This has been the case for centuries. It is not a new phenomenon.
Most artists are poor, or do not make their primary living wage from their art.
In fact the situation has IMPROVED over the last century with mass media, the ability to mass-produce or copy art, and digital works. At least now many artists are regularly hired by media companies and entertainment companies.
Art used to be something for the rich people. If you wanted to see art you needed to go to a gallery. If you wanted to hear art there were some street performers or you could go a concert. There were plays and musicals and operas, but if you were a peasant you might catch a street performance or save up for a poor seat at the theater.
This is a discussion of those in "high art", such as PhD in literature. Historically those who made a living in "high art" were born into wealthy families, educated by masters, and then either were supported by their family wealth or were hired to educate others.
Many other people had training in various arts, but that is just like the piano teacher around the corner or the dance teacher down the street. It is a skill they learn and a skill they teach, but it isn't the main source of revenue.
Me:Honey, I'm thinking I'd like to sign our daughter up for a Facebook account, even though she is twelve.
Wife: That's probably okay. All her friends are already on it, and she is very responsible.
Suddenly...
BOOM! Conspiracy to commit computer fraud. Which carries the same penalty of actually committing computer fraud. Which includes potential jail time for both parents.
97% of all federal court cases end with a plea bargain. Last year the SCOTUS ruled on Missouri v. Frye and Lafler v. Cooper, those bound it up even tighter. Go look them up.
Justice Scalia wrote on them: "the Court today opens a whole new field of constitutionalized criminal procedure: plea-bargaining law. The ordinary
criminal process has become too long, too expensive, and
unpredictable, in no small part as a consequence of an
intricate federal Code of Criminal Procedure imposed on
the States by this Court in pursuit of perfect justice.... The Court now moves to
bring perfection to the alternative in which prosecutors
and defendants have sought relief. Today’s opinions deal
with only two aspects of counsel’s plea-bargaining inadequacy, and leave other aspects (who knows what they
might be?) to be worked out in further constitutional
litigation that will burden the criminal process. And it
would be foolish to think that “constitutional” rules governing counsel’s behavior will not be followed by rules
governing the prosecution’s behavior in the plea
bargaining process that the Court today announces “‘is the
criminal justice system,’” Is it
constitutional, for example, for the prosecution to with
draw a plea offer that has already been accepted? Or to
withdraw an offer before the defense has had adequate
time to consider and accept it? Or to make no plea offer at
all, even though its case is weak—thereby excluding the
defendant from “the criminal justice system”?
He also wrote: The plea-bargaining process is a subject worthy of regulation, since it is the means by which most criminal convictions are obtained. It happens not to be, however, a subject covered by the Sixth Amendment, which is concerned not with the fairness of bargaining but with the
fairness of conviction. The Constitution . . . is not an allpurpose tool for judicial construction of a perfect world;
and when we ignore its text in order to make it that, we
often find ourselves swinging a sledge where a tack hammer is needed.
The burden for accuracy should be on the data broker, and they should be liable if they sell incorrect data.
a couple years ago I almost wasn't given a job because the background check company flagged me as having a criminal record.
As long as the background check was not through a credit bureau (they easily escape liability) it is even better for you to find out about issues like that.
You describe an ideal defamation case if you had the actual evidence. To falsely impute a criminal offense is defamation and damages are automatic; if you can show that the defamation also cost you a job or a job offer you could claim rather substantial damages against the background check company.
Do you still have the background check information? How long ago was it? If you still have proof about it or can get it from your employer, a visit to a qualified lawyer may be in order.
Also, the redigi case is going to be reversed on appeal. It is directly contradictory to established rulings including the landmark case RIAA v Diamond.
The low-court judge's summary-judgement logic was that copying data to a new hard drive makes a new copy of a work under copyright law. RIAA v Diamond had the appeals court look at that in depth, and they found that it does not.
No, actually, he didn't. That is another part of his (flawed) logic.
The 18 page ruling is pretty simple to read. There is a section on his preface, there is a section on his reasoning, there is a SINGLE LINE of his determination, and then there is the fallout from it. Here is the single statement that matters:
[T]he Court determines that the embodiment of a digital music file on a new hard disk is a reproduction within the meaning of the Copyright Act.
His ruling is very specific to a hard disk. So if they use SSD or an SD card array or any other storage medium they can play cat and mouse for a while.
But as mentioned, searches on his legal background show he has mainly worked with narcotics law and money laundering. He obviously has no clue when it comes to either technology or when it comes to copyright. I still think he ruled that way just to make the appeals court do his work for him.
Read the decision. The decision itself is contrary to RIAA v Diamond. It also pushes against the Betamax decision.
In case you have forgotten, RIAA v Diamond is the lawsuit that declared MP3 players legal, (format shifting and space shifting) and Betamax enabled time shifting.
The judge makes this logic, which is flawed:
Whenever a digital file is transferred, it moves from one 'material object' to another 'material object'. Title 17 has mixed definitions about what that means, but one interpretation is that when a different 'material object' has the content placed upon it, that constitutes creating a copy, which is a protected right. He rules that it does not matter if the original data is destroyed or not, it is considered a new instance of the work and is a protected right.
In RIAA v Diamond, the court declared that logic unreasonable, saying: “any recording device could evade regulation simply by passing the music through a computer and ensuring that the MP3 file resided momentarily on the hard drive.”
According to this judge's interpretation, ANY transfer of data to a new 'material object' requires the blessing of the copyright holder. That means we cannot legally transfer our files to a second hard drive, since it is a new material object. We cannot legally transfer the files from a PC to a laptop, since it is a new material object. We cannot transfer files to a smart phone or tablet or other device, because they are different material objects. We cannot transfer data "to the cloud", because it is one or more new material objects.
This ruling will be remanded to the judge within a few months.
In some ways I think the judge is trolling or admitting that he has no clue. His background is narcotics law and money laundering (and rubber-stamping plea bargains for prosecuters). He has no real experience with IP law. He's probably just waiting for the appeals court to tell him what the ruling is supposed to be since he doesn't have any clue.
try paying for your groceries in gold bullion. Then tell me gold has no value.
Gold bullion itself is not a currency. Gold bullion coins are an investment currency, not a circulating currency. BitCoin claims to be a circulating currency.
Bullion coins, such as the silver and gold American Eagle coins, are currency even though they are traded for the metal in them. They have a face value printed on the coin. If someone tried to pass a $50 Gold Eagle coin for it's face value, I'd snap it up in a hurry.
The fact that you don't actually have a copy of it does not extend to just games.
Software as as service (SaaS) is not just in games. You don't actually own it, and you get the privilege of purchasing it again and again every year.
In the Enterprise world it has been increasingly common over the last many years. SalesForce, SuccessFactors, Nimble, and other big CRM companies are delivered as SAAS. Many big companies like IBM and Oracle have been moving various systems over.
That's my same argument about the latest round of SaaS Microsoft Office.
Even consumer-facing services like DropBox, Amazon's web services, and Google Office face the same issues.
This is not just EA, and not just SaaS game systems like Steam. It is huge swaths of the software ecosystem that is moving.
Log in to the Evil Twin network. Start a bunch of illegal torrents and "accidentally" alert the appropriate parties by IP address.
Some appropriate in-theater movies and the MPAA would be a good start.
My physician's office explicitly tells me why they stick with paper-only records: They don't want to deal with the data security mess. They are a medical office, not an IT shop.
Amazingly after all these years on paper records, I don't get double-billed, I've never had a problem between them and the insurance company, and they manage to handle my billing in a timely manner.
There are different laws for making bets, taking bets, facilitating payments (this is what usually gets prosecuted), accepting advertising for gambling, displaying advertising for gambling, and even differences in regulation between types of gambling (sports betting, gambling machines, card games, etc.)
Then there are issues with corruption (throwing the game), and money laundering. For better or worse, organized crime loves gambling because it is easy to casually shift funds from one account to another without a paper trail.
On top of that, the government wants their cut in tax revenue.
"Enabling piracy" is the mindset of a consumer, not a producer.
I produce data. I can easily generate 200GB of data from a multi-day photo shoot. I would LOVE to have that much storage available to me on a stick. Right now I use a small pile of 64GB and 128GB class-10 SD cards. I'd be a little worried about having that much data in a single point of failure, but the convenience factor would be very nice.
Videographers are becoming more commonplace at weddings and other events, and I've heard them complain about the same issue: portable storage space is a pain.
Yes, some people will use them to pirate stuff. That same stuff is available off the interwebz and cards and usb drives already, so it doesn't really open a new vector.
Side channel attacks are old-school but any security researcher worth their title knows about them.
This was a popular attack in the 60's and 70's for governments.
Decades ago CS programs taught about how spies once leaked data from secret-privileged machines by emitting communications through CPU load, or through disk usage, or through various other timing attacks.
Still, many have been totally unqualified and it becomes readily apparent in the interview process.
Then you are doing something wrong.
The people you want are already gainfully employed by great companies. They are the people who were not laid off during the recession, and now those companies are doing everything they can to keep them.
To get them you need to pay directly through salaries and perks and big hiring bonuses, or hire a headhunter plus offer the salaries and perks. You cannot lure happy talented professionals away from their jobs very easily. And companies I've seen are doing all they can to keep their best workers very happy.
My current company is doing everything it can to keep the talent it has. It seems every week or so there is an email asking how they can make our lives better. We're also hiring at salaries that remind me of the dot-com bubble.
Apparently strong network security (packet/protocol level) + network operations background + minor software development + security clearance is an impossible combination to find.
Ya think?
- Network security person + clearance. One job.
- NOC ops + clearance. One job.
- Part time software development. One job, either part time or contract.
Don't complain that you can't find somebody stupid enough to attempt to do all three jobs. If they already have their security clearance then their BS filter works just as good as your resume filter. There is no shortage of open jobs that are SINGLE jobs requiring security clearance.
I've seen my own share of job postings where it is clear the job will be a nightmare just by the way they word it. The classics are like yours, listing multiple full time jobs as a single job, and then mentioning overtime will be requested for the salaried position.
They already know that the drugs are going by that road. They already stop people when they are suspect. What is scanning plates going to change, except violate peoples privacy and cost money? What is the cost-benefit analysis of this whole thing? If they don't publish that, it's either not researched and should never be allowed, or it's so bad that if it were to become public, nobody would want it to happen.
At the hearings that is one of the many points that was brought up.
Basically the legislative committee saw there was no real benefit, it exposed huge privacy and long-term Big Brother concerns, etc. None of the legislators in the committee seemed likely to go for the plan.
Non-profit does not mean you need to have zero cash at the new fiscal year.
A non-profit organization simply means that the capital funds cannot be withdrawn by individuals; it is not their profitable enterprise. Non-profit organizations can (and do) accumulate wealth --- they are just a little bit limited to what they can do with the money.
Non-profit organizations can carry as much money as it takes to do business. For example, a non-profit healthcare company may have a billion or so invested in hospitals and medical equipment, they don't need to sell everything so they are completely broke every fiscal year.
You are right that light balance and natural noise are both very important.
Take for example the camera-assistant production slates (those little boards you see movie makers use with the clapper on top). They do a lot more than just showing the script location and film location, but they also have little black and white (and gray) lines on the clapper. Those are amazing tools that are deceptively simple. The clapper makes a sharp noise that lets you sync and balance the audio, digital boards will record the sync for individual film frames, and the lines provide for image calibration.
The black, gray, and white boards allow you to balance the brightness in post production exactly the way the original post was looking for.
Most boards also have calibrated colors to help balance those, as well.
Shooting slate is a very important step in good photography, both for stills and motion pictures.
And to the posters suggesting trying to eliminate all natural noise in photos, you don't really understand what you are talking about. Your eye expects noise in the real world.
Photos need natural noise, they look unnatural or cartoonish without it. Traditional photographs are full of noise because the silver halide gelatin and other chemicals are not perfectly uniform. The chemicals naturally clump up and form noise. (This property makes it easy to identify tampered photos since the natural noise is different between two areas.) Even digital photos get noise when you print them or display them on your screen. If your camera automatically smoothed out all the noise, the image would look like a cartoon or a naively ray-traced image.
As far as using image editing apps such as the GIMP or Photoshop, yes they are able to do a great job with digital images but they are limited by the knowledge and skill of the human using them.
Working for EA doesn't necessarily mean being EA at places like EARS or Tiburon. There are countless third-party companies (like the one I'm at) who work on EA titles. Some places are horrible, we have some nasty stories from people who worked at two different studios a few miles away. But some are great, offering wonderful pay, benefits, and perks.
As for the choice of CS degrees: Get a BS in CS. If you ever leave or even fail to get in to the games industry, you will be best off with that. When I worked as a database programmer, they would have shied away from anybody with a games degree in favor of a simple CS degree.
However, you should go for the MS degree in whatever field you find most interesting. If they have that in the games degree, then get it there. If they have it in the CS degree, get it there. If they have it in the physics department, get it there.
Once you are actually working for a company, nobody really cares what you got your degree in, the only care that you can do the work presented to you, and do it well.
Heck, let's just grab one random shmuck from each district every other year to serve as a representative
No, that's supposed to the job of a jury. The smarter, successful people should make up the government, and the normal people in the local area decide if punishments should be made or not. At least, in criminal cases anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
To quote a recently fired Microsoft games employee: "why would anyonewant to live there?"
This has been the case for centuries. It is not a new phenomenon.
Most artists are poor, or do not make their primary living wage from their art.
In fact the situation has IMPROVED over the last century with mass media, the ability to mass-produce or copy art, and digital works. At least now many artists are regularly hired by media companies and entertainment companies.
Art used to be something for the rich people. If you wanted to see art you needed to go to a gallery. If you wanted to hear art there were some street performers or you could go a concert. There were plays and musicals and operas, but if you were a peasant you might catch a street performance or save up for a poor seat at the theater.
This is a discussion of those in "high art", such as PhD in literature. Historically those who made a living in "high art" were born into wealthy families, educated by masters, and then either were supported by their family wealth or were hired to educate others.
Many other people had training in various arts, but that is just like the piano teacher around the corner or the dance teacher down the street. It is a skill they learn and a skill they teach, but it isn't the main source of revenue.
Okay, let's try this variation:
Me:Honey, I'm thinking I'd like to sign our daughter up for a Facebook account, even though she is twelve.
Wife: That's probably okay. All her friends are already on it, and she is very responsible.
Suddenly...
BOOM! Conspiracy to commit computer fraud. Which carries the same penalty of actually committing computer fraud. Which includes potential jail time for both parents.
Simply talking about breaking the terms of service caries the same felony punishment.
THAT'S NOT HER JOB. It's the OPPOSITE of her job.
You must be new to the modern legal system.
97% of all federal court cases end with a plea bargain. Last year the SCOTUS ruled on Missouri v. Frye and Lafler v. Cooper, those bound it up even tighter. Go look them up.
Justice Scalia wrote on them: "the Court today opens a whole new field of constitutionalized criminal procedure: plea-bargaining law. The ordinary criminal process has become too long, too expensive, and unpredictable, in no small part as a consequence of an intricate federal Code of Criminal Procedure imposed on the States by this Court in pursuit of perfect justice. ... The Court now moves to
bring perfection to the alternative in which prosecutors
and defendants have sought relief. Today’s opinions deal
with only two aspects of counsel’s plea-bargaining inadequacy, and leave other aspects (who knows what they
might be?) to be worked out in further constitutional
litigation that will burden the criminal process. And it
would be foolish to think that “constitutional” rules governing counsel’s behavior will not be followed by rules
governing the prosecution’s behavior in the plea
bargaining process that the Court today announces “‘is the
criminal justice system,’” Is it
constitutional, for example, for the prosecution to with
draw a plea offer that has already been accepted? Or to
withdraw an offer before the defense has had adequate
time to consider and accept it? Or to make no plea offer at
all, even though its case is weak—thereby excluding the
defendant from “the criminal justice system”?
He also wrote: The plea-bargaining process is a subject worthy of regulation, since it is the means by which most criminal convictions are obtained. It happens not to be, however, a subject covered by the Sixth Amendment, which is concerned not with the fairness of bargaining but with the fairness of conviction. The Constitution . . . is not an allpurpose tool for judicial construction of a perfect world; and when we ignore its text in order to make it that, we often find ourselves swinging a sledge where a tack hammer is needed.
The burden for accuracy should be on the data broker, and they should be liable if they sell incorrect data.
a couple years ago I almost wasn't given a job because the background check company flagged me as having a criminal record.
As long as the background check was not through a credit bureau (they easily escape liability) it is even better for you to find out about issues like that.
You describe an ideal defamation case if you had the actual evidence. To falsely impute a criminal offense is defamation and damages are automatic; if you can show that the defamation also cost you a job or a job offer you could claim rather substantial damages against the background check company.
Do you still have the background check information? How long ago was it? If you still have proof about it or can get it from your employer, a visit to a qualified lawyer may be in order.
The low-court judge's summary-judgement logic was that copying data to a new hard drive makes a new copy of a work under copyright law. RIAA v Diamond had the appeals court look at that in depth, and they found that it does not.
No, actually, he didn't. That is another part of his (flawed) logic.
The 18 page ruling is pretty simple to read. There is a section on his preface, there is a section on his reasoning, there is a SINGLE LINE of his determination, and then there is the fallout from it. Here is the single statement that matters:
His ruling is very specific to a hard disk. So if they use SSD or an SD card array or any other storage medium they can play cat and mouse for a while.
But as mentioned, searches on his legal background show he has mainly worked with narcotics law and money laundering. He obviously has no clue when it comes to either technology or when it comes to copyright. I still think he ruled that way just to make the appeals court do his work for him.
In case you have forgotten, RIAA v Diamond is the lawsuit that declared MP3 players legal, (format shifting and space shifting) and Betamax enabled time shifting.
The judge makes this logic, which is flawed:
Whenever a digital file is transferred, it moves from one 'material object' to another 'material object'. Title 17 has mixed definitions about what that means, but one interpretation is that when a different 'material object' has the content placed upon it, that constitutes creating a copy, which is a protected right. He rules that it does not matter if the original data is destroyed or not, it is considered a new instance of the work and is a protected right.
In RIAA v Diamond, the court declared that logic unreasonable, saying: “any recording device could evade regulation simply by passing the music through a computer and ensuring that the MP3 file resided momentarily on the hard drive.”
According to this judge's interpretation, ANY transfer of data to a new 'material object' requires the blessing of the copyright holder. That means we cannot legally transfer our files to a second hard drive, since it is a new material object. We cannot legally transfer the files from a PC to a laptop, since it is a new material object. We cannot transfer files to a smart phone or tablet or other device, because they are different material objects. We cannot transfer data "to the cloud", because it is one or more new material objects.
This ruling will be remanded to the judge within a few months.
In some ways I think the judge is trolling or admitting that he has no clue. His background is narcotics law and money laundering (and rubber-stamping plea bargains for prosecuters). He has no real experience with IP law. He's probably just waiting for the appeals court to tell him what the ruling is supposed to be since he doesn't have any clue.
try paying for your groceries in gold bullion. Then tell me gold has no value.
Gold bullion itself is not a currency. Gold bullion coins are an investment currency, not a circulating currency. BitCoin claims to be a circulating currency.
Bullion coins, such as the silver and gold American Eagle coins, are currency even though they are traded for the metal in them. They have a face value printed on the coin. If someone tried to pass a $50 Gold Eagle coin for it's face value, I'd snap it up in a hurry.
claiming it is being widely used for every day living. I have yet to see anything to back up either extreme.
Let me know when I can pay my rent in bitcoins, pay my fuel bill in bitcoins, or buy groceries in bitcoins.
For now it is a geek-only way to exchange goods and services.
The fact that you don't actually have a copy of it does not extend to just games.
Software as as service (SaaS) is not just in games. You don't actually own it, and you get the privilege of purchasing it again and again every year.
In the Enterprise world it has been increasingly common over the last many years. SalesForce, SuccessFactors, Nimble, and other big CRM companies are delivered as SAAS. Many big companies like IBM and Oracle have been moving various systems over.
That's my same argument about the latest round of SaaS Microsoft Office.
Even consumer-facing services like DropBox, Amazon's web services, and Google Office face the same issues.
This is not just EA, and not just SaaS game systems like Steam. It is huge swaths of the software ecosystem that is moving.
Log in to the Evil Twin network. Start a bunch of illegal torrents and "accidentally" alert the appropriate parties by IP address. Some appropriate in-theater movies and the MPAA would be a good start.
My physician's office explicitly tells me why they stick with paper-only records: They don't want to deal with the data security mess. They are a medical office, not an IT shop.
Amazingly after all these years on paper records, I don't get double-billed, I've never had a problem between them and the insurance company, and they manage to handle my billing in a timely manner.
Go figure.
There is more to online gambling law than that.
There are different laws for making bets, taking bets, facilitating payments (this is what usually gets prosecuted), accepting advertising for gambling, displaying advertising for gambling, and even differences in regulation between types of gambling (sports betting, gambling machines, card games, etc.)
Then there are issues with corruption (throwing the game), and money laundering. For better or worse, organized crime loves gambling because it is easy to casually shift funds from one account to another without a paper trail.
On top of that, the government wants their cut in tax revenue.
Aren't they just encouraging piracy?
"Enabling piracy" is the mindset of a consumer, not a producer.
I produce data. I can easily generate 200GB of data from a multi-day photo shoot. I would LOVE to have that much storage available to me on a stick. Right now I use a small pile of 64GB and 128GB class-10 SD cards. I'd be a little worried about having that much data in a single point of failure, but the convenience factor would be very nice.
Videographers are becoming more commonplace at weddings and other events, and I've heard them complain about the same issue: portable storage space is a pain.
Yes, some people will use them to pirate stuff. That same stuff is available off the interwebz and cards and usb drives already, so it doesn't really open a new vector.
Side channel attacks are old-school but any security researcher worth their title knows about them.
This was a popular attack in the 60's and 70's for governments.
Decades ago CS programs taught about how spies once leaked data from secret-privileged machines by emitting communications through CPU load, or through disk usage, or through various other timing attacks.
Still, many have been totally unqualified and it becomes readily apparent in the interview process.
Then you are doing something wrong.
The people you want are already gainfully employed by great companies. They are the people who were not laid off during the recession, and now those companies are doing everything they can to keep them.
To get them you need to pay directly through salaries and perks and big hiring bonuses, or hire a headhunter plus offer the salaries and perks. You cannot lure happy talented professionals away from their jobs very easily. And companies I've seen are doing all they can to keep their best workers very happy.
My current company is doing everything it can to keep the talent it has. It seems every week or so there is an email asking how they can make our lives better. We're also hiring at salaries that remind me of the dot-com bubble.
Apparently strong network security (packet/protocol level) + network operations background + minor software development + security clearance is an impossible combination to find.
Ya think?
- Network security person + clearance. One job.
- NOC ops + clearance. One job.
- Part time software development. One job, either part time or contract.
Don't complain that you can't find somebody stupid enough to attempt to do all three jobs. If they already have their security clearance then their BS filter works just as good as your resume filter. There is no shortage of open jobs that are SINGLE jobs requiring security clearance.
I've seen my own share of job postings where it is clear the job will be a nightmare just by the way they word it. The classics are like yours, listing multiple full time jobs as a single job, and then mentioning overtime will be requested for the salaried position.
They already know that the drugs are going by that road. They already stop people when they are suspect. What is scanning plates going to change, except violate peoples privacy and cost money? What is the cost-benefit analysis of this whole thing? If they don't publish that, it's either not researched and should never be allowed, or it's so bad that if it were to become public, nobody would want it to happen.
At the hearings that is one of the many points that was brought up. Basically the legislative committee saw there was no real benefit, it exposed huge privacy and long-term Big Brother concerns, etc. None of the legislators in the committee seemed likely to go for the plan.
The answer here is randomly pull over cars, if you find drugs, make the driver smoke all of it. No matter the drug, he has to smoke ALL of it.
I can see the headline now: Canadian Drug Runner's Genitals Explode When Forced to Smoke 1500 Kilos of Viagra.
A non-profit organization simply means that the capital funds cannot be withdrawn by individuals; it is not their profitable enterprise. Non-profit organizations can (and do) accumulate wealth --- they are just a little bit limited to what they can do with the money.
Non-profit organizations can carry as much money as it takes to do business. For example, a non-profit healthcare company may have a billion or so invested in hospitals and medical equipment, they don't need to sell everything so they are completely broke every fiscal year.
Take for example the camera-assistant production slates (those little boards you see movie makers use with the clapper on top). They do a lot more than just showing the script location and film location, but they also have little black and white (and gray) lines on the clapper. Those are amazing tools that are deceptively simple. The clapper makes a sharp noise that lets you sync and balance the audio, digital boards will record the sync for individual film frames, and the lines provide for image calibration.
The black, gray, and white boards allow you to balance the brightness in post production exactly the way the original post was looking for.
Most boards also have calibrated colors to help balance those, as well.
Shooting slate is a very important step in good photography, both for stills and motion pictures.
And to the posters suggesting trying to eliminate all natural noise in photos, you don't really understand what you are talking about. Your eye expects noise in the real world.
Photos need natural noise, they look unnatural or cartoonish without it. Traditional photographs are full of noise because the silver halide gelatin and other chemicals are not perfectly uniform. The chemicals naturally clump up and form noise. (This property makes it easy to identify tampered photos since the natural noise is different between two areas.) Even digital photos get noise when you print them or display them on your screen. If your camera automatically smoothed out all the noise, the image would look like a cartoon or a naively ray-traced image.
As far as using image editing apps such as the GIMP or Photoshop, yes they are able to do a great job with digital images but they are limited by the knowledge and skill of the human using them.
As for the choice of CS degrees: Get a BS in CS. If you ever leave or even fail to get in to the games industry, you will be best off with that. When I worked as a database programmer, they would have shied away from anybody with a games degree in favor of a simple CS degree.
However, you should go for the MS degree in whatever field you find most interesting. If they have that in the games degree, then get it there. If they have it in the CS degree, get it there. If they have it in the physics department, get it there.
Once you are actually working for a company, nobody really cares what you got your degree in, the only care that you can do the work presented to you, and do it well.