Why did this get modded to +5? Its in Slashdot fantasy land. One corporate lawyer who writes three letters to get a $5k settlement has already eaten half of it (and even $50m wouldn't rate a line item on a single record company's annual report). The suits are only an adjunct to their anti-pirating publicity campaign -- its a strategic hedge to ensure that their constituent companies can continue making $9 / CD.
"Marketing not always at fault for R&D being overconfident": This would probably be moderated higher on an Internet discussion forum not named after a command line artifact.
No slight against Mr. Yamaguchi, but this doesn't even compare to the amount of charity Bill Gates does on yearly basis. He's forgoing a severance package worth somewhere between $2 and $10 million (estimated based on general Japanese practice -- their executives are not well compensated salary-wise compared to American ones, although they have "perks" which are kept off the books to balance things out, but thats a whole 'nother topic)... but not his 10% of a $13 billion dollar market capitalization (might be more now -- I'm estimating from their stock repurchase of 2003). To put this in perspective, if you're making $30,000 a year this is like you dropping $50 into the widows and orphans fund at the end of the year.
He's also letting Nintendo keep the money, and as a for-profit company it wouldn't be my personal charitable choice, but I can't criticize him since he's earned it and if he wants the company to be his legacy it's his call.
The problem as I see it isn't that this was inspired by TA. It *is* TA. Down to the art resources. There is another project on SourceForge for an OSS "port" of Microsoft Transport Tycoon... which will only run if you have the original CD (or, ahem, steal it) to grab their art resources. Now, I'm all for OSS gaming, but for it to evolve it needs to develop a bloody infrastructure which can do more than clone a successful commercial release, lift their art resources, and then start doing balance tweaks. We had moddable software already to make balance tweaks on top of a commercial game (TA allowed 3rd party addons out of the box!), we need something more. You want to create something inspired by a closed-source commercial game, go right ahead. Write a SNES-style overhead perspective sprite-based RPG with totally original art (as original as you can make dungeon tiles, anyhow), story, characters, and a play system which is 90% derivative plus one unique trick. That would be a triumph for OSS gaming in its present state (how sad it is to say that), if it was actually fun to play.
I can sort of understand the constant bickering on slashdot about outsourcing. Sort of. Look, the economy changes, and being able to write a webpage or due GUI work in Java is not an iron rice bowl anymore. Oh well, move on. Get yourself a skill that means you're not competing against 1 million unemployed engineers and 2.5 million entry-level college grads plus the entire nation of India for your next job.
Take me, for example. I combined some fairly standard academic CS fields (AI, language processing, etc) with Japanese. And, presto, the number of US-based competitors I had for some positions is in the double digits. And English/Japanese bilingual engineers aren't exactly suffering a crush of supply in Japan -- thats why they brought me over here. I probably have email addresses for half of the bilingual natural language researchers in the US, and the most common way people get hired is to start with someone you already know who does it and ask "Say, give me somebody". When the hiring dynamic works like that, you don't have to slice $10k off your salary and work EA-style hours to have a chance at getting the job for 3 years before it gets moved to Bangalore sans you.
We techies can't stay mired in the industrial production mode where we're moderately skilled labor which is essentially fungible. Any tech position which fits that description will see its salary decline asymptotically to nothing, guaranteed. And don't expect the government or unions to protect you like they spent a lot of the last century protecting the guys at the GM plant or in textiles (by the way, any time you think you've got it rough, take a look at those guys) -- the economy is globalizing and you can either get on the train or get crushed by it. There are like fifty zillion different occupational specialties which we just can't bloody find enough people to do -- I know one employer who would throw $80,000 at someone capable of designing a UI in Arabic (and being able to work in the office efficiently) if he could just find that someone.
TBS has made a mint on aquiring relatively high-valued IP for relative pennies and then milking it for every cent. It was the essence of Ted Turner's cable TV model -- buy rights to every Western/John Wayne film/WWII drama/Law and Order episode/Walker:Texas Ranger and then spread the content over a massive distribution network. It works sort of like the long tail distribution model -- there are non-trivial markets out there for almost EVERY IP, so if you can get the rights to it cheaply and get the word out to the markets that they can get it from you you can make a killing. This is just them taking the same model into a different medium which happens to be synergistic with their cable providing arm.
Ah, university, what a great racket. I had a grant proposal for $200 to buy a Japanese PS2 ("Cultural Studies") written up but chickened out at the last minute, but my prof said it would have been golden (hard for a guy whose research speciality is manga* to say your field lacks academic merit).
* You'd expect it to have been the worst class in terms of actual content in my college career, but it was EASILY in the top half once you cut past all the BS that was on the syllabus to convince the department that there was a Prestigious University Education happening in there.
As much as people love to hate Disney, if an author hasn't made a buck off their work in 10 years, then I don't see why they should have the right to stop someone else from doing it.
See, there is no provision for that argument in the proposal. Regardless of whether the content is a major revenue stream for the original owner or not, at 10 years the stream dies. You could have a highly successful fantasy series/science textbook/genre-defining-artwork and be receiving Potter-esque mad bank or even just a decent living (one moderately successful novel in some genres is a $5,000 / yr revenue stream for the author -- hey, it pays the bills) and at ten years, boom, its over. Then somebody with more capital than creativity comes in and strip-mines your idea in ways that were beyond your reach (say, making it into a movie) -- and to make matters worse, the existence of this copyright stream actively hurts your interest in, say, the movie rights to your fantasy series because a) you can't guarantee them for the entire length of the movie pipeline (total time it takes you to publish a book, become a megaseller, enter negotiations with XYZ Studios, and have them make the movie could well extend over 10 years), meaning that there is the substantial risk that the Office Movie is the third one to come out, and b) why bother paying you when you can just delay release of the derivative works until the content is in the public domain?
Or, to put it in Slashdot-approved terms, this makes authors have their jobs outsourced to younger versions of themselves who are willing to work for nothing. Continuous revolutionary improvements in quality are NOT possible in some content industries in the ten-year timeframe.
Thats an idea I could theoretically support if it didn't eviscerate the poor content generators. Take, say, dictionary writers. How are you supposed to sell the 2015 version of your dictionary if you've got to compete against the 2005 edition of your own bloody dictionary, except that edition is free? Language doesn't change enough in 10 years to justify the 50 dollar purchase for most people.
You can come up with historical examples, too, where this would have cut the knees out from under authors: the Hobbit would have been public domain 7 years before Lord of the Rings came out and Tolkien would have received exactly nothing from the value he added to his own work. Then the Big Content Companies which we like to poke fun at would adapt their suckiness to the new legal environment -- for example, Disney might decide that actually developing original ideas was forever beyond its reach and just start reaching back into the 10+ year archive for concepts which had falled into the public domain ("Hey, fantasy is big this season and I once read this book called Sword of Shanarra... and now we don't even have to pay licensing fees! Sweet!")
Nice thing to know that aside from the rampant violence, pervasive sexual misconduct, and continued failure to teach about a third of the kids who go through them to read and write, our public schools are scoring some successes in computer education. Leave no script kiddie behind!
No, it will appear as punycode to you. You'll end up getting a domain name which looks like xn--tdali-d8a8w.lv (always starts with xn, tends to end up with a lot of - signs). Which is great for you, because if you work in an environment where its possible you can just redirect to/dev/null/ any messages which come from one of those domains, or set SpamAssassin to consider that a very spammy token.
The social utility of the study is recognition that certain types of "publicly available" information really bloody shouldn't be. For example, on facebook to protect privacy they block my access to people at schools other than my alma mater who have not "opted in" as my friends. I can't see their sex, their major, their dorm room number (if they're silly enough to put that in -- honestly, what possible good is that going to do), their political leanings, or their hobbies. But I can see their name, school, photo, and graduation year (for the purposes of finding friends). And, whoops, I can walk their friends lists.
This study argues in the strongest possible way that that design decision is a security risk. So if you go to facebook without this study and say "Hey guys, love the site, but I think the friends lists are abusable" and they say "They're pretty secure, people know who friends are in real life anyhow, there is no damage if the information is disclosed, and we think the remote possibility of abuse is outweighed by the benefit to our members", what do you do? Say "Alright, here is a proof-of-concept exploit which is empirically demonstrated to be a gaping security hole". Now, why do this without asking facebook first? Because there are hundreds of social networking sites out there and EVERY ONE which exposes relationship information to the outside world has the same design flaw. This adds to the public recognition that that flaw is actually a flaw, much like academic research has demonstrated that, say, web systems which rely on hash tables should salt their hashes or they can be DOSed by a single dialup modem producing intentional collisions and getting worst-case performance from the table. Now THATS socially valuable research.
This is completely aside from other valuable insights gained from the study in terms of human psychology and man-machine interfaces.
The technology to take a 360 degree video capture around you and analyze it (in real time) for human figures, mark them as monsters, allow you to "kill" them without actually killing them, and then try to deal with the disconnect when the "dead" man blocks your line of sight to the "live" woman by shuffling his dead corpse in front of her, while wondering what the wacko with the goggles is staring at?
Keep dreaming.
By the way -- I do real-time visual processing for a 360 degree camera system (this baby). Not only is it not going to be convinently man-portable anytime soon, to even RENDER the 3-D scene in real time requires 6 clustered dual processor 3 GHz Xeons running Linux, the rendering application, and nothing else.
Here is the original paper about Warhol Worms. While it makes an excellent sales pitch for AV companies, and a good "wow, scary technological Y2K-type problem on the horizon" for Newsweek or Wired, I don't think we'll ever see one in real life.
The big reason is the sheer vastness and varied topology of the Internet. Try running a massively distributed application sometime and get a real life education in exactly how theoretical the guarantee of data transfer between two machines picked at random is. My organization ran a 1,300 PC computer grid in our prefecture and was unable to get effective performance out of 300 of the machines due to them being isolated from the rest of the network, due to causes ranging from internal firewalls, misconfigured routers, and packets that vanished into the ether for no particular reason.
The other biggie is, of course, computational "biodiversity", which didn't hamper our application (which we were able to recompile for every type of machine on our grid) but which would bite a worm, Worhol or not, in the posterior. For a Warhol Worm you need to have a infection vector which works without user intervention, which in practice means a buffer overrun in a network service, and there is no implementation of any network service running on over 50% of the Internet (you'd think Windows would have a few, right? Nope, saved by the MS marketing department's decision to develop a million flavors of the same OS).
Now, outside the context of the Warhol Worm, I think F/OSS is actually going to make the biodiversity problem worse, not better. Take a look at the attack on Mozilla earlier this year through the shared JPEG library. Widely used "best of breed" OSS libraries *will* be targetted as they gain significant installed bases (which is happening very rapidly with the upswing of corporate support to OSS).
I've generally found its easier to express big numbers to people in terms of kiloBibles. (1 Bible = 4.24 MB, at least if you take the ASCII English King James Version w/o commentary)
So thats, lets see, 123,652,830 Bibles and about a Torah worth of change transferred, or a sustainted transfer rate of 141 Bps (Bibles per second), with enough room to send an extra Old Testament over the wire every second, too.
The sailing puzzle, which is not at all evil (well, OK, I used to be the resident Dr. Mario champ and they play exactly the same) is described in detail here.
You get progressively better ranks in the puzzle for faster completition times per board (you'd typically complete several boards over the course of a battle or a trip between two navigation points), and better ranks for your many sailors increases the speed at which the ship sails, to a predetermined maximum based on hull type (in battle, its slightly different -- I think you get four moves max regardless but if your sailors are cruddy you won't get all of them -- that could be disastrous because it allows the other ship to get somewhere it shouldn't be, like directly behind you to pound you with unanswerable cannonfire).
Puzzle Pirates, by the way, is the best free trial you'll ever play in your life. Even if you uninstall it and never get into the MMORPG part the puzzles are just breathtakingly fun to play. Its a puzzle game, except the puzzle MATTERS (imagine playing Gem Fighter to settle crew-to-crew combat and being able to brag to people that you swordfought seven guys at a time, including a Cleaver (high rank of AI), and killed them all).
Or, you could just save yourself the billion dollar supertanker and take a quick jaunt to Europe. Hard to torpedo the Netherlands (and, unofficially, half the rest of the Continent).
It also happens to Aussies, Swedes, Brits, and Kiwis, and Irish -- and thats just my direct experience. Some nations have tax treaties with each other where you can claim an exemption to prevent the same income from being taxed twice.
The IRS will point out to the proprietors that, while it was an amusing idea the first time it was tried (decades ago -- "Hey, if we operate a casino on the high seas then we don't have to tax winnings!"), they're still responsible for federal income taxes on income earned in places America has no soverign jurisdiction over. Thats why, for example, I have to file a tax return every year from Japan. Of course, the ship could just try to ignore them, but they'd have bank accounts and shore leave in places where the long arm of the law reaches quite easily.
Before you write your book, please learn what a "Turing machine" is. It doesn't mimic or emulate real life (it does, however, do a bang-up job of string processing). You probably meant "a machine capable of passing the 'Turing Test'", which is closer but not quite the same (its capable of carrying on a conversation and, on average, being confused for human as often as humans are confused for computers). Neither Turing machines nor machines which are capable of passing the Turing test have any special magic abilities to emulate stuff, although you can demonstrate mathematically that a Turing machine can emulate any program any computer is capable of running, so if you think simulations of real life are possible then they are possible on a properly programmed Turing machine (if only you knew the algorithm).
Technically, they're saying that you're not buying a property interest in the item, but a limited licensing right ("right to use"). However, I doubt a court would see it that way, so I think your first point holds a lot of water. It would be like MS telling all its customers: "We're not going to abbrogate our Windows95 licenses or anything, but next time you turn on the computer it will auto-download an update disabling everything but Notepad. Toodles".
Alright, since I can read Japanese, I'll help you out:
You're correct for the first release (two episodes = 50 minutes). After that, you get four episodes (100 minutes of content) and the bundle is 8,190 yen while the DVD only version is 6,300 yen. They'll be releasing once a month. There is no information about a UMD only option listed on that page.
(You can also just rent the DVD, which will be given to rental stores on the same day of its release. Costs like 250 yen here for 3 days, maybe 400 if you live in a more expensive part of the country.)
Slashdot Mirror
Why did this get modded to +5? Its in Slashdot fantasy land. One corporate lawyer who writes three letters to get a $5k settlement has already eaten half of it (and even $50m wouldn't rate a line item on a single record company's annual report). The suits are only an adjunct to their anti-pirating publicity campaign -- its a strategic hedge to ensure that their constituent companies can continue making $9 / CD.
"Marketing not always at fault for R&D being overconfident": This would probably be moderated higher on an Internet discussion forum not named after a command line artifact.
He's also letting Nintendo keep the money, and as a for-profit company it wouldn't be my personal charitable choice, but I can't criticize him since he's earned it and if he wants the company to be his legacy it's his call.
At least they're not entertaining pirates in Southeast Asia. Oh, wait, they are.
The problem as I see it isn't that this was inspired by TA. It *is* TA. Down to the art resources. There is another project on SourceForge for an OSS "port" of Microsoft Transport Tycoon... which will only run if you have the original CD (or, ahem, steal it) to grab their art resources. Now, I'm all for OSS gaming, but for it to evolve it needs to develop a bloody infrastructure which can do more than clone a successful commercial release, lift their art resources, and then start doing balance tweaks. We had moddable software already to make balance tweaks on top of a commercial game (TA allowed 3rd party addons out of the box!), we need something more. You want to create something inspired by a closed-source commercial game, go right ahead. Write a SNES-style overhead perspective sprite-based RPG with totally original art (as original as you can make dungeon tiles, anyhow), story, characters, and a play system which is 90% derivative plus one unique trick. That would be a triumph for OSS gaming in its present state (how sad it is to say that), if it was actually fun to play.
Take me, for example. I combined some fairly standard academic CS fields (AI, language processing, etc) with Japanese. And, presto, the number of US-based competitors I had for some positions is in the double digits. And English/Japanese bilingual engineers aren't exactly suffering a crush of supply in Japan -- thats why they brought me over here. I probably have email addresses for half of the bilingual natural language researchers in the US, and the most common way people get hired is to start with someone you already know who does it and ask "Say, give me somebody". When the hiring dynamic works like that, you don't have to slice $10k off your salary and work EA-style hours to have a chance at getting the job for 3 years before it gets moved to Bangalore sans you.
We techies can't stay mired in the industrial production mode where we're moderately skilled labor which is essentially fungible. Any tech position which fits that description will see its salary decline asymptotically to nothing, guaranteed. And don't expect the government or unions to protect you like they spent a lot of the last century protecting the guys at the GM plant or in textiles (by the way, any time you think you've got it rough, take a look at those guys) -- the economy is globalizing and you can either get on the train or get crushed by it. There are like fifty zillion different occupational specialties which we just can't bloody find enough people to do -- I know one employer who would throw $80,000 at someone capable of designing a UI in Arabic (and being able to work in the office efficiently) if he could just find that someone.
TBS has made a mint on aquiring relatively high-valued IP for relative pennies and then milking it for every cent. It was the essence of Ted Turner's cable TV model -- buy rights to every Western/John Wayne film/WWII drama/Law and Order episode/Walker:Texas Ranger and then spread the content over a massive distribution network. It works sort of like the long tail distribution model -- there are non-trivial markets out there for almost EVERY IP, so if you can get the rights to it cheaply and get the word out to the markets that they can get it from you you can make a killing. This is just them taking the same model into a different medium which happens to be synergistic with their cable providing arm.
* You'd expect it to have been the worst class in terms of actual content in my college career, but it was EASILY in the top half once you cut past all the BS that was on the syllabus to convince the department that there was a Prestigious University Education happening in there.
Or, to put it in Slashdot-approved terms, this makes authors have their jobs outsourced to younger versions of themselves who are willing to work for nothing. Continuous revolutionary improvements in quality are NOT possible in some content industries in the ten-year timeframe.
You can come up with historical examples, too, where this would have cut the knees out from under authors: the Hobbit would have been public domain 7 years before Lord of the Rings came out and Tolkien would have received exactly nothing from the value he added to his own work. Then the Big Content Companies which we like to poke fun at would adapt their suckiness to the new legal environment -- for example, Disney might decide that actually developing original ideas was forever beyond its reach and just start reaching back into the 10+ year archive for concepts which had falled into the public domain ("Hey, fantasy is big this season and I once read this book called Sword of Shanarra... and now we don't even have to pay licensing fees! Sweet!")
Nice thing to know that aside from the rampant violence, pervasive sexual misconduct, and continued failure to teach about a third of the kids who go through them to read and write, our public schools are scoring some successes in computer education. Leave no script kiddie behind!
No, it will appear as punycode to you. You'll end up getting a domain name which looks like xn--tdali-d8a8w.lv (always starts with xn, tends to end up with a lot of - signs). Which is great for you, because if you work in an environment where its possible you can just redirect to /dev/null/ any messages which come from one of those domains, or set SpamAssassin to consider that a very spammy token.
This study argues in the strongest possible way that that design decision is a security risk. So if you go to facebook without this study and say "Hey guys, love the site, but I think the friends lists are abusable" and they say "They're pretty secure, people know who friends are in real life anyhow, there is no damage if the information is disclosed, and we think the remote possibility of abuse is outweighed by the benefit to our members", what do you do? Say "Alright, here is a proof-of-concept exploit which is empirically demonstrated to be a gaping security hole". Now, why do this without asking facebook first? Because there are hundreds of social networking sites out there and EVERY ONE which exposes relationship information to the outside world has the same design flaw. This adds to the public recognition that that flaw is actually a flaw, much like academic research has demonstrated that, say, web systems which rely on hash tables should salt their hashes or they can be DOSed by a single dialup modem producing intentional collisions and getting worst-case performance from the table. Now THATS socially valuable research.
This is completely aside from other valuable insights gained from the study in terms of human psychology and man-machine interfaces.
Keep dreaming.
By the way -- I do real-time visual processing for a 360 degree camera system (this baby). Not only is it not going to be convinently man-portable anytime soon, to even RENDER the 3-D scene in real time requires 6 clustered dual processor 3 GHz Xeons running Linux, the rendering application, and nothing else.
The big reason is the sheer vastness and varied topology of the Internet. Try running a massively distributed application sometime and get a real life education in exactly how theoretical the guarantee of data transfer between two machines picked at random is. My organization ran a 1,300 PC computer grid in our prefecture and was unable to get effective performance out of 300 of the machines due to them being isolated from the rest of the network, due to causes ranging from internal firewalls, misconfigured routers, and packets that vanished into the ether for no particular reason.
The other biggie is, of course, computational "biodiversity", which didn't hamper our application (which we were able to recompile for every type of machine on our grid) but which would bite a worm, Worhol or not, in the posterior. For a Warhol Worm you need to have a infection vector which works without user intervention, which in practice means a buffer overrun in a network service, and there is no implementation of any network service running on over 50% of the Internet (you'd think Windows would have a few, right? Nope, saved by the MS marketing department's decision to develop a million flavors of the same OS).
Now, outside the context of the Warhol Worm, I think F/OSS is actually going to make the biodiversity problem worse, not better. Take a look at the attack on Mozilla earlier this year through the shared JPEG library. Widely used "best of breed" OSS libraries *will* be targetted as they gain significant installed bases (which is happening very rapidly with the upswing of corporate support to OSS).
So thats, lets see, 123,652,830 Bibles and about a Torah worth of change transferred, or a sustainted transfer rate of 141 Bps (Bibles per second), with enough room to send an extra Old Testament over the wire every second, too.
You get progressively better ranks in the puzzle for faster completition times per board (you'd typically complete several boards over the course of a battle or a trip between two navigation points), and better ranks for your many sailors increases the speed at which the ship sails, to a predetermined maximum based on hull type (in battle, its slightly different -- I think you get four moves max regardless but if your sailors are cruddy you won't get all of them -- that could be disastrous because it allows the other ship to get somewhere it shouldn't be, like directly behind you to pound you with unanswerable cannonfire).
Puzzle Pirates, by the way, is the best free trial you'll ever play in your life. Even if you uninstall it and never get into the MMORPG part the puzzles are just breathtakingly fun to play. Its a puzzle game, except the puzzle MATTERS (imagine playing Gem Fighter to settle crew-to-crew combat and being able to brag to people that you swordfought seven guys at a time, including a Cleaver (high rank of AI), and killed them all).
WoW female human paladins circa level 55. Its like God decided to issue his holy warriors specially enchanted plate-mail dental floss.
Dear VolciMaster, We already did. Signed, China
Or, you could just save yourself the billion dollar supertanker and take a quick jaunt to Europe. Hard to torpedo the Netherlands (and, unofficially, half the rest of the Continent).
It also happens to Aussies, Swedes, Brits, and Kiwis, and Irish -- and thats just my direct experience. Some nations have tax treaties with each other where you can claim an exemption to prevent the same income from being taxed twice.
The IRS will point out to the proprietors that, while it was an amusing idea the first time it was tried (decades ago -- "Hey, if we operate a casino on the high seas then we don't have to tax winnings!"), they're still responsible for federal income taxes on income earned in places America has no soverign jurisdiction over. Thats why, for example, I have to file a tax return every year from Japan. Of course, the ship could just try to ignore them, but they'd have bank accounts and shore leave in places where the long arm of the law reaches quite easily.
Before you write your book, please learn what a "Turing machine" is. It doesn't mimic or emulate real life (it does, however, do a bang-up job of string processing). You probably meant "a machine capable of passing the 'Turing Test'", which is closer but not quite the same (its capable of carrying on a conversation and, on average, being confused for human as often as humans are confused for computers). Neither Turing machines nor machines which are capable of passing the Turing test have any special magic abilities to emulate stuff, although you can demonstrate mathematically that a Turing machine can emulate any program any computer is capable of running, so if you think simulations of real life are possible then they are possible on a properly programmed Turing machine (if only you knew the algorithm).
Technically, they're saying that you're not buying a property interest in the item, but a limited licensing right ("right to use"). However, I doubt a court would see it that way, so I think your first point holds a lot of water. It would be like MS telling all its customers: "We're not going to abbrogate our Windows95 licenses or anything, but next time you turn on the computer it will auto-download an update disabling everything but Notepad. Toodles".
Alright, since I can read Japanese, I'll help you out: You're correct for the first release (two episodes = 50 minutes). After that, you get four episodes (100 minutes of content) and the bundle is 8,190 yen while the DVD only version is 6,300 yen. They'll be releasing once a month. There is no information about a UMD only option listed on that page. (You can also just rent the DVD, which will be given to rental stores on the same day of its release. Costs like 250 yen here for 3 days, maybe 400 if you live in a more expensive part of the country.)