Other way around. The phone plans were billed by the minute. Then came the Internet. In is first generation, Internet was essentially just a long distance call through a modem. Hence it was billed - like the call - by the minute.
Dedicated Internet wires came much later, and then the dedicated phone lines were dropped as voip was better quality and cheaper compared to the dedicated lines.
While the phone still had a dedicated line it didn't actually need a power connection, as the power through the phone wire was sufficient.
I'm thoroughly confused as to how what you're saying differs from my previous post, but I believe you just misunderstand that by "early phone plans" in my post's and the parent post's context, I meant phone plans for Internet access ("early" being the feature phone era).
Online services most assuredly billed by the minute. He'll, AOL had a huge marketing campaign offering "free" minutes for new customers. You might also have charges from the phone company but those were independent of the online service charges. It wasn't until the late 90s the major online services went to flat rate "unlimited" plans.
> Online services most assuredly billed by the minute. He'll, AOL had a huge marketing campaign offering "free" minutes for new customers. You might also have charges from the phone company but those were independent of the online service charges.
AOL was offering free minutes because it was an ISP, not because it was an online service. (It was also an online service. Most of that service was indeed free; some of it billed by the minute, but that was separate from the rate you paid for connecting to the internet.)
> Dedicated Internet wires came much later, and then the dedicated phone lines were dropped as voip was better quality and cheaper compared to the dedicated lines.
The telephone network made the utterly bizarre choice to intentionally degrade the audio signal of a call, guaranteeing that people would have an unnatural, distorted voice if you spoke to them over the phone. There was no way for voip not to be better quality.
It's a port of a disassembly that requires you to provide your own ROM. The legality of such things is a tangled web that anyone producing them needs to navigate very, very carefully.
It's mostly argued around or against the application of fair use. I suggest consulting a lawyer if you're truly interested, as it quickly gets into legalese around what constitutes ownership, distribution, etc. Throw in a lack of extensive case law and you quickly get into opinions rather than legal bases.
I get the sense that these disassembly/decompilation projects believe that some types of IP-laden asset data can be shipped embedded into the project — not necessarily "legally", but in that they'll likely get away with doing so indefinitely — as long as:
1. those assets are stored in proprietary formats that only the game code itself understands, and
2. no tool exists in the project to extract the assets from these proprietary formats into open formats, unless that tool itself exists only in source-code form in the codebase, and requires the ROM as an input to compile it (even if in the case of such a tool, the ROM is doing nothing but serving as a "key" to unlock compilation.)
Basically, if you have to prove you have your own copy of the IP in order to make their embedded copy of the IP "legible", then it's very hard to construct an evidence-based DMCA takedown order that actually makes any coherent point about the project "distributing" said IP.
That being said, shipping assets like this at all, even if you "can get away with it", is ultimately just a kind of laziness / shortcut-taking. They do it because there's either no clear/simple/obvious way to automatically extract the given asset data from the ROM (e.g. because the relevant data is split up into various data planes + metadata bits that are stored "exploded" all over the ROM), so they just did it once by hand, committing the results; or because there's no clear/simple/obvious way to store the extracted asset data such that a regular compiler/assembler natively understands how to embed it into the binary in the particular form it was found in the original ROM. (Remember, re-assembling/compiling to the original ROM is always the test these projects use to ensure their disassembly/decompilation is preserving semantics. So they need to replicate every weird layout quirk the original dev tooling imposed upon the original ROM. And sometimes the original dev tooling included special-purpose domain-specific asset-codegen tools that aren't part of regular compiler toolchains.)
What these projects should actually be doing, is taking on the schlep: writing the extract tooling anyway, even if it's just "copy these bytes from here and these bytes from there, and spit them out as hex in an .asm file with this header"; and/or writing matching asset-codegen tooling to the tooling that likely existed in the platform SDK, to run before compile/assemble time, converting the extracted ROM asset files into a form (probably a bunch of little assembly files) that will land in the right places when linked back together to form the original ROM.
And, to be clear, they mostly do do this! These projects are very good at doing this!
But sometimes — especially on a larger project with many contributors — one or two things like this aren't audited properly, and fall through the cracks. Or they start out as temporary "bootstrap" approaches made during a private phase of development to get things working + compiling to a correct image; and then not all of those get cleaned up before the repo gets made public.
Perhaps I'm mistaken but the project doesn't need a copy of the original ROM at all right?
To be clear; I don't really understand the law around this - my own country is based on case law which means that even if I wanted to open source some of my reverse engineered games (I have a few private partial implementations of some old defunct game engines in-progress), the distinct lack of prior cases means, sadly, it's prudent not to release them at all while the companies are still active.
Much like agents, I can tell myself I'm a senior infrastructure/security engineer doing a thorough, adversarial code review, but that doesn't change the results much.
> Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.
The Spanish Civil War was arguably just a proxy opening of WW2 between the USSR and Germany. Doesn’t change your point, just came to mind while reading your comment.
Very true, I preemptively assumed someone would reply 'What about Spain?' but then whether you consider the civil war part of WW2 or not is irrelevant given it had the same effect.
Ultimately, a company like Stripe sits on top of a fragile patchwork of societal/technological abstractions that are a byproduct of generations of compounded wealth.
Humans battling in the marketplace builds this compounded value, humans battling in warfare destroys it and makes you start from zero.
Just as the industrial revolution started decades before humans began leaving the farm en masse, the digital revolution started decades before anyone had a personal computer on their desk.
Europe was busy rebuilding firebombed cities and industrial capacity, while Americans were free to birth the next layer of abstraction post-WW2 (the digital one). This early lead compounded. Moral of story: don't get in wars on your soil.
> Americans were free to birth the next layer of abstraction post-WW2 (the digital one)
The "on your own soil part" is even more complex than this implies. America spent decades waging wars across the world to reduce the chance that Russia could do the same.
I started reading history hoping to learn how to avoid the mistakes of the past, and instead came to the conclusion that history inexorably repeats itself, over a cycle just long enough for the current generation to forget the last event. (I'm trying to indicate similar kinds of mistakes in judgment, the details are always different of course.)
> I started reading history hoping to learn how to avoid the mistakes of the past
It's a noble pursuit, but the key part for you is that you _wanted_ to avoid those mistakes and put forth an effort to learn how to. The necessity, in order to truly avoid them, is that enough individuals collectively desire and pursue that. It's why (good) public education is so important for the long term health of societies.
One of the secrets to parenting is that kids will rebel no matter what you do. They will push back on something, and giving in means they will push back on something else. Choosing when and what is the complicated part, because it really is simple that you cannot and should not prevent the rebellion.
> I'm sure it doesn't help that people continue to buy things at this price.
Implicitly, but that's blaming the consumer who has no or few equivalent choices. Purchasing RAM is not like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. A better analogy is that when a hurricane is coming or a natural disaster has already hit, it doesn't help that people will purchase food and fuel at any price.
People can choose to use online services to game or other various ones for compute. The demand is surely more elastic than food and fuel after a natural disaster. The consumer can also forego any purchases.
I feel like a broken record with this sometimes, but things compared in an analogy are generally dissimilar while sharing some similarities. No one claimed what you are asking.
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