"apparently defined by the bill as real or simulated graphic depictions of physical injuries or physical violence against parties who realistically appear to be human beings'
So if a rational person judges that NPC "people" in the game are not realistic human beings? I mean, nobody actually thinks a real person is being injured when I run over a San Andreas pedestrian right? So that isn't realistic to me. But if they are alien zombies or Combine soldiers, will it still be okay? I guess all of next years games will feature aliens, 'cuz aliens don't vote.
Google could just trade under the "Google Mail" name, and advertise the mail.google.com addresses, but since they own gmail.com and are using it the gmail.com addresses could still continue to work, and jut forward to a comparable mail.google.com addresses. There would not have to be any distruption of service to the user, but the name would change.
Unless g-mail can win the gmail.com name, that is another story. Right now they are just threatening to sue for trademark infringement.
The only study I ever saw on poker winning said that 80% of the players in a brick&mortar card room lose, while 70% of the online players lose. And no, I'm not going to go find it for you, it was about a year ago that I saw it.
So at least 30% of the players who think they are winners are not deluding themselves. And I expect that some of the losers know they are losers.
I don't think a Steam-like system is going to have much luck on consoles, since X-Box Live already exists, unless you count X-Box Live as a Steam-like system.
However, I DO think that Steam and Steam-like systems, properly done, have great potential to break the strangle-hold that the publishers have on the industry. An alternative, low-cost, popular (that is the tough one) distribution system could create a market for smaller developers and games with smaller budgets that won't get picked up by Sierra and EA and won't ever get on store shelves. Everything people hate about today's game industry could be destroyed by good independant distribution.
Because the whole thing is just a pretense to keep the user from giving the empties to the companies that refill them. They are purposely trying to form a contract with the cartridge buyer in order to be able to go after the refillers for "inducing" the buyer into violating the contract.
It seems pretty unfair to hold the 3rd party to the terms of a rebate contract they never saw, didn't agree to, and are not a part of does it?
yes, except that the earlier lawsuit was about the scope of copyright, and this threatened lawsuit is about a patent, which has been reviewed and granted already, and may have the weight of enforcement, including an injunction on selling iPods, until (and if) the patent is invalidated and retracted.
If the loser has to pay the winner's court costs, and you eventually lose...
Oh, and by the way, the suer might convince a judge that since you are being combative and doing nothing to mitigate the infringement on their patent, they need an injunction to stop you from shipping your product and further infringing until a license agreement has been reached, or until you can invalidate their patent.
Now do you want to explain to your shareholders and board why you didn't come to a licensing agreement that would allow you to keep shipping the most successfull product your company has. Even if you can later get the patent invalidated, you've still lost because your only mission in life is maximize shareholder value, and the stock price got hammered.
I think you and the parent poster who claims it has been 15 years are forgetting or not giving proper credit to Counter-Strike. Although it was written on top of a licensed engine, and was later sold as a commercial product, it was written/developed non-commercially by a team of volunteers, was given away for no additional cost, and was for a time the most popular game on the internet.
I aplogize for the typo. That should have read "much greater productivity" not "much great." And yes, I'm trying to make a very narrow (or shallow if you prefer) point. A person who can hear and see can communicate easier than a person who can't. A person with full mobility can get to work easier and faster than a person with reduced mobility. A person without diabetes doesn't spend time and money monitoring and managing their blood-sugar. We'd all be better off if we could cure these things instead of treating them, or managing them, or working-around them.
I acknowledge that you have a fair point. There have been many times in history when a new idea wasn't accepted until the people that held the old idea died. However I think there are plenty of counter-examples of people who never stop learning and who would only get more productive if they lived another 50 years. Imagine what Stephen Hawking might accomplish if he could walk and talk. There are not many people left who know what it was like to live through the Great Depression here in the US, what wisdom has been lost there?
On a personal note, I work in high-tech, I'm 35 and most of the people I work with are younger than 40, and there are very few older than 50. However the most exciting person I've worked with was in his late 60s. He had built vacuum-tube radios, and gone on through transistors and then silicon. He has worked in digital and analog from kilohertz to gigahertz. I don't know how many patents he had written, I think he lost count. It seemed like there wasn't any problem that he hadn't seen before in some form and solved. He never stops teaching and it is dramatic to watch how quickley a new engineer right out of college would become a really good engineer just from working with Phil. Two years with Phil was worth 12 years of normal experience. Keeping that king of knowledge and experience around would be a benefit to society.
Yes, yes, wouldn't it be horrible if all those people with reduced abilities or special needs suddenly had much great potential to be productive, or suddenly didn't need expensive support systems to just live their lives.
The applications are mind-boggling. Of course the amputees are the most obvious beneficiaries. But one of the mice regrew optic nerves, that means quadrapeligics, blind deaf. Maybe people with MS, diabetes, various other degenerative and chronic diseases that pour resources into drug manufacturing companies.
I'm only focusing on the money/resources aspect because it is the most concrete, and because that investment could be spent on making the planet more livable, or reducing the impact of humans on the environment. One could also make a pretty good arguement that curing a fellow man is the right thing to do in a moral sense, but that isn't my point. I'm saying that worrying about the environment is a luxury that many people who are just trying to survive and live their lives don't have, and if you raise their qualitiy of life, they may be able to start thinking about the long term.
A poker bot can play 10 tables at the same time and keep track of every statistic about all 90 other players at the tables.
Of course, playing ten tables at a time is a good way to get yourself noticed, but you could probably get away with 5 or 6 tables at a time. My brother-in-law plays 5 tables live, without a bot. He does, however, use Pokertracker, which helps him keep statistics on everyone he plays with, which in my opinion isn't cheating, it is just automating something that you could do manually. Having seen his statistics for the average 3/6 player on PartyPoker, I have no doubt that a bot could make money there. Maybe it wouldn't make 2.2 big-bets per hour the way the best human limit players do, but I have no doubt that 1 BB/hr would be easy. Play 5 bots at 5/10 and that is $50/hour. Run it 4-6 hours a day to avoid getting noticed by the admins and it wouldn't make you a millionaire, but it would be a nice chunk of change.
Today's solid-state lasers are 10% efficient? Is that a ballpark figure for pretty-much all solid-state lasers? Or was that just for example? I only have a passing familiarity with low-power laser diodes.
"But how does the laser know there's a missle on the way?"
Getting hit with radar lock is a pretty good indicator. Or, if you're trying to shoot down SCUDs or Silkworms you might rely on an AWACS or something like it to spot for you.
"And how does it keep focused on it while the pilot is trying to pull a 9-G turn? It would take gonads of neutronium to maintain a straight course while the missle is heading your way."
How many milli-seconds do you suppose it takes a 150Kw laser to disable surface-to-air missle? Have you seen the "gun-camera" footage of a spotting-laser tracking on a target while the pilot circles it and the laser-guided bomb is in transit? That targeting tech is OLD. I'm pretty confident that the people who do this stuff can recongnize a hostile missle and auto-direct a lightspeed beam from a moving platform to a moving target. It is a lot easier than shooting a missle at a missle from a fixed location.
From what I understand, DARPA spent most of it's laser money in the 80's and early 90's on chemical lasers because they are capable of much higher energy. But the drawback is that they use up their fuel and require huge cooling systems. The truck-mounted lasers and the one in the 747 are chemical lasers.
And obviously a solid-state laser just needs electricity so that is a lot easier to come by on a battlefield, but solid state lasers have been limited in their power, and have to be pulsed. If a 150Kw solid state laser could be fit to a small plane, you would have a very effective weapon (outside of smoke, clouds, rain) that would not need reloading and wouldn't miss very much.
So is this new liquid laser a hybrid of the two, or is it a cousin to the solid state laser, or is it an entirely new beast that deserves it's own species? And does it need to be reloaded?
I halfway suspect that you are trolling with that inaccurate information. Sure, it is a Bad Idea for young people to play a game like GTA, but it isn't against any law.
There is no law or ban against 5-year-old kids playing GTA. The game industry has a policy in place that says that the stores won't sell to kids who aren't old enough for the rating, but it is self-enforced.
And obviously if you weigh the risk-benefit for the store (losing a sale if they follow the policy or possibly making some parents angry) they should be breaking the rule with impunity.
IRL, if you buy stolen goods, even if you had no way of knowing they were stolen, and it is discovered the authorities will return the goods to their rightfull owner with no compensation to you. Your only recourse is to go after the person who sold you stolen goods.
I don't see why the game-maker has any obligation to refund the money of the person who bought goods (which is against the TOS) from a cheater.
IANAL, but I don't think this all hinges on intent. After all, if robbing an in-game avatar of their virtual property is okay and is an accepted part of the game, then a group doing it in an organized fashion is also okay. As far as I can tell, racketeering is for things that are illegal. If I intend to complete the transaction that I agreed to, and then try and ambush the other player afterwards and get my item back through methods that are an accepted part of the game, well it is a dirty trick, but I think it is legal.
One shouldn't expect anyone to be willing to trade with you again. And some people might take it personally and hunt you, but that too is part of the game.
"Did the guy sign the EULA ? If not, why should the law be interested in whether he followed it or not ?"
It isn't the EULA, it is the TOS. I don't know squat about Lineage 2, but I expect that a player agrees to a TOS during the creation of their player account. Since you are given the terms before you agree to them and pay your monthy fee (unlike a click-wrap EULA) it is clearly a binding legal contract between the provider and the customer. So he has agreed to NOT use a bot and compete fairly with the other players, and those players are relying on that contract when they risk their virtual possesions. You can't take harbor in "It is part of the game" while doing something that is clearly against the agreed-upon rules of the game. The fraud is that he represents to be obeying the rules and competing fairly with the other players, but he is cheating and profiting from it.
The conclusion is that it seems highly unlikely that Yahoo's index is twice the size of Google's index because in 10,012 dictionary word combinations that returned less than 1000 results Google returned more results 96.6% of the time.
"That cost is rolled up into the price of service. If the cost of raw materials goes up, the cost of the service goes up."
No, it isn't, and no, it doesn't. UPS and FedEx are charging as much as the market will bear. If their costs go down, they make more profit, and if their costs go up they make less. If FedEx and UPS choose to give away free boxes for their own reasons, that is between them and the people that take advantage of it. It doesn't effect other customers one bit.
I'll give you one example: if prices were strictly linked to costs, then cans of soda-pop would cost more in states where the distributors and retailers have to take a deposit and then refund it when the customer returns the can. Clearly, it costs them something to process and keep account of those cans coming back to the retailer and then back to the distributor, but the prices are not any higher.
Slashdot Mirror
"apparently defined by the bill as real or simulated graphic depictions of physical injuries or physical violence against parties who realistically appear to be human beings'
So if a rational person judges that NPC "people" in the game are not realistic human beings? I mean, nobody actually thinks a real person is being injured when I run over a San Andreas pedestrian right? So that isn't realistic to me. But if they are alien zombies or Combine soldiers, will it still be okay? I guess all of next years games will feature aliens, 'cuz aliens don't vote.
Google could just trade under the "Google Mail" name, and advertise the mail.google.com addresses, but since they own gmail.com and are using it the gmail.com addresses could still continue to work, and jut forward to a comparable mail.google.com addresses. There would not have to be any distruption of service to the user, but the name would change.
Unless g-mail can win the gmail.com name, that is another story. Right now they are just threatening to sue for trademark infringement.
As the Old Wise labrats say: if you want to reduce the reliability of something, add a connector, if it is still too reliable, add sockets.
The only study I ever saw on poker winning said that 80% of the players in a brick&mortar card room lose, while 70% of the online players lose. And no, I'm not going to go find it for you, it was about a year ago that I saw it.
So at least 30% of the players who think they are winners are not deluding themselves. And I expect that some of the losers know they are losers.
I don't think a Steam-like system is going to have much luck on consoles, since X-Box Live already exists, unless you count X-Box Live as a Steam-like system.
However, I DO think that Steam and Steam-like systems, properly done, have great potential to break the strangle-hold that the publishers have on the industry. An alternative, low-cost, popular (that is the tough one) distribution system could create a market for smaller developers and games with smaller budgets that won't get picked up by Sierra and EA and won't ever get on store shelves. Everything people hate about today's game industry could be destroyed by good independant distribution.
Because the whole thing is just a pretense to keep the user from giving the empties to the companies that refill them. They are purposely trying to form a contract with the cartridge buyer in order to be able to go after the refillers for "inducing" the buyer into violating the contract.
It seems pretty unfair to hold the 3rd party to the terms of a rebate contract they never saw, didn't agree to, and are not a part of does it?
yes, except that the earlier lawsuit was about the scope of copyright, and this threatened lawsuit is about a patent, which has been reviewed and granted already, and may have the weight of enforcement, including an injunction on selling iPods, until (and if) the patent is invalidated and retracted.
If the loser has to pay the winner's court costs, and you eventually lose...
Oh, and by the way, the suer might convince a judge that since you are being combative and doing nothing to mitigate the infringement on their patent, they need an injunction to stop you from shipping your product and further infringing until a license agreement has been reached, or until you can invalidate their patent.
Now do you want to explain to your shareholders and board why you didn't come to a licensing agreement that would allow you to keep shipping the most successfull product your company has. Even if you can later get the patent invalidated, you've still lost because your only mission in life is maximize shareholder value, and the stock price got hammered.
You have quite an imagination if you think there is any pity in this "healthy people are more productive" argument.
I think you and the parent poster who claims it has been 15 years are forgetting or not giving proper credit to Counter-Strike. Although it was written on top of a licensed engine, and was later sold as a commercial product, it was written/developed non-commercially by a team of volunteers, was given away for no additional cost, and was for a time the most popular game on the internet.
I aplogize for the typo. That should have read "much greater productivity" not "much great." And yes, I'm trying to make a very narrow (or shallow if you prefer) point. A person who can hear and see can communicate easier than a person who can't. A person with full mobility can get to work easier and faster than a person with reduced mobility. A person without diabetes doesn't spend time and money monitoring and managing their blood-sugar. We'd all be better off if we could cure these things instead of treating them, or managing them, or working-around them.
I acknowledge that you have a fair point. There have been many times in history when a new idea wasn't accepted until the people that held the old idea died. However I think there are plenty of counter-examples of people who never stop learning and who would only get more productive if they lived another 50 years. Imagine what Stephen Hawking might accomplish if he could walk and talk. There are not many people left who know what it was like to live through the Great Depression here in the US, what wisdom has been lost there?
On a personal note, I work in high-tech, I'm 35 and most of the people I work with are younger than 40, and there are very few older than 50. However the most exciting person I've worked with was in his late 60s. He had built vacuum-tube radios, and gone on through transistors and then silicon. He has worked in digital and analog from kilohertz to gigahertz. I don't know how many patents he had written, I think he lost count. It seemed like there wasn't any problem that he hadn't seen before in some form and solved. He never stops teaching and it is dramatic to watch how quickley a new engineer right out of college would become a really good engineer just from working with Phil. Two years with Phil was worth 12 years of normal experience. Keeping that king of knowledge and experience around would be a benefit to society.
Yes, yes, wouldn't it be horrible if all those people with reduced abilities or special needs suddenly had much great potential to be productive, or suddenly didn't need expensive support systems to just live their lives.
The applications are mind-boggling. Of course the amputees are the most obvious beneficiaries. But one of the mice regrew optic nerves, that means quadrapeligics, blind deaf. Maybe people with MS, diabetes, various other degenerative and chronic diseases that pour resources into drug manufacturing companies.
I'm only focusing on the money/resources aspect because it is the most concrete, and because that investment could be spent on making the planet more livable, or reducing the impact of humans on the environment. One could also make a pretty good arguement that curing a fellow man is the right thing to do in a moral sense, but that isn't my point. I'm saying that worrying about the environment is a luxury that many people who are just trying to survive and live their lives don't have, and if you raise their qualitiy of life, they may be able to start thinking about the long term.
A poker bot can play 10 tables at the same time and keep track of every statistic about all 90 other players at the tables.
Of course, playing ten tables at a time is a good way to get yourself noticed, but you could probably get away with 5 or 6 tables at a time. My brother-in-law plays 5 tables live, without a bot. He does, however, use Pokertracker, which helps him keep statistics on everyone he plays with, which in my opinion isn't cheating, it is just automating something that you could do manually. Having seen his statistics for the average 3/6 player on PartyPoker, I have no doubt that a bot could make money there. Maybe it wouldn't make 2.2 big-bets per hour the way the best human limit players do, but I have no doubt that 1 BB/hr would be easy. Play 5 bots at 5/10 and that is $50/hour. Run it 4-6 hours a day to avoid getting noticed by the admins and it wouldn't make you a millionaire, but it would be a nice chunk of change.
Today's solid-state lasers are 10% efficient? Is that a ballpark figure for pretty-much all solid-state lasers? Or was that just for example? I only have a passing familiarity with low-power laser diodes.
"But how does the laser know there's a missle on the way?"
Getting hit with radar lock is a pretty good indicator. Or, if you're trying to shoot down SCUDs or Silkworms you might rely on an AWACS or something like it to spot for you.
"And how does it keep focused on it while the pilot is trying to pull a 9-G turn? It would take gonads of neutronium to maintain a straight course while the missle is heading your way."
How many milli-seconds do you suppose it takes a 150Kw laser to disable surface-to-air missle? Have you seen the "gun-camera" footage of a spotting-laser tracking on a target while the pilot circles it and the laser-guided bomb is in transit? That targeting tech is OLD. I'm pretty confident that the people who do this stuff can recongnize a hostile missle and auto-direct a lightspeed beam from a moving platform to a moving target. It is a lot easier than shooting a missle at a missle from a fixed location.
So is liquid another name for chemical?
From what I understand, DARPA spent most of it's laser money in the 80's and early 90's on chemical lasers because they are capable of much higher energy. But the drawback is that they use up their fuel and require huge cooling systems. The truck-mounted lasers and the one in the 747 are chemical lasers.
And obviously a solid-state laser just needs electricity so that is a lot easier to come by on a battlefield, but solid state lasers have been limited in their power, and have to be pulsed. If a 150Kw solid state laser could be fit to a small plane, you would have a very effective weapon (outside of smoke, clouds, rain) that would not need reloading and wouldn't miss very much.
So is this new liquid laser a hybrid of the two, or is it a cousin to the solid state laser, or is it an entirely new beast that deserves it's own species? And does it need to be reloaded?
Well, at least the stray light doesn't leave as much of a mess as spent uranium does. And it doesn't fall back to earth if you shoot it up in the sky.
I halfway suspect that you are trolling with that inaccurate information. Sure, it is a Bad Idea for young people to play a game like GTA, but it isn't against any law.
There is no law or ban against 5-year-old kids playing GTA. The game industry has a policy in place that says that the stores won't sell to kids who aren't old enough for the rating, but it is self-enforced.
And obviously if you weigh the risk-benefit for the store (losing a sale if they follow the policy or possibly making some parents angry) they should be breaking the rule with impunity.
Movie ratings work the same way.
IRL, if you buy stolen goods, even if you had no way of knowing they were stolen, and it is discovered the authorities will return the goods to their rightfull owner with no compensation to you. Your only recourse is to go after the person who sold you stolen goods.
I don't see why the game-maker has any obligation to refund the money of the person who bought goods (which is against the TOS) from a cheater.
IANAL, but I don't think this all hinges on intent. After all, if robbing an in-game avatar of their virtual property is okay and is an accepted part of the game, then a group doing it in an organized fashion is also okay. As far as I can tell, racketeering is for things that are illegal. If I intend to complete the transaction that I agreed to, and then try and ambush the other player afterwards and get my item back through methods that are an accepted part of the game, well it is a dirty trick, but I think it is legal.
One shouldn't expect anyone to be willing to trade with you again. And some people might take it personally and hunt you, but that too is part of the game.
I just read the EULA and the TOS for Lineage 2. It says you can't advertise in game, but it doesn't say you can't sell virtual property.
There are also three other rules in the TOS of which he probably broke at least two in using the bot. So sorry, no, it doesn't invalidate itself.
"Did the guy sign the EULA ? If not, why should the law be interested in whether he followed it or not ?"
It isn't the EULA, it is the TOS. I don't know squat about Lineage 2, but I expect that a player agrees to a TOS during the creation of their player account. Since you are given the terms before you agree to them and pay your monthy fee (unlike a click-wrap EULA) it is clearly a binding legal contract between the provider and the customer. So he has agreed to NOT use a bot and compete fairly with the other players, and those players are relying on that contract when they risk their virtual possesions. You can't take harbor in "It is part of the game" while doing something that is clearly against the agreed-upon rules of the game. The fraud is that he represents to be obeying the rules and competing fairly with the other players, but he is cheating and profiting from it.
Nowhere did it conclude that anything was better.
The conclusion is that it seems highly unlikely that Yahoo's index is twice the size of Google's index because in 10,012 dictionary word combinations that returned less than 1000 results Google returned more results 96.6% of the time.
"That cost is rolled up into the price of service. If the cost of raw materials goes up, the cost of the service goes up."
No, it isn't, and no, it doesn't. UPS and FedEx are charging as much as the market will bear. If their costs go down, they make more profit, and if their costs go up they make less. If FedEx and UPS choose to give away free boxes for their own reasons, that is between them and the people that take advantage of it. It doesn't effect other customers one bit.
I'll give you one example: if prices were strictly linked to costs, then cans of soda-pop would cost more in states where the distributors and retailers have to take a deposit and then refund it when the customer returns the can. Clearly, it costs them something to process and keep account of those cans coming back to the retailer and then back to the distributor, but the prices are not any higher.