The shears in and of themselves are worth nothing at all!
The entire value comes from the service of playing the game. Getting items is a PART of the SERVICE of playing that game. By "spending 12 hours" to get the shears, you have spent 12 hours on the service in pursuit of enjoyment.
If the game company decided to nullify your service early, even if you have a level 60 everquest avatar, the only thing you SHOULD be able to get back is your unused subscription amount.
IE if you played 1 month of a payed for 6 month subscription, you should get the 5 months back that you arent allowed to play.
these online games are a SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICE. you agree to that when you sign up for them. I know you "feel bad" when you lose something online, i have lost some "important" items myself on these games due to poorly handled trades, but the thing is, when it comes down to it, you are playing a game, and the mechanics of the game are an interface to a service.
You did NOT put "work" into getting those items, no more than when you go to mcdonalds, buy a hamburger, did you put "work" into the seat because you decided to eat there.
You no more "own" the plate at a restaurant because they used it to serve food to you, than you own an item online.
now the question of "worth" is different, it may be "worth" money for you to give them an aspect of the service with which they do not want to invest time to be a part of (im talking about getting the shears from you with "real" money).
but dont feel bad that once you buy those shears, and someone then nerfs them, you havent "lost" any more money than you had lost before.
you simply now have an aspect of the service that is worthless to you.
Someone else isnt liable for your "loss" since you did not OWN what you traded for anyway.
You did not buy a "licence" to that object, so you have no loss in licencing fee.;(
I was looking at this, and despite the funny jokes about a redneck skynet, and all hail the rise of the john deer overlords, I do have a couple serious questions.
In kansas a lot of the farmed land in the north western parts of kansas is non-uniform. People tend to have this idea of kansas as being a flat area, but the land is actually quite hilly in the western parts.
What happens if a tractor slips or loses traction? Or do the tractors simply not operate when it is muddy? How much error detection and fixiing do these tractors have. What happens if it finds itself on a part of a field it shouldnt be on, IE its transmitter goes out for a short period of time due to electrical disturbance (say freak lightning or something else).
Does the tractor drive across tilled land to get back to the spot (possibly destroying crops) or does it know to re-orient itself, drive along the right path, and then proceed about its task.
What happens if there is a hardware failure, is it possible to set a new tractor right where the last one set off, or does it need to go through the entire process again?
these things werent answered very well in the article, but are very obvious questions i think that should pop up to someone who read the article.
Why does Bittorrent always get posted up as a "FILE SHARING" program, its no more a "fire sharing" program than windows IIS. Bittorrent happens to make it convenient for a single distributor to allow access to his files without incurring a major bandwidth costs.
IN fact to find out someone who does just that, go to gametab.com, or redvsblue.com
they have saved craploads of bandwidth on there completely legal files. Bandwidth has made it so files can be available that would otherwise be completely unavailable otherwise as the main host went down.
Bittorrent is being abused as a file distribution method for movies and such, but so is IRC, and so are chat programs and e-mail for christ sake.
Are we going to ban file send capabilies from chat now because someone might send the HULK over it?
How about just ban the entire internet? You can argue that Bittorrents greatest use is for downloading large, illegal files,and I might agree with you. But the internet, by your same thinking, is just a big illegal file sharing network too, all you have to do is prove taht more than oh 50% of the bandwidth USED on the internet is used to download illegal content, or hell if your the RIAA just try to prove 20%, and then you could say "well the internet is just a havent for filesharers we should see it shutting down"
what rediculous bullshit. I have loved bittorrent, I use it to download licenced anime, and to download redvsblue episodes and the odd movie that gets slashdoted.
The main difference between bittorrent and kaaza, is bittorrent is not an anonymous fileshare program, there is always a single point of distribution, and thus a single person that can be tracked down to have started it.
why is this a "good" thing? because its not a filesharing program, using bittorrent is not an excercise in your fair use rights, you may be using it as such, but it has a very powerfull, very real legal use for it.
Unlike kaaza, with a littlle tweaking, bittorrent could be the "big" thing patches and such being distributed, even by companies such as IDSoftware, your not going to do that with a program like Kaaza, because you have no trust of what the file is going to be. On bittorrent since it comes from a single original source file, you have complete trust of the content being sent to you.
I dont know, i am repsonding to the few threads i saw "but bittorrent is illegal" and i started in a new thread cause i could easily see them getitng modded down.
I spent all my education skill points on computer programming, and now I cant seem to use the damn skills because someone nerfed the ability to gain money with them like before. I wanted to be a god damned power user, now I am trying to get a skillset in another area that looks good, and that will probably be nerfed too!
You know I am a real cynic a lot of times, and I simply think new fangled things such as what you propose are kinda retarded... But not this time, that really is a good Idea, I am all for making laws... real.. tangible, and accessible. I did not realize building codes were already treated thus. If someone wants to create teh building codes, and be suplemented them, then let the government supplement them for the research, not the actual sale of the material.
It can be given at zero cost, so let it be given at zero cost other than the taxes to maintain and aquire it.
Re:Here's an interesting quote
on
Open Source Law
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· Score: 1
What is even more interesting is the implications of a copyrighted law...
what would that mean exactly? that every time someone made a public address that cited the law, that they would have to pay royalties to the writer?
Lawyers would have to pay royalties to practice certain kinds of law?
I could just imagine "we dont defend against this firm, because they paid 300 thousand to actually be told what the law is, we cannot therefor know that law since we did not pay the legal royalties on it."
That leaves me lost, and confused.
I mean, its as stupid as say... patenting an on-line auction that was based on a real world model...
only in the sense that they never stopped the original project that started skynet. I mean who knows, with the mutability of time that they propose, connor could send back a terminator pre-sarah terminator one and just kill off all the people/parents of people that had a hand in creating ANY version of skynet.
IE the brewsters chick father, anyone in that room etc... they could then "stop" skynet. but thats not how time has happened... yet...
do you see what I am saying? In fact, time could have happened a 100 different ways by the time we see terminator 3, they could have sent back 50 terminators, each going BEFORE the previous version, or time could have happened exactly as it did happen. Hell, each terminator might not even been sent in any logical sequence that we can think of.
Hell the first terminator might have been the "last" terminator they sent to attempt to kill john connor, the terminatrix might have been the first.
of course as movie goers we know that simply isnt the case, but as time works it could have happened like that.
but because time is so easy to alter, and alter in a non paradoxical way, that it doesnt matter to those perceiving time.
Basically it puts forth a non paradox method of time travel, if you send someone back, and they kill there grandfather, they still exist in that time frame, even though they would never have been born, but by mere fact of existing in that time they exist in all instances after that time.
other time theories would put forward that if you went back in time, you always went back in time, that heals the paradox, because you never interfered with the events that put you in your situation, think of it as how the twelve monkeys handled time travel, they sent the guy back but because they sent him back they caused the crisis which caused him to be sent back.
Or in another sense you could think of it, if they tried to send someone back to kill their own grandfather, they would never be able to accomplish their goal, because they never did thus proving their existance.
something to wrap your head around.
the matrix is sorta like thinking of time as an array of time instances, all are created via some algorithm where time is some instance n, now as you go along instance N you do "work" on the array, now the array an edit itself at n and n-x where x is some arbitrary number (IE you wnt to go x time instances back in time), so when you get your initial array, lets call this instance
Time the way time would happen initially, and then you start working along the array, and at time say n = 2032 some crazy machine decides to send a terminator back to n = 1982 and kill someone that affects it at time 2032.
well then your index has to go back to 1982, and though the array has changed, because of the edit, there was no paradox!
oh well im thinking of this too hard and i think i lost something in my explanation, but so goes it.
the different ideas of time travel are by no means new. and to the tard that says its 2003 and there are no robots and its a movie.... yes it is, but the fun of movies is you can talk about them, and there context.
I think he should go catch his latest episode of "friends" before he clubs one of us.
anyway, making time completely mutable, ala Back To the Future (IE you can change time simply by knowning what the outcome would have been), makes it a more interesting movie, it allows for anything to happen, simply because the cause and events hadnt happened in the first event timeline to warrant sending a robot back, but when the robot was sent back it changed the timeline for a different robot to be sent back.
that kinda thing.
Now see thats the way you should be thinking, people seem to forget that the way they are using time in the terminator movies is how they use time in say, Orson Scott Cards "Pastwatch: Redemption of Christopher Columbus"
Each time the machines send back a terminator they create a small paradox, IE things stop happening the way that they happened the previous time.
The first skynet could have been created in a different manner the first time, but by sending back the first terminator also facilitated his existance at an earlier date.
When they destroyed the hands and such of the first terminator in Terminator 2, they merely destroyed the timeline that involved skynet coming to exist in 1997.
In fact, they boldly say that is the case in the movie, when he is talking about the chick and how he met her, and he said "if you had never been sent back that time, I would have hooked up with her then"
The original part of the series "could" happen, simply because UNTIL the first terminator was sent back, things DID happen where skynet was created, and almost created its own causal loop in creating john connor, who might not even have had the same father in the original timeline (ie some guy other than the future guy).
Then when he came back he becames the father, thus destroying some of the time line, etc..
it gets complicated but if you think of time is completely mutable from any instant to the intstants ahead of it, then the plot can work out just fine.
I know no one will read this, but I am now putting this Idea into the public domain so that anyone can use this, including large corporations, with the caveat that it cannot be copyrighted or patented as a business process. If you wish to use this, contact me;-)
anyway here is the idea, completely but not totally unlike microsofts Idea.
The method would be of translating the message into one language (your target language) and then re-translating it back to english in real time, and presenting the re-translated version in a sub window.
IE in an example messaging system, such as trillian, it would have one "top" window which was the raw english version, then between the two windows it would have the conversion type, in this case ENglish -> Spanish.
THe program assumes that the person writing in english does not know spanish.
When the person types in the top window, the English->spanish->english translation pops up underneath.
the user can look at the English->spanish->english version at the bottom and see if that is "close enough" to what they are trying to say.
If it is, they can then send either the English version, or the Spanish version by hitting send in either the top, or the bottom frame.
this would allow people to have a "small" sanity check to see if its re-translated as something that they intended it to say.
The accuracy of the translation is held up to "some algorithm" which would be implemented by whatever programming is implementing such a system.
It is different than the microsoft system in the fact htat it doesnt send english to be translated, it sends already translated material.
If someone didnt secure their machines, you made obscene gestures at them, showed them obscene acts, and used obscene language to attempt to make them stop doing stupid crap.
Unfortunately my attempts to do this at my "in home" environment has only made ME disliked, when all I did was point out how stupid they were.
But hey I dont want to talk to them anyway.
(the above was a joke btw, i didnt make obscene acts).
Acually, he has a point. When you use someones phone, or use there e-mail, you are invading their property with your e-mail/phone call. They pay for the service, and it is up to them how it should be used. You should not have to allow "anyone" to send you anything into your home BECAUSE you pay for a service. You SHOULD have the right, the liberty, to define what does and does not enter your home. When you watch television you are allowing whatever those people want to come into your home, and it is up to you to decide whether you want to turn it off or not.
When you have a phone you are not requesting the information that people send to you, you are using it as a communications device.
When a company starts sending unsolicited material, in volume, that might be construed as an invasion of property, a denial of service against your phone so to speak.
YOU PAY FOR THE PHONE, you should have the RIGHT to say "i dont want MY phone to be used this way"
because it is YOUR phone, YOUR service.
if someone signed up for a "i dont want to be part of a gallop poll" list then yes by god that person shouldnt have the gallop poll ringing their house.
it is not freedom of speech to FORCE someone to listen to, or receive content. It is freedom of speech to ALLOW someone to say there peice, but it is NOT freedom of speech to make someone listen to it.
That is a captive audience, and thats what telemarkters, TV, and Spammers, all want.
IT IS NOT THE RIGHT of SPAMMERS, TV, TELEMARKTERS to have a captive audience, or even a "partially captive audience" (ie forcing you to at least allow them to try to talk to you). They can send there message as much as they wwant, but they should not necessarilly be allowed to do it using private infrastructure (the phone to your house).
The problem is, TV, spammers, etc, are all trying to get into the mode where it is required you listen to someone elses "free speech" or "corporate speech" so that they can try to sell you products. But it is stupid because once you receive the information you paid for, you should be able to block, stop, or edit it for how YOU want to view it.
but that is becoming illegal, alreayd is illegal in some venues.
This is really a great victory for privacy advocates because it says people can stop others from using their property, and their infrastructure to annoy them without the ability to stop them.
All those 1950's movies with people tooling around in flying saucers would have been more accurate than anything produced in the last 30 years.
OMG I lauhged so hard, and I think I would suffer a brain annurism from the irony of seeing one these tooling around during a re-run of "the day the earth stood still"
Actually no, you are wrong on this case. The method is opt-in, by doing an opt-in they can ask for the age of the person using the computer. If the persons says they are over X age, then you have to beleive them and then if they are not over age X then you are not responsible because you asked the question with no reasonable method of verification.
But the way spammers work is they send it to anyone that they can reasonably find has a legitimate e-mail address, not how old the person is that recieves the spam. It would be akin to sending nude magazines 1400 10th avenue leavenworth kansas, just because you found out the street address existed and accepted e-mail. When the address is actually to a high school, so basically you would be sending porno to a high school. Now I knwo that it wouldnt be veiwed by children in that case, but it shows indiscriminiate spamming and how it can get to people.
You can easily know who the box belongs to, you ask. If they trick you, then your not liable, because you were tricked. The same reason you are not liable if someone comes on and buys a dildo off your web site with a valid credit card and other information, and then you find out that that person is a 10 year old buy who knows a little to much about his computer and his parents credit card.
It is also a good reason not to be liable if a child comes to your web site and you have a warning on its index page, this way you are not responsible if they see bad content, because they violated the agreement by being too young and you had no method of verifying that they were who they claimed to be.
In fact, I would say there was 100% liability for sending porn spam to a random box and not having any verification it was a child at all. You are pushing a supply onto the user, instead of recieving a demand for your product from someone you cant verify.
In fact, child porno, and other indecent things, might be one of the best reasons to ban at least sexually oriented spam, and spam inapropriate to children. (IE drugs that could be dangerous for children to have, because it would increase interest in taht drug from someone who might not be mature enough to make a good decision regarding how the spam is handled).
you can actually do this with MOHAA relatievly easy, you just force the player to use the connect command on an IP you specify.
works pretty good actually, doesnt work with portnumbers, but I have a mod for MOHAA that forwards people to other servers if the server gets too full.
We tried to "do" quake 3, unfortunatly big tim died by rocket explosion, and there must of been lag or something cause he didnt respawn. No one else wanted to play after that so we, went to try total annihilation, but none of us could figure out how to nano-lathe structures into existence.
the ideal would be to have a minimum performance rating, the "last" part was just a "suggestion" of a sort.
basically it would try to give the person a minimum of say.... oh 20 k a second. so if a single person had a 5 k upload, it would give 15k of the sites bandwidth in its place. and he could raise the "minimum" standard depending on how much the user has previously contributed.
people with higher upload rates would automatically be at a benefit for site credits, and thus be more likely to have a file to give to others.
the idea is to get people interested in downloading and serving a file even if they dont particularly want the file, they may want to help serve it so that tehy could get prime access to a later file that they might want.
I am thinking of this mostly say perhaps a distibution site for free independent films, or large CD's of music compiled from free sources.
lets say you scoured the net, and got permissionf rom a lot of independent artits, and compiled isos (say one time a week) of what you consider as "the best" music of the week. and you wanted to serve these 650 meg isos, and in the ISO it might come with a label cover, lyrics, and perhaps fan art/fan music videos done wiht the musci.
I am thinking that sites that provided the service of compiling such things, fan art, fan music videos (maybe even anime music video) would have a lot of demand, and these thigns would add value to the music as well, and you could serve them only in an iso.
and to make sure its distrubuted the people that would get the iso first would be those who had the most site credits.
The process could also be used for sites whcih have to have multiple patches, think ID and Valve software.
They could serve patches up to "high" user credit customers, and people such as fileplanet and such who would pay for the exclusive service of being a gold credit member.
This could save a place like ID software, or Valve (half life makers) a lot of money in initial bandwidth for sending these files, they could just start a bittorrent as explained in my previous post, and they would let the users suck up the usually HELLISH initial rush for files.
Sites such as fileplanet could move over to bittorrent for non-subscribers, thus freeing there bandwidth as well.
I mean the savings are immense, and companies that do file sharing for a business could save so much money by using bittorrent, even in its current form, all they would have to do is write something that wouldnt let an IP that wasnt logged in use the bittorrent, and they would be set.
The savings alone would translate into pure profit;-)
A good project for someone to use, is to have the corporate version where the main corporate site can have the file as a bittorrent, and always be serving it. If it cant find any other clients, it uses the corporate file LAST to download from.
this way the first few people on the thing would be getting it from the corporate client, then after that from other peers, but then when the file becomes unpopular, people would then basically be getting it from the corporate client again.
This would a little improvement. Though this may just show my ignorance of how bittorrent works as well. Currently I download some files using bittorrent (wolfenstein enemy territories) but when all the seeds go away it can cause issues.
So basically make it so that there is a relatively permanent seed, and he is always requested from LAST. that way if the file is popular the site doesnt have to worry about losing bandwidth.
also, stats tracking should be "ramped up" a little, to where someone would have to register to use the torrents on a specific site, this way the tracking per user could be used. Now this wouldnt interfere with anyones right to privacy, but could be used as a "bonus" system, to provide incentive to keep the torrent open. IE the more you upload the more "credit" you are given. If you think of it in slashdot subscriber terms, perhaps people that have a high "credit" (ie they leave their client open after being finished) would get earlier access to files. maybe have a 3 teir file access. top teir (high uploaders) would get the file as soon as it was served. second teir would get at it 20 minutes later, and 3rd teir get it 45 minutes to an hour later.
this would allow sites to reward those that are high quality users, and maybe allow them to track site benefits based on participation.
maybe call it "sitetorrent" or such.
and this is actually an original idea i thought of trying to get some freinds of mine and myself to code 2 years ago, but I had neither the experience nor the time to work on it. Then someone showed me bittorrent about 2 months ago and I was like "holy shit thats exactly what my product was going to be sans user participation";-) oh well, bittorrent rocks!
Oh, and you cant steal my idea, i provide it free to the public today 6/2/03, as a business application given freely and documented.
Since the game is provided as a service (not a good) then you cant claim it as a goods or service. You made your online book, you own the copy right for it, in fact copyright law is specifically there to protect such transactions, so that you can be the only seller or only person to give the rights to sell your copyrighted material.
To SELL copyrighted material without a license is piracy. (though copying for you and your friends for free is not since no money was made, but thats another argument).
you did not provide labour to build the house, you may have put labour in, as a part of the service provided, but it is still a service. Your service ends, along with the house, and whatever crap you bought online, the second you close your account to the game. The house is a form of ranking of use during the service, the online house is not a good, it is not physically created, it is a maniftestation of the service.
If a hacker comes on, deletes your character, deletes your house, then the only liability is the monthly charge that may need to be refunded for that month by the service provider, and you may stop using there service as well, since they provided bad (as in hackable service).
The whole reason the online service provider is liable in any way to even return to a backup is solely because they want your continued use of their service.
Just because you can sell your virtual property, you are in essence just selling your time using the service to gain higher ranking within the service, and then you can sell this effort to someone else. But since it is againts the rules of most of the services (everquest daoc etc) to sell your manifestation of service online, they hold 0 liability if your service and manifestation thereof gets deleted in transfer, or is destroyed by another player.
It is all part of the service, which you accepted when you joined, and if you do not enjoy the service because of an act of another player, or faulty security on the part of the service, you can ask for the most recent months refund, or refund of remaining credit, and quit the service.:-) It would be similar to renting a truck, then making a modification to the truck, and saying you owned that part of the truck because you modified it, and then selling the modication to someone after you have given the truck back to the company, then suing them because they removed the modification but you wanted to sell it.
You have been reading "Light of another day" by Arthur C. Clarke havent you?
It gets into some issues with 0 privacy technology (ie the ability to view you no matter where you are, even whhen you are (IE they could look at you in the past), and it came to the point where people who wanted privacy were wearing invisiblity cloaks and used hand gestures similar to that to speak to a blind and deaf person.
pretty interesting read if you want to see the true extremes of 0 privacy.
this system could be abused by "cloners" as the article said, people making "fake" license plates then going down town to drive while someone else is charged the fee.
Oh well, yet another problem with automatic systems;-(
What they should do is keep a small 10 second clip of the vehicle for court, and make it easy to come in and file a claim against the device, if the snapshot or vehicle shows THEIR vehicle, then they have to pay a court fee.
Otherwise the tax is waved, and the car in the screenshot is flagged by its make and model, and its owner arrested if it can be identified again, and file a criminal case against them.
I think this is a good idea, if they feel that it is truly necessarry to use it. Imagine being able to use this to identify stolen vehicles, minutes after they are reported stolen, just put in the recognition to look for a car and there you go.
There are some issues about location tracking of your citizens, but as it is being used it is for tracking who is using the roadway during high congestion periods. As long as it is not used for private data mining (IE trying to figure out where you tend to shop and such) then I am all for it. If there is a counter argument, I am not seeing exactly "where" the abuses could be applied on this one to any extent. As long as the thing wasnt being used as an auto traffic cop for running through red lights and such, since we know from some experience here in the U.S. that that can cause some seriuos issues via mis-identifying breaking the law, and turning right at a red.
As long as it is used for congestion identification, and possibly tracking of stolen vehicles/people who have committed a crime and the police which to facilitate their capture. I cannot see a bad side to this.
Since driving is a privilidge given by the state, being able to track who is driving is also a responsiblity of the state if they wish to implement it.
I had to track radar, what weapon i was on, ammo amounts, and what direction my top toros was facing!
what did they say about mech games!
oh man, I feel so left out.
But on a more serious note. I think these games do increase twitch re-actions for people, to be even remotely good you have to be able to identify a things distance, and even slight variations on where it exists in space to determine if you are going to fire at it.
Just taking medal of honor for example, many times on servers which force the skin type, it can be very hard to determine if someone is behind a wall because of the lack of contrast between default uniforms and the background.
The ability to know how thick an object is can really help determine how abnormal its shape is versus what it should be.
Anyone thats played these games a while, and has become familiar with where things are on there maps can almost run them backward. I used to play on a map called canalzone (the original for qwtf) that was "huge" and I could run it backward, or looking straight at the ground, as long as i knew where my start positon was. You need a good feel for how large the 3d space is relative to your character in the game to be able to do these kinds of things.
Now on games where weapons have travel time in space, knowledge of 3d space is even more important, games such as mechwarrior 4, coupled with some lag, require to know the movement speed in space so you can lead the target. If you dont have any idea how they are going to change relative shape vs distance in space, you are much less likely to hit your target.
so the hypothesis that games can affect how you determine things in 3d space seems completely plausible to me, because having "trained" people to play many 3d games myself (planetfortress.com/canalzone) (www.themfb.com search on wayback machine or google) I can tell you that the ability to have a good twitch instinct and judgment factors about objects in 3d space can really help.
You make security sound so easy! dear god, if it were that easy then everything would be secure.
You cant think of everything to be secure against, if you could then there would be no such thing as hacking. Only an idiot would not realise this.
Slashdot Mirror
The shears in and of themselves are worth nothing at all!
;(
The entire value comes from the service of playing the game. Getting items is a PART of the SERVICE of playing that game. By "spending 12 hours" to get the shears, you have spent 12 hours on the service in pursuit of enjoyment.
If the game company decided to nullify your service early, even if you have a level 60 everquest avatar, the only thing you SHOULD be able to get back is your unused subscription amount.
IE if you played 1 month of a payed for 6 month subscription, you should get the 5 months back that you arent allowed to play.
these online games are a SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICE. you agree to that when you sign up for them. I know you "feel bad" when you lose something online, i have lost some "important" items myself on these games due to poorly handled trades, but the thing is, when it comes down to it, you are playing a game, and the mechanics of the game are an interface to a service.
You did NOT put "work" into getting those items, no more than when you go to mcdonalds, buy a hamburger, did you put "work" into the seat because you decided to eat there.
You no more "own" the plate at a restaurant because they used it to serve food to you, than you own an item online.
now the question of "worth" is different, it may be "worth" money for you to give them an aspect of the service with which they do not want to invest time to be a part of (im talking about getting the shears from you with "real" money).
but dont feel bad that once you buy those shears, and someone then nerfs them, you havent "lost" any more money than you had lost before.
you simply now have an aspect of the service that is worthless to you.
Someone else isnt liable for your "loss" since you did not OWN what you traded for anyway.
You did not buy a "licence" to that object, so you have no loss in licencing fee.
I was looking at this, and despite the funny jokes about a redneck skynet, and all hail the rise of the john deer overlords, I do have a couple serious questions.
In kansas a lot of the farmed land in the north western parts of kansas is non-uniform. People tend to have this idea of kansas as being a flat area, but the land is actually quite hilly in the western parts.
What happens if a tractor slips or loses traction? Or do the tractors simply not operate when it is muddy? How much error detection and fixiing do these tractors have. What happens if it finds itself on a part of a field it shouldnt be on, IE its transmitter goes out for a short period of time due to electrical disturbance (say freak lightning or something else).
Does the tractor drive across tilled land to get back to the spot (possibly destroying crops) or does it know to re-orient itself, drive along the right path, and then proceed about its task.
What happens if there is a hardware failure, is it possible to set a new tractor right where the last one set off, or does it need to go through the entire process again?
these things werent answered very well in the article, but are very obvious questions i think that should pop up to someone who read the article.
Why does Bittorrent always get posted up as a "FILE SHARING" program, its no more a "fire sharing" program than windows IIS. Bittorrent happens to make it convenient for a single distributor to allow access to his files without incurring a major bandwidth costs.
IN fact to find out someone who does just that, go to gametab.com, or redvsblue.com
they have saved craploads of bandwidth on there completely legal files. Bandwidth has made it so files can be available that would otherwise be completely unavailable otherwise as the main host went down.
Bittorrent is being abused as a file distribution method for movies and such, but so is IRC, and so are chat programs and e-mail for christ sake.
Are we going to ban file send capabilies from chat now because someone might send the HULK over it?
How about just ban the entire internet? You can argue that Bittorrents greatest use is for downloading large, illegal files,and I might agree with you. But the internet, by your same thinking, is just a big illegal file sharing network too, all you have to do is prove taht more than oh 50% of the bandwidth USED on the internet is used to download illegal content, or hell if your the RIAA just try to prove 20%, and then you could say "well the internet is just a havent for filesharers we should see it shutting down"
what rediculous bullshit. I have loved bittorrent, I use it to download licenced anime, and to download redvsblue episodes and the odd movie that gets slashdoted.
The main difference between bittorrent and kaaza, is bittorrent is not an anonymous fileshare program, there is always a single point of distribution, and thus a single person that can be tracked down to have started it.
why is this a "good" thing? because its not a filesharing program, using bittorrent is not an excercise in your fair use rights, you may be using it as such, but it has a very powerfull, very real legal use for it.
Unlike kaaza, with a littlle tweaking, bittorrent could be the "big" thing patches and such being distributed, even by companies such as IDSoftware, your not going to do that with a program like Kaaza, because you have no trust of what the file is going to be. On bittorrent since it comes from a single original source file, you have complete trust of the content being sent to you.
I dont know, i am repsonding to the few threads i saw "but bittorrent is illegal" and i started in a new thread cause i could easily see them getitng modded down.
Buzz OUT
I spent all my education skill points on computer programming, and now I cant seem to use the damn skills because someone nerfed the ability to gain money with them like before. I wanted to be a god damned power user, now I am trying to get a skillset in another area that looks good, and that will probably be nerfed too!
You know I am a real cynic a lot of times, and I simply think new fangled things such as what you propose are kinda retarded... But not this time, that really is a good Idea, I am all for making laws... real.. tangible, and accessible. I did not realize building codes were already treated thus. If someone wants to create teh building codes, and be suplemented them, then let the government supplement them for the research, not the actual sale of the material.
It can be given at zero cost, so let it be given at zero cost other than the taxes to maintain and aquire it.
What is even more interesting is the implications of a copyrighted law...
what would that mean exactly? that every time someone made a public address that cited the law, that they would have to pay royalties to the writer?
Lawyers would have to pay royalties to practice certain kinds of law?
I could just imagine "we dont defend against this firm, because they paid 300 thousand to actually be told what the law is, we cannot therefor know that law since we did not pay the legal royalties on it."
That leaves me lost, and confused.
I mean, its as stupid as say... patenting an on-line auction that was based on a real world model...
only in the sense that they never stopped the original project that started skynet. I mean who knows, with the mutability of time that they propose, connor could send back a terminator pre-sarah terminator one and just kill off all the people/parents of people that had a hand in creating ANY version of skynet.
IE the brewsters chick father, anyone in that room etc... they could then "stop" skynet. but thats not how time has happened... yet...
do you see what I am saying? In fact, time could have happened a 100 different ways by the time we see terminator 3, they could have sent back 50 terminators, each going BEFORE the previous version, or time could have happened exactly as it did happen. Hell, each terminator might not even been sent in any logical sequence that we can think of.
Hell the first terminator might have been the "last" terminator they sent to attempt to kill john connor, the terminatrix might have been the first.
of course as movie goers we know that simply isnt the case, but as time works it could have happened like that.
but because time is so easy to alter, and alter in a non paradoxical way, that it doesnt matter to those perceiving time.
Basically it puts forth a non paradox method of time travel, if you send someone back, and they kill there grandfather, they still exist in that time frame, even though they would never have been born, but by mere fact of existing in that time they exist in all instances after that time.
other time theories would put forward that if you went back in time, you always went back in time, that heals the paradox, because you never interfered with the events that put you in your situation, think of it as how the twelve monkeys handled time travel, they sent the guy back but because they sent him back they caused the crisis which caused him to be sent back.
Or in another sense you could think of it, if they tried to send someone back to kill their own grandfather, they would never be able to accomplish their goal, because they never did thus proving their existance.
something to wrap your head around.
the matrix is sorta like thinking of time as an array of time instances, all are created via some algorithm where time is some instance n, now as you go along instance N you do "work" on the array, now the array an edit itself at n and n-x where x is some arbitrary number (IE you wnt to go x time instances back in time), so when you get your initial array, lets call this instance
Time the way time would happen initially, and then you start working along the array, and at time say n = 2032 some crazy machine decides to send a terminator back to n = 1982 and kill someone that affects it at time 2032.
well then your index has to go back to 1982, and though the array has changed, because of the edit, there was no paradox!
oh well im thinking of this too hard and i think i lost something in my explanation, but so goes it.
Buzz OUT
the different ideas of time travel are by no means new. and to the tard that says its 2003 and there are no robots and its a movie.... yes it is, but the fun of movies is you can talk about them, and there context. I think he should go catch his latest episode of "friends" before he clubs one of us. anyway, making time completely mutable, ala Back To the Future (IE you can change time simply by knowning what the outcome would have been), makes it a more interesting movie, it allows for anything to happen, simply because the cause and events hadnt happened in the first event timeline to warrant sending a robot back, but when the robot was sent back it changed the timeline for a different robot to be sent back. that kinda thing.
Now see thats the way you should be thinking, people seem to forget that the way they are using time in the terminator movies is how they use time in say, Orson Scott Cards "Pastwatch: Redemption of Christopher Columbus"
Each time the machines send back a terminator they create a small paradox, IE things stop happening the way that they happened the previous time.
The first skynet could have been created in a different manner the first time, but by sending back the first terminator also facilitated his existance at an earlier date.
When they destroyed the hands and such of the first terminator in Terminator 2, they merely destroyed the timeline that involved skynet coming to exist in 1997.
In fact, they boldly say that is the case in the movie, when he is talking about the chick and how he met her, and he said "if you had never been sent back that time, I would have hooked up with her then"
The original part of the series "could" happen, simply because UNTIL the first terminator was sent back, things DID happen where skynet was created, and almost created its own causal loop in creating john connor, who might not even have had the same father in the original timeline (ie some guy other than the future guy).
Then when he came back he becames the father, thus destroying some of the time line, etc..
it gets complicated but if you think of time is completely mutable from any instant to the intstants ahead of it, then the plot can work out just fine.
I know no one will read this, but I am now putting this Idea into the public domain so that anyone can use this, including large corporations, with the caveat that it cannot be copyrighted or patented as a business process. If you wish to use this, contact me ;-)
anyway here is the idea, completely but not totally unlike microsofts Idea.
The method would be of translating the message into one language (your target language) and then re-translating it back to english in real time, and presenting the re-translated version in a sub window.
IE in an example messaging system, such as trillian, it would have one "top" window which was the raw english version, then between the two windows it would have the conversion type, in this case ENglish -> Spanish.
THe program assumes that the person writing in english does not know spanish.
When the person types in the top window, the English->spanish->english translation pops up underneath.
the user can look at the English->spanish->english version at the bottom and see if that is "close enough" to what they are trying to say.
If it is, they can then send either the English version, or the Spanish version by hitting send in either the top, or the bottom frame.
this would allow people to have a "small" sanity check to see if its re-translated as something that they intended it to say.
The accuracy of the translation is held up to "some algorithm" which would be implemented by whatever programming is implementing such a system.
It is different than the microsoft system in the fact htat it doesnt send english to be translated, it sends already translated material.
"security through obscurity"
I wish there was security by obscenity.
If someone didnt secure their machines, you made obscene gestures at them, showed them obscene acts, and used obscene language to attempt to make them stop doing stupid crap.
Unfortunately my attempts to do this at my "in home" environment has only made ME disliked, when all I did was point out how stupid they were.
But hey I dont want to talk to them anyway.
(the above was a joke btw, i didnt make obscene acts).
Acually, he has a point. When you use someones phone, or use there e-mail, you are invading their property with your e-mail/phone call. They pay for the service, and it is up to them how it should be used. You should not have to allow "anyone" to send you anything into your home BECAUSE you pay for a service. You SHOULD have the right, the liberty, to define what does and does not enter your home. When you watch television you are allowing whatever those people want to come into your home, and it is up to you to decide whether you want to turn it off or not.
When you have a phone you are not requesting the information that people send to you, you are using it as a communications device.
When a company starts sending unsolicited material, in volume, that might be construed as an invasion of property, a denial of service against your phone so to speak.
YOU PAY FOR THE PHONE, you should have the RIGHT to say "i dont want MY phone to be used this way"
because it is YOUR phone, YOUR service.
if someone signed up for a "i dont want to be part of a gallop poll" list then yes by god that person shouldnt have the gallop poll ringing their house.
it is not freedom of speech to FORCE someone to listen to, or receive content. It is freedom of speech to ALLOW someone to say there peice, but it is NOT freedom of speech to make someone listen to it.
That is a captive audience, and thats what telemarkters, TV, and Spammers, all want.
IT IS NOT THE RIGHT of SPAMMERS, TV, TELEMARKTERS to have a captive audience, or even a "partially captive audience" (ie forcing you to at least allow them to try to talk to you). They can send there message as much as they wwant, but they should not necessarilly be allowed to do it using private infrastructure (the phone to your house).
The problem is, TV, spammers, etc, are all trying to get into the mode where it is required you listen to someone elses "free speech" or "corporate speech" so that they can try to sell you products. But it is stupid because once you receive the information you paid for, you should be able to block, stop, or edit it for how YOU want to view it.
but that is becoming illegal, alreayd is illegal in some venues.
This is really a great victory for privacy advocates because it says people can stop others from using their property, and their infrastructure to annoy them without the ability to stop them.
All those 1950's movies with people tooling around in flying saucers would have been more accurate than anything produced in the last 30 years.
OMG I lauhged so hard, and I think I would suffer a brain annurism from the irony of seeing one these tooling around during a re-run of "the day the earth stood still"
Actually no, you are wrong on this case. The method is opt-in, by doing an opt-in they can ask for the age of the person using the computer. If the persons says they are over X age, then you have to beleive them and then if they are not over age X then you are not responsible because you asked the question with no reasonable method of verification.
But the way spammers work is they send it to anyone that they can reasonably find has a legitimate e-mail address, not how old the person is that recieves the spam. It would be akin to sending nude magazines 1400 10th avenue leavenworth kansas, just because you found out the street address existed and accepted e-mail. When the address is actually to a high school, so basically you would be sending porno to a high school. Now I knwo that it wouldnt be veiwed by children in that case, but it shows indiscriminiate spamming and how it can get to people.
You can easily know who the box belongs to, you ask. If they trick you, then your not liable, because you were tricked. The same reason you are not liable if someone comes on and buys a dildo off your web site with a valid credit card and other information, and then you find out that that person is a 10 year old buy who knows a little to much about his computer and his parents credit card.
It is also a good reason not to be liable if a child comes to your web site and you have a warning on its index page, this way you are not responsible if they see bad content, because they violated the agreement by being too young and you had no method of verifying that they were who they claimed to be.
In fact, I would say there was 100% liability for sending porn spam to a random box and not having any verification it was a child at all. You are pushing a supply onto the user, instead of recieving a demand for your product from someone you cant verify.
In fact, child porno, and other indecent things, might be one of the best reasons to ban at least sexually oriented spam, and spam inapropriate to children. (IE drugs that could be dangerous for children to have, because it would increase interest in taht drug from someone who might not be mature enough to make a good decision regarding how the spam is handled).
Buzz OUT
you can actually do this with MOHAA relatievly easy, you just force the player to use the connect command on an IP you specify. works pretty good actually, doesnt work with portnumbers, but I have a mod for MOHAA that forwards people to other servers if the server gets too full.
We tried to "do" quake 3, unfortunatly big tim died by rocket explosion, and there must of been lag or something cause he didnt respawn. No one else wanted to play after that so we, went to try total annihilation, but none of us could figure out how to nano-lathe structures into existence.
the ideal would be to have a minimum performance rating, the "last" part was just a "suggestion" of a sort.
;-)
basically it would try to give the person a minimum of say.... oh 20 k a second. so if a single person had a 5 k upload, it would give 15k of the sites bandwidth in its place. and he could raise the "minimum" standard depending on how much the user has previously contributed.
people with higher upload rates would automatically be at a benefit for site credits, and thus be more likely to have a file to give to others.
the idea is to get people interested in downloading and serving a file even if they dont particularly want the file, they may want to help serve it so that tehy could get prime access to a later file that they might want.
I am thinking of this mostly say perhaps a distibution site for free independent films, or large CD's of music compiled from free sources.
lets say you scoured the net, and got permissionf rom a lot of independent artits, and compiled isos (say one time a week) of what you consider as "the best" music of the week. and you wanted to serve these 650 meg isos, and in the ISO it might come with a label cover, lyrics, and perhaps fan art/fan music videos done wiht the musci.
I am thinking that sites that provided the service of compiling such things, fan art, fan music videos (maybe even anime music video) would have a lot of demand, and these thigns would add value to the music as well, and you could serve them only in an iso.
and to make sure its distrubuted the people that would get the iso first would be those who had the most site credits.
The process could also be used for sites whcih have to have multiple patches, think ID and Valve software.
They could serve patches up to "high" user credit customers, and people such as fileplanet and such who would pay for the exclusive service of being a gold credit member.
This could save a place like ID software, or Valve (half life makers) a lot of money in initial bandwidth for sending these files, they could just start a bittorrent as explained in my previous post, and they would let the users suck up the usually HELLISH initial rush for files.
Sites such as fileplanet could move over to bittorrent for non-subscribers, thus freeing there bandwidth as well.
I mean the savings are immense, and companies that do file sharing for a business could save so much money by using bittorrent, even in its current form, all they would have to do is write something that wouldnt let an IP that wasnt logged in use the bittorrent, and they would be set.
The savings alone would translate into pure profit
buzz OUT: -)
A good project for someone to use, is to have the corporate version where the main corporate site can have the file as a bittorrent, and always be serving it. If it cant find any other clients, it uses the corporate file LAST to download from.
;-) oh well, bittorrent rocks!
this way the first few people on the thing would be getting it from the corporate client, then after that from other peers, but then when the file becomes unpopular, people would then basically be getting it from the corporate client again.
This would a little improvement. Though this may just show my ignorance of how bittorrent works as well. Currently I download some files using bittorrent (wolfenstein enemy territories) but when all the seeds go away it can cause issues.
So basically make it so that there is a relatively permanent seed, and he is always requested from LAST. that way if the file is popular the site doesnt have to worry about losing bandwidth.
also, stats tracking should be "ramped up" a little, to where someone would have to register to use the torrents on a specific site, this way the tracking per user could be used. Now this wouldnt interfere with anyones right to privacy, but could be used as a "bonus" system, to provide incentive to keep the torrent open. IE the more you upload the more "credit" you are given. If you think of it in slashdot subscriber terms, perhaps people that have a high "credit" (ie they leave their client open after being finished) would get earlier access to files. maybe have a 3 teir file access. top teir (high uploaders) would get the file as soon as it was served. second teir would get at it 20 minutes later, and 3rd teir get it 45 minutes to an hour later.
this would allow sites to reward those that are high quality users, and maybe allow them to track site benefits based on participation.
maybe call it "sitetorrent" or such.
and this is actually an original idea i thought of trying to get some freinds of mine and myself to code 2 years ago, but I had neither the experience nor the time to work on it. Then someone showed me bittorrent about 2 months ago and I was like "holy shit thats exactly what my product was going to be sans user participation"
Oh, and you cant steal my idea, i provide it free to the public today 6/2/03, as a business application given freely and documented.
Buzz OUT!
Since the game is provided as a service (not a good) then you cant claim it as a goods or service. You made your online book, you own the copy right for it, in fact copyright law is specifically there to protect such transactions, so that you can be the only seller or only person to give the rights to sell your copyrighted material.
:-) It would be similar to renting a truck, then making a modification to the truck, and saying you owned that part of the truck because you modified it, and then selling the modication to someone after you have given the truck back to the company, then suing them because they removed the modification but you wanted to sell it.
To SELL copyrighted material without a license is piracy. (though copying for you and your friends for free is not since no money was made, but thats another argument).
you did not provide labour to build the house, you may have put labour in, as a part of the service provided, but it is still a service. Your service ends, along with the house, and whatever crap you bought online, the second you close your account to the game. The house is a form of ranking of use during the service, the online house is not a good, it is not physically created, it is a maniftestation of the service.
If a hacker comes on, deletes your character, deletes your house, then the only liability is the monthly charge that may need to be refunded for that month by the service provider, and you may stop using there service as well, since they provided bad (as in hackable service).
The whole reason the online service provider is liable in any way to even return to a backup is solely because they want your continued use of their service.
Just because you can sell your virtual property, you are in essence just selling your time using the service to gain higher ranking within the service, and then you can sell this effort to someone else. But since it is againts the rules of most of the services (everquest daoc etc) to sell your manifestation of service online, they hold 0 liability if your service and manifestation thereof gets deleted in transfer, or is destroyed by another player.
It is all part of the service, which you accepted when you joined, and if you do not enjoy the service because of an act of another player, or faulty security on the part of the service, you can ask for the most recent months refund, or refund of remaining credit, and quit the service.
You have been reading "Light of another day" by Arthur C. Clarke havent you?
It gets into some issues with 0 privacy technology (ie the ability to view you no matter where you are, even whhen you are (IE they could look at you in the past), and it came to the point where people who wanted privacy were wearing invisiblity cloaks and used hand gestures similar to that to speak to a blind and deaf person.
pretty interesting read if you want to see the true extremes of 0 privacy.
this system could be abused by "cloners" as the article said, people making "fake" license plates then going down town to drive while someone else is charged the fee.
;-(
Oh well, yet another problem with automatic systems
What they should do is keep a small 10 second clip of the vehicle for court, and make it easy to come in and file a claim against the device, if the snapshot or vehicle shows THEIR vehicle, then they have to pay a court fee.
Otherwise the tax is waved, and the car in the screenshot is flagged by its make and model, and its owner arrested if it can be identified again, and file a criminal case against them.
I think this is a good idea, if they feel that it is truly necessarry to use it. Imagine being able to use this to identify stolen vehicles, minutes after they are reported stolen, just put in the recognition to look for a car and there you go.
There are some issues about location tracking of your citizens, but as it is being used it is for tracking who is using the roadway during high congestion periods. As long as it is not used for private data mining (IE trying to figure out where you tend to shop and such) then I am all for it. If there is a counter argument, I am not seeing exactly "where" the abuses could be applied on this one to any extent. As long as the thing wasnt being used as an auto traffic cop for running through red lights and such, since we know from some experience here in the U.S. that that can cause some seriuos issues via mis-identifying breaking the law, and turning right at a red.
As long as it is used for congestion identification, and possibly tracking of stolen vehicles/people who have committed a crime and the police which to facilitate their capture. I cannot see a bad side to this.
Since driving is a privilidge given by the state, being able to track who is driving is also a responsiblity of the state if they wish to implement it.
I had to track radar, what weapon i was on, ammo amounts, and what direction my top toros was facing!
what did they say about mech games!
oh man, I feel so left out.
But on a more serious note. I think these games do increase twitch re-actions for people, to be even remotely good you have to be able to identify a things distance, and even slight variations on where it exists in space to determine if you are going to fire at it.
Just taking medal of honor for example, many times on servers which force the skin type, it can be very hard to determine if someone is behind a wall because of the lack of contrast between default uniforms and the background.
The ability to know how thick an object is can really help determine how abnormal its shape is versus what it should be.
Anyone thats played these games a while, and has become familiar with where things are on there maps can almost run them backward. I used to play on a map called canalzone (the original for qwtf) that was "huge" and I could run it backward, or looking straight at the ground, as long as i knew where my start positon was. You need a good feel for how large the 3d space is relative to your character in the game to be able to do these kinds of things.
Now on games where weapons have travel time in space, knowledge of 3d space is even more important, games such as mechwarrior 4, coupled with some lag, require to know the movement speed in space so you can lead the target. If you dont have any idea how they are going to change relative shape vs distance in space, you are much less likely to hit your target.
so the hypothesis that games can affect how you determine things in 3d space seems completely plausible to me, because having "trained" people to play many 3d games myself (planetfortress.com/canalzone) (www.themfb.com search on wayback machine or google) I can tell you that the ability to have a good twitch instinct and judgment factors about objects in 3d space can really help.
You make security sound so easy! dear god, if it were that easy then everything would be secure. You cant think of everything to be secure against, if you could then there would be no such thing as hacking. Only an idiot would not realise this.
Words of slashdot decendant to your decendant.
"Hey your great *times a lot* grandad said he bet his house, so that means ALL yOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US"
of course my humour filter is pretty weak right now so thats probably not funny in the least