People are too afraid to let their kids fail. You learn skepticism by messing up, by making bad decisions, by getting scammed. Let your kids fail (just make sure they aren't getting in over their heads so that failure doesn't have consequences that are *too* dire).
Don't be afraid to share with them about failures of judgement you've made in your own life, and what the consequences were, and how you dealt with those failures afterwords.
Also, make sure your kids watch/listen/see news after a certain age. It's true you might not want to scare them when they are entirely too young, but I would think that once a kid's older than about 5 years old, it's probably time to start teaching them about the world. Make sure they are aware of the stories in the news about people getting scammed, or kids and high school students getting kidnapped, etc.
So in summary, let them learn from their own failures, and make sure they are aware of and learn from other peoples' failures too. Don't shield them too much. People learn skepticism themselves if they simply aren't shielded from the truth too much.
A one time fee of $99 isn't much money. I'm sure an open source project could come up with $99 somewhere. After all, if you are going to put thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars worth of developer hours into developing the project, what's $99? Developers also sometimes pay money for domain names (of course, that's more like $10, but it's still spending money to start your free software project). Developers pay for internet access. Web hosting sometimes. They typically pay for the computers they use to do development on, and for the electricity to run those computers. Remember, Free Software is Free, not free. Also, if the application idea you have is interesting, I bet you could get someone else to donate the $99 to get a key if you asked nicely in an appropriate forum, mailing list, etc. Someone who was interested in seeing such a Free Software application developed, but who wasn't interested in developing it themselves.
Also, potentially multiple projects could share a key. The article also stated that you could sign as many applications as you wanted with that key, so organizations like Apache Foundation which sponsor dozens of projects can use a single key.
In any case, an argument that you don't want to pay $99 dollars is not an argument that you cannot develop Free Software for the iPhone. Granted, it would be nice of Apple if they were to offer free or very cheap keys for Free Software projects (after all, they've benefited tremendously by using a LOT of Free Software, such as BSD, khtml/webkit, Samba, Apache, GCC, etc), but my point is, I haven't yet seen a good reason given why it would be particularly difficult to do Free Software for the iPhone?
I'm not saying you're wrong, but you also need to consider the part that liberals, as nominally represented by the Democratic party, play in this whole scheme too. Democrats/liberals love big government programs. The problem is, big government programs cost money. So you need tax revenue streams. The democrats are all about getting as much tax revenue as possible. You can tax the revenue that corporations make on licensing fees for creative works. You can't tax free copies.
Democrats, in fact, love rich corporations and rich individuals. In a democracy, it's much easier to sell the majority on taxing 'them', instead of taxing 'you'. The democrats try to solve everyone's problems by taxing the rich and taxing corporations, because it's easier to get the majority, who aren't rich, to go along with that. The whole two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for lunch thing. (I know, someone's going to be outraged that I just compared rich, powerful corps and individuals to sheep, and the non-rich individuals as the wolves, but in this case, the analogy applies - the majority making decisions that primarily affect the minority instead of the majority).
Ultimately, all governments do have some responsibility to look out for the overall welfare of the economy and the business environment (that is, the system of laws and taxes which govern business). They *should* try to help the businesses who choose to locate in their borders, pay taxes, and submit to their laws/regulations to thrive, as much as possible. That is because, generally speaking, that is to the benefit of their citizens - it does allow them to generate tax revenues to pay for national defense, public infrastructure, law enforcement, and social programs. However, they should not sacrifice their people to ridiculously totalitarian laws in order to do so. They should also not try to protect or help individual corporations at the expense of all corporations and the people, which sadly is what is happening too often now.
I don't see why Open Source / Free Software apps still couldn't happen on the iPhone. For one thing, I would assume that actual development of the programs occurs on a Mac or PC, then get's cross-compiled for the iPhone. So, you can just setup your normal website/sourceforge, cvs/subversion, mailing lists, etc that you would normally use to manage the project, and people can download the source and do development on their computer. As for testing the app on your iPhone, the apps are required to be signed with a key, but I don't necessarily see any reason an open source project couldn't get a key from Apple, sign their builds (even developer builds), which would then allow any developer to download that build and test it.
You're absolutely correct - with *so many* things that are clearly more important for the government to be doing, I can't possibly see how the government can elevate intellectual property enforcement to the highest priority. But, they probably will. The government, is, essentially, a business. The highest priority for any business is to protect their revenue streams. I think people in the government think this way: protecting copyright/patent holders' revenue streams will in turn protect business-, capital gains-, and personal income tax revenue streams, so enforcement will pay for itself, and maybe pay for other programs and services. That might be giving them too much credit, though, as it's quite possible they are just trying to keep the people who pay for their campaigns, vacations, and private suites at stadiums, happy.
If history has taught us anything, though, it's that this made-up legal power of copyright is, actually, very difficult and expensive to enforce. I doubt it can even be made break-even in the long term.
The truth is, the best tool copyright holders have for generating revenue is the goodwill of their patrons. Some people will always rip you off if they can. Some other people have a high personal moral sense, and will always try to compensate artists, programmers, etc for their work. An example of this is the artist who performs in the park, or on the sidewalk, with a hat or something on the ground that people toss change or money into; some people will listen to the music (or watch, if it's a visual performing artist) and enjoy it, but still not pitch any money in, other people will put some money in because they enjoyed it and realize it's important to support the artist if you want to enable that artist to concentrate on their art, and not be force to spend significant amounts of time on other methods of generating income. Most people fall somewhere in the middle, where if they think you are trying to rip them off (e.g. charge way too much for your product), they will rip you off, but if you ask for a reasonable price, they will happily pay it.
I, personally, fall into the second camp - if I enjoy a song, game, movie, book, or whatever, I *want* to pay a *reasonable* amount of money to support that creative effort. I don't even mind that middle men like publishers, record labels, etc make some money, as long as they aren't ripping off the artists (which, unfortunately, is usually the case anyhow) - the middlemen, usually do, after all, add some value in terms of production, promotion, and distribution. If you ask too much money for the product, I will just not buy it, but also not steal it. I don't need your product after all. There's other music, games, movies, books that I can enjoy, and which I find I *can* do business with the copyright holders.
See, this is why I've almost completely given up MMO's. Game's aren't supposed to be realistic. Fundamentally, they're supposed to be fun. Some sense of connection to reality as we know it can certainly help a game out. I tried Eve for a little while. I gave it up pretty quick, because I saw what that games becomes pretty quick. . . a second job. I play games when I'm not working, because I don't want to work. If I wanted to work more, I'd make *real* money by working a *real* job. Eve (and most MMOs) seemed like a lot of grinding to get Isk to buy up skills and equipment so you can make more Isk so you can buy up skills and still better equipment, to. . .
Sure, those are worthwhile grinds *in real life*. I'd rather spend time grinding my "programming skill", "car repair skill", or grinding up my Checking Account, Savings Account, and IRA, than grinding up skills and accounts in games. But, I don't want to work all the time, which is why I play games. You know, things that aren't work.
Trees and weeds *grow themselves* if we simply don't destroy their habitat. I somehow doubt that a few small trees per household in pots on people decks, and small weed gardens are really going to offset the many thousands of Acres per day of wild spaces that are burned, bulldozed, and otherwise de-vegetaged. Sure, it might add up to a few hundred million additional trees, which sounds good, but I think in practice, everyone who *can* grow some trees and gardens (e.g. they have some land on which to grow plants) largely already does. Every house with land around it I've ever seen already has some landscaping. Even commercial and often times industrial property will have *some* plants on them.
The problem is, when humans occupy a space, it goes from hundreds of trees and thousands of smaller plant varieties (ok, I'm kind of making up numbers here, but the general gist of this is still true) packed into an acre, to a building, a drive way, sidewalks, some grass, maybe up to 10 trees, and a dozen or so shrubs.
Granted, we gotta live, and work, and go to school, and do commerce, *somewhere*, so it's a tough problem. The biggest problem, I think, is simply overpopulation of the planet. We're approaching 7 Billion people in the world, and that is really a spectacularly large number, especially since humans consume far more resources per-capita than most species (meaning we require a lot more land). 7 Billion ants, on the other hand are probably what you would find in a small rural town and outlying townships.
Population is a deliciously difficult problem to deal with because, as far as I can tell, people just won't voluntarily slow down reproduction, and non-voluntary population reduction measures, at least all that I've ever heard proposed, range from morally difficult, to downright evil.
Now I gotta go play the dern game again, lol. I can't honestly remember. I do seem to remember there was some definite choice, almost a suicide aspect, to his death. I'm still not sure Fountain couldn't have popped out of a vita-chamber; he rather seemed to want to live.
The thing I'm a bit puzzled about. . . if this system has data which is so important that the whole plant must be SHUT DOWN for two days if it fails, then why aren't there *at least* TWO of them (I'd say there's a good argument for 3 or 4, but. ..)? That way, you can take one out of the loop for updates, verify the update didn't hose your data, sync the data from the 'live' system, then put it online, take the other one offline, and complete the update on it.
If I were the power co owning this plant, I'd be ticked if the plant was dark for 2 days. With the price of energy these days, and the amount of energy a single Nuclear plant can generate, you're talking some real serious cash when the thing is down for 2 days. Especially if I have to look forward to the same thing happening again, potentially every time our systems need updating (not that it necessarily would happen every time, I would sure hope it wouldn't, but with only one system, every update is a potential for the whole plant to go down for some period of time).
. . . start creating some competition. I know, I know, it's definitely an uphill battle trying to gain traction against incumbent monopolies/duopolies who would love to protect the status quo, but, the best way to ensure network neutrality is to start an ISP, then you can guarantee network neutrality. Also, the best way to make sure there is sufficient bandwidth, again, is to start your own ISP (granted, anywhere you have to peer to other networks is a place for the other networks to hose you, but, hopefully, if you have enough peers, you can route around the damage, and then take whatever steps necessary against the network that is screwing you up (e.g. lawsuit, if you have a Service Level Agreement with them which they are not abiding by).
I'd love to see a new startup in the Fiber-to-the-home business, to give Verizon & ATT some competition.
I thought about this more and, sci-fi has a long history of bringing back 'dead' antagonists. There's no reason why the Bioshock writer's couldn't potentially bring up some cliche, cheezy thing like Tony Fountain had a clone of himself that was activated after you defeated him, or Ryan might have had a trick like that up his sleeve. I mean, we *are* talking about a game centered around genetic engineering sci fi, which already stretches the theoretical potential of genetic engineering from the plausible to the extremely improbable.
Heck, maybe Ryan and Tony just popped out of the nearest Vita-Chamber when you defeated them (I mean, if you could be revived by the Vita-Chambers, why not the villain?). That would be the simplest explanation for the devs to use.
Actually, one thing that occurs to me would be an awesome gameplay twist in one of the sequels is if you, in order to achieve the mission objectives, have to, somewhere near the end of the game, shutdown all the Vita Chambers (thus forcing the player into a sequence somewhere, where defeat isn't an option - not too long of a sequence, mind you, or that could get very very frustrating, but still could be an interesting story/gameplay interaction).
IIRC (it's been like six months since I played it), the first game didn't end with the destruction of the city, leaving open the possibility for someone to come in and assume power. Maybe the german scientist lady, or someone else. I thought the ending rather didn't tie up a lot of loose ends. Also, just because it shows the player character growing old, doesn't mean there aren't further adventures in the character's life between when you leave rapture the first time, and when you grow old.
Sure, you can do that to. But, I'm just saying, I don't understand why a recorded phone call, if necessary, isn't used more often. They could have you state something like:
I hereby declare under penalty of perjury that my name is John A Smith, and I am the parent or legal guardian of Robert B Smith. Today's Date is June, 06, 2008, and I hereby authorize Mercy Medical Center of of Cincinnati, Ohio to provide medical treatment to Robert Smith.
Simple, to the point, and as long as the the phone call/recording isn't horrible, a Jury could reasonably match your voice to the recording. The only potential problem is if someone else calls in, pretending to be you. I suppose that might be the problem with this particular option - reasonably verifying the voice on the other end of the phone is actually the person they claim to be.
I wasn't really mixing up the two. In fact, somehow I hadn't noticed the DEC Multia before. I was thinking of the Netwinder, but just misremembered the name. I remember going to a Linux conference somewhere, and seeing the Netwinder's being demod. Part of me lusted after it, because it was so small and power efficient. But, ultimately, I remember looking at the price and thinking to myself I could get a pretty decent PC with significantly better specs than the netwinder (in terms of graphics, RAM, HDD) for about the same price.
I was hoping that the things would find a market, and eventually get to a more competitive price point (I also figured if the company was successful at all, that in a couple years' time there'd be better units [reasoning that in 2-3 years time, there'd likely be upgrades to the StongARM cpu, or maybe they'd just switch to some other power-efficient, cool CPU, plus they'd get more ram, maybe better integrated graphics, and larger hard drives), at about the same price or possibly slightly cheaper, that would be a more compelling value to me).
Well, anyhow, I suspect that this Eee PC from Asus will do better (Asus is an established company that, I think, can put the necessary funding into marketing, production [to drive the per-unit costs down to a compelling point], and keeping with it long enough for the product to start to succeed.
They were cool looking little boxes. I might have to buy me one someday soon (before you can't find em anymore). I think I remember they were bought up by Corel at some point? Did Corel do anything with the Netwinder? As far as I can tell, Corel is one of those companies where good products go to die.
I dunno, how about they RECORD THE PHONE CALL wherein you are heard giving consent to perform the operation. Yes, that could potentially still be abused, but it's a lot harder to find someone whose voice is similar, than to forge or copy a signature.
Ok, I don't remember for sure if I have the name right, but I remember, back about 1998 or 2000, there was a company showcasing these tiny, power efficient PC's which had a form-factor somewhat similar to that Eee mini-PC in the linked image from the article. I think they used an ARM, or maybe it was Alpha, RISC processor, and came with some Linux distro.
I think the main downfall of that endeavor was that 1) the computers weren't Intel compatible, or Mac compatible, so you had to use Linux or BSD on them (and would have needed an Intel emulator on top of that to run any binaries compiled for Intel), I think, in order to keep them small and relatively cheap (they were still, I think, like 600 bucks, so kind of expensive, considering you could get generic PC's for about 400) and 3) the company that produced them was too small and simply lacked the funding necessary to survive in any case.
Still, I've always thought tiny-form factor PCs were nifty. If you could get one that was powerful enough, with decent enough video, you could use them as the basis for your own set-top boxes, routers, and things like that, or even just a small, low-power, inconspicuous server.
Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily think that something like JavaScript, where the DOM can be manipulated dynamically to create more dynamic webpages, is necessarily a bad thing, or Ajax where data can be sent to the browser to render into the DOM. There could, potentially, be the chance for there to be some kind of buffer overflow in the browser that attackers could exploit - but that is potentially even a problem with straight html + images. I just have to trust the browser developer to do a decent job of coding securely, and to fix found exploits quickly. I'm pretty confident with Mozilla's ability to do that, as well as Apple (Safari), Opera, Konq, etc. Even to some extent Microsoft.
My problem is this concept of putting full-fledged programming languages with full access to the.Net framework libraries (which has lots of system-call type objects/methods, e.g. file access, registry modification, program execution, etc). The article (yes, I did read it) made it sound like Microsoft was going to put a full Ruby implementation into SilverLight, and give that Ruby implementation full access to the.Net framework? Am I reading that right? Does SilverLight already give developers using 'traditional'.Net languages full access to the framework? That just seems like a plain bad idea.
I don't mind something like Flash or SilverLight if it only lets developers draw stuff on screen, receive mouse/keyboard events, and play sounds, but I don't like the idea of stuff I load from the Internet having access to system calls. That's just scary.
I confess I don't know a lot about Ruby on Rails, but I've looked into it once or twice. I thought Rails was a Server-Side technology for creating dynamic websites? I thought SilverLight is a Flash-clone, for implementing client side interfaces and rich media playback? Is Microsoft talking about a SilverLight-based user-interface which connects to a Rails backend running on the server? Or actually Rails running in the browser? What benefits would Rails in the browser bring you?
Also, slightly off-topic, but is anyone else concerned about the security implications of pushing more and more languages/capabilities/functionality into the web browser, which can be controlled by scripts/code loaded from remote, un-trusted, servers? Why can't a web browser just be a web browser?
The thing is, the Havok free license requires you to distribute your whole software package as binary only. That's incredibly un-friendly to Open Source. Sure, there could potentially be an open source license which doesn't require shared libraries you link to be open source as well (actually, in reading the GPL, I think you could make the case that you could even distribute your software under the GPL if it links to proprietary libraries, because in as much as those libraries are not really part of your program, they wouldn't have to be covered by the GPL), but even if you used such a license for your software, you STILL couldn't link your software with Havok, because the Havok license *requires* you to NOT distribute source code to people. The Havok license is FAR, FAR more restrictive and obnoxious than the GPL ever was or will be.
I don't know that the GPL expressely forbids linking to non-GPL libraries. However, there is definitely a license conflict between Havok and the GPL. . .
From the Havok license:
"i. publicly demonstrate, and publicly distribute a Havok-enabled non-commercial end-user compiled, binary executable software application or game for the Windows PC Platform, in which the Software is compiled and distributed within the software application or game in an integral, non-separable way, for no direct or indirect commercial value;". Notice, particularly, "compiled, binary executable. ..in which the Software is compiled. . . in an integral, non-seperable way".
From the GPL v3 (GPL v2 is basically identical in this regard): See section 6 (not copied here because it's fairly long). In a nutshell, if you distribute binary/object code of the GPL'ed work, you MUST offer recipients access to the source code. So, if you honor the terms of the Havok license, you violate the GPL, or vice-versa.
Also from the GPL v3: See section 5, wherein the user is given permission to modify the work and distribute copies, but those copies MUST be licensed with the GPL (and so the user gets permission to modify the work). Access to the source code, and the right to modify it, means that end users could seperate Havok from the GPL'ed software. So, again, you would have to either violate the Havok license (by providing users access to the source and the right to modify it), or violate the GPL.
There's absolutely no way you can simultaneously abide by the terms of both the Havok license and the GPL.
I honestly think the gaming industry really needs to consider pricing, as well, as an incentive to get people to buy instead of copy (particularly in parts of the world with low per-capita incomes, like most of Asia). There's what, about 3 Billion people in Asia? (I think I remember seeing statistics that there about 1B in China, 1B in India/Pakistan, and about 1B in all the rest of Asia). The thing is, there's a lot of people in Asia, but a lot of them don't make very much money. (Granted, a lot of them probably don't even have computers or know how to use them, but I would bet that out of that 3 Billion, you would probably have close to 1/2 Billion computer users; and, the number must be going up all the time). Maybe, though, you could get them to pay $3 for a game?
Doesn't sound like much, but if your game has enough appeal, and you get, say 30 million people to buy a copy of your game, that's almost 100 million dollars. I don't really know if you could get people to even give you $3 bucks, but I figure you'll have an easier time with that, than with $60. Also, if you are willing to only see $2-3 of revenue per copy, you might be able to experiment with other revenue models, like advertising supported games where the user doesn't pay for the game.
I think that you summed it up pretty well, there. I was reading the articles, and over and over again, these companies got, maybe 200 Million in funding and IPO cash, then tried to build a billion-dollar infrastructure and offices in 10 cities in 1 or 2 years. Then, shock! they ran out of money before they finished building. It reminds me of the first few times I tried to play SimCity, and went bust because I tried to grow too fast, without developing enough revenue base in the city. At some point you have to figure out that, with this amount of money, I can afford to spend this amount of it on growth, then need to save the rest of it to cover costs until I can achieve profitability. Be profitable for a couple years, which proves the business model has a fighting chance to succeed, then go back to investors for a much larger amount of money to resume growing.
"The interface is pretty much designed around a controller, and not a keyboard and mouse."
Which is why I was extremely surprised to discover that on Windows/Mac/Linux, *gamepads are not supported* (I found this out by searching on the games support forum, but I don't have the link handy now). I've got a very functional Logitech USB gamepad, which I would *love* to use with Rainslick. Oh well. I'm cutting them some slack because they created a game which does run substantially the same on all 3 of the most popular PC OS'es, and I suspect that gamepad detection and event notification might not be easy to do cross-platform? (Not sure on that though, seems like cross-platform game engines/libraries/sdks would have this functionality available to the developers.)
Still, overall, it's a pretty decent game. Unfortunately, this game suffers from a problem that most games seem to have - demos that are very unimpressive. You don't get to anything good, really, until after the demo is over. Which means that people considering buying the game, who check out the demo, may very well be put off from buying it, very understandably.
Game developers/publishers need to think about creating demos that really "Wow" people right from the very first minute, and give people very interesting gameplay, even early in the game. Rainslick is sort RPG-like in it's system, where your characters gain levels, and new abilities. The problem is, RPG-like games typically don't demo very well, because at low levels, your character basically has no interesting abilities or attack chains, and at low levels, encounters are typically very boring with both the character and enemies being weak, slow, and utlimately, not very challenging (or in some games, overly-challenging because of the low level). The other issue is that, just frankly, the first area of the game (which is all you can access in the demo), is pretty boring (I mean, come on, it's a suburb; even if a suburb is stomped on by a giant robot, it's still boring), and you don't get much story or amusing dialog or characters during that first area.
The dialog and story do get a bit better, but my experience has been that the real draw of this game is a lot of the encounters with NPCs - the dialog and stories of the individual encounters, is much better than the over-arching story (at least, what I've seen of it so far; I haven't finished the game yet).
Slashdot Mirror
People are too afraid to let their kids fail. You learn skepticism by messing up, by making bad decisions, by getting scammed. Let your kids fail (just make sure they aren't getting in over their heads so that failure doesn't have consequences that are *too* dire).
Don't be afraid to share with them about failures of judgement you've made in your own life, and what the consequences were, and how you dealt with those failures afterwords.
Also, make sure your kids watch/listen/see news after a certain age. It's true you might not want to scare them when they are entirely too young, but I would think that once a kid's older than about 5 years old, it's probably time to start teaching them about the world. Make sure they are aware of the stories in the news about people getting scammed, or kids and high school students getting kidnapped, etc.
So in summary, let them learn from their own failures, and make sure they are aware of and learn from other peoples' failures too. Don't shield them too much. People learn skepticism themselves if they simply aren't shielded from the truth too much.
A one time fee of $99 isn't much money. I'm sure an open source project could come up with $99 somewhere. After all, if you are going to put thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars worth of developer hours into developing the project, what's $99? Developers also sometimes pay money for domain names (of course, that's more like $10, but it's still spending money to start your free software project). Developers pay for internet access. Web hosting sometimes. They typically pay for the computers they use to do development on, and for the electricity to run those computers. Remember, Free Software is Free, not free. Also, if the application idea you have is interesting, I bet you could get someone else to donate the $99 to get a key if you asked nicely in an appropriate forum, mailing list, etc. Someone who was interested in seeing such a Free Software application developed, but who wasn't interested in developing it themselves.
Also, potentially multiple projects could share a key. The article also stated that you could sign as many applications as you wanted with that key, so organizations like Apache Foundation which sponsor dozens of projects can use a single key.
In any case, an argument that you don't want to pay $99 dollars is not an argument that you cannot develop Free Software for the iPhone. Granted, it would be nice of Apple if they were to offer free or very cheap keys for Free Software projects (after all, they've benefited tremendously by using a LOT of Free Software, such as BSD, khtml/webkit, Samba, Apache, GCC, etc), but my point is, I haven't yet seen a good reason given why it would be particularly difficult to do Free Software for the iPhone?
I'm not saying you're wrong, but you also need to consider the part that liberals, as nominally represented by the Democratic party, play in this whole scheme too. Democrats/liberals love big government programs. The problem is, big government programs cost money. So you need tax revenue streams. The democrats are all about getting as much tax revenue as possible. You can tax the revenue that corporations make on licensing fees for creative works. You can't tax free copies.
Democrats, in fact, love rich corporations and rich individuals. In a democracy, it's much easier to sell the majority on taxing 'them', instead of taxing 'you'. The democrats try to solve everyone's problems by taxing the rich and taxing corporations, because it's easier to get the majority, who aren't rich, to go along with that. The whole two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for lunch thing. (I know, someone's going to be outraged that I just compared rich, powerful corps and individuals to sheep, and the non-rich individuals as the wolves, but in this case, the analogy applies - the majority making decisions that primarily affect the minority instead of the majority).
Ultimately, all governments do have some responsibility to look out for the overall welfare of the economy and the business environment (that is, the system of laws and taxes which govern business). They *should* try to help the businesses who choose to locate in their borders, pay taxes, and submit to their laws/regulations to thrive, as much as possible. That is because, generally speaking, that is to the benefit of their citizens - it does allow them to generate tax revenues to pay for national defense, public infrastructure, law enforcement, and social programs. However, they should not sacrifice their people to ridiculously totalitarian laws in order to do so. They should also not try to protect or help individual corporations at the expense of all corporations and the people, which sadly is what is happening too often now.
I don't see why Open Source / Free Software apps still couldn't happen on the iPhone. For one thing, I would assume that actual development of the programs occurs on a Mac or PC, then get's cross-compiled for the iPhone. So, you can just setup your normal website/sourceforge, cvs/subversion, mailing lists, etc that you would normally use to manage the project, and people can download the source and do development on their computer. As for testing the app on your iPhone, the apps are required to be signed with a key, but I don't necessarily see any reason an open source project couldn't get a key from Apple, sign their builds (even developer builds), which would then allow any developer to download that build and test it.
So, what, exactly, is the problem again?
nothingbettertodo
You're absolutely correct - with *so many* things that are clearly more important for the government to be doing, I can't possibly see how the government can elevate intellectual property enforcement to the highest priority. But, they probably will. The government, is, essentially, a business. The highest priority for any business is to protect their revenue streams. I think people in the government think this way: protecting copyright/patent holders' revenue streams will in turn protect business-, capital gains-, and personal income tax revenue streams, so enforcement will pay for itself, and maybe pay for other programs and services. That might be giving them too much credit, though, as it's quite possible they are just trying to keep the people who pay for their campaigns, vacations, and private suites at stadiums, happy.
If history has taught us anything, though, it's that this made-up legal power of copyright is, actually, very difficult and expensive to enforce. I doubt it can even be made break-even in the long term.
The truth is, the best tool copyright holders have for generating revenue is the goodwill of their patrons. Some people will always rip you off if they can. Some other people have a high personal moral sense, and will always try to compensate artists, programmers, etc for their work. An example of this is the artist who performs in the park, or on the sidewalk, with a hat or something on the ground that people toss change or money into; some people will listen to the music (or watch, if it's a visual performing artist) and enjoy it, but still not pitch any money in, other people will put some money in because they enjoyed it and realize it's important to support the artist if you want to enable that artist to concentrate on their art, and not be force to spend significant amounts of time on other methods of generating income. Most people fall somewhere in the middle, where if they think you are trying to rip them off (e.g. charge way too much for your product), they will rip you off, but if you ask for a reasonable price, they will happily pay it.
I, personally, fall into the second camp - if I enjoy a song, game, movie, book, or whatever, I *want* to pay a *reasonable* amount of money to support that creative effort. I don't even mind that middle men like publishers, record labels, etc make some money, as long as they aren't ripping off the artists (which, unfortunately, is usually the case anyhow) - the middlemen, usually do, after all, add some value in terms of production, promotion, and distribution. If you ask too much money for the product, I will just not buy it, but also not steal it. I don't need your product after all. There's other music, games, movies, books that I can enjoy, and which I find I *can* do business with the copyright holders.
See, this is why I've almost completely given up MMO's. Game's aren't supposed to be realistic. Fundamentally, they're supposed to be fun. Some sense of connection to reality as we know it can certainly help a game out. I tried Eve for a little while. I gave it up pretty quick, because I saw what that games becomes pretty quick. . . a second job. I play games when I'm not working, because I don't want to work. If I wanted to work more, I'd make *real* money by working a *real* job. Eve (and most MMOs) seemed like a lot of grinding to get Isk to buy up skills and equipment so you can make more Isk so you can buy up skills and still better equipment, to. . .
Sure, those are worthwhile grinds *in real life*. I'd rather spend time grinding my "programming skill", "car repair skill", or grinding up my Checking Account, Savings Account, and IRA, than grinding up skills and accounts in games. But, I don't want to work all the time, which is why I play games. You know, things that aren't work.
Trees and weeds *grow themselves* if we simply don't destroy their habitat. I somehow doubt that a few small trees per household in pots on people decks, and small weed gardens are really going to offset the many thousands of Acres per day of wild spaces that are burned, bulldozed, and otherwise de-vegetaged. Sure, it might add up to a few hundred million additional trees, which sounds good, but I think in practice, everyone who *can* grow some trees and gardens (e.g. they have some land on which to grow plants) largely already does. Every house with land around it I've ever seen already has some landscaping. Even commercial and often times industrial property will have *some* plants on them.
The problem is, when humans occupy a space, it goes from hundreds of trees and thousands of smaller plant varieties (ok, I'm kind of making up numbers here, but the general gist of this is still true) packed into an acre, to a building, a drive way, sidewalks, some grass, maybe up to 10 trees, and a dozen or so shrubs.
Granted, we gotta live, and work, and go to school, and do commerce, *somewhere*, so it's a tough problem. The biggest problem, I think, is simply overpopulation of the planet. We're approaching 7 Billion people in the world, and that is really a spectacularly large number, especially since humans consume far more resources per-capita than most species (meaning we require a lot more land). 7 Billion ants, on the other hand are probably what you would find in a small rural town and outlying townships.
Population is a deliciously difficult problem to deal with because, as far as I can tell, people just won't voluntarily slow down reproduction, and non-voluntary population reduction measures, at least all that I've ever heard proposed, range from morally difficult, to downright evil.
Now I gotta go play the dern game again, lol. I can't honestly remember. I do seem to remember there was some definite choice, almost a suicide aspect, to his death. I'm still not sure Fountain couldn't have popped out of a vita-chamber; he rather seemed to want to live.
The thing I'm a bit puzzled about. . . if this system has data which is so important that the whole plant must be SHUT DOWN for two days if it fails, then why aren't there *at least* TWO of them (I'd say there's a good argument for 3 or 4, but. . .)? That way, you can take one out of the loop for updates, verify the update didn't hose your data, sync the data from the 'live' system, then put it online, take the other one offline, and complete the update on it.
If I were the power co owning this plant, I'd be ticked if the plant was dark for 2 days. With the price of energy these days, and the amount of energy a single Nuclear plant can generate, you're talking some real serious cash when the thing is down for 2 days. Especially if I have to look forward to the same thing happening again, potentially every time our systems need updating (not that it necessarily would happen every time, I would sure hope it wouldn't, but with only one system, every update is a potential for the whole plant to go down for some period of time).
. . . start creating some competition. I know, I know, it's definitely an uphill battle trying to gain traction against incumbent monopolies/duopolies who would love to protect the status quo, but, the best way to ensure network neutrality is to start an ISP, then you can guarantee network neutrality. Also, the best way to make sure there is sufficient bandwidth, again, is to start your own ISP (granted, anywhere you have to peer to other networks is a place for the other networks to hose you, but, hopefully, if you have enough peers, you can route around the damage, and then take whatever steps necessary against the network that is screwing you up (e.g. lawsuit, if you have a Service Level Agreement with them which they are not abiding by).
I'd love to see a new startup in the Fiber-to-the-home business, to give Verizon & ATT some competition.
I thought about this more and, sci-fi has a long history of bringing back 'dead' antagonists. There's no reason why the Bioshock writer's couldn't potentially bring up some cliche, cheezy thing like Tony Fountain had a clone of himself that was activated after you defeated him, or Ryan might have had a trick like that up his sleeve. I mean, we *are* talking about a game centered around genetic engineering sci fi, which already stretches the theoretical potential of genetic engineering from the plausible to the extremely improbable.
Heck, maybe Ryan and Tony just popped out of the nearest Vita-Chamber when you defeated them (I mean, if you could be revived by the Vita-Chambers, why not the villain?). That would be the simplest explanation for the devs to use.
Actually, one thing that occurs to me would be an awesome gameplay twist in one of the sequels is if you, in order to achieve the mission objectives, have to, somewhere near the end of the game, shutdown all the Vita Chambers (thus forcing the player into a sequence somewhere, where defeat isn't an option - not too long of a sequence, mind you, or that could get very very frustrating, but still could be an interesting story/gameplay interaction).
IIRC (it's been like six months since I played it), the first game didn't end with the destruction of the city, leaving open the possibility for someone to come in and assume power. Maybe the german scientist lady, or someone else. I thought the ending rather didn't tie up a lot of loose ends. Also, just because it shows the player character growing old, doesn't mean there aren't further adventures in the character's life between when you leave rapture the first time, and when you grow old.
Sure, you can do that to. But, I'm just saying, I don't understand why a recorded phone call, if necessary, isn't used more often. They could have you state something like:
I hereby declare under penalty of perjury that my name is John A Smith, and I am the parent or legal guardian of Robert B Smith. Today's Date is June, 06, 2008, and I hereby authorize Mercy Medical Center of of Cincinnati, Ohio to provide medical treatment to Robert Smith.
Simple, to the point, and as long as the the phone call/recording isn't horrible, a Jury could reasonably match your voice to the recording. The only potential problem is if someone else calls in, pretending to be you. I suppose that might be the problem with this particular option - reasonably verifying the voice on the other end of the phone is actually the person they claim to be.
I'm thinking at 36 Watt, the monitor is probably the largest consumer of power these days? Any idea how efficient LCD's have gotten?
I wasn't really mixing up the two. In fact, somehow I hadn't noticed the DEC Multia before. I was thinking of the Netwinder, but just misremembered the name. I remember going to a Linux conference somewhere, and seeing the Netwinder's being demod. Part of me lusted after it, because it was so small and power efficient. But, ultimately, I remember looking at the price and thinking to myself I could get a pretty decent PC with significantly better specs than the netwinder (in terms of graphics, RAM, HDD) for about the same price.
I was hoping that the things would find a market, and eventually get to a more competitive price point (I also figured if the company was successful at all, that in a couple years' time there'd be better units [reasoning that in 2-3 years time, there'd likely be upgrades to the StongARM cpu, or maybe they'd just switch to some other power-efficient, cool CPU, plus they'd get more ram, maybe better integrated graphics, and larger hard drives), at about the same price or possibly slightly cheaper, that would be a more compelling value to me).
Well, anyhow, I suspect that this Eee PC from Asus will do better (Asus is an established company that, I think, can put the necessary funding into marketing, production [to drive the per-unit costs down to a compelling point], and keeping with it long enough for the product to start to succeed.
They were cool looking little boxes. I might have to buy me one someday soon (before you can't find em anymore). I think I remember they were bought up by Corel at some point? Did Corel do anything with the Netwinder? As far as I can tell, Corel is one of those companies where good products go to die.
I dunno, how about they RECORD THE PHONE CALL wherein you are heard giving consent to perform the operation. Yes, that could potentially still be abused, but it's a lot harder to find someone whose voice is similar, than to forge or copy a signature.
Ok, I don't remember for sure if I have the name right, but I remember, back about 1998 or 2000, there was a company showcasing these tiny, power efficient PC's which had a form-factor somewhat similar to that Eee mini-PC in the linked image from the article. I think they used an ARM, or maybe it was Alpha, RISC processor, and came with some Linux distro.
I think the main downfall of that endeavor was that 1) the computers weren't Intel compatible, or Mac compatible, so you had to use Linux or BSD on them (and would have needed an Intel emulator on top of that to run any binaries compiled for Intel), I think, in order to keep them small and relatively cheap (they were still, I think, like 600 bucks, so kind of expensive, considering you could get generic PC's for about 400) and 3) the company that produced them was too small and simply lacked the funding necessary to survive in any case.
Still, I've always thought tiny-form factor PCs were nifty. If you could get one that was powerful enough, with decent enough video, you could use them as the basis for your own set-top boxes, routers, and things like that, or even just a small, low-power, inconspicuous server.
Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily think that something like JavaScript, where the DOM can be manipulated dynamically to create more dynamic webpages, is necessarily a bad thing, or Ajax where data can be sent to the browser to render into the DOM. There could, potentially, be the chance for there to be some kind of buffer overflow in the browser that attackers could exploit - but that is potentially even a problem with straight html + images. I just have to trust the browser developer to do a decent job of coding securely, and to fix found exploits quickly. I'm pretty confident with Mozilla's ability to do that, as well as Apple (Safari), Opera, Konq, etc. Even to some extent Microsoft.
My problem is this concept of putting full-fledged programming languages with full access to the
I don't mind something like Flash or SilverLight if it only lets developers draw stuff on screen, receive mouse/keyboard events, and play sounds, but I don't like the idea of stuff I load from the Internet having access to system calls. That's just scary.
I confess I don't know a lot about Ruby on Rails, but I've looked into it once or twice. I thought Rails was a Server-Side technology for creating dynamic websites? I thought SilverLight is a Flash-clone, for implementing client side interfaces and rich media playback? Is Microsoft talking about a SilverLight-based user-interface which connects to a Rails backend running on the server? Or actually Rails running in the browser? What benefits would Rails in the browser bring you?
Also, slightly off-topic, but is anyone else concerned about the security implications of pushing more and more languages/capabilities/functionality into the web browser, which can be controlled by scripts/code loaded from remote, un-trusted, servers? Why can't a web browser just be a web browser?
The thing is, the Havok free license requires you to distribute your whole software package as binary only. That's incredibly un-friendly to Open Source. Sure, there could potentially be an open source license which doesn't require shared libraries you link to be open source as well (actually, in reading the GPL, I think you could make the case that you could even distribute your software under the GPL if it links to proprietary libraries, because in as much as those libraries are not really part of your program, they wouldn't have to be covered by the GPL), but even if you used such a license for your software, you STILL couldn't link your software with Havok, because the Havok license *requires* you to NOT distribute source code to people. The Havok license is FAR, FAR more restrictive and obnoxious than the GPL ever was or will be.
I don't know that the GPL expressely forbids linking to non-GPL libraries. However, there is definitely a license conflict between Havok and the GPL. . .
From the Havok license:
"i. publicly demonstrate, and publicly distribute a Havok-enabled non-commercial end-user compiled, binary executable software application or game for the Windows PC Platform, in which the Software is compiled and distributed within the software application or game in an integral, non-separable way, for no direct or indirect commercial value;". Notice, particularly, "compiled, binary executable. .
From the GPL v3 (GPL v2 is basically identical in this regard): See section 6 (not copied here because it's fairly long). In a nutshell, if you distribute binary/object code of the GPL'ed work, you MUST offer recipients access to the source code. So, if you honor the terms of the Havok license, you violate the GPL, or vice-versa.
Also from the GPL v3: See section 5, wherein the user is given permission to modify the work and distribute copies, but those copies MUST be licensed with the GPL (and so the user gets permission to modify the work). Access to the source code, and the right to modify it, means that end users could seperate Havok from the GPL'ed software. So, again, you would have to either violate the Havok license (by providing users access to the source and the right to modify it), or violate the GPL.
There's absolutely no way you can simultaneously abide by the terms of both the Havok license and the GPL.
I honestly think the gaming industry really needs to consider pricing, as well, as an incentive to get people to buy instead of copy (particularly in parts of the world with low per-capita incomes, like most of Asia). There's what, about 3 Billion people in Asia? (I think I remember seeing statistics that there about 1B in China, 1B in India/Pakistan, and about 1B in all the rest of Asia). The thing is, there's a lot of people in Asia, but a lot of them don't make very much money. (Granted, a lot of them probably don't even have computers or know how to use them, but I would bet that out of that 3 Billion, you would probably have close to 1/2 Billion computer users; and, the number must be going up all the time). Maybe, though, you could get them to pay $3 for a game?
Doesn't sound like much, but if your game has enough appeal, and you get, say 30 million people to buy a copy of your game, that's almost 100 million dollars. I don't really know if you could get people to even give you $3 bucks, but I figure you'll have an easier time with that, than with $60. Also, if you are willing to only see $2-3 of revenue per copy, you might be able to experiment with other revenue models, like advertising supported games where the user doesn't pay for the game.
I think that you summed it up pretty well, there. I was reading the articles, and over and over again, these companies got, maybe 200 Million in funding and IPO cash, then tried to build a billion-dollar infrastructure and offices in 10 cities in 1 or 2 years. Then, shock! they ran out of money before they finished building. It reminds me of the first few times I tried to play SimCity, and went bust because I tried to grow too fast, without developing enough revenue base in the city. At some point you have to figure out that, with this amount of money, I can afford to spend this amount of it on growth, then need to save the rest of it to cover costs until I can achieve profitability. Be profitable for a couple years, which proves the business model has a fighting chance to succeed, then go back to investors for a much larger amount of money to resume growing.
"The interface is pretty much designed around a controller, and not a keyboard and mouse."
Which is why I was extremely surprised to discover that on Windows/Mac/Linux, *gamepads are not supported* (I found this out by searching on the games support forum, but I don't have the link handy now). I've got a very functional Logitech USB gamepad, which I would *love* to use with Rainslick. Oh well. I'm cutting them some slack because they created a game which does run substantially the same on all 3 of the most popular PC OS'es, and I suspect that gamepad detection and event notification might not be easy to do cross-platform? (Not sure on that though, seems like cross-platform game engines/libraries/sdks would have this functionality available to the developers.)
Still, overall, it's a pretty decent game. Unfortunately, this game suffers from a problem that most games seem to have - demos that are very unimpressive. You don't get to anything good, really, until after the demo is over. Which means that people considering buying the game, who check out the demo, may very well be put off from buying it, very understandably.
Game developers/publishers need to think about creating demos that really "Wow" people right from the very first minute, and give people very interesting gameplay, even early in the game. Rainslick is sort RPG-like in it's system, where your characters gain levels, and new abilities. The problem is, RPG-like games typically don't demo very well, because at low levels, your character basically has no interesting abilities or attack chains, and at low levels, encounters are typically very boring with both the character and enemies being weak, slow, and utlimately, not very challenging (or in some games, overly-challenging because of the low level). The other issue is that, just frankly, the first area of the game (which is all you can access in the demo), is pretty boring (I mean, come on, it's a suburb; even if a suburb is stomped on by a giant robot, it's still boring), and you don't get much story or amusing dialog or characters during that first area.
The dialog and story do get a bit better, but my experience has been that the real draw of this game is a lot of the encounters with NPCs - the dialog and stories of the individual encounters, is much better than the over-arching story (at least, what I've seen of it so far; I haven't finished the game yet).