This is the way things tend to work up here. In the beginning, our leaders and lawmakers generally will just quietly make rational decisions based on ethical public policy and good technical input. Things are fine for some time here while we enjoy the sensible solution that seems to elude our neighbours to the source. Things continue happily for us while the same fight drags on in the US until big money wins out there. Then the same big money just pays for getting the American government to put pressure on ours until we capitulate.
So yes, it will be nice for a while, until your diplomats come calling to outline our terribly unfair (to ISPs) policies which are out of line with the rest of the world (America) and are damaging international relations. At which point, just to illustrate the issue, a softwood lumber tariff will get slapped on us which, of course, is completely unrelated to the net neutrality issue. " - you're accusing us of a punitive tariff? You wound us." But, surprise, surprise, it gets lifted when we cave in.
The extension to murder implies that copying a music CD is inherently wrong - in the legal world, malum in se. Murder, rape, serious assaults - they cause harm, and are generally agreed to be wrong anywhere you go. I don't think that many people would agree that copying a CD causes direct harm to the copyright holder. If there is any harm at all, it can only be indirect - perhaps due to a loss of revenue. If that revenue loss to the copyright holder is made up by the state by a special tax, wherein is there any harm done at all?
There is actually some convincing evidence that suggests there is no link between music copying and a loss of revenue, even in countries where such copying is illegal and there is no tax. Often such copying is done by people who would never have purchased the "retail" CD anyway, even if they couldn't copy. There is evidence to suggest that copying by those people results in the wider dissemination of music to those who can (and do) then purchase it. If this is indeed the case, then the blank media tax is actually giving the music industry more money than they would have had even if there was no copying done at all.
Whether or not this is the case, the fact is that if someone who would never have purchased a CD copies it, there cannot be said to be any harm done to the copyright holder. The copyright holder has lost nothing. This can only ever be malum prohibitum.
In Canada, rather than empowering our government with more and more draconian measures to stop violations of laws with questionable underpinnings, we simply add a small tax to blank media. This is our way of indicating how much we value music makers, and remunerating them for what they provide us. No DMCA, no court system clogged by the RIAA suing disabled people or single mothers, just a quietly effective system that looks to me to be fair to all.
The sad thing, is that law makers in the United States are putting enormous pressure on our government to adopt a more American system. That would be a tragedy, and I hope that we hold out.
I do apologize for the misinformation about data/audio CDs. I seem to remember this distinction being made at some point, though, so that may be a change in more recent levies. I don't generally use blank CDs much for data nowadays anyway - I use DVD, which has no levy. In fact, I only ever use blank CDs for the occasional audio disc, so the levy works well in my case.
If the assumption was as you say, then the levy would be the amount of a price of a music CD. As it is, it's a few cents. And it's not on every blank CD - it's on ones marked as for audio. Which means you can just buy stacks of "data" CDs and use them to your hearts content, levyless, to copy audio.
Your argument, that our legal system assumes everyone is "guilty" of piracy, is circular. How can our legal system be assuming you're guilty of violating a law when doing an act the same legal system explicitly permits? It's like saying a tax on gasoline means you're guilty of driving. Dizzying logic, even for an American.:)
This isn't an attempt to force people to have fun...
It isn't them trying to control your activities in the park...
It isn't a commentary on whether or not PDAs are bad...
So ergo, it isn't about the poor kids waiting in line while moronic dads have their noses in a PDA...
It is a publicity stunt, and apparently it's working very well.
I'm deeply concerned about the unit's stability. Tri-wheeled ATCs have been banned in most jurisdiction due to their high center of gravity leading to tipping. This unit has an even higher center of gravity, and goes significantly faster than most ATCs would. ATCs mostly tip when braking while turning, due to the single wheel being forward. In this case the single wheel is rear and the driver is sitting almost on top of it. This would make the unit prone to tipping when turning while accelerating. Common manoeuvres like accelerating out of curves, or veering out from behind a vehicle to pass would seem to be very likely to cause tipping. Especially given the very high acceleration of the unit.
I would like to see the "driver" in a much lower, sitting position, perhaps with his feet resting ahead of him on an "axle" linking to two forward wheels. The axle doesn't have to provide any structural support, so can be collapsing or foldable. As it is, I'm virtually certain than it would not pass road-worthiness tests at the speeds given.
Really, the use of fear of z standard becoming outdated is just a justification for inaction. There is no answer to that in any sort of technical field. What can you say when technology will always improve, standards will always become outdated. Saying you shouldn't adopt a standard because it will become outdated is precisely akin to saying you shouldn't drive a car because it will eventually run out of gas. It's just a mask to allow them to justify to the public why they won't move forward.
If fear of a standard becoming obsolete is a reason for not adopting it, I'm curious as to how they justify any of their IT budget?
Do you really think this graphics card is even a graphics card? The producers don't seem to think so. They describe it as "an FPGA development platform." They go on to say that it is sold as a "blank," and is "preprogrammed only with basic diagnostic logic." Does it even have drivers?
Is it really a graphics card, or is it something that might possibly become one with the right FPGA programming.
This isn't self healing any more than a scab represents a healed wound. When aircraft wings bleed nano-agents that reweave the carbon fibres, then I'll call the system self-healing. Until then, label it correctly. Self-patching, or even more correctly, damage-mitigating materials or design.
It's more simple than even an issue of privacy. The issue is that Wikileaks is publishing a copyrighted work without the consent of the copyright holder. I don't care if it's a religious manual, or a sex manual, or a list of random numbers.
If Wikileaks published the text for an upcoming Harry Potter novel, you can bet that people wouldn't be calling the legal efforts to get it removed censorship. But because it's a church manual, it's somehow fair game to distribute it and call efforts at enforcing copyright compliance censorship. Whatever you think about religion, that is seriously uncool.
No, there won't be an explosion, since anything we design will also inherit all our neurosis.
"Brain the size of a planet, but I've got this pain in all the diodes along my left side."
Welcome to what happens when you offload your software into web apps. This is why I use Thunderbird for email, not Hotmail or GMail. Sure, people can get angry if Microsoft holds onto their contact data, but for heaven's sake, what did they expect?
If you want control of your contact list, keep your contact list on your own hot little PC.
The text of the story is technically which says:
SCO...still owes Novell 95 percent of the SVRX UNIX royalties it collected from Microsoft and Sun However, it is a little misleading in that it has to be determined at trial what percentage of the Microsoft and Sun deals were for SVRX. All the trial judge said is that some amount of those deals is for SVRX. Because the judge determined that the deals weren't entirely SVRX, he couldn't determine any sort of dollar amount. It could be a trivial amount, it could be substantial.
I have heard so many times, in so many different arguments, that you can't/shouldn't legislate morality. The reality is, all law is based on morality. Anyone that uses the argument that you shouldn't make a rule or law based on some principal of morality is simply trying to sell an incompatible principal of morality that he or she doesn't want a rule or law to forbid.
Laws forbidding murder are based on the moral principal that human life is precious and that, in most circumstances, killing is wrong. Whatever you may think of religion, it is religious principles and the morality that springs from them that are the cornerstone of virtually all the world's jurisprudence.
The FSF is most certainly promoting a certain paradigm of morality. There is, however, nothing wrong with this. What is truly evil, is for someone else to come along and label them religious fanatics for promoting their morality, while doing them same thing himself. Linus is arguing moral principals - which is fine. I have no problem with his coming out and saying "there is nothing wrong with TiVo-ization". I don't agree, but there is nothing wrong with that point of view. What is absolutely reprehensible is the way he makes personal attacks out of his arguments.
If there is some party in this debate who is acting like a totalitarian state (with his constant statements of "go write your own OS if you don't like what I'm doing"), it seems to me to be Linus that fits the bill best.
Ok, think of it this way: Let's say I run a cafe that is close to a bookstore. To drum up business, I enter into an agreement with that nearby bookstore. I pay the bookstore for 500 copies of the new Harry Potter and the bookstore issues me 500 coupons that allow the bearer to get a free copy. I then run a promotion - come to my cafe and order so many meals and get a coupon. A customer takes advantage of this and turns in the coupon for the book. The customer is the buyer, the bookstore is the seller, and my cafe is doing nothing but paying the purchase price.
Now, saying that Microsoft is at all liable for anything under GPLv3 is like saying that J.K Rowling could claim the cafe is violating her copyright. I don't need J.K. Rowling's permission to give out coupons for her book, because my cafe didn't copy it. The publisher/bookseller (I'm lumping them together to make the analogy simpler) copied it. The publisher/bookseller is is the party that needs permission to copy the book, not me. I'm just acting as a mediator to bring together someone who is licensed to sell the book with people who want the book.
Now, if the bookstore was making bootleg copies of the book, and I knew this and got some sort of a discount on their coupons because of it, then a case could be made that my coupons facilitated copyright violations. This is where facilitation clauses in copyright law come in - but this doesn't apply in the Microsoft deal. There is no inherent copyright violation in Novell's distributing of Linux, so Microsoft giving out coupons for it doesn't count like that. Microsoft is not facilitating copyright violations with their coupons, because Novell is licensed (by the GPL) to hand out Linux. If Novell was violating the GPL in some way, and Microsoft knew about this and was using the coupons as a way of facilitating that violation, then they could be said to be liable under copyright law. That isn't the case, so Microsoft has nothing to fear. Microsoft doesn't need the GPL's permission to do what they are doing, because they aren't copying.
The GPL is not keeping anyone from suing Microsoft over this deal, because the GPL doesn't apply to Microsoft in this deal. Microsoft isn't copying the work. They are bound by nothing, just as my cafe isn't subject to any copyright laws for distributing harry potter coupons.
Contributory infringement wouldn't frighten me, and I don't think it frightens them either. It really doesn't come into play except to expand the sphere of liability for clear copyright infringement. In this case, there is no intrinsic infringement going on - the deal in question is a legal one between a buyer and Novell. It would take a lot of fast talking in a court to successfully equate a tracker helping people illegally download bootleg movies and a generally respectable company using coupons as a way to help people pay for a legal product.
Had you read what I wrote, I addressed this. No matter what PJ might want to have be the case, the GPLv3 cannot define what constitutes its own invocation if the party doesn't cross the line given in national copyright laws. I can write a license that says anything. I can write one that says if you blow your nose, then you become subject to the license on my project. Does that mean the next time you blow your nose you're violating the license? This is ludicrous. GPLv3 cannot define a stricter interpretation of what constitutes copying than the underlying copyright law people are bound by. Which means that it is the law's definition that counts, not GPLv3's. And the reality is, since Microsoft isn't doing anything that constitutes copying according to the law, there's nothing the GPLv3 can do to impose any licensing conditions on them.
I would love it to be the case as much as anyone, but that doesn't make it so.
The whole point that PJ has been going on about are Microsoft's little coupons. She is under the impression that issuing a coupon is the same thing as distributing - that if any of Microsoft's coupons are redeemed for a GPLv3-licensed product, that Microsoft has then distributed it. This is an extremely tenuous position, for the simple fact that Microsoft hasn't copied anything. A coupon is a method for a third party to step in and facilitate payment between a seller and a buyer. In this case, the seller (Novell) is the one doing the copying, and the buyer (the one turning in the coupon) is the one who is getting a license and will be bound by it.
In shory, GPLv3 can say anything it wants, but it falls under copyright law, and if I don't copy, I can't infringe. No version of the GPL can define what constitutes making a copy - only the law can do that.
Indeed, I have dismissed the original poster's comments out of hand. Just as the poster seems to dismiss out of hand the competency of librarians. Librarians need to go out and play Halo 2 so, what, they can understand what book a client wants? So they can work out a gamepad interface into catalogues? Perhaps it's so they can develop a first person shooter where the books zip around and you have to shoot the one you want. Or maybe so we can get one of those nifty glove interfaces that clueless Hollywood producers put into theoretically "futuristic" movies that show information retrieval as some sort of 3-d experience zipping around holographic Tron-like landscapes. The librarians will probably have to add some sort of recognizer-like opponent with a little electro-shock feedback into the interface to make it realistic. "Careful of the search viruses."
If a game player wants to find some sort of information out and doesn't know how, perhaps that person can simply do what everyone else does, and translate the request into proper English and simply speak it to a librarian. This is a skill that has worked well for several hundred years Oh, right, this is new technology so that obviously means all existing paradigms are invalid.
Most librarians that I have interacted with are extremely competent, know how to find what you want to know, and are helpful to a fault. Which is sort of a job requirement for them because (as the article I'm commenting on illustrates so clearly) some people have this sense of entitlement when they speak to one. They figure the librarian owes them on a personal level the information they want in the format that best suits them. That somehow it's the library's job to reach out proactively and bestow needed information on everyone like a fairy godmother. Wrong. The student is the supplicant (as much as the article seems to want to mock this), and the student that wants to know can jolly well learn how to learn. This is the greatest skill that any university can teach, and simply plopping it in a student's lap does that student no good.
But speakers said that there was a larger split between students -- who are "digital natives," in one popular way of classifying people based on their experience with technology -- and librarians, who are more likely to be "digital immigrants." They may have learned the language, but it's a second language.' In my experience, it's just the opposite. The librarians are more likely to be English natives, and the students are more likely to approach English as an immigrant. They may have grown up with the language, but it's still like a second language.
I just love these statistics they quote. "Forecasters' predictions could be degraded by up to 16% percent". Not 15%, not 17%... no... 16%. Reminds me of the core breach countdowns on ST:TNG. Every time there was going to be a catastrophic failure of some component, the computer would of course know to the exact second when the failure would occur and calmly count it down for you.
Now if we could only get Majel Barret to do some voiceover for this event: "Sattelite failure iminent - 16% degredation of forecast capabilities will occur in seventeen days."
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This is the way things tend to work up here. In the beginning, our leaders and lawmakers generally will just quietly make rational decisions based on ethical public policy and good technical input. Things are fine for some time here while we enjoy the sensible solution that seems to elude our neighbours to the source. Things continue happily for us while the same fight drags on in the US until big money wins out there. Then the same big money just pays for getting the American government to put pressure on ours until we capitulate.
So yes, it will be nice for a while, until your diplomats come calling to outline our terribly unfair (to ISPs) policies which are out of line with the rest of the world (America) and are damaging international relations. At which point, just to illustrate the issue, a softwood lumber tariff will get slapped on us which, of course, is completely unrelated to the net neutrality issue. " - you're accusing us of a punitive tariff? You wound us." But, surprise, surprise, it gets lifted when we cave in.
The extension to murder implies that copying a music CD is inherently wrong - in the legal world, malum in se. Murder, rape, serious assaults - they cause harm, and are generally agreed to be wrong anywhere you go. I don't think that many people would agree that copying a CD causes direct harm to the copyright holder. If there is any harm at all, it can only be indirect - perhaps due to a loss of revenue. If that revenue loss to the copyright holder is made up by the state by a special tax, wherein is there any harm done at all?
There is actually some convincing evidence that suggests there is no link between music copying and a loss of revenue, even in countries where such copying is illegal and there is no tax. Often such copying is done by people who would never have purchased the "retail" CD anyway, even if they couldn't copy. There is evidence to suggest that copying by those people results in the wider dissemination of music to those who can (and do) then purchase it. If this is indeed the case, then the blank media tax is actually giving the music industry more money than they would have had even if there was no copying done at all.
Whether or not this is the case, the fact is that if someone who would never have purchased a CD copies it, there cannot be said to be any harm done to the copyright holder. The copyright holder has lost nothing. This can only ever be malum prohibitum.
In Canada, rather than empowering our government with more and more draconian measures to stop violations of laws with questionable underpinnings, we simply add a small tax to blank media. This is our way of indicating how much we value music makers, and remunerating them for what they provide us. No DMCA, no court system clogged by the RIAA suing disabled people or single mothers, just a quietly effective system that looks to me to be fair to all.
The sad thing, is that law makers in the United States are putting enormous pressure on our government to adopt a more American system. That would be a tragedy, and I hope that we hold out.
I do apologize for the misinformation about data/audio CDs. I seem to remember this distinction being made at some point, though, so that may be a change in more recent levies. I don't generally use blank CDs much for data nowadays anyway - I use DVD, which has no levy. In fact, I only ever use blank CDs for the occasional audio disc, so the levy works well in my case.
You actually bought all those game... like from a store?
If the assumption was as you say, then the levy would be the amount of a price of a music CD. As it is, it's a few cents. And it's not on every blank CD - it's on ones marked as for audio. Which means you can just buy stacks of "data" CDs and use them to your hearts content, levyless, to copy audio.
:)
Your argument, that our legal system assumes everyone is "guilty" of piracy, is circular. How can our legal system be assuming you're guilty of violating a law when doing an act the same legal system explicitly permits? It's like saying a tax on gasoline means you're guilty of driving. Dizzying logic, even for an American.
This isn't an attempt to force people to have fun...
It isn't them trying to control your activities in the park...
It isn't a commentary on whether or not PDAs are bad...
So ergo, it isn't about the poor kids waiting in line while moronic dads have their noses in a PDA...
It is a publicity stunt, and apparently it's working very well.
To watch all the Apple product placement, you'd think they ruled the world now.
I'm deeply concerned about the unit's stability. Tri-wheeled ATCs have been banned in most jurisdiction due to their high center of gravity leading to tipping. This unit has an even higher center of gravity, and goes significantly faster than most ATCs would. ATCs mostly tip when braking while turning, due to the single wheel being forward. In this case the single wheel is rear and the driver is sitting almost on top of it. This would make the unit prone to tipping when turning while accelerating. Common manoeuvres like accelerating out of curves, or veering out from behind a vehicle to pass would seem to be very likely to cause tipping. Especially given the very high acceleration of the unit.
I would like to see the "driver" in a much lower, sitting position, perhaps with his feet resting ahead of him on an "axle" linking to two forward wheels. The axle doesn't have to provide any structural support, so can be collapsing or foldable. As it is, I'm virtually certain than it would not pass road-worthiness tests at the speeds given.
Really, the use of fear of z standard becoming outdated is just a justification for inaction. There is no answer to that in any sort of technical field. What can you say when technology will always improve, standards will always become outdated. Saying you shouldn't adopt a standard because it will become outdated is precisely akin to saying you shouldn't drive a car because it will eventually run out of gas. It's just a mask to allow them to justify to the public why they won't move forward.
If fear of a standard becoming obsolete is a reason for not adopting it, I'm curious as to how they justify any of their IT budget?
Nerds are dorks who, through tragic psychopathy, are unaware of that fact.
Do you really think this graphics card is even a graphics card? The producers don't seem to think so. They describe it as "an FPGA development platform." They go on to say that it is sold as a "blank," and is "preprogrammed only with basic diagnostic logic." Does it even have drivers?
Is it really a graphics card, or is it something that might possibly become one with the right FPGA programming.
This isn't self healing any more than a scab represents a healed wound. When aircraft wings bleed nano-agents that reweave the carbon fibres, then I'll call the system self-healing. Until then, label it correctly. Self-patching, or even more correctly, damage-mitigating materials or design.
Do no evil, unless of course doing evil lets us make scads of money somewhere with evil laws. In that case, it's ok.
It's more simple than even an issue of privacy. The issue is that Wikileaks is publishing a copyrighted work without the consent of the copyright holder. I don't care if it's a religious manual, or a sex manual, or a list of random numbers. If Wikileaks published the text for an upcoming Harry Potter novel, you can bet that people wouldn't be calling the legal efforts to get it removed censorship. But because it's a church manual, it's somehow fair game to distribute it and call efforts at enforcing copyright compliance censorship. Whatever you think about religion, that is seriously uncool.
No, there won't be an explosion, since anything we design will also inherit all our neurosis. "Brain the size of a planet, but I've got this pain in all the diodes along my left side."
Welcome to what happens when you offload your software into web apps. This is why I use Thunderbird for email, not Hotmail or GMail. Sure, people can get angry if Microsoft holds onto their contact data, but for heaven's sake, what did they expect? If you want control of your contact list, keep your contact list on your own hot little PC.
The SCO story has always reminded me of that old TNG newsgroup.
I have heard so many times, in so many different arguments, that you can't/shouldn't legislate morality. The reality is, all law is based on morality. Anyone that uses the argument that you shouldn't make a rule or law based on some principal of morality is simply trying to sell an incompatible principal of morality that he or she doesn't want a rule or law to forbid.
Laws forbidding murder are based on the moral principal that human life is precious and that, in most circumstances, killing is wrong. Whatever you may think of religion, it is religious principles and the morality that springs from them that are the cornerstone of virtually all the world's jurisprudence.
The FSF is most certainly promoting a certain paradigm of morality. There is, however, nothing wrong with this. What is truly evil, is for someone else to come along and label them religious fanatics for promoting their morality, while doing them same thing himself. Linus is arguing moral principals - which is fine. I have no problem with his coming out and saying "there is nothing wrong with TiVo-ization". I don't agree, but there is nothing wrong with that point of view. What is absolutely reprehensible is the way he makes personal attacks out of his arguments.
If there is some party in this debate who is acting like a totalitarian state (with his constant statements of "go write your own OS if you don't like what I'm doing"), it seems to me to be Linus that fits the bill best.
Ok, think of it this way: Let's say I run a cafe that is close to a bookstore. To drum up business, I enter into an agreement with that nearby bookstore. I pay the bookstore for 500 copies of the new Harry Potter and the bookstore issues me 500 coupons that allow the bearer to get a free copy. I then run a promotion - come to my cafe and order so many meals and get a coupon. A customer takes advantage of this and turns in the coupon for the book. The customer is the buyer, the bookstore is the seller, and my cafe is doing nothing but paying the purchase price.
Now, saying that Microsoft is at all liable for anything under GPLv3 is like saying that J.K Rowling could claim the cafe is violating her copyright. I don't need J.K. Rowling's permission to give out coupons for her book, because my cafe didn't copy it. The publisher/bookseller (I'm lumping them together to make the analogy simpler) copied it. The publisher/bookseller is is the party that needs permission to copy the book, not me. I'm just acting as a mediator to bring together someone who is licensed to sell the book with people who want the book.
Now, if the bookstore was making bootleg copies of the book, and I knew this and got some sort of a discount on their coupons because of it, then a case could be made that my coupons facilitated copyright violations. This is where facilitation clauses in copyright law come in - but this doesn't apply in the Microsoft deal. There is no inherent copyright violation in Novell's distributing of Linux, so Microsoft giving out coupons for it doesn't count like that. Microsoft is not facilitating copyright violations with their coupons, because Novell is licensed (by the GPL) to hand out Linux. If Novell was violating the GPL in some way, and Microsoft knew about this and was using the coupons as a way of facilitating that violation, then they could be said to be liable under copyright law. That isn't the case, so Microsoft has nothing to fear. Microsoft doesn't need the GPL's permission to do what they are doing, because they aren't copying.
The GPL is not keeping anyone from suing Microsoft over this deal, because the GPL doesn't apply to Microsoft in this deal. Microsoft isn't copying the work. They are bound by nothing, just as my cafe isn't subject to any copyright laws for distributing harry potter coupons.
Contributory infringement wouldn't frighten me, and I don't think it frightens them either. It really doesn't come into play except to expand the sphere of liability for clear copyright infringement. In this case, there is no intrinsic infringement going on - the deal in question is a legal one between a buyer and Novell. It would take a lot of fast talking in a court to successfully equate a tracker helping people illegally download bootleg movies and a generally respectable company using coupons as a way to help people pay for a legal product.
Had you read what I wrote, I addressed this. No matter what PJ might want to have be the case, the GPLv3 cannot define what constitutes its own invocation if the party doesn't cross the line given in national copyright laws. I can write a license that says anything. I can write one that says if you blow your nose, then you become subject to the license on my project. Does that mean the next time you blow your nose you're violating the license? This is ludicrous. GPLv3 cannot define a stricter interpretation of what constitutes copying than the underlying copyright law people are bound by. Which means that it is the law's definition that counts, not GPLv3's. And the reality is, since Microsoft isn't doing anything that constitutes copying according to the law, there's nothing the GPLv3 can do to impose any licensing conditions on them.
I would love it to be the case as much as anyone, but that doesn't make it so.
The whole point that PJ has been going on about are Microsoft's little coupons. She is under the impression that issuing a coupon is the same thing as distributing - that if any of Microsoft's coupons are redeemed for a GPLv3-licensed product, that Microsoft has then distributed it. This is an extremely tenuous position, for the simple fact that Microsoft hasn't copied anything. A coupon is a method for a third party to step in and facilitate payment between a seller and a buyer. In this case, the seller (Novell) is the one doing the copying, and the buyer (the one turning in the coupon) is the one who is getting a license and will be bound by it.
In shory, GPLv3 can say anything it wants, but it falls under copyright law, and if I don't copy, I can't infringe. No version of the GPL can define what constitutes making a copy - only the law can do that.
Indeed, I have dismissed the original poster's comments out of hand. Just as the poster seems to dismiss out of hand the competency of librarians. Librarians need to go out and play Halo 2 so, what, they can understand what book a client wants? So they can work out a gamepad interface into catalogues? Perhaps it's so they can develop a first person shooter where the books zip around and you have to shoot the one you want. Or maybe so we can get one of those nifty glove interfaces that clueless Hollywood producers put into theoretically "futuristic" movies that show information retrieval as some sort of 3-d experience zipping around holographic Tron-like landscapes. The librarians will probably have to add some sort of recognizer-like opponent with a little electro-shock feedback into the interface to make it realistic. "Careful of the search viruses."
If a game player wants to find some sort of information out and doesn't know how, perhaps that person can simply do what everyone else does, and translate the request into proper English and simply speak it to a librarian. This is a skill that has worked well for several hundred years Oh, right, this is new technology so that obviously means all existing paradigms are invalid.
Most librarians that I have interacted with are extremely competent, know how to find what you want to know, and are helpful to a fault. Which is sort of a job requirement for them because (as the article I'm commenting on illustrates so clearly) some people have this sense of entitlement when they speak to one. They figure the librarian owes them on a personal level the information they want in the format that best suits them. That somehow it's the library's job to reach out proactively and bestow needed information on everyone like a fairy godmother. Wrong. The student is the supplicant (as much as the article seems to want to mock this), and the student that wants to know can jolly well learn how to learn. This is the greatest skill that any university can teach, and simply plopping it in a student's lap does that student no good.
I just love these statistics they quote. "Forecasters' predictions could be degraded by up to 16% percent". Not 15%, not 17%... no... 16%. Reminds me of the core breach countdowns on ST:TNG. Every time there was going to be a catastrophic failure of some component, the computer would of course know to the exact second when the failure would occur and calmly count it down for you.
Now if we could only get Majel Barret to do some voiceover for this event:
"Sattelite failure iminent - 16% degredation of forecast capabilities will occur in seventeen days."