Is the government going to start arresting the CEOs of gun manufacturers and the foremen in knife factories?
Well, maybe not arresting but they sure do like to sue manufacturers of guns. Of course, that's mostly city governments. The government will do anything that they think they can get away with politically... the only antidote is to show they that they won't get away with it politically and they'll be out of work when the next election comes if they continue to endorse stupid policies...
That kind of letter should be sent to your Senator, Congressman, or the President... not the copyright office. Look, I've often noticed how people who hate the government trust the courts (I've done it myself, or fervently wished they would turn out to be trustworthy) because, theoretically, they are not politically biased or "buyable." Of course, in practice they are just less political and less buyable than the rest of the government. However, I'd never try writing angry letters to the Supreme Court, because I know they'd just ignore them. I'm guessing that the copyright office is more like the Supreme Court and less like the Attorney General. I could be wrong, but even so I think political tactics are best aimed at elected officials, the members of the copyright office are likely appointed.
Depends on the point you are trying to make here. If the point is political and you believe you are writing to a politically biased body, paper mail is better. It takes up space, it weighs a ton, and it doesn't take "one-click" to delete. (Surprised Amazon hasn't sued over the fact that it takes one click to delete Email.)
Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the office we are considering writing to isn't the best place to write to make political comments. I think they are as politically non-biased as any part of the government can be, and I don't think they are planning to ignore well written Emails that bring up good legal points. In this case, I think they really are interested in information and in clarifying their position on the law.
To summarize, by all means use paper mail when writing to your Senators and congressmen/women. (You are writing to them, I hope?) Because the intern who reads their Emails for them might fail to give them the gist of your Email... especially if it is mixed in with one million other Emails (we can hope). But to write to the Copyright Office, probably follow their rules. I mean, I'd bet that this isn't the first time they've ever asked for comments like this... just the first time they've been posted on Slashdot.
Note, you do have the option of sending 16 copies of your letter by paper mail, it's within the rules. I just don't think the copyright office is going to be as intimidated by this sort of thing as voter-fearing politicians will be... and I think intimidation isn't really the goal here, anyway.
Hmm, you know, my brother's computer has a DVD drive and a licensed DVD-decryption card, so just for fun I tried something. I copied one of the VOB files off of his Bubble Gum crisis DVD and ran it from the hard drive using the Screen saver program that came with the DVD card. It showed, full screen, the section of the video I had copied to the hard drive without the DVD disk in the DVD-ROM drive. It was a pretty good portion of the video, too. Now, with a big enough hard drive I could copy all the VOB files off of the disk, and put them all into the screen saver. Now, I think it played the VOBs randomly (if anyone has this card it is the one that comes with the screensaver with all the clips from Star Trek: Generations), but I could still put the whole thing on the computer. What am I missing here? Maybe I should've done it with a more mainstream video, because I suppose it is possible that BubbleGum Crisis wasn't properly encrypted.
Anyway, I was thinking that people who are worried about Feds and lawsuits could put the DeCSS code in comment-form on their Web pages. I mean, they'd be less likely to be caught and they could point people they knew and trusted to the page and just have them "view source."
Gaming magazines seem to focus on a particular type of game: the kinds that are graphic, gruesome, and military or battle-oriented. Taken as a whole, most of the ads in gaming magazines are quite dark. They deal with death, evil, and destroying things, whether it is space ships, souped-up cars with rocket launchers, or demons. This leads me to believe that these computer gaming magazines focus more on the war gaming genre than any other. Is this a bad thing? Well, if you are not interested in combative games, or if you prefer non-violent games, you will probably be a bit put off by all this. For many gamers, the focus on violence and war and the failure to target the female market constitute several strikes against signing up for a magazine subscription. -- quote from article
Hmm, when my Mom was a kid she used to love the TV shows Flash Gordon and Capt. Video, but she didn't like Dale Arden, because Dale Arden would faint rather than fight. My Mom also loves the Modesty Blaise novels, science fiction, and a lot of stuff that in a sexist world women aren't supposed to like. Now, I can't say she likes computer games, because she doesn't (closest I ever got was the Atari 800 version of the board game 221B Baker Street, which she liked because she liked the board game.) Basically, you are saying "I'm a woman and I don't like combat therefore no women should like combat." I have to assume this is the link, or else why does it belong in an article about sexism in gaming magazines?
Oh, and how, exactly, do you limit coverage of war or combat games (incidentally, the popularity of these games is not due to magazine coverage, the coverage is due to their popularity) without alienating people who like them. I'll tell you how, you don't. You lose subscribers in far greater numbers than the ones you alienate by portraying combat oriented games. The safe magazine you are talking about, the way you've described it, wouldn't sell. Now, I think there should be a gaming magazine for pre-teens, I think it would sell (it would also mostly be about Pokemon). But if I read you right, you want a non-violent gaming magazine for adults (your definition of safe.) I hope you have a charitable organization set up to fund it...
Actually, sheep cloned using this procedure should be called Dollys(tm). In this way, when they've gotten a sheep that produces really great wool, and they decide to clone it and sell the clones they can say to garmet manufacturers, "Are your clothes made from boring old sheep or Dollys(tm) the exciting sheep cloned from the world's best wool producer."
First of all when you are buying something, even something that degrades, you are buying it. When you have to keep things in stock to sell, as opposed to renting, you change the business model you are operating under completely. Example: I go to the video store to rent Six String Samurai. They have one copy in stock, I rent it, bring it back in a few days and it's there again. Six months later, I tell someone I know how great Six String Samurai is, he goes to the video store and rents it. He returns it, it's still there, somebody else can rent it. In fact, word of mouth (in my theoretical world) makes this DVD go through several rentals. Finally, they put it up for sale, and I buy it because I'm strapped for cash and can't afford it new.
Now we have our "degradable DVDs" the store gets in about 2 copies, after all the store isn't expecting much demand for it and they need the shelf space for 100 copies of the Pokemon movie. I buy one copy, but since no one else looks for it until six months later, the store decides not to restock. The other guy buys the remaining copy, and now the store have more room for the latest Earnest movie. Our copies degrade, only two people see them, and the store never has an incentive to restock them.
I also have a really hard time believing that video rental stores would want to switch to this model. Think about it, with DVDs they can buy one and make money off of it indefinitely. With Degrado-DVDs they have to operate like Sam Goody, they have to buy a lot of stock and if it doesn't move, they probably will have to eat some of the losses. It might be better for the DVD manufacturers to do business this way (though perhaps not, what if they get a cut of each rental?) but is it that good for Blockbuster? Won't they have to rebuild their stores to make room for the stock they now have to keep in the back? Well, just some random thoughts.
Oh, and there are also going to be the cries of, "But they tried that with Divx." People don't realize this but after the great video game crash it was almost impossible to shop video game consoles around (Nintendo managed an amazing thing) people didn't want to touch anything that resembled something that failed so abjectly.
Ahem, why can't we just put DVDs in special mailers we get from the video store and mail them back? I mean, heck, the Post Office has been worried about being replaced by Email, this would be something new for them to do, and it is so simple. (I mean eventually DVD will replace CD, and I'm pretty sure we're going to all get about a billion AOL DVDs.)
I concur, the worst Email flames I have ever gotten were from a woman. I was going to go into the whole story here, but since it is an example and not an attempt to single her out I won't. I will say that getting flamed by someone you have become chummy with on Email is a lot worse than being flamed by some anonymous person you don't care about. Incidentally, we all know it is tough to tell who is male and who is female in a truly anonymous environment. However, unless the person I refer to has staged a truly elaborate deception, I've verifyed her gender from multiple sources.
The most difficult thing about flaming is that it is like drunk talk, it makes sense while you are doing it but if you have it played back to you later you get embarrassed. However, people keep talking about it like it is totally seperate from real life. Well, here is an interesting article about it from Jon's old stomping ground, Wired:
I wonder why Jon didn't refer to it? (Maybe he doesn't keep up with Wired or doesn't want to give them the satisfaction.)
The most peculiar thing about this is that Jon seems to be indicated that white, male, teenaged geeks are the source of all that is wrong with the Internet discussion environment. Sigh... here's a point you may not have considered Jon, the Internet is no longer just the stomping ground of geeks. My ungeeky sister has posted some passionate things to the "All My Children" discussion board, my ungeeky brother sends Email letters to the editor to Websites that he likes. These are people who know how to use Internet explorer and have mastered the arcane concept of Internet forms, but neither of them could write code, build a circuit, do Algebra or any other "geeky" activities to save their lives. Heck, if you've ever been to the right college campus (Rutgers springs to mind) you know you don't need a computer to flame... just a bunch of nastly leaflets and a bucket of wallpaper paste.
Some geeks are hostile, but there are also a lot of hostile non-geeks out there who have figured out the rudiments of pressing the "Submit" button.
FUD, Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, is a specific kind of propaganda. Sure, you can do pro-Linux FUD, it would be something like "Micros~1 Windows is so badly written it occaisionally formats your hard drive when you use the defragmenter." But FUD is more commonly aimed at average people who don't understand computers deeply and don't want too. So you say, "Linux will never be plug and play, and you'll never get most hardware devices working under it," and people who like "Plug and Play" despite its flaws will get afraid and think, "Linux doesn't do Plug and Play, I'd better stick with Microsoft."
To conclude: FUD isn't lies or scewed truth designed to make your product look good, FUD is lies or scewed truth designed to make other peoples products look bad.
Um, It relates to another old saying "Spare the rod spoil the child." The woodshed is where you would get beaten, maybe to prevent blood from getting on the good furniture?
I know you once had this in Britain, I've read Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff is an example of someone who made many "trips to the woodshed."
Hey, I'm willing to wait till I see it before I make a judgement... but then I'm perfectly happy with my already huge collection of First Edition stuff that I never get to play with anyway. I think people are worried that it is going to be done by people who don't get it and are out to make a buck. I bring this up in almost every thread (ok, slight exageration) but look at what happened when Time/Warner bought Atari. They didn't understand video games and didn't like video games they just thought they had purchased a money making machine. Unfortunately, because of their attitude toward video games, they just ran the company and its products into the ground and sunk an entire industry for a short time.
I hope Hasbro surprises me, I really do. I'd love to be a chicken little in this case and find out the sky isn't falling!
I mean heck didn't Milton Bradley make Dark Tower and wasn't that cool as Hell? Sometimes these companies will surprise you... but usually not.
The most irritating thing is that there is just so much cool stuff associated with D&D and it has been so influential in so many ways. Look at Squaresoft, look at Sony's EverQuest, look at all the FRPGs to come out on computers that seem locked into a D&D mindset like Diablo. I read that Quake was based (probably loosely) on someones AD&D campaign, and I know Record of the Lodoss War was.
I think people who think D&D is just a Tolkien rip-off just don't understand it. The original AD&D seemed to me to be, "That's cool lets put it in." Some Tolkien, some Clark Ashton Smith, some of various other authors and a lot of original imaginative material all mixed together. I mean, how can it just disappear from the world because Hasbro gobbled it up? Sigh... AD&D is just important... hmm, maybe we could convince one of the companies making computer-RPG clones of AD&D like Origin or Square (well, the early Final Fantasy games were) to create pen and paper versions of their games... I mean, it'd be a little late for Hasbro to sue them now, wouldn't it?
I mean, heck, I'd have to go searching but I know I've seen a few computer or console RPGs that lifted tons of stuff from AD&D without having any relationship with TSR. Isn't there some kind of law that if you ignore a copyright for a certain number of years and let other people use copyrighted material without complaining that the copyright disappears?
Hmm, I suppose I haven't kept up enough with the Soviet space program. I do respect what they have done, and the fact that they seem to take it very seriously and put their best minds to work on it.
Ahem, it was meant to be a quote from a TV news show... considering the position I have on AOL (that it is an evil company which doesn't do the job as well as local ISPs), I think it is unlikely I would ever call Steve Case a visionary.
The whole sordid story is worse than you could imagine... I just read the Gary Gygax Faq. It's a sad but interesting tale of good and evil... in which evil wins, unfortunately.
The Shadowrun game for the Sega Genesis is kind of interesting. My personal opinion? They should have ignored most of the game and concentrated on the Netrunning section, which is the most fun part (of the Sega genesis game.) They could have figured out a way to connect it to a Shadowrun plot, I think.
Correction, and last response to this sadly off-topic thread.
I did not mean to imply all anime was either for kids or hentai, I was referring to perception. For prime time on HBO, I meant something like Irresponsible Captain Tylor (I know people will disagree with that choice, so insert your favorite here).
Ahem, I read that Wizards of the Coast rereleased the Tomb of Horrors I think it would be cool if Jeremy Irons became a demi-lich in one of the movie sequels... (back on topic ^_-)...
You have a good point, about anime being either for kids or Urotsukidouji. It's a problem, I sometimes think the best solution would be for one of the better anime series for grown-ups to be shown on TV in prime time. Perhaps on HBO after Spawn (um, I haven't seen Spawn because I don't get HBO, but I heard it was adult.) or something. Trouble is, it would be tough to convince a network to do that... especially if it wasn't dubbed.
Anime, for adults, children, young adults is getting more acceptable in the US anyway... stuff like Pokemon is just the most visible example. Its a far cry from when a consortium of American animators got together to suppress the Miyazaki Lupin movies because they feared the competition...
Problem: There is nothing wrong with a movie having a PG rating. There is something wrong if the producers are willing to alter plot elements, characterization and battle scenes developed for good story related reasons because they must have a PG-rating. It's the difference between creating good art (or even good pop-art) that happens to be rated PG, or butchering a work of art (even pop-art) so it will appeal to a mass, mainstream audience.
Can D&D reach a mainstream audience? Certain people were very successful at libeling the game as evil, satan inspired suicide-causing material. Shouldn't they just make the best movie they can and forget the mainstream?
I agree with your story and your dark world view, but ought D&D fans to take it lying down? I mean, I think the time has come to create an Open Source RPG. (Sigh... Mayfair games tried to treat AD&D as open source, remember Demons? But I think they got successfully sued for that one.)
I think that a few good things have come out of WoTC, notably the Dragon Magazine archive which seems to contain the issues intact and with no censorship (i.e. Ed Greenwoods The Nine Hells is intact, the "naughty" art hasn't been altered.) So maybe the pessimism isn't warranted. If they decide AD&D is commercially worthless, maybe a group of fans could pool their resources, buy it, and open source it... or am I a hopeless dreamer?
Uh-oh... the rights won't be commercially worthless as long as the computer games are making money, darn it...
Check out NUON (um, huge amounts of Flash in the Website, not my fault though.) an idea that may have taken too long to develop (considering that the Playstation 2 will also play DVDs). It was an interesting idea though, I wonder how Dragon's Lair would've worked with it.
While it may be possible that anime can be stereotyped as porn, I don't see how that can last in the face of what my brother calls "The Mattel/Mars Bars Chocobot Show" of anime, I refer of course to Pokemon (also Digimon and Monster Rancher all of which are being shown at the moment. Not to mention Sailor Moon and Ronin Warriors) Now, what does this mean to the American anime fan? Well, it means you can say, "Hey, not all anime is porn look at Pokemon."
This will lead to two possible responses:
1. Well, My kids won't be watching Pokemon any more then...
Or 2. Hmm, I guess your right...
Lodoss 2 is coming soon according to the latest Animenation catalog, cool... I hope Karla is in it...
Slashdot Mirror
That kind of letter should be sent to your Senator, Congressman, or the President... not the copyright office. Look, I've often noticed how people who hate the government trust the courts (I've done it myself, or fervently wished they would turn out to be trustworthy) because, theoretically, they are not politically biased or "buyable." Of course, in practice they are just less political and less buyable than the rest of the government. However, I'd never try writing angry letters to the Supreme Court, because I know they'd just ignore them. I'm guessing that the copyright office is more like the Supreme Court and less like the Attorney General. I could be wrong, but even so I think political tactics are best aimed at elected officials, the members of the copyright office are likely appointed.
Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the office we are considering writing to isn't the best place to write to make political comments. I think they are as politically non-biased as any part of the government can be, and I don't think they are planning to ignore well written Emails that bring up good legal points. In this case, I think they really are interested in information and in clarifying their position on the law.
To summarize, by all means use paper mail when writing to your Senators and congressmen/women. (You are writing to them, I hope?) Because the intern who reads their Emails for them might fail to give them the gist of your Email... especially if it is mixed in with one million other Emails (we can hope). But to write to the Copyright Office, probably follow their rules. I mean, I'd bet that this isn't the first time they've ever asked for comments like this... just the first time they've been posted on Slashdot.
Note, you do have the option of sending 16 copies of your letter by paper mail, it's within the rules. I just don't think the copyright office is going to be as intimidated by this sort of thing as voter-fearing politicians will be... and I think intimidation isn't really the goal here, anyway.
Anyway, I was thinking that people who are worried about Feds and lawsuits could put the DeCSS code in comment-form on their Web pages. I mean, they'd be less likely to be caught and they could point people they knew and trusted to the page and just have them "view source."
Oh, and how, exactly, do you limit coverage of war or combat games (incidentally, the popularity of these games is not due to magazine coverage, the coverage is due to their popularity) without alienating people who like them. I'll tell you how, you don't. You lose subscribers in far greater numbers than the ones you alienate by portraying combat oriented games. The safe magazine you are talking about, the way you've described it, wouldn't sell. Now, I think there should be a gaming magazine for pre-teens, I think it would sell (it would also mostly be about Pokemon). But if I read you right, you want a non-violent gaming magazine for adults (your definition of safe.) I hope you have a charitable organization set up to fund it...
Actually, sheep cloned using this procedure should be called Dollys(tm). In this way, when they've gotten a sheep that produces really great wool, and they decide to clone it and sell the clones they can say to garmet manufacturers, "Are your clothes made from boring old sheep or Dollys(tm) the exciting sheep cloned from the world's best wool producer."
Now we have our "degradable DVDs" the store gets in about 2 copies, after all the store isn't expecting much demand for it and they need the shelf space for 100 copies of the Pokemon movie. I buy one copy, but since no one else looks for it until six months later, the store decides not to restock. The other guy buys the remaining copy, and now the store have more room for the latest Earnest movie. Our copies degrade, only two people see them, and the store never has an incentive to restock them.
I also have a really hard time believing that video rental stores would want to switch to this model. Think about it, with DVDs they can buy one and make money off of it indefinitely. With Degrado-DVDs they have to operate like Sam Goody, they have to buy a lot of stock and if it doesn't move, they probably will have to eat some of the losses. It might be better for the DVD manufacturers to do business this way (though perhaps not, what if they get a cut of each rental?) but is it that good for Blockbuster? Won't they have to rebuild their stores to make room for the stock they now have to keep in the back? Well, just some random thoughts.
Oh, and there are also going to be the cries of, "But they tried that with Divx." People don't realize this but after the great video game crash it was almost impossible to shop video game consoles around (Nintendo managed an amazing thing) people didn't want to touch anything that resembled something that failed so abjectly.
Ahem, why can't we just put DVDs in special mailers we get from the video store and mail them back? I mean, heck, the Post Office has been worried about being replaced by Email, this would be something new for them to do, and it is so simple. (I mean eventually DVD will replace CD, and I'm pretty sure we're going to all get about a billion AOL DVDs.)
In fact this idea was probably created by the Cult of Cthuhlu in order to hasten the destruction of the human race and the return of the Old Ones!
Ia, Ia, Cthuhlu Phtagn!!!
The most difficult thing about flaming is that it is like drunk talk, it makes sense while you are doing it but if you have it played back to you later you get embarrassed. However, people keep talking about it like it is totally seperate from real life. Well, here is an interesting article about it from Jon's old stomping ground, Wired:
Usenet Ban a Slippery Slope?
I wonder why Jon didn't refer to it? (Maybe he doesn't keep up with Wired or doesn't want to give them the satisfaction.)
The most peculiar thing about this is that Jon seems to be indicated that white, male, teenaged geeks are the source of all that is wrong with the Internet discussion environment. Sigh... here's a point you may not have considered Jon, the Internet is no longer just the stomping ground of geeks. My ungeeky sister has posted some passionate things to the "All My Children" discussion board, my ungeeky brother sends Email letters to the editor to Websites that he likes. These are people who know how to use Internet explorer and have mastered the arcane concept of Internet forms, but neither of them could write code, build a circuit, do Algebra or any other "geeky" activities to save their lives. Heck, if you've ever been to the right college campus (Rutgers springs to mind) you know you don't need a computer to flame... just a bunch of nastly leaflets and a bucket of wallpaper paste.
Some geeks are hostile, but there are also a lot of hostile non-geeks out there who have figured out the rudiments of pressing the "Submit" button.
FUD, Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, is a specific kind of propaganda. Sure, you can do pro-Linux FUD, it would be something like "Micros~1 Windows is so badly written it occaisionally formats your hard drive when you use the defragmenter." But FUD is more commonly aimed at average people who don't understand computers deeply and don't want too. So you say, "Linux will never be plug and play, and you'll never get most hardware devices working under it," and people who like "Plug and Play" despite its flaws will get afraid and think, "Linux doesn't do Plug and Play, I'd better stick with Microsoft."
To conclude: FUD isn't lies or scewed truth designed to make your product look good, FUD is lies or scewed truth designed to make other peoples products look bad.
I know you once had this in Britain, I've read Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff is an example of someone who made many "trips to the woodshed."
I hope Hasbro surprises me, I really do. I'd love to be a chicken little in this case and find out the sky isn't falling!
I mean heck didn't Milton Bradley make Dark Tower and wasn't that cool as Hell? Sometimes these companies will surprise you... but usually not.
I think people who think D&D is just a Tolkien rip-off just don't understand it. The original AD&D seemed to me to be, "That's cool lets put it in." Some Tolkien, some Clark Ashton Smith, some of various other authors and a lot of original imaginative material all mixed together. I mean, how can it just disappear from the world because Hasbro gobbled it up? Sigh... AD&D is just important... hmm, maybe we could convince one of the companies making computer-RPG clones of AD&D like Origin or Square (well, the early Final Fantasy games were) to create pen and paper versions of their games... I mean, it'd be a little late for Hasbro to sue them now, wouldn't it?
I mean, heck, I'd have to go searching but I know I've seen a few computer or console RPGs that lifted tons of stuff from AD&D without having any relationship with TSR. Isn't there some kind of law that if you ignore a copyright for a certain number of years and let other people use copyrighted material without complaining that the copyright disappears?
Reverse phrenonlogy? Hmm, your idea sounds like a crude version of In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka....
Hmm, I suppose I haven't kept up enough with the Soviet space program. I do respect what they have done, and the fact that they seem to take it very seriously and put their best minds to work on it.
Remember, for TV, visionary=rich.
The whole sordid story is worse than you could imagine... I just read the Gary Gygax Faq. It's a sad but interesting tale of good and evil... in which evil wins, unfortunately.
The Shadowrun game for the Sega Genesis is kind of interesting. My personal opinion? They should have ignored most of the game and concentrated on the Netrunning section, which is the most fun part (of the Sega genesis game.) They could have figured out a way to connect it to a Shadowrun plot, I think.
I did not mean to imply all anime was either for kids or hentai, I was referring to perception. For prime time on HBO, I meant something like Irresponsible Captain Tylor (I know people will disagree with that choice, so insert your favorite here).
Ahem, I read that Wizards of the Coast rereleased the Tomb of Horrors I think it would be cool if Jeremy Irons became a demi-lich in one of the movie sequels... (back on topic ^_-)...
Anime, for adults, children, young adults is getting more acceptable in the US anyway... stuff like Pokemon is just the most visible example. Its a far cry from when a consortium of American animators got together to suppress the Miyazaki Lupin movies because they feared the competition...
Can D&D reach a mainstream audience? Certain people were very successful at libeling the game as evil, satan inspired suicide-causing material. Shouldn't they just make the best movie they can and forget the mainstream?
I think that a few good things have come out of WoTC, notably the Dragon Magazine archive which seems to contain the issues intact and with no censorship (i.e. Ed Greenwoods The Nine Hells is intact, the "naughty" art hasn't been altered.) So maybe the pessimism isn't warranted. If they decide AD&D is commercially worthless, maybe a group of fans could pool their resources, buy it, and open source it... or am I a hopeless dreamer?
Uh-oh... the rights won't be commercially worthless as long as the computer games are making money, darn it...
Check out NUON (um, huge amounts of Flash in the Website, not my fault though.) an idea that may have taken too long to develop (considering that the Playstation 2 will also play DVDs). It was an interesting idea though, I wonder how Dragon's Lair would've worked with it.
This will lead to two possible responses:
1. Well, My kids won't be watching Pokemon any more then...
Or 2. Hmm, I guess your right...
Lodoss 2 is coming soon according to the latest Animenation catalog, cool... I hope Karla is in it...