Yes, you can. You quoted part B. yourself. You can be convincted if you are a person who has or has had possession of the key. If you maintained an encrypted file system a couple years ago and kept the key on a USB drive and lost it six months before the investigation happened, you can be convicted of not giving them what you don't have.
I am disappointed in you. Can you really now see how someone who is not you could do something that you find unethical and not find themselves to be unethical?
You cannot build a completely safe and accessible system. There's always a legitimate way in, and someone always has a chance to find that way by brute force, blind luck, or social engineering. The goal of information security is twofold: 1.) Make it not worth the effort. If it takes on average 10000 years, it's not worth it. 2.) Make sure you know that your system has been breached.
An honest look at our world shows that we humans are generally rather nasty, selfish creatures
At times, this seems true, but I should remind you that >75% of the US population alone has given at least some money to charity. There are over a million registered nonprofits. If you sneeze in public, somebody will usually say bless you. People open source their code. If you trip and fall on the street, somebody will almost always help you up.
We CAN be nasty, we CAN be selfish, but an honest look at our world would show that we tend to be better than that.
Yes, that is precisely the correct attitude for war. It is precisely the incorrect attitude for court. The whole idea of a court system is to ennoble man by removing the whole dirty fighting thing.
Do you know if there's a guide anywhere on taking the Tivo Series2 hardware and using it for other things now that I've cancelled my account? I'd love to use the whole box as a myth tv box, or failing that, I'd love to rip out the video capture card.
I have problems with all of these requirements. There are real exceptions to every single one of them. This shouldn't be called a Player's Bill of Rights, it should be called "General Guidelines For Video Games." Bill of Rights implies it's always valid.
The Right to Play.
Choose your own adventure books are a type of game. You spend 99% of your time reading the pages, but rather often make a decision that changes the character's path. The videogame equivalent seems fine to me, just so long as you're given several opportunities to change things. Sure, it's not as interactive as some players might like, but that doesn't make it a bad game, just a different game.
The Right to Win.
Victory can be defined in a lot of ways. If you were playing a game where your character is a tragic hero or, for some important plot reason, is supposed to be defeated, that doesn't mean the game's bad. If this was a rule, you could never have Hamlet the video game.
The Right to Instructions.
I played a game called Zone of the Enders. It begins with a kid falling into a spaceship and having to fight an enemy having no idea how to control his ship. After you defeat the enemy, the instructions start, but for a moment, you're actually supposed to be a confused kid figuring out the controls. There really are ALWAYS valid exceptions to the rule.
The Right to Feedback.
There's a track in Mario 64 that has several twisting, different routes to the goal. It is by design supposed to be confusing as to which route is best. The progress bar that is usually present is replaced by question marks because, gasp, it's sometimes good for the players not to know for sure how they're doing.
The Right To Motivation.
The article quotes Sid Meier a little later, which is funny because this rule blows his games out of the water. There are purely explorational games. Sometimes they're awesome.
The Right to Make Decisions.
Well, so much for the platformers. Most of them were totally linear and, while I would've liked some branching, they're a genre of game. They're a POPULAR genre of game. Deal with it.
The Right to a Swift Death.
This one I mostly agree with, although I know of one or two games where it was violated to good effect.
The Right To Control Cut-Scenes.
I think it's kind of funny that the author is concerned about "destroying immersion." Surely nothing breaks immersion more than carefully replaying cut scenes with a pencil writing down valuable hints. I mean, I like skipping cut scenes all the time, but I don't think we ought to require a replay option for every single friggin' cut scene. Final Fantasy VI didn't offer it, and it was a fantastic game anyway.
The Right to Quit, Pause, Save and Resume the Game.
Nethack. Doesn't require being in one session, but half the fun is not being able to backup your character.
The Right to Choose Not to Save the Game.
I personally like regular auto-save, so long as it's done in a seperate save slot. I fail to see how it's necessarily a right to have an annoying "would you like to autosave?" bit come up every time.
The Right to Reconfigure the Input Device.
For the PC, I agree with this. For anything else, I disagree.
The Right Not To Be Insulted.
This is part of the game's tone. It can choose to insult the player if it likes. Art is about invoking emotion, and if you want the emotion you invoke to be annoyance, disgust, anger, or anything else, that's up to your game.
Yes, how DARE Slashdot consider a citation-filled, disprovable, scientific paper whose results are disagreeable to current thinking to be acceptable science!
Now, a finisher and/or a real snare would be nice, as well as a mount/epic mount that wasn't worthless in PvP (I'd give up the "free" part in exchange for a mana-less mount)
Your pencil and paper as a scratchpad example shows how easily a new regulation can ignore an industry. If we set this as a standard, sure, it helps the CS guys and maybe the engineers. However, what about the geneticists out there patenting new strains of DNA? None of them are gonna be able to work out strains with a scratchpad, so everything's non-obvious.
The only damn good game that is free is Nethack and it kind of sucks. A blessed scroll of genocide will help you with those brain-sucking mindflayers, you know.
The 99% of programming that companies will pay you to do? Over half the programs in the world were weritten in Visual Basic. They do simple, repetitive tasks such as converting files, displaying files, and giving the user a couple options and then doing some simple other thing. They are not creative. They are not interesting. Nobody wants to do them. They are what you will write.
That'd be a good point, except that States may have to recognize gay marriages of other states even if their own laws prohibit it. That's because of Article IV, Section 1: "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State."
Most people sent to prison, such as theives are sent for reform not to extract vengeance upon them.
First of all, no, we put people in prison to punish them nowadays. Prosecutors talk about justice and demand that we protect our families by putting the criminal somewhere far away, and, equally important, unpleasant. The whole idea of redemption by putting in prison came from the Quakers, who couldn't physically harm you for religious reasons, so the best they could do was to put you in a locked room and hope you found Jesus.
>Cinderella works, and has continued to work for >over a thousand years, not because the paranormal >events are well explained, but because they are not >"explained" at all. It's magic. Everybody knows >that.
They DID explain Cinderella. It was the ghost of her dead mother, which inhabited the tree--wait, you mean the Disney's, don't you?
This isn't a strike against free emulation. If you want to use ROMs of games that you have lying around and emulate them, this isn't a strike against that. It's also not a strike against you buying collections of old games.
This service offers about a THOUSAND games, for a wide variety of platforms. They plan on constantly expanding the number of games they offer, providing everything from pong to fairly modern PC games. The monthly fee lets you download and play whichever ones you want. Is Napster a money-grubbing asshat for not charging you a one-time fee for its entire song library? No. Neither is Turner.
It actually makes perfect sense for Turner to be doing this. TBS, TCM, TNT, these are all carefully branded channels of previously-released content. TBS gets comedy, TNT gets drama, TCM gets classic movies. This is basically syndication for video games, and Turner's in the business of syndication.
Slashdot Mirror
You, sir, must be a pedant and language nazi for attempting to make light of misuse of the English language.
You mean a pedant and A language Nazi.
Yes, you can. You quoted part B. yourself. You can be convincted if you are a person who has or has had possession of the key. If you maintained an encrypted file system a couple years ago and kept the key on a USB drive and lost it six months before the investigation happened, you can be convicted of not giving them what you don't have.
I am disappointed in you. Can you really now see how someone who is not you could do something that you find unethical and not find themselves to be unethical?
You cannot build a completely safe and accessible system. There's always a legitimate way in, and someone always has a chance to find that way by brute force, blind luck, or social engineering. The goal of information security is twofold:
1.) Make it not worth the effort. If it takes on average 10000 years, it's not worth it.
2.) Make sure you know that your system has been breached.
An honest look at our world shows that we humans are generally rather nasty, selfish creatures
At times, this seems true, but I should remind you that >75% of the US population alone has given at least some money to charity. There are over a million registered nonprofits. If you sneeze in public, somebody will usually say bless you. People open source their code. If you trip and fall on the street, somebody will almost always help you up.
We CAN be nasty, we CAN be selfish, but an honest look at our world would show that we tend to be better than that.
Did you buy it from ebgames.com?
Yes, that is precisely the correct attitude for war. It is precisely the incorrect attitude for court. The whole idea of a court system is to ennoble man by removing the whole dirty fighting thing.
Yes. If you had thought of that 20 years ago, we WOULD owe you millions.
Yes, now if only you'd stop downloading the songs their stone age business model produces, you'd be entirely in the moral clear.
Do you know if there's a guide anywhere on taking the Tivo Series2 hardware and using it for other things now that I've cancelled my account? I'd love to use the whole box as a myth tv box, or failing that, I'd love to rip out the video capture card.
The world is veiled in
darkness. The wind stops,
the sea is wild,
and the earth begins to rot.
The people wait,
their only hope, a prophecy....
'When the world is in darkness
Four Warriors will come....'
After a long journey, four
young warriors arrive,
each holding an ORB.
'They shall settle
In one single massive flamewar
The answer to which was best:
IV, VI, or VII.
How embarrassing it would be if half of your army surrendered at the first shot!
</flame>
I have problems with all of these requirements. There are real exceptions to every single one of them. This shouldn't be called a Player's Bill of Rights, it should be called "General Guidelines For Video Games." Bill of Rights implies it's always valid.
The Right to Play.
Choose your own adventure books are a type of game. You spend 99% of your time reading the pages, but rather often make a decision that changes the character's path. The videogame equivalent seems fine to me, just so long as you're given several opportunities to change things. Sure, it's not as interactive as some players might like, but that doesn't make it a bad game, just a different game.
The Right to Win.
Victory can be defined in a lot of ways. If you were playing a game where your character is a tragic hero or, for some important plot reason, is supposed to be defeated, that doesn't mean the game's bad. If this was a rule, you could never have Hamlet the video game.
The Right to Instructions.
I played a game called Zone of the Enders. It begins with a kid falling into a spaceship and having to fight an enemy having no idea how to control his ship. After you defeat the enemy, the instructions start, but for a moment, you're actually supposed to be a confused kid figuring out the controls. There really are ALWAYS valid exceptions to the rule.
The Right to Feedback.
There's a track in Mario 64 that has several twisting, different routes to the goal. It is by design supposed to be confusing as to which route is best. The progress bar that is usually present is replaced by question marks because, gasp, it's sometimes good for the players not to know for sure how they're doing.
The Right To Motivation.
The article quotes Sid Meier a little later, which is funny because this rule blows his games out of the water. There are purely explorational games. Sometimes they're awesome.
The Right to Make Decisions.
Well, so much for the platformers. Most of them were totally linear and, while I would've liked some branching, they're a genre of game. They're a POPULAR genre of game. Deal with it.
The Right to a Swift Death.
This one I mostly agree with, although I know of one or two games where it was violated to good effect.
The Right To Control Cut-Scenes.
I think it's kind of funny that the author is concerned about "destroying immersion." Surely nothing breaks immersion more than carefully replaying cut scenes with a pencil writing down valuable hints. I mean, I like skipping cut scenes all the time, but I don't think we ought to require a replay option for every single friggin' cut scene. Final Fantasy VI didn't offer it, and it was a fantastic game anyway.
The Right to Quit, Pause, Save and Resume the Game.
Nethack. Doesn't require being in one session, but half the fun is not being able to backup your character.
The Right to Choose Not to Save the Game.
I personally like regular auto-save, so long as it's done in a seperate save slot. I fail to see how it's necessarily a right to have an annoying "would you like to autosave?" bit come up every time.
The Right to Reconfigure the Input Device.
For the PC, I agree with this. For anything else, I disagree.
The Right Not To Be Insulted.
This is part of the game's tone. It can choose to insult the player if it likes. Art is about invoking emotion, and if you want the emotion you invoke to be annoyance, disgust, anger, or anything else, that's up to your game.
Yes, how DARE Slashdot consider a citation-filled, disprovable, scientific paper whose results are disagreeable to current thinking to be acceptable science!
http://www.pvponline.com/archive/2005/pvp20050818. gif
Now, a finisher and/or a real snare would be nice, as well as a mount/epic mount that wasn't worthless in PvP (I'd give up the "free" part in exchange for a mana-less mount)
Then buy a mount!
Your pencil and paper as a scratchpad example shows how easily a new regulation can ignore an industry. If we set this as a standard, sure, it helps the CS guys and maybe the engineers. However, what about the geneticists out there patenting new strains of DNA? None of them are gonna be able to work out strains with a scratchpad, so everything's non-obvious.
The only damn good game that is free is Nethack and it kind of sucks.
A blessed scroll of genocide will help you with those brain-sucking mindflayers, you know.
The 99% of programming that companies will pay you to do? Over half the programs in the world were weritten in Visual Basic. They do simple, repetitive tasks such as converting files, displaying files, and giving the user a couple options and then doing some simple other thing. They are not creative. They are not interesting. Nobody wants to do them. They are what you will write.
That'd be a good point, except that States may have to recognize gay marriages of other states even if their own laws prohibit it. That's because of Article IV, Section 1: "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State."
Most people sent to prison, such as theives are sent for reform not to extract vengeance upon them.
First of all, no, we put people in prison to punish them nowadays. Prosecutors talk about justice and demand that we protect our families by putting the criminal somewhere far away, and, equally important, unpleasant. The whole idea of redemption by putting in prison came from the Quakers, who couldn't physically harm you for religious reasons, so the best they could do was to put you in a locked room and hope you found Jesus.
>Cinderella works, and has continued to work for
>over a thousand years, not because the paranormal
>events are well explained, but because they are not
>"explained" at all. It's magic. Everybody knows
>that.
They DID explain Cinderella. It was the ghost of her dead mother, which inhabited the tree--wait, you mean the Disney's, don't you?
What the heck are you talking about?
This isn't a strike against free emulation. If you want to use ROMs of games that you have lying around and emulate them, this isn't a strike against that. It's also not a strike against you buying collections of old games.
This service offers about a THOUSAND games, for a wide variety of platforms. They plan on constantly expanding the number of games they offer, providing everything from pong to fairly modern PC games. The monthly fee lets you download and play whichever ones you want. Is Napster a money-grubbing asshat for not charging you a one-time fee for its entire song library? No. Neither is Turner.
It actually makes perfect sense for Turner to be doing this. TBS, TCM, TNT, these are all carefully branded channels of previously-released content. TBS gets comedy, TNT gets drama, TCM gets classic movies. This is basically syndication for video games, and Turner's in the business of syndication.
I think you misunderstand. He was not being critical to Sun or Java when he suggested that java.net is an ironic name.