I fully agree, which is why I'm glad that a company in my own city is working on a space elevator that should cost around $10 billion - which is less than we're looking to spend to replace an earthquake-damamged viaduct.
Re:Cost of media vs. "cost" of piracy
on
CD Copy Stopper
·
· Score: 1
I agree with your ethical reasoning, but I don't think it applies to these concerns:
- A perfectly-protected digital product (which is theoretical, of course) is impossible to back up. I have a right to be able to back up things I own so that if the original is damaged I don't have to buy it again.
- Adding copy protection like this only increases the cost for legitimate consumers, since the people who pirate it are going to do so and get it for free anyway.
I'm guessing you (like several people I know) don't understand why people play videogames either. A lot of people (like myself) would like to do things that we can't - whether it's flying a space shuttle, piloting mecha, or leading a party of adventurers into a dungeon. Flying an airplane is cool, but it's just not the same thing, any more than getting a job in the timber industry driving a six-legged forest walker would convince me to sell my copy of MechWarrior 2 =).
I don't have a problem with a non-lethal weapon that causes temporary pain without permanent damage to its targets. I think it's vastly preferable to the alternatives. I do, however, think it's unethical to test such a weapon on animals, especially when they have human volunteers for the project.
"does it really matter that the government knows what you are up to?"
Yes, it does. The right to privacy is a basic element of a free society. If you want to give up that right, there are plenty of other countries in the world that do *not* guarantee it.
Oh yeah, PC-DOPE! I always wanted to try it out to prove to myself that it was impossible, but it never made my PC make any sounds from either the built-in speaker *or* the audio output.
In fact, it looks like you can still download it, at least from here: http://www.third-plateau.org/knowledgebase/downloa ds.shtml. Maybe I'll pull the old 486SX out of the closet so I don't overdose from running it on my Athlon XP system =).
Booting from floppy is incredibly useful for legacy purposes and for flashing BIOSes. There are several pieces of older sampler (as in the musical instrument)-related software that read/write disc images, but only work under DOS. Even though a lot of hardware can be flashed from Windows now, at least as much of it cannot. I was surprised when I put my latest PC together to discover that the CDROM drive, DVDROM drive, MB, and even my brand-new GeForce4 can only be flashed from DOS.
A lot of the games were the same, but the technology behind them was not. If you compare the Atari 2600 version of Asteroids, Pac Man, or Star Wars with the arcade version, you will see light-years of difference.
Liquid bearings add a little bit to the price. At New Egg, for example, a 40GB ATA133 Maxtor is $3 more with liquid bearings and an 80GB ATA133 Maxtor is $8 more with liquid bearings.
Allegedly they operate with less noise than standard bearings. I haven't verified this personally, but the online reviews I've read seem to indicate that this is true.
I hope, before you formed that opinion, that you crossreferenced the UCITA promotional link you provided with other, more balanced links, almost all of which are critical of UCITA
I haven't formed any opinion yet. I just found that summary a useful starting point since - unlike the letter linked in the beginning of this thread - it doesn't assume prior knowledge of the subject.
Even if I do end up disagreeing with UCITA, it is still critical for me to know how its proponents intend it to be perceived.
I completely agree. Right before reading this thread I had just watched _Enemy of the State_ for the first time, and the/. summary was giving me visions of spikey-haired guys in a van pulling up my crappy old webpage from 1996 and using it against me. So I read the article, and while (like EotS) it is a little overblown in terms of the power it attributes to Google, it's basically just saying "look! you can find stuff online! especially if you use unique keywords!" A little fearfully, I decided to do a search on my own name, and all I came up with was a link to a document on the web site I maintain and my entry in the Old Man Murray Cratemaster screenshot competition =).
In the US, mod chips are illegal under the DMCA because their primary purpose is to circumvent copy protection. I would be surprised if Canada didn't have a similar law, or at least plans for one. They beat us to the "tax blank media to 'compensate' the record industry" laws, after all =). So while it's a lot less likely that he would have been convicted on the mod chip charge alone, it's not *impossible*.
That's a little like saying that it's okay to intentionally spread AIDS because it's within the power of your sex partners to abstain or use protection. Doing something which can easily lead to people dying is not suddenly ethical just because it is theoretically possible for them to prevent it.
I remember reading an article in Newsweek back when the YF22 was selected. The YF22 was newly built from the ground up, whereas the YF23 incorporated some old bits and bobs (I remember specifically that the entire cockpit was from an F15). Apparently that was one of the big factors, that Lockheed could have what was basically a complete prototype in the same time that it took Northrop/MD to build one using old parts as stand-ins.
In a perfectly-managed world, the RAID array would probably be a better choice, because corporations wouldn't have tons of free disk space lying around on workstations. I work for a large (~50k+ employees) organization, and the vast majority of our workstations have 1-15GB free on their drives. It almost never gets used because most of the large-volume users are too paranoid to store anything locally for fear of it getting erased. I could see something like this being really handy, especially since we do deal in multi-terabytes of disk space for certain applications.
I can think of several reasons why this type of product isn't really produced anymore:
1) There's no continuing revenue from it. Games are getting shorter and shorter (for a variety of reasons), so something that a consumer can spend hundreds of hours playing with is going to be less profitable than a stream of games that take 15-20 hours to complete.
2) Balancing capabilities vs. making sure your regular games are still better. Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit on the Amiga was originally slated to include a lot more capabilities, like getting powerups. These were removed because of thinking along the lines of "if you can build a shooter that's as good or better than ones on the store shelves, we're not going to sell any of those."
3) Support. Supporting what is basically a dev tool for the average consumer would be a nightmare. Most of the mod tools for existing games are unsupported, but I poked around in the NWN forum just for chuckles, and - as limited as the NWN editor is - people were still having a lot of trouble with basic questions like "how can I resize monster objects" (answer: "you can't").
That having been said, I really miss this type of product too. Something like EA's Adventure Construction Set was pretty limited, but making my own world was a lot of fun, as was using the random game generator.
I love the idea of Linux, and I've set up and administered several servers based on it, but the overhead in terms of time is just too much for me to deal with. I like working on PCs, but I don't like being *forced* to work on them to do basic things I need to get done. I don't have enough free time to get Linux running properly on one of my own PCs, let alone troubleshoot it over the phone for my mom. Then there's the issue of ongoing support. If I set up my mom with Linux, and then I [ move across the country/die/am otherwise rendered incapable of making in-person visits ], who is she supposed to get to fix it? My mom lives on an island. She connects at 28.8 because of the terrible quality of the phone lines, which means I can't remotely do anything. No one on the island is going to be able to help her out, so if there are serious issues, she'd just be out of luck. I'd much rather she be able to go to the one computer store on that island and say "hey, Windows won't load, could you copy some important files off of the hard drive to CD and then fix it?" than have them - for example - not be able to pull off her word processing docs because the guys there don't know Linux.
I'm a little concerned with the prospect of SpamAssassin combined with automated notification of ISPs for two reasons:
SpamAssassin - it's overzealous, at least in some configurations. I replied to a "free computer parts" email I got through a friend (it was from his coworker) saying "sure, I'd be interested in a couple of those things" and it got dumped into his spam box because his original message had mentioned the words "toner cartridge" in relation to a printer he was giving away. Since he followed the "check the spam box once a week or so" philosophy, by the time he saw my message he'd already sent all the stuff to the recycler since he thought no one wanted it.
Automated reporting - IMO, it's a cool concept, but a bad idea in practice. I've been tagged at least once by a script like that, with root@myisp, postmaster@myisp, etc all spammed because I'd used one of the key phrases in a post on Usenet or a mailing list (it was awhile ago, I can't remember the exact details).
Automated systems are great for bringing things to people's attention, but it's unfair to expect everyone else to suffer the consequences of arbitrary rules set for them by their maintainers when they take action on their own. Another example is a music-related mailing list I'm on. One of the subscriber's (corporate) mailservers is set up with a filter to block and reply with a canned message to anything with the word "hot" in the title. Someone started a thread along the lines of "hot tips for the S-760" and we all ended up getting a ton of the autoreplies for several days afterwards. It's not as bad as the sysadmins at your ISP being told that "one of your users is a spammer!!! look!!" but it's an example of what happens when someone with good intentions goes over the top (and then doesn't specify an address to contact if there are problems with the filter).
Slashdot Mirror
Can someone tell me how explaining the reason that someone associated cremation with going to hell is considered flamebait?
I fully agree, which is why I'm glad that a company in my own city is working on a space elevator that should cost around $10 billion - which is less than we're looking to spend to replace an earthquake-damamged viaduct.
I agree with your ethical reasoning, but I don't think it applies to these concerns:
- A perfectly-protected digital product (which is theoretical, of course) is impossible to back up. I have a right to be able to back up things I own so that if the original is damaged I don't have to buy it again.
- Adding copy protection like this only increases the cost for legitimate consumers, since the people who pirate it are going to do so and get it for free anyway.
Some religions (or at least sects of those religions) believe that cremation is morally wrong.
I'm guessing you (like several people I know) don't understand why people play videogames either.
A lot of people (like myself) would like to do things that we can't - whether it's flying a space shuttle, piloting mecha, or leading a party of adventurers into a dungeon.
Flying an airplane is cool, but it's just not the same thing, any more than getting a job in the timber industry driving a six-legged forest walker would convince me to sell my copy of MechWarrior 2 =).
I don't have a problem with a non-lethal weapon that causes temporary pain without permanent damage to its targets. I think it's vastly preferable to the alternatives.
I do, however, think it's unethical to test such a weapon on animals, especially when they have human volunteers for the project.
"does it really matter that the government knows what you are up to?"
Yes, it does. The right to privacy is a basic element of a free society. If you want to give up that right, there are plenty of other countries in the world that do *not* guarantee it.
The Sharper Image beat you to it.
Now you too can look like the cyborg security guards in Cloud City.
Oh yeah, PC-DOPE! I always wanted to try it out to prove to myself that it was impossible, but it never made my PC make any sounds from either the built-in speaker *or* the audio output.
In fact, it looks like you can still download it, at least from here: http://www.third-plateau.org/knowledgebase/downloa ds.shtml. Maybe I'll pull the old 486SX out of the closet so I don't overdose from running it on my Athlon XP system =).
Booting from floppy is incredibly useful for legacy purposes and for flashing BIOSes.
There are several pieces of older sampler (as in the musical instrument)-related software that read/write disc images, but only work under DOS.
Even though a lot of hardware can be flashed from Windows now, at least as much of it cannot. I was surprised when I put my latest PC together to discover that the CDROM drive, DVDROM drive, MB, and even my brand-new GeForce4 can only be flashed from DOS.
I think Jesse Jarrell and Isa Gordon's Psymbiote is the most elegant design I've seen for a wearable computer.
A lot of the games were the same, but the technology behind them was not. If you compare the Atari 2600 version of Asteroids, Pac Man, or Star Wars with the arcade version, you will see light-years of difference.
Some examples:
Asteroids on the Atari 2600 (Raster graphics)
Asteroids in the arcade (Vector graphics)
Atari 2600 Pac Man (Raster)
Arcade Pac Man Plus (Also Raster, no shots of the original, but the graphics are the same)
Atari 2600 Star Wars(Raster)
Arcade Star Wars (Vector)
Liquid bearings add a little bit to the price. At New Egg, for example, a 40GB ATA133 Maxtor is $3 more with liquid bearings and an 80GB ATA133 Maxtor is $8 more with liquid bearings.
Allegedly they operate with less noise than standard bearings. I haven't verified this personally, but the online reviews I've read seem to indicate that this is true.
I hope, before you formed that opinion, that you crossreferenced the UCITA promotional link you provided with other, more balanced links, almost all of which are critical of UCITA
I haven't formed any opinion yet. I just found that summary a useful starting point since - unlike the letter linked in the beginning of this thread - it doesn't assume prior knowledge of the subject.
Even if I do end up disagreeing with UCITA, it is still critical for me to know how its proponents intend it to be perceived.
If, like me, you've never heard of UCITA and are looking to form your own opinion, a summary is available here:
http://www.ucitaonline.com/slhpwiu.html
I completely agree. /. summary was giving me visions of spikey-haired guys in a van pulling up my crappy old webpage from 1996 and using it against me.
Right before reading this thread I had just watched _Enemy of the State_ for the first time, and the
So I read the article, and while (like EotS) it is a little overblown in terms of the power it attributes to Google, it's basically just saying "look! you can find stuff online! especially if you use unique keywords!"
A little fearfully, I decided to do a search on my own name, and all I came up with was a link to a document on the web site I maintain and my entry in the Old Man Murray Cratemaster screenshot competition =).
In the US, mod chips are illegal under the DMCA because their primary purpose is to circumvent copy protection. I would be surprised if Canada didn't have a similar law, or at least plans for one. They beat us to the "tax blank media to 'compensate' the record industry" laws, after all =).
So while it's a lot less likely that he would have been convicted on the mod chip charge alone, it's not *impossible*.
That's a little like saying that it's okay to intentionally spread AIDS because it's within the power of your sex partners to abstain or use protection.
Doing something which can easily lead to people dying is not suddenly ethical just because it is theoretically possible for them to prevent it.
I remember reading an article in Newsweek back when the YF22 was selected. The YF22 was newly built from the ground up, whereas the YF23 incorporated some old bits and bobs (I remember specifically that the entire cockpit was from an F15). Apparently that was one of the big factors, that Lockheed could have what was basically a complete prototype in the same time that it took Northrop/MD to build one using old parts as stand-ins.
I see a new ad campaign... "UnitedLinux: You've never seen a way of painting lamb's blood on your doorway like this."
=)
In a perfectly-managed world, the RAID array would probably be a better choice, because corporations wouldn't have tons of free disk space lying around on workstations.
I work for a large (~50k+ employees) organization, and the vast majority of our workstations have 1-15GB free on their drives. It almost never gets used because most of the large-volume users are too paranoid to store anything locally for fear of it getting erased.
I could see something like this being really handy, especially since we do deal in multi-terabytes of disk space for certain applications.
I can think of several reasons why this type of product isn't really produced anymore:
1) There's no continuing revenue from it. Games are getting shorter and shorter (for a variety of reasons), so something that a consumer can spend hundreds of hours playing with is going to be less profitable than a stream of games that take 15-20 hours to complete.
2) Balancing capabilities vs. making sure your regular games are still better. Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit on the Amiga was originally slated to include a lot more capabilities, like getting powerups. These were removed because of thinking along the lines of "if you can build a shooter that's as good or better than ones on the store shelves, we're not going to sell any of those."
3) Support. Supporting what is basically a dev tool for the average consumer would be a nightmare. Most of the mod tools for existing games are unsupported, but I poked around in the NWN forum just for chuckles, and - as limited as the NWN editor is - people were still having a lot of trouble with basic questions like "how can I resize monster objects" (answer: "you can't").
That having been said, I really miss this type of product too. Something like EA's Adventure Construction Set was pretty limited, but making my own world was a lot of fun, as was using the random game generator.
I totally agree.
I love the idea of Linux, and I've set up and administered several servers based on it, but the overhead in terms of time is just too much for me to deal with.
I like working on PCs, but I don't like being *forced* to work on them to do basic things I need to get done. I don't have enough free time to get Linux running properly on one of my own PCs, let alone troubleshoot it over the phone for my mom.
Then there's the issue of ongoing support. If I set up my mom with Linux, and then I [ move across the country/die/am otherwise rendered incapable of making in-person visits ], who is she supposed to get to fix it? My mom lives on an island. She connects at 28.8 because of the terrible quality of the phone lines, which means I can't remotely do anything. No one on the island is going to be able to help her out, so if there are serious issues, she'd just be out of luck.
I'd much rather she be able to go to the one computer store on that island and say "hey, Windows won't load, could you copy some important files off of the hard drive to CD and then fix it?" than have them - for example - not be able to pull off her word processing docs because the guys there don't know Linux.
OMG! So clever! And you're so proud of your achievement that you post anonymously.
I'm a little concerned with the prospect of SpamAssassin combined with automated notification of ISPs for two reasons:
SpamAssassin - it's overzealous, at least in some configurations. I replied to a "free computer parts" email I got through a friend (it was from his coworker) saying "sure, I'd be interested in a couple of those things" and it got dumped into his spam box because his original message had mentioned the words "toner cartridge" in relation to a printer he was giving away. Since he followed the "check the spam box once a week or so" philosophy, by the time he saw my message he'd already sent all the stuff to the recycler since he thought no one wanted it.
Automated reporting - IMO, it's a cool concept, but a bad idea in practice. I've been tagged at least once by a script like that, with root@myisp, postmaster@myisp, etc all spammed because I'd used one of the key phrases in a post on Usenet or a mailing list (it was awhile ago, I can't remember the exact details).
Automated systems are great for bringing things to people's attention, but it's unfair to expect everyone else to suffer the consequences of arbitrary rules set for them by their maintainers when they take action on their own. Another example is a music-related mailing list I'm on. One of the subscriber's (corporate) mailservers is set up with a filter to block and reply with a canned message to anything with the word "hot" in the title. Someone started a thread along the lines of "hot tips for the S-760" and we all ended up getting a ton of the autoreplies for several days afterwards. It's not as bad as the sysadmins at your ISP being told that "one of your users is a spammer!!! look!!" but it's an example of what happens when someone with good intentions goes over the top (and then doesn't specify an address to contact if there are problems with the filter).