Yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater and disseminating security information that has people's lives on the line blurs the line between between speech and an assault weapon. In both cases, people can die as a direct result of the action of speaking. Both cases are basically the same as telling someone that you will pay them if they murder someone: your speech causes someone to die and makes you an accessory to murder. However, this is not the case with porn. People do not die as a direct result of viewing pornography.
I'm sick of people saying "Oh, but you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater" whenever someone complains about limits on free speech. There's a huge difference between speech that VERY DIRECTLY results in human death and the other 99.99% of human speech and art. That law was enacted because at the time that it was enacted, hundreds of people at a time could die because of false alarms about fires in theaters. It is one of the few instances of speech that can directly cause death and is therefore not a reason why no speech should be free and unrestricted.
What can I tell you about them? Well, I can tell you that all of the Dreamcast and PlayStation ports are absolute shit, and that everyone I know that owns them absolutely hates them. They have excessive loading times, various glitches, and some versions of them even have huge problems such as the sound being delayed by at least half a second. I certainly wouldn't recommend them, especially for demo purposes.
As for the PC ports, the information is sketchy on those, but as far as anyone in the MAME community can tell, those are actually just MAME (not a homebrew emulator, but ACTUAL MAME) packaged with a Neo Geo ROM of the company's choice, which breaks the MAME license. Like I said, the information is currently sketchy on those, but if they really are abusing a free work for their own profit against the wishes of the people that created it, it makes me wonder why anyone should care about abusing their works for non-profit personal entertainment.
And that's all fine and good about the Neo Geo not being intended as a console system, but I don't see your point. It IS available as a console system, its arcade version isn't found in most arcades, and there's no way for most people to get a demonstration of it and its games. That statement didn't even have anything to do with what I was saying.
So the Supreme Court thinks that "free speech" means "free if the majority of the populace likes it or agrees with it" (community standards). Isn't the First Amendment sort of nullified by a reading like that? If you're not allowed to make a statement or produce an artwork (including photographs) that the general populace doesn't agree with, then your speech isn't really free. It's just allowed or banned under the will of the government, which is the sort of situation that the original constitutional amendments were meant to put a stop to.
There are the collectors, the pirates, and then there's the third group, the people in between, which I'm a part of. I'd buy a Neo Geo and some games for it, but I honestly can't see paying several hundred dollars so that I can play the same games, minus internet multiplayer, slower loading times, and instant swappability. I'm all for supporting the artists and such, but not when it costs both money and the entertainment value of the product. That's just a little too much for me.
The same goes for the ports of Neo Geo games. I bought The King of Fighters '99 for the PlayStation so that at least a little bit of my money would get to SNK/Playmore. I'm now the fine owner of a worthless frisbee with "The King of Fighters '99" printed on one side of it.
Who the Hell would buy a ridiculously expensive system with even more ridiculously expensive games without even seeing it in action first? People can't try out a Neo Geo in the local Electronics Boutique, nor can they take it for a spin over a friend's house. The only way to take the NG for a test drive is to pirate the games for a few hours.
Oh my God! You mean the security device that corporations have been hailing as super ultra mega secure and completely impenetrable is easily circumvented?
I might as well be the first to mention that most Neo-Geo games are supported by Mame and my personal emulator of choice, Kawaks. If you'd like to try the newer Neo Geo games before you consider the high price road, you should download those emulators and then try searching for some ROMs in various websites, IRC channels, and P2P programs. My personal game recommendations are "Garou: Mark of the Wolves", "The King of Fighters 2000", and any of the Metal Slug games, especially "Metal Slug X".
Oh, and if you see any of the PlayStation ports of Neo Geo games in stores, don't bother with them. They're buggy, bastardized versions of the games with at least twenty to sixty times the amount of loading time (and no, that's not an exaggeration).
Justification for piracy of books on the internet: Found
But seriously, this is another one of those brilliant corporate ideas that fuels internet piracy, just like $20 for a music CD with a couple of good songs and several rushed throw-away tracks on it, the movie industry's insistence on stopping the horrific evil of importing DVDs that aren't available in your country, and several different industry groups' attempts to rob us of any fair use rights, or in some cases, any rights that we might have at all (especially in the case of the artists).
And they're going to go crying right to their legislators when internet piracy suddenly picks up a week or two after their bone-headed idea is implemented...
You want a solution? Here it is. Make it as difficult as possible to get to the waste (stone, concrete, iron, let engineers call the shots). Then make sure than the place is flooded with signs in various medium (stone, metal, ceramic, you name it), each one depicting the best graphical representation of what danger lies in there....bodies slowly curling up as waves pass through them, animals dead, it's not hard to visualise it. After that if any future civilization is foolish enough to ignore every single sign, and break through all those barriers then those who tresspass deserve what they get for being just as stupid as you are!
The problem there, as with almost all solutions, is that there are still common ways that a fairly intelligent person could misinterpret such signs. Cave paintings are filled with depictions of death and horror, but they're always seen as primitive art, rather than warning signs. Similarly, most ancient graves are filled with depictions of death. To archeologists, these signs aren't a warning of danger. They're a marker declaring, "Hey, you, archeologist guy! This is where our dead are buried. It's exactly what you're looking for!".
The best plan that I can think of, which I believe they're already using in some nuclear waste sites, is a Rosetta Stone. A warning sign that's printed in every current language and several dead languages, so that, even in the event of a global catastrophy wiping out most human knowledge, there's a good chance that someone would recognize the warning.
As most visitors to Slashdot should already know, at least one of these scientists is most definitely NOT dead. One year from now, we will discover that it wasn't him that died, but instead his robotic clone. At this time, he will most likely die again, only to be replaced one year later by a different scientist that is actually being controlled by yet another robotic clone of Dr. Wiley.
My apologies to the family of the victims, but I couldn't help but share my geekish laughter at the idea of "Dr. Wiley" (sic, sort of) mysteriously dying. My only hope is that the doctor, while he was still alive, got a good laugh out of his name and title, too.
The problem is that they're never going to wake up and realize that piracy isn't really hurting them as much as they think. If the data that they collect says that piracy isn't a problem, they'll just hide the results, keep claiming that piracy is a problem and that more levies must be legislated in their interests, and then use the data to plot consumer viewing habits and find a way to make the viewer tolerate more invasive advertising.
These people are never going to wake up to the idea of anything but that which helps them make more money, and acknowledging that piracy isn't the problem that they currently think it is does not help them make more money. But then again, that's what they're supposed to do. They're corporations. They're here to make money. We're consumers. We're here to pay as little as possible. This is how the two main groups of a capitalist society are MEANT to function. The only problem is that the corporations are winning a few too many battles recently in this eternal struggle for money.
We wouldn't be able to run around while invisible, but wouldn't this sort of thing actually allow you to fully disappear while hiding? Instead of your eyes or leg sticking out behind the bushes, you could just completely disappear among the foliage as long as you're stationary. The same could work for any other hiding spot where you're already partially hidden. And at night, the suit could allow you to change your coloring to the correct shade of dark blue to completely blend into the shadows like a ninja.
They've already covered this legislation. It's called "The Digital Millenium Copyright Act", and it's already pretty broad. If we need more legislation every couple of years to avoid really bad copyright laws, we might as well just save ourselves a few years of trouble and let them pass the CBDTPA right now. If we need to go beyond the DMCA, then we'll eventually go beyond whatever is proposed.
What you should really be doing is pointing out that the current laws are already ridiculously broad and that you cannot change the basic functions of the internet in any way (aside from making certain functions illegal to USE) without seriously harming the technology industry, which pumps a lot more money into the economy than the copyright industry. You should also push the fact that this sort of legislation, i.e. any legislation that hinders the technology industry by forcing them to implement legal restrictions in hardware and software, will just hold the United States back in a technology market that is growing by the day.
Some times, more legislation just isn't the answer. At some point, they have to be satisfied with the legislation that they have and stop playing games with the rights of US citizens and the health of the US economy. The DMCA already does enough damage to our rights and the open nature of computer standards. Any further copyright bills will be a huge blow to not only our rights, but the economy and the companies and employees within it.
Actually, I believe the point of that statement was that normally, the average computer novice or internet user can at least heed virus warnings from their friends, such as "Don't open e-mails with the subject '--specific subject here--'. Just delete them immediately!". However, they cannot heed virus warnings from their friends that read: "Don't open e-mails with the subjects '--list of 120 different subjects and variations, with more appearing daily--'". The average person relies on remembering subjects to find viruses, rather than using safer programs, firewalls, and virus scanners, which is what the more experienced users rely on.
Rent a Metal Gear game some time. The amount of preaching on nuclear disarmament, technology's future role in society, and science benefiting from military funding manages to exhaust many of its players, mostly because they weren't expecting the sort of storylines that are typical of RPGs and their hybrids. The same goes for Final Fantasy Tactics, which is practically a slap on the face to Catholicism. Or Final Fantasy VII, whose entire plot is revolved around corporate destruction of the environment.
(Warning: I do not own a Dreamcast. I'm just a gaming addict.)
Dude, that's a pretty pathetic defense of the Dreamcast. "Oh, look, it has a 2D shooter and a port of a fighting game from a decade-old console!" Even from someone that likes the Neo Geo, that registers a big honkin' "whatever" in my book. How about bringing up the fact that the Dreamcast is going so strong in Japan that one of its new RPG (Sakura Taisen 4) bent the shiny remake of Resident Evil for the GameCube over its knee and spanked it in the sales charts? It beat the RE remake by a 3-to-1 margin, and whereas the RE remake has practically fallen off the charts, Sakura Taisen 4 is still going strong?
That, or you could just bring up the simple point that the Dreamcast is much more alive than the X-Box, which is dead last on the console charts in the US and stillborn in every other country.
Well, then, you must live in a pretty odd place with pretty odd friends. In my experience, people only use one console at a time when they're home. And when they're with friends, they traditionally all play the same multiplayer game on the same console. The point of this mod, beyond the "Because we CAN!" niftiness, is that it conserves a lot of space. Instead of having a PC, a PS2, a GameCube, an X-Box, an NES, a 2600, and all of the required wires and video switchers between them taking up an entire entertainment center and leaving little room for other important entertainment center appliances like stereos, VCRs, and a television, this box keeps them all together, keeps all of the wires in a small space, and cuts out their ridiculous form factors which rarely go well together. Hell, just between the main three consoles, you've got a huge rectangle, a thin black monolith, and a cube. Those shapes don't exactly go well together within an entertainment center that's divided into rather small square and rectangular spaces.
$200 X-Box + $10-$30 PAL to NTSC Converter + Shipping + Customs MUST = More than $300. Toss in the region mod and you might as well just buy an American X-Box and then wipe your ass with thirty or forty bucks.
Slashdot Mirror
Yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater and disseminating security information that has people's lives on the line blurs the line between between speech and an assault weapon. In both cases, people can die as a direct result of the action of speaking. Both cases are basically the same as telling someone that you will pay them if they murder someone: your speech causes someone to die and makes you an accessory to murder. However, this is not the case with porn. People do not die as a direct result of viewing pornography.
I'm sick of people saying "Oh, but you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater" whenever someone complains about limits on free speech. There's a huge difference between speech that VERY DIRECTLY results in human death and the other 99.99% of human speech and art. That law was enacted because at the time that it was enacted, hundreds of people at a time could die because of false alarms about fires in theaters. It is one of the few instances of speech that can directly cause death and is therefore not a reason why no speech should be free and unrestricted.
Yeah, and just about everyone has their money on that bastard copyright holder being Nintendo. The entire thing had their style written all over it.
What can I tell you about them? Well, I can tell you that all of the Dreamcast and PlayStation ports are absolute shit, and that everyone I know that owns them absolutely hates them. They have excessive loading times, various glitches, and some versions of them even have huge problems such as the sound being delayed by at least half a second. I certainly wouldn't recommend them, especially for demo purposes.
As for the PC ports, the information is sketchy on those, but as far as anyone in the MAME community can tell, those are actually just MAME (not a homebrew emulator, but ACTUAL MAME) packaged with a Neo Geo ROM of the company's choice, which breaks the MAME license. Like I said, the information is currently sketchy on those, but if they really are abusing a free work for their own profit against the wishes of the people that created it, it makes me wonder why anyone should care about abusing their works for non-profit personal entertainment.
And that's all fine and good about the Neo Geo not being intended as a console system, but I don't see your point. It IS available as a console system, its arcade version isn't found in most arcades, and there's no way for most people to get a demonstration of it and its games. That statement didn't even have anything to do with what I was saying.
So the Supreme Court thinks that "free speech" means "free if the majority of the populace likes it or agrees with it" (community standards). Isn't the First Amendment sort of nullified by a reading like that? If you're not allowed to make a statement or produce an artwork (including photographs) that the general populace doesn't agree with, then your speech isn't really free. It's just allowed or banned under the will of the government, which is the sort of situation that the original constitutional amendments were meant to put a stop to.
This isn't about kiddie porn. It's about run-of-the-mill porn, featuring adults, which could possibly be VIEWED by children on the internet.
There are the collectors, the pirates, and then there's the third group, the people in between, which I'm a part of. I'd buy a Neo Geo and some games for it, but I honestly can't see paying several hundred dollars so that I can play the same games, minus internet multiplayer, slower loading times, and instant swappability. I'm all for supporting the artists and such, but not when it costs both money and the entertainment value of the product. That's just a little too much for me.
The same goes for the ports of Neo Geo games. I bought The King of Fighters '99 for the PlayStation so that at least a little bit of my money would get to SNK/Playmore. I'm now the fine owner of a worthless frisbee with "The King of Fighters '99" printed on one side of it.
Who the Hell would buy a ridiculously expensive system with even more ridiculously expensive games without even seeing it in action first? People can't try out a Neo Geo in the local Electronics Boutique, nor can they take it for a spin over a friend's house. The only way to take the NG for a test drive is to pirate the games for a few hours.
Oh my God! You mean the security device that corporations have been hailing as super ultra mega secure and completely impenetrable is easily circumvented?
SHOCK! HORROR! SURPRISE! Yawn...
I might as well be the first to mention that most Neo-Geo games are supported by Mame and my personal emulator of choice, Kawaks. If you'd like to try the newer Neo Geo games before you consider the high price road, you should download those emulators and then try searching for some ROMs in various websites, IRC channels, and P2P programs. My personal game recommendations are "Garou: Mark of the Wolves", "The King of Fighters 2000", and any of the Metal Slug games, especially "Metal Slug X".
Oh, and if you see any of the PlayStation ports of Neo Geo games in stores, don't bother with them. They're buggy, bastardized versions of the games with at least twenty to sixty times the amount of loading time (and no, that's not an exaggeration).
Justification for piracy of books on the internet: Found
But seriously, this is another one of those brilliant corporate ideas that fuels internet piracy, just like $20 for a music CD with a couple of good songs and several rushed throw-away tracks on it, the movie industry's insistence on stopping the horrific evil of importing DVDs that aren't available in your country, and several different industry groups' attempts to rob us of any fair use rights, or in some cases, any rights that we might have at all (especially in the case of the artists).
And they're going to go crying right to their legislators when internet piracy suddenly picks up a week or two after their bone-headed idea is implemented...
You want a solution? Here it is. Make it as difficult as possible to get to the waste (stone, concrete, iron, let engineers call the shots). Then make sure than the place is flooded with signs in various medium (stone, metal, ceramic, you name it), each one depicting the best graphical representation of what danger lies in there....bodies slowly curling up as waves pass through them, animals dead, it's not hard to visualise it. After that if any future civilization is foolish enough to ignore every single sign, and break through all those barriers then those who tresspass deserve what they get for being just as stupid as you are!
The problem there, as with almost all solutions, is that there are still common ways that a fairly intelligent person could misinterpret such signs. Cave paintings are filled with depictions of death and horror, but they're always seen as primitive art, rather than warning signs. Similarly, most ancient graves are filled with depictions of death. To archeologists, these signs aren't a warning of danger. They're a marker declaring, "Hey, you, archeologist guy! This is where our dead are buried. It's exactly what you're looking for!".
The best plan that I can think of, which I believe they're already using in some nuclear waste sites, is a Rosetta Stone. A warning sign that's printed in every current language and several dead languages, so that, even in the event of a global catastrophy wiping out most human knowledge, there's a good chance that someone would recognize the warning.
As most visitors to Slashdot should already know, at least one of these scientists is most definitely NOT dead. One year from now, we will discover that it wasn't him that died, but instead his robotic clone. At this time, he will most likely die again, only to be replaced one year later by a different scientist that is actually being controlled by yet another robotic clone of Dr. Wiley.
My apologies to the family of the victims, but I couldn't help but share my geekish laughter at the idea of "Dr. Wiley" (sic, sort of) mysteriously dying. My only hope is that the doctor, while he was still alive, got a good laugh out of his name and title, too.
The problem is that they're never going to wake up and realize that piracy isn't really hurting them as much as they think. If the data that they collect says that piracy isn't a problem, they'll just hide the results, keep claiming that piracy is a problem and that more levies must be legislated in their interests, and then use the data to plot consumer viewing habits and find a way to make the viewer tolerate more invasive advertising.
These people are never going to wake up to the idea of anything but that which helps them make more money, and acknowledging that piracy isn't the problem that they currently think it is does not help them make more money. But then again, that's what they're supposed to do. They're corporations. They're here to make money. We're consumers. We're here to pay as little as possible. This is how the two main groups of a capitalist society are MEANT to function. The only problem is that the corporations are winning a few too many battles recently in this eternal struggle for money.
We wouldn't be able to run around while invisible, but wouldn't this sort of thing actually allow you to fully disappear while hiding? Instead of your eyes or leg sticking out behind the bushes, you could just completely disappear among the foliage as long as you're stationary. The same could work for any other hiding spot where you're already partially hidden. And at night, the suit could allow you to change your coloring to the correct shade of dark blue to completely blend into the shadows like a ninja.
They've already covered this legislation. It's called "The Digital Millenium Copyright Act", and it's already pretty broad. If we need more legislation every couple of years to avoid really bad copyright laws, we might as well just save ourselves a few years of trouble and let them pass the CBDTPA right now. If we need to go beyond the DMCA, then we'll eventually go beyond whatever is proposed.
What you should really be doing is pointing out that the current laws are already ridiculously broad and that you cannot change the basic functions of the internet in any way (aside from making certain functions illegal to USE) without seriously harming the technology industry, which pumps a lot more money into the economy than the copyright industry. You should also push the fact that this sort of legislation, i.e. any legislation that hinders the technology industry by forcing them to implement legal restrictions in hardware and software, will just hold the United States back in a technology market that is growing by the day.
Some times, more legislation just isn't the answer. At some point, they have to be satisfied with the legislation that they have and stop playing games with the rights of US citizens and the health of the US economy. The DMCA already does enough damage to our rights and the open nature of computer standards. Any further copyright bills will be a huge blow to not only our rights, but the economy and the companies and employees within it.
Yes, yes you do. Why? Because people like TechTV, Slashdot, ZDNet, and Wired will cover it.
They fixed the hole a year ago. This problem isn't happening because of Microsoft, it's happening because of people that don't patch their systems.
Actually, I believe the point of that statement was that normally, the average computer novice or internet user can at least heed virus warnings from their friends, such as "Don't open e-mails with the subject '--specific subject here--'. Just delete them immediately!". However, they cannot heed virus warnings from their friends that read: "Don't open e-mails with the subjects '--list of 120 different subjects and variations, with more appearing daily--'". The average person relies on remembering subjects to find viruses, rather than using safer programs, firewalls, and virus scanners, which is what the more experienced users rely on.
Preach it, brother. (No pun intended)
My first thought: A Mega Man X villain.
"Storm Eagle! Volt Catfish! SHARP ZAURUS!!!"
Rent a Metal Gear game some time. The amount of preaching on nuclear disarmament, technology's future role in society, and science benefiting from military funding manages to exhaust many of its players, mostly because they weren't expecting the sort of storylines that are typical of RPGs and their hybrids. The same goes for Final Fantasy Tactics, which is practically a slap on the face to Catholicism. Or Final Fantasy VII, whose entire plot is revolved around corporate destruction of the environment.
(Warning: I do not own a Dreamcast. I'm just a gaming addict.)
Dude, that's a pretty pathetic defense of the Dreamcast. "Oh, look, it has a 2D shooter and a port of a fighting game from a decade-old console!" Even from someone that likes the Neo Geo, that registers a big honkin' "whatever" in my book. How about bringing up the fact that the Dreamcast is going so strong in Japan that one of its new RPG (Sakura Taisen 4) bent the shiny remake of Resident Evil for the GameCube over its knee and spanked it in the sales charts? It beat the RE remake by a 3-to-1 margin, and whereas the RE remake has practically fallen off the charts, Sakura Taisen 4 is still going strong?
That, or you could just bring up the simple point that the Dreamcast is much more alive than the X-Box, which is dead last on the console charts in the US and stillborn in every other country.
Well, then, you must live in a pretty odd place with pretty odd friends. In my experience, people only use one console at a time when they're home. And when they're with friends, they traditionally all play the same multiplayer game on the same console. The point of this mod, beyond the "Because we CAN!" niftiness, is that it conserves a lot of space. Instead of having a PC, a PS2, a GameCube, an X-Box, an NES, a 2600, and all of the required wires and video switchers between them taking up an entire entertainment center and leaving little room for other important entertainment center appliances like stereos, VCRs, and a television, this box keeps them all together, keeps all of the wires in a small space, and cuts out their ridiculous form factors which rarely go well together. Hell, just between the main three consoles, you've got a huge rectangle, a thin black monolith, and a cube. Those shapes don't exactly go well together within an entertainment center that's divided into rather small square and rectangular spaces.
$200 X-Box + $10-$30 PAL to NTSC Converter + Shipping + Customs MUST = More than $300. Toss in the region mod and you might as well just buy an American X-Box and then wipe your ass with thirty or forty bucks.
Heh heh. I laughed really hard on that one. You've made my day, CurlyG.