As near as I can tell from the page source, it is all being done through Javascript. The canvas tag seems purely nominal. In fact, disabling Javascript disables the demo completely. I'm pretty sure I saw this entire demo, or something isomorphic to it, back in 1998.
Once again I find myself completely underwhelmed by the canvas element.
If P2P multiplayer has taught me anything over the last few years it's that NAT traversal is by no way or means a settled issue in networking. Time and time again, on multiple system, console and PC, I have seen P2P games fail to connect, had connections flake out and generally problems all round.
All this no matter how I configure my router, PC, PS3 or Xbox. Port forwarding, UPnP, QoS, Custom services, DMZs, fixed IPs, DHCP, IP Passthrough. You name it, I've tried it. And every individual game seems to want either new ports forwarded, or else ports 80 and 443 all to itself.
The only reliable method I have found for guaranteed flawless P2P online play is PPPoE, and there is no way in all seven hells that I am going back to having a windows box exposed to the elements like that again. I'm reluctant to even put the PS3 out there like that. Besides, do most ISPs even support PPPoE?
P2P online play has been the way PC RTS games have gone over the last few years. I doubt Starcraft 3 will the exception. What I suspect is that, since their last serverless multiplayer game was Warcraft 3, Blizzard initially went with a P2P based multiplayer solution, and now have had to delay the release when they finally realized what a monstrosity they had unleashed upon themselves. (Check out this NAT FAQ for the game which even gives the usual pawn off to portforward.com) Can you imagine the damage to Blizzard's reputation when millions of WoW-heads turned on their latest title only to have it completely fail to even start and online game?
My money is on NAT, and Blizzards inexperience with it as the root cause of this delay. If this is the case, I suspect that Battle.net may even go to some kind of client server model. NAT has become a problem as people have moved behind Broadband Routers and Gateways, instead of having modems directly hooked to their main rig. I could be wrong, but given Blizzard's sheer size it would be folly for them to leave their users having in the wind on the NAT traversal issue.
Then the small print said "artist's impression", and the actual image of a blue smudge just wasn't all that exciting anymore.
Speak for yourself. I saw it and thought "That's a real image of a star 640 light years away". I don't care how blurry it is. Betelgeuse just became that much more real to me today.
Imagine what we could see with another Hubble telescope.
Universities is where you go to get a bit of culture and to develop connections that will help you later in life.
No! No, no, no! If you do that then you really will be wasting your time as the OP suggested.
You're at university to get an education in the principles of your chosen field. There is no other realistic way to get such a solid foundation in a discipline. Trying to educate yourself to degree level while holding down a job is a herculean labour. Trying to pick one up over the course of a career is going to be like making a scientific discovery. Most people need several years of devoted study to be prepared to work efficiently in a professional field.
The classic example is medicine. That's one extreme. But virtually every other "hard" discipline will require this level of rigour. Law, Engineering, Accounting, Medicine. It takes years to turn a high school graduate into someone ready to be a professional. It's not just an attitude shift. Universities impart essential knowladge that is difficult to obtain anywhere else.
Perhaps in fields like MBA's, the arts and humanities and other "soft" disiplines, making connections is in fact more important than whatever fluff they learn besides. Perhaps that's the reason our modern institutions, public and private, suffer from chronic incompetence, lack of direction and catastrophic collapses. The people who run them go to University to better practice cronyism and to learn the art of appearing as through they know anything at all, instead of actually learning something useful.
If you meet a few people, so be it, but for the vast majority of graduates meeting people is not going to be a firm basis for a future career. You can't expect to live out of people you met in college for the rest of your life. For any career worth having, there are really only two options. Higher education, or self employment. Preferably both.
I spent most of my years in University in our student relaxing room playing boardgames and arguing with fellow students and faculty members. Now people who graduated years before me and have achieved higher positions in companies know me or are my friends and have a good understanding on how I fit in teams/groups.
You slack off when your supposed to be working and schmooze up to people to make them feel important. Who wouldn't want you as their stooge?!
A lot of teens and their parents are still duped into believing that a degree will still lead to a guaranteed "good" job.
The big problem here is that society at large has come to view universities and higher education in general as advanced vocational training. The trouble is, the universities themselves have no such delusion.
In short, it is impossible for universities to provide vocational training for professions. There are too many jobs, too many ways of doing them, and too many changes in practices in every single profession for any one institution to have a ghost of chance of keeping up with all of them.
Now, there is some element of "job training" in higher education, but only in an academic sense. You can be taught about binary trees and methods to search them in a university course, but there simply isn't time to train you in how to use the IDE, language and indeed operating system that you will be asked to implement those searches by your employer. And computer science courses are in fact VERY vocational as courses go. Most engineering course will only be able to teach you how to use a bandsaw and AutoCAD. Small use when you have to use the latest tabletop wonder from Hansvedt.
At the end of the day, final training for a job must be done by employers. Unfortunately, many skimp on this and complain that Universities aren't doing their job. HR departments demand experience not because they believe it will provide quality, but because the company does not want to go to the bother of expense of actually passing on skills. Yes, Graduates do come out of universities will few "real world" skills. But this has always been the case. What has changed is a fickle employment culture in which companies hire and fire at will and thus cannot risk training someone only to see them run off at a moments notice for a higher paid position.
There's plenty of material out there to counter-act this view and show that in many (possibly even now a majority) of cases, it's a waste of time and money.
I wouldn't go quite so far. It is true that certain courses can be difficult to get a job out of, but it's also true that not taking any course can make it very difficult to get a well paid, and indeed fulfilling job. A university course should be chosen for two reasons; Interest in the subject, and the prospect of a vocation. Both are important. If people choose wisely and put in the effort, their time spent in university will be far from a waste of time and money, and indeed will be time well spent and very well rewarded. Fours years of good education will allow you to hold your own in your chosen field, and prepare you for a changing world and workplace. This is not guaranteed, but the odds are certainly in your favour.
Realizing that 50% of consumers lack the genes necessary to "grow a set"
Consumers may be quick to roll over, but the thing to remember about video game players is that they use their products for quite a bit longer than most comparable ones. An average game will last at the very least 10 hours. A good game 40+. A great game 200+ hours.
Now, from this standpoint, it's easy to see why marketing execs want in on video game screen time. However, as a game player, I can say with some certainty that this is going to seriously hurt the bottom line of any company that tries to pull this stunt.
People play video games to get away from it all. Despite IP based multiplayer becoming commonplace, playing video games is still essentially a private pastime, played alone in sitting rooms or bedrooms, and is an exercise far more akin to reading a book than watching a film. When you throw an ad into a video game, you tear people out of the immersion of the experience. You remind them obtusely of the real world and how shallow it can be. You pop the bubble of the happy fantasy they were indulging themselves in, and then continue to pop it time and again with every advertisement. Eventually, the game is worth far less than the price they paid for it.
I compared video games to books, which I think is as fair and accurate a comparison as can be made between "new" and "old" media. It's useful to look to see how the publishing industry has integrated advertisements into its products over its 250+ year existence. In short, it hasn't. The most you get from books is publisher's ads for other books in the series or genre. You most certainly do not have ads strewn intermittently throughout the text, or have passages such as Galadriel giving Frodo the gift of a refreshing glass of Coca-Cola.
I will never buy Bionic Commando. To me, it is, and always will be, "That Pepsi Game". I can't spend 10+ hours being drawn into a story and setting while being constantly being reminded of taste tests and the Spice Girls. I will never play Wipeout HD either. More importantly, I will never buy their sequels. I fairly sure I won't be alone. Gamers play games to get away from advertisements. If you start putting them in your game, they'll play others just to get away from you.
Are you claiming that your hormones, now that you have children, make you incapable of deciding something rationally?
As near as I can tell, this claim is 100% accurate. Having children seems to turn rational reasonable people into concentrated, quivering balls of paranoia, that hiss and spit at anything that moves quickly or makes a loud noise.
In under a year, he has had his house vandalized three times (people throw rocks through his windows or spray paint stuff like "RAPIST" on the front of his house).
And who are those people? The righteous? The zealots? The ignorent?
No. Those people are criminals.
The vindictive persecution and vilification of sex offenders, no matter how light their offence, is the ultimate unstated goal of sex offence laws. We've created an underclass of people who can be beaten, tormented and even killed by those so inclined with no fear of censure.
The truth is that people enjoy tormenting sex offenders, not because they are sex offenders, but because they simply enjoy tormenting people. They don't really care about sex offences. You could easily replace sex offenders with communists, Jews, blacks, foreigners, etc.
Sex offenders are merely the way our society has found to satisfy the urges of a large segment of the population who takes pleasure in persecution and violence. We have evolved a way for idle and violent people to lash out without running foul of societies mores.
I don't think this is a part of a vast conspiracy. Rather, it is a instance of a natural evolution that human societies will undergo in any time or era as it is in our nature to have such an underclass in order to fulfil such desires.
This isn't about the crimes. This is, and always has been, about the hysteria and the violence that follows, and the people who enjoy both.
What he did was the moral equivalent of walking through an unlocked, unguarded door and having a look round. For this he's facing 60 years in jail. This is not justice.
That hippy tried to make a fool out of The United States Armed Forces, and by extension, their entire nation. Nothing is more important than the good standing of the brave men who defend their nations freedom.
Most, no all, of this Fermi Paradox/Drake Equation nonsense is just that. Nonsense. It certainly isn't science, as anyone with a smidgen of education can see by the ten orders of magnitude that the various estimates for the probability of alien life span.
This study says fewer than 10. Well, I say more than 10,000. And who is to say I'm wrong? I can dress up my estimate with Polar charts, statistical studies and differential equations too if you like. However, none of my investigations will bring me, or anyone else any closer to the truth.
As time goes by and our promised moon bases fail to materialise, the concept of the Von-Neumann wave is looking increasingly ridiculous. The idea that 1950's technology can propagate a species across a galaxy is supposedly sound in theory(I doubt even that), but shaky in practice. The idea of automated probes is also pretty unlikely considering the snails pace at which AI research has progressed.
Science fiction is all very well, but it has no place in Science. You don't see scientists talking about fairies, or wizards, or goblins over the course of their work. So why should they talk about aliens and colonization waves, which are no less fantastic?
This type of fuzzy science seems to have become popular after the 1960/70's, Carl Sagan, and probably one too many LSD trips. I thought things like the Heaven's Gate and Scientology would discredit this unwise intrusion of fantasy into serious scientific work, but studies like this, and the unwillingness of many scientists to leave their sci-fi novels at home have taught me otherwise.
Sorry, but if I or CannonbalHead composes a 5-piece brass ensemble, NO ONE should be allowed to duplicate it without my permission.
Why? What gives you the right to stop other people from playing that music? If you say someone is not allowed to play it unless they compensate you, why should they listen? They have the music, they have the band, and they're willing to play, and people are willing to listen. Why should you, a third party, have to give the go ahead every time? Just because you wrote the piece 5/10/20/50/100 years ago? Why should you get to sit on your ass forever collecting protection money from people who actually play music for a living?
I mean apply your logic to somthing like "Happy Birthday". What you're saying is that if the person who wrote happy birthday, or their estate, was still around, people shouldn't be allowed to sing happy birthday without paying that estate a fee. What lunacy!....Oh wait.
By this you say my composition is only worth the paper it's printed on. I call BS.
No, it's worth less than that. The paper needed would probably come to something like, say, 10c. On the other hand the composition itself would probably take less than 1MB to store, costing fractions of a cent. It would cost a fraction of that to copy the file across the world. The composition is effectively worthless.
This isn't some abstract argument. The worth of data is going down and down. The forces of reality are slowly catching up with a concept that was always slightly artificial to begin with. You cannot reasonably expect people to treat data worth next to nothing as something worthy of sacrosanct protections. The modern surge in copyright infringement shows that people do not accept the status quo that abstract data has concrete worth and value. As our ability to store and copy ever larger data files increases, this attitude is going to become even more pronounced.
The only parallel I can think of in history for the current effect of technology on copyright is the effect of the printing press on translation of the bible. The church maintained for years that teh bible could not, even should not be translated into the vernacular, and that to do so was heresy. But as printing presses came of age, technology improved, and slowly more and more "heretics"/criminals began to translate the book and printed copies came into circulation.
Nowadays, we think nothing of a printed bible in the vernacular, or indeed someones right to make one. But back then it was a contentious issue. I think a similar fate awaits copyright. As technology improves, the status quo will slowly pass from unreasonable to nonsensical, and the whole concept of copyright will either have to go, or be amended so it can cope with the new reality of the digital age.
Why are you not interested in doing actual science? We simply don't have data to support Hansen's and Gore's wild accusations.
And therein lies the root of the Global Warming debate. On the one hand, we have people holding up scientific evidence which shows a human effect on climate, of the order of a degree or so. On the other hand, we have other people holding up that same data, as evidence that the earth will not freeze/flood over like Gore or any other hysteric claimed it would or is believed to have claimed it would.
Climate change is real. It's not going to cause Hollywood style disasters or wipe out the human race, but it's probably going to be the last straw of a few species, and lead to, subtle, changes in the environment that many species, including our own, may have trouble adapting to. The question facing our society is do we really give a shit?
They say public input, but what is to stop any lobby group with deep enough pockets and a large enough network from organising its own flash mob, to sway the government one way or the other.
This seems to be a common feature of modern life. We are told that policy is driven by the will of the people, but how can we be sure of that? How do you tell the difference between thousands of genuinely aggrieved people, and thousands being paid to be aggrieved? How do you tell the difference between consent, and manufactured consent?
It's our own fault really. We support a system where the people we elect to make decisions dare not sign a single paper, for fear it may cause outrage or scandal. Or at least, manufactured outrage or scandal. How convenient for producers.
Like many things in life, there is a right way and a wrong way to respond to a ridiculous lawsuit
The "right way" being to craft a stately letter filled with "professional" prose, and thus confering not a small amount of legitimacy to the actions of these blackmailers. By doing so, the responder tacitly recognises the worthiness of the claims to be heard in court and dives headfirst into the molasses of rules, traditions and procedures of the legal system, where cunning lawyers have the upper hand.
Better to reject their claims as contemptible nonsense, and say as much to the court when (if) the matter is finally heard. Remember, they're the ones who have to prove that you've done something wrong. It's not your job to prove you haven't.
Slashdot Mirror
As near as I can tell from the page source, it is all being done through Javascript. The canvas tag seems purely nominal. In fact, disabling Javascript disables the demo completely. I'm pretty sure I saw this entire demo, or something isomorphic to it, back in 1998.
Once again I find myself completely underwhelmed by the canvas element.
They may well be doing just that.
If P2P multiplayer has taught me anything over the last few years it's that NAT traversal is by no way or means a settled issue in networking. Time and time again, on multiple system, console and PC, I have seen P2P games fail to connect, had connections flake out and generally problems all round.
All this no matter how I configure my router, PC, PS3 or Xbox. Port forwarding, UPnP, QoS, Custom services, DMZs, fixed IPs, DHCP, IP Passthrough. You name it, I've tried it. And every individual game seems to want either new ports forwarded, or else ports 80 and 443 all to itself.
The only reliable method I have found for guaranteed flawless P2P online play is PPPoE, and there is no way in all seven hells that I am going back to having a windows box exposed to the elements like that again. I'm reluctant to even put the PS3 out there like that. Besides, do most ISPs even support PPPoE?
P2P online play has been the way PC RTS games have gone over the last few years. I doubt Starcraft 3 will the exception. What I suspect is that, since their last serverless multiplayer game was Warcraft 3, Blizzard initially went with a P2P based multiplayer solution, and now have had to delay the release when they finally realized what a monstrosity they had unleashed upon themselves. (Check out this NAT FAQ for the game which even gives the usual pawn off to portforward.com) Can you imagine the damage to Blizzard's reputation when millions of WoW-heads turned on their latest title only to have it completely fail to even start and online game?
My money is on NAT, and Blizzards inexperience with it as the root cause of this delay. If this is the case, I suspect that Battle.net may even go to some kind of client server model. NAT has become a problem as people have moved behind Broadband Routers and Gateways, instead of having modems directly hooked to their main rig. I could be wrong, but given Blizzard's sheer size it would be folly for them to leave their users having in the wind on the NAT traversal issue.
Speak for yourself. I saw it and thought "That's a real image of a star 640 light years away". I don't care how blurry it is. Betelgeuse just became that much more real to me today.
Imagine what we could see with another Hubble telescope.
I forgive your blasphemy!
They see me pwnin'. They hatin'.
No! No, no, no! If you do that then you really will be wasting your time as the OP suggested.
You're at university to get an education in the principles of your chosen field. There is no other realistic way to get such a solid foundation in a discipline. Trying to educate yourself to degree level while holding down a job is a herculean labour. Trying to pick one up over the course of a career is going to be like making a scientific discovery. Most people need several years of devoted study to be prepared to work efficiently in a professional field.
The classic example is medicine. That's one extreme. But virtually every other "hard" discipline will require this level of rigour. Law, Engineering, Accounting, Medicine. It takes years to turn a high school graduate into someone ready to be a professional. It's not just an attitude shift. Universities impart essential knowladge that is difficult to obtain anywhere else.
Perhaps in fields like MBA's, the arts and humanities and other "soft" disiplines, making connections is in fact more important than whatever fluff they learn besides. Perhaps that's the reason our modern institutions, public and private, suffer from chronic incompetence, lack of direction and catastrophic collapses. The people who run them go to University to better practice cronyism and to learn the art of appearing as through they know anything at all, instead of actually learning something useful.
If you meet a few people, so be it, but for the vast majority of graduates meeting people is not going to be a firm basis for a future career. You can't expect to live out of people you met in college for the rest of your life. For any career worth having, there are really only two options. Higher education, or self employment. Preferably both.
You slack off when your supposed to be working and schmooze up to people to make them feel important. Who wouldn't want you as their stooge?!
The big problem here is that society at large has come to view universities and higher education in general as advanced vocational training. The trouble is, the universities themselves have no such delusion.
In short, it is impossible for universities to provide vocational training for professions. There are too many jobs, too many ways of doing them, and too many changes in practices in every single profession for any one institution to have a ghost of chance of keeping up with all of them.
Now, there is some element of "job training" in higher education, but only in an academic sense. You can be taught about binary trees and methods to search them in a university course, but there simply isn't time to train you in how to use the IDE, language and indeed operating system that you will be asked to implement those searches by your employer. And computer science courses are in fact VERY vocational as courses go. Most engineering course will only be able to teach you how to use a bandsaw and AutoCAD. Small use when you have to use the latest tabletop wonder from Hansvedt.
At the end of the day, final training for a job must be done by employers. Unfortunately, many skimp on this and complain that Universities aren't doing their job. HR departments demand experience not because they believe it will provide quality, but because the company does not want to go to the bother of expense of actually passing on skills. Yes, Graduates do come out of universities will few "real world" skills. But this has always been the case. What has changed is a fickle employment culture in which companies hire and fire at will and thus cannot risk training someone only to see them run off at a moments notice for a higher paid position.
I wouldn't go quite so far. It is true that certain courses can be difficult to get a job out of, but it's also true that not taking any course can make it very difficult to get a well paid, and indeed fulfilling job. A university course should be chosen for two reasons; Interest in the subject, and the prospect of a vocation. Both are important. If people choose wisely and put in the effort, their time spent in university will be far from a waste of time and money, and indeed will be time well spent and very well rewarded. Fours years of good education will allow you to hold your own in your chosen field, and prepare you for a changing world and workplace. This is not guaranteed, but the odds are certainly in your favour.
Consumers may be quick to roll over, but the thing to remember about video game players is that they use their products for quite a bit longer than most comparable ones. An average game will last at the very least 10 hours. A good game 40+. A great game 200+ hours.
Now, from this standpoint, it's easy to see why marketing execs want in on video game screen time. However, as a game player, I can say with some certainty that this is going to seriously hurt the bottom line of any company that tries to pull this stunt.
People play video games to get away from it all. Despite IP based multiplayer becoming commonplace, playing video games is still essentially a private pastime, played alone in sitting rooms or bedrooms, and is an exercise far more akin to reading a book than watching a film. When you throw an ad into a video game, you tear people out of the immersion of the experience. You remind them obtusely of the real world and how shallow it can be. You pop the bubble of the happy fantasy they were indulging themselves in, and then continue to pop it time and again with every advertisement. Eventually, the game is worth far less than the price they paid for it.
I compared video games to books, which I think is as fair and accurate a comparison as can be made between "new" and "old" media. It's useful to look to see how the publishing industry has integrated advertisements into its products over its 250+ year existence. In short, it hasn't. The most you get from books is publisher's ads for other books in the series or genre. You most certainly do not have ads strewn intermittently throughout the text, or have passages such as Galadriel giving Frodo the gift of a refreshing glass of Coca-Cola.
I will never buy Bionic Commando. To me, it is, and always will be, "That Pepsi Game". I can't spend 10+ hours being drawn into a story and setting while being constantly being reminded of taste tests and the Spice Girls. I will never play Wipeout HD either. More importantly, I will never buy their sequels. I fairly sure I won't be alone. Gamers play games to get away from advertisements. If you start putting them in your game, they'll play others just to get away from you.
Or incredibly hungry.
Yes, but it's a more boring explanation, so people are going to ignore it.
I've rarely seen a private institution fulfilling its legal obligations with such thoroughness and zeal.
As near as I can tell, this claim is 100% accurate. Having children seems to turn rational reasonable people into concentrated, quivering balls of paranoia, that hiss and spit at anything that moves quickly or makes a loud noise.
And who are those people? The righteous? The zealots? The ignorent?
No. Those people are criminals.
The vindictive persecution and vilification of sex offenders, no matter how light their offence, is the ultimate unstated goal of sex offence laws. We've created an underclass of people who can be beaten, tormented and even killed by those so inclined with no fear of censure.
The truth is that people enjoy tormenting sex offenders, not because they are sex offenders, but because they simply enjoy tormenting people. They don't really care about sex offences. You could easily replace sex offenders with communists, Jews, blacks, foreigners, etc.
Sex offenders are merely the way our society has found to satisfy the urges of a large segment of the population who takes pleasure in persecution and violence. We have evolved a way for idle and violent people to lash out without running foul of societies mores.
I don't think this is a part of a vast conspiracy. Rather, it is a instance of a natural evolution that human societies will undergo in any time or era as it is in our nature to have such an underclass in order to fulfil such desires.
This isn't about the crimes. This is, and always has been, about the hysteria and the violence that follows, and the people who enjoy both.
But think of the important moral lesson for the other children and for the community at large:
Nobody screws harder than the Government.
Not if you went back in time!! Didn't you read the GP post!
Ummmm...hmmmmmm.
That hippy tried to make a fool out of The United States Armed Forces, and by extension, their entire nation. Nothing is more important than the good standing of the brave men who defend their nations freedom.
We go'in fry that sucker, I-tell-you-what!
Most, no all, of this Fermi Paradox/Drake Equation nonsense is just that. Nonsense. It certainly isn't science, as anyone with a smidgen of education can see by the ten orders of magnitude that the various estimates for the probability of alien life span.
This study says fewer than 10. Well, I say more than 10,000. And who is to say I'm wrong? I can dress up my estimate with Polar charts, statistical studies and differential equations too if you like. However, none of my investigations will bring me, or anyone else any closer to the truth.
As time goes by and our promised moon bases fail to materialise, the concept of the Von-Neumann wave is looking increasingly ridiculous. The idea that 1950's technology can propagate a species across a galaxy is supposedly sound in theory(I doubt even that), but shaky in practice. The idea of automated probes is also pretty unlikely considering the snails pace at which AI research has progressed.
Science fiction is all very well, but it has no place in Science. You don't see scientists talking about fairies, or wizards, or goblins over the course of their work. So why should they talk about aliens and colonization waves, which are no less fantastic?
This type of fuzzy science seems to have become popular after the 1960/70's, Carl Sagan, and probably one too many LSD trips. I thought things like the Heaven's Gate and Scientology would discredit this unwise intrusion of fantasy into serious scientific work, but studies like this, and the unwillingness of many scientists to leave their sci-fi novels at home have taught me otherwise.
Downloading Game:
|====--------------- 21% /|
ETA: 6 hours 27 minutes
And the distinction between those two things is....?
Why? What gives you the right to stop other people from playing that music? If you say someone is not allowed to play it unless they compensate you, why should they listen? They have the music, they have the band, and they're willing to play, and people are willing to listen. Why should you, a third party, have to give the go ahead every time? Just because you wrote the piece 5/10/20/50/100 years ago? Why should you get to sit on your ass forever collecting protection money from people who actually play music for a living?
I mean apply your logic to somthing like "Happy Birthday". What you're saying is that if the person who wrote happy birthday, or their estate, was still around, people shouldn't be allowed to sing happy birthday without paying that estate a fee. What lunacy! ....Oh wait.
No, it's worth less than that. The paper needed would probably come to something like, say, 10c. On the other hand the composition itself would probably take less than 1MB to store, costing fractions of a cent. It would cost a fraction of that to copy the file across the world. The composition is effectively worthless.
This isn't some abstract argument. The worth of data is going down and down. The forces of reality are slowly catching up with a concept that was always slightly artificial to begin with. You cannot reasonably expect people to treat data worth next to nothing as something worthy of sacrosanct protections. The modern surge in copyright infringement shows that people do not accept the status quo that abstract data has concrete worth and value. As our ability to store and copy ever larger data files increases, this attitude is going to become even more pronounced.
The only parallel I can think of in history for the current effect of technology on copyright is the effect of the printing press on translation of the bible. The church maintained for years that teh bible could not, even should not be translated into the vernacular, and that to do so was heresy. But as printing presses came of age, technology improved, and slowly more and more "heretics"/criminals began to translate the book and printed copies came into circulation.
Nowadays, we think nothing of a printed bible in the vernacular, or indeed someones right to make one. But back then it was a contentious issue. I think a similar fate awaits copyright. As technology improves, the status quo will slowly pass from unreasonable to nonsensical, and the whole concept of copyright will either have to go, or be amended so it can cope with the new reality of the digital age.
And therein lies the root of the Global Warming debate. On the one hand, we have people holding up scientific evidence which shows a human effect on climate, of the order of a degree or so. On the other hand, we have other people holding up that same data, as evidence that the earth will not freeze/flood over like Gore or any other hysteric claimed it would or is believed to have claimed it would.
Climate change is real. It's not going to cause Hollywood style disasters or wipe out the human race, but it's probably going to be the last straw of a few species, and lead to, subtle, changes in the environment that many species, including our own, may have trouble adapting to. The question facing our society is do we really give a shit?
The answer is no.
They say public input, but what is to stop any lobby group with deep enough pockets and a large enough network from organising its own flash mob, to sway the government one way or the other.
This seems to be a common feature of modern life. We are told that policy is driven by the will of the people, but how can we be sure of that? How do you tell the difference between thousands of genuinely aggrieved people, and thousands being paid to be aggrieved? How do you tell the difference between consent, and manufactured consent?
It's our own fault really. We support a system where the people we elect to make decisions dare not sign a single paper, for fear it may cause outrage or scandal. Or at least, manufactured outrage or scandal. How convenient for producers.
The "right way" being to craft a stately letter filled with "professional" prose, and thus confering not a small amount of legitimacy to the actions of these blackmailers. By doing so, the responder tacitly recognises the worthiness of the claims to be heard in court and dives headfirst into the molasses of rules, traditions and procedures of the legal system, where cunning lawyers have the upper hand.
Better to reject their claims as contemptible nonsense, and say as much to the court when (if) the matter is finally heard. Remember, they're the ones who have to prove that you've done something wrong. It's not your job to prove you haven't.