Bay 12 Games Forum

Thinks that obvious giraffe is horse.

There are definitely cultures that have a similarly easygoing attitude to cannibalism as BFEL, such as the Maori.

Could you please give me a source for that about the Maori, the wikipedia page doesn't mention it.

I still think that uploaded humans are a better option for this sort of thing than anything we're likely to think up.
Unless of course we can get some sort of frame-dragging drive working so we don't need fuel, it's unlikely that any advancements are going to justify the mass that we can't remove as biological beings.

Get some generalized robotic shells that can be piloted, build some fabricators, and then reincarnate back into fleshy bodies for the insystem travel, if that is really required.

Or you could remain as a ghost in a machine, a machine with sufficient sensory information to not drive you insane, some of them just made up to augment the reality and reduce claustrophobia and sensory-deprivation. Ultimately, unless major advances are made, given that ramscoops don't appear feasible currently(according to more recent estimates of interstellar medium densities), we don't have much choice. We'll have to go digital and move out into the universe and then when we get there improvise something.

I may have been reading some Orion's Arm.

Well, the Berne Convention has been around since the 1880's, so you have over 100 years worth of arguing to do.

Well... If I argued, even successfully against the points made for this... Convention of law. Then if I failed, then I might profit from the argument I made for longer than I argued about it.

That might be the least useful straw-man argument I've ever made against my own thinking. I'll look into the Berne Convention. I might just not know the justifications for having copyright work this way, and those justifications might actually make sense. I'll find arguments against it before I calcify my opinion on it.

Besides, I don't like the idea of what happened with the "Happy Birthday" song. Luckily that was overturned, because it was ruled that the writers of the song( Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill) had never given the rights to the Warner/Chapel organization.

Also it appears that it was out of copyright for a significant period of time prior to the most recent ruling made upon it.

I tried to formulate an argument against the Berne Convention and found myself making points that were entirely speculation based that do not appear to be supported by current evidence. I don't want copyright to exist forever, that's the best I can do with that argument.

Looking further into it, I see that the argument against copyright as a whole is that it creates artificial scarcity, since it does not deplete finite resources in a meaningful way. Especially with digital technology as it is. There are also questions as to whether copyright has the intended effect of ensuring that authors are paid and recieve work and dues and praise appropriate to the work, however I don't have solid facts on this, and solid facts in such a statement  are necessarily scarce because there hasn't been a switch back out of copyright recently enough to know if older(pre-1900) statistics from countries that had not yet implemented copyright laws are still valid.

In any case, it seems that ownership in general is an issue that has non-linearities in economic behaviour when ownership is enhanced or weakened. Unfortunately, it seems that some groups believe that ownership being what made them wealthy and powerful and allowed them to make changes to the world believe that increasing the hold of their ownership would improve their power further.

@jaked:
Yeah, now all we need to do is work antitrust enforcement into these treaties.

I don't get extra notifications if you don't actually quote me, and that's what I pay attention to in the thread, but thanks for the agreement.

I doubt that there are any in the agreements, as this does seem to favour large corporations fairly singularly.

Made another video of Armok Vision

Your skills are very impressive. How did you get your start learning to write programs like that? I haven't managed to make a game of any sort yet.

Again, I went over all of this. It does not make white-hat hacking illegal; it makes bypassing technological protections illegal if you do it for financial gain or commercial advantage without consent. That, and it requires an "infringing" act which implies distribution. Just please, read what I posted; I went over all of this already. Also, what TheBiggerFish said- most white-hat hacking goes on with consent which makes all of this moot.

Damn. Your posts are very informative. I am very slightly less apprehensive of it now. I still think that 70 years after death is far too long for a copyright to last, but hey, if they really want the creator of whatever <copyrighted work> to allow his children to make money off their acheivements for their entire natural lives... Still though.

I was speaking specifically of testing software on a system owned by the white hat hacker. Interfering with services is something I can understand being illegal.

Did you not read my earlier posts?

Sorry, I missed those skimming through. I'm just a little confused about the intensity that the cheese stuff has been brought up. I get that its protecting traditional manufacturing of these... "Cultural products"... heh.

Also, this deal makes white-hat hacking illegal and results in the destruction of devices containing the information. Without white hat hackers, our software would be as buggy and security hole ridden as software(OSs in particular) were in the early 2000s. I don't care about the end user not seeing the effects until they realize that all the devices they own have been stealing their money and the companies that made them were unaware of the problems that allowed it to happen. This is about the principle.

And the principle that you ought to be able to test whether or not software is safe to use and inform the company and the world at large about issues so that it may be fixed, or the company can be pressured into it by their customers is important. If we lose that, we've lost our computers, any semblence of security, and traded it for corporate prestige for corporations that would rather automate their employees out of it.

Why would you use binary json? The whole point is that it can be loaded easily by either javascript or python.

Besides, if performance matters, but you can't have a large json file, then I'd use zlib to compress it with a deflate stream, which works fairly well and won't slow your modern machine down too much.