One of the beauties of Star Craft is that the game can be over in 4 minutes. Your adrenaline starts pumping from the time the first probe hits the mineral line.
You've got to be prepared for the rush. If you leave yourself open to it then you have no one but yourself to blame.
If you're good enough, you can stop it and still have a better economy than your opponent who had to sacrifice his own economy to get early units.
I can understand if that style of game doesn't appeal to you, but I've always found it to be a very enjoyable part of the core mechanic of StarCraft. Rushing loses to standard openings, standard openings lose to economic powering, and economic powering loses to rushing. This rock, paper, scissors element shows up in the game over and over again.
Heh. I was going to link the same article.
You linked page 3, btw.
Here is page 1
It's probably the best thing on the site, and the site has many quality articles.
Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
DeSadeski: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
The California constitution is an "actual" constitution as well. At least we Californians like to think so.
Our legal system doesn't work on a majority rules basis. If the majority of Californians voted that you, Bryansix, weren't allowed to get married, you'd still be able to say, hey, that's not a valid law, because it discriminates against me specifically, and we have constitutional protections that say people are equal under the law.
And just because something wasn't permitted in the past isn't a good indication that we should keep it that way: As recently as 1967 there were state laws banning marriage of white and non-white people.
The "activist" judge overseeing Loving v. Virginia found that this wasn't consistent with our concept of equality under the law and overturned it. Mildred and Richard Loving's rights were protected even though many people at the time undoubtedly found their relationship distasteful.
And now three republican and one democratic California Supreme Court justices have ruled that preventing gay couples from marrying violates their civil rights. I have no doubt that in forty years we'll look back on this case in a similar way.
What I'm saying here is... this is legit. This is the judicial system doing what the judicial system is there to do.
So, stop with the whining already and suck it up. :)
Yeah, I get the feeling that this is going to be Yahoo vs Google in search world, except this time Google is the Yahoo.
For the complete ClusterF!!! that Wikipedia is, it's got some fascinating information. The articles I read on Knol were frankly shallow by comparison.
It does seem to be skewed towards medical articles, and there might be advantages to having experts write up medical entries.
I'm sure the Google's lawyers quake when they think of someone typing "epileptic seizure" into Google, getting the Wikipedia entry, and some joker has added advice to smear yogurt over the victims nipples.
It might be less convenient to develop open source software without the GPL, since others would be able to modify your software and distribute the modified binaries, without releasing their source changes
Exactly.
But then you'd be free to reverse-engineer their code and port the changes back into your open source version
You throw around the word reverse-engineer like it were a trivial thing. Sure, unobfuscated java class files decompile quite nicely, but as soon as you get away from that, you're massively ramping up the overhead required to modify their code.
- or you could just freely use and share their binary version.
But not change it... which is really the whole point of the GPL.
As long as there's demand for movies like Toy Story to be produced, I have a hard time seeing how they could just "go away": if the market has taught us anything, it's that money will eventually find its way from the people who want something to the people who can provide it.
Exactly. And that system is called copyright! It's a novel idea that lets a movie maker recoup the cost of creating a movie from many, many interested parties, meaning that no single one of them has to fund the entire venture.
It's already happening, slowly but surely. See Big Buck Bunny [bigbuckbunny.org], for example.
I didn't watch BBB, but I did download Elephants Dream. It was an interesting technology demo, but it wasn't much of a movie. I'm not quite ready to trade in all of Hollywood for it yet.
And yet bloggers are still faced with takedown notices for obvious instances of fair use. HorsesAss.org just had to deal with something like this, where they posted a short clip from TVW (basically a statewide C-SPAN) and ended up having to host it themselves because TVW complained to YouTube.
Agreed. This is a problem. I talked about it in the last post.
Yes, those are negative effects, and it's important that they be balanced out by sufficient positives. The negatives of copyright, however, are not, and there's little evidence that copyright really is important for the common good.
And this is really where we disagree I think. I see copyright as being important for the common good. Even something as interesting as the GPL would not exist without it. You might say that the GPL would be unnecessary, but if you think about it, that isn't quite true...
And like you say, we wouldn't have Toy Story or the Incredibles, or for that matter any movie with a budget of more than a hundred thousand dollars.
There would still be music, books, and software, although there would probably be a smaller selection of them.
The landscape would indeed be different without copyright, but it's a fallacy to conclude that "different" means "worse".
Heh. Perhaps I'm just short sighted then. I look at the content we agree we would lose, and I don't want it to go away. Of the content we would gain... I'm not really seeing the added value.
Perhaps you could have people building up movies organically like open source software. But I can't really picture that working out.
(No pedantic hair-splitting over "communicate" vs. "say", please. Sending you a file over the internet is equivalent to calling you on the phone and reading a bunch of numbers; it's just more convenient.)
I'm afraid I'm going to have to object to this. File transfer and human speech are distinct operations in my book. I suspect most people would agree.
You don't think those videos just magically disappear when someone complains, at no cost to anyone involved, do you?
It would be silly to deny that there are some costs to Google. They aren't complaining and don't appear to be suffering for it. It's only one of the regulatory issues that they have to deal with on a day to day basis. I'm sure they appreciate you stepping in to fight for them though.
The sites also become less useful as a result. If I want to share a news clip, maybe I'll choose to host it myself instead of putting it on YouTube, because I'm wary that someone portrayed in the clip might file a takedown notice, which will waste my time even if I manage to counter it
I think there are two different issues here... one, you don't own copyright to a news clip, so you probably don't actually have the right to post it to YouTube.
But there is another issue you touch on that I think is a problem: The people with the biggest lawyers often win these competitions. So there are cases where even legal behavior is quashed through overreaching legal coercion. I'm not sure how to best address this, but I don't think it means we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Right. Like I said, that's one of the negative effects that copyright has on people other than the copyright holders: if they want to share something, but they're forbidden from doing so, that's hardly a good thing for them.
If you're going to start considering everything that people want to do but aren't allowed to as a "negative effect" then I'm sure you'll find many examples. I don't want to pay taxes. I don't want to obey speed limits. We as a society have decided that these things are important for the common good.
In addition, it's unclear that without copyright laws, the copyrighted content that the people want to share would even exist. Do you think Pixar would spend fifty million dollars creating their next movie if they couldn't charge licensing fees to make back their investment?
I will grant you that the hardware limitations are lame. I would favor letting people buy hardware that lets them do the useful, fair use things they want to do.
But...
"Average folks have to restrict what they say to each other because some pieces of information are off-limits."
Sound familiar? You can't throw it out there, then claim somebody else brought it in as a strawman.
"Web hosts have to police their users' content"
Yeah, since when. Do you think Cmdr. Taco reads all the posts that go up on slashdot? That people at YouTube look at each new video?
You know they don't. They do take-downs when the actual copyright owners ask them to. So the owners of the content have to police the websites themselves.
"end users who are prohibited from sharing content with other people"
Yeah, well, that's really the whole point, isn't it. The end users have purchased a license to the content that lets them use the content. If someone else wants to use it, they need to buy a license.
God knows nobody is forcing them to though. Maybe if they feel strongly about it they should go find an open source alternative to the content. Then they can share to their heart's content.
We've been using pfSense as the firewall for our business for the last couple of months.
We tried some of the other open source install on a PC firewall packages, but they didn't offer the features or the user interface that pfsense offers.
The quality of service graphing was very useful for us. You can select a router for your firewall to ping every minute. The pfsense web interface will display a real-time graph of the ping time/packet loss to this machine. It shows various time intervals from the last four hours, to the last year.
We used it to monitor a bad router a few hops out from us, in order to have data to present to our ISP.
I haven't used the traffic shaping portions of the firewall yet, but I've heard good things about the software that it's based on.
I went the other way. I haven't bought a game that wasn't on Steam for the last couple of years.
I have about 40 or so Steam games now. Many purchases through packs. Got the whole id catalog for like $50. Replaying all the GTA III games too.
It's just damn convenient. Click to install the demo. Play the game. Like it? Type in your credit card, and it installs the full version. All patches to the game are applied automatically, so you're always playing the most recent version.
Well, the steam cloud storage is an API that the developers are going to have to interface with, so, if they're smart, they save machine specific settings on the machine, and use the steam cloud for player specific settings.
They're donating months/years of their time, finding funding for millions of dollars of equipment, and they discover the people making the rules are on a completely different wavelength from their own goals.
Seems like dropping out is the only sane thing to do. Why play if you're not having any fun?
Hah. Wow. I don't even know what to say to this. Yeah, they're all going to sue you. They're probably bugging your house too. Actually they just told me they were. Apparently you're sitting at the computer right now. (how else could I know that). Well good luck!
Right. Which has nothing to do with a monopoly, unless you're going to define the term in an incredibly wide way.
Everyone is free to make and market computer generated super hero movies.
I agree that YouTube is incredibly compelling. And I'm a little surprised that they're getting away with it since it is (for the most part) one big copyright violation. I think it's because the clips are of limited length and the quality is such that nobody in their right mind would consider it a worthwhile source of either video or audio content. Except to browse and reminisce. Which in turn generates interest in the commercial properties.
I apologize. I misinterpreted your post and misrepresented you.
There are basically two types of software development that go on. Contract work for individual customers (that you and I both do for a living) and consumer software directed to a larger audience (which I've written in the past).
Copyright protection is clearly less important for contract work, because there isn't any need to spread the development costs of the software over a large group of people. One side writes the code, the other side pays for the code. Everybody is happy.
But for consumer software where writing the code may require many man years of development and will appeal to a wide audience, copyright laws allow a vender to charge a comparatively low price to a wide swath of people.
Take Bioshock for example, a popular single player video game. They spent millions of development dollars creating this piece of software, but what did I pay for it? $60
Because with copyright laws they can sell individual licenses to people like me so that the development costs are shared.
If only one person had to buy the software then they could share it with everyone on the internet, the developer would go broke. Or the one person would have to pay $10 million for the video game. Pretty unlikely.
That's the part that the free information people never seem to get. Copyright make it possible for people to create great stuff and make a living doing it. Stuff that you and I want to buy.
Slashdot Mirror
For items that are costlier to create (TV shows, movies), product placement is a fine way to profit from the distribution of the product.
"Mommy.. why is Gandolf drinking a coke?"
"Never mind, dear."
I recently grew a beard, and I've noticed a subtle difference in the way authority figures treat me.
I think it has less to do with looking like a terrorist (I'm blond and blue eyed), and more to do with looking like a trouble maker.
As a geek, I'm actually kind of flattered that I can manage to look vaguely dangerous, but it is occasionally a pain in the ass.
One of the beauties of Star Craft is that the game can be over in 4 minutes. Your adrenaline starts pumping from the time the first probe hits the mineral line.
You've got to be prepared for the rush. If you leave yourself open to it then you have no one but yourself to blame.
If you're good enough, you can stop it and still have a better economy than your opponent who had to sacrifice his own economy to get early units.
I can understand if that style of game doesn't appeal to you, but I've always found it to be a very enjoyable part of the core mechanic of StarCraft. Rushing loses to standard openings, standard openings lose to economic powering, and economic powering loses to rushing. This rock, paper, scissors element shows up in the game over and over again.
Heh. I was going to link the same article. You linked page 3, btw. Here is page 1 It's probably the best thing on the site, and the site has many quality articles.
Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
DeSadeski: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
Strangelove: Thank you, sir.
The California constitution is an "actual" constitution as well. At least we Californians like to think so.
Our legal system doesn't work on a majority rules basis. If the majority of Californians voted that you, Bryansix, weren't allowed to get married, you'd still be able to say, hey, that's not a valid law, because it discriminates against me specifically, and we have constitutional protections that say people are equal under the law.
And just because something wasn't permitted in the past isn't a good indication that we should keep it that way: As recently as 1967 there were state laws banning marriage of white and non-white people.
The "activist" judge overseeing Loving v. Virginia found that this wasn't consistent with our concept of equality under the law and overturned it. Mildred and Richard Loving's rights were protected even though many people at the time undoubtedly found their relationship distasteful.
And now three republican and one democratic California Supreme Court justices have ruled that preventing gay couples from marrying violates their civil rights. I have no doubt that in forty years we'll look back on this case in a similar way.
What I'm saying here is... this is legit. This is the judicial system doing what the judicial system is there to do.
So, stop with the whining already and suck it up. :)
Let me diagram my post for you.
The D.C. law said you couldn't have handguns. The courts said this law violated the constitution. The constitution wins, you get guns.
The California law said gay people couldn't get married. The courts said this violated the constitution. The constitution wins, I get to get married.
I'm just pointing out that we could just stop being bitter and enjoy our freedoms. Really, it was kind of a light and frothy post.
Yeah, I get the feeling that this is going to be Yahoo vs Google in search world, except this time Google is the Yahoo.
For the complete ClusterF!!! that Wikipedia is, it's got some fascinating information. The articles I read on Knol were frankly shallow by comparison.
It does seem to be skewed towards medical articles, and there might be advantages to having experts write up medical entries.
I'm sure the Google's lawyers quake when they think of someone typing "epileptic seizure" into Google, getting the Wikipedia entry, and some joker has added advice to smear yogurt over the victims nipples.
unconstitutional state law.
We should be able to work this out. Maybe we can just agree that you get to keep your handguns and I get to get married.
Exactly.
You throw around the word reverse-engineer like it were a trivial thing. Sure, unobfuscated java class files decompile quite nicely, but as soon as you get away from that, you're massively ramping up the overhead required to modify their code.
But not change it... which is really the whole point of the GPL.
Exactly. And that system is called copyright! It's a novel idea that lets a movie maker recoup the cost of creating a movie from many, many interested parties, meaning that no single one of them has to fund the entire venture.
I didn't watch BBB, but I did download Elephants Dream. It was an interesting technology demo, but it wasn't much of a movie. I'm not quite ready to trade in all of Hollywood for it yet.
Agreed. This is a problem. I talked about it in the last post.
And this is really where we disagree I think. I see copyright as being important for the common good. Even something as interesting as the GPL would not exist without it. You might say that the GPL would be unnecessary, but if you think about it, that isn't quite true...
And like you say, we wouldn't have Toy Story or the Incredibles, or for that matter any movie with a budget of more than a hundred thousand dollars.
There would still be music, books, and software, although there would probably be a smaller selection of them.
Heh. Perhaps I'm just short sighted then. I look at the content we agree we would lose, and I don't want it to go away. Of the content we would gain... I'm not really seeing the added value.
Perhaps you could have people building up movies organically like open source software. But I can't really picture that working out.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to object to this. File transfer and human speech are distinct operations in my book. I suspect most people would agree.
It would be silly to deny that there are some costs to Google. They aren't complaining and don't appear to be suffering for it. It's only one of the regulatory issues that they have to deal with on a day to day basis. I'm sure they appreciate you stepping in to fight for them though.
I think there are two different issues here... one, you don't own copyright to a news clip, so you probably don't actually have the right to post it to YouTube.
But there is another issue you touch on that I think is a problem: The people with the biggest lawyers often win these competitions. So there are cases where even legal behavior is quashed through overreaching legal coercion. I'm not sure how to best address this, but I don't think it means we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
If you're going to start considering everything that people want to do but aren't allowed to as a "negative effect" then I'm sure you'll find many examples. I don't want to pay taxes. I don't want to obey speed limits. We as a society have decided that these things are important for the common good.
In addition, it's unclear that without copyright laws, the copyrighted content that the people want to share would even exist. Do you think Pixar would spend fifty million dollars creating their next movie if they couldn't charge licensing fees to make back their investment?
I will grant you that the hardware limitations are lame. I would favor letting people buy hardware that lets them do the useful, fair use things they want to do.
But...
"Average folks have to restrict what they say to each other because some pieces of information are off-limits."
Sound familiar? You can't throw it out there, then claim somebody else brought it in as a strawman.
"Web hosts have to police their users' content"
Yeah, since when. Do you think Cmdr. Taco reads all the posts that go up on slashdot? That people at YouTube look at each new video?
You know they don't. They do take-downs when the actual copyright owners ask them to. So the owners of the content have to police the websites themselves.
"end users who are prohibited from sharing content with other people"
Yeah, well, that's really the whole point, isn't it. The end users have purchased a license to the content that lets them use the content. If someone else wants to use it, they need to buy a license.
God knows nobody is forcing them to though. Maybe if they feel strongly about it they should go find an open source alternative to the content. Then they can share to their heart's content.
lol. I'm guessing you're happy you posted that one AC.
Someone should point out to you that Free Software is currently produced even *with* copyright law.
This way authors have the freedom to choose. Do I want to give my work away, or do I want to charge for it?
This way users have a choice: is the current open source solution the best choice, or would I like to pony up for a commercial product?
Why should we force everyone down one path, when clearly there is a place for both options?
We've been using pfSense as the firewall for our business for the last couple of months.
We tried some of the other open source install on a PC firewall packages, but they didn't offer the features or the user interface that pfsense offers.
The quality of service graphing was very useful for us. You can select a router for your firewall to ping every minute. The pfsense web interface will display a real-time graph of the ping time/packet loss to this machine. It shows various time intervals from the last four hours, to the last year.
We used it to monitor a bad router a few hops out from us, in order to have data to present to our ISP.
I haven't used the traffic shaping portions of the firewall yet, but I've heard good things about the software that it's based on.
I went the other way. I haven't bought a game that wasn't on Steam for the last couple of years.
I have about 40 or so Steam games now. Many purchases through packs. Got the whole id catalog for like $50. Replaying all the GTA III games too.
It's just damn convenient. Click to install the demo. Play the game. Like it? Type in your credit card, and it installs the full version. All patches to the game are applied automatically, so you're always playing the most recent version.
And if you ever get a letter from the RIAA, then you literally will be putting your money where your mouth was.
You might find that your choice of music distribution was more expensive than iTunes.
Well, the steam cloud storage is an API that the developers are going to have to interface with, so, if they're smart, they save machine specific settings on the machine, and use the steam cloud for player specific settings.
How exactly is that childish?
They're donating months/years of their time, finding funding for millions of dollars of equipment, and they discover the people making the rules are on a completely different wavelength from their own goals.
Seems like dropping out is the only sane thing to do. Why play if you're not having any fun?
Who's pretending? I live in Los Angeles. About 20% of my friends make their living in the film industry.
They're not getting rich or anything, but they make a decent living doing script supervising, lighting special effects, building sets, etc.
Their salaries depend on the money people pay for the movies that they make.
Hah. Wow. I don't even know what to say to this. Yeah, they're all going to sue you. They're probably bugging your house too. Actually they just told me they were. Apparently you're sitting at the computer right now. (how else could I know that). Well good luck!
Right. Which has nothing to do with a monopoly, unless you're going to define the term in an incredibly wide way.
Everyone is free to make and market computer generated super hero movies.
I agree that YouTube is incredibly compelling. And I'm a little surprised that they're getting away with it since it is (for the most part) one big copyright violation. I think it's because the clips are of limited length and the quality is such that nobody in their right mind would consider it a worthwhile source of either video or audio content. Except to browse and reminisce. Which in turn generates interest in the commercial properties.
I apologize. I misinterpreted your post and misrepresented you.
There are basically two types of software development that go on. Contract work for individual customers (that you and I both do for a living) and consumer software directed to a larger audience (which I've written in the past).
Copyright protection is clearly less important for contract work, because there isn't any need to spread the development costs of the software over a large group of people. One side writes the code, the other side pays for the code. Everybody is happy.
But for consumer software where writing the code may require many man years of development and will appeal to a wide audience, copyright laws allow a vender to charge a comparatively low price to a wide swath of people.
Take Bioshock for example, a popular single player video game. They spent millions of development dollars creating this piece of software, but what did I pay for it? $60
Because with copyright laws they can sell individual licenses to people like me so that the development costs are shared.
If only one person had to buy the software then they could share it with everyone on the internet, the developer would go broke. Or the one person would have to pay $10 million for the video game. Pretty unlikely.
That's the part that the free information people never seem to get. Copyright make it possible for people to create great stuff and make a living doing it. Stuff that you and I want to buy.
You kill copyright, and the stuff goes away.
What monopolies are we talking about here?
If Britney Spears records a song does that mean that nobody else can record a song?
If Pixar creates "The Incredibles" does that mean that nobody else can make a movie?
No, there is plenty of competition in the music and movie worlds.
So go out there and make some art my friend. And give it away if you like. Nobody is stopping you.