special), whereas I pointed out that this has been happening for ages and ages --- indeed, significantly longer than the 40k years that you mentioned. It has been happening ever since primitive Man started using tools, the first instruments of his technology.
Exponential growth curves start off extremely flat before they skyrocket upwards. The highly noticeable rate of growth in our capability and in our process of self-transformation is merely the ever-faster acceleration along an exponential path that started umpteen thousands of years ago, and not something new. Mankind has been evolving himself through technology for ages.
There is yet another aspect to our ever more self-determined evolution that I didn't mention before, but should be included for completeness: that in parallel with taking the technological path, Mankind has been decoupling himself from dependency on his natural environment as well, as a matter of choice and not merely as necessary fallout from improving technology. It's still early days in this process but it's already happening very visibly, and it too will become highly noticeable in due course, once its own exponential curve takes off.
This is human-directed evolution in action, a natural product of our natural minds and hence a natural progression. It's not a result of some mystical intelligence seed implanted by aliens.;-) That's why I dispute the premise that something special and unique has suddenly happened, which smacks a little of creationism or "intelligent design". Just look at Man's history of technological development a little further back, plot the curves, and it becomes quite clear that no magic is required to explain what's been happening.
There is no sudden transition occurring, but merely a smooth, ever accelerating exponential curve of progress and human development, and that's why the "end of human life" premise is incorrect. It only looks sudden to someone who isn't acquainted with exponentials.
To say that the advent of powerful AI will spell the end of human life is to misunderstand humanity.
Humanity is an evolving entity, not a static and stagnant one. It has been evolving beyond its mere animal origins for a long time now, and the rate of change is increasing exponentially in step with our mastery of technology. In fact, through our intelligence, we have taken control of evolution away from nature (a very haphazard director at best), and are beating a path towards a very engineered and steadily improving future humanity. It's a continuous process, and it continually redefines humanity through tiny improvements which are often seen as mere remedial changes, such as vitamins and denture correction.
This isn't going to stop, and the machinery of the brain is no exception to this. Yes it's complex, but so is everything else. We're not put off by complexity. In fact, it's a strong driving force for study and mastery, a challenge for our technological capability. While I understand that some people have a natural preference for the things and ways of the past, some of us look forward very optimistically to a future humanity that would be unrecognizable today, a humanity that is physically more robust and capable, mentally expanded through integration with computing machinery, more logical, and far less driven by animal instincts, delusion and hysteria.
It might be valid to claim that technology spelled the end of the 1st phase of human life, perhaps, but that happened a long time ago now, whichever way you measure it. We're nothing like the initial homo sapiens that nature conjured up. And good riddance too. The fleas were probably annoying.
In Guild Wars, you can choose the nationality or language of your district when in any town or outpost. This makes it a great game for practicing languages, including far eastern ones.
There are no subscription costs either, just the single fairly low purchase price, although if you became interested in the gaming you'd end up buying the two other campaigns and the expansion as well.
The downside is that games players can't spell for shit, so you'd be learning from very bad teachers. Learning languages via MMO needs some grammar and spell-checking add-ons.:-)
Your story of depression for musicians is an artifact of not embracing new technologies and markets, but instead trying to sell your music within the framework set by the music industry. That approach is guaranteed to fail as it's stacked against independents. But there are alternatives.
In the virtual world of Second Life, many hundreds of musicians are performing live in 1-hour slots in front of audiences of up to 100 people (a system scalability limit), and that happens throughout the day, every day, in thousands of venues. It not only gives them exposure, but it also brings in hard cash through the tip jar and from direct music music sales. (Second Life's currency is convertible to and from US dollars.) And they make a living from it.
So things are not as bad as you portray them, as long as a musician is willing to leave the normal music industry channels and is not afraid to try something new.
The article is quite accurate, although the decline was already in progress by 1990, going by my personal experience.
I was a university lecturer in Electrical and Computer Engineering during the latter part of the 80's, and the maths standards of university applicants were causing us more and more problems as the decade progressed. To put it simply, even the best qualified young people were not really up to the rather tough mathematical requirements of an engineering degree course.
What we ended up doing was organizing a prior summer course to help out those who were nearly there, and sometimes recommending an entire remedial year for the lower median students, mainly focussed on gaining the missing mathematics competence. Sadly, quite a few seemingly good students couldn't even cope with that and dropped out, but better to drop out early than halfway through a hard course.
It's a very bad situation. We live in a technological civilization, and pretty much everything manufactured around us is the product of applying mathematically-based knowledge somewhere along the line. The dropping competence in mathematics, and hence the declining ability to handle the hard sciences and engineering, is extremely worrying.
Slashdot Mirror
This latest feature is just one more reason for people to run pirate copies, with that particular "Advantage" disabled.
Microsoft really doesn't get it. The only way to make people buy your software is to make it useful and friendly, not by making it annoying.
This is just a small part of Microsoft's huge misconception about operating systems. No Microsoft, people don't buy operating systems to benefit you, nor to benefit third parties like content providers. People buy operating systems to benefit THEMSELVES.
Such a simple concept, but apparently incomprehensible to Microsoft.
> [as a user] would I be under any obligation to release the source code to the software I wrote?
No, as a user of GPL software, as opposed to a (re)developer or distributor, you do not engage any of the relevant conditions of the GPL with respect to provision of the source code.
As the ex-FSF's Eben Moglen has said on many occasions (paraphrased but close), "The GPL is not a usage license, but a distribution license". That's a very clearcut distinction, and Eben has written the book in this area.
There is a small corner case to watch out for, however, and that's static linking with GPL libraries --- a few people call this "derivation" despite the fact that you're only an end user and are only aggregating the GPL library functions statically with your code, so the issue is slightly grey. However, most linkage with GPL libraries is dynamic, and even Richard Stallman has conceded that legally, dynamic linking cannot ever be derivation but only mere usage. No doubt Eben put him straight on that. "Aggregation is not derivation" appears in the FSF's own explanatory materials.
On the whole then, the answer is "No, you're safe", unless you go out of your way to use static linking, which would open you up to the possibility of occasional arguments within the community, although probably not legal ones.
The article seems to be mainly concerned with recording the history of high-profile global events in virtual worlds, but this technology can go a lot further than that. Every single event can be recorded, and replayed later for our delight, amusement, education, and for less savoury purposes as well (like tracking and stalking people).
Many gaming environments have replay systems available, most commonly associated with their PvP side. Guild Wars provides a good example: with a keystroke you can enter Observer Mode, and choose which tournament or battle to watch from a large selection of recent events of different types. It's quite engrossing to watch the tactics of expert teams pitted against each other, and since you can control the camera yourself to follow a player (or leave it on auto) and monitor the skills that they use during battle, it's very educational for players within the game as well, and a good spectator sport.
If Observer Mode can be used to replay PvP tournaments, then it can also be used to replay every other event occurring in the Guild Wars world and any other virtual world or online game, and in principle this data can be stored forever, much as suggested in TFA. What's more, we're not talking about massive amounts of data either, because no video needs to be stored but only the stream of event data, which is hugely more compact. (And as a bonus it's a lot more flexible than video, since camera control is left to each observer and not decided at the time of recording.)
This event replay technology clearly has huge potential. Indeed, one day it could provide the "new TV", as this approach is not limited to virtual worlds alone. At the present time we can't really display real-world events in this manner photorealistically, but in a few years or decades that ability will come. And with that will come full digitization and replay of all events, in all our worlds. First we'll see virtual events that just look like real-world ones, but it's quite inevitable that there will be a convergence of the two.
It's very early days of course, but it already hints at a very interesting (but somewhat scary) picture of where we're heading in the area of event digitization and recording.
Others have pointed out that Guild Wars has had henchmen for hire from the start, but that idea gained an even more striking boost in the 3rd GW campaign, Nightfall --- Heroes.
In the original two campaigns (Profecies, and Factions), you had a choice of one or two henchmen (both male and female) per profession in the game, which at that time had 8 different professions (now 10). Most professions offered only one henchman for hire per town, but the important professions of monk (healer/protection) and warrier provided two henchmen in most places. So, for example, in a town with a maximum teamsize of 8 members which can be either live players or henchmen, you might build a team with 7 henchmen of various kinds plus yourself, or 7 real people plus a henchman to fill the empty slot, or any other combination.
However, those original henchmen had a fixed skill set and a standard AI behaviour which you could not alter, and you could not control their positions either. They simply followed the human team players around, and fought whatever you fought.
When Nightfall came out, the original henchmen remained available, but to them were added customizable Heroes which you earned by completion of special storyline quests. When you complete such a quest, the corresponding Hero is "unlocked", which means that it is available to you in every town or campaign in the game, forever more, and the level of customization is extremely impressive. (Each human player can add up to 3 Heroes to a team, and the mix of players, Heroes and henchmen can be anything you like.)
Not only can you set up the weapons and shields of each of each of your own Heroes, but you can also set up two properties on each of their 5 pieces of armor (insignias and runes, on each of head/chest/arms/legs/feet). Furthermore, while each Hero has a fixed primary profession, you can change the secondary profession of each one at will, and spread the Hero's available attribute points across any of the Hero's skill attributes. Typically you do this just before heading into a fight zone or dungeon, so that your Heroes are most effectively configured for the battle ahead.
In addition to the above, you can configure up each Hero's skills bar with 8 active skills (the same as human players get), chosen from among any of the skills that any of the characters on your account have acquired, in other words thousands of skills once you've played the game for a while. The combination of skill attribute points allocation and set of skills on the skills bar is called a build in GW parlance, and you can can configure such a build in just a couple of seconds, simply by loading a skill template that you stored away earlier, or which another player has given you.
And, the icing on the cake: each Hero recruited has a "control flag" button on the window decoration surrounding the mini-map/radar of its owner, and with a click of that button you can make the corresponding hero go to any spot on the map or terrain and remain there until the control button is unclicked. There is also a general team control flag which any henchmen in your team will obey, and this is also obeyed by your Heroes unless overridden by their individual flags.
Finally, the UI allows the behavioural AI of heroes to be varied a bit as well, by giving them individual attack targets, and also by setting their fight mode to Fight, Guard, or Avoid Combat. And, for the most part, they will each use their 8 chosen skills quite intelligently, often better than players. :-)
This level of customization and control is very powerful, and the balance between control and complexity is quite good. It sounds complex at first, but it takes only a few hours to become quite expert at using the control interface at high speed during the mayhem of battle. And, since the skills deployed by Heroes are ordinary player skills, the competence you acquire with skills on your own characters i
Ray, although what you say is true, it should be your 3rd answer, not your first. Here are the first two:
1) Because the defendant's precarious personal situation directly determines the direct damages suffered by the defendant.
2) Because the RIAA campaign of intimidation and extortion relies on the weakness of their targets making them settle under pressure.
These two points are much more important than the fact that the RIAA lawyers are rat bastards. 1) and 2) support the case directly.
Keep on plugging away at them, Ray. They must suffer personally and professionally for this, not just in the form of business losses.
> I can't understand making that move at all.
It makes a lot of sense. They were always chasing tail lights when developing chipsets to support Intel + AMD CPUs, whereas now they'll be in exclusive control of their device interface specifications and no longer be competing against chipsets from those other manufacturers.
It's good on all fronts for VIA.
It's less good for customers of Intel and AMD since some competition disappears, but I don't think that that will really matter. Both Intel and AMD make their large profits from CPUs, not from their motherboard chipsets as those are not "sexy" enough to command large margins, so competition from VIA didn't actually have any significant impact on chipset pricing.
The stated approach of "use fine art instead of high poly count" for visual beauty is perfectly true, as you can see in Guild Wars.
I run GW on a modern Core2Duo with 8600GT on a lovely 24" 1920x1200 screen at 80 FPS, and the hi-def beauty is really gorgeous. Yet, the same game runs on my crappy old P4 with 5200 PCI graphics at lower res but still good frame rate, just because the environment and characters are not heavy on polygons but instead are drawn beautifully and quite realistically. ArenaNet know how to do that very well.
Aion seems to be done in that same fashion, although the dumbing down of the skills system compared to GW can't be a good thing. GW requires you to become an expert in applying complex skills and to use tactics, whereas in Aion they seem to have decided that thinking is too hard and so have replaced it with repeated grinding. That doesn't sound like fun, as the "challenge" will not be in gameplay but in keeping your eyelids from closing.
The other techniques have so many uncertainties that it's simply too dangerous to rely on them. We have only one chance to get it right, and that's all.
Landing is fraught with uncertainties (composition, center of gravity, even existence of surface, material rigidity, locking onto surface under such tiny gravity, stability under thrust) and difficulties (rock spinning, danger and ambiguity in landing, thrust vector issues).
Crashing is likewise fraught with uncertainties (center of gravity, composition) and difficulties (waste of kinetic energy of the impactor by conversion into heat and spin, accuracy of high-speed impactor).
In contrast, the gravity tractor method is continuously adaptive and acts on all the material in the rock simultaneously, so it's immune to all the above issues. What's more, ion engines are extremely fuel-efficient, so long-term station keeping just off the rock isn't a massively hard problem.
Given just one shot at this, I would much rather trust the life of the planet to the gravity tractor approach. There's less to go wrong.
I'd send several tractors though, not just one. We simply can't afford to fail.
Sadly, you may be right about this, judging by the vast majority of responses from developers in this article thread so far.
Almost as one, the FOSS developers here seem to have responded (paraphrasing): "Nobody is paying me for this work, so I'll be darned if they're going to tell me how the UI should be designed for usability." And even some non-developers have defended that stance.
This suggests that, indeed, there may be no solution to the problem coming from the community of FOSS developers itself.
But what if we were shamed into it?
What if Microsoft, or Apple, came out with a public statement that "FOSS products have extremely poor usability, because their developers refuse to accept usability input." It would be hard to defend against such an accusation, since we have almost no cases of devs accepting input from non-devs.
This would cause a huge uproar, I'm willing to bet. Maybe that would shake us out of this impasse.
> If a game had no grind, players would lose interest quickly
That is incorrect.
Guild Wars is an example of an online game that has (almost) no grind, and yet is massively popular (millions), and growing.
And GW has (almost) no bots, since there is almost no boring grinding for bots to replace. As a result, the only reason left to run bots in GW is for farming for drops, but it's very rarely done.
So no, you're wrong. WoW (and EverQuest and others) did not need to be designed as time sinks, but they were, simply because that extends the companies' monthly revenues. And now Blizzard deserves to be overrun with Glider-type bots, because the grinding problem is of their own design and making.
The need for grinding is a sign of a very badly designed game. Repetition has no redeeming aspects at all.
> I wonder if you could legally set up landmines on private property.
Definitely not, because emergency services may need to enter your property, and they'd take exception to being blown up.
However, how about mining your property with non-lethal and non-hurting mines, like custard pie launchers and water grenades for example? Would that be legal, as long as there's no possibility of accidental public access?
And if it's still not legal, it begs the question of how free you really are in your own house, on your own property. I bet the real answer is, "You're not".
> one could even "out" symptoms of their friends or speculate which friends made them sick. lots of issues with it, but a different data source for inf disease folks, even if the data was not completely accurate, would be helpful in predictions.
Yeah, right, just what we need, an inaccurate resource for the insurance companies to data-mine. Your premium has now increased by a factor of 5, just because someone with your name (Mike Smith) allegedly made someone else sick. Great.
No thanks.
You're talking total tripe, because we don't need free energy nor wormholes nor warp drives nor any other nonexistent inventions nor any new physics to make travelling to Mars cheap and widely available. All we need is *time* (a lot of it) for our engineering systems to mature.
Travel is a matter of harnessing energy, and energy is plentiful. The earth's surface receives a bit less than 150,000 TW of solar irradiation, of which we harness and use no more than 18-20 TW (that's just 20, not 20,000), so there's no energy shortage at ground level. Add solar energy collection beyond the atmosphere to our capabilities and the available energy becomes effectively infinite. That also means that travel within the solar system will be effectively unlimited in an easily forseeable future. It's a sure bet. The sun isn't going to dim any time soon.
What we do need of course is many centuries of good solid engineering to develop such a capability, because creating an infrastructure for widespread space travel is not something that can be done in just a few decades. But it's coming for sure, because there are no reasons why it shouldn't come and ample reasons why people will want it ... no doubt it will be fueled by the lure of profits like everything else.
We certainly do not need a change in the laws of physics nor any magic transports. Stop talking crap.
(New physics will undoubtedly appear over the centuries, but current physics is more than enough as a foundation for universal space travel. Energy is the only hard constraint on space travel given by the laws of physics, which effectively means that we are not constrained at all, at least within the inner solar system.)
> Both government and corporation are flawed structures ... We need radical new thinking ... and we need it fast.
Although what you say is accurate, unfortunately calling for new thinking as if it could provide a solution is probably pie in the sky as well. The problem is that those in power, who inhabit a fuzzy but integrated political and corporate tier that is self-propagating, will never willingly dismiss themselves from their power and fortune, regardless of any new thinking. Nor is the democratic process able to dismiss them, but only to reshuffle their figureheads a little with nil result.
I doubt that even a civil war or full-scale revolution in the West could dismantle this setup they have running ... we'd just end up with yet another bunch of figureheads, while the world continues to march to the tune of those with the resources. What's more, civil unrest and revolutions don't happen without mass discontent, but 95% of Western populations are programmed with the agendas they receive through the media and thus are perfectly happy with the current situation, so there is no dry social tinder ready to catch fire. Mass unrest is not going to happen, the system's too tightly sewn up and life is too comfortable.
By what means could new thinking change anything then? While it's always interesting to dream up new and better schemes to save the planet and humanity, unless you simultaneously come up with an action vector for removing or transforming or sidelining the old crud (against their will), all you have is empty gesturing.
I think there *IS* a solution, but it's of comfort only to those who take a long-term view: just wait until humanity starts migrating off its birth planet, which in time will dilute to zero the old power and resource structures. Of course, the new power structures that replace them might be even worse, but at least it provides an opportunity for change, and an opportunity for choice in the immensity out there.
I don't wish to dampen your thinking, but don't fall into the Libertarian trap: great ideas + no viable action vector == nil result. (Every proposal that is based on the democratic process has no viable action vector for change, because the political route is totally stage-managed and only delivers an illusion of democracy. The powers aren't stupid enough to provide a real means for their removal.)
> I'm pretty knowledgeable about both Linux and Windows, and the weirdnesses of GNOME and KDE still leave me scratching my head.
Well your prior knowledge of Windows leaves you open to accusations of prior mind-shaping, by those who would dispute what you say.
That doesn't apply to me though.
In my case, I'm a 100% Unix/Linux person and I've never used Adobe Photoshop nor MS office apps nor any other such "standards", and yet the wierdness/dumbness/unergonomics of both Gnome and KDE apps leave me speechless, and annoyed. They're both so appallingly bad that I consider them as standing between me and my ability to use my machines, instead of helping. As a result, I frequently remove the bulk of their bloated and unnecessary layers from at least half the distros I use, and run with just a window manager plus some embellishments. I *want* to use higher level apps, but they need to be structured logically and consistently.
Seriously, the bulk of both Gnome and KDE is a disaster, and unergonomic to the extreme. It's as if the apps had been sent to a usability testing center, and then the worst possible app UIs chosen. FFS, it's just appalling. (And that's coming from a complete FOSS fan since I use nothing else, so don't bother with shill theories.)
I know that it's part and parcel of the FOSS environment (which I 100% use, endorse, and support) that developers scratch their own itch rather than working to requirements, but that's no excuse for developing atrociously unusable UIs. The mind just boggles.
I'm not sure where FOSS UIs are going, but I do know that things are seriously out of whack in this area. The situation is far beyond just "poor". I don't know of a solution currently.
Sadly, it's not possible to contribute to FOSS projects from a usability angle, as they're largely ruled by alpha-male elites and a fanboy entourage that dismisses any view counter to theirs.
On the positive side, I *CAN* do everything I want with these almost-unusable apps ... but why is such UI suffering necessary?
> There's just no way that there's going to be a 1MW charger (1000V @ 1000A) handy (my whole house can only supply 32kW)
You can deliver energy to your car at home at any rate you like. Only the average power over 24h is limited by your mains supply rating and house wiring, not the instantaneous power. What you can't do is supply higher powers continuously over a 24 hour period, but only for a short burst. Eg. charge up your garage ultracapacitor over 24 hours at 32kW, then connect up the car and squirt the energy over to it at 1MW for 45 minutes through really fat bus bars.
This is bound to be the way it'll be done eventually (assuming that ultracaps become stable and mainstream), since people don't want long charging periods. Instead, your home ultracap in the garage or driveway will charge up your car ultracap at megawatts rate for a short period each day, and then the car ultracap will charge up your car battery more slowly, if it can't run your car directly for some reason. What your 32kW-continuous rating *does* limit is the total amount of energy your car can store each day (and hence your trip lengths), but that's a separate matter from the charging wattage.
Blasting electrical energy across at 1MW from a low-rated mains supply is not a particularly hard problem. The difficulty is in making a temporary storage unit that can take it.
About those alleged "Complications" ... well yes sure, if you run out of stored power then you're in trouble. However, this isn't exclusive to electric cars, but applies similarly to liquid-fueled vehicles. If you set out on a voyage of 500 miles with only 200 miles of gasoline and you can't find anywhere to refuel, then you're in trouble too. Fortunately, most people understand power and refueling constraints and know how to plan ahead.
Admittedly, electrical recharging infrastructure is almost non-existent at the moment. However, this isn't a total disaster nor an unforseen "Complication". It's thoroughly forseen, so any early adopter who can add and subtract won't be travelling further than the stored energy allows, minus a safety margin since nobody likes getting stuck. In many cases, it'll be a second car anyway, mainly for short hops around the local area and short office commutes.
But let's look at the worst case scenario as well. When the power runs out in between recharge points, will it be a total disaster? Well, it certainly will be a big annoyance, but that's where the recovery services come in. All it takes is a phone call and some waiting in the comfort of your car while you sulk at your arithmetic incompetence, but soon your vehicle will be sitting snugly on the back of the recovery truck, and remedial transport sorted out. This is normal today in the event of breakdowns, and it will be just as normal when cars go electric, both for breakdowns and for recharging mishaps. (The vehicle recovery industry will certainly boom for a few decades, until vehicle recharging infrastructure is widespread.)
So while "Complications" will exist in the short term, they're not exceptional ones. We already have similar issues today, and solutions to them as well. It's just a matter of degree. For the next few years, trips in EVs will have to be a fair bit shorter on average. We can cope with that.
> Google has just been stupid here about privacy, and now it's coming home to roost in a very public way.
This is true, but it's not the worst of it.
Much, *MUCH* worse is that the judge has imposed on Google a legal ruling that the RIAA must be wetting themselves to obtain. And of course, these records will go straight to the MPAA, despite the contraints placed on their use.
This is either a case of extreme naivete on the part of the judge in ignoring the privacy ramifications in his incredible ruling, or quite possibly a simple case of corruption. Such naivete would be so incredible in a judge that isn't senile, that corruption has to be far more likely.
As for Google, their lawyers should have IMMEDIATELY said to the judge "Our client cannot do that, on privacy grounds. Google's duty to protect the privacy of millions cannot be dismissed by a legal ruling." Judges are not omnipotent, even when some of them think they are.
The RIAA's lawsuits are purely speculative, based on a standard of "evidence" that would be laughed out of court in any other area. When there is no penalty for speculative litigation, litigation becomes a business method instead of an instrument of last resort. This case needs to be dismissed With Prejudice to counteract this misuse of the legal system.
In addition, the RIAA as plaintiffs suffer no discomfort from a failed lawsuit, as it's all just paperwork and their daily office job for them. In contrast, their defendants suffer horribly from the process win or lose, with years of their lives being damaged and unrecoverable, since the litigation process is entirely foreign to their normal lives. This is unbalanced, unfair, and inadequate.
Both areas need redress, starting with dismissal With Prejudice and including compensation to the defendant for harm caused. But really more than that is needed. The RIAA lawyers themselves need to suffer some kind of professional penalty that will stay on their record, or this kind of legal abuse will not stop. Without negative feedback, systems spiral out of control, and that is as true in law as in science.
We obviously have water. CO2 can be reprocessed into O2.
And when you take out the O2, you end up with C, which certainly isn't unwanted waste matter. There is probably a big future for graphene, diamondoid, and carbon nanotubes on Mars. Since locally produced oxygen will be a necessity, there will be a lot of carbon available from the process.
At the current rate of progress, pretty soon there won't be anything we can't make with carbon and carbon composites, from nanocircuits to human habitats. That could be important, not just on Mars but also here on Earth.
You seem to have misunderstood what I wrote entirely, because my point is the same one that you are making, and is directly supported by it: that technology is taking Mankind up an exponential path of directed development.
;-) That's why I dispute the premise that something special and unique has suddenly happened, which smacks a little of creationism or "intelligent design". Just look at Man's history of technological development a little further back, plot the curves, and it becomes quite clear that no magic is required to explain what's been happening.
However, you attribute this to something "magical" which has happened only recently with modern technology ("magical" in the sense of treating only the most recent technology as something special), whereas I pointed out that this has been happening for ages and ages --- indeed, significantly longer than the 40k years that you mentioned. It has been happening ever since primitive Man started using tools, the first instruments of his technology.
Exponential growth curves start off extremely flat before they skyrocket upwards. The highly noticeable rate of growth in our capability and in our process of self-transformation is merely the ever-faster acceleration along an exponential path that started umpteen thousands of years ago, and not something new. Mankind has been evolving himself through technology for ages.
There is yet another aspect to our ever more self-determined evolution that I didn't mention before, but should be included for completeness: that in parallel with taking the technological path, Mankind has been decoupling himself from dependency on his natural environment as well, as a matter of choice and not merely as necessary fallout from improving technology. It's still early days in this process but it's already happening very visibly, and it too will become highly noticeable in due course, once its own exponential curve takes off.
This is human-directed evolution in action, a natural product of our natural minds and hence a natural progression. It's not a result of some mystical intelligence seed implanted by aliens.
There is no sudden transition occurring, but merely a smooth, ever accelerating exponential curve of progress and human development, and that's why the "end of human life" premise is incorrect. It only looks sudden to someone who isn't acquainted with exponentials.
To say that the advent of powerful AI will spell the end of human life is to misunderstand humanity.
Humanity is an evolving entity, not a static and stagnant one. It has been evolving beyond its mere animal origins for a long time now, and the rate of change is increasing exponentially in step with our mastery of technology. In fact, through our intelligence, we have taken control of evolution away from nature (a very haphazard director at best), and are beating a path towards a very engineered and steadily improving future humanity. It's a continuous process, and it continually redefines humanity through tiny improvements which are often seen as mere remedial changes, such as vitamins and denture correction.
This isn't going to stop, and the machinery of the brain is no exception to this. Yes it's complex, but so is everything else. We're not put off by complexity. In fact, it's a strong driving force for study and mastery, a challenge for our technological capability. While I understand that some people have a natural preference for the things and ways of the past, some of us look forward very optimistically to a future humanity that would be unrecognizable today, a humanity that is physically more robust and capable, mentally expanded through integration with computing machinery, more logical, and far less driven by animal instincts, delusion and hysteria.
It might be valid to claim that technology spelled the end of the 1st phase of human life, perhaps, but that happened a long time ago now, whichever way you measure it. We're nothing like the initial homo sapiens that nature conjured up. And good riddance too. The fleas were probably annoying.
In Guild Wars, you can choose the nationality or language of your district when in any town or outpost. This makes it a great game for practicing languages, including far eastern ones.
:-)
There are no subscription costs either, just the single fairly low purchase price, although if you became interested in the gaming you'd end up buying the two other campaigns and the expansion as well.
The downside is that games players can't spell for shit, so you'd be learning from very bad teachers. Learning languages via MMO needs some grammar and spell-checking add-ons.
Your story of depression for musicians is an artifact of not embracing new technologies and markets, but instead trying to sell your music within the framework set by the music industry. That approach is guaranteed to fail as it's stacked against independents. But there are alternatives.
In the virtual world of Second Life, many hundreds of musicians are performing live in 1-hour slots in front of audiences of up to 100 people (a system scalability limit), and that happens throughout the day, every day, in thousands of venues. It not only gives them exposure, but it also brings in hard cash through the tip jar and from direct music music sales. (Second Life's currency is convertible to and from US dollars.) And they make a living from it.
So things are not as bad as you portray them, as long as a musician is willing to leave the normal music industry channels and is not afraid to try something new.
The article is quite accurate, although the decline was already in progress by 1990, going by my personal experience.
I was a university lecturer in Electrical and Computer Engineering during the latter part of the 80's, and the maths standards of university applicants were causing us more and more problems as the decade progressed. To put it simply, even the best qualified young people were not really up to the rather tough mathematical requirements of an engineering degree course.
What we ended up doing was organizing a prior summer course to help out those who were nearly there, and sometimes recommending an entire remedial year for the lower median students, mainly focussed on gaining the missing mathematics competence. Sadly, quite a few seemingly good students couldn't even cope with that and dropped out, but better to drop out early than halfway through a hard course.
It's a very bad situation. We live in a technological civilization, and pretty much everything manufactured around us is the product of applying mathematically-based knowledge somewhere along the line. The dropping competence in mathematics, and hence the declining ability to handle the hard sciences and engineering, is extremely worrying.