POKEMON! Come on, why didn't anyone remember this? Its recent and successful and all (tho that doesn't mean its good, the ending is just horrid)...
For those who don't know or are misinformed, Pokemon started as a gameboy game. A roleplaying game with a very unique playing style that was not made for children. Then they made a cartoon from it and after that the hellstorm of Pokestuff began. Lots of people think the childrens cartoon begat the gameboy game, but no, it was a non-childrens game which begat a childrens cartoon. Sort of like Ghostbusters going from a good adult movie (sex, living nightmares, etc, I think that qualifies as an adult movie) to a childish cartoon...
Hehe, isn't it fun to try to have ideals in this day and age when people vie ideals as stupid and impractical? I give the Linux community 2 years before they try to get the government to try to force people to port their products to Linux.
Look at anti-smoking people. What they should have done is simply not eat in any place that allows smoking, etc and tell the management why they're not eating there. Let them exercise some power. Instead, what do they do? They can't do without their precious steak for a few years to get the establishment to change its policies, instead they bitch to the government to make it law.
Watch for it, I guarantee within 2 years the 8 or 9 people who use Linux and are gamers and would actually *PURCHASE* the game and not pirate it in the name of Open Source (if there are that many) will be trying to force companies to port software for them.
Surely you didn't just suggest that Diablo is a roguelike game?
Now I'm not one of the freaky puritans that will cut my penis off if someone mentions that roguelikes might work with graphics or even in a 3D environment, but roguelikes gotta have certain things to be qualified as roguelikes.
At least 5 races and 5 classes producing 25 combinations. This is a BARE minimum, most roguelikes have over 25 races and over 25 classes alone. Diablo fails with its 3 wussy classes.
Randomly generated dungeons. Diablo has these.
The random number generator controls the game to an unprecedented degree (unprecedented in other genres I mean) determining what you find, what you run into, etc. Diablo fails. Unless I'm wrong here, you can't run into Diablo 8 levels out of depth.
Thousands of items. Diablo fails.
Thousands of weapons. Diablo fails.
Thousands of armor pieces. Diablo fails.
Extremely complex keyboard control. Diablo fails. Turn-based. Diablo fails. Single player only. Diablo fails. (Until there is a multiplayer turn-based roguelike, there are no multiplayer roguelikes. You go to realtime and you may not call your game roguelike.)
Etc, etc. Diablo simply is not immersive enough to be called a roguelike. When you play a roguelike you can feel the definition in your bones, that's why its so hard to define. yeah for the first hour or so all you do is die and die and die and forget what keys do what, but after a couple hours you're playing the keybaord like a master pianist at his grand piano, formulating strategies, etc.
Until i can be playing Diablo, get into a corner facing a Drolem and a Lesser Titan, and walk around my bedroom trying to think of what I've got on me that could possibly save me (teleport? What if I land in something worse? Heal staff? What if I fail? Recall? What if I don't get recalled in time?), Diablo is not a roguelike.
Esperandi If Diablo is a roguelike because it has random dungeons then Quake 3 is an RPG because it has player stats (health and armor).
Hehe, well, I've got original signatures of the entire Intellivision game design team on my "Intellivision Lives!" CD... they didn't offer an autographed version but I emailed them before they released the thing and begged em so they signed it before they mailed mine out;)
In their FAQ (which apparently no one has been able to find;) it says they expect to release it within the first half of 2000. But, something has got me excited. First, this release of the Collectors Edition thing. What you say makes sense. Did you go to Blizzards page? Did you read the news item about the collectors edition? Okay, did you read the news item right underneath it? It read "*LAST* screenshot of the week".. emphasis mine.
Note #1, go to Walmart and get your Sims, I did this past weekend, haven't done much else since;)
Note #2, Blizzards FAQ says it'll try to get it out by the first half of 2000, which would put it right around June, whatever place gave him that estimate prolly just guessed based on that...
Esperandi I'm sorry Johnny, Santa didn't bring you a new game because it didn't meet Blizzard's rigorous standards... please quit crying.
Well, the announced release date originally was Xmas 99. Blizzard is always a minimum of 6 months late because they refuce to hire me as a project manager. So that means it'll prolly be out around June-July 00... The FAQ on their site seems quite pissed off (read: guilty) about people asking and says they'll try for first half of 2000, but they won't let it leave the office until it meets their rigorous standards.
People say they'd rather wait for a game and not have to get patches than get a slightly buggy version and have to download patches... I feel exactly opposite, but I understand the companies stance. Say they release Diablo 2 right now and in a week realize that theres a sword you can buy for 3 gold that kills most anything in one swipe. Players are buying it up by the bagful, but the patch obliterates the sword and refunds everyone the 3 gold. People are gonna hate that...
Esperandi The community around a game is far more important than the game itself. Designing your game so that a community will form around it is the dumbest thing you can do. Think about it.
Diablo did well because it had a mere sprinkling of roguelike flavor. The roguelike genre (Rogue, Nethack, Angband, etc) is completely ignored by big game companies even though they are by far the most addictive and interesting games in existence (Personally I've been playing for over 10 years, never beat one, and I'm still not bored). They made it replayable like a roguelike with the randomly generated dungeons. For people who liked the game, they could keep starting over and it'd never get old. If they had added even more roguelike features (extremely complex keyboard interface that feels like playing a piano and is just as natural once you play for a couple hours, thousands of creatures, thousands of items, hundreds of spells, etc) the game would still be selling off the shelves.
Now, Diablo 2 isn't going to be adding any more roguelike flavor to it, sadly. They've still got the randomly generated dungeon but its nowhere near as expansive as a real roguelike...
Esperandi Drop by rec.games.roguelike.angband or rec.games.roguelike.development and worship the random number generator with us.
I realize that the majority of people interested in this issue are rampant, unashamed music thieves who use scenarios like I'm about to propose to protect their ability to steal, but I assure you it is genuine.
When I buy a CD I instantly transfer it to my hard drive and MP3 it. I never listen to the audio CD ever. I've got several dozen CDs I've never heard from the plastic. So would this be legal, the CD considered to be the backup or something like that? I also copy the MP3s to a Rio and listen to it on the road which has been deemed legal, so I'm not really seeing where the line begins and end about music transference...
The way you phrase your reply makes it sound liek you still don't even understand the most basic tenets of data compression. The idea is that if you have a body of data that holds, say, 16 separate bit-pair combinations, and they are repeated over and over, you only need 5 bits in the compressed file to represent the 16 which are produced for output. The idea of increasing the repetition in some reliable way was just an idea I had a few days ago, I'm not a charlatan or an imbecile, I've simply never read (and I've read a lot about data compression) anything that even thought about artificially creating repetition. In a simple run-length algorithm this could work. Just keep track of the position where you replaced a bit, and instead of having (9)(B)(1)(Y)(9)(B) you'd have (19)(B)(10)Y, there, compression. 6 bytes down to 4. That's just a general idea and not the idea I had at all (mine involved bitwise operations on a couple of bytes, producing 3 bytes from which the original 2 could be reconstructed, and I think the 3 produced would have more repetition in a large random set than the 2 originals alone, I might be completely wrong about that though).
You seem to believe that data compression in itself is impossible... a great new algorithm could definitely be on the horizon. Not a takeoff on the Huffman algorithm like most lossless ones are or anything, but a completely new way of doing it, maybe someday someone will make a breakthrough with fractal compression (its in use now but it's not too fantastic and its usually used in lossy compression like RealVideo) or something along those lines, it's all a matter of being able to find patterns in the data and reference those patterns instead of repoducing them.
There are limits, and no compressor can be universal (in terms that it can't have universal results on radically differing file contents). However, your assumptions about a 4-bit file only representing 16 possibilities is quite wrong. The worlds most limited but most efficient compressor is the one that takes a 1 bit file and repoduces one entire file from it if its a 0 or a 1, the whole files are just stored in the program and the program checks for a 1 or a 0.
I think the next big breakthrough will be a compressor that can take a file with not much repetition of data (therefore hard to compress using current algorithms) and create a file with much more repetition in it (and perhaps larger) and then compress that down.
Hehe, I'm sitting here laughing my ass off imagining someone playing Othello and wondering why Go is known as the most complicated game in the history of mankind...
It is the fault of consumers and consumers alone if they are too wimpy to make hard choices in life to stand up for their principles. If my electric bill goes up to $800/mo I will live in the dark. I will not complain and whine and ask the government to use its guns to protect me. If I find out that the people I always buy my computer products from is a rascist company - I will not buy from them any more. Even if that means paying more, getting worse service,, etc, etc. I weigh those choices and I make them. And I live by them. I live my life.
As for your retort about the stream that doesn't go into anyone elses property, you were the one who proposed it! I had already told you that if it affected anyone else a lawsuit would ensue. Were you simply re-asking the question? The answer is still the same. And a river delta would probably have the most powerful representative group of owners around.. people using it as a sea route, fisherman, tourism boards, hotels on the oceanfront, etc, etc. The company that polluted that would probably go out of business after they got smacked with that lawsuit.
First, kudos in mentioning Rand, a lot of people misunderstand her work and a lot of slashdotters loathe her.
Approaching this issue from the viewpoint of an Objectivist is an interesting task because it involves a lot of thought, quite unlike the knee-jerk reaction of most people in this day and age that they want it free and they feel entitled to it. Objectivists know that they are entitled only to what they earn. So what to do, eliminate MP3s, Streambox, and DeCSS completely? We have to take into account as you did that someone originally created the work. Those people most definitely deserve just compensation. In the MP3 case, MP3ing your CDs and listening to them on your PC or on a portable device most definitely should be completely legal. Trading or sharing those MP3s most assuredly should not be. Plus, the people who are doing the sharing are the ones who are committing a crime and should be punished. Streambox. Not too difficult. The Fair Use clause is quite nice and they should most definitely be allowed to continue their product, it simply allows time-shifting, enhances the viewing experience, etc. Redistributing these downloaded files is alaughable idea. Would you rather send a 50MB video to a friend or refer them to a central server where they can get it for free and legally? I'm sure both sides would prefer the latter.
Now, DeCSS. The information gathered and its use to create a DVD player should not be made illegal. Then it comes to the nasty part, the source. Technically speaking, no source is secret, decompilers are a thing of common sense, anyone with a little knowledge of executables and computer architecture can write a simple one. Since the source code would be released, we would see a proliferation of DVD-copying programs based upon it. I believe THOSE authors should be arrested, fined, and jailed, but not the original authors. Their release of the source code was not a criminal action.
Esperandi Open Source is not antithetical to capitalism at all if you understand it. It is also not antithetical to Objectivism, the philosophy of reason and selfishness. There are a lot of Marxist followers of Open Source, but hey, Marxists wrote books, that didn't make books antithetical to capitalism or Objectivism. Explaining the whole concepts behind it is long-winded and this is too long anyways. Just keep in mind that improvement in your software helps you as an author, a perfectly acceptable selfish motivation.
"It is creating new, special rights for corporations at the expense of consumers' rights of fair use. "
No, it explicitly and in black and white does NOT do this. It very very specifically says that the DMCA must never be interpreted in such a way that it infringes on fair use. (This is why Streambox will win their court case) You ask whether copying an MP3 to your hard drive is different from making a tape of it. Its not, making the taoe is illegal too, always has been. Fair Use does not cover whole songs, they cover up to 45 seconds of the song. A radio station can play 44 seconds and pay nothing, if they play 45+, they must pay royalties. That really has nothing to do with the DMCA because it does not involve circumventing a copyright protection mechanism (read the bill, they define the mechanism and it has to be something substantial)
The DMCA goes to great length to preserve Fair Use and to not harm people who are using copyright circumvention to exercise their right to Fair Use. People just need to understand that Fair Use is not a license to steal the work of a thousand people because they're too cheap to go buy a CD. I make MP3s of my CDs and the CD never gets opened again. I do not distribute the MP3s, I listen to them on my RIO. I am doing nothing illegal in this scenario. The second I go on the net to download an MP3 or give my MP3s to someone else, then I'm breaking the law.
Esperandi If Streambox loses their case, *THEN* is the time to be scared.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I'd say get a federal judge to suspend the law and take it to the Supreme Court. It only took a couple weeks to get it to the Supreme Court with the CDA (longer to actually get it HEARD of course, but it was suspended until it could be heard) and the Supreme Court seems to have a few good heads on their shoulders voting 9-0.
BTW, Streambox has released a new beta of StreamboxVCR, the product under injunction... they got a deal and removed all capability to download RealMedia content using the PNM and RTSP protocols. The thing is, if they modify StreamboxVCR to honor the "copyright switch" that RealNetworks puts in, they'd be allowed to include that (though that would mean it couldn't download 99% of the content on the net). The catch? RealNetworks isn't giving Streambox the info it needs about the copyright switch to incorporate it (surpise surprise, it would make RealPlayerPlus completely useless). I wouldn't worry about Streambox even though it is one of my favorite products of all time, they'll most likely win their case arguing Fair Use and using the case againt Sony when VCRs were created.
According to the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act of 1996, no service provider can be held responsible for what people do on their service. The only people who could possibly get busted under the DMCA would be the people using Napster. Even then, is Napster breaking any copyright protection methods? No. There is no security built into audio CDs and there is no security built into MP3s. If Napster stripped information from the audio industries "secure" format, then maybe it'd be relevant. Even then, the issue of the colleges is irrelevant. They cannot be held responsible for what their student do. If the students are using the schools server space to serve them, the school STILL can't be busted.
But I'm certain they got a couple letters from the RIAA telling them they COULD be implicated under the DMCA. They can't. So much for bastions of knowledge.
Esperandi Since the last time I posted facts like this someone lost his cookies because I didn't include a link and was too stupid to look it up himself and ended up convincing moderators that I was just lying, heres a damn link: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/hr2265.html
That's the fulltext of the No Electronic Theft Act. If you've never read it, you might want to.
The official Slashdot policy is to reject thousands of submissions of a story and only post it once it is has been good and scooped by other news organizations. Frequently they are a couple days or so behind on the news even though people have submitted the stories right after they broke...
Maybe they just wait to see if they get a ton of submissions so they don't have to worry about picking the good stories, they just go with the growd (they'd call it "doing the best for the community")
Esperandi Yeah, I'm pissed off today, leave me alone. My Sim burned alive because the moron couldn't cook.
If that stream doesn't flow across anyone elses land, into another body of water, etc, why shuld I do anything? It is hurting me and only me.
As for the companies banding together and buying most of the Mississippi system, if the consumers are happy with how that affects the world, let them. If they're not hurting anyone in the immediate time and neither the corporations nor the consumers (who are the only thing keeping them alive - no business in the world can survive for long with 0 customers) care what happens down the line in the future - they deserve to be screwed in 10 years when they get cancer, etc. Hey, you make bad decisions, you have bad things happen to you. It's reality.
And contrary to popular belief, humans are animals. Everything we do it part of nature. Every bit of sludge we spill, every species that we extinct is just as natural as a lion hunting down an antelope in the serenghetti.
Sigh, someone always brigns this up and they make themselves look like a complete tool. The Pentium 166 ran about $2000 in quantities off 1000.... the week after it was released. The week after a processor is released, it is SKY HIGH in price - it halves in 2 months. It happens this way with each and every single chip. The Athlon 500 I've got opened up at around $900, it plummeted in price right afterwards.
The bottom line is do not trust price estimates unless you're an OEM who *MUST* have the fastest thing the split second it is released. Otherwise, just wait until the thing is not only shipped but in the hands of retail vendors, then hop on pricewatch.com every day forr a week and watch the prices fall through the floor.
Computers are getting cheaper and cheaper in every aspect, only people who don't realize this just aren't experienced with watching processor prices...
Esperandi (BTW, a P3 500 Xeon with 2MB of L2 cache costs $1900 *RIGHT*NOW* after its been out for ages, if you want expensive, there's the "other guy" to look at;)
750 doesn't support PC100 memory? Doesn't support Super Bypass? Huh? It supports both. It didn't support super bypass when it first came out, but they do now.
Somethnig else to consider: 1.25x800 = 1GHz 1x1GHz = 1GHz
Lower multiplier to overclock. The multiplier on the processor is also probably different.
People seem to forget that a benchmarked chip is almost always slower. A chip running 100MHz x 4 = 400MHz is slower than a 200MHz x 2.
Yeah, and no one cared about when the Athlon hit 600 before Intel. Remember, that's why Andy Grove put his engineers under the whip and produced a nice little processor that promptly overheated and melted in the socket. Sure, they fixed it with a patch later (and reduced its performance significantly), but I think this is a good sign that AMD should try to fluster Intel all the time.
When you sit back for years being the biggest kid on the block used to releasing processors at your leizure and leading the speed race by a mile, you get fat. And a little later on down the road, you get your ass trampled by the little skinny kid who has been running his ass off and before you know it you're sitting there with an 800MHz chip which runs slower than the kids 750 which doesn't even really matter anyways because he just released a 900, a 950, and a 1GHz.
Everyone is railing about the cache. It's still going to be faster than the slowpoke P3.
And all you anti-corporation nazis take note - this is how monopolies are tumbled!
Well, considering what Intel has been doing since AMD beat them in the clock-speed race and every benchmark race there is, I'd say that Intel is definitely just shooting for the MHz and not even caring about whateher the chips melt in their sockets (the 600s) or even boot!(the 800s)
But, don't get all worried about the 1/3cache like everyone else is, just overclock it to half and it'll beat anything Intel throws on the market for 3 months.
The county that the river runs through owns that section of the river. If theres a spill like you hypothesize happens, the county it starts in brings action against the offender for negligence with all of the other counties/private land owners/businesspeople (fisherman would obviously be affected) and they have a big old class action lawsuit, or they pursue it individually if they wish. If it flows into another country, that's irrelevant. We can't tell that country to eliminate their version of the EPA and go to an ownership and responsibility system. Unless it was a TREMENDOUS spill and it was very close to the border, chances are that their EPA would have to ingore the spill because paying it any attention would detract from their bigger problems. For instance, if someone pours a couple of buckets of paint or oil or something else hazardous into a small creek on my property, the EPA won't be willing to do anything about it. If the county or city owned it and I complained, they more likely would be willing to act on it. When it flows into another owners property, liability increases.
The point here is to make polluting as unattractive as possible, remember. Right now the game is to pollute but stay small enough so the squakier wheels are getting the grease, in this system it would be more like if you pollute, you get nailed. Local places can set much stricter pollution standards if they vote to do so. But, what if a city at the mouth of, say, the delta of the Mississippi sets their pollution regs very tight while people north of them have them much more lax? Well, if you're a company planning on polluting, you're going to have to consider that down the road...
Esperandi Under this system it would also be possible to simply not allow the incoming probable polluters to even setup shop as well.
We're just as free as you, we just have more anal retentive people;) If there were organized boycotts of advertisers and junk like that in Canada, I'm sure you'd see more black bars and hear more bleeps...
Esperandi BTW, what kind of regulation is there of Canadian TV on the "obscenity" front? I know they're much more liberal than the U.S. but I don't think they're quite as liberal as, say Brazil, are they? (in Brazil you could make a Coke commercial of a woman masturbating with the bottle and they wouldn't give a hoot, nudity is used in commercials all the time)
Slashdot Mirror
POKEMON! Come on, why didn't anyone remember this? Its recent and successful and all (tho that doesn't mean its good, the ending is just horrid)...
For those who don't know or are misinformed, Pokemon started as a gameboy game. A roleplaying game with a very unique playing style that was not made for children. Then they made a cartoon from it and after that the hellstorm of Pokestuff began. Lots of people think the childrens cartoon begat the gameboy game, but no, it was a non-childrens game which begat a childrens cartoon. Sort of like Ghostbusters going from a good adult movie (sex, living nightmares, etc, I think that qualifies as an adult movie) to a childish cartoon...
Esperandi
Hehe, isn't it fun to try to have ideals in this day and age when people vie ideals as stupid and impractical? I give the Linux community 2 years before they try to get the government to try to force people to port their products to Linux.
Look at anti-smoking people. What they should have done is simply not eat in any place that allows smoking, etc and tell the management why they're not eating there. Let them exercise some power. Instead, what do they do? They can't do without their precious steak for a few years to get the establishment to change its policies, instead they bitch to the government to make it law.
Watch for it, I guarantee within 2 years the 8 or 9 people who use Linux and are gamers and would actually *PURCHASE* the game and not pirate it in the name of Open Source (if there are that many) will be trying to force companies to port software for them.
Esperandi
Surely you didn't just suggest that Diablo is a roguelike game?
Now I'm not one of the freaky puritans that will cut my penis off if someone mentions that roguelikes might work with graphics or even in a 3D environment, but roguelikes gotta have certain things to be qualified as roguelikes.
At least 5 races and 5 classes producing 25 combinations. This is a BARE minimum, most roguelikes have over 25 races and over 25 classes alone. Diablo fails with its 3 wussy classes.
Randomly generated dungeons. Diablo has these.
The random number generator controls the game to an unprecedented degree (unprecedented in other genres I mean) determining what you find, what you run into, etc. Diablo fails. Unless I'm wrong here, you can't run into Diablo 8 levels out of depth.
Thousands of items. Diablo fails.
Thousands of weapons. Diablo fails.
Thousands of armor pieces. Diablo fails.
Extremely complex keyboard control. Diablo fails. Turn-based. Diablo fails. Single player only. Diablo fails. (Until there is a multiplayer turn-based roguelike, there are no multiplayer roguelikes. You go to realtime and you may not call your game roguelike.)
Etc, etc. Diablo simply is not immersive enough to be called a roguelike. When you play a roguelike you can feel the definition in your bones, that's why its so hard to define. yeah for the first hour or so all you do is die and die and die and forget what keys do what, but after a couple hours you're playing the keybaord like a master pianist at his grand piano, formulating strategies, etc.
Until i can be playing Diablo, get into a corner facing a Drolem and a Lesser Titan, and walk around my bedroom trying to think of what I've got on me that could possibly save me (teleport? What if I land in something worse? Heal staff? What if I fail? Recall? What if I don't get recalled in time?), Diablo is not a roguelike.
Esperandi
If Diablo is a roguelike because it has random dungeons then Quake 3 is an RPG because it has player stats (health and armor).
Hehe, well, I've got original signatures of the entire Intellivision game design team on my "Intellivision Lives!" CD... they didn't offer an autographed version but I emailed them before they released the thing and begged em so they signed it before they mailed mine out ;)
Esperandi
In their FAQ (which apparently no one has been able to find ;) it says they expect to release it within the first half of 2000. But, something has got me excited. First, this release of the Collectors Edition thing. What you say makes sense. Did you go to Blizzards page? Did you read the news item about the collectors edition? Okay, did you read the news item right underneath it? It read "*LAST* screenshot of the week".. emphasis mine.
Esperandi
Note #1, go to Walmart and get your Sims, I did this past weekend, haven't done much else since ;)
Note #2, Blizzards FAQ says it'll try to get it out by the first half of 2000, which would put it right around June, whatever place gave him that estimate prolly just guessed based on that...
Esperandi
I'm sorry Johnny, Santa didn't bring you a new game because it didn't meet Blizzard's rigorous standards... please quit crying.
Well, the announced release date originally was Xmas 99. Blizzard is always a minimum of 6 months late because they refuce to hire me as a project manager. So that means it'll prolly be out around June-July 00... The FAQ on their site seems quite pissed off (read: guilty) about people asking and says they'll try for first half of 2000, but they won't let it leave the office until it meets their rigorous standards.
People say they'd rather wait for a game and not have to get patches than get a slightly buggy version and have to download patches... I feel exactly opposite, but I understand the companies stance. Say they release Diablo 2 right now and in a week realize that theres a sword you can buy for 3 gold that kills most anything in one swipe. Players are buying it up by the bagful, but the patch obliterates the sword and refunds everyone the 3 gold. People are gonna hate that...
Esperandi
The community around a game is far more important than the game itself. Designing your game so that a community will form around it is the dumbest thing you can do. Think about it.
Diablo did well because it had a mere sprinkling of roguelike flavor. The roguelike genre (Rogue, Nethack, Angband, etc) is completely ignored by big game companies even though they are by far the most addictive and interesting games in existence (Personally I've been playing for over 10 years, never beat one, and I'm still not bored). They made it replayable like a roguelike with the randomly generated dungeons. For people who liked the game, they could keep starting over and it'd never get old. If they had added even more roguelike features (extremely complex keyboard interface that feels like playing a piano and is just as natural once you play for a couple hours, thousands of creatures, thousands of items, hundreds of spells, etc) the game would still be selling off the shelves.
Now, Diablo 2 isn't going to be adding any more roguelike flavor to it, sadly. They've still got the randomly generated dungeon but its nowhere near as expansive as a real roguelike...
Esperandi
Drop by rec.games.roguelike.angband or rec.games.roguelike.development and worship the random number generator with us.
I realize that the majority of people interested in this issue are rampant, unashamed music thieves who use scenarios like I'm about to propose to protect their ability to steal, but I assure you it is genuine.
When I buy a CD I instantly transfer it to my hard drive and MP3 it. I never listen to the audio CD ever. I've got several dozen CDs I've never heard from the plastic. So would this be legal, the CD considered to be the backup or something like that? I also copy the MP3s to a Rio and listen to it on the road which has been deemed legal, so I'm not really seeing where the line begins and end about music transference...
Esperandi
The way you phrase your reply makes it sound liek you still don't even understand the most basic tenets of data compression. The idea is that if you have a body of data that holds, say, 16 separate bit-pair combinations, and they are repeated over and over, you only need 5 bits in the compressed file to represent the 16 which are produced for output. The idea of increasing the repetition in some reliable way was just an idea I had a few days ago, I'm not a charlatan or an imbecile, I've simply never read (and I've read a lot about data compression) anything that even thought about artificially creating repetition. In a simple run-length algorithm this could work. Just keep track of the position where you replaced a bit, and instead of having
(9)(B)(1)(Y)(9)(B) you'd have (19)(B)(10)Y, there, compression. 6 bytes down to 4. That's just a general idea and not the idea I had at all (mine involved bitwise operations on a couple of bytes, producing 3 bytes from which the original 2 could be reconstructed, and I think the 3 produced would have more repetition in a large random set than the 2 originals alone, I might be completely wrong about that though).
Esperandi
You seem to believe that data compression in itself is impossible... a great new algorithm could definitely be on the horizon. Not a takeoff on the Huffman algorithm like most lossless ones are or anything, but a completely new way of doing it, maybe someday someone will make a breakthrough with fractal compression (its in use now but it's not too fantastic and its usually used in lossy compression like RealVideo) or something along those lines, it's all a matter of being able to find patterns in the data and reference those patterns instead of repoducing them.
There are limits, and no compressor can be universal (in terms that it can't have universal results on radically differing file contents). However, your assumptions about a 4-bit file only representing 16 possibilities is quite wrong. The worlds most limited but most efficient compressor is the one that takes a 1 bit file and repoduces one entire file from it if its a 0 or a 1, the whole files are just stored in the program and the program checks for a 1 or a 0.
I think the next big breakthrough will be a compressor that can take a file with not much repetition of data (therefore hard to compress using current algorithms) and create a file with much more repetition in it (and perhaps larger) and then compress that down.
Esperandi
Hehe, I'm sitting here laughing my ass off imagining someone playing Othello and wondering why Go is known as the most complicated game in the history of mankind...
Esperandi
It is the fault of consumers and consumers alone if they are too wimpy to make hard choices in life to stand up for their principles. If my electric bill goes up to $800/mo I will live in the dark. I will not complain and whine and ask the government to use its guns to protect me. If I find out that the people I always buy my computer products from is a rascist company - I will not buy from them any more. Even if that means paying more, getting worse service,, etc, etc. I weigh those choices and I make them. And I live by them. I live my life.
As for your retort about the stream that doesn't go into anyone elses property, you were the one who proposed it! I had already told you that if it affected anyone else a lawsuit would ensue. Were you simply re-asking the question? The answer is still the same. And a river delta would probably have the most powerful representative group of owners around.. people using it as a sea route, fisherman, tourism boards, hotels on the oceanfront, etc, etc. The company that polluted that would probably go out of business after they got smacked with that lawsuit.
Esperandi
First, kudos in mentioning Rand, a lot of people misunderstand her work and a lot of slashdotters loathe her.
Approaching this issue from the viewpoint of an Objectivist is an interesting task because it involves a lot of thought, quite unlike the knee-jerk reaction of most people in this day and age that they want it free and they feel entitled to it. Objectivists know that they are entitled only to what they earn. So what to do, eliminate MP3s, Streambox, and DeCSS completely? We have to take into account as you did that someone originally created the work. Those people most definitely deserve just compensation. In the MP3 case, MP3ing your CDs and listening to them on your PC or on a portable device most definitely should be completely legal. Trading or sharing those MP3s most assuredly should not be. Plus, the people who are doing the sharing are the ones who are committing a crime and should be punished. Streambox. Not too difficult. The Fair Use clause is quite nice and they should most definitely be allowed to continue their product, it simply allows time-shifting, enhances the viewing experience, etc. Redistributing these downloaded files is alaughable idea. Would you rather send a 50MB video to a friend or refer them to a central server where they can get it for free and legally? I'm sure both sides would prefer the latter.
Now, DeCSS. The information gathered and its use to create a DVD player should not be made illegal. Then it comes to the nasty part, the source. Technically speaking, no source is secret, decompilers are a thing of common sense, anyone with a little knowledge of executables and computer architecture can write a simple one. Since the source code would be released, we would see a proliferation of DVD-copying programs based upon it. I believe THOSE authors should be arrested, fined, and jailed, but not the original authors. Their release of the source code was not a criminal action.
Esperandi
Open Source is not antithetical to capitalism at all if you understand it. It is also not antithetical to Objectivism, the philosophy of reason and selfishness. There are a lot of Marxist followers of Open Source, but hey, Marxists wrote books, that didn't make books antithetical to capitalism or Objectivism. Explaining the whole concepts behind it is long-winded and this is too long anyways. Just keep in mind that improvement in your software helps you as an author, a perfectly acceptable selfish motivation.
"It is creating new, special rights for corporations at the expense of consumers' rights of fair use. "
No, it explicitly and in black and white does NOT do this. It very very specifically says that the DMCA must never be interpreted in such a way that it infringes on fair use. (This is why Streambox will win their court case) You ask whether copying an MP3 to your hard drive is different from making a tape of it. Its not, making the taoe is illegal too, always has been. Fair Use does not cover whole songs, they cover up to 45 seconds of the song. A radio station can play 44 seconds and pay nothing, if they play 45+, they must pay royalties. That really has nothing to do with the DMCA because it does not involve circumventing a copyright protection mechanism (read the bill, they define the mechanism and it has to be something substantial)
The DMCA goes to great length to preserve Fair Use and to not harm people who are using copyright circumvention to exercise their right to Fair Use. People just need to understand that Fair Use is not a license to steal the work of a thousand people because they're too cheap to go buy a CD. I make MP3s of my CDs and the CD never gets opened again. I do not distribute the MP3s, I listen to them on my RIO. I am doing nothing illegal in this scenario. The second I go on the net to download an MP3 or give my MP3s to someone else, then I'm breaking the law.
Esperandi
If Streambox loses their case, *THEN* is the time to be scared.
"IANAL so what the hell do we do now?"
I'm not a lawyer either, but I'd say get a federal judge to suspend the law and take it to the Supreme Court. It only took a couple weeks to get it to the Supreme Court with the CDA (longer to actually get it HEARD of course, but it was suspended until it could be heard) and the Supreme Court seems to have a few good heads on their shoulders voting 9-0.
BTW, Streambox has released a new beta of StreamboxVCR, the product under injunction... they got a deal and removed all capability to download RealMedia content using the PNM and RTSP protocols. The thing is, if they modify StreamboxVCR to honor the "copyright switch" that RealNetworks puts in, they'd be allowed to include that (though that would mean it couldn't download 99% of the content on the net). The catch? RealNetworks isn't giving Streambox the info it needs about the copyright switch to incorporate it (surpise surprise, it would make RealPlayerPlus completely useless). I wouldn't worry about Streambox even though it is one of my favorite products of all time, they'll most likely win their case arguing Fair Use and using the case againt Sony when VCRs were created.
Esperandi
According to the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act of 1996, no service provider can be held responsible for what people do on their service. The only people who could possibly get busted under the DMCA would be the people using Napster. Even then, is Napster breaking any copyright protection methods? No. There is no security built into audio CDs and there is no security built into MP3s. If Napster stripped information from the audio industries "secure" format, then maybe it'd be relevant. Even then, the issue of the colleges is irrelevant. They cannot be held responsible for what their student do. If the students are using the schools server space to serve them, the school STILL can't be busted.
But I'm certain they got a couple letters from the RIAA telling them they COULD be implicated under the DMCA. They can't. So much for bastions of knowledge.
Esperandi
Since the last time I posted facts like this someone lost his cookies because I didn't include a link and was too stupid to look it up himself and ended up convincing moderators that I was just lying, heres a damn link:
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/hr2265.html
That's the fulltext of the No Electronic Theft Act. If you've never read it, you might want to.
The official Slashdot policy is to reject thousands of submissions of a story and only post it once it is has been good and scooped by other news organizations. Frequently they are a couple days or so behind on the news even though people have submitted the stories right after they broke...
Maybe they just wait to see if they get a ton of submissions so they don't have to worry about picking the good stories, they just go with the growd (they'd call it "doing the best for the community")
Esperandi
Yeah, I'm pissed off today, leave me alone. My Sim burned alive because the moron couldn't cook.
If that stream doesn't flow across anyone elses land, into another body of water, etc, why shuld I do anything? It is hurting me and only me.
As for the companies banding together and buying most of the Mississippi system, if the consumers are happy with how that affects the world, let them. If they're not hurting anyone in the immediate time and neither the corporations nor the consumers (who are the only thing keeping them alive - no business in the world can survive for long with 0 customers) care what happens down the line in the future - they deserve to be screwed in 10 years when they get cancer, etc. Hey, you make bad decisions, you have bad things happen to you. It's reality.
And contrary to popular belief, humans are animals. Everything we do it part of nature. Every bit of sludge we spill, every species that we extinct is just as natural as a lion hunting down an antelope in the serenghetti.
Esperandi
Sigh, someone always brigns this up and they make themselves look like a complete tool. The Pentium 166 ran about $2000 in quantities off 1000.... the week after it was released. The week after a processor is released, it is SKY HIGH in price - it halves in 2 months. It happens this way with each and every single chip. The Athlon 500 I've got opened up at around $900, it plummeted in price right afterwards.
;)
The bottom line is do not trust price estimates unless you're an OEM who *MUST* have the fastest thing the split second it is released. Otherwise, just wait until the thing is not only shipped but in the hands of retail vendors, then hop on pricewatch.com every day forr a week and watch the prices fall through the floor.
Computers are getting cheaper and cheaper in every aspect, only people who don't realize this just aren't experienced with watching processor prices...
Esperandi
(BTW, a P3 500 Xeon with 2MB of L2 cache costs $1900 *RIGHT*NOW* after its been out for ages, if you want expensive, there's the "other guy" to look at
750 doesn't support PC100 memory? Doesn't support Super Bypass? Huh? It supports both. It didn't support super bypass when it first came out, but they do now.
Somethnig else to consider:
1.25x800 = 1GHz
1x1GHz = 1GHz
Lower multiplier to overclock. The multiplier on the processor is also probably different.
People seem to forget that a benchmarked chip is almost always slower. A chip running 100MHz x 4 = 400MHz is slower than a 200MHz x 2.
Esperandi
Yeah, and no one cared about when the Athlon hit 600 before Intel. Remember, that's why Andy Grove put his engineers under the whip and produced a nice little processor that promptly overheated and melted in the socket. Sure, they fixed it with a patch later (and reduced its performance significantly), but I think this is a good sign that AMD should try to fluster Intel all the time.
When you sit back for years being the biggest kid on the block used to releasing processors at your leizure and leading the speed race by a mile, you get fat. And a little later on down the road, you get your ass trampled by the little skinny kid who has been running his ass off and before you know it you're sitting there with an 800MHz chip which runs slower than the kids 750 which doesn't even really matter anyways because he just released a 900, a 950, and a 1GHz.
Everyone is railing about the cache. It's still going to be faster than the slowpoke P3.
And all you anti-corporation nazis take note - this is how monopolies are tumbled!
Esperandi
Well, considering what Intel has been doing since AMD beat them in the clock-speed race and every benchmark race there is, I'd say that Intel is definitely just shooting for the MHz and not even caring about whateher the chips melt in their sockets (the 600s) or even boot!(the 800s)
But, don't get all worried about the 1/3cache like everyone else is, just overclock it to half and it'll beat anything Intel throws on the market for 3 months.
Esperandi
The county that the river runs through owns that section of the river. If theres a spill like you hypothesize happens, the county it starts in brings action against the offender for negligence with all of the other counties/private land owners/businesspeople (fisherman would obviously be affected) and they have a big old class action lawsuit, or they pursue it individually if they wish. If it flows into another country, that's irrelevant. We can't tell that country to eliminate their version of the EPA and go to an ownership and responsibility system. Unless it was a TREMENDOUS spill and it was very close to the border, chances are that their EPA would have to ingore the spill because paying it any attention would detract from their bigger problems. For instance, if someone pours a couple of buckets of paint or oil or something else hazardous into a small creek on my property, the EPA won't be willing to do anything about it. If the county or city owned it and I complained, they more likely would be willing to act on it. When it flows into another owners property, liability increases.
The point here is to make polluting as unattractive as possible, remember. Right now the game is to pollute but stay small enough so the squakier wheels are getting the grease, in this system it would be more like if you pollute, you get nailed. Local places can set much stricter pollution standards if they vote to do so. But, what if a city at the mouth of, say, the delta of the Mississippi sets their pollution regs very tight while people north of them have them much more lax? Well, if you're a company planning on polluting, you're going to have to consider that down the road...
Esperandi
Under this system it would also be possible to simply not allow the incoming probable polluters to even setup shop as well.
We're just as free as you, we just have more anal retentive people ;) If there were organized boycotts of advertisers and junk like that in Canada, I'm sure you'd see more black bars and hear more bleeps...
Esperandi
BTW, what kind of regulation is there of Canadian TV on the "obscenity" front? I know they're much more liberal than the U.S. but I don't think they're quite as liberal as, say Brazil, are they? (in Brazil you could make a Coke commercial of a woman masturbating with the bottle and they wouldn't give a hoot, nudity is used in commercials all the time)