I think the truth lies somewhere in between. A mechanical, soul-less knock-off, like the flow example in the article, accomplishes nothing from a creative perspective. Yet even the most conservative "Doom Clone" brought some sort of rich addition to the design mix, even if it was just new levels. In the act of duplication, creative forces can be at work, producing a less-than-exact copy which carries with it some trace of the creative processes of the duplicator. There's a broad spectrum there.
There's scant little "pen and paper" in Warhammer, and the gameplay is bugger-all like Warcraft. The setting is a knock-off but the game sure as hell isn't.
If you, an intelligent Slashdot reader, can no longer distinguish between a genuine creative influence and copying something wholesale, then the notion of authorship is fucked, and it's all commodity.
It's just an experiment that the iRobot corp was conducting, where they cross a Roomba with one of their military devices
Running around in spirals and zooming at random's certainly been an effective combat strategy for the troops and manned aircraft, no reason it wouldn't work with robots.
That's a fairly daunting interface for the inexperienced phone user, though. Pointing and taking a pic, not so much, even if it's doing the same thing (looking up your location and the direction you're facing) in the back end.
Google Similar Images is offered, and works quite well, for images of a poorer resolution than even the crappiest phone cams on sale today. Besides, Android handsets have your location and view direction already, which cuts the problem down enormously. I suspect they could do it without any image recognition at all and get remarkably good results.
In principle, the information is only visible to a pre-defined list of other users, your "friends". The point of the article is that that list is often composed with only its social function in mind, with a disregard for its security function.
So you didn't de-lace the interace or uncabulate the turboencabulator? I'm now about 85% convinced that the open source movement is just making shit up.
Ah, I hadn't realised they'd gone on with significant new editions - I had assumed they'd kept rules compatibility and just changed the army books. That strikes me as staggeringly un-necessary, given that the third edition already led people into building sizable armies which was surely the point of the exercise. As far as the army size increase goes, I didn't mind it too much - the standard minimum of two units and an HQ was a reasonable size for a game with those rules, and wasn't exactly wallet-busting.
Specifically, the issue is that HSDPA only gives about 3Mbps per tower, and no mesh wi-fi network will get around that because each phone will be using the same over-subscribed tower.
They keep releasing new editions which dumb the rules down
I keep hearing this, but I got into 40K on the second edition (first if you don't count Rogue Trader) and it was an unplayable mess if you went in with more than a dozen miniatures and two players. It was a great skirmish game as Necromunda showed but it was an utter dog in the large-scale games it was originally designed for. Dumbing down the rules to allow actual strategic play instead of 2 hours of dice rolling per turn was essential. That was accompanied by a shift towards good, cheap, plastic miniatures for army-building (likewise in Fantasy Battle), which hugely improved the ability to actually build an army. I got out shortly afterwards, but from what I can see, GW's games are cheaper and more playable than they've ever been. That's not to say that they're cheap, or playable, but they're a sight better than they were in my day.
That's not "standard practice" in the UK for the sale of goods. We have an entire "sale of goods act" outlining a customer's rights, for example that a contract is final and binding once money has changed hands, that a seller has specific undisclaimable responsibilities with regards to the quality of goods (a kind of super-warranty) and so on. Apple is being held to the same standard as everyone else.
Funnily enough the extradition treaty that's sending McKinnon to the US was meant to be bilateral, the US just refused to ratify it after we held up our end of the bargain. Yet we didn't nix it. Our leaders must be idiots.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's based on ethics. Misrepresenting another's work as your own is a breach of creative ethics.
You clearly don't, if you think that duplication of code (or any other text) is a requisite.
I'm not saying that it does: I'm arguing that its derivitive nature does not automatically eliminate the possibility of creativity.
Precisely: commodity. It could be Walmart's own-brand for all you care.
He's not calling it stealing, he's calling it plagiarism. Which it is.
I think the truth lies somewhere in between. A mechanical, soul-less knock-off, like the flow example in the article, accomplishes nothing from a creative perspective. Yet even the most conservative "Doom Clone" brought some sort of rich addition to the design mix, even if it was just new levels. In the act of duplication, creative forces can be at work, producing a less-than-exact copy which carries with it some trace of the creative processes of the duplicator. There's a broad spectrum there.
It's not exactly a clone, though. What made SR so welcome was that it was so un-GTA in so many regards. That's not cloning, that's evolution.
There's scant little "pen and paper" in Warhammer, and the gameplay is bugger-all like Warcraft. The setting is a knock-off but the game sure as hell isn't.
If you, an intelligent Slashdot reader, can no longer distinguish between a genuine creative influence and copying something wholesale, then the notion of authorship is fucked, and it's all commodity.
Microbial biofuels could have serious political implications
Running around in spirals and zooming at random's certainly been an effective combat strategy for the troops and manned aircraft, no reason it wouldn't work with robots.
I was sceptical after looking at the first link, but those images really convinced me.
In what sense is OpenGL not "full hardware accelleration"? I'm legitimately curious, not snarking. Are we talking hardware video decoding?
Nobody's actually proposing replacing one with the other, though.
That's a fairly daunting interface for the inexperienced phone user, though. Pointing and taking a pic, not so much, even if it's doing the same thing (looking up your location and the direction you're facing) in the back end.
Google Similar Images is offered, and works quite well, for images of a poorer resolution than even the crappiest phone cams on sale today. Besides, Android handsets have your location and view direction already, which cuts the problem down enormously. I suspect they could do it without any image recognition at all and get remarkably good results.
In principle, the information is only visible to a pre-defined list of other users, your "friends". The point of the article is that that list is often composed with only its social function in mind, with a disregard for its security function.
He's not the first to suggest something like that.
rewrite of the writeback code
So you didn't de-lace the interace or uncabulate the turboencabulator? I'm now about 85% convinced that the open source movement is just making shit up.
Ah, I hadn't realised they'd gone on with significant new editions - I had assumed they'd kept rules compatibility and just changed the army books. That strikes me as staggeringly un-necessary, given that the third edition already led people into building sizable armies which was surely the point of the exercise. As far as the army size increase goes, I didn't mind it too much - the standard minimum of two units and an HQ was a reasonable size for a game with those rules, and wasn't exactly wallet-busting.
Specifically, the issue is that HSDPA only gives about 3Mbps per tower, and no mesh wi-fi network will get around that because each phone will be using the same over-subscribed tower.
They keep releasing new editions which dumb the rules down
I keep hearing this, but I got into 40K on the second edition (first if you don't count Rogue Trader) and it was an unplayable mess if you went in with more than a dozen miniatures and two players. It was a great skirmish game as Necromunda showed but it was an utter dog in the large-scale games it was originally designed for. Dumbing down the rules to allow actual strategic play instead of 2 hours of dice rolling per turn was essential. That was accompanied by a shift towards good, cheap, plastic miniatures for army-building (likewise in Fantasy Battle), which hugely improved the ability to actually build an army. I got out shortly afterwards, but from what I can see, GW's games are cheaper and more playable than they've ever been. That's not to say that they're cheap, or playable, but they're a sight better than they were in my day.
Games Workshop is a British company.
That's not "standard practice" in the UK for the sale of goods. We have an entire "sale of goods act" outlining a customer's rights, for example that a contract is final and binding once money has changed hands, that a seller has specific undisclaimable responsibilities with regards to the quality of goods (a kind of super-warranty) and so on. Apple is being held to the same standard as everyone else.
Funnily enough the extradition treaty that's sending McKinnon to the US was meant to be bilateral, the US just refused to ratify it after we held up our end of the bargain. Yet we didn't nix it. Our leaders must be idiots.