The trouble is that there needs to be honesty on both sides. The pro-restriction side is fundamentally dishonest.
A good example of this is region encoding in video games. Some of these games have been restricted by Sony (or whoever) from _ever_ being released in the United States. Sony's basic philosophy about them is "you can't play those games, even if you legally purchase them. We don't want you to import a Playstation and we will go after you if you try to fix your Playstation so it can play them. Or if you try to reverse engineer an emulator so you can play them on a PC even if a judge specifically rules it legal to do so in a court of law.(See Bleem!)" (Which, incidentally, is the only way I've ever been able to get my legally purchased Playstation version of Rockman 3 to work since they also came up with technological fixes for mod-chipping that have no effect on "pirated" copies of games but screw up legitimate Japanese copies of games. Grrrr....)
The same thing can be said of movies, "We won't release it unless we think it will be profitable but we won't let things in our back catalog become public domain either. We will manage to get around illegally restricting stuff that should be public domain by lobbying for eternal copyright extensions. If that means that aspects of culture are annihilated, so be it, it is better than having new movies compete with some sort of Project Gutenburg for classic movies."
Or music, "We don't care if our new copy protection means you can't play our CD's in your player of choice. You are an insignificant minority who won't impact our bottom line."
What has happened is the copyright holders are doing their best to put themselves on the same level, morally, with warez dudez, and as far as I'm concerned, suceeding. Actually, suceeding too well, as I currently put so-called pirates on a higher plane than Sony, Disney and the rest.
Actually, I don't think the author is out of touch, he has an agenda. The agenda of this article is to increase the RIAA tax on blank CD media. Whether or not CDs are passe for listening to music, admitting they are wouldn't help that cause, though it would help pass SSSCA.
Kent: Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just lost the picture, but,
uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft
has been taken over -- "conquered", if you will -- by a master
race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this
vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men
or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no
stopping them; the ants will soon be here.
And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to
remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful
in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar
caves.
The telcos are part of the system, they are still quasi-governmental organizations (part of the U. S. socialist system, ever since the government created the original Bell monopoly.)
The FCC never makes any decisions without the stamp of approval of the big telcos, which is who it exists to serve, after all.
The other problem is that when government gets into the game of providing bad solutions to things which may or may not be problems, they undermine efforts to create a technological solution. Let's take for example, the article today on/. about 3rd World Internet cafes providing cheap phone service. Imagine that in those countries the government had come up with a plan to tax people who's income was above a certain arbitrary amount (people who are most likely also poor by U. S. standards) to provide cheaper long-distance phone service to people who were relatively poor. This makes the phone company happy, because it guarantees them an income. It make the poor people who want to call their relatives in the U. S. happy, because they can afford it. However, the people who make more than the poverty level are know being taxed essentially to pay the phone company, and there is no incentive to come up with a technological solution except for as a curiousity. (Notice that the article states that ISP telephony is available stateside but it is mostly a curiousity for technophiles.)
Of course, one of the reasons Internet cafes take off in the third world is because there isn't much regulation of them. One of my friends from Thailand was recently having to make a decison about whether or not to return there permanently to take care of a relative. Of course, her problem was that employment there was hard to come by. However, she could open a Playstation 2 or Internet cafe out of her home and make money that way. Imagine doing that in the US, I expect that sooner or later the cops would be by, with complaints you were violating zoning laws or some other laws and shut you down.
Oh, and one more thing, remember before you cry for the "underserved" that often these people make their decisions knowing that society will subsidize where they choose to live. I know plenty of people here in Florida who are moderately well off, pensions plus social security, diverse stock portfolios, not super wealthy but definitely not poor who choose to live in isolated, undeveloped areas of this state knowing that the government will take care of any little inconveniences at the expense of all of us. These people wouldn't move out to what my Dad calls "the back of beyond" to live their dream retirements if they didn't know that all the little conveniences of modern life weren't going to be brought to them. They aren't farmers or anything else, just idle retirees.
In fact, I consider it interesting that Leftists, who are often environmentalists as well as socialists would want government to subsidize relatively well off, idle people to build up formerly pristine wilderness areas. The best way to prevent people from moving out to these areas would be to make them pay all the costs themselves.
Unfortunately for all of us, then the political class would lose some of the support of the big utility companies, who they are providing with a guaranteed income extorted from working people through government coercion.
Yes, I really feel sorry for the "underserved"....
For a while if you were looking for reasonable priced games in the U. S., the Dreamcast has been a good choice (I got Unreal Tournament new for just $9.00), too...
I just want to point out that the first computer I ever owned (well, technically my parents owned it but it ended up as mine when my Dad bought a second one), the Atari 800, used a TV as a monitor. It was a real computer, it had the BASIC and PILOT programming languages, we eventually got a floppy drive to go along with a tape drive, and a modem to log on to Compuserve and local BBSs. Oh, and a printer for using the cartridge based(!) word processor (in those days, cut & paste was the big new thing in UI design.)
How did I solve the problem you mention? Simple, the Atari computer had a dedicated TV for it's monitor. It was a small one, but it meant that if I wanted to play M. U. L. E. or type in a program from Compute! magazine, I didn't need to quit when someone else was watching TV. (Also all the hardware fit on a desk. Of course, in those days I don't think they had mice, my pointing device was an Atari joystick.)
Heck, right now I have my Sega Dreamcast hooked up, along with a keyboard and a mouse to a VGA monitor on a desk in my office using the VGA box (with a boom box for sound). Since it doesn't have any serious rewritable storage it isn't useful for much beyond game playing and Web surfing (unfortunately it seems that interest in porting Linux or BSD to it has waned somewhat). However, it could be made into a computer so easily...
Still, since there is a VGA box available for XBox (though I think it is 3rd party and not MS endorsed), you could do the same thing.
I used to MUCK. I never spent as much time on it as the true fanatics (in other words, I never had any trouble disappearing from the MUCKs I was on if real life was more interesting or more important) but I understand what is called "addiction." It is simple peer pressure, no different than its offline equivalent. If you are on a MUCK and want to be well known and popular, you have to spend a lot of time there. Even if it isn't one where you have a character to build up, people will just forget who you are and ignore you if you don't spend much time on a MUCK.
The trouble with articles like this and many of the comments I read is that they use the word addiction and thus ignore the social dimension of stuff like Everquest or Asheron's Call. This is not "Pac Man Fever" we're talking about here, but most of the articles are just portraying it as such. In other words, Pac Man was "addictive" these other games are more advanced and therefore "more addictive." They don't take into account that these have almost no relationship to Pac Man and the like and are more like British Legends on Compuserve back in the 80's if you want to trace their lineage (and yes, I'm sure there were other MUDs before that that's just the first one I was ever on.)
By ignoring the peer pressure and social issues, people are getting no insights on these games.
The metaphor is all wrong, if people want a metaphor for online gaming, it is more like joining a gang or a fraternity than it is like getting hooked on crack.
...and protect yourself by posting it anonymously or maybe through the EFF. (At least consult with them first.) Bleem was a 100% legal product (Reverse engineered Playstation emulator) that did not cut into Sony's profit margins at all. It actually made them money, but it had the potential to undermine their dominance in the market.
So, Sony kept suing and losing until Bleem! went out of business. This was after Bleem! had been explicitely declared legal by the courts.
Companies like Sony operate under a different set of laws than ordinary people need to follow. (I mean, honestly, isn't that what the whole Dmitry Sklyarov case was about?)
The NRA represents gun owners, not gun companies. Sometimes, the NRA will manage to oppose bills that the gun manufacturers want (one possible example, banning cheap foriegn made guns). There has been some reporting on this, but I haven't got any links (or any time to look for them at work.)
The NRA is a fairly effective lobbying group.
But, GeekPAC? Don't they realize that the elderly gentlemen who run this country are going to have preconcieved notions about that terminiology?
Another problem is this: Is the "books are better" crowd trying to say to me that reading Stephen King's The Tommyknockers is a more intellectually stimulating experience than watching The Prisoner or I, Claudius just because The Tommyknockers is a book? (Yes, I realize that I, Claudius was originally a book, I'm merely asking if any book is considered to be better than any TV show.)
Because, frankly, that is a position I stridently disagree with.
What about Shakespeare's plays? Those weren't intended to be read but to be performed. Is reading Shakespeare better than watching it on PBS? (By the way, the answer to that question is: Probably not unless the director took horrible liberties with the text.)
Mandrake does this. Anytime I log into my Mandrake box as root, it says "You do not seem to have configured a source for security updates, would you like to do this now?"
Later decided that they changed their minds and broke it up, and this is supposed to give me some faith that government can do good? What about all the damage government did to telecommunications in the mean time? (The Bell monopoly was enforced by the SSSCA's of its day. There was a time when you needed AT&T's permission to hook up a modem The Origins of Tymnet.)
I should point out that I am not an anarchist, protecting people from fraud is one of the police functions that a government should do. However, just because government occaisionally does it's proper job doesn't mean I want it to expand into other areas like controlling what I eat, drink, read, write, and spend money on.
For every good use of government, it seems, they throw up an SSSCA or DMCA. Be aware of the government's culpability in the whole Enron fiasco, Myths About Enron, which they have managed to successfully hide in most of the mainstream media.
Penn Gillette once remarked that the old saying on Candid Camera, "It's fun to laugh at yourself," was just a lie. He said the genius of that show was that it made fools of people and got them to pretend they liked it.
Slashdot Mirror
A good example of this is region encoding in video games. Some of these games have been restricted by Sony (or whoever) from _ever_ being released in the United States. Sony's basic philosophy about them is "you can't play those games, even if you legally purchase them. We don't want you to import a Playstation and we will go after you if you try to fix your Playstation so it can play them. Or if you try to reverse engineer an emulator so you can play them on a PC even if a judge specifically rules it legal to do so in a court of law.(See Bleem!)" (Which, incidentally, is the only way I've ever been able to get my legally purchased Playstation version of Rockman 3 to work since they also came up with technological fixes for mod-chipping that have no effect on "pirated" copies of games but screw up legitimate Japanese copies of games. Grrrr....)
The same thing can be said of movies, "We won't release it unless we think it will be profitable but we won't let things in our back catalog become public domain either. We will manage to get around illegally restricting stuff that should be public domain by lobbying for eternal copyright extensions. If that means that aspects of culture are annihilated, so be it, it is better than having new movies compete with some sort of Project Gutenburg for classic movies."
Or music, "We don't care if our new copy protection means you can't play our CD's in your player of choice. You are an insignificant minority who won't impact our bottom line."
What has happened is the copyright holders are doing their best to put themselves on the same level, morally, with warez dudez, and as far as I'm concerned, suceeding. Actually, suceeding too well, as I currently put so-called pirates on a higher plane than Sony, Disney and the rest.
Actually, I don't think the author is out of touch, he has an agenda. The agenda of this article is to increase the RIAA tax on blank CD media. Whether or not CDs are passe for listening to music, admitting they are wouldn't help that cause, though it would help pass SSSCA.
Kent: Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just lost the picture, but, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has been taken over -- "conquered", if you will -- by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
Tell that to Bram Stoker after what King did with Salem's Lot...
He voted against the bill, even though many of his constituents were either directly NRA members or sympathetic to the cause.
I assume you mean he voted for the assault weapons ban, not against.
Hmm, that's interesting because my maternal grandfather was a newfie.
The parent post is brilliant, too bad I can't mod it up.
The FCC never makes any decisions without the stamp of approval of the big telcos, which is who it exists to serve, after all.
Of course, one of the reasons Internet cafes take off in the third world is because there isn't much regulation of them. One of my friends from Thailand was recently having to make a decison about whether or not to return there permanently to take care of a relative. Of course, her problem was that employment there was hard to come by. However, she could open a Playstation 2 or Internet cafe out of her home and make money that way. Imagine doing that in the US, I expect that sooner or later the cops would be by, with complaints you were violating zoning laws or some other laws and shut you down.
Oh, and one more thing, remember before you cry for the "underserved" that often these people make their decisions knowing that society will subsidize where they choose to live. I know plenty of people here in Florida who are moderately well off, pensions plus social security, diverse stock portfolios, not super wealthy but definitely not poor who choose to live in isolated, undeveloped areas of this state knowing that the government will take care of any little inconveniences at the expense of all of us. These people wouldn't move out to what my Dad calls "the back of beyond" to live their dream retirements if they didn't know that all the little conveniences of modern life weren't going to be brought to them. They aren't farmers or anything else, just idle retirees.
In fact, I consider it interesting that Leftists, who are often environmentalists as well as socialists would want government to subsidize relatively well off, idle people to build up formerly pristine wilderness areas. The best way to prevent people from moving out to these areas would be to make them pay all the costs themselves.
Unfortunately for all of us, then the political class would lose some of the support of the big utility companies, who they are providing with a guaranteed income extorted from working people through government coercion.
Yes, I really feel sorry for the "underserved" ....
Oh, and if you get a GP 32, a smart media card, and go to GP Developers to get the free launcher, you can get games for it for free....
Wolfenstein 3D (the original shareware) and Spear of Destiny (the original shareware) run really well, and they didn't cost me a dime. (Doom is coming along nicely too..)
For a while if you were looking for reasonable priced games in the U. S., the Dreamcast has been a good choice (I got Unreal Tournament new for just $9.00), too...
How did I solve the problem you mention? Simple, the Atari computer had a dedicated TV for it's monitor. It was a small one, but it meant that if I wanted to play M. U. L. E. or type in a program from Compute! magazine, I didn't need to quit when someone else was watching TV. (Also all the hardware fit on a desk. Of course, in those days I don't think they had mice, my pointing device was an Atari joystick.)
Heck, right now I have my Sega Dreamcast hooked up, along with a keyboard and a mouse to a VGA monitor on a desk in my office using the VGA box (with a boom box for sound). Since it doesn't have any serious rewritable storage it isn't useful for much beyond game playing and Web surfing (unfortunately it seems that interest in porting Linux or BSD to it has waned somewhat). However, it could be made into a computer so easily...
Still, since there is a VGA box available for XBox (though I think it is 3rd party and not MS endorsed), you could do the same thing.
http://www.lik-sang.com/catalog/news.php?artc=2552
Not a mod, per say, but this kind of amateur development is important, too.
The trouble with articles like this and many of the comments I read is that they use the word addiction and thus ignore the social dimension of stuff like Everquest or Asheron's Call. This is not "Pac Man Fever" we're talking about here, but most of the articles are just portraying it as such. In other words, Pac Man was "addictive" these other games are more advanced and therefore "more addictive." They don't take into account that these have almost no relationship to Pac Man and the like and are more like British Legends on Compuserve back in the 80's if you want to trace their lineage (and yes, I'm sure there were other MUDs before that that's just the first one I was ever on.)
By ignoring the peer pressure and social issues, people are getting no insights on these games.
The metaphor is all wrong, if people want a metaphor for online gaming, it is more like joining a gang or a fraternity than it is like getting hooked on crack.
Don't forget Otaku No Video....
So, Sony kept suing and losing until Bleem! went out of business. This was after Bleem! had been explicitely declared legal by the courts.
Companies like Sony operate under a different set of laws than ordinary people need to follow. (I mean, honestly, isn't that what the whole Dmitry Sklyarov case was about?)
He must be talking about the Saturn, because the Dreamcast is extremely developer friendly.
The NRA is a fairly effective lobbying group.
But, GeekPAC? Don't they realize that the elderly gentlemen who run this country are going to have preconcieved notions about that terminiology?
Because, frankly, that is a position I stridently disagree with.
What about Shakespeare's plays? Those weren't intended to be read but to be performed. Is reading Shakespeare better than watching it on PBS? (By the way, the answer to that question is: Probably not unless the director took horrible liberties with the text.)
My reply from Senator Bill Nelson of Florida
It might help you. (If you download it, it will be more legible, but oversized. I had trouble with the scanner.)
Nag, nag, nag...
Unnatural Monopoly: Critical Moments in The Development of The Bell System Monopy
Later decided that they changed their minds and broke it up, and this is supposed to give me some faith that government can do good? What about all the damage government did to telecommunications in the mean time? (The Bell monopoly was enforced by the SSSCA's of its day. There was a time when you needed AT&T's permission to hook up a modem The Origins of Tymnet.)
I should point out that I am not an anarchist, protecting people from fraud is one of the police functions that a government should do. However, just because government occaisionally does it's proper job doesn't mean I want it to expand into other areas like controlling what I eat, drink, read, write, and spend money on.
For every good use of government, it seems, they throw up an SSSCA or DMCA. Be aware of the government's culpability in the whole Enron fiasco, Myths About Enron, which they have managed to successfully hide in most of the mainstream media.
I agree. I was just making the point that he wasn't a kid.
He was 21 years old!
Penn Gillette once remarked that the old saying on Candid Camera, "It's fun to laugh at yourself," was just a lie. He said the genius of that show was that it made fools of people and got them to pretend they liked it.