I suppose you'd have fit right in in Germany circa WWII.
No wonder our country is being dismantled, destroyed and fed to corporations. Because "life's not fair" and voting and taxes are our only responsibilities to it. Fixing it when it's broken and causing additional, unnecessary unfairness, well that's somebody else's problem.
Oh, and no, I don't know what to do about it either--but dismissing evil behavior offhand is not even a possibility.
I probably wouldn't have ranted if your post had been modded funny (as you probably intended) rather than insightful.
Perhaps they could add something more fun than "Buying Stuff" instead. Even Pokemon had a game to play while you were mindlessly collecting "them all".
Try buying an iPod accessory on the way out of town to help on your long trip, then, while driving, realize that you don't have any cutting implements.
Can you sue the manufacture for the ensuing multi-car rage-inspired collision?
An organization is made up of a lot of people--the CEO doesn't make every decision, but you're right, he's responsible for them.
So, what have they done. Typically legal manipulation to improve their stockholders position in relation to other companies. Sometimes the manipulation was questionable/illegal, but I'm sure they never saw it that way (it's a very strong human tendency to mentally justify your position--For instance, people who sell art tend to believe in strong copyright laws, almost to the person).
Now, me personally, I'm not really pro-American, I think we're dangerous, but most people would say it was a good thing to have a leader who put his country first and did everything he could for the citizens of that country. It's not like he was lying or cheating for personal gain like EVERY POLITICIAN OUT THERE, I think he just set his mind on making Microsoft the best it could be and made some stupid decisions based on that.
(Honestly, I think the foundation may be his way of recognizing that and trying to give back)
As a person, I find his qualities generally admirable. As a manager I find his skills impressive.
Do you really think that when Microsoft acted dishonestly, Bill actually thought about it and told his staff "Hey, let's lie to crush this other company!"? I just can't see any justification for that... I think he believed what he was doing was honest and the best overall for his company (and therefore, for everyone). Being a little deluded is an attribute every human has, at least it's just a little delusion and not the complete fantasy world that GWB and most of his staff live in.
Are you really saying that you prefer a career politician over Bill?
I agree, most sales/project managers these days did not come from an engineering background. When I was forming that post I was constantly finding that I had to stick with the good qualities of engineers and managers with an engineering background and shy away from managers with a management background and marketing.
For instance, most engineers understand that contracting work to India doesn't work. It takes a year before they can actually be productive--and yet I've had managers repeatedly say that THEY can make it work. The engineer observes the repeated failures and says no, but of course, the manager is the one saying what upper management wants to hear, so...
And of course, lawyers are WAY worse than managers, at least managers occasionally get exposed to good practices.
A good engineer or manager will evaluate his past schedule performance and use the evaluation to adjust his future schedules. Could you even imagine a lawyer or politician doing something like that?
This is possible, but for comparison, we have a server running an emulator that we wrote (My group, as I said I'm not much of a unix head). Each person runs their own emulator. There are 10 people running typically, all logging in and starting the emulator, connecting and reconnecting constantly. The emulator crashes sometimes, or we get might make a bad build.
Many people also telnet in to use it as a secondary workstation (they prefer working in Unix, but run windows at their desk).
I've yet to hear of it crashing. I know my server stays up from the time I start it until I stop it without exception.
That's a FAR CRY from a clean-room system just running one app that was created by the same company that created the OS.
How long can you keep a windows Hydra server running 10 different logins running beta application software running? In my experience, you would have to reboot weekly at BEST even with win2K pro server--if it was XP I'd say daily.
I could do that, the problem generally occurs on a full-screen game that has taken over the keyboard and monitor, so I can't get to a shell. I never thought of telnetting in from another PC and killing it though--that would totally work.
GridBagLayout is intended for use by GUI builders only. Not understanding that fact emphasizes your point about a lack of experience (competence is a little much).
Every java programmer I've known nests BorderLayout and other common layouts that fit the need.
But I understand the Mac interface builder is pretty good. So is the VB one by the way. When either works for all platforms and allows the GUI to be manipulated by code as easily as with java, I may re-evaluate it. (For instance, I used to use VB and to create a new control with code at runtime was a terrible mess of hidden control arrays... I hope it got better)
Java's slower development of toolkits is akin to complaining that jet liners don't have parachutes. Sure it might help to add them, but rarely and not much--so we just don't. I really would, in fact, avoid airlines that thought they were a good idea.
or really anyone who understands engineering and responsibility.
GWB Couldn't last a week in any engineering capacity--not just because he is an absolute idiot, but because he has no concept of responsibility, honesty, fairness, ethics, or any of another hundred positive values.
Not that all engineers are great at all areas, but--well for instance.
Could you imagine someone with significant engineering experience going into a project without defining how the project ends? That's a first time consulting mistake that you never make again. Engineers tend to be a little more logical about how we go through things... When you learn coding you don't only learn how to write code, you learn to examine the different paths that each decision can take. We may not practice it every day at home, but when we are at work, we generally make logical decisions based on the information we have.
And honestly, I'd love to get anyone in there who hadn't been beaten down by the entire political process. Someone who hasn't been around so long that they consider lying an imperative and so normal that it's not even an issue (like Bush lying about Rumsfield before the election, then afterwards admitting without shame that he lied). These are our servants, To hide information by lying in order to effect the political process IS TREASON, period.
So yeah, I'd vote for him, campaign for him, whatever it takes.
I've always wondered why simply serializing a GUI wasn't used more in Java. Perhaps because Swing is so easy to use. Most java programmers I've known in the past shunned any type of GUI development tool in favor of hand-coding swing because it's so much more straight forward.
Also, it's difficult to get reuse out of a GUI editing tool, but very easy to get it by hand-coding. I generally write factory-type code that handles generating menus, buttons and linked Actions together, in a GUI tool you will often end up having to deal with each of these separately.
Much of the GUI code I've had to deal with is in the form of Properties sheets (large number of controls in predictable patterns). You absolutely should never generate this kind of GUI--or hand code the gui itself for that matter. The entire GUI should be generated from data files.
So in the past, RAD tools for swing were used by more amateur less professional users, and the amateur users are going to feel much more comfortable with generated code. Now that the tools are coming up to the point where professionals are starting to use them, I think we'll see a lot more cases of "Serialize out a finished screen at design time" and "Serialize it back in at runtime". (This was in some of SUN's original Java tools if I remember correctly).
Hmm, just one warning. If you think you have never been rooted, you are probably wrong.
I hope you are not going by the popular virus systems. Norton doesn't ever detect rootkits as far as I know. The other one (McAfee?) detected one once, but I wouldn't think it detects them all.
Run rootkit revealer and be sure to walk through all the results--It's a really annoying task but very enlightening.
I rarely use Linux, but by what means are you judging stability?
I can keep a linux system up and running for years with a handful of services, and I'm horrid at unix. For instance, I know "dd", ":q", ":wq", "i", "a" from VI, that's IT.
On the other hand, I'm pretty much a windows expert. I can do pretty much anything with a windows machine EXCEPT keep it running for more than a month. I'm not talking windows expert as in the guy in your family that helps with PCs, I'm speaking as the guy who helps the IT department when they get stuck.
How about hackability? I don't think I've ever seen a rooted Linux machine (but as I said, I don't get a ton of exposure to Linux workstations, maybe I don't know?)--yet I find it rare when dealing with a PC over 6 months old to not have a rootkit or some such garbage installed. I keep a Linux machine at home and won't do financial transactions on any of my 4 windows PCs or this work pc I'm on now.
I admit I'm talking different uses. PCs I've used have generally had apps installed and uninstalled over time, and are in a pretty flakey condition within a year. The Linux pc's I've set up are generally fire-and-forget, but as I said, I do run one linux laptop where I load bunches of apps, delete bunches of apps, etc and it's still crashless (well, apps lock up sometimes and I'm sometimes not good enough to shut them down without rebooting the laptop, but it could be done if I was better with Linux.)
Also: a "Good" windows admin will schedule reboots daily or weekly. I've never heard of a "Good" linux admin doing that. Doesn't that alone say a lot about general stability?
Did you have some different definition of stability than uptime (no crashes, no reboots) and a lack of degradation over time?
Pot is not known to be physically addictive, but you get addicted to the "Fun" and the mindset. Many addictions are that way--gambling, exercise, etc.
As I had it explained to me once--mental addictions are actually physical addictions to chemicals your brain creates when it's happy or wants to be happy (Dopamine), and this is the mechanism of most (all?) addictive drugs as well--they manipulate your dopamine receptors.
That said, I'm getting sick of people using any sort of addiction as an excuse.
How many recent scandals were attributed to alcohol addiction?
When you start with any drug--be it coffee, alcohol, chocolate or WOW--You NEED TO UNDERSTAND that you may not be able to handle it, and weather or not you understand the addiction potential, it's still COMPLETELY your fault because you choose to do it in the first place.
It's as much your fault that you were sending sexual text messages to young children, getting illegal pills from your maid, got pregnant in the bar, robbed a house or whatever stupid thing your addiction caused you to do.
There, now that the fault/responsibility problem is understood, all we need to do is come up with an overhaul for the entire rehabilitation system and we'll be on our way.
Perhaps it will help put the breaks on globalism and the patent/copyright feeding frenzy. It's obvious that we are going to have legal problems, to not resolve them up-front seems pretty crazy, but since greed got us where we are now, maybe it can get us out too.
Close. The actual statement should read more like "what course of action will be generally perceived to have the greatest benefit to those making the decisions"
Even if you refactor "those making the decisions" to the company, you can't get away from the fact that if you can alter perceptions of the decision makers, you completely alter the course and outcome of the project.
I hadn't thought of that, if it's implemented that way then you are absolutely right, it can't really be protected. Well, you could encrypt it and pass it down, but really anything that runs on a client machine is unsafe.
You could have code execute on the server and just pass "actions" to the client such as move this graphic over here or cycle these 5 graphics, but that's probably not how it's done.
Personally I'm for an open, copy everything system, but I believe that the basic concept behind the "Limited Monopoly for inventors" is a good concept, but it's been so corrupted as to be a n absolute evil in its current state.
If you are saying that if someone wants to reverse-engineer an in-game item, there is nothing to be done, I agree.
If you are saying that the game creators cannot stop in-game copying, I gotta kind of disagree there. It would be absolutely possible for them to hide all the code for a given item from other programs.
You seem to be saying they should not stop copying--gotta disagree with that.
If someone in-game spends 2 years and codes up some giant magnificent edifice with the expectation that he can sell copies for $5000 a piece, he probably won't do so if he finds that the first person he sells it to can charge $2.50 to sell copies.
I realize that it's an artificial limitation, but then so is the patent system.
The ultimate for everyone would be to allow a creator to "buy" a patent period on any in-game item he creates, and for that time nobody else can read the code, but afterwards the code can be read and rewritten by anyone so that the overall quality of in-game objects increases.
This is very similar to how patents were INTENDED to work in the real world, but corporate corruption can destroy any good idea.
Now that I think about it, buying a timed patent/copyright would be an interesting idea--with varying prices dependent on how long you wanted to keep the idea/object/art protected. Another nice limitation might be total $ made on the product. After $1,000,000 profit the protection expires. Perhaps you could buy higher profit limits (another income stream for the government, offset some taxes perhaps).
I'm a moderator and I'm really pissed of that there isn't a -1 completely wrong.
A copy of a Picaso doesn't lower the value of the original--but if it was the ability to make an EXACT copy, of course it would. If you couldn't tell the difference between the original and the copies, then the original is only worth what the copies are worth.
That's exactly how digital copies of digital entities work.
This technology is going to completely revolutionize all sorts of encounters. Sadly (for the US) it will mostly balance in favor of the invaded rather than the invader.
In the end, this is nearly 100% software, so the cost is going to be minimal--probably less than mines.
Imagine thousands of these $5000 "mines" throughout a city like Baghdad. Each group is linked to a single cheap PC. Each group has both cameras and guns, concealed from view.
When a group of soldiers come into view, they can be activated--either remotely by radio or by identifying some insignia on the clothing. After being activated they can silently track until all targets are in view at the same time. One or two shots to the head of each soldier should make for nearly a 100% kill rate--there is no real reason for a shot to miss (a very simple calibration routine and software that waits until all targets are vulnerable should take care of that).
The soldiers that are left, if any, would be incapable of identifying the locations of most of the "Mines". Each "Mine" would be reusable, cheap, and nearly 100% accurate, and they could operate automatically or with targets selected by a solder located in an inaccessible bunker.
And the type of imaging software required for this is so useful that it MUST be developed and spread. With this type of technology, you also get the ability to do things like:
-Notice any patron in a restaurant that raises a hand and send a waiter to him immediately. -Perhaps even simple drink orders by hand gesture. -Track peoples locations at home and use the info to control heat, light, music,... -Identify people in a store that need help. -Identify erratic movement patterns that indicate a potential crime. -All sorts of interaction via hand-gestures in all sorts of locations. -Criminals in jails could actually be watched at all times--no more shivs. -Insects could be tracked for laser eradication. -Crack houses could be seriously defended from police... (I'm not saying I think these things are all good, I just think they are all going to happen.)
All these "advances" come from simply being able to combine multiple camera images into a 3-d model, kind of the opposite of what a graphics card does today. I think that ability will revolutionize computers and how we interact with them yet again, but it scares the crap out of me too.
I'm not one of those people who rants on about the dvorak keyboard or anything, I'm pretty happy with my keyboard, but I recognize that it was DESIGNED explicitly to slow down fast typists that were breaking the keyboards of manual typewriters.
Although I know it doesn't really slow down or speed up cell phone typists (if they are used to the qwerty layout it might help them get used to it a little quicker), but the irony is oh so sweet.
Slashdot Mirror
Like I said, meh.
So because life's not fair we shouldn't care?
I suppose you'd have fit right in in Germany circa WWII.
No wonder our country is being dismantled, destroyed and fed to corporations. Because "life's not fair" and voting and taxes are our only responsibilities to it. Fixing it when it's broken and causing additional, unnecessary unfairness, well that's somebody else's problem.
Oh, and no, I don't know what to do about it either--but dismissing evil behavior offhand is not even a possibility.
I probably wouldn't have ranted if your post had been modded funny (as you probably intended) rather than insightful.
I imagined it--and it's still totally meh.
Perhaps they could add something more fun than "Buying Stuff" instead. Even Pokemon had a game to play while you were mindlessly collecting "them all".
Only as offtopic as the +5 modded trolls above him.
Try buying an iPod accessory on the way out of town to help on your long trip, then, while driving, realize that you don't have any cutting implements.
Can you sue the manufacture for the ensuing multi-car rage-inspired collision?
An organization is made up of a lot of people--the CEO doesn't make every decision, but you're right, he's responsible for them.
So, what have they done. Typically legal manipulation to improve their stockholders position in relation to other companies. Sometimes the manipulation was questionable/illegal, but I'm sure they never saw it that way (it's a very strong human tendency to mentally justify your position--For instance, people who sell art tend to believe in strong copyright laws, almost to the person).
Now, me personally, I'm not really pro-American, I think we're dangerous, but most people would say it was a good thing to have a leader who put his country first and did everything he could for the citizens of that country. It's not like he was lying or cheating for personal gain like EVERY POLITICIAN OUT THERE, I think he just set his mind on making Microsoft the best it could be and made some stupid decisions based on that.
(Honestly, I think the foundation may be his way of recognizing that and trying to give back)
As a person, I find his qualities generally admirable. As a manager I find his skills impressive.
Do you really think that when Microsoft acted dishonestly, Bill actually thought about it and told his staff "Hey, let's lie to crush this other company!"? I just can't see any justification for that... I think he believed what he was doing was honest and the best overall for his company (and therefore, for everyone). Being a little deluded is an attribute every human has, at least it's just a little delusion and not the complete fantasy world that GWB and most of his staff live in.
Are you really saying that you prefer a career politician over Bill?
I agree, most sales/project managers these days did not come from an engineering background. When I was forming that post I was constantly finding that I had to stick with the good qualities of engineers and managers with an engineering background and shy away from managers with a management background and marketing.
For instance, most engineers understand that contracting work to India doesn't work. It takes a year before they can actually be productive--and yet I've had managers repeatedly say that THEY can make it work. The engineer observes the repeated failures and says no, but of course, the manager is the one saying what upper management wants to hear, so...
And of course, lawyers are WAY worse than managers, at least managers occasionally get exposed to good practices.
A good engineer or manager will evaluate his past schedule performance and use the evaluation to adjust his future schedules. Could you even imagine a lawyer or politician doing something like that?
I just think he posses the basic qualities that all humans who haven't been through our political process have. Could be wrong.
Now that I think about it, he is planning on leaving his kids $10m each and giving the rest to charity, that covers a few of those (if not all).
He took good care of his employees with stock, etc. (when he was closely involved).
Hmm, I don't know--do you have some specific instances of him personally not observing those qualities (I don't mean Microsoft, I mean Bill).
This is possible, but for comparison, we have a server running an emulator that we wrote (My group, as I said I'm not much of a unix head). Each person runs their own emulator. There are 10 people running typically, all logging in and starting the emulator, connecting and reconnecting constantly. The emulator crashes sometimes, or we get might make a bad build.
Many people also telnet in to use it as a secondary workstation (they prefer working in Unix, but run windows at their desk).
I've yet to hear of it crashing. I know my server stays up from the time I start it until I stop it without exception.
That's a FAR CRY from a clean-room system just running one app that was created by the same company that created the OS.
How long can you keep a windows Hydra server running 10 different logins running beta application software running? In my experience, you would have to reboot weekly at BEST even with win2K pro server--if it was XP I'd say daily.
I could do that, the problem generally occurs on a full-screen game that has taken over the keyboard and monitor, so I can't get to a shell. I never thought of telnetting in from another PC and killing it though--that would totally work.
thanks.
GridBagLayout is intended for use by GUI builders only. Not understanding that fact emphasizes your point about a lack of experience (competence is a little much).
Every java programmer I've known nests BorderLayout and other common layouts that fit the need.
But I understand the Mac interface builder is pretty good. So is the VB one by the way. When either works for all platforms and allows the GUI to be manipulated by code as easily as with java, I may re-evaluate it. (For instance, I used to use VB and to create a new control with code at runtime was a terrible mess of hidden control arrays... I hope it got better)
Java's slower development of toolkits is akin to complaining that jet liners don't have parachutes. Sure it might help to add them, but rarely and not much--so we just don't. I really would, in fact, avoid airlines that thought they were a good idea.
or really anyone who understands engineering and responsibility.
GWB Couldn't last a week in any engineering capacity--not just because he is an absolute idiot, but because he has no concept of responsibility, honesty, fairness, ethics, or any of another hundred positive values.
Not that all engineers are great at all areas, but--well for instance.
Could you imagine someone with significant engineering experience going into a project without defining how the project ends? That's a first time consulting mistake that you never make again. Engineers tend to be a little more logical about how we go through things... When you learn coding you don't only learn how to write code, you learn to examine the different paths that each decision can take. We may not practice it every day at home, but when we are at work, we generally make logical decisions based on the information we have.
And honestly, I'd love to get anyone in there who hadn't been beaten down by the entire political process. Someone who hasn't been around so long that they consider lying an imperative and so normal that it's not even an issue (like Bush lying about Rumsfield before the election, then afterwards admitting without shame that he lied). These are our servants, To hide information by lying in order to effect the political process IS TREASON, period.
So yeah, I'd vote for him, campaign for him, whatever it takes.
I've always wondered why simply serializing a GUI wasn't used more in Java. Perhaps because Swing is so easy to use. Most java programmers I've known in the past shunned any type of GUI development tool in favor of hand-coding swing because it's so much more straight forward.
Also, it's difficult to get reuse out of a GUI editing tool, but very easy to get it by hand-coding. I generally write factory-type code that handles generating menus, buttons and linked Actions together, in a GUI tool you will often end up having to deal with each of these separately.
Much of the GUI code I've had to deal with is in the form of Properties sheets (large number of controls in predictable patterns). You absolutely should never generate this kind of GUI--or hand code the gui itself for that matter. The entire GUI should be generated from data files.
So in the past, RAD tools for swing were used by more amateur less professional users, and the amateur users are going to feel much more comfortable with generated code. Now that the tools are coming up to the point where professionals are starting to use them, I think we'll see a lot more cases of "Serialize out a finished screen at design time" and "Serialize it back in at runtime". (This was in some of SUN's original Java tools if I remember correctly).
Hmm, just one warning. If you think you have never been rooted, you are probably wrong.
I hope you are not going by the popular virus systems. Norton doesn't ever detect rootkits as far as I know. The other one (McAfee?) detected one once, but I wouldn't think it detects them all.
Run rootkit revealer and be sure to walk through all the results--It's a really annoying task but very enlightening.
I rarely use Linux, but by what means are you judging stability?
I can keep a linux system up and running for years with a handful of services, and I'm horrid at unix. For instance, I know "dd", ":q", ":wq", "i", "a" from VI, that's IT.
On the other hand, I'm pretty much a windows expert. I can do pretty much anything with a windows machine EXCEPT keep it running for more than a month. I'm not talking windows expert as in the guy in your family that helps with PCs, I'm speaking as the guy who helps the IT department when they get stuck.
How about hackability? I don't think I've ever seen a rooted Linux machine (but as I said, I don't get a ton of exposure to Linux workstations, maybe I don't know?)--yet I find it rare when dealing with a PC over 6 months old to not have a rootkit or some such garbage installed. I keep a Linux machine at home and won't do financial transactions on any of my 4 windows PCs or this work pc I'm on now.
I admit I'm talking different uses. PCs I've used have generally had apps installed and uninstalled over time, and are in a pretty flakey condition within a year. The Linux pc's I've set up are generally fire-and-forget, but as I said, I do run one linux laptop where I load bunches of apps, delete bunches of apps, etc and it's still crashless (well, apps lock up sometimes and I'm sometimes not good enough to shut them down without rebooting the laptop, but it could be done if I was better with Linux.)
Also: a "Good" windows admin will schedule reboots daily or weekly. I've never heard of a "Good" linux admin doing that. Doesn't that alone say a lot about general stability?
Did you have some different definition of stability than uptime (no crashes, no reboots) and a lack of degradation over time?
Pot is not known to be physically addictive, but you get addicted to the "Fun" and the mindset. Many addictions are that way--gambling, exercise, etc.
As I had it explained to me once--mental addictions are actually physical addictions to chemicals your brain creates when it's happy or wants to be happy (Dopamine), and this is the mechanism of most (all?) addictive drugs as well--they manipulate your dopamine receptors.
That said, I'm getting sick of people using any sort of addiction as an excuse.
How many recent scandals were attributed to alcohol addiction?
When you start with any drug--be it coffee, alcohol, chocolate or WOW--You NEED TO UNDERSTAND that you may not be able to handle it, and weather or not you understand the addiction potential, it's still COMPLETELY your fault because you choose to do it in the first place.
It's as much your fault that you were sending sexual text messages to young children, getting illegal pills from your maid, got pregnant in the bar, robbed a house or whatever stupid thing your addiction caused you to do.
There, now that the fault/responsibility problem is understood, all we need to do is come up with an overhaul for the entire rehabilitation system and we'll be on our way.
Perhaps it will help put the breaks on globalism and the patent/copyright feeding frenzy. It's obvious that we are going to have legal problems, to not resolve them up-front seems pretty crazy, but since greed got us where we are now, maybe it can get us out too.
Meh, I'm too optimistic.
Damn, where are my mod points when I need 'em.
Well, I give this a +1 funny and a +1 insightful!
Hmm, then it might be too high, might have to give it a -1 overrated too.
Close. The actual statement should read more like "what course of action will be generally perceived to have the greatest benefit to those making the decisions"
Even if you refactor "those making the decisions" to the company, you can't get away from the fact that if you can alter perceptions of the decision makers, you completely alter the course and outcome of the project.
Hmm, the title's really all I had to say about this garbage.
I hadn't thought of that, if it's implemented that way then you are absolutely right, it can't really be protected. Well, you could encrypt it and pass it down, but really anything that runs on a client machine is unsafe.
You could have code execute on the server and just pass "actions" to the client such as move this graphic over here or cycle these 5 graphics, but that's probably not how it's done.
Personally I'm for an open, copy everything system, but I believe that the basic concept behind the "Limited Monopoly for inventors" is a good concept, but it's been so corrupted as to be a n absolute evil in its current state.
I think I agree.
If you are saying that if someone wants to reverse-engineer an in-game item, there is nothing to be done, I agree.
If you are saying that the game creators cannot stop in-game copying, I gotta kind of disagree there. It would be absolutely possible for them to hide all the code for a given item from other programs.
You seem to be saying they should not stop copying--gotta disagree with that.
If someone in-game spends 2 years and codes up some giant magnificent edifice with the expectation that he can sell copies for $5000 a piece, he probably won't do so if he finds that the first person he sells it to can charge $2.50 to sell copies.
I realize that it's an artificial limitation, but then so is the patent system.
The ultimate for everyone would be to allow a creator to "buy" a patent period on any in-game item he creates, and for that time nobody else can read the code, but afterwards the code can be read and rewritten by anyone so that the overall quality of in-game objects increases.
This is very similar to how patents were INTENDED to work in the real world, but corporate corruption can destroy any good idea.
Now that I think about it, buying a timed patent/copyright would be an interesting idea--with varying prices dependent on how long you wanted to keep the idea/object/art protected. Another nice limitation might be total $ made on the product. After $1,000,000 profit the protection expires. Perhaps you could buy higher profit limits (another income stream for the government, offset some taxes perhaps).
Oh well, enough daydreaming.
I'm a moderator and I'm really pissed of that there isn't a -1 completely wrong.
A copy of a Picaso doesn't lower the value of the original--but if it was the ability to make an EXACT copy, of course it would. If you couldn't tell the difference between the original and the copies, then the original is only worth what the copies are worth.
That's exactly how digital copies of digital entities work.
This technology is going to completely revolutionize all sorts of encounters. Sadly (for the US) it will mostly balance in favor of the invaded rather than the invader.
...
In the end, this is nearly 100% software, so the cost is going to be minimal--probably less than mines.
Imagine thousands of these $5000 "mines" throughout a city like Baghdad. Each group is linked to a single cheap PC. Each group has both cameras and guns, concealed from view.
When a group of soldiers come into view, they can be activated--either remotely by radio or by identifying some insignia on the clothing. After being activated they can silently track until all targets are in view at the same time. One or two shots to the head of each soldier should make for nearly a 100% kill rate--there is no real reason for a shot to miss (a very simple calibration routine and software that waits until all targets are vulnerable should take care of that).
The soldiers that are left, if any, would be incapable of identifying the locations of most of the "Mines". Each "Mine" would be reusable, cheap, and nearly 100% accurate, and they could operate automatically or with targets selected by a solder located in an inaccessible bunker.
And the type of imaging software required for this is so useful that it MUST be developed and spread. With this type of technology, you also get the ability to do things like:
-Notice any patron in a restaurant that raises a hand and send a waiter to him immediately.
-Perhaps even simple drink orders by hand gesture.
-Track peoples locations at home and use the info to control heat, light, music,
-Identify people in a store that need help.
-Identify erratic movement patterns that indicate a potential crime.
-All sorts of interaction via hand-gestures in all sorts of locations.
-Criminals in jails could actually be watched at all times--no more shivs.
-Insects could be tracked for laser eradication.
-Crack houses could be seriously defended from police...
(I'm not saying I think these things are all good, I just think they are all going to happen.)
All these "advances" come from simply being able to combine multiple camera images into a 3-d model, kind of the opposite of what a graphics card does today. I think that ability will revolutionize computers and how we interact with them yet again, but it scares the crap out of me too.
I'm not one of those people who rants on about the dvorak keyboard or anything, I'm pretty happy with my keyboard, but I recognize that it was DESIGNED explicitly to slow down fast typists that were breaking the keyboards of manual typewriters.
Although I know it doesn't really slow down or speed up cell phone typists (if they are used to the qwerty layout it might help them get used to it a little quicker), but the irony is oh so sweet.