At the point where they took the PD work and used it to create a derivative work, they actually fully owned the derivative work. At the point where the originally-PD work is clawed back, the new owners are no longer the new owners; now they are shared owners at best, scofflaws at worst. They have lost rights they previously had.

This is my "reasonable interpretation", and note I phrased it as "reasonable interpretation" deliberately, rather than claiming it's a rock-solid argument. Your interpretation is reasonable too, I think. A court could go reasonably go either way. I just thought I'd expand on it, since you brought it up. :)

I don't like the ruling, but it's probably correct. Congress has the Constitutional authority to institute copyright laws and there is no particular legal reason to presume that once something is in the public domain, it can never be returned to being copyrighted. Not liking it is not a legal reason.

However, after skimming over the decision I see no mention of the issue of this being an ex post facto law w.r.t. using things that were in the public domain, but suddenly weren't. I believe that under a reasonable interpretation of that clause you can not touch those people, and it is not Constitutional to ask them to pony up any money, "reasonable" amounts or otherwise. Liabilities should only be incurred based on the copyrighted status of the used works at the time of use, not at the whim of any future Congressional acts. Unlike "not liking retroactive extension", this point is actually a Constitution-based argument.

In my experience, my doctor pays a lot more attention after I flash the secret sign of the Bayesian Conspiracy, to show I understand the stats involved. YMMV.

Sounds like they shot above what a normal person could understand. A good choice on that DVD, you probably own it only if you're a bit of an enthusiast, and if you're watching the special features on this already-special DVD you must really be interested.

Avatar's much more mass market, for better or for worse, and the special features are largely an excuse to see more footage of celebrities. Alas. (Perhaps Avatar specifically has good ones, I don't know, because I'm just speaking in general, where I think I've seen enough "making ofs" to have a relatively firm opinon.)

Seriously, though, modern "Making Ofs" are all the same.

Whereas the late 70s and 80s are actually interesting, because they had to do things. The "Making Ofs" for Tron and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, regardless of your opinions on the movies themselves, are actually interesting because they faced challenges that normal people could understand and met them with answers normal people can understand.

In fact, a really technical "making of" of Avatar might be really interesting to us, but because the "making of" will be targeted at people in general, it is unlikely to have more than a few seconds of really interesting technical content, because people in general do not understanding complex computer graphics issues. (Nor should they have to.) All they can say is "They made it with computers. Here, here's some shots of rotating computer models."

Tron 2 and the latest Star Trek movie are, of course, "They made it on a computer."

Bricking a system usually means that the only way or ways the system has to boot now has something unbootable on it. Now the only way to boot it is to remove the firmware chips and write them with external hardware.

If you can boot your own code, that doesn't necessarily give you full control over the device, but it's certainly a big step in that direction, so all the closed platforms do their best to prevent this. As a side effect, this makes it a lot easier to brick, because if they fry their one-and-only path in, you lose.

I didn't find anything right away, but if the Pandora can boot off of its SD card, and it would be really stupid for an open platform built on hardware that can probably already do that to make that move, then it may be effectively impossible to permanently brick the thing, barring some sort of Killer Poke. You can always boot with the SD card and reload whatever you screwed up.

Closed systems brick easily. Open systems don't. I wouldn't call that so much an advantage of the open system as a disadvantage of the closed one. We know nothing stops consoles from booting off of writable optical media; the Dreamcast could.

We play with a House Rule whereby all players are simply given the list of two-letter words. We have no intention of ever competing in a tournament, and this is nearly equivalent to memorizing them.

It actually moves things along. There's enough valid two-letter words that it makes legal moves where there didn't used to be, and now we far more rarely have the problem where the entire board is basically consumed, everybody still has tiles, and there's "nowhere" left to play. Now the play board ends up more compact and we more rarely end up with "nowhere" to move.

I recommend it.

Many people have done a good job of giving you metaphors on how to think about it. I want to warn about something you must not think about. Forget everything science fiction has ever "taught" you about dimensions. 4D is not "subspace". 4D does not lead to "alternate dimensions", which is loaded down with connotative baggage far, far beyond what the actual math implies.

A three dimensional space is nothing more and nothing less than a space in which you require 3 numbers to locate a given point. Those three dimensions may be space, but they may be other things too; for instance the rotational characteristics of a rigid object are also three dimensional (three possible axes of rotation you must account for). The description of the income of a two-income family requires two dimensions to describe fully, one describing the one partner's income and the other, the other partner's income. Science fiction and to a lesser extent pop sci load the term "dimension" down with all kinds of things that are, frankly, bullshit.

A four dimensional space is nothing more and nothing less than a space in which you require 4 numbers to locate a given point. Space-time requires 3 for the spatial dimensions and 1 for the temporal dimension. A strictly 4-spatial-dimension space requires 4 for the spatial dimensions. Technically, that means this game is 5D as there is definitely a time component to the game as well :).

As I pointed out in another comment, this game appears to actually use a rather small space, where the playfield is actually about 8x8x8x4 or so, with 3D cubes layered on top of points as a presentation device. If that is true, then any constituent cube in the playing field can be described with 4 rather small numbers; 3 for the usual spatial dimensions, then a 4th to indicate its 4d position. Nothing more, nothing less. The reason it looks weird is that we aren't ready for 4D rotations, but mathematically it's a straightforward extension of rotations. It bends our brains because they are highly optimized (with good reason!) for the 3D case, but there isn't much mystery to it.

If you'd like to see an example of some of the prime-grade bullshit I was referring to, I submit to you this video, which isn't intended to be an exhaustive catalog of every bullshit idea about dimensionality that scifi has produced, but manages quite well nevertheless. It's accurate up to 4 but takes a sharp turn to gibberish after that.

Looking at the video, it is pretty clear that despite drawing the gardens with cubes everywhere, the garden itself is actually made out of points that are being represented with cubes. If they were "really" cubes, the first fourth-dimension shift would not have left the ring that gets moved unchanged; exactly what happens depends on the exact nature of the transformation but it would have done something to it. (I think one likely possibility is that you would end up with something still recognizably a ring, but now only two dimensional.) But because the ring is actually made of points, it's actually a 2D square, so when we shift, the square remains unchanged in the two dimensions we didn't rotate, and so it all works. (You would get the 2D square I described if you rotated such that depth and 4thD switched, leaving height and breadth alone.) That is also why the ring we don't move retained an entire cube, rather than manifesting as a (small) square after the shift.

So rather than a 3D environment of significant size, we're actually working in a puzzle space of something like 8x8x8x4 points or something (I recall that what is initially the fourth dimension was smaller than the rest but I have not gone back to count. Incidentally, also note that there appears to be another 3D garden world two steps 4above the initial world.).

That's just a non-sequitor. Those few advocating anarchy are no more a viable political force today than they were twenty years ago, and they certainly didn't magically attract the affiliation of half the country in the last two years.

And trying to wrap your admission that you have no evidence of your claims in sarcasm doesn't... do whatever rhetorical trick you thought you were accomplishing there. Have you considered perhaps examining your beliefs to see if they should be changed, rather than just lashing out at people? It does hurt the first few times (no sarcasm intended at all, I'm dead serious), but it gets easier with practice.

You're being manipulated. Evidence that Tea Partiers are violent has been almost entirely fabricated; when pressed for concrete evidence, nobody can actually produce any despite significant motivation. If you feel otherwise, please feel free to link the video on YouTube that proves your point.

Skip the part where you link to more vague hit pieces on the New York Times, please. I'm asking for concrete evidence, which in this age of video-cameras-on-every-phone is hardly asking for much.

IMHO, Tea Partiers are the ones trying to stop the full-on march to fascism, not create it. You can not create a fascist government regime by campaigning to strip the government of power! That's just stupid. Look to the ones trying to collect government power.

then gained much of it back once I started eating "normal" food,

Unfortunately, "normal food" in the United States is actively bad for you. It's actually pretty easy to eat healthy in the US with only a little judgment, but it doesn't happen automatically the way it does in some cultures, where you'd have to go out of your way to come even close to matching our sugar and HFCS consumption. This proves rather less about the virtue of low-carb dieting and more about how nasty our current food environment is.

That doesn't even make sense. Do away with "the top" and you'll just create a new "the top" to deal with. Your view is a caricature so strange I don't even know where you got it from. From what I can see, anti-government people (which right now also include "government is good in general but right now we've got too much of it") pretty much do want to cut at all levels. I for one could live with fewer czars.

The Intellivoice sounds like a closer fit to what we're talking about, as it enabled a new form of game, rather than functioning as backwards compatibility.

No idea if that's what the original poster meant. But it definitely does show that augmenting consoles is a very old idea... older than many people reading about it. :)

Somewhere around here I still have an Intellivoice, and all four released games for it (I don't count the baseball one). You have not lived until you've heard a little 4KB cartridge (not a typo! in fact, 4KB was twice the usual size; and yes, I'm using bytes because I think measuring games in kilobits is a crock) babbling away at you. An amazing amount of voice was shoehorned into those things. Online MP3s that have samples of even a single thing it could say are themselves larger than all released games combined.

The problem you have is not that you have a wrong idea of programming, but that you have a wrong idea of mathematics. Most people only get educated into a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of mathematics and subconsciously think that something like the quadratic equation is the height of mathematical expression complexity.

However, nothing stops a mathematician from examining the consequences of much larger systems, such as might look like a program, and in fact mathematicians do. There's research into large numbers, research into large proof systems that make most programs look like small beans (go read the Principia Mathematica... or rather, go skim the Principia Mathematica and run screaming), research into all sorts of things that are definitely math but look a lot more like a program than you think if you've only been education with conventional primary school mathematics, or even if you've gotten a bachelor's degree in computer science, which does not generally cover the Curry-Howard isomorphism. (I didn't even get it in my masters program, I had to learn it myself.)

There is no feasible way of drawing a distinction between mathematics and programs. You might be able to draw a legal one, but as always happens when you try to introduce colors to bits, the coloring just won't stand up to the sort of sandblaster scrutiny that will be applied by the plaintiffs and defendants.

You might observe that few programmers appear to be thinking mathematically when they program, to which I'd follow up with an observation that no, no they don't and boy does it show! But note carefully that's a characteristic of the programmer, not the program. The programmer may not understand math, and may crank out a mathematical system of breathtaking worthlessness and with few or none of the properties the programmer would have found desirable (like "actually doing what it's supposed to do"), but it is not written into the definition of mathematics that something is only mathematics if it is "useful" or "good". It's still all just a term-rewriting system when you get down to it, and any attempt to draw a barrier around "term rewriting system" and "real-world program" is simply doomed to failure.

It's all just assembler, and all assembler can do is basic arithmetic, moving numbers around in memory in a manner very easy to characterize mathematically, and some very mathematical conditionals. You might be able to fool yourself into thinking you've somehow transcended these primitives into a "non-math" domain... but you haven't.