Our beloved CmdrTaco doesn't dispute that Blizzard has the rights to set and enforce naming conventions in its virtual world. I suspect that if his forced name-change had occurred early in his WOW career, we wouldn't be reading this monologue.
Yes, what this illustrates is that rules should be applied promptly and consistently to preserve goodwill. Best policy would be to have a "Proscribed names" list. Names are screened against the list immediately at time of creation, and names that are in violation are rejected. No reliance on the judgment of a GM. The proscribed list can be extended, but anybody who had their name before it went on the list gets grandfathered.
You know how these class action suits on consumer electronics generally work out. The lawyer rakes in a fat commission, and consumers who bought the product get a $10 gift certificate--at least, the ones who are willing to spend $10 worth of their time collecting the documentation to prove that they bought the product.
It does not matter how unworkable is for Google to implement an opt-in scheme. The law is not to be obeyed only when it is "workable" to do so.
It certainly matters to me. Nobody is suggesting that Google engage in civil disobedience, so this "law is to be obeyed" nonsense is just that.
It seems to me that what Google is doing should qualify as "fair use." It is certainly in the spirit of the sort of activities that the fair use exemption was created to protect. If the courts disagree, then the law should be amended to make it clear that this sort of indexing is fair use.
In any case, suggesting that Google could just switch to an "opt-in" system is disingenuous, because it is quite obvious that opt-in won't work. Opt-out is the only way in which this project, which has substantial public benefits, will be able to proceed.
1. You sure that Google isn't using an affiliate link for the "Buy This Book" links? You sure that they aren't getting other revenue from the vendors? I'm not saying that they are, but I wouldn't be surprised.
From TFA:
We refer people who discover books through Google Print to online retailers, but we don't make a penny on referrals. We also don't place ads on Google Print pages for books from our Library Project, and we do so for books in our Publishing Program only with the permission of publishers
2. I think even if there was no direct benefit you'd have a hard time arguing that Google didn't obtain even an indirect advantage from the venture. It gives them more poise, it increases the areas where they have a foothold.
It is certainly good for Google's reputation--a common motivation for philanthropy--but it is hard to see how they are getting a commercial advantage.
3. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if Google isn't selling ads on Google Print... what's this?
Probably from the Google Publisher Program (see above), where books are listed upon specific request by the publisher, which is irrelevant to the issues at hand. See here for more info as to how Google proposes to display the data:
Clearly Google is doing this for their own good, not for the public's. They stand to profit (adverts, cut on book sales) from valuable IP that they don't own. It may be covered by fair use, it may not be.
Google isn't placing any ads on pages for their library project, so it is hard to see how they benefit except in the general way that companies benefit from philanthropic acts by increased goodwill. The only way ads will be present is if the publisher wants to put one there. If the publisher or bookseller doesn't see a benefit and doesn't want to pay, no ads and no profit. And a lot of the books are out of print anyway, so they aren't going to get much in the way of advertising revenue.
Understand it's a gamble. If they lose the court case they will have to stop the projet and compensate copyright holders a little, but it won't come to much relative to Google's wealth.
Who decides what's a little? Simply the cost of the labor involved in tracking down the owners of books, many of them long out of print, and negotiating a price with them would be prohibitive considering the number of books they are proposing to scan.
In this instance I'd still side with Google because what they are doing ultimately serves the public, but still, the IP belongs to the authors, it should be allowed a voice in what they can do with it (yes I know that they can "opt out", but if you think "opt in" is a lot of work for Google, similarly "opt out" is a lot of work for the publishers).
The publishers presumably know what they own, so it shouldn't be more than a few hours, if that. On the other hand, figuring out who owns the rights to a heterogeneous collection of books, many of them decades out-of-print and with the imprints of defunct publishing houses, would be an extraordinarily expensive research task--and with no guarantee of success. Google would be left open to ruinous lawsuits if they failed to find the owners, and the they later popped up with lawyers.
the reproduction or distribution is made without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage;
(1) rules out the first exception in 17 USC 108.
Since Google is a free service, the only way this project could give them a commercial advantage would be by selling ads on Google Print pages--which they aren't doing. So this exemption does indeed seem to apply.
The limitations are: 107 - fair use 108 - library and archives 109 - first sale, maybe more 110-122 - not sure just by scanning, you can read them if you'd like. From titles, none apperas to apply to books.
Considering that this is being done by libraries for purposes of an archive, it may well fall under 108.
There's a term that describes what Google is doing: "evil." They are screwing over the authors and publishers, and it's starting to tarnish the reputation they've worked so hard to maintain.
It is difficult to see how anybody is being "screwed over," because the restrictions Google is placing on access are such that nobody is likely to lose sales (and many sales will probably be made) by virtue of the existence of this archive.
An "opt-in" scheme is obviously unworkable, because the amount of effort required to chase down the often obscure chain of ownership rights to every book would be cost-prohibative.
In contrast, the public value of such an archive is enormous. Google deserves great credit for having the courage to embark upon this project. If copyright laws are interpreted in such a way as to make this project impossible, it would be an excellent reason to change the law to add an explicit "fair use" exemption. But I doubt if this will be necessary.
I agree that hardly anybody will buy an iPod for video, although the possibility might influence somebody's iPod choice toward the high-end models ("I don't really care about video, but I might in the future, and anyway it's only a little bit more money"). But a lot of people will get iPods just for the music, but purchase a few shows because it is easy, convenient, and cheap.
Except the videos are at QVGA resolution (320x240). That's substantially less than even analog TV, much less DVD or HDTV. Don't count on a lot of people ditching their Tivos just yet. Or ditching bittorrent, for that matter.
I'm not ditching my HDTiVo. On the other hand, if I somehow manage to miss a show, or decide to pick up watching a show midseason, at $2 a pop, I'd be more likely to go to iTunes than to Bittorrent.
This looks like a good foot-in-the-door move for Apple. At that resolution, it's not all that threatening for the TV studios. But if it turns out to be a big source of revenue, the studios might be willing to consider higher resolution.
What strikes me as most interesting, though, is the potential for selling not merely current shows, but the huge backlist of old TV shows. These weren't HD to begin with, so the low resolution would be less of a sacrifice. And I'll bet that they'll find that they can sell individual shows to people who would not be likely to go to a video shop and pick up a DVD collection.
So, should I chalk this up to "We don't like to do hard [math] problems"? Yes, it's easier for us to work with, but again, I don't see that as evidence why natural laws should be simple or elegant.
We don't know that they are. Indeed, the historical trend has been for models to become more complex.
However, science advances by exclusion of wrong ideas. A simple model (one with fewer degrees of freedom) requires less data to exclude than a more complex mode. To give a trivial example, to exclude a polynomial of degree n requires a minimum of n+2 data points.
So in ordering possible models for investigation, is is most efficiently to proceed from simple to complex.
P.S. I loved the story, I too almost want to go out and start reading the comics.
In general, the Marvel "Ultimate" titles are excellent re-envisioning of the classic Marvel characters. They try to be a bit more "realistic" than the originals (although obviously when talking about superheroes that is very much relative), and they have just enough twists on the original versions to keep older readers from thinking that they know what is going to happen. In particular, the Ultimate Spiderman comics are quite good, and recapture some of the appeal of the early Spiderman stories when Peter Parker was still in high school. The early issues are available as collections.
What I really loved about Spiderman 2 was the way that you really had to plan out your webbing on the fly, webbing onto specific buildings. The rest of the game was just so-so, but swinging around the city was an incredible blast. I was planning to pass this one up because it sounded like it was missing the one thing that I really liked in Spiderman2. I was really hoping for a sequel to Spiderman2 that kept the web swinging but with more types of random events and a better story.
So how badly has the web swinging been dumbed down? Does the webbing still attach to buildings? (I hope we haven't returned to the old webbing-from-the-sky scheme of older Spiderman games). Are the acrobatics still there? What could you do in Spiderman 2 that you can't do in this game?
I don't really understand the "academic" bit of your comment. Isn't showing a Powerpoint or Keynote presentation enough to permanently revoke your intellectual credentials? What "academic" would be caught dead with such a hucksterish and infantile way of presenting their ideas? They would look like a retard from business school.
We're all using Powerpoint now. Kodak doesn't even make slide projectors any more, and my institution has recently announced that they will no longer support slide presentations in classrooms and auditoriums. The last few major scientific meetings I've been to, almost everything was Powerpoint. So like it or not, it's Powerpoint or Keynote.
That being said, while these programs seem to be designed to promote the glitz-over-content type of presentation so beloved of business types, they are powerful enough that they can support serious academic presentations (just don't use any of their "canned" presentation formats). The hucksterism is more a function of the presenter than the software. I've been particularly impressed by some of the presentations that I've seen from graduate students who have "grown up" with Powerpoint, where the animation and transition features of these programs have been used to guide the viewer through complicated content far more effectively than one can do with a slide projector and a laser pointer.
A video iPod would be cool, but I don't know that I'd buy one. On the other hand, if Apple comes out with a photo iPod with a Keynote presentation player (not just a slide show, but effects and all) and VGA output for a projector, I'll definitely buy one, and so will every other academic, and probably a lot of business types as well.
Not only has it blocked almost 95% of the bullshit, it kicked in almost instantaneously. The execptions for charities are annoying/minor. Some utiliies and banks I do business occasionally bug me with the claim that I opted-in somehow - or that its just a "courtesy call.."
I had the same experience. The vast majority of calls stopped the day the law went into effect. Now I only get calls from people who are exempt from the law, like politicians and charities (who at least don't call at dinner time, because they are more concerned about pissing people off, so they usually end up talking to the answering machine anyway).
Probably they asked the wrong question--not "Did you get fewer unsolicited calls?", but "Did the calls stop?"
Ok, now that I think I got my point across... this is apparently what you do. And for some reason you think this is appropriate and helpful in the long run of things? Trying to make people feel crappy about what they do to make a living, whether or not you agree with it or not is ridiculous.
The more unpleasant we make the job, the more they'll have to pay people to do it. Which increases their costs, which decreases my calls. There are fewer telemarketers, and the ones who remain are better paid. Seems like a pretty reasonable outcome.
A pocket sized form factor, attractive colors, and a large dial to access a large number of choices (many frequencies on the radio, many songs on the iPod). It is hard to know to what extent this is convergent design, constrained by similar goals, and to what extent the former inspired the latter.
Same thing. If there is non-zero angular momentum then gravity does not cause things to fall in, it causes them to orbit. Orbits can only decay and "fall in" if you find some way to bleed of the angular momentum.
However, if perigee of the orbit is within the Schwarzchild radius of the hole, then the star will never come out again. The orbit does not have to decay; the angular momentum is conserved and is added to the angular momentum of the hole itself.
I had the opposite experience. I loved Warriors of the Wind. Even in its butchered form, it is far superior to most US animation, and perfectly comprehensible. It inspired me to seek out the rest of Miyazaki's work, including the fan-dubbed original. To see the original version was a true treat. The full version is inarguably far superior, but Miyazaki's brilliance still shines through.
How many times do they need to shoot themselves in the foot, leg, arm, groin, shoulder, and any other extremedy until they realize that they should stop trying to come up with new ideas, just because they look or sound good. The controllers we have now are so widely used because they work.
Or at least, they work for the same old game designs that we are used to. This obviously is not the console for people whose major motivation for buying a new system is to play sequels with slightly better graphics.
Nintendo tends to build a console around a controller philosophy. You can be sure that Nintendo has some original game ideas in mind that could not be done any other way. It is nice that there is still one company remaining with the courage to innovate. I doubt if there will be as many generic 3rd party games available for the Revolution as for the XBox360 or the PS3, but it will offer a unique experience that will not be available anywhere else.
The first analog stick I remember was on the Apple II (although not, I believe, manufactured by Apple, although they brought out one eventually), but there might have been a couple of coin-op arcade games before that. I know that Tailgunner used an analog stick, but I'm not sure of the chronology.
The first analog controller on console that I remember was for the Atari 5200. It was not self-centering, and was not generally considered to be a success.
Slashdot Mirror
Our beloved CmdrTaco doesn't dispute that Blizzard has the rights to set and enforce naming conventions in its virtual world. I suspect that if his forced name-change had occurred early in his WOW career, we wouldn't be reading this monologue.
Yes, what this illustrates is that rules should be applied promptly and consistently to preserve goodwill. Best policy would be to have a "Proscribed names" list. Names are screened against the list immediately at time of creation, and names that are in violation are rejected. No reliance on the judgment of a GM. The proscribed list can be extended, but anybody who had their name before it went on the list gets grandfathered.
You know how these class action suits on consumer electronics generally work out. The lawyer rakes in a fat commission, and consumers who bought the product get a $10 gift certificate--at least, the ones who are willing to spend $10 worth of their time collecting the documentation to prove that they bought the product.
It does not matter how unworkable is for Google to implement an opt-in scheme. The law is not to be obeyed only when it is "workable" to do so.
It certainly matters to me. Nobody is suggesting that Google engage in civil disobedience, so this "law is to be obeyed" nonsense is just that.
It seems to me that what Google is doing should qualify as "fair use." It is certainly in the spirit of the sort of activities that the fair use exemption was created to protect. If the courts disagree, then the law should be amended to make it clear that this sort of indexing is fair use.
In any case, suggesting that Google could just switch to an "opt-in" system is disingenuous, because it is quite obvious that opt-in won't work. Opt-out is the only way in which this project, which has substantial public benefits, will be able to proceed.
From TFA:
2. I think even if there was no direct benefit you'd have a hard time arguing that Google didn't obtain even an indirect advantage from the venture. It gives them more poise, it increases the areas where they have a foothold.
It is certainly good for Google's reputation--a common motivation for philanthropy--but it is hard to see how they are getting a commercial advantage.
3. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if Google isn't selling ads on Google Print... what's this?
Probably from the Google Publisher Program (see above), where books are listed upon specific request by the publisher, which is irrelevant to the issues at hand. See here for more info as to how Google proposes to display the data:
Clearly Google is doing this for their own good, not for the public's. They stand to profit (adverts, cut on book sales) from valuable IP that they don't own. It may be covered by fair use, it may not be.
Google isn't placing any ads on pages for their library project, so it is hard to see how they benefit except in the general way that companies benefit from philanthropic acts by increased goodwill. The only way ads will be present is if the publisher wants to put one there. If the publisher or bookseller doesn't see a benefit and doesn't want to pay, no ads and no profit. And a lot of the books are out of print anyway, so they aren't going to get much in the way of advertising revenue.
Understand it's a gamble. If they lose the court case they will have to stop the projet and compensate copyright holders a little, but it won't come to much relative to Google's wealth.
Who decides what's a little? Simply the cost of the labor involved in tracking down the owners of books, many of them long out of print, and negotiating a price with them would be prohibitive considering the number of books they are proposing to scan.
In this instance I'd still side with Google because what they are doing ultimately serves the public, but still, the IP belongs to the authors, it should be allowed a voice in what they can do with it (yes I know that they can "opt out", but if you think "opt in" is a lot of work for Google, similarly "opt out" is a lot of work for the publishers).
The publishers presumably know what they own, so it shouldn't be more than a few hours, if that. On the other hand, figuring out who owns the rights to a heterogeneous collection of books, many of them decades out-of-print and with the imprints of defunct publishing houses, would be an extraordinarily expensive research task--and with no guarantee of success. Google would be left open to ruinous lawsuits if they failed to find the owners, and the they later popped up with lawyers.
Since Google is a free service, the only way this project could give them a commercial advantage would be by selling ads on Google Print pages--which they aren't doing. So this exemption does indeed seem to apply.
Considering that this is being done by libraries for purposes of an archive, it may well fall under 108.
There's a term that describes what Google is doing: "evil." They are screwing over the authors and publishers, and it's starting to tarnish the reputation they've worked so hard to maintain.
It is difficult to see how anybody is being "screwed over," because the restrictions Google is placing on access are such that nobody is likely to lose sales (and many sales will probably be made) by virtue of the existence of this archive.
An "opt-in" scheme is obviously unworkable, because the amount of effort required to chase down the often obscure chain of ownership rights to every book would be cost-prohibative.
In contrast, the public value of such an archive is enormous. Google deserves great credit for having the courage to embark upon this project. If copyright laws are interpreted in such a way as to make this project impossible, it would be an excellent reason to change the law to add an explicit "fair use" exemption. But I doubt if this will be necessary.
I agree that hardly anybody will buy an iPod for video, although the possibility might influence somebody's iPod choice toward the high-end models ("I don't really care about video, but I might in the future, and anyway it's only a little bit more money"). But a lot of people will get iPods just for the music, but purchase a few shows because it is easy, convenient, and cheap.
Except the videos are at QVGA resolution (320x240). That's substantially less than even analog TV, much less DVD or HDTV. Don't count on a lot of people ditching their Tivos just yet. Or ditching bittorrent, for that matter.
I'm not ditching my HDTiVo. On the other hand, if I somehow manage to miss a show, or decide to pick up watching a show midseason, at $2 a pop, I'd be more likely to go to iTunes than to Bittorrent.
This looks like a good foot-in-the-door move for Apple. At that resolution, it's not all that threatening for the TV studios. But if it turns out to be a big source of revenue, the studios might be willing to consider higher resolution.
What strikes me as most interesting, though, is the potential for selling not merely current shows, but the huge backlist of old TV shows. These weren't HD to begin with, so the low resolution would be less of a sacrifice. And I'll bet that they'll find that they can sell individual shows to people who would not be likely to go to a video shop and pick up a DVD collection.
Again, who is going to install this keylogger? The hotel? The FBI? Some "bad guy/thief"?
The low-paid contractor who installed all of those computers in the hotel rooms?
So, should I chalk this up to "We don't like to do hard [math] problems"? Yes, it's easier for us to work with, but again, I don't see that as evidence why natural laws should be simple or elegant.
We don't know that they are. Indeed, the historical trend has been for models to become more complex.
However, science advances by exclusion of wrong ideas. A simple model (one with fewer degrees of freedom) requires less data to exclude than a more complex mode. To give a trivial example, to exclude a polynomial of degree n requires a minimum of n+2 data points.
So in ordering possible models for investigation, is is most efficiently to proceed from simple to complex.
P.S. I loved the story, I too almost want to go out and start reading the comics.
In general, the Marvel "Ultimate" titles are excellent re-envisioning of the classic Marvel characters. They try to be a bit more "realistic" than the originals (although obviously when talking about superheroes that is very much relative), and they have just enough twists on the original versions to keep older readers from thinking that they know what is going to happen. In particular, the Ultimate Spiderman comics are quite good, and recapture some of the appeal of the early Spiderman stories when Peter Parker was still in high school. The early issues are available as collections.
What I really loved about Spiderman 2 was the way that you really had to plan out your webbing on the fly, webbing onto specific buildings. The rest of the game was just so-so, but swinging around the city was an incredible blast. I was planning to pass this one up because it sounded like it was missing the one thing that I really liked in Spiderman2. I was really hoping for a sequel to Spiderman2 that kept the web swinging but with more types of random events and a better story.
So how badly has the web swinging been dumbed down? Does the webbing still attach to buildings? (I hope we haven't returned to the old webbing-from-the-sky scheme of older Spiderman games). Are the acrobatics still there? What could you do in Spiderman 2 that you can't do in this game?
I don't really understand the "academic" bit of your comment. Isn't showing a Powerpoint or Keynote presentation enough to permanently revoke your intellectual credentials? What "academic" would be caught dead with such a hucksterish and infantile way of presenting their ideas? They would look like a retard from business school.
We're all using Powerpoint now. Kodak doesn't even make slide projectors any more, and my institution has recently announced that they will no longer support slide presentations in classrooms and auditoriums. The last few major scientific meetings I've been to, almost everything was Powerpoint. So like it or not, it's Powerpoint or Keynote.
That being said, while these programs seem to be designed to promote the glitz-over-content type of presentation so beloved of business types, they are powerful enough that they can support serious academic presentations (just don't use any of their "canned" presentation formats). The hucksterism is more a function of the presenter than the software. I've been particularly impressed by some of the presentations that I've seen from graduate students who have "grown up" with Powerpoint, where the animation and transition features of these programs have been used to guide the viewer through complicated content far more effectively than one can do with a slide projector and a laser pointer.
A video iPod would be cool, but I don't know that I'd buy one. On the other hand, if Apple comes out with a photo iPod with a Keynote presentation player (not just a slide show, but effects and all) and VGA output for a projector, I'll definitely buy one, and so will every other academic, and probably a lot of business types as well.
Not only has it blocked almost 95% of the bullshit, it kicked in almost instantaneously. The execptions for charities are annoying/minor. Some utiliies and banks I do business occasionally bug me with the claim that I opted-in somehow - or that its just a "courtesy call .."
I had the same experience. The vast majority of calls stopped the day the law went into effect. Now I only get calls from people who are exempt from the law, like politicians and charities (who at least don't call at dinner time, because they are more concerned about pissing people off, so they usually end up talking to the answering machine anyway).
Probably they asked the wrong question--not "Did you get fewer unsolicited calls?", but "Did the calls stop?"
Ok, now that I think I got my point across... this is apparently what you do.
And for some reason you think this is appropriate and helpful in the long run of things?
Trying to make people feel crappy about what they do to make a living, whether or not you
agree with it or not is ridiculous.
The more unpleasant we make the job, the more they'll have to pay people to do it. Which increases their costs, which decreases my calls. There are fewer telemarketers, and the ones who remain are better paid. Seems like a pretty reasonable outcome.
A pocket sized form factor, attractive colors, and a large dial to access a large number of choices (many frequencies on the radio, many songs on the iPod). It is hard to know to what extent this is convergent design, constrained by similar goals, and to what extent the former inspired the latter.
Same thing. If there is non-zero angular momentum then gravity does not cause things to fall in, it causes them to orbit. Orbits can only decay and "fall in" if you find some way to bleed of the angular momentum.
However, if perigee of the orbit is within the Schwarzchild radius of the hole, then the star will never come out again. The orbit does not have to decay; the angular momentum is conserved and is added to the angular momentum of the hole itself.
I had the opposite experience. I loved Warriors of the Wind. Even in its butchered form, it is far superior to most US animation, and perfectly comprehensible. It inspired me to seek out the rest of Miyazaki's work, including the fan-dubbed original. To see the original version was a true treat. The full version is inarguably far superior, but Miyazaki's brilliance still shines through.
Why is this a problem? Wouldn't it just spin up the hole?
How many times do they need to shoot themselves in the foot, leg, arm, groin, shoulder, and any other extremedy until they realize that they should stop trying to come up with new ideas, just because they look or sound good.
The controllers we have now are so widely used because they work.
Or at least, they work for the same old game designs that we are used to. This obviously is not the console for people whose major motivation for buying a new system is to play sequels with slightly better graphics.
Nintendo tends to build a console around a controller philosophy. You can be sure that Nintendo has some original game ideas in mind that could not be done any other way. It is nice that there is still one company remaining with the courage to innovate. I doubt if there will be as many generic 3rd party games available for the Revolution as for the XBox360 or the PS3, but it will offer a unique experience that will not be available anywhere else.
I can't wait to play Metroid on this thing!
The first analog stick I remember was on the Apple II (although not, I believe, manufactured by Apple, although they brought out one eventually), but there might have been a couple of coin-op arcade games before that. I know that Tailgunner used an analog stick, but I'm not sure of the chronology.
The first analog controller on console that I remember was for the Atari 5200. It was not self-centering, and was not generally considered to be a success.