What if it was a monotonically increasing percentage of revenue? Like a sales tax, but it gets more each decade. For instance:
first 10 years: free
next 10 years: 10% of revenue
next 10 years: 20% of revenue
???
Profit! Err, I mean, Enter Public Domain!
This way, if Disney is still making substantial revenue from an old work, they pay a proportionally high fee.
There should probably also be an exponentially increasing minimum "copyright maintenance" fee, to create an incentive to put works that generate no revenue into the public domain.
It seems reasonable to me that lengthy copyright protection should be a paid service. Copyright seems like a system of getting something for nothing (which isn't always a bad thing, but current copyright laws have become ridiculous).
More Atlantean info, from Atlantis, the Antidiluvian World, by Ignatius Donnelly (also available from project gutenberg, but here it is html formatted)
Here is a short excerpt from Plato's description:
"Such was the vast power which the god settled in the lost island of Atlantis; and this he afterward directed against our land on the following pretext, as traditions tell: For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned toward the gods, who were their kinsmen; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, practising gentleness and wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another. They despised everything but virtue, not caring for their present state of life, arid thinking lightly on the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtuous friendship with one another, and that by excessive zeal for them, and honor of them, the good of them is lost, and friendship perishes with them.
"By such reflections, and by the continuance in them of a divine nature, all that which we have described waxed and increased in them; but when this divine portion began to fade away in them, and became diluted too often, and with too much of the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper-hand, then, they being unable to bear their fortune, became unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see, they began to appear base, and had lost the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they still appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were filled with unrighteous avarice and power. Zeus, the god of gods, who rules with law, and is able to see into such things, perceiving that an honorable race was in a most wretched state, and wanting to inflict punishment on them, that they might be chastened and improved, collected all the gods into his most holy habitation, which, being placed in the centre of the world, sees all things that partake of generation. And when he had called them together he spake as follows:"
[Here Plato's story abruptly ends.]
Reminds me quite strongly of the fall of Numenor in the Silmarillion...
no, I just use the html kjv bible for quick reference. I have, however, read The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, A journey to the center of the earth, lilith, phantastes, the princess and the goblin, captain Stormfield's visit to heaven, and the rime of the ancient mariner off of my computer screen and it didn't kill me.
A cd of Project Gutenberg books would be a reasonable thing for a library to carry. Staring at a screen isn't the best way to read a book, but I've read quite a few that way.
Some of my favorites (Some of which I read in dead tree format, I'm not masochistic enough to read Les Miserables via CRT):
I have used Twiki, Drupal, and Plone. Twiki and Drupal are toys compared to Plone. As far as I can tell, any PHP based CMS is a toy compared to Plone
Twiki is based on perl, not php.
I haven't used Twiki, Drupal, or Plone, but I have used PHP-Nuke, Post-Nuke, and TikiWiki. I wouldn't say that *-Nuke are toys, but they do seem to have a useability issues (too much interface, following links from outside to a password protected PHP-Nuke page will take you to some other page once you log in, not the one intended, etc...).
I'm a lot more impressed by Tikiwiki. The wiki system is very useable, and has per-page access control. The blog system is functionally similar to forums in other CMSs, but allows threaded comments (Yay!), though it lacks per-blog access control (D'oh!). The excessive amount of annoying interface so common to CMSs is easy to turn off.
I'd be interested to know what features plone supports (forums? blogs? wikis?), but it's not immediately obvious from their site.
-jim
One of the reasons I'm interested is that my parents live in one of those oft-forgotten places in the US where high speed internet is a far-away dream.
It's funny you mention that, my parents just got wireless broadband at their place (on a hill 5 miles from town). 2mbps download speeds. Not sure what technology it uses, probably 802.16 or something similar. (Next time I'm at their place maybe I'll check the fccid and look it up in the online fccid database.) 802.16 theretically can go quite a ways (something like 30 miles iirc), so It's definitely an interesting solution for the forgotten residents of rural America. On the other hand, you could always try picking up a big spool of singlemode fiber on ebay:)
Granted these numbers include europe, but according to this, Ocarina of Time sold 5,720,000 as of 1999.
story
I'm not saying Windwaker was a bad game, I enjoyed playing it, it just wasn't quite as fantastically awesome as some previous Zelda games in terms of gameplay (sailing around and feeding the fish to get maps got pretty monotonous, I kept finding money with no way to spend it, etc...) and while the graphics were impressive in a lot of ways, and I don't have anything against 'toon rendering in general, the whole game felt like it was aimed specifically and exclusively at a young audience (which of course won't stop older people from playing them, it just makes it harder to identify with their on-screen character). I didn't get that vibe from Ocarina of Time (which is my all-time favorite adventure game, so I'm holding Windwaker to a high standard). I don't think games need to be targetted at a particular audience, they just need to be good and people will like them.
Cartoon rendering is actually harder than normal rendering, and requires heavy use of vertex and/or fragment engines in the graphics card. Have you seen the latest Zelda? The graphics are amazing.
On the other hand, it seems a lot of that technology seems misplaced. Windwaker was so excessively cartoony that I think most people over ten years old would be embarassed to be seen playing it by their peers. Also, while I respect Nintendo for trying something new, the format of the game was also somewhat lacking. Sailing around from island to island got a little monotonous after awhile.
It seems to me that most adventure-type games fall into two extremes: they're either unnecessarily dark, morbid, and violent (Nintendo has done well avoiding this extreme), or their unnecessarily cartoony, and cute, thus offending 2/3 of their user base.
Where are the good games that stand on their own merits without resorting to morbidity or offensive cuteness as a replacement for quality? Myst, for instance, had an excellent storyline that drew you into the game. Zelda, the Ocarina of Time, while sometimes offensively cute, usually conveyed an appropriate let's-go-slay-some-dragons sense of adventure. I don't really know any current examples.
Maybe I just don't know what the current good games are. Is there an IMDB for games that I don't know about?
Slashdot Mirror
What if it was a monotonically increasing percentage of revenue? Like a sales tax, but it gets more each decade. For instance:
This way, if Disney is still making substantial revenue from an old work, they pay a proportionally high fee.
There should probably also be an exponentially increasing minimum "copyright maintenance" fee, to create an incentive to put works that generate no revenue into the public domain.
It seems reasonable to me that lengthy copyright protection should be a paid service. Copyright seems like a system of getting something for nothing (which isn't always a bad thing, but current copyright laws have become ridiculous).
-jim
More Atlantean info, from Atlantis, the Antidiluvian World, by Ignatius Donnelly (also available from project gutenberg, but here it is html formatted)
Here is a short excerpt from Plato's description:
Reminds me quite strongly of the fall of Numenor in the Silmarillion...
-jim
It seems like I've heard of something like this before
-jim
no, I just use the html kjv bible for quick reference. I have, however, read The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, A journey to the center of the earth, lilith, phantastes, the princess and the goblin, captain Stormfield's visit to heaven, and the rime of the ancient mariner off of my computer screen and it didn't kill me.
-jim
A cd of Project Gutenberg books would be a reasonable thing for a library to carry. Staring at a screen isn't the best way to read a book, but I've read quite a few that way.
Some of my favorites (Some of which I read in dead tree format, I'm not masochistic enough to read Les Miserables via CRT):
-jim
Twiki is based on perl, not php.
I haven't used Twiki, Drupal, or Plone, but I have used PHP-Nuke, Post-Nuke, and TikiWiki. I wouldn't say that *-Nuke are toys, but they do seem to have a useability issues (too much interface, following links from outside to a password protected PHP-Nuke page will take you to some other page once you log in, not the one intended, etc...).
I'm a lot more impressed by Tikiwiki. The wiki system is very useable, and has per-page access control. The blog system is functionally similar to forums in other CMSs, but allows threaded comments (Yay!), though it lacks per-blog access control (D'oh!). The excessive amount of annoying interface so common to CMSs is easy to turn off.
I'd be interested to know what features plone supports (forums? blogs? wikis?), but it's not immediately obvious from their site. -jim
It's funny you mention that, my parents just got wireless broadband at their place (on a hill 5 miles from town). 2mbps download speeds. Not sure what technology it uses, probably 802.16 or something similar. (Next time I'm at their place maybe I'll check the fccid and look it up in the online fccid database.) 802.16 theretically can go quite a ways (something like 30 miles iirc), so It's definitely an interesting solution for the forgotten residents of rural America. On the other hand, you could always try picking up a big spool of singlemode fiber on ebay :)
-jim
htmlified link to pdf of paper and webpage for the lazy
Lisong Xu, Khaled Harfoush, and Injong Rhee, "Binary Increase Congestion Control for Fast Long-Distance Networks", To appear in Infocom 2004.
jim
Don't forget existing ad-hoc routing protocols that work fine with IPV4 or IPV6, like
dynamic source routing (dsr)
destination sequenced distance vector (dsdv)
temorally ordered routing (tora)
ad-hoc on demand distance vector (dsdv)
comparison paper
Some of these are even used in reasonably large real world networks.
-jim
Granted these numbers include europe, but according to this, Ocarina of Time sold 5,720,000 as of 1999. story
I'm not saying Windwaker was a bad game, I enjoyed playing it, it just wasn't quite as fantastically awesome as some previous Zelda games in terms of gameplay (sailing around and feeding the fish to get maps got pretty monotonous, I kept finding money with no way to spend it, etc...) and while the graphics were impressive in a lot of ways, and I don't have anything against 'toon rendering in general, the whole game felt like it was aimed specifically and exclusively at a young audience (which of course won't stop older people from playing them, it just makes it harder to identify with their on-screen character). I didn't get that vibe from Ocarina of Time (which is my all-time favorite adventure game, so I'm holding Windwaker to a high standard). I don't think games need to be targetted at a particular audience, they just need to be good and people will like them.
-jim
Cartoon rendering is actually harder than normal rendering, and requires heavy use of vertex and/or fragment engines in the graphics card. Have you seen the latest Zelda? The graphics are amazing.
On the other hand, it seems a lot of that technology seems misplaced. Windwaker was so excessively cartoony that I think most people over ten years old would be embarassed to be seen playing it by their peers. Also, while I respect Nintendo for trying something new, the format of the game was also somewhat lacking. Sailing around from island to island got a little monotonous after awhile.
It seems to me that most adventure-type games fall into two extremes: they're either unnecessarily dark, morbid, and violent (Nintendo has done well avoiding this extreme), or their unnecessarily cartoony, and cute, thus offending 2/3 of their user base.
Where are the good games that stand on their own merits without resorting to morbidity or offensive cuteness as a replacement for quality? Myst, for instance, had an excellent storyline that drew you into the game. Zelda, the Ocarina of Time, while sometimes offensively cute, usually conveyed an appropriate let's-go-slay-some-dragons sense of adventure. I don't really know any current examples.
Maybe I just don't know what the current good games are. Is there an IMDB for games that I don't know about?
-jim
The whole Silmarillion might not make a good movie, but individual parts (i.e. the stories of Beren, Turin, Tuor, etc...) might work.
On the other hand, it would make a great real time strategy game (think Warcraft with ents and balrogs).
On the third hand, I would probably be offended by numerous inconsistencies with the book, so maybe its better they don't make a game or movie.
-jim
The main site seems to be slashdotted. There appears to be an online book on the subject here
Version Control with Subversion
Draft Revision 8770
Ben Collins-Sussman
Brian W. Fitzpatrick
C. Michael Pilato
-jim