This isn't entirely a new idea. Tokyo already has space-efficient parking garages that stack cars using turntables and elevators. I think the images atop this link are fake, but the video appears real and this appears similar to what I saw from outside.
What do you think of the adversarial system of law? Each side hires a professional shill to present a biased opinion in as convincing a way as possible, to convince an audience. We trust that system to more or less present that audience with something they can use to decide the real story.
From someone who would really like to write for games:
Right now, a lot of professional games seem to have very limited writing, and it's not just a function of bad writing but of gameplay. I recently played the Zelda-like RPG Okami, for instance, and found that there was almost no innovation in NPC interaction over the first Final Fantasy: walk up to people who stand there like idiots and hit one button to read a one-way dialogue blurb. There are notable exceptions like the Elder Scrolls series, and PC games tend to be better in this respect than console games. Still, a lot of what holds game writing back is that the characters are brainless billboards. As AI develops, game writing will/should become less a matter of composing canned text as of creating characters that can answer questions and take action on their own instead of waiting to "say their line." I'd like to be able, at least, to go up to those randomly-wandering NPCs and quiz them about their town to get interesting background information.
And what about the Play It Cyber-Safe campaign by the Business Software Alliance? Here a hip anthro-ferret offers kids a "Cyber Ethics Champion Code" and a game in which he battles the evil forces of copyright infringement. "Stop the pirates from freezing the city. Throw your ball into the pirates and their stolen software before they hit the ground."
Brin's answer to obnoxious peeping Toms and stalkers -- as opposed to legitimate uses like watching the police or seeing whether our date is still waiting at the restaurant -- seems to be to make sure that people know who's been watching them. That is, if somebody's stalking teenage girls, the fact that they're doing so is itself public knowledge. But I don't see how that two-way feature could be implemented, other than to design the camera net so that anyone requesting footage must identify themselves and have their use of the system tracked. (And how would that work?) Maybe what we should be working on is a private sensor net paralleling the public one.
Seriously, DARPA has been working with MIT through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies to develop advanced armor, apparently including powered armor.
But will you like knowing that you're on camera several hundred times a day (as is supposedly true for Englishmen today), monitored not just by a bored policeman but by software designed to identify people and suspicious behavior (eg. this story)? Considering the existing cameras with microphones, will you shiver when the machines call you by name and ask what you're doing? "Move along, citizen."
If we're to be monitored, we should be pushing to make sure that we have access, ourselves, to the surveillance network and that we're not shut out by laws "protecting privacy" from everyone but the government. This is the argument developed in Brin's The Transparent Society.
Iraq was not ready for democracy and will not be anytime soon from the way it looks. As bad as this sounds, a dictator was needed to keep the country in check.
The fact that so many people risked their lives to vote when they finally had a chance suggests that this is something they want, and that it's not something we arrogant Westerners are imposing on people who "chose" their dictator. Imagine telling an escapee from North Korea that we don't think North Koreans are "ready for democracy" and are better off under Kim.
Can we fix our mistake - I don't know...probably not, at least not without angering millions, losing thousands of our own citizen's lives, and making our children and grand children pay for this continuing war. Is it worth it...I don't think so...what about you?
A friend is of the opinion that we should fight ruthlessly, knowing that this means killing a whole lot of people and leveling any neighborhood that's not pacified, or not fight at all; and that our current strategy handcuffs our troops, whose specialty is fighting, not "winning hearts and minds." I don't know whether to think this is awful, or agree. But I don't think that leaving will end the war, not while we remain in the region, support Israel, and refuse to convert to Wahabism.
Returning to China, the Atlantic Monthly had an article saying that China is a military threat to America (at least at sea) not because their numbers outweigh our technology, but because they, too can fight "asymmetric warfare." Hit one US ship with one rocket and CNN and Fox News will trumpet it, track the American body count, and show weeping families.
This is a topic that should be addressed at greater length. Good work.
One point worth adding is that it's a bad idea to react to invasive copyright measures by saying, "Let's all pirate stuff so we can stick it to the Man." If we do that, we prove organizations like the MPAA right in their assumption that we just want to take stuff without paying for it. A technological measure of any kind will be unable to stop piracy (abuse of copyright, however you want to define it) if our culture is such that piracy is condoned as a form of rebellion.
I came across this idea recently via a writers' group. The author proposes breaking the "warez" distribution system by deliberately putting out many partly-broken versions of software. For a game this would probably mean some versions that crash halfway through or subtly corrupt saved games. But if the warez networks are using hash signatures to identify perfect original versions of media, wouldn't this technique fail?
An ignorant question: Why, then, does MS persist in leaving them open? It seems like there's no real reason for doing so unless you have a specific reason, and that it's possible to open ports only as necessary, eg., opening whatever port(s) MS Messenger uses only while MS Messenger is running. Since MS presumably has competent people designing its security and doing the best they can with such a complex product, why haven't they taken this obvious step?
This is silly, but there's a comic called Licensable Bear (tm) arguing for innate "intellectual property" rights. (The link goes to a comic from the same issue, the only one I've seen; the scene in question isn't on display there.) The character makes the devil's advocate argument: You can't own ideas! Property rights only apply to physical objects, of course, and we get the right to the raw materials by owning land, which we get either by royal charter or by conquest. At this point his audience is thinking, "Hey, how is it we can legitimately own land because our tribe conquered it, yet we can't own something we created from nothing?" It's tongue-in-cheek, but there's some truth to it. I would consider an argument for recognizing "fundamental rights" in ideas made tangible in the form of writings and inventions, rather than saying that those ideas are totally unprotected or protected only in violation of freedom of speech.
Would you say, then, that the Progress Clause (or whatever we should call it) has always been a dead letter, overridden completely by the First Amendment? It's a legally plausible position, as you'd be saying that the Amendment (which came after the Clause) eliminates and blocks all restrictions on freedom of the press, therefore canceling the authority that the Clause gives Congress to grant exclusive reproduction rights to media. But if that's so, then all copyrights are unconstitutional, and possibly even patents.
A letter by Jefferson presented his idea that "the exclusive right to invention [is] given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society." He wrote that "natural law" or "universal law" or "nature" was the source of our rights. He distinguished between those rights "derived from nature" and those from "the gift of social law," putting patent/copyright firmly in the latter category and questioning its practical worth even in that capacity.
Counterexample: I write stories. I make very little money at it so far, and I keep writing despite that fact, because it's something I love. In fact, I would like to devote more time to it, but so far I'm forced to earn money by doing something uncreative instead. If I were able to make a living as a writer, my time and therefore my output would be greater. So, the money does encourage creative production.
They got greedy and deserve to be punished for it.
While I sympathize with your main point, I disagree with the "punishment" part. Thinking of the situation this way leads to the notion of millions of teenagers thinking, "I'm gonna pirate the latest music album and it's not wrong, because I'm sticking it to the Man and those big corporations deserve to be punished!" If we go around abusing fair use and just taking things without paying for them -- not that that's what you're advocating, but the wording makes it sound like that -- then the media companies in question are right to think we're thieves, aren't they? If we really support the idea that the creators of ideas should be able to make a living at it, and that we shouldn't be supporting companies that use coercive content restrictions, then doesn't it make sense to focus on an "opt-out" strategy instead of vindictiveness? Don't buy music from big record labels! Don't buy software with obnoxious licensing terms! A lot of the stuff is not worth your money, anyway. This part sounds a lot like what you're saying, but let's focus on fixing the problem by amending copyright law and turning our backs on bad industry practices rather than somehow "inflicting punishment."
I have to question you on this one. There are two main theories of where "intellectual property" comes from, and the debate over patent/copyright is contentious enough that law professors can't even agree on whether to refer to the Constitution's "IP Clause" or "Copyright Clause" or "Progress Clause." (I favor the latter.) Jefferson compared knowledge to a lighted taper [candle], that can be spread with no harm to the original holder; Franklin was a printer of pirated books. The actual wording that made it into the Constitution is ambiguous: patent/copyright law exists to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts," which suggests that ownership rights in ideas are not fundamental rights, but ones established through the government as a form of subsidy for creativity. The fact that these rights are "for a limited time" supports this notion. The other theory emphasizes the wording about "securing rights" as though people did have innate rights to exclusive control over their work. In either case, it's not "God" creating the rights but a social contract/natural law.
And in either case, you apparently do not have a Constitutionally protected right to copy media even under the First Amendment, because the Progress Clause grants "the exclusive right" to the creators. So, does the First Amendment override and destroy the Progress Clause? Or did the Founders understand the First Amendment to not cover copyright (which means there was a large hole knocked in it from the beginning)? I don't know the answer here, but there's troubling ambiguity even just from trying to figure out the original intent of the Constitution.
The sort of user who will only use Firefox, Thunderbird and OO (good programs) also strikes me as the sort who knows and cares nothing about the issues that cause the original article to speak of "freedom." In what way are they better off with Linux, then? It seems kind of patronizing to tell people "this is better," substitute something they see as identical, and not explain why it's better. If you want people to become more experienced and skillful computer users who appreciate issues like DRM and Net security, then they're going to need to learn about things like the file system. A tutorial starting on a very basic level would help to introduce new Linux users to the OS, letting them satisfy any curiosity they have about what they can do other than check their e-mail, and gradually increasing their skill.
It's interesting to see a chessmaster involved in this situation. Long ago, Ayn Rand wrote an essay titled "An Open Letter To Boris Spassky," who was then a chess champion. She denounced him for being a pawn of the Soviet state, turning his intellectual abilities to a pointless logic game because he wasn't willing to change the rules of his country's "game."
And after having his Freedom Disc installed, he'll still not know what to do with those programs, because Linux doesn't yet seem to have a large, friendly "TUTORIAL" button on its default desktop. Asking him to go to IRC with any problems, or read a textbook to learn about this Linux thing, creates a substantial hurdle before this new user can do anything with the new system. If he's told, "What's so hard? There's your Internet browser; there's your word processor," then he's as badly off as if he'd stuck with Windows -- no knowledge of the underlying file system, permissions, etc..
I was first in line to get a signed copy of Dawkins' The God Delusion when he spoke on campus, so I sympathize with your reaction, but I also mostly agree with the critique. I don't think his point is that his religion (whatever it is) was left out, but that it's a bizarre continuity breach to assume, without explanation, that religion has vanished altogether from human culture. I've written a related column arguing that religion should play a greater role in a particular SF/fantasy subgenre, not because I'm a fan of it but because it's both a rich source of story material, and such a universal part of human life to date that ignoring it weakens a story setting's plausibility. Look at the "Firefly" essay below the Trek one -- the author approves of a story where there's just one character who's got a Bible and makes offhand references to Jesus and Buddha. That's a far cry from turning the show into BibleMan. So, a writer can incorporate religion into a story without bludgeoning the audience with their own personal views. Its total absence among humans in the Trek world is mysterious to the point of being implausible.
As for the lack of capitalism, he's right to note that the main Trek species that has recognizable business dealings is portrayed as a gang of sniveling pirates who somehow don't even have banks or letters of credit. Maybe you'd get a utopian society in the Federation if "replicator" technology were perfected, but it's strange that the show seems contemptuous of civilizations where people actually have to work for a living. Also, Trek doesn't need a magic fix-all-economic-problems technology. Wouldn't it be more interesting than the current setup to say that the Federation actually needs to explore space to create continued opportunity for a growing, ambitious population that still has poor people in it?
Replicator tech is itself implausible due to how it's handled. It seems to be an unlimited matter/energy conversion gadget! With such a device, who needs a matter/antimatter reactor or a phaser? Just throw a rock into the replicator and get all the energy you need! Even if that's not how it works, the Federation seems able to manipulate matter on the particle scale (for transporters at least), so why does their technology look as though it's built by conventional manufacturing methods? Why aren't there lots of privately owned mini-spaceships mining Jupiter for raw matter and building space habitats and ringworlds all over the place? Instead of an unprecedented explosion of human creativity and freedom, Trek seems to be about a central authority dominating all activity and building a benevolent empire no more imaginative than the average 4X space game. Sure, the shows' focus on military life gives us a skewed view, but why is there such limited imagination in looking at the implications of its technology?
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't entirely a new idea. Tokyo already has space-efficient parking garages that stack cars using turntables and elevators. I think the images atop this link are fake, but the video appears real and this appears similar to what I saw from outside.
What do you think of the adversarial system of law? Each side hires a professional shill to present a biased opinion in as convincing a way as possible, to convince an audience. We trust that system to more or less present that audience with something they can use to decide the real story.
Some contest sponsors provide a check to cover taxes, but that income is also taxable.
So taxes are like rocket fuel: you need to carry money to pay the taxes on the other money, plus the taxes on the big briefcase to hold the money.
From someone who would really like to write for games:
Right now, a lot of professional games seem to have very limited writing, and it's not just a function of bad writing but of gameplay. I recently played the Zelda-like RPG Okami, for instance, and found that there was almost no innovation in NPC interaction over the first Final Fantasy: walk up to people who stand there like idiots and hit one button to read a one-way dialogue blurb. There are notable exceptions like the Elder Scrolls series, and PC games tend to be better in this respect than console games. Still, a lot of what holds game writing back is that the characters are brainless billboards. As AI develops, game writing will/should become less a matter of composing canned text as of creating characters that can answer questions and take action on their own instead of waiting to "say their line." I'd like to be able, at least, to go up to those randomly-wandering NPCs and quiz them about their town to get interesting background information.
And what about the Play It Cyber-Safe campaign by the Business Software Alliance? Here a hip anthro-ferret offers kids a "Cyber Ethics Champion Code" and a game in which he battles the evil forces of copyright infringement. "Stop the pirates from freezing the city. Throw your ball into the pirates and their stolen software before they hit the ground."
Brin's answer to obnoxious peeping Toms and stalkers -- as opposed to legitimate uses like watching the police or seeing whether our date is still waiting at the restaurant -- seems to be to make sure that people know who's been watching them. That is, if somebody's stalking teenage girls, the fact that they're doing so is itself public knowledge. But I don't see how that two-way feature could be implemented, other than to design the camera net so that anyone requesting footage must identify themselves and have their use of the system tracked. (And how would that work?) Maybe what we should be working on is a private sensor net paralleling the public one.
Increase your odds for the suit -- its inventor upgraded it recently.
Seriously, DARPA has been working with MIT through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies to develop advanced armor, apparently including powered armor.
But will you like knowing that you're on camera several hundred times a day (as is supposedly true for Englishmen today), monitored not just by a bored policeman but by software designed to identify people and suspicious behavior (eg. this story)? Considering the existing cameras with microphones, will you shiver when the machines call you by name and ask what you're doing? "Move along, citizen."
If we're to be monitored, we should be pushing to make sure that we have access, ourselves, to the surveillance network and that we're not shut out by laws "protecting privacy" from everyone but the government. This is the argument developed in Brin's The Transparent Society.
Iraq was not ready for democracy and will not be anytime soon from the way it looks. As bad as this sounds, a dictator was needed to keep the country in check.
The fact that so many people risked their lives to vote when they finally had a chance suggests that this is something they want, and that it's not something we arrogant Westerners are imposing on people who "chose" their dictator. Imagine telling an escapee from North Korea that we don't think North Koreans are "ready for democracy" and are better off under Kim.
Can we fix our mistake - I don't know...probably not, at least not without angering millions, losing thousands of our own citizen's lives, and making our children and grand children pay for this continuing war. Is it worth it...I don't think so...what about you?
A friend is of the opinion that we should fight ruthlessly, knowing that this means killing a whole lot of people and leveling any neighborhood that's not pacified, or not fight at all; and that our current strategy handcuffs our troops, whose specialty is fighting, not "winning hearts and minds." I don't know whether to think this is awful, or agree. But I don't think that leaving will end the war, not while we remain in the region, support Israel, and refuse to convert to Wahabism.
Returning to China, the Atlantic Monthly had an article saying that China is a military threat to America (at least at sea) not because their numbers outweigh our technology, but because they, too can fight "asymmetric warfare." Hit one US ship with one rocket and CNN and Fox News will trumpet it, track the American body count, and show weeping families.
This is a topic that should be addressed at greater length. Good work.
One point worth adding is that it's a bad idea to react to invasive copyright measures by saying, "Let's all pirate stuff so we can stick it to the Man." If we do that, we prove organizations like the MPAA right in their assumption that we just want to take stuff without paying for it. A technological measure of any kind will be unable to stop piracy (abuse of copyright, however you want to define it) if our culture is such that piracy is condoned as a form of rebellion.
"-1, Lethal," I think. 8) Seriously, even with my very limited understanding I can say, don't try this at home.
I loved that game! But now it's nearly unavailable, and hard to get running at all. Is there any PC remake or independent spinoff of it out there?
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System's first generation had a port on the bottom for a CD add-on.
I came across this idea recently via a writers' group. The author proposes breaking the "warez" distribution system by deliberately putting out many partly-broken versions of software. For a game this would probably mean some versions that crash halfway through or subtly corrupt saved games. But if the warez networks are using hash signatures to identify perfect original versions of media, wouldn't this technique fail?
An ignorant question: Why, then, does MS persist in leaving them open? It seems like there's no real reason for doing so unless you have a specific reason, and that it's possible to open ports only as necessary, eg., opening whatever port(s) MS Messenger uses only while MS Messenger is running. Since MS presumably has competent people designing its security and doing the best they can with such a complex product, why haven't they taken this obvious step?
This is silly, but there's a comic called Licensable Bear (tm) arguing for innate "intellectual property" rights. (The link goes to a comic from the same issue, the only one I've seen; the scene in question isn't on display there.) The character makes the devil's advocate argument: You can't own ideas! Property rights only apply to physical objects, of course, and we get the right to the raw materials by owning land, which we get either by royal charter or by conquest. At this point his audience is thinking, "Hey, how is it we can legitimately own land because our tribe conquered it, yet we can't own something we created from nothing?" It's tongue-in-cheek, but there's some truth to it. I would consider an argument for recognizing "fundamental rights" in ideas made tangible in the form of writings and inventions, rather than saying that those ideas are totally unprotected or protected only in violation of freedom of speech.
Would you say, then, that the Progress Clause (or whatever we should call it) has always been a dead letter, overridden completely by the First Amendment? It's a legally plausible position, as you'd be saying that the Amendment (which came after the Clause) eliminates and blocks all restrictions on freedom of the press, therefore canceling the authority that the Clause gives Congress to grant exclusive reproduction rights to media. But if that's so, then all copyrights are unconstitutional, and possibly even patents.
A letter by Jefferson presented his idea that "the exclusive right to invention [is] given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society." He wrote that "natural law" or "universal law" or "nature" was the source of our rights. He distinguished between those rights "derived from nature" and those from "the gift of social law," putting patent/copyright firmly in the latter category and questioning its practical worth even in that capacity.
Counterexample: I write stories. I make very little money at it so far, and I keep writing despite that fact, because it's something I love. In fact, I would like to devote more time to it, but so far I'm forced to earn money by doing something uncreative instead. If I were able to make a living as a writer, my time and therefore my output would be greater. So, the money does encourage creative production.
They got greedy and deserve to be punished for it.
While I sympathize with your main point, I disagree with the "punishment" part. Thinking of the situation this way leads to the notion of millions of teenagers thinking, "I'm gonna pirate the latest music album and it's not wrong, because I'm sticking it to the Man and those big corporations deserve to be punished!" If we go around abusing fair use and just taking things without paying for them -- not that that's what you're advocating, but the wording makes it sound like that -- then the media companies in question are right to think we're thieves, aren't they? If we really support the idea that the creators of ideas should be able to make a living at it, and that we shouldn't be supporting companies that use coercive content restrictions, then doesn't it make sense to focus on an "opt-out" strategy instead of vindictiveness? Don't buy music from big record labels! Don't buy software with obnoxious licensing terms! A lot of the stuff is not worth your money, anyway. This part sounds a lot like what you're saying, but let's focus on fixing the problem by amending copyright law and turning our backs on bad industry practices rather than somehow "inflicting punishment."
I have to question you on this one. There are two main theories of where "intellectual property" comes from, and the debate over patent/copyright is contentious enough that law professors can't even agree on whether to refer to the Constitution's "IP Clause" or "Copyright Clause" or "Progress Clause." (I favor the latter.) Jefferson compared knowledge to a lighted taper [candle], that can be spread with no harm to the original holder; Franklin was a printer of pirated books. The actual wording that made it into the Constitution is ambiguous: patent/copyright law exists to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts," which suggests that ownership rights in ideas are not fundamental rights, but ones established through the government as a form of subsidy for creativity. The fact that these rights are "for a limited time" supports this notion. The other theory emphasizes the wording about "securing rights" as though people did have innate rights to exclusive control over their work. In either case, it's not "God" creating the rights but a social contract/natural law.
And in either case, you apparently do not have a Constitutionally protected right to copy media even under the First Amendment, because the Progress Clause grants "the exclusive right" to the creators. So, does the First Amendment override and destroy the Progress Clause? Or did the Founders understand the First Amendment to not cover copyright (which means there was a large hole knocked in it from the beginning)? I don't know the answer here, but there's troubling ambiguity even just from trying to figure out the original intent of the Constitution.
The sort of user who will only use Firefox, Thunderbird and OO (good programs) also strikes me as the sort who knows and cares nothing about the issues that cause the original article to speak of "freedom." In what way are they better off with Linux, then? It seems kind of patronizing to tell people "this is better," substitute something they see as identical, and not explain why it's better. If you want people to become more experienced and skillful computer users who appreciate issues like DRM and Net security, then they're going to need to learn about things like the file system. A tutorial starting on a very basic level would help to introduce new Linux users to the OS, letting them satisfy any curiosity they have about what they can do other than check their e-mail, and gradually increasing their skill.
It's interesting to see a chessmaster involved in this situation. Long ago, Ayn Rand wrote an essay titled "An Open Letter To Boris Spassky," who was then a chess champion. She denounced him for being a pawn of the Soviet state, turning his intellectual abilities to a pointless logic game because he wasn't willing to change the rules of his country's "game."
And after having his Freedom Disc installed, he'll still not know what to do with those programs, because Linux doesn't yet seem to have a large, friendly "TUTORIAL" button on its default desktop. Asking him to go to IRC with any problems, or read a textbook to learn about this Linux thing, creates a substantial hurdle before this new user can do anything with the new system. If he's told, "What's so hard? There's your Internet browser; there's your word processor," then he's as badly off as if he'd stuck with Windows -- no knowledge of the underlying file system, permissions, etc..
Why does any OS need roughly 10 GB for its own files?
I was first in line to get a signed copy of Dawkins' The God Delusion when he spoke on campus, so I sympathize with your reaction, but I also mostly agree with the critique. I don't think his point is that his religion (whatever it is) was left out, but that it's a bizarre continuity breach to assume, without explanation, that religion has vanished altogether from human culture. I've written a related column arguing that religion should play a greater role in a particular SF/fantasy subgenre, not because I'm a fan of it but because it's both a rich source of story material, and such a universal part of human life to date that ignoring it weakens a story setting's plausibility. Look at the "Firefly" essay below the Trek one -- the author approves of a story where there's just one character who's got a Bible and makes offhand references to Jesus and Buddha. That's a far cry from turning the show into BibleMan. So, a writer can incorporate religion into a story without bludgeoning the audience with their own personal views. Its total absence among humans in the Trek world is mysterious to the point of being implausible.
As for the lack of capitalism, he's right to note that the main Trek species that has recognizable business dealings is portrayed as a gang of sniveling pirates who somehow don't even have banks or letters of credit. Maybe you'd get a utopian society in the Federation if "replicator" technology were perfected, but it's strange that the show seems contemptuous of civilizations where people actually have to work for a living. Also, Trek doesn't need a magic fix-all-economic-problems technology. Wouldn't it be more interesting than the current setup to say that the Federation actually needs to explore space to create continued opportunity for a growing, ambitious population that still has poor people in it?
Replicator tech is itself implausible due to how it's handled. It seems to be an unlimited matter/energy conversion gadget! With such a device, who needs a matter/antimatter reactor or a phaser? Just throw a rock into the replicator and get all the energy you need! Even if that's not how it works, the Federation seems able to manipulate matter on the particle scale (for transporters at least), so why does their technology look as though it's built by conventional manufacturing methods? Why aren't there lots of privately owned mini-spaceships mining Jupiter for raw matter and building space habitats and ringworlds all over the place? Instead of an unprecedented explosion of human creativity and freedom, Trek seems to be about a central authority dominating all activity and building a benevolent empire no more imaginative than the average 4X space game. Sure, the shows' focus on military life gives us a skewed view, but why is there such limited imagination in looking at the implications of its technology?