The Founders were very concerned about freedom of assembly--the curtailment of that freedom was one the methods dictators, in this case King George and the Tories, use to suppress dissent. If the 'government' could monitor the revolutionary meetings and find out who attended, they could then quietly round the participants up one by one later. In the modern age, the telephone is used to arrange many meetings. If any government wants to repress freedom of assembly and quash dissent, what better way than to have a list of a dissenter's contacts to round up for questioning? A few police dragnets and stakeouts and the matter is closed. They don't need to know the content of the call--association is 'guilty' and you are on the call list so you are brought in for quesitoning. Sure, there is a remote possibility the NSA _might_ find find some terrorists in this net, but this brute force drift net is going to trap and drown as a 'side kill' our freedom with much more certainty. The fact that this escapes the average American is no surprise--most of them have never read the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution and many don't recognize paragraphs from them when given in a poll. Freedom is too important to be trusted to the uneducated mob.--they won't miss it until they need it and then it will be too late.
Many of you are making two very, very dangerous assumptions about the limits of the activities and consequences of them:
1) you are assuming Microsoft's definition of 'illegal' coincides with that of a court of law or most of you. Clearly, if we look at past behavior of Microsoft and SONY for instance, that is not the case. Corporations with profits at risk have a disturbing tendency to tilt such definitions selfishly to the detriment of freedom and consumer's rights. I see no indication they would not abuse this new power based on past behavior
2) Most of you are assuming their invasion will be 'competent' and not inadvertantly produce collateral damage. But that is _exactly_ what SONY's recent DRM invasion did. I can easily forsee invasions crippling rival programs or corrupting data 'accidently' or mistakenly targeting open source program you might have installed. It won't matter if the damage was accidental due to incompetence or deliberate--and it will be very, very hard to prove tha latter and receive damages.
How many of you have the financial muscle to prove a case against SONY or Microsoft? Thought so. This is very scary indeed
"Regal Entertainment Group and National Amusements Inc. have countered, saying that seeing a movie in the theater is a 'fuller, more entertaining experience' and that the time window between movie and DVD releases should even be extended."
If it was so much 'fuller' and 'more entertaining' then it would be able to compete without artificial market manipulation such as delaying the releases. Obviosuly the market doesn't think ti 'fuller' hence theaters struggle and want reflied by forcing us to go to them or have to wait longer to see a video.
That's a business plan JFC! I am starting think the extreme position of disallowing patents on software period makes the most sense. It will encourage innovation, create more competition for monopolists, and speed up delivery cycles. Although there will be downsides, in balance it seems the correct approach. This nonsense must stop. Now.
"The key was vendor acknowledged critical vulnerabilities. Thus, if Microsoft (or the Mozilla Foundation) didn't agree it was critical, then it didn't get counted."
When asked if downloading music via P2P is 'stealing', respondents uniformly replied that it wasn't, so their downloads ceased being counted in MPAA music theft figures. The MPAA in a separate announcment stated it had no legal standing in curent cases and withdrew all complaints and charges against all music 'sharers'.
Political correctness has taken aim at the head of the freedom to conduct business and commerce and will kill a vehicle consumers use to economically market their wares. Big firms, the ones who can afford to police their postings, don't use Craig's List. No, it is the domain of ordinary folks. But because they are 'low budget' Craig's List cannot afford to police them and still keep rates affordable for the individual. Yeah, great idea, let's shut them down so some chump and their lawyer can earn a few buck while taking a breather from ambulance chasing. So, in the siprit of smashing a fly with a sledge hammer, let's shut this one down. Pretty soon, in this overly-litigious society, only major corporations with big money will be able to do anything public to earn money. First free speech, now the right to earn a buck--what's left of freedom after that? Just freedom to open one's wallet I guess. How sad.
Quite a few of us are getting way off topic here. While all the punishment and justive talk is interesting and this guy is a voyeur and pedophile, it is straying from the point.
To quote some evidence from decision: "Lohman agreed that police had
no information or evidence that defendant took any of the original pictures or made any of the
original videos found on the CD-Rs."
Further "
-3-
Defendant argued against bindover on the counts related to the CD-Rs, contending that
the burning or saving of images or data onto a CD-R does not rise to the level of producing,
creating, manufacturing, or making child sexually abusive material. Defendant further argued
that the transference of the images from the Internet to his computer's hard drive and then to the
CD-Rs constituted nothing more than the storage of data. Defendant maintained that at most
there was only evidence of possession of child pornography pursuant to MCL 750.145c(4)"
To get back on point, the issue is not punishment or justice or whether possessin is illegal (it is only for _child_ porn in most cases), it is whether burning some images to a removable optical medium is PUBLISHING and DISTRIBUTION.
So let's examine this arguments implication through some hypothetical cases.
Is copying your DVD collection to removeable optical media illegal--I thought it was legal under fair use of purchased material?
Is wrting it to a hard drive?
It the drive is removable or external?
What about flash cards?
In fact viewing a web site actually copies some or all of it to a cache in DRAM is that PUBLISHING AND DISTRIBUTION?
What if I back the cache up along with my system to DVD+RWs?
This over-zealous and poorly considered decision materially blurred the line substantially and might just have handed th RIAA and MPAA the equivalent of the 'A Bomb' depnding upon how far this is stretched. Right now, thankfully, this is not a ferderal court or in an infulential state supreme court. Let's hope it is an anomaly.
I predicted that one of the first casualties of the Intel-Apple relationship would be Firewire since Intel has fought Firewire in favor of their standard, USB--despite its inferiority in I/O overhead. So I have written a few times in various forums that the Intel relationship with Apple would see increased pressure on Apple to give in and result in a gradual abandonment of Firewire. Many people vehemently disagreed with me. However, we are now seeing the first evidence that I may, unfortunately, be right. Buried in the news about the Macbook Pro was this: "The disappearance of FW800 has also been discussed: Apple said it would have required them toi build a specific FW800 card (Intel does not support it), and that they had no plans for it". If the lack of glue chip support doomed Firewire 800 on the laptops, then might it not doom it on the desktop systems of the future as well since Intel's glue chips will be just as important there as well? Surely Apple is not going to use up a PCI-X slot just for a Firewire 800 card at an added price. I have not seen anything from Apple guarranteeing Firewire support for the future unless I missed it. So I think this may be the beginning of the end for Firewire. I am sure Intel will produce the next generation of USB chips at the 800 speed or better and with Firewire stuck at 400, that will be the death knell for it. I'll be betting that way though I don't like it.
My 5-year-old DVDs play just fine still, but if this is true, then the MPAA ought to be forced to allow legal copies so we may preserve films we legally purchased from them by copying them to new media every 4 years. I don't recall any warnings on any of the DVDs I purchased about shelf life--neither from the MPAA, the distributor, or the manufacturer of DVD recorders.
The MPAA and manufacturers have a lot of explaining to do:
First, DRM to restrict copying,
Then region codes to force markets to be smaller and less competitive (no global free global trade in DVDs), and
Now planned obsolesescence.
On top of it, this begs the question of whether there is any longevity improvement for the new DVD formats. Are the new formats going to have any better shelf life--because with those data densities, even more data will be at risk.
Most of you are looking at this from an individual perspective and you are grossly mistaken. How foolish you all are to think this law is to protect you! You the people! Hah! This administration doesn't do things for the people, they do them for big businesses with lots of funding to contribute to campaigns and with lobbyists who have big entertainment budgets. In other words corporations who are tired of trying to use ineffective civil law suits to stifle free speech about them. So this law is _not_ to give you power--it is to give corporations the power to criminalize product and corporate criticism on the internet. After all, civil suits are so darned expensive, but if a corporation can send a few people to jail, then that will have an immediate and severe chillng effect and squelch bad product reviews and negative comments about customer service and corporations. Don't believe me? Wait an see.
Given the fact that some of our distant relations, e.g. Chimpanzees, still kill and eat humans if they can, it doesn't surprise me that early humans might have done this as well. It probably was never a food of choice but was a 'meal of opportunity' so to speak. In addition, there could also be another reason behind the cannabalism: ritual. Many primitive cultures had rituals in which they eat animal parts in order to obtain some of that animal's powers and it isn't much of a stretch to assume ritualized cannabalism of vanquished enemies was practiced as well by early humans. We certainly know men have been killing each other for a long, long time and show no signs of developing a distaste for it (no pun intended). Even today, some Asians consume tiger genitalia and other animal parts for certain perceived benefits which probably has an origin in those rituals. The patterns seem clear enough, but it isn't very politically correct in the most religious of industrialized nations to point out man's animal orgins so I expect significant resources will be brought to bear to dissprove this even if fabrication is necessary.
A federal court ruling quashing the teaching of the religiously-motivated pseudo-science of intelligent design in Pennsylvania schools (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10545387/). Its great to have fought off this challenge to science and education in America (yet again), but sad that we are still having these challenges after all science has accomplished since Western mankind threw off the yoke theocracy first put on science in the Middle Ages.
Come Michael, your book film, now tv-series (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424600/) is old news--saw it, saw the movie, won't watch the new series--been there, done that.--that was then, this is now. Write something new instead of flogging your old work.
Once upon a time, the government recognized the value of unfettered communication to our democracy. So it held at bay those who wanted to privatize it, meter it , and restrict access. No longer it seems. This is not really a new phenomenon in a capitalist economic system, many of our forms of communication have drifted away from the commons. The internet was granted a brief reprieve because it had its roots in the non-profit government and academic worlds. But it has grown big enough and widepsread enough, that the capitalists want to own it now. They leer at its freedom and scope and lust to control it. What they miss is that it grew exactly because it wasn't owned privately by people whose only vision is profit. I don't think there is any stopping it unless the goverment declares it a utility and a commons--and that is very unlikely to happen under this administration. It was at one time a popular notion which is why the air waves have been generally a commons--though that distinction has been chipped away. And today's media moguls will be damned if they let new forms of communication follow that 'free', as in unbiquitous and uncontrolled, route. The Telcos and video broadcasters just want what the RIAA and MPAA want: to meter their services, IP, and content to the greatest extent the market will bear and maximize profits. The Telcos, unlike the RIAA and MPAA, suffered a setback with the breakup of 'Mother Bell' and that despoiled their fertile field for profit, telephone service, and ruined it for a long time to come. They moved rapidly into cellular mobile phones and that rewarded them for a while until the price wars broke out and bandwidth cheapened to the point it is difficult ot get a great return on infrastructure (it doesn't help that the merger mania the execs engaged in caused them to over pay which significantly lengthened payback periods). So as they search for ways to bring their profits back, the internet provides a great and vast infrastructure for content, services, and IP delivery that they want to control. In order to squeeze every last bit of profit out of it the telcos and broadcasters will need to wrest control from the public and concentrate it in their hands. This means the usual: eliminate competition from free content, supress service competitors like Skype , create a premium tier they can use for content delivery and charge, charge, charge for every scrap of value and access. If free speech and communication for everyone is trod upon and obliterated, they'll shed not a tear--they don't care about anything but profit. That's the nature of the beast and part of the tragedy of the commons. And that's why not all things should be 'free' as in 'free markets'. There are some things too precious to give to those who worship profit above all else and the handful of brilliant men that founded this nation tried to anticipate the rapaciousness of the capitalist and preserve those things in their founding documents. Too bad no one in the White House, the legislative, or judicial branches reads the writings of those men or those doucments much any more--too little time left after reading the checks from the lobbyists, popular polls, and their bank statements. The hundreds of billions in Iraq could have funded a free internet for our children as a commons--but that ship has sailed. they are building oen in the EU and Aisia--we'll be left behind.
RTFL from the EFF. It wasn't the volume of opinion or all your voices or a realization that pearLyrics might be beneficial to them or a conscience--it was the potential liability for damages from misrepresenting a non-infringement to the developer's ISP as an infringement that caught their eye. They would very likely have lost and paid out money not even adding the insult of losing in court and having that all over the web. They have no conscience--this was simply fear and greed in action. They had the legal tables turned on them, saw a potential loss staring them in the face, and gave up--defeat is not an indication of remorse or conscience--it is just defeat, no more, no less.
Who needs non-linear single-player, when a group of humans adds a much greater degree of unpredictabiliity than state of the art AI? That is why MP games are taking off even when short on 'realism' and with less sophisticated engines and visual effects. This is why the Halo versions are so popular and why Q3 Arean is still somewhat. They are simply more challenging and unpredictable and, frankly, fun.
Let me try to understand this poor reasoning...
1. anything very complex is unlikely to have occurred on its own
2. life is too complex to have occurred without the intervention of a creator
3. therefore a creator must have made life
4. but for a creator to create life, it msut be very complex
5. therefore a creator could not have simply 'occurred' but had to be created by a creator since it could not have crated itself
6. but that second creator, is complex and powerful and therefore it msut have been created by a third creator...
7. ad infinitum. ad absurdum
The potential author publishes a summary, atable of contents, and a schedule on a web site. the web site advertizes the potentil project and solicts bids. An on-line aution ensues. What is unique is that indivduals pool their bids in this auctionb with each diecding what it is worth to them. Eventually an aggregate price forms and each bidder has to pay the same or withdraw. When teh price stabilizes, the author decides if the price is worth the effort, if so the author writes the article/book/whatever and those who bid have to pur their money in escrow. If not, the bargaining continues until a price is reacehd or the parties lose interest.
By analogy then, a patient who has had 5 quadruple by-pass operations and 4 stints is much healthier than one who has had a couple of stints?
I don't know what's more scary: 1) Microsoft's continuing cavalier "if we cannot fix Window security adequately (shown by the volume of patches) we'll just mount a huge propaganda campaign to herald its safety instead" or 2) the fact that the Chief of Microsoft Security has such poor logic skills.
Slashdot Mirror
The Founders were very concerned about freedom of assembly--the curtailment of that freedom was one the methods dictators, in this case King George and the Tories, use to suppress dissent. If the 'government' could monitor the revolutionary meetings and find out who attended, they could then quietly round the participants up one by one later. In the modern age, the telephone is used to arrange many meetings. If any government wants to repress freedom of assembly and quash dissent, what better way than to have a list of a dissenter's contacts to round up for questioning? A few police dragnets and stakeouts and the matter is closed. They don't need to know the content of the call--association is 'guilty' and you are on the call list so you are brought in for quesitoning. Sure, there is a remote possibility the NSA _might_ find find some terrorists in this net, but this brute force drift net is going to trap and drown as a 'side kill' our freedom with much more certainty. The fact that this escapes the average American is no surprise--most of them have never read the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution and many don't recognize paragraphs from them when given in a poll. Freedom is too important to be trusted to the uneducated mob.--they won't miss it until they need it and then it will be too late.
They have been far over-valuing their intellectual property. So I guess Uncle Sam is going to have to write them a nice check one day soon ;-)
Many of you are making two very, very dangerous assumptions about the limits of the activities and consequences of them:
1) you are assuming Microsoft's definition of 'illegal' coincides with that of a court of law or most of you. Clearly, if we look at past behavior of Microsoft and SONY for instance, that is not the case. Corporations with profits at risk have a disturbing tendency to tilt such definitions selfishly to the detriment of freedom and consumer's rights. I see no indication they would not abuse this new power based on past behavior
2) Most of you are assuming their invasion will be 'competent' and not inadvertantly produce collateral damage. But that is _exactly_ what SONY's recent DRM invasion did. I can easily forsee invasions crippling rival programs or corrupting data 'accidently' or mistakenly targeting open source program you might have installed. It won't matter if the damage was accidental due to incompetence or deliberate--and it will be very, very hard to prove tha latter and receive damages.
How many of you have the financial muscle to prove a case against SONY or Microsoft? Thought so. This is very scary indeed
"Regal Entertainment Group and National Amusements Inc. have countered, saying that seeing a movie in the theater is a 'fuller, more entertaining experience' and that the time window between movie and DVD releases should even be extended."
If it was so much 'fuller' and 'more entertaining' then it would be able to compete without artificial market manipulation such as delaying the releases. Obviosuly the market doesn't think ti 'fuller' hence theaters struggle and want reflied by forcing us to go to them or have to wait longer to see a video.
That's a business plan JFC! I am starting think the extreme position of disallowing patents on software period makes the most sense. It will encourage innovation, create more competition for monopolists, and speed up delivery cycles. Although there will be downsides, in balance it seems the correct approach. This nonsense must stop. Now.
"The key was vendor acknowledged critical vulnerabilities. Thus, if Microsoft (or the Mozilla Foundation) didn't agree it was critical, then it didn't get counted."
When asked if downloading music via P2P is 'stealing', respondents uniformly replied that it wasn't, so their downloads ceased being counted in MPAA music theft figures. The MPAA in a separate announcment stated it had no legal standing in curent cases and withdrew all complaints and charges against all music 'sharers'.
See we can use corporate logic too!
Political correctness has taken aim at the head of the freedom to conduct business and commerce and will kill a vehicle consumers use to economically market their wares. Big firms, the ones who can afford to police their postings, don't use Craig's List. No, it is the domain of ordinary folks. But because they are 'low budget' Craig's List cannot afford to police them and still keep rates affordable for the individual. Yeah, great idea, let's shut them down so some chump and their lawyer can earn a few buck while taking a breather from ambulance chasing. So, in the siprit of smashing a fly with a sledge hammer, let's shut this one down. Pretty soon, in this overly-litigious society, only major corporations with big money will be able to do anything public to earn money. First free speech, now the right to earn a buck--what's left of freedom after that? Just freedom to open one's wallet I guess. How sad.
To quote some evidence from decision: "Lohman agreed that police had no information or evidence that defendant took any of the original pictures or made any of the original videos found on the CD-Rs."
Further " -3- Defendant argued against bindover on the counts related to the CD-Rs, contending that the burning or saving of images or data onto a CD-R does not rise to the level of producing, creating, manufacturing, or making child sexually abusive material. Defendant further argued that the transference of the images from the Internet to his computer's hard drive and then to the CD-Rs constituted nothing more than the storage of data. Defendant maintained that at most there was only evidence of possession of child pornography pursuant to MCL 750.145c(4)"
To get back on point, the issue is not punishment or justice or whether possessin is illegal (it is only for _child_ porn in most cases), it is whether burning some images to a removable optical medium is PUBLISHING and DISTRIBUTION.
So let's examine this arguments implication through some hypothetical cases.
This over-zealous and poorly considered decision materially blurred the line substantially and might just have handed th RIAA and MPAA the equivalent of the 'A Bomb' depnding upon how far this is stretched. Right now, thankfully, this is not a ferderal court or in an infulential state supreme court. Let's hope it is an anomaly.
I predicted that one of the first casualties of the Intel-Apple relationship would be Firewire since Intel has fought Firewire in favor of their standard, USB--despite its inferiority in I/O overhead. So I have written a few times in various forums that the Intel relationship with Apple would see increased pressure on Apple to give in and result in a gradual abandonment of Firewire. Many people vehemently disagreed with me. However, we are now seeing the first evidence that I may, unfortunately, be right. Buried in the news about the Macbook Pro was this: "The disappearance of FW800 has also been discussed: Apple said it would have required them toi build a specific FW800 card (Intel does not support it), and that they had no plans for it". If the lack of glue chip support doomed Firewire 800 on the laptops, then might it not doom it on the desktop systems of the future as well since Intel's glue chips will be just as important there as well? Surely Apple is not going to use up a PCI-X slot just for a Firewire 800 card at an added price. I have not seen anything from Apple guarranteeing Firewire support for the future unless I missed it. So I think this may be the beginning of the end for Firewire. I am sure Intel will produce the next generation of USB chips at the 800 speed or better and with Firewire stuck at 400, that will be the death knell for it. I'll be betting that way though I don't like it.
My 5-year-old DVDs play just fine still, but if this is true, then the MPAA ought to be forced to allow legal copies so we may preserve films we legally purchased from them by copying them to new media every 4 years. I don't recall any warnings on any of the DVDs I purchased about shelf life--neither from the MPAA, the distributor, or the manufacturer of DVD recorders.
The MPAA and manufacturers have a lot of explaining to do:
On top of it, this begs the question of whether there is any longevity improvement for the new DVD formats. Are the new formats going to have any better shelf life--because with those data densities, even more data will be at risk.
Most of you are looking at this from an individual perspective and you are grossly mistaken. How foolish you all are to think this law is to protect you! You the people! Hah! This administration doesn't do things for the people, they do them for big businesses with lots of funding to contribute to campaigns and with lobbyists who have big entertainment budgets. In other words corporations who are tired of trying to use ineffective civil law suits to stifle free speech about them. So this law is _not_ to give you power--it is to give corporations the power to criminalize product and corporate criticism on the internet. After all, civil suits are so darned expensive, but if a corporation can send a few people to jail, then that will have an immediate and severe chillng effect and squelch bad product reviews and negative comments about customer service and corporations. Don't believe me? Wait an see.
Given the fact that some of our distant relations, e.g. Chimpanzees, still kill and eat humans if they can, it doesn't surprise me that early humans might have done this as well. It probably was never a food of choice but was a 'meal of opportunity' so to speak. In addition, there could also be another reason behind the cannabalism: ritual. Many primitive cultures had rituals in which they eat animal parts in order to obtain some of that animal's powers and it isn't much of a stretch to assume ritualized cannabalism of vanquished enemies was practiced as well by early humans. We certainly know men have been killing each other for a long, long time and show no signs of developing a distaste for it (no pun intended). Even today, some Asians consume tiger genitalia and other animal parts for certain perceived benefits which probably has an origin in those rituals. The patterns seem clear enough, but it isn't very politically correct in the most religious of industrialized nations to point out man's animal orgins so I expect significant resources will be brought to bear to dissprove this even if fabrication is necessary.
A federal court ruling quashing the teaching of the religiously-motivated pseudo-science of intelligent design in Pennsylvania schools (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10545387/). Its great to have fought off this challenge to science and education in America (yet again), but sad that we are still having these challenges after all science has accomplished since Western mankind threw off the yoke theocracy first put on science in the Middle Ages.
Come Michael, your book film, now tv-series (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424600/) is old news--saw it, saw the movie, won't watch the new series--been there, done that.--that was then, this is now. Write something new instead of flogging your old work.
Once upon a time, the government recognized the value of unfettered communication to our democracy. So it held at bay those who wanted to privatize it, meter it , and restrict access. No longer it seems. This is not really a new phenomenon in a capitalist economic system, many of our forms of communication have drifted away from the commons. The internet was granted a brief reprieve because it had its roots in the non-profit government and academic worlds. But it has grown big enough and widepsread enough, that the capitalists want to own it now. They leer at its freedom and scope and lust to control it. What they miss is that it grew exactly because it wasn't owned privately by people whose only vision is profit. I don't think there is any stopping it unless the goverment declares it a utility and a commons--and that is very unlikely to happen under this administration. It was at one time a popular notion which is why the air waves have been generally a commons--though that distinction has been chipped away. And today's media moguls will be damned if they let new forms of communication follow that 'free', as in unbiquitous and uncontrolled, route. The Telcos and video broadcasters just want what the RIAA and MPAA want: to meter their services, IP, and content to the greatest extent the market will bear and maximize profits. The Telcos, unlike the RIAA and MPAA, suffered a setback with the breakup of 'Mother Bell' and that despoiled their fertile field for profit, telephone service, and ruined it for a long time to come. They moved rapidly into cellular mobile phones and that rewarded them for a while until the price wars broke out and bandwidth cheapened to the point it is difficult ot get a great return on infrastructure (it doesn't help that the merger mania the execs engaged in caused them to over pay which significantly lengthened payback periods). So as they search for ways to bring their profits back, the internet provides a great and vast infrastructure for content, services, and IP delivery that they want to control. In order to squeeze every last bit of profit out of it the telcos and broadcasters will need to wrest control from the public and concentrate it in their hands. This means the usual: eliminate competition from free content, supress service competitors like Skype , create a premium tier they can use for content delivery and charge, charge, charge for every scrap of value and access. If free speech and communication for everyone is trod upon and obliterated, they'll shed not a tear--they don't care about anything but profit. That's the nature of the beast and part of the tragedy of the commons. And that's why not all things should be 'free' as in 'free markets'. There are some things too precious to give to those who worship profit above all else and the handful of brilliant men that founded this nation tried to anticipate the rapaciousness of the capitalist and preserve those things in their founding documents. Too bad no one in the White House, the legislative, or judicial branches reads the writings of those men or those doucments much any more--too little time left after reading the checks from the lobbyists, popular polls, and their bank statements. The hundreds of billions in Iraq could have funded a free internet for our children as a commons--but that ship has sailed. they are building oen in the EU and Aisia--we'll be left behind.
RTFL from the EFF. It wasn't the volume of opinion or all your voices or a realization that pearLyrics might be beneficial to them or a conscience--it was the potential liability for damages from misrepresenting a non-infringement to the developer's ISP as an infringement that caught their eye. They would very likely have lost and paid out money not even adding the insult of losing in court and having that all over the web. They have no conscience--this was simply fear and greed in action. They had the legal tables turned on them, saw a potential loss staring them in the face, and gave up--defeat is not an indication of remorse or conscience--it is just defeat, no more, no less.
Who needs non-linear single-player, when a group of humans adds a much greater degree of unpredictabiliity than state of the art AI? That is why MP games are taking off even when short on 'realism' and with less sophisticated engines and visual effects. This is why the Halo versions are so popular and why Q3 Arean is still somewhat. They are simply more challenging and unpredictable and, frankly, fun.
Let me try to understand this poor reasoning... 1. anything very complex is unlikely to have occurred on its own 2. life is too complex to have occurred without the intervention of a creator 3. therefore a creator must have made life 4. but for a creator to create life, it msut be very complex 5. therefore a creator could not have simply 'occurred' but had to be created by a creator since it could not have crated itself 6. but that second creator, is complex and powerful and therefore it msut have been created by a third creator... 7. ad infinitum. ad absurdum
The potential author publishes a summary, atable of contents, and a schedule on a web site. the web site advertizes the potentil project and solicts bids. An on-line aution ensues. What is unique is that indivduals pool their bids in this auctionb with each diecding what it is worth to them. Eventually an aggregate price forms and each bidder has to pay the same or withdraw. When teh price stabilizes, the author decides if the price is worth the effort, if so the author writes the article/book/whatever and those who bid have to pur their money in escrow. If not, the bargaining continues until a price is reacehd or the parties lose interest.
By analogy then, a patient who has had 5 quadruple by-pass operations and 4 stints is much healthier than one who has had a couple of stints?
I don't know what's more scary: 1) Microsoft's continuing cavalier "if we cannot fix Window security adequately (shown by the volume of patches) we'll just mount a huge propaganda campaign to herald its safety instead" or 2) the fact that the Chief of Microsoft Security has such poor logic skills.