Depends on the reader to be honest. I've used my GamePark32 to read at least 5+ books. The ONLY thing I have to worry about is battery charge but 2 AA rechargables last for at least 4+ hours of book reading. Not to mention I can easily bookmark where i'm at and carry an entire library's worth of books in my pocket. (128mb smart media cards, they are incredibly small, I carry a bunch of them in my wallet, very convenient). The bootup time is lighting fast as well if you use the bios hack that boots straight to windups "OS" (which has a built-in e-book reader). I've also used it to read web pages on the go (copy and paste the text to notepad, save the images seperately, there is an image viewer for gp32). For the size (the same size as a gameboy advance) and the benifits (some e-book reader's for gp32 allow you to play mp3's while listening, ability to carry a library's worth of books IN MY POCKET) I personally don't see THAT many benifits to paper versions. Sure you can carry them around but they are bulky as hell. E-books are far from being perfect yet but they are also far from useless. And btw, the format of the e-books I read on it are just simple.txt files. Cheers:)
I agree, i've read 5 entire books on my gp32 (using the reader in Windups) and thats just a tiny 320x240 screen but it's clear enough to read pretty well on and has a bookmark system so if you have a few spare moments waiting for something you can just whip it out and read, bookmark then turn it off. I especially like e-books because I can read tons of them at the same time (meaning start and continue reading a new book while not currently finished reading another book, etc) without having to carry them all as seperate objects, I can just bust out the gp32 and decide what i'm in the mood to read.
That is until they make xerox machines detect the RFID's within a certain distance and refuse to make any copies of anything until the RFID is far enough away.
Kinda like HP printers and adobe photoshop's currency copying protection.
Gotta love a corporate amerika!
It's f**king heavy as hell. Reading on a laptop would be wayyy more efficient then paperback (not just for weight reasons but because even if it was the same weight, you can do way more with a laptop then just read, like listen to mp3's while reading it, etc) also, you can't do an "Find" or a copy/paste on a physical book. Considering his book is hot for criticism and quotation, copy/pasting and quick reference are very handy. The point isn't to print it out as you've definetly made a case against that anyways.:)
In the timeline it talks about Yoda reading some Sith book and meditating on the future because of it. Perhaps this is why he and Obi-wan flee and wait. Both of them are responsible for turning luke into a jedi and hence causing the defeat of the empire and (supposedly) of Emperor Palpatine in ROTJ. So maybe the book was written by a Sith nostradamus of sorts and it was in their best interest to wait things out instead of fighting in the open as fugitives in a war they know they can't win?
Makes sense but George Lucas is still a complete piece of crap and should be banned from film-making imo. Here's to the final deathblow to a formerly great universe, EP3!
\Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See Thief.] 1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief. See Larceny, and the Note under Robbery.
Some key lines here: "every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief." "removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same" notice "of the same", meaning in this case, if you are depriving the owner of a song they still posess it, so that's obviously not true, if you are depriving them of money then the pirates would have said money, not an mp3 file, so again, obviously incorrect.
Stop with the f*%king FUD terms like Theft. Yes copyright infringement in many (not all!) cases can be detrimental to an artists pocketbook and lifestyle, but in some cases I think this is like taking a penny from a millionaire.
To judge the entire idea of file sharing, and specifically mp3 file sharing as a whole is immensely ignorant. Look at the artists who DO support it and think it is a great way to get exposure. The RIAA is a big bloated beast that is past it's time. It's a postmodernist world, if they can't adapt they die, evolution. Sucking political cock for new laws and favors is just trying to get divine intervention to save them from their own stupidity. By using words like theft to describe it indescriminatly makes you look like just as much of a jackass as them.
Copyright infringement, yes. Theft, no. Don't be a FUD spreading modernist, evolve.
1) Hardware "dongle's" were tried with various pieces of expensive software (like 3d studio max) and I beleive failed for the most part due to cracking of the software part that checks for the dongle.
2) The no refund policy would cause a lot of problems without plenty of evidence to backup account removals. Logs are the only reason it woulnd't be easy to "frame people" in online games and get their account removed. I see no problem with the account removal part but a no refund policy would be bound to cause legal issues.
3) "It works quite well." That's definetly a seperate discussion for sure as I'm sure there are many slashdotters who will disagree, I for one don't bother screening any messages out because sometimes the moderation could become censorship. My question to you is, what are you talking about moderating? the forums (highly moderated already usually)? the chat? (how would one moderate real time chat? a warning system similar to aim? I would hope not since aim's system is very very easy to abuse. would you simply vote a good player up and their chat would be "bolder" ?), I don't really understand what your talking about.
4) that's really a matter of taste and really kinda pidgeonholing game design which is imo a bad idea. I personally think exploring games are VERY boring, but the point is that a game should go for whatever it's goal is. The difference between exploring and combat is that combat is more fun to repeat (subjective opinion of course). For example, you could explore and find some neat little tree. How many times would you want to "re-explore" that tree? once you've been everywhere there isn't much point to going back, it's a single shot single player kind of thing, imo not well suited to mmorpg's where people pay per month to do things over and over and socialize or whatever (I personally don't really get why people pay to do the same thing over and over, like leveling up). If you want an mmorpg type thing thats more about exploring then maybe you should check out some "virtual worlds" like There and Active Worlds. Combat seems to fill a need that many people are willing to pay for, no reason for them to remove that if people want it.
5) Natural langauge processing is always a lot more complicated then it seems, every tried talking to any chat bots? imo the way people talk on those games not being "realistic" is a social problem more then a technically solvable issue. You would think that if a majority of users wanted to talk "in character" then they would, so in essence (sp?) you would be forcing those that don't want to into a sort of censorship. But like I said, either way you slice it I don't think it's a technical issue.
6) I beleive daggerfall (a simple player, awesome rpg) did something very similar to what you suggest. You would have the choice of manually picking a race/class/etc or answering questions to determine it. There should probably always be a manual option but I definetly agree that implmenting that system in mmorpg's would be welcome as an OPTION.
Sounds to me like you want to try and impose lots of technical issues to solve social problems. While in some cases it's definetly a great idea to use technological tools to help smooth them out. In general it's up to the people themselves. You can't "force" people to be nice and "be a team player". Reward systems sometimes work good.
I agree a lot of thought needs to be put into the design of a good mmorpg since they are a far more social game then say "Counterstrike". All in all we just need good game designers that think things through and learn from mistakes.
Sorry for the long rant, just bored here at work:)
When you buy a hammer for something legit do you purchase in cash and make tons of attempts to hide your identity because some crazy person could smash someone else's property with it?
I'm sure legitimate purchasers of the card programmers weren't thinking "Oh boy I hope DirecTV doesn't come after me for working on my new security hobby." Many of the victims don't even have a satallite(sp) dish.
When you have to hide your identity just to buy something completely legit something is wrong with the world. I can't see how DirecTV would even lose $3,500 when someone does use it for illigitamite (sp) reasons. As someone else mentioned that's approximately 3 years of service. So that's assuming the customer was going to stay with them for another 3 years. Not to mention, I don't think most people who cough up the $3,500 are going to stay customers. So does this mean DirecTV doesn't plan to last another 3 years or grow at all? Aren't they posting high profits? There's no excuse for their behavior. And the real morons are the ones who let shit like this slide. Should you have purchased your VCR under an assumed name?
What would stop them from just forming tons of mini-companies to hold their patents?
There needs to be some kind of huge conference on the patent issue as its very clearly BROKEN and/or corrupt.
Not to mention the writer uses a left handed mouse (he mentions so in the touchstream section).
This RTFA moment brought to you by the united slashdot trolls of america.
What I would love to see is for someone to find a way to make kind of a combination of touchscreen/keyboard that would basically allow you to any kind of crazy custom keyboard layout. But of course there is obvious problems with that like touchscreens sucking and probably not being good for typing on extensively but I just want to see some kind of truely customizable keyboard. Hmmmm, maybe a keyboard thats an entire filled grid of keys and you can remove the ones you don't want to use and customize the layout for the rest? Just some ideas.
Re:And the first title will be....
on
Infinite Games?
·
· Score: 1
*sobs in the corner quietly waiting for quiksilver*
Re:freedom in gaming? why not RL?
on
Infinite Games?
·
· Score: 1
Problem being we are afraid of the power/reset button in RL as we know not what it does...
Plus you can't enjoy RL in easy managable chunks. Although tell that to MMORPG addicts...
Re:Careful what you wish for...
on
Infinite Games?
·
· Score: 1
That was a flaw in a pre-built narrative. Yeah in single/multi-track plot games having rails is important. The point of liquid narrative however was to be dynamic track and consequences don't necessarily prevent "winning the game" if there is such(well with the possible exceptiong of player death) but may hinder your options some, while opening up others. The whole point of dynamic systems is for the player to be ABLE to do things the developers never dreamed possible, sometimes it is wow factor and other times it can be a lot more meaningful.
Re:First-Person shooter versus real wargames
on
Infinite Games?
·
· Score: 1
*cough*world war II online*cough*
(well, pretty close at least)
a virus (which are illegal to distribute)?
If no permission is given to install it and it installs without giving you an option to get rid of it. Sure it doesn't spread from your computer to other computers but it spreads from xupiter to home computers so I can see it still being classified as a virus...
when is someone gonna bring a lawsuit on companies that thing they can pull this crap and put a stop to it?
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the reader to be honest. I've used my GamePark32 to read at least 5+ books. The ONLY thing I have to worry about is battery charge but 2 AA rechargables last for at least 4+ hours of book reading. Not to mention I can easily bookmark where i'm at and carry an entire library's worth of books in my pocket. (128mb smart media cards, they are incredibly small, I carry a bunch of them in my wallet, very convenient). The bootup time is lighting fast as well if you use the bios hack that boots straight to windups "OS" (which has a built-in e-book reader). I've also used it to read web pages on the go (copy and paste the text to notepad, save the images seperately, there is an image viewer for gp32). For the size (the same size as a gameboy advance) and the benifits (some e-book reader's for gp32 allow you to play mp3's while listening, ability to carry a library's worth of books IN MY POCKET) I personally don't see THAT many benifits to paper versions. Sure you can carry them around but they are bulky as hell. E-books are far from being perfect yet but they are also far from useless. And btw, the format of the e-books I read on it are just simple .txt files. Cheers :)
I agree, i've read 5 entire books on my gp32 (using the reader in Windups) and thats just a tiny 320x240 screen but it's clear enough to read pretty well on and has a bookmark system so if you have a few spare moments waiting for something you can just whip it out and read, bookmark then turn it off. I especially like e-books because I can read tons of them at the same time (meaning start and continue reading a new book while not currently finished reading another book, etc) without having to carry them all as seperate objects, I can just bust out the gp32 and decide what i'm in the mood to read.
Wouldn't that be IANAP? Or better yet, just take out the "am", I NAP. ;)
Gotta love slashdot abbreviations.
I thought of the same thing at first, but if it's watermarked into the text that kinda doesn't work...
That is until they make xerox machines detect the RFID's within a certain distance and refuse to make any copies of anything until the RFID is far enough away. Kinda like HP printers and adobe photoshop's currency copying protection. Gotta love a corporate amerika!
It's f**king heavy as hell. Reading on a laptop would be wayyy more efficient then paperback (not just for weight reasons but because even if it was the same weight, you can do way more with a laptop then just read, like listen to mp3's while reading it, etc) also, you can't do an "Find" or a copy/paste on a physical book. Considering his book is hot for criticism and quotation, copy/pasting and quick reference are very handy. The point isn't to print it out as you've definetly made a case against that anyways. :)
In the timeline it talks about Yoda reading some Sith book and meditating on the future because of it. Perhaps this is why he and Obi-wan flee and wait. Both of them are responsible for turning luke into a jedi and hence causing the defeat of the empire and (supposedly) of Emperor Palpatine in ROTJ. So maybe the book was written by a Sith nostradamus of sorts and it was in their best interest to wait things out instead of fighting in the open as fugitives in a war they know they can't win? Makes sense but George Lucas is still a complete piece of crap and should be banned from film-making imo. Here's to the final deathblow to a formerly great universe, EP3!
From dictionary.com
theft
\Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See Thief.] 1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief. See Larceny, and the Note under Robbery.
Some key lines here: "every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief."
"removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same"
notice "of the same", meaning in this case, if you are depriving the owner of a song they still posess it, so that's obviously not true, if you are depriving them of money then the pirates would have said money, not an mp3 file, so again, obviously incorrect.
Stop with the f*%king FUD terms like Theft. Yes copyright infringement in many (not all!) cases can be detrimental to an artists pocketbook and lifestyle, but in some cases I think this is like taking a penny from a millionaire.
To judge the entire idea of file sharing, and specifically mp3 file sharing as a whole is immensely ignorant. Look at the artists who DO support it and think it is a great way to get exposure. The RIAA is a big bloated beast that is past it's time. It's a postmodernist world, if they can't adapt they die, evolution. Sucking political cock for new laws and favors is just trying to get divine intervention to save them from their own stupidity. By using words like theft to describe it indescriminatly makes you look like just as much of a jackass as them.
Copyright infringement, yes. Theft, no.
Don't be a FUD spreading modernist, evolve.
Hope you see the light,
mzo
1) Hardware "dongle's" were tried with various pieces of expensive software (like 3d studio max) and I beleive failed for the most part due to cracking of the software part that checks for the dongle.
:)
2) The no refund policy would cause a lot of problems without plenty of evidence to backup account removals. Logs are the only reason it woulnd't be easy to "frame people" in online games and get their account removed. I see no problem with the account removal part but a no refund policy would be bound to cause legal issues.
3) "It works quite well." That's definetly a seperate discussion for sure as I'm sure there are many slashdotters who will disagree, I for one don't bother screening any messages out because sometimes the moderation could become censorship. My question to you is, what are you talking about moderating? the forums (highly moderated already usually)? the chat? (how would one moderate real time chat? a warning system similar to aim? I would hope not since aim's system is very very easy to abuse. would you simply vote a good player up and their chat would be "bolder" ?), I don't really understand what your talking about.
4) that's really a matter of taste and really kinda pidgeonholing game design which is imo a bad idea. I personally think exploring games are VERY boring, but the point is that a game should go for whatever it's goal is. The difference between exploring and combat is that combat is more fun to repeat (subjective opinion of course). For example, you could explore and find some neat little tree. How many times would you want to "re-explore" that tree? once you've been everywhere there isn't much point to going back, it's a single shot single player kind of thing, imo not well suited to mmorpg's where people pay per month to do things over and over and socialize or whatever (I personally don't really get why people pay to do the same thing over and over, like leveling up). If you want an mmorpg type thing thats more about exploring then maybe you should check out some "virtual worlds" like There and Active Worlds. Combat seems to fill a need that many people are willing to pay for, no reason for them to remove that if people want it.
5) Natural langauge processing is always a lot more complicated then it seems, every tried talking to any chat bots? imo the way people talk on those games not being "realistic" is a social problem more then a technically solvable issue. You would think that if a majority of users wanted to talk "in character" then they would, so in essence (sp?) you would be forcing those that don't want to into a sort of censorship. But like I said, either way you slice it I don't think it's a technical issue.
6) I beleive daggerfall (a simple player, awesome rpg) did something very similar to what you suggest. You would have the choice of manually picking a race/class/etc or answering questions to determine it. There should probably always be a manual option but I definetly agree that implmenting that system in mmorpg's would be welcome as an OPTION.
Sounds to me like you want to try and impose lots of technical issues to solve social problems. While in some cases it's definetly a great idea to use technological tools to help smooth them out. In general it's up to the people themselves. You can't "force" people to be nice and "be a team player". Reward systems sometimes work good.
I agree a lot of thought needs to be put into the design of a good mmorpg since they are a far more social game then say "Counterstrike". All in all we just need good game designers that think things through and learn from mistakes.
Sorry for the long rant, just bored here at work
When you buy a hammer for something legit do you purchase in cash and make tons of attempts to hide your identity because some crazy person could smash someone else's property with it? I'm sure legitimate purchasers of the card programmers weren't thinking "Oh boy I hope DirecTV doesn't come after me for working on my new security hobby." Many of the victims don't even have a satallite(sp) dish. When you have to hide your identity just to buy something completely legit something is wrong with the world. I can't see how DirecTV would even lose $3,500 when someone does use it for illigitamite (sp) reasons. As someone else mentioned that's approximately 3 years of service. So that's assuming the customer was going to stay with them for another 3 years. Not to mention, I don't think most people who cough up the $3,500 are going to stay customers. So does this mean DirecTV doesn't plan to last another 3 years or grow at all? Aren't they posting high profits? There's no excuse for their behavior. And the real morons are the ones who let shit like this slide. Should you have purchased your VCR under an assumed name?
What would stop them from just forming tons of mini-companies to hold their patents? There needs to be some kind of huge conference on the patent issue as its very clearly BROKEN and/or corrupt.
Not to mention the writer uses a left handed mouse (he mentions so in the touchstream section). This RTFA moment brought to you by the united slashdot trolls of america.
Check out some of the chorded keyboards designed for one hand.
Yes 1984 is out on dvd, we have it for sale at the local Hollywood Video.
"2.) People aren't stupid." I'm afraid i'm going to have to respectfully disagree there good sir. The rest however, i'm not going to touch.
Not sure of the exact specs but maybe what you want is a Nokia N-Gage then ;)
*cough* America's Army *cough*
of a slashdot article being a few days behind memepool...
He's coming out of the closet, if your a fellow man he might actually be the one COMING for you. /me kills self for horrible joke
thank you, drive thru
What I would love to see is for someone to find a way to make kind of a combination of touchscreen/keyboard that would basically allow you to any kind of crazy custom keyboard layout. But of course there is obvious problems with that like touchscreens sucking and probably not being good for typing on extensively but I just want to see some kind of truely customizable keyboard. Hmmmm, maybe a keyboard thats an entire filled grid of keys and you can remove the ones you don't want to use and customize the layout for the rest? Just some ideas.
*sobs in the corner quietly waiting for quiksilver*
Problem being we are afraid of the power/reset button in RL as we know not what it does... Plus you can't enjoy RL in easy managable chunks. Although tell that to MMORPG addicts...
That was a flaw in a pre-built narrative. Yeah in single/multi-track plot games having rails is important. The point of liquid narrative however was to be dynamic track and consequences don't necessarily prevent "winning the game" if there is such(well with the possible exceptiong of player death) but may hinder your options some, while opening up others. The whole point of dynamic systems is for the player to be ABLE to do things the developers never dreamed possible, sometimes it is wow factor and other times it can be a lot more meaningful.
*cough*world war II online*cough* (well, pretty close at least)
a virus (which are illegal to distribute)? If no permission is given to install it and it installs without giving you an option to get rid of it. Sure it doesn't spread from your computer to other computers but it spreads from xupiter to home computers so I can see it still being classified as a virus... when is someone gonna bring a lawsuit on companies that thing they can pull this crap and put a stop to it?