Yes Linux is better in how it handles hardware(ONE reboot AFTER install is complete is all I ever seem to have to do with a linux install, windows has at least 2 for JUST the os, leet alone dirvers, updates, etc.).
But it's lacking in several other areas that would scare developers away.
The big one is will it run out of the box, right now the way compatability between distros and even versions of the same distro work the odds are against it. The would probably have to ship a game with a spare cd containing all the variations on the binaries needed just to work on most of the mainstream distros.
And as much as I laud and love the way Linux distros install in one go without reboot hell, and deal well with hardware changes, Games need good vidcard drivers and that requires getting ati and nvidia on board with optimized linux drivers Though this last point is somthing of a chicken/egg problem as is the next point.
Linus still does not have installed user base to make porting a worthwile effort for many game/app developers.
The concept behind the LSB was a good one and a step in the right direction even if the implementation had its detractors.
And, no, "The Sims" doesn't work under wine.:( But, it does crash very well after a bit of game play. I suspect problems with the software, not Windows, in this case.
There is a way to get the sims to work under Linux. At least Mandrake managed to do it, they even shipped a ver of Mandrake with the Sims for a while there. You might want to see if you can find out what they did. Of course it's possible some change in wine or some other lib broke it, or one of the sims add-ons if you were using those.
The've actually done quite a bit of testing on rover slippage on inclines with and engineering prototype here and have a chart showing up/down angles vs. slippage. elswise when they tell it to go forward 15 meters, it may stop at 12 or go past to 17 if the weels slip (the rovers rely on sensing wheel rotation to calculate distance traveled) they've been refining this test data (which they found alot closer to reality than they had hoped) with actuall measurements since then.
Thier data indicates that at about 25 degrees an uphill climb becomes impossible because of the slippage. so all they need to do is find a usuable slope under 25 degrees in angle.
Ahhh, sorry I misunderstood your question. Odds are they don't know yet. It will take time to gather evidence. And considering thier discussing whether or not to enter the crater at all, I would assume they don't have any significant evidence yet.
The first point is a valid reason not send one, though I think other issues probably had more to do with it. Like what would they use it for on a water finding mission. I supose to reveal deeper layers or somthing, but really an explosive device probably isn't all that usefull on this mision, especially for trouble to get it there.
As to the second, it's not entirely true. It is possible to make all sorts of explosive device that eigther don't depend on combustion (IIRC tnt explodes not by combustion, but by 'falling apart') or contain oxidizers in the mix removing the need for atmospheric O2.
NASA sent the twin rovers to Mars to prospect for geologic evidence of past water on the now dry and dusty planet. Sooo... Did they find any?! Did the article writer not know, or was it not considered interesting enough to print.:)
Here's what I found earlier in the article:
Opportunity revealed the Eagle crater outcrop formed in water; they now want to know if that was the case for the deeper - and thus older - rocks in Endurance.
Well at least you labled your troll correctly. It is mostly lies, half-truths, and opinions.
Well actually I'm not sure I saw an actual lie. I did see some over-simplifications resulting in incorrect conclusions, but that could be considered a subset of half truth.
I did not mean to imply the Red Cross family of charities were bad. Just that they weren't as thrifty/efficient as other charities. And, though barely hinted at in my aside, my opinion is that targeted charities preferable.
The Red Cross is the best charity for donating blood. Other charities are better at other things.
The lions club for example collects used eyeglasses to help those that can't afford them. Jerry Louis's charities fight MS, Variety Club with dissabled children, and so on.
If you just want to give to charity, and don't have a specific cause you wish to support, then there is nothing wrong with giving to the Red Cross.
Clearly I took the post from a different angle. the original post seemed to be talking about lawyers not wanting to get into litigation anymore unless they shure thier side wins because of who pays. That seemed a non-sequiter outside of the sub-case where the looser was unable to pay.
While looser pays puts pressure on potential initiators of lawsuits to be shure they have a good case first, it's little pressure on the lawyers. They get paid in any event unless the looser can't pay.
Looser pays has a significant downside. Those with the money can still sue even when thier odds aren't so good. An even if the odds are against them they only have to be high enough to dissuade laywers from signing onto the little guys side, and even if the little guy gets a lawyer they can still play games with injunctions, delay the actual trial as much as possible, and so on till the little guy or his lawyer gives up or he does.
And if it's the little guy wanting to sue, his case has to much, much more certain to get a lawyer to sign onto it.
The actual trial and verdict are only a small part of the game, especially when the game isn't win in court, but shut the little guy down. This gets even easier in when we're talking about IP in the IT realm, where you only need a couple of years to render something effectively pointless.
Sheesh, talk about context based wierdness. I suddenly got an image of a village of vampires hiring a lawyer to sue over a sudden blood shortage in thier hometown.
If a valid patent were involved, then it would make a difference.
Instead of being an crooked uber slimeball, this guy would meerly be a bit slimy.
Though the red cross is not an ideal charity, they have a 50% overhead (if you donate $100, only $50 will reach the needy). I would (and have showed up twice to do so) give blood though, they are currently the best charity in that regards by far.
I don't get it. How does loser pays make change this. unless of course the a lawyer is himself the plaintif/defendand.
Loser pays just re-structures who pays the leagle bills, not whether they exist.
I suppose it would make a difference if the looser was so poor he couldn't pay, that would reduce the number of poor people who could sue to those with a case iron clad enough a lawyer felt he could count on winning. But other than that I don't see your logic.
I never could get Klingon Academy to run, I probably should try again since last time was when I still ran win95. Could never get enough dos memory free. I couldn't get all the drivers in memory, even with relocating as much as possible to HMA and so on, and still have enough to run it. Running without the drivers wouldn't work eigther.
Hmm that pretty much leaves win2k as the only significant item that could be causing your problem with morrowind. It doese have a higher system resource load (more bloat if you will) than win9x and Morrowind wasn't really designed with win2k in mind. On the slim chance you haven't installed the patches for Morrowind I would try that, I seem to remember it had issues on win2k (it was written for win9x systems)that had to be patched.
It runs o.k. on my system with everything turned all the way up. My system is an athalon2200+ with a single 512meg (single pc2100 dimm), a Radeon 9600AIW, a soundblaster live platinum, an 80gig hd, a 27gig hd, and winxp.
Bump maping is basicaly a texture that tells the render engine(hopefully with hw support) how to re-divide a poly and extend portions of it in the direction of the normal.
A normal is basicly a pointer to which side of a poly you have to be on to see the texture.
Some bump mapping implementations look to me more like they manipulate the textures aparent view angle without actually changing the underlying polygons any though. I assume this is less computationaly intensive. It also doesn't produce as good an effect, especially should you get it close.
While you were making a joke, I In all seriousness, would really like to see body language and espression better devolped for games, it's why I don't play MMORPG's anymore (that and lag, no broadband here). I got tired of wasting so much time trying to figure who was who. The minute some clothing/armour/weapon combo got cool everyone looked and animated EXACTLY the same.
Ever been playing a fps and the bad guys have the same slightly constipated look at 10% life they had before they 'knew' you were there?
The first game to get that right, as long as they don't blow it anywhere else, will massively wow players I bet. (and I don't gamble!)
I believe the matrix game did somthing linke this, they recorded everything the actors said about 15 times for just that reason.
Of course they did a lot of other cool things with motion capture, and modeling the actors, etc.
Wish they'd used a little higher poly-count on faces and hands though. I've always found it anoying when I tell a crease or other 3d feature is just a texture. and hands are NOT mittens.
Well since we're talking about graphics in modern games here I'm gonna through out a pet peve of mine about morrowind.
Don't get me wrong it's a good game with incredible flexability.
But why are the models and textures so crappy! I've downloaded Mods with new meshes and textures that positively blow away what comes included. they could at least publish an add-on that updates alot of them.
And no it's not because when they started consumer computers couldn't render the better meshes. Some of the stuff I've downloaded has FEWER polygons than the ones they replace, yet go from looking like mid 90 console 3d to cut scene level. Rhedd's head's and some of the stuff in the female beauty pack for example. (Though in Rhedd's case I doubt there are many people who can do that good, let alone on so few pollies!)
But then again, I do give them credit for makeing such mods possible, now If only It didn't require a $600-$3000 program for adding your own models. The mod community really needs a nif export plugin for blender and the other $100 programs.
Bridge Commander?!?! I'll agree that the concept, if fleshed out properly, would be cool. And it's a fun enough time waster, but frankly it's a good example of taking a vauge idea, building a quick proof of concept, and shipping it. It best redeeming feature is that you can create new starships and bridges for it.
It too much the same thing over and over again, with really flimsy excuses to shoot up yet another bunch of craft, to claim it's got a plot or rational story line.
It just struck what it reminds me of. It's like watching someone else play a video game. you sit there watching the other craft move around on the view-screen, and watch bolts go back and forth, and get to kibitz with guy actually doing the shooting and steering.
The sad thing is the box implied it a lot more interaction with the crew and the rest of the ship. Meaningfull interaction that would have an effect on the storyline and plot. LOL what load of bs that turned out to be.
No it's not theft. Your thinking comes from the belief that IP holders have a right to the ip they controll. In fact all they have is privilige,a leagly sanctioned privilige, granted for the express purpose of increasing the public good when those grants of privilige expire.
They do NOT own that music or movie or concept. The minute they place that info in the public view, WE own it. However in order to incourage them to create such things we (via our proxy, the government) grant them a limited monopoly on the profitable distribution/use of that material for a limited time.
At least that is how it is supposed to be in the United States. But corporate $$ has been spent to buy poloticians and propaganda untill a suprisingly large number of people actually believe they have some sort of natural right or ownership over ideas just because they were first to come up with it, or at least file paperwork claiming so.
?!?!?!?
Artificialy inflate thier prices? If you don't like the what they're charging for somthing, irregardless of the reason/excuse or lack thereof, go down the street and buy it somewhere cheaper.
Just because you think someone or some corporation is getting to rich too easily doesn't make the actuall stealing or destroying thier property any different than doing it to your next door neighbor.
You don't have to care why they charge what they charge, unless it's price fixing which is illeagle, you are alway free to shop somewhere else or do without.
As far as overcharging, well if you mean they are charging more than the price it's labled/advertised at plus applicable taxes this is called false advertising and is illeagle almost everywhere in the US.
If you believe a company/person is making money illeagly you are free to report them to the authorities.
If you think they are doing so immorally / unethically, you can report them to everyone you know.
If you think, like many do, that our government has bent excessively in favor of corporations making money over the best interest of it's citizens, then you have a right to protest, write your congresscritters, boycoyt the companies that lobby for this crap, and so on.
But stealing is still wrong. And stealing because you feel somthing cost too much and the reasons given for it's price are false are just juvinile.
No actually when it comes to the GPL it's not that suddenly peoples opinion of copyright has changed, it's people opion on HOW copyright is used and the concept of IP is used and aplied that creates the false image of a double standard.
Many see IP as an artificial restriction that has no basis in the real world. Say I show someone how to make somthing usefull and good, now that I have 'given' then that knowledge, am I somehow deprived thereof? no of course not, if anything I've improved society. This sharing is a good thing.
However many good ideas and knowledges and devices, etc. take considerable time and effort to devolop into a workable system. Time and effort that one could spend on say feeding thier family, or persuing personal gain, or any number of other, more imediatly rewarding, goals.
Those that set up the US constitution saw this issue and debated it, the answer they came up with was that the trade off of limiting the gain from ideas to thier creators, for a short time, was an acceptable tradeoff in exachange for the increased inovation it encouraged.
They did not feel it was an inherent right, nor that it was even desireable, for and individual or group to have sole use and controll of ideas and concepts. Some of them actually argued against such a thing as they felt is was preposterous, and feared it could lead where it has. One has only to look at 75 year copyright terms, patents on math and one click shopping, and so on to see why.
The original intent of copyright was indeed to incourage inovation and the sharing thereof. As it was intended for works to fall into the public domain, and for the patent office to eventually be repository of ideas and inventions, that uppon expiration of patent, would be of free use and benifit to all.
If anything the GPL and other licenses that guarantee sharing of the work with all commers more honours the intent of copyright than the current laws on the books, and all the clickthroughs you see on modern software. The fact that it uses current copyright laws in a ju-jitsu like move to do so is simply ironic justice.
I won't speak to everything you said. The deus ex thing was wrong on thier part, I would have simply told them take it back or I cancle the check/revers the cc charges. I have gotten a store to take software back once. It was a 19.99 and supposedly would let me connect to the i-net for free (and show ads, that's how they got paid back for giving out the free bandwith, kinda juno did back then) only thing is the box didn't tell you service was only available in about 8 western states, in fact the box implied the whole us.
When I took it back to walmart they didn't want to take it back at first, when I pointed out the box lied on the outer package and was effectively false advertising. I told them I would quite happily notify the bbb and states atorny general would get a nice letter, etc. (the manager I was talking to had an attitude that really ticked me off or I might not have been ready go so overboard for $20), well I got my money back on that one.
You say Morrowind ran bad on a >=1600mhz machine with >=512k of ram and a >=64 meg card? I had it running smooth except in rare cases on a 900mhz tbird core athlon with 640meg ram and a 32 meg vid card under WinMe. I suspect you've got somthing wrong with your system, possibly a virus as unfortunately some number of pirated games, cp hacks, etc. are trojans for malware, just an off the cuff supposition. You know there is even an fps utitility for it that will dynamical increase the view range beyound the games normal maximimun for faster machines, a lot of people with systems at or near your specs wanted to see farther and were running pretty high fps. It will also dynamically lower fps where the scenery gets complicated so that your fps stay within whatever range you set it for.
It did run sluggish on my brothers old machine, but that was a 400mhz amd chip with 384k and a 32 meg vid card. And it was almost playable even then. He got most of my above system when I upgraded last fall
Slashdot Mirror
Yes Linux is better in how it handles hardware(ONE reboot AFTER install is complete is all I ever seem to have to do with a linux install, windows has at least 2 for JUST the os, leet alone dirvers, updates, etc.).
But it's lacking in several other areas that would scare developers away.
The big one is will it run out of the box, right now the way compatability between distros and even versions of the same distro work the odds are against it. The would probably have to ship a game with a spare cd containing all the variations on the binaries needed just to work on most of the mainstream distros.
And as much as I laud and love the way Linux distros install in one go without reboot hell, and deal well with hardware changes, Games need good vidcard drivers and that requires getting ati and nvidia on board with optimized linux drivers Though this last point is somthing of a chicken/egg problem as is the next point.
Linus still does not have installed user base to make porting a worthwile effort for many game/app developers.
The concept behind the LSB was a good one and a step in the right direction even if the implementation had its detractors.
Mycroft
There is a way to get the sims to work under Linux. At least Mandrake managed to do it, they even shipped a ver of Mandrake with the Sims for a while there. You might want to see if you can find out what they did. Of course it's possible some change in wine or some other lib broke it, or one of the sims add-ons if you were using those.
Mycroft
The've actually done quite a bit of testing on rover slippage on inclines with and engineering prototype here and have a chart showing up/down angles vs. slippage. elswise when they tell it to go forward 15 meters, it may stop at 12 or go past to 17 if the weels slip (the rovers rely on sensing wheel rotation to calculate distance traveled) they've been refining this test data (which they found alot closer to reality than they had hoped) with actuall measurements since then.
Thier data indicates that at about 25 degrees an uphill climb becomes impossible because of the slippage. so all they need to do is find a usuable slope under 25 degrees in angle.
Mycroft
Ahhh, sorry I misunderstood your question. Odds are they don't know yet. It will take time to gather evidence. And considering thier discussing whether or not to enter the crater at all, I would assume they don't have any significant evidence yet.
Mycroft
The first point is a valid reason not send one, though I think other issues probably had more to do with it. Like what would they use it for on a water finding mission. I supose to reveal deeper layers or somthing, but really an explosive device probably isn't all that usefull on this mision, especially for trouble to get it there.
As to the second, it's not entirely true. It is possible to make all sorts of explosive device that eigther don't depend on combustion (IIRC tnt explodes not by combustion, but by 'falling apart') or contain oxidizers in the mix removing the need for atmospheric O2.
Mycroft
Here's what I found earlier in the article:
Hope this helps.
Mycroft
Well at least you labled your troll correctly. It is mostly lies, half-truths, and opinions.
Well actually I'm not sure I saw an actual lie. I did see some over-simplifications resulting in incorrect conclusions, but that could be considered a subset of half truth.
Mycroft
I think it has somthing to do with casino regulations in vegas, not sure though, :)
Mycroft
I did not mean to imply the Red Cross family of charities were bad. Just that they weren't as thrifty/efficient as other charities. And, though barely hinted at in my aside, my opinion is that targeted charities preferable.
The Red Cross is the best charity for donating blood. Other charities are better at other things.
The lions club for example collects used eyeglasses to help those that can't afford them. Jerry Louis's charities fight MS, Variety Club with dissabled children, and so on.
If you just want to give to charity, and don't have a specific cause you wish to support, then there is nothing wrong with giving to the Red Cross.
Mycroft
Clearly I took the post from a different angle. the original post seemed to be talking about lawyers not wanting to get into litigation anymore unless they shure thier side wins because of who pays. That seemed a non-sequiter outside of the sub-case where the looser was unable to pay.
While looser pays puts pressure on potential initiators of lawsuits to be shure they have a good case first, it's little pressure on the lawyers. They get paid in any event unless the looser can't pay.
Looser pays has a significant downside. Those with the money can still sue even when thier odds aren't so good. An even if the odds are against them they only have to be high enough to dissuade laywers from signing onto the little guys side, and even if the little guy gets a lawyer they can still play games with injunctions, delay the actual trial as much as possible, and so on till the little guy or his lawyer gives up or he does.
And if it's the little guy wanting to sue, his case has to much, much more certain to get a lawyer to sign onto it.
The actual trial and verdict are only a small part of the game, especially when the game isn't win in court, but shut the little guy down. This gets even easier in when we're talking about IP in the IT realm, where you only need a couple of years to render something effectively pointless.
Mycroft.
Sheesh, talk about context based wierdness. I suddenly got an image of a village of vampires hiring a lawyer to sue over a sudden blood shortage in thier hometown.
Mycroft
If a valid patent were involved, then it would make a difference.
Instead of being an crooked uber slimeball, this guy would meerly be a bit slimy.
Though the red cross is not an ideal charity, they have a 50% overhead (if you donate $100, only $50 will reach the needy). I would (and have showed up twice to do so) give blood though, they are currently the best charity in that regards by far.
Mycroft
I don't get it. How does loser pays make change this. unless of course the a lawyer is himself the plaintif/defendand.
Loser pays just re-structures who pays the leagle bills, not whether they exist.
I suppose it would make a difference if the looser was so poor he couldn't pay, that would reduce the number of poor people who could sue to those with a case iron clad enough a lawyer felt he could count on winning. But other than that I don't see your logic.
Mycroft
I never could get Klingon Academy to run, I probably should try again since last time was when I still ran win95. Could never get enough dos memory free. I couldn't get all the drivers in memory, even with relocating as much as possible to HMA and so on, and still have enough to run it. Running without the drivers wouldn't work eigther.
Mycroft
Hmm that pretty much leaves win2k as the only significant item that could be causing your problem with morrowind. It doese have a higher system resource load (more bloat if you will) than win9x and Morrowind wasn't really designed with win2k in mind. On the slim chance you haven't installed the patches for Morrowind I would try that, I seem to remember it had issues on win2k (it was written for win9x systems)that had to be patched.
It runs o.k. on my system with everything turned all the way up. My system is an athalon2200+ with a single 512meg (single pc2100 dimm), a Radeon 9600AIW, a soundblaster live platinum, an 80gig hd, a 27gig hd, and winxp.
Mycroft
Bump maping is basicaly a texture that tells the render engine(hopefully with hw support) how to re-divide a poly and extend portions of it in the direction of the normal.
A normal is basicly a pointer to which side of a poly you have to be on to see the texture.
Some bump mapping implementations look to me more like they manipulate the textures aparent view angle without actually changing the underlying polygons any though. I assume this is less computationaly intensive. It also doesn't produce as good an effect, especially should you get it close.
Mycroft
While you were making a joke, I In all seriousness, would really like to see body language and espression better devolped for games, it's why I don't play MMORPG's anymore (that and lag, no broadband here). I got tired of wasting so much time trying to figure who was who. The minute some clothing/armour/weapon combo got cool everyone looked and animated EXACTLY the same.
Ever been playing a fps and the bad guys have the same slightly constipated look at 10% life they had before they 'knew' you were there?
The first game to get that right, as long as they don't blow it anywhere else, will massively wow players I bet. (and I don't gamble!)
Mycroft
I believe the matrix game did somthing linke this, they recorded everything the actors said about 15 times for just that reason.
Of course they did a lot of other cool things with motion capture, and modeling the actors, etc.
Wish they'd used a little higher poly-count on faces and hands though. I've always found it anoying when I tell a crease or other 3d feature is just a texture. and hands are NOT mittens.
Mycroft
error, poster(self) failed to preview, correction follows.
final sentence should read:
The mod community really needs a nif export plugins for blender and other sub $100 programs.
sorry.
Mycroft
Well since we're talking about graphics in modern games here I'm gonna through out a pet peve of mine about morrowind.
Don't get me wrong it's a good game with incredible flexability.
But why are the models and textures so crappy! I've downloaded Mods with new meshes and textures that positively blow away what comes included. they could at least publish an add-on that updates alot of them.
And no it's not because when they started consumer computers couldn't render the better meshes. Some of the stuff I've downloaded has FEWER polygons than the ones they replace, yet go from looking like mid 90 console 3d to cut scene level. Rhedd's head's and some of the stuff in the female beauty pack for example. (Though in Rhedd's case I doubt there are many people who can do that good, let alone on so few pollies!)
But then again, I do give them credit for makeing such mods possible, now If only It didn't require a $600-$3000 program for adding your own models. The mod community really needs a nif export plugin for blender and the other $100 programs.
Mycroft
Bridge Commander?!?! I'll agree that the concept, if fleshed out properly, would be cool. And it's a fun enough time waster, but frankly it's a good example of taking a vauge idea, building a quick proof of concept, and shipping it. It best redeeming feature is that you can create new starships and bridges for it.
It too much the same thing over and over again, with really flimsy excuses to shoot up yet another bunch of craft, to claim it's got a plot or rational story line.
It just struck what it reminds me of. It's like watching someone else play a video game. you sit there watching the other craft move around on the view-screen, and watch bolts go back and forth, and get to kibitz with guy actually doing the shooting and steering.
The sad thing is the box implied it a lot more interaction with the crew and the rest of the ship. Meaningfull interaction that would have an effect on the storyline and plot. LOL what load of bs that turned out to be.
Mycroft
No it's not theft. Your thinking comes from the belief that IP holders have a right to the ip they controll. In fact all they have is privilige,a leagly sanctioned privilige, granted for the express purpose of increasing the public good when those grants of privilige expire.
They do NOT own that music or movie or concept. The minute they place that info in the public view, WE own it. However in order to incourage them to create such things we (via our proxy, the government) grant them a limited monopoly on the profitable distribution/use of that material for a limited time.
At least that is how it is supposed to be in the United States. But corporate $$ has been spent to buy poloticians and propaganda untill a suprisingly large number of people actually believe they have some sort of natural right or ownership over ideas just because they were first to come up with it, or at least file paperwork claiming so.
Mycroft
?!?!?!?
Artificialy inflate thier prices?
If you don't like the what they're charging for somthing, irregardless of the reason/excuse or lack thereof, go down the street and buy it somewhere cheaper.
Just because you think someone or some corporation is getting to rich too easily doesn't make the actuall stealing or destroying thier property any different than doing it to your next door neighbor.
You don't have to care why they charge what they charge, unless it's price fixing which is illeagle, you are alway free to shop somewhere else or do without.
As far as overcharging, well if you mean they are charging more than the price it's labled/advertised at plus applicable taxes this is called false advertising and is illeagle almost everywhere in the US.
If you believe a company/person is making money illeagly you are free to report them to the authorities.
If you think they are doing so immorally / unethically, you can report them to everyone you know.
If you think, like many do, that our government has bent excessively in favor of corporations making money over the best interest of it's citizens, then you have a right to protest, write your congresscritters, boycoyt the companies that lobby for this crap, and so on.
But stealing is still wrong. And stealing because you feel somthing cost too much and the reasons given for it's price are false are just juvinile.
Mycroft
No actually when it comes to the GPL it's not that suddenly peoples opinion of copyright has changed, it's people opion on HOW copyright is used and the concept of IP is used and aplied that creates the false image of a double standard.
Many see IP as an artificial restriction that has no basis in the real world. Say I show someone how to make somthing usefull and good, now that I have 'given' then that knowledge, am I somehow deprived thereof? no of course not, if anything I've improved society. This sharing is a good thing.
However many good ideas and knowledges and devices, etc. take considerable time and effort to devolop into a workable system. Time and effort that one could spend on say feeding thier family, or persuing personal gain, or any number of other, more imediatly rewarding, goals.
Those that set up the US constitution saw this issue and debated it, the answer they came up with was that the trade off of limiting the gain from ideas to thier creators, for a short time, was an acceptable tradeoff in exachange for the increased inovation it encouraged.
They did not feel it was an inherent right, nor that it was even desireable, for and individual or group to have sole use and controll of ideas and concepts. Some of them actually argued against such a thing as they felt is was preposterous, and feared it could lead where it has. One has only to look at 75 year copyright terms, patents on math and one click shopping, and so on to see why.
The original intent of copyright was indeed to incourage inovation and the sharing thereof. As it was intended for works to fall into the public domain, and for the patent office to eventually be repository of ideas and inventions, that uppon expiration of patent, would be of free use and benifit to all.
If anything the GPL and other licenses that guarantee sharing of the work with all commers more honours the intent of copyright than the current laws on the books, and all the clickthroughs you see on modern software. The fact that it uses current copyright laws in a ju-jitsu like move to do so is simply ironic justice.
Mycroft
I won't speak to everything you said. The deus ex thing was wrong on thier part, I would have simply told them take it back or I cancle the check/revers the cc charges. I have gotten a store to take software back once. It was a 19.99 and supposedly would let me connect to the i-net for free (and show ads, that's how they got paid back for giving out the free bandwith, kinda juno did back then) only thing is the box didn't tell you service was only available in about 8 western states, in fact the box implied the whole us.
When I took it back to walmart they didn't want to take it back at first, when I pointed out the box lied on the outer package and was effectively false advertising. I told them I would quite happily notify the bbb and states atorny general would get a nice letter, etc. (the manager I was talking to had an attitude that really ticked me off or I might not have been ready go so overboard for $20), well I got my money back on that one.
You say Morrowind ran bad on a >=1600mhz machine with >=512k of ram and a >=64 meg card? I had it running smooth except in rare cases on a 900mhz tbird core athlon with 640meg ram and a 32 meg vid card under WinMe. I suspect you've got somthing wrong with your system, possibly a virus as unfortunately some number of pirated games, cp hacks, etc. are trojans for malware, just an off the cuff supposition. You know there is even an fps utitility for it that will dynamical increase the view range beyound the games normal maximimun for faster machines, a lot of people with systems at or near your specs wanted to see farther and were running pretty high fps. It will also dynamically lower fps where the scenery gets complicated so that your fps stay within whatever range you set it for.
It did run sluggish on my brothers old machine, but that was a 400mhz amd chip with 384k and a 32 meg vid card. And it was almost playable even then. He got most of my above system when I upgraded last fall
Mycroft