No, I read between the lines a little bit because this is Slashdot, and the only thing more safely assumed than the copyright = theft opinion of many of the hoi polloi would be their generally poor communication skills. And, actually, that's not what I assumed you were arguing, and said as much. I even thought I was pretty plain about this.
The reason I bring up the copyright limits of 200 years ago is that the 15-years with one extension arrangement popped up not all that long ago as being generally optimal for 'fostering creativity'. In addition to being far, far shorter than modern copyright laws, that limit is still sufficiently long that it would keep all four titles out of the public domain. If you're all about copyright as a long-term means of enriching the larger society, then that seems a relevant point, though I admit made it poorly.
Also, your grasp of hyperbole and irony are excellent. Do keep up the good work!
I suppose I am unnecessarily insulting, but this hardly the first of these copyright arguments I've seen around here, and they all seem to go in roughly the same direction. I'm pretty sure I understand you just fine. It's you who seems to be having difficulty understanding me, and I'll freely grant that may be my fault.
Actually, since the oldest game under discussion is 12 years old and, hey!, it's the one that isn't ad-supported (the others are at most 4 years old), you'd be wrong on all counts. Well, unless your underlying argument is that copyright is bad, mm'kay, and should be abolished completely (but I think that's the other guy, so you get the benefit of the doubt).
What I'm getting at is that these aren't, any of them, games that would be in the public domain if copyright limits were still what they were two hundred years ago, when they were still reasonable. The knee-jerk reaction here indicates that these companies would have been just as well off to keep these things to themselves and put you to the difficulty of either tracking down a used copy or re-releasing out of print games (i. e., the Command and Conquer game mentioned above) in exchange for your money. I don't mean to say that this should somehow earn EA your undying gratitude and appreciation, but I don't see how falling all over ourselves to claim that Ubisoft's attempt to release recent games for free on an ad-supported model is the worst thing ever is going to foster creativity. If it were me, I'd just figure there wasn't a market for it, so the time and resources spent on that sort of project could be better spent putting out my company's version of Sports Game {$year}.
In short, you don't need to love EA or Ubisoft for this, but maybe we could not be a bunch of self-absorbed, greedy little cranks.
Seriously, no person (or company) has the right to take combinations of light and sound and claim it as their own, let alone put people in a cage for looking at said light and sound.
Seriously, no person has the right to take combinations of letters and punctuations and claim it as their own, etc.
I'm especially bemused by the vague organized-religion-bit-me-when-I-was-a-poor-uneduc ated-pre-Enlightenment-peasant rubbish. Your argument is balderdash, groundless and ridiculous.
You're right. They totally remove the ads, and make it available for $$ or not at all.
Honestly. You guys are a bunch of whiney, ungrateful jerks. The Ubisoft games aren't even that old--the Prince of Persia title's from 2003 and FarCry's from 2004, which puts them both in the $20 budget bin. And Rayman Raving Rabbids (which is conspicuously absent from the summary above) isn't even a year old. Seriously, what do you want for nothing?
Or it may be an incentive to study the pet subjects of the bulk of the faculty and staff, or to subsidize less popular majors (basically the same thing), or to penalize majors deemed incompatible with the academe's political agenda, or...
The truth of the matter is that a high starting salary and higher lifetime earnings will put a lot of butts in seats, whether tuition is expensive or not. Scholarships and financial aid will tend to do a lot to cover the difference. $30K/yr didn't stop poor-but-capable students at my alma mater, a private college. An additional $40 a credit hour isn't going to stop very many at a state university.
Amazon Unbox can now be accessed directly from your TiVo. With the right (TiVo-provided) software, you can tell your TiVo where on the local network it may find your MP3s and photographs, which you may then play or browse at you leisure. (That feature is at least three years old.) Dunno about video on your local network. However, I can check that out this evening.
In the mean time, if the cable companies "eat TiVo's lunch", we won't get a better TiVo. TiVo will be gone, and we'll be stuck with mediocre, cable company DVRs and over-priced HTPCs. And AppleTV, which isn't the same thing at all. Well, and ReplayTV, but I can't recall the last time I actually saw one of those in a store.
You can crack open your TiVo and upgrade its hard drive right now. Takes some know-how, but not that much more than doing the same thing to a PC, from what I recall. There have been versions which included built-in DVD burners (they were $$$, so didn't sell so great, IIRC, ca 2004, when DVD recorders were $$$). And it's easy to use. It may not be a general computer, but there's really no good excuse for making it one, either.
Unless you're talking about RF modulation (which identifies nothing, it just tends to muck up video being piped through multiple devices), I don't think they can identify any analogue device hooked up to the cable TV. (Modems would be different, and possibly, but probably not, HD sets. Cable boxes, again, are a bit different.)
Lots of people lease cars, too. (People lease cellphones? That's a new one on me.) The major benefit being that, at the end of the lease, you get a new lease on a new car. As a result, you never really have to deal with most of the major maintenance problems that go with long-term car ownership. On the downside, it costs more over the long term (I assume it must be less expensive over the short term, but I'm not sure), and, yeah, it's never really yours.
Personally, I don't even like subscription fees if I can avoid them. It's one of the few things keeping me on a Series 2 TiVo: I have me a lifetime subscription, and I don't wish to lose it (or pay for it again, so I can transfer it to a new unit). It'll happen eventually, though. Given the option, I prefer to pay for things up front, most of the time. However, it does make a lot of sense with items that have a short life cycle and which become useless when that cycle is over. Cable modems are, as I understand it, in roughly this category (so, ironically, I had to buy mine from the local cable company). Most things aren't, though, and I really don't care for the rent-to-never-own pricing model.
1. The $300 PC should be plenty sufficient for most classwork-related needs for at least the next year or two. Boosting the RAM will probably extend that a bit farther. Adding a dedicated video card might even make it practical for many popular (if not new) PC games. For students pursuing many liberal arts degrees, it'll probably be sufficient for their entire college career, even if the software remains rather out of date. 2. At $300, they can probably afford to buy an OEM copy of Windows XP to downgrade the OS to something that doesn't suck on the hardware, and then, effectively, throw the machine in the trash at the end of the year to buy a new one in the fall.
Granted, a gig-and-a-half Via processor isn't any too beefy for a new computer, but it's not that much less powerful that the five-year-old Athlon XP I use at home (under Win 2k, though). And it's undoubtedly more powerful than the 166Mhz Pentium (with MMX! and 48MB of RAM!) I was issued as a freshman almost ten years ago, and the 700Mhz desktop Athlon I had the last year I was a college student. Ultimately, the issue you seem to be missing isn't that don't need computers, it's that your average schmoe still doesn't need much of a computer for 80-100% of what they're doing with it.
What I'm getting at is that not everybody is/was a compsci or engineering student (or does 3D modeling, or whatever).
Civil War was a hamhanded attempt at political commentary in which a handful of powerful individuals decided to force a situation that would require infringing on the "rights" of many super-powered vigilantes. As the storyline wore on, we had Captain America on the side of those who wanted to preserve their right to dress up in funny pajamas and fight other people in funny pajamas anonymously, and Iron Man manufacturing a growing crisis on the other side of the argument in order to get his registration act through and wind up head of SHIELD. To make it go down easier, an equivalence was drawn to both sides to show that, hey, we're just as bad as them. Oh, and we got some of the goddamned stupidest commentary ever about Captain America being out of touch with the people because he didn't keep track of NASCAR.
It was stupid, and the allegory was clumsy and juvenile. Granted, comics, and superhero comics especially, are a medium aimed at a juvenile audience. Writing for an audience of juveniles doesn't have to be, though.
What makes the death of Captain America even dumber is that it's probably all going to be undone before the movie they're working on comes out in 2009, or whenever Jeph Loeb is done with the book, whichever comes first.
Assumed innocence is a legal concept. It applies to juries and the judge, but not so much to the peanut gallery (journalists are guided by legal advice that keeps them from being sued for slander or libel).
So, yes, as far as the court is concerned, it is up to the DA and the police to provide a convincing argument, supported by evidence, as to Mr. Reiser's guilt. None of this stops anyone here from drawing their own conclusions. Consider this: is there still anyone credible who thinks O. J. Simpson is innocent of his ex-wife's murder? He was found not guilty in a court of law, after all.
Nobody's going to be sent to the chair for comments made by some other schmoe on Slashdot.
I should really RTFA, but I'm lazy and working, besides. Anyway, I recall hearing almost this exact claim when I was a college freshman, taking an intro psychology course. Is this news, then, or are we just confirming the already known?
George S. Patton's memoirs would disagree with you a little bit; ISTR that he credits his (very brief, toward the end of the war and mostly spent laid up in a hospital) service in WWI France with inspiring him as to the value of armored cavalry. (I also seem to recall that Patton far preferred light tanks, which probably goes back to his experience with early French units.)
I'm guessing that a great many technical innovations don't make their biggest impact in their earliest iterations, but in later developments and refinements of the idea. We don't use steam trains any longer except as novelties, but the steam engine eventual begot the steam turbine, which you'll find in many power generation plants, and the steam train has given way to diesel-driven, turbine-powered engines. The French and British tanks of WWI weren't that influential themselves, but they did serve as able precursors to later designs like the Sherman tank and German panzers.
The first steam-powered autombiles were basically toys for the wealthy, but, combined with other innovations (the assembly line, the internal combustion engine) and manufactured cheaply, they let us commute to work and vacation across the country independently and speedily.
Perhaps the blogger has "35% of people pass" confused with "35% right is a passing grade".
I think it's more probable that he's confused his having a background in mathematics and experience with the bar exam as having a clue what he's talking about. This response, above, from clifyt also pretty enlightening on the subject.
It's only in the very general style of DA quote. It's intentionally absurd, is all. Adams:
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
I believe that's from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it's been a number of years, so I can't recall if that's from the book or the BBC miniseries. (In particular, I think the place I source that from may have misquoted, or quoted from a localized edition. I could have sworn it was "to the chemist", not "the drug store". Whichever.)
And, in all seriousness, I would like to compliment you on the graciousness with which you responded there. I don't see that sort of thing much on Slashdot, so it's a pleasant surprise.
You aren't regarded as a very funny man by your friends, are you?
Kmac06 made a joke about solar power on the space station by pointing out the irony of renewable power in the one place we can't (presumably) pollute. Pinder followed it up by observing that, indeed, the price of power (I assume they haul up batteries instead of liquid fuel) is very expensive in the ionosphere. This is akin to the Douglas Adams quote comparing the size of space to distance to the nearest pharmacy. An appropriate follow-up might have been to point out that economic incentives are working to reduce our dependency on foreign oil (because, in fact, the price of hauling Earth-generated power into space is precisely one of the reasons for utilizing solar power on the ISS).
So, really, you missed the point twice on this one. Bravo!
The FF series has always have usually pushed the graphics pretty hard, actually. I agree that I don't think it's as big a selling point as it used to be, but it's always been a big deal for the series.
From personal experience, the FF combat system has often been less about strategy and more about power-leveling. It's been this way since FF1, and it's been true in the vast majority of the FF games. FF2, not to be confused with FF4, is probably the worst this way, but they've pretty much all been like this. Sure, strategy *helps*, but, when in doubt, you wander around and kill things to gain levels. As such, the combat's almost always been boring, and FFXII had a nice approach to alleviating that by not necessitating that you pay full attention to the combat to win a battle.
As to the story, I actually thought it was a breath of fresh air in the otherwise stale series, even if the setting (Ivalice) is actually recycled from earlier games. Personally, I really intend to skip FFXIII, since it promises to be more of the same that we got from the bulk of series.
Presumably, it's a Russian patent. Laws may be different in that case.
Truth is, the one party involved in the design and manufacture of the AK-47 for whom I feel sorry is Mikhail Kalashnikov. As I understand it, he's never made a dime off it.
Ithink it's pretty much the same thing that happens when you get yourself far enough in debt on non-tax-related owage: you declare bankruptcy, and the courts divide up your assets to settle with your creditors.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha-ha! Witty!
No, I read between the lines a little bit because this is Slashdot, and the only thing more safely assumed than the copyright = theft opinion of many of the hoi polloi would be their generally poor communication skills. And, actually, that's not what I assumed you were arguing, and said as much. I even thought I was pretty plain about this.
The reason I bring up the copyright limits of 200 years ago is that the 15-years with one extension arrangement popped up not all that long ago as being generally optimal for 'fostering creativity'. In addition to being far, far shorter than modern copyright laws, that limit is still sufficiently long that it would keep all four titles out of the public domain. If you're all about copyright as a long-term means of enriching the larger society, then that seems a relevant point, though I admit made it poorly.
Also, your grasp of hyperbole and irony are excellent. Do keep up the good work!
I suppose I am unnecessarily insulting, but this hardly the first of these copyright arguments I've seen around here, and they all seem to go in roughly the same direction. I'm pretty sure I understand you just fine. It's you who seems to be having difficulty understanding me, and I'll freely grant that may be my fault.
Actually, since the oldest game under discussion is 12 years old and, hey!, it's the one that isn't ad-supported (the others are at most 4 years old), you'd be wrong on all counts. Well, unless your underlying argument is that copyright is bad, mm'kay, and should be abolished completely (but I think that's the other guy, so you get the benefit of the doubt).
What I'm getting at is that these aren't, any of them, games that would be in the public domain if copyright limits were still what they were two hundred years ago, when they were still reasonable. The knee-jerk reaction here indicates that these companies would have been just as well off to keep these things to themselves and put you to the difficulty of either tracking down a used copy or re-releasing out of print games (i. e., the Command and Conquer game mentioned above) in exchange for your money. I don't mean to say that this should somehow earn EA your undying gratitude and appreciation, but I don't see how falling all over ourselves to claim that Ubisoft's attempt to release recent games for free on an ad-supported model is the worst thing ever is going to foster creativity. If it were me, I'd just figure there wasn't a market for it, so the time and resources spent on that sort of project could be better spent putting out my company's version of Sports Game {$year}.
In short, you don't need to love EA or Ubisoft for this, but maybe we could not be a bunch of self-absorbed, greedy little cranks.
I'm especially bemused by the vague organized-religion-bit-me-when-I-was-a-poor-unedu
You're right. They totally remove the ads, and make it available for $$ or not at all.
Honestly. You guys are a bunch of whiney, ungrateful jerks. The Ubisoft games aren't even that old--the Prince of Persia title's from 2003 and FarCry's from 2004, which puts them both in the $20 budget bin. And Rayman Raving Rabbids (which is conspicuously absent from the summary above) isn't even a year old. Seriously, what do you want for nothing?
What has this to do with a federal shield law?
Or it may be an incentive to study the pet subjects of the bulk of the faculty and staff, or to subsidize less popular majors (basically the same thing), or to penalize majors deemed incompatible with the academe's political agenda, or ...
The truth of the matter is that a high starting salary and higher lifetime earnings will put a lot of butts in seats, whether tuition is expensive or not. Scholarships and financial aid will tend to do a lot to cover the difference. $30K/yr didn't stop poor-but-capable students at my alma mater, a private college. An additional $40 a credit hour isn't going to stop very many at a state university.
Amazon Unbox can now be accessed directly from your TiVo.
With the right (TiVo-provided) software, you can tell your TiVo where on the local network it may find your MP3s and photographs, which you may then play or browse at you leisure. (That feature is at least three years old.) Dunno about video on your local network. However, I can check that out this evening.
In the mean time, if the cable companies "eat TiVo's lunch", we won't get a better TiVo. TiVo will be gone, and we'll be stuck with mediocre, cable company DVRs and over-priced HTPCs. And AppleTV, which isn't the same thing at all. Well, and ReplayTV, but I can't recall the last time I actually saw one of those in a store.
You can crack open your TiVo and upgrade its hard drive right now. Takes some know-how, but not that much more than doing the same thing to a PC, from what I recall. There have been versions which included built-in DVD burners (they were $$$, so didn't sell so great, IIRC, ca 2004, when DVD recorders were $$$). And it's easy to use. It may not be a general computer, but there's really no good excuse for making it one, either.
I'm not sure I quite believe you.
Unless you're talking about RF modulation (which identifies nothing, it just tends to muck up video being piped through multiple devices), I don't think they can identify any analogue device hooked up to the cable TV. (Modems would be different, and possibly, but probably not, HD sets. Cable boxes, again, are a bit different.)
Lots of people lease cars, too. (People lease cellphones? That's a new one on me.) The major benefit being that, at the end of the lease, you get a new lease on a new car. As a result, you never really have to deal with most of the major maintenance problems that go with long-term car ownership. On the downside, it costs more over the long term (I assume it must be less expensive over the short term, but I'm not sure), and, yeah, it's never really yours.
Personally, I don't even like subscription fees if I can avoid them. It's one of the few things keeping me on a Series 2 TiVo: I have me a lifetime subscription, and I don't wish to lose it (or pay for it again, so I can transfer it to a new unit). It'll happen eventually, though. Given the option, I prefer to pay for things up front, most of the time. However, it does make a lot of sense with items that have a short life cycle and which become useless when that cycle is over. Cable modems are, as I understand it, in roughly this category (so, ironically, I had to buy mine from the local cable company). Most things aren't, though, and I really don't care for the rent-to-never-own pricing model.
1. The $300 PC should be plenty sufficient for most classwork-related needs for at least the next year or two. Boosting the RAM will probably extend that a bit farther. Adding a dedicated video card might even make it practical for many popular (if not new) PC games. For students pursuing many liberal arts degrees, it'll probably be sufficient for their entire college career, even if the software remains rather out of date.
2. At $300, they can probably afford to buy an OEM copy of Windows XP to downgrade the OS to something that doesn't suck on the hardware, and then, effectively, throw the machine in the trash at the end of the year to buy a new one in the fall.
Granted, a gig-and-a-half Via processor isn't any too beefy for a new computer, but it's not that much less powerful that the five-year-old Athlon XP I use at home (under Win 2k, though). And it's undoubtedly more powerful than the 166Mhz Pentium (with MMX! and 48MB of RAM!) I was issued as a freshman almost ten years ago, and the 700Mhz desktop Athlon I had the last year I was a college student. Ultimately, the issue you seem to be missing isn't that don't need computers, it's that your average schmoe still doesn't need much of a computer for 80-100% of what they're doing with it.
What I'm getting at is that not everybody is/was a compsci or engineering student (or does 3D modeling, or whatever).
Civil War was a hamhanded attempt at political commentary in which a handful of powerful individuals decided to force a situation that would require infringing on the "rights" of many super-powered vigilantes. As the storyline wore on, we had Captain America on the side of those who wanted to preserve their right to dress up in funny pajamas and fight other people in funny pajamas anonymously, and Iron Man manufacturing a growing crisis on the other side of the argument in order to get his registration act through and wind up head of SHIELD. To make it go down easier, an equivalence was drawn to both sides to show that, hey, we're just as bad as them. Oh, and we got some of the goddamned stupidest commentary ever about Captain America being out of touch with the people because he didn't keep track of NASCAR.
It was stupid, and the allegory was clumsy and juvenile. Granted, comics, and superhero comics especially, are a medium aimed at a juvenile audience. Writing for an audience of juveniles doesn't have to be, though.
What makes the death of Captain America even dumber is that it's probably all going to be undone before the movie they're working on comes out in 2009, or whenever Jeph Loeb is done with the book, whichever comes first.
Assumed innocence is a legal concept. It applies to juries and the judge, but not so much to the peanut gallery (journalists are guided by legal advice that keeps them from being sued for slander or libel).
So, yes, as far as the court is concerned, it is up to the DA and the police to provide a convincing argument, supported by evidence, as to Mr. Reiser's guilt. None of this stops anyone here from drawing their own conclusions. Consider this: is there still anyone credible who thinks O. J. Simpson is innocent of his ex-wife's murder? He was found not guilty in a court of law, after all.
Nobody's going to be sent to the chair for comments made by some other schmoe on Slashdot.
I should really RTFA, but I'm lazy and working, besides. Anyway, I recall hearing almost this exact claim when I was a college freshman, taking an intro psychology course. Is this news, then, or are we just confirming the already known?
George S. Patton's memoirs would disagree with you a little bit; ISTR that he credits his (very brief, toward the end of the war and mostly spent laid up in a hospital) service in WWI France with inspiring him as to the value of armored cavalry. (I also seem to recall that Patton far preferred light tanks, which probably goes back to his experience with early French units.)
I'm guessing that a great many technical innovations don't make their biggest impact in their earliest iterations, but in later developments and refinements of the idea. We don't use steam trains any longer except as novelties, but the steam engine eventual begot the steam turbine, which you'll find in many power generation plants, and the steam train has given way to diesel-driven, turbine-powered engines. The French and British tanks of WWI weren't that influential themselves, but they did serve as able precursors to later designs like the Sherman tank and German panzers.
The first steam-powered autombiles were basically toys for the wealthy, but, combined with other innovations (the assembly line, the internal combustion engine) and manufactured cheaply, they let us commute to work and vacation across the country independently and speedily.
The tank first saw use in the Battle of the Sommes in WWI, which is why, despite being very important, it's not actually an innovation of WWII.
Sorry, nothing to offer except nitpicking just now!
And, in all seriousness, I would like to compliment you on the graciousness with which you responded there. I don't see that sort of thing much on Slashdot, so it's a pleasant surprise.
You aren't regarded as a very funny man by your friends, are you?
Kmac06 made a joke about solar power on the space station by pointing out the irony of renewable power in the one place we can't (presumably) pollute. Pinder followed it up by observing that, indeed, the price of power (I assume they haul up batteries instead of liquid fuel) is very expensive in the ionosphere. This is akin to the Douglas Adams quote comparing the size of space to distance to the nearest pharmacy. An appropriate follow-up might have been to point out that economic incentives are working to reduce our dependency on foreign oil (because, in fact, the price of hauling Earth-generated power into space is precisely one of the reasons for utilizing solar power on the ISS).
So, really, you missed the point twice on this one. Bravo!
The FF series has always have usually pushed the graphics pretty hard, actually. I agree that I don't think it's as big a selling point as it used to be, but it's always been a big deal for the series.
From personal experience, the FF combat system has often been less about strategy and more about power-leveling. It's been this way since FF1, and it's been true in the vast majority of the FF games. FF2, not to be confused with FF4, is probably the worst this way, but they've pretty much all been like this. Sure, strategy *helps*, but, when in doubt, you wander around and kill things to gain levels. As such, the combat's almost always been boring, and FFXII had a nice approach to alleviating that by not necessitating that you pay full attention to the combat to win a battle.
As to the story, I actually thought it was a breath of fresh air in the otherwise stale series, even if the setting (Ivalice) is actually recycled from earlier games. Personally, I really intend to skip FFXIII, since it promises to be more of the same that we got from the bulk of series.
Hasn't got a US release on the PS2, just on the X-Box. I'll have to remember that, though, since I wasn't aware it had a US release at all.
Duuuuude. I would almost kill for some Samurai Shodown. Dag.
Presumably, it's a Russian patent. Laws may be different in that case.
Truth is, the one party involved in the design and manufacture of the AK-47 for whom I feel sorry is Mikhail Kalashnikov. As I understand it, he's never made a dime off it.
1. 'indiscriminant' is not a word. You probably meant 'indiscriminate'.
2. Surveillance has two l's and only two e's.
And this hardly constitutes indiscriminate surveillance.
Ithink it's pretty much the same thing that happens when you get yourself far enough in debt on non-tax-related owage: you declare bankruptcy, and the courts divide up your assets to settle with your creditors.