That's completely untrue. Science requires faith in the uniformity of the universe, or the validity of induction, or some other equivalent formulation. Yes, this is actually faith. Any evidence you gathered for it would be begging the question.
I agree, and even though I like fighting games I don't really know the difference between say a brawler or a tournament fighter (though if I knew, it might explain some of my likes/dislikes in those cases).
Tournament figher: Street Fighter. Brawler: Final Fight (or more recently, The Bouncer). You probably did know the difference but the latter category didn't occur to you... brawlers aren't extremely common these days, and most people just call tournament fighters "fighting games".
Console-RPGs and Computer-RPGs don't share a lot in common other than say various stats for the characters, but then RPG tends to be a fairly watered-down term with any electronic game, anyway (try defining what makes a game an RPG when it comes to computer or console-based games).
I can't, but I think the main reason for that is precisely the existence of these two significantly different categories of games which are both referred to as RPGs.:-) The way I'd probably do it is to give a list of characteristics, and the more a game has, the more RPG-like it is:
Strong story - the story drives the action rather than vice versa
Battles where you give commands to your characters rather than controlling their actions in realtime (there are a few borderline games like Secret of Mana, but even that has menus)
Experience points you earn by defeating monsters, or some equivalent system (such as FFX's Sphere Grid)
Fantasy setting, or sci-fi but with magic (this is incidental, but seems to be very strongly associated with RPGs anyway)
You control more than one character at once
Stats-based gameplay in general
Long playtime before beating the game
There are almost certainly more characteristics, but I don't feel like trying to think of all of them at the moment.
This one I usually leave at computer-style. Most people understand if they've played computer RPGs before, or I will associate it with one of the previous computer RPGs that is similar, such as Ultima or BG (which have decidedly different styles, too), or even Diablo, which is more of a hack-n-slash style.
I haven't played Diablo, but I've heard it described as "Nethack with graphics".
Even if we decide to say that computer RPGs are 'character-driven' and console RPGs are 'story-driven', people will come forward stating that console RPGs have more character detail, even though the only reason I choose character-driven is because I believe the player develops the character through the game, and this drives the game forward more than the story, which drives progress in a console-RPG (you really can't develop the character in a standard console-RPG, the characters develop through the story, although arguably in the first FF and some other console-RPGs the character is still a blank slate and can be developed by the player to some extent).
I wouldn't really say they're character-driven. The vast majority of plots are driven by their characters, whereas characters that aren't predefined can't really make scripted choices, thus they aren't really driving the game. I'd say that computer-style RPGs are gameplay-driven, but "character building" is a pretty good description of the main part of the gameplay.
The only thing that determines whether or not your characters are the Light Warriors in FF1 is whether or not you can finish the game, whereas in KOTOR you can finish the game in a number of different ways, depending on how you play your character.
FF1 is actually a kind of unusual game, and fits poorly into either of these two categories (understandable, since it was almost genre-defining). It has a pretty much linear plot (and not an incredibly strong one, either, although to be fair it didn't seem as clicheed when the game was first released), but quite a lot of freedom in defining your characters (really, I think the reason for what inflexibility there is was largely technical; there wasn't enough room on an NES cart to let you customize your characters that much).
I think the terms Console-RPG and Computer-RPG are used as much as Eastern-/Western- or American-/Japanese-, and all related to the primary origin of the style rather than any limitations. [...]
It's not that the two platforms limit the games this way (although they may have in the past), it's that it's the traditional style of play on those platforms which leads to the genres being named this way.
I actually think I agree with you. Note how I (mistakenly) claimed that I use "computer RPG" and "console RPG" early on in my post, and then actually used "computer-style RPG" and "console-style RPG". This is because if you leave off the "style", people sometimes assume that you mean literally what you're saying, viz. games written for that particular platform.
I've noted the lack of good terms for these two types of game before. It's kind of annoying, because they're really separate genres, or at least subgenres, that have about as much in common as go-kart racing and a realistic car simulation, or tournament fighters and brawlers, but people who don't really know anything about either one tend to assume they're the same since they have the same name. "Oh, that's an RPG, you'd like that." I think the most accurate term for what I generally end up calling console-style RPGs is "story-driven RPGs" (or "plot-driven RPGs" if you won't accept that... some computer-style RPGs might be considered story-driven, but very few if any even have a plot). This leaves me without a good term for computer-style RPGs, though... tactical RPGs? That implies that console-style RPGs aren't tactical, though, which isn't always the case (FFX's battles seem pretty tactical) and the first thing it makes me think of is FF Tactics anyway. Non-linear RPGs? That makes me think of Saga Frontier and Legend of Mana, even though I never played either of them. Freeform RPGs? I think that's the best I can come up with.
Of course, to enable non-players to differentiate between them, they shouldn't have the "RPG" part in common, in which case I'd probably use RPG for computer-style RPGs (which I don't like, but to be fair, they involve a lot more "role-playing" than console-style RPGs do) and "plot game" for console-style RPGs. This would probably end up including some games we wouldn't think of as console-style RPGs (or any kind of RPG, for that matter) today, but I still think it would be more accurate. But no one will change their terms anyway.
I don't agree. The story is mostly advanced during cutscenes/story bits...and there isn't more than two hours of cutscenes in any game that I can think of. The overland exploration mode and combat mode generally contain very little story advancement.
Umm... off the top of my head, every Final Fantasy game (to pick the most standard console-style RPGs there are) has more than two hours of cutscenes / story bits, counting all dialogue as "story bits", unless you read really fast. You're right that combat and the overworld map (for those games that have one, which up until recently was pretty much every console-style RPG) don't advance the plot much, but wandering around towns talking to people does. Also, if by "cutscene" you mean FMV only, you're forgetting all of the non-FMV dialogue.
Admittedly the best novels have better stories than any RPG; of course, they have to, since that's all they've got, and also since there have been a whole lot more novels than console-style RPGs. Still, comparing a console-style RPG and a movie in scope just isn't right. Extremely few movies have more than five or six really well-developed characters. Any good console-style RPG has more than that.
Meaningless? You develop them! They mean a lot more to me than some random scriptwriter's opinion of what a character should be like.
You "develop" them in the sense that you choose their stats and abilities, but their personality? Most people don't bother. Think seriously about how much personality you've ascribed to even your most favorite computer-style RPG characters. Without personality, there can be no drama. Without drama, plot inevitably suffers terribly.
As for whether the characters mean more or less than those developed by a scriptwriter, you of course are entitled to your opinion. However, the scriptwriters aren't "random", they're chosen because of their ability to write scripts. Creating a bunch of stats is easy; anyone can do that (and some console-style RPGs do more or less let you fully design your characters in regards to stats; however, I think this makes the game suffer, since characters become fungible in regards to gameplay). It takes skill to make a believable personality, though.
Sure, but I think that's my point. It's a cultural reason, not primarily a technological one.
Then I guess by your theory I'm at the least an anomaly, if not a counterexample, since I strongly prefer a PC that can do a lot of things to a one-use device, yet I greatly enjoy console-style RPGs and find computer-style RPGs merely an enormous waste of time.
I've always felt that if you're going to just want a movie, for the love of God, watch the move. Higher budget, and you don't have to do a bunch of work (build up, build up, build up) to watch little snippits of said low-budget movie.
Console RPGs have a much broader scope than a movie. A novel might be a more fair comparison, but those don't have the audiovisual or interactive elements. A TV miniseries is probably the closest other medium. The experience is still pretty different, though.
Now, a Western RPG lets you explore, do what you want.
In return for meaningless characters and a boring plot, sure. (Granted, a lot of console-style RPGs have these problems too, but a computer-style RPG has them almost by definition.)
As an interesting aside, I think the reason they use the terms "Western" and "Eastern", and the fact that I use "computer RPG" and "console RPG" is because the Japanese love little closed, non-modifiable, single purpose consumer devices. Consumer electronics are huge in Japan. Computers, in the full-blown sense that we use them, are much bigger in the US. The consumer devices guide you along a path that the manufacturer chose, and the general-purpose computers let you do what you want, find your own way. This closely mirrors the way the Western and Eastern RPGs operate.
I think the reason they use the terms "Western" and "Eastern" is that they identified the games based on their place of origin, and the reason you (and I) use "computer RPG" and "console RPG" is because we identify them based on their platform. Now, consoles are a lot more popular in Japan than PCs, and perhaps vice versa in the US (although certainly not by as much). However, I think you're reading too much into this. There's absolutely no reason you can't write a {Western,console-style} RPG for the PC, and little reason it can't go the other way, although computer-style RPGs do tend to use features of the PC such as hard disks and network access that until recently haven't been available on consoles, and still aren't standard equipment.
The fact that we don't see many console-style RPGs on PC (I'll ignore the other direction since the technical limitations are at least somewhat valid), I think, isn't even that they wouldn't sell. Rather, it's because the console market is significantly larger, especially when you consider Japan, and because developing for a console (note "a", you really used to have to pick just one and consider ports later, although this is becoming less true (however, RPGs seem to be some of th least cross-platform software out there)) is different enough from developing for PC that it's really tough to do both at once, almost like you're developing two totally separate backends that only get to share data files (and even those might need some editing to make full use of each platform's technical capabilities).
No, you don't own the copyright to the closed-source program, so you don't have the right to do that. By linking it with a GPL library you're probably violating the license of the closed-source program, and you're definitely violating the GPL. If this weren't true then I could write a replacement for some Windows library with the license "you're free to use this software for whatever you want, provided that all profits from any program with which it's linked belong to me", get someone to use it, then sue Microsoft for all of the money they make off of Windows when they refused to just hand it over.
If by "explicit exceptions in the comments" you mean using the LGPL instead of the GPL, then yes, most GNU C libraries (including glibc) do have them. I pointed out one particular GNU C library (Readline) which doesn't.
I'm flaming you for being a pedantic twit who criticizes the style of the argument rather than the substance.
Style and substance aren't totally separable, though. Is it part of the substance of her article that she makes such errors as the multiply-noted (by others) claim that males have an additional chromosome, or her very questionable reasoning as to games improving one's cognitive skills?
It is purely a personal ego-booster wherein you get to act holier-than-her and show off how big your spelling/grammar-dick is.
Honestly, the ego boost to me comes from just reading the article. That alone wouldn't be a reason to post a complaint about it. The reason to post a complaint is that I'm a little irritated at the low quality of writing online generally, and I'd appreciate it if people improved it. Although I addressed my complaint towards this specific article (as making the complaint concrete requires an example), I intended its scope to be broader.
It's fine if you think her style interferes with her substance, but at least address the substance.
Honestly, I didn't find her substance all that interesting. I thought the topic was at least promising enough to make it worth clicking on the link (I remember reading one article on the same topic which I thought was pretty good), and it didn't really do it for me.
I believe it's "umlaut" (with one over the first "u", but of course Slashdot won't let me type that). I tried both pasting the character into the text box, as you apparently did, and using the é escape sequence. The former gave me just a plain "e", and the latter gave nothing at all.
Does linking to GPL standard C libraries force you to open source your code?
Umm... yes. The vast majority of libraries on Linux are LGPL for exactly that reason. Readline isn't, so closed-source (or even open-source non-GPL-compatible) software can't use it.
Quoting the GPL won't help since your quoting a legal document which has not had this question decided by a court.
If you say so, but the GPL seems to be very clear about it, to the point that a decision by the court is a foregone conclusion:
The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. ... You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: ... You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
Note that this appears to be more relevant to static than to dynamic linking, but IANAL.
Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill... either you don't read much online, or you felt extraordinarily picky over this article. With all due respect, most articles online aren't Grade-A English essays. Most articles may not even pass the Word 97 grammar checker.
I read a lot online, and you're right, much of it is poorly copy-edited. It nearly always annoys me, and I guess I was just in the mood to complain about it this time.
By the way, I don't know about the Word 97 grammar checker in particular, but every grammar checker I've ever used has been so horrendous I turned it off. Not only do they flag things that are correct (albeit perhaps not considered "best practices"), they miss completely blatant errors. I think one time I deliberately entered a random sequence of words and whatever grammar checker I was testing at the time saw nothing wrong with it.
She said "I am in no way saying that by playing video games will make you smarter". She's trying to avoid people going up to her and saying "You said playing Halo would raise my IQ" or "I played Counterstrike all night and didn't pass my exam, you said-" etc. Rather she clarifies her position and says the studies would help people remember certain things (whether they are remembering gaming tips or integration techniques).
I think you're reading that rather charitably, and even so, I see little more justification for it than for the belief that playing violent video games causes real-life violence. I.e., it might be "common sense", but there doesn't seem to be any actual support for it.
Forgive my poor html, it is the best I can do.
Of course, but if you want your posts to look more like mine, try the <blockquote> tag.
Anyhow... I don't even see why you had to pull this sentence out of the article to complain about. Many sentences can be reworded different to carry the same message. She wanted to write like that. Perhaps she wished to use the "conquer" word and make it more game related. Simply put: she wanted it worded like that to convey a certain message.
If you honestly think that she was being that wordy to try to achieve a particular effect, then I can see why you wouldn't object to her writing style. She can certainly use the word "conquer" if she wants to, but what does "It is a well-known fact that" add to her sentence? As far as I can see, it just increases her word count and makes her article more annoying to read.
I just think you're picking at such minute details that reading your post is more annoying then reading the errors in her work.
Well, it should have been pretty easy to tell that my post was a grammar / style flame relatively early on. You could have just skipped over it if you didn't want to read it. On the other hand, then I would have missed out on the chance to see my post criticized on its own terms, so I'm glad that you didn't.
Perhaps you should apply for an editor position at that web page instead and spare us her grammatical inaccuracies beforehand.
Touche. (Slashdot doesn't appear to give me any way of getting an e with an acute accent. I find that irritating.)
Somehow though, I suspect ISPs would rather disclose the names of the P2P users the minute they get subpoenaed, and not be hassled by the RIAA, if they could get away with it...
Are you paranoid? This and the following quote from the story writeup:
So SBC, like Verizon, is concerned about the cost/hassle of complying with all the subpoenas it has been receiving.
really make me wonder about people. These P2P users are paying customers. Sure, they may take up a decent chunk of bandwidth (and the worst of them the ISPs probably do want to kick off, but they can do that or throttle them without the RIAA's help), but if there's any legal way an ISP can get away with not disclosing this information to the RIAA, they're going to do it. I mean, their goal is to make a profit, and this is a significant selling point. If you want to use KaZaA or whatever, would you rather go with an ISP that rolls over when the RIAA even breathes in their direction, or one that will fight as hard as they reasonably can to not have to tell the RIAA who you are?
I mean, I might agree with the point she was making, but the author of the linked-to article comes off as a complete moron. In lieu of a detailed analysis, allow me to give several quotes, explaining what's wrong with them:
After attending the Austin Gaming Expo and seeing that my sex was outnumbered I began to wonder why. Gaming is reserved for those with that extra chromosome. Which made me think; in a world dominated by the male sex, why do women choose to put themselves in the position of the minority?
Although the first two sentences here are gramatically correct English sentences, the logic strongly suggests that they should have been one sentence. Why does the first sentence end with a "why"? Even if this could be correct, a good writer should see that this would be misread and choose a different phrasing. The use of the semicolon in the third sentence is not only superfluous but incorrect. "Which made me think" is not a clause.
I would like to consider myself a half-way descent gamer.
That should be "decent".
But why are our skills impressive or is it embarrassing to be beaten by a girl?
If this is two questions, there should be a comma after "impressive". If it's a compound question, there should be another "why", as well as a bit of rephrasing.
(This is not to say that there are not boys who play with Barbie and girls who own Hot Wheels; for there are always exceptions to these gender rules.)
This is another incorrect use of the semicolon.
I know that a lot of this is changing as gaming becomes recognized as more of a healthy activity to engage in, but I have come up with five reasons why all girls should play in the minority as they grow into young women and eventually adults.
Here's an example of what I really object to in this article. It isn't so much grammatical incorrectness (although I do find that annoying, and by the way it's irritating too, and it really bothers me a lot) as excessive wordiness. Why couldn't this sentence have been "I know that this is changing as gaming becomes recognized as a healthy activity, but here are five reasons why girls should continue to play video games as they grow up."? That would have been clearer and made the author look like less of an airhead.
There has been a study that shows that playing video games actually helps you out in the mental department, so why not just play and make better grades. I am in no way saying that by playing video games will make you smarter. What I am saying is that studies have shown that it helps with cognitive recognition or remembering things.
So cognitive recognition and memory aren't part of being smarter? She's confusing me by making assumptions about the correct theory of intelligence. She doesn't even bother to state them explicitly.
If you are a non gamer you spend every Friday night sitting at home watching Lifetime movies fuming that it is almost midnight and he isn't home yet. Not to mention that his friends resent you for making him come home at midnight. So when you all go out to dinner the next time you could cut the tension with a knife.
I find this conversational style annoying even in email. People seem to be so afraid of long sentences that they take them and just break them up at points having little to do with grammar. If one really wants to avoid long sentences, there's almost always a way to reword things, but inserting periods instead of commas isn't it.
It is a well known fact that working in an office is still sometimes a hard task for a woman to conquer.
With all due respect, I think video games have rotted her brain a little. Why not "Working in an office may stil
The only downside is that legally you cannot take fixes made by those outside users and put them into your closed-source drivers. However it is highly likely that you can ask the authors of the changes for permission to use the code, one way to convince them is to say that doing that is the only way for their code to get into the "official linux driver" that can be downloaded from your web page.
Or just release your Windows drivers under the GPL. I mean, if you're releasing GPL Linux drivers anyway, then you're clearly not protecting any proprietary interface information or whatnot, and drivers are hardly an item on which you can make a profit by selling them anyway, so it really seems like you don't lose anything at all by GPLing the Windows drivers too.
Yeah, this is "not the way it's done" and the managers won't agree to it. My point isn't necessarily that this is realistic, but that the people opposed to it are just being stupid.
I don't think the current deal is so sweet. Look at how many artist detest the recording industry, but have no choice but to hope they'll create a smash hit and make some money too. And if the arms race between the file sharing public and the media cartels + governments (it's a powerful combination, I know) is ultimately won by the former (and I'm about 50% sure it will), then artists will be forced to look at alternatives to copyright.
I think the deal definitely is sweet, otherwise no one would use it, but I misstated for whom. I said "content producers" when I should have said "those assigned exclusive rights under copyright law". For music, that's generally the labels, not the artists.
(Regarding big-name content creators cashing in on their names)
Perhaps, but people are merciless. If you pull that stunt too often, you may need to record your next album in your own basement.
Right, I said this is the smaller problem with this system. The bigger problem is how difficult it makes it for new content creators to break in, and how they get basically nothing for even a truly amazing first work.
Heh. I'm not at all a libertarian. I think that laws that apply to everyone equally, and established by a democratic process, should be stronger than any random individual or corporation can ever get. [...]
This is getting a bit off topic, so I'm not going to go into this in detail, but suffice it to say that I disagree. I'm not a big fan of democracy at all, if that helps you understand where I'm coming from, although I also don't like plutocracy (which, sadly, I think is more or less what we currently have in the USA) or autocracy.
But going back to your point, I do think that western governments today refuse to do anything that's in the public interest if it harms the big corporations and free trade. A lot of people think that way too. That's why I point out that in my proposed system, you still have a free market instead of a bureaucracy that divides tax money among artists. And in this particular case, I happen to favour the free market too.
Our government in particular definitely is reluctant (if not outright unwilling) to do anything that would harm our big corporations, but your plan would undoubtedly do that (at least for the content production industries). I don't see so much of an ideological goal to promote free markets - that seems to be merely one aspect of the government's helping out big business these days. What I'm saying is that I don't think either of our systems are politically viable right now, but perhaps they will become viable if things get bad enough, and if so, I still think my system would result in a greater overall quality and quantity of products of the mind and a greater ability for anyone who wants to to make use of them. I could still be convinced that that's not true, though (although short of seeing one of our systems atcually put into practice, that seems unlikely).
Socialism is a system whereby the rights of an individual are placed second to the rights of the collective.
It is one such type of system, yes, but not all systems meeting this description are socialism. From m-w.com:
any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done
None of these quite match what you're saying here (and I'm not just being annoying by going to the dictionary - "socialism" is a word I almost never use myself, so I had to look it up to be sure I got it right).
Yes, in anarchy, a person could steal your music, but they could steal your car as well. The US constitution protects you from both types of threats.
I know you're going to think this is akin to Stallman insisting that people call the complete operating system "GNU/Linux" (and for the record, even though I mostly agree with his point, I call it "Linux" - it's shorter and easier for most people to understand), but I really think it makes it easier to reason if you use a neutral term like "copy without authorization" rather than "steal" to refer to copyright infringement. (I'm not asking you to use a positive term, like "share with your friends", just a neutral one.) Also, the Constitution protects you from neither of those threats. It authorizes the legislature to enact laws which, when enforced, protect you from them - and in the case of music, authorizes such protection only under pretty strict limits (which unfortunately our government currently seems to be ignoring).
Any system where the govt, controls pricing will be corrupt since pricing is completely artificial and now it's who you know in the govt that counts, not how good your music is. That's obvious.
It's not obvious at all. Government obviously has less motivation to be efficient than private companies do, but that doesn't mean every single thing they do has to be inefficient and corrupt. It would be a technical challenge to come up with a system which accounts for the usage of different types of media and figures out payments, but I hardly think it's an insurmountable one. I have a few ideas on how to do it myself.
Your statement that "intellectual property is fascism" isn't meaningless. You just don't understand what you're saying. Fascism is a system whereby the state is more important than the individual, so your statement is irrational, but it does have a meaning.
It definitely is meaningless, because I didn't intend to mean anything by it. I wrote it as a cute example, nothing more. Meaning is in the mind of the one who means (if you doubt this, imagine that we had made the same statements and spoke English with the exception that the meanings of the words "socialism" and "copulation" were exchanged, as were those of "fascism" and "chastity").
Meanwhile, regarding your original statement, maybe you did mean something by "Compulsory licensing is socialism", but boy, it sure came off as a content-free piece of flamebait. You need to explain statements like that in more detail, or at the very least word them in a somewhat less inflammatory manner.
The starting point is that you can only demand a certain sum of money before you publish.
I've thought about this type of system myself before. First off, you have to realize that under any even halfway sane copyright system, something like this can be implemented in userspace by means of a contract. (In a system with compulsory licensing, I'm asuming that you'd be allowed to waive your cut of the take; if not, you could always donate it to your favorite charity.) People could use this system right now; they don't because content producers know they can get a sweeter deal because of the abilities copyright currently affords them.
The fundamental problem with this as the only available means of generating revenue for products of the mind is that it makes the money which can be raised for a work be funded by the reputation of those working on it, rather than the work's actual quality. This is exploitable to a minor degree by big-name creators who "cash in" on their names by writing junk that they know people will fund every once in a while. The more troubling side is that anyone who doesn't have a reputation yet would essentially have to give away his first work for free - no one in their right mind is likely to give money to a project with no expectations of how it will turn out. This also means that someone who only produces one work of note in his entire life will get basically nothing for it. (Well, maybe he'll make it back on his next (not-so-good) work... still, something seems wrong here. What if he dies before finishing another work?)
I do think that a system such as you propose could be made workable, and it would certainly be better than the "hard-line copyright" we in theory currently have (albeit fairly loosely enforced). I'm not convinced that the overall result would be better than that with compulsory licensing, though. You seem to be coming from a pretty strict libertarian perspective, which I have a lot of sympathy for, but I think that products of the mind really challenge a lot of the assumptions that make libertarianism work so well for physical objects. I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong, and indeed, probably the best way to find out would be to try both systems and see which worked better... unfortunately, even compulsory licenses clash with the libertarian "get government out of anything it doesn't absolutely have to be involved in" mandate.
Now, I'm sure we both realize that the previous statement was roughly meaningless and designed only to incite emotion. The point is that yours is the same. Copyright is a legal construct in the first place. It does not exist independent of the government's creating it.
But moreover, I don't see how it is socialism in any case. Socialism implies that the means of production are owned by the government. Umm, in this case I guess that would mean that the content producers were owned by the government? Or their equipment, perhaps? Nope, none of this is making any sense.
I'll take DRM over it any day of the week. I'd rather not be able to look at certain memory locations in my computer for data that Im not supposed to have free access to anyway (except for fair use purposes, which can be accomodated) than not be able to write a song and sell it at a price of my choosing.
Well, you've made it quite clear what your opinion is, but you haven't really given any reason for anyone else to accept it. My point of view is that compulsory licensing has at least this benefit: it stops the "arms race" between file sharers / traders / copyright infringers (however you want to look at it) and the RIAA / MPAA. While I think the technological aspect of this "arms race" may actually produce technologies which are interesting and useful in their own respects, the legal "arms race" is much more troubling, as very questionable law is being enacted at the request of the side that evidently donates more money to political campaigns.
Compulsory licensing does mean that you can't "write a song and sell it at a price of [your] choosing", but the way I look at it, you didn't have a right to do that anyway. You currently have the ability, yes, but that ability is only justified (in the USA, by the Constitution) to be granted to you to "promote the progress of science and useful arts".
And yes, I realize you were probably just trying to get a rise out of me and the many Slashdotters who think as I do, but the point is that there are real, legitimate issues here. Most people accept copyright law because it's what they're used to, but the fact is that when you look carefully, the foundations for it--especially in its present form--are pretty shaky.
One interesting point raised by the linked-to article, which you did not address, is that in a compulsory-licensing system, the producers have an incentive to try to fake the system. That honestly hadn't occurred to me. I think this can be solved, say by having rankings signed with a public-key system, and I think the solution would be simpler and less Draconian in implementation than trying to get DRM on everything, but it is worth thinking about.
If you're going to analyze a movie, at some level you need to accept the things purported as truth within that movie. I agree, thermodynamically the humans as batteries idea makes no sense. However for whatever reason, batteries, spare brain cycles, whatever, the Machines need Humans in order to maintain their quality of life. However they are willing to accept a lesser quality of life if there is a good enough reason to destroy all the humans.
Actually, my favorite plot theories (although admittedly also the least likely to be presented as fact in Revolutions) make the whole battery thing not be true, for whatever reason. For example: the machines are actually serving man, just in a really complicated way; or the machines are keeping them around as museum pieces or pets of a sort. (The most common theory that would have the humans-as-batteries thing not be true, of course, are the Zion-is-another-Matrix theories, but while I think Reloaded was deliberately intended to give some fuel to those theories, I also think it's extremely unlikely that they will be presented as fact in Revolutions.)
That wouldn't serve the audience of the movie very well, and it wouldn't server
Heh, I make that typo all the time too, although I usually catch it.
the Architect very well either. The colloquialism he used got his point across just fine.
Well, I was able to understand what he was saying, but it sounded... imprecise. As Brendan Byrd said elsewhere in this thread, the Architect was generally extremely careful in word choice, which makes a metaphorical usage of "design" sound odd.
I think it is. The Architect said that the earliest, perfect versions of the Matrix were a failure. They set everything up the way they thought they should be, and made all the humans happy to boot, but lots of people rejected it.
[snip long, accurate plot summary]
Everything you say is correct, but I still don't see how it explains why the "anomaly" would cause "fluctuations" in "even the most simplistic equations". I mean, everything you say just comes down to "the problem is choice", as Neo said. But, while this is a good plot device, it's not intuitively plausible. What kind of special issues does choice raise? Sure, humans are unpredictable, but what exactly are the nature of the "fluctuations" that the humans are able to induce? Is that how Neo and friends are able to make the Matrix conform to their wills? It's not obvious why a system that doesn't allow this to happen would necessarily be unacceptable to humans.
Understand that I'm not saying that the movie should have explained this, both because it would have had to go into a lot of depth to fully satisfy me (taking away screen time and likely boring the rest of the audience) and because until we see the third movie, we won't really know what to make of all this anyway. And I wouldn't point out things like this in Star Wars or whatever at all. It's only because the Matrix series seems to aspire to "hard" sci-fi status that I think these kinds of criticisms are even relevant.
Let's write it this way: "At an opportune time, she entered the matrix to save your life at the cost of her own." The timing was pretty critical to Neo taking the action he did.
Okay, I guess it makes sense. I just wasn't familiar with that usage of the term, and it still sounds strange to me.
Not really, if you look at how they are used. The Architect is basically saying that the question "Why am I here" at first glance appears to be of critical importance, but in the long run in meaningless. Neo is there because he is. While that seems important it doesn't matter. What matters is what he does in the future. It's kind of a counterpoint to Morpheus' speach "I am here becase of what is behind me."
But "pertinent" doesn't mean "seeming to be relevant", it just means "relevant".
This is perfectly clear if you take it in context:
The Architect - "Failure to comply with this process will result in a cataclysmic system crash killing everyone connected to the matrix, which coupled with the extermination of Zion will ultimately result in the extinction of the entire human race."
Neo - "You won't let it happen, you can't. You need human beings to survive."
The Architect - "There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept."
The machines are willing to accept the death of all humans, thus lowering the level of their own existance, if the allow Neo to destroy the Matrix. It's perfectly clear.
I'm glad it was clear to you, I guess. I've seen the movie four times, and that possibility didn't even occur to me until the third. (Part of the reason for this may be that I tend to be pretty suspicious of the whole "humans as batteries" idea in the first place, on thermodynamic grounds - plus, I don't think humans are all that efficient.)
I think you are reading too much into this. To me, the Architect is just talking about human emotion, which was "designed" to overwhelm logic. He is not implying whether he designed it, a god designed it or natural selection designed it.
The scare quotes you put around "designed" are important, though. Natural selection can't literally design anything. Saying that it does is a (potentially misleading) form of personification.
See, they have different definitions, thus he uses the one that fits better.
Well, I note that you didn't quarrel with "at the same time", because it means exactly the same thing as "concurrently", but would have been easier for the movie's audience to understand. That said, the states of affairs to which the Architect is referring aren't really specifically temporal (remember how the Oracle said earlier that Neo was seeing the world "without time"? This applies here too), and thus I could make an argument that "also" would have actually been more appropriate here.
Humans have a tendancy to overuse the same words and use the wrong word without a precise definition.
We do, but I'm doubtful that it's even possible to be 100% precise in English, especially when the underlying concepts may not be the same to the speaker and the listener. I mean, obviously the Architect wouldn't think in English. That would just be silly. Given that he understood human nature enough to create the Matrix, you'd think that he would also be able to come up with an algorithm to convert his thoughts into speech which maintained a decent balance between precision and comprehensibility - unless the movie was trying to make a point with the Architect's way of speaking, which is exactly what I think it was doing. Don't get me wrong, I thought the Architect's speech was, if not brilliant, at least very good, and I didn't have much trouble understanding it. All I'm saying is that I'm pretty sure that a decent chunk of the audience were left scratching their heads or assuming that the speech was largely nonsense/technobabble, and that this could have been avoided (albeit at some cost in terms of the impression we get of the Architect).
Xnext = A*Xcurr*(1-Xcurr) for A between ~3.6 and 4 and X between 0 and 1
While this is technically an equation, I find thinking of it as an assignment much more natural:
X <- A*X*(1-X)
I'm a functional programmer, so if even I think of this more as an assignment than an equation, I'd venture that almost any computer scientist would do the same (of course, this may not be as true of mathematicians). This exact tension is why I think the word "equation" sounds out of place in the speech; I think it was worded the way it was because "equation" would make the non-geeks in the audience think "oh, he's talking about math" whereas "iterative function" would have just had them scratching their heads.
That said, your idea is interesting, although I'm not sure that it's right. After all, since the Matrix is a created system, presumably they can choose to set it up with whatever equations they want. Why the "anomaly" would cause "fluctuations" in "even the most simplistic equations" is definitely not explained in the movie. It's possible to "backfit" explanations like you're doing here, of course; but that's possible for almost anything in the Matrix series, if you think about it. After all, not only does a large portion of the movies take place inside a simulated world in which our laws of physics need not apply; also, we have no guarantee that Zion, even if it is not just another Matrix, follows exactly the same rules as the world in which you and I live.
Slashdot Mirror
That's completely untrue. Science requires faith in the uniformity of the universe, or the validity of induction, or some other equivalent formulation. Yes, this is actually faith. Any evidence you gathered for it would be begging the question.
It irritates me when people make this mistake.
In my experience, everyone calls those "nipples".
Tournament figher: Street Fighter. Brawler: Final Fight (or more recently, The Bouncer). You probably did know the difference but the latter category didn't occur to you... brawlers aren't extremely common these days, and most people just call tournament fighters "fighting games".
I can't, but I think the main reason for that is precisely the existence of these two significantly different categories of games which are both referred to as RPGs. :-) The way I'd probably do it is to give a list of characteristics, and the more a game has, the more RPG-like it is:
There are almost certainly more characteristics, but I don't feel like trying to think of all of them at the moment.
I haven't played Diablo, but I've heard it described as "Nethack with graphics".
I wouldn't really say they're character-driven. The vast majority of plots are driven by their characters, whereas characters that aren't predefined can't really make scripted choices, thus they aren't really driving the game. I'd say that computer-style RPGs are gameplay-driven, but "character building" is a pretty good description of the main part of the gameplay.
FF1 is actually a kind of unusual game, and fits poorly into either of these two categories (understandable, since it was almost genre-defining). It has a pretty much linear plot (and not an incredibly strong one, either, although to be fair it didn't seem as clicheed when the game was first released), but quite a lot of freedom in defining your characters (really, I think the reason for what inflexibility there is was largely technical; there wasn't enough room on an NES cart to let you customize your characters that much).
I actually think I agree with you. Note how I (mistakenly) claimed that I use "computer RPG" and "console RPG" early on in my post, and then actually used "computer-style RPG" and "console-style RPG". This is because if you leave off the "style", people sometimes assume that you mean literally what you're saying, viz. games written for that particular platform.
I've noted the lack of good terms for these two types of game before. It's kind of annoying, because they're really separate genres, or at least subgenres, that have about as much in common as go-kart racing and a realistic car simulation, or tournament fighters and brawlers, but people who don't really know anything about either one tend to assume they're the same since they have the same name. "Oh, that's an RPG, you'd like that." I think the most accurate term for what I generally end up calling console-style RPGs is "story-driven RPGs" (or "plot-driven RPGs" if you won't accept that... some computer-style RPGs might be considered story-driven, but very few if any even have a plot). This leaves me without a good term for computer-style RPGs, though... tactical RPGs? That implies that console-style RPGs aren't tactical, though, which isn't always the case (FFX's battles seem pretty tactical) and the first thing it makes me think of is FF Tactics anyway. Non-linear RPGs? That makes me think of Saga Frontier and Legend of Mana, even though I never played either of them. Freeform RPGs? I think that's the best I can come up with.
Of course, to enable non-players to differentiate between them, they shouldn't have the "RPG" part in common, in which case I'd probably use RPG for computer-style RPGs (which I don't like, but to be fair, they involve a lot more "role-playing" than console-style RPGs do) and "plot game" for console-style RPGs. This would probably end up including some games we wouldn't think of as console-style RPGs (or any kind of RPG, for that matter) today, but I still think it would be more accurate. But no one will change their terms anyway.
Umm... off the top of my head, every Final Fantasy game (to pick the most standard console-style RPGs there are) has more than two hours of cutscenes / story bits, counting all dialogue as "story bits", unless you read really fast. You're right that combat and the overworld map (for those games that have one, which up until recently was pretty much every console-style RPG) don't advance the plot much, but wandering around towns talking to people does. Also, if by "cutscene" you mean FMV only, you're forgetting all of the non-FMV dialogue.
Admittedly the best novels have better stories than any RPG; of course, they have to, since that's all they've got, and also since there have been a whole lot more novels than console-style RPGs. Still, comparing a console-style RPG and a movie in scope just isn't right. Extremely few movies have more than five or six really well-developed characters. Any good console-style RPG has more than that.
You "develop" them in the sense that you choose their stats and abilities, but their personality? Most people don't bother. Think seriously about how much personality you've ascribed to even your most favorite computer-style RPG characters. Without personality, there can be no drama. Without drama, plot inevitably suffers terribly.
As for whether the characters mean more or less than those developed by a scriptwriter, you of course are entitled to your opinion. However, the scriptwriters aren't "random", they're chosen because of their ability to write scripts. Creating a bunch of stats is easy; anyone can do that (and some console-style RPGs do more or less let you fully design your characters in regards to stats; however, I think this makes the game suffer, since characters become fungible in regards to gameplay). It takes skill to make a believable personality, though.
Then I guess by your theory I'm at the least an anomaly, if not a counterexample, since I strongly prefer a PC that can do a lot of things to a one-use device, yet I greatly enjoy console-style RPGs and find computer-style RPGs merely an enormous waste of time.
Console RPGs have a much broader scope than a movie. A novel might be a more fair comparison, but those don't have the audiovisual or interactive elements. A TV miniseries is probably the closest other medium. The experience is still pretty different, though.
In return for meaningless characters and a boring plot, sure. (Granted, a lot of console-style RPGs have these problems too, but a computer-style RPG has them almost by definition.)
I think the reason they use the terms "Western" and "Eastern" is that they identified the games based on their place of origin, and the reason you (and I) use "computer RPG" and "console RPG" is because we identify them based on their platform. Now, consoles are a lot more popular in Japan than PCs, and perhaps vice versa in the US (although certainly not by as much). However, I think you're reading too much into this. There's absolutely no reason you can't write a {Western,console-style} RPG for the PC, and little reason it can't go the other way, although computer-style RPGs do tend to use features of the PC such as hard disks and network access that until recently haven't been available on consoles, and still aren't standard equipment.
The fact that we don't see many console-style RPGs on PC (I'll ignore the other direction since the technical limitations are at least somewhat valid), I think, isn't even that they wouldn't sell. Rather, it's because the console market is significantly larger, especially when you consider Japan, and because developing for a console (note "a", you really used to have to pick just one and consider ports later, although this is becoming less true (however, RPGs seem to be some of th least cross-platform software out there)) is different enough from developing for PC that it's really tough to do both at once, almost like you're developing two totally separate backends that only get to share data files (and even those might need some editing to make full use of each platform's technical capabilities).
Damn... you're right. You'd still probably be violating the closed-source software's license, though.
No, you don't own the copyright to the closed-source program, so you don't have the right to do that. By linking it with a GPL library you're probably violating the license of the closed-source program, and you're definitely violating the GPL. If this weren't true then I could write a replacement for some Windows library with the license "you're free to use this software for whatever you want, provided that all profits from any program with which it's linked belong to me", get someone to use it, then sue Microsoft for all of the money they make off of Windows when they refused to just hand it over.
If by "explicit exceptions in the comments" you mean using the LGPL instead of the GPL, then yes, most GNU C libraries (including glibc) do have them. I pointed out one particular GNU C library (Readline) which doesn't.
Style and substance aren't totally separable, though. Is it part of the substance of her article that she makes such errors as the multiply-noted (by others) claim that males have an additional chromosome, or her very questionable reasoning as to games improving one's cognitive skills?
Honestly, the ego boost to me comes from just reading the article. That alone wouldn't be a reason to post a complaint about it. The reason to post a complaint is that I'm a little irritated at the low quality of writing online generally, and I'd appreciate it if people improved it. Although I addressed my complaint towards this specific article (as making the complaint concrete requires an example), I intended its scope to be broader.
Honestly, I didn't find her substance all that interesting. I thought the topic was at least promising enough to make it worth clicking on the link (I remember reading one article on the same topic which I thought was pretty good), and it didn't really do it for me.
I believe it's "umlaut" (with one over the first "u", but of course Slashdot won't let me type that). I tried both pasting the character into the text box, as you apparently did, and using the é escape sequence. The former gave me just a plain "e", and the latter gave nothing at all.
Umm... yes. The vast majority of libraries on Linux are LGPL for exactly that reason. Readline isn't, so closed-source (or even open-source non-GPL-compatible) software can't use it.
If you say so, but the GPL seems to be very clear about it, to the point that a decision by the court is a foregone conclusion:
Note that this appears to be more relevant to static than to dynamic linking, but IANAL.
I read a lot online, and you're right, much of it is poorly copy-edited. It nearly always annoys me, and I guess I was just in the mood to complain about it this time.
By the way, I don't know about the Word 97 grammar checker in particular, but every grammar checker I've ever used has been so horrendous I turned it off. Not only do they flag things that are correct (albeit perhaps not considered "best practices"), they miss completely blatant errors. I think one time I deliberately entered a random sequence of words and whatever grammar checker I was testing at the time saw nothing wrong with it.
I think you're reading that rather charitably, and even so, I see little more justification for it than for the belief that playing violent video games causes real-life violence. I.e., it might be "common sense", but there doesn't seem to be any actual support for it.
Of course, but if you want your posts to look more like mine, try the <blockquote> tag.
If you honestly think that she was being that wordy to try to achieve a particular effect, then I can see why you wouldn't object to her writing style. She can certainly use the word "conquer" if she wants to, but what does "It is a well-known fact that" add to her sentence? As far as I can see, it just increases her word count and makes her article more annoying to read.
Well, it should have been pretty easy to tell that my post was a grammar / style flame relatively early on. You could have just skipped over it if you didn't want to read it. On the other hand, then I would have missed out on the chance to see my post criticized on its own terms, so I'm glad that you didn't.
Touche. (Slashdot doesn't appear to give me any way of getting an e with an acute accent. I find that irritating.)
Are you paranoid? This and the following quote from the story writeup:
really make me wonder about people. These P2P users are paying customers. Sure, they may take up a decent chunk of bandwidth (and the worst of them the ISPs probably do want to kick off, but they can do that or throttle them without the RIAA's help), but if there's any legal way an ISP can get away with not disclosing this information to the RIAA, they're going to do it. I mean, their goal is to make a profit, and this is a significant selling point. If you want to use KaZaA or whatever, would you rather go with an ISP that rolls over when the RIAA even breathes in their direction, or one that will fight as hard as they reasonably can to not have to tell the RIAA who you are?
I mean, I might agree with the point she was making, but the author of the linked-to article comes off as a complete moron. In lieu of a detailed analysis, allow me to give several quotes, explaining what's wrong with them:
Although the first two sentences here are gramatically correct English sentences, the logic strongly suggests that they should have been one sentence. Why does the first sentence end with a "why"? Even if this could be correct, a good writer should see that this would be misread and choose a different phrasing. The use of the semicolon in the third sentence is not only superfluous but incorrect. "Which made me think" is not a clause.
That should be "decent".
If this is two questions, there should be a comma after "impressive". If it's a compound question, there should be another "why", as well as a bit of rephrasing.
This is another incorrect use of the semicolon.
Here's an example of what I really object to in this article. It isn't so much grammatical incorrectness (although I do find that annoying, and by the way it's irritating too, and it really bothers me a lot) as excessive wordiness. Why couldn't this sentence have been "I know that this is changing as gaming becomes recognized as a healthy activity, but here are five reasons why girls should continue to play video games as they grow up."? That would have been clearer and made the author look like less of an airhead.
So cognitive recognition and memory aren't part of being smarter? She's confusing me by making assumptions about the correct theory of intelligence. She doesn't even bother to state them explicitly.
I find this conversational style annoying even in email. People seem to be so afraid of long sentences that they take them and just break them up at points having little to do with grammar. If one really wants to avoid long sentences, there's almost always a way to reword things, but inserting periods instead of commas isn't it.
With all due respect, I think video games have rotted her brain a little. Why not "Working in an office may stil
Or just release your Windows drivers under the GPL. I mean, if you're releasing GPL Linux drivers anyway, then you're clearly not protecting any proprietary interface information or whatnot, and drivers are hardly an item on which you can make a profit by selling them anyway, so it really seems like you don't lose anything at all by GPLing the Windows drivers too.
Yeah, this is "not the way it's done" and the managers won't agree to it. My point isn't necessarily that this is realistic, but that the people opposed to it are just being stupid.
I think the deal definitely is sweet, otherwise no one would use it, but I misstated for whom. I said "content producers" when I should have said "those assigned exclusive rights under copyright law". For music, that's generally the labels, not the artists.
(Regarding big-name content creators cashing in on their names)
Right, I said this is the smaller problem with this system. The bigger problem is how difficult it makes it for new content creators to break in, and how they get basically nothing for even a truly amazing first work.
This is getting a bit off topic, so I'm not going to go into this in detail, but suffice it to say that I disagree. I'm not a big fan of democracy at all, if that helps you understand where I'm coming from, although I also don't like plutocracy (which, sadly, I think is more or less what we currently have in the USA) or autocracy.
Our government in particular definitely is reluctant (if not outright unwilling) to do anything that would harm our big corporations, but your plan would undoubtedly do that (at least for the content production industries). I don't see so much of an ideological goal to promote free markets - that seems to be merely one aspect of the government's helping out big business these days. What I'm saying is that I don't think either of our systems are politically viable right now, but perhaps they will become viable if things get bad enough, and if so, I still think my system would result in a greater overall quality and quantity of products of the mind and a greater ability for anyone who wants to to make use of them. I could still be convinced that that's not true, though (although short of seeing one of our systems atcually put into practice, that seems unlikely).
It is one such type of system, yes, but not all systems meeting this description are socialism. From m-w.com:
None of these quite match what you're saying here (and I'm not just being annoying by going to the dictionary - "socialism" is a word I almost never use myself, so I had to look it up to be sure I got it right).
I know you're going to think this is akin to Stallman insisting that people call the complete operating system "GNU/Linux" (and for the record, even though I mostly agree with his point, I call it "Linux" - it's shorter and easier for most people to understand), but I really think it makes it easier to reason if you use a neutral term like "copy without authorization" rather than "steal" to refer to copyright infringement. (I'm not asking you to use a positive term, like "share with your friends", just a neutral one.) Also, the Constitution protects you from neither of those threats. It authorizes the legislature to enact laws which, when enforced, protect you from them - and in the case of music, authorizes such protection only under pretty strict limits (which unfortunately our government currently seems to be ignoring).
It's not obvious at all. Government obviously has less motivation to be efficient than private companies do, but that doesn't mean every single thing they do has to be inefficient and corrupt. It would be a technical challenge to come up with a system which accounts for the usage of different types of media and figures out payments, but I hardly think it's an insurmountable one. I have a few ideas on how to do it myself.
It definitely is meaningless, because I didn't intend to mean anything by it. I wrote it as a cute example, nothing more. Meaning is in the mind of the one who means (if you doubt this, imagine that we had made the same statements and spoke English with the exception that the meanings of the words "socialism" and "copulation" were exchanged, as were those of "fascism" and "chastity").
Meanwhile, regarding your original statement, maybe you did mean something by "Compulsory licensing is socialism", but boy, it sure came off as a content-free piece of flamebait. You need to explain statements like that in more detail, or at the very least word them in a somewhat less inflammatory manner.
I've thought about this type of system myself before. First off, you have to realize that under any even halfway sane copyright system, something like this can be implemented in userspace by means of a contract. (In a system with compulsory licensing, I'm asuming that you'd be allowed to waive your cut of the take; if not, you could always donate it to your favorite charity.) People could use this system right now; they don't because content producers know they can get a sweeter deal because of the abilities copyright currently affords them.
The fundamental problem with this as the only available means of generating revenue for products of the mind is that it makes the money which can be raised for a work be funded by the reputation of those working on it, rather than the work's actual quality. This is exploitable to a minor degree by big-name creators who "cash in" on their names by writing junk that they know people will fund every once in a while. The more troubling side is that anyone who doesn't have a reputation yet would essentially have to give away his first work for free - no one in their right mind is likely to give money to a project with no expectations of how it will turn out. This also means that someone who only produces one work of note in his entire life will get basically nothing for it. (Well, maybe he'll make it back on his next (not-so-good) work... still, something seems wrong here. What if he dies before finishing another work?)
I do think that a system such as you propose could be made workable, and it would certainly be better than the "hard-line copyright" we in theory currently have (albeit fairly loosely enforced). I'm not convinced that the overall result would be better than that with compulsory licensing, though. You seem to be coming from a pretty strict libertarian perspective, which I have a lot of sympathy for, but I think that products of the mind really challenge a lot of the assumptions that make libertarianism work so well for physical objects. I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong, and indeed, probably the best way to find out would be to try both systems and see which worked better... unfortunately, even compulsory licenses clash with the libertarian "get government out of anything it doesn't absolutely have to be involved in" mandate.
Intellectual property is fascism.
Now, I'm sure we both realize that the previous statement was roughly meaningless and designed only to incite emotion. The point is that yours is the same. Copyright is a legal construct in the first place. It does not exist independent of the government's creating it.
But moreover, I don't see how it is socialism in any case. Socialism implies that the means of production are owned by the government. Umm, in this case I guess that would mean that the content producers were owned by the government? Or their equipment, perhaps? Nope, none of this is making any sense.
Well, you've made it quite clear what your opinion is, but you haven't really given any reason for anyone else to accept it. My point of view is that compulsory licensing has at least this benefit: it stops the "arms race" between file sharers / traders / copyright infringers (however you want to look at it) and the RIAA / MPAA. While I think the technological aspect of this "arms race" may actually produce technologies which are interesting and useful in their own respects, the legal "arms race" is much more troubling, as very questionable law is being enacted at the request of the side that evidently donates more money to political campaigns.
Compulsory licensing does mean that you can't "write a song and sell it at a price of [your] choosing", but the way I look at it, you didn't have a right to do that anyway. You currently have the ability, yes, but that ability is only justified (in the USA, by the Constitution) to be granted to you to "promote the progress of science and useful arts".
And yes, I realize you were probably just trying to get a rise out of me and the many Slashdotters who think as I do, but the point is that there are real, legitimate issues here. Most people accept copyright law because it's what they're used to, but the fact is that when you look carefully, the foundations for it--especially in its present form--are pretty shaky.
One interesting point raised by the linked-to article, which you did not address, is that in a compulsory-licensing system, the producers have an incentive to try to fake the system. That honestly hadn't occurred to me. I think this can be solved, say by having rankings signed with a public-key system, and I think the solution would be simpler and less Draconian in implementation than trying to get DRM on everything, but it is worth thinking about.
Actually, my favorite plot theories (although admittedly also the least likely to be presented as fact in Revolutions) make the whole battery thing not be true, for whatever reason. For example: the machines are actually serving man, just in a really complicated way; or the machines are keeping them around as museum pieces or pets of a sort. (The most common theory that would have the humans-as-batteries thing not be true, of course, are the Zion-is-another-Matrix theories, but while I think Reloaded was deliberately intended to give some fuel to those theories, I also think it's extremely unlikely that they will be presented as fact in Revolutions.)
Heh, I make that typo all the time too, although I usually catch it.
Well, I was able to understand what he was saying, but it sounded... imprecise. As Brendan Byrd said elsewhere in this thread, the Architect was generally extremely careful in word choice, which makes a metaphorical usage of "design" sound odd.
Everything you say is correct, but I still don't see how it explains why the "anomaly" would cause "fluctuations" in "even the most simplistic equations". I mean, everything you say just comes down to "the problem is choice", as Neo said. But, while this is a good plot device, it's not intuitively plausible. What kind of special issues does choice raise? Sure, humans are unpredictable, but what exactly are the nature of the "fluctuations" that the humans are able to induce? Is that how Neo and friends are able to make the Matrix conform to their wills? It's not obvious why a system that doesn't allow this to happen would necessarily be unacceptable to humans.
Understand that I'm not saying that the movie should have explained this, both because it would have had to go into a lot of depth to fully satisfy me (taking away screen time and likely boring the rest of the audience) and because until we see the third movie, we won't really know what to make of all this anyway. And I wouldn't point out things like this in Star Wars or whatever at all. It's only because the Matrix series seems to aspire to "hard" sci-fi status that I think these kinds of criticisms are even relevant.
Well, I note that you didn't quarrel with "at the same time", because it means exactly the same thing as "concurrently", but would have been easier for the movie's audience to understand. That said, the states of affairs to which the Architect is referring aren't really specifically temporal (remember how the Oracle said earlier that Neo was seeing the world "without time"? This applies here too), and thus I could make an argument that "also" would have actually been more appropriate here.
We do, but I'm doubtful that it's even possible to be 100% precise in English, especially when the underlying concepts may not be the same to the speaker and the listener. I mean, obviously the Architect wouldn't think in English. That would just be silly. Given that he understood human nature enough to create the Matrix, you'd think that he would also be able to come up with an algorithm to convert his thoughts into speech which maintained a decent balance between precision and comprehensibility - unless the movie was trying to make a point with the Architect's way of speaking, which is exactly what I think it was doing. Don't get me wrong, I thought the Architect's speech was, if not brilliant, at least very good, and I didn't have much trouble understanding it. All I'm saying is that I'm pretty sure that a decent chunk of the audience were left scratching their heads or assuming that the speech was largely nonsense/technobabble, and that this could have been avoided (albeit at some cost in terms of the impression we get of the Architect).
While this is technically an equation, I find thinking of it as an assignment much more natural:
X <- A*X*(1-X)
I'm a functional programmer, so if even I think of this more as an assignment than an equation, I'd venture that almost any computer scientist would do the same (of course, this may not be as true of mathematicians). This exact tension is why I think the word "equation" sounds out of place in the speech; I think it was worded the way it was because "equation" would make the non-geeks in the audience think "oh, he's talking about math" whereas "iterative function" would have just had them scratching their heads.
That said, your idea is interesting, although I'm not sure that it's right. After all, since the Matrix is a created system, presumably they can choose to set it up with whatever equations they want. Why the "anomaly" would cause "fluctuations" in "even the most simplistic equations" is definitely not explained in the movie. It's possible to "backfit" explanations like you're doing here, of course; but that's possible for almost anything in the Matrix series, if you think about it. After all, not only does a large portion of the movies take place inside a simulated world in which our laws of physics need not apply; also, we have no guarantee that Zion, even if it is not just another Matrix, follows exactly the same rules as the world in which you and I live.