I had the same run in with this kind of BS when I was in HS. I caught the tail end or the CIPA for my senior year. Not only did they block porn sites and things like that but it blocked sites that were perfectly legal and useful for research.
One person was doing a research paper on how drugs is effecting America. All the sites on that subject were of course blocked indiscriminately.
There were several others in the same boat that had the same issue doing legitamate work on 'hot topics'. By far the blocks were much worse with them than without them. All the terminals were public and were monitored anyway so it wouldn't matter if there was a block or not because the person looking at porn or whatever would be caught and punished for it.
People would still get around it in so many ways anyhow that it wasn't funny. The faculty was also behind the very same filter. It's just like those Democrats to take something perfectly good and trash it.
The whole point of this is.. The way sites were chosen was indiscriminate and totally undisclosed. These companies will not show you their list under any circumstances.
In the 'slippery slope' scenerio legislators will be able to go out for blood and with the added leverage push for statewide internet filtering for everyone at the ISP level.
The thing that I think everyone needs to understand is.. people in our government and who are working for our government do not usually do things for the good of the country. There are really very few people in government that will be team players.
A few select Senators try to get their twisted bible-belted nazi regime ideas to work in the vision of tring to change things in their own visions. Others still will do it for their own personal gains both monetarily and in fame. All some want is their picture in the paper just because they support some wacky new law that gets thousands of posts and replies about them. It is doubtful if people like Sen Hollings even know what technology is out there let alone how it works. People like him just think they can pass a law to fix all the problems with every aspect of life.
This country was founded on freedom and freedom alone. People like Hollings and many others in our govt are the ones that caused us to fight a revolution in the first place. If our forefathers, namely Thomas Jefferson was alive today then he would go insane at the site of what our govt has become. He spent a year of his life arguing on the toopic of human rights to people that are nothing more than powerhungry. The reason why we have the constitution and the bill of rights is to hinder the progress of oppressors creating unjust laws. Checks and Balances are supposed to kill any law that is unfair, unjust and bad for America. At this point our govt. is totally corrupted, it is rotting like a tooth.. from the inside out. When that proverbial tooth turns black and falls out; us Americans are going to be in a world of hurt.
Laws like blocking certain sites cannot work out well, it will also block perfectly legit sites. It is only a lever that oppressors will use to push them into absolute power.
Micro$oft has made it perfectly clear in their leaked emails about their views on GPL and mainly linux. They probably lose more than $200,000 a day on xbox consoles anyway. The only reason why they take this loss is to make up by selling games. Why would they let someone turn their gaming machine that they lose $150 per unit into a pc that people wont play as many games on?
Seems to me that the advocates for the DMCA have been searching for a legitimate case for a long time to get their law validated.
The decess case and skylarov were kind of grey because their 'crimes' could have been protected under fair use.
For the first time someone arrested under the DMCA will be prosecuted and probably lose their case. This will open the door for lesser crimes under the DMCA to be pursued.
Coupled with Homeland Security the DMCA and it's cousins; the govt will eventually squash people for even hinting that the govt is bad.
Our Govt has been slowed by the fact that we have undeniable rights and certain restrictions in The Constitution, but the country built by our forefathers is no more than an illusion or a memory.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin
Formula 1 cars are made mostly of carbon fiber. Carbon Fiber can absorb more of an impact than any other known material on earth plus they are lighter than any metal that can be used as a building material...If only it were cheaper:(.
On the other hand plastic cars are bad for the consumer and good for the manufacturer. It can simplify the building process greatly while being able to add shapes to the car that would be impossible to make in metal. Features like that will make the car look better and possibly sell better as well. The bad thing for the consumer is that the life of the car will not rival a car made out of galvanized steel. They may claim that the plastic coating will last forever. Eventually the coating will fade, chip, scratch, etc. And the car will look horrible sometime down the road. In a steel car you can just get the whole thing repainted without a problem. When there is an accident with the plastic car the consumer will have no choice but to replace it from dealer parts.
Some cars that are well over 50 years old are still being used today for recreation. These cars go under intense restorations and customizations over the years.
Plastic cars will not be able to be restored in this way. You can also forget about chopping the roof or anything like that because plastic cars cannot be modified without actually replacing parts.
These plastic cars will do nothing but fuel the throw away culture that in recent years has gained velocity. Nothing today can be really be repaired. Once it goes bad it gets thrown away. This keeps a purpetual need to constantly buy new things of the same item over and over and over. This even applies to computers now. The intel has changed the core multiple times in the p4's and each time not making them backward compatible. Sometimes only a few months goes by when something like that happens.
The whole trend of this started way back when GE and Phillips decided that rather make a lightbulb last forever lets put a limited lifespan on them so we will get repeat sales. Before that nearly every product made could be repaired at a local shop.
IMHO there is nothing that can be done to reverse the process of making every product we own be chinsey. Since we buy stuff with essentially nothing since cash money really has no value anyway. Somewhere down the road when the entire population has turned into brainless automotons because all our decisions are being made by machines there will be nothing left of this great country's rights and ideas that we take for granted today. The govt will eventually win total control over us. This is a basically a law of governments that when their limits are exceeded they will create new limits somehow someway through an endless string of loopholes that will come full circle and suffocate us all.
Kevin was nothing more than the victim of fear.
on
Kevin Mitnick Answers
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Fear is what has caused more pain and suffering in 'good' people people since the dawn of time. A few people in Mitnick's time used this fear to strike terror in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans. These people are the terrorists not Mitnick. He was nothing more than a victim of the fear inspired by Markoff and others. In reality there are literally thousands of other 'hackers' that have caused way more damage than he could ever hope to achieve. The books, headlines and the hacker movies have told non hackers and non computer users a different story from reality.
When a movie was made about hacking and Kevin's name was used it further proves the statement of fear. Our government is using tools far more powerful than any 'hacker' has ever been able to have access too to watch our every single move.
In an Orwellian world the government needs to extend blame onto otherwise innocent people so they can stand on their backs to be heard and in turn gain more power. While there may not be a huge government conspiracy to ruin Mitnick, the media and government have a field day. This is exactly how they are able to name a few terrorists and go off to war with full support.
The software providers and the music/movie business will claim that they lost the retail price of everything copied. That's even though they sell their products much cheaper to resellers. Every piece of software and media copied doesn't mean a direct loss is inflicted. The way the law stands that it's illegal to have a copy of illegally copied software in your posession. Most of the copied material is by young kids and college students. Neither have the means to pay for; nor the need to buy 99% of what they have. In many ways piracy is free advertising. Record sales have risen at least 20% since the invention of the mp3. For the first time other bands that might not even be stocked at your local record store are heard. You cannot get away with using copied software in a corporate business. Corporate sales reflect a vast majority of total sales. Even if someone finds a program to download and likes it; they are still required to have someone to pay for it to use at work professionally. In this way more good products are sold. They are bought for their utility rather than fancy packaging and/or advertising. There are several groups that go to corporate sites and audit their systems to make sure that they are properly licensed. For all the bands that complain about Napster and filesharing in general get front page advertising or even cartoons about them.
Several years ago i bought a huge box of used floppy disks. They were all supposed to be erased but instead it was tons of software with another blank label on the top of it. Over 90% of the floppies were original diskettes and I ended up with an entire new suite of corel and lotus apps.
The Human Mind works on parallel planes of thought. If there is a substantial change which changes the way a person thinks, then memories will seem to disappear. The memories are instead stored in an inaccessible part of the brain. There have been studies that we use 10% of the brain at one time or less. It's possible that the other parts do get used in different times of their lives. If a person was to suffer a severe shock, they would most likely not remember everything even if they were conscious through the whole ordeal. Learning something that will strongly change the patterns of thought in a person's mind such as speech will change thought patterns permanantly. Since we cannot go back to the thoughts we thought without language, we cannot remember what it's like. Through hypnosis and other types of treatments without scientific backing have supposedly helped people remember some very early things about their life. It also helps people remember a trauma which has been blocked out. Both early life and shock are very similar and have the same basic solution. Will it be possible to someday remember our own birth? I believe we will sometime in the near future we will be able to.
It would be far cheaper and easier to make your own untracable gun powder than it would to buy bullets at $100 a pop. All the ingredients for ist are available anywhere. Organized crime will still have the upper hand. They can simply have people hired to make bullets. It will only be another law passed by someone that thinks they know what's best, but are dead wrong. Very much like the rest of our govt. By passing laws like this, they are tring to disarm America state by state. Passing laws that take away our civil liberties is the real MO of our govt. Because of the constitution, our govt has to take 'baby steps' into bringing the US into tyranny. Every terrorist event that goes on fuels the fire for Congress to pass laws that seemingly protect them better and give them more power. Look how quickly the Patriot Act came out. The WTC fires weren't even out before this was proposed. Then the anthrax scare happened to Congress. The person that was caught was an American. Is it possible that an unnamed branch of our govt is causing these atrocities for it's own purpose? I am afraid we will never know or get a straight answer from anyone. There are theories that sport tons of evidence against our state for the 9/11 event. 9/11 was very good for our government. Much of our govt is run by Jews. They have enough money and power to buy any of our elected officials. The Arabs are sworn enemies of the Jews for thousands of years. It's not a far stretch that they would solicit propoganda against the Arabs to get enough people to support a full blown war against them. At the same time removing our rights as private citizens one by one by laws that would make all our founding fathers roll over twice in their graves.
Phoenix is a word thousands of years old, it has been used in mythology, in movies, to name places, as a last name, and in many other places. The word and idea have been around long before copyright and trademark and therefore should not be able to have trademark rights at all. This is like M$ tring to copyright generic words to describe their software like windows, word, notepad, etc. Good thing those cases lost, we would have to have to pay royalties whether we bought windows 9x or double hung Anderson's.
The only reason this is enforceable is because the lawyers of america will do any dirty trick in the book and be able to win the case. It has been proven that you can get away with murder if you have enough $$.
Again, lawyers are ruining America. Every day is another day where they harm our rights. This process can only be stopped with an armed revolution.
The only way to get these rediculous laws from being passed is to educate the people voting on the matter. Let's face it, these people were elected on the basis of their person to person skills. It's not often that you see a computer engineer or any type of professional run for congress or president. Some of these people elected are so old that they barely know how to turn a computer on; how would they have any idea about the dangerous and wrong laws they passing.
Private organizations come in and present all these sugarcoated ideas in to people that clearly don't get it. They (RIAA, WIPO, MPAA, BSA, etc.) come in, take people out to an expensive meal, and sweettalk them into submission. If that fails then some may resort to 'gifts' to their party for key votes.
I guess our government is up for sale to the highest bidder.
No matter what copyright laws there are out there; someone somewhere will still violate them. The 'war' on copyright cannot be handled like the war on communism.
Rental movies should never be edited beyond the specs of what the MPAA already did to it. When they hit the shelves everywhere, a good amount of movies are already edited. Some of those reasons are to edit out gore, some sexual content and ultra violence. After they are edited, then they recieve a rating based on the content in the edited version. When 3rd parties decide to further edit their movies; they cannot market their edits as the former rating. Since there is no standard on what the new ratings should be; then there is no way that the 3rd parties can label the rating with the same one as MPAA. They also cannot label it as a MPAA rating. If the 3rd party cannot label their movies with a proper rating, then they should be fined by the MPAA for every violation.
There is no reason to try to take the editing software/hardware off the market. This will do nothing but regress the market for an indefinite number of years. No laws should be put into place that cannot be fully enforced and supported my the majority. Such a grandiose approach is both a flagrant use of power and an ignorant approach. Look what happened with prohibition; prohibition did nothing but add a branch into the illegal sector where the mob made millions bootlegging beer while the legitimate businesses like coors, budweiser, pabst, miller etc all lost millions. Of the hundreds or thousands of brewers around before prohibition, only a few companies managed to survive by selling alternative products. This set the beer industry back by not the 10 or so years prohbition was in, but more like 100 years. The art of making good beer vanished for years and now has only been resurfacing in the past 10-20 years. The same thing will happen with the computer industry. When huge companies and groups limit the use of tons of things like they are now. This includes everything found under the dmca, as well as the new bills that are being pushed in, the patriot act, and every new reg and copyright protection that will try to kill opensource and freeware like microsoft's palladium will only help line the pockets of less than 1% of the people.
Closing off technology like the MPAA, RIAA, USGOV, Microsoft would like to see will not only set us back by how many years this crap is allowed to take place, but for possibly hundreds or thousands of years. This could be the equivelant to the Library of Alexandria burning down.
Real time movie quality will come to pcs. But the amount of time is highly questionable. As the technology develops to create more realistic looking scenes; the amount of rendering time will increase.
Right now movies rendered entirely in CG are not even close to looking realistic. Final Fantasy was not that long ago and the quality still looks cartoonish. IMHO I believe we are only ~1/2 way to the goal of having rendered video that can contend with live action scenes.
At this time we are able to create quasi-realistic buildings, machines, water, and terrain that are believeable looking. But we are still not even close to being able to create believeable looking actors completely in CG without going through a large amount of work making copies from real actors. It takes more time to do motion capture and inserting CG actors into space then it does to shoot live scenes. The ability to create complete CG actors with their own voices is at least 50 years away. If speech synthesis was parallel with graphics development; we would still be in the "Tron" age. The training of the CG artists will also have to increase at the same rate of it's development. Right now working with CG takes many years to learn and a lifetime to master. The real bottleneck is going to be the people.
As far as being able to render games in photoquality.. that will probably be close to 20 years behind the CG market. Right now it is possible to render Tron-like scenes in real time. Tron is 20 years old from it's release date. There was probably a couple of years putting the whole movie together with the graphics. So if the CG market expands at a steady pace and takes at least 20-50 years more to mature; we should be seeing real life animations in about 70 years in games unless some major breakthrough occurs.
Another aspect may be that the first 3d cards came out in ~1996 and doubles the speed every 9 months or so which is moore's law squared. Some major breakthroughs have come about and are on their way that may greatly accelerate the speed needed to do real time graphics that are about the same quality of toy story 1 within 10 years. In 10 years the quality of rendering may begin to reach an apex due to the fact that less breakthroughs are possible to create a more realistic scene. Home based hardware may be able to be able to create a realistic movie that can be rendered quick enough to have acceptable looking movie within 10 years. But in no way will this mean that your average Joe will be able to create their own home-brew movie that will be able to compete with the media cartels. Movies not only need much effort into drawing up a screenplay, casting, picking a location, etc etc. but it also requires the ability to create a believeable movie that someone would be interested. 99.99% of the gerneral public does not have the skills, talent, or the drive to create a movie. There won't be any real change 20 years ago than there is today in the movie industry. There will be job shifts, but nothing out of the ordinary. Anyone who knows anything about film will tell you that it takes a lot more than pretty graphics to make a movie. There are many movies out there that are good and don't have or need any computer graphics at all.
While it might take 20-50 years for it to fully mature; CG will be very believeable in most applications. Most of the applications now are to insert rendered scenes into live action scenes which are done today beautifully. The Lord of The Rings movie proves that such a thing is possible.
Making games that are photo-realistic is a hit or miss thing. For many kinds of games; good graphics are not only unnecessary, but deter and distract the user from playing. Puzzle games like Tetris have proven this fact. The later Tetris games have many annoyances such as different sounds, music and videos play for different levels. The games that will benefit the most from this are RPGS and FPS'. RPGS and MMORPGS like EverQuest, Ashernon Online, and Anarchy Online are already more addicting than crack, nicotine and heroin combined. The graphics for EverQuest are very primitive, yet still capture a person's imagination enough for them to forget about reality and do nothing but play the game. Games are becoming more and more about how good their graphics are and nothing to do with the gameplay itself. Games completely devoted to graphics have proven time and again in many studies that they don't promote mental stimulation, but decrease the activity in the brain causing brain to atrophy and regression in people to the point where they are complete zombies. This will make a person completely dependant on the games they play and will not be able to function normally in society. The process has already begun in many people. Instead of these people going out and exploring all life has to offer, they are at home or in cyber cafes wasting their lives on someone elses dreams and visions. There will always be a large part of the population that will depend on other's ideas. Gaming will become more and more like a religion. While the interest into religion may wane, the interest in playstations, xboxes and geforces will wax.
Slashdot Mirror
fp
I had the same run in with this kind of BS when I was in HS. I caught the tail end or the CIPA for my senior year. Not only did they block porn sites and things like that but it blocked sites that were perfectly legal and useful for research.
One person was doing a research paper on how drugs is effecting America. All the sites on that subject were of course blocked indiscriminately.
There were several others in the same boat that had the same issue doing legitamate work on 'hot topics'. By far the blocks were much worse with them than without them. All the terminals were public and were monitored anyway so it wouldn't matter if there was a block or not because the person looking at porn or whatever would be caught and punished for it.
People would still get around it in so many ways anyhow that it wasn't funny. The faculty was also behind the very same filter. It's just like those Democrats to take something perfectly good and trash it.
The whole point of this is.. The way sites were chosen was indiscriminate and totally undisclosed. These companies will not show you their list under any circumstances.
In the 'slippery slope' scenerio legislators will be able to go out for blood and with the added leverage push for statewide internet filtering for everyone at the ISP level.
The thing that I think everyone needs to understand is.. people in our government and who are working for our government do not usually do things for the good of the country. There are really very few people in government that will be team players.
A few select Senators try to get their twisted bible-belted nazi regime ideas to work in the vision of tring to change things in their own visions. Others still will do it for their own personal gains both monetarily and in fame. All some want is their picture in the paper just because they support some wacky new law that gets thousands of posts and replies about them. It is doubtful if people like Sen Hollings even know what technology is out there let alone how it works. People like him just think they can pass a law to fix all the problems with every aspect of life.
This country was founded on freedom and freedom alone. People like Hollings and many others in our govt are the ones that caused us to fight a revolution in the first place. If our forefathers, namely Thomas Jefferson was alive today then he would go insane at the site of what our govt has become. He spent a year of his life arguing on the toopic of human rights to people that are nothing more than powerhungry. The reason why we have the constitution and the bill of rights is to hinder the progress of oppressors creating unjust laws. Checks and Balances are supposed to kill any law that is unfair, unjust and bad for America. At this point our govt. is totally corrupted, it is rotting like a tooth.. from the inside out. When that proverbial tooth turns black and falls out; us Americans are going to be in a world of hurt.
Laws like blocking certain sites cannot work out well, it will also block perfectly legit sites. It is only a lever that oppressors will use to push them into absolute power.
'He who controls the media controls the world.'
How did an idiot like that become the richest man in the world?
If the DMCA is going to be validated anyway then it should be amended to it since they are so closely related.
Micro$oft has made it perfectly clear in their leaked emails about their views on GPL and mainly linux. They probably lose more than $200,000 a day on xbox consoles anyway. The only reason why they take this loss is to make up by selling games. Why would they let someone turn their gaming machine that they lose $150 per unit into a pc that people wont play as many games on?
Seems to me that the advocates for the DMCA have been searching for a legitimate case for a long time to get their law validated.
The decess case and skylarov were kind of grey because their 'crimes' could have been protected under fair use.
For the first time someone arrested under the DMCA will be prosecuted and probably lose their case. This will open the door for lesser crimes under the DMCA to be pursued.
Coupled with Homeland Security the DMCA and it's cousins; the govt will eventually squash people for even hinting that the govt is bad.
Our Govt has been slowed by the fact that we have undeniable rights and certain restrictions in The Constitution, but the country built by our forefathers is no more than an illusion or a memory.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin
Formula 1 cars are made mostly of carbon fiber. Carbon Fiber can absorb more of an impact than any other known material on earth plus they are lighter than any metal that can be used as a building material. ..If only it were cheaper :(.
On the other hand plastic cars are bad for the consumer and good for the manufacturer. It can simplify the building process greatly while being able to add shapes to the car that would be impossible to make in metal. Features like that will make the car look better and possibly sell better as well. The bad thing for the consumer is that the life of the car will not rival a car made out of galvanized steel. They may claim that the plastic coating will last forever. Eventually the coating will fade, chip, scratch, etc. And the car will look horrible sometime down the road. In a steel car you can just get the whole thing repainted without a problem. When there is an accident with the plastic car the consumer will have no choice but to replace it from dealer parts.
Some cars that are well over 50 years old are still being used today for recreation. These cars go under intense restorations and customizations over the years.
Plastic cars will not be able to be restored in this way. You can also forget about chopping the roof or anything like that because plastic cars cannot be modified without actually replacing parts.
These plastic cars will do nothing but fuel the throw away culture that in recent years has gained velocity. Nothing today can be really be repaired. Once it goes bad it gets thrown away. This keeps a purpetual need to constantly buy new things of the same item over and over and over. This even applies to computers now. The intel has changed the core multiple times in the p4's and each time not making them backward compatible. Sometimes only a few months goes by when something like that happens.
The whole trend of this started way back when GE and Phillips decided that rather make a lightbulb last forever lets put a limited lifespan on them so we will get repeat sales. Before that nearly every product made could be repaired at a local shop.
IMHO there is nothing that can be done to reverse the process of making every product we own be chinsey. Since we buy stuff with essentially nothing since cash money really has no value anyway. Somewhere down the road when the entire population has turned into brainless automotons because all our decisions are being made by machines there will be nothing left of this great country's rights and ideas that we take for granted today. The govt will eventually win total control over us. This is a basically a law of governments that when their limits are exceeded they will create new limits somehow someway through an endless string of loopholes that will come full circle and suffocate us all.
When a movie was made about hacking and Kevin's name was used it further proves the statement of fear. Our government is using tools far more powerful than any 'hacker' has ever been able to have access too to watch our every single move.
In an Orwellian world the government needs to extend blame onto otherwise innocent people so they can stand on their backs to be heard and in turn gain more power. While there may not be a huge government conspiracy to ruin Mitnick, the media and government have a field day. This is exactly how they are able to name a few terrorists and go off to war with full support.
The software providers and the music/movie business will claim that they lost the retail price of everything copied. That's even though they sell their products much cheaper to resellers. Every piece of software and media copied doesn't mean a direct loss is inflicted. The way the law stands that it's illegal to have a copy of illegally copied software in your posession. Most of the copied material is by young kids and college students. Neither have the means to pay for; nor the need to buy 99% of what they have. In many ways piracy is free advertising. Record sales have risen at least 20% since the invention of the mp3. For the first time other bands that might not even be stocked at your local record store are heard. You cannot get away with using copied software in a corporate business. Corporate sales reflect a vast majority of total sales. Even if someone finds a program to download and likes it; they are still required to have someone to pay for it to use at work professionally. In this way more good products are sold. They are bought for their utility rather than fancy packaging and/or advertising. There are several groups that go to corporate sites and audit their systems to make sure that they are properly licensed. For all the bands that complain about Napster and filesharing in general get front page advertising or even cartoons about them.
Several years ago i bought a huge box of used floppy disks. They were all supposed to be erased but instead it was tons of software with another blank label on the top of it. Over 90% of the floppies were original diskettes and I ended up with an entire new suite of corel and lotus apps.
The Human Mind works on parallel planes of thought. If there is a substantial change which changes the way a person thinks, then memories will seem to disappear. The memories are instead stored in an inaccessible part of the brain. There have been studies that we use 10% of the brain at one time or less. It's possible that the other parts do get used in different times of their lives. If a person was to suffer a severe shock, they would most likely not remember everything even if they were conscious through the whole ordeal. Learning something that will strongly change the patterns of thought in a person's mind such as speech will change thought patterns permanantly. Since we cannot go back to the thoughts we thought without language, we cannot remember what it's like. Through hypnosis and other types of treatments without scientific backing have supposedly helped people remember some very early things about their life. It also helps people remember a trauma which has been blocked out. Both early life and shock are very similar and have the same basic solution. Will it be possible to someday remember our own birth? I believe we will sometime in the near future we will be able to.
It would be far cheaper and easier to make your own untracable gun powder than it would to buy bullets at $100 a pop. All the ingredients for ist are available anywhere. Organized crime will still have the upper hand. They can simply have people hired to make bullets. It will only be another law passed by someone that thinks they know what's best, but are dead wrong. Very much like the rest of our govt. By passing laws like this, they are tring to disarm America state by state. Passing laws that take away our civil liberties is the real MO of our govt. Because of the constitution, our govt has to take 'baby steps' into bringing the US into tyranny. Every terrorist event that goes on fuels the fire for Congress to pass laws that seemingly protect them better and give them more power. Look how quickly the Patriot Act came out. The WTC fires weren't even out before this was proposed. Then the anthrax scare happened to Congress. The person that was caught was an American. Is it possible that an unnamed branch of our govt is causing these atrocities for it's own purpose? I am afraid we will never know or get a straight answer from anyone. There are theories that sport tons of evidence against our state for the 9/11 event. 9/11 was very good for our government. Much of our govt is run by Jews. They have enough money and power to buy any of our elected officials. The Arabs are sworn enemies of the Jews for thousands of years. It's not a far stretch that they would solicit propoganda against the Arabs to get enough people to support a full blown war against them. At the same time removing our rights as private citizens one by one by laws that would make all our founding fathers roll over twice in their graves.
Phoenix is a word thousands of years old, it has been used in mythology, in movies, to name places, as a last name, and in many other places. The word and idea have been around long before copyright and trademark and therefore should not be able to have trademark rights at all. This is like M$ tring to copyright generic words to describe their software like windows, word, notepad, etc. Good thing those cases lost, we would have to have to pay royalties whether we bought windows 9x or double hung Anderson's.
The only reason this is enforceable is because the lawyers of america will do any dirty trick in the book and be able to win the case. It has been proven that you can get away with murder if you have enough $$.
Again, lawyers are ruining America. Every day is another day where they harm our rights. This process can only be stopped with an armed revolution.
The only way to get these rediculous laws from being passed is to educate the people voting on the matter. Let's face it, these people were elected on the basis of their person to person skills. It's not often that you see a computer engineer or any type of professional run for congress or president. Some of these people elected are so old that they barely know how to turn a computer on; how would they have any idea about the dangerous and wrong laws they passing. Private organizations come in and present all these sugarcoated ideas in to people that clearly don't get it. They (RIAA, WIPO, MPAA, BSA, etc.) come in, take people out to an expensive meal, and sweettalk them into submission. If that fails then some may resort to 'gifts' to their party for key votes. I guess our government is up for sale to the highest bidder.
It's illegal to run unlicensed software made with MS' SDK. However Xbox linux does not use the SDK and is perfectly legal software.
Tux Racer will run at that speed unless accelerated drivers are installed in x which i doubt they have gotten to yet.
Maybe the linux nvidia drivers will run on that. If they do then the speed will be more like 60fps.
No matter what copyright laws there are out there; someone somewhere will still violate them. The 'war' on copyright cannot be handled like the war on communism.
Rental movies should never be edited beyond the specs of what the MPAA already did to it. When they hit the shelves everywhere, a good amount of movies are already edited. Some of those reasons are to edit out gore, some sexual content and ultra violence. After they are edited, then they recieve a rating based on the content in the edited version. When 3rd parties decide to further edit their movies; they cannot market their edits as the former rating. Since there is no standard on what the new ratings should be; then there is no way that the 3rd parties can label the rating with the same one as MPAA. They also cannot label it as a MPAA rating. If the 3rd party cannot label their movies with a proper rating, then they should be fined by the MPAA for every violation.
There is no reason to try to take the editing software/hardware off the market. This will do nothing but regress the market for an indefinite number of years. No laws should be put into place that cannot be fully enforced and supported my the majority. Such a grandiose approach is both a flagrant use of power and an ignorant approach. Look what happened with prohibition; prohibition did nothing but add a branch into the illegal sector where the mob made millions bootlegging beer while the legitimate businesses like coors, budweiser, pabst, miller etc all lost millions. Of the hundreds or thousands of brewers around before prohibition, only a few companies managed to survive by selling alternative products. This set the beer industry back by not the 10 or so years prohbition was in, but more like 100 years. The art of making good beer vanished for years and now has only been resurfacing in the past 10-20 years. The same thing will happen with the computer industry. When huge companies and groups limit the use of tons of things like they are now. This includes everything found under the dmca, as well as the new bills that are being pushed in, the patriot act, and every new reg and copyright protection that will try to kill opensource and freeware like microsoft's palladium will only help line the pockets of less than 1% of the people.
Closing off technology like the MPAA, RIAA, USGOV, Microsoft would like to see will not only set us back by how many years this crap is allowed to take place, but for possibly hundreds or thousands of years. This could be the equivelant to the Library of Alexandria burning down.
Real time movie quality will come to pcs. But the amount of time is highly questionable. As the technology develops to create more realistic looking scenes; the amount of rendering time will increase.
Right now movies rendered entirely in CG are not even close to looking realistic. Final Fantasy was not that long ago and the quality still looks cartoonish. IMHO I believe we are only ~1/2 way to the goal of having rendered video that can contend with live action scenes.
At this time we are able to create quasi-realistic buildings, machines, water, and terrain that are believeable looking. But we are still not even close to being able to create believeable looking actors completely in CG without going through a large amount of work making copies from real actors. It takes more time to do motion capture and inserting CG actors into space then it does to shoot live scenes. The ability to create complete CG actors with their own voices is at least 50 years away. If speech synthesis was parallel with graphics development; we would still be in the "Tron" age. The training of the CG artists will also have to increase at the same rate of it's development. Right now working with CG takes many years to learn and a lifetime to master. The real bottleneck is going to be the people.
As far as being able to render games in photoquality.. that will probably be close to 20 years behind the CG market. Right now it is possible to render Tron-like scenes in real time. Tron is 20 years old from it's release date. There was probably a couple of years putting the whole movie together with the graphics. So if the CG market expands at a steady pace and takes at least 20-50 years more to mature; we should be seeing real life animations in about 70 years in games unless some major breakthrough occurs.
Another aspect may be that the first 3d cards came out in ~1996 and doubles the speed every 9 months or so which is moore's law squared. Some major breakthroughs have come about and are on their way that may greatly accelerate the speed needed to do real time graphics that are about the same quality of toy story 1 within 10 years. In 10 years the quality of rendering may begin to reach an apex due to the fact that less breakthroughs are possible to create a more realistic scene. Home based hardware may be able to be able to create a realistic movie that can be rendered quick enough to have acceptable looking movie within 10 years. But in no way will this mean that your average Joe will be able to create their own home-brew movie that will be able to compete with the media cartels. Movies not only need much effort into drawing up a screenplay, casting, picking a location, etc etc. but it also requires the ability to create a believeable movie that someone would be interested. 99.99% of the gerneral public does not have the skills, talent, or the drive to create a movie. There won't be any real change 20 years ago than there is today in the movie industry. There will be job shifts, but nothing out of the ordinary. Anyone who knows anything about film will tell you that it takes a lot more than pretty graphics to make a movie. There are many movies out there that are good and don't have or need any computer graphics at all.
While it might take 20-50 years for it to fully mature; CG will be very believeable in most applications. Most of the applications now are to insert rendered scenes into live action scenes which are done today beautifully. The Lord of The Rings movie proves that such a thing is possible.
Making games that are photo-realistic is a hit or miss thing. For many kinds of games; good graphics are not only unnecessary, but deter and distract the user from playing. Puzzle games like Tetris have proven this fact. The later Tetris games have many annoyances such as different sounds, music and videos play for different levels. The games that will benefit the most from this are RPGS and FPS'. RPGS and MMORPGS like EverQuest, Ashernon Online, and Anarchy Online are already more addicting than crack, nicotine and heroin combined. The graphics for EverQuest are very primitive, yet still capture a person's imagination enough for them to forget about reality and do nothing but play the game. Games are becoming more and more about how good their graphics are and nothing to do with the gameplay itself. Games completely devoted to graphics have proven time and again in many studies that they don't promote mental stimulation, but decrease the activity in the brain causing brain to atrophy and regression in people to the point where they are complete zombies. This will make a person completely dependant on the games they play and will not be able to function normally in society. The process has already begun in many people. Instead of these people going out and exploring all life has to offer, they are at home or in cyber cafes wasting their lives on someone elses dreams and visions. There will always be a large part of the population that will depend on other's ideas. Gaming will become more and more like a religion. While the interest into religion may wane, the interest in playstations, xboxes and geforces will wax.