I've seen "perpetual" licenses exactly how you describe them. We "own" it, but it is tied to a particular machine. You have to pay "maintainance" if you want updates, support, or to move the license to a new server. If you have let your maintainance lapse, you have to pay back maintainance, plus a penalty, in order to get current. If you let the maintainace lapse for more than 3 years, it is cheaper to buy a new license than it is to pay back maintainace on the old license.
I have never seen perpetual licenses like the article describes.
You're right about that. Every once in a while a dramatic sales shift can be directly attributed to advertising. But now that Sprite is #3, how do you measure the effectiveness of the current ads? Are they maintaining the product image and encouraging customer loyalty? Or have the earlier ads converted people, so you could cut the ad budget and not see a drop in sales? Is Kobe Bryant worth his endorsement money? Is replaying the first "Obey Your Thirst" ads from 4 years ago having the desired effect?
But there are also things you can do to protect yourself. Anyone with a patent will already know this, but most of us don't have patents. In any patent dispute, your best asset is documentation. Accordingly, the best thing to do is keep a bound lab notebook (not looseleaf) and sign and date every page. Get a witness to sign the page too, when it is appropriate. Write all your inventions or work towards inventions down. If there is stuff that can be printed out rather that written, glue it into your notebook pages, describe it and sign it.
This is of course a huge burden, and requires a completely different way of doing things to be effective. But it is cheaper than lawyers. And it is pretty much the only way to convince a judge that you really did develop an idea yourself, and before the other patent was disclosed.
I think you misunderstood which people the TV execs worry about having respect for their advertising. Its not you, the consumer. They are worried about their customers, the potential advertisers, not respecting the effectiveness of their current ads. So they are looking for something new that those people will spend money on.
"Just how many people actually tune in to watch a second-rate sequel that's seven years old on a second-rate cable network?"
I don't see a quick and easy way to get those particular ratings, but over 2.5 million people tuned in to WTBS last Sunday night to watch
Austin Powers
so if even 1/10th of that number watched
Father of the Bride
, and if only 1% of the unhappy people actually complain (rather than your estimate of 10%, just to be pessimistic) then I think all practical people would call TNTs little experiment a success.
I'm not saying I like it. I'm just lending you another perspective. Your other point about entertaining ads is also a good one, but there is a caveat: many entertaining ads get watched, and remembered, but the watchers can't remember what the product or brand was. I'm getting getting off on a bit of a tangent here, but come along anyways. IT IS VERY VERY HARD TO MEASURE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ADVERTISING. There are all kinds of different goals: build brand awareness, build product awareness, improve brand image, improve product loyalty, etc. Sometimes when you catch the consumer at just the right time, you can make a lifelong impression, particularly on young people. When I was a young teenager, Diet Coke ran a "just for the taste of it" campaign for a while with gorgeous visuals of hot chicks, and cars, and jets swooping, and catchy music I can still remember vividly, and for a time it made me think Diet Coke was "cool." And so I drank Diet Coke over all other soft drinks for the next 15 years. No practical amount of market research is going to clearly protray something like that, so TV execs, and ad firms, need to convice advertisers that stories like that really happen and justify $100,000 for 30 seconds, or whatever the ad rates are. Another quick one, when Energizer came out with the pink Energizer Bunny campaign, it was a huge success by some measurements: most people recognized the Bunny after only a little exposure to the ad, and could correctly identify the product behind it. But there was NO EVIDENCE that it made people any more likely to buy Energizer batteries. Is that a success or a failure? Well they cancelled the campaigne for a long time, and then they brought it back, so its a matter of opinion obviously. Will pop-up ads work? Thats a matter of opinion too, but in the face of falling ad revenues, TV execs are willing to try anything.
Why do so many allegedly smart people (nerds) cite fiction as basis for an opinion? You know thats not real, right? Yeah, I know about half the posters are making a joke, but I really worry about the tenuous grasp on reality that the other half has.
Its not that hard to harden something against EMP, if you think that EMP is a significant risk. You know how the Squidy hunter-killers in The Matrix were only susceptable to EMP, and the super advanced machines had no defense against it? Yeah, that wasn't real. Someone made it up.
"the *civillians* in that game don't take sh*t lying down"
Yeah, I think the detail of the NPC behaviors, and its variety, is one of the high points of the game. If a car blows up, some pedestrians will run away screaming, some will run over to inspect the wreckage (and get taken out by secondary explosions.) Attack a gang member, and all the other gang members who witness it will come after you. Try carjacking a mafia member some time if you want some excitement. The funniest suprise to me was when I mugged a pedstrian and then was hanging around in the area looking for something. An ambulance came and the EMTs revived the guy on the ground. Then he got up and came after me, caught me totally off guard. I guess I didnt' expect an NPC to have a memory like that.
The people who comment on Palladium are an informed minority. The people who would offer us content ONLY if we use a DRM system, are not the majority either.
Umm...not that it is actually important to your point, but unless you are foolish or unlucky, you very rarely get caught by the police in GTA3. You can jack a car right in front of a cop, and he will chase you for about 30 seconds, but then stop if you don't commit any more crimes (like running over pedestrians) along the way. But run over a cop or shoot one, and you better make a quick run to the pay'n'spray to get your car repainted so they cops won't recognize you. The cops seem to get pretty upset about any grenade use too, though molotov cocktails are fine. When you get arrested, you lose some money, your weapons, and your car to bribe your way out. On one mission, a bad cop pays you to kill a stoolie in the witness protection program. All of which I use to illustrate that there are no good guys in GTA3. Its just a game.
So I agree with you, games don't cause social ills. If a parent doesn't want their 13 old playing GTA3, and I wouldn't, then don't let them play. Parents are legally responsible for their 13 year olds.
One of the biggest problems right now is that the program to make a new reentry vehicle was a complete failure. So there are these very old Russian cargo pods that deliver supplies, and they keep one around all the time. They put garbage in them and send them back to earth when they get full. They can hold 3 people. If there is a big fire or something else catastrophic, the plan is get in the garbage can and ride it down. Without a larger lifeboat vehicle, and nobody knows what it would cost to make one, or how much development time it would take, the permanent crew is limited to 3 people, which isn't enough to do very much real science. It might take less than 30 billion to make a "new shuttle/lifeboat" but I wouldn't count on it.
I think only 1 of the shuttles has had its avionics and computer systems upgraded. And its not because 'they haven't needed to.' It is the red-tape nature of the government project buerocracy that it moves so slow as to be locked into old technology. The ISS crew uses laptops, but they are x486 based, because that was what was spec'ed at the time. They are very expensive now, because nobody makes 486 laptops any more, but you can't just go buy new off-the-shelf laptops. Thats not how the government buys things.
There are plenty of good things about the shuttle program, but the bad thing about the shuttle program is that everything else that NASA does revolves around it. The HST was put into low orbit so the shuttle could deploy and service it, which limits it's usefullness. The Chandra x-ray telescope had to be designed to fit in a shuttle cargo bay and be launched from the shuttle's top altitude, which isn't very high. You can launch a satellite with a rocket for cheaper than you can launch it with the shuttle. We spend and have spent a lot of money on this tool (the shuttles) and so we are locked into useing them even if they are not the best thing for the job.
I'm not offering an opinion on what we should be doing, just my understanding of the facts.
This unit only has regular analog audio out, like any other piece of audio equipment. So there is no way to take the digital music back out. That is the kind of copying they can support, one-way and in a proprietary format.
I'll wager that it is an ordinary audio CD player in there too(rather than a CD-ROM player), so that it can play their copy-protected CDs, which means that the audio goes from digital to analog before encoded back to digital.
"It can just as easily store the music on your tapes or even vinyl records, thanks to the analog and digital audio inputs on the back, or even from the built-in radio."
Hrmm...so I guess a person could hook their computer's digital out on their sound card directly to the digital in on the Sony unit and copy the entire contents in one big stream over a few days. Not ideal, and certainly not what they intended.
Of course the $1000 price tag makes absolutely no sense. One could build a new micro-atx mini system that would sit in about the same footprint for less than that, and it would do a whole lot more.
Hey that could be a partial solution to the "global warming" thing. Make a very, very, very large geosynchronous orbital solar collector (perhaps overwhelmingly large?) and its "shadow" would reduce the heat that reaches the earch by a very,very,very small amount. The "shadow" which is really only a slight localised reduction in intensity, would move west to east each day and north to south and back during the year, so it would be spread over an oval shape centered on the equator.
I don't think anyone has ruled out the theory that global warming is the result of increased solar intensity, and if it is true, than this would be direct treatment of the root cause.
Since Sealand is within the territorial waters of the UK (while also claiming an overlaping area that would give them rights to the sea lanes) I imagine that the UK would not stand by and allow a foreign power to "invade", nor a private act of piracy. Therefore the only threat of "invasion" comes from the UK itself, which has already recognized that they have no legal jurisdiction there.
Since Sealand fairly immune to legal (and therefore military matters), the other point of attack would be political, by which I mean some kind of embargo or something that makes running their business difficult. As long as Sealand doesn't do anything really bad that would make the general public of the UK see them as the bad guy, then I don't think any politician or party is going to want to be the one going after the little guy, doing the bidding of big business. Its just not the kind of thing that gets you votes. Plus, although Sealand doesn't pay taxes to the UK, they presumabley buy bandwidth and supplies from the UK, therefore they pump foreign money into the UK economy, so the UK gains something from their existance. Sealand's bigger threat is to be a target for the Real Time Black List or some such, which is why they won't host anything they think will put their business in danger.
Sealand may not be able to flout all laws and conventions with impunity, but they are immune to subpoena, and have a tax advantage, which makes them something special.
So the answers are: 1. build two sets of solar power collectors on nearly opposite sides on the moon so that one is in the light nearly all the time. and 2. Build a network of satellites to redirect the beam around to the earth surface receiver.
That sounds like it makes the project about 3 times larger than just "build a solar array on the moon and beam it back to the earth" sounded. Criswell call this a "limitless supply" and "clean energy that's low in cost so developing nations can afford it." But in fact, it is not limitless, and costs about $200 Billion US to get to break-even, plus the ongoing cost of maintainance and the cost of interest on $200 billion. It is certainly an entertaining idea, but gosh the moon is so very far away. I can't help but think we could do more with that $200 Billion right here on earth. Generating the power close to where it is used whenever possible seems like good practice.
Principality Notice
PN 011/01: Sealand offers assistance to US
20 September 2001 The Principality condemns the recent global terrorist activities and announces
that any such related activity whether real or intended undertaken within its
Territorial limits shall be considered an act against Sealand Criminal Code
which provides for placing any persons suspected of such activities under
immediate arrest and detention at the Sovereign's pleasure.
The Principality has communicated directly with the United States of America
offering its resources and making them available not only to the USA but
to any State for the purpose of suppressing terrorist acts of any kind. Its
sympathy and concern for all effected was expressed.
The Principality is on a state of alert, and all activities are currently
subject to scrutiny by Sealand authorities who are co-operating as appropriate
with the International community to combat terrorism of whatever kind.
Solar Panels on the Moon? I missed that article. Off the top of my head, the problem I see is that the moon would only be in line of sight to a ground based receiving station for half of each day, and any particular point on the moon would only be in sunlight for about 14 of every 28 days. How do they overcome those problems?
Several people have pointed out that the study makes no distinction about what kind of game is being played. IMHO, it doesn't matter what kind of game is being played, almost all games, after the initial learning phase, become simple stimulus -response. Whether it is "find enemy then shoot-dodge", or "see shortage of resources, make more peons." or "he's building flyers, I need to build anti-flyers." there is really no higher thinking going on. No creativity or moral judgement. The player is just looking for a known pattern and using a known response.
I think that even a thinking game like chess would get similar results. There is a lot of mental activity going on, but very little creative thinking. One isn't forming new thoughts, but instead managing variables in a closed system.
Which is why this study, though possibly interesting, doesn't mean what it pretends to mean.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen "perpetual" licenses exactly how you describe them. We "own" it, but it is tied to a particular machine. You have to pay "maintainance" if you want updates, support, or to move the license to a new server. If you have let your maintainance lapse, you have to pay back maintainance, plus a penalty, in order to get current. If you let the maintainace lapse for more than 3 years, it is cheaper to buy a new license than it is to pay back maintainace on the old license.
I have never seen perpetual licenses like the article describes.
I can just hear him now: "Lets screw up the units in the most obvious way possible and see how many people post about it. 10...20...30..."
You're right about that. Every once in a while a dramatic sales shift can be directly attributed to advertising. But now that Sprite is #3, how do you measure the effectiveness of the current ads? Are they maintaining the product image and encouraging customer loyalty? Or have the earlier ads converted people, so you could cut the ad budget and not see a drop in sales? Is Kobe Bryant worth his endorsement money? Is replaying the first "Obey Your Thirst" ads from 4 years ago having the desired effect?
But there are also things you can do to protect yourself. Anyone with a patent will already know this, but most of us don't have patents. In any patent dispute, your best asset is documentation. Accordingly, the best thing to do is keep a bound lab notebook (not looseleaf) and sign and date every page. Get a witness to sign the page too, when it is appropriate. Write all your inventions or work towards inventions down. If there is stuff that can be printed out rather that written, glue it into your notebook pages, describe it and sign it.
This is of course a huge burden, and requires a completely different way of doing things to be effective. But it is cheaper than lawyers. And it is pretty much the only way to convince a judge that you really did develop an idea yourself, and before the other patent was disclosed.
"Just how many people actually tune in to watch a second-rate sequel that's seven years old on a second-rate cable network?"
I don't see a quick and easy way to get those particular ratings, but over 2.5 million people tuned in to WTBS last Sunday night to watch
- Austin Powers
so if even 1/10th of that number watched- Father of the Bride
, and if only 1% of the unhappy people actually complain (rather than your estimate of 10%, just to be pessimistic) then I think all practical people would call TNTs little experiment a success.I'm not saying I like it. I'm just lending you another perspective. Your other point about entertaining ads is also a good one, but there is a caveat: many entertaining ads get watched, and remembered, but the watchers can't remember what the product or brand was. I'm getting getting off on a bit of a tangent here, but come along anyways. IT IS VERY VERY HARD TO MEASURE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ADVERTISING. There are all kinds of different goals: build brand awareness, build product awareness, improve brand image, improve product loyalty, etc. Sometimes when you catch the consumer at just the right time, you can make a lifelong impression, particularly on young people. When I was a young teenager, Diet Coke ran a "just for the taste of it" campaign for a while with gorgeous visuals of hot chicks, and cars, and jets swooping, and catchy music I can still remember vividly, and for a time it made me think Diet Coke was "cool." And so I drank Diet Coke over all other soft drinks for the next 15 years. No practical amount of market research is going to clearly protray something like that, so TV execs, and ad firms, need to convice advertisers that stories like that really happen and justify $100,000 for 30 seconds, or whatever the ad rates are. Another quick one, when Energizer came out with the pink Energizer Bunny campaign, it was a huge success by some measurements: most people recognized the Bunny after only a little exposure to the ad, and could correctly identify the product behind it. But there was NO EVIDENCE that it made people any more likely to buy Energizer batteries. Is that a success or a failure? Well they cancelled the campaigne for a long time, and then they brought it back, so its a matter of opinion obviously. Will pop-up ads work? Thats a matter of opinion too, but in the face of falling ad revenues, TV execs are willing to try anything.
Why do so many allegedly smart people (nerds) cite fiction as basis for an opinion? You know thats not real, right? Yeah, I know about half the posters are making a joke, but I really worry about the tenuous grasp on reality that the other half has.
Its not that hard to harden something against EMP, if you think that EMP is a significant risk. You know how the Squidy hunter-killers in The Matrix were only susceptable to EMP, and the super advanced machines had no defense against it? Yeah, that wasn't real. Someone made it up.
"the *civillians* in that game don't take sh*t lying down"
Yeah, I think the detail of the NPC behaviors, and its variety, is one of the high points of the game. If a car blows up, some pedestrians will run away screaming, some will run over to inspect the wreckage (and get taken out by secondary explosions.) Attack a gang member, and all the other gang members who witness it will come after you. Try carjacking a mafia member some time if you want some excitement. The funniest suprise to me was when I mugged a pedstrian and then was hanging around in the area looking for something. An ambulance came and the EMTs revived the guy on the ground. Then he got up and came after me, caught me totally off guard. I guess I didnt' expect an NPC to have a memory like that.
The people who comment on Palladium are an informed minority. The people who would offer us content ONLY if we use a DRM system, are not the majority either.
500 Amps!
Holy Moley.
Umm...not that it is actually important to your point, but unless you are foolish or unlucky, you very rarely get caught by the police in GTA3. You can jack a car right in front of a cop, and he will chase you for about 30 seconds, but then stop if you don't commit any more crimes (like running over pedestrians) along the way. But run over a cop or shoot one, and you better make a quick run to the pay'n'spray to get your car repainted so they cops won't recognize you. The cops seem to get pretty upset about any grenade use too, though molotov cocktails are fine. When you get arrested, you lose some money, your weapons, and your car to bribe your way out. On one mission, a bad cop pays you to kill a stoolie in the witness protection program. All of which I use to illustrate that there are no good guys in GTA3. Its just a game.
So I agree with you, games don't cause social ills. If a parent doesn't want their 13 old playing GTA3, and I wouldn't, then don't let them play. Parents are legally responsible for their 13 year olds.
One of the biggest problems right now is that the program to make a new reentry vehicle was a complete failure. So there are these very old Russian cargo pods that deliver supplies, and they keep one around all the time. They put garbage in them and send them back to earth when they get full. They can hold 3 people. If there is a big fire or something else catastrophic, the plan is get in the garbage can and ride it down. Without a larger lifeboat vehicle, and nobody knows what it would cost to make one, or how much development time it would take, the permanent crew is limited to 3 people, which isn't enough to do very much real science. It might take less than 30 billion to make a "new shuttle/lifeboat" but I wouldn't count on it.
I think only 1 of the shuttles has had its avionics and computer systems upgraded. And its not because 'they haven't needed to.' It is the red-tape nature of the government project buerocracy that it moves so slow as to be locked into old technology. The ISS crew uses laptops, but they are x486 based, because that was what was spec'ed at the time. They are very expensive now, because nobody makes 486 laptops any more, but you can't just go buy new off-the-shelf laptops. Thats not how the government buys things.
There are plenty of good things about the shuttle program, but the bad thing about the shuttle program is that everything else that NASA does revolves around it. The HST was put into low orbit so the shuttle could deploy and service it, which limits it's usefullness. The Chandra x-ray telescope had to be designed to fit in a shuttle cargo bay and be launched from the shuttle's top altitude, which isn't very high. You can launch a satellite with a rocket for cheaper than you can launch it with the shuttle. We spend and have spent a lot of money on this tool (the shuttles) and so we are locked into useing them even if they are not the best thing for the job.
I'm not offering an opinion on what we should be doing, just my understanding of the facts.
Actually, peeing on your own feet kills athelete's foot fungus.
Changing the goals and parameters of an in-progress design, over and over again, is something far worse than that.
"Wow! I got linked to by [H]ard|OCP today. I sure hope this server will hold up much better than my old one ;) "
Oh, if it was only HardOCP, then you might have a chance. Alas, that was only the beginning.
This unit only has regular analog audio out, like any other piece of audio equipment. So there is no way to take the digital music back out. That is the kind of copying they can support, one-way and in a proprietary format.
I'll wager that it is an ordinary audio CD player in there too(rather than a CD-ROM player), so that it can play their copy-protected CDs, which means that the audio goes from digital to analog before encoded back to digital.
from the article
"It can just as easily store the music on your tapes or even vinyl records, thanks to the analog and digital audio inputs on the back, or even from the built-in radio."
Hrmm...so I guess a person could hook their computer's digital out on their sound card directly to the digital in on the Sony unit and copy the entire contents in one big stream over a few days. Not ideal, and certainly not what they intended.
Of course the $1000 price tag makes absolutely no sense. One could build a new micro-atx mini system that would sit in about the same footprint for less than that, and it would do a whole lot more.
Hey that could be a partial solution to the "global warming" thing. Make a very, very, very large geosynchronous orbital solar collector (perhaps overwhelmingly large?) and its "shadow" would reduce the heat that reaches the earch by a very,very,very small amount. The "shadow" which is really only a slight localised reduction in intensity, would move west to east each day and north to south and back during the year, so it would be spread over an oval shape centered on the equator.
I don't think anyone has ruled out the theory that global warming is the result of increased solar intensity, and if it is true, than this would be direct treatment of the root cause.
It is both funny and interesting.
Since Sealand is within the territorial waters of the UK (while also claiming an overlaping area that would give them rights to the sea lanes) I imagine that the UK would not stand by and allow a foreign power to "invade", nor a private act of piracy. Therefore the only threat of "invasion" comes from the UK itself, which has already recognized that they have no legal jurisdiction there.
Since Sealand fairly immune to legal (and therefore military matters), the other point of attack would be political, by which I mean some kind of embargo or something that makes running their business difficult. As long as Sealand doesn't do anything really bad that would make the general public of the UK see them as the bad guy, then I don't think any politician or party is going to want to be the one going after the little guy, doing the bidding of big business. Its just not the kind of thing that gets you votes. Plus, although Sealand doesn't pay taxes to the UK, they presumabley buy bandwidth and supplies from the UK, therefore they pump foreign money into the UK economy, so the UK gains something from their existance. Sealand's bigger threat is to be a target for the Real Time Black List or some such, which is why they won't host anything they think will put their business in danger.
Sealand may not be able to flout all laws and conventions with impunity, but they are immune to subpoena, and have a tax advantage, which makes them something special.
So the answers are:
1. build two sets of solar power collectors on nearly opposite sides on the moon so that one is in the light nearly all the time. and
2. Build a network of satellites to redirect the beam around to the earth surface receiver.
That sounds like it makes the project about 3 times larger than just "build a solar array on the moon and beam it back to the earth" sounded. Criswell call this a "limitless supply" and "clean energy that's low in cost so developing nations can afford it." But in fact, it is not limitless, and costs about $200 Billion US to get to break-even, plus the ongoing cost of maintainance and the cost of interest on $200 billion. It is certainly an entertaining idea, but gosh the moon is so very far away. I can't help but think we could do more with that $200 Billion right here on earth. Generating the power close to where it is used whenever possible seems like good practice.
Kari Ann from Dallas looks like a fine young lady too.
Principality Notice PN 011/01: Sealand offers assistance to US 20 September 2001 The Principality condemns the recent global terrorist activities and announces that any such related activity whether real or intended undertaken within its Territorial limits shall be considered an act against Sealand Criminal Code which provides for placing any persons suspected of such activities under immediate arrest and detention at the Sovereign's pleasure. The Principality has communicated directly with the United States of America offering its resources and making them available not only to the USA but to any State for the purpose of suppressing terrorist acts of any kind. Its sympathy and concern for all effected was expressed. The Principality is on a state of alert, and all activities are currently subject to scrutiny by Sealand authorities who are co-operating as appropriate with the International community to combat terrorism of whatever kind.
Solar Panels on the Moon? I missed that article. Off the top of my head, the problem I see is that the moon would only be in line of sight to a ground based receiving station for half of each day, and any particular point on the moon would only be in sunlight for about 14 of every 28 days. How do they overcome those problems?
Several people have pointed out that the study makes no distinction about what kind of game is being played. IMHO, it doesn't matter what kind of game is being played, almost all games, after the initial learning phase, become simple stimulus -response. Whether it is "find enemy then shoot-dodge", or "see shortage of resources, make more peons." or "he's building flyers, I need to build anti-flyers." there is really no higher thinking going on. No creativity or moral judgement. The player is just looking for a known pattern and using a known response.
I think that even a thinking game like chess would get similar results. There is a lot of mental activity going on, but very little creative thinking. One isn't forming new thoughts, but instead managing variables in a closed system.
Which is why this study, though possibly interesting, doesn't mean what it pretends to mean.