I don't think so. The sound has to go from speakers to your ears. The movie has to go from the screen to your eyes. Unless they put DRM on your body parts, the signal can be intercepted there and recorded. Or better yet, intercepted in analog form on the speaker or video wires. Most people couldn't tell the difference between a damn good analog recording turned into digital and a digital original anyway.
I heard that new televisions will be made without audio/video out so you cannot record from them. So what? All it takes is one electronics jock to wire up to allow this, release the "patch" and everyone can do it. All it takes is A SINGLE COPY of any work to hit the net and it is propogated as fast as popularity pulls it into circulation.
I actually do NOT disapprove of DRM. I think its the right of every creator to create what he wants. If his creation has DRM integral, well so be it.
If you don't like a DRM product, don't use it. No one is holding a gun to your head to watch the latest Shakira video.
Though I sympathise with your plight, you better wake up and smell the coffee. American steel workers went the way of the horse and buggy too.
Copyright violation is not stealing under the LAW (a little thing we have in this country which you may not be used to). The absolute proof of that is, if it were stealing, it would be considered petty theft because the items involved are under $50 almost always.
Since the damages are range up to $150,000 dollars, this obviously is not the same thing as theft. It's copyright infringement and is a different beast, both according to anyone with common sense and the law.
This is not something I'm promoting, or something I desire. It just is.
How can you expect to control a world, to enforce the "right to copy" when anyone can make 100 copies a second of virtually any data only work?
In India, before Ghandi G. came along, it was illegal to make salt. People near the ocean were surrounded by billions of tons of salt but weren't allowed to extract it from the ocean. The british mandated this by law to protect their salt industry.
This is the exact same scenario that is happening with copyright. Some laws were passed 200 years or so ago to make it a civil wrong to do something that is very easy to do nowdays. These laws are unenforceable unless you want to assign the death penalty for possession of a xerox machine, a printing press, a tape recorder, a CD burner or especially a computer.
It's over people.
The current think going around is "how can we make these expensive movies if we can't profit from the copyrights?". My answer is, lower your expenses. The first thing you can do is dump expensive actors whose cost is sometimes 70% of a film.
My response to bad media, movies and music is not to participate. To not contribute to it. I don't think it is a moral justification to infringe copyright to claim that the material sucks anyway. That's really degenerate thinking. Tell it to the judge and see how far you get with that.
I'm not trying to justify my vision. It's just a fact that copyrights are finished. I'm offerring solutions. While the facts may offend some people, all their ranting, lawsuits and legal maneuvers won't change those facts.
The facts are technological. The march of progress is currently consuming another hapless victim. I would suggest not getting in the way of the thrashing beast in its death throes. Wounded animals are the most dangerous of all.
The computer language Prolog is very clever at figuring out solutions from complex data. It can learn new rules and information and include those in its solutions.
Has it even been used for game AI? If not, why not? If so, how did that go?
There are certain aspects of programming that programmers of ALL age simply do not get.
Use of Exceptions in C++ as they were intended is the biggest. I've yet to meet anyone except the guys who write the books, who uses them properly. Even many web sites and tutorials that explain exceptions do it wrongly.
This is next followed by the use of virtual functions correctly, as laid out in the C++ FAQs book. Programmers I run into tinker with virtual functions without really making the jump to basing their code around the entire idea of reusable, replaceable components.
This is followed next by OOP in general. I've yet to see a C++ programmer who abstracts his problem domain into objects FIRST and then proceeds to code.
I've been maddened and made curious by this inability or darnright refusal to make the jump to warp speed in ones programming. I try to patiently explain the benefits of these things and I get met with blank stares and chit chat behind my back about "controversial techniques" and my "using stupid Microsoft stuff".
It is my understanding that you need to have a working prototype. In fact I saw a show about a guy who was protesting that the patent office wouldn't patent his perpetual motion machine because it didn't work as he claimed.
Identifying location by ip address doesn't work reliably. That's like bringing in an old can of rusty nuts and bolts to the patent office and saying "This is an interstellar probe, patent it biatch."
Doesn't an invention have to work to be patented?
Wouldn't it be easy to challenge this in court by simply doing a live demonstration of it incorrectly identifying the location of an ip address?
I agree. Not only that, on those cold nights I cram the power supply to my laptop right in there to warm my sac. My "special place" can store lots of heat and transfer it to my circulatory system which warms me up nicely.
Date? Who ever dated? All I ever did was say, "want to come over and see the computers the chat system is running on"?
Boy, I can't even count the number of fat chicks with hairy ass cracks I had in my day. And skinny one's too but I can tell you, if all you've ever had is skinny, hairless wenches, you don't know what sex is.
You are like my wife. She thinks one dollar bill is different from another, that money she earns at one place is different than money she earns at another.
Here is absolute proof that copyright violation isn't stealing in a legal sense, it's copyright violation. If it were stealing then the value of the items ($17 for a CD for example) would be the damages instead of $150,000 per violation.
If you give away someone else's copyrighted work for free when you don't have permission, you are hurting them just as much. The money you didn't pay them is your profit because now the money you would have spent on the item, you can spend on something else.
When you distribute such an item to many people, there are SOME potential sales lost. I'm only saying a small percentage of those people would have paid for the item but it still hurts the copyright holder the way the world is structured nowdays.
I happen to personally THINK that things have to change, and that free distribution must be accomodated but until it's proven that this doesn't hurt the copyright holder more than help him, you are hurting that person.
Things need to be restructured so that the original creator cannot sell away a certain percentage of the item. Right now it's the record companies who are becoming obsolete but they own most of this material outright. People justify copyright violation by telling themselves it's only the rich record companies they are hurting. If the artists had irrevocable percentages this justification would no longer be available.
Your idea of the world is very childish if you think that only cash has value.
Hahahaha. Yes, I guess in your fantasy world you could do that, but in the real world one must have standing. You can sue anyone for anything but if you aren't the copyright holder in this case, it will be thrown out. You might argue some sort of other damages, but not copyright violation.
What you COULD do is go to the copyright holder and finance his lawsuit against the copyright violator.
Also, anyone who violates copyrights by downloading files on p2p networks (myself included) is very hypocritical if he claims his copyright has been violated or that anyone elses has been violated.
If you don't believe in ownership of expression then stop whining about people violating it.
Re:This paper is a concentrated piece of PR
on
A College Guide to EA
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is exactly what it is. I worked as a slave for the notorious Church of Scientology when I was "just out of college" and swore I'd never do that kind of thing again because I was just being used by the higher ups to make themselves rich.
The same exploitation exists at EA with the difference that you get paid, however, outside of that it is the same manipulation, backstabbing, and diabolical exploitation of suckers who will work endless hours without additional pay because they believe in the cause.
I greatly respect true paragons in their field, but I despise cheaters. Richard Nixon won his election by cheating. EA gets its massive profits by cheating also. Any corporation that worked its employees twice as long for the same pay is not really productive. It's cheating.
The reason laws are necessary to prevent this sort of thing is because it gives bad management a way to "seem" good. Instead of using ingenuity (the American way) to increase production, they use pur brute force. This is pathetic, especially from a technology company.
Limiting people to working 8 hours a day by law basically says, "If you cannot be profitable with people working 8 hours a day, don't go into business in the first place". This would require entrepreneurs to structure their ventures appropriately.
Can you get productive work out of people after they have worked a full 8 hours? Ask yourself this, "Would you want a surgeon operating on you after he'd just performed an 8 hour surgery before yours?
Let them. Using fear of outsourcing to control people is a bluff that needs to be called. I think they would have done so already if they could. Everyone assumes that third world countries are populated with slaves but it just isn't true. Many of these countries are socialist and employess have more rights that in the U.S.
I know someone who moved his company to Mexico, expecting a windfall profit hiring cheap employees. Well, it turned out that labor laws in Mexico are much more strict that in the U.S. and it cost him more than it would have here.
For example, when you fire someone down there you have to give them 3 months pay PLUS a christmas bonus. I'm not joking. While he did pay less hourly for people, he got raped by lawsuits, no count good for nothing slackers that had to be paid 3 months pay to be fired, and employees stealing equipment so that in the end it just wasn't worth it.
Also, many managers are hands on people and just can't manage a remote project. I've managed outsource teams myself and most of the code had to be re-written by local talent.
Twist the company's arm.."? You sound bitter, like, you are a manager or something that sees employess as extorting you somehow. I think I see a pattern here. Perhaps the managers resent being paid less than the programmers, and being the vindictive pricks they usually are, get their revenge by making the programmers their slaves as much as is possible in this day and age.
My only beef is that the company does not come out and say "80 hours a week is our work week" on the hiring agreement. In my case, the EA subsidary said the company hours were from 9am to 6pm Monday through Friday but when I started, I was told within a few days by my boss that we had to work evenings and weekends until the product shipped.
Companies don't tell you this up front because they know that only the desperate beginners, screwups and those without lives would take such a job.It's deceptive, dishonest and they know it but they justify it in their minds by telling themselves "this is how it is in the game industry. If you don't like it you can leave".
I'd have no beef at all if they were up front about it before you started work.
Oh, and the code there was atrocious. It was a C++ attempt, but mostly C and assembly language used completely unnecessarily. In talking to the developers they basically were tired, and said they never had time to learn anything new, that for years they'd been under the gun to just get something working. "This is the game industry" was their common cry as if this justified bad code and shady employment practices.
It's not healthy for the company either. If one of the principal programmers left or got hit by a truck, the product line would be dead because only the original programmer who'd been slaving over his particular section of the game could debug or add features
Yes, Bruce Hornseby once said "That's just the way it is".
I noticed you didn't say you liked it.
This process of working people like this acts as a filter. Only the ones who accept it stay so that you end up surrounded by people who accept being treated this way, so it seems normal to you. It's like members of the Church of Scientology who give up their lives with a glassy eyed devotion to Save The Earth, only to regret it later on in life when they find out how much time they wasted and how they were being exploited by the people at the top who live like kings, sitting around on yachts with boat drinks and laughing at them.
This is so true that in fact, if I cared for my job I would not document or comment my code (if I could get away with that). Makes me too easy to replace:)
Any game programmer with half a brain should keep that in mind. It's the only ammo you have against the corporate reaper when it comes 'a reaping at layoff time.
And never under any circumstances do MAINTENANCE programming. It's way harder than original coding. It doesn't get as much respect even though it takes more of some types of skills and pays less.
Also, if the original programmer is still there you are completely expendable because they can just work him extra hours if you are gone.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think so. The sound has to go from speakers to your ears. The movie has to go from the screen to your eyes. Unless they put DRM on your body parts, the signal can be intercepted there and recorded. Or better yet, intercepted in analog form on the speaker or video wires. Most people couldn't tell the difference between a damn good analog recording turned into digital and a digital original anyway.
I heard that new televisions will be made without audio/video out so you cannot record from them. So what? All it takes is one electronics jock to wire up to allow this, release the "patch" and everyone can do it. All it takes is A SINGLE COPY of any work to hit the net and it is propogated as fast as popularity pulls it into circulation.
I actually do NOT disapprove of DRM. I think its the right of every creator to create what he wants. If his creation has DRM integral, well so be it.
If you don't like a DRM product, don't use it. No one is holding a gun to your head to watch the latest Shakira video.
Though I sympathise with your plight, you better wake up and smell the coffee. American steel workers went the way of the horse and buggy too.
Copyright violation is not stealing under the LAW (a little thing we have in this country which you may not be used to). The absolute proof of that is, if it were stealing, it would be considered petty theft because the items involved are under $50 almost always.
Since the damages are range up to $150,000 dollars, this obviously is not the same thing as theft. It's copyright infringement and is a different beast, both according to anyone with common sense and the law.
Is that copyrights are finished.
This is not something I'm promoting, or something I desire. It just is.
How can you expect to control a world, to enforce the "right to copy" when anyone can make 100 copies a second of virtually any data only work?
In India, before Ghandi G. came along, it was illegal to make salt. People near the ocean were surrounded by billions of tons of salt but weren't allowed to extract it from the ocean. The british mandated this by law to protect their salt industry.
This is the exact same scenario that is happening with copyright. Some laws were passed 200 years or so ago to make it a civil wrong to do something that is very easy to do nowdays. These laws are unenforceable unless you want to assign the death penalty for possession of a xerox machine, a printing press, a tape recorder, a CD burner or especially a computer.
It's over people.
The current think going around is "how can we make these expensive movies if we can't profit from the copyrights?". My answer is, lower your expenses. The first thing you can do is dump expensive actors whose cost is sometimes 70% of a film.
My response to bad media, movies and music is not to participate. To not contribute to it. I don't think it is a moral justification to infringe copyright to claim that the material sucks anyway. That's really degenerate thinking. Tell it to the judge and see how far you get with that.
I'm not trying to justify my vision. It's just a fact that copyrights are finished. I'm offerring solutions. While the facts may offend some people, all their ranting, lawsuits and legal maneuvers won't change those facts.
The facts are technological. The march of progress is currently consuming another hapless victim. I would suggest not getting in the way of the thrashing beast in its death throes. Wounded animals are the most dangerous of all.
The computer language Prolog is very clever at figuring out solutions from complex data. It can learn new rules and information and include those in its solutions.
Has it even been used for game AI? If not, why not? If so, how did that go?
There are certain aspects of programming that programmers of ALL age simply do not get.
Use of Exceptions in C++ as they were intended is the biggest. I've yet to meet anyone except the guys who write the books, who uses them properly. Even many web sites and tutorials that explain exceptions do it wrongly.
This is next followed by the use of virtual functions correctly, as laid out in the C++ FAQs book. Programmers I run into tinker with virtual functions without really making the jump to basing their code around the entire idea of reusable, replaceable components.
This is followed next by OOP in general. I've yet to see a C++ programmer who abstracts his problem domain into objects FIRST and then proceeds to code.
I've been maddened and made curious by this inability or darnright refusal to make the jump to warp speed in ones programming. I try to patiently explain the benefits of these things and I get met with blank stares and chit chat behind my back about "controversial techniques" and my "using stupid Microsoft stuff".
It is my understanding that you need to have a working prototype. In fact I saw a show about a guy who was protesting that the patent office wouldn't patent his perpetual motion machine because it didn't work as he claimed.
Identifying location by ip address doesn't work reliably. That's like bringing in an old can of rusty nuts and bolts to the patent office and saying "This is an interstellar probe, patent it biatch."
Doesn't an invention have to work to be patented?
Wouldn't it be easy to challenge this in court by simply doing a live demonstration of it incorrectly identifying the location of an ip address?
They hang down so when you're walking you can try to match the rythm of their swing to the Star Spangled Banner.
Tap tap. Is this thing on?
Speaking of warm balls, what's the definition of "Relative Humidity"? It's the sweat that builds up on your balls when your boning your sister.
I know I'm seriously blowing my Karma but I just can't resist.
Yes, like I used to tell my dates who were pleasing me in the car, "Ok honey, stop when you smell smoke".
Woo hoo!! Vindicated finally!
I just tell them, "I would but all I can't keep that thing out of my wife's mouth for long enough to do so".
Exactly. It's that air flow that puts the cherry on top of a relaxing night of ball warming.
Hahahaha. No, they are called BALLTOPS now.
I agree. Not only that, on those cold nights I cram the power supply to my laptop right in there to warm my sac. My "special place" can store lots of heat and transfer it to my circulatory system which warms me up nicely.
Date? Who ever dated? All I ever did was say, "want to come over and see the computers the chat system is running on"?
Boy, I can't even count the number of fat chicks with hairy ass cracks I had in my day. And skinny one's too but I can tell you, if all you've ever had is skinny, hairless wenches, you don't know what sex is.
Oh man. Skinny chicks may look nice but a curvaceous plumper gives a much deeper, and satisfying orgasm. Take it from someone who knows.
And hair. She's got to have hair all the way up the crack of her ass.
You are like my wife. She thinks one dollar bill is different from another, that money she earns at one place is different than money she earns at another.
Here is absolute proof that copyright violation isn't stealing in a legal sense, it's copyright violation. If it were stealing then the value of the items ($17 for a CD for example) would be the damages instead of $150,000 per violation.
If you give away someone else's copyrighted work for free when you don't have permission, you are hurting them just as much. The money you didn't pay them is your profit because now the money you would have spent on the item, you can spend on something else.
When you distribute such an item to many people, there are SOME potential sales lost. I'm only saying a small percentage of those people would have paid for the item but it still hurts the copyright holder the way the world is structured nowdays.
I happen to personally THINK that things have to change, and that free distribution must be accomodated but until it's proven that this doesn't hurt the copyright holder more than help him, you are hurting that person.
Things need to be restructured so that the original creator cannot sell away a certain percentage of the item. Right now it's the record companies who are becoming obsolete but they own most of this material outright. People justify copyright violation by telling themselves it's only the rich record companies they are hurting. If the artists had irrevocable percentages this justification would no longer be available.
Your idea of the world is very childish if you think that only cash has value.
Good Luck.
Hahahaha. Yes, I guess in your fantasy world you could do that, but in the real world one must have standing. You can sue anyone for anything but if you aren't the copyright holder in this case, it will be thrown out. You might argue some sort of other damages, but not copyright violation.
What you COULD do is go to the copyright holder and finance his lawsuit against the copyright violator.
Also, anyone who violates copyrights by downloading files on p2p networks (myself included) is very hypocritical if he claims his copyright has been violated or that anyone elses has been violated.
If you don't believe in ownership of expression then stop whining about people violating it.
This is exactly what it is. I worked as a slave for the notorious Church of Scientology when I was "just out of college" and swore I'd never do that kind of thing again because I was just being used by the higher ups to make themselves rich.
The same exploitation exists at EA with the difference that you get paid, however, outside of that it is the same manipulation, backstabbing, and diabolical exploitation of suckers who will work endless hours without additional pay because they believe in the cause.
I greatly respect true paragons in their field, but I despise cheaters. Richard Nixon won his election by cheating. EA gets its massive profits by cheating also. Any corporation that worked its employees twice as long for the same pay is not really productive. It's cheating.
The reason laws are necessary to prevent this sort of thing is because it gives bad management a way to "seem" good. Instead of using ingenuity (the American way) to increase production, they use pur brute force. This is pathetic, especially from a technology company.
Limiting people to working 8 hours a day by law basically says, "If you cannot be profitable with people working 8 hours a day, don't go into business in the first place". This would require entrepreneurs to structure their ventures appropriately.
Can you get productive work out of people after they have worked a full 8 hours? Ask yourself this, "Would you want a surgeon operating on you after he'd just performed an 8 hour surgery before yours?
I got a snapshot of it: The Front Gate Oh yes. Their motto here is "Work will make you free". Marvelous.
Let them. Using fear of outsourcing to control people is a bluff that needs to be called. I think they would have done so already if they could. Everyone assumes that third world countries are populated with slaves but it just isn't true. Many of these countries are socialist and employess have more rights that in the U.S.
I know someone who moved his company to Mexico, expecting a windfall profit hiring cheap employees. Well, it turned out that labor laws in Mexico are much more strict that in the U.S. and it cost him more than it would have here.
For example, when you fire someone down there you have to give them 3 months pay PLUS a christmas bonus. I'm not joking. While he did pay less hourly for people, he got raped by lawsuits, no count good for nothing slackers that had to be paid 3 months pay to be fired, and employees stealing equipment so that in the end it just wasn't worth it.
Also, many managers are hands on people and just can't manage a remote project. I've managed outsource teams myself and most of the code had to be re-written by local talent.
So let them outsource. I dare them.
Uh huh.
Twist the company's arm.."? You sound bitter, like, you are a manager or something that sees employess as extorting you somehow. I think I see a pattern here. Perhaps the managers resent being paid less than the programmers, and being the vindictive pricks they usually are, get their revenge by making the programmers their slaves as much as is possible in this day and age.
My only beef is that the company does not come out and say "80 hours a week is our work week" on the hiring agreement. In my case, the EA subsidary said the company hours were from 9am to 6pm Monday through Friday but when I started, I was told within a few days by my boss that we had to work evenings and weekends until the product shipped.
Companies don't tell you this up front because they know that only the desperate beginners, screwups and those without lives would take such a job.It's deceptive, dishonest and they know it but they justify it in their minds by telling themselves "this is how it is in the game industry. If you don't like it you can leave".
I'd have no beef at all if they were up front about it before you started work.
Oh, and the code there was atrocious. It was a C++ attempt, but mostly C and assembly language used completely unnecessarily. In talking to the developers they basically were tired, and said they never had time to learn anything new, that for years they'd been under the gun to just get something working. "This is the game industry" was their common cry as if this justified bad code and shady employment practices.
It's not healthy for the company either. If one of the principal programmers left or got hit by a truck, the product line would be dead because only the original programmer who'd been slaving over his particular section of the game could debug or add features
Yes, Bruce Hornseby once said "That's just the way it is".
I noticed you didn't say you liked it.
This process of working people like this acts as a filter. Only the ones who accept it stay so that you end up surrounded by people who accept being treated this way, so it seems normal to you. It's like members of the Church of Scientology who give up their lives with a glassy eyed devotion to Save The Earth, only to regret it later on in life when they find out how much time they wasted and how they were being exploited by the people at the top who live like kings, sitting around on yachts with boat drinks and laughing at them.
But, if that's what you want, ok!
This is so true that in fact, if I cared for my job I would not document or comment my code (if I could get away with that). Makes me too easy to replace :)
Any game programmer with half a brain should keep that in mind. It's the only ammo you have against the corporate reaper when it comes 'a reaping at layoff time.
And never under any circumstances do MAINTENANCE programming. It's way harder than original coding. It doesn't get as much respect even though it takes more of some types of skills and pays less.
Also, if the original programmer is still there you are completely expendable because they can just work him extra hours if you are gone.