Ah yes, Timeline, the masterpiece of well thought out plot where someone invents time travel and nano computers in order to enact a nafarious plan to build...Busch Gardens!
If they did ABCXYZ that's ok - they can do that and in fact write a new patent for it. The problem is that these companies are getting the equivalent of the 1. X 2. ??? 3 PROFIT! patents where they figure out A..Z, someone comes in with BCXY and they get the shit sued out of them. The problem lies with the patent office granting bad patents and courts upholding them. And of course, that doesn't even get into business method/software patents where this stuff really comes into play.
Ah, but now you've seen a classic/. poster archetype, the grumpy old man/Luddite. See any article on phones with more functions than making phone calls ("I just want something simple that makes a phone call"), game consoles with HD graphics ("no one wants these fancy graphics, no thanks"), HD TVs/BluRay/etc ("No one owns an HD tv, no one wants this, DVD is just fine for me thank-ya-very-much"), or websites that resemble anything past 1996 ("Whats with all these flash ads and graphics, give me 3 fonts on a repeating background!") This poster enjoys racing other posters of the same type to the bottom of the heap to show how old-school/not-affording that latest crap they are. Frequently spotted in threads about the iPhone, Wii/PS3/Xb360, and programming languages that were invented after 1981.
That's all for now. Tune in later for "I know about topic X, topic X rhymes with article topic Y, let me tell you how smart I am" and everyone's favorite "This scientific breakthrough is no big deal unless I can buy some practical application of it tomorrow at Wal-Mart"
Seriously, if you want to actually access that info move it off now and onto newer medium. That whole stack could go on a thumbdrive or CD and be safe for the next 10 years or so.
Hi, thanks for reading all of my comment! That was Super! With a capital S!
Did I say anything about timelocking it? I said its not supposed to be "uncrackable". I didn't say anything about releasing patches. I said people who design and make DRM _know_ its going to be cracked (at least the kind that doesn't rely on you connecting to the internet like Steam). This isn't the game developers saying it, its the people actually selling the DRM. They measure things in "how long it takes a crack to hit the street". A truly truly succesful disc based DRM will take a month to crack (fully crack, not just boot the game), but those are pretty rare.
What does DRM have to do with game hardware? The fact that you can't run a DOS game on your Vista box is completely different.
Movies definately have a shelflife in terms of where they make their money, same as games. They have a few different distrobution channels so they get another bump (theater release, Pay-per-view, DVD, TV) per release, but you make most of the money up front with each release and it trickles off from there. Books go out of print, so do movies and video games. Why is this a difficult concept? You can of course find them (and Blade Runner is a bad example since there have been 45 different versions - go find Rollerball or something like that), and a popular game gets boxed sets and re-releases to try to extend the life of the game. Look at GTA4 - they sold something like 7-8 million copies last week. They'll probably sell double that or more before their done, but it will trickle in at the end.
If that guy's eyes had rolled out of his head at the end. He looks like the hunchback from Young Frankenstien and Gareth from The Office had a baby who was then raised by the Cookie Monster.
I think I've posted this a hundred times to/. already but I'll say it again:
Game DRM is NOT about locking a game down forever. We're not stupid. We made the game after all, and that's a pretty hard task in itself, so there is some comprehension of what's going on. Do you think game makers have never themselves played a game before? People working in the industry now have been through all the copy protection out there you have, from entering in key phrases off the manual (just xerox the book!) to putting in the CD (GCW for the win!) to more modern systems like SecureROM and Steam. We KNOW it will be cracked. That's a given.
The goal in this is a cat and mouse game to _delay_ the cracking. Games have a shelf life like movies and all other popular entertainment. It comes out, the marketing goes out, stores stock it for some amount of time, and that's your window to make the bucks. Pretty much the first few months (or maybe up to the next holiday season), and then something better is out to take away your players. The DRM is in place to (hopefully) prevent cracking such that Joe Average can't just download the game off a torrent site and play it. He might have to wait, and if he's excited enough to get it he'll buy it instead.
That's the philosophy anyways. I don't know that there's any good evidence pointing either way whether it works or not. It does take a while sometimes to get a good crack for a game with more modern DRM stuff (sometimes you can have 0-days that are incomplete and it takes a while to get a good one out), but then again sometimes not. I'm actually fine with things like Steam - for me I don't ever notice it because I'm usually online. And it works when I'm offline on a plane or something but can still get that game of Portal in. I heartily believe myself in getting developers their money (its how I get my bread), but I also know there's a lot of people who'd jump at playing for free if its easy enough to do.
Lastly, don't be so quick to blame the creators of the game. 95% of the time they have nothing to do with this stuff.
Ah, so the ancient greek translation actually talks about a big bang and evolution! Cool!:) I'm kidding of course, but you're somehow suggesting the original Hebrew (?) (greek for new testament?) somehow doesn't mention a flood that covers the earth or an ark that holds every species of animal currently in existence? (Or the jist at least). I had read that the New Testament had been grossly edited but didn't thing the old one had been that far compromised. Or does the creation tale (where people live hundreds of years) just not count in your book?
Right, they explain in terms of the religion and the science of the time. Genesis has floodgates sitting over the Earth that opened to cause the flood Noah lived through. Same with creation, the direct decendancy of man from God, etc. Once those claims have been refuted by scientists, the fall back to "well, its all an interpretation that people had of the time - could have mean a billion years = 1 day, etc" - and anything else that science doesn't have a good answer for is "oh, well, that, now that is what God really did!" You're totally correct though that that kind of dogma are inventions of the religion's followers and not the founders.
I actually have much more respect for fundamentalists that take the book at its absolute word than those that try some song and dance to make the religion fit their own world view. Either its all true or its all not and you believe it or you don't. Other than that you're either lying to yourself or someone is lying to you.
To the GP: I was talking more about "ghost in the machine" and the separation of consciousness from our biological brains as opposed to the classic "immortal soul". But the above is correct: burden of proof falls upon the person making the assertion "I, you, we have a soul".
Particularly the phone calls of our congressmen and presidents to lobbyists and such, top secret or not. As long as that provision is on the bill I'm fine with it because you know it will never ever ever get passed.
Whatever happened to "I don't know?" Just because we don't know the answer doesn't mean we have to make one up. Your answer "God did it" is just a placeholder - we've used that placeholder a lot in previous history and we've found the answer before. So you can have that one for now (after all you've lost disease, weather, gravity, the stars, evolution, the soul, dinosaurs, and pretty much everything else attributed to a diety or the supernatural).
There is stuff we don't know about the universe. There is probably more stuff we don't know about the universe than we do know about the universe. But we don't need to fill in the gaps with "God did it" to make ourselves feel better. We can admit we don't know something and try to find the answer rather than make something up and move on. That's the difference in believing in made up fairy tails and "believing in science".
Just to correct you - he doesn't "discard the notion outright" - I just saw him on Bill Maher and he says he's "99.999%" sure, but saying its 100% wouldn't be valid because its unfalsifiable. Of course, that's going off my memory of the show, so if I got that wrong, someone please correct me:)
Given his homepage, ballyhooing of usenet, and only late 80's-early 90s pop culture references its quite obvious that Kent has just stepped out of his time pod to see what the world has become in 15 years. Welcome to the future Kent! FRACK OFF! (That's how we say hello now, and should be returned in kind with a hearty "FRACK YOU TOO!")
Oh man you hit the nail on the head buddy! What a bunch of idiots overthere! Don't they know anything? I always say, for any resarch project everyone should just post their idea to slashdot and see what comes up with the comments before they even spend a dime on it. Often you'll always find that:
a) What you're doing doesn't make any sense whatsoever based on that article I read a few years ago. b) What you're doing was done 50 years ago and was better because that's what I did in my day. c) What you're doing breaks most of the laws of physics I don't really understand. d) You need to figure out step 2 before making a profit. e) Its already been done in reverse in Russia. f) There's a wiki link on something sort of related to that other thing that has the same letters as this. g) Your idea has already been implemented by this site also hosting a picture of a gaping anus.
Seriously we need to just drop all peer-review and send papers this way. For science!
This whole thing is rediculous and is exactly why open standards exist. I should be able to buy a settop box on my own and point it at any content providers I want over my neutral pipe (say what you will about the modem age, the telephone company had no control over the bits passing over my line). I want a Warner Bros. movie, I go to the Warner Bros. content point (some web service somewhere) and buy the movie from them. If they want to focus on their core competencies and license out the movies to someone else, that's fine. But it seems dumb to have "blockbuster" and "apple" and whomever competing over delivering the same content. The only thing that middlemen add value to is having a single subscriber account - and that's really because there's no way for me to pay them without setting up an account and going to a third party. And as "channels" - setting up syndication points that buy X copies of the show in bulk from the content providers and resell for a discount as part of a package. So what's currently "SciFi" becomes an all-you-can-eat selection of various shows.
Blockbuster's business model is dead. Shoving it into some half-assed internet service isn't going to make it live again.
" A little-mentioned affect on privacy is how RFID antennas could easily be placed around campus and around Seattle, tracking students as they go about their lives."
Yes, it certainly would be easy, wouldn't it! All one would have to do is get some budgeting approved for a few thousand antennas, then ensure that you have the proper paperwork to install the antennas on private/public property. Next lets make sure we can run power to these suckers (they need some juice to go full time), and of course we'll need to either get them running on a cell network or else run some cable to get back the data. Finally, I'll need some easy simple software to combine all the data streams I'm getting, cross-reference them against the student database, and then plot everyone's movements out on my giant command and control station. Yes, yes, ALL too easy! I've got you now Johnny Q. Student! You're going to... the Library! Ah-ha! Now I can...uh...know where you are!
What about gaining unauthorized access for a non-malicious intent? i.e. jailbreaking the iPhone, making backups of DVDs, disarming a bomb, etc. Seems like in this case you're "fixing" the problem which is the design of the thing itself, so that's a hack. In the case of Android there's nothing to "fix" to open it up, so you're pretty much just developing instead of hacking. (And in software development, that's a good thing. No one likes a hack unless its necessary).
If I recall correctly (been a year or two since I finished it) the third one actually had around 50 pages of resolution that wrapped up MOST of the story lines (there was definitely some "then why the hell did they bother with all that other stuff????") I found the ending of the Baroque cycle to be very satisfying -- so just in case you were holding off on them because you were afraid he'd let pretty much everything from the past 2000 pages drop and finish in a couple paragraphs, its definitely not the case.
"Perhaps if some great leaders played the game they could inspire the masses to band together and overthrow the griefers. A George Washington of the gaming world."
I've actually seen this happen - I'm not a big MMO player because I generally hate grinding and love PvP. Anyways, I tried my hand for a month on an early Asheron's Call PvP server. They're system was stupid though - you could get ganked for your stuff while you were in a menu talking to an NPC. Killing someone meant taking a good item from them and some gold, so there was a definite penalty for death there. Towns generally were taken over by griefers (mobsters) and regular folks had to stay clear when they were camping out or they'd pretty much kill any newb who walked into town. It did lead to some interesting roleplaying opportunities like robbing people on the highway (they'd usually pay you 20GP instead of risking losing their weapon), or actually making alliances worthwhile ("you really don't want to mess with me, do you know who I'm with?").
Anyways, at one point a really high level camper took over a main area - he was way way overpowered compared to the newbs in town. It was a one hit kill on most everyone. Eventually enough people were fed up and waiting outside town for him to leave that someone got the idea to drop all our stuff and form an angry mob. Everyone stripped down to nothing except a club or small sword and went in as a giant mob against him. It took forever and a lot of times you'd die before you got a hit off, but eventually the 30-40 newbs killed the guy and dropped a ridiculous weapon that he had.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, Timeline, the masterpiece of well thought out plot where someone invents time travel and nano computers in order to enact a nafarious plan to build...Busch Gardens!
Did you mean: Tiananmen square
If they did ABCXYZ that's ok - they can do that and in fact write a new patent for it. The problem is that these companies are getting the equivalent of the 1. X 2. ??? 3 PROFIT! patents where they figure out A..Z, someone comes in with BCXY and they get the shit sued out of them. The problem lies with the patent office granting bad patents and courts upholding them. And of course, that doesn't even get into business method/software patents where this stuff really comes into play.
Ah, but now you've seen a classic /. poster archetype, the grumpy old man/Luddite. See any article on phones with more functions than making phone calls ("I just want something simple that makes a phone call"), game consoles with HD graphics ("no one wants these fancy graphics, no thanks"), HD TVs/BluRay/etc ("No one owns an HD tv, no one wants this, DVD is just fine for me thank-ya-very-much"), or websites that resemble anything past 1996 ("Whats with all these flash ads and graphics, give me 3 fonts on a repeating background!") This poster enjoys racing other posters of the same type to the bottom of the heap to show how old-school/not-affording that latest crap they are. Frequently spotted in threads about the iPhone, Wii/PS3/Xb360, and programming languages that were invented after 1981.
That's all for now. Tune in later for "I know about topic X, topic X rhymes with article topic Y, let me tell you how smart I am" and everyone's favorite "This scientific breakthrough is no big deal unless I can buy some practical application of it tomorrow at Wal-Mart"
Seriously, if you want to actually access that info move it off now and onto newer medium. That whole stack could go on a thumbdrive or CD and be safe for the next 10 years or so.
Hi, thanks for reading all of my comment! That was Super! With a capital S!
Did I say anything about timelocking it? I said its not supposed to be "uncrackable". I didn't say anything about releasing patches. I said people who design and make DRM _know_ its going to be cracked (at least the kind that doesn't rely on you connecting to the internet like Steam). This isn't the game developers saying it, its the people actually selling the DRM. They measure things in "how long it takes a crack to hit the street". A truly truly succesful disc based DRM will take a month to crack (fully crack, not just boot the game), but those are pretty rare.
What does DRM have to do with game hardware? The fact that you can't run a DOS game on your Vista box is completely different.
Movies definately have a shelflife in terms of where they make their money, same as games. They have a few different distrobution channels so they get another bump (theater release, Pay-per-view, DVD, TV) per release, but you make most of the money up front with each release and it trickles off from there. Books go out of print, so do movies and video games. Why is this a difficult concept? You can of course find them (and Blade Runner is a bad example since there have been 45 different versions - go find Rollerball or something like that), and a popular game gets boxed sets and re-releases to try to extend the life of the game. Look at GTA4 - they sold something like 7-8 million copies last week. They'll probably sell double that or more before their done, but it will trickle in at the end.
If that guy's eyes had rolled out of his head at the end. He looks like the hunchback from Young Frankenstien and Gareth from The Office had a baby who was then raised by the Cookie Monster.
I think I've posted this a hundred times to /. already but I'll say it again:
Game DRM is NOT about locking a game down forever. We're not stupid. We made the game after all, and that's a pretty hard task in itself, so there is some comprehension of what's going on. Do you think game makers have never themselves played a game before? People working in the industry now have been through all the copy protection out there you have, from entering in key phrases off the manual (just xerox the book!) to putting in the CD (GCW for the win!) to more modern systems like SecureROM and Steam. We KNOW it will be cracked. That's a given.
The goal in this is a cat and mouse game to _delay_ the cracking. Games have a shelf life like movies and all other popular entertainment. It comes out, the marketing goes out, stores stock it for some amount of time, and that's your window to make the bucks. Pretty much the first few months (or maybe up to the next holiday season), and then something better is out to take away your players. The DRM is in place to (hopefully) prevent cracking such that Joe Average can't just download the game off a torrent site and play it. He might have to wait, and if he's excited enough to get it he'll buy it instead.
That's the philosophy anyways. I don't know that there's any good evidence pointing either way whether it works or not. It does take a while sometimes to get a good crack for a game with more modern DRM stuff (sometimes you can have 0-days that are incomplete and it takes a while to get a good one out), but then again sometimes not. I'm actually fine with things like Steam - for me I don't ever notice it because I'm usually online. And it works when I'm offline on a plane or something but can still get that game of Portal in. I heartily believe myself in getting developers their money (its how I get my bread), but I also know there's a lot of people who'd jump at playing for free if its easy enough to do.
Lastly, don't be so quick to blame the creators of the game. 95% of the time they have nothing to do with this stuff.
Don't forget they have to get through your Mom and her rolling pin on the way down to the basement!
Ah, so the ancient greek translation actually talks about a big bang and evolution! Cool! :) I'm kidding of course, but you're somehow suggesting the original Hebrew (?) (greek for new testament?) somehow doesn't mention a flood that covers the earth or an ark that holds every species of animal currently in existence? (Or the jist at least). I had read that the New Testament had been grossly edited but didn't thing the old one had been that far compromised. Or does the creation tale (where people live hundreds of years) just not count in your book?
Right, they explain in terms of the religion and the science of the time. Genesis has floodgates sitting over the Earth that opened to cause the flood Noah lived through. Same with creation, the direct decendancy of man from God, etc. Once those claims have been refuted by scientists, the fall back to "well, its all an interpretation that people had of the time - could have mean a billion years = 1 day, etc" - and anything else that science doesn't have a good answer for is "oh, well, that, now that is what God really did!" You're totally correct though that that kind of dogma are inventions of the religion's followers and not the founders.
I actually have much more respect for fundamentalists that take the book at its absolute word than those that try some song and dance to make the religion fit their own world view. Either its all true or its all not and you believe it or you don't. Other than that you're either lying to yourself or someone is lying to you.
To the GP: I was talking more about "ghost in the machine" and the separation of consciousness from our biological brains as opposed to the classic "immortal soul". But the above is correct: burden of proof falls upon the person making the assertion "I, you, we have a soul".
Particularly the phone calls of our congressmen and presidents to lobbyists and such, top secret or not. As long as that provision is on the bill I'm fine with it because you know it will never ever ever get passed.
Whatever happened to "I don't know?" Just because we don't know the answer doesn't mean we have to make one up. Your answer "God did it" is just a placeholder - we've used that placeholder a lot in previous history and we've found the answer before. So you can have that one for now (after all you've lost disease, weather, gravity, the stars, evolution, the soul, dinosaurs, and pretty much everything else attributed to a diety or the supernatural).
There is stuff we don't know about the universe. There is probably more stuff we don't know about the universe than we do know about the universe. But we don't need to fill in the gaps with "God did it" to make ourselves feel better. We can admit we don't know something and try to find the answer rather than make something up and move on. That's the difference in believing in made up fairy tails and "believing in science".
Just to correct you - he doesn't "discard the notion outright" - I just saw him on Bill Maher and he says he's "99.999%" sure, but saying its 100% wouldn't be valid because its unfalsifiable. Of course, that's going off my memory of the show, so if I got that wrong, someone please correct me :)
Given his homepage, ballyhooing of usenet, and only late 80's-early 90s pop culture references its quite obvious that Kent has just stepped out of his time pod to see what the world has become in 15 years. Welcome to the future Kent! FRACK OFF! (That's how we say hello now, and should be returned in kind with a hearty "FRACK YOU TOO!")
Oh man you hit the nail on the head buddy! What a bunch of idiots overthere! Don't they know anything? I always say, for any resarch project everyone should just post their idea to slashdot and see what comes up with the comments before they even spend a dime on it. Often you'll always find that:
a) What you're doing doesn't make any sense whatsoever based on that article I read a few years ago.
b) What you're doing was done 50 years ago and was better because that's what I did in my day.
c) What you're doing breaks most of the laws of physics I don't really understand.
d) You need to figure out step 2 before making a profit.
e) Its already been done in reverse in Russia.
f) There's a wiki link on something sort of related to that other thing that has the same letters as this.
g) Your idea has already been implemented by this site also hosting a picture of a gaping anus.
Seriously we need to just drop all peer-review and send papers this way. For science!
This whole thing is rediculous and is exactly why open standards exist. I should be able to buy a settop box on my own and point it at any content providers I want over my neutral pipe (say what you will about the modem age, the telephone company had no control over the bits passing over my line). I want a Warner Bros. movie, I go to the Warner Bros. content point (some web service somewhere) and buy the movie from them. If they want to focus on their core competencies and license out the movies to someone else, that's fine. But it seems dumb to have "blockbuster" and "apple" and whomever competing over delivering the same content. The only thing that middlemen add value to is having a single subscriber account - and that's really because there's no way for me to pay them without setting up an account and going to a third party. And as "channels" - setting up syndication points that buy X copies of the show in bulk from the content providers and resell for a discount as part of a package. So what's currently "SciFi" becomes an all-you-can-eat selection of various shows.
Blockbuster's business model is dead. Shoving it into some half-assed internet service isn't going to make it live again.
" A little-mentioned affect on privacy is how RFID antennas could easily be placed around campus and around Seattle, tracking students as they go about their lives."
... the Library! Ah-ha! Now I can...uh...know where you are!
Yes, it certainly would be easy, wouldn't it! All one would have to do is get some budgeting approved for a few thousand antennas, then ensure that you have the proper paperwork to install the antennas on private/public property. Next lets make sure we can run power to these suckers (they need some juice to go full time), and of course we'll need to either get them running on a cell network or else run some cable to get back the data. Finally, I'll need some easy simple software to combine all the data streams I'm getting, cross-reference them against the student database, and then plot everyone's movements out on my giant command and control station. Yes, yes, ALL too easy! I've got you now Johnny Q. Student! You're going to
From where you sit its probably just you that you're smelling.
What about gaining unauthorized access for a non-malicious intent? i.e. jailbreaking the iPhone, making backups of DVDs, disarming a bomb, etc. Seems like in this case you're "fixing" the problem which is the design of the thing itself, so that's a hack. In the case of Android there's nothing to "fix" to open it up, so you're pretty much just developing instead of hacking. (And in software development, that's a good thing. No one likes a hack unless its necessary).
Woah...where's that sitar music coming from?
If I recall correctly (been a year or two since I finished it) the third one actually had around 50 pages of resolution that wrapped up MOST of the story lines (there was definitely some "then why the hell did they bother with all that other stuff????") I found the ending of the Baroque cycle to be very satisfying -- so just in case you were holding off on them because you were afraid he'd let pretty much everything from the past 2000 pages drop and finish in a couple paragraphs, its definitely not the case.
They already do this with accelerators and breaking systems, so if you have a new car you might already be in the program.
"Perhaps if some great leaders played the game they could inspire the masses to band together and overthrow the griefers. A George Washington of the gaming world."
:)
I've actually seen this happen - I'm not a big MMO player because I generally hate grinding and love PvP. Anyways, I tried my hand for a month on an early Asheron's Call PvP server. They're system was stupid though - you could get ganked for your stuff while you were in a menu talking to an NPC. Killing someone meant taking a good item from them and some gold, so there was a definite penalty for death there. Towns generally were taken over by griefers (mobsters) and regular folks had to stay clear when they were camping out or they'd pretty much kill any newb who walked into town. It did lead to some interesting roleplaying opportunities like robbing people on the highway (they'd usually pay you 20GP instead of risking losing their weapon), or actually making alliances worthwhile ("you really don't want to mess with me, do you know who I'm with?").
Anyways, at one point a really high level camper took over a main area - he was way way overpowered compared to the newbs in town. It was a one hit kill on most everyone. Eventually enough people were fed up and waiting outside town for him to leave that someone got the idea to drop all our stuff and form an angry mob. Everyone stripped down to nothing except a club or small sword and went in as a giant mob against him. It took forever and a lot of times you'd die before you got a hit off, but eventually the 30-40 newbs killed the guy and dropped a ridiculous weapon that he had.
So there you go, community policing in action