ISPs want what they've always wanted - to have "unlimited" deals that they can charge a premium for, but which customers will subscribe to and not use - i.e. money for nothing. We're already paying for the content to come down the pipes, if we're not paying enough they should just tell us that, I'd rather have an honest pricing scheme than one where I don't know where I stand in terms of "fair usage" (and to me, if I'm paying for unlimited downloads, fair usage should be everything up to and including infinite downloads, but not a kilobyte more, but that's a different matter) and one where the content providers are now going to get screwed, too.
It kind of depends on how narrowly you interpret the term. The narrow definition seems to be a physical activity in which athletes participate, which would suggest that both chess and computer games are not sports. The very wide definition seems to be any recreational or fun activity, in which case they would be sports. I guess the truth is somewhere in between (playing Wii, for instance, is more strenuous than playing snooker), but actually it's just a lot easier to say "sport" than "competitive computer gaming", so I suspect the usage will stick.
The problem from the gamers' standpoint is that it will be much more necessary to change games if they're doing this competitively and want to stay at the top of the game. For the most part people will want to see matches on the latest games, while traditional sports might have been largely unchanged for decades or even centuries, the landscape for the virtual gamer would be constantly shifting. I wonder if the reason we see sports people go from one sport to another with a certain degree of success isn't just because only the sportsmen who are confident of their abilities in the other sport would consider the move. If you knew you'd suck at RU, you'd stick with RL - virtual gamers might not have that luxury.
You're confusing the concept of "news for nerds" with the concept of "news which is personally interesting to me". Nerds cover a wide spectrum of interests and nationalities. The development of these competitive tournaments in the field of gaming are certainly interesting to me on one level, even though I'm neither Korean nor into Starcraft - it's interesting to see where this is headed, and similarly interesting to see the parallels with sports (in terms of the fame of the players and even match fixing scandals now). I don't follow this too closely, I'm mildly interested, but other people follow this passionately, for that particular group of nerds, this is definitely "stuff that matters".
I assume this is their opening gambit - the customer is entitled to press for a repair or full refund if the product is not fit for purpose, but it might be that he's happy enough to have some money back if it's a feature he used rarely, so it would be silly of them not to try and mitigate their losses in this way (in fact, I think they have to attempt to mitigate the loss in order to pass the costs on to the manufacturer, which is why it's generally so damn hard to get a refund).
Indeed. The news should be "Google Earth lets scientists make discoveries... a bit cheaper than previously" - it still required specialist analytical knowledge, and honestly the story stands on its own as a scientific piece without the technology tie in, surely?
The biggest and most important achievements in science and art happened before the existence of copyright and patent laws
It's a little specious to imply that it was the lack of copyright and patent laws that caused this, no? I would contend that what really caused the greatest achievements in science and art is the ignorance/narrow culture preceding its creation.
You're missing the point - that the lack of copyright didn't cause this, obviously, but more crucially it didn't prevent it, either. None of the great artists/scientists of the period ever said, "Oh, I'm not going to get paid over and over for this one piece of work for the term of my life +95 years? Well, screw that, I'm becoming a banker", which disproves the oft-cited argument that artists need these guaranteed rights or they'd refuse to work. Sure there's risk for them because they often have to put in a lot of effort upfront without a guarantee of repayment later, but generally an artist will know whether their hard work has paid off decades before the current copyright expiration date.
Depends what OP means by "professional musicians" - if he means session musicians (i.e. the people doing radio and TV jingles, etc), well they're generally hired for a specific piece of work for which they're paid and they never own the copyright in any event. If he means artists who release singles and who perform for audiences, well they'll make money the way they currently do - through playing live concerts. This is and has always been the most lucrative part of the business for artists, if anything giving away their music for free should improve their earnings since it removes any barrier of entry for new fans to find their music.
We already had widespread non-commercial sharing of major productions prior to the internet, and the content providers didn't go out of business. The only change here is that websites now exist which profit on the process by giving easy access to that shared content in exchange for advertising hits. The focus of the law should be back on stopping those profiteers, but if someone wanted to throw up some music on his site for his friends to grab, that's no different to the days when he'd make a tape and pass it around.
The effect of this would be that casual users would continue to buy rather than download. Hardcore sharers will still go to the effort of tracking down content, either because they like hoarding, or they're true fans but broke, or they just like getting something for nothing - artists, these are not your audience, much as you'd like them to be, so stop worrying about "lost profits" from this group. At the other end you'll have people who would always buy regardless of the ease of sharing, again artists need not worry about this group, only the casual group in the middle. This approach worked in the early days of the internet, sharing sites would appear, the hardcore sharers would always find them, the casual users might drop in and out but usually didn't have the time or motivation to follow the trends. What changed was the artists (or rather, the **AA orgs) got sick of playing whack-a-mole with sharing sites and decided to go after their customers instead. There's no reason a shift of focus back to the way things were a decade ago would suddenly put them out of business
That would be almost impossible to adjudicate. Music, for instance, might be a throwaway pop tune, or it might be a cultural classic that becomes deeply ingrained in the minds of a whole generation, so a flexible copyright system would have to allow for both possibilities regardless of the format, music, video, the written word, etc. It wouldn't be enough to say "All music copyright lasts 14 years, software 7, written word 21" or similar, that would create incredible injustice and would fail at the first technical hurdle (if I sell a digital copy of a book, is it written word or software, if I have an audio book, is it music, etc). Once you have a situation like that, someone has to be in charge of determining which end of the scale every single piece of created material sits (remember, even your holiday photos on flickr or the movie you filmed on your phone are subject to copyright). Not only would that be a endless task in itself, but whoever was in charge of determining those things would be the weak point in the link, he'd have every lobbyist trying to persuade him their works needed the maximum protection. No, one arbitrary figure to cover all media is the only workable approach.
Not only that, it would discourage authors who find themselves in the position of having a long-running series suddenly becoming lazy and churning out filler volumes to squeeze money from their fans if, at some reasonable time after the first edition, another author could add to the series. Authors would have to produce consistently good works to retain those fans, and if a better writer picks up the mantle and does a better job then that is a win for the public. Sure it sucks a little for the original author, but he's made his money on the initial idea, if he doesn't have the skill to continue that then he doesn't have the god-given right to be paid no matter what - if anything his series will continue to be relevant despite his lack of skill and people may end up buying his original books on the basis of the subsequent author's work.
That is one of the best arguments on the subject I've ever seen, and surprisingly relevant considering it was made over 170 years ago.
A lot of what he has predicted has come to pass. The relentless extension of copyright has certainly diluted it in the eyes of many, even with the threat of legal action it's clear that copyright is increasingly seen as outdated and people are happy to infringe it on a daily basis, whereas if it was for a short term and could be demonstrated of proven benefit to artists rather than greedy middle men who "drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress", people would be more likely to respect it.
That's a completely different situation, since you're acting as an agent on behalf of the company when you write the software - this is already covered by agency law and doesn't need to be accounted for by a special rule of copyright.
Well the issue is that there are many words no one will ever come across in their entire life except on a scrabble board. I immediately lost interest in scrabble as soon as I realized winning was a measure of memorizing disused words.
I was the same with latin. Seriously, though, why should the length of the word factor if you're being awarded for memorising obscure words? The two letter words really only give an advantage in a close end-game, and many of the more useful ones aren't so obscure that you won't either know them already or pick them up after a couple of games. It's just a learning curve, once you've passed that, the person playing consistently longer words will almost always win (so long as their strategy with regards to tile placement doesn't suck totally), so that in itself penalises two word play.
Well I presume the noun would still need to be in the dictionary as a point of reference for challenges, which would still require the ability to spell said word. With that limit imposed there's no reason this couldn't work at tournaments, but without the latest teeny pop boy bands in the dictionary, I don't see how this would attract a younger audience - more likely just frustrate them as all their supposedly allowed words get rejected. The alternative, that it doesn't have to be a dictionary word, is just unthinkable from an adjudication perspective, literally any combination of letters could be allowed.
Scrabble has always been more about memorising letter combinations than learning or vocabulary. Sure, as an amateur a large vocabulary might help, but the best players tend to learn useful words by rote without really needing to understand what they mean. All they've done is allowed people who remember more contemporary letter combinations to play along; really it's no different to the various flavours of Trivial Pursuit centred around pop culture.
I always thought that the rule ought to be every word played should be accompanied by a description of what the word means or how it should be used, and that this too could be challenged. That way people would have to understand the words they played and the game would favour vocabulary over memory. It seems Mattel preferred to go the other way and dumb down rather than create a better tool for learning.
Well since both DoTA and WoW have their origins in Warcraft III, it's hardly surprising that they'd have a similar style. I guess they could have done something different just to avoid the obvious comparisons, but that might have changed the feel of the game, and since Warcraft was ripped off from Warhammer, which ripped off everything else in the process, it's far too incestuous a mess for anyone to begin to unravel:)
Beta testing isn't just about the game - it can also be about people's attitudes towards it. If a large enough percentage of people quit playing because it's not fun for balance reasons, sure that's not as useful as if they stay and help resolve the balance issues, but it's valuable information nevertheless which help shape the game for the public beta - from the sounds of it according to GP this approach is working.
What I'd really like to see is a study into how many speed cameras, speed bumps, one way systems, coned off areas, traffic lights, predestrian crossings, traffic jams and various other interruptions to driving you can cram into a square mile before the speed reduction is offset by the frustration quotient and it actually levels off or even increases the accident statistic. This study is all well and good if it's a minor part of your journey, but I suspect if it's replicated everywhere it will cause people to drive more recklessly through potential danger zones than they usually would, simply to offset the increased journey time - after all, if your entire journey is spent dodging parked cars, eventually you'll stop caring so much about or even noticing the parked cars, so when you get to a school zone where there's a good reason to be wary about parked cars, you'll be off guard once more.
I can imagine the faster processor, but I suspect based on past performance that they won't give multi tasking until the iteration after the next, as these are both reasonable selling points in themselves. I also think the front-facing VGA camera is a good possibility, and it if works for them in the press expect the next iPad to have this as its next big selling point. This incremental process seems to be working for them so I agree they're unlikely to throw everything into the next version when they can space it out over two releases and still get the sales, it's infuriating to us geeks who just want the latest, fastest tech, but as a marketing tool it seems to be standing them in good stead.
I'm more and more attracted to the HTC Desire, which should give me the best of both worlds, with the freedom of Android (and they're not too shabby App store) but with the slick Sense UI interface. My fiancé has the iPhone and she loves it, and while I was and still am a little tempted to get one for convenience sake, I do get the impression it won't satisfy my tech cravings as much as the HTC, not to mention I'd have to wait until summer while the HTC is all kinds of awesome right now.
Depends on the source of the rumor. Some sites got the iPad right when they predicted a large iPod Touch with 3G capabilities. But generally the rule is to wait til Apple makes an announcement.
Well in that case the source of the rumour doesn't really matter, since we have no way of verifying it before the fact. The fact that so many rumours are circulating means a ton of sites will get it right, even though their sources were probably non-existent and they were just guessing. Hell, I guessed the iPad would be a big iPod Touch with 3G, I certainly don't have any insider sources.
Slashdot Mirror
ISPs want what they've always wanted - to have "unlimited" deals that they can charge a premium for, but which customers will subscribe to and not use - i.e. money for nothing. We're already paying for the content to come down the pipes, if we're not paying enough they should just tell us that, I'd rather have an honest pricing scheme than one where I don't know where I stand in terms of "fair usage" (and to me, if I'm paying for unlimited downloads, fair usage should be everything up to and including infinite downloads, but not a kilobyte more, but that's a different matter) and one where the content providers are now going to get screwed, too.
It kind of depends on how narrowly you interpret the term. The narrow definition seems to be a physical activity in which athletes participate, which would suggest that both chess and computer games are not sports. The very wide definition seems to be any recreational or fun activity, in which case they would be sports. I guess the truth is somewhere in between (playing Wii, for instance, is more strenuous than playing snooker), but actually it's just a lot easier to say "sport" than "competitive computer gaming", so I suspect the usage will stick.
The problem from the gamers' standpoint is that it will be much more necessary to change games if they're doing this competitively and want to stay at the top of the game. For the most part people will want to see matches on the latest games, while traditional sports might have been largely unchanged for decades or even centuries, the landscape for the virtual gamer would be constantly shifting. I wonder if the reason we see sports people go from one sport to another with a certain degree of success isn't just because only the sportsmen who are confident of their abilities in the other sport would consider the move. If you knew you'd suck at RU, you'd stick with RL - virtual gamers might not have that luxury.
You're confusing the concept of "news for nerds" with the concept of "news which is personally interesting to me". Nerds cover a wide spectrum of interests and nationalities. The development of these competitive tournaments in the field of gaming are certainly interesting to me on one level, even though I'm neither Korean nor into Starcraft - it's interesting to see where this is headed, and similarly interesting to see the parallels with sports (in terms of the fame of the players and even match fixing scandals now). I don't follow this too closely, I'm mildly interested, but other people follow this passionately, for that particular group of nerds, this is definitely "stuff that matters".
I assume this is their opening gambit - the customer is entitled to press for a repair or full refund if the product is not fit for purpose, but it might be that he's happy enough to have some money back if it's a feature he used rarely, so it would be silly of them not to try and mitigate their losses in this way (in fact, I think they have to attempt to mitigate the loss in order to pass the costs on to the manufacturer, which is why it's generally so damn hard to get a refund).
Indeed. The news should be "Google Earth lets scientists make discoveries... a bit cheaper than previously" - it still required specialist analytical knowledge, and honestly the story stands on its own as a scientific piece without the technology tie in, surely?
It's a little specious to imply that it was the lack of copyright and patent laws that caused this, no? I would contend that what really caused the greatest achievements in science and art is the ignorance/narrow culture preceding its creation.
You're missing the point - that the lack of copyright didn't cause this, obviously, but more crucially it didn't prevent it, either. None of the great artists/scientists of the period ever said, "Oh, I'm not going to get paid over and over for this one piece of work for the term of my life +95 years? Well, screw that, I'm becoming a banker", which disproves the oft-cited argument that artists need these guaranteed rights or they'd refuse to work. Sure there's risk for them because they often have to put in a lot of effort upfront without a guarantee of repayment later, but generally an artist will know whether their hard work has paid off decades before the current copyright expiration date.
Depends what OP means by "professional musicians" - if he means session musicians (i.e. the people doing radio and TV jingles, etc), well they're generally hired for a specific piece of work for which they're paid and they never own the copyright in any event. If he means artists who release singles and who perform for audiences, well they'll make money the way they currently do - through playing live concerts. This is and has always been the most lucrative part of the business for artists, if anything giving away their music for free should improve their earnings since it removes any barrier of entry for new fans to find their music.
We already had widespread non-commercial sharing of major productions prior to the internet, and the content providers didn't go out of business. The only change here is that websites now exist which profit on the process by giving easy access to that shared content in exchange for advertising hits. The focus of the law should be back on stopping those profiteers, but if someone wanted to throw up some music on his site for his friends to grab, that's no different to the days when he'd make a tape and pass it around.
The effect of this would be that casual users would continue to buy rather than download. Hardcore sharers will still go to the effort of tracking down content, either because they like hoarding, or they're true fans but broke, or they just like getting something for nothing - artists, these are not your audience, much as you'd like them to be, so stop worrying about "lost profits" from this group. At the other end you'll have people who would always buy regardless of the ease of sharing, again artists need not worry about this group, only the casual group in the middle. This approach worked in the early days of the internet, sharing sites would appear, the hardcore sharers would always find them, the casual users might drop in and out but usually didn't have the time or motivation to follow the trends. What changed was the artists (or rather, the **AA orgs) got sick of playing whack-a-mole with sharing sites and decided to go after their customers instead. There's no reason a shift of focus back to the way things were a decade ago would suddenly put them out of business
That would be almost impossible to adjudicate. Music, for instance, might be a throwaway pop tune, or it might be a cultural classic that becomes deeply ingrained in the minds of a whole generation, so a flexible copyright system would have to allow for both possibilities regardless of the format, music, video, the written word, etc. It wouldn't be enough to say "All music copyright lasts 14 years, software 7, written word 21" or similar, that would create incredible injustice and would fail at the first technical hurdle (if I sell a digital copy of a book, is it written word or software, if I have an audio book, is it music, etc). Once you have a situation like that, someone has to be in charge of determining which end of the scale every single piece of created material sits (remember, even your holiday photos on flickr or the movie you filmed on your phone are subject to copyright). Not only would that be a endless task in itself, but whoever was in charge of determining those things would be the weak point in the link, he'd have every lobbyist trying to persuade him their works needed the maximum protection. No, one arbitrary figure to cover all media is the only workable approach.
Not only that, it would discourage authors who find themselves in the position of having a long-running series suddenly becoming lazy and churning out filler volumes to squeeze money from their fans if, at some reasonable time after the first edition, another author could add to the series. Authors would have to produce consistently good works to retain those fans, and if a better writer picks up the mantle and does a better job then that is a win for the public. Sure it sucks a little for the original author, but he's made his money on the initial idea, if he doesn't have the skill to continue that then he doesn't have the god-given right to be paid no matter what - if anything his series will continue to be relevant despite his lack of skill and people may end up buying his original books on the basis of the subsequent author's work.
That is one of the best arguments on the subject I've ever seen, and surprisingly relevant considering it was made over 170 years ago.
A lot of what he has predicted has come to pass. The relentless extension of copyright has certainly diluted it in the eyes of many, even with the threat of legal action it's clear that copyright is increasingly seen as outdated and people are happy to infringe it on a daily basis, whereas if it was for a short term and could be demonstrated of proven benefit to artists rather than greedy middle men who "drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress", people would be more likely to respect it.
That's a completely different situation, since you're acting as an agent on behalf of the company when you write the software - this is already covered by agency law and doesn't need to be accounted for by a special rule of copyright.
That's not a knife...now that's a knife!
No it's not, that's a spoon.
Yes, I've played knifey-spoony before.
Well the issue is that there are many words no one will ever come across in their entire life except on a scrabble board. I immediately lost interest in scrabble as soon as I realized winning was a measure of memorizing disused words.
I was the same with latin. Seriously, though, why should the length of the word factor if you're being awarded for memorising obscure words? The two letter words really only give an advantage in a close end-game, and many of the more useful ones aren't so obscure that you won't either know them already or pick them up after a couple of games. It's just a learning curve, once you've passed that, the person playing consistently longer words will almost always win (so long as their strategy with regards to tile placement doesn't suck totally), so that in itself penalises two word play.
Well I presume the noun would still need to be in the dictionary as a point of reference for challenges, which would still require the ability to spell said word. With that limit imposed there's no reason this couldn't work at tournaments, but without the latest teeny pop boy bands in the dictionary, I don't see how this would attract a younger audience - more likely just frustrate them as all their supposedly allowed words get rejected. The alternative, that it doesn't have to be a dictionary word, is just unthinkable from an adjudication perspective, literally any combination of letters could be allowed.
Bring on the Secret Agent Laser Obstacle Scrabble!
Scrabble has always been more about memorising letter combinations than learning or vocabulary. Sure, as an amateur a large vocabulary might help, but the best players tend to learn useful words by rote without really needing to understand what they mean. All they've done is allowed people who remember more contemporary letter combinations to play along; really it's no different to the various flavours of Trivial Pursuit centred around pop culture.
I always thought that the rule ought to be every word played should be accompanied by a description of what the word means or how it should be used, and that this too could be challenged. That way people would have to understand the words they played and the game would favour vocabulary over memory. It seems Mattel preferred to go the other way and dumb down rather than create a better tool for learning.
Well since both DoTA and WoW have their origins in Warcraft III, it's hardly surprising that they'd have a similar style. I guess they could have done something different just to avoid the obvious comparisons, but that might have changed the feel of the game, and since Warcraft was ripped off from Warhammer, which ripped off everything else in the process, it's far too incestuous a mess for anyone to begin to unravel :)
Beta testing isn't just about the game - it can also be about people's attitudes towards it. If a large enough percentage of people quit playing because it's not fun for balance reasons, sure that's not as useful as if they stay and help resolve the balance issues, but it's valuable information nevertheless which help shape the game for the public beta - from the sounds of it according to GP this approach is working.
My cynical side suggests the accident rates are lower in the UK because 90% of the cars are stuck in permanent gridlock on the M25...
What I'd really like to see is a study into how many speed cameras, speed bumps, one way systems, coned off areas, traffic lights, predestrian crossings, traffic jams and various other interruptions to driving you can cram into a square mile before the speed reduction is offset by the frustration quotient and it actually levels off or even increases the accident statistic. This study is all well and good if it's a minor part of your journey, but I suspect if it's replicated everywhere it will cause people to drive more recklessly through potential danger zones than they usually would, simply to offset the increased journey time - after all, if your entire journey is spent dodging parked cars, eventually you'll stop caring so much about or even noticing the parked cars, so when you get to a school zone where there's a good reason to be wary about parked cars, you'll be off guard once more.
I can imagine the faster processor, but I suspect based on past performance that they won't give multi tasking until the iteration after the next, as these are both reasonable selling points in themselves. I also think the front-facing VGA camera is a good possibility, and it if works for them in the press expect the next iPad to have this as its next big selling point. This incremental process seems to be working for them so I agree they're unlikely to throw everything into the next version when they can space it out over two releases and still get the sales, it's infuriating to us geeks who just want the latest, fastest tech, but as a marketing tool it seems to be standing them in good stead.
I'm more and more attracted to the HTC Desire, which should give me the best of both worlds, with the freedom of Android (and they're not too shabby App store) but with the slick Sense UI interface. My fiancé has the iPhone and she loves it, and while I was and still am a little tempted to get one for convenience sake, I do get the impression it won't satisfy my tech cravings as much as the HTC, not to mention I'd have to wait until summer while the HTC is all kinds of awesome right now.
Depends on the source of the rumor. Some sites got the iPad right when they predicted a large iPod Touch with 3G capabilities. But generally the rule is to wait til Apple makes an announcement.
Well in that case the source of the rumour doesn't really matter, since we have no way of verifying it before the fact. The fact that so many rumours are circulating means a ton of sites will get it right, even though their sources were probably non-existent and they were just guessing. Hell, I guessed the iPad would be a big iPod Touch with 3G, I certainly don't have any insider sources.