I'd love to hear people's thoughts on how this is (or isn't) different from the standard x-ray and metal detector rigamarole. Seems like many of the complaints one could register against this approach would also apply to the already existing intrus^H^H^H^H^H^Hsecurity measures.
"Every major city in the world has a subway system."
Guess this guy doesn't live in the U.S. Raise your hand if you're from a major U.S. city that doesn't have a subway system. It's called urban sprawl, folks -- when you build horizontally instead of vertically, subways become prohibitively expensive (in the short run, which is all that matters to those who have the power to build them).
How terrifically annoying it must be to correspond to you. Yeah, humans can work it out. Humans also like to use address books. Humans also don't like to have to check the calendar each time they email someone.
May I suggest something? Procure a piece of green cellophane and a piece of red cellophane. View said LED in its different states through each piece of cellophane in turn. Seems like the light would be discernably different when you filter it like this. And you only have to ask someone else which color is which one time, when you buy the cellophane (just don't get them mixed up! Sharpie is your friend).
Replace "Windows" with "1000 free hours of America Online" and see if your argument still makes any sense. If the user doesn't want Windows, and can't sell it to anyone, then it's worthless to them so they lose nothing by not having it included with their computer.
It's called strongarm negotiation. If you really want to know about this, you should just go look at the discussion for the original post stating that Dell would not sell computers without an OS.
Briefly, it's not as cut-and-dry as MS just laying down the law for Dell. Rather, MS cuts Dell a huge discount based on a purchase contract they've hammered out, and in order to get a greater discount Dell agrees to terms like these. That's the nature of contracts -- get a little, give a little.
Okay, perhaps I'm not understanding something here. I didn't see anything in their press release about the whole "$100 but you must publish through us" scheme, so maybe there is a critical fact missing here, but as I read it there is a huge problem for any developer choosing to use an engine under this sort of license.
$100 is cheap, great. But the main investment in such a project is the developers' time. Lots and lots of time. Now, typically, if you've made a great game you have the option to shop it around to a lot of different publishing companies. Most of them will say no, but you might get lucky if your game is good and your pitch is good (naturally, in the real world you'd generally do this before developing the game, but the point remains the same). Main point, getting published ain't easy.
So is Garage Games going to guarantee that they will publish any game produced with their engine? If so, they have no quality control and a few rotten apples (or a whole lot) will spoil their public image. If not, then any developer who spends all the time developing for this publisher-specific engine stands a very real risk of being screwed. If Garage Games says "no," the developer has no recourse -- they can't shop the game around to other publishers, because of the license.
No developer should be stupid enough to place the fate of their project in such a position, where it can be arbitrarily killed by someone with no involvement in the project (yeah, I know, lots of companies work that way internally, but it's different here).
So maybe I'm missing something. I sure hope so. But I can't see how they could use a scheme like this to publish games in a professional manner without screwing a lot of developers. Not to badmouth them -- I'm sure they're nice guys! But it seems like the only way this business model could survive would be to do that. Someone tell me the flaw in this logic, please.
George Boole and Boolean math comes to mind as an example of this. When George was thinking about AND and OR in the 1800's, it was a pointless diversion. Now? It's the backbone of modern society.
As someone who has studied logic and the philosophy of mathematics a fair bit in my undergraduate work, I have to take exception to this. Boole was not doing engineering when he came up with his arithmetic, but that doesn't make it a "pointless diversion." Would you care to characterize all philosophy as such, or all theoretical math? Boole's work was an attempt to understand the basis of mathematics, and performed marvelously in that respect. The great-great-grandkiddies of his efforts have much more direct applications -- quantum mathematics, for example. The use of Boolean arithmetic in computers is important, sure, but you can't ignore the intent of the original work as if it were meaningless.
You don't remember the oft-repeated line, "Califoooornia," in a whine that would make Luke Skywalker wince? Hmm, what else... I believe that Lucas (the glove-owning character) actually uttered the line "love the glove" or something like that.
Another odd thing I remember about that movie is a scene from the sub-plot where the dad and the older brother are on the road trying to find the kids. The dad stays up all night playing TMNT, and says something like "I can't stop now, I just got the scroll weapon!" Which is ludicrous for a couple of reasons. First, the scroll weapon is available reasonably early in the game (though I guess if he just sucks at the game he could be proud anyway). Second, I don't think the game ever actually referred to it as "the scroll weapon." I remember playing the game and wondering why everyone called it that. Probably came from Nintendo Power or something.
Ah, thinking about The Wizard brings back memories. Remember the third player in the final round? Okay, show of hands, who thought she had any chance at all of winning? Anyone? She was so obviously the fall guy (fall girl?) it was absurd.
Why don't they make heartwarming movies about exploiting autistic savants anymore? The Wizard, Rain Man... is that the end of the genre?
I'm amused by how readily/.ers will jump up in defense of anyone accused of any sort of IP infringement. The suffix "-zilla" has entered the lexicon as a direct result of the Godzilla franchise. If I start a restaurant and sell a product called "sandwichzilla," you know I'm talking about a big honkin' monster of a sammich. And if I use a reptilian mascot to hawk said sammich, you know it's a reference to Godzilla. The very uniqueness of the name, and its well-known association with a giant reptilian monster, is exactly why this is legitimate infringement. It's asking too much suspension of disbelief to suppose that I might have independently come up with the nonsense syllables "zilla" and chosen to associate them with the very attributes that the "Godzilla" trademark has made famous.
But Toho has taken far too long to say anything about it, and they have no legitimate grounds upon which to complain now. They failed to defend their mark, and now it's part of the common lexicon. It's like what we saw recently with the claims of a privately-held patent on the JPEG standard. Many people rightly quoted, uh, someone, saying something like "those who sleep on their rights cannot expect others to defend them."
Re:they need to get their costs right
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 2
Well, you see, metric is cheaper...
Alternatively... as you get things farther up, they will weigh less but have the same mass. So a pound at the top of the elevator has more mass, and if the cost is based on mass then you'd expect this sort of effect when calculating cost.
Ugh, I can't believe this. I've read through just about every visible post here, and maybe two of them have actually made a reasonable attempt to answer the question. When someone poses an interesting hypothetical question about an unrealistic situation, it's not a particularly insightful response to say "that wouldn't ever happen" or the like. Forget about what the idea is. Forget about whether it's right to delay releasing it. Just answer the damn question!
So here are my attempts.
Someone else suggested something like this, but I'll state my version... use a cryptographic scheme which produces a number of keys, some or all of which must be used in combination to retrieve the original message. Probably just some of them would be best. Give the keys to a number of high-profile parties in a very public way, making sure to choose people for whom it would be a publicity disaster to divulge ahead of time. I was thinking of religious leaders, but the other poster suggested civil liberties organizations, which is another good idea. Anyway, a critical aspect of this scheme would be to make sure the public would react negatively to early news-breaking. If it was a free-energy scheme or something, there would be too much outcry and your trusted parties would be pressured to divulge instead of the other way around. Of course, you could always lie about the contents of the message -- once it was revealed (on time rather than early), if it was important enough nobody would blame you for lying.
A variation on the EM-bounce idea. Launch a spacecraft (did I mention this is kind of an expensive option?) and have it fly away from Earth in a straight line, then broadcast the message at the appropriate time. This would only fail due to interference (someone overtakes your spacecraft and extracts the data or destroys it), mechanical failure of the craft, or failure to receive it. I think mechanical failure is the biggest problem here. You could generate enough publicity to guarantee someone would be listening when the time came, and you could give your spacecraft a difficult-to-predict course so that a pursuer (even with more advanced tech) would have a hard time catching it.
Others have suggested time-lock encryption schemes, which seem like a good idea. My variation on that, which would take some ingenuity but is a cool idea anyway: fashion a computer program which constantly alters its own code, and which will (given enough time, as determined by Moore's law) eventually output the secret. Care would have to be exercised to make sure that inspection of the program would not make it possible to guess the output without running it. But from what I know of Turing machines, I think this might be theoretically possible. The main problem is that it might take as long or longer to design the program as it would to run it, which may or may not be a problem depending on your scenario.
Obscurity. Place the secret somewhere publicly accessible but obscure. Bury it in a hole. Put it on a web page, add that page to Google's cache, and then delete the original page. Something like that. The problem here is retrieval. Nothing is suggesting itself to me, so I guess this is at best a partial solution.
Find a healthy person and gain their trust. Give them a copy of the secret (or the key to unlock it, or whatever), but don't let them know what it is. Have them place it in a safe deposit box, to be opened in case of their death. Arrange with a reliable hit man to kill that person at a particular time in the future. Or implant a subdermal time-bomb at the base of their skull or something. You get the idea here. The main thing is to make sure there's no connection to you.
Find some way to include the secret, or its key, in a set of sealed government records which are to be unveiled at some particular future time. Kind of like the JFK assassination case files or something.
Revisiting some of the above ideas, you could simply hide a broadcast device in an undisclosed location, and set it to begin broadcasting the secret at the specified time. If you could figure out how to stick it on the moon or something that would be even better.
Eh, running out of ideas and nobody's gonna read this anyway, so I guess I'm done.
Did you read the article? Just because the tantalum exists somewhere, that doesn't mean it's readily available. It takes 10 years to open up a new mine, and 2 years to expand an existing one. Tantalum demand has been skyrocketing -- its price went up about 10 times in 2000, and currently sits at 60-70% of that high. So companies that are desparate to cut costs are going to buy the stuff wherever they can find it. If the Congo rebels can offer a lower price than a "nice Western nation" like Australia, that's where they're going to get it.
I'd like to point out that if it's done right, making acceptance/rejection notification available online is a perfectly worthwhile and beneficial use of technology. Applying for college is very stressful and people want to know as soon as possible when a decision has been made. In fact, they often need to know in order to make future plans.
At least keystrokes are sometimes productive. Check out The Kill Everyone Project for a truly pointless exercise in mouse-click-counting. I used to be in the top 100, before those were all in the millions.
Oh, naturally. Those extended warranties are a rip-off. I inherited a wise policy from my father -- if you can afford to replace it or fix it yourself, don't buy a warranty or insurance for it unless you have no choice. Because you always lose to that margin.
I was simply pointing out that while everyone knows (or should know) what a rip-off extended warranties are, they fail to apply the same reasoning when the warranty is mandatory.
That's the weird thing about warranties. If a manufacturer/retailer/whatever offers you an optional warranty, they're perceived as trying to milk the customer for more money. Whereas if they make it mandatory, customers for some reason think they're getting something for free. Woohoo, it comes with a free warranty! Yeah, and where do you think the money comes from to pay for the costs of that warranty? It all goes into the bottom line -- you're paying for it regardless.
Of course, one can still comparison-shop, so it is possible to get a better deal with a standard warranty included sometimes, but it's far from the free lunch that people seem to think.
I couldn't disagree with you more. By notifying the media, Perens has, in effect, notified the authorities.
You didn't follow the thread of conversation. I was saying that the poster I was replying to was not engaged in civil disobedience. Of course Perens is (planning to be).
I understand your point, but I think we may differ even so on our definition of civil disobedience. My feeling is that unless you're really *trying* to get caught, it's just not the same. Being open about it in casual conversation is nice, but you surely don't expect your friends to turn you in. Nor is it likely that someone will track you down via your slashdot posts.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to hear people's thoughts on how this is (or isn't) different from the standard x-ray and metal detector rigamarole. Seems like many of the complaints one could register against this approach would also apply to the already existing intrus^H^H^H^H^H^Hsecurity measures.
Guess this guy doesn't live in the U.S. Raise your hand if you're from a major U.S. city that doesn't have a subway system. It's called urban sprawl, folks -- when you build horizontally instead of vertically, subways become prohibitively expensive (in the short run, which is all that matters to those who have the power to build them).
How terrifically annoying it must be to correspond to you. Yeah, humans can work it out. Humans also like to use address books. Humans also don't like to have to check the calendar each time they email someone.
I have a dream that one day programming languages will be judged not by their checkered pasts, but by their suitability to the task at hand.
I'd say just directly stimulate the pleasure center of the brain. Just what we need, current addicts (cf. The Ringworld Engineers by Niven).
May I suggest something? Procure a piece of green cellophane and a piece of red cellophane. View said LED in its different states through each piece of cellophane in turn. Seems like the light would be discernably different when you filter it like this. And you only have to ask someone else which color is which one time, when you buy the cellophane (just don't get them mixed up! Sharpie is your friend).
Replace "Windows" with "1000 free hours of America Online" and see if your argument still makes any sense. If the user doesn't want Windows, and can't sell it to anyone, then it's worthless to them so they lose nothing by not having it included with their computer.
The spirit of the contract seems to be that MS is full of bastards who deserve what they get. Seems consistent to me.
Briefly, it's not as cut-and-dry as MS just laying down the law for Dell. Rather, MS cuts Dell a huge discount based on a purchase contract they've hammered out, and in order to get a greater discount Dell agrees to terms like these. That's the nature of contracts -- get a little, give a little.
$100 is cheap, great. But the main investment in such a project is the developers' time. Lots and lots of time. Now, typically, if you've made a great game you have the option to shop it around to a lot of different publishing companies. Most of them will say no, but you might get lucky if your game is good and your pitch is good (naturally, in the real world you'd generally do this before developing the game, but the point remains the same). Main point, getting published ain't easy.
So is Garage Games going to guarantee that they will publish any game produced with their engine? If so, they have no quality control and a few rotten apples (or a whole lot) will spoil their public image. If not, then any developer who spends all the time developing for this publisher-specific engine stands a very real risk of being screwed. If Garage Games says "no," the developer has no recourse -- they can't shop the game around to other publishers, because of the license.
No developer should be stupid enough to place the fate of their project in such a position, where it can be arbitrarily killed by someone with no involvement in the project (yeah, I know, lots of companies work that way internally, but it's different here).
So maybe I'm missing something. I sure hope so. But I can't see how they could use a scheme like this to publish games in a professional manner without screwing a lot of developers. Not to badmouth them -- I'm sure they're nice guys! But it seems like the only way this business model could survive would be to do that. Someone tell me the flaw in this logic, please.
As someone who has studied logic and the philosophy of mathematics a fair bit in my undergraduate work, I have to take exception to this. Boole was not doing engineering when he came up with his arithmetic, but that doesn't make it a "pointless diversion." Would you care to characterize all philosophy as such, or all theoretical math? Boole's work was an attempt to understand the basis of mathematics, and performed marvelously in that respect. The great-great-grandkiddies of his efforts have much more direct applications -- quantum mathematics, for example. The use of Boolean arithmetic in computers is important, sure, but you can't ignore the intent of the original work as if it were meaningless.
If I can't type with it on, you can bet your chapped genitals I wouldn't want to do anything... else with it on either.
Another odd thing I remember about that movie is a scene from the sub-plot where the dad and the older brother are on the road trying to find the kids. The dad stays up all night playing TMNT, and says something like "I can't stop now, I just got the scroll weapon!" Which is ludicrous for a couple of reasons. First, the scroll weapon is available reasonably early in the game (though I guess if he just sucks at the game he could be proud anyway). Second, I don't think the game ever actually referred to it as "the scroll weapon." I remember playing the game and wondering why everyone called it that. Probably came from Nintendo Power or something.
Ah, thinking about The Wizard brings back memories. Remember the third player in the final round? Okay, show of hands, who thought she had any chance at all of winning? Anyone? She was so obviously the fall guy (fall girl?) it was absurd.
Why don't they make heartwarming movies about exploiting autistic savants anymore? The Wizard, Rain Man... is that the end of the genre?
But Toho has taken far too long to say anything about it, and they have no legitimate grounds upon which to complain now. They failed to defend their mark, and now it's part of the common lexicon. It's like what we saw recently with the claims of a privately-held patent on the JPEG standard. Many people rightly quoted, uh, someone, saying something like "those who sleep on their rights cannot expect others to defend them."
Alternatively... as you get things farther up, they will weigh less but have the same mass. So a pound at the top of the elevator has more mass, and if the cost is based on mass then you'd expect this sort of effect when calculating cost.
So here are my attempts.
- Someone else suggested something like this, but I'll state my version... use a cryptographic scheme which produces a number of keys, some or all of which must be used in combination to retrieve the original message. Probably just some of them would be best. Give the keys to a number of high-profile parties in a very public way, making sure to choose people for whom it would be a publicity disaster to divulge ahead of time. I was thinking of religious leaders, but the other poster suggested civil liberties organizations, which is another good idea. Anyway, a critical aspect of this scheme would be to make sure the public would react negatively to early news-breaking. If it was a free-energy scheme or something, there would be too much outcry and your trusted parties would be pressured to divulge instead of the other way around. Of course, you could always lie about the contents of the message -- once it was revealed (on time rather than early), if it was important enough nobody would blame you for lying.
- A variation on the EM-bounce idea. Launch a spacecraft (did I mention this is kind of an expensive option?) and have it fly away from Earth in a straight line, then broadcast the message at the appropriate time. This would only fail due to interference (someone overtakes your spacecraft and extracts the data or destroys it), mechanical failure of the craft, or failure to receive it. I think mechanical failure is the biggest problem here. You could generate enough publicity to guarantee someone would be listening when the time came, and you could give your spacecraft a difficult-to-predict course so that a pursuer (even with more advanced tech) would have a hard time catching it.
- Others have suggested time-lock encryption schemes, which seem like a good idea. My variation on that, which would take some ingenuity but is a cool idea anyway: fashion a computer program which constantly alters its own code, and which will (given enough time, as determined by Moore's law) eventually output the secret. Care would have to be exercised to make sure that inspection of the program would not make it possible to guess the output without running it. But from what I know of Turing machines, I think this might be theoretically possible. The main problem is that it might take as long or longer to design the program as it would to run it, which may or may not be a problem depending on your scenario.
- Obscurity. Place the secret somewhere publicly accessible but obscure. Bury it in a hole. Put it on a web page, add that page to Google's cache, and then delete the original page. Something like that. The problem here is retrieval. Nothing is suggesting itself to me, so I guess this is at best a partial solution.
- Find a healthy person and gain their trust. Give them a copy of the secret (or the key to unlock it, or whatever), but don't let them know what it is. Have them place it in a safe deposit box, to be opened in case of their death. Arrange with a reliable hit man to kill that person at a particular time in the future. Or implant a subdermal time-bomb at the base of their skull or something. You get the idea here. The main thing is to make sure there's no connection to you.
- Find some way to include the secret, or its key, in a set of sealed government records which are to be unveiled at some particular future time. Kind of like the JFK assassination case files or something.
- Revisiting some of the above ideas, you could simply hide a broadcast device in an undisclosed location, and set it to begin broadcasting the secret at the specified time. If you could figure out how to stick it on the moon or something that would be even better.
Eh, running out of ideas and nobody's gonna read this anyway, so I guess I'm done.Did you read the article? Just because the tantalum exists somewhere, that doesn't mean it's readily available. It takes 10 years to open up a new mine, and 2 years to expand an existing one. Tantalum demand has been skyrocketing -- its price went up about 10 times in 2000, and currently sits at 60-70% of that high. So companies that are desparate to cut costs are going to buy the stuff wherever they can find it. If the Congo rebels can offer a lower price than a "nice Western nation" like Australia, that's where they're going to get it.
So much so, that I'm not sure which party the poster is referring to. I think Yale.
I'd like to point out that if it's done right, making acceptance/rejection notification available online is a perfectly worthwhile and beneficial use of technology. Applying for college is very stressful and people want to know as soon as possible when a decision has been made. In fact, they often need to know in order to make future plans.
At least keystrokes are sometimes productive. Check out The Kill Everyone Project for a truly pointless exercise in mouse-click-counting. I used to be in the top 100, before those were all in the millions.
I was simply pointing out that while everyone knows (or should know) what a rip-off extended warranties are, they fail to apply the same reasoning when the warranty is mandatory.
As opposed to, say, making money? That is the point of the whole exercise, you know.
Of course, one can still comparison-shop, so it is possible to get a better deal with a standard warranty included sometimes, but it's far from the free lunch that people seem to think.
You didn't follow the thread of conversation. I was saying that the poster I was replying to was not engaged in civil disobedience. Of course Perens is (planning to be).
I understand your point, but I think we may differ even so on our definition of civil disobedience. My feeling is that unless you're really *trying* to get caught, it's just not the same. Being open about it in casual conversation is nice, but you surely don't expect your friends to turn you in. Nor is it likely that someone will track you down via your slashdot posts.