Years ago, in high school band, our teacher used to photocopy all of the instrument parts to each song and lock the originals in a cabinet so they wouldn't get damaged. Each band arrangement had enough original parts for everyone to read from, give or take a few depending on that year's enrollment.
When I went back as a substitute teacher a few years later, the band teachers still did that for rehearsals, but had to pull out the originals for performances, especially for the annual music festival, where the adjudicators would actually check to make sure they weren't using photocopies. By now, they probably use the originals even for rehearsals.
And this is in Canada, where the DMCA does not apply, and fair use does. Unfortunately, the band teachers didn't know enough about copyright law (neither did I at the time) to protest these gradually tightening restrictions. If a teacher buys one copy of a textbook, and makes thirty copies for the students to use for the year, that's one thing, and should be stopped by copyright enforcement. But it's unfortunate that draconian anti-copy-cops are preventing fair use copying in a country that does not even have a ridiculous "millennium" copyright act to deal with.
If you tell someone "This is the truth" then what you get is someone who believes what he hears. If you show someone how to find the truth, what you get is someone who can make his own descision about what he is told.
Well said. This is more important in teaching science than it is in teaching religion. Religion relies on belief alone. Science should never rely on belief at all. Yet many science teachers simply tell students "scientific facts" that are not facts at all, but the best conclusions drawn from known evidence.
Thus, for many people, science has become its own belief system. When someone proposes an idea that contradicts a generally accepted theory, the reaction is usually "That's not true!" instead of "That contradicts this observation.". If someone proposes an idea, and you can't find any evidence to refute it, you have to file it as a 'maybe' until you find contrary evidence.
Science teachers need to tell their students that almost everything in science is a conclusion based on a theory. Plate tectonics, evolution, even gravity; they're all theories that happen to stand up under the evidence we've found. Just because we haven't found contradictory evidence doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And just because there are gaps in the evidence doesn't mean there is no evidence to fill the gaps.
4. Compartmentalize revenue - The revenue from Duke 4 pays for Duke 5. The revenue from Duke 5 pays for Duke 6. The revenue for Hillbilly Spider Aliens does not pay for Duke Anything. This will prevent any particular release from becoming The Monster That Ate the Dev Team(TM), like Duke Forever... wherever it's getting its funding from.
The problem is, in that span, a normal team could have gotten several (say 2-4) of the better concepts for a DukeNukem game to market and have had at least one good, if not great game.
They say projects are never completed; they are merely abandonned.
You are exactly right. 3DRealms should have released 2-4 good (but not great) games since I bought my copy of Duke Nukem Atomic Edition way back when. I still load that game onto my computer occasionally when I feel like blasting some aliens, because even though the game technology is years old, it's still a very playable game.
Here's my armchair perspective of how 3DR should proceed:
Replace the project manager - Whoever is in charge of the project has obviously never managed a project for a company where the customer sets the deadlines. Replace this guy with a non-game developer type who knows when a product is good enough for the market.
Kill "Forever" - The name of the current vapor-game implies that this will be the ultimate Duke Nukem experience, the game to end all games, after which every gamer will burn his Quake, GTA, and DOOM3 CDs in despair. Forget pursuing the Holy Grail. Just make a game.
Release your results after one year no matter what - Sure, you'll have cool stuff you want to add on release day, but you can save it for Duke 5. You know? The one you'll be able to develop because Duke 4 brings in some revenue?
3DR needs to stop thinking of Duke 4 in terms of a motion picture masterpiece that will go down in history with Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, or Debbie Does Dallas. Think of it more like James Bond or Star Trek. Some people will like each release, some people will hate it. But it brings in enough dough to keep the franchise going, and gives your core fan base a whole lot of fun.
This is a lot like the backlash against Intrelligent Design. Of course, ID should not be taught in science class because it is not a scientific theory, and consists entirely of "Oh yeah? How do you explain that? But the very mention of ID should not be banned. Let students discuss it, even in science class, and learn why it is not scientific, instead of polarizing two groups solely on belief--scientific or religious.
Suppressing global warming naysayers does not help the cause of global warming evangelists; it merely polarizes the issue based on belief: those who believe in human-influenced global warming on one side, and those who believe it's 'just a natural cycle' on the other. In both cases, science loses.
The theory of evolution is not an incontrovertible fact; nor is the theory that humans are having a significant effect on Earth's climate. Both are theories that best fit the facts as we know them.
But while denial of the theory of evolution isn't causing any immediate problems, denial of humanity's role in climate change, and the resulting lack of action, could have very serious consequences if sea level rises as much as predicted. Say goodbye to a billion people (who live in low-lying coastal areas), and a significant fraction of Earth's photosynthetic capability (from blue-green algae, which will be wiped out by greatly increased sedimentation as coastal areas flood.)
Unfortunately, it's because of corporate inertia. Take my company, for example. I'm the IT department (no, that's not a typo) for a small Canadian company that is owned by a large European company. I've removed the big 'e' from everyone's desktop, installed Firefox, and told everyone to use it.
Unfortunately, we have a couple of applications we can only use through a centrally-administered terminal server environment. That environment includes IE. And of course the corporate IT guys can't replace Internet Exploiter because "It's a corporate standard," meaning the CIO is a manager, not a tech, and won't let them install "unlicensed" software. ("How can it be properly licensed if we don't pay for it?"... "Free software is never free for business use!", etc.)
Unfortunately Microsoft does listen to its customers, and its biggest (and loudest) customers are corporate IT departments. Those customers have specifically demanded that patches be released on a regular schedule, to ease their own testing and rollout procedures.
I call BS on that one. It takes me five minutes to apply a patch to a test machine, and after a suitable test period it takes me another five minutes to walk into the server room, log in to the WSUS server, and approve an update.
If I want to deploy an update off-schedule, it doesn't take a lot of time to do so. And if I don't want to deploy it off-schedule, it can just sit there on WSUS until Patch Tuesday comes around.
Microsoft's patch schedule has nothing to do with its customers' demands, any more than Norton's ridiculous virus update schedule. Saying that they're doing it to satisfy customer requirements is like the sign at Safeway that says "For your convenience, please leave heavy items in the cart." My convenience, my ass. It's because the 16-year-old, 90-pound checkout girl can't lift the 5-gallon water jug I'm buying.
Don't tell me you're doing something for my sake when I know you're doing it for your own business reasons.
In other news, a competing company based in Lake of the Woods, Ontario has released the RedGreenBerry. It's a cordless phone handset with a standard Windows keyboard duct taped to the back.
If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy. Keep your stick on the ice.
I would like to see Google...develop a better car.
Unfortunately, the Googlemobile Beta(TM) would only run on paved roads. A gravel-road-capable version would be In Development(TM) for some time.
Also, you wouldn't actually buy a Googlemobile. Each beta driver would receive twenty sets of keys which they could give to their friends to enable them to go pick up their own Googlemobile.
It would have awkward handling too, because if its 2500-cubic-foot trunk (71-cubic-meter boot, for those across the pond).
And when it occasionally crashed, you wouldn't be upset because it's just a beta, and Google would fix it without charge. And the Ajax-coded airbags would deploy quickly, even if their function was a bit jerky.
The only real problem would be when you hit the brakes and it gave you a message saying "Function is temporarily unavailable."
Years ago, Isaac Asimov wrote an article called Just Mooning Around that I read in a collection called Of Time and Space and Other Things.
In the article, Asimov calculated what he called the "tug-of-war ratio" for a particular satellite: the ratio of the sun's pull on a satellite to the primary's pull on that satellite. For Jupiter's satellites, for example, the Galilean moons are pulled much more strongly by Jupiter than by the Sun, whereas with the outer satellites Jupiter just barely wins the contest, making it likely that they are captured asteroids.
He goes on to calculate a maximum distance at which each planet is able to hold satellites. This gets interesting in the inner solar system. Mars' "tug-of-war distance" is just beyond where its two tiny moons happen to exist; Venus' maximum satellite distance is within its atmoshpere; and Mercury's maximum distance is beneath its surface. The Earth, of course, has no natural satellites within its maximum calculated distance.
So what's up with our Moon? At a quarter of a million miles away from us, the Sun pulls our Moon more than twice as strongly as the Earth does. Therefore, Asimov speculates, the Moon is not a true satellite of the Earth. He says that if you were to draw the Moon's orbit to scale, it would always be concave toward the Sun, and concludes that the Earth and the Moon are a binary planet system.
So the reason Venus has no moons is because it can't... then again the Earth can't have the moon it does either, but it managed to cheat somehow.
Concerned Citizen: Police! Stop that terrorist!
Police Officer: Terrorist? That's just Mr. Sanderson.
C Cit: Yes, but... He's running with scissors!
P Off:... ?
CC: Well... he could snip the President!
PO: We're in Erehwon, Iowa, son. No president has visited here since Taft!
CC: But... I think he downloaded a copy of Loose Change last week!
PO (running): STOP! You're under arrest for treason!... and running with scissors!
Interesting analogy. I guess the difference is that you can't patch a blighted potato.
"Aye, son, just spray a fine mist o' Service Pack 2 o'er that field o' mashers."
Re:Foreigners... it's always foreigners.
on
Return of the Web Mob
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· Score: 2, Funny
Phew, its a good job there are no malicious hackers in North America.
It's even more fortunate that there isn't some sort of international network of wires and cables that would let these foreigners attack our computers from overseas.
... and what the catalyst was that finally got the people to act?
Uh.... Boston Tea Party?
Actually, that was the reaction, not the stimulus. The final straw was an increase in taxes in general, but the first reaction was specifically against an increase in the tax on tea; that's why they threw it into the harbor... IIRC; I'm not American, so I didn't have that much American history in school.
I think there was also a 'party' in reaction to increased liquor taxes, but halfway through, the participants couldn't remember why they were pissed off, and had too much of a headache to start a revolution the next day.
...[by] the time we hear about the issue, it isn't a matter of removing one or two pieces, it is usually closer to 20 or 30.
I think you missed a zero on those last two numbers. By the time a couple of my users' machines got slow enough for them to complain to me, they had several hundred malware objects. We've got a pretty open browsing policy here (basically, just "no porn"), but once I identify my problem users, I lock their machines down like Fort Knox.
Speaking of which, why don't hackers devote their creative energy to a good old-fashioned gold heist instead? At least that might kill off a few of them.
About 3-4 years ago, while in college, I wrote a paper on global warming...
What pisses me off are the folks who claim that they are "saving the Earth." You are not saving the Earth, you are saving your own ass. The Earth could care less, and it and a large number of species will easily survive our worst damage and come back and flourish with no problem.
I wrote a paper in Grade 9 (20-some-odd years ago) saying essentially the same thing. The Earth has been much hotter and much colder in the past, and will be the same way again. Humanity is just causing a short-term fluctuation.
But the significance of this short-term fluctuation is that it will kill millions--potentially billions--of people. With an ocean thousands of meters deep, a rise of three to five meters doesn't seem that bad, except for the fact that many millions of people live right beside those oceans.
And this won't only affect inconvenient third-world people that you don't think about while driving your Hummer H2 to work. Millions of people around the world will have to re-locate their beachfront condos. And what's worse, the rabble that live in the common neighborhoods that were some distance from the shore will now have prime beachfront real estate! And isn't that the real crime here?
Disclaimer: It's early. My thought processes ramble when I'm tired.
Are these the same 71% that voted in a leader who doesn't believe... that global warming is real?
Oh, come on! You are demonstrating a gross lack of understanding of the American electoral process! Americans don't vote for a president based on issues. They flip a coin and pull the lever, knowing that the voting machines will elect the right candidate no matter how they vote.
Bush-Cheney '08! Repeal the 22nd!
Life, liberty, and SUVs for all! ...unless we think you're a terrorist
Since most human-induced global warming comes from the burning of fossil fuels, a 'War on Heat' would probably involve attacking oil-producing countries.
After 2008, there will be such a backlash against the current administration's militaristic agenda, the next president will announce a "war on war". This initiative will come to a screeching halt when it spends most of its time fighting against itself.
...just like every other "war on [foo]" initiative.
What? No shocked covering of your daughter's eyes? No phoning your ISP and demanding that they take the offensive sites off their "Interweb"? No empty threats to sue "the Internet" for allowing your child to spend hours alone surfing porn? No wailing cries of "Won't sombody please think of the children!"?
Turn in your apple pie! You can't be a true, patriotic, red-blooded American!
...at least, not one of the relatively small number who give the rest such a bad name. Seriously, kudos to you for taking responsibility rather than abdicating it.
The separation of church and state is part of the US constitution, isn't it? I mean, part of the original document, not tacked on as an amendment?
I wonder what Ben, George, Tom, and the rest would have to say about the current theocratic regime. Well, at least he doesn't call his wife "Mommy" and let her run the country by proxy.
Slashdot Mirror
Years ago, in high school band, our teacher used to photocopy all of the instrument parts to each song and lock the originals in a cabinet so they wouldn't get damaged. Each band arrangement had enough original parts for everyone to read from, give or take a few depending on that year's enrollment.
When I went back as a substitute teacher a few years later, the band teachers still did that for rehearsals, but had to pull out the originals for performances, especially for the annual music festival, where the adjudicators would actually check to make sure they weren't using photocopies. By now, they probably use the originals even for rehearsals.
And this is in Canada, where the DMCA does not apply, and fair use does. Unfortunately, the band teachers didn't know enough about copyright law (neither did I at the time) to protest these gradually tightening restrictions. If a teacher buys one copy of a textbook, and makes thirty copies for the students to use for the year, that's one thing, and should be stopped by copyright enforcement. But it's unfortunate that draconian anti-copy-cops are preventing fair use copying in a country that does not even have a ridiculous "millennium" copyright act to deal with.
The US stores all of its secret UFO information in Guantanamo. What? Do you think Castro looks like a normal Earhling?
Forgot one:
4. Compartmentalize revenue - The revenue from Duke 4 pays for Duke 5. The revenue from Duke 5 pays for Duke 6. The revenue for Hillbilly Spider Aliens does not pay for Duke Anything. This will prevent any particular release from becoming The Monster That Ate the Dev Team(TM), like Duke Forever... wherever it's getting its funding from.They say projects are never completed; they are merely abandonned.
You are exactly right. 3DRealms should have released 2-4 good (but not great) games since I bought my copy of Duke Nukem Atomic Edition way back when. I still load that game onto my computer occasionally when I feel like blasting some aliens, because even though the game technology is years old, it's still a very playable game.
Here's my armchair perspective of how 3DR should proceed:
3DR needs to stop thinking of Duke 4 in terms of a motion picture masterpiece that will go down in history with Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, or Debbie Does Dallas. Think of it more like James Bond or Star Trek. Some people will like each release, some people will hate it. But it brings in enough dough to keep the franchise going, and gives your core fan base a whole lot of fun.
This is a lot like the backlash against Intrelligent Design. Of course, ID should not be taught in science class because it is not a scientific theory, and consists entirely of "Oh yeah? How do you explain that? But the very mention of ID should not be banned. Let students discuss it, even in science class, and learn why it is not scientific, instead of polarizing two groups solely on belief--scientific or religious.
Suppressing global warming naysayers does not help the cause of global warming evangelists; it merely polarizes the issue based on belief: those who believe in human-influenced global warming on one side, and those who believe it's 'just a natural cycle' on the other. In both cases, science loses.
The theory of evolution is not an incontrovertible fact; nor is the theory that humans are having a significant effect on Earth's climate. Both are theories that best fit the facts as we know them.
But while denial of the theory of evolution isn't causing any immediate problems, denial of humanity's role in climate change, and the resulting lack of action, could have very serious consequences if sea level rises as much as predicted. Say goodbye to a billion people (who live in low-lying coastal areas), and a significant fraction of Earth's photosynthetic capability (from blue-green algae, which will be wiped out by greatly increased sedimentation as coastal areas flood.)
Imagine the New Orleans disaster... everywhere.
But how else will it protect against an attack by the Mole People?!
Unfortunately, it's because of corporate inertia. Take my company, for example. I'm the IT department (no, that's not a typo) for a small Canadian company that is owned by a large European company. I've removed the big 'e' from everyone's desktop, installed Firefox, and told everyone to use it.
Unfortunately, we have a couple of applications we can only use through a centrally-administered terminal server environment. That environment includes IE. And of course the corporate IT guys can't replace Internet Exploiter because "It's a corporate standard," meaning the CIO is a manager, not a tech, and won't let them install "unlicensed" software. ("How can it be properly licensed if we don't pay for it?" ... "Free software is never free for business use!", etc.)
I call BS on that one. It takes me five minutes to apply a patch to a test machine, and after a suitable test period it takes me another five minutes to walk into the server room, log in to the WSUS server, and approve an update.
If I want to deploy an update off-schedule, it doesn't take a lot of time to do so. And if I don't want to deploy it off-schedule, it can just sit there on WSUS until Patch Tuesday comes around.
Microsoft's patch schedule has nothing to do with its customers' demands, any more than Norton's ridiculous virus update schedule. Saying that they're doing it to satisfy customer requirements is like the sign at Safeway that says "For your convenience, please leave heavy items in the cart." My convenience, my ass. It's because the 16-year-old, 90-pound checkout girl can't lift the 5-gallon water jug I'm buying.
Don't tell me you're doing something for my sake when I know you're doing it for your own business reasons.
In other news, a competing company based in Lake of the Woods, Ontario has released the RedGreenBerry. It's a cordless phone handset with a standard Windows keyboard duct taped to the back.
If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy. Keep your stick on the ice.
The US has fired off a bunch of trade sanctions. Unfortunately, they've got terrible aim, so they all hit Canada instead.
Unfortunately, the Googlemobile Beta(TM) would only run on paved roads. A gravel-road-capable version would be In Development(TM) for some time.
Also, you wouldn't actually buy a Googlemobile. Each beta driver would receive twenty sets of keys which they could give to their friends to enable them to go pick up their own Googlemobile.
It would have awkward handling too, because if its 2500-cubic-foot trunk (71-cubic-meter boot, for those across the pond).
And when it occasionally crashed, you wouldn't be upset because it's just a beta, and Google would fix it without charge. And the Ajax-coded airbags would deploy quickly, even if their function was a bit jerky.
The only real problem would be when you hit the brakes and it gave you a message saying "Function is temporarily unavailable."
Years ago, Isaac Asimov wrote an article called Just Mooning Around that I read in a collection called Of Time and Space and Other Things.
In the article, Asimov calculated what he called the "tug-of-war ratio" for a particular satellite: the ratio of the sun's pull on a satellite to the primary's pull on that satellite. For Jupiter's satellites, for example, the Galilean moons are pulled much more strongly by Jupiter than by the Sun, whereas with the outer satellites Jupiter just barely wins the contest, making it likely that they are captured asteroids.
He goes on to calculate a maximum distance at which each planet is able to hold satellites. This gets interesting in the inner solar system. Mars' "tug-of-war distance" is just beyond where its two tiny moons happen to exist; Venus' maximum satellite distance is within its atmoshpere; and Mercury's maximum distance is beneath its surface. The Earth, of course, has no natural satellites within its maximum calculated distance.
So what's up with our Moon? At a quarter of a million miles away from us, the Sun pulls our Moon more than twice as strongly as the Earth does. Therefore, Asimov speculates, the Moon is not a true satellite of the Earth. He says that if you were to draw the Moon's orbit to scale, it would always be concave toward the Sun, and concludes that the Earth and the Moon are a binary planet system.
So the reason Venus has no moons is because it can't... then again the Earth can't have the moon it does either, but it managed to cheat somehow.
Hmm...
Concerned Citizen: Police! Stop that terrorist! ... ?
Police Officer: Terrorist? That's just Mr. Sanderson.
C Cit: Yes, but... He's running with scissors!
P Off:
CC: Well... he could snip the President!
PO: We're in Erehwon, Iowa, son. No president has visited here since Taft!
CC: But... I think he downloaded a copy of Loose Change last week!
PO (running): STOP! You're under arrest for treason!... and running with scissors!
Interesting analogy. I guess the difference is that you can't patch a blighted potato.
"Aye, son, just spray a fine mist o' Service Pack 2 o'er that field o' mashers."
It's even more fortunate that there isn't some sort of international network of wires and cables that would let these foreigners attack our computers from overseas.
Actually, that was the reaction, not the stimulus. The final straw was an increase in taxes in general, but the first reaction was specifically against an increase in the tax on tea; that's why they threw it into the harbor... IIRC; I'm not American, so I didn't have that much American history in school.
I think there was also a 'party' in reaction to increased liquor taxes, but halfway through, the participants couldn't remember why they were pissed off, and had too much of a headache to start a revolution the next day.
I think you missed a zero on those last two numbers. By the time a couple of my users' machines got slow enough for them to complain to me, they had several hundred malware objects. We've got a pretty open browsing policy here (basically, just "no porn"), but once I identify my problem users, I lock their machines down like Fort Knox.
Speaking of which, why don't hackers devote their creative energy to a good old-fashioned gold heist instead? At least that might kill off a few of them.
I wrote a paper in Grade 9 (20-some-odd years ago) saying essentially the same thing. The Earth has been much hotter and much colder in the past, and will be the same way again. Humanity is just causing a short-term fluctuation.
But the significance of this short-term fluctuation is that it will kill millions--potentially billions--of people. With an ocean thousands of meters deep, a rise of three to five meters doesn't seem that bad, except for the fact that many millions of people live right beside those oceans.
And this won't only affect inconvenient third-world people that you don't think about while driving your Hummer H2 to work. Millions of people around the world will have to re-locate their beachfront condos. And what's worse, the rabble that live in the common neighborhoods that were some distance from the shore will now have prime beachfront real estate! And isn't that the real crime here?
Disclaimer: It's early. My thought processes ramble when I'm tired.
Oh, come on! You are demonstrating a gross lack of understanding of the American electoral process! Americans don't vote for a president based on issues. They flip a coin and pull the lever, knowing that the voting machines will elect the right candidate no matter how they vote.
Bush-Cheney '08! Repeal the 22nd!
...unless we think you're a terrorist
Life, liberty, and SUVs for all!
Since most human-induced global warming comes from the burning of fossil fuels, a 'War on Heat' would probably involve attacking oil-producing countries.
Oh, wait a minute...
I recommend none other than The WHO.
Whoooooo are you?
Who, who?
Who, who?
After 2008, there will be such a backlash against the current administration's militaristic agenda, the next president will announce a "war on war". This initiative will come to a screeching halt when it spends most of its time fighting against itself.
...just like every other "war on [foo]" initiative.What? No shocked covering of your daughter's eyes? No phoning your ISP and demanding that they take the offensive sites off their "Interweb"? No empty threats to sue "the Internet" for allowing your child to spend hours alone surfing porn? No wailing cries of "Won't sombody please think of the children!"?
Turn in your apple pie! You can't be a true, patriotic, red-blooded American!
...at least, not one of the relatively small number who give the rest such a bad name. Seriously, kudos to you for taking responsibility rather than abdicating it.
The separation of church and state is part of the US constitution, isn't it? I mean, part of the original document, not tacked on as an amendment?
I wonder what Ben, George, Tom, and the rest would have to say about the current theocratic regime. Well, at least he doesn't call his wife "Mommy" and let her run the country by proxy.