You're looking at this from a very Earth-centric viewpoint (as opposed to a species-centric viewpoint)!
Earth != Humanity in the case that we have a permanent, self-sustaining base elsewhere in the solar system.
My guess is that our Earth is going to hell in a handbasket, and the most likely thing to save us as a species is to be able to survive without it.
One of Bush's goals was a permanent installation on the Moon which is certainly down the "self-sustaining" path if just for economic reasons.
Assume that we -are- able to get a permament base on the moon, and that it is self-sustaining--
The launch costs from the moon to any other part of the solar system are MUCH less prohibitive when compared to launch costs from the much deeper gravity-well of the Earth (not to mention that the Moon doesn't have much of an atmosphere to punch through...)
The Space-Elevator concept is wonderful, but simply getting men into space doesn't solve the most important problem of them being able to -stay- there.
If men are able to stay in space, and an installation can become self-sufficient, then you can have a colony...
The science I'm most interested in is that which allows man to -stay- in space. (i.e. self-sustaining space environments, or nearly self-sustaining)
Obviously, the intl. space station is not very interesting in this regard.
Bush's Mars mission is more likely to approach this goal than any non-manned science mission, and as such I believe it to be a better use of funds.
Let me be absolutely clear-- (inter)planetary science is fascinating, but men -living- in space seems more important to me.
(After all, it is getting easier and easier for us to destroy our little planet here. It is much more difficult to destroy two planets when it is difficult to get out of a gravity well!)
Although, I have to say that I agree-- Playing with it at home is what gave me the confidence to suggest it at work.
I'm much less likely to suggest RH now for anything corporate since I cannot vouch for it at home, and the corporation is likely to pay for it, and frankly I want to work on the same OS at work and home... So, no RedHat (since they've created a chicken-and-egg like dilemna for their prospective users).
It seems to me like this is a "Why shoot yourself in the foot when you can aim for the head?" opportunity.
I am a longtime RedHat user and afficionado, now feeling uncertain about recommending -anything- RedHat.
The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, I feel burned by the early demise of support for RH9. Secondly, and much MUCH more importantly, there is very very little chance of me recommending installation of an OS that I will not be running at home.
How will you combat this lack of word-of-mouth support (given that most people are like me in that they will not recommend something they have not tried themselves...)?
But, beyond that, using a orthographic projection, and actualy giving REAL depth to the windows (i.e. if a window would obscure another window, it must be closer to you) is a more appropriate analogy for what you are trying to do..
I.e. Our so-called 2D desktops ARE really 3d desktops with an orthographic projection.
If we use the 3D hardware directly, then the code to do just about everything should get less complex.
Furthermore, the simplicity garnered in such an approach at a -driver- level would likely spur more interesting application development.
Now, if the 3D hardware guys would finally create a consumer level card with order-independent transparency implemented -effeciently- in hardware, life would be good!
Their job or project experience. The school means little to nothing to me, as I've met poor quality people from all the high-prestige schools, and high quality from low-prestige schools.
Those with talent generally have an interesting project list.
It sounds like you've never played Robotron or "Bounce" or similar games.
> The tech at the time could only support very narrow concepts, like "eat the magic pills."
Which is exactly why game designers focused more on gameplay.
Designers focused more on gameplay back then because there was less they could do in other arenas to make the game 'good'. Also, there were fewer 'magic formulas' for making a game.. i.e. many games were truely original concepts, as opposed to today, where most are merely variants.
The point of a game is not necessarily to identify with the avatar. This what you imply when you say "it is pretty hard to thing of yourself as a yellow circle...," etc. The point of a game is to have fun... Suspension of disbelief is beside the point-- When I played board games as a kid I didn't imagine that I was the token on the board!
The real questions are: Do graphics improve gameplay? Do graphics by themselves make for a good game?
Sure, of course. But pretty graphics by themselves do not a good game make... They may make a pretty photo album, but without a means of interaction... Who cares?
Unfortuantely a lot of management/business types really DON'T understand sunk cost.
You should buy something you want to use. Using something simply because you bought it is moronic.
The waste happens on the purchasing side, not the usage side.
This is not a 'geek' view, this is a good economist/businessperson's view, and for anyone who disagrees with it, here is a good example.
You're stuck on a desert island. You knew you would be stuck here. TO prepare for being stuck here, you bought some cyanide-based glue (i.e. superglue). Your major problem is that there is no food on the island. Do you 1) Eat the cyanide-based glue 2) Don't eat the cyanide-based glue
The "Well, it would be going to waste if I don't eat it" argument obviously doesn't work here. If you don't get the right tool for the job, you shouldn't be forced to use it-- The damage is already done, no need to exacerbate it.
What is the difference then between streaming and reading from a network drive, legally ?
If there is no difference, then I'm sure that most of us have been streaming music within our homes and are thussly required to pay 3.5c/song.
Unfortunately, I don't believe that reading the law itself will help anyone in their understanding of acceptable behaviour-- interpretation of these laws is so incredibly loose in areas and so incredibly tight in areas, that it only seems to make sense to look at the cases.:/
DO you know that for a fact? I mean, did you read the iTunes EULA? It certainly seems from their marketing material that they make use of the word "buy" and "purchase" in close proximity with "music" and without the word "license".
Seriously though-- I'm interested in hearing the facts of the EULA.
After the act of distribution, I don't see how it can any longer be distribution... Thus, I can understand how they would disallow you from BUYing anything more from iTunes, but playing your already-downloaded songs? If it isn't going through the distribution channel anymore, it isn't (or shouldn't be) distribution.
If this is intentional (and not simply broken software), then they have some rather draconian agreements with the labels/artists/RIAA.
The natural refinement of this idea is to stream the music, with the stipulation that you may not store it on disk. This increases the 'effeciency' in that a person may not hold onto the ownership of that CD indefinately, but only so long as they are listening to it.
Now, this 'streaming' would have to be of the demand-based, probably with FF/RW/Seek capabilities, and would probably manifest as a file-lock. Simple, really.
All one would have to do to make this a reality is hack some net-based filesystem.
Actually, it is still more interesting since any 'stolen source ' is no longer source code once compiled, and as such, you are not distributing a copy of the source..
You might be able to argue that it is a derivative work, however.
IANAL, and it should go without saying that one shouldn't take (any) legal advice from Slashdot.
The line is less than grey, and will continue to get greyer and wider as time progresses and our memory-enhancing (harddrives, ram, etc) devices become more integral to our life (perhaps even integrated -into- our person).
What will the court decide then? When a person has the ability to perfectly recollect something, will the ability to recount the experience of something exactly, person to person, be regulated as other things are?
Yes, the RIAA is (finally) targeting the end-user. It is premature to call them copyright infringers-- they've not yet been convicted.
Assuming that they ARE infringers, then I believe that the RIAA is doing something within the law. The unfortunate truth is that even if they are NOT infringers, and the RIAA doesn't have sufficient evidence to convince a resonable person, the RIAA is within the law to subpeona information about said persons.
One of the problems with this is that there are no reasonable protections against this behaviour.
As for supporting the RIAA et al- Not so long as they get away with price-fixing, and other nasty monopolistic practices (such as buying retroactive copyright extensions, etc).
Whether or not they are within the law, and others not , I hope the association (et al) dies a horrible financial death and goes away. Copyright law had enough protections for these people already.
I personally wonder if it is possible to sue the person or persons who stated that it would not be reasonable/possible to sue individual infringers. Obviously, if they are doing so, then it must be possible and reasonable.
By that logic, playing a CD on a cd-player is also infringement because the CD player must make a copy in order to do an D->A.
Anything timeshifted absolutely must without fail make a copy in some sense-- Thus, if you disagree that the bits stored in the D->A are insufficient to imply infringement, then certainly any cd-player with skip protection implies infringement.
You have to be very careful when you start going down the road you just mentioned-- Nearly EVERY USE of copyrighted material can be construed as copying it.
I can hear it already-- "Reading a book isn't copying" "Listening to live music isn't copying".
BS.
I can listen to a tune and whistle it-- thus reproducing it. If you assert that you cannot transfer data without copying it, then you must accept that ANY transmission WHATSOEVER -must- be infringement.
This argument becomes truely ambiguous, and this is why the words of copyright law say something about "fixed in a tangible medium", or something to that effect.
The real question becomes-- what is a tangible medium?
Sure, however you have to consider the general backlash agains the obsessive/repressive control that the current crop of large copyright holders are imposing/attempting to impose.
Seen in such light, it may still seem like the 'right thing to do'.
The side-effect is, unfortunately, that individual artists may have a more difficult time making a living with music, etc.
IMHO the large copyright holders are eliminating the business model of selling copyrighted 'property' because they are not meeting the market's price/demand intersection point. Instead, they fix prices, etc, and as a result, the market has found another way of meeting that price point.
Again, it is unfortunate that some suffer, but it HAS to be expected-- A way to meed demand is nearly always met when demand is so high!
If you argue 'But this didn't happen before the internet', well, yes I agree.
The internet brought new levels of convience to our society. Don't kid yourself-- Convience is the monster that rules most of the decisions people make. Why the washer/dryer? Why the dishwasher? Why the microwave? Why the automobile?... The internet is a mechanism akin the the automobile-- It gets you there more conviently.
A result of this is that the market's demand changed. The price of distribution went down DRASTICALLY. Thus, the price for music should have gone down drastically too (traditionally, the price of music distribution has been the highest, recently, this has changed)
Slashdot Mirror
That is simple--
One of the currencies of the open source movement is praise.
Doing what people want is more likely to get you praise (and praised).
Note, I did not say the only currency, I said 'one of the currencies.'
Another way of putting it is that they get happy feelings from having people enjoy the fruits of their labors.
You're looking at this from a very Earth-centric viewpoint (as opposed to a species-centric viewpoint)!
Earth != Humanity in the case that we have a permanent, self-sustaining base elsewhere in the solar system.
My guess is that our Earth is going to hell in a handbasket, and the most likely thing to save us as a species is to be able to survive without it.
One of Bush's goals was a permanent installation on the Moon which is certainly down the "self-sustaining" path if just for economic reasons.
Assume that we -are- able to get a permament base on the moon, and that it is self-sustaining--
The launch costs from the moon to any other part of the solar system are MUCH less prohibitive when compared to launch costs from the much deeper gravity-well of the Earth (not to mention that the Moon doesn't have much of an atmosphere to punch through...)
The Space-Elevator concept is wonderful, but simply getting men into space doesn't solve the most important problem of them being able to -stay- there.
If men are able to stay in space, and an installation can become self-sufficient, then you can have a colony...
The science I'm most interested in is that which allows man to -stay- in space. (i.e. self-sustaining space environments, or nearly self-sustaining)
Obviously, the intl. space station is not very interesting in this regard.
Bush's Mars mission is more likely to approach this goal than any non-manned science mission, and as such I believe it to be a better use of funds.
Let me be absolutely clear--
(inter)planetary science is fascinating, but men -living- in space seems more important to me.
(After all, it is getting easier and easier for us to destroy our little planet here. It is much more difficult to destroy two planets when it is difficult to get out of a gravity well!)
They don't, but neither does he.
Tit for tat is trite, but it is the real world.
Although, I have to say that I agree-- Playing with it at home is what gave me the confidence to suggest it at work.
I'm much less likely to suggest RH now for anything corporate since I cannot vouch for it at home, and the corporation is likely to pay for it, and frankly I want to work on the same OS at work and home... So, no RedHat (since they've created a chicken-and-egg like dilemna for their prospective users).
Well said.
It would be nice if I spelled 'ambiguous' properly. Bah.
The dollar sign '$' is ambigious, since several countries have a 'dollar' currency, not the least of which is Canada.
USD is a relatively common way of saying a United States Dollar, which is much less ambigious.
It seems to me like this is a "Why shoot yourself in the foot when you can aim for the head?" opportunity.
I am a longtime RedHat user and afficionado, now feeling uncertain about recommending -anything- RedHat.
The reason for this is twofold.
Firstly, I feel burned by the early demise of support for RH9.
Secondly, and much MUCH more importantly, there is very very little chance of me recommending installation of an OS that I will not be running at home.
How will you combat this lack of word-of-mouth support (given that most people are like me in that they will not recommend something they have not tried themselves...)?
Which is precisely the point...
But, beyond that, using a orthographic projection, and actualy giving REAL depth to the windows (i.e. if a window would obscure another window, it must be closer to you) is a more appropriate analogy for what you are trying to do..
I.e. Our so-called 2D desktops ARE really 3d desktops with an orthographic projection.
If we use the 3D hardware directly, then the code to do just about everything should get less complex.
... but the console is still bitmapped... it uses bitmapped fonts...!!!
I agree wholeheartedly.
Furthermore, the simplicity garnered in such an approach at a -driver- level would likely spur more interesting application development.
Now, if the 3D hardware guys would finally create a consumer level card with order-independent transparency implemented -effeciently- in hardware, life would be good!
Their job or project experience.
The school means little to nothing to me, as I've met poor quality people from all the high-prestige schools, and high quality from low-prestige schools.
Those with talent generally have an interesting project list.
It sounds like you've never played Robotron or "Bounce" or similar games.
> The tech at the time could only support very narrow concepts, like "eat the magic pills."
Which is exactly why game designers focused more on gameplay.
Designers focused more on gameplay back then because there was less they could do in other arenas to make the game 'good'. Also, there were fewer 'magic formulas' for making a game.. i.e. many games were truely original concepts, as opposed to today, where most are merely variants.
The point of a game is not necessarily to identify with the avatar. This what you imply when you say "it is pretty hard to thing of yourself as a yellow circle...," etc. The point of a game is to have fun... Suspension of disbelief is beside the point-- When I played board games as a kid I didn't imagine that I was the token on the board!
The real questions are:
Do graphics improve gameplay?
Do graphics by themselves make for a good game?
Sure, of course.
But pretty graphics by themselves do not a good game make... They may make a pretty photo album, but without a means of interaction... Who cares?
My roomate is a coinop operator, and has a large collection of old/rare games.
It is very much still an alive community of collectors/restorers.
Many of these machines can be seen at the show they put on each year --
"California Extreme" http://www.caextreme.org/
here there are several hundred pinball games and several hundred arcade games from practically all eras.
Unfortuantely a lot of management/business types really DON'T understand sunk cost.
You should buy something you want to use.
Using something simply because you bought it is moronic.
The waste happens on the purchasing side, not the usage side.
This is not a 'geek' view, this is a good economist/businessperson's view, and for anyone who disagrees with it, here is a good example.
You're stuck on a desert island. You knew you would be stuck here. TO prepare for being stuck here, you bought some cyanide-based glue (i.e. superglue). Your major problem is that there is no food on the island. Do you
1) Eat the cyanide-based glue
2) Don't eat the cyanide-based glue
The "Well, it would be going to waste if I don't eat it" argument obviously doesn't work here. If you don't get the right tool for the job, you shouldn't be forced to use it-- The damage is already done, no need to exacerbate it.
I believe its more like 6 seconds.
What is the difference then between streaming and reading from a network drive, legally ?
:/
If there is no difference, then I'm sure that most of us have been streaming music within our homes and are thussly required to pay 3.5c/song.
Unfortunately, I don't believe that reading the law itself will help anyone in their understanding of acceptable behaviour-- interpretation of these laws is so incredibly loose in areas and so incredibly tight in areas, that it only seems to make sense to look at the cases.
DO you know that for a fact?
I mean, did you read the iTunes EULA? It certainly seems from their marketing material that they make use of the word "buy" and "purchase" in close proximity with "music" and without the word "license".
Seriously though-- I'm interested in hearing the facts of the EULA.
After the act of distribution, I don't see how it can any longer be distribution... Thus, I can understand how they would disallow you from BUYing anything more from iTunes, but playing your already-downloaded songs? If it isn't going through the distribution channel anymore, it isn't (or shouldn't be) distribution.
If this is intentional (and not simply broken software), then they have some rather draconian agreements with the labels/artists/RIAA.
The natural refinement of this idea is to stream the music, with the stipulation that you may not store it on disk. This increases the 'effeciency' in that a person may not hold onto the ownership of that CD indefinately, but only so long as they are listening to it.
Now, this 'streaming' would have to be of the demand-based, probably with FF/RW/Seek capabilities, and would probably manifest as a file-lock. Simple, really.
All one would have to do to make this a reality is hack some net-based filesystem.
Actually, it is still more interesting since any 'stolen source ' is no longer source code once compiled, and as such, you are not distributing a copy of the source..
You might be able to argue that it is a derivative work, however.
IANAL, and it should go without saying that one shouldn't take (any) legal advice from Slashdot.
Exactly the problem.
The line is less than grey, and will continue to get greyer and wider as time progresses and our memory-enhancing (harddrives, ram, etc) devices become more integral to our life (perhaps even integrated -into- our person).
What will the court decide then? When a person has the ability to perfectly recollect something, will the ability to recount the experience of something exactly, person to person, be regulated as other things are?
Again, it is a grey and wide line?
Yes, the RIAA is (finally) targeting the end-user. It is premature to call them copyright infringers-- they've not yet been convicted.
Assuming that they ARE infringers, then I believe that the RIAA is doing something within the law.
The unfortunate truth is that even if they are NOT infringers, and the RIAA doesn't have sufficient evidence to convince a resonable person, the RIAA is within the law to subpeona information about said persons.
One of the problems with this is that there are no reasonable protections against this behaviour.
As for supporting the RIAA et al- Not so long as they get away with price-fixing, and other nasty monopolistic practices (such as buying retroactive copyright extensions, etc).
Whether or not they are within the law, and others not , I hope the association (et al) dies a horrible financial death and goes away. Copyright law had enough protections for these people already.
I personally wonder if it is possible to sue the person or persons who stated that it would not be reasonable/possible to sue individual infringers. Obviously, if they are doing so, then it must be possible and reasonable.
By that logic, playing a CD on a cd-player is also infringement because the CD player must make a copy in order to do an D->A.
Anything timeshifted absolutely must without fail make a copy in some sense-- Thus, if you disagree that the bits stored in the D->A are insufficient to imply infringement, then certainly any cd-player with skip protection implies infringement.
You have to be very careful when you start going down the road you just mentioned-- Nearly EVERY USE of copyrighted material can be construed as copying it.
I can hear it already-- "Reading a book isn't copying" "Listening to live music isn't copying".
BS.
I can listen to a tune and whistle it-- thus reproducing it. If you assert that you cannot transfer data without copying it, then you must accept that ANY transmission WHATSOEVER -must- be infringement.
This argument becomes truely ambiguous, and this is why the words of copyright law say something about "fixed in a tangible medium", or something to that effect.
The real question becomes-- what is a tangible medium?
Sure, however you have to consider the general backlash agains the obsessive/repressive control that the current crop of large copyright holders are imposing/attempting to impose.
Seen in such light, it may still seem like the 'right thing to do'.
The side-effect is, unfortunately, that individual artists may have a more difficult time making a living with music, etc.
IMHO the large copyright holders are eliminating the business model of selling copyrighted 'property' because they are not meeting the market's price/demand intersection point. Instead, they fix prices, etc, and as a result, the market has found another way of meeting that price point.
Again, it is unfortunate that some suffer, but it HAS to be expected-- A way to meed demand is nearly always met when demand is so high!
If you argue 'But this didn't happen before the internet', well, yes I agree.
The internet brought new levels of convience to our society. Don't kid yourself-- Convience is the monster that rules most of the decisions people make. Why the washer/dryer? Why the dishwasher? Why the microwave? Why the automobile?... The internet is a mechanism akin the the automobile-- It gets you there more conviently.
A result of this is that the market's demand changed. The price of distribution went down DRASTICALLY. Thus, the price for music should have gone down drastically too (traditionally, the price of music distribution has been the highest, recently, this has changed)