He's not being judge jury or executioner. he's simply saying that this will happen if you do this. it's up to you whether you want to do this. there is a sign that says do not taunt the dynamite monkey. if you taunt the dynamite monkey, expect to get the expected and stated result. Yeah, that's pretty much the basis of the judge, jury, executioner analogy. He, and by extension the software he wrote is the only thing making the decision each step of the way. With no notification or option to give any kind of defence to the charges the software is effectively bringing against the user.
The monkey analogy is also apt, although you miss the crucial point that I and others are trying to make: Strapping dynamite to a monkey is both immoral and illegal. Simply putting up a sign and calling it a contract changes neither of those things. I'm also trying to point out that the monkey doesn't even need to be taunted, it's entirely possible that the monkey will mistake innocent bystanders' actions for provocation and detonate anyway, with no way for the bystanders to know how the monkey will react.
Your claim that 'this wont stop anyone..' is your opinion. he has a different opinion (one that i happen to share). It may be that you are absolutely right (who knows), but the point isnt who is right or who is wrong - it is that he is well within his rights to offer terms as he likes. as the terms are clearly stated, i can't see how you have a gripe. and even if it was "all for revenge".. who cares? it is his right, especially as the software does as it says it will. - If it stops any amount of piracy I imagine it'll be directly proportional to the amount of legitimate customers he'll lose in the process. Regardless of that, the point remains, and I don't think there's any way to state this from a new angle that hasn't been covered already by someone in this discussion, from straight legal-speak to explosive monkey analogies: You can't stick anything you like into a EULA and consider it legally binding.
What he's doing isn't justifiable from any stand-point. It's illegal, immoral, he cannot guarantee it's accuracy, the reason behind it doesn't stand up to simple logic. It is, quite frankly: bullshit.
The second-hand software point might not apply to this case specifically, it was more of a general response to the concept of anti-piracy vigilantism.
All of your counter-points revolve around the idea that the user getting screwed is somehow OK in the pirates vs. software developers conflict. As if it's fair game that a few innocent people take hits because that's just the price of fighting piracy. Except it isn't. Whether the user can sue the developer after the fact is irrelevant, the point is this should never be happening because it's a reckless act of spite, not a legitimate attempt to prevent piracy.
This method won't stop anyone from using the pirated software that existing non-deletion methods wouldn't, all it does do is provide additional grief for the user whether they're guilty or not. It's not the software developers place to be judge, jury, and executioner as this guy seems to think. His method here isn't about preventing more piracy of his software, it's about getting revenge on those people who he decides are trying to wrong him.
You're assuming that both the developer and the user can always accurately identify that whether the software is pirated or not. That's by no means the case. Consider the possibilities of this failing:
Accidentally bought pirated software (yes, it really does happen)
Second-hand software
Someone simply breaking the key-cracking algorithm and generating your valid key and using it for piracy
False positives in the software. Think about other developers' attempts at piracy prevention like Genuine Advantage or the hundreds of software companies who have helplines for when their software mistakenly identifies a legitimate key. Those mistakes are tolerated because it's simply a case of contacting the developers and getting them to provide a legitimate key that works. Try contacting this guy and asking for your files back.
As TFA and the even the/. summary note, there isn't anything Earth-shattering about it. It's an overall improvement, but not a very big one.
Most of the stuff MS worked on for the last 10 years didn't make it into the final release. They spent the better part of the decade hyping the innovation that'd be coming anyday and then realised all the innovative stuff wouldn't work, so they took all that out and spent the last two years making UAC dialog boxes.
It's not Microsoft's responsibility to make other people's software run on their OS. Obviously it's their responsibility to a fair market to not deliberately hinder other developers' software in favour of their own, and of course it is in Microsoft's best interests for the most part to make Windows as backwards compatible as possible (there's no point having a decade of software compatability lock-in only to throw it away for nothing).
But of course a new OS will create compatability issues, and frankly many of the compatability issues with Vista are because of progressive things (eg. involving stopping use of the registry, forcing the proper use of user folders). It's the software developers' responsibility to make sure that those areas are covered, and frankly with the open way in which Vista was Beta'd no developers have an excuse for not being ready.
Colonizing anywhere other than earth is such an expensive endevour, that I suspect natural human pervisity will lead us to some 4th solution. - Don't worry. The article makes note of WoW.
Re:maybe I misunderstood but...
on
Interstellar Ark
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No, we just slam on the brakes at the end. If you don't survive it's your own fault. Seatbelts save lives.
Nevermind. Just paid a bit more attention to TFA and realised they're talking about it hitting "the pacific ocean", not specifically the Californian coastline, in which case they probably can safely make that assumption if the timing were just right.
To be honest I still don't get it. I get that we're in the cone of possible projected paths for this thing. But surely that's one whole side of the Earth that's in it. If we can calculate the precise time in which it would hit us then I can obviously see that maybe the Californian coastline might be smack in the centre of the Earth relative to the asteroid, but surely that still means there's only a tiny fraction of the 1/45000 chance that it will actually hit dead centre. No?
Most RPGs start you off unimaginatively at the absolute lowest level, so you get a sense of progression. Isn't that kind of the point though? Much of the fun of an RPG is the progression and the ability to choose how you progress. If you started off as a level 100 uber-arch-mage with a +50 staff of insta-death and just spent most of the game trampling on underlings and occasionally fighting a main enemy who puts up a fight it wouldn't really be appealing to what most people want from an RPG. Sure, it could be an OK game if done right, but it would lack much of what people want from an RPG. A lot of the fun comes from building up from nothing into a self-made super-powerful being of your design and improving your inventory as you go. While the start of the game might not have the fun of being able to put up a good fight you instead get a decent storyline (hopefully) that keeps things interesting and makes you want to keep going. That's why BG and games like it work - you might be a piss-ant at the start but you get a good story from beginning to end.
Responding to the majority of your customers' complaints about your site not working with "aha! but your browser doesn't follow web standards" is a fast way to get rid of all your complaints. And all your customers. The "just use web standards and screw everyone else" viewpoint is not a practical one. Especially if we're talking about a business. Bottom line, most people use IE and most people don't give a damn about web standards, they just want things to work. You don't tell ~80% of your customers it's "their fault" they can't get to your webpage. Or at least you don't if you still intend to be in business a few months down the line.
Having said that, standards are obviously the way to go. As long as you don't do anything too radical IE will follow along for the most part, and generally speaking even when you do push it too far workaround can be made so that everyone can make use of the site even if they don't all get quite the same experience.
Just curious, what kind of IE-only content are you talking about here? Granted I've never developed a commerical web app but I haven't come across any major obstacles to implementing cross-browser functionality in anything I've written in recent years. OK so I usually end up with a couple of dozen IE-specific fixes that have to be made and maybe some browsers get less functionality than others but I've not come across anything which worked on one browser that couldn't fail gracefully on another.
Or am I just being ignorant in thinking this isn't really a major problem anymore?
OK then maybe mature isn't the best word to use. My point is that there's no point pulling off some statistics about net CO2 conversion of a tree at 5 years old and then planting a seed or a sapling of a tree and expecting it to start consuming the same amount of CO2 straight away. I'm well aware of the balance between O2 and CO2 intake in plants, but that isn't the issue here.
I'm all for sustainable foresting, stopping the mass deforestation of places like the rainforest, and generally keeping the balance tree-wise. However I don't believe for a second that simply doing that will counteract the negative effects of our current way of life, which is what the GP was implying.
Yep, like clockwork, environmentalists can come up with an excuse why anything other than micromanaging developed economies according to their dictates won't save the planet from global warming, only THEY know the way.
Since this plan allows for expensive solutions, why not put the trees on artificial floating islands in the Pacific? I bet you already have a story about why any blockage of sunlight over the Pacific would DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENT. I want to hear this one. - I'm not an environmentalist, I'm simply a person who sees the very real situation that we're in. Given the exposure it's been given, especially lately, if you're telling me you don't see it then you're outright ignorant. If you think keeping things the way they are now and just planting trees will keep the balance you're a fool.
How much do you think an artificial island runs for? If you think $25 million will buy you an artificial island big enough to plant trees to compensate for 1 billion tons of CO2 per year I'm afraid you're going to be in for a big shock. Not to mention the fundamental problem of finding enough materials to create islands, the manpower to build them, and of course the sheer time it would take to build. Consider then what happens when you try to make enough artificial islands to account for all of the world's excess CO2 emissions in the next 50 years, bearing in mind the continued development of poorer nations who have up til now produced a negligable carbon footprint, then tell me where the money, materials, manpower, and time is going to come from to make all that happen.
When you've got a reasonable answer for those problems give Richard Branson a call.
How much carbon dioxide does a single tree consume in a year of respiration and how many trees could be planted for $25 million? - Depends on the trees. I'm no expert but I'll bet $25 million worth of any plant is going to consume far far less than a billion metric tonnes of CO2. Plus you don't plant wholly grown trees so you've got to wait however many years for them to mature before getting the real benefit - time we don't have. Also, planting $25 million worth of trees would most likely be considered eco-unfriendly since you'd need to find a pretty huge amount of space that isn't already developed - meaning that presumably you'd be destroying a non-forested habitat by sticking trees all over it. More importantly though, it would be missing the point. The technology we use that is creating the pollution is going to become more and more abundant as more and more countries become part of the "developed world". We can't keep planting x thousand trees for every person on Earth and keep everything else as-is, it's just not feasible in the short-term and not sustainable in the long-term.
Actually iPod nano's are already at 8GB. Remember also that while a flash-based iPod would be smaller than an equivalent HDD-based one, it needn't be as small as the nano. It could probably have about 3x the volume of a nano and still be notably smaller, lighter and more energy efficient than existing iPods. That'd give an approximate 24GB on existing flash chips, meaning you'd only need a 2-2.5x increase in memory density to get the sizes talked about in the article - a 2.5x increase is pretty likely to be available in 12-18 months.
The difference is that generally speaking you can just as easily have fun playing computer games as you can have watching them. The same isn't necessarily true of a sport. For instance for many traditional sports you need the right equipment, you need space to play it, you need a number of people available if it's a team sport, depending on the sport you might need to be fit or at least not tired, and of course maybe the sport is rough and you're a bit of a pussy.
None of those things generally apply to games. Most people have a computer, a team is brought together online from around the world, no space required, no physical or mental fitness necessary, and no injuries possible (besides ego and maybe RSI).
Of course this isn't entirely what makes watching sport fun but I do think that for many many people it's a case of "if I'm going to watch a character prance around a screen for a few hours it may as well be me controlling it". It may get some fans but I don't think it'll ever be a mainstream event, certainly not as popular as watching real sport.
That's not even kind of relevant to what I'm saying.
Firstly the inconvenience in that situation would be felt by the person whose life would potentially be saved, meaning if they chose life over inconvenience that's entirely up to them. Unless you're saying murder victims are given the choice about whether to be murdered or to get spam for the rest of their life then sorry but you're talking bollocks.
Secondly, I'm not saying spammers shouldn't be punished or that they shouldn't be imprisoned even. All I'm saying is that the GP's stance that imprisoning a spammer is a greater plus for society than imprisoning a murderer or rapist is rubbish.
Somehow I knew the saving money is saving lives thing would come up. Even if spam really does cost the US 10 billion dollars per year* the fact is that money lost in this manner can never be directly correlated to a cost in lives or emotional damage. Otherwise where would we be? Would someone caught stealing $100 be charged with an equivalent sentence of a double murder? Ridiculous right? How about $1000, $10k, $100k, $1M? At what point is theft equivalent to taking a life, raping someone, or some other violent crime? It's a cliché to say you can't put a value on a life but with good reason. Sure spammers are arseholes and I'll reiterate that I'm not against imprisoning spammers and taking every penny they've made (and more) from them, but nobody will ever convince me that a spammer is as bad or worse than a rapist or a murderer or a wife-beater. I dread the day our society is so fucked up that we can equate monetary loss on the same scale as physical or sexual abuse.
I'll get down off my soapbox now.
*: I suspect those figures are entirely bogus though. Most likely calculated in the same style that the RIAA uses to say that piracy costs them 100 trillion dollars per nanosecond or whatever they're claiming these days.
While I don't think jailing people who illegally trade in personal data (it's not just the spammers themselves affected by this law remember) is too much, your idea that jailing a spammer is more worthy than jailing a rapist or a violent criminal because of the number of lives involved is obscenely stupid. For all the millions of lives impacted by spam, that impact on each is still nothing more than inconvenience. The very concept that a million people's inconvenience is worse than "less than a hundred" people's lives, whether literally ended or "just" destroyed by rape or violent abuse is ridiculous.
Sure, waking up in the morning and finding 70 emails, of which 65 are spam is pretty damn annoying, but it's nothing in the bigger picture. You need to seriously take a step back from the computer and get some fucking perspective.
No, if it created more harvesting then the price would go down again, until it reached a new equilibrium which would probably be slightly more expensive than currently and involving slightly less harvesters. Now if more and more countries start taking this kind of thing seriously then the amount of places where it can go unpunished and the number of people willing to risk punishment will go down, leading to less email harvesting and higher prices for e-mail addresses - until eventually it's no longer financially viable to send spam. Then the hand-holding and kum-ba-yah'ing can begin.
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The monkey analogy is also apt, although you miss the crucial point that I and others are trying to make: Strapping dynamite to a monkey is both immoral and illegal. Simply putting up a sign and calling it a contract changes neither of those things. I'm also trying to point out that the monkey doesn't even need to be taunted, it's entirely possible that the monkey will mistake innocent bystanders' actions for provocation and detonate anyway, with no way for the bystanders to know how the monkey will react. Your claim that 'this wont stop anyone..' is your opinion. he has a different opinion (one that i happen to share). It may be that you are absolutely right (who knows), but the point isnt who is right or who is wrong - it is that he is well within his rights to offer terms as he likes. as the terms are clearly stated, i can't see how you have a gripe. and even if it was "all for revenge".. who cares? it is his right, especially as the software does as it says it will. - If it stops any amount of piracy I imagine it'll be directly proportional to the amount of legitimate customers he'll lose in the process. Regardless of that, the point remains, and I don't think there's any way to state this from a new angle that hasn't been covered already by someone in this discussion, from straight legal-speak to explosive monkey analogies: You can't stick anything you like into a EULA and consider it legally binding.
What he's doing isn't justifiable from any stand-point. It's illegal, immoral, he cannot guarantee it's accuracy, the reason behind it doesn't stand up to simple logic. It is, quite frankly: bullshit.
The second-hand software point might not apply to this case specifically, it was more of a general response to the concept of anti-piracy vigilantism.
All of your counter-points revolve around the idea that the user getting screwed is somehow OK in the pirates vs. software developers conflict. As if it's fair game that a few innocent people take hits because that's just the price of fighting piracy. Except it isn't. Whether the user can sue the developer after the fact is irrelevant, the point is this should never be happening because it's a reckless act of spite, not a legitimate attempt to prevent piracy.
This method won't stop anyone from using the pirated software that existing non-deletion methods wouldn't, all it does do is provide additional grief for the user whether they're guilty or not. It's not the software developers place to be judge, jury, and executioner as this guy seems to think. His method here isn't about preventing more piracy of his software, it's about getting revenge on those people who he decides are trying to wrong him.
As TFA and the even the /. summary note, there isn't anything Earth-shattering about it. It's an overall improvement, but not a very big one.
Most of the stuff MS worked on for the last 10 years didn't make it into the final release. They spent the better part of the decade hyping the innovation that'd be coming anyday and then realised all the innovative stuff wouldn't work, so they took all that out and spent the last two years making UAC dialog boxes.
It's not Microsoft's responsibility to make other people's software run on their OS. Obviously it's their responsibility to a fair market to not deliberately hinder other developers' software in favour of their own, and of course it is in Microsoft's best interests for the most part to make Windows as backwards compatible as possible (there's no point having a decade of software compatability lock-in only to throw it away for nothing).
But of course a new OS will create compatability issues, and frankly many of the compatability issues with Vista are because of progressive things (eg. involving stopping use of the registry, forcing the proper use of user folders). It's the software developers' responsibility to make sure that those areas are covered, and frankly with the open way in which Vista was Beta'd no developers have an excuse for not being ready.
It doesn't say "no nonsense", it says "no-nonsense". The article writer has a stutter you insensitive clod!
...and the lampposts have terahertz imaging scanners.
No, we just slam on the brakes at the end. If you don't survive it's your own fault. Seatbelts save lives.
Nevermind. Just paid a bit more attention to TFA and realised they're talking about it hitting "the pacific ocean", not specifically the Californian coastline, in which case they probably can safely make that assumption if the timing were just right.
To be honest I still don't get it. I get that we're in the cone of possible projected paths for this thing. But surely that's one whole side of the Earth that's in it. If we can calculate the precise time in which it would hit us then I can obviously see that maybe the Californian coastline might be smack in the centre of the Earth relative to the asteroid, but surely that still means there's only a tiny fraction of the 1/45000 chance that it will actually hit dead centre. No?
Responding to the majority of your customers' complaints about your site not working with "aha! but your browser doesn't follow web standards" is a fast way to get rid of all your complaints. And all your customers. The "just use web standards and screw everyone else" viewpoint is not a practical one. Especially if we're talking about a business. Bottom line, most people use IE and most people don't give a damn about web standards, they just want things to work. You don't tell ~80% of your customers it's "their fault" they can't get to your webpage. Or at least you don't if you still intend to be in business a few months down the line.
Having said that, standards are obviously the way to go. As long as you don't do anything too radical IE will follow along for the most part, and generally speaking even when you do push it too far workaround can be made so that everyone can make use of the site even if they don't all get quite the same experience.
Just curious, what kind of IE-only content are you talking about here? Granted I've never developed a commerical web app but I haven't come across any major obstacles to implementing cross-browser functionality in anything I've written in recent years. OK so I usually end up with a couple of dozen IE-specific fixes that have to be made and maybe some browsers get less functionality than others but I've not come across anything which worked on one browser that couldn't fail gracefully on another.
Or am I just being ignorant in thinking this isn't really a major problem anymore?
OK then maybe mature isn't the best word to use. My point is that there's no point pulling off some statistics about net CO2 conversion of a tree at 5 years old and then planting a seed or a sapling of a tree and expecting it to start consuming the same amount of CO2 straight away. I'm well aware of the balance between O2 and CO2 intake in plants, but that isn't the issue here.
I'm all for sustainable foresting, stopping the mass deforestation of places like the rainforest, and generally keeping the balance tree-wise. However I don't believe for a second that simply doing that will counteract the negative effects of our current way of life, which is what the GP was implying.
Since this plan allows for expensive solutions, why not put the trees on artificial floating islands in the Pacific? I bet you already have a story about why any blockage of sunlight over the Pacific would DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENT. I want to hear this one. - I'm not an environmentalist, I'm simply a person who sees the very real situation that we're in. Given the exposure it's been given, especially lately, if you're telling me you don't see it then you're outright ignorant. If you think keeping things the way they are now and just planting trees will keep the balance you're a fool.
How much do you think an artificial island runs for? If you think $25 million will buy you an artificial island big enough to plant trees to compensate for 1 billion tons of CO2 per year I'm afraid you're going to be in for a big shock. Not to mention the fundamental problem of finding enough materials to create islands, the manpower to build them, and of course the sheer time it would take to build. Consider then what happens when you try to make enough artificial islands to account for all of the world's excess CO2 emissions in the next 50 years, bearing in mind the continued development of poorer nations who have up til now produced a negligable carbon footprint, then tell me where the money, materials, manpower, and time is going to come from to make all that happen.
When you've got a reasonable answer for those problems give Richard Branson a call.
Actually iPod nano's are already at 8GB. Remember also that while a flash-based iPod would be smaller than an equivalent HDD-based one, it needn't be as small as the nano. It could probably have about 3x the volume of a nano and still be notably smaller, lighter and more energy efficient than existing iPods. That'd give an approximate 24GB on existing flash chips, meaning you'd only need a 2-2.5x increase in memory density to get the sizes talked about in the article - a 2.5x increase is pretty likely to be available in 12-18 months.
The difference is that generally speaking you can just as easily have fun playing computer games as you can have watching them. The same isn't necessarily true of a sport. For instance for many traditional sports you need the right equipment, you need space to play it, you need a number of people available if it's a team sport, depending on the sport you might need to be fit or at least not tired, and of course maybe the sport is rough and you're a bit of a pussy.
None of those things generally apply to games. Most people have a computer, a team is brought together online from around the world, no space required, no physical or mental fitness necessary, and no injuries possible (besides ego and maybe RSI).
Of course this isn't entirely what makes watching sport fun but I do think that for many many people it's a case of "if I'm going to watch a character prance around a screen for a few hours it may as well be me controlling it". It may get some fans but I don't think it'll ever be a mainstream event, certainly not as popular as watching real sport.
That's not even kind of relevant to what I'm saying.
Firstly the inconvenience in that situation would be felt by the person whose life would potentially be saved, meaning if they chose life over inconvenience that's entirely up to them. Unless you're saying murder victims are given the choice about whether to be murdered or to get spam for the rest of their life then sorry but you're talking bollocks.
Secondly, I'm not saying spammers shouldn't be punished or that they shouldn't be imprisoned even. All I'm saying is that the GP's stance that imprisoning a spammer is a greater plus for society than imprisoning a murderer or rapist is rubbish.
Somehow I knew the saving money is saving lives thing would come up. Even if spam really does cost the US 10 billion dollars per year* the fact is that money lost in this manner can never be directly correlated to a cost in lives or emotional damage. Otherwise where would we be? Would someone caught stealing $100 be charged with an equivalent sentence of a double murder? Ridiculous right? How about $1000, $10k, $100k, $1M? At what point is theft equivalent to taking a life, raping someone, or some other violent crime? It's a cliché to say you can't put a value on a life but with good reason. Sure spammers are arseholes and I'll reiterate that I'm not against imprisoning spammers and taking every penny they've made (and more) from them, but nobody will ever convince me that a spammer is as bad or worse than a rapist or a murderer or a wife-beater. I dread the day our society is so fucked up that we can equate monetary loss on the same scale as physical or sexual abuse.
I'll get down off my soapbox now.
*: I suspect those figures are entirely bogus though. Most likely calculated in the same style that the RIAA uses to say that piracy costs them 100 trillion dollars per nanosecond or whatever they're claiming these days.
While I don't think jailing people who illegally trade in personal data (it's not just the spammers themselves affected by this law remember) is too much, your idea that jailing a spammer is more worthy than jailing a rapist or a violent criminal because of the number of lives involved is obscenely stupid. For all the millions of lives impacted by spam, that impact on each is still nothing more than inconvenience. The very concept that a million people's inconvenience is worse than "less than a hundred" people's lives, whether literally ended or "just" destroyed by rape or violent abuse is ridiculous.
Sure, waking up in the morning and finding 70 emails, of which 65 are spam is pretty damn annoying, but it's nothing in the bigger picture. You need to seriously take a step back from the computer and get some fucking perspective.
No, if it created more harvesting then the price would go down again, until it reached a new equilibrium which would probably be slightly more expensive than currently and involving slightly less harvesters. Now if more and more countries start taking this kind of thing seriously then the amount of places where it can go unpunished and the number of people willing to risk punishment will go down, leading to less email harvesting and higher prices for e-mail addresses - until eventually it's no longer financially viable to send spam. Then the hand-holding and kum-ba-yah'ing can begin.