For one, its more likely to use a piece of software for decades and want to avoid concerns about the vendor end-of-lifing it, and have the resources (provided it has access to the source) to arrange its own support, so it has a lot more to gain than a consumer from OSS -- which, btw, is more than just Linux. While desktop Linux may not work "out of the box" as well as Windows (a debate for another time and place), plenty of OSS software does work out of the box as well as its commercial competition, and a lot of that is the OSS that a big purchaser like a government would be most interested in.
Sex" is a biological attribute. "Gender" is a grammatical or social construct; it has also recently come to be widely used to refer to sexual identity.
This dichotomy is not accurate. "Gender" also refers to "sex" (in the sense of biological attribute), as any decent dictionary will tell you. Many people, particularly those that frequently have to deal with distinction between the biological attribute ("sex") and the social construct or subjective identity ("gender"), prefer to isolate the usages for clarity, but it is incorrect to assert that this is the only correct usage.
I personally agree that it is a desirable usage, though.
Nonetheless, unless you somehow know whether an unborn baby is heterosexual, homosexual, transsexual, etc., you have no idea what its sexual identity (i.e., gender) is.
The subjective identity usually identified with "gender" is orthogonal to being "heterosexual" or "homosexual" (which are sexual orientations), and as usually used it relates to "transsexual" only in that "transsexual" refers to a mismatch between biological sex and "gender" (as sexual identity). Or at least, I haven't generally seen "gender" used to refer to homosexual/heterosexual orientation (or "identity").
Anything you buy with the intent of getting a return in utility over time is investment, whether the return expected is an appreciation in resale value, a cash income stream, or just some more direct, less fungible, form of utility like entertainment.
Er, well, that may be the excuse in blade runner, but short of even more sci-fi advances in maneuverability and traffic control, a built up urban environment is bad for flying cars rather than encouraging them.
The real advantage of small personal aircraft that take off or land almost anywhere (with operating on the ground a nice bonus) is that it allows greater routing freedom without having roadways running in every conceivable direction from every conceivable location. This is probably assisted by broad suburban sprawl rather than super-developed urban areas and relatively undeveloped rural areas.
Communication technology has made it possible to transform our lives in many ways, but we haven't reached a point where the culture has re-organized around it just yet. It's still only a small fraction of people who use broad-band Internet in America, and even fewer that use it for anything more than recreation and shopping. (And what is Internet shopping really, other than mail-order without a printed catalog?)
Forget broadband -- its a much larger portion of the population that uses the internet, period, which itself is essentally completely new in the last 30 years. And, yeah, internet shopping from many e-tailers is just mail-order -- without the need to get a printed catalog mailed to you or pick one up from a dead-tree store. Which instantly gives access to several orders of magnitude more sources than 30 years ago most people would be likely to have access to through mail-order.
And that's without talking about things liek E-Bay -- sure, auctions exist off-line too, what doesn't exist is a common exchange not limited by geography and directly, practically, accessible by individuals as buyers and sellers. That's one of the key changes of the internet.
And "shopping" is pretty much the central activity of the economy, so, no, the fact that most people may "only" use the internet for shopping doesn't reduce its importance.
I love telecommuting a couple times a week, but the vast majority of people in our society are still driving in to office buildings every weekday. I'd say the invention of the cubicle wall impacted work-day culture at least as much as the invention of the computer.
You seem to be judging cultural impact by rather shallow direct impacts. Ubiquitous communication technology has impacts on people beyond their personal use of particular gadgets. Just as the airplane effects the culture beyond just the people that actually fly, so too information technology has changed culture, touching people who may not themselves directly consume much of the more well-known bits of it. The immediacy of global news is part of that effect, too.
In America, most people seem to just have their phones with them as a "safety net" device. It makes it easier to hear from their babysitter if there's a problem at home, or hear from the office if there's a crisis at work, or call for a tow truck if their car breaks down. All stuff which could be done before, but not as conveniently.
And most people use of a car is just something that could be done with a horse, just not as conveniently. Convenience effects culture (not that I think you are all that accurate in what most people use their cell phones for -- many people tell themselves that its just a "safety net" device, but really use it a lot more than that. There wouldn't be demand for plans with huge stacks of minutes if that wasn't the case.)
This is the only true cyberpunk movie that captured the spirit set mainly by Gibson in e.g. Neuromancer and by others.... What's particulary interesting about Neuromancer was, apart from the fact it was a book on many levels such as romatic or 80ties gloom thinking, it was also a warning or investigation in what tech can do to humanity.
While, certainly, Blade Runner was a movie that captured the cyberpunk spirit fairly well, so, I'd say, was Minority Report. (Totall Recall, for all its typical Schwarzenegger-vehicle focus on over-the-top action, wasn't too bad in this regard, either.)
And there are probably some examples not based on Phillip K. Dick works, as well.
Cell phones are new, but are they really such a major change to our lives?
I'd say, yes. But note that I wasn't talking about cell phones in isolation, I was talking about the pervasive array of information technology, of which cell phones and the internet are merely two of the most visible components.
But even cell phones (and directly associated technologies like SMS messaging, etc.), alone, I think are a major change, sure.
I make calls on my cell phone maybe 20 times a week, at most.
Yeah, and lots of people don't user cars that often. Or airplanes, heck, I'm having a busy flying year if I fly in one more than once in a year.
Nevertheless, they have a big effect on culture and society.
Yes, Blade Runner (if you take it as a serious attempt at predicting the future, which is itself kindof foolish) made the mistake of assuming that the advances of the next 30 years would be in many of the same areas (cars) of the last 30 years.
But, you now, cars aren't the whole of technology and culture. There have been radical changes in common-use technology and associated changes in culture in the last 30 years, they just don't mostly concerns cars.
Also, the cop car in Blade Runner could fly. Are you seriously saying we are 13 years from flying cars???
Perhaps; the Moller Skycar might well both become available and be produced in enough quantity to actually become, well, not likely affordable, per se, but accessible to more than just the super-rich by then.
The biggest changes in our culture in the last 30 years have nothing to do with transportation, whether in terms of new developments or taking what we have for granted.
Ubiquitous communication -- cell phones, internet, etc. -- that is a major change of the last 30 years.
This is the big issue, and it keeps Linux in the realm of the hobbyist market (we'll ignore the outsourced, this-is-what-you'll-get approach from a big consultancy). If Linux wants to be taken seriously, the prime things it has to get right are standardisation on some simple features (eg basic directory structure), and binary installers. No 'just./configure and./compile', just 'yum install xyz'. (or apt-get, I don't care which) that can install anything.
I find using apt-get with a decent GUI front-end to be easier than using windows binary installers (especially when it comes to resolving dependencies and, particularly, conflicting dependencies).
Of course "If Linux wants to be taken seriously..." arguments are hard to take seriously themselves -- Linux is taken seriously now. Its not competing for the unsophisiticated home user -- because a lot of things are missing simple "just works" functionality. But Joe User doesn't care if that's an abstraction built on top of apt-get or some other process that might involve building a package when it is download or whether its a simple binary installer. As long as there is a "click it and I get it" mechanism, whose security features are understandable and straightforward, that will serve the need.
There is always going to be some type of leveling.
Yes, if you redefine levelling to mean "any persistent change to a character's features" than there will always be lebelling, assuming you have a game based on persistent player avatars (which isn't the only peristent MMO possibility, though it defines the MMORPG genre).
OTOH, if you take levelling to mean a single, common unidimensional measure that applies to all characters, then, no, there doesn't have to be levelling. And, yeah, its easier to say I have a Level XX warrior, that doesn't mean it is more interesting than multidimensional variation that doesn't always increase.
No. Unlike commercial EULAs (see one that comes with Windows for example) Linux licenses are written in a clear language - what it says is what it intends.
Just like commercial EULA's, the GPL and other Free Software/Open Source license use technical language which can be unclear to people unfamiliar with either the area of law or to technical language in computing, and many are perhaps more unclear than many commercial EULA's because in their attempt to be unintimidating in size and complexity, they avoid things like sections of clarifying definitions; further, like (perhaps worse than) commercial EULA's, Free Software/Open Source licenses often used strained sentence structures which make it unclear where provisions apply (a good example, IMO, being section 2 of the GPL, where it is ambiguous which restrictions apply to all modifications, and which apply to distribution.)
From users point of view all are equally good as they allow one to use the program and perform personal modifications.
Well, sure, that's the selling point; the actual terms of the specific agreements may be less clear on the exact degree of freedom granted.
DRM ultimately relies on security-through-obscurity (complemented by security-through-heavy-handed-government-action, see DeCSS), because it relies on the authorized user of data being able to use the data stream without actually being able to access the data stream.
If authorized users also had information on how the system worked, they'd be able to get their DRM'd data out into the clear and do with it whatever they wanted.
This is like saying the DVD Consortium is anti-DRM, because multiple companies belong.
There is a difference between a group cooperating on one standard (who thus all have a motive to see it protected), and making competing players reveal to each other information about a system that relies on obscurity to maintain its key function.
Allowing the former is not anti-DRM. Mandating the latter is, or at least, anti-the-existing-systems-of-DRM. And by de facto mandating a common standard (as long as their are competing standards whose detaials must be revealed to the competition, partisans of one side will have a strong incentive to try to ensure that information about the other sides system that facilitates breaking it leaks), weakens DRM, because any crack developed will be universally useful. Now, that's a cost the DVD consortium was willing to accept because they weren't, the way the digital music sellers are, trying to control the whole distribution chain, and were relying on physical distribution where lack of interoperability would hurt everyone's sales, since B&M vendors have limited shelf-space.
AT&T is the one prohibited by law from providing this information; the government isn't prohibited from receiving it, though they are prohibited from seizing it.
So they are suing the people that broke the law.
Plus, of course, sovereign immunity makes it difficult to sue the government unless it voluntarily decides to let you.
I'd always heard that was to punish Bayer for collaborating with the Nazi party in WWII.
Not quite: the trademark was taken from Bayer as war reparations after WWI and resold to a US company; it was later lost by the US company because it had failed to prevent the term from being genericized.
Then I'm going to be a level 30 casual-playing character on that server and suddenly realize that the leader of my city has been killed by a bunch of uber-twinked 60's who ran the city over and over again until they could go through and cause the effect.
This presumes the game would be driven by a "level up" drive; while that's an easy to code concrete reward system, its not the only possible model for a game, even an MMO. A game with a more dynamic environment wouldn't, ideally, have to feature levelling up to give players an evolving set of challenges.
It's true, Blizzard has boiled down the MMORPG genre to the elements that, ideally, are most fun (quests, exploration, small group runs).
That's one part of development, the other part is finding new elements. You could look at it as a necessary Revolution/Evolution duality -- there should be a constant process of recombining existing gameplay elements to find the best combination -- and perhaps Blizzard has done that well with what is out there, currently, that works in the MMO realm.
But there also needs to be development of new gameplay elements to add to the mix (and perhaps resurrecting old ones that have fallen out because they didn't work well without some of the new ones, but might work better with them). Otherwise, the market stagnates.
And there's the problem: The developers couldn't just create a static amusement park world the way they do now. Instead, they'd have to be continually adding, changing, and removing content to create a dynamically changing universe in reaction to the players.
Or they'd have to design systems in the game that added or removed elements of content and adapted behavior dynamically in reaction to the players.
I have played MMORPGs where there was a single event that once done could be done by no others. Guess what, its annoying. Why? Because as soon as that event can be played out it will be. The one luxury an online game does not have is ability to time itself to all the players. A CRPG doesn't care, the player controls the time in the game. Someone is going to do the event first and everyone else will be left with either congratulating them or jeering the developers over how unfair it was because it happened when they were not online.
It seems to me that for a "do once" model to work there need to be a frequent-enough emergence of new things to do, and that there should be things that need done that rely on more than one small group acting, and require action over an extended time. This probably relies on getting away from tightly scripted events, though, and finding away to make adaptive, emergent challenges entertaining.
I don't think the industry is far from being able to make that kind of game.
Still the games have to be mostly predictable because it is far easier to code for that. A lot of work has to go into making sure the players cannot do things "unpredictable". Unpredictable means exploitive and abusive. Developers have to make sure what they put in the game is used as intended and if not then the abuse must not adversely affect others.
That's certainly a valid concern, and certainly controlling abuse is a concern, though whether or not tight controls on what can happen is the best way to acheive that is...well, I don't think its entirely clear. I think new "light-handed" ways of controlling abuse and subtly promoting activity that enhances enjoyment of the gamer community is one area that MMOs can be expected to advance in.
I dunno that that's all that generally true; it certainly seems to me to be punctuated by major leaps.
What the author seems to want is a many thousand player MOO or MUSH. I'm sorry to be the one to break it to him, but most people just have no interest in such an open-ended environment. MOOs and MUSHes were always more niche and less popular than their MUD brethren (though there were big ones out there, don't get me wrong.) But whereas anyone is capable of typing in a few lines of text and thus creating an object in a MOO, a modern game requires the ability to create 3D Models. And not only that to animate them. And not only that to do so well enough that it warrants repetitious viewing.
And there is plenty of that being done in the community for non-MMO games, so I don't think its beyond reason to think that there could be a significant market for an MMO game that allowed this freedom -- of course, allowing it would rather sharply erodes the developer's control of the experience.
The real problem I see isn't users creating and animating 3D models, its providing both the freedom for players to create susbtantive behaviors for custom game elements and providing some reasonable constraints on them.
That also means I can't run my own web server because if I got slashdotted, I could go bankrupt.
Metered bandwidth for servers is not unusual, and often comes with caps -- your service gets cut off if you are over your bandwidth limit, until you agree to pay for more. Presumably, household metered serice would work the same way, so if you got slashdotted, you'd just go down and be notified that your bandwidth was exceeded.
Not metering bandwidth, though, probably saves ISPs money with household users -- dealing with the additional tracking, complaints, etc. might well outweigh any benefits of metering.
You need to refer to your employee hand book again.
I don't think my employee handbook is relevant to what the Illinois school district employees are required to do, since I've never worked in Illinois, and don't work in the schools.
Faculty is *required* to report illegal activity to law enforcement.
In the schools I have worked in, this is certainly not correct. Faculty are required by law to report known or suspected child abuse to the responsible authorities (they are one of a fairly broad category of "mandatory reporters" in that sense), and they are generally required by policy to report a wide range of actions (many illegal, many not themselves certainly illegal) that threaten the safety of students, the pedagogical mission of the school, or that are done by or to students while the school is responsible for them to administrators within the school system (usually, those people are entrusted with discretion as to which to report out, and to whom, though failing to do so to the right people can result in liability if harm results and the decision wasn't justified by some other countervailing need or legal mandate.)
I suppose it's because it's pretty easy to lose a trademark, so you have to be careful, or people could be making "Bob's Frisbee's" and "Joe's Rollerblades" instead of being forced to use the less sexy descriptors.
Its exactly for this reason -- an example is found in Aspirin losing its protected status in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Is not your average computer user.
For one, its more likely to use a piece of software for decades and want to avoid concerns about the vendor end-of-lifing it, and have the resources (provided it has access to the source) to arrange its own support, so it has a lot more to gain than a consumer from OSS -- which, btw, is more than just Linux. While desktop Linux may not work "out of the box" as well as Windows (a debate for another time and place), plenty of OSS software does work out of the box as well as its commercial competition, and a lot of that is the OSS that a big purchaser like a government would be most interested in.
This dichotomy is not accurate. "Gender" also refers to "sex" (in the sense of biological attribute), as any decent dictionary will tell you. Many people, particularly those that frequently have to deal with distinction between the biological attribute ("sex") and the social construct or subjective identity ("gender"), prefer to isolate the usages for clarity, but it is incorrect to assert that this is the only correct usage.
I personally agree that it is a desirable usage, though.
The subjective identity usually identified with "gender" is orthogonal to being "heterosexual" or "homosexual" (which are sexual orientations), and as usually used it relates to "transsexual" only in that "transsexual" refers to a mismatch between biological sex and "gender" (as sexual identity). Or at least, I haven't generally seen "gender" used to refer to homosexual/heterosexual orientation (or "identity").
Anything you buy with the intent of getting a return in utility over time is investment, whether the return expected is an appreciation in resale value, a cash income stream, or just some more direct, less fungible, form of utility like entertainment.
Er, well, that may be the excuse in blade runner, but short of even more sci-fi advances in maneuverability and traffic control, a built up urban environment is bad for flying cars rather than encouraging them.
The real advantage of small personal aircraft that take off or land almost anywhere (with operating on the ground a nice bonus) is that it allows greater routing freedom without having roadways running in every conceivable direction from every conceivable location. This is probably assisted by broad suburban sprawl rather than super-developed urban areas and relatively undeveloped rural areas.
Forget broadband -- its a much larger portion of the population that uses the internet, period, which itself is essentally completely new in the last 30 years. And, yeah, internet shopping from many e-tailers is just mail-order -- without the need to get a printed catalog mailed to you or pick one up from a dead-tree store. Which instantly gives access to several orders of magnitude more sources than 30 years ago most people would be likely to have access to through mail-order.
And that's without talking about things liek E-Bay -- sure, auctions exist off-line too, what doesn't exist is a common exchange not limited by geography and directly, practically, accessible by individuals as buyers and sellers. That's one of the key changes of the internet.
And "shopping" is pretty much the central activity of the economy, so, no, the fact that most people may "only" use the internet for shopping doesn't reduce its importance.
You seem to be judging cultural impact by rather shallow direct impacts. Ubiquitous communication technology has impacts on people beyond their personal use of particular gadgets. Just as the airplane effects the culture beyond just the people that actually fly, so too information technology has changed culture, touching people who may not themselves directly consume much of the more well-known bits of it. The immediacy of global news is part of that effect, too.
And most people use of a car is just something that could be done with a horse, just not as conveniently. Convenience effects culture (not that I think you are all that accurate in what most people use their cell phones for -- many people tell themselves that its just a "safety net" device, but really use it a lot more than that. There wouldn't be demand for plans with huge stacks of minutes if that wasn't the case.)
While, certainly, Blade Runner was a movie that captured the cyberpunk spirit fairly well, so, I'd say, was Minority Report. (Totall Recall, for all its typical Schwarzenegger-vehicle focus on over-the-top action, wasn't too bad in this regard, either.)
And there are probably some examples not based on Phillip K. Dick works, as well.
I'd say, yes. But note that I wasn't talking about cell phones in isolation, I was talking about the pervasive array of information technology, of which cell phones and the internet are merely two of the most visible components.
But even cell phones (and directly associated technologies like SMS messaging, etc.), alone, I think are a major change, sure.
Yeah, and lots of people don't user cars that often. Or airplanes, heck, I'm having a busy flying year if I fly in one more than once in a year.
Nevertheless, they have a big effect on culture and society.
But, you now, cars aren't the whole of technology and culture. There have been radical changes in common-use technology and associated changes in culture in the last 30 years, they just don't mostly concerns cars.
Perhaps; the Moller Skycar might well both become available and be produced in enough quantity to actually become, well, not likely affordable, per se, but accessible to more than just the super-rich by then.
The biggest changes in our culture in the last 30 years have nothing to do with transportation, whether in terms of new developments or taking what we have for granted.
Ubiquitous communication -- cell phones, internet, etc. -- that is a major change of the last 30 years.
I find using apt-get with a decent GUI front-end to be easier than using windows binary installers (especially when it comes to resolving dependencies and, particularly, conflicting dependencies).
Of course "If Linux wants to be taken seriously..." arguments are hard to take seriously themselves -- Linux is taken seriously now. Its not competing for the unsophisiticated home user -- because a lot of things are missing simple "just works" functionality. But Joe User doesn't care if that's an abstraction built on top of apt-get or some other process that might involve building a package when it is download or whether its a simple binary installer. As long as there is a "click it and I get it" mechanism, whose security features are understandable and straightforward, that will serve the need.
Yes, if you redefine levelling to mean "any persistent change to a character's features" than there will always be lebelling, assuming you have a game based on persistent player avatars (which isn't the only peristent MMO possibility, though it defines the MMORPG genre).
OTOH, if you take levelling to mean a single, common unidimensional measure that applies to all characters, then, no, there doesn't have to be levelling. And, yeah, its easier to say I have a Level XX warrior, that doesn't mean it is more interesting than multidimensional variation that doesn't always increase.
Just like commercial EULA's, the GPL and other Free Software/Open Source license use technical language which can be unclear to people unfamiliar with either the area of law or to technical language in computing, and many are perhaps more unclear than many commercial EULA's because in their attempt to be unintimidating in size and complexity, they avoid things like sections of clarifying definitions; further, like (perhaps worse than) commercial EULA's, Free Software/Open Source licenses often used strained sentence structures which make it unclear where provisions apply (a good example, IMO, being section 2 of the GPL, where it is ambiguous which restrictions apply to all modifications, and which apply to distribution.)
Well, sure, that's the selling point; the actual terms of the specific agreements may be less clear on the exact degree of freedom granted.
If authorized users also had information on how the system worked, they'd be able to get their DRM'd data out into the clear and do with it whatever they wanted.
There is a difference between a group cooperating on one standard (who thus all have a motive to see it protected), and making competing players reveal to each other information about a system that relies on obscurity to maintain its key function.
Allowing the former is not anti-DRM. Mandating the latter is, or at least, anti-the-existing-systems-of-DRM. And by de facto mandating a common standard (as long as their are competing standards whose detaials must be revealed to the competition, partisans of one side will have a strong incentive to try to ensure that information about the other sides system that facilitates breaking it leaks), weakens DRM, because any crack developed will be universally useful. Now, that's a cost the DVD consortium was willing to accept because they weren't, the way the digital music sellers are, trying to control the whole distribution chain, and were relying on physical distribution where lack of interoperability would hurt everyone's sales, since B&M vendors have limited shelf-space.
AT&T is the one prohibited by law from providing this information; the government isn't prohibited from receiving it, though they are prohibited from seizing it.
So they are suing the people that broke the law.
Plus, of course, sovereign immunity makes it difficult to sue the government unless it voluntarily decides to let you.
Not quite: the trademark was taken from Bayer as war reparations after WWI and resold to a US company; it was later lost by the US company because it had failed to prevent the term from being genericized.
This presumes the game would be driven by a "level up" drive; while that's an easy to code concrete reward system, its not the only possible model for a game, even an MMO. A game with a more dynamic environment wouldn't, ideally, have to feature levelling up to give players an evolving set of challenges.
That's one part of development, the other part is finding new elements. You could look at it as a necessary Revolution/Evolution duality -- there should be a constant process of recombining existing gameplay elements to find the best combination -- and perhaps Blizzard has done that well with what is out there, currently, that works in the MMO realm.
But there also needs to be development of new gameplay elements to add to the mix (and perhaps resurrecting old ones that have fallen out because they didn't work well without some of the new ones, but might work better with them). Otherwise, the market stagnates.
Or they'd have to design systems in the game that added or removed elements of content and adapted behavior dynamically in reaction to the players.
It seems to me that for a "do once" model to work there need to be a frequent-enough emergence of new things to do, and that there should be things that need done that rely on more than one small group acting, and require action over an extended time. This probably relies on getting away from tightly scripted events, though, and finding away to make adaptive, emergent challenges entertaining.
I don't think the industry is far from being able to make that kind of game.
That's certainly a valid concern, and certainly controlling abuse is a concern, though whether or not tight controls on what can happen is the best way to acheive that is...well, I don't think its entirely clear. I think new "light-handed" ways of controlling abuse and subtly promoting activity that enhances enjoyment of the gamer community is one area that MMOs can be expected to advance in.
I dunno that that's all that generally true; it certainly seems to me to be punctuated by major leaps.
And there is plenty of that being done in the community for non-MMO games, so I don't think its beyond reason to think that there could be a significant market for an MMO game that allowed this freedom -- of course, allowing it would rather sharply erodes the developer's control of the experience.
The real problem I see isn't users creating and animating 3D models, its providing both the freedom for players to create susbtantive behaviors for custom game elements and providing some reasonable constraints on them.
I don't think my employee handbook is relevant to what the Illinois school district employees are required to do, since I've never worked in Illinois, and don't work in the schools.
In the schools I have worked in, this is certainly not correct. Faculty are required by law to report known or suspected child abuse to the responsible authorities (they are one of a fairly broad category of "mandatory reporters" in that sense), and they are generally required by policy to report a wide range of actions (many illegal, many not themselves certainly illegal) that threaten the safety of students, the pedagogical mission of the school, or that are done by or to students while the school is responsible for them to administrators within the school system (usually, those people are entrusted with discretion as to which to report out, and to whom, though failing to do so to the right people can result in liability if harm results and the decision wasn't justified by some other countervailing need or legal mandate.)
...has no hyphen.
Its exactly for this reason -- an example is found in Aspirin losing its protected status in the US.
...to cut down on the use of an overused, increasingly meaningless, buzzword.