"Limbaugh said he reviewed four different video games and found "no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech. The court finds that video games have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion pictures.""
So let me get this straight; if a movie tells a story, or expresses and idea, it is protected speech, but if I make a video game based ON that movie, with the same plot, the same characters, the same locations, and the same themes, the only real difference being the additon interactivity, suddenly all premise of expression is lost?
If I take a choose-your-own adventure book, convert it to a simple program, and the only thing lost is the paper and ink, I would essentially have any of the early video games. How is this not speech?
And how is a board game not speech? Many board games are obviously designed entirely to express various ideas; ranging from promoting a drug-free lifestyle to acting out a war to teaching the traditions of judaism.
This judge is obviously incompetent. His judgement has no chance of holding up in the supreme court. I only hope that the people of Saint Louis have the sense to get rid of him.
I would love to see this idea succeed, and work. Then we could start applying it to other groups within American society, such as: - A huge tax on children's school supplies to support schools. I am getting ready to move out of the county I live in because of taxes going up to pay for schools, maybe if only the breeders payed taxes to send their little broodlings to school they wouldn't have so damned many kids. - Tax the living crap out of gas to pay for traffic cops, roads, etc.. - Tax ramen noodles, rice, beans, and Budweiser to support welfare. - Tax pro-wrestling to support literacy campaigns.
Apps won't happen until the Open Source community gives up in X as a desktop GUI. Open source coders need to realize what Apple did; that X is great for running GUI apps across a network, but as far as the desktop goes, X still pretty much sucks, even with high-res anti-aliased fonts and the nice 3D support we have been getting from Nvidia. Programmers don't have time to dick around with an XF86Config (I know more than one great programmer who has no idea what video card is in his machine.), or to restart X any time a USB mouse accidentally gets disconnected while moving a running laptop around.
To really succeed on the desktop, the open source world needs to do what Apple did- take a wonderful UNIX/Open/Free subsystem and, create a GUI meant just to be a gorgeous, easy to use, desktop environment. Apple did it, and developers love it. UNIX users are flocking to OS X in droves. The Linux world needs to take a hint and try doing something really innovative, instead of trying to attract users by creating unstable knockoffs of Adobe and Microsoft products and appending "Gnu" or "K" to the name.
Browser slowness is flat out the biggest problem I have with OS X. I have been using X for about eight months, and every day I spend at least a few minutes staring at the screen while that annoying little wheel spins. Funny thing is, I tried a few other web browsers and found that most of the time they are just as bad as IE. Rendering anything even a little complicated takes too long. Once a site gets past the first ten or so images, images seem to impair performance exponentially (For a great example of this, load up one of Fark's Photoshopping links.) based on size and number.
And of course, being IE, it still crashes all the bloody time as well... *sigh*
Oh well, maybe one day we will see a "light" version of Mozilla without all the extra shit slowing it down and making it crash and port it to OS X.
1- Do ANYTHING that prevents me from downloading, installing, and using it immediately.
2- Require any sort of registration, especially when it requires a real email address. I don't want you to contact me, and if you don't want to contact me without approval, than you do not need my email address.
3- Limit your more useful and necessary features. Think about it.
A lot of people seem to think this is a pretty cool idea for those long binges of coding/system administration/photoshopping/etc.. Sure it keeps you awake, but what about one of the really nasty downsides to sleep deprivation that I am sure most/. readers have experienced: hallucinations. I can honestly say that I have on numerous occasions been up all night playing EverQuest/Final Fantasy and then gone straight to work with little if any sleep (And help from my friends at Starbucks.); resulting in aural and visual hallucinations. About that time I pass out, but I have a friend who can go for 36+ hours without crashing, and experiences what he calls "LGMs," short for little green men. What happens when the geeks of the world can stay up for days at a time- do we go into hallucinatory overdrive? Or does Provigil deal with the LGMs? Anybody know?
Re:Someone start a support group! / Why it won't l
on
The Lure of Heroinware
·
· Score: 2
Not sure, but I know a guy who gave his daughter away to his mother-in-law when his wife quit her job to play EQ 24/7, and wasn't feeding/changing the baby while he was at work...
User-friendly VIM! I can't wait! Nothing sounds kludgely like a mouseless text editor with mouse support!
*sigh*
Someone start a support group! / Why it won't last
on
The Lure of Heroinware
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I can no longer easily count the friends I have seen do serious damage to their "real" lives by playing these games. I know numerous people who have lost their jobs, signifigant others, social lives, and even their sanity due to addictions to EverQuest, Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, and StarCraft. Sometimes in my circle of friends, I am the weird one for being the person who goes out and interacts with the real world, and not vice versa.
What really scares me, though, is that I don't find the term heroinware at all offensive, because I actually know more people who have completely ruined their lives with these games than I do people who have ruined everything with drugs - and at least the drug users manage to quit!
Seriously, this problem is just beginning to rear its ugly head. Once Blizzard releases World of Warcraft, things are going to get really, really nasty, as entire offices have their IT departments stripped on important "game days." And that will be the beginning of the end for these virtual worlds; as companies lose the benefits of computers to an increasing number of problem staff members, there WILL be some sort of legislation to wean geeks away from these games.
How about plain old freedom? I think of this as the freedom to do with things what I want, without being restricted by other people who wish to protect their profits by legislating what should be commercial systems. Government lead copyright protection systems are not at all in the public interest, as they do nothing but lock us all into using existing infrastructure, while hampering the development of new technology. This is in direct opposition to free-market capitalism, nothing more than socialism that benefits the rich, and absolutely unamerican.
Not only does such a system hamper new technological development, it hampers development of new content. By allowing corporations to control the handling of all media, it will be easier for these corporations to decide what is seen, heard, read, etc.. It will be easier for these companies to ignore new artists as it finds ways to dig up and resell old content over and over again. These companies will find ways to direct people to their most profitable content via the control software, while finding creative ways to lock other artists out of their systems by making it inconvenient, if not impossible, to access any media that circumvents the system.
When the government restricts the way computers handle information, it also restricts the flow and dissemination of information, and thus restricts the freedom of expression, something specifically prohibited by our constitution.
The CBDTPA is blatant tyranny; an obvious sign of class warfare in American, the haves are attempting to control the lives of the have-nots as much as possible, and then to squeeze every last drop of money as possible from the have-nots. Of course, the haves never need to fear these kind of restrictions on their freedoms, because they have money, lawyers, and if all else fails, passports.
A better title for this article: "Leahy extorts future campaign contributions from RIAA, MPAA, and all major media corporations, ensuring the continuation of his political career."
Who the hell needs any help figuring out what killed @Home? Let me make it simple: Wasting billions of dollars buying, promoting, supporting, and maintaining Excite.com. Excite was just another knockoff of Yahoo/Altavista when @Home bought it. @Home never had a chance of @Home bringing in enough customers to recoup the cost, and since Excite had no chance of being inherently profitable, the whole thing was just a huge waste of money, quickly draining the life out of a company with an otherwise brilliant future.
Now DoubleClick and all related networks can end up on the various blackhole lists, so we can start seeing their advertisements and cookies disappear! Rock on!
So StarOffice is now going seriously commercial. No more free StarOffice.
Good!
This means that from now on, I can try to convince people to switch to StarOffice because it is less expensive. No longer do I have to worry about management taking me out of the bonus pool because I suggest switching to that free stuff, which is always: - Unsupported (Not that Microsoft's pay-per-incedence support is any better than Ms. Cleo.) - Promoting communism. - Hurting the economy by taking jobs.
Seriously, Sun tried very, very hard to give StarOffice away (Though it could have done better.), and people just didn't catch on. Maybe now that StarOffice is the product of a big-name American computer company, and not just a free app by a little german company, I can finally convince all those asshole PHB's to switch.
"is lack of transport infrastructure and refrigeration to ensure that..."
Which leads to... food shortages! When the food is a thousand miles away and is not likely to be brought in, that consitutes a lack of food.
"Perhaps if we didn't cripple an entire continent's economy with IMF 'restructuring' loans"
Because they had money to begin with? Were they forced to take the money? Is it the lenders fault the people let their leaders squander it?
"tell me you wouldn't be doing exactly the same thing."
Doing what, slowly starving to death? I know exactly what those people go through, and if I was in their shoes, I would do the same thing my nigerian and ethiopian friends did; drag my starving ass to the coast, get a menial job in a big city, save up every penny I could, and then immigrate to the US.
What does this posting by Blizzard mean? It means that within a day they had already recieved enough protests to put this FAQ up.
What does this mean for us? Keep up the fight! Send in more emails letting them know that their explanation still does not make up for their despicable actions! Tell them that you will continue to spread the word, and push for a total boycott of Blizzard products until they relent and learn to behave like decent members of a free society.
"Companies will talk to a college drop out that can talk about real projects over a CS grad with a 4-point if all he has to show for it is the b-tree program he wrote for his algorithms class."
Absolutely right. I dropped out of college, got a sysadmin job, and now make more money in a year than my jobless college graduate friends spent going to college.
A bit of advice to anyone working on any computer-related degree in school; spend time in that lab doing something other than class work. Volunteer to help out the administrators. Run your own web/ftp/mailservers. If you program well, join an open source effort, and help out with the management as well as the coding. Whatever you do, don't show up at an interview with your final project from some programming class as a crowning achievement.
I really find it hard to give much credit to theories that AIDS was developed as a germ warfare weapon... Why the hell would anyone create a virus like HIV/AIDS that spreads via the transfer of body fluids, and can take anywhere from months to years to actually kick in?
Ok, yet another project designed to help those poor, suffering Africans. Wonderful. A continent full of people with no food, no medical care, no concepts of hygene, and how do we help them? By keeping them alive a little longer so they can have more children, and in the long run, just make things worse.
The rest of the world is never going to really kick in enough money to Africa to seriously fix stuff. So how about trying to just straighten things out the natural way; leave them to die. Without intervention, AIDS, malaria and starvation will ravage the continent, eventually bringing populations in line with what the land can actually support, and they can start over and perhaps get things right this time, assuming the Europeans don't just claim it all as territory again.
Slashdot Mirror
Rock! Now I can train my Nokia snakes into uber-monsters to summon into FFOnline!
"Limbaugh said he reviewed four different video games and found "no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech. The court finds that video games have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion pictures.""
So let me get this straight; if a movie tells a story, or expresses and idea, it is protected speech, but if I make a video game based ON that movie, with the same plot, the same characters, the same locations, and the same themes, the only real difference being the additon interactivity, suddenly all premise of expression is lost?
If I take a choose-your-own adventure book, convert it to a simple program, and the only thing lost is the paper and ink, I would essentially have any of the early video games. How is this not speech?
And how is a board game not speech? Many board games are obviously designed entirely to express various ideas; ranging from promoting a drug-free lifestyle to acting out a war to teaching the traditions of judaism.
This judge is obviously incompetent. His judgement has no chance of holding up in the supreme court. I only hope that the people of Saint Louis have the sense to get rid of him.
I would love to see this idea succeed, and work. Then we could start applying it to other groups within American society, such as:
- A huge tax on children's school supplies to support schools. I am getting ready to move out of the county I live in because of taxes going up to pay for schools, maybe if only the breeders payed taxes to send their little broodlings to school they wouldn't have so damned many kids.
- Tax the living crap out of gas to pay for traffic cops, roads, etc..
- Tax ramen noodles, rice, beans, and Budweiser to support welfare.
- Tax pro-wrestling to support literacy campaigns.
This is definately a great idea! Run with it!
Apps won't happen until the Open Source community gives up in X as a desktop GUI. Open source coders need to realize what Apple did; that X is great for running GUI apps across a network, but as far as the desktop goes, X still pretty much sucks, even with high-res anti-aliased fonts and the nice 3D support we have been getting from Nvidia. Programmers don't have time to dick around with an XF86Config (I know more than one great programmer who has no idea what video card is in his machine.), or to restart X any time a USB mouse accidentally gets disconnected while moving a running laptop around.
.02...
To really succeed on the desktop, the open source world needs to do what Apple did- take a wonderful UNIX/Open/Free subsystem and, create a GUI meant just to be a gorgeous, easy to use, desktop environment. Apple did it, and developers love it. UNIX users are flocking to OS X in droves. The Linux world needs to take a hint and try doing something really innovative, instead of trying to attract users by creating unstable knockoffs of Adobe and Microsoft products and appending "Gnu" or "K" to the name.
Just my
test message, plz ignore.
Browser slowness is flat out the biggest problem I have with OS X. I have been using X for about eight months, and every day I spend at least a few minutes staring at the screen while that annoying little wheel spins. Funny thing is, I tried a few other web browsers and found that most of the time they are just as bad as IE. Rendering anything even a little complicated takes too long. Once a site gets past the first ten or so images, images seem to impair performance exponentially (For a great example of this, load up one of Fark's Photoshopping links.) based on size and number.
And of course, being IE, it still crashes all the bloody time as well... *sigh*
Oh well, maybe one day we will see a "light" version of Mozilla without all the extra shit slowing it down and making it crash and port it to OS X.
1- Do ANYTHING that prevents me from downloading, installing, and using it immediately.
2- Require any sort of registration, especially when it requires a real email address. I don't want you to contact me, and if you don't want to contact me without approval, than you do not need my email address.
3- Limit your more useful and necessary features. Think about it.
A lot of people seem to think this is a pretty cool idea for those long binges of coding/system administration/photoshopping/etc.. Sure it keeps you awake, but what about one of the really nasty downsides to sleep deprivation that I am sure most /. readers have experienced: hallucinations. I can honestly say that I have on numerous occasions been up all night playing EverQuest/Final Fantasy and then gone straight to work with little if any sleep (And help from my friends at Starbucks.); resulting in aural and visual hallucinations. About that time I pass out, but I have a friend who can go for 36+ hours without crashing, and experiences what he calls "LGMs," short for little green men. What happens when the geeks of the world can stay up for days at a time- do we go into hallucinatory overdrive? Or does Provigil deal with the LGMs? Anybody know?
Not sure, but I know a guy who gave his daughter away to his mother-in-law when his wife quit her job to play EQ 24/7, and wasn't feeding/changing the baby while he was at work...
User-friendly VIM! I can't wait! Nothing sounds kludgely like a mouseless text editor with mouse support!
*sigh*
I can no longer easily count the friends I have seen do serious damage to their "real" lives by playing these games. I know numerous people who have lost their jobs, signifigant others, social lives, and even their sanity due to addictions to EverQuest, Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, and StarCraft. Sometimes in my circle of friends, I am the weird one for being the person who goes out and interacts with the real world, and not vice versa.
What really scares me, though, is that I don't find the term heroinware at all offensive, because I actually know more people who have completely ruined their lives with these games than I do people who have ruined everything with drugs - and at least the drug users manage to quit!
Seriously, this problem is just beginning to rear its ugly head. Once Blizzard releases World of Warcraft, things are going to get really, really nasty, as entire offices have their IT departments stripped on important "game days." And that will be the beginning of the end for these virtual worlds; as companies lose the benefits of computers to an increasing number of problem staff members, there WILL be some sort of legislation to wean geeks away from these games.
Really.
The real winner here is the consumer, who has the choice of XBox, Gamecube, PS2, and even the dirt-cheap leftover Dreamcasts.
How about plain old freedom? I think of this as the freedom to do with things what I want, without being restricted by other people who wish to protect their profits by legislating what should be commercial systems. Government lead copyright protection systems are not at all in the public interest, as they do nothing but lock us all into using existing infrastructure, while hampering the development of new technology. This is in direct opposition to free-market capitalism, nothing more than socialism that benefits the rich, and absolutely unamerican.
Not only does such a system hamper new technological development, it hampers development of new content. By allowing corporations to control the handling of all media, it will be easier for these corporations to decide what is seen, heard, read, etc.. It will be easier for these companies to ignore new artists as it finds ways to dig up and resell old content over and over again. These companies will find ways to direct people to their most profitable content via the control software, while finding creative ways to lock other artists out of their systems by making it inconvenient, if not impossible, to access any media that circumvents the system.
When the government restricts the way computers handle information, it also restricts the flow and dissemination of information, and thus restricts the freedom of expression, something specifically prohibited by our constitution.
The CBDTPA is blatant tyranny; an obvious sign of class warfare in American, the haves are attempting to control the lives of the have-nots as much as possible, and then to squeeze every last drop of money as possible from the have-nots. Of course, the haves never need to fear these kind of restrictions on their freedoms, because they have money, lawyers, and if all else fails, passports.
A better title for this article:
"Leahy extorts future campaign contributions from RIAA, MPAA, and all major media corporations, ensuring the continuation of his political career."
Things like this make me ashamed to be an American...
Who the hell needs any help figuring out what killed @Home? Let me make it simple: Wasting billions of dollars buying, promoting, supporting, and maintaining Excite.com. Excite was just another knockoff of Yahoo/Altavista when @Home bought it. @Home never had a chance of @Home bringing in enough customers to recoup the cost, and since Excite had no chance of being inherently profitable, the whole thing was just a huge waste of money, quickly draining the life out of a company with an otherwise brilliant future.
Now DoubleClick and all related networks can end up on the various blackhole lists, so we can start seeing their advertisements and cookies disappear! Rock on!
So StarOffice is now going seriously commercial. No more free StarOffice.
Good!
This means that from now on, I can try to convince people to switch to StarOffice because it is less expensive. No longer do I have to worry about management taking me out of the bonus pool because I suggest switching to that free stuff, which is always:
- Unsupported (Not that Microsoft's pay-per-incedence support is any better than Ms. Cleo.)
- Promoting communism.
- Hurting the economy by taking jobs.
Seriously, Sun tried very, very hard to give StarOffice away (Though it could have done better.), and people just didn't catch on. Maybe now that StarOffice is the product of a big-name American computer company, and not just a free app by a little german company, I can finally convince all those asshole PHB's to switch.
Haven't most Linux distros done this for years? Every time I have installed Linux on a Windows/Mac machine it has...
"is lack of transport infrastructure and refrigeration to ensure that..."
Which leads to... food shortages! When the food is a thousand miles away and is not likely to be brought in, that consitutes a lack of food.
"Perhaps if we didn't cripple an entire continent's economy with IMF 'restructuring' loans"
Because they had money to begin with? Were they forced to take the money? Is it the lenders fault the people let their leaders squander it?
"tell me you wouldn't be doing exactly the same thing."
Doing what, slowly starving to death? I know exactly what those people go through, and if I was in their shoes, I would do the same thing my nigerian and ethiopian friends did; drag my starving ass to the coast, get a menial job in a big city, save up every penny I could, and then immigrate to the US.
What does this posting by Blizzard mean? It means that within a day they had already recieved enough protests to put this FAQ up.
What does this mean for us? Keep up the fight! Send in more emails letting them know that their explanation still does not make up for their despicable actions! Tell them that you will continue to spread the word, and push for a total boycott of Blizzard products until they relent and learn to behave like decent members of a free society.
"Companies will talk to a college drop out that can talk about real projects over a CS grad with a 4-point if all he has to show for it is the b-tree program he wrote for his algorithms class."
Absolutely right. I dropped out of college, got a sysadmin job, and now make more money in a year than my jobless college graduate friends spent going to college.
A bit of advice to anyone working on any computer-related degree in school; spend time in that lab doing something other than class work. Volunteer to help out the administrators. Run your own web/ftp/mailservers. If you program well, join an open source effort, and help out with the management as well as the coding. Whatever you do, don't show up at an interview with your final project from some programming class as a crowning achievement.
I really find it hard to give much credit to theories that AIDS was developed as a germ warfare weapon... Why the hell would anyone create a virus like HIV/AIDS that spreads via the transfer of body fluids, and can take anywhere from months to years to actually kick in?
Ok, yet another project designed to help those poor, suffering Africans. Wonderful. A continent full of people with no food, no medical care, no concepts of hygene, and how do we help them? By keeping them alive a little longer so they can have more children, and in the long run, just make things worse.
The rest of the world is never going to really kick in enough money to Africa to seriously fix stuff. So how about trying to just straighten things out the natural way; leave them to die. Without intervention, AIDS, malaria and starvation will ravage the continent, eventually bringing populations in line with what the land can actually support, and they can start over and perhaps get things right this time, assuming the Europeans don't just claim it all as territory again.
For all of the conspiracy theorists creating ludicrous examples of why Sun doesn't like Apache, let me put this into simple, obvious terms:
Now that AOL has given up on selling iplanet as a webserver (Apart from other things.), Sun is still trying to make money off of it.
Apache is iplanet's biggest competitor. Apache is free, more popular than iplanet, and considered by many people to be better than iplanet.
Every time someone runs apache on Solaris, Sun sees that as another iplanet sale lost.
Need any more details?