The Official Star Wars Blog is running an article about a toy that translates brainwaves to Force powers.
Apparently, it uses a headset that will interpret some signal from your brain into movement of a ball within a transparent tube. Whatever the underlying science, it sounds like a lot of fun.
I may have to shell out the $90-100 for this toy (I’m assuming that’s in US money).
In my daily stumblings around the net, I discovered this little gem of an article. It purports to be a rational and researched examination of PC game piracy, DRM, and general hysteria surrounding the whole topic.
It provides an interestingly cool-headed counter to some other bloggers I could mention.
One thing about Shamus Young’s stance on DRM that bothers me is that he assumes that the consumer owns the game when they purchase it. Now, I don’t like it, but the actual way things work (and he should know this, being a professional programmer) is that end-users purchase a license to use the software, not the software itself. There are very few (if any) commercial software products that transfer ownership of the software (either in source, or in binary format) upon purchase. Just because you paid money for it, doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want.
And it’s never been that way. Looking back as far as I’ve been buying software, I can remember seeing license agreements in packages that were quite explicit about that. And it’s understandable: how else can the creator of the code enforce their ownership?
DRM is pretty evil, but I am (at least temporarily) swayed by the arguments in the article that piracy causes the escalation in protection of software, and that the only determinant of piracy is the popularity of the software. There is a vocal minority that might claim DRM causes piracy, but the numbers certainly seem against it.
I also liked the acknowledgement that no copyright protection system is fool-proof, but if it can prevent day-one piracy in order to help developers and publishers recoup their expenses, then that’s a good thing. Developers and publishers with cash in their pockets can continue to make games.
Don’t get me wrong. Poorly-implemented DRM (a la Bioshock) can make life a living hell, but the only way for us to reduce it is to put pressure on people who won’t put any money into a game developer’s pocket at all.
Like many users, I make mistakes when working with my computer. Some of them are easy to recover from (the Undo command is made more powerful every day). Some are not, like when you’re trying to clean up hard drive space with the Unix ‘find’ command. Let’s just say that you should always use the ‘-print0’ flag when trying to run ‘find’ results through ‘rm’.
Anyway, due to some major carelessness, I managed to delete a large chunk of my iTunes music library. Not good, particularly when I’m not even sure how I got some of those rare mp3s in the first place. Fortunately, I am a regular user of Carbon Copy Cloner by Bombich Software.
This nifty bit of Mac donationware keeps me alive with a bootable backup of my entire harddrive on an external USB drive. One of the main selling points of CCC is that it preserves metadata. This is very important because a lot of software (including the operating system) need this metadata in order to function correctly. It can also do backup schedules, incremental backups, and a host of other nifty options.
For those of you not currently backing up your software, I highly recommend the practice. For those of you who are looking for a good backup product for the Mac, I recommend Carbon Copy Cloner. It’s donationware, and regularly maintained.
I’ve stayed generally clear of commenting on my democratically elected government’s plan to slow down censor the internet. After all, the majority of the Australian voting population put their ballots in and chose them for the next four (if not eight) years. They must want their already substandard broadband connections further choked by mandatory filters put in place and regulated by the lowest common denominator standards that already govern books, movies, music, and video games.
Fine, I guess. They are idiots, but I’m all for rule of the people, and that’s what they want.
But now they’re planning to scan P2P sharing as well. I’m aware that the majority of consumer internet traffic is P2P, and that the majority of P2P traffic is illegal, but this really says to me that my government – which is supposed to uphold rights and freedoms like Privacy – is more interested in monitoring every little thing I do on the internet for illegal activity. It’s like I’m presumed guilty and have to prove my innocence. If a government agency wants to monitor who I talk to on the phone or intercept my mail, they have to apply for a warrant. Why should it be any different?
Also, if this is being done “to protect the children”, then who gets to make that call? I agree that there are things out there that children should not have access to. In some ways, I’m more conservative than most, but I still assert that it is the parent’s responsibility to be actively involved. There are plenty of good commercial filters available for installation on your home PC. But you shouldn’t leave it up to automation. Go out, do some research, talk to your kids about what is and isn’t acceptable, and why.
If adults want to abdicate their responsibilities as parents, then perhaps they should ask themselves why they are parents in the first place. But that’s for another rant, and not for this blog.
Anyway, I realise that this sort of debate is often quite polarising. Can you think of a rational reason why state-sponsored censorship would be a good thing?
Having to go several days without one’s primary PC makes one appreciate anything that can help replace the lost functionality. And so I spent a very intense couple of days with my new iPod Touch.
This second generation is very sexy. I’ve been interested in upgrading my Nano for a while, but couldn’t justify the iPhone to myself. As an all-in-one package for media play and portable web access, it really is a great device.