Is it necessary? I'd always thought of open source as something you did in your free time or between jobs, not something you did expecting to get money out of it. As long as everyone knows that, is it really a problem?
Of course you could always go with the paypal donation type aproach, although i don't know if that's approved of by mormal GNU type licences.
Searle is a retard. His dumb "Chinese Room" argument shows how confused he is about the stuff he rants about, but hey, I'll be a nice contributing member of slashdot and give a little feedback:
It's been a long time since i've taken any philosophy classes, but after reading the "Chinese Room" thought experiment, the following imidiately pops to mind.
As far as i can tell, the Chinese Room is completly analagous to another case. A paraplegic Chinese man is locked into a room. He has an advanced chip implanted in his brain, which communicates with a similar chip in the brain of a mouse. The man is able to use this chip to tell the mouse to move forwards and backwards and from side to side, and to press a button. There is also a screen and a large keyboard with every chinese symbol on it.
The screen displays questions entered in by people outside. The man interprets these signals and gives commands to the mouse, causing him to type out responses that seem perfectly normal and correct.
Searle's conclusion would be that the mouse can not speak chinese. Or perhaps that the system can not speak chinese because the mouse doesn't understand the meaning of the symbols on the buttons it presses.
In either case i think Searle is entirely missing the point.
The racket uses new advanced piezoelectric matierials to power a hightech microchip in the handle. This microchip then uses the power generated from the ball striking the racket to generate radio waves, which it uses to communicate with a special "robot" device attached to the handle.
This "robot," which has been previously imprinted with the player's memory and skills, will predict the reactions the player would want to make, and perform them with greater speed, accuracy, and strength.
Although the player can hold the hand of the robat while it performs to make it look like they're actually doing something, if they wish they can just go sit in a lounge chair and have a lemonade until the match is over instead.
You are very mistaken. Capitalism works precisely because it does _not_ assume that people are good and honest. Capitalism assumes that people will act out of self-interest, which is usually true.
Sorry, Capitalism doesn't really assume that people will be good, but it does assume that they will play fair.
Somehow when an area is dominated by one corporation who is overcharging for bad service, a small company is supposed to be able to start up and offer some innovatice new approach which will lead to competition, improved service, and cheaper prices for everyone. After all, when confronted with a cheaper better product, the larger company will have to improve to stay competitive, right?
Well what if instead of playing fair the big competitor does a little more marketing, and then drops the price on their product to less than it costs to make it? Or if there's a high barrier to entry into the market, they don't even need to drop it that low, just below the price for the new company to provide the service given the added entry costs. Wait a few months, new company goes bankrupt, big company raises the rates again.
That's not how capitalism is supposed to work, and the only reason it doesn't happen more often is because the Government stepped in and made laws to try and make the coporations "play nice."
Yeah, communism is even more idealistic and way ahead of it's time, but Capitalism takes a lot of things on faith too.
If the corporations ever got big enough and the government looked the other way long enough, you would eventually find corporations buying "compulsion" lisences, either secretly or out in the open. Mafioso guys showing up at your door to convince you to shut down your new startup operation is not what Capitalism is supposed to be about, but it is a realistic extension of the idea.
Even Adam Smith himself believe that fair play was needed in order for capitalism to work successfully.
So how long until i can pay a small fee to the cable companies and watch a crapy broadband version over my DSL line? =)
Or equally as good, when will the cable companies come up with a decent pricing format? I'm not going to pay $20 or $30 a month for 90 channels when all i want are Sci-fi, Commedy, Cartoon Network, Discovery, Learning Channel, and History Channel.
Throw in good feeds of the network channels, and we're talking about 13 or 14 channels, over half of which i could get with just an antena anyways. Should be about $5 a month?
The way to beat cheaters is to apply tried and true security practices. Don't trust that the machine on the other end of the connection is really a client(so don't feed it any extra data beyond what it should need to know to function). Don't blindly accept any data coming back from supposed clients(does the client really have "permission" do what it is telling the server to do?).
This isn't always possible, depending on what type of game it is. The other systems need to know certain information, especially if there is any kind of synchronization going on.
Synchronization is in many ways a good thing, because since each computer does its own calculations individually it really limits what kinds of cheats can be run. You can't make a cheat that boosts your stats becuase your stats will remain normal on my machine, and a desynch will occur the next time your stats effect gameplay.
However in order for synchronization to work just about all data needs to be shared, which makes the data hacks mentioned above possible.
On an RTS i was working on recently it was my job to eliminate the map cheat, whereby the user made the entire map visible, giving them a huge advantage. I did this by having each system report the state of its map to the other players and synchornizing that value. It was still possible to cheat and clear the map, but doing so imemdiatly caused you to be booted from the game.
Although peer to peer is more computationally expensive than client-server models, it does make it easier to control many kinds of cheating.
And on a side note, given some of the other discusions i've seen on this topic, i thought i would mention that both the producers and i agreed that no cheat detection should be used in single player mode. What do we care what you do with the game on your own time? If cheating is the way you enjoy it most, fine with us. When it becomes our problem is when you try to cheat against others online, and ruin _their_ experience, which they have a right to.
The guy who put my toaster together created something of value, but I don't have to pay him every time I make a bagel.
Well that depends, do you buy a new toaster every time you want to make toast? You don't have to pay every time you stick an old CD into your stereo or an old game into your PC/console.
If you want a new toaster or a new record though, you've got to pay. If you're buying the same media ten times in a row then I think there's something wrong with you, not with the industry.
If the entire city of New York decided to do anything like, oh, say, all start smoking pot, then what exactly would the government be able to do about it? Arrest all 8(?) million people?
To live in a (somewhat) safe and (somewhat) ordered society, we surrender some rights. In an orderless society, I would have the right to kill and steal. I (involuntarily) surrender these rights for the privelidge of living in this society.
How is it involuntary? You are over the age of consent, right? So no one is actually forcing you to stay here. Choosing to remain witin a society is de facto acceptance of it's laws as laws. Not necessarily accepting that they are good laws or just laws or even laws that you will obey, but that they are the laws you are going to live under.
If you dislike the laws taking away certain rights, then go somewhere where the laws are different. I don't know if there are countries where killing and stealing are sanctioned by the government, but then I'm not the one who claims to be involuntarily living under laws agaisnt it.
Have you done any research on the subject? And if you found such a place would you move there? If the answer to either or both of those questions is no, then the decision to live without those rights is pretty darn voluntary on your part.
It's been months, months i tell you! And where's my expansion pack?? Those damn lazy developers are getting a whole four or six hours of sleep a night, while I'm sitting here in agony because my whims aren't being met immediatly!
One superstition, however, seems to be actually gaining prominence: Feng Shui. There are people who actually take it seriously. My wife has a friend (who's Asian) whose mother actually made her not buy a particular condo she was looking at because some Feng Shui witch doctor didn't like it. I've even heard some stories about dot-com idiots in the Silicon Valley who felt the need to blow big $$$ on Feng Shui analyses of their office spaces.
Not sure what the point of all this is, but I found it interesting.
Well feng shui does have practical benefits as others have commented. If you follow it your (house/apartment/office/whatever) will be more ordered and attractive than if you just tossed stuff around wherever.
Presumably underlying all the superstition is some experimentally developed human psychology. People who have messy cluttered stores don't get as much buisness as people with clean well organized stores. The fact that feng shui experts tell their customers that the store should be well organized by having a particular kind of pot in a certain corner may or may not be relevant. It might just be the fact that it forces cleanliness and organization, or perhaps it's been refined enough over 3000 years that they've found that people havea preference for a pot in the left corner of them room rather than the right.
Regardless of the exactness of the details, and the (in my opinion) irrelevancy of the mystical component, overall following feng shui probably gave you some increased chance of success in life compared to those who didn't bother.
Now days you could probably get just as good results with a good interior decorator, but that doesn't mean that feng shui won't still do the job. Of course the positive psychological feedback from having consulted a feng shui expert (for those who believe in it at least) probably helps too.
If they happen to have a rule that building on scaly ground allows evil spirits to rise up and haunt you doesn't mean that they knew radon gas might also leak out of scaly ground (or whatever).
I think the point was they _didn't_ know. The theory proposed was that the Chinese have about 3000 years of experimental evidence about what works and what doesn't. Instead of using it to develop a consitent science, they just overlayed some superstition to explain the results.
Of course claims like avoiding radon gas should be looked at a little more closely. Given the life expectancy of medieval peasants i doubt the presence or lack of radon caused a statistically noticeable difference that would result in such spots being avoided. But i could be wrong.
This would be similar to the Biblical strictures against pork and such. Yahweh doesn't want us to eat pork. How can you tell? Cause sometimes after eating pork you get sick and die. Doesn't mean they knew about the parasites in pork.
I guess that means the DMCA was not violated although the posting mentions that Microsoft intend on addressing these 'holes' in future revisions of XBOX hardware.
What, they're patching hardware now too? The price on _that_ service plan is going to suck!
Never mind that ABC, CBS, NBC, LA Times, NY Times, Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek are all run by socialist commies and are mouthpieces for the left.
Oh yeah, that explains why the media loves Bush so much right now. Or why they were so big to jump on Clinton for all of the various scandals.
Whatever history the media might have had, and the contention that they were ever all "run by socialist commies and are mouthpieces for the left," is dubious at best, at the present all they care about is money.
They're not leftists, they're not rightists, they're capitalists. The only thing they have any concern about besides money is free speech, and that's only cause they can't sell what they can't say.
Do you happen to remember the author of that book?
As usual Amazon's crappy search engine does not return exact matches first, so a search for "Victory" returns dozens of books with titles like "Victory Garden Cookbook" and "Victory over the Darkness" and "Every Man's Batle: Winning the War On Sexual Temptation One Victory at a Tine"
Of course it takes awhile, and won't fill up to it's original levels, and if they go back and suck that stuff out it will "replenish" even slower the second time, and to an even lower level, ad infinitum.
What's even more sad than the fact that Eminem is ranked #2 is that people are _paying_ for pirate copies of media.
You can argue the pros and cons of file sharing and information wanting to be free and such, but paying someone else to copy the music is dumb _and_ immoral.
Either it should be free, or the artist should get paid. Somebody _other_ than the person who holds the rights making a profit off the thing is just wrong.
...Hey wait a minute, except for the "holding the rights" bit, that describes the RIAA to a T doesn't it?
If Eminem is a _good_ rapper, then I'm glad I've stayed away from the genre as a whole, and especially glad that I've not heard too much of the stuff that's _worse_ than what he does.
It's not the content that bothers me, just that the music sucks.
It quite clearly said at the begining of the article that he was comparing Star Wars Episode 2 to Spiderman. I really doubt that the inflation over the two weeks between their release played a very big roll in sales.
I'm wondering if that site has made the same mistake that a lot of such comparisons have. Assuming that you can calculate the infalted value by just multiplying the total sales by the inflation rate since it was released.
A lot of the sales for Gone With the Wind happened after the initial relase, so not all $198 million of it deserves the same inflation values.
Of course this exact same chain of comments happened about two weeks ago in response to yet another article about AotC.
Oh come on, sure people will be talking about Star Wars for a long time, but it's not because it's a masterpiece of extended story telling. It's a good story, but like any other it has mistakes and errors and misteps.
Why is Darth Vader, a sith lord for over 20 years, unable to use the lightning which Dooku mastered in less than ten years? Best explanation I've heard is that every time Anakin gets a piece of himself sliced off he loses all the midichlorians that were in that piece. By the time he becomes Vader he's lost so much of his body he doesn't have enough midichlorians left to generate the bolts.
But the real reason why Luke didn't get warned about the lightning is that all of Luke's training with Yoda took place in Empire Strikes Back. The lightning didn't get introduced until Return of the Jedi. Yoda didn't teach Luke how to counter lightning because LUCAS HADN'T INVENTED IT YET! Same reason as for why we never see Vader use it.
There was no plot by Yoda and Obiwan to push Vader over the edge by watching his son get tortured, not in Lucas's original at least. Any explanation for it, by us or by him, is just after the fact rationalization.
Sure, the theorizing can be fun, but the persistance of the Star Wars mythology is not because of anything that Lucas inherently did. He unknowingly tapped into the same geek subculture that Star Trek did, and like Star Trek it's the fans that have been keeping it alive, not any particular story telling genius on the part of Lucas.
Spiderman and just about every other storyline out there has fans that will endlessly debate the discrepencies and try to work them into the plot, same as we're doing for Star Wars. I don't know why Star Wars got the lion's share of those fans, but that is why it has maintained it's popularity.
Lucas wrote a good story, but it's the fans who have made it great. Lucas has been riding on the coattails of those fans, and as PM, and to a lesser extent AotC, have shown he's not doing the best job possible of it.
It's kind of scary looking at the thing that in five or ten years we'll be depending on to store our data, and seeing the huge irregularities in its structure. I suppose the stuff inside computers right now is like that too, but it makes you wonder how they get the precision they need, and why those flaws don't make the things break more often than they do.
On the other hand, I've heard one or two allegations that one of the reasons that AotC had such weak dialogue was that they wanted to make things easy for the translaters so they could get everything done in time for the global release.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course you could always go with the paypal donation type aproach, although i don't know if that's approved of by mormal GNU type licences.
It's been a long time since i've taken any philosophy classes, but after reading the "Chinese Room" thought experiment, the following imidiately pops to mind.
As far as i can tell, the Chinese Room is completly analagous to another case. A paraplegic Chinese man is locked into a room. He has an advanced chip implanted in his brain, which communicates with a similar chip in the brain of a mouse. The man is able to use this chip to tell the mouse to move forwards and backwards and from side to side, and to press a button. There is also a screen and a large keyboard with every chinese symbol on it.
The screen displays questions entered in by people outside. The man interprets these signals and gives commands to the mouse, causing him to type out responses that seem perfectly normal and correct.
Searle's conclusion would be that the mouse can not speak chinese. Or perhaps that the system can not speak chinese because the mouse doesn't understand the meaning of the symbols on the buttons it presses.
In either case i think Searle is entirely missing the point.
So external batteries are not allowed, but piezoelectric materials are okay, because they're "self-powered"?
Ok, am i the only one here who is seriously worried about what they're going to come up with once tabletop fusion is economical?
This "robot," which has been previously imprinted with the player's memory and skills, will predict the reactions the player would want to make, and perform them with greater speed, accuracy, and strength.
Although the player can hold the hand of the robat while it performs to make it look like they're actually doing something, if they wish they can just go sit in a lounge chair and have a lemonade until the match is over instead.
Sorry, Capitalism doesn't really assume that people will be good, but it does assume that they will play fair.
Somehow when an area is dominated by one corporation who is overcharging for bad service, a small company is supposed to be able to start up and offer some innovatice new approach which will lead to competition, improved service, and cheaper prices for everyone. After all, when confronted with a cheaper better product, the larger company will have to improve to stay competitive, right?
Well what if instead of playing fair the big competitor does a little more marketing, and then drops the price on their product to less than it costs to make it? Or if there's a high barrier to entry into the market, they don't even need to drop it that low, just below the price for the new company to provide the service given the added entry costs. Wait a few months, new company goes bankrupt, big company raises the rates again.
That's not how capitalism is supposed to work, and the only reason it doesn't happen more often is because the Government stepped in and made laws to try and make the coporations "play nice."
Yeah, communism is even more idealistic and way ahead of it's time, but Capitalism takes a lot of things on faith too.
If the corporations ever got big enough and the government looked the other way long enough, you would eventually find corporations buying "compulsion" lisences, either secretly or out in the open. Mafioso guys showing up at your door to convince you to shut down your new startup operation is not what Capitalism is supposed to be about, but it is a realistic extension of the idea.
Even Adam Smith himself believe that fair play was needed in order for capitalism to work successfully.
So how long until i can pay a small fee to the cable companies and watch a crapy broadband version over my DSL line? =)
Or equally as good, when will the cable companies come up with a decent pricing format? I'm not going to pay $20 or $30 a month for 90 channels when all i want are Sci-fi, Commedy, Cartoon Network, Discovery, Learning Channel, and History Channel.
Throw in good feeds of the network channels, and we're talking about 13 or 14 channels, over half of which i could get with just an antena anyways. Should be about $5 a month?
This isn't always possible, depending on what type of game it is. The other systems need to know certain information, especially if there is any kind of synchronization going on.
Synchronization is in many ways a good thing, because since each computer does its own calculations individually it really limits what kinds of cheats can be run. You can't make a cheat that boosts your stats becuase your stats will remain normal on my machine, and a desynch will occur the next time your stats effect gameplay.
However in order for synchronization to work just about all data needs to be shared, which makes the data hacks mentioned above possible.
On an RTS i was working on recently it was my job to eliminate the map cheat, whereby the user made the entire map visible, giving them a huge advantage. I did this by having each system report the state of its map to the other players and synchornizing that value. It was still possible to cheat and clear the map, but doing so imemdiatly caused you to be booted from the game.
Although peer to peer is more computationally expensive than client-server models, it does make it easier to control many kinds of cheating.
And on a side note, given some of the other discusions i've seen on this topic, i thought i would mention that both the producers and i agreed that no cheat detection should be used in single player mode. What do we care what you do with the game on your own time? If cheating is the way you enjoy it most, fine with us. When it becomes our problem is when you try to cheat against others online, and ruin _their_ experience, which they have a right to.
Well that depends, do you buy a new toaster every time you want to make toast? You don't have to pay every time you stick an old CD into your stereo or an old game into your PC/console.
If you want a new toaster or a new record though, you've got to pay. If you're buying the same media ten times in a row then I think there's something wrong with you, not with the industry.
Why exactly do they need the guns?
How is it involuntary? You are over the age of consent, right? So no one is actually forcing you to stay here. Choosing to remain witin a society is de facto acceptance of it's laws as laws. Not necessarily accepting that they are good laws or just laws or even laws that you will obey, but that they are the laws you are going to live under.
If you dislike the laws taking away certain rights, then go somewhere where the laws are different. I don't know if there are countries where killing and stealing are sanctioned by the government, but then I'm not the one who claims to be involuntarily living under laws agaisnt it.
Have you done any research on the subject? And if you found such a place would you move there? If the answer to either or both of those questions is no, then the decision to live without those rights is pretty darn voluntary on your part.
Cruel, cruel world!
Not sure what the point of all this is, but I found it interesting.
Well feng shui does have practical benefits as others have commented. If you follow it your (house/apartment/office/whatever) will be more ordered and attractive than if you just tossed stuff around wherever.
Presumably underlying all the superstition is some experimentally developed human psychology. People who have messy cluttered stores don't get as much buisness as people with clean well organized stores. The fact that feng shui experts tell their customers that the store should be well organized by having a particular kind of pot in a certain corner may or may not be relevant. It might just be the fact that it forces cleanliness and organization, or perhaps it's been refined enough over 3000 years that they've found that people havea preference for a pot in the left corner of them room rather than the right.
Regardless of the exactness of the details, and the (in my opinion) irrelevancy of the mystical component, overall following feng shui probably gave you some increased chance of success in life compared to those who didn't bother.
Now days you could probably get just as good results with a good interior decorator, but that doesn't mean that feng shui won't still do the job. Of course the positive psychological feedback from having consulted a feng shui expert (for those who believe in it at least) probably helps too.
I think the point was they _didn't_ know. The theory proposed was that the Chinese have about 3000 years of experimental evidence about what works and what doesn't. Instead of using it to develop a consitent science, they just overlayed some superstition to explain the results.
Of course claims like avoiding radon gas should be looked at a little more closely. Given the life expectancy of medieval peasants i doubt the presence or lack of radon caused a statistically noticeable difference that would result in such spots being avoided. But i could be wrong.
This would be similar to the Biblical strictures against pork and such. Yahweh doesn't want us to eat pork. How can you tell? Cause sometimes after eating pork you get sick and die. Doesn't mean they knew about the parasites in pork.
What, they're patching hardware now too? The price on _that_ service plan is going to suck!
Oh yeah, that explains why the media loves Bush so much right now. Or why they were so big to jump on Clinton for all of the various scandals.
Whatever history the media might have had, and the contention that they were ever all "run by socialist commies and are mouthpieces for the left," is dubious at best, at the present all they care about is money.
They're not leftists, they're not rightists, they're capitalists. The only thing they have any concern about besides money is free speech, and that's only cause they can't sell what they can't say.
As usual Amazon's crappy search engine does not return exact matches first, so a search for "Victory" returns dozens of books with titles like "Victory Garden Cookbook" and "Victory over the Darkness" and "Every Man's Batle: Winning the War On Sexual Temptation One Victory at a Tine"
Hmmm, definitely want to avoid that last one =)
Of course it takes awhile, and won't fill up to it's original levels, and if they go back and suck that stuff out it will "replenish" even slower the second time, and to an even lower level, ad infinitum.
Kidna like the space program.
You can argue the pros and cons of file sharing and information wanting to be free and such, but paying someone else to copy the music is dumb _and_ immoral.
Either it should be free, or the artist should get paid. Somebody _other_ than the person who holds the rights making a profit off the thing is just wrong.
It's not the content that bothers me, just that the music sucks.
It quite clearly said at the begining of the article that he was comparing Star Wars Episode 2 to Spiderman. I really doubt that the inflation over the two weeks between their release played a very big roll in sales.
A lot of the sales for Gone With the Wind happened after the initial relase, so not all $198 million of it deserves the same inflation values.
Of course this exact same chain of comments happened about two weeks ago in response to yet another article about AotC.
Why is Darth Vader, a sith lord for over 20 years, unable to use the lightning which Dooku mastered in less than ten years? Best explanation I've heard is that every time Anakin gets a piece of himself sliced off he loses all the midichlorians that were in that piece. By the time he becomes Vader he's lost so much of his body he doesn't have enough midichlorians left to generate the bolts.
But the real reason why Luke didn't get warned about the lightning is that all of Luke's training with Yoda took place in Empire Strikes Back. The lightning didn't get introduced until Return of the Jedi. Yoda didn't teach Luke how to counter lightning because LUCAS HADN'T INVENTED IT YET! Same reason as for why we never see Vader use it.
There was no plot by Yoda and Obiwan to push Vader over the edge by watching his son get tortured, not in Lucas's original at least. Any explanation for it, by us or by him, is just after the fact rationalization.
Sure, the theorizing can be fun, but the persistance of the Star Wars mythology is not because of anything that Lucas inherently did. He unknowingly tapped into the same geek subculture that Star Trek did, and like Star Trek it's the fans that have been keeping it alive, not any particular story telling genius on the part of Lucas.
Spiderman and just about every other storyline out there has fans that will endlessly debate the discrepencies and try to work them into the plot, same as we're doing for Star Wars. I don't know why Star Wars got the lion's share of those fans, but that is why it has maintained it's popularity.
Lucas wrote a good story, but it's the fans who have made it great. Lucas has been riding on the coattails of those fans, and as PM, and to a lesser extent AotC, have shown he's not doing the best job possible of it.
It's kind of scary looking at the thing that in five or ten years we'll be depending on to store our data, and seeing the huge irregularities in its structure. I suppose the stuff inside computers right now is like that too, but it makes you wonder how they get the precision they need, and why those flaws don't make the things break more often than they do.
On the other hand, I've heard one or two allegations that one of the reasons that AotC had such weak dialogue was that they wanted to make things easy for the translaters so they could get everything done in time for the global release.