You (and the +5 poster a thread or two up) misunderstand "transformative" use.

The proper analogy to video gameplay has already been decided on by the courts, and it is written plays (which, also applies to screenwriting).

All three take another work, and produce an interpretation of that work. The original playwright/screenwriter/videogame author still is the owner of the base copyright being used, and the work is classified as a Derivative Work. The performer has also contributed significant copyrightable-product, but the genesis and base of the entire (new) work still rests on the original play/screenplay/game.

Also, just because something is "transformative" doesn't absolve it of the requirements to be of "limited" domain. Using the entirety of a video game (artwork included) in your new LP video is pretty much the definition of "not limited".

I've looked at a couple of those videos, and the amount of content which is copyrightable Nintendo (or whomever the on-screen game author is) is WAAAAAY beyond anything allowable for Fair Use or similar exception.

I'm certainly not in favor of Nintendo or the like suing these folks for copyright infringement. The "unique performance" issue is certainly one which can be discussed, but I liken this to plays - sure, the individual performance of a play is unique, but since you didn't write the script, you can't expect to be profiting from the performance without the author's permission.

Thus, I can't see why the authors of these videos are complaining that Nintendo gets the ad revenue. I think that's an entirely reasonable compromise - Nintendo essentially implicitly licenses the video authors to show those derivative-work videos, in return for the publicity and the ad revenue.

Nintendo, of course, could be much less tone-deaf about saying the preceding, of course.

But, in the end, those videos are derivative-works under copyright law, and they can't be shown without some sort of license.

MoveOn.org isn't solely a 503(c).4 organization. They're very explicitly split into two branches: the main site, which engages in all the permissible organizational and democratic (small 'd') stuff, and the MoveOn PAC, which explicitly is a registered PAC and does promote candidates and specific issues. Their books are separate, and open, and the sections of the web site where PAC vs 503 stuff goes on is clearly demarked. Donations are also clearly marked as to whether you're giving to the PAC or the 503.

The problem with many of the newer 503(c).4 organizations is that they:

(a) don't file the appropriate paperwork, so it's hard to see if they're complying with the reporting and transparency requirements

(b) Engage in activities that are, at best, grey advocacy, and at worst, outright political support of individuals and issues.

I do agree that we need more auditing, and that the selection of who to target was wrong. But that doesn't mean there isn't a serious problem on the Right around this, particularly since there's been a whole lot more money poured into Right Wing 503(c).4 orgs in the past 4 years, and also because the vast majority of these organizations seem to be very heavily politicized, and much less socially-oriented.

FYI - laws say it's fine for a 503(c).4 to advocate certain general positions (i.e. "Clean Water", "Less Coal, more Wind", and do what used to be called "Community Organizing"), so long as they did not promote specific candidates or parties or legislation/initiatives. The problem has been that may 503(c).4 orgs aren't obeying those restrictions. That is, you see a lot of Left-Wing 503(c) doing general voter registration and promoting Big Causes. Recent Right Wing stuff has heavily been oriented around "Defeat taxation" and "Stop Immigration" and the like, which leads (or is intended) to be mostly legislative lobbying, which is NOT OK for a 503(c).4

First off, I do think it was politically motivated, at least in the extent that someone decided to do something that would be looked favorably on the higher-ups. That's not OK, and people should get fired for it.

However, do note that what they are discussing here is auditing 503(c).4 organizations, to make sure they were complying with the regulations.

That is, these organizations are supposed to be engaging in NON-POLITICAL activities, for which we give them the benefit of being non-profit (and, making donations to them tax deductible).

There's been an explosion of 503(c).4 organizations over the past 4 years (after the Citizen's United decision), and a large number of them have been funded from "right-wing" sources. These organizations have been very lax about filing the proper paperwork about their donors, and in fact, have been downright secretive. And many of them are engaging in activities that very much skirt the line (if not cross it entirely) of political advocacy. The quantity of money (and number of organizations) engaged in this kind of shadowy advocacy/political support is very seriously tilted towards right-wing sources.

The fact is this: if you want to engage in political activity, then fine. Government can and should not have any say about your content. But if you want to get tax-free benefits, then there's a certain set of rules that you MUST play by, and claiming that this is suppressing Free Speech because we won't give you the benefit while you violate the rules is sophistry.

All 503(c).4 organizations need more scrutiny. I'm pretty sure that the IRS was engaging in the equivalent of racial profiling here, with the added notion of pleasing some political higher-ups. But at the end of the day, if those 503(c).4 organizations were breaking the law, then it's hard to say the IRS wasn't doing it's job by auditing them.

OK, first off, tracking such objects is a useful exercise, for many reasons, not just for the OMG, WE'RE GONNA GET HIT, crowd.

Unfortunately, it's practically useless for the purpose it's being touted for. That is, to give short notice warning of an impending impact.

Firstly, given the design criteria, we're looking at 48 hours notice, maximum, before an impact. Note that at the outer edge of this prediction envelope, it's a predicted impact - that is, one with a significant change of impact, but not a certainty of one. Now, hopefully, people would take this as seriously as we now do Tsunami Warnings. But think about it one more step:

Secondly, the impact area simply can't be computed until relatively shortly before impact. That is, if we detect the incoming meteor 48 hours ahead of time, it will take a couple of hours to compute a rough impact zone (meaning, just which part of the GLOBE it will hit), and likely you won't have a decent small error probability zone (meaning, something less than 100 miles across) until 12 hours or less before impact.

Does anyone think that a 12 hour warning of an impact can have any actual damage mitigation effect? Sure, if the area being hit has (a) a relatively low population, AND (b) a very good transportation system. But virtually all places on the Earth fail at one of those. There's simply no way to effectively evacuate even a mid-size city in time, and it's not like you can put everyone into blast shelters like the old Nuclear War scenarios wanted us to do.

So, spend the money on ATLAS, and get ourselves some great astrometric data for future use. It just won't be any sort of useful in terms of damage avoidance.

-Erik

This is interesting, since all the scientific data I've seen says that ultimately, Venus is far better than Mars as a target for Terraforming, yet this research is claiming that Venus is far outside the habitable zone, while Mars is smack in the middle of it.

Mars simply lacks two things: (1) the ability to generate a good strong magnetic field (too small, and no molten iron core), so it gets constantly bombarded with far more solar radiation than terrestrial life can stand outdoors, and (b) its much smaller mass and lack of magnetic field make is impossible for Mars to hold an atmosphere that's much more than it has now. So the result is that, while Mars superficially seems a better place for life now, there's no good way for us to transplant onto Mars without having to either live underground or under thick domes.

Venus, on the other hand, already generates a good magnetic field, and has no problem holding a significant atmosphere. It's just too hot and toxic. But a couple thousand tons of bacteria into the upper atmosphere will solve that problem, so Venus is actually the best candidate to turn into an Earth-like place.

I guess we'll have to look for two criteria: (1) which planets are most likely to have Earth-like indigenous life on them, and (2) which planets are best suited to be terraformed for occupation by us.

Like I said, interesting...

-Erik

You forget the place that Java has had the most success: Enterprise computing.

I'll agree that the sum total of the Java Plugin + JDK Libraries + JVM provides too much opportunity to attack on the desktop / web app space. There's simply too many flaws in the plugin and libraries. The JVM itself, though, is very solid (fewer than 10 major flaws over 15 years).

However, Java as a middleware platform is simply far better than any of the alternatives, and that's where I expect it to remain. Insulated from the types of attacks that render Java dangerous on the desktop, middleware app servers play directly to Java's big strengths: speed, ease of development, and massive library support, plus a framework which helps discourage the types of coding flaws that hurt middleware computing the most. Java will likely remain king of middlewhere for a long time, and deservedly so.

On the desktop or as a downloadable app, well, yes, Java is simply never going to measure up to the better cross-platform alternatives.

-Erik

To a certain extent, you're correct.

However, part of the social contract that exists to support Copyright, is the implicit agreement that "We (society) allow you to protect your item, and in return you make more of them so we can use them". Failure to live up to that implicit contract (i.e. sequestering I.P.) on the content provider's end voids the social contract (i.e. consumer's promise to respect Copyright).

I'm not a big fan of many of the justifications for copyright infringement, but in cases of "lost" authorship or abandonware or failure to publish or deliberate removal of a product from market, the I.P. author has effectively forfeited any rights they have.

Simple:

• Oracle completely screwed up the acquisition, and made major changes to the Java division. Management was completely redone, and the release/bug process was made much worse (not that it was great under Sun).
• All the old Sun personnel got pissed off at Oracle, for a variety of reasons. Less than 25% of those there in 2008 are still in the Java division; and, that's from an organization where people averaged 10+ years of work at Sun. Oracle hasn't been able to replace this brain drain, and is unlikely to ever succeed in restaffing to an acceptable level. The JDK codebase is incredibly complex - far worse than practically anything else I can think of, including the Linux kernel. The number of people on the planet who are good VM coders numbers maybe a hundred or two. That's it. And the rest of the organization has been decimated, too.

I worked at Sun for 6 years in the JVM group before the acquisition. I stayed on for another 1.5 years before I left. I only know a handful of people there anymore, and they're staying simply to ride it out to retirement (all are in their 50s). Over three dozen people I used to work with are gone, and there's no decent replacements.

Basically, people used to working "the Sun Way" detested the new "Oracle Way" and decamped en masse between 2009 and 2011. The whole Java division is a shadow of itself, and won't ever recover.

You missed the point of my comment.

"Small Government" Republicans don't want any restrictions on businesses, and think all "services" (as you point out) should be either individual contribution or charity, but they're big into legislated morality.

Hence, the concept that all they want to regulate (or have the government care about) is what kind of sex you're having.

At some point in the (now distant) past, "small government" republicans actually were for responsible spending, and that included basic services and some thing that a Tea Party person would rage at as "socialist". I haven't see a GOP candidate actually advocate that (and mean it) for at least two decades, and now going on three.

RTFA indicates that this is almost identical to the ballistic computer (aka gunsight computer) found in practically any modern MBT or IFV. They've shrunk it down and merged it with a rifle. However, they've once again failed the "Just because we CAN, doesn't mean we SHOULD" question.

I saw this once before: Objective Individual Combat Weapon

It's what taking a $400 M-16 and mating it with a new 25mm grenade launcher, then running it through the Military Industrial Complex gets you: a $800,000 weapon that's too bulky to use, of marginal benefit, and of questionable utility.

Honestly, the Marine Corp and British Marines have a solution that works far better than either the OICW or this new gadget: it's called PRACTICE. I'm willing to bet that putting in a couple of dozen hours at a local shooting range would do the potential buyer of this gadget far more good. Not to mention saving them $15k or more. I also seriously doubt this "system" is rugged enough to be used (and abused) in the field for any length of time, even just for hunting. Even by pampered super-rich hunting dilettantes.

Sometimes, technology just gets in the way of getting things done.

The bad part is the "recommended" graphics card is now the upper level of the mid-range, the Nvidia 560 or 660, and the ATI 5870.

This is becoming a real big issue for Graphics cards, far more than video RAM or any other part of the system.

The problem is that the upper-mid-range cards now require *very* significant power. The 560/660 and 5870 above really require TWO 6-pin supplemental power connectors, since they're now pulling 200W under load. The problem there is that this means a 500W+ power supply, and ONLY high-end workstations or custom gaming rigs have those, so you're inherently cutting out the section of the population which games, has a pretty beefy rig, but got a pre-made system from HP/Dell/whomever, none of which have more than a 400W (and usually a 300W) power supply.

I'm a excellent example: I happen to have a HP Z210 workstation - that's a Xeon E3-1200-class CPU (which kicks the crap out of everything consumer-class, including the i7 series), 16GB of RAM, and an SSD. Yet, it was only designed with a 400W power supply, as it was targeted for mid-level pro graphics. I've been looking, and the absolutely fastest GPU I can use is the Nvidia 650 Ti; everything else draws too much power. Consumer PCs are in an even worse situation, since they might have a high-end i5 Ivy bridge CPU, but they've only got 350W power supplies, which probably can't even drive my 650 Ti, let alone a 660. So, you're looking at having to buy a system for $1500 (sans graphics card) rather than $500 to play these games.

Realistically, game makers need to target the lower-mid-range cards - at least, they have to be able to play very well at around 1680x1050 or 1440x900 on one of those lower-power-draw cards (e.g. Nvidia 650 or AMD 7850).

Frankly, I think this is going to be a *big* drag on the PC Gaming industry, since unless they can convince Nvidia/AMD to cut down on the power-draw requirements, or somehow get PC makers to beef up their PS more, new games won't be able to run reasonably on ANYTHING not a custom gaming rig. And that's a *tiny* portion of the market.

-Erik

And, EVERYONE else has to do it, so why should software get a free pass?

Software has gotten completely away from this, to its detriment. I'm not talking about being bug-free. I'm not even talking about being able to prevent "evil exploits", though programs which fail basic standards of secuity should be held to the same standards that any other product should. What I am talking about is that the program (let's say a word processor) doesn't crash repeatedly when run on OSes it is sold as "compatible" with, doesn't randomly delete your data, or doesn't read your on-line cookies and insert your name, SSN, and credit card number into the file format when you save the document. That is, software should have to do EXACTLY what it says it does, and nothing more. Any deviation from that should require a FREE FIX from the manufacturer, in a short amount of time, and manufacturers should be liable for unreasonable (in the legal sense) damage that it causes (e.g. in the case of a word processor, if it decided to erase your system drive, that's unreasonable, and the mfg owes you damages, but deleting a saved file, while requiring a fix, shouldn't trigger damages).

It's time we quite treating software as something so horribly unique and different than any other possible thing that humankind has ever developed that NONE of the prior rules on warranties, fitness of purpose, or consumer protection should ever apply.

All other manufacturers manage to deal quite well with product liability, so why is software supposed to be so different? Remember, product liability is about things that are unreasonably broken, or that the manufacturer knew about, and refused to fix and still cause damage. It's not about being able to hunt down all the heisenbugs ever possible.

-Erik