Now lawyers will start to reap most profits from games.
I felt like retching. What a despicable attitude the authors of the article have.
Basically they say: true, patents for game developers are useless, evil, and costly, but pay us to get them for you, because your competitor may do so too and you won't be able to defend yourself if you don't have patents of your own.
I almost felt ill when I read how they encouraged game developers to patent even VERY small changes to existing game concepts. What a great way to stop innovation in games!
And, of course, nobody says that game devlopers are the only ones to patent game designs. In fact, I think it is even easier to come up with game ideas when you don't have to think of how to implement them.
So, what are we still lacking now in games now...
One. Battles between armies with hundreds of thousands of individually controlled units! Let's patent that! The technology will be here in a few years, and having a patent at the time will effectively stop any game developer from building this into a game!
Two. Brain-controlled game characters. Instead of controlling a character with a mouse, you just think about what your character needs to do, and it will do it. Can't do that now, maybe can't do that within twenty years, but at least we will go some steps away from mouse and joystick towards more direct interfacing, so with a proper "and any reminiscent techniques not explicitly mentioned in this patent", we will go a long way in cashing on new interfaces too.
Three. A computer-controlled character you can have an actual relationship with. Yes, I know, AI is not far enough yet, but it will come more quickly than most people expect.
And I could go on like this...
I was almost going to say "Too bad I live in Europe"...
The documentary Lost in La Mancha is very favorable to him, and he did have a run of bad luck, but it also sounds to me like he failed to have backup plans and cut things too close to the wire. Under those circumstances projects will always fail, because things go wrong.
Actually, in "Lost in La Mancha" Gilliam admits that he was cutting it too thin, that under pressure of studios and because of his desire to make a movie, he started out basically under budget.
Of course, it is pretty nice if you have enough money so that you don't need to worry if a flood washes all of your equipment away. And he WAS insured, only the consequence of the insurance was that he had to stop the movie.
As far as the first Harry Potter movie goes, I can only agree with Gilliam: it was crap. It was tremendously boring. But that is mainly because of the script, that was too afraid to diverge from the book.
That doesn't mean I think Gilliam would have done better. This simply wasn't his kind of movie. He is not really a character director, certainly not an average-character director, and the Harry Potter movies are all about average characters (in an extraordinary situation, that's true).
More than that, he takes risks with his work. He kills off beloved characters if it serves his story, regardless of the fan reaction. He did a show that was almost entirely without dialogue and an hour-long musical episode.
Don't forget the last episode of Firefly, "Objects in Space". Watch the episode twice. The first time you are interested but confused. The second time you start to notice lots of philosophical touches. Then listen to the commentary for the episode on the DVD, and understand why it is such a gripping tale.
I bet you don't believe me when I tell you that in the Netherlands the TV schedules of public channels may not be published more than a couple of days ahead by bodies other than the broadcasting associations.
I am Dutch, and I can tell you you are right: I indeed don't believe you. AFAIK, your statement on TV schedules was true until a couple of years ago, but no longer.
Not that I am really interested in TV schedules anyway. Dutch TV is just like US TV: hundreds of channels and everything sucks.
If a time traveler chose to come back to such conference, he/she would obviously come to the first one, as that of the most historic importance.
"The first one" is only of historic importance if time is linear. But if time-travel is possible, time is not linear. So, for a time-traveller, "the first one" is NOT by definition the one of most importance.
Personally, I think a time traveller will go to a party where there are lots of nice girls (doubtful at nerd central), or at least no interference of high-strung natives. So it will either be in a harem, or in the Jurassic.
Re:The ridiculous height of the tax is untrue
on
Dutch Pass iPod Tax
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· Score: 1
I don't think your reasoning holds. If you look at the amounts charged, you see that it's 40 cents for a CD and 60 cents for a DVD. That means that and increase of 500% in storage capacity, leads to a tax increase of only 50%. If we extrapolate, since a 60 Gb iPod is less than twice a 500% increase in storage capacity, the tax increase will be less than twice 50%. So we may expect a tax of less than 1.35 euros. It will probably rounded up to a nice number, also because of the high price of iPods in the Netherlands, but I'm not worried.
What actually does worry me is that, while we pay extra taxes to pay for copying, we can still be prosecuted if we actually do the copying. I almost feel compelled to write a letter to the government demanding my taxes back exery time I buy a blank DVD, stating that I use it to store my own data and not copyrighted material. Because, if I don't do that, it might be considered an admission that I am pirating.
The ridiculous height of the tax is untrue
on
Dutch Pass iPod Tax
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· Score: 4, Informative
While it is true that a tax of MP3-players is considered in the Netherlands, the height of the tax mentioned is simply untrue (link in Dutch).
To quote from the link: "Het bestuur van de SONT heeft nog geen besluit genomen over de hoogte van het tarief; de onderhandelingen zijn gaande. Berichten die suggereren dat er al enige duidelijkheid is over de hoogte van een tarief zijn onjuist.", which translates as, "The management of the SONT has not decided yet on the height of the tax; that is still being negotiated. Any statements that suggest that there is any clarity on the height of the tax are false." This message is from April 2005.
The tax on blank DVDs is something like a couple of cents. I suspect that the tax on storage space in MP3-players will probably not be much higher.
He was a genius programmer - but wrote code that almost no one else could ever maintain.
If he writes code no one else can maintain, he is NOT a genius programmer. He may be a genius spaghetti-writer or a genius obfuscator. But making your code understandable for others is one of the essential characteristics of a professional programmer, and a genius programmer is not exempted.
When you look at the code of a genius programmer, you should say, "This is brilliant -- I could have never thought that up, but it clearly solves the problem in an elegant way." You should not say, "This must be brilliant because I can't understand it at all."
Netscape had massive market share before IE was bundled with windows. Bundling with windows can do excellent things to your market share.
True, but there is a big difference: at the time MS included IE in Windows, there weren't THAT many people online. That came after. And all those new people started with IE. In the PDF/Metro case, however, all those people currently online ALREADY use PDF, and have Acrobat Reader installed. Of course, MS will be able to push their own format, but it will only start to bloom when many people have switched to Longhorn. Given the fact that the average turnover of PCs for pure Internet-users (which is the majority of PC-owners) is a lot lower than MS would like to see, people who make documents available will do so in PDF first, and in Metro later. That is apart from the fact that documents already available in PDF will not be converted quickly.
So perhaps a good solution is to let the USPTO get paid for every patent they REJECT. If with such a scheme we see the USPTO reject more patents than it does now, we KNOW that their evaluation methods are no good.
Re:I shall wait for you in death's halls, my love.
on
For Love of The Game
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· Score: 1
Actually, PS:T has many such emotionally touching moments.
My personal favorite is at the very end of the game. If you manage to restore all your friends to life, there is a very intense goodbye scene. I especially loved the words spoken to Fall-From-Grace and to Nordom. Other great moments are the confrontation with Ravel and with the Pillar of Skulls.
The problem with your manifesto is that it is far too long for a MEP to read. They get tons of documents to read, and they will surely skip this text as "another one of those". You are better off stating in two hundred words or less what you want them to learn.
Since when did the European Commission take the European Parliament seriously? Can't see this making much difference myself, so I won't be getting my hopes up just yet.
But that doesn't matter. It is now out of the hands of the EC, and into the hands of the EP. The EP has final say in this matter. The only problem is that their final say should be supported by more than 50% of its members (i.e., absentees basically vote against changes to the EC's proposal).
No, as I read it: a robot arm would be patentable, the physical interface between the arm and the software would be patentable, but the software would not be patentable.
Just yesterday I read that Ericsson has started to threaten the Swedish government that research and development will be moved out of Europe to countries that "respect software patents"
This sounds like pure bullying. Ericsson has NOTHING to gain in the area of protecting their software by moving to the US or Japan. You have to apply for patents in countries where you wish to RELEASE your product, not where you DEVELOP your products. So if Ericsson wishes to release products in both the US and Sweden, they have to apply for patents in both places, whether they have their factory located in the US or in Sweden. Actually, they run a higher risk in the US, because in the US a competitor might attempt to close them down because they are (alledgedly) infringing on one of the competitor's patents, while, without software patents in Sweden, in Sweden they wouldn't run any risk at all. That is aside the fact that rebuilding a factory and rehiring personnel in a very expensive country like the US would probably not be profitable. So, methinks this is a lot of hot air from Ericsson.
I remember the same thing happening in 1994. OS/2 (I believe it was version 2.0, might have been a later version -- a good version of OS/2 anyway) was released, and Microsoft was struggling with building Windows 95. The most-read computer-mag in the Netherlands published an article that compared OS/2 to Windows 95. It explained in half a dozen pages why Windows 95 was MUCH better than OS/2. It was larded with screenshots from both OSses, those of OS/2 mainly consisting of a window opened in which a DOS-shell was run, while, of course, the Windows 95 screenshots showed cool icons. At the end of the article, in a very small font, it said that the author of this article was a Microsoft sales manager. I wrote the mag a letter of which the geste was, that it is easy to call a system faultless if it doesn't exist. I also ended my subscription, since it was clear to me they had "sold out".
Of course, those that have followed Microsoft's career know that their basic strategy is always promising, if not guaranteeing, that the next version of their applications will be perfect. Amazingly, some users still believe this hogwash.
The review says Trillian will be a romantic interest of Arthur Dent. If anything, this convinces me they did something seriously wrong with the movie. A romantic interest is for heroes, or at least for guys with something going for them. Arthur Dent is a notorious failure, a complete nobody in the universe, and he is driven, at least in the first three books, mainly by a quest to find a decent cup of tea. Is he going to "save the girl" now? Shocking.
If what Wikepedia says is true, Spore will be one of the worst games of all time:
Tidepool stage is similar to Pac-Man I loathe Pac-Man.
Evolution, Diablo I like the original Diablo, but I'm not really fond of Diablo II.
Tribal, Populous Populous was an OK game.
City, SimCity SimCity can be fun, although gets boring quite quickly.
Civilization, Risk and Civilization Civ is great fun! Risk sucks.
Invasion, similar to 4X and space colonization games Apart from CRPGs, my favorite kind of game.
Now, I am not saying everyone will agree with my assessment, but you can be dead sure dat almost nobody likes all these game types. Now, why would you play a game that consists of six different game types, four of which you don't like? And knowing Will Wright's record, he will fuck up at least five of the six game types.
Will Wright's latest games have, in general, got reviews (which I agree with) that said: "Brilliant game in places, but overall not that good." It seems with Spore Will is trying to make sure he'll get another of those reviews. It probably can't miss.
What you must keep in mind with such speeches is that they are designed to convince people to vote for something on the basis of what the speech claims that something is about, while it is really just the opposite. That is exactly what is happening with the patent directive in Europe. Everybody claims that they are against software patents. But half of the politicians say that you should vote against the directive because it allows software patents, while the other half says you should vote for it because it doesn't allow software patents.
Now, I would say that if indeed all these politicians are against software patents, they should add a rule to the directive that states "Software patents are not allowed". Instead, you get lawyer-speak.
So, does the directive allow software patents, or doesn't it? It is actually not so difficult to determine. The big companies that are very much in favour of software patents, want this directive. The directive has been designed by patent lawyers who have much to gain by allowing software patents. And the European Patent Office is very actively lobbying for this directive, while they are also very much in favour of software patents. It seems pretty clear to me what this directive is about...
Not too often do you hear about the rights of the patent holders, or the rights of the inventors, or the creators... do they have no rights?
I think the reason people get so worked up over patents on/. is that many of them fall into the classes of inventors and creators. And the patent system abuses what they feel are their rights, namely to build, use, multiply, and sell their own inventions and creations. The patent system as it is now in the US only grants rights to the patent holders. And patent holders are, for the most part, rich mega-corporations that claim rights even if they don't really have them. But any attempt as a small inventor/creator to defend him/herself against such claims is doomed to end in financial ruin of said inventor/creator. So, while inventors/creators have moral rights, the patent system denies them their legal rights. And that is something to get annoyed about.
Elizabeth Boukis, spokeswoman for Sony Electronics, says the work is speculative. "There were not any experiments done," she says. "This particular patent was a prophetic invention. It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us."
If you are allowed to patent pure speculation, doesn't that mean science fiction novels may constitute prior art? In that case, there is abundant prior art, I would say.
Really, the US patent system is ridiculous. Please let us Europeans be spared this nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
I felt like retching. What a despicable attitude the authors of the article have.
Basically they say: true, patents for game developers are useless, evil, and costly, but pay us to get them for you, because your competitor may do so too and you won't be able to defend yourself if you don't have patents of your own.
I almost felt ill when I read how they encouraged game developers to patent even VERY small changes to existing game concepts. What a great way to stop innovation in games!
And, of course, nobody says that game devlopers are the only ones to patent game designs. In fact, I think it is even easier to come up with game ideas when you don't have to think of how to implement them.
So, what are we still lacking now in games now...
One. Battles between armies with hundreds of thousands of individually controlled units! Let's patent that! The technology will be here in a few years, and having a patent at the time will effectively stop any game developer from building this into a game!
Two. Brain-controlled game characters. Instead of controlling a character with a mouse, you just think about what your character needs to do, and it will do it. Can't do that now, maybe can't do that within twenty years, but at least we will go some steps away from mouse and joystick towards more direct interfacing, so with a proper "and any reminiscent techniques not explicitly mentioned in this patent", we will go a long way in cashing on new interfaces too.
Three. A computer-controlled character you can have an actual relationship with. Yes, I know, AI is not far enough yet, but it will come more quickly than most people expect.
And I could go on like this...
I was almost going to say "Too bad I live in Europe"...
Actually, in "Lost in La Mancha" Gilliam admits that he was cutting it too thin, that under pressure of studios and because of his desire to make a movie, he started out basically under budget.
Of course, it is pretty nice if you have enough money so that you don't need to worry if a flood washes all of your equipment away. And he WAS insured, only the consequence of the insurance was that he had to stop the movie.
As far as the first Harry Potter movie goes, I can only agree with Gilliam: it was crap. It was tremendously boring. But that is mainly because of the script, that was too afraid to diverge from the book.
That doesn't mean I think Gilliam would have done better. This simply wasn't his kind of movie. He is not really a character director, certainly not an average-character director, and the Harry Potter movies are all about average characters (in an extraordinary situation, that's true).
Don't forget the last episode of Firefly, "Objects in Space". Watch the episode twice. The first time you are interested but confused. The second time you start to notice lots of philosophical touches. Then listen to the commentary for the episode on the DVD, and understand why it is such a gripping tale.
This is really brilliant television.
I am Dutch, and I can tell you you are right: I indeed don't believe you. AFAIK, your statement on TV schedules was true until a couple of years ago, but no longer.
Not that I am really interested in TV schedules anyway. Dutch TV is just like US TV: hundreds of channels and everything sucks.
"The first one" is only of historic importance if time is linear. But if time-travel is possible, time is not linear. So, for a time-traveller, "the first one" is NOT by definition the one of most importance.
Personally, I think a time traveller will go to a party where there are lots of nice girls (doubtful at nerd central), or at least no interference of high-strung natives. So it will either be in a harem, or in the Jurassic.
What actually does worry me is that, while we pay extra taxes to pay for copying, we can still be prosecuted if we actually do the copying. I almost feel compelled to write a letter to the government demanding my taxes back exery time I buy a blank DVD, stating that I use it to store my own data and not copyrighted material. Because, if I don't do that, it might be considered an admission that I am pirating.
To quote from the link: "Het bestuur van de SONT heeft nog geen besluit genomen over de hoogte van het tarief; de onderhandelingen zijn gaande. Berichten die suggereren dat er al enige duidelijkheid is over de hoogte van een tarief zijn onjuist.", which translates as, "The management of the SONT has not decided yet on the height of the tax; that is still being negotiated. Any statements that suggest that there is any clarity on the height of the tax are false." This message is from April 2005.
The tax on blank DVDs is something like a couple of cents. I suspect that the tax on storage space in MP3-players will probably not be much higher.
If he writes code no one else can maintain, he is NOT a genius programmer. He may be a genius spaghetti-writer or a genius obfuscator. But making your code understandable for others is one of the essential characteristics of a professional programmer, and a genius programmer is not exempted.
When you look at the code of a genius programmer, you should say, "This is brilliant -- I could have never thought that up, but it clearly solves the problem in an elegant way." You should not say, "This must be brilliant because I can't understand it at all."
Seems Jobs managed to pull that one too.
True, but there is a big difference: at the time MS included IE in Windows, there weren't THAT many people online. That came after. And all those new people started with IE. In the PDF/Metro case, however, all those people currently online ALREADY use PDF, and have Acrobat Reader installed. Of course, MS will be able to push their own format, but it will only start to bloom when many people have switched to Longhorn. Given the fact that the average turnover of PCs for pure Internet-users (which is the majority of PC-owners) is a lot lower than MS would like to see, people who make documents available will do so in PDF first, and in Metro later. That is apart from the fact that documents already available in PDF will not be converted quickly.
But Microsoft is notorious for releasing betas as the final product...
So perhaps a good solution is to let the USPTO get paid for every patent they REJECT. If with such a scheme we see the USPTO reject more patents than it does now, we KNOW that their evaluation methods are no good.
My personal favorite is at the very end of the game. If you manage to restore all your friends to life, there is a very intense goodbye scene. I especially loved the words spoken to Fall-From-Grace and to Nordom. Other great moments are the confrontation with Ravel and with the Pillar of Skulls.
The problem with your manifesto is that it is far too long for a MEP to read. They get tons of documents to read, and they will surely skip this text as "another one of those". You are better off stating in two hundred words or less what you want them to learn.
But that doesn't matter. It is now out of the hands of the EC, and into the hands of the EP. The EP has final say in this matter. The only problem is that their final say should be supported by more than 50% of its members (i.e., absentees basically vote against changes to the EC's proposal).
No, as I read it: a robot arm would be patentable, the physical interface between the arm and the software would be patentable, but the software would not be patentable.
This sounds like pure bullying. Ericsson has NOTHING to gain in the area of protecting their software by moving to the US or Japan. You have to apply for patents in countries where you wish to RELEASE your product, not where you DEVELOP your products. So if Ericsson wishes to release products in both the US and Sweden, they have to apply for patents in both places, whether they have their factory located in the US or in Sweden. Actually, they run a higher risk in the US, because in the US a competitor might attempt to close them down because they are (alledgedly) infringing on one of the competitor's patents, while, without software patents in Sweden, in Sweden they wouldn't run any risk at all. That is aside the fact that rebuilding a factory and rehiring personnel in a very expensive country like the US would probably not be profitable. So, methinks this is a lot of hot air from Ericsson.
Of course, those that have followed Microsoft's career know that their basic strategy is always promising, if not guaranteeing, that the next version of their applications will be perfect. Amazingly, some users still believe this hogwash.
The review says Trillian will be a romantic interest of Arthur Dent. If anything, this convinces me they did something seriously wrong with the movie. A romantic interest is for heroes, or at least for guys with something going for them. Arthur Dent is a notorious failure, a complete nobody in the universe, and he is driven, at least in the first three books, mainly by a quest to find a decent cup of tea. Is he going to "save the girl" now? Shocking.
Now, I am not saying everyone will agree with my assessment, but you can be dead sure dat almost nobody likes all these game types. Now, why would you play a game that consists of six different game types, four of which you don't like? And knowing Will Wright's record, he will fuck up at least five of the six game types.
Will Wright's latest games have, in general, got reviews (which I agree with) that said: "Brilliant game in places, but overall not that good." It seems with Spore Will is trying to make sure he'll get another of those reviews. It probably can't miss.
So, no, I am not looking forward to this.
Hmmm.
1.0 falls in the range [0.95,1.04].
1.00 falls in the range [0.995,1.004].
Worst cases:
0.95 + 0.995 = 1.945, rounded off to 1 decimal makes 1.9.
1.04 + 1.004 = 2.044, rounded off to 1 decimal makes 2.0.
Isn't the number of significant digits after the decimal point indeed zero?
The variety of the articles might not be so high as you think...
Now, I would say that if indeed all these politicians are against software patents, they should add a rule to the directive that states "Software patents are not allowed". Instead, you get lawyer-speak.
So, does the directive allow software patents, or doesn't it? It is actually not so difficult to determine. The big companies that are very much in favour of software patents, want this directive. The directive has been designed by patent lawyers who have much to gain by allowing software patents. And the European Patent Office is very actively lobbying for this directive, while they are also very much in favour of software patents. It seems pretty clear to me what this directive is about...
I think the reason people get so worked up over patents on /. is that many of them fall into the classes of inventors and creators. And the patent system abuses what they feel are their rights, namely to build, use, multiply, and sell their own inventions and creations. The patent system as it is now in the US only grants rights to the patent holders. And patent holders are, for the most part, rich mega-corporations that claim rights even if they don't really have them. But any attempt as a small inventor/creator to defend him/herself against such claims is doomed to end in financial ruin of said inventor/creator. So, while inventors/creators have moral rights, the patent system denies them their legal rights. And that is something to get annoyed about.
If you are allowed to patent pure speculation, doesn't that mean science fiction novels may constitute prior art? In that case, there is abundant prior art, I would say.
Really, the US patent system is ridiculous. Please let us Europeans be spared this nonsense.