Up until the 1980s (but primarily in the 1950s), major radio stations produced audio dramas. Sometimes adaptations of books (including both of your examples, Treasure Island and Amontillado, and others of the ilk), sometimes pulp-magazine short stories, and sometimes originals.
A simple websearch for "OTR" or "Old Time Radio" will find many sources for digitized recordings- on CDROM, MP3, or streaming audio.
The providers / traders of these files seem to act as if the stuff is public domain. I guess they haven't heard of the Sonny Bono act. It's hard to blame them for ignoring the law- it seems quite silly to think that something broadcast in 1935 is still copyrighted.
In any event, the widespread availablity of last century's radio plays reduces the incentive for any modern group to work on reading Gutenberg texts aloud. No net.geek will do a better job than Orson Welles.
It looks like you meant to write the traditional "cleanup code" example, but your pseudocode does not make sense. "close(resource1);" should only be done if it had been opened (when "a" was true), but you have it called based on "b", not "a".
The pattern you're looking for is if (!(a = open("a"))) return; if (!(b = open("b"))){
close(a); return; } if (!(c = open("c"))){
close(b); close(a); return; }...
Anyhow, gotos are still bad (from the academic standpoint that professors use).
The example of cleanup statements is an insufficient argument for allowing goto into a language. That problem can be solved with try/catch exception handlers, or final{} blocks, or even a special limited-goto which can only jump forward to the top-level of the same function.
A real goto statement, however, can do many more things that just jump to the postscript of a function. It can jump forwards, backwards, to/from the bodies of loops and other functions- in short, it can make your program enormously more difficult to understand, analyze, or optimize.
Djikstra alluded to the wisdom that goto should only be used for "alarm exits" or "abortion clauses". But restricting programmers to only use a feature in a few certain ways is less reliable than restricting the language to offer only safer, alternative features.
Or, maybe, by providing competition in the "low-per-payment fee" category, they'll inspire the Credit Cards to change how they work.
Scenario A: Peppercoin.com becomes moderately successful, and has a few clones/competitors spring up. Then Visa and Mastercard buy them all out, and start offering micropayments as part of their normal services.
Scenario B: Peppercoin.com is successful, and begins accepting bank checks (instead of ccard payments) to reconcile your monthly bill. Eventually some customers start using Peppercoin for even large transactions, and don't bother with credit-cards anymore. Visa and Mastercard are forced to adapt.
If each individual merchant accumulated credit to occasional payoffs, there would be too much overhead, and no reliable guarantee that the charges would ever be large enough to be worth reconciling.
The biggest problem is of merchants who don't have enough content to have a chance for any one consumer to spend enough for the transaction to be worthwhile. Suppose me & 2 friends play a song and sell it as MP3 for $0.35. If it's a nice tune, we might get a few thousand people willing to pay per month. But if each only spends $1, we can't aggregate enough to profitably collect from their credit cards. But, since those consumers are probably also purchasing many other small data items online, Peppercoin.com can wait and aggregate them into reasonable chunks.
A related benefit is that Peppercoin (or some other, centralized micropayments service) will reduce the sign-up overhead for accessing paid-content. Today paid content is very rare- not just because you've got to be billed a lot (to cover ccard fees), but also because the time it takes for a potential user to sign up for the first use of the service.
By the time a customer has input credit card and billing info, created & memorized a password, and decided if the merchant is trustworthy or not, he's probably lost interest in whatever drew him there, or is ready to search for a free alternative (even if it's not quite as good).
If a user could follow a random link from a weblog and see a promise of amusing content for $0.25, there's a fair chance he'll pay it, as long as only 2-3 mouse clicks are needed.
(Yes, this does open the door to some scams- mislabelling my junk files as something valuable or entertaining. But there are technological approaches to make them less likely- distributed reputation servers and similar)
You can. Just append the text "and apparatus" after the writeup of your algorithm. You haven't quite patented the alg itself, but you do have rights to any machine running it, which is just as good.
That still doesn't mean a customer gets a dice-roll to avoid paying. Peppercoin.com will probably aggregate all of a customer's monthly purchases into a single transaction.
That way, they only lose money on the credit-card overhead if a user makes just a few micropayments per month. This is probably a kind of loss-leader behavior to jumpstart the industry. Hopefully, once things get rolling along, no customer will have an incentive to spend $10/month.
(And if that happens, they might decide to push back the billing for another 30 days, to keep costs low.)
Most people who have the expertise needed to make meaningful changes to system config at the sector level (or even the/etc level) will already have another method of writing to the hard disk.
The fix-it guy could slam the drive into a computer dedicated for that task, or insert a boot CD to take precedence over the hard disk. In either case, the repairer then has access to a full suite of personalized software and online documentation to help him do the repairs right. Much more powerful than anything the BIOS could provide.
the First Ammendment is not relevant to this discussion. However, fair use is.
They're the same thing. The "Fair" part about the use is that it is in support of freedom of speech.
Duplicating an author's work is against copyright law. But duplicating parts of the work may be necessary to produce other kinds of original, protected speech (like journalistic review and academic analysis), and is allowed.
"Fair Use" is basically the courts' established interpretation of the boundaries between the First Amendment and Section 8.8.
I assumed that Neo's waking world was a near-future scenario where strong DRM had made casual music-duplication impossible. Only uber-hackers could trick the computer into unprotecting a copyrighted work.
So, the punks just wanted some unreleased tracks from N4pster.
"The Patriot" depicted events which bore no resemblance to the actual conduct of the Revolutionary War. Nothing plausible about them at all.
There were a handful of well-documented atrocities against civilians, but nothing on the scale presented in that film. The British were trained to conduct a very "civilized" style of warfare, and although this was stressed by the colonists' reluctance to wear uniforms, they never attacked obvious civilians.
In particular, the burning of a church full of civilians is something that the forces of Vlad the Impaler and Adolf Hitler have both done, but the Redcoats would never consider such a thing.
What if I created a film about a real 14th centruy Pope, and had him conduct murderous Black Masses? Would that be OK? It would all depend on how it was portrayed. If an obvious fantasy, then it's fine. If I use it merely as the backdrop for some other story, and present those events as if they'd really happened, then I've committed a double wrong: my audience has been mis-educated, and the Vactican has been defamed.
"The Butcher" really did exist
The fact that he did exist makes more wrong. To create a fictional man to commit warcrimes is one thing. To invent major atrocities and assign them to a person who merely executed some prisoners is another. (His actions were somewhat defensible even by modern rules of war. "Spies"- combatants without uniforms- were often executed in 20th century combat)
You want to watch some guy wash colonial dishes for two hours? I sure don't.
We could watch some guy battle British troops for two hours. That really happened, and would be exciting. We could even exaggerate the hero's prowess, and let him play decisive role in every major battle. But the producer of "The Patriot" decided to underscore the hero's goodness by exaggerating his enemy's badness, and in so doing, libelled an entire nation.
Fictional man, doing good: no problem.
Real man, doing good: Author may be misrepresenting the truth, but it's positive, so there's few complaints.
Fictional man, doing bad: The audience knows it's all fake, so no harm done.
Real man, doing bad: The author is spreading lies.
I don't know the detail's of Sony's planning (although 10^6 was even more focused on offline combat than Sovreign was going to be), but for persistent games in general, there is a 3rd option for preventing offline players from being attacked:
Force (major) PvP combat to be prescheduled.
That is, the enemy must announce the time of the attack (to within 30 minutes) from 24 to 96 hours ahead of time. That gives both your and their allies time to gather up for the fight, and helps ensure that the conquering of terrority is based on superior materials and tactical skill, and not luck of being offline at the wrong moment.
The in-character explanation for this behavior could be that the warriors are bound by a strong sense of honor, or that their bases are protected by magic fields which only can be eroded by a slow-acting magic spell. Something like the Shield Disablers of AO.
Of course, there are numerous flaws stopping this approach from being successful on its own- stemming from the fact that not everyone can skip work for an appointment made by a videogame. Partial solutions can be munged up. (For instance, the player can pre-script responses to the specific attack at that time, or delegate control of your forces to a trusted ally who will be online at that time. In a big enough clan, someone will be available 24/7. Or, the challenged player could be allowed to offer a reschedule)
Oh, any number of things could qualify as that, but they're not easy to prove. The CIA, and Clinton himself, are both notorious for leaving wiggle room. A favorite CIA line is "We weren't trying to kill him- only to sabotage his infrastructure by denying use of an automobile. If he happened to be driving it at the time, that's just an accident"
You could never share between a portals-based game (like Descent) with a BSP-tree based game like Quake, because they organize data in a fundamentally different manner.
You can. Both of those formats can be automatically compiled from a shared representation as simple polygons. The resultant map won't have the same manual optimization as if an artist had tweaked it by hand, though. For at least one of the engines, it will be slower than necessary. Quake and Descent are both 3 generations old, though, so a modern computer will chuckle at the extra work. (And the created Descent map may be quite ugly, as stretched-inverse-cubes are unlikely to gracefully represent the details of a Quake level)
The more substantive problem to sharing maps is the gameplay itself. Imagine what would happen if Mr. Quake was spawned in a Descent map: he'd run 10 meters, then fall into an inescapable depression- because the map was built for a flying hero. Likewise, a Descent spaceship might find a Quake map terminally boring ("I just fly up, over the castle, back down, and win!")
If the maps are intended for more compatible genres, then it might work a little better. At least assumptions like "player needs to walk across floor to the doorway" will hold true. But still, building a fun, professional-quality game map means tweaking to exactly challenge the player's ability to move, jump, and shoot.
Restricting the desired category of games to highly realistic ones makes the idea of sharing terrain much more worthwhile. In that case, as long as the terrain correctly duplicates the original location, then any inability of the game system to work well in it can be filed as a bug against the software.
In particular, I've noticed a trend in several FPS programs to include the Fort McKenna MOUT training grounds as a playable map, which becomes a common point of comparison.
Well, we're obviousy getting our propaganda from opposite ends fo the spectrum.
Propaganda? Those were terse statements of simple facts. Nobody can dispute them. I leave open the question of why one "end fo the spectrum" hides from those truths. Don't like cannabisnews? There's plenty of other places to back up that claim. Do you find the BBC more worthy of trust? Someone wanted sources, I just gave the top few Google hits. 10 minutes there will get you a flood of consistent claims. (Some morelinks, for those too busy to search on their own)
Justbecuase we gave the Taliban money doesn't mean they complied very quickly or effctively.
Oh, so paying the Taliban for doing nothing is a lot better? The reasons Clinton called them evil in 1999 didn't go away. (But they really did destroy the drug. Quite possibly the largest drug interdiction that has ever happened. Ask any street-level narc what's happening to the price or heroine these days- it's dropping steeply after the 2001 hikes.)
My understanding is that the Taliban was a loose conglomerate of several groups.
Not "loose", at least not relative to what preceded and followed them. The Taliban was the most strongly unified government in Afganistan for more than a decade.
Also, realize that it's an execute order, not a law.
Yeah, it sounds like a violation of US separation of powers, huh? Nevertheless, there are laws which declare it is illegal to violate an executive order. Regarding "emergency foreign relations", the President can nearly write his own laws. In 2002, an American citizen was prosecuted under them.
In the case of direct and specific requests of the President conflicting with previus executive orders,
Then the President should revoke that order. (This has often happened) To do otherwise is the baldest hypocracy. In a free society, the set of actions which only the government is allowed to do must be kept as small as possible.
(Note- I'm not being partisan. Clinton is similarly guilty. In November 1998 he violated Executive Order 12333 Section 2.11, leading to costly repurcussions)
If there's any truth behind the 10% brain-usage myth, it may lie in the difference between kinds of cells in the brain.
We've all heard of neurons, the interesting ones, with a blob of chemical receptors on one end and a multi-centimeter electrically-conductive tail on the other.
But also there are neuroglyia (doubt I can spell that). They account for most of the mass of a brain, but are not believed to engage in important checmical or electrical reactions.
Nonetheless, they at least serve the purpose of keeping the neurons properly supported, with correct amounts of spacing between them. So even if most of the brain's cells don't carry nerve impluses, it's incorrect to say they're not being used.
That effect may be coming much sooner than genuine Mind Reading (if it's even possible).
Mind Reading (as the term is commonly used), implies that the subject's actual, abstract thoughts are understood. This could possibly be more difficult than creating a self-aware AI.
Using some kind of neural-uplink to accelerate your data input speed is a drastically easier challenge- a foolish, wealthy person could even trying having one installed today (no guarantees of fitness or safety, though!)
Look at research like the CyberMonkey. (It mentions a biochip as a less invasive, higher resolution way to perform the procedure)
A willing human could get a bundle of electrodes buried into his cortex, and plugged via a USB interface into your computer. Then, with a lot of practice against a program that gives visible feedback, the subject could learn to control the eletrodes enough to manuver a mouse or keyboard equivalent.
Any guesses as to how many of his existing muscular systems will be paralyzed by the tampering?
A technical asset (in some cases), but not a legal one. All the technical superiority in the world doesn't help any if the government decides an entire category of technology is illegal. (Small numbers of dedicated persons can skirt a law, but the majority will have to comply)
The RIAA and MPAA have a demonstrated ability to influence lawmakers. For any clever tricks you can cook up, they can argue that the mere installation of the related software is a circumvention device. Then you could be hauled to court not for any specific act of copyright infringement, but just for having the ability to do so.
Depending on your interpretation, the present-day DMCA might not support such prosecutions. But if the trends which created the DMCA are not reversed, future laws will "correct that loophole".
The only way to make something "obscure" (enough that you get a modicum of security) is to not use it very much.
That's all the RIAA really needs- keep file trading in a corner amoung people who can comprehend the intricacies of IRC, USENET, and FTP servers. It's only when a system becomes so easy to use that it is popular (and no longer obscure) that they feel threatened.
But the fact is, as long as something is illegal, and there is money to be gained by enforcing the prohibition, America will find a way.
(Regarding 802.11b WiFi in coffee shops, there's many ways you might be tracked: if it's a paid-access arrangement, then they probably have your credit card. Or your Starbucks-Saver card, or whatever. Or the Feds can require that the MAC addresses of users be logged for some period- and begin to outlaw software which modifies the effective access. Steps like that would be a blow to free software as well)
The only really good strategy for keeping P2P transfers possible is to make them legal. Fighting to reduce the power of copyright is the way to start.
(Encouraging the developement of a safe, reliable micropayment system is an alternative approach, as it might provide an alternative economic model for the RIAA)
In 2002, the US DEA was quick to claim that opium was a prime source of Taliban funding.
But back in 2001, the US government gave the Taliban $43,000,000 dollars in exchange for destroying the opium crops that had previously supplied a major portion of their GNP.
(Never mind that "Transacting with the Taliban" had been illegal for US citizens since 1999. I don't see any of Bush's administrators being arrested for helping the Taliban much more than John Lindh ever did. It seems ignorance of the law is an excuse.)
Now that the Taliban has been deposed, the flow of Afganistan opium is starting to resume.
But, given all that, it never hooked onto who is using that card.
The Federal Department of Justice can obligate communications providers to install equipment to facilitate court-ordered investigations. Primarily, this has taken the form of telcos keeping their switches ready to trace or wiretap.
If enough ISPs start claiming "anonymous prepaid cardholder" as an explaination for failing to complete DCMA 512h requests, then the Feds will start to require them to use a Caller-Id function to log the phone numbers used for the dialup.
Avoiding spies by approaches like that is security through obscurity. It'll only work as long as too few people are doing it to make it worthwhile to hunt- and that's all the RIAA really needs.
Clever methods like that are labor intensive. They require a significant time investment both to perform the transfer, and more time for the sender and reciever to learn of each other in the first place.
The revolutionary aspect of Napster (and follow-on p2p applications) was that it made both those tasks trivially easy- less than 10 seconds of user time each.
It is these highly scaled, highly automated systems that the RIAA wants to target. And because they're automatic and repetitive, automated scanning software can easily observe them as well.
Slashdot Mirror
And if it can't load other things, then it's not a general-purpose operating system. So it's not Linux.
Up until the 1980s (but primarily in the 1950s), major radio stations produced audio dramas. Sometimes adaptations of books (including both of your examples, Treasure Island and Amontillado, and others of the ilk), sometimes pulp-magazine short stories, and sometimes originals.
A simple websearch for "OTR" or "Old Time Radio" will find many sources for digitized recordings- on CDROM, MP3, or streaming audio.
The providers / traders of these files seem to act as if the stuff is public domain. I guess they haven't heard of the Sonny Bono act. It's hard to blame them for ignoring the law- it seems quite silly to think that something broadcast in 1935 is still copyrighted.
In any event, the widespread availablity of last century's radio plays reduces the incentive for any modern group to work on reading Gutenberg texts aloud. No net.geek will do a better job than Orson Welles.
It looks like you meant to write the traditional "cleanup code" example, but your pseudocode does not make sense. "close(resource1);" should only be done if it had been opened (when "a" was true), but you have it called based on "b", not "a".
...
The pattern you're looking for is
if (!(a = open("a"))) return;
if (!(b = open("b"))){
close(a); return;
}
if (!(c = open("c"))){
close(b); close(a); return;
}
Anyhow, gotos are still bad (from the academic standpoint that professors use).
The example of cleanup statements is an insufficient argument for allowing goto into a language. That problem can be solved with try/catch exception handlers, or final{} blocks, or even a special limited-goto which can only jump forward to the top-level of the same function.
A real goto statement, however, can do many more things that just jump to the postscript of a function. It can jump forwards, backwards, to/from the bodies of loops and other functions- in short, it can make your program enormously more difficult to understand, analyze, or optimize.
Djikstra alluded to the wisdom that goto should only be used for "alarm exits" or "abortion clauses". But restricting programmers to only use a feature in a few certain ways is less reliable than restricting the language to offer only safer, alternative features.
Or, maybe, by providing competition in the "low-per-payment fee" category, they'll inspire the Credit Cards to change how they work.
Scenario A: Peppercoin.com becomes moderately successful, and has a few clones/competitors spring up. Then Visa and Mastercard buy them all out, and start offering micropayments as part of their normal services.
Scenario B: Peppercoin.com is successful, and begins accepting bank checks (instead of ccard payments) to reconcile your monthly bill. Eventually some customers start using Peppercoin for even large transactions, and don't bother with credit-cards anymore. Visa and Mastercard are forced to adapt.
If each individual merchant accumulated credit to occasional payoffs, there would be too much overhead, and no reliable guarantee that the charges would ever be large enough to be worth reconciling.
The biggest problem is of merchants who don't have enough content to have a chance for any one consumer to spend enough for the transaction to be worthwhile. Suppose me & 2 friends play a song and sell it as MP3 for $0.35. If it's a nice tune, we might get a few thousand people willing to pay per month. But if each only spends $1, we can't aggregate enough to profitably collect from their credit cards. But, since those consumers are probably also purchasing many other small data items online, Peppercoin.com can wait and aggregate them into reasonable chunks.
A related benefit is that Peppercoin (or some other, centralized micropayments service) will reduce the sign-up overhead for accessing paid-content. Today paid content is very rare- not just because you've got to be billed a lot (to cover ccard fees), but also because the time it takes for a potential user to sign up for the first use of the service.
By the time a customer has input credit card and billing info, created & memorized a password, and decided if the merchant is trustworthy or not, he's probably lost interest in whatever drew him there, or is ready to search for a free alternative (even if it's not quite as good).
If a user could follow a random link from a weblog and see a promise of amusing content for $0.25, there's a fair chance he'll pay it, as long as only 2-3 mouse clicks are needed.
(Yes, this does open the door to some scams- mislabelling my junk files as something valuable or entertaining. But there are technological approaches to make them less likely- distributed reputation servers and similar)
You can. Just append the text "and apparatus" after the writeup of your algorithm. You haven't quite patented the alg itself, but you do have rights to any machine running it, which is just as good.
That still doesn't mean a customer gets a dice-roll to avoid paying. Peppercoin.com will probably aggregate all of a customer's monthly purchases into a single transaction.
That way, they only lose money on the credit-card overhead if a user makes just a few micropayments per month. This is probably a kind of loss-leader behavior to jumpstart the industry. Hopefully, once things get rolling along, no customer will have an incentive to spend $10/month.
(And if that happens, they might decide to push back the billing for another 30 days, to keep costs low.)
Not very useful, I don't think.
/etc level) will already have another method of writing to the hard disk.
Most people who have the expertise needed to make meaningful changes to system config at the sector level (or even the
The fix-it guy could slam the drive into a computer dedicated for that task, or insert a boot CD to take precedence over the hard disk. In either case, the repairer then has access to a full suite of personalized software and online documentation to help him do the repairs right. Much more powerful than anything the BIOS could provide.
the First Ammendment is not relevant to this discussion. However, fair use is.
They're the same thing. The "Fair" part about the use is that it is in support of freedom of speech.
Duplicating an author's work is against copyright law. But duplicating parts of the work may be necessary to produce other kinds of original, protected speech (like journalistic review and academic analysis), and is allowed.
"Fair Use" is basically the courts' established interpretation of the boundaries between the First Amendment and Section 8.8.
That post would seem more authoritative if you could reduce the number of "m"s in Ammendment. (One mistake can be a slipup. Seven just looks stupid.)
since when did skaterpunks get into programming?
I assumed that Neo's waking world was a near-future scenario where strong DRM had made casual music-duplication impossible. Only uber-hackers could trick the computer into unprotecting a copyrighted work.
So, the punks just wanted some unreleased tracks from N4pster.
There were a handful of well-documented atrocities against civilians, but nothing on the scale presented in that film. The British were trained to conduct a very "civilized" style of warfare, and although this was stressed by the colonists' reluctance to wear uniforms, they never attacked obvious civilians.
In particular, the burning of a church full of civilians is something that the forces of Vlad the Impaler and Adolf Hitler have both done, but the Redcoats would never consider such a thing.
What if I created a film about a real 14th centruy Pope, and had him conduct murderous Black Masses? Would that be OK? It would all depend on how it was portrayed. If an obvious fantasy, then it's fine. If I use it merely as the backdrop for some other story, and present those events as if they'd really happened, then I've committed a double wrong: my audience has been mis-educated, and the Vactican has been defamed.
"The Butcher" really did exist
The fact that he did exist makes more wrong. To create a fictional man to commit warcrimes is one thing. To invent major atrocities and assign them to a person who merely executed some prisoners is another. (His actions were somewhat defensible even by modern rules of war. "Spies"- combatants without uniforms- were often executed in 20th century combat)
You want to watch some guy wash colonial dishes for two hours? I sure don't.
We could watch some guy battle British troops for two hours. That really happened, and would be exciting. We could even exaggerate the hero's prowess, and let him play decisive role in every major battle. But the producer of "The Patriot" decided to underscore the hero's goodness by exaggerating his enemy's badness, and in so doing, libelled an entire nation.
A few more:t ype=tex tures&page2=General%20Textures
http://buzzsaw.gamedesign.net/?page=files&
I don't know the detail's of Sony's planning (although 10^6 was even more focused on offline combat than Sovreign was going to be), but for persistent games in general, there is a 3rd option for preventing offline players from being attacked:
Force (major) PvP combat to be prescheduled.
That is, the enemy must announce the time of the attack (to within 30 minutes) from 24 to 96 hours ahead of time. That gives both your and their allies time to gather up for the fight, and helps ensure that the conquering of terrority is based on superior materials and tactical skill, and not luck of being offline at the wrong moment.
The in-character explanation for this behavior could be that the warriors are bound by a strong sense of honor, or that their bases are protected by magic fields which only can be eroded by a slow-acting magic spell. Something like the Shield Disablers of AO.
Of course, there are numerous flaws stopping this approach from being successful on its own- stemming from the fact that not everyone can skip work for an appointment made by a videogame. Partial solutions can be munged up. (For instance, the player can pre-script responses to the specific attack at that time, or delegate control of your forces to a trusted ally who will be online at that time. In a big enough clan, someone will be available 24/7. Or, the challenged player could be allowed to offer a reschedule)
Oh, any number of things could qualify as that, but they're not easy to prove. The CIA, and Clinton himself, are both notorious for leaving wiggle room. A favorite CIA line is "We weren't trying to kill him- only to sabotage his infrastructure by denying use of an automobile. If he happened to be driving it at the time, that's just an accident"
You could never share between a portals-based game (like Descent) with a BSP-tree based game like Quake, because they organize data in a fundamentally different manner.
You can. Both of those formats can be automatically compiled from a shared representation as simple polygons. The resultant map won't have the same manual optimization as if an artist had tweaked it by hand, though. For at least one of the engines, it will be slower than necessary. Quake and Descent are both 3 generations old, though, so a modern computer will chuckle at the extra work. (And the created Descent map may be quite ugly, as stretched-inverse-cubes are unlikely to gracefully represent the details of a Quake level)
The more substantive problem to sharing maps is the gameplay itself. Imagine what would happen if Mr. Quake was spawned in a Descent map: he'd run 10 meters, then fall into an inescapable depression- because the map was built for a flying hero. Likewise, a Descent spaceship might find a Quake map terminally boring ("I just fly up, over the castle, back down, and win!")
If the maps are intended for more compatible genres, then it might work a little better. At least assumptions like "player needs to walk across floor to the doorway" will hold true. But still, building a fun, professional-quality game map means tweaking to exactly challenge the player's ability to move, jump, and shoot.
Restricting the desired category of games to highly realistic ones makes the idea of sharing terrain much more worthwhile. In that case, as long as the terrain correctly duplicates the original location, then any inability of the game system to work well in it can be filed as a bug against the software.
In particular, I've noticed a trend in several FPS programs to include the Fort McKenna MOUT training grounds as a playable map, which becomes a common point of comparison.
Well, we're obviousy getting our propaganda from opposite ends fo the spectrum.
Propaganda? Those were terse statements of simple facts. Nobody can dispute them. I leave open the question of why one "end fo the spectrum" hides from those truths. Don't like cannabisnews? There's plenty of other places to back up that claim. Do you find the BBC more worthy of trust? Someone wanted sources, I just gave the top few Google hits. 10 minutes there will get you a flood of consistent claims. (Some more links, for those too busy to search on their own)
Justbecuase we gave the Taliban money doesn't mean they complied very quickly or effctively.
Oh, so paying the Taliban for doing nothing is a lot better? The reasons Clinton called them evil in 1999 didn't go away.
(But they really did destroy the drug. Quite possibly the largest drug interdiction that has ever happened. Ask any street-level narc what's happening to the price or heroine these days- it's dropping steeply after the 2001 hikes.)
My understanding is that the Taliban was a loose conglomerate of several groups.
Not "loose", at least not relative to what preceded and followed them. The Taliban was the most strongly unified government in Afganistan for more than a decade.
Also, realize that it's an execute order, not a law.
Yeah, it sounds like a violation of US separation of powers, huh? Nevertheless, there are laws which declare it is illegal to violate an executive order. Regarding "emergency foreign relations", the President can nearly write his own laws. In 2002, an American citizen was prosecuted under them.
In the case of direct and specific requests of the President conflicting with previus executive orders,
Then the President should revoke that order. (This has often happened) To do otherwise is the baldest hypocracy. In a free society, the set of actions which only the government is allowed to do must be kept as small as possible.
(Note- I'm not being partisan. Clinton is similarly guilty. In November 1998 he violated Executive Order 12333 Section 2.11, leading to costly repurcussions)
If there's any truth behind the 10% brain-usage myth, it may lie in the difference between kinds of cells in the brain.
We've all heard of neurons, the interesting ones, with a blob of chemical receptors on one end and a multi-centimeter electrically-conductive tail on the other.
But also there are neuroglyia (doubt I can spell that). They account for most of the mass of a brain, but are not believed to engage in important checmical or electrical reactions.
Nonetheless, they at least serve the purpose of keeping the neurons properly supported, with correct amounts of spacing between them. So even if most of the brain's cells don't carry nerve impluses, it's incorrect to say they're not being used.
That effect may be coming much sooner than genuine Mind Reading (if it's even possible).
Mind Reading (as the term is commonly used), implies that the subject's actual, abstract thoughts are understood. This could possibly be more difficult than creating a self-aware AI.
Using some kind of neural-uplink to accelerate your data input speed is a drastically easier challenge- a foolish, wealthy person could even trying having one installed today (no guarantees of fitness or safety, though!)
Look at research like the CyberMonkey. (It mentions a biochip as a less invasive, higher resolution way to perform the procedure)
A willing human could get a bundle of electrodes buried into his cortex, and plugged via a USB interface into your computer. Then, with a lot of practice against a program that gives visible feedback, the subject could learn to control the eletrodes enough to manuver a mouse or keyboard equivalent.
Any guesses as to how many of his existing muscular systems will be paralyzed by the tampering?
Scale, again, becomes an asset.
A technical asset (in some cases), but not a legal one. All the technical superiority in the world doesn't help any if the government decides an entire category of technology is illegal. (Small numbers of dedicated persons can skirt a law, but the majority will have to comply)
The RIAA and MPAA have a demonstrated ability to influence lawmakers. For any clever tricks you can cook up, they can argue that the mere installation of the related software is a circumvention device.
Then you could be hauled to court not for any specific act of copyright infringement, but just for having the ability to do so.
Depending on your interpretation, the present-day DMCA might not support such prosecutions. But if the trends which created the DMCA are not reversed, future laws will "correct that loophole".
The only way to make something "obscure" (enough that you get a modicum of security) is to not use it very much.
That's all the RIAA really needs- keep file trading in a corner amoung people who can comprehend the intricacies of IRC, USENET, and FTP servers. It's only when a system becomes so easy to use that it is popular (and no longer obscure) that they feel threatened.
But the fact is, as long as something is illegal, and there is money to be gained by enforcing the prohibition, America will find a way.
(Regarding 802.11b WiFi in coffee shops, there's many ways you might be tracked: if it's a paid-access arrangement, then they probably have your credit card. Or your Starbucks-Saver card, or whatever. Or the Feds can require that the MAC addresses of users be logged for some period- and begin to outlaw software which modifies the effective access. Steps like that would be a blow to free software as well)
The only really good strategy for keeping P2P transfers possible is to make them legal. Fighting to reduce the power of copyright is the way to start.
(Encouraging the developement of a safe, reliable micropayment system is an alternative approach, as it might provide an alternative economic model for the RIAA)
In 2002, the US DEA was quick to claim that opium was a prime source of Taliban funding.
But back in 2001, the US government gave the Taliban $43,000,000 dollars in exchange for destroying the opium crops that had previously supplied a major portion of their GNP.
(Never mind that "Transacting with the Taliban" had been illegal for US citizens since 1999. I don't see any of Bush's administrators being arrested for helping the Taliban much more than John Lindh ever did. It seems ignorance of the law is an excuse.)
Now that the Taliban has been deposed, the flow of Afganistan opium is starting to resume.
But, given all that, it never hooked onto who is using that card.
The Federal Department of Justice can obligate communications providers to install equipment to facilitate court-ordered investigations. Primarily, this has taken the form of telcos keeping their switches ready to trace or wiretap.
If enough ISPs start claiming "anonymous prepaid cardholder" as an explaination for failing to complete DCMA 512h requests, then the Feds will start to require them to use a Caller-Id function to log the phone numbers used for the dialup.
Soon enough, they'll track you down.
Avoiding spies by approaches like that is security through obscurity. It'll only work as long as too few people are doing it to make it worthwhile to hunt- and that's all the RIAA really needs.
Clever methods like that are labor intensive. They require a significant time investment both to perform the transfer, and more time for the sender and reciever to learn of each other in the first place.
The revolutionary aspect of Napster (and follow-on p2p applications) was that it made both those tasks trivially easy- less than 10 seconds of user time each.
It is these highly scaled, highly automated systems that the RIAA wants to target. And because they're automatic and repetitive, automated scanning software can easily observe them as well.