The first question this brings to mind is 'where is Old Zealand?'
I don't actually know much at all about their country, but I know it's a fairly well developed nation where people and sheep can live harmoniously. Is this sort of censorship common? The way the language in the paper refers to censorship (pg. 7) makes it look like censorship is accepted as a part of the government's job.
If that is in fact the case, how could this sort of thing work? Would ISPs be responsible for harvesting the URLs of all webpages with content offensive to the New Zealandic(New Zealish? Zealic? Zealaly?) government? That would be horrendously time consuming and expensive, and would be a constant chore. And we've talked about the consequences of blocking IPs on/. before. Would they be liable if a single thing got through?
I dunno guys. This sounds like a law without any teeth. If it's actually enforced, it seems to me (in all my ignorance) that it would result in NZish/ic/ian ISPs being unable to function. And even if it worked, it would take like three days before someone put out a program that simply went around the filtering. I mean, have your buddy in Seattle set up a webpage with a Java web-browser imbedded. Log into that site and ouila (wah-lah), you're knee-deep in scatological goat-rape porn. And I'm sure there's a way to set something like that up so that it would be very difficult to filter.
Okay, my ramble is done. I had to write a long time because I didn't want to be modded -1 for early posting;).
Although it was itself planning to use product activation next year, Block is now making anti-product activation the centerpiece of its marketing campaign for the remainder of the tax season
If scientific journalism is going to be entertaining and responsible, it needs to be meaningfully educational. When I read a story on Slashdot, I frequently don't know a great deal about the subject matter (this is, in fact, why I read Slashdot). So as I read the linked-to article, I'll frequently come across concepts that are new to me. I then go on Google and find out what they're all about. Frequently, it takes quite a bit of reading to learn enough to understand what the article is actually getting at.
Let's have more of this. In printed media, it is very difficult to write about science in a way that really presents the data properly while being open to the lay-person, but some attempt should be made to explain the details so that the article can be widely understood while at the same time being truly informative. In online media, on the other hand, there's no reason the basic article shouldn't have hypertext on every other word, linking to other articles on the same subject, so that a person can actually educate themselves enough to understand the article properly.
I'm a geek, and so I may be a little off track, but almost everyone liked Sesame Street, and almost everyone liked Mr. Rogers. We're learning creatures, and I think if you give a person the ability to use scientific literature to do a little creative learning, that all by itself will be entertaining.
I'm a youngin at 20, and I'll be damned if I wasn't blown away when my Inspiron 8200 was the nicest laptop on the market for three whole months.
That definately exceeded my expectations, I think my dual-proc AthlonMP 1500+ with the G-Force2 was a killer box until like the next Tuesday.
~Benjamin
It really is, and it bites. Really, I think this sort of discussion is important, though, because even if the problem just gets harder and harder to solve, we must never give up. This site is a forum where the best and brightest come to speak their minds (and people like me, too), so let's keep trying to lick this thing and maybe we'll come up with a good idea. It never hurts to try.
These laws are primarily a control issue, and those that bought these laws (and bought they certainly were, there is no evidence at all that the general voting constituency clamored for these laws), want to have complete control over how (and where and on what) you experience their content, and the concept of fair use is anathema to them.
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that I see on here all the time. It's insightful from the perspective that it points out that it's detrimental to society to have restrictions in place that prevent the free flow of art and information. I wholeheartedly agree. On the other hand, this kind of argument fails to address the real question here.
The main reason I have a problem here is that I can't imagine a boardroom full of executives coming to the conclusion that free use is anathema. "Yes," they say, "if we were to prevent our product from being sampled and redistributed for educational purposes, we'd make millions!" In my mind, there's simply no way that's the case.
Remember that the people behind these corporations are exactly that; people. They're not monsters hell-bent on destroying civilization, they are simply under pressure from their constituents (anyone who owns stock) to make money doing what they do. That's the way it should work; capitalism is about profit motive. If owners of copyright all over the country want to prevent the reproduction and distribution of their intellectual property from being so easy that an autistic chipmunk could figure it out, they probably have a genuine fear of losing real customers.
Don't get me wrong here, I hate copy protection. All I'm saying is that you haven't provided an answer to my question. Given that copy protection is both worthless and harmful to the consumer, how should a copyright owner go about preventing their information from being spread all over the world and enjoyed without their being recompensed?
Peace,
~SL
I'm all for the government taking the technology that prevents me from making backup copies of games and music and reducing it to a pile of smoldering dung. Smoldering dung is, in my book, way cooler than an irreplaceable copy of Unreal 2003 that my sister rolls over with my computer chair (hypothetically speaking... grr...)
But let's not forget that there are legitimate concerns about the pirating of software and music. It's not just the RIAA and other large organizations. The widespread pirating of software does, in fact, have the ability to cripple businesses that produce it. As I recall, the guys that made Thief made next to nothing on Thief 2 (and are no longer in business as a result), but everyone I knew had a copy.
So I'm Asking Slashdot <dramatic music>: What should companies be doing to prevent the loss of income from pirating while leaving inviolate the right of the consumer to make copies of materials to which we own legal license?</dramatic music>
I know, I know, we talk about this all the time, but I don't think anyone's offered a suggestion that would really work; this is a tough nut to crack.
Black Label Games, it seems, is a subsidiary of Vivendi Universal Games, the makers of such great games as Homeworlds, Baldur's Gate, etc...
I'm not really sold on them, though, for this kind of production. Homeworlds, while it was a pretty game, was absolute crap in terms of strategy, and the next closest thing to a RTS they've made was the Caesar series, which is a lot like Sim City for crack-babies (don't get me wrong; I liked it, but it's weird).
I'm sick of this dichotomy in the gaming industry. Any game based on a universe the gaming community knows and loves will suck, because the company in charge knows it will sell like crazy based solely on the license appeal. I wish just once the big men on top would be sack-heavy enough to take a solid license and then give the game the time it takes to really make it rock.
There is hope for us. Matrix: Reloaded looks like it may very well not suck. But when a company gets the license to LOTR and then just starts pumping the games out like this (evidently Vivendi's Black Label has sole license to the video games for the LOTR universe), they're all going to be crappy and/or simplistic.
Game companies: We gamers are patient. We'll wait the two or three years it takes to bring together a good title! Making a good RTS doesn't happen in eight months!
I should have remembered about the single calling computer. One of my friends once told me that it was possible to screw with the telemarketers by simply setting the phone down, and not hanging it up. Because they have no actual control over their own phone line, the telemarketer is supposedly unable to do anything without sending for a supervisor to disconnect the line.
Anybody care to confirm/deny this one? It'd be cool to find out more; anything we can do to make telemarketing less cost-effective is a bonus in my book.
I worked as a telemarketer once... for a week. I got paid full time for my training and then bailed and got a new job before ever making a call. So I know nothing about the industry.
I'm curious, how long do you think it would take a telemarketing company to pay off the huge chunk of change they'd require to buy enough copies of this program to outfit their entire outfit? As I recall, there were several hundred stations at the place I worked.
We crawled from the muck on malformed fins and sucked hot air into barely functional lungs. Preyed upon by the greater beasts of the land, we sought solace in the trees. Gradually we developed intelligence and tools, and we became the hunters. We tamed the wild grasses and settled together, forming the first civilization. Through centuries of toil we have made art, science, mathematics, and endless perseverence our tools and our allies. And now, millions of years after we first set out on our voyage, we are slowly setting out to escape the bonds of Earth. We are reaching up, and with outstretched hands, touching the face of God.
I know that we all ache in our hearts for everything that NASA has not been able to do these last forty years. Don't ever forget, however, all the incredible things that have been done. Cheers, to everyone at NASA, and to all mankind.
I'd have to differ on the basic logic there. I very rarely find myself saying "I'd like to go out and purchase myself some entertainment." Usually I've got a pretty good idea of what I feel like today. Music, a video game, or spending a few hours going all out for troll mods on/.;) I don't think people see how expensive music is, and decide to purchase movies instead. I think that for people who like music, it's an itch that they need to scratch. If a cheaper alternative shows up (MP3 d/ls, cheap indie records that don't suck, etc), certainly a lot of people will exploit that resource, but the basic commodity, the music, will still be sought after.
~SL
Am I missing a connection here?
on
The Future of the CD
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe I'm just missing something that's obvious to everyone else, but the connection this article tries to draw between rising DVD sales and slipping CD sales seems ludicrous to me. It's like claiming that fewer people are buying Dodge pickup trucks because Dreyers ice-cream has become more popular; DVDs are used for movies, where is this supposed competition coming from?
Science doesn't want to do anything. Science doesn't have motivations, it is simply the biproduct of a few centuries of observations and experiments. Science has produced evidence that a great deal of our personality is a byproduct of our genes. In the future, the exact nature and amount of that impact may or may not be completely understood. Saying that genes having an impact on our personality is just a rediculous excuse on the part of science is like arguing that the photoelectric effect is just an excuse science uses to explain flashy lights.
Slashdot Mirror
The first question this brings to mind is 'where is Old Zealand?'
/. before. Would they be liable if a single thing got through?
;).
I don't actually know much at all about their country, but I know it's a fairly well developed nation where people and sheep can live harmoniously. Is this sort of censorship common? The way the language in the paper refers to censorship (pg. 7) makes it look like censorship is accepted as a part of the government's job.
If that is in fact the case, how could this sort of thing work? Would ISPs be responsible for harvesting the URLs of all webpages with content offensive to the New Zealandic(New Zealish? Zealic? Zealaly?) government? That would be horrendously time consuming and expensive, and would be a constant chore. And we've talked about the consequences of blocking IPs on
I dunno guys. This sounds like a law without any teeth. If it's actually enforced, it seems to me (in all my ignorance) that it would result in NZish/ic/ian ISPs being unable to function. And even if it worked, it would take like three days before someone put out a program that simply went around the filtering. I mean, have your buddy in Seattle set up a webpage with a Java web-browser imbedded. Log into that site and ouila (wah-lah), you're knee-deep in scatological goat-rape porn. And I'm sure there's a way to set something like that up so that it would be very difficult to filter.
Okay, my ramble is done. I had to write a long time because I didn't want to be modded -1 for early posting
~SL
Although it was itself planning to use product activation next year, Block is now making anti-product activation the centerpiece of its marketing campaign for the remainder of the tax season
I love it...
~SL
If scientific journalism is going to be entertaining and responsible, it needs to be meaningfully educational. When I read a story on Slashdot, I frequently don't know a great deal about the subject matter (this is, in fact, why I read Slashdot). So as I read the linked-to article, I'll frequently come across concepts that are new to me. I then go on Google and find out what they're all about. Frequently, it takes quite a bit of reading to learn enough to understand what the article is actually getting at.
Let's have more of this. In printed media, it is very difficult to write about science in a way that really presents the data properly while being open to the lay-person, but some attempt should be made to explain the details so that the article can be widely understood while at the same time being truly informative. In online media, on the other hand, there's no reason the basic article shouldn't have hypertext on every other word, linking to other articles on the same subject, so that a person can actually educate themselves enough to understand the article properly.
I'm a geek, and so I may be a little off track, but almost everyone liked Sesame Street, and almost everyone liked Mr. Rogers. We're learning creatures, and I think if you give a person the ability to use scientific literature to do a little creative learning, that all by itself will be entertaining.
~SL
I'm a youngin at 20, and I'll be damned if I wasn't blown away when my Inspiron 8200 was the nicest laptop on the market for three whole months. That definately exceeded my expectations, I think my dual-proc AthlonMP 1500+ with the G-Force2 was a killer box until like the next Tuesday. ~Benjamin
We need to find something better than the shuttle before they're forty years old. That last one hit a little more than 2500 degrees.
~SL
It really is, and it bites. Really, I think this sort of discussion is important, though, because even if the problem just gets harder and harder to solve, we must never give up. This site is a forum where the best and brightest come to speak their minds (and people like me, too), so let's keep trying to lick this thing and maybe we'll come up with a good idea. It never hurts to try.
~SL
These laws are primarily a control issue, and those that bought these laws (and bought they certainly were, there is no evidence at all that the general voting constituency clamored for these laws), want to have complete control over how (and where and on what) you experience their content, and the concept of fair use is anathema to them.
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that I see on here all the time. It's insightful from the perspective that it points out that it's detrimental to society to have restrictions in place that prevent the free flow of art and information. I wholeheartedly agree. On the other hand, this kind of argument fails to address the real question here.
The main reason I have a problem here is that I can't imagine a boardroom full of executives coming to the conclusion that free use is anathema. "Yes," they say, "if we were to prevent our product from being sampled and redistributed for educational purposes, we'd make millions!" In my mind, there's simply no way that's the case.
Remember that the people behind these corporations are exactly that; people. They're not monsters hell-bent on destroying civilization, they are simply under pressure from their constituents (anyone who owns stock) to make money doing what they do. That's the way it should work; capitalism is about profit motive. If owners of copyright all over the country want to prevent the reproduction and distribution of their intellectual property from being so easy that an autistic chipmunk could figure it out, they probably have a genuine fear of losing real customers.
Don't get me wrong here, I hate copy protection. All I'm saying is that you haven't provided an answer to my question. Given that copy protection is both worthless and harmful to the consumer, how should a copyright owner go about preventing their information from being spread all over the world and enjoyed without their being recompensed? Peace, ~SL
I'm all for the government taking the technology that prevents me from making backup copies of games and music and reducing it to a pile of smoldering dung. Smoldering dung is, in my book, way cooler than an irreplaceable copy of Unreal 2003 that my sister rolls over with my computer chair (hypothetically speaking... grr...)
But let's not forget that there are legitimate concerns about the pirating of software and music. It's not just the RIAA and other large organizations. The widespread pirating of software does, in fact, have the ability to cripple businesses that produce it. As I recall, the guys that made Thief made next to nothing on Thief 2 (and are no longer in business as a result), but everyone I knew had a copy.
So I'm Asking Slashdot <dramatic music>: What should companies be doing to prevent the loss of income from pirating while leaving inviolate the right of the consumer to make copies of materials to which we own legal license?</dramatic music>
I know, I know, we talk about this all the time, but I don't think anyone's offered a suggestion that would really work; this is a tough nut to crack.
Peace,
~SL
I got an Inspiron 8200 for Cristmas and it's already a paperweight... crap.
~SL
Qubit? Spintronics?
You made that up!!! 8^P
~SL
But did you hear the one about Amazon patenting domain names? See, it's funny, because Amazon patents everything!!! It's funny!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
~SL
Dude. Racism? The man in charge of the armies of evil was Sauramon the white!
~SL
Black Label Games, it seems, is a subsidiary of Vivendi Universal Games, the makers of such great games as Homeworlds, Baldur's Gate, etc...
I'm not really sold on them, though, for this kind of production. Homeworlds, while it was a pretty game, was absolute crap in terms of strategy, and the next closest thing to a RTS they've made was the Caesar series, which is a lot like Sim City for crack-babies (don't get me wrong; I liked it, but it's weird).
I'm sick of this dichotomy in the gaming industry. Any game based on a universe the gaming community knows and loves will suck, because the company in charge knows it will sell like crazy based solely on the license appeal. I wish just once the big men on top would be sack-heavy enough to take a solid license and then give the game the time it takes to really make it rock.
There is hope for us. Matrix: Reloaded looks like it may very well not suck. But when a company gets the license to LOTR and then just starts pumping the games out like this (evidently Vivendi's Black Label has sole license to the video games for the LOTR universe), they're all going to be crappy and/or simplistic.
Game companies: We gamers are patient. We'll wait the two or three years it takes to bring together a good title! Making a good RTS doesn't happen in eight months!
~SL
When they can recognize chrysanthemums, I'll be really impressed. ~SL
I should have remembered about the single calling computer. One of my friends once told me that it was possible to screw with the telemarketers by simply setting the phone down, and not hanging it up. Because they have no actual control over their own phone line, the telemarketer is supposedly unable to do anything without sending for a supervisor to disconnect the line.
Anybody care to confirm/deny this one? It'd be cool to find out more; anything we can do to make telemarketing less cost-effective is a bonus in my book.
~SL
What I meant was, an open-source version of the anti-anti telemarketer program. It was a joke ;).
My first down-graded post... I'm so ashamed...
~SL
I especially like the line "crying crybaby" :)
~SL
Is SourceForge working on a competing model yet?
~SL
I worked as a telemarketer once... for a week. I got paid full time for my training and then bailed and got a new job before ever making a call. So I know nothing about the industry.
I'm curious, how long do you think it would take a telemarketing company to pay off the huge chunk of change they'd require to buy enough copies of this program to outfit their entire outfit? As I recall, there were several hundred stations at the place I worked.
~SL
probably got stranded in 200BC and was trying to charge his GBA batteries... ~SL
We crawled from the muck on malformed fins and sucked hot air into barely functional lungs. Preyed upon by the greater beasts of the land, we sought solace in the trees. Gradually we developed intelligence and tools, and we became the hunters. We tamed the wild grasses and settled together, forming the first civilization. Through centuries of toil we have made art, science, mathematics, and endless perseverence our tools and our allies. And now, millions of years after we first set out on our voyage, we are slowly setting out to escape the bonds of Earth. We are reaching up, and with outstretched hands, touching the face of God.
I know that we all ache in our hearts for everything that NASA has not been able to do these last forty years. Don't ever forget, however, all the incredible things that have been done. Cheers, to everyone at NASA, and to all mankind.
~SL
Diablo: Whack something with a sword. Pick up a better sword. Whack something bigger with the new sword. OOH! A better sword!
Nethack: Kill a basilisk. Put on a pair of gloves. Weild the basilsk as a weapon.
Nethack has heart.
~SL
I'd have to differ on the basic logic there. I very rarely find myself saying "I'd like to go out and purchase myself some entertainment." Usually I've got a pretty good idea of what I feel like today. Music, a video game, or spending a few hours going all out for troll mods on /. ;) I don't think people see how expensive music is, and decide to purchase movies instead. I think that for people who like music, it's an itch that they need to scratch. If a cheaper alternative shows up (MP3 d/ls, cheap indie records that don't suck, etc), certainly a lot of people will exploit that resource, but the basic commodity, the music, will still be sought after.
~SL
Maybe I'm just missing something that's obvious to everyone else, but the connection this article tries to draw between rising DVD sales and slipping CD sales seems ludicrous to me. It's like claiming that fewer people are buying Dodge pickup trucks because Dreyers ice-cream has become more popular; DVDs are used for movies, where is this supposed competition coming from?
~SL
Science doesn't want to do anything. Science doesn't have motivations, it is simply the biproduct of a few centuries of observations and experiments. Science has produced evidence that a great deal of our personality is a byproduct of our genes. In the future, the exact nature and amount of that impact may or may not be completely understood. Saying that genes having an impact on our personality is just a rediculous excuse on the part of science is like arguing that the photoelectric effect is just an excuse science uses to explain flashy lights.