id Software, as always, is being responsible and generous to its fans. Instead of keeping its source code under wraps until the game is released to the public domain by copyright law some time in the year NEVER, id Software has decided to release the source code for a game that it is no longer using so that the fans may tinker with it and learn from it.
If any of the people from id Software are reading this (which there is a chance of): Thank you. You rock.
Besides, what if Lindows does succeed: do we really want to perpetuate the use of Windows software on a linux platform?
Of course we do. Just think about it. If a console system somehow played games from the PS2, GameCube, XBox, Super Nintendo, Genesis, and ROMs downloaded off the internet for any of those systems AND Mame... wouldn't you buy it? If an HDTV set somehow came with built-in VHS player and a built-in DVD player that could play VCDs, any music format you wanted on a CD or CD-R, AND burn both CDs, CD-Rs, and DVDs, including off another DVD... wouldn't you buy it? Of course you would. These things would do anything, take up less space than several different consoles/players, be much easier to setup, and would probably cost less.
The point? The thing that does everything, does it right, and does it at an acceptable price is the best thing out there. If Linux could run just about any program you wanted, no matter what operating system it was originally meant for, it would be the perfect operating system. It would be the operating system equivalent to a Swiss Army Knife, and would be a perfect alternative to the system that most computer users have to put up with now: Use Windows alone or have Windows on one partition and Linux on the other. Because of the limitations of work, school, and gaming, most people NEED to use some Windows programs. To make it more accessable to those people, Linux should definitely run Windows programs, and if possible flawlessly.
Even though the email says "our", the email address isn't from "@robotstreetgang.com", and the server obviously wasn't ready for a Slashdotting, despite the fact that the owner of the site was supposed to have sent this in. Anyone else wondering whether or not some guy just decided to take his chances at getting a little site that he has a grudge against Slashdotted? After all, making their bandwidth bill take a flying leap is one of the best ways to seriously impact the life of a nameless, faceless person that you have a grudge against on the internet.
::shrug:: Just a thought.
Re:I seem to remember...
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The "commercially produced portable PlayStation" is the PSOne, and it's sort of awkward. It's basically a console with an optional screen attached. You still need to hook up the controllers externally, it needs a constant power connection to run, etc. It's only barely portable, whereas his PlayStation Portable is a complete unit that fits in your hand and can run either on batteries or a wall connection.
Re:Where does this guy get his screen from
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He uses Active Matrix screens from 2.5" RCA portable TVs, which run about $150 each. Basically, he just takes the thing out of the case, replaces the tube with LEDs, and then pops the thing in his custom portable case and hooks the composite connection on the console to the composite connection on the screen. Surprisingly simple, but still sort of pricy.
Sports games? How about FIGHTING games? In the first Street Fighter II game for the GBA, you have to change the button arrangement in the options when you switch between characters to get the most special moves out of each character, and in the second one, they just plain cut out two of the buttons.:(
A controller with four main buttons and two or more secondary buttons isn't absolutely necessary for a solid gaming system, but it's certainly necessary for ports from a system that had six main buttons.
"Free speech" is a very simple concept that means exactly what it says. It is the freedom to say what you want. It's the freedom to talk about anything, and that freedom should certainly extend beyond spoken words and into other forms of speech, such as books, movies, music, and video games.
The government deciding that it's alright for you to stand on a crate and claim that the government sucks, but deciding that you shouldn't be able to say, read, listen to, watch, or in this case play what you want to, is not free speech. Free speech is the government not messing with speech AT ALL. What you're talking about is limited, but certainly not free, speech.
IANAE (I Am Not An Expert), but I believe that 190,000 million theoretical operations per second would be approximately 190 first-run Mac G4 processors. So we're definitely talking about the supercomputer range. Somewhere around the computing power of a 130GHz processor system (extremely rough estimate).
Is there any way this story could get bumped up to the front page? Is there a system for that? Because personally, I think this is incredibly interesting, especially in the comments. This story brings up a deep and interesting question: In GTA, you can choose to be fairly good (ambulance, taxi, police officer) or incredibly evil (fucking and murdering prostitutes, doing drug runs, stealing cars). That's the nature of an extremely open game world where you can do almost anything. So if Australia's going to start banning games for what you CAN do instead of what you must do, will MMORPGs be banned for "sexually explicit dialogue" because people can talk dirty to each other in them? Will gaming worlds that are becoming increasingly more open have to restrict themselves in some areas to avoid being banned, thus cheapening the reality of the game in the internationally released version?
These questions are very important for the future of gaming, i.e. incredibly open and diverse gaming worlds.
Honestly, yes. It's called "free speech". Morally, people should be allowed to create video games that allow us to bash and kill a prostitute for money after having sex with her. And morally, I should be allowed to play that game that allows me to bash and kill a prostitute for money after having sex with her. However, the government of Oz seems to differ in the legal department of this issue. Because they're prudish assholes.
First off, please pardon my ignorance. I'm sure I'm wrong here somewhere, and this post is more of a question than a statement.
Couldn't some sort of antitrust or similar unfair business practices suit be brought against either of these companies for intentionally waiting until after a PVR market has built up to patent their "inventions", thereby creating a secondary business model for themselves that exploits their entire market? If either of these companies were legitimately patenting their "inventions", wouldn't they have filed their patents long before a market of similar products and businesses had sprung up?
And on another thought... can't these patents be easily overturned, anyway? There must be some reason why neither Atari, Mattel, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, or Microsoft has been able to successfully patent "a console system primarily used for playing proprietary gaming software".
Any lawyers here, by any chance? I vaguely remembered Slashdot having a few regular lawyers that sounded pretty credible.
I see too many people here actually agreeing with this crap. Didn't any of you play Doom with your friends when you were in the fourth grade or watch Terminator 2 several times when you were seven? Or maybe even watch popular shows Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ghost Busters, Starblazers, or whatever else was big when you were a kid? Those shows are exact equivalents to shows like Dragon Ball Z and Mobile Suit Gundam today, and Metal Gear Solid 2 is an even tamer equivalent to Doom.
A few people here have said that they'd never let a ten-year-old play Doom or Metal Gear Solid 2, let them watch gory movies, or let them play with some of these toys. Try to think of your own life and get some perspective. Was your TV viewing limited to Jesus Christ's Bible Adventures when you were ten? Do you owe your current well-being to how sheltered you were as a kid, having not seen a gun fight on TV until you were old enough to drive, and having not even HEARD of sex until you were no longer jailbait?
Personally, I don't think you do. I think you played Wolfenstein 3D and Doom when you were younger. I think you watched a few horror movies in your pre-pubescent days. I think you even hid a Playboy under your bed, or at the very least made regular visits to Playboy.com when you were twelve. And I think you certainly watched a popular kiddie show or two as a kid, and bought lots of action figures for it, too. You had G.I. Joe toys, or a Leonardo figure, or a ghost from Ghost Busters, or a big toy of the Yamato... you had those, or something very much like them. And you're fine, aren't you? In fact, you know an entire generation of people that's fine, multiple generations in fact.
Try to think of how YOU were raised and what YOUR life was like before you tell people that it's wrong for a ten year old to play Quake 3 or watch a violent movie. Stop listening to the endless stream of propaganda and actually take some time to think for yourself. These people think that they can successfully force their illogical bullshit on others if they yell loud enough and keep repeating it endlessly. Don't let them do that. Think for yourself. Maybe you'll still agree with them after you take that time to think... but I don't think you will. Because I think your life is a text book case of how to warp a child and "turn their heart dark", but somehow, by the same improbable miracle that 99% of all other people experience, you turned out fine... because this "violence desensitizes children" thing is bullshit.
And there's no way in Hell you didn't watch Looney Toons when you were a kid. There just isn't.
While I agree on isolating children from reality being a bad thing, testing cosmetics on animals is not something that should be taken lightly. On farms, animals are given a fairly good life and then killed almost instantly by having their head decapitated in a single, strong blow before their corpses are slaughtered. Farmers intentionally make sure that the animal feels no pain and does not suffer. Cosmetic testing burns, maims, and tortures an animal before it kills it. Not only are animals' flesh burned by ridiculous amounts of acidic chemicals, but the people in the testing facilities will also slash an animal repeatedly and pour similar chemicals in the wound, as well as drowning other animals in the chemicals and reusing animals that survive tests over and over until they die. In fact, these people pretty much torture the animals in every way you can think of. Pouring acidic chemicals in their eyes, in their wounds, on furred skin, on exposed skin, on skin that's been worn with razors... it's just ridiculous, especially when many other facilities just do the same tastes on cell cultures that have no ability to process pain.
That summer, I almost cancelled a week long vacation to Virginia Beach because I wanted to stay at home and play the game.
Personally, I see that as simply tradition fighting against new forms of enjoyment. I mean, really... in that sentence, what you basically said was that you almost cancelled a vacation because you wanted to relax and have fun (playing a game). People act like being addicted to games, which I suppose is possible, is like being addicted to gambling, smoking, or alchohol. A gaming addiction is an addiction to a non-harmful form of fun. It's like being "addicted" to football by watching it religiously every week, or being "addicted" to playing baseball with your high school team.
It looks like this thing is practically patenting copying video to a hard drive... so couldn't not only Tivo, but also RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, tons of independant video players, etc. be used as examples of prior art if SonicBlue were to go after anyone with this?
Seems like a pretty weak and unenforcable patent when prior art is EVERYWHERE.
While many people offer conjecture and theories about how to combat net obscurity, I believe that I actually have The Answer. When working on my old site (which is since no longer updated, just due to a lack of time on my part), my friend and I stumbled onto the bizarre secret of building a community online.
Build a good site, update it regularly, and offer visible community features. But DON'T let the community be the entire site.
The real key is that last part. Personally, I think sites like Wikipedia are poorly designed because the community is the entire website. That's just plain stupid, and it takes several years or a bizarre miracle to work. The real way to build a community is to create a regularly updated site with both news and content, tethered to a broad but somewhat specific subject. In other words, you want Slashdot. Slashdot news and articles centered around the topic of technology, with a community built up around it via comments/talkback.
But I think the real key, in the end, is not to look like you're really trying to build a community. If you just build a good site and offer community features, that community will build up and eventually it will be large enough that it can either become a main feature of the site or 90% of the site itself, creating its own content off-shoots like Ask Slashdot.
So they'll steal the civil liberties of all of their citizens, and even more from immigrants, in the name of security... but do they bother to do a background check on their new computer security advisor? Of course not. That's just... predictable. I wanted to say sad, surprising, or shocking, but really, it's just predictable.
Oh, and for those that claim that this guy isn't responsible for the holes in Microsoft software, and that thus this guy is actually pretty good at his job of protecting MS's network: You're half right. He DOESN'T have anything to do with the Microsoft software security holes. However, he was the one in charge of protecting Microsoft's network during the incident six months to a year ago when a hacker group hacked into Microsoft's network, completely 0wning the whole thing, and Microsoft didn't find out about it until the group had already been making regular visits to the network for three months, downloading the majority of the network (possibly the entire thing, I don't think anyone's really sure) during that time. And while some may wave that off as "one intrusion in X amount of time", remember that these guys got in and then kept making REGULAR VISITS to the Microsoft network without anyone noticing for three months. So while only one group managed to do it, it sounds like they managed to keep doing it on an almost daily basis. That makes for a pretty bad security record, and it would've been a huge fucking disaster if this had been done during the upcoming era of widespread.NET and Passport services, or only a "somewhat large fucking disaster" during the current era of consumer and business consumer information being regularly logged through XP's activation madness.
I guess this proves that from now on, the government will be too busy looking at our computers to even take a passing glance at the situation of their own.
Don't you remember six months to a year or so ago when Microsoft discovered that a hacker group had had access to their network for over three months and had downloaded just about the entire network from them during that time? Whether or not he's responsible for the security holes, he still isn't right for the job. Microsoft got 0wn3d on his watch, and they got 0wn3d for an extraordinarily long amount of time in comparison to most network intrusions.
The bad reporting makes it seem as if they are dealing with a human-non-human hybrid or perhaps a human-non-human chimera [washington.edu] but I would not bet on it.
Actually, we sort of are dealing with human-non-human hybrids and chimeras in this situation. Because there is NO legal guideline regarding the mixing of human and non-human DNA in Japan right now, it is legal to both create an animal expressing a human protein or two AND a full hybrid/chimera. Without any sort of guideline AT ALL, this legalizes both of those things, and personally, I don't have a problem with that. I like Japan's hands-off approach to technology. So far, it has worked. And while the idea of derivative species of humanity may seem strange to us, science might actually find a useful application for them that we may not even be able to consider right now.
I'm with Japan on this one. I believe in actually achieving a scientific breakthrough, and then seeing if the result of the breakthrough is wrong, rather than just making ignorant and stupid decisions. They could always make it illegal after the breakthrough takes place if it turns out to be a horrible, horrible thing, but until it occurs, we won't really know what could be.
Hmmm... well, you pretty much sold me, but I still wonder about the subscription fee. Because they can be changed at any time on a whim, subscription services always bother me, and even moreso for the realm of P2P, which can be very finicky depending on its popularity, the generosity of the users, and even the time of day. But otherwise, a damn good arguement for uServ.
My apologies if I'm reading you wrong but.... does this mean that you think it's wrong to illegitimately use unlicensed "boxed" software, but that to use shareware in the same way is okay?
Actually, you kind of are reading me wrong. In the context of my post, the problem I had with uServ was the subscription fee. The white paper states "We believe the uServ service can therefore be profitably offered for a small yearly fee". That seems counterproductive to me. For one thing, it isn't the good alternative to free hosting services that it pretends to be, because it isn't free. That's like saying that Adobe Photoshop is a good alternative to freeware photo editors that have ads in them. Obviously, Photoshop wouldn't be, because it isn't FREE, and the reason people put up with freeware programs that have ads in them is because they cost absolutely nothing. Also, with a subscription service in place, uServ isn't anywhere near as up-front as shareware. With shareware, you test it, you pay for it once, and then you own it forever. With subscription services, IBM could just wait until it had a large user base and then decide to up the yearly subscription fee by a very large number, leaving you either with IBM or right back in the wasteland of free hosting services or desperately trying to host your site off your cable modem.
In short, I just don't see how a service that makes you pay a subscription fee while taking up your bandwidth and your overall computer speed at the same time is so much better than either putting up with a free hosting service and its ads or just paying for hosting through a web hosting service. Without being free like the majority of P2P file-swapping services are, I just don't see how uServ has an edge over its more traditional web hosting competition.
The white paper talks about letting people use this program for a fee... but isn't the point of P2P, at least in 90% of cases, to be a way for people that don't have the money for big web servers and T1 lines to serve files and content? It talks about how this is a good alternative to free web hosting services, yet it isn't free, which does not make it a viable option for people that are looking for a FREE web hosting service. If people were willing to pay to serve content, why would they choose this over uploading their files to the server of a web hosting service they would pay for? The biggest and most important difference between those two, it seems, are that this way of hosting content will take up a lot more of your computer's speed and its internet connection than simply uploading your files to a hosting service would.
If this were a freeware/shareware/open source P2P web hosting program, I'd be thrilled. In fact, I would already have a web page up on it, because I've been looking for just such a solution. But a closed source program that I have to pay a subscription fee for, with a larger fee if I want its fullest abilities? Compared to a hosting service that wants a subscription fee but doesn't take up my internet connection or bog down my computer with continuous server processes, this "P2P Web Hosting (Subscription) Service" is just reinventing the wheel by making it a triangle.
They backed down from the threat, and allowed Felten to publish his paper without prosecution. They were being assholes and at some point they decided to stop being assholes. In my mind, that qualifies as rectifying the situation.
This article really opened my eyes. It made me realize something important. Slashdot and 2600 always paint a grim, horrible picture of judges, telling us that they decided after only twenty-five minutes of debate, that they're always completely uninformed, etcetera. But in this case, Felten, the EFF, and their vocal supporters like Slashdot and 2600 are the ones who are wrong.
The RIAA is clearly an evil organization. They and their cohorts like Disney and the MPAA even make open statements about how privacy laws are an obstacle to their profits. There's no question that they are evil. But judges have to take cases, at least for the most part, on an action-by-action basis. In this case, the RIAA did something clearly evil (threatening Felten), but they then rectified it. All speculation about their motives aside, they DID rectify it, for whatever reason. Yet after they rectify it, Felten and the EFF try to go after the RIAA in an attempt to get a fully illegal and immoral immunity from prosecution, despite the lack of an ongoing controversy or action on the RIAA's part. If it were the RIAA asking the courts for the right never to be sued by scientific researchers or the EFF, all of us would've said that their actions were illegal, immoral, and just plain ridiculous. But when scientific researchers and the EFF ask the courts for the right never to be seued by the RIAA, we hail it as a wonderful thing and call its rejection a blow against freedom. That's just ridiculous.
I fully believe that the RIAA and the DMCA are evil, and that Felten should not be stopped from publishing his work. But the RIAA deserves their right to sue, just like we have the right to sue them. Felten's attempts to get immunity against being sued by the RIAA is playing dirty and going even below their level, because by asking for a right not to be sued, Felten was trying to take away the RIAA's freedom to sue people that may legitimately wrong them. While some may call this flamebait, I just think that this is one of those instances where we were wrong. This case wasn't a fight for freedom. It was a fight to take away the freedoms of others because we don't like what they're doing and the way they use their rights. Isn't that exactly what the RIAA has been trying to do to us?
Just because your opponent fights dirty doesn't mean that it isn't wrong for you to do the same.
For anyone that's unfortunately bound to Windows and is looking for a new file sharing service to jump to, I'd recommend WinMX. It's a great P2P program that has always had whatever I'm looking for (and what I look for is pretty damn obscure, i.e. Asian pop and such), yet has still remained firmly under the radars of the RIAA and MPAA. Of course, at the rate the RIAA is going, every currently existing P2P program will be gone eventually (though they will be replaced with new ones in the mean time), but I estimate that you'll get at least six or ten months of use, and possibly much more, out of this one.
And by the way, for those that are modding this... I do not work for WinMX in any capacity, nor do I have any financial or personal stake in it. I'm just trying to help the people that looked at this article and thought, "Well, damn. What's left for me to go to now that doesn't suck?".
Slashdot Mirror
id Software, as always, is being responsible and generous to its fans. Instead of keeping its source code under wraps until the game is released to the public domain by copyright law some time in the year NEVER, id Software has decided to release the source code for a game that it is no longer using so that the fans may tinker with it and learn from it.
If any of the people from id Software are reading this (which there is a chance of): Thank you. You rock.
Of course we do. Just think about it. If a console system somehow played games from the PS2, GameCube, XBox, Super Nintendo, Genesis, and ROMs downloaded off the internet for any of those systems AND Mame... wouldn't you buy it? If an HDTV set somehow came with built-in VHS player and a built-in DVD player that could play VCDs, any music format you wanted on a CD or CD-R, AND burn both CDs, CD-Rs, and DVDs, including off another DVD... wouldn't you buy it? Of course you would. These things would do anything, take up less space than several different consoles/players, be much easier to setup, and would probably cost less.
The point? The thing that does everything, does it right, and does it at an acceptable price is the best thing out there. If Linux could run just about any program you wanted, no matter what operating system it was originally meant for, it would be the perfect operating system. It would be the operating system equivalent to a Swiss Army Knife, and would be a perfect alternative to the system that most computer users have to put up with now: Use Windows alone or have Windows on one partition and Linux on the other. Because of the limitations of work, school, and gaming, most people NEED to use some Windows programs. To make it more accessable to those people, Linux should definitely run Windows programs, and if possible flawlessly.
Even though the email says "our", the email address isn't from "@robotstreetgang.com", and the server obviously wasn't ready for a Slashdotting, despite the fact that the owner of the site was supposed to have sent this in. Anyone else wondering whether or not some guy just decided to take his chances at getting a little site that he has a grudge against Slashdotted? After all, making their bandwidth bill take a flying leap is one of the best ways to seriously impact the life of a nameless, faceless person that you have a grudge against on the internet.
::shrug:: Just a thought.
The "commercially produced portable PlayStation" is the PSOne, and it's sort of awkward. It's basically a console with an optional screen attached. You still need to hook up the controllers externally, it needs a constant power connection to run, etc. It's only barely portable, whereas his PlayStation Portable is a complete unit that fits in your hand and can run either on batteries or a wall connection.
He uses Active Matrix screens from 2.5" RCA portable TVs, which run about $150 each. Basically, he just takes the thing out of the case, replaces the tube with LEDs, and then pops the thing in his custom portable case and hooks the composite connection on the console to the composite connection on the screen. Surprisingly simple, but still sort of pricy.
Sports games? How about FIGHTING games? In the first Street Fighter II game for the GBA, you have to change the button arrangement in the options when you switch between characters to get the most special moves out of each character, and in the second one, they just plain cut out two of the buttons. :(
A controller with four main buttons and two or more secondary buttons isn't absolutely necessary for a solid gaming system, but it's certainly necessary for ports from a system that had six main buttons.
"Free speech" is a very simple concept that means exactly what it says. It is the freedom to say what you want. It's the freedom to talk about anything, and that freedom should certainly extend beyond spoken words and into other forms of speech, such as books, movies, music, and video games.
The government deciding that it's alright for you to stand on a crate and claim that the government sucks, but deciding that you shouldn't be able to say, read, listen to, watch, or in this case play what you want to, is not free speech. Free speech is the government not messing with speech AT ALL. What you're talking about is limited, but certainly not free, speech.
IANAE (I Am Not An Expert), but I believe that 190,000 million theoretical operations per second would be approximately 190 first-run Mac G4 processors. So we're definitely talking about the supercomputer range. Somewhere around the computing power of a 130GHz processor system (extremely rough estimate).
Is there any way this story could get bumped up to the front page? Is there a system for that? Because personally, I think this is incredibly interesting, especially in the comments. This story brings up a deep and interesting question: In GTA, you can choose to be fairly good (ambulance, taxi, police officer) or incredibly evil (fucking and murdering prostitutes, doing drug runs, stealing cars). That's the nature of an extremely open game world where you can do almost anything. So if Australia's going to start banning games for what you CAN do instead of what you must do, will MMORPGs be banned for "sexually explicit dialogue" because people can talk dirty to each other in them? Will gaming worlds that are becoming increasingly more open have to restrict themselves in some areas to avoid being banned, thus cheapening the reality of the game in the internationally released version?
These questions are very important for the future of gaming, i.e. incredibly open and diverse gaming worlds.
Honestly, yes. It's called "free speech". Morally, people should be allowed to create video games that allow us to bash and kill a prostitute for money after having sex with her. And morally, I should be allowed to play that game that allows me to bash and kill a prostitute for money after having sex with her. However, the government of Oz seems to differ in the legal department of this issue. Because they're prudish assholes.
First off, please pardon my ignorance. I'm sure I'm wrong here somewhere, and this post is more of a question than a statement.
Couldn't some sort of antitrust or similar unfair business practices suit be brought against either of these companies for intentionally waiting until after a PVR market has built up to patent their "inventions", thereby creating a secondary business model for themselves that exploits their entire market? If either of these companies were legitimately patenting their "inventions", wouldn't they have filed their patents long before a market of similar products and businesses had sprung up?
And on another thought... can't these patents be easily overturned, anyway? There must be some reason why neither Atari, Mattel, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, or Microsoft has been able to successfully patent "a console system primarily used for playing proprietary gaming software".
Any lawyers here, by any chance? I vaguely remembered Slashdot having a few regular lawyers that sounded pretty credible.
A few people here have said that they'd never let a ten-year-old play Doom or Metal Gear Solid 2, let them watch gory movies, or let them play with some of these toys. Try to think of your own life and get some perspective. Was your TV viewing limited to Jesus Christ's Bible Adventures when you were ten? Do you owe your current well-being to how sheltered you were as a kid, having not seen a gun fight on TV until you were old enough to drive, and having not even HEARD of sex until you were no longer jailbait?
Personally, I don't think you do. I think you played Wolfenstein 3D and Doom when you were younger. I think you watched a few horror movies in your pre-pubescent days. I think you even hid a Playboy under your bed, or at the very least made regular visits to Playboy.com when you were twelve. And I think you certainly watched a popular kiddie show or two as a kid, and bought lots of action figures for it, too. You had G.I. Joe toys, or a Leonardo figure, or a ghost from Ghost Busters, or a big toy of the Yamato... you had those, or something very much like them. And you're fine, aren't you? In fact, you know an entire generation of people that's fine, multiple generations in fact.
Try to think of how YOU were raised and what YOUR life was like before you tell people that it's wrong for a ten year old to play Quake 3 or watch a violent movie. Stop listening to the endless stream of propaganda and actually take some time to think for yourself. These people think that they can successfully force their illogical bullshit on others if they yell loud enough and keep repeating it endlessly. Don't let them do that. Think for yourself. Maybe you'll still agree with them after you take that time to think... but I don't think you will. Because I think your life is a text book case of how to warp a child and "turn their heart dark", but somehow, by the same improbable miracle that 99% of all other people experience, you turned out fine... because this "violence desensitizes children" thing is bullshit.
And there's no way in Hell you didn't watch Looney Toons when you were a kid. There just isn't.
While I agree on isolating children from reality being a bad thing, testing cosmetics on animals is not something that should be taken lightly. On farms, animals are given a fairly good life and then killed almost instantly by having their head decapitated in a single, strong blow before their corpses are slaughtered. Farmers intentionally make sure that the animal feels no pain and does not suffer. Cosmetic testing burns, maims, and tortures an animal before it kills it. Not only are animals' flesh burned by ridiculous amounts of acidic chemicals, but the people in the testing facilities will also slash an animal repeatedly and pour similar chemicals in the wound, as well as drowning other animals in the chemicals and reusing animals that survive tests over and over until they die. In fact, these people pretty much torture the animals in every way you can think of. Pouring acidic chemicals in their eyes, in their wounds, on furred skin, on exposed skin, on skin that's been worn with razors... it's just ridiculous, especially when many other facilities just do the same tastes on cell cultures that have no ability to process pain.
PETA sucks... but they have a point here.
Personally, I see that as simply tradition fighting against new forms of enjoyment. I mean, really... in that sentence, what you basically said was that you almost cancelled a vacation because you wanted to relax and have fun (playing a game). People act like being addicted to games, which I suppose is possible, is like being addicted to gambling, smoking, or alchohol. A gaming addiction is an addiction to a non-harmful form of fun. It's like being "addicted" to football by watching it religiously every week, or being "addicted" to playing baseball with your high school team.
It looks like this thing is practically patenting copying video to a hard drive... so couldn't not only Tivo, but also RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, tons of independant video players, etc. be used as examples of prior art if SonicBlue were to go after anyone with this?
Seems like a pretty weak and unenforcable patent when prior art is EVERYWHERE.
Build a good site, update it regularly, and offer visible community features. But DON'T let the community be the entire site.
The real key is that last part. Personally, I think sites like Wikipedia are poorly designed because the community is the entire website. That's just plain stupid, and it takes several years or a bizarre miracle to work. The real way to build a community is to create a regularly updated site with both news and content, tethered to a broad but somewhat specific subject. In other words, you want Slashdot. Slashdot news and articles centered around the topic of technology, with a community built up around it via comments/talkback.
But I think the real key, in the end, is not to look like you're really trying to build a community. If you just build a good site and offer community features, that community will build up and eventually it will be large enough that it can either become a main feature of the site or 90% of the site itself, creating its own content off-shoots like Ask Slashdot.
Oh, and for those that claim that this guy isn't responsible for the holes in Microsoft software, and that thus this guy is actually pretty good at his job of protecting MS's network: You're half right. He DOESN'T have anything to do with the Microsoft software security holes. However, he was the one in charge of protecting Microsoft's network during the incident six months to a year ago when a hacker group hacked into Microsoft's network, completely 0wning the whole thing, and Microsoft didn't find out about it until the group had already been making regular visits to the network for three months, downloading the majority of the network (possibly the entire thing, I don't think anyone's really sure) during that time. And while some may wave that off as "one intrusion in X amount of time", remember that these guys got in and then kept making REGULAR VISITS to the Microsoft network without anyone noticing for three months. So while only one group managed to do it, it sounds like they managed to keep doing it on an almost daily basis. That makes for a pretty bad security record, and it would've been a huge fucking disaster if this had been done during the upcoming era of widespread .NET and Passport services, or only a "somewhat large fucking disaster" during the current era of consumer and business consumer information being regularly logged through XP's activation madness.
I guess this proves that from now on, the government will be too busy looking at our computers to even take a passing glance at the situation of their own.
Don't you remember six months to a year or so ago when Microsoft discovered that a hacker group had had access to their network for over three months and had downloaded just about the entire network from them during that time? Whether or not he's responsible for the security holes, he still isn't right for the job. Microsoft got 0wn3d on his watch, and they got 0wn3d for an extraordinarily long amount of time in comparison to most network intrusions.
Actually, we sort of are dealing with human-non-human hybrids and chimeras in this situation. Because there is NO legal guideline regarding the mixing of human and non-human DNA in Japan right now, it is legal to both create an animal expressing a human protein or two AND a full hybrid/chimera. Without any sort of guideline AT ALL, this legalizes both of those things, and personally, I don't have a problem with that. I like Japan's hands-off approach to technology. So far, it has worked. And while the idea of derivative species of humanity may seem strange to us, science might actually find a useful application for them that we may not even be able to consider right now.
I'm with Japan on this one. I believe in actually achieving a scientific breakthrough, and then seeing if the result of the breakthrough is wrong, rather than just making ignorant and stupid decisions. They could always make it illegal after the breakthrough takes place if it turns out to be a horrible, horrible thing, but until it occurs, we won't really know what could be.
Hmmm... well, you pretty much sold me, but I still wonder about the subscription fee. Because they can be changed at any time on a whim, subscription services always bother me, and even moreso for the realm of P2P, which can be very finicky depending on its popularity, the generosity of the users, and even the time of day. But otherwise, a damn good arguement for uServ.
Actually, you kind of are reading me wrong. In the context of my post, the problem I had with uServ was the subscription fee. The white paper states "We believe the uServ service can therefore be profitably offered for a small yearly fee". That seems counterproductive to me. For one thing, it isn't the good alternative to free hosting services that it pretends to be, because it isn't free. That's like saying that Adobe Photoshop is a good alternative to freeware photo editors that have ads in them. Obviously, Photoshop wouldn't be, because it isn't FREE, and the reason people put up with freeware programs that have ads in them is because they cost absolutely nothing. Also, with a subscription service in place, uServ isn't anywhere near as up-front as shareware. With shareware, you test it, you pay for it once, and then you own it forever. With subscription services, IBM could just wait until it had a large user base and then decide to up the yearly subscription fee by a very large number, leaving you either with IBM or right back in the wasteland of free hosting services or desperately trying to host your site off your cable modem.
In short, I just don't see how a service that makes you pay a subscription fee while taking up your bandwidth and your overall computer speed at the same time is so much better than either putting up with a free hosting service and its ads or just paying for hosting through a web hosting service. Without being free like the majority of P2P file-swapping services are, I just don't see how uServ has an edge over its more traditional web hosting competition.
If this were a freeware/shareware/open source P2P web hosting program, I'd be thrilled. In fact, I would already have a web page up on it, because I've been looking for just such a solution. But a closed source program that I have to pay a subscription fee for, with a larger fee if I want its fullest abilities? Compared to a hosting service that wants a subscription fee but doesn't take up my internet connection or bog down my computer with continuous server processes, this "P2P Web Hosting (Subscription) Service" is just reinventing the wheel by making it a triangle.
The whole thing just seems... kind of stupid.
They backed down from the threat, and allowed Felten to publish his paper without prosecution. They were being assholes and at some point they decided to stop being assholes. In my mind, that qualifies as rectifying the situation.
The RIAA is clearly an evil organization. They and their cohorts like Disney and the MPAA even make open statements about how privacy laws are an obstacle to their profits. There's no question that they are evil. But judges have to take cases, at least for the most part, on an action-by-action basis. In this case, the RIAA did something clearly evil (threatening Felten), but they then rectified it. All speculation about their motives aside, they DID rectify it, for whatever reason. Yet after they rectify it, Felten and the EFF try to go after the RIAA in an attempt to get a fully illegal and immoral immunity from prosecution, despite the lack of an ongoing controversy or action on the RIAA's part. If it were the RIAA asking the courts for the right never to be sued by scientific researchers or the EFF, all of us would've said that their actions were illegal, immoral, and just plain ridiculous. But when scientific researchers and the EFF ask the courts for the right never to be seued by the RIAA, we hail it as a wonderful thing and call its rejection a blow against freedom. That's just ridiculous.
I fully believe that the RIAA and the DMCA are evil, and that Felten should not be stopped from publishing his work. But the RIAA deserves their right to sue, just like we have the right to sue them. Felten's attempts to get immunity against being sued by the RIAA is playing dirty and going even below their level, because by asking for a right not to be sued, Felten was trying to take away the RIAA's freedom to sue people that may legitimately wrong them. While some may call this flamebait, I just think that this is one of those instances where we were wrong. This case wasn't a fight for freedom. It was a fight to take away the freedoms of others because we don't like what they're doing and the way they use their rights. Isn't that exactly what the RIAA has been trying to do to us?
Just because your opponent fights dirty doesn't mean that it isn't wrong for you to do the same.
And by the way, for those that are modding this... I do not work for WinMX in any capacity, nor do I have any financial or personal stake in it. I'm just trying to help the people that looked at this article and thought, "Well, damn. What's left for me to go to now that doesn't suck?".