I've always thought it would be good to have a skill system that was based on your use of particular skills rather than on experience or skill points. I mean, it doesn't really make much sense for a fighter to earn experience points smashing creatures over the head with a mace, and use them to learn a new spell does it? His experience was in monster-bashing, not hand-waving.
The idea I've had floating around in my head is to link progression with abilities used. Every time you make a melee attack, there's a chance of your strength increasing. If you keep on using the slow, powerful attacks, eventually you get access to the higher level slow, powerful attacks. If you keep using the quick, weak attacks, then you advange in agility and get more fencing-type skills. Same for progressing along elemental strands of magic.
The advantage to this is it gives flexibility (if you know you want to be a fire mage/warrior, you know you'll have to cast lots of fire spells and attack in melee) and it lets casual gamers build a character that fits their play style without having to research a lot of skills - the character just grows in the direction you play it. It's also a bit more realistic, in that practicing a certain skill will get you better at it.
The only game I've played that had anything resembling this sort of system was Final Fantasy Adventure II (Gameboy game, using the Final Fantasy franchise, but not, I believe produced by Square). In that game, at the end of every battle, you had a chance of your character changing. Everyone had a chance for more HP, if you used a strength attack in the battle, you had a chance for a strength boost, if you used a magic attack you had a chance for learning more spells, etc. It really didn't go far in that direction though, as most character progression and abilities were gained through items.
Getting issued with a legal threat is not the same as a conviction. That has nothing to do with the law, it's just the MPAA threatening your ISP. If it did come down to a court case, the fact that you hadn't downloaded anything would probably get you off scot free.
I was referring to the OP, sorry, not your OP, who said "Traditional encyclopedias choose to ignore pop culture out of cultural bias". In my mind, at least, that's what this conversation's been about - not saying traditional encyclopedia's are better than wikis, but that they don't ignore pop culture because they hate pop culture.
Having every 10th byte of a file would be just as copyrigthable as having the first 10% of the file. Atleast there's no logical reason to treat the two differently, especially not when the *purpose* in both cases is to collect pieces until you've got a complete file.
The difference is you can play the first 10% of a file (under most encoding schemes) and get a complete segment of a copyrighted work. With every 10th byte, there is not way you could play that get anything resembling any part of a copyrighted work, unless you also had some of the 9 other bits. If it was possible to call that copyrightable, then any pattern of bits could be copyrighted, as they can all be transformed into a copyrightable work with sufficient information.
Technically, it's copyright infringement. Argue about the morality of the two being equivelant all you like, but anyone whose been prosecuted under the law for these things has been prosecuted under the offense of copyright infringement, not theft.
But, as is the constant cry on this site, copyright infringement is not theft. I don't know how well they could stretch stolen goods to cover goods that infringe copyright.
I assume you'd have a complete file somewhere else on your computer. The thing is that you only have an incoherent part of the file on offer for download.
No, I'm arguing that the person culpable (not necessarily the same as responsible) is the person who is offering the item for download. When you download something, your computer sends a request for data. The remote computer is the one that locates that data, and sends a duplicate down the wire to you. At the moment, asking someone for a illegal copy isn't illegal. Giving someone a copy is. That isn't to say it'll be that way forever; I expect the laws will be changed as soon as someone can be bothered prosecuting a downloader. For the most part, it's more efficient to sue and take down the uploaders - take the uploaders out of the picture and file-sharing dies. They're far fewer than the downloaders, it's easier to track them, and easier to prosecute them.
Yep, I mention that here. There are currently swarming applications in production which guarantee that each person has only an incoherent part of the complete file. For example, you might have every 10th byte of a file. When somebody requests a copy, various arbitrary parts are copied from a list of seeds which combine into the actual file on the downloaders computer. The idea is that every 10th byte of a media file is fairly indistinguishable from noise, and is not copyrightable. Likewise, a list of seeds that contain which peers contain portions of a file would not be copyrightable. The idea is that nobody would be able to sue any of the uploaders for copyright violation.
That seems like a bit of a house of cards to me; I can imagine it wouldn't take too much work for a reasonable intelligent lawyer to demonstrate that the very existence of such a system indicates intent.
Oh, and where did the new copy came from? It was copied from the original. Where is the original? In the uploader's possession. Who duplicated the item? The uploader. Who sent the duplicate? The uploader. Who received the duplicate? The downloader. Which is illegal, duplicating and distributing a copyrighted work, or receiving it? Duplicating and distributing.
So the MPAA/RIAA are only going after file sharing people? Not leeches.
Yep
So you would be totally safe if you only download stuff and never upload?
I think you have to assume they could know everything you do online.
It's easy to find the distributors - their IP has to be advertised in order for them to distribute stuff. It's harder to find just the leechers. Of course, in a swarming application like BitTorrent, everyone is an uploader as well as a downloader, so it's easy to get peer IPs once you connect to the swarm.
However, I believe it's currently only illegal to upload - after all, you can hardly be charged distributing X-Men 3 if you never actually had a copy of X-Men 3. Copyright is a prohibition against distributing, not copying - it was originally setup for the protection of publishing houses, so that if they bought the rights to a novel, a rival publishing house couldn't just run off it's own copies without the expense of buying the rights. In those days, publishing was a large and expensive business, and it wasn't really conceivable that the laws be used against individuals; individuals had no way practical ways to publish. In the mdoern era, however, individual publishing has become dead easy.
The person who owns the original media is the one whose generating the copy. The downloader is receiving it. An analagous situation: a guy is selling ripped-off copies of DVDs from a market store. Someone buys a copy. It's the seller (the distributor, the one who reproduced it) that gets busted, not the buyer.
Actually, obtaining files that are copyrighted isn't a crime anywhere (that I know of) even the US. It's reproducing (ie: uploading) that's illegal, not the downloading.
Uh, that's my point. Britannica has been treating the web as if it were just a new kind of printing press. They don't seem to recognize that the web is an entirely different medium and that the old methods of developing articles need to be reviewed and thoroughly revised.
They probably don't care; they're in the print business, not the web business. Their website is just a side show, so of course it's not going to hold a candle to Wikipedia, where the website is the main attraction. I agree that they don't have many pop culture entries in Britannica, all I'm saying is the reasons are more likely due to economics and audience rather than some unreasoning bias against pop culture that the original comment claimed.
It's online version is probably simply an online version of their print one - they don't get writers to create whole new articles just for their web version. They don't have an army of fanboys ready to write up pages and pages on their hobby horses like Wikipedia do. Yes, there are disadvantages to having a physical encyclopedia, just as their disadvantages to having an online collaborative one. My point was that the differences are most likely due to inherent limitations of their various media, rather than some "cultural bias" you dreamed up in order to try and put it to the establishment and feel all cool and rebellious.
I wouldn't say it's due to cultural bias, but rather because paper is more expensive than electrons. Wikipedia can afford to publish 10,000 pages on Trek. If Britannica dedicated as many pages to Harry Potter, Internet Memes and Joss Whedon as Wikipedia did, it would be 10 times the size it is now.
I don't think I've ever bought an official strategy guide, but I often use the ones on sites like gamesfaqs that are made by fans. Here are my top three reasons:
Insufficient information. Lately it seems developers have been putting less and less information into the game manuals. Final Fantasy X is a case in point; in that game your characters can learn about 40 different skills. None of the skills are described in the instruction manual, and in-game, all they give you is the skill name. Some are fairly obvious, especially if you've played past Final Fantasy games, but others aren't. What does Sentinel do? Or Spare Change? The only way to find out is trial and error, or a strategy guide. If you use trial and error too much, you are likely to take your character down a screwed-up skill path and make them useless in combat.
Out-of-genre Elements. When I play a game, it's usually because I feel like playing a particular style of game. I play Final Fantasy games for immersive environments and stories, and complex character development. I play shooters for a run-around frag fest. I play adventure games when I'm in a mood for puzzle solving. However, it seems that more and more developers are trying to bleed in bits of other genres into their game. You get the shooter that has a move-the-box puzzle, or the Final Fantasy game that has a sports simulation mini-game. Not only do I not feel like shuffling around crates when I'm the mood for a shoot-out, games that focus on shooting generally don't have the development time or expertise to develop really good puzzles, or an engine that caters to them. I'll use a strategy guide to get me past the sub-par bits I don't feel like doing to get to the part of the game that actually excels.
Completeness. This is mostly a factor in RPG-esque games, like the Final Fantasy series. But often they have powerful abilities or items that you can only get through a series of obscure/time-consuming activites, like breeding a Golden Chocobo so you can get the Knights of the Round summon in Final Fantasy VII. I'm not interested in Chocobo Breeding for its own sake; it's a boring mini-game (see point 2). But I enjoy decking out my characters, optimizing their abilities and theming them all out. If want to make my lightning-elemental speed-based melee character, then I need to know where to find that Double Cut materia. So I consult a strategy guide to make sure I don't miss out on any of the goodies that I need to do what I actually enjoy about the game.
Back in the day there was a phrase going around, which seemed to have great merit: Stick to your core competency.
You mean the way Apple stuck to its core competency as a computer hardware/OS supplier, and not a music distributor, or developer of portable music devices?
That phrase should be ammended to "stick to your competencies". Consumers don't care whether or not this new service is "core", as long as the company does a good job with it. See also Microsoft's foray into hardware, with keyboards, mice and X-boxes, often praised by people who don't particularly like their software.
In general, companies who don't diversify die. Once they fill their original product's niche, and get the attention of all their target market, there is no way to grow except diversification. And if a company isn't growing, it's dying. That's particularly true of companies with a retail model; once you've sold your product to everyone who wants one, the only sales you're going to get are for replacements. That volume of sale won't be able to support the sort infrastructure you had when you were growing, so your company wil have to downsize. As you downsize, your ability to produce and sell your product likewise decreases, and you start the slow (or more often, very fast) spiral into obscurity.
Unfortunately, that model would put any creator of content out of business almost instantaneously. If, for the price of a DVD, you could then become a distributor of that movie, you could essentially pick your price - you only need to recoup $20 or so. You could sell copies for $0.50 and still turn a profit.
However, the studio that filmed that movie incurred huge costs - just look at the budgets of todays movies. Granted, some of those are over-inflated due to stupidly-large salaries paid to higher execs and Hollywood's latest darlings, but even so, making a good movie is expensive, especially if your movie is in a genre that requires special effects: action, science fiction, fantasy, etc. Studios have to sell movies at a certain price point in order for it to be economically viable. If they had to compete against anyone with a net connection and tracker access, there's no way they could do it. They'd go out of business, and you'd be left with nothing but indie films. Some indie films are great, but they often take a long time to produce (without a large budget to grease the wheels), have amateur actors (not necessarily bad, but they often are) and can't afford stuff like, say, rendering 10,000 orcs for a huge battle scene.
That said, copyright restricts consumers only in regards to a single action: distribution. Not copying, not making backgrounds for your own personal use, not ripping the soundtrack for your own personal use, not cracking their encryption so you can play foreign releases, not ignoring their lock-codes so you can fast-forward through their inane commercials at the start of the disc. Copyright only restricts distribution. The one point you raise that is covered by copyright (Posting clips from the movie for critical review) is granted an exception through Fair User.
The problem isn't with copyright laws, or with fair use laws. The problem is that the distributors have been pushing the envelope constantly, trying to get new restrictions added on top of that, whether through legal restrictions (DMCA) or technological (Macromedia, CSS, other forms of DRM). I have no problem with the actual concept of copyright and fair use - it's a necessity if you want cheap, plentiful, good-quality movies - but I'm vehemently against all the additional crap that has been added over recent years which only serves to increase profits at the expense of the consumer.
No it's not. It's not even called civil disobedience. An example of civil disobedience would be setting up a CD-burning booth outside the RIAA corporate offices. The whole point of civil disobedience is to get yourself persecuted for disobeying a law you consider unjust. If a lot of other people consider that law unjust, and the authorities are seen to be being heavy-handed, then you'll probably get a whole lot of support, and build up public resentment against the law in question.
Sitting at home downloading MP3s from your home computer doesn't cut it though; that's an act purely in your own personal interest, not a noble political statement.
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Probably get you a less severe penalty too.
I've always thought it would be good to have a skill system that was based on your use of particular skills rather than on experience or skill points. I mean, it doesn't really make much sense for a fighter to earn experience points smashing creatures over the head with a mace, and use them to learn a new spell does it? His experience was in monster-bashing, not hand-waving.
The idea I've had floating around in my head is to link progression with abilities used. Every time you make a melee attack, there's a chance of your strength increasing. If you keep on using the slow, powerful attacks, eventually you get access to the higher level slow, powerful attacks. If you keep using the quick, weak attacks, then you advange in agility and get more fencing-type skills. Same for progressing along elemental strands of magic.
The advantage to this is it gives flexibility (if you know you want to be a fire mage/warrior, you know you'll have to cast lots of fire spells and attack in melee) and it lets casual gamers build a character that fits their play style without having to research a lot of skills - the character just grows in the direction you play it. It's also a bit more realistic, in that practicing a certain skill will get you better at it.
The only game I've played that had anything resembling this sort of system was Final Fantasy Adventure II (Gameboy game, using the Final Fantasy franchise, but not, I believe produced by Square). In that game, at the end of every battle, you had a chance of your character changing. Everyone had a chance for more HP, if you used a strength attack in the battle, you had a chance for a strength boost, if you used a magic attack you had a chance for learning more spells, etc. It really didn't go far in that direction though, as most character progression and abilities were gained through items.
Getting issued with a legal threat is not the same as a conviction. That has nothing to do with the law, it's just the MPAA threatening your ISP. If it did come down to a court case, the fact that you hadn't downloaded anything would probably get you off scot free.
I was referring to the OP, sorry, not your OP, who said "Traditional encyclopedias choose to ignore pop culture out of cultural bias". In my mind, at least, that's what this conversation's been about - not saying traditional encyclopedia's are better than wikis, but that they don't ignore pop culture because they hate pop culture.
We sort of talked about that here.
Having every 10th byte of a file would be just as copyrigthable as having the first 10% of the file. Atleast there's no logical reason to treat the two differently, especially not when the *purpose* in both cases is to collect pieces until you've got a complete file.
The difference is you can play the first 10% of a file (under most encoding schemes) and get a complete segment of a copyrighted work. With every 10th byte, there is not way you could play that get anything resembling any part of a copyrighted work, unless you also had some of the 9 other bits. If it was possible to call that copyrightable, then any pattern of bits could be copyrighted, as they can all be transformed into a copyrightable work with sufficient information.
Technically, it's copyright infringement. Argue about the morality of the two being equivelant all you like, but anyone whose been prosecuted under the law for these things has been prosecuted under the offense of copyright infringement, not theft.
But, as is the constant cry on this site, copyright infringement is not theft. I don't know how well they could stretch stolen goods to cover goods that infringe copyright.
I assume you'd have a complete file somewhere else on your computer. The thing is that you only have an incoherent part of the file on offer for download.
No, I'm arguing that the person culpable (not necessarily the same as responsible) is the person who is offering the item for download. When you download something, your computer sends a request for data. The remote computer is the one that locates that data, and sends a duplicate down the wire to you. At the moment, asking someone for a illegal copy isn't illegal. Giving someone a copy is. That isn't to say it'll be that way forever; I expect the laws will be changed as soon as someone can be bothered prosecuting a downloader. For the most part, it's more efficient to sue and take down the uploaders - take the uploaders out of the picture and file-sharing dies. They're far fewer than the downloaders, it's easier to track them, and easier to prosecute them.
Yep, I mention that here. There are currently swarming applications in production which guarantee that each person has only an incoherent part of the complete file. For example, you might have every 10th byte of a file. When somebody requests a copy, various arbitrary parts are copied from a list of seeds which combine into the actual file on the downloaders computer. The idea is that every 10th byte of a media file is fairly indistinguishable from noise, and is not copyrightable. Likewise, a list of seeds that contain which peers contain portions of a file would not be copyrightable. The idea is that nobody would be able to sue any of the uploaders for copyright violation.
That seems like a bit of a house of cards to me; I can imagine it wouldn't take too much work for a reasonable intelligent lawyer to demonstrate that the very existence of such a system indicates intent.
Oh, and where did the new copy came from? It was copied from the original. Where is the original? In the uploader's possession. Who duplicated the item? The uploader. Who sent the duplicate? The uploader. Who received the duplicate? The downloader. Which is illegal, duplicating and distributing a copyrighted work, or receiving it? Duplicating and distributing.
So the MPAA/RIAA are only going after file sharing people? Not leeches.
Yep
So you would be totally safe if you only download stuff and never upload?
I think you have to assume they could know everything you do online.
It's easy to find the distributors - their IP has to be advertised in order for them to distribute stuff. It's harder to find just the leechers. Of course, in a swarming application like BitTorrent, everyone is an uploader as well as a downloader, so it's easy to get peer IPs once you connect to the swarm.
However, I believe it's currently only illegal to upload - after all, you can hardly be charged distributing X-Men 3 if you never actually had a copy of X-Men 3. Copyright is a prohibition against distributing, not copying - it was originally setup for the protection of publishing houses, so that if they bought the rights to a novel, a rival publishing house couldn't just run off it's own copies without the expense of buying the rights. In those days, publishing was a large and expensive business, and it wasn't really conceivable that the laws be used against individuals; individuals had no way practical ways to publish. In the mdoern era, however, individual publishing has become dead easy.
The person who owns the original media is the one whose generating the copy. The downloader is receiving it. An analagous situation: a guy is selling ripped-off copies of DVDs from a market store. Someone buys a copy. It's the seller (the distributor, the one who reproduced it) that gets busted, not the buyer.
Actually, obtaining files that are copyrighted isn't a crime anywhere (that I know of) even the US. It's reproducing (ie: uploading) that's illegal, not the downloading.
Uh, that's my point. Britannica has been treating the web as if it were just a new kind of printing press. They don't seem to recognize that the web is an entirely different medium and that the old methods of developing articles need to be reviewed and thoroughly revised.
They probably don't care; they're in the print business, not the web business. Their website is just a side show, so of course it's not going to hold a candle to Wikipedia, where the website is the main attraction. I agree that they don't have many pop culture entries in Britannica, all I'm saying is the reasons are more likely due to economics and audience rather than some unreasoning bias against pop culture that the original comment claimed.
It's online version is probably simply an online version of their print one - they don't get writers to create whole new articles just for their web version. They don't have an army of fanboys ready to write up pages and pages on their hobby horses like Wikipedia do. Yes, there are disadvantages to having a physical encyclopedia, just as their disadvantages to having an online collaborative one. My point was that the differences are most likely due to inherent limitations of their various media, rather than some "cultural bias" you dreamed up in order to try and put it to the establishment and feel all cool and rebellious.
Bash religion on Slashdot. Get your free mod points TODAY!
I wouldn't say it's due to cultural bias, but rather because paper is more expensive than electrons. Wikipedia can afford to publish 10,000 pages on Trek. If Britannica dedicated as many pages to Harry Potter, Internet Memes and Joss Whedon as Wikipedia did, it would be 10 times the size it is now.
Back in the day there was a phrase going around, which seemed to have great merit: Stick to your core competency.
You mean the way Apple stuck to its core competency as a computer hardware/OS supplier, and not a music distributor, or developer of portable music devices?
That phrase should be ammended to "stick to your competencies". Consumers don't care whether or not this new service is "core", as long as the company does a good job with it. See also Microsoft's foray into hardware, with keyboards, mice and X-boxes, often praised by people who don't particularly like their software.
In general, companies who don't diversify die. Once they fill their original product's niche, and get the attention of all their target market, there is no way to grow except diversification. And if a company isn't growing, it's dying. That's particularly true of companies with a retail model; once you've sold your product to everyone who wants one, the only sales you're going to get are for replacements. That volume of sale won't be able to support the sort infrastructure you had when you were growing, so your company wil have to downsize. As you downsize, your ability to produce and sell your product likewise decreases, and you start the slow (or more often, very fast) spiral into obscurity.
All hail Nostradamus
Unfortunately, that model would put any creator of content out of business almost instantaneously. If, for the price of a DVD, you could then become a distributor of that movie, you could essentially pick your price - you only need to recoup $20 or so. You could sell copies for $0.50 and still turn a profit.
However, the studio that filmed that movie incurred huge costs - just look at the budgets of todays movies. Granted, some of those are over-inflated due to stupidly-large salaries paid to higher execs and Hollywood's latest darlings, but even so, making a good movie is expensive, especially if your movie is in a genre that requires special effects: action, science fiction, fantasy, etc. Studios have to sell movies at a certain price point in order for it to be economically viable. If they had to compete against anyone with a net connection and tracker access, there's no way they could do it. They'd go out of business, and you'd be left with nothing but indie films. Some indie films are great, but they often take a long time to produce (without a large budget to grease the wheels), have amateur actors (not necessarily bad, but they often are) and can't afford stuff like, say, rendering 10,000 orcs for a huge battle scene.
That said, copyright restricts consumers only in regards to a single action: distribution. Not copying, not making backgrounds for your own personal use, not ripping the soundtrack for your own personal use, not cracking their encryption so you can play foreign releases, not ignoring their lock-codes so you can fast-forward through their inane commercials at the start of the disc. Copyright only restricts distribution. The one point you raise that is covered by copyright (Posting clips from the movie for critical review) is granted an exception through Fair User.
The problem isn't with copyright laws, or with fair use laws. The problem is that the distributors have been pushing the envelope constantly, trying to get new restrictions added on top of that, whether through legal restrictions (DMCA) or technological (Macromedia, CSS, other forms of DRM). I have no problem with the actual concept of copyright and fair use - it's a necessity if you want cheap, plentiful, good-quality movies - but I'm vehemently against all the additional crap that has been added over recent years which only serves to increase profits at the expense of the consumer.
It is called social disabdience.
No it's not. It's not even called civil disobedience. An example of civil disobedience would be setting up a CD-burning booth outside the RIAA corporate offices. The whole point of civil disobedience is to get yourself persecuted for disobeying a law you consider unjust. If a lot of other people consider that law unjust, and the authorities are seen to be being heavy-handed, then you'll probably get a whole lot of support, and build up public resentment against the law in question.
Sitting at home downloading MP3s from your home computer doesn't cut it though; that's an act purely in your own personal interest, not a noble political statement.
Well, the FBI can't even catch them when they do use wiretaps, so who cares.