"They couldn't have known" means that the law is likely to be misapplied. And why not? Anybody who codes or has made a rules based system knows of unintended consequences of any set of laws.

Of course, you have a large number of options with most games. By construction, there are a relatively small number of correct and enjoyable ways to play a game and a much larger number of incorrect ways that lead to failure. I don't understand how this is even debatable. Are you saying that anybody can just pick up a game controller and everything to be seen and experienced in the game would just play itself out? In fact, what I have just described would be very much like a movie or a book. In that case, I agree, gameplay videos in this case would be some kind of infringement.

But an LP doesn't include the entirety of the video game. In order to do that, the player would have to show every possible way of playing the game. Instead, what makes an LP interesting is the particular path through the content decision tree that the player took. This is what makes all the difference in the world. Otherwise, people wouldn't even buy games to play; they would just look at the static artwork and read the plot as text.

The difference, though, is that games are fundamentally different from the type of works that Congress had in mind when they wrote those rules. As was mentioned before, footage of a tv show within a movie presents pretty much the entirety of the show. In contrast, a video game presents to the player a very large number of options when playing. The amount of "work" involved is essentially infinite, meaning that the "portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole" approaches zero for a particular gameplay video. A person doing a "let's play" only shows a single path through the decision-tree of playing the game (minus fail restarts). The choice of that path is itself the creative part in making the "let's play", in addition to the commentary.

I don't have a problem with Nintendo taking some of the ad revenue from long gameplay videos, but all of it? For a lot of viewers, a good part of the entertainment value of the gameplay video is the player's mistakes and failings. It's the funny commentary and the sound of their voice. There's a million videos of people playing Super Mario Brothers 3 but no one cares about most of them because the person playing it sucks or is unknown. They want to know how "ClassicGamingFan34" plays Super Mario Brothers 3.

You really can't compare creating a movie from a book to creating a gameplay video because the primary merit of the book or movie is to reveal the plot. Once you've revealed the plot of the story, what else is left? This isn't true with gameplay videos because games do not normally play themselves. You can put your own personal mark on a gameplay video (and here I'm talking mostly of LPs, not just silent gameplay footage). Most games are not purchased just for the plot, but rather for a player to play the game.

Here is my challenge: if Nintendo and other gaming companies think that they deserve all the ad revenue from gameplay video, then why don't they just have all the LPs and videos taken down and have an officially sponsered LP or gameplay video? If the official video makes just as much money via ads as the fan created videos then they can rightly claim that the fans added nothing of value to the game content. But if the ad revenue drops then the companies have to admit that part of the appeal of the original videos was the personal touch of the fan that created and uploaded it.

Sadly, what you say is absolutely true, at least if you are only interested in shorterm profit. The history of crackpots, cranks and con-men prove that if you are good at selling things, you can make money no matter how good the product is or even without a product at all. The opposite is not true, even with the best and most effective product. Exhibit A: Homeopathy.

tunein

The bigger problem for me, much bigger than even used games, is that with an always on connection, the game companies and Microsoft have complete control over your console. It is not just yours -- not exclusively, anyway -- but rather is shared between you and the game companies. If you want to run the games with a lower patch level because you don't like the latest gameplay tweaks, you can't do that anymore. If the latest patch does something you don't like, game companies can forcefully upgrade you to it because, well, they can. If you deny them access by disconnecting the console, then they deny you access to the game. This is true regardless of DRM. If Microsoft wants to inject ads on the settings screens, then that's tough shit, they can do whatever they want because it's their console; you only use it with their approval.

I don't see a problem with saying "on the order of 120,000"; it is the same as "the order of" 100,000.

I don't know where your skepticism is coming from but it looks to me like you're moving the goal posts. Every time a computer surpasses a feat that was formerly only thought to be possible with human intelligence, people move the goal posts and say that it wasn't intelligence after all. First it was chess, then Jeopardy. Now it seems to be physical problem solving involved with locomotion and vision. Self-driving cars and robots like big dog will take us far in that direction. If your definition of intelligence includes problem solving then you have to acknowledge that Watson has "real intelligence" on at least some level. It is certainly information processing that captures the subtle characteristics of language and does it well enough to beat the best humans on earth. The fact that you are impressed by automated deduction but not Watson is especially puzzling since the inferences (not deductions, since the problems faced by Watson are probabilistic in nature) are far closer in nature to the inferences humans have to make than theorem provers. Computer systems with a library of knowledge that can be expanded already exists. If they need to know something about the real world than you're talking about having the right sensors and actuators. Insight, which is a characteristic of intelligence you seem to hold high, is just a type of information processing carried out by the brain and the core problem can't be exponentially difficult or else it couldn't be done by the brain, which has finite computational resources and knowledge.

Human intelligence evolved from lower animal intelligence and much of animal intelligence is understood. Are you saying that non-human animals aren't intelligent? I'm not saying that it is easy to create the type of intelligence you seem to be looking for but if it is an extension of animal intelligence then there is nothing I see to suggest it is impossible to duplicate in a computer.

Sorry, I didn't mean "you" as in "you" personally. I meant "you" as in "anyone" or "one".

There is no generic "browser" request on Windows. You click on the icon (or nowadays, live tile) for the browser you want and it opens. If I clicked on the Firefox icon and IE started up then I would be right to piss and moan. If Windows could understand speech commands and I said "open browser", I wouldn't be too surprised if IE came up and there wouldn't much to complain about. Since the command was ambiguous anyway, I wouldn't be surprised for them to promote their own browser, all things being equal.

If only more people believed this. Then you couldn't accuse Google of having a monopoly since an alternative is merely a free click away.

Indeed. Any software that does this to its users is clearly unfit and should die a horrible death.

Not saying that I'm an expert but special relativity was subsumed by general relativity almost a hundred years ago. The whole point of this article is that you are not locally traveling faster than light. Light in your vicinity would get to the destination faster than you as expected. It has already been well established that space can expand between two objects faster than light (or any other information) can traverse the distance.

You want to be careful with stress, though. Long-term stress -- even low level -- can be damaging even if you think you're okay.