So the obvious answer is to decriminalise carrying and using, but to severely restrict growing to licensed producers who are using recognisable (i.e. taxable) dsitribution channels. I can't see the average hippy wanting to risk jail time when they can legally buy instead of growing, the growing was always a means to a specific end (but by all means they should feel free to grow the munchies and buy the product if they're really attached to the horticultural aspects of it).
Regardless of how they spend the money (disgusting as it may be to many people), the real reason indefinite copyright is bad is because, if that artist can get paid forever for one successful piece of work, it takes away any reason they may have to produce further pieces of work in the future. The whole purpose of copyright is meant to be to ensure artists produce work, so if indefinite copyrights let them stop producing work then QED copyright is broken. If governments weren't so busy courting big media you'd hope someone there would be bright enough to see this.
You don't believe language can evolve at a much faster rate in a world that's constantly connected via the internet? Remember, back when the term tory was evolving, you were considered a wise traveller if you visited the next village over. Look at how many terms specificially invented for use with technology have already become common-place - grandparents using the term "LOL" when they wouldn't even know how to plug in a DVD player. Maybe you're right that it's currently offputting in a political party (although I'd have voted for them if they had a candidate in my area at the last election - it would send a pretty strong message) but whether it will take a lifetime for that to change depends on what happens over the next few years. The more the **AAs tar everyone as pirates, and the more people who believe IP is too restrictive use the mantle in fun, the less effective it is as a derogatory term - in any case it always takes someone to be the first to stand up and say "you're accusing me of being this thing - well you know what, I am this thing, moreover there's nothing wrong with it and I'm proud of the fact".
The problem is too many workers in country X now see this kind of basic assembly work for minimum wage as being beneath them. The only way to ever change this is to have barriers on imports and a much higher minimum wage - that will force customers to pay more for local products, but it's completely counter to global free trade, few companies will be able to break the international barrier as you almost need to already have manufacturing and distribution set up in the market you're trying to enter, whereas right now the barrier to entry is pretty low. This kind of approach would also be tremendously stifling to technological advancement (look at former eastern bloc closed markets for examples of this in the wild).
I'm not sure what the answer is - wherever there is a human who stands to gain from doing something illegal or immoral you have a weak point in the chain. Who's to say that people assembling computers in the west would be less open to bribery - it might seem that way because all the current attack vectors are happening in China, but that is likely nothing more than coincidence because that's where all the manufacturing happens coupled with the fact that it's only relatively recently that people stood to profit substantially from this kind of attack.
At the very least that shows people behind the firewall that certain things are being censored. China's original stance was that Google should be complicit in the censorship by hiding even this fact and just removing blacklisted sites from the search results. If you've never lived in a democracy and you google "democracy" and get zero results (or every page in the results is a negative opinion of democracy) you might get the viewpoint that democracy is bad. If you do the same search and most of the links are firewalled, you might wonder exactly what they're trying to hide (also, Google cache seems to work, although what the exact position is behind the firewall we can't really say).
Actually a refusal to co-operate at all can be effective, but only when it's universal. Your example of aliens, for instance - for all we know they have massively advanced technologies and we are suffering by the lack of any trade, but imagine if we were trading with other companies in the Hedron Nebula, but Xeyon Inc refused to trade with us - then they'd only be hurting themselves. To bring it back to Earth, the second Google pulled out, MS and the others would rush to fill the void, but if all companies outside China refused to do business with China it could make a real difference (in reality this will never happen, in which case your argument that Google can do more from the inside than the sidelines is of course right).
I doubt that. It's true that, in most cases, the duty of the directors is to steer the company to generate money for the shareholders, and they can be liable if they fail to do this. In Google's case, however, the "Do No Evil" approach is so integral to their image, if they were to commit an act the world considered evil, the harm this would do to their image would be sufficient defence to argue against committing the act, even if it resulted in lesser profits. It's in neither the shareholders' nor the company's best interests to maximise profits at the expense of committing commercial suicide (whether it would actually make any difference to whether people used it is another matter, but the threat is probably sufficient that they can use it to justify taking the moral high ground at the expense of greater profits).
Similarly amusing to equate freedom and democracy. I live in a democracy where my freedoms have been eroded constantly by my own government in the name of chasing the terrorist bogeyman. It might be a world away from what's happening in China, but it's still hardly freedom.
I actually tried this (visiting Google China and clicking through to HK) a week ago when I read about it elsewhere, so when I read this story today I assumed they'd changed their stance again. It turns out it was just the/. one-week breaking news time delay effect (or else this is a dupe and it was here I originally read about it). I wonder how many of the people accusing Google are doing so from the basis of the same misunderstanding (of course, it's still arguable they should have checked the site first, but at least the confusion is a tad more understandable in that case).
I'd love to be able to split the screen between a normal 2D view of a game and television or a movie, and it seems like the tech to do that right now should be reasonably trivial. Living with a partner who isn't into games, and being someone who isn't really into TV, this would mean neither had to sacrifice time in front of the idiot box so the other could use it. Also, it would have been a godsend when I lived at home with my parents - being able to blast away on the console while they watched crummy made-for-TV movies without having to shut myself away in my room (we didn't have a basement, sorry) on the crappy portable TV would have been great.
Apart from the addition of a pair of unwieldy 3D glasses and the extra resources required to show two views at once when the player is only ever going to see one of them at a time, I don't see what that would add over a button that switched between two views.
That's great if you have the space. I only have space for one decent size TV in the living room (and putting two small ones in there would not be a reasonable alternative), and the only other way to do this is to have the players in different rooms (which also probably means two consoles or computers and two copies of the game in addition to the extra screen). For most people this will be a very practical way of having full screen multiplayer on the living room - for anyone serious about multiplayer it's probably less so, but still might be nice for an informal gaming session while relaxing on the couch.
It might not be great for spectators, but it would also be better for deathmatch type games, where having split screen takes away some of the fun because you can see your opponent is waiting around the next corner. Mind you, I can stomach about an hour, maybe 90 minutes of cinema 3D glasses tops, so I can't see me ever getting into 3D in the home unless something is drastically improved (not to mention, as a spectacle wearer already and pretty short-sighted at that, just the practicality of wearing 3D glasses needs addressing).
Add to that content providers seeing this as a way to add another layer of, if not complexity (I don't know if there are issues with compression and 3D for instance), then at least file size, to their product to make it harder to distribute on "teh intarwebs", i.e. make the files so big that a physical medium is the most convenient form of distribution.
That shouldn't be necessary as prior art is a defence to patent infringement, and there must be literally thousands (or at the very least hundreds) of examples of split-screen games that pre-date the patent.
Of course, that's just about the situation already except in the case of a few notable exceptions. It's easier for devs to just insist multiplayer is online or requires two consoles on a LAN (not to mention more profitable to require two copies of the game) than it is to optimise for split-screen multiplayer. This has been the de facto position for a while now, the bigger question would be whether this new technology can revive multiplayer on a single console or whether it will simply replace split screen as the niche offering of a handful of games.
Ditto on thinking of this a while ago - I had the same thought after watching Avatar in 3D (in fact, I was thinking about it at the time to take my mind off Avatar, but I digress...) and the two movie one screen concept was the first that sprang to my mind. I was thinking, with headsets delivering two soundtracks, I could be watching something entirely different to everyone else right now, although admittedly we'd all be watching in 2D. The next step was using this in the home so kids can watch their shows while adults watch the news or something (there was a lot of talk of 3D television being the next big in home entertainment hook), and of course the next logical step is using it for co-op games, or even letting me play games while my partner watches a slushy movie. I've also spoken to other people who have had exactly the same idea independently so this is far from non-obvious use of the technology.
Of course, the difference is Top Gear wouldn't be in the media's line of fire for one of the worst man-made ecological disasters in our history. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with trying to clean up an image for display, but when a company is already under immense scrutiny for their actions and their attempts to skew the truth of those actions, it's a poorly judged mis-step to then allow themselves to get called out for doctoring photos of the clean up operation (especially following on the heels of stories about how they are supposedly making it difficult for others to photograph the clean up operation - again regardless of the validity of that story), whatever the reason.
The thing is, BP and the other big oil companies (not to mention most big multi-national corporations) have been crapping all over other people's yards for decades. The reason there's generally not much uproar is because it's some third world country, the story might make the news for a couple of days then they do their usual job of sweeping it all under the carpet and it's business as usual. The only difference here is that it's the US that's the victim this time, so suddenly it's big news and they can't just wave their hand (or a chequebook) and make the problem disappear. Really we should be using this as a reason to look at how these mega-corporations conduct business globally, but actually all that will happen is BP will be hung out to dry and once again it will be business as usual (and this is in no way a defence of BP, they deserved to be hung out to dry long before now so if this takes them down it's not like it wouldn't be richly deserved, but I can guarantee that we'll learn absolutely nothing from this mess).
The prisoner he's talking about is Lockerbie bomber, al-Megrahi, who was released on compassionate grounds to die at home of agressive cancer, the recent news being that he might now live another ten years or more (although why his release should cause anti-British feeling is beyond me, it was a Scottish executive decision that most people in Britain were against and the British parliament had no say in, and in fact I think the three parties were all against the release). And if "[the] guy probably would have been released on appeal anyway", then he should have appealed. As it stands he's a convicted terrorist guilty of the biggest mass murder in the country's history and he was allowed to go home on "compassionate" grounds, it's not just people in the US who were angry over this by a long chalk. It was heavily rumoured at the time that the motivator in Scotland releasing al-Megrahi was Libyan oil (lots of oil companies wanted to open talks with Libya but al-Megrahi's imprisonment was a barrier, not to mention Scotland has a lot of experience in the oil industry and stands to benefit selling that expertise) - of course the oil link was widely refuted at the time, but now there have been suggestions (again refuted) that BP directly lobbied for the release.
Surely the less powerful backlight is more about extended battery life than cutting costs (I doubt there's much cost difference between a dim and a bright backlight, the expense is all after-sale on the customer's side). If glossy over matt lets me have a Core 2 duo laptop with a 5 hour battery life then I'm more than happy to make the compromise.
Slashdot Mirror
Cancer? I'm sure a headline for a cure will appear on /. soon, o yeah and they have not proved it causes it no more than car exhaust!!!
I don't know about you, but just to be on the safe side I don't huff on my car's exhaust pipe.
Oblig. Shelldon: "Oh, well, this would be one of those circumstances that people unfamiliar with the law of large numbers would call a coincidence."
So the obvious answer is to decriminalise carrying and using, but to severely restrict growing to licensed producers who are using recognisable (i.e. taxable) dsitribution channels. I can't see the average hippy wanting to risk jail time when they can legally buy instead of growing, the growing was always a means to a specific end (but by all means they should feel free to grow the munchies and buy the product if they're really attached to the horticultural aspects of it).
Marijuana does not even impair your ability to drive a car
From the linked article:
Regardless of how they spend the money (disgusting as it may be to many people), the real reason indefinite copyright is bad is because, if that artist can get paid forever for one successful piece of work, it takes away any reason they may have to produce further pieces of work in the future. The whole purpose of copyright is meant to be to ensure artists produce work, so if indefinite copyrights let them stop producing work then QED copyright is broken. If governments weren't so busy courting big media you'd hope someone there would be bright enough to see this.
You don't produce dance music by beating something for more than ten minutes. You beat it once, sample it over some disco and repeat it infinitely.
You don't believe language can evolve at a much faster rate in a world that's constantly connected via the internet? Remember, back when the term tory was evolving, you were considered a wise traveller if you visited the next village over. Look at how many terms specificially invented for use with technology have already become common-place - grandparents using the term "LOL" when they wouldn't even know how to plug in a DVD player. Maybe you're right that it's currently offputting in a political party (although I'd have voted for them if they had a candidate in my area at the last election - it would send a pretty strong message) but whether it will take a lifetime for that to change depends on what happens over the next few years. The more the **AAs tar everyone as pirates, and the more people who believe IP is too restrictive use the mantle in fun, the less effective it is as a derogatory term - in any case it always takes someone to be the first to stand up and say "you're accusing me of being this thing - well you know what, I am this thing, moreover there's nothing wrong with it and I'm proud of the fact".
The problem is too many workers in country X now see this kind of basic assembly work for minimum wage as being beneath them. The only way to ever change this is to have barriers on imports and a much higher minimum wage - that will force customers to pay more for local products, but it's completely counter to global free trade, few companies will be able to break the international barrier as you almost need to already have manufacturing and distribution set up in the market you're trying to enter, whereas right now the barrier to entry is pretty low. This kind of approach would also be tremendously stifling to technological advancement (look at former eastern bloc closed markets for examples of this in the wild).
I'm not sure what the answer is - wherever there is a human who stands to gain from doing something illegal or immoral you have a weak point in the chain. Who's to say that people assembling computers in the west would be less open to bribery - it might seem that way because all the current attack vectors are happening in China, but that is likely nothing more than coincidence because that's where all the manufacturing happens coupled with the fact that it's only relatively recently that people stood to profit substantially from this kind of attack.
At the very least that shows people behind the firewall that certain things are being censored. China's original stance was that Google should be complicit in the censorship by hiding even this fact and just removing blacklisted sites from the search results. If you've never lived in a democracy and you google "democracy" and get zero results (or every page in the results is a negative opinion of democracy) you might get the viewpoint that democracy is bad. If you do the same search and most of the links are firewalled, you might wonder exactly what they're trying to hide (also, Google cache seems to work, although what the exact position is behind the firewall we can't really say).
Actually a refusal to co-operate at all can be effective, but only when it's universal. Your example of aliens, for instance - for all we know they have massively advanced technologies and we are suffering by the lack of any trade, but imagine if we were trading with other companies in the Hedron Nebula, but Xeyon Inc refused to trade with us - then they'd only be hurting themselves. To bring it back to Earth, the second Google pulled out, MS and the others would rush to fill the void, but if all companies outside China refused to do business with China it could make a real difference (in reality this will never happen, in which case your argument that Google can do more from the inside than the sidelines is of course right).
I doubt that. It's true that, in most cases, the duty of the directors is to steer the company to generate money for the shareholders, and they can be liable if they fail to do this. In Google's case, however, the "Do No Evil" approach is so integral to their image, if they were to commit an act the world considered evil, the harm this would do to their image would be sufficient defence to argue against committing the act, even if it resulted in lesser profits. It's in neither the shareholders' nor the company's best interests to maximise profits at the expense of committing commercial suicide (whether it would actually make any difference to whether people used it is another matter, but the threat is probably sufficient that they can use it to justify taking the moral high ground at the expense of greater profits).
Similarly amusing to equate freedom and democracy. I live in a democracy where my freedoms have been eroded constantly by my own government in the name of chasing the terrorist bogeyman. It might be a world away from what's happening in China, but it's still hardly freedom.
I actually tried this (visiting Google China and clicking through to HK) a week ago when I read about it elsewhere, so when I read this story today I assumed they'd changed their stance again. It turns out it was just the /. one-week breaking news time delay effect (or else this is a dupe and it was here I originally read about it). I wonder how many of the people accusing Google are doing so from the basis of the same misunderstanding (of course, it's still arguable they should have checked the site first, but at least the confusion is a tad more understandable in that case).
I'd love to be able to split the screen between a normal 2D view of a game and television or a movie, and it seems like the tech to do that right now should be reasonably trivial. Living with a partner who isn't into games, and being someone who isn't really into TV, this would mean neither had to sacrifice time in front of the idiot box so the other could use it. Also, it would have been a godsend when I lived at home with my parents - being able to blast away on the console while they watched crummy made-for-TV movies without having to shut myself away in my room (we didn't have a basement, sorry) on the crappy portable TV would have been great.
Apart from the addition of a pair of unwieldy 3D glasses and the extra resources required to show two views at once when the player is only ever going to see one of them at a time, I don't see what that would add over a button that switched between two views.
That's great if you have the space. I only have space for one decent size TV in the living room (and putting two small ones in there would not be a reasonable alternative), and the only other way to do this is to have the players in different rooms (which also probably means two consoles or computers and two copies of the game in addition to the extra screen). For most people this will be a very practical way of having full screen multiplayer on the living room - for anyone serious about multiplayer it's probably less so, but still might be nice for an informal gaming session while relaxing on the couch.
It might not be great for spectators, but it would also be better for deathmatch type games, where having split screen takes away some of the fun because you can see your opponent is waiting around the next corner. Mind you, I can stomach about an hour, maybe 90 minutes of cinema 3D glasses tops, so I can't see me ever getting into 3D in the home unless something is drastically improved (not to mention, as a spectacle wearer already and pretty short-sighted at that, just the practicality of wearing 3D glasses needs addressing).
Add to that content providers seeing this as a way to add another layer of, if not complexity (I don't know if there are issues with compression and 3D for instance), then at least file size, to their product to make it harder to distribute on "teh intarwebs", i.e. make the files so big that a physical medium is the most convenient form of distribution.
That shouldn't be necessary as prior art is a defence to patent infringement, and there must be literally thousands (or at the very least hundreds) of examples of split-screen games that pre-date the patent.
Of course, that's just about the situation already except in the case of a few notable exceptions. It's easier for devs to just insist multiplayer is online or requires two consoles on a LAN (not to mention more profitable to require two copies of the game) than it is to optimise for split-screen multiplayer. This has been the de facto position for a while now, the bigger question would be whether this new technology can revive multiplayer on a single console or whether it will simply replace split screen as the niche offering of a handful of games.
Ditto on thinking of this a while ago - I had the same thought after watching Avatar in 3D (in fact, I was thinking about it at the time to take my mind off Avatar, but I digress...) and the two movie one screen concept was the first that sprang to my mind. I was thinking, with headsets delivering two soundtracks, I could be watching something entirely different to everyone else right now, although admittedly we'd all be watching in 2D. The next step was using this in the home so kids can watch their shows while adults watch the news or something (there was a lot of talk of 3D television being the next big in home entertainment hook), and of course the next logical step is using it for co-op games, or even letting me play games while my partner watches a slushy movie. I've also spoken to other people who have had exactly the same idea independently so this is far from non-obvious use of the technology.
Of course, the difference is Top Gear wouldn't be in the media's line of fire for one of the worst man-made ecological disasters in our history. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with trying to clean up an image for display, but when a company is already under immense scrutiny for their actions and their attempts to skew the truth of those actions, it's a poorly judged mis-step to then allow themselves to get called out for doctoring photos of the clean up operation (especially following on the heels of stories about how they are supposedly making it difficult for others to photograph the clean up operation - again regardless of the validity of that story), whatever the reason.
The thing is, BP and the other big oil companies (not to mention most big multi-national corporations) have been crapping all over other people's yards for decades. The reason there's generally not much uproar is because it's some third world country, the story might make the news for a couple of days then they do their usual job of sweeping it all under the carpet and it's business as usual. The only difference here is that it's the US that's the victim this time, so suddenly it's big news and they can't just wave their hand (or a chequebook) and make the problem disappear. Really we should be using this as a reason to look at how these mega-corporations conduct business globally, but actually all that will happen is BP will be hung out to dry and once again it will be business as usual (and this is in no way a defence of BP, they deserved to be hung out to dry long before now so if this takes them down it's not like it wouldn't be richly deserved, but I can guarantee that we'll learn absolutely nothing from this mess).
The prisoner he's talking about is Lockerbie bomber, al-Megrahi, who was released on compassionate grounds to die at home of agressive cancer, the recent news being that he might now live another ten years or more (although why his release should cause anti-British feeling is beyond me, it was a Scottish executive decision that most people in Britain were against and the British parliament had no say in, and in fact I think the three parties were all against the release). And if "[the] guy probably would have been released on appeal anyway", then he should have appealed. As it stands he's a convicted terrorist guilty of the biggest mass murder in the country's history and he was allowed to go home on "compassionate" grounds, it's not just people in the US who were angry over this by a long chalk. It was heavily rumoured at the time that the motivator in Scotland releasing al-Megrahi was Libyan oil (lots of oil companies wanted to open talks with Libya but al-Megrahi's imprisonment was a barrier, not to mention Scotland has a lot of experience in the oil industry and stands to benefit selling that expertise) - of course the oil link was widely refuted at the time, but now there have been suggestions (again refuted) that BP directly lobbied for the release.
Surely the less powerful backlight is more about extended battery life than cutting costs (I doubt there's much cost difference between a dim and a bright backlight, the expense is all after-sale on the customer's side). If glossy over matt lets me have a Core 2 duo laptop with a 5 hour battery life then I'm more than happy to make the compromise.