Re:Japanese sci-fi predictions?
on
GUIs for Robots
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· Score: 2
Some of them have predicted a combination of the two, which I feel is the most likely prediction. A single, highly trained commander pilots a robot and is then assisted by several somewhat AI controlled robots that obey his commands. Thus, the robots cannot go out of control because they require commands and the signal can't be jammed as easily because of the strength of the signal due to the short distance, but the entire platoon of robots still act with one mind.
...but if or when legitimate file-sharing _IS_ affected, let those put out by it come forward at that time and start a class action suit for the costs of lost bandwidth.
How does a bankrupt company that has had its funds drained by a continuous attack on the bandwidth pipe that it pays for and its revenue stream taken away by the fact that it can no longer serve advertising banners pay for a class action suit? Oh, that's right, they don't.
A defendant in a civil suit has his money taken away from him AFTER he is found guilty and not before for exactly this reason. That, and that insignificant little "innocent until proven guilty" thing that the courts are so hung up on.
The concept of copyright was meant to be permanently attached to the concept of the public domain. Since allowing authors, musicians, etc. to claim their work as "intellectual property" undermines the free flow of information within a society, copyrights in the United States were originally attached to the idea of the public domain. After about 14 years (I believe it was fourteen), anything that was copyrighted would enter the public domain and thus could freely be used, copied, and reworked by anyone.
Because the public domain has been unintentionally halted by Congress (as well as legislative bodies all around the world) through copyright extensions throughout the last century, the value of the public domain has become unknown to the average person. For instance, most Disney movies could not have been made without the public domain, because Disney would not have been allowed to rework and rewrite previous literary works like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Sleeping Beauty, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, etc. into new movie classics.
Also, libraries only let you borrow books because books are physical objects, and thus are in a limited supply. Librarians across the country are now in favor of distributing e-books and giving them out permanently, because that was always the idea behind libraries --- the most free flow of information possible. Lending books was not a purposeful idea, but instead a necessity of the past.
...sharing involves ONE copy that has been paid for, with you know money, then when one person shares it to another only one can listen to it so no effect has been made to the sales, that is legal, your *sharing* however, produces a copy that is not paid for, in effect one sond/cd is sold but 2 are made.
Man, we really need a new word for this thing. I am so sick of these sharing/pirating/stealing/copying/whatevering debates where people try to figure out which wildly inappropriate word is slightly more appropriate than the others. What people are doing on P2P systems is completely different from the traditional definitions of sharing, pirating, or stealing. And "copying" just doesn't provide enough information on what is actually happening.
I bought a CDR right when it came out and after around 3 weeks of playing around I stopped using it.
EXACTLY my sentiment. I was an early adopter of both CD-ROM and CD-RW drives, but in both cases I didn't have a regular use for them until about two years later. And I'm one of the lucky ones, if you really think about it. If I had been an early adopter for Laser Disc, Divx, or any of the failed writable DVD standards, I would've wasted several hundred dollars on a stupid mistake.
You do understand that AIM and ICQ are both products of AOL, right?
I don't see how that matters, other than to drive home my point that they are two (almost) completely different things.
I think it's become apparent through the efforts of Jabber, Trillian, etc. that the technological side of getting interoperability between the networks isn't impossible.
Oh, of course the technological side isn't impossible. But I was talking about the usability side, and so far all of the "universal instant messenger" services that connect with anything that they can find display the same sort of problems that you would find in a Swiss Army Knife, i.e. they do everything "okay" or "pretty well", but overall don't do the job as well as a service or tool that is tailored to one specific job.
But then again, services like Jabber and Trillian aren't really what was being talked about in the article. The article, at least when it mentioned instant messaging, was talking about forcing instant messaging services to conform to a standard. This differs greatly from programs that deal with the differing standards and manage to lump them all into one program. Accepting differing standards and packaging them together allows you to keep most of the purity of each standard by keeping them mostly seperate from one another. Forcing the services themselves to conform to a standard, however, would force the groups behind AIM and ICQ to decide whether or not they, for instance, wanted messages for a user that is offline to be stored and then sent when the user logs on. They wouldn't be allowed to make seperate decisions about how they wanted their services to work, so there would be a lot less choice and competition among instant messaging users. And that just doesn't serve any purpose, or at least much less of a purpose than creating a standard in upload and download speeds over cable and DSL lines that aren't federally regulated.
I spotted none of that, but I did spot Char's Zaku II from the old Japanese sci-fi anime TV show "Mobile Suit Gundam". So maybe these guys are just an international coalition of evil nerds.
And yes, I unfortunately launched all adjectives for great confusion in that first sentence, but I couldn't figure out a better way to fit it all in.
He pointed to the current "balkanization" of instant messaging, where a lack of standards prevents America Online users from communicating with people on rival services.
The people in this article made a very good point when they mentioned the problems that arise from upload speeds that differ wildly from the download speeds on the same service. However, the above point was just absolute stupidity. AIM and ICQ are COMPLETELY different services that function very differently from one another. They have differing levels of privacy, different ways of conveying information, and even very different ways of sending and receiving messages (AIM only receives messages when the user is online, while ICQ effectively acts as a short message equivalent to an e-mail account). A forced standard in this situation would do nothing but annoy those who have chosen AIM or ICQ specifically because they prefer the very different functions of whichever one they chose.
They're both referred to as "instant messaging services" (or some such), but that's where the similarities between AIM and ICQ end. Trying to force AIM and ICQ to conform to a standard is like trying to force ham radio companies and phone companies to conform to a standard. On the surface, they're very similar, as they're both forms of solely verbal communication between individuals or small groups. But the similarities stop there and the two services should be kept completely independant of one another for that reason.
Maybe they're tourists from ancient Rome, and can't read Arabic numbers.
I actually thought of that, too, because the same would apply to people from Japan, China, North or South Korea, Taiwan, etc. However, if someone can't remember which distinct set of squiggly lines is what number, then I doubt that colors would help them.
However, what about students who lack that. We haven't reached the point where all students in all public schools have computer access or even a relevant amount of computer knowledge.
If they don't have a computer or don't know how to use one, then they should be given one and taught how to use it. I saw first hand in high school just a few years ago what happens to the kids that don't have any access to technology. They fall behind, they're forced to work harder to get a smaller amount of information, and they generally learn less and have a harder time in school.
Teachers shouldn't shy away from giving technology to kids because they might not know how to use it. They should be given that technology and taught how to use it for exactly that reason.
And this differs from kids drawing in their notebooks, making paper airplanes and origami out of notebook paper, and playing paper games like Tic-Tac-Toe... how?
That's like protesting a possible water rate hike by running your tap all day, or an electric rate hike by leaving your fridge open all day. Your sad little "protest" is cutting off your nose to spite your face, and doing demonstrable harm to everyone else who wants to use the resource. You're a short-sighted, anti-social idiot.
People like you keep assuming that these corporations are doing these things because their customers are forcing them to. I seriously doubt that that is true. Much like the way the RIAA and MPAA just pull ten digit financial numbers out of their ass when they complain about piracy, the cable companies are probably ecstatic about the fact that they can now take advantage of their monopoly and are blaming the effects of their greed on... well, on customers that use the service that they pay for, really ("unlimited bandwidth per month" and all). Thus, regardless of what any of us do, the prices are still going to steadily go up until there is competition in the market.
The numbers are just going to be inflated anyway according to what the cable companies want them to look like, so if we're going to feel the negative effects of "abuse" of the service anyway, why not just full-on abuse it and cost the cable companies as much money as possible?
actually i seem to remember somewhere in the licence agreement for officially licensed nintendo carts that lending was against the license. however, i ignored it as i am sure everyone else did.
Nintendo has also claimed in various different venues that emulation (regardless of ROMs) and importing games (or anything, really) are against the laws of the United States of America. No one gives a shit, most importantly the courts of said country.
Best advice is to not go where they have sufficiently stupid laws.
Would you mind giving us an example of this place where they do not have sufficiently stupid laws? Does it happen to have a breathable atmosphere? I'd like to visit there some time.
Why not try out a game that you've never played before and test it for yourself? Personally, I was only recently introduced to some NES, SNES, and Neo Geo games that I missed via emulation, and I think a lot of them have been really ingenius and a lot of fun.
Well, the other justification would be "I own the game". Games used to be a lot cheaper than they are now, and it's not uncommon for a Nintendo fan to have bought thirty or forty games before the cartridges died. Emulation allows me to get back the intellectual property that I already paid for.
It could also be argued, although with less of a slightly less solid basis, that emulation lets us share our games again. My friends used to let me borrow their Nintendo games, but now that there are no longer physical copies of the games for them to give me, how are they supposed to share the intellectual property that they've paid for and are legally allowed to share with others? Emulation seems to be the closest way for them to do that.
It's 'piracy', though I prefer the term 'illegal copying'.
"Piracy", a word that basically means violent theft, is no more accurate a description of the illegal copying of intellectual property than the word "theft" itself.
I just turned WinMX on, gave high priority to all of the anime uploads, and then set GetRight to download as many episodes as possible. And it's not because I'm afraid that I'll lose my high bandwidth. It's because I feel like sending a nice little "fuck you" to Comcast while I still can.
I don't see how this is ever going to be a killer app for the X-Box. Unless Electronics Boutique and Toys R Us start selling pre-modded X-Boxes, far less than one percent of X-Box customers will have DivX functionality. The same really applies to all modded systems. With a modded PS2, I can download hundreds of free games. However, PS2s with mod chips are so rare that the international community of people online that are trading PS/PS2 games is, at most, ten thousand people out of the twenty-six million plus PS2 owners in the world.
Sure, this is a killer app for a couple of geeks, but it isn't going to change the X-Box's sales or revolutionize the movie industry.
Aside from pissing people off by shutting down a city...what's to say that the stunt will work perfectly? What's to say that they don't accidentally crash that sucker into one of these buildings? They'd end up with a crap load more pissed off people.
They're asking for the city to be shut down because they're taking the possibility of an accident into account. If there's an accident while the city is shut down, they can just pay the huge amount of money for repairs. If there's an accident while the city ISN'T shut down, they would kill a lot of people and injure many others.
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Some of them have predicted a combination of the two, which I feel is the most likely prediction. A single, highly trained commander pilots a robot and is then assisted by several somewhat AI controlled robots that obey his commands. Thus, the robots cannot go out of control because they require commands and the signal can't be jammed as easily because of the strength of the signal due to the short distance, but the entire platoon of robots still act with one mind.
...but if or when legitimate file-sharing _IS_ affected, let those put out by it come forward at that time and start a class action suit for the costs of lost bandwidth.
How does a bankrupt company that has had its funds drained by a continuous attack on the bandwidth pipe that it pays for and its revenue stream taken away by the fact that it can no longer serve advertising banners pay for a class action suit? Oh, that's right, they don't.
A defendant in a civil suit has his money taken away from him AFTER he is found guilty and not before for exactly this reason. That, and that insignificant little "innocent until proven guilty" thing that the courts are so hung up on.
world- first plan that legalises [sic] music piracy
It's spelled "legalizes" in America, but it's spelled "legalises" in Britain, Australia, Canada, et al. There is no need for the "[sic]".
The concept of copyright was meant to be permanently attached to the concept of the public domain. Since allowing authors, musicians, etc. to claim their work as "intellectual property" undermines the free flow of information within a society, copyrights in the United States were originally attached to the idea of the public domain. After about 14 years (I believe it was fourteen), anything that was copyrighted would enter the public domain and thus could freely be used, copied, and reworked by anyone.
Because the public domain has been unintentionally halted by Congress (as well as legislative bodies all around the world) through copyright extensions throughout the last century, the value of the public domain has become unknown to the average person. For instance, most Disney movies could not have been made without the public domain, because Disney would not have been allowed to rework and rewrite previous literary works like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Sleeping Beauty, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, etc. into new movie classics.
Also, libraries only let you borrow books because books are physical objects, and thus are in a limited supply. Librarians across the country are now in favor of distributing e-books and giving them out permanently, because that was always the idea behind libraries --- the most free flow of information possible. Lending books was not a purposeful idea, but instead a necessity of the past.
...sharing involves ONE copy that has been paid for, with you know money, then when one person shares it to another only one can listen to it so no effect has been made to the sales, that is legal, your *sharing* however, produces a copy that is not paid for, in effect one sond/cd is sold but 2 are made.
Man, we really need a new word for this thing. I am so sick of these sharing/pirating/stealing/copying/whatevering debates where people try to figure out which wildly inappropriate word is slightly more appropriate than the others. What people are doing on P2P systems is completely different from the traditional definitions of sharing, pirating, or stealing. And "copying" just doesn't provide enough information on what is actually happening.
Come on, guys. You can do better than this. At least take a quick look at the front page every once and awhile.
I bought a CDR right when it came out and after around 3 weeks of playing around I stopped using it.
EXACTLY my sentiment. I was an early adopter of both CD-ROM and CD-RW drives, but in both cases I didn't have a regular use for them until about two years later. And I'm one of the lucky ones, if you really think about it. If I had been an early adopter for Laser Disc, Divx, or any of the failed writable DVD standards, I would've wasted several hundred dollars on a stupid mistake.
You do understand that AIM and ICQ are both products of AOL, right?
I don't see how that matters, other than to drive home my point that they are two (almost) completely different things.
I think it's become apparent through the efforts of Jabber, Trillian, etc. that the technological side of getting interoperability between the networks isn't impossible.
Oh, of course the technological side isn't impossible. But I was talking about the usability side, and so far all of the "universal instant messenger" services that connect with anything that they can find display the same sort of problems that you would find in a Swiss Army Knife, i.e. they do everything "okay" or "pretty well", but overall don't do the job as well as a service or tool that is tailored to one specific job.
But then again, services like Jabber and Trillian aren't really what was being talked about in the article. The article, at least when it mentioned instant messaging, was talking about forcing instant messaging services to conform to a standard. This differs greatly from programs that deal with the differing standards and manage to lump them all into one program. Accepting differing standards and packaging them together allows you to keep most of the purity of each standard by keeping them mostly seperate from one another. Forcing the services themselves to conform to a standard, however, would force the groups behind AIM and ICQ to decide whether or not they, for instance, wanted messages for a user that is offline to be stored and then sent when the user logs on. They wouldn't be allowed to make seperate decisions about how they wanted their services to work, so there would be a lot less choice and competition among instant messaging users. And that just doesn't serve any purpose, or at least much less of a purpose than creating a standard in upload and download speeds over cable and DSL lines that aren't federally regulated.
I spotted none of that, but I did spot Char's Zaku II from the old Japanese sci-fi anime TV show "Mobile Suit Gundam". So maybe these guys are just an international coalition of evil nerds.
And yes, I unfortunately launched all adjectives for great confusion in that first sentence, but I couldn't figure out a better way to fit it all in.
He pointed to the current "balkanization" of instant messaging, where a lack of standards prevents America Online users from communicating with people on rival services.
The people in this article made a very good point when they mentioned the problems that arise from upload speeds that differ wildly from the download speeds on the same service. However, the above point was just absolute stupidity. AIM and ICQ are COMPLETELY different services that function very differently from one another. They have differing levels of privacy, different ways of conveying information, and even very different ways of sending and receiving messages (AIM only receives messages when the user is online, while ICQ effectively acts as a short message equivalent to an e-mail account). A forced standard in this situation would do nothing but annoy those who have chosen AIM or ICQ specifically because they prefer the very different functions of whichever one they chose.
They're both referred to as "instant messaging services" (or some such), but that's where the similarities between AIM and ICQ end. Trying to force AIM and ICQ to conform to a standard is like trying to force ham radio companies and phone companies to conform to a standard. On the surface, they're very similar, as they're both forms of solely verbal communication between individuals or small groups. But the similarities stop there and the two services should be kept completely independant of one another for that reason.
Maybe they're tourists from ancient Rome, and can't read Arabic numbers.
I actually thought of that, too, because the same would apply to people from Japan, China, North or South Korea, Taiwan, etc. However, if someone can't remember which distinct set of squiggly lines is what number, then I doubt that colors would help them.
No need to unfold it to find the silly number, and no need to make sure that there isn't an extra '0' after the '5'.
If determining whether a number is alone or beside another number is too hard for you, then you should not be handling money.
However, what about students who lack that. We haven't reached the point where all students in all public schools have computer access or even a relevant amount of computer knowledge.
If they don't have a computer or don't know how to use one, then they should be given one and taught how to use it. I saw first hand in high school just a few years ago what happens to the kids that don't have any access to technology. They fall behind, they're forced to work harder to get a smaller amount of information, and they generally learn less and have a harder time in school.
Teachers shouldn't shy away from giving technology to kids because they might not know how to use it. They should be given that technology and taught how to use it for exactly that reason.
And this differs from kids drawing in their notebooks, making paper airplanes and origami out of notebook paper, and playing paper games like Tic-Tac-Toe... how?
They're planning on the robots developed herd/pack behavior, so if this happens again two months from now, that's exactly what we'll see.
Wow. At first, I thought, "It's an MP3 player for the Mac. That isn't necessarily a rip-off of the iPod". But then I saw what it looked like...
I can feel thousands of Apple-print panties bunching as we speak.
That's like protesting a possible water rate hike by running your tap all day, or an electric rate hike by leaving your fridge open all day. Your sad little "protest" is cutting off your nose to spite your face, and doing demonstrable harm to everyone else who wants to use the resource. You're a short-sighted, anti-social idiot.
People like you keep assuming that these corporations are doing these things because their customers are forcing them to. I seriously doubt that that is true. Much like the way the RIAA and MPAA just pull ten digit financial numbers out of their ass when they complain about piracy, the cable companies are probably ecstatic about the fact that they can now take advantage of their monopoly and are blaming the effects of their greed on... well, on customers that use the service that they pay for, really ("unlimited bandwidth per month" and all). Thus, regardless of what any of us do, the prices are still going to steadily go up until there is competition in the market.
The numbers are just going to be inflated anyway according to what the cable companies want them to look like, so if we're going to feel the negative effects of "abuse" of the service anyway, why not just full-on abuse it and cost the cable companies as much money as possible?
actually i seem to remember somewhere in the licence agreement for officially licensed nintendo carts that lending was against the license. however, i ignored it as i am sure everyone else did.
Nintendo has also claimed in various different venues that emulation (regardless of ROMs) and importing games (or anything, really) are against the laws of the United States of America. No one gives a shit, most importantly the courts of said country.
Best advice is to not go where they have sufficiently stupid laws.
Would you mind giving us an example of this place where they do not have sufficiently stupid laws? Does it happen to have a breathable atmosphere? I'd like to visit there some time.
Why not try out a game that you've never played before and test it for yourself? Personally, I was only recently introduced to some NES, SNES, and Neo Geo games that I missed via emulation, and I think a lot of them have been really ingenius and a lot of fun.
Well, the other justification would be "I own the game". Games used to be a lot cheaper than they are now, and it's not uncommon for a Nintendo fan to have bought thirty or forty games before the cartridges died. Emulation allows me to get back the intellectual property that I already paid for.
It could also be argued, although with less of a slightly less solid basis, that emulation lets us share our games again. My friends used to let me borrow their Nintendo games, but now that there are no longer physical copies of the games for them to give me, how are they supposed to share the intellectual property that they've paid for and are legally allowed to share with others? Emulation seems to be the closest way for them to do that.
It's 'piracy', though I prefer the term 'illegal copying'.
"Piracy", a word that basically means violent theft, is no more accurate a description of the illegal copying of intellectual property than the word "theft" itself.
I just turned WinMX on, gave high priority to all of the anime uploads, and then set GetRight to download as many episodes as possible. And it's not because I'm afraid that I'll lose my high bandwidth. It's because I feel like sending a nice little "fuck you" to Comcast while I still can.
I don't see how this is ever going to be a killer app for the X-Box. Unless Electronics Boutique and Toys R Us start selling pre-modded X-Boxes, far less than one percent of X-Box customers will have DivX functionality. The same really applies to all modded systems. With a modded PS2, I can download hundreds of free games. However, PS2s with mod chips are so rare that the international community of people online that are trading PS/PS2 games is, at most, ten thousand people out of the twenty-six million plus PS2 owners in the world.
Sure, this is a killer app for a couple of geeks, but it isn't going to change the X-Box's sales or revolutionize the movie industry.
Aside from pissing people off by shutting down a city...what's to say that the stunt will work perfectly? What's to say that they don't accidentally crash that sucker into one of these buildings? They'd end up with a crap load more pissed off people.
They're asking for the city to be shut down because they're taking the possibility of an accident into account. If there's an accident while the city is shut down, they can just pay the huge amount of money for repairs. If there's an accident while the city ISN'T shut down, they would kill a lot of people and injure many others.