I'm curious how much a federal judge would care about Microsoft abusing its control of software against a group of people who don't stand to make money off the software they write.
They have no problem when a criminal steals goods that the owner wasn't going to earn money with.
Judges are theoretically intelligent people, and can grasp the simple economic concept illustrated by "a penny saved is a penny earned": WINE user are really making money when they avoid buying Microsoft.
DMCA, you mean that little law that *specifially* allows reverse engineering for interoperability?
If the DMCA really allowed interoperability, then it would be legal for a USA-based Linux distribution to include DVD-player software in their default install. But, it's not.
He said he keeps all the state in globals so he's not messing around with stack or heap variables.
Right, but if the game state can be described without using heap-allocated variables, it must be a pretty simplistic game. Space Invaders, Pacman, or Tetris is about as elaborate as you'd want to get without using some kind of dynamic memory allocation. So the question about whether or not this guy has ever written a large project is quite appropriate.
If saving the globals en mass to disk works for you to save games, then there must not be any pointers in your globals, which means your program is avoiding some very common and useful techniques.
The only way to place a thermometer in full time sun is with a counter-geosynchronous orbit, which means it could not possibly be in your area (for very long)
OK, here's the text from the law itself regarding infringement
The text you've quoted is entirely sufficient to demonstrate that you are incorrect. Specifically, this line:
with which such use is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive
Obviously, since there is no deception or confusion, there is no violation. And if you think there is deception, then you simply didn't read the article, or understand how Google's paid search-placement works.
It is illegal when you use it to promote your product.
No, it's not. That's a simple fact, which I can't really re-state in any clearer form. Maybe you don't understand the difference between "represent as" (illegal) and "promote with" (fine).
To promote my own truck, I can say "Better than Ford". That is not a violation of their trademark. (In many jurisdictions, printing an ad like that exposes me to lawsuits regarding libel or truth in advertising, but those risks are completely separate from trademark infringement. I could still be liable for those things, even if they had not trademarked their product)
Or, whenever Microsoft sponsors an advertisement describing "Windows XP has 37% lower TCO than Linux", do you actually believe they're breaking the law? Because they are obviously using Linus's trademark to promote Bill's product.
But to see a trademark in a paid advertisers area and have it link to a competitor is deceptive.
And since that's not Google does, it has no bearing on this case. The situation is that a person searches for "Company A", they get a page with links to sites mentioning "Company A", and then in the upper-right corner, a little box with 3 links reading "Company B", which go to pages about Company B. There is no deception- each link goes exactly where it appears to.
I would think it was unethical for Burger King to pay you to stand in front of McDonalds and tell everybody walking in that they should go to Burger King instead.
So, just to clarify: You don't believe in freedom of speech. Ok, good to know!
What I did say is that no one plays RPGs for the battle aspect... you play for the story!
A quick check of the 40 top selling computer RPGs of all times shows that 100% of them focus the gameplay on battle. So... what planet did you say you were living on, again?
If we want our robots to live in a human world in our homes and cities they more or less need to fit our form factor.
Funny, dogs and cars both fit well in my world of cities, and aren't my form factor. Both have a stabler shape that reduces much of the difficulties of bipedalism.
Neither URU nor There.com are MMORPGs. They are MMOs or MMOGs, but not RPG in any way. Consider the original non-multiplayer version of URU, Myst. Nobody called it an RPG! (It was either described as "Adventure", or "Puzzle")
Likewise if a hypothetical single-box Here.com existed, it wouldn't be on the RPG shelf either. RPGs, as a genre, always possess stat building, and usually combat too.
analog devices sells two-axis MEMS accelerometers in either 2G or 10G,
I've used them and found them inadequate... but that was from a VR perspective, where you want to use the relative accelerations to update the position of an object or limb. For a minimal Harry Potter game, where the movements are all relative (or at least can be considered to reset back to the starting position every few seconds), they could be OK.
By that logic, the MMOs should be just as detailed, story/plotwise as the MUDs, since it'd be easy to find a "semi-decent writer" or twelve to work on a video game.
You're still not getting the logic. Games are a visual/audible/interactive medium, meaning story in games should be presented with images, sounds, or gameplay (similar to cinematic films, although those lack the interaction). A writer alone cannot add those things.
Slapping a bunch of text into some boxes before and after the action can never truely give a game a story. If the story isn't reflected in how gameplay works, or at least presented with compelling multimedia content during play, then it's not even a real part of the game.
PS. This whole discussion is moot, because the initial premise (that MUDs have complicated features like Smedley's suggestions) is false. MUD and MOO designers have experimented with many oddball concepts, but the core gameplay of the actually popular ones is the same as EQ2: kill monster, grab loot, buy weapons, heal wounds, repeat.
No one ever played old-fashioned table top D&D just to level up or accumulate gold and items.
No, they do it to win fights. That was the objective of the first D&D game ever played (run by Gary Gygax with variant CHAINMAIL rules). That goal has remained close to the core of most (popular) RPGs ever since.
No one ever played old-fashioned table top D&D just to level up or accumulate gold and items.
No one ever played old-fashioned tabletop D&D to play the stock market or trade renewable commodities. (Players who want a game about economics can try Monopoly or Settlers Of Catan)
The GM isn't sitting there updating a big spreadsheet of the speculative rating for leather skullcap futures in the empire's 6 biggest cities- she (and her players) just don't care. The way that PC customers interact with merchants cannot really cause inflation, revaluation, or any other feature of a real economy . Any economic effects are created by GM specifically to fit the needs of the plot.
Sure, on occasion PCs in the same party will have a very localized economy as they bargain amoung themselves to exchange magic boots for platinum coins- but once they exchange money with anyone outside the little group, it vanishes into the GM's imagination.
The virtual economy is necissary for this virtual world to be about anything more than just hacking and slashing your way through the next dungeon.
No it isn't. How many table top D&D games include an actual economy? Probably zero, and certainly less than 10. (To be an economy, the GM would need to track money and items as they circulate amoung merchants outside the immediate party. That's impossible)
The mistake you make is to assume that things have value in themselves.
No, it turns out my mistake was to take your words at face value.
Saying that the in game items are not valueable to the player (with the properties they possed when he first aquired them) is absurd.
Correct, it is truely absurd. But if you know that, then why did you claim otherwise:
The virtual goods have value attached to them regardless of the game companies recognizing them.
The game items only possess properties because the game company recognizes them. If I secretly download a copy of the FFXII server, edit a character to have 50 billion gil, and try to sell it to you on a CD-R, it won't have value, because the game company won't recognize the item.
Based on other (spelling) errors you've made, I suspect that your English language rank is low enough that you don't understand the meaning of the words you actually wrote. Prehaps you had intended the sentence to end with "it" instead of "them", which completely changes the parsing.
"It" is singular, and refers to "value" (the most-recently referenced singular noun). "Them" is plural, and refers to the most recent plural noun, "items". Items having value if the company doesn't recognize the value makes sense; but if the company doesn't recognize the item, then it naturally has almost no value.
One of the criticisms, perhaps justifiable, of Clarke pre-9/11 is that he was too obsessed with cyber terrorism and computer security.
No, nobody could say that. Such a claim would not only be unjustifiable, but blatantly ignorant. In the 2nd Bush administration, if Clarke had any "obsession" at all, it was with al Quaeda.
Indeed, he irritated Bush's political appointees with his emphasis on something that contradicted their pre-concieved notions of foreign policy threats. He kept on pushing them to look at Islamic terrorism as a real danger, such as by creating the infamous "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US" briefing.
How this could be used in a puzzle to render bots entirely useless without annoying the human, I don't know
I don't think there's any way it could help. Even if it's not cracked, all CAPTCHA can tell you is that an actual human is present on the client-side, not whether or not that human is moving the wand itself, or running a cheat program, it can't do.
(Well, the only way it could is if the gameplay itself was something too complex for a computer to perform adequately. Currently, most Chess players can be beaten by a computer, but most Go players cannot. However, popular commercial games will need to attract less-skillful users overall)
Sadly, it appears that the most plausible future preventive for online cheaters will be TCPA-style remote attestation. (Which is marginally better than today's solution: giving up administrator control of your own machine to the game company)
You could get by without the wand by using joystick or mouse gestures but I think it would be a big mistake and cheap little accelerometers can do the job.
Cheap accelerometers don't really exist. Cheaper: $10 USB webcam + two bright flourescent stickers on a pencil. Software can easily track the two points of unique color to calculate want orientation. And, bonus: it can display the user in an onscreen window, with appropriate magical sparks superimposed upon correct magic operation.
One thing I've always wanted was to be able to plug a second mouse in for your other hand.
Under Linux, at least, this is simple enough to program yourself. (Just open multiple/dev/input/mouseN files). But of course, the drawbacks are enormous, not just in ergonomics, but also HCI-semantics.
And, players don't WANT to reload manually. (A general rule of thumb is that uncontested challenges of skill should be omitted from games...)
I'm not a U.S. citzen so I'm not up on its constitution.
Most all constitutions have a line like that. "Life, Liberty, Property" is almost a standard boilerplate. The UN also declares them as human rights.
But this happens every time something is declared illegal,
That happens pretty rarely (except with synthetic drugs), and there are mitigating factors: The ban is always pre-announced, so existing owners have a chance to sell it out of the country first. And there is often a "grandfather clause", where quantities of the banned material already present are allowed to remain, although no new ones can be produced.
That applies to machine-guns in the USA, for example. You can't buy new ones, but you can keep ones you have.
PS. As a side note, whenever the USA Congress extends the length of copyright terms, they are illegally depriving the public of property- by the same argument.
The U.S. could quite easily pass a law making private ownership of foreign currency illegal.
That wouldn't be "easy", as it would require passing a Constitutional Amendment to revoke the existing Fifth Amendment. So USA citizens enjoy that right exactly as strongly as the do any other right.
Achieving your goals just by logging enough hours (which you pay for) is no nobler than cutting out the wasted step and buying the end product directly.
That's why economically rational game companies must try to prevent gil-farming (to use the FFXI-specific term). They're selling an experience, and revealing that there's a shortcut to the endpoint removes the fun, and will cost customers.
Imagine how profitable a casino would be if they just gave you a number at the door and just instantly gave you 94.3% of whatever money you gave them. Its more honest, and require less investment from them as a business, but without the mystique and pagentry of gambling, nobody will pay for it.
MMORPGs, like casino gambling, is a businessm model dependent on the customer's willingly ignoring what's really going on. Gil-sellers threaten to pull back that curtain, and reveal the time-sink straighaway. Some potential customers won't even bother to play- others will spend $50 for a high level character, play for 2 months, and then quit feeling they've experienced the whole game in less time.
If those dangers didn't exist, then you can be sure game companies would be in the gil-selling business themselves- as they can obviously undercut the business of anyone who actually needs to play to earn gil, but simply punch numbers into the database.
To extend the taxes argument--it's clear that if you can "win" or "lose" the game and get money for it, it's gambling.
Wrong. Gambling is based mainly on random probability, and is often illegal (unless the government is running it). Games of skill are separate, which is why gambling in poker is legal in many, many more places than blackjack- the skill component is so much higher.
Furthermore, you're wrong because in many USA states, gambling of all kinds isn't illegal at all. For example, in New York gambling is totally legal, but possession of gambling equipment is outlawed.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious how much a federal judge would care about Microsoft abusing its control of software against a group of people who don't stand to make money off the software they write.
They have no problem when a criminal steals goods that the owner wasn't going to earn money with.
Judges are theoretically intelligent people, and can grasp the simple economic concept illustrated by "a penny saved is a penny earned": WINE user are really making money when they avoid buying Microsoft.
DMCA, you mean that little law that *specifially* allows reverse engineering for interoperability?
If the DMCA really allowed interoperability, then it would be legal for a USA-based Linux distribution to include DVD-player software in their default install. But, it's not.
That means "unsupported" is not telling the whole story.
The word "antisupported" is appropriate in these cases. Compare support/unsupport/antisupport with social/asocial/antisocial...
He said he keeps all the state in globals so he's not messing around with stack or heap variables.
Right, but if the game state can be described without using heap-allocated variables, it must be a pretty simplistic game. Space Invaders, Pacman, or Tetris is about as elaborate as you'd want to get without using some kind of dynamic memory allocation. So the question about whether or not this guy has ever written a large project is quite appropriate.
If saving the globals en mass to disk works for you to save games, then there must not be any pointers in your globals, which means your program is avoiding some very common and useful techniques.
e.g. in full time shade, in full time sun,
The only way to place a thermometer in full time sun is with a counter-geosynchronous orbit, which means it could not possibly be in your area (for very long)
go turn on a car the size of a speck of dirt
Well, if you really want to pursue that avenue of experimentation, then to be valid, you'd need almost 2 billion of those tiny cars...
OK, here's the text from the law itself regarding infringement
The text you've quoted is entirely sufficient to demonstrate that you are incorrect. Specifically, this line:
with which such use is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive
Obviously, since there is no deception or confusion, there is no violation. And if you think there is deception, then you simply didn't read the article, or understand how Google's paid search-placement works.
It is illegal when you use it to promote your product.
No, it's not. That's a simple fact, which I can't really re-state in any clearer form. Maybe you don't understand the difference between "represent as" (illegal) and "promote with" (fine).
To promote my own truck, I can say "Better than Ford". That is not a violation of their trademark. (In many jurisdictions, printing an ad like that exposes me to lawsuits regarding libel or truth in advertising, but those risks are completely separate from trademark infringement. I could still be liable for those things, even if they had not trademarked their product)
Or, whenever Microsoft sponsors an advertisement describing "Windows XP has 37% lower TCO than Linux", do you actually believe they're breaking the law? Because they are obviously using Linus's trademark to promote Bill's product.
But to see a trademark in a paid advertisers area and have it link to a competitor is deceptive.
And since that's not Google does, it has no bearing on this case. The situation is that a person searches for "Company A", they get a page with links to sites mentioning "Company A", and then in the upper-right corner, a little box with 3 links reading "Company B", which go to pages about Company B. There is no deception- each link goes exactly where it appears to.
I would think it was unethical for Burger King to pay you to stand in front of McDonalds and tell everybody walking in that they should go to Burger King instead.
So, just to clarify: You don't believe in freedom of speech. Ok, good to know!
What I did say is that no one plays RPGs for the battle aspect... you play for the story!
A quick check of the 40 top selling computer RPGs of all times shows that 100% of them focus the gameplay on battle. So... what planet did you say you were living on, again?
If we want our robots to live in a human world in our homes and cities they more or less need to fit our form factor.
Funny, dogs and cars both fit well in my world of cities, and aren't my form factor. Both have a stabler shape that reduces much of the difficulties of bipedalism.
Neither URU nor There.com are MMORPGs. They are MMOs or MMOGs, but not RPG in any way. Consider the original non-multiplayer version of URU, Myst. Nobody called it an RPG! (It was either described as "Adventure", or "Puzzle")
Likewise if a hypothetical single-box Here.com existed, it wouldn't be on the RPG shelf either. RPGs, as a genre, always possess stat building, and usually combat too.
analog devices sells two-axis MEMS accelerometers in either 2G or 10G,
I've used them and found them inadequate... but that was from a VR perspective, where you want to use the relative accelerations to update the position of an object or limb. For a minimal Harry Potter game, where the movements are all relative (or at least can be considered to reset back to the starting position every few seconds), they could be OK.
By that logic, the MMOs should be just as detailed, story/plotwise as the MUDs, since it'd be easy to find a "semi-decent writer" or twelve to work on a video game.
You're still not getting the logic. Games are a visual/audible/interactive medium, meaning story in games should be presented with images, sounds, or gameplay (similar to cinematic films, although those lack the interaction). A writer alone cannot add those things.
Slapping a bunch of text into some boxes before and after the action can never truely give a game a story. If the story isn't reflected in how gameplay works, or at least presented with compelling multimedia content during play, then it's not even a real part of the game.
PS. This whole discussion is moot, because the initial premise (that MUDs have complicated features like Smedley's suggestions) is false. MUD and MOO designers have experimented with many oddball concepts, but the core gameplay of the actually popular ones is the same as EQ2: kill monster, grab loot, buy weapons, heal wounds, repeat.
No one ever played old-fashioned table top D&D just to level up or accumulate gold and items.
No, they do it to win fights. That was the objective of the first D&D game ever played (run by Gary Gygax with variant CHAINMAIL rules). That goal has remained close to the core of most (popular) RPGs ever since.
No one ever played old-fashioned table top D&D just to level up or accumulate gold and items.
No one ever played old-fashioned tabletop D&D to play the stock market or trade renewable commodities. (Players who want a game about economics can try Monopoly or Settlers Of Catan)
The GM isn't sitting there updating a big spreadsheet of the speculative rating for leather skullcap futures in the empire's 6 biggest cities- she (and her players) just don't care. The way that PC customers interact with merchants cannot really cause inflation, revaluation, or any other feature of a real economy . Any economic effects are created by GM specifically to fit the needs of the plot.
Sure, on occasion PCs in the same party will have a very localized economy as they bargain amoung themselves to exchange magic boots for platinum coins- but once they exchange money with anyone outside the little group, it vanishes into the GM's imagination.
The virtual economy is necissary for this virtual world to be about anything more than just hacking and slashing your way through the next dungeon.
No it isn't. How many table top D&D games include an actual economy? Probably zero, and certainly less than 10. (To be an economy, the GM would need to track money and items as they circulate amoung merchants outside the immediate party. That's impossible)
The mistake you make is to assume that things have value in themselves.
No, it turns out my mistake was to take your words at face value.
Saying that the in game items are not valueable to the player (with the properties they possed when he first aquired them) is absurd.
Correct, it is truely absurd. But if you know that, then why did you claim otherwise:
The virtual goods have value attached to them regardless of the game companies recognizing them.
The game items only possess properties because the game company recognizes them. If I secretly download a copy of the FFXII server, edit a character to have 50 billion gil, and try to sell it to you on a CD-R, it won't have value, because the game company won't recognize the item.
Based on other (spelling) errors you've made, I suspect that your English language rank is low enough that you don't understand the meaning of the words you actually wrote. Prehaps you had intended the sentence to end with "it" instead of "them", which completely changes the parsing.
"It" is singular, and refers to "value" (the most-recently referenced singular noun). "Them" is plural, and refers to the most recent plural noun, "items". Items having value if the company doesn't recognize the value makes sense; but if the company doesn't recognize the item, then it naturally has almost no value.
One of the criticisms, perhaps justifiable, of Clarke pre-9/11 is that he was too obsessed with cyber terrorism and computer security.
No, nobody could say that. Such a claim would not only be unjustifiable, but blatantly ignorant. In the 2nd Bush administration, if Clarke had any "obsession" at all, it was with al Quaeda.
Indeed, he irritated Bush's political appointees with his emphasis on something that contradicted their pre-concieved notions of foreign policy threats. He kept on pushing them to look at Islamic terrorism as a real danger, such as by creating the infamous "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US" briefing.
How this could be used in a puzzle to render bots entirely useless without annoying the human, I don't know
I don't think there's any way it could help. Even if it's not cracked, all CAPTCHA can tell you is that an actual human is present on the client-side, not whether or not that human is moving the wand itself, or running a cheat program, it can't do.
(Well, the only way it could is if the gameplay itself was something too complex for a computer to perform adequately. Currently, most Chess players can be beaten by a computer, but most Go players cannot. However, popular commercial games will need to attract less-skillful users overall)
Sadly, it appears that the most plausible future preventive for online cheaters will be TCPA-style remote attestation. (Which is marginally better than today's solution: giving up administrator control of your own machine to the game company)
You could get by without the wand by using joystick or mouse gestures but I think it would be a big mistake and cheap little accelerometers can do the job.
Cheap accelerometers don't really exist.
Cheaper: $10 USB webcam + two bright flourescent stickers on a pencil. Software can easily track the two points of unique color to calculate want orientation. And, bonus: it can display the user in an onscreen window, with appropriate magical sparks superimposed upon correct magic operation.
One thing I've always wanted was to be able to plug a second mouse in for your other hand.
/dev/input/mouseN files). But of course, the drawbacks are enormous, not just in ergonomics, but also HCI-semantics.
Under Linux, at least, this is simple enough to program yourself. (Just open multiple
And, players don't WANT to reload manually. (A general rule of thumb is that uncontested challenges of skill should be omitted from games...)
Unless I can advance in a non-quantitative manner, I don't really want to pay a monthly fee.
As long as it still runs on a computer, that's a tall order. Because "computer", you know, it means... quantities are all it does...
I'm not a U.S. citzen so I'm not up on its constitution.
Most all constitutions have a line like that. "Life, Liberty, Property" is almost a standard boilerplate. The UN also declares them as human rights.
But this happens every time something is declared illegal,
That happens pretty rarely (except with synthetic drugs), and there are mitigating factors: The ban is always pre-announced, so existing owners have a chance to sell it out of the country first. And there is often a "grandfather clause", where quantities of the banned material already present are allowed to remain, although no new ones can be produced.
That applies to machine-guns in the USA, for example. You can't buy new ones, but you can keep ones you have.
PS. As a side note, whenever the USA Congress extends the length of copyright terms, they are illegally depriving the public of property- by the same argument.
The U.S. could quite easily pass a law making private ownership of foreign currency illegal.
That wouldn't be "easy", as it would require passing a Constitutional Amendment to revoke the existing Fifth Amendment. So USA citizens enjoy that right exactly as strongly as the do any other right.
Achieving your goals just by logging enough hours (which you pay for) is no nobler than cutting out the wasted step and buying the end product directly.
That's why economically rational game companies must try to prevent gil-farming (to use the FFXI-specific term). They're selling an experience, and revealing that there's a shortcut to the endpoint removes the fun, and will cost customers.
Imagine how profitable a casino would be if they just gave you a number at the door and just instantly gave you 94.3% of whatever money you gave them. Its more honest, and require less investment from them as a business, but without the mystique and pagentry of gambling, nobody will pay for it.
MMORPGs, like casino gambling, is a businessm model dependent on the customer's willingly ignoring what's really going on. Gil-sellers threaten to pull back that curtain, and reveal the time-sink straighaway. Some potential customers won't even bother to play- others will spend $50 for a high level character, play for 2 months, and then quit feeling they've experienced the whole game in less time.
If those dangers didn't exist, then you can be sure game companies would be in the gil-selling business themselves- as they can obviously undercut the business of anyone who actually needs to play to earn gil, but simply punch numbers into the database.
To extend the taxes argument--it's clear that if you can "win" or "lose" the game and get money for it, it's gambling.
Wrong. Gambling is based mainly on random probability, and is often illegal (unless the government is running it). Games of skill are separate, which is why gambling in poker is legal in many, many more places than blackjack- the skill component is so much higher.
Furthermore, you're wrong because in many USA states, gambling of all kinds isn't illegal at all. For example, in New York gambling is totally legal, but possession of gambling equipment is outlawed.