You know, I never really had read the fulltext of the Fair Use laws. And something jumps out at me and waves flags in my face.
-Criticism-.
The way the law is phrased, it sounds like if you form critical opinions regarding a pirated copy of a copyrighted work and pass those opinions on to others (potentially encouraging them to purchase said work), you are not in violation.
You are not damaging the market value of the work, because you are giving the company free advertising. You'd be more likely to get away with it if you don't charge anyone for your opinion, since that would be for nonprofit (purpose and character) uses.
Obviously, you can't critique something unless you have full access to the item in question in its entirity (amount and substantiality).
The only thing left is the nature of the copyrighted work, which I'm curious as to how such is considered.
So, all you kazaa users, come up with about a sentence per song, a paragraph per TV episode, and about 150 words per movie. You should be able to get away with it.
This gets me thinking: There's an awful lot of borderline sci-fi from the 80's depicting technology from the near future in interesting ways. A good chunk of this fantastical tech is perfectly possible now. Just how far off are we from being able to simulate Max Hedroom?
Do a 3D-face scan, distort to give it a plastic appearance, lip sync to a rudimentary bank of soundbytes (which could be customized from user to user), studder in the proper places-ces-ces. Proper places. The current range of 3D cards could -easily- render something even more believable than Max. Sure, it wouldn't be intelligent, but then, how many intelligent people do you know? You know?
That seems like a reasonably profitable desktop toy to me.
And by the way, why hasn't anyone made a version of Space Paranoids?
Lessee here... Superman, not human. Green Lantern, human. Flash, human. Wonder Woman, not human. Martian Manhunter, not human. Batman (and many Gotham baddies, except Clayface and post-decapitation Mr. Freeze), human...
Seems DC still would have to pay the higher tariff.
I'm curious as to how arrived at many of the conclusions stated here.
Firstly, M:tG and Mage Knight are hardly the small games. They are the dominating force within the tabletop gaming industry. Secondly, neither really does anything particularly innovative (but then, it could be argued that all card games are essentially some combination of Gin/Rummy, Poker, and War).
The small, simple games would be things like Icehouse, Kill Dr. Lucky, and to a lesser degree, The Settlers of Catan (This statement is false in Germany, where Catan has more commercial success than Monopoly has here in the states). Details about these games (and indeed, places to buy them) can be found at:
Also, I would particularly reccomend Piecepack, which is a sort of open-source boardgame development system (only physical, not digital). Details can be found at:
HanaHo is no fledgling company when it comes to the emulation community. They have successfully licensed a number of games in the past, and turned it into a profitable enough business.
Honestly, I'm not surprised -at all- that he was as terse as he was. If anything, I'm surprised he was as polite as he was. Consider how many people posted asking him why he killed his wife, how he got away with killing his wife, if he and his wife ever did any sexual roleplaying with Trek characters...
Quite honestly, I think he probably read about the first dozen or so questions and then got to the point where he just got fed up with us asking stupid, insensitive, and downright hurtful questions. I'm amazed that some of you had the gall to call him a murderer, a pervert, and an egomaniac all in the same breath.
Why not actually look at which titles they are claiming? See, just saying it's "obviously false" based purely on the number of games is utter nonsense. There's over 6000 Gameboy roms out there, and a good chunk of those -are- public domain, as in, made by homebrew developers, or officially declared so by the current copyright holder.
So apparantly your definition of "checked out" is "gave a cursory glance and developed an uninformed, knee-jerk opinion."
I think the basic signifigance of this is that the controller actually looks like the original Atari controller. More of these compilation devices -should- follow suit, but probably won't.
Now the real question: When is someone going to hack one of these to include more games? Surely it would be possible.
Honestly, when companies can post things like this:
http://www.nintendo.com/corp/faqs/legal.html
(The basic gist of the page being that "Yes, consumers have a right to make backups, but no, they don't have the right to own, manufacture, or use the -means- to make backups)...the law really needs close scrutiny.
I find it surpriising that no one has mentioned this: Pinball machines are emulated.
Well, sort of. They're simulated, anyway. The scoreboards are emulated.
The two programs to get are Visual Pinball and Visual PinMAME. Visual Pinball simulates the table, sounds, and rules of the machine, while Visual PinMAME does the dot matrix scoreboard.
The machine is simulated in lovely 3D, which you can zoom and rotate.
A vast majority of Pinball machines are simulated in this manner, including Dr. Who, Star Trek TNG, Theatre of Magic, Jurassic Park and a number of others.
In order to simulate a table, you must download VPinball and VPinMAME, as well as the table files for the machine you want, and the rom files for the scoreboard.
I'm not sure as to the legality of distributing the scoreboard romfiles: Bally was allowing people to download them from their website some time back.
You relize that when this thing eventually finds its way onto the market, someone somewhere will likely compile a "Complete Game Collection," a massive archive of every videogame to date. Ever. And it'll only take up 2 or 3 discs. Heck, the biggest part will be the PSX games, and that might not be that big, after all.
Now, once emulation reaches perfection on all the known systems... that's when the real fun begins.
Now hang on a moment. John Lennon and Yoko Ono had a track called "Two Minutes of Silence." I could have sworn that Victor Borge did a bit where he introduced a song as a length of time (IE, "I call this one 'One Minute Forty-Four') and just sat at the piano doing nothing, and eventually checking his watch.
This is one of those absurd examples of Copyright law gone seriously awry that I used to use as a joke. Seriously, I used to ask people if I could be sued for distributing John and Yoko's "Two Minutes" in MP3 format, and if I would get in even more trouble if I just made a program that switched off someone's speakers for exactly two minutes, therefore making it a purer silence of higher quality than the original.
Looks like it's high time for the legal system to start beating itself up.
Wouldn't the statement of anything being a "computer" implicitly necessitate the existance of a "creator" or "programmer"?
Of course, I'm being facetious. Science has long acknowledged the concept of "intelligent design". Apparantly, the universe was created by something intelligent, a super-powerful sentient being of sorts. It just wasn't God. Makes me wonder what it was...
Why hasn't someone taken one of these things (as there seems to be a myriad of different ones ranging from the NES to the 2600) and figured out how the games are stored? Then instead of companies releasing an "every game ever" console, which they would never have the rights to do, you could hack it into one yourself. 'Course, you'd have to buy enough flash ram to hold all of them. Not difficult with the Atari 2600, but the NES has something over a gig worth of games, uncompressed.
Now another question: Most of the NES versions of these devices feature obscure unlicenced NES games, like Tekken. (Tekken on the NES? You can bet that it's not Namco-approved.) Does this mean that these semi-portable NES's support -all- mappers? The pirate games almost always used proprietary mappers. For the uninitiated, mappers were custom chips used in the NES cartridges themselves. Most current emulators of the NES don't support all mappers, and so several games just plain don't work.
The DMCA states that any manufacture, sale, or distribution of any device whose primary use is that of copyright violation. This implies that the manufacturing company may be held responsible for the commercial appeal of its product. In other words, a company can be punished if the public perceives its product to be useful in copyright violation.
A computer is exactly that. I would say that a majority of people perceive computers as primarily useful in piracy, especially computers using CD recording devices and exceptionally large hard disk drives. These devices are clearly, therefore, illegal, and immediate charges should be brought against Toshiba, Mitsumi, Creative, IBM, and a number of other companies to stop the manufacture and sale of such products. If not computers, then the aforementioned peripherals. Hundred plus gigabyte hard drives currently have "limited commercial appeal" other than copyright violation. Their primary legit commercial appeal is industrial.
Law and common sense. I wish the two could get along.
Because all of Terry Gilliam's films (with the exception of the short film at the beginning of Monty Python's Meaning of Life) center around one theme:
Did what you saw on the screen just now really happen, or was it in the imagination of one of the characters?
Harry Potter has none of that. There comes a point where people bandy about names because they like that person's previous works, without taking into consideration the fact that there is a contiguous thread in them. _Time Bandits_, _Brazil_, and _Baron Munchausen_ are considered to be a trilogy: Kevin, Sam Lowry, and the Baron are thematically the same character.
In short, having Terry Gilliam direct _Harry Potter_ would be like having Roger Waters score Looney Tunes cartoons. Stranger than it needs to be, and overall not what the artist wants to do.
Then again, this is the world that had George Carlin as Mr. Conductor.
I may be missing something, but wasn't the article talking about greyscale only? Looks like it's going to be even longer before we see the same thing in all 32k color shades.
Whether or not Nintendo is actually planning a lit GBA, I don't know, but I do know that they won't be doing it backlit. The type of display used in the GBA is a REFLECTIVE lcd. That means that it needs light from the front in order to be visible. If it has light coming in from the back, all you see is white, and your world is woe.
Notice, portablemonopoly.com keeps talking about "frontlight solutions".
Re:Approximate index, then search...
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 1
This too is an interesting idea: Taking a "near" value and going forward. Another possibility would be to find the first instance of your string, then take the previous 100 (or 1024, or 4096, or any particularly unlikely length) digits and record those digits and the number of times they occured in that sequence up to that point.
So, the Payne Constant is found at _insert_impossibly_long_number_here_. Take the 4096 digits before that (call this number f for no particular reason) and record them. Now, check pi for instances of that 4096 digit sequence up to that point and count them. Also, record the length of the file you're retrieving
So, instead of looking for offset _impossibly_long_number_, you're looking for the xth instance of f, and the next billion digits after it. Decode to hex and extract.
Sadly, even though this is a nice pipedream, and possibly might even work, statistics dictate that it would _still_ take up more space than you started with, and would be virtually impossible to do in any rational period of time anyway, even on some of the faster home PCs.
The simple fact of the matter is that you _cannot_ represent any possible string of length N in less than N space. There just aren't enough possibilities to go around. The thing that keeps nagging at me is that you've got impossibly long number, namely PI, to work from.
What I'm thinking is instead of trying to compress data into values within pi, why not try to compress values in pi into data?
You: Computer, I have this file, and it somehow represents a value in pi at location, oh, 238523562. Extrapolate the exact method of encryption.
Computer: Here is your otherwise meaningless formula which can only be used with the offset you gave me.
Going about this all wrong.
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 1
I just realized, this is a completely backwards approach to the whole thing. Sure, pi is easy to find in nature all around you, circles are fairly common. But unless the value you're looking for is 314159... you're stuck with more digits than you started with.
What we really need is a method of finding a calculable irrational number for any value. According to most of the more egotistical mathematicians I've met, "Anything can be represented as a formula."
At that point, all hell breaks loose, though. Your Max Payne ISO number (The Payne Constant) has no mathematical signifigance at all other than being a complete representation of a popular video game. Huzzah for you and your number, but good gosh. The Payne Constant formula is being posted to newsgroups, bulletin boards, heck, there's a car over there which has it on a bumper sticker. That guy over there is wearing a t-shirt with it printed on it. It's on my business cards, and I end all my phone calls by reciting it. Bang goes software development of any kind, and in marches copyright law reform.
Then again, that might be a good thing...
And from there it gets worse. Why stop at a single formula for Max Payne? How about the complete Playstation ISO collection, as a single number? The Absolute Library of Congress (updated yearly) as a single number? _Insert interesting archive here_ as a single number?
It reaches the point where, even if such a program for calculating formulae for irrational nubmers _could_ be produced, that doesn't mean it _should_ be produced. Then again, if it _can_ be produced, human nature dictates that it probably _will_ be produced.
There's an obsession for every person, and a person for every obsession. Everything that is possible will be done. But now I'm reaching into the realms of philosophy, and dodgy philosophy at that. All in all, this is probably far more effort put into a post which will never be read than is rational.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I never really had read the fulltext of the Fair Use laws. And something jumps out at me and waves flags in my face.
-Criticism-.
The way the law is phrased, it sounds like if you form critical opinions regarding a pirated copy of a copyrighted work and pass those opinions on to others (potentially encouraging them to purchase said work), you are not in violation.
You are not damaging the market value of the work, because you are giving the company free advertising. You'd be more likely to get away with it if you don't charge anyone for your opinion, since that would be for nonprofit (purpose and character) uses.
Obviously, you can't critique something unless you have full access to the item in question in its entirity (amount and substantiality).
The only thing left is the nature of the copyrighted work, which I'm curious as to how such is considered.
So, all you kazaa users, come up with about a sentence per song, a paragraph per TV episode, and about 150 words per movie. You should be able to get away with it.
This gets me thinking: There's an awful lot of borderline sci-fi from the 80's depicting technology from the near future in interesting ways. A good chunk of this fantastical tech is perfectly possible now. Just how far off are we from being able to simulate Max Hedroom?
Do a 3D-face scan, distort to give it a plastic appearance, lip sync to a rudimentary bank of soundbytes (which could be customized from user to user), studder in the proper places-ces-ces. Proper places. The current range of 3D cards could -easily- render something even more believable than Max. Sure, it wouldn't be intelligent, but then, how many intelligent people do you know? You know?
That seems like a reasonably profitable desktop toy to me.
And by the way, why hasn't anyone made a version of Space Paranoids?
Click on the -products- link there to see an interesting illustration of uses of the Storcard.
They somehow think that MS is going to let them use these things in the XBox.
Secondly, the site says "capacity from 100 megabytes to 5+ gigabytes". Which do you think will cost $15?
Lessee here... Superman, not human. Green Lantern, human. Flash, human. Wonder Woman, not human. Martian Manhunter, not human. Batman (and many Gotham baddies, except Clayface and post-decapitation Mr. Freeze), human...
Seems DC still would have to pay the higher tariff.
I'm curious as to how arrived at many of the conclusions stated here.
i rgames.com
Firstly, M:tG and Mage Knight are hardly the small games. They are the dominating force within the tabletop gaming industry. Secondly, neither really does anything particularly innovative (but then, it could be argued that all card games are essentially some combination of Gin/Rummy, Poker, and War).
The small, simple games would be things like Icehouse, Kill Dr. Lucky, and to a lesser degree, The Settlers of Catan (This statement is false in Germany, where Catan has more commercial success than Monopoly has here in the states). Details about these games (and indeed, places to buy them) can be found at:
www.wunderland.com
www.cheapass.com
www.mayfa
Respectively.
Also, I would particularly reccomend Piecepack, which is a sort of open-source boardgame development system (only physical, not digital). Details can be found at:
www.piecepack.org
HanaHo is no fledgling company when it comes to the emulation community. They have successfully licensed a number of games in the past, and turned it into a profitable enough business.
Check out www.hanaho.com.
Perhaps more useful is Longbet's open bet #86:
By the year 2150, over 50% of schools in the USA or Western Europe will require classes in defending against robot attacks.
Honestly, I'm not surprised -at all- that he was as terse as he was. If anything, I'm surprised he was as polite as he was. Consider how many people posted asking him why he killed his wife, how he got away with killing his wife, if he and his wife ever did any sexual roleplaying with Trek characters...
Quite honestly, I think he probably read about the first dozen or so questions and then got to the point where he just got fed up with us asking stupid, insensitive, and downright hurtful questions. I'm amazed that some of you had the gall to call him a murderer, a pervert, and an egomaniac all in the same breath.
Is the TekWar series of novels over?
Do you prefer to take Sci-Fi roles as an actor?
Do you prefer to watch Sci-Fi shows/movies?
What's the most obscure show/movie that you think deserves more recognition?
What creative or acting persuits are currently on your horizon?
What question were you most hoping someone would ask, but they didn't?
Why not actually look at which titles they are claiming? See, just saying it's "obviously false" based purely on the number of games is utter nonsense. There's over 6000 Gameboy roms out there, and a good chunk of those -are- public domain, as in, made by homebrew developers, or officially declared so by the current copyright holder.
So apparantly your definition of "checked out" is "gave a cursory glance and developed an uninformed, knee-jerk opinion."
I think the basic signifigance of this is that the controller actually looks like the original Atari controller. More of these compilation devices -should- follow suit, but probably won't.
Now the real question: When is someone going to hack one of these to include more games? Surely it would be possible.
Honestly, when companies can post things like this:
...the law really needs close scrutiny.
http://www.nintendo.com/corp/faqs/legal.html
(The basic gist of the page being that "Yes, consumers have a right to make backups, but no, they don't have the right to own, manufacture, or use the -means- to make backups)
I find it surpriising that no one has mentioned this: Pinball machines are emulated.
Well, sort of. They're simulated, anyway. The scoreboards are emulated.
The two programs to get are Visual Pinball and Visual PinMAME. Visual Pinball simulates the table, sounds, and rules of the machine, while Visual PinMAME does the dot matrix scoreboard.
The machine is simulated in lovely 3D, which you can zoom and rotate.
A vast majority of Pinball machines are simulated in this manner, including Dr. Who, Star Trek TNG, Theatre of Magic, Jurassic Park and a number of others.
In order to simulate a table, you must download VPinball and VPinMAME, as well as the table files for the machine you want, and the rom files for the scoreboard.
I'm not sure as to the legality of distributing the scoreboard romfiles: Bally was allowing people to download them from their website some time back.
Enjoy.
You relize that when this thing eventually finds its way onto the market, someone somewhere will likely compile a "Complete Game Collection," a massive archive of every videogame to date. Ever. And it'll only take up 2 or 3 discs. Heck, the biggest part will be the PSX games, and that might not be that big, after all.
Now, once emulation reaches perfection on all the known systems... that's when the real fun begins.
Now hang on a moment. John Lennon and Yoko Ono had a track called "Two Minutes of Silence." I could have sworn that Victor Borge did a bit where he introduced a song as a length of time (IE, "I call this one 'One Minute Forty-Four') and just sat at the piano doing nothing, and eventually checking his watch.
This is one of those absurd examples of Copyright law gone seriously awry that I used to use as a joke. Seriously, I used to ask people if I could be sued for distributing John and Yoko's "Two Minutes" in MP3 format, and if I would get in even more trouble if I just made a program that switched off someone's speakers for exactly two minutes, therefore making it a purer silence of higher quality than the original.
Looks like it's high time for the legal system to start beating itself up.
Secret message from my teeth!
Wouldn't the statement of anything being a "computer" implicitly necessitate the existance of a "creator" or "programmer"?
Of course, I'm being facetious. Science has long acknowledged the concept of "intelligent design". Apparantly, the universe was created by something intelligent, a super-powerful sentient being of sorts. It just wasn't God. Makes me wonder what it was...
Why hasn't someone taken one of these things (as there seems to be a myriad of different ones ranging from the NES to the 2600) and figured out how the games are stored? Then instead of companies releasing an "every game ever" console, which they would never have the rights to do, you could hack it into one yourself. 'Course, you'd have to buy enough flash ram to hold all of them. Not difficult with the Atari 2600, but the NES has something over a gig worth of games, uncompressed.
Now another question: Most of the NES versions of these devices feature obscure unlicenced NES games, like Tekken. (Tekken on the NES? You can bet that it's not Namco-approved.) Does this mean that these semi-portable NES's support -all- mappers? The pirate games almost always used proprietary mappers. For the uninitiated, mappers were custom chips used in the NES cartridges themselves. Most current emulators of the NES don't support all mappers, and so several games just plain don't work.
The DMCA states that any manufacture, sale, or distribution of any device whose primary use is that of copyright violation. This implies that the manufacturing company may be held responsible for the commercial appeal of its product. In other words, a company can be punished if the public perceives its product to be useful in copyright violation.
A computer is exactly that. I would say that a majority of people perceive computers as primarily useful in piracy, especially computers using CD recording devices and exceptionally large hard disk drives. These devices are clearly, therefore, illegal, and immediate charges should be brought against Toshiba, Mitsumi, Creative, IBM, and a number of other companies to stop the manufacture and sale of such products. If not computers, then the aforementioned peripherals. Hundred plus gigabyte hard drives currently have "limited commercial appeal" other than copyright violation. Their primary legit commercial appeal is industrial.
Law and common sense. I wish the two could get along.
Because all of Terry Gilliam's films (with the exception of the short film at the beginning of Monty Python's Meaning of Life) center around one theme:
Did what you saw on the screen just now really happen, or was it in the imagination of one of the characters?
Harry Potter has none of that. There comes a point where people bandy about names because they like that person's previous works, without taking into consideration the fact that there is a contiguous thread in them. _Time Bandits_, _Brazil_, and _Baron Munchausen_ are considered to be a trilogy: Kevin, Sam Lowry, and the Baron are thematically the same character.
In short, having Terry Gilliam direct _Harry Potter_ would be like having Roger Waters score Looney Tunes cartoons. Stranger than it needs to be, and overall not what the artist wants to do.
Then again, this is the world that had George Carlin as Mr. Conductor.
Were there any regular cast members you got along with particularly well?
Were there any who you constantly butted heads with?
What characteristics of Wesley are completely unlike you, and vice versa?
I may be missing something, but wasn't the article talking about greyscale only? Looks like it's going to be even longer before we see the same thing in all 32k color shades.
Whether or not Nintendo is actually planning a lit GBA, I don't know, but I do know that they won't be doing it backlit. The type of display used in the GBA is a REFLECTIVE lcd. That means that it needs light from the front in order to be visible. If it has light coming in from the back, all you see is white, and your world is woe.
Notice, portablemonopoly.com keeps talking about "frontlight solutions".
This too is an interesting idea: Taking a "near" value and going forward. Another possibility would be to find the first instance of your string, then take the previous 100 (or 1024, or 4096, or any particularly unlikely length) digits and record those digits and the number of times they occured in that sequence up to that point.
So, the Payne Constant is found at _insert_impossibly_long_number_here_. Take the 4096 digits before that (call this number f for no particular reason) and record them. Now, check pi for instances of that 4096 digit sequence up to that point and count them. Also, record the length of the file you're retrieving
So, instead of looking for offset _impossibly_long_number_, you're looking for the xth instance of f, and the next billion digits after it. Decode to hex and extract.
Sadly, even though this is a nice pipedream, and possibly might even work, statistics dictate that it would _still_ take up more space than you started with, and would be virtually impossible to do in any rational period of time anyway, even on some of the faster home PCs.
The simple fact of the matter is that you _cannot_ represent any possible string of length N in less than N space. There just aren't enough possibilities to go around. The thing that keeps nagging at me is that you've got impossibly long number, namely PI, to work from.
What I'm thinking is instead of trying to compress data into values within pi, why not try to compress values in pi into data?
You: Computer, I have this file, and it somehow represents a value in pi at location, oh, 238523562. Extrapolate the exact method of encryption.
Computer: Here is your otherwise meaningless formula which can only be used with the offset you gave me.
I just realized, this is a completely backwards approach to the whole thing. Sure, pi is easy to find in nature all around you, circles are fairly common. But unless the value you're looking for is 314159... you're stuck with more digits than you started with. What we really need is a method of finding a calculable irrational number for any value. According to most of the more egotistical mathematicians I've met, "Anything can be represented as a formula." At that point, all hell breaks loose, though. Your Max Payne ISO number (The Payne Constant) has no mathematical signifigance at all other than being a complete representation of a popular video game. Huzzah for you and your number, but good gosh. The Payne Constant formula is being posted to newsgroups, bulletin boards, heck, there's a car over there which has it on a bumper sticker. That guy over there is wearing a t-shirt with it printed on it. It's on my business cards, and I end all my phone calls by reciting it. Bang goes software development of any kind, and in marches copyright law reform. Then again, that might be a good thing... And from there it gets worse. Why stop at a single formula for Max Payne? How about the complete Playstation ISO collection, as a single number? The Absolute Library of Congress (updated yearly) as a single number? _Insert interesting archive here_ as a single number? It reaches the point where, even if such a program for calculating formulae for irrational nubmers _could_ be produced, that doesn't mean it _should_ be produced. Then again, if it _can_ be produced, human nature dictates that it probably _will_ be produced. There's an obsession for every person, and a person for every obsession. Everything that is possible will be done. But now I'm reaching into the realms of philosophy, and dodgy philosophy at that. All in all, this is probably far more effort put into a post which will never be read than is rational.