Doesn't the fact that Slashdot is called "News for Nerds," right in the logo, perpetuate the nerd stereotype for Slashdotters? (Hey, I had a co-worker jokingly say "Oh, so you are one of the nerds, eh?" But I don't see how anyone who has seen every episode of Dr. Who and collects Role Playing Games could be considered a nerd, anyway.)
Besides, I'm sure lots of Penthouse centerfolds play D&D, so who needs the Playboy ones (well, at least that's how it is in the alternate universe where I'm from... I notice things are different in this one...)
Actually, they aren't all like that. Terra and Celes are arguably the protagonists of FFIII(American Numbering System). Celes ends up with Locke at the end, (what a waste, Setzer was much cooler!) and Terra is alone at the end. Of course, it's tough to use the term protagonist with an interactive game with multiple sub-plots and characters, I'm simply using the fact that in FFIII you start out as Terra in the main world and Celes in the world of ruin.
Actually, the game that I'd compare to FF VII is Phantasy Star II, in that Nei reminds me of Aeris both in the fact that she's only partly human and she gets killed(;_;).
Of course, it is true that the plot of most RPGs (RPGs that have plots, that is) tend to involve either the horrible evil villain who is going to take over the world or the villain who is going to destroy it. So, there are some similarities in that way, between Kefka and Sepiroth. But then, aren't a lot of epic plots like that? Certainly the Star Wars series seems to fall into the same catagory...
If you want to try another J-RPG series, you could try Lunar. Lunar:SSC is coming out for PC (though not for Linux, darn it!), I like the Lunar series as much as the Final Fantasy series, myself...
For more information about the Lunar series, consult Working Designs
The article doesn't seem to mention the DMCA, it refers to the Sonny Bono Amendment prominently and the Berne Convention.
However, the story is a great example of corporate virtue (the link is for people who don't feel like cutting and pasting http://anotheruniverse.com/comics/features/superma nrights.html ).
I'd like to note this quote:
While this means legal wrangling for Superman, it doesn't mean that you'll soon see Stan Lee doing the same thing. Along with Jack Kirby, Lee created Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the rest of the Marvel Universe under a work-for-hire contract. By the letter of the law, the company hiring the writer under such a contract is considered the sole author of the work and therefore, the copyright to any character is in the company's name.
Everybody remember that the next time AOL/Warner says they are looking out for the best interests of their artists..
As far as funding open source programmers goes, I don't think creating a whole *country* on an island is necessary (if it is, why not just revolt against our government? it's worked in chiapas, mexico so far), instead why not solicit donations from rich geeks with the intent of starting housing cooperatives? Take a small, old house, pack it full of geeks who are willing to live on a budget, along with all the computer equipment and internet access necessary to create really cool stuff, and see what happens.
Heck, you don't even have to go as far as Mexico, just look at Utah. A perfect little theocracy which is only theoretically bound by US law (theoretically as in "not really"). Or we could pick a Jon Katz favorite, Walt Disney World, which seems to be able to do pretty much what it wants in the state of Florida.
The big question, though, is where you build this Utopia, and how you protect it from the outside world.
Also, contact the EFF for advice. Remember, even though they are busy and being hit from all fronts by RIAA and MPAA, they still will hopefully be able to help you. (Actually, the EFF was originally founded taking on small issues like the one you mention... Steven Jackson games versus the Secret Service springs to mind.)
Oh! And which ISP was it? I need to know so if I'm doing business with them I can drop the account, and tell them why.
The big question a person who believes in Capitalism with little or no government interference always needs to ask him/herself is "when does a corporation become a government, itself?" I'm a great fan of John Locke and his ideas about the social contract. In other words, people band together and form governments so that the biggest, strongest people don't always knock them down and take their stuff. That's why people are willing to sign away the absolute freedom they had in "the state of nature" to form governments which have the right to take their lives, liberty, and property when they break the law. Because, really, they didn't have real freedom in the state of nature, they had a completely arbitrary system. Under lawful government, people have certain expectations that they can rely on the government to keep its promises to the people. They don't believe the because they are naivé, but because they know their voice can be heard in the government.
The American system is different than other governments because it never had to deal with feudalism. We hear the phrase "a jury of ones peers" but the origin of that phrase is the fact that there was an aristocracy and peasantry, and the aristocrats could expect to be tried by other aristocrats, NOT peasants. (When Charles I of England was being tried, he refused, all the way up to the point his head was seperated from his body to acknowledge the authority of the court which tried him. This was perfectly valid according to feudalism, he was King, no one in England was his peer, and therefore none could judge him save God alone.)
In the United States, our government rejected such a system from the first (though, of course, a version of it existed in the south even in the U.S.). People were not landed gentry or aristocrats. To this very day, it is illegal for Americans to accept titles from other nations if they hope to maintain their citizenship.
Frankly, I see corporations working to create a new kind of feudalism, with these new laws that give them broad powers over society. People associated with certain corporations would have more power, simply by virtue of that association, than ordinary citizens. Remember, a big part of the basis of feudalism was land holding. The lord owned the land and the peasant worked it for him, and it would be almost impossible under the old laws for a peasant to ever truly own land. If a peasant did manage to get land of his own, well, then he wasn't a peasant anymore.
The new feudalism will be based on intellectual property, for another important way of controlling people is controlling their access to learning. Sometimes the media giants own the rights to things which the creators of those things signed over to them... but sometimes the creators of content are long dead, and possible without families. Besides which, naivé content creators can be duped or cheated out of things. We've all heard stories of disgruntled musicians having troubles with their labels.
The point is that the DMCA is a new law, it's not some old law protecting corporate rights that already existed. It is creating new, special rights for corporations at the expense of consumers' rights of fair use. It is the same with UCITA. If these were just meant to insure "fairness," wouldn't enforcing existing laws dealing with intellectual property be enough? The excuse behind this new law is new technology, but is it really about new technology? Is copying songs onto a hard drive as an MP3 really that much different than recording them onto tape? Is watching DVDs under Linux really significantly different than running Macintosh or Windows programs under each others operating systems using an emulator? Or is the "threat" of new technology merely a useful boogeyman for large corporations to use to gain sweeping new powers?
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act needs to be repealed, and the corporations deserve to suffer a backlash because of it. We already have a legally elected government, we don't need to give corporations their own policing powers (as UCITA and DMCA do). When Adam Smith referred to the "wretched spirit of monopoly" in Wealth of Nations, I don't think he only meant one company owning all the rights to something. I think he referred to those monopolies granted by the Crown, in which the government gave special economic rights to certain corporations or individuals. Well, that's what the DMCA and UCITA do. So, I feel justified in saying that free people should oppose the "wretched spirits of the DMCA and UCITA" just as strongly.
Yesterday I was hunting through my parents' garage and I found my old Atari 800 copy of Ultima III: Exodus and it got me to thinking about some of the nostalga games that are available in Windows. I've bought some of these packages (notable Sega's Smash Pack) and would like to play them natively under Linux. Have you ever considered doing native Linux ports of some of these types of older games? Would it be a trivial thing to port them to Linux, do you think or would it be more work than it was worth considering Wine?
If you can find a copy, Futuredays by Isaac Asimov is just that. Basically, Asimov analyses a bunch of 19th Century French Trading cards based arount the theme of the year 2000. They contain things like mechanical hairdressers, motorized battle wagons, and radium heating (i.e. a piece of radium suspended in a thing that looks something like a fireplace... scary!)
The biggest thing in these cards was of course, airtravel and travel in general. I think the people who made them saw the way travel was going to change the world, though they didn't get the details right. The had no ideas about the information age, but after all that would be easily eclipsed by the huge travel revolutions that was occuring in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The biggest problem of today, and a problem that gets dressed up in many different ways is the concept of greed. People have a tendency to think that greedy people are the ones who have the most chance of changing things in the world, and that non-greedy people are ultimately not going to matter. This kind of social pressure reminds me of a story I heard that comes from England during The Great War (WWI). Ok, the story involved a young communist who was a conscientious objector to the war. (Incidentally, I am not promoting communism here, but I believe in giving people all the facts in a given situation. I personally think that the communist systems that have existed in the world have often been run by people motivated by greed.) To him, the war was being fought for the upper class that were his real enemies (in all the participating countries) and the soldiers who went off to fight the war were fools. However, throughout the country, able bodied men who refused to go off to fight the war were branded as cowards. No one was willing to look very deeply at their philosophical objections to the war. This fellow finally went off to fight in the war after a pretty young girl dropped a white feather in his lap (i.e. saying in a silent way, "You are healthy and you are here in England and not at the front, therefore, you are a coward.")
That's the real trouble with our modern greed based culture, TV shows like "Who wants to marry a multi-millionaire?" and the like show that money and material success are the true measure of a person. Most people would chuckle at a person who had a chance to sell out and make millions who chose instead to help society, at least that's the impression I get from the media. The first thing they'll do is castigate the person for naiveté, the next after that is impugn the person's motives, "No one is that altruistic, it must be a scam."
The big question though, is are greedy people happy? I would say that people who are greedy will be on the whole less happy than people who are not. They'll be more driven, perhaps, more ambitious, but not happy. This has nothing to do with rich or poor, either, I'm talking about people who think of greed as a cardinal virtue, whatever their tax bracket.
One thing any individual can do is to drop the "Greed is good" mentality from their own mind. There are better motivations to get you to success, such as idealism. Greed is just an artificial lust, it is an unfulfilled desire. Unfulfilled desires lead to suffering until they are rejected (ahem, this is not my own idea, of course, it comes from Buddhism) or fullfilled. I wonder when you look at some of these incredibly rich people driving things like the battle over deCSS who always want more, more, more if greed is even a fulfillable desire?
I think greed is more like compulsive gambling. A desire that goes on, without end.
Hrm... If I were you, I'd put my dog under a spot light and ask her,
"Who do you work for? Who put you up to this? Sony? Microsoft? Nintendo?"
I mean, it can't be a coincidence.
Of course, if she squeled you'd have to protect her from any other dogs involved in the conspiracy... see "Thomas Edison's Shaggy Dog" by James Thurber for details...
Mind you, I'm not being smug here, I gave my Atari 800 to a kid;_; I get depressed about it now and then.. I hope she found it to be an inspiration.
Ok, here's the thing, this definately something that Sony wants. I mean, the laws in Japan are extremely favorable to megacorporations. In past years, there was a fight over whether it was even legal to sell used games under Japanese copyright laws:
Sony has worked very hard to keep Americans, Japanese and Europeans from buying and using import products. For example, a lot of the new Japanese games that come out contain code which can detect whether you have a mod-chip in your Playstation (Dino Crisis is the best example I can think of. This detection can be beaten, but it is starting to get into the "it's more trouble than it is worth catagory."). They do not want people to be able to region jump.
In my case, they have thoroughly alienated my business. I have no interest in Sony products any more, and won't buy from them. Now, this isn't me proposing a boycott or anything, this is just me getting disgusted by a company that treats consumers like garbage. I'm sure Playstation II will do well, I'm sure that unlike previous systems it will be more taylored to what the bosses of Sony think each region should get. I expect to see a lot of "lowest common denominator" games come out, and people won't be able to get things from outside their region.
That's ok by me, it'll give me more money to spend on my computer.
Another point is that this case helped to define that the press is still the press, whether the words are contained on paper or on magnetic disks. You see, it was the refusal of the SS (Secret Service, but I love using that acronym in this case) to return the Cyberpunk book to Steven Jackson games that violated the Constitutional rights of SJ Games in a novel way. The breaking, entering and trashing of the offices weren't particularly new, corrupt cops had been doing it for ages. Not that they weren't serious violations, but they weren't new. It was the suppression of G.U.R.P.S. Cyperpunk that was the biggest problem, because SJ Games didn't have any printed backups. The SS just assumed they didn't have to return the book because it was stored on a hard drive as opposed to on paper.
At the time of the Secret Service raids, the game resided entirely on the hard disks they confiscated. Indeed, it was their target. They told Jackson that, based on its author's background, they had reason to believe it was a "handbook on computer crime." It was therefore inappropriate for publication, 1st Amendment or no 1st Amendment.-- CRIME AND PUZZLEMENT by John Perry Barlow
This is important when you think about the WWW, especially in recent filtering cases. I wouldn't be surprised if it was used as a precedent in the fight against the CDA (unfortunately, I haven't studied the details of that case.)
The one bright spot in this whole affair was the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In mid-1990, Mitch Kapor, John Barlow and John Gilmore formed the EFF to address this and similar outrages. It's a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the Constitutional rights of computer users. (For more information, look at the EFF web site, or write them at 1550 Bryant Street, Suite 725, San Francisco, CA 94103-4832.) The EFF provided the financial backing that made it possible for SJ Games and four Illuminati users to file suit against the Secret Service. -- from the page linked above
Do I really need to add anything to this? Ok, I will:
It's been three months as I write this and, not only has nothing been returned to them, but, according to Steve Jackson, the Secret Service will no longer take his calls. He figures that, in the months since the raid, his little company has lost an estimated $125,000. With such a fiscal hemorrhage, he can't afford a lawyer to take after the Secret Service. Both the state and national offices of the ACLU told him to "run along" when he solicited their help. -- From Crime and Puzzlement by John Perry Barlow
It was because the ACLU didn't understand the implication of this and similar cases that the EFF is necessary. The incident was an important part of THE HACKER CRACKDOWN by Bruce Sterling. It was the "Boston Massacre" of the Electronic Civil Liberties movement. It showed that government agencies, because of their unfathomable, deep seated ignorance of computers and everything related to them, were actually dangerous to individuals and companies who depended on computers for their livelyhood.
This you dismiss as unimportant? Remember this is a very old case, and also remember that when someone beats the Federal government, it is a big deal, it means the courts sided with SJ Games against the SS. That the SS was in the wrong. Hopefully, it caused the SS, FBI and other organizations to act less obviously outside the law in future cases. (Though I'm not sure that's true.) At anyrate, it showed that you can beat the government when they break the law because of ignorence and incompetence related to computer equipment.
Actually, I was in CompUSA (the big computer store around here) and they had Playstation games, which surprised me. I honestly think that the shelf space could be better used for Pc games, since you can get Playstation games anywhere (like Walmart, blockbuster, etc.) but in a store that is primarily computer products I don't really consider that they fit.
Of course, this goes back to the days when the primary place to go in a mall to get video games was stores like Software, Etc. However, these days the gaming market has expanded incredibly.
I'm tempted to respond to the Troll (parent of this thread, Rev. Null), so I will. Of course games are a huge moneymaking business themselves, and the business of business is to make money. I mean, honestly I haven't needed a new wordprocessor since I bought Lotus WordPro '96, and I'm not really expecting to ever. What's the new wordprocessor going to have that's so great? New and better ways to pass viruses around? Memory hogging cute graphical Paperclip Guys? In my opinion the only thing that continues to sell new wordprocessing software is planned obsolescence. I don't know much about spreadsheets or accounting software (seems to me spreadsheets are accounting software), but I mean if everything is E-commerce right now, doesn't that mean that companies need something to sell? Aren't games something?
Oh well, not a bad troll, if Calvin Coolidge had risen from the grave, I imagine that's what he'd write.
Ah, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, Scourge of Liberty and Friend to the Tyrant.
We really must get this damnéd thing repealed.
Of course, if you are in New Jersey, you should go to my old Alma Mater, Rutgers, anyway (where I got my B.A. in English). I think they have a more liberal use policy, here it is http://rucs.rutgers.edu/acceptabl e-use-guide.html
The trouble is hype! The informercial phenomenon was mostly seen as a way to sell cheesy, substandard merchandise that couldn't be unloaded any other way. I mean, that's just the way it has been presented. I don't know if there are informercial billionaires, but when I think of infomercials I still think of Ron Popeil pocket fisherman type stuff and Jim Carrey's classic Juiceman bit from In Living Color
However, all you ever hear about the Internet is how all the young people in America are getting to be zillionaires from it. There was even a recent, creepy, Salon Article about it just today. As Homer Simpson said, "Everyone is getting rich off the Internet and we are being left behind!"
A wise man said, "Just because you don't take an interest in politics, doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." Well, with all this huge hype, it isn't surprising that politics is taking an interest in the Internet. I jut wish people would stop thinking that everyone gettig rich was a young computer professional. Some of the people getting rich are old corporate lawyers.
It was part of the original US Constitution that there would be no Federally mandated income tax.
Of course, that was changed with an amendment and we have the current system. I think it was done to pay for American involvement in the Great War (WWI), but I'd have to double check my history books to be sure.
It's called "selective enforcement," and it's one of the reasons I'm a Libertarian. You see, the government can pile up unenforcable law after unenforcable law, until it becomes impossible even for lawyers to fully understand what is or is not against the law. Heck, with this model, they can even put up laws that contradict each other.
The key to making this model is that the police will then only enforce the law when it is politically expedient or profitable. The trouble with that is it can lead to a police state, in which the police can harrass the general population on a whim and then back it up with the huge numbers of ridiculous laws we've got.
I used to live in New Jersey, and people from NYC would come there to shop, because the taxes were lower. Well, someone in New York government came up with the bright idea of sending cops into New Jersey mall parking lots and searching for New York plates. Later they would send threatening letters to the people who were shopping in the New Jersey stores saying, "You still owe New York sales tax and you'd better pay it!"
This, of course caused friction between NJ and NY, and was eventually dropped (I think, I haven't been back in a while, it was back when Florio was governor of NJ.) Of course, the original reason that interstate commerce was supposed to be exempt from taxation was to help keep the country united so you wouldn't have a bunch of little wars between individual states, and its worked pretty well for years (well, except for a few little altercations in the past.)
It is idiotic for the Federal government to allow individual states to tax the Internet this way, because the Internet is a national and International resource. The Federal government is supposed to be responsible for things which fall into the catagory of national. Personally, I don't think there is any pressing need to tax Internet commerce, but with all the hype about the Internet goldrush it is definitely going to happen. The rational way to handle it is on the national level, not the state level.
Of course, I'd rather we didn't get these wonderful new taxes, but then I'd rather Harry Browne would be the next president rather than George Bush or Al Gore.
Ok, seems that the Taylor Family had a winery that produced some popular wines, and some big corporate Behemoth decided, "Oh, look a vast expanse of gold as far as the eye can see! Let's aquire them!"
Well, there was one stubborn Taylor who refused to sell out.
But the Behemoth got him, see, they didn't really care about the land or the wine so much as the name Taylor, which had mindshare and synergy and all that good stuff. So, he could continue to make wine... but he is legally not allowed to put his own name on it. This is the way corporations operate with their wonderful intellectual property laws, like patents, trademarks and copyrights.
So, I hope this little fable may enlighten you as to why cororate behemoths love "intellectual property," but us individuals should hate it.
Since I can't moderate this up, I figured I'd comment. The 3-4 channels thing isn't completely accurate, but I get about 10 channels and around six of them would be considered unwatchable (by normal people, a category I don't fall into, I'm afraid) because of snow and noise. I'm thinking of heading to Radio Shack and seeing if I can rig something up to improve reception, one of these days. I wonder if AOL/Warner Mega-Corp will ever try to make it illegal to buy "tools for improving TV reception?" Actually, I guess their intention is just to make it a non-issue and lobby the government to sell the airwaves being used for TV now to cell-phone companies so individuals can't rig up their own "pirate" TV station (like some people have already done with radio.)
Incidentally, the same thing seems to be happening to satellite TV. See, I'm not sure how many people here have an old-fashioned satellite dish (i.e. not those satellite-pay TV rigs that have become popular recently) but you used to be able to get network broadcasts on wildfeeds, but that seems to be more difficult now. Oh, for those of you who don't know a wild feed is when the networks are beaming their programs to their affiliates, with big black spaces where the local commercials would be. It used to be a way for us to get Babylon 5 a few days early, when they were beaming the show out. This was legal. Rich people in Canada who could afford satellite dishes like my parents' could do this too. Because, you see, no one owns the air! If you can pick up the signal, you are allowed to watch it.
Of course, I don't see my parents as often as I used to, so I don't have as much access to their dish. So it may just be when I call my Dad and say, "Hey, I missed the Simpsons, see if you can catch it on a West Coast wild feed," he just doesn't feel like hunting through Orbit to try to find it, so he says, "Sorry, we don't seem to be getting that wild feed anymore." Any satellite-dish enthusiasts out there who can verify this?
Oh, incidentally, everyone does know that they've been steadily increasing the ratio of Ads-to-show, right? One of the reasons why I don't bother paying for cable is that most of the cable channels with commercials show far too many. I'm guessing that eventually I will no longer be capable of watching network TV either for the same reason. Already, I have a hard time "watching" TV unless I'm doing something else at the same time. (Like playing games on my PC, for instance.)
Re:Networks love to bash the competition.
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They've done lots of stuff like this in the past: Alleged entertainment that makes villans or monsters of home computer users, the web, role-playing games, and even cable channel broadcasters. (I recall one cop show, for instance, where the murderer was a cable-channel operator, as part of a scheme to get access to a cable system.)
oh, don't get me started, I remember being in a one man boycott of NBC for years because of an anti-RPG propaganda piece they did called Cruel Doubt. I remember when they were reading from the Dungeon Master's Guide, which I had the exact same edition, stuff that was simply not in the book!.
Still... it was the X-Files and my brother owns the X-Files computer game, so I have to assume it was incompetance rather than deliberate malice.
If you were really educated you would know that it was Socrates who came up with catharsis trying to refute the Platonic idea that we need to banish all the poets from the city...
Your studies, if there are any, are garbage anyway because you can't legally do controlled experiments about violence with human beings and not other studies are worth a tinker's damn.
...Master of all I Survey, I have Thirteen Progressively Harder Levels...
See the "Bishop of Battle" sequence in Nightmares was the best because there was never any question that the Bishop had transformed from video game villain into supernatural real world villain. Essentially, a variation on the old "you sharpen the pencils, then the pencils sharpen you, " plots out of the old E.C. Horror comics. That's why it was cool, especially, because they didn't have video games back in the days of E.C. Horror comics. It was basically a genius machina story, like Christine, except about a video game...
Oh...um.. and this is on topic because that's how they should've done the X-Files episode, too... uh-huh... Yeah, that's the ticket..
For more information about Nightmare's consult your local Library, or click the link.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't the fact that Slashdot is called "News for Nerds," right in the logo, perpetuate the nerd stereotype for Slashdotters? (Hey, I had a co-worker jokingly say "Oh, so you are one of the nerds, eh?" But I don't see how anyone who has seen every episode of Dr. Who and collects Role Playing Games could be considered a nerd, anyway.)
Besides, I'm sure lots of Penthouse centerfolds play D&D, so who needs the Playboy ones (well, at least that's how it is in the alternate universe where I'm from... I notice things are different in this one...)
Final Fantasy: Legend of the Four Crystals
Unfortunately, I haven't seen it... because, as Chris Peterson would say, "I'm not made of money ;_;"
I kind of like the Fatal Fury OAVs and Movies, too...
Actually, the game that I'd compare to FF VII is Phantasy Star II, in that Nei reminds me of Aeris both in the fact that she's only partly human and she gets killed(;_;).
Of course, it is true that the plot of most RPGs (RPGs that have plots, that is) tend to involve either the horrible evil villain who is going to take over the world or the villain who is going to destroy it. So, there are some similarities in that way, between Kefka and Sepiroth. But then, aren't a lot of epic plots like that? Certainly the Star Wars series seems to fall into the same catagory...
If you want to try another J-RPG series, you could try Lunar. Lunar:SSC is coming out for PC (though not for Linux, darn it!), I like the Lunar series as much as the Final Fantasy series, myself...
For more information about the Lunar series, consult Working Designs
However, the story is a great example of corporate virtue (the link is for people who don't feel like cutting and pasting http://anotheruniverse.com/comics/features/superma nrights.html ).
I'd like to note this quote:
Everybody remember that the next time AOL/Warner says they are looking out for the best interests of their artists..The big question, though, is where you build this Utopia, and how you protect it from the outside world.
Oh! And which ISP was it? I need to know so if I'm doing business with them I can drop the account, and tell them why.
The American system is different than other governments because it never had to deal with feudalism. We hear the phrase "a jury of ones peers" but the origin of that phrase is the fact that there was an aristocracy and peasantry, and the aristocrats could expect to be tried by other aristocrats, NOT peasants. (When Charles I of England was being tried, he refused, all the way up to the point his head was seperated from his body to acknowledge the authority of the court which tried him. This was perfectly valid according to feudalism, he was King, no one in England was his peer, and therefore none could judge him save God alone.)
In the United States, our government rejected such a system from the first (though, of course, a version of it existed in the south even in the U.S.). People were not landed gentry or aristocrats. To this very day, it is illegal for Americans to accept titles from other nations if they hope to maintain their citizenship.
Frankly, I see corporations working to create a new kind of feudalism, with these new laws that give them broad powers over society. People associated with certain corporations would have more power, simply by virtue of that association, than ordinary citizens. Remember, a big part of the basis of feudalism was land holding. The lord owned the land and the peasant worked it for him, and it would be almost impossible under the old laws for a peasant to ever truly own land. If a peasant did manage to get land of his own, well, then he wasn't a peasant anymore.
The new feudalism will be based on intellectual property, for another important way of controlling people is controlling their access to learning. Sometimes the media giants own the rights to things which the creators of those things signed over to them... but sometimes the creators of content are long dead, and possible without families. Besides which, naivé content creators can be duped or cheated out of things. We've all heard stories of disgruntled musicians having troubles with their labels.
The point is that the DMCA is a new law, it's not some old law protecting corporate rights that already existed. It is creating new, special rights for corporations at the expense of consumers' rights of fair use. It is the same with UCITA. If these were just meant to insure "fairness," wouldn't enforcing existing laws dealing with intellectual property be enough? The excuse behind this new law is new technology, but is it really about new technology? Is copying songs onto a hard drive as an MP3 really that much different than recording them onto tape? Is watching DVDs under Linux really significantly different than running Macintosh or Windows programs under each others operating systems using an emulator? Or is the "threat" of new technology merely a useful boogeyman for large corporations to use to gain sweeping new powers?
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act needs to be repealed, and the corporations deserve to suffer a backlash because of it. We already have a legally elected government, we don't need to give corporations their own policing powers (as UCITA and DMCA do). When Adam Smith referred to the "wretched spirit of monopoly" in Wealth of Nations, I don't think he only meant one company owning all the rights to something. I think he referred to those monopolies granted by the Crown, in which the government gave special economic rights to certain corporations or individuals. Well, that's what the DMCA and UCITA do. So, I feel justified in saying that free people should oppose the "wretched spirits of the DMCA and UCITA" just as strongly.
Yesterday I was hunting through my parents' garage and I found my old Atari 800 copy of Ultima III: Exodus and it got me to thinking about some of the nostalga games that are available in Windows. I've bought some of these packages (notable Sega's Smash Pack) and would like to play them natively under Linux. Have you ever considered doing native Linux ports of some of these types of older games? Would it be a trivial thing to port them to Linux, do you think or would it be more work than it was worth considering Wine?
The biggest thing in these cards was of course, airtravel and travel in general. I think the people who made them saw the way travel was going to change the world, though they didn't get the details right. The had no ideas about the information age, but after all that would be easily eclipsed by the huge travel revolutions that was occuring in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The biggest problem of today, and a problem that gets dressed up in many different ways is the concept of greed. People have a tendency to think that greedy people are the ones who have the most chance of changing things in the world, and that non-greedy people are ultimately not going to matter. This kind of social pressure reminds me of a story I heard that comes from England during The Great War (WWI). Ok, the story involved a young communist who was a conscientious objector to the war. (Incidentally, I am not promoting communism here, but I believe in giving people all the facts in a given situation. I personally think that the communist systems that have existed in the world have often been run by people motivated by greed.) To him, the war was being fought for the upper class that were his real enemies (in all the participating countries) and the soldiers who went off to fight the war were fools. However, throughout the country, able bodied men who refused to go off to fight the war were branded as cowards. No one was willing to look very deeply at their philosophical objections to the war. This fellow finally went off to fight in the war after a pretty young girl dropped a white feather in his lap (i.e. saying in a silent way, "You are healthy and you are here in England and not at the front, therefore, you are a coward.")
That's the real trouble with our modern greed based culture, TV shows like "Who wants to marry a multi-millionaire?" and the like show that money and material success are the true measure of a person. Most people would chuckle at a person who had a chance to sell out and make millions who chose instead to help society, at least that's the impression I get from the media. The first thing they'll do is castigate the person for naiveté, the next after that is impugn the person's motives, "No one is that altruistic, it must be a scam."
The big question though, is are greedy people happy? I would say that people who are greedy will be on the whole less happy than people who are not. They'll be more driven, perhaps, more ambitious, but not happy. This has nothing to do with rich or poor, either, I'm talking about people who think of greed as a cardinal virtue, whatever their tax bracket.
One thing any individual can do is to drop the "Greed is good" mentality from their own mind. There are better motivations to get you to success, such as idealism. Greed is just an artificial lust, it is an unfulfilled desire. Unfulfilled desires lead to suffering until they are rejected (ahem, this is not my own idea, of course, it comes from Buddhism) or fullfilled. I wonder when you look at some of these incredibly rich people driving things like the battle over deCSS who always want more, more, more if greed is even a fulfillable desire?
I think greed is more like compulsive gambling. A desire that goes on, without end.
"Who do you work for? Who put you up to this? Sony? Microsoft? Nintendo?"
I mean, it can't be a coincidence.
Of course, if she squeled you'd have to protect her from any other dogs involved in the conspiracy... see "Thomas Edison's Shaggy Dog" by James Thurber for details...
Mind you, I'm not being smug here, I gave my Atari 800 to a kid ;_; I get depressed about it now and then.. I hope she found it to be an inspiration.
Used Games Under Fire in Japan
Sony has worked very hard to keep Americans, Japanese and Europeans from buying and using import products. For example, a lot of the new Japanese games that come out contain code which can detect whether you have a mod-chip in your Playstation (Dino Crisis is the best example I can think of. This detection can be beaten, but it is starting to get into the "it's more trouble than it is worth catagory."). They do not want people to be able to region jump.
In my case, they have thoroughly alienated my business. I have no interest in Sony products any more, and won't buy from them. Now, this isn't me proposing a boycott or anything, this is just me getting disgusted by a company that treats consumers like garbage. I'm sure Playstation II will do well, I'm sure that unlike previous systems it will be more taylored to what the bosses of Sony think each region should get. I expect to see a lot of "lowest common denominator" games come out, and people won't be able to get things from outside their region.
That's ok by me, it'll give me more money to spend on my computer.
I know, I love the way that acronym works ;)
This you dismiss as unimportant? Remember this is a very old case, and also remember that when someone beats the Federal government, it is a big deal, it means the courts sided with SJ Games against the SS. That the SS was in the wrong. Hopefully, it caused the SS, FBI and other organizations to act less obviously outside the law in future cases. (Though I'm not sure that's true.) At anyrate, it showed that you can beat the government when they break the law because of ignorence and incompetence related to computer equipment.
Actually, I was in CompUSA (the big computer store around here) and they had Playstation games, which surprised me. I honestly think that the shelf space could be better used for Pc games, since you can get Playstation games anywhere (like Walmart, blockbuster, etc.) but in a store that is primarily computer products I don't really consider that they fit.
Of course, this goes back to the days when the primary place to go in a mall to get video games was stores like Software, Etc. However, these days the gaming market has expanded incredibly.
I'm tempted to respond to the Troll (parent of this thread, Rev. Null), so I will. Of course games are a huge moneymaking business themselves, and the business of business is to make money. I mean, honestly I haven't needed a new wordprocessor since I bought Lotus WordPro '96, and I'm not really expecting to ever. What's the new wordprocessor going to have that's so great? New and better ways to pass viruses around? Memory hogging cute graphical Paperclip Guys? In my opinion the only thing that continues to sell new wordprocessing software is planned obsolescence. I don't know much about spreadsheets or accounting software (seems to me spreadsheets are accounting software), but I mean if everything is E-commerce right now, doesn't that mean that companies need something to sell? Aren't games something?
Oh well, not a bad troll, if Calvin Coolidge had risen from the grave, I imagine that's what he'd write.
Ah, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, Scourge of Liberty and Friend to the Tyrant.
We really must get this damnéd thing repealed.
Of course, if you are in New Jersey, you should go to my old Alma Mater, Rutgers, anyway (where I got my B.A. in English). I think they have a more liberal use policy, here it is http://rucs.rutgers.edu/acceptabl e-use-guide.html
However, all you ever hear about the Internet is how all the young people in America are getting to be zillionaires from it. There was even a recent, creepy, Salon Article about it just today. As Homer Simpson said, "Everyone is getting rich off the Internet and we are being left behind!"
A wise man said, "Just because you don't take an interest in politics, doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." Well, with all this huge hype, it isn't surprising that politics is taking an interest in the Internet. I jut wish people would stop thinking that everyone gettig rich was a young computer professional. Some of the people getting rich are old corporate lawyers.
Of course, that was changed with an amendment and we have the current system. I think it was done to pay for American involvement in the Great War (WWI), but I'd have to double check my history books to be sure.
The key to making this model is that the police will then only enforce the law when it is politically expedient or profitable. The trouble with that is it can lead to a police state, in which the police can harrass the general population on a whim and then back it up with the huge numbers of ridiculous laws we've got.
I used to live in New Jersey, and people from NYC would come there to shop, because the taxes were lower. Well, someone in New York government came up with the bright idea of sending cops into New Jersey mall parking lots and searching for New York plates. Later they would send threatening letters to the people who were shopping in the New Jersey stores saying, "You still owe New York sales tax and you'd better pay it!"
This, of course caused friction between NJ and NY, and was eventually dropped (I think, I haven't been back in a while, it was back when Florio was governor of NJ.) Of course, the original reason that interstate commerce was supposed to be exempt from taxation was to help keep the country united so you wouldn't have a bunch of little wars between individual states, and its worked pretty well for years (well, except for a few little altercations in the past.)
It is idiotic for the Federal government to allow individual states to tax the Internet this way, because the Internet is a national and International resource. The Federal government is supposed to be responsible for things which fall into the catagory of national. Personally, I don't think there is any pressing need to tax Internet commerce, but with all the hype about the Internet goldrush it is definitely going to happen. The rational way to handle it is on the national level, not the state level.
Of course, I'd rather we didn't get these wonderful new taxes, but then I'd rather Harry Browne would be the next president rather than George Bush or Al Gore.
Have you ever heard of Taylor Wines?
Well, have you?
Ok, seems that the Taylor Family had a winery that produced some popular wines, and some big corporate Behemoth decided, "Oh, look a vast expanse of gold as far as the eye can see! Let's aquire them!"
Well, there was one stubborn Taylor who refused to sell out.
But the Behemoth got him, see, they didn't really care about the land or the wine so much as the name Taylor, which had mindshare and synergy and all that good stuff. So, he could continue to make wine... but he is legally not allowed to put his own name on it. This is the way corporations operate with their wonderful intellectual property laws, like patents, trademarks and copyrights.
So, I hope this little fable may enlighten you as to why cororate behemoths love "intellectual property," but us individuals should hate it.
Incidentally, the same thing seems to be happening to satellite TV. See, I'm not sure how many people here have an old-fashioned satellite dish (i.e. not those satellite-pay TV rigs that have become popular recently) but you used to be able to get network broadcasts on wildfeeds, but that seems to be more difficult now. Oh, for those of you who don't know a wild feed is when the networks are beaming their programs to their affiliates, with big black spaces where the local commercials would be. It used to be a way for us to get Babylon 5 a few days early, when they were beaming the show out. This was legal. Rich people in Canada who could afford satellite dishes like my parents' could do this too. Because, you see, no one owns the air! If you can pick up the signal, you are allowed to watch it.
Of course, I don't see my parents as often as I used to, so I don't have as much access to their dish. So it may just be when I call my Dad and say, "Hey, I missed the Simpsons, see if you can catch it on a West Coast wild feed," he just doesn't feel like hunting through Orbit to try to find it, so he says, "Sorry, we don't seem to be getting that wild feed anymore." Any satellite-dish enthusiasts out there who can verify this?
Oh, incidentally, everyone does know that they've been steadily increasing the ratio of Ads-to-show, right? One of the reasons why I don't bother paying for cable is that most of the cable channels with commercials show far too many. I'm guessing that eventually I will no longer be capable of watching network TV either for the same reason. Already, I have a hard time "watching" TV unless I'm doing something else at the same time. (Like playing games on my PC, for instance.)
Still... it was the X-Files and my brother owns the X-Files computer game, so I have to assume it was incompetance rather than deliberate malice.
Your studies, if there are any, are garbage anyway because you can't legally do controlled experiments about violence with human beings and not other studies are worth a tinker's damn.
See the "Bishop of Battle" sequence in Nightmares was the best because there was never any question that the Bishop had transformed from video game villain into supernatural real world villain. Essentially, a variation on the old "you sharpen the pencils, then the pencils sharpen you, " plots out of the old E.C. Horror comics. That's why it was cool, especially, because they didn't have video games back in the days of E.C. Horror comics. It was basically a genius machina story, like Christine, except about a video game...
Oh...um.. and this is on topic because that's how they should've done the X-Files episode, too... uh-huh... Yeah, that's the ticket..
For more information about Nightmare's consult your local Library, or click the link.