Indeed, this is exactly why no rich person is ever going to do anything like this.
Hey, look, the most tempting target of pirates, ever! (And the fun thing, you don't even need to leave after kidnapping them.)
Rich people live on private islands, sure, but they're private islands inside a nation that will respond with a navy if they're invaded. (Or, more correctly, would never let a flotilla of pirates wander around inside their waters to start with.) The ones without a navy usually have the US navy to help out. We don't let pirates wander around the the ocean even if they're outside our waters. But it's sorta idiotic to expect that if you blatantly move somewhere built to avoid the US.
People for some reason think rich people want 'no laws'. No, they want no taxes and they want no regulations for their companies.
They sure as fuck want laws against kidnapping and theft. (And a law that can't be enforced is no law at all.)
You're saying "if I do this thing the GPL allows me to do, then I've agreed to do it and therefore it's a contract."
Uh, no, I haven't said anything like that at all. I am getting very angry that people are just MAKING UP things I say. I ask everyone to notice the lack of quotes of me.
I said, you fucking imbecile, that the GPL is a contract. Just like any contract, you can agree to it, or not. Hey, look, I literally said that, 'The GPL is a contract people can choose to agree to, or not.'
If you do not agree with it, though, you've got no license to distribute the work at all, so you'll look pretty silly when they take you to court for copyright violation.
Sorry, but all the GPL says about distributing to third parties is that if you do so, you may continue to distribute the work. It says nothing about what you MUST do, only what you MAY do.
What, did you forget to learn how to think in school? (Have you gotten to school yet?)
Saying 'You can do X, but only if you do Y', is exactly the same thing as saying 'to do X, you must do Y'.
The sentence 'You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source....' is exactly the same as 'If you convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, you must also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source...'
I think you're also confusing two meanings of "agree," one being "consent" and the other being "pledge/commit to an action."
Uh, no, I didn't. The parent did that, by taking me saying 'people had to agree to the GPL' and pretending I meant 'people were required to sign the contract'. (Actually, that's a slightly different grammatical confusion based on 'had to'.)
When of course I meant that 'contracts were things that people had to agree to or they were not bound by them'. To be a 'contract' requires agreement on both sides, and by 'requires agreement' I mean 'or the contract does not really exist', not 'everyone is forced to agree'.
I will now repeat the actual positrons I actually have, not the goddamn made up one that people keep inventing. If you have an actual problem with these positions, you are invited to quote these positions, and we can have a discussion.
If you do not quote part of my post after this paragraph in your reply, or have a problem with some other imaginary position, I will assume you are a troll and not respond. I will refrain from using 'agree':
The GPL is a contract. This contract includes in it a license to distribute the software.
Being a contract, you cannot be bound by it without deciding you are bound by it. You are not bound by it by using GPL software, and you are not bound by it by distributing GPL software.
However, as the GPL is pretty much the only way to license the right to distribute the software, if you aren't bound by it when distributing the software, you're pretty much unarguably in violation of the copyright. (Which is why GPL violators tend to say they have decided to be bound by it, but lie and say what they are doing is compliant.)
That is my position, that is all I have said in any of the posts above.
It is entirely reasonable to argue with my positions. In fact, the FSF argues with my 'contract' statement, and I've been fucking prepared to argue that this entire time. They're wrong. The fact that licenses agreements have special treatment under the law does not mean they cannot be contracts, and in fact most are.
But that is a reasonable argument. What is not reasonable, and I will no longer stand, is arguing with imaginary positions I supposedly hold.
When you suggested that the GPL makes you agree to do something.
How the hell can you be 'made' to agree to something? Are you even talking English?
No. WRONG. You MAY distribute the derived work under certain conditions, you don't have to AGREE to anything and the GPL does not FORCE you to do anything. What part of "you may" (i.e. you are licensed) don't you get?
You don't have to agree to contracts. That's why they're contracts instead of, I dunno, slavery.
If the GPL said you had to commit to distributing something, you'd be right. But it doesn't.
The GPL does say you have to commit to distribute something...if you do certain things. If you give out copies, you have to commit to the distribute copies of the source code to specific people during a certain time period. Committing to distribute something is, in fact, exactly what the GPL requires. (Of course, you can pre-emptively distribute the source when you distribute the software, and then you don't have to worry about it later. But it's still a requirement, it's just one you've already met.)
True. You don't have to exchange anything with the copyright holder of a GPL'd work. The reason you MAY do so is because the rights to the derived work BELONG to the original copyright holder. Are you so dense that you don't get that?
I don't understand what you think I said, but basically you seem to be under the impression that I said people have to agree to the GPL. I have no idea why you think I said that, or how the fuck that would even work. Gunpoint, perhaps?
The GPL is a contract people can choose to agree to, or not. JUST LIKE ALL CONTRACTS. That's what contracts are. There's no such thing as non-optional contracts.
If people choose to agree to it, it gives them a license to distribute a copyright work (and thus derivatives of that work), in exchange for requiring certain other things of them, like handing out source code to certain people. (Namely, those you distributed binaries to.)
I don't know I can make that simpler, and I have no idea what sort of retarded argument you think you're having about the GPL 'required'. At no point have I suggested the GPL was required. The GPL is a contract that people can agree to, or not. (Of course, if they do not agree, and have no other license to distribute the work, they're in copyright violation if they hand out copies.) In fact, that concept is inherent in my statement it's a contract.
I think you've decided that I think it's an EULA. As I pointed out way back there, EULAs are bogus. They attempt to 'grant rights' that people already have, and hence have no consideration. And I know you don't have to agree to the GPL to use GPL software, if that's the nonsensical problem you've invented in your head. (You don't have to agree to any license to use any software. Using software you legally possess a copy, even making the disk and memory copies required to use it, of is explicitly granted under copyright law.)
The GPL is a contract, one side of which the original author has already agreed to, and the other side anyone can agree to. No one 'has to' agree to it, but, of course, they usually don't have any permission to make copies outside of that agreement.
Completely wrong. If you link your code with GPL'd code, it is a derived work and you do not own the copyright on it, ergo you don't get to choose how you can distribute it.
What the fuck are you yammering about? When did I say you could link your code with GPL code and then choose how to distribute it?
You can only distribute a derivative work you made under permission from the original copyright holder. (And yourself, obviously.)
The GPL says that if you distribute this derived work, you must distribute the entire thing including source code. It carves out an exception if you want to distribute the source separately (through download, or an included offer to provide it) but otherwise you don't have to "agree" to a damn thing.
Read what you just wrote:
The GPL says that if you distribute this derived work, you must distribute the entire thing including source code.
In other words, you have to 'agree' to distribute the entire thing including source code. You are agreeing to distribute the code for your derivative work (And grant others the same rights) in return for the ability to distribute your compiled derivative work.
That's what a contract is. One party agrees to X if and only if the other party agrees to Y.
It's a license, not a contract.
Saying 'It's a license, not a contract' is like saying 'It's a payment, not a contract'. Dude, lots of contracts have payments in them, and lots of contracts have licenses in them. Yes, you can have payments and licenses exist outside of contracts, also, but that doesn't make them opposites.
A contract is an agree-upon mutual exchange, an license is granting someone the right to do something they otherwise would not have the right to do. Like produce copies of someone else's copyrighted work. (In this context, we're talking about non-government licenses, but driver's licenses and stuff like that fall into the same general concept.)
Such a license is, obviously, is often granted as part of an aforementioned mutual exchange, aka, as part of a contract.
In fact, most copyright licenses are inside contracts. For example, almost all music is licensed to a recording company by the artist, giving that record company permission to copy the artist-copyrighted music, via a contract that gives the artist a percentage of the profits on each CD sold.
Seriously, I can see the argument that the GPL isn't a contract, on the grounds the original copyright holder gets nothing out of it, so the original copyright holder has no consideration. The FSF has argued this before. As I pointed out in my post, that's a misunderstanding of the fact contracts require 'consideration'...contracts that require you to do something for a third-party that has nothing to do with the contract are entirely valid. Or they can even require you to do random crap that benefits no one, like dance a jig every day at noon for ten minutes. As long as the contract requires each party to do something the other party wants, there is 'consideration', no matter how inane or pointless it is. Requiring people to distribute the source is, indeed, 'consideration'.
But I can understand that misinformed argument.
What I can't understand is the braindead idea that contracts and licenses cannot overlap. That's not even slightly correct. Almost all licenses are inside contracts in the real world!
The record companies finance the recording and advertising of the work, but they don't create it in any way, neither in the performance nor the writing.
No, even that isn't true. Record companies don't finance the recording or advertising of the work.
They issue a loan to the artist called an 'advance' (Which is spent on making the record.) and require the artist to pay it back before they start making any money.
The idea that it's a work-for-hire is complete and utter nonsense. At no point has the music industry ever operated like that.
Uh, no. A lot of people appear very confused about this.
A contract is any agreement between two people that has consideration on both sides.
The GPL allows one party to do one thing (make copies, which would otherwise be illegal) in return for the other party getting what they want (Forcing the first party to give out the source.)
Ergo, the GPL is a form of license agreement that has consideration on both sides.
Q.E.D., it is a contract.
Now, there are forms of license agreements that don't have consideration on both sides. Some forms of the BSD license do not. Those are not contracts.
But anything that says 'If I let you X, you also have to do Y' is a contract.
A few people, include the FSF at times, have claimed the GPL not a contract because it doesn't get the author any reward...it's more 'pay it forward'. This is utter nonsense, legally. The courts don't care to whose benefit the contract is...I can write a contract saying 'If you donate $1000 to the Red Cross, I will paint your house.'. Or even 'I will paint some random person's house'. Contracts require 'consideration' on both sides, not 'actual gain'.
If you allow someone to do something, in return for forcing them to do something else, whatever you force them to do is the 'consideration' on your part, no matter whom it seems to benefit.
You don't need to make them do it manually, there's a command line calibre converter tool. (And no one claims that calling a command line is a derivative work.)
No, you can't agree to a contract in one place, and then totally avoid it in another. If you're distributing GPL stuff, you have to follow the terms of the GPL in everything you do....you can't magically move actions into some other 'thing' and claim it's unrelated.
Imagine how contracts would work otherwise. 'I agreed to give you money if you agreed to not do X. And then you did X!' 'Well, yes, but I didn't do X as part of the contract, I just did that randomly, unrelated to my agreement with you not to do X.'.
This is plainly silly. And, yes, a license to distribute copyright work can, and often does, place limits on what else someone can do. (For example, TV stations that buy a license to distribute a TV show often have all sorts of rules about how they can advertise that show.)
You're thinking of an EULA, which it would indeed be unreasonable for such terms, pretending EULAs were reasonable at all. But the GPL isn't an EULA. It's a distribution license, it's a real, actual, contract that gives benefits to both parties. If you agree to the GPL and do X, you are allowed to do Y. (As opposed to EULAs, which attempt to take away rights already granted under the law and give nothing in return.)
However, yes, a loophole exists, in that one party could modify a GPL program into a DLL, and distribute it, entirely complying with the GPL...and another party could call that DLL, without distributing their own source.
This has, in fact, actually happened a few times.
But it requires at least two parties. You can't hack the program into DLL form and then yourself write another program to do that, because to distribute the DLL you have to agree to the GPL, including the parts that say calling such a DLL would be a derivative work.
If you don't agree with that (Even if the court says it's legal.) you can't distribute GPL software. You can use it, yes, but not distribute it. The right to distribute it is predicated on agreeing with the GPL, and the GPL can, indeed, take away rights that are given under the law, in exchange for granting you the right to distribute the software. If the GPL demands you treat linked programs as a derivative work and release the code for them, you have to do that if you want to distribute the GPL software, even if the court says they aren't any such a thing.
However, that loophole is totally irrelevant here. Distributing half-compiled blobs isn't complying with the GPL at all. Even if they want to make the argument that their 'viewer blob' is an actual DLL, and pretending that they (as opposed to someone else) can release such a DLL without releasing stuff that links to it...they haven't actually released the source to that blob either, the blob with actual literal GPL code in it, so that blob is utterly in violation of the GPL no matter how plausible this 'derivative work DLL loophole' is.
Trade secrets have no protection against someone independently reinventing them (Like patents do) nor do they have any protection against the company that holds them publishing them. (Like copyrights.)
As long as you're within the law when you learn someone else's trade secret, as long as you don't violate someone's NDA or break into their safe or something, it's entirely legal to use that information however you want.
But, if to learn that trade secret, you do break the law, or do violate an NDA, though, every state has some sort of 'trade secret law' where the original company can sue you for epic damages, and even force a gag on you so you can't spread the secret, with even more damages if you do so.
Well, yes, I'm sure there are some hypothetical companies that , indeed, pour all their profits into employees.
But even if they exist, to say 'Tax cuts help those companies pay more', you'd still have to hypothesize some sort of weird situation where they want their CEO to have a fixed amount of income, and thus raise and lower his gross pay based on his taxes.
Which, frankly, is such an absurd idea it doesn't really matter if some companies, hypothetically, would hire, or keep on, employees they don't need if they could afford it. Personal income taxes don't have anything at all to do with what a company can afford in the first place!
Houses, throughout history, have cost 3x-4x the total yearly wage of a person, so $150,000 is roughly reasonable, assuming people make $40,000-$50,000.
What is unreasonable, however, is that as wages have fallen or remained steady, housing prices continued to go up, where they were roughly at 8x yearly wage. Some of this is due to the stupid bubble, and the rest is due to banks pretending it is sane to buy a $300,000 house if you have a yearly wage of $40,000. Thus changing the types of houses on the market, so that people are all buying houses too expensive, simply because cheaper houses do not exist. (When is the last time you saw anyone build a two bedroom one bath?)
What is also unreasonable is the fact that banks continue to come up with absurd payment methods, where even if you can find a reasonable house for $150,000, you'll end up paying way $1,000,000.
It used to be that you'd be able to find a house at three times your yearly salary, and pay maybe a total of six times it. Now, you find them at five times, and the banks want you to pay twenty.
It being a bubble did not automatically mean that mortgage-backed securities were iffy. All the rating agencies cared was: 'Were people going to continue to pay their mortgage?' They couldn't care less if the house value was going to collapse, except to the extent that it was going to affect the likelihood of paying the mortgage.
However, the fact it was a bubble did affect that, and hence the rating agencies should have taken a closer look at them...
...and when they had, they would have noticed the massive fraud going on inside them, fraud that still seems to not make the newspaper. I'm not talking about 'selling mortgages to people who can afford them' fraud (which is, indeed, fraud.), I'm talking about actual fraud within the mortgage backed securities.
Something like half those damn things never had the mortgages properly transferred inside. Some mortgage backed securities appear to, legally, have no mortgages at all in them.
This isn't some sort of fraud in the loan making, where the rating agencies arguably weren't supposed to care about. It wasn't fraud in the foreclosures, which is also happening. This is fraud in the actual securities. Some of the investors who went bust have started looking at the actual securities, and discovered they were utter nonsense, without actual loans inside.
Forget the damn housing bubble, or the economic collapse. Those can be argued the rating agencies weren't able to foresee. However, the fact they stamped A+ or whatever on an security with bogus pieces of paper stating that some unknown mortgage will be transferred in at some future date, some mortgage that didn't even exist and can't be transferred now...well...seriously, I don't understand how they're still in business.
...which would result in a massive devaluation of our debt as China quickly sold it to other investors, resulting in interest rates skyrocketing as we issued new bonds and no one would buy them at current interest rates.
You don't really understand how this works, do you? China isn't sitting there with a bunch of pieces of paper that say 'bonds we sold to China'.
They just have normal bonds. Like any other bonds, they can be sold to others. We can't just magically revoke them, it's not like there's a list, and the way the bond market works, half the time it's not even China redeeming them anyway. They could easily make that 'none of the time' if they felt like it.
The only reason we know that China has about $900 billion of our debt is that they've told us that, and we can roughly confirm it by watching how the market operates.
And this is not to mention the fact that once you start targeting individual bond holders and changing the laws so you don't have to pay them (Or delusionaly think you don't have it, when of course they'll just sell the bonds to others.), uh, you've basically destroyed your credit rating forever.
Nothing has changed that makes the US more likely to default.
Really?
Where were you the last month?
We just had a rather dramatic demonstration that enough politician are willing to deliberately cause default that it could, indeed, happen.
No one can really argue with the S&P on this on...when a debt issuer stands around arguing in public whether or not they'll pay off their debt, and enough of the issuing party to cause them not to pay seems to think it would be a good thing if they defaulted...
...yeah, you downgrade their credit rating. They are clearly at risk of defaulting on their debt, because enough of them to cause them to default has repeatedly stated in public they don't think that's any big deal and would be a good idea
I don't understand why we weren't downgraded by everyone, back in early July, when the Tea Party idiots first opened their mouths and stated a default was acceptable behavior.
(Not that anyone should care the slightest about the rating of any rating agency that played along with the bank's nonsense of the last decade.)
All this talk about raising taxes on the wealthy "killing small business" is crap. Something like 80% of businesses in this country bring in less than $75,000 a year, the statistics are all on the various government agencies that do the reporting.
Man, don't even frame it that way, you're already inside the lies.
It doesn't matter how much small businesses bring in. The wealthy's income taxes has nothing to do with how much money businesses have.
The wealthy own, or are employed by, businesses. The only way taxing them can even possibly hurt monetarily is if some sort of magical fixed amount of money going to the wealthy, so when the wealthy make less due to taxes, they merely have to file a complaint somewhere, and the business bumps up their income, and therefore decreases everyone else's. (And if that's how the world works...damn, we're already rather fucked up.)
Once you actually point this out, idiots ill try to make 'reducing taxes' the rich investing in companies, but that doesn't work either...that's capital gains tax, not income tax. (And even if companies are invested in, they don't hire more people until they need them, period, no exceptions.)
Don't buy into the idea it's some sort of trade off, but the right is lying because income tax increases will only 'hurt' large companies. It's not any sort of fucking trade off at all. Companies do not hire and fire people based on their own taxes, and they sure as fuck don't hire and fire them based on the taxes of their owners and the taxes of their CEOs. It's not any sort of arguable point. It's total nonsense, either the person arguing that is a partisan liar, or they're an idiot.
However, even pretending the whole 'businesses will have less money (Because they magically have to pay the rich the same amount.)' is true, it doesn't make sense anyway. It requires an utterly stupid concept of how businesses work. Companies do not sit around going 'Man, we've got some extra workers now, but we'll keep them around until we (aka, the rich CEO) need some extra the money, at which point we'll fire them and hand the profits to the CEO.' Companies don't keep extra people around, and giving them more money won't cause them to keep extra people around, and removing money won't remove people.
Companies hire people because they need people working for them to produce the jobs and services that others buy from them. Period. The only way to fix the economy is to have people start buying stuff, so companies hire people to produce said stuff. And the only way to have people start buying stuff is either to give money to the poor, who spend it immediately, or have the government just buy stuff, like it for WWIII to get out of out the Great Depression.
Instead, we've decided to give money to the rich, because uh, I dunno know.
No, he produced a certificate of live birth. These are provided to anyone, and you can get them saying you were born wherever.
Saying words in a different order does not make them a different thing. A 'certificate of live birth' is, indeed, a 'live birth certificate'.
In fact, almost no government certificate at all, says 'X certificate'. They mostly say 'certificate of X'. Go look at a marriage certificate if you don't believe me. The fact it says words in the 'wrong order' does not make it not a 'birth certificate', anymore than something saying 'certificate of marriage' does not mean it's not a 'marriage certificate'.
That is literally what it is saying, in English you can put the words in either order. A 'birth certificate' is 'certificate of birth'. Anyone who argues otherwise is simply too dumb to be allowed to comment politically, and probably should be in some sort of home for the mentally incompetent.
Nor is it important it puts the word 'live' before that, which is just to distinguish it from being born dead, which would be a 'certificate of birth resulting in stillbirth'. Or a 'stillborn birth certificate'. These are combination birth/dead certificates. (That's rather moot, I don't think anyone's arguing Obama was not alive when he was born, but who knows what sort of stupid conspiracies have show up.)
And you can't just go and invent any of those. They are birth certificates. They aren't things 'sorta like birth certificates', they aren't 'we'll use it in place of a birth certificate', they are actual, real, true, birth certificates. They are so valuable, that criminals have a black market in existing ones where the person is dead, for fake identities.
What Obama produced in May was simply the long form. That's it. The short form, which he produced years ago, is a one without all the hospital stuff on it, intended to be use for authentication, which is record in a database and gets printed out when people need a certified copy.
This is opposed to what Obama eventually produced in May, which is a photocopy of the hospital birth certificate, which has a bunch of other, random stuff on it. (And is not kept by the state, but rather the hospital you were born in. The state cares not one bit who delivered you.)
And, I should point out, the long form also says 'certificate of live birth'. (In fact, almost all of them do. Mine does.)
Huh? You don't have to run Steam in the background at startup if you don't want. That is optional.
If you're not running Steam, it will launch when you run a Steam program, which will produce an annoying five second delay as it authenticates you, but I guess that's well worth it to save the eight megabytes (six megs, plus a two meg service) of memory that Steam takes up when it launches at startup.
And, of course, it wickedly stays around in the background...until you right click on the icon to close it, which closes Steam and the service it launches.
This is MY PC and I want absolute control over every fucking bit of software running, and if it's done running,
Yes, your machine must be utterly controlled by you, we get it. You're the big macho man with a big whip and you will force that machine to do what you say.
What you have failed to notice is that, uh, Steam is under your control, unless you can't spend two seconds right clicking to shut Steam down after playing a Steam game. Not that the amount of memory that Steam takes up is even slightly relevant on any modern computer. Windows Explorer appears to take four times as much memory on my computer.
Once again, I'm forced to ask: Has anyone here complaining about Steam ever seen how it works?
You know, you actually can install it without buying anything, and they do have occasional free games. You can get an account, with no obligation, download it, install it, play around for a bit, and uninstall it.
Perhaps instead of just making shit up, some of the people complaining about Steam should actually see how it actually functions.
...everyone is aware that's not what a 'flash mob' is, right?
There are law enforcement issues issues with 'flash mobs', specifically, they work very well as a pre-scheduled distraction for the police, and can even be used for help with escape.
At some point, I suspect that will happen, that some bank robber wearing a clown outfit will actually escape into a flash mob of clowns, and everyone participating in the flash mob will be charged as an 'attractive nuisance', which is legal speak for 'behaving so stupidly that you make the job of criminals easier', and this whole 'flash mob' thing will die out, or at least the anonymous ones.
However, thugs that know each other, coordinating an attack via text messages, is not a 'flash mob'.
DRM means that you can only install the game as long as they say so - if you bought a new computer each year and installed the game on your new systems too many times, your ability to install the game you paid for is revoked.
So you're saying that rootkits like SecuROM (Which, after all, don't stop you from installing however often you want?) aren't DRM? You might want to tell everyone else here bitching about DRM and meaning what you say is just 'copy protection', because in everyone else's universe they're the same thing.
In fact, most of the complaints about DRM are complaints about rootkits and whatnot. We started this discussion talking about Fallout 3 vs. Fallout New Vegas, and how Fallout New Vegas had less DRM than Fallout 3...whereas, in your universe, Fallout 3 has no DRM at all.
And they are right, and you are wrong. DRM is a term for access control technologies, and certainly does include 'check for oddities on the disk' (Which is how copy protection works.) If you can't burn a normal working copy of the disk using standard burning software, which is the definition of 'copy protection', you have some sort of 'access control technology' according to the law, and you have DRM according to pretty much any definition of the term. (However, serial numbers without any sort of activation don't seem to count as DRM.)
In fact, some of the most obvious and intrusive forms of DRM have been copy protection. I point to Sony's rootkit mess. Trying to retroactively say 'that's not DRM' is insane. That's where half the county learned the term.
If the company goes bankrupt, you can no longer install the game. Hell, if they decide that they want to try to force you to buy Cool Game 2012, they just have to turn off the activation server for Cool Game 2011 and you can no longer install your game, or play it if it requires a persistent connection to their server to play, ever again. Your game you paid good money for is now just an expensive coaster.
You know someone's having trouble in the argument when they have to invent hypothetical situations. Especially when they're explicitly banned under the contract I have with the company (Steam cannot take away games.), or require a company division making a billion a year to just go bankrupt. (And it folds for some reason, instead of being sold to another company.)
DRM also revokes your ability to resell games (in most cases) by tying it to one and only one account.
As I said, if you want to resell your games, you obviously shouldn't buy games with activation. Some of us do not resell games, and in fact have nowhere where we could resell games, and thus do not give a flying fuck about that ability.
DRM also causes frequent problems for paying customers, such as activation server issues preventing people who just bought a game at launch to be unable to install it for several days - other DRM requires each account on the same physical computer to use a separate license, thus for games with low activation counts (I believe it was Bioshock that had a limit of three), installing it once on a family computer and each person playing under their own account on that same computer means you can never reinstall the game. The best you can do is call the company and beg them to let you use the product that you paid $60 for.
Luckily, Steam doesn't work anything like that at all. You can download, install, and run games form Steam on as many computers as you want. Steam stops you from running multiple instances at the same time, it has no problem with multiple installs not at the same time. In fact, you can use the 'backup files' ability to download on one computer, burn to DVD, and then install on as many as you want. (You've never actually used Steam, have you?)
And complaining about such hypothetical install problems is surreal...have fun attempting to purchase a popular game in the first few days it's out at the store. And Steam does
I love it when people say 'DRM=bad'. Why, exactly? Do you have any actual reason for that, or is it something you just learned by rote?
Does this extend to all 'DRM', like the fact games often will only install off a DVD, and want the DVD in the drive to play. Does it matter if there's copy protection on the DVD, or does the fact it just wants a DVD count as 'DRM'?
Do series numbers count as DRM? What about Windows activation? (You do realize that Fallout New Vegas isn't even an option without Windows, right? Has that touched your computer?)
What if a game won't let you play online with two copies with the same serial number? Is that DRM? If not, how exactly is that different than how Steam operates? Oh, look, it asked a server if you were allowed to install the game. The horror!
Do you even have a definition of DRM? Do you understand that different things called 'DRM' work entirely different ways?
Some DRM fucks with your computer. It installs rootkits, it does whatever it wants. This is patently unacceptable...but Steam doesn't do that. (Someone else here thought it was relevant to point out it could...yeah, pretty much any program you have installed could install a rootkit on an update. Let's work in actual facts here.)
Some DRM often results in you getting locked out of things you've purchased. No one's run into this problem with Steam as far as I know. It helps that if something breaks, people can just switch to Offline mode and operate fine. In fact, right after I installed Dragon Age via Steam, Steam screwed up and complained about my DLCs, and I thought something was wrong with my purchase (It was wrong for all of Dragon Age.) and I just kept it offline until I had time to google about it and learned that 'Oh, that was broken all weekend, but is now fixed'.
Some DRM limits resells. Steam does do that, and if you plan to resell your games Steam is obviously a stupid choice to buy them over.
However, selling things that people can't resell, when it's patently obvious they can't resell, does not seem to me to be 'bad'. Plenty of people don't resell games, and at least Steam is upfront about it. Unlike all those games that come with 'free DLCs', forgetting to mention that those get tied to an account..you can resell the game, but the person you sell to doesn't get the DLC...and they're putting more and more content in those and less in the actual game. Unless we get some actual laws on the matter, reselling games is going away, and it doesn't have much to do with Steam at all.
That is a valid complaint when the game isn't available any other way, like FO:NV. If I resold games, I certainly wouldn't buy it.
So tell me, without using the word 'DRM' or reciting how 'DRM=bad': Why is it 'bad' for games, when they install, to check that you have an account that said game is registered on? How exactly does this cause any harm to you?
I'm not ever going to install an uncracked game with a rootkit anywhere near a computer I care about.
The parent post is wrong, Fallout New Vegas is not an add-on for Fallout 3. It is a different game on mostly the same engine. New Vegas does not have any sort of rootkit. It requires Steam, even if you buy it in the store, like Half-Life.
Steam might do less damage than SecuROM, but it still sits there with administrative rights to do things beyond your back.
That's nothing. I was going to install a stand-alone game once, and the installer wanted admin rights! It could have done anything behind my back!
Jesus Christ, get a grip on yourself.
Any game actually sold has 'admin rights', at least during the install, and can do things behind your back. I've never seen a windows game willing to install in a user's home directory before.
Incidentally, do you actually have any evidence that Steam does have admin rights? It seems to be running under my user ID on my computer. (It can do this because the Steam game directories are world-writable, which is, uh, kinda stupid. Although nice for installing mods.)
I love how some people have to try to justify some reason to hate Steam. Steam is pretty much the least bad DRM we're ever going to see.
There are legit reasons to dislike Steam, like inability to resell, or even loan, games. Or the fact your computer has to be on the internet. (Which is, at this point, a silly complaint.) But don't go making up 'It could install a rootkit if it wanted' nonsense. Yeah, so could every game you've ever installed.
So apparently you have no idea how much fucking work it would be to launder a million dollars using the lottery?
Of course, in the original post, he mentions he sold 'a couple of hundred dollars a day to a somewhat disreputable person.'. A couple of hundred dollars a day in tickets...will yield you 100 dollars a day in winnings. That would plausible, sell drugs for eight hours, deal with the lottery for an hour, to justify your profits. Except that's nonsense. No one has to fucking justify $300 a day...they can walk up to a bank and simply turn it in.
Money laundering is not normally used as a 'tax justification', as I pointed out. Anyone who thinks that has no understanding of either it, or how taxes work. You do not need to justify your income to the IRS.The IRS doesn't care if you sell drugs. All you have to do is declare, and pay taxes on, all your income (or at least enough income to support your lifestyle) and they're happy. You can make the money mugging people for all they care. (I would not actually declare something actually illegal as your profession...but 'odd job contractor' will do. Also, don't try to take a business expense deductions.)
Actual money laundering is use to convert cash where you can deposit it in bank accounts with a justified origin, because you can't walk up to the bank with $30,000 in cash without getting reported.
And hence it operates on a larger scale than would be possible to launder money through a lottery. No one is running around laundering a few hundred dollars at a time! The entire concept is nonsensical.
And what's even more nonsensical is, when you win small amounts (Which 90% of the '40-50%' of winnings would be), they just get handed to you from the cashier. As cash. (Granted, this might work different in the UK.) You have to win over $500 or something to go to a lottery location and presumably get a check and actual documentation you won.
So even if you did buy $30,000 in lottery tickets, at the end of this supposed 'lottery laundering', you have ended back up with $12,000...IN CASH. (And maybe two 'big' wins totaling $2000 with documentation.)
The bank is still going to report that $12,000. Because it's still in cash.
So, apparently this is the Ultimate Spider-Man, not the standard one.
Gee, would have been nice to mention that at some point, beside the mention it was happening in 'Ultimate Fallout'. (I don't actually pay attention to the Ultimate universe, and half the time forget it's there.)
Slashdot Mirror
want to take you hostage
Indeed, this is exactly why no rich person is ever going to do anything like this.
Hey, look, the most tempting target of pirates, ever! (And the fun thing, you don't even need to leave after kidnapping them.)
Rich people live on private islands, sure, but they're private islands inside a nation that will respond with a navy if they're invaded. (Or, more correctly, would never let a flotilla of pirates wander around inside their waters to start with.) The ones without a navy usually have the US navy to help out. We don't let pirates wander around the the ocean even if they're outside our waters. But it's sorta idiotic to expect that if you blatantly move somewhere built to avoid the US.
People for some reason think rich people want 'no laws'. No, they want no taxes and they want no regulations for their companies.
They sure as fuck want laws against kidnapping and theft. (And a law that can't be enforced is no law at all.)
You're saying "if I do this thing the GPL allows me to do, then I've agreed to do it and therefore it's a contract."
Uh, no, I haven't said anything like that at all. I am getting very angry that people are just MAKING UP things I say. I ask everyone to notice the lack of quotes of me.
I said, you fucking imbecile, that the GPL is a contract. Just like any contract, you can agree to it, or not. Hey, look, I literally said that, 'The GPL is a contract people can choose to agree to, or not.'
If you do not agree with it, though, you've got no license to distribute the work at all, so you'll look pretty silly when they take you to court for copyright violation.
Sorry, but all the GPL says about distributing to third parties is that if you do so, you may continue to distribute the work. It says nothing about what you MUST do, only what you MAY do.
What, did you forget to learn how to think in school? (Have you gotten to school yet?)
Saying 'You can do X, but only if you do Y', is exactly the same thing as saying 'to do X, you must do Y'.
The sentence 'You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source....' is exactly the same as 'If you convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, you must also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source...'
I think you're also confusing two meanings of "agree," one being "consent" and the other being "pledge/commit to an action."
Uh, no, I didn't. The parent did that, by taking me saying 'people had to agree to the GPL' and pretending I meant 'people were required to sign the contract'. (Actually, that's a slightly different grammatical confusion based on 'had to'.)
When of course I meant that 'contracts were things that people had to agree to or they were not bound by them'. To be a 'contract' requires agreement on both sides, and by 'requires agreement' I mean 'or the contract does not really exist', not 'everyone is forced to agree'.
I will now repeat the actual positrons I actually have, not the goddamn made up one that people keep inventing. If you have an actual problem with these positions, you are invited to quote these positions, and we can have a discussion.
If you do not quote part of my post after this paragraph in your reply, or have a problem with some other imaginary position, I will assume you are a troll and not respond. I will refrain from using 'agree':
The GPL is a contract. This contract includes in it a license to distribute the software.
Being a contract, you cannot be bound by it without deciding you are bound by it. You are not bound by it by using GPL software, and you are not bound by it by distributing GPL software.
However, as the GPL is pretty much the only way to license the right to distribute the software, if you aren't bound by it when distributing the software, you're pretty much unarguably in violation of the copyright. (Which is why GPL violators tend to say they have decided to be bound by it, but lie and say what they are doing is compliant.)
That is my position, that is all I have said in any of the posts above.
It is entirely reasonable to argue with my positions. In fact, the FSF argues with my 'contract' statement, and I've been fucking prepared to argue that this entire time. They're wrong. The fact that licenses agreements have special treatment under the law does not mean they cannot be contracts, and in fact most are.
But that is a reasonable argument. What is not reasonable, and I will no longer stand, is arguing with imaginary positions I supposedly hold.
When you suggested that the GPL makes you agree to do something.
How the hell can you be 'made' to agree to something? Are you even talking English?
No. WRONG. You MAY distribute the derived work under certain conditions, you don't have to AGREE to anything and the GPL does not FORCE you to do anything. What part of "you may" (i.e. you are licensed) don't you get?
You don't have to agree to contracts. That's why they're contracts instead of, I dunno, slavery.
If the GPL said you had to commit to distributing something, you'd be right. But it doesn't.
The GPL does say you have to commit to distribute something...if you do certain things. If you give out copies, you have to commit to the distribute copies of the source code to specific people during a certain time period. Committing to distribute something is, in fact, exactly what the GPL requires. (Of course, you can pre-emptively distribute the source when you distribute the software, and then you don't have to worry about it later. But it's still a requirement, it's just one you've already met.)
True. You don't have to exchange anything with the copyright holder of a GPL'd work. The reason you MAY do so is because the rights to the derived work BELONG to the original copyright holder. Are you so dense that you don't get that?
I don't understand what you think I said, but basically you seem to be under the impression that I said people have to agree to the GPL. I have no idea why you think I said that, or how the fuck that would even work. Gunpoint, perhaps?
The GPL is a contract people can choose to agree to, or not. JUST LIKE ALL CONTRACTS. That's what contracts are. There's no such thing as non-optional contracts.
If people choose to agree to it, it gives them a license to distribute a copyright work (and thus derivatives of that work), in exchange for requiring certain other things of them, like handing out source code to certain people. (Namely, those you distributed binaries to.)
I don't know I can make that simpler, and I have no idea what sort of retarded argument you think you're having about the GPL 'required'. At no point have I suggested the GPL was required. The GPL is a contract that people can agree to, or not. (Of course, if they do not agree, and have no other license to distribute the work, they're in copyright violation if they hand out copies.) In fact, that concept is inherent in my statement it's a contract.
I think you've decided that I think it's an EULA. As I pointed out way back there, EULAs are bogus. They attempt to 'grant rights' that people already have, and hence have no consideration. And I know you don't have to agree to the GPL to use GPL software, if that's the nonsensical problem you've invented in your head. (You don't have to agree to any license to use any software. Using software you legally possess a copy, even making the disk and memory copies required to use it, of is explicitly granted under copyright law.)
The GPL is a contract, one side of which the original author has already agreed to, and the other side anyone can agree to. No one 'has to' agree to it, but, of course, they usually don't have any permission to make copies outside of that agreement.
Completely wrong. If you link your code with GPL'd code, it is a derived work and you do not own the copyright on it, ergo you don't get to choose how you can distribute it.
What the fuck are you yammering about? When did I say you could link your code with GPL code and then choose how to distribute it?
You can only distribute a derivative work you made under permission from the original copyright holder. (And yourself, obviously.)
The GPL says that if you distribute this derived work, you must distribute the entire thing including source code. It carves out an exception if you want to distribute the source separately (through download, or an included offer to provide it) but otherwise you don't have to "agree" to a damn thing.
Read what you just wrote:
The GPL says that if you distribute this derived work, you must distribute the entire thing including source code.
In other words, you have to 'agree' to distribute the entire thing including source code. You are agreeing to distribute the code for your derivative work (And grant others the same rights) in return for the ability to distribute your compiled derivative work.
That's what a contract is. One party agrees to X if and only if the other party agrees to Y.
It's a license, not a contract.
Saying 'It's a license, not a contract' is like saying 'It's a payment, not a contract'. Dude, lots of contracts have payments in them, and lots of contracts have licenses in them. Yes, you can have payments and licenses exist outside of contracts, also, but that doesn't make them opposites.
A contract is an agree-upon mutual exchange, an license is granting someone the right to do something they otherwise would not have the right to do. Like produce copies of someone else's copyrighted work. (In this context, we're talking about non-government licenses, but driver's licenses and stuff like that fall into the same general concept.)
Such a license is, obviously, is often granted as part of an aforementioned mutual exchange, aka, as part of a contract.
In fact, most copyright licenses are inside contracts. For example, almost all music is licensed to a recording company by the artist, giving that record company permission to copy the artist-copyrighted music, via a contract that gives the artist a percentage of the profits on each CD sold.
Seriously, I can see the argument that the GPL isn't a contract, on the grounds the original copyright holder gets nothing out of it, so the original copyright holder has no consideration. The FSF has argued this before. As I pointed out in my post, that's a misunderstanding of the fact contracts require 'consideration'...contracts that require you to do something for a third-party that has nothing to do with the contract are entirely valid. Or they can even require you to do random crap that benefits no one, like dance a jig every day at noon for ten minutes. As long as the contract requires each party to do something the other party wants, there is 'consideration', no matter how inane or pointless it is. Requiring people to distribute the source is, indeed, 'consideration'.
But I can understand that misinformed argument.
What I can't understand is the braindead idea that contracts and licenses cannot overlap. That's not even slightly correct. Almost all licenses are inside contracts in the real world!
The record companies finance the recording and advertising of the work, but they don't create it in any way, neither in the performance nor the writing.
No, even that isn't true. Record companies don't finance the recording or advertising of the work.
They issue a loan to the artist called an 'advance' (Which is spent on making the record.) and require the artist to pay it back before they start making any money.
The idea that it's a work-for-hire is complete and utter nonsense. At no point has the music industry ever operated like that.
Uh, no. A lot of people appear very confused about this.
A contract is any agreement between two people that has consideration on both sides.
The GPL allows one party to do one thing (make copies, which would otherwise be illegal) in return for the other party getting what they want (Forcing the first party to give out the source.)
Ergo, the GPL is a form of license agreement that has consideration on both sides.
Q.E.D., it is a contract.
Now, there are forms of license agreements that don't have consideration on both sides. Some forms of the BSD license do not. Those are not contracts.
But anything that says 'If I let you X, you also have to do Y' is a contract.
A few people, include the FSF at times, have claimed the GPL not a contract because it doesn't get the author any reward...it's more 'pay it forward'. This is utter nonsense, legally. The courts don't care to whose benefit the contract is...I can write a contract saying 'If you donate $1000 to the Red Cross, I will paint your house.'. Or even 'I will paint some random person's house'. Contracts require 'consideration' on both sides, not 'actual gain'.
If you allow someone to do something, in return for forcing them to do something else, whatever you force them to do is the 'consideration' on your part, no matter whom it seems to benefit.
You don't need to make them do it manually, there's a command line calibre converter tool. (And no one claims that calling a command line is a derivative work.)
No, you can't agree to a contract in one place, and then totally avoid it in another. If you're distributing GPL stuff, you have to follow the terms of the GPL in everything you do....you can't magically move actions into some other 'thing' and claim it's unrelated.
Imagine how contracts would work otherwise. 'I agreed to give you money if you agreed to not do X. And then you did X!' 'Well, yes, but I didn't do X as part of the contract, I just did that randomly, unrelated to my agreement with you not to do X.'.
This is plainly silly. And, yes, a license to distribute copyright work can, and often does, place limits on what else someone can do. (For example, TV stations that buy a license to distribute a TV show often have all sorts of rules about how they can advertise that show.)
You're thinking of an EULA, which it would indeed be unreasonable for such terms, pretending EULAs were reasonable at all. But the GPL isn't an EULA. It's a distribution license, it's a real, actual, contract that gives benefits to both parties. If you agree to the GPL and do X, you are allowed to do Y. (As opposed to EULAs, which attempt to take away rights already granted under the law and give nothing in return.)
However, yes, a loophole exists, in that one party could modify a GPL program into a DLL, and distribute it, entirely complying with the GPL...and another party could call that DLL, without distributing their own source.
This has, in fact, actually happened a few times.
But it requires at least two parties. You can't hack the program into DLL form and then yourself write another program to do that, because to distribute the DLL you have to agree to the GPL, including the parts that say calling such a DLL would be a derivative work.
If you don't agree with that (Even if the court says it's legal.) you can't distribute GPL software. You can use it, yes, but not distribute it. The right to distribute it is predicated on agreeing with the GPL, and the GPL can, indeed, take away rights that are given under the law, in exchange for granting you the right to distribute the software. If the GPL demands you treat linked programs as a derivative work and release the code for them, you have to do that if you want to distribute the GPL software, even if the court says they aren't any such a thing.
However, that loophole is totally irrelevant here. Distributing half-compiled blobs isn't complying with the GPL at all. Even if they want to make the argument that their 'viewer blob' is an actual DLL, and pretending that they (as opposed to someone else) can release such a DLL without releasing stuff that links to it...they haven't actually released the source to that blob either, the blob with actual literal GPL code in it, so that blob is utterly in violation of the GPL no matter how plausible this 'derivative work DLL loophole' is.
Uh, yes, they do.
Trade secrets have no protection against someone independently reinventing them (Like patents do) nor do they have any protection against the company that holds them publishing them. (Like copyrights.)
As long as you're within the law when you learn someone else's trade secret, as long as you don't violate someone's NDA or break into their safe or something, it's entirely legal to use that information however you want.
But, if to learn that trade secret, you do break the law, or do violate an NDA, though, every state has some sort of 'trade secret law' where the original company can sue you for epic damages, and even force a gag on you so you can't spread the secret, with even more damages if you do so.
Well, yes, I'm sure there are some hypothetical companies that , indeed, pour all their profits into employees.
But even if they exist, to say 'Tax cuts help those companies pay more', you'd still have to hypothesize some sort of weird situation where they want their CEO to have a fixed amount of income, and thus raise and lower his gross pay based on his taxes.
Which, frankly, is such an absurd idea it doesn't really matter if some companies, hypothetically, would hire, or keep on, employees they don't need if they could afford it. Personal income taxes don't have anything at all to do with what a company can afford in the first place!
Houses, throughout history, have cost 3x-4x the total yearly wage of a person, so $150,000 is roughly reasonable, assuming people make $40,000-$50,000.
What is unreasonable, however, is that as wages have fallen or remained steady, housing prices continued to go up, where they were roughly at 8x yearly wage. Some of this is due to the stupid bubble, and the rest is due to banks pretending it is sane to buy a $300,000 house if you have a yearly wage of $40,000. Thus changing the types of houses on the market, so that people are all buying houses too expensive, simply because cheaper houses do not exist. (When is the last time you saw anyone build a two bedroom one bath?)
What is also unreasonable is the fact that banks continue to come up with absurd payment methods, where even if you can find a reasonable house for $150,000, you'll end up paying way $1,000,000.
It used to be that you'd be able to find a house at three times your yearly salary, and pay maybe a total of six times it. Now, you find them at five times, and the banks want you to pay twenty.
It being a bubble did not automatically mean that mortgage-backed securities were iffy. All the rating agencies cared was: 'Were people going to continue to pay their mortgage?' They couldn't care less if the house value was going to collapse, except to the extent that it was going to affect the likelihood of paying the mortgage.
However, the fact it was a bubble did affect that, and hence the rating agencies should have taken a closer look at them...
Something like half those damn things never had the mortgages properly transferred inside. Some mortgage backed securities appear to, legally, have no mortgages at all in them.
This isn't some sort of fraud in the loan making, where the rating agencies arguably weren't supposed to care about. It wasn't fraud in the foreclosures, which is also happening. This is fraud in the actual securities. Some of the investors who went bust have started looking at the actual securities, and discovered they were utter nonsense, without actual loans inside.
Forget the damn housing bubble, or the economic collapse. Those can be argued the rating agencies weren't able to foresee. However, the fact they stamped A+ or whatever on an security with bogus pieces of paper stating that some unknown mortgage will be transferred in at some future date, some mortgage that didn't even exist and can't be transferred now...well...seriously, I don't understand how they're still in business.
...which would result in a massive devaluation of our debt as China quickly sold it to other investors, resulting in interest rates skyrocketing as we issued new bonds and no one would buy them at current interest rates.
You don't really understand how this works, do you? China isn't sitting there with a bunch of pieces of paper that say 'bonds we sold to China'.
They just have normal bonds. Like any other bonds, they can be sold to others. We can't just magically revoke them, it's not like there's a list, and the way the bond market works, half the time it's not even China redeeming them anyway. They could easily make that 'none of the time' if they felt like it.
The only reason we know that China has about $900 billion of our debt is that they've told us that, and we can roughly confirm it by watching how the market operates.
And this is not to mention the fact that once you start targeting individual bond holders and changing the laws so you don't have to pay them (Or delusionaly think you don't have it, when of course they'll just sell the bonds to others.), uh, you've basically destroyed your credit rating forever.
Nothing has changed that makes the US more likely to default.
Really? Where were you the last month?
We just had a rather dramatic demonstration that enough politician are willing to deliberately cause default that it could, indeed, happen.
No one can really argue with the S&P on this on...when a debt issuer stands around arguing in public whether or not they'll pay off their debt, and enough of the issuing party to cause them not to pay seems to think it would be a good thing if they defaulted...
I don't understand why we weren't downgraded by everyone, back in early July, when the Tea Party idiots first opened their mouths and stated a default was acceptable behavior.
(Not that anyone should care the slightest about the rating of any rating agency that played along with the bank's nonsense of the last decade.)
All this talk about raising taxes on the wealthy "killing small business" is crap. Something like 80% of businesses in this country bring in less than $75,000 a year, the statistics are all on the various government agencies that do the reporting.
Man, don't even frame it that way, you're already inside the lies.
It doesn't matter how much small businesses bring in. The wealthy's income taxes has nothing to do with how much money businesses have.
The wealthy own, or are employed by, businesses. The only way taxing them can even possibly hurt monetarily is if some sort of magical fixed amount of money going to the wealthy, so when the wealthy make less due to taxes, they merely have to file a complaint somewhere, and the business bumps up their income, and therefore decreases everyone else's. (And if that's how the world works...damn, we're already rather fucked up.)
Once you actually point this out, idiots ill try to make 'reducing taxes' the rich investing in companies, but that doesn't work either...that's capital gains tax, not income tax. (And even if companies are invested in, they don't hire more people until they need them, period, no exceptions.)
Don't buy into the idea it's some sort of trade off, but the right is lying because income tax increases will only 'hurt' large companies. It's not any sort of fucking trade off at all. Companies do not hire and fire people based on their own taxes, and they sure as fuck don't hire and fire them based on the taxes of their owners and the taxes of their CEOs. It's not any sort of arguable point. It's total nonsense, either the person arguing that is a partisan liar, or they're an idiot.
However, even pretending the whole 'businesses will have less money (Because they magically have to pay the rich the same amount.)' is true, it doesn't make sense anyway. It requires an utterly stupid concept of how businesses work. Companies do not sit around going 'Man, we've got some extra workers now, but we'll keep them around until we (aka, the rich CEO) need some extra the money, at which point we'll fire them and hand the profits to the CEO.' Companies don't keep extra people around, and giving them more money won't cause them to keep extra people around, and removing money won't remove people.
Companies hire people because they need people working for them to produce the jobs and services that others buy from them. Period. The only way to fix the economy is to have people start buying stuff, so companies hire people to produce said stuff. And the only way to have people start buying stuff is either to give money to the poor, who spend it immediately, or have the government just buy stuff, like it for WWIII to get out of out the Great Depression.
Instead, we've decided to give money to the rich, because uh, I dunno know.
No, he produced a certificate of live birth. These are provided to anyone, and you can get them saying you were born wherever.
Saying words in a different order does not make them a different thing. A 'certificate of live birth' is, indeed, a 'live birth certificate'.
In fact, almost no government certificate at all, says 'X certificate'. They mostly say 'certificate of X'. Go look at a marriage certificate if you don't believe me. The fact it says words in the 'wrong order' does not make it not a 'birth certificate', anymore than something saying 'certificate of marriage' does not mean it's not a 'marriage certificate'.
That is literally what it is saying, in English you can put the words in either order. A 'birth certificate' is 'certificate of birth'. Anyone who argues otherwise is simply too dumb to be allowed to comment politically, and probably should be in some sort of home for the mentally incompetent.
Nor is it important it puts the word 'live' before that, which is just to distinguish it from being born dead, which would be a 'certificate of birth resulting in stillbirth'. Or a 'stillborn birth certificate'. These are combination birth/dead certificates. (That's rather moot, I don't think anyone's arguing Obama was not alive when he was born, but who knows what sort of stupid conspiracies have show up.)
And you can't just go and invent any of those. They are birth certificates. They aren't things 'sorta like birth certificates', they aren't 'we'll use it in place of a birth certificate', they are actual, real, true, birth certificates. They are so valuable, that criminals have a black market in existing ones where the person is dead, for fake identities.
What Obama produced in May was simply the long form. That's it. The short form, which he produced years ago, is a one without all the hospital stuff on it, intended to be use for authentication, which is record in a database and gets printed out when people need a certified copy.
This is opposed to what Obama eventually produced in May, which is a photocopy of the hospital birth certificate, which has a bunch of other, random stuff on it. (And is not kept by the state, but rather the hospital you were born in. The state cares not one bit who delivered you.)
And, I should point out, the long form also says 'certificate of live birth'. (In fact, almost all of them do. Mine does.)
Huh? You don't have to run Steam in the background at startup if you don't want. That is optional.
If you're not running Steam, it will launch when you run a Steam program, which will produce an annoying five second delay as it authenticates you, but I guess that's well worth it to save the eight megabytes (six megs, plus a two meg service) of memory that Steam takes up when it launches at startup.
And, of course, it wickedly stays around in the background...until you right click on the icon to close it, which closes Steam and the service it launches.
This is MY PC and I want absolute control over every fucking bit of software running, and if it's done running,
Yes, your machine must be utterly controlled by you, we get it. You're the big macho man with a big whip and you will force that machine to do what you say.
What you have failed to notice is that, uh, Steam is under your control, unless you can't spend two seconds right clicking to shut Steam down after playing a Steam game. Not that the amount of memory that Steam takes up is even slightly relevant on any modern computer. Windows Explorer appears to take four times as much memory on my computer.
Once again, I'm forced to ask: Has anyone here complaining about Steam ever seen how it works?
You know, you actually can install it without buying anything, and they do have occasional free games. You can get an account, with no obligation, download it, install it, play around for a bit, and uninstall it.
Perhaps instead of just making shit up, some of the people complaining about Steam should actually see how it actually functions.
...everyone is aware that's not what a 'flash mob' is, right?
There are law enforcement issues issues with 'flash mobs', specifically, they work very well as a pre-scheduled distraction for the police, and can even be used for help with escape.
At some point, I suspect that will happen, that some bank robber wearing a clown outfit will actually escape into a flash mob of clowns, and everyone participating in the flash mob will be charged as an 'attractive nuisance', which is legal speak for 'behaving so stupidly that you make the job of criminals easier', and this whole 'flash mob' thing will die out, or at least the anonymous ones.
However, thugs that know each other, coordinating an attack via text messages, is not a 'flash mob'.
DRM means that you can only install the game as long as they say so - if you bought a new computer each year and installed the game on your new systems too many times, your ability to install the game you paid for is revoked.
So you're saying that rootkits like SecuROM (Which, after all, don't stop you from installing however often you want?) aren't DRM? You might want to tell everyone else here bitching about DRM and meaning what you say is just 'copy protection', because in everyone else's universe they're the same thing.
In fact, most of the complaints about DRM are complaints about rootkits and whatnot. We started this discussion talking about Fallout 3 vs. Fallout New Vegas, and how Fallout New Vegas had less DRM than Fallout 3...whereas, in your universe, Fallout 3 has no DRM at all.
And they are right, and you are wrong. DRM is a term for access control technologies, and certainly does include 'check for oddities on the disk' (Which is how copy protection works.) If you can't burn a normal working copy of the disk using standard burning software, which is the definition of 'copy protection', you have some sort of 'access control technology' according to the law, and you have DRM according to pretty much any definition of the term. (However, serial numbers without any sort of activation don't seem to count as DRM.)
In fact, some of the most obvious and intrusive forms of DRM have been copy protection. I point to Sony's rootkit mess. Trying to retroactively say 'that's not DRM' is insane. That's where half the county learned the term.
If the company goes bankrupt, you can no longer install the game. Hell, if they decide that they want to try to force you to buy Cool Game 2012, they just have to turn off the activation server for Cool Game 2011 and you can no longer install your game, or play it if it requires a persistent connection to their server to play, ever again. Your game you paid good money for is now just an expensive coaster.
You know someone's having trouble in the argument when they have to invent hypothetical situations. Especially when they're explicitly banned under the contract I have with the company (Steam cannot take away games.), or require a company division making a billion a year to just go bankrupt. (And it folds for some reason, instead of being sold to another company.)
DRM also revokes your ability to resell games (in most cases) by tying it to one and only one account.
As I said, if you want to resell your games, you obviously shouldn't buy games with activation. Some of us do not resell games, and in fact have nowhere where we could resell games, and thus do not give a flying fuck about that ability.
DRM also causes frequent problems for paying customers, such as activation server issues preventing people who just bought a game at launch to be unable to install it for several days - other DRM requires each account on the same physical computer to use a separate license, thus for games with low activation counts (I believe it was Bioshock that had a limit of three), installing it once on a family computer and each person playing under their own account on that same computer means you can never reinstall the game. The best you can do is call the company and beg them to let you use the product that you paid $60 for.
Luckily, Steam doesn't work anything like that at all. You can download, install, and run games form Steam on as many computers as you want. Steam stops you from running multiple instances at the same time, it has no problem with multiple installs not at the same time. In fact, you can use the 'backup files' ability to download on one computer, burn to DVD, and then install on as many as you want. (You've never actually used Steam, have you?)
And complaining about such hypothetical install problems is surreal...have fun attempting to purchase a popular game in the first few days it's out at the store. And Steam does
I love it when people say 'DRM=bad'. Why, exactly? Do you have any actual reason for that, or is it something you just learned by rote?
Does this extend to all 'DRM', like the fact games often will only install off a DVD, and want the DVD in the drive to play. Does it matter if there's copy protection on the DVD, or does the fact it just wants a DVD count as 'DRM'?
Do series numbers count as DRM? What about Windows activation? (You do realize that Fallout New Vegas isn't even an option without Windows, right? Has that touched your computer?)
What if a game won't let you play online with two copies with the same serial number? Is that DRM? If not, how exactly is that different than how Steam operates? Oh, look, it asked a server if you were allowed to install the game. The horror!
Do you even have a definition of DRM? Do you understand that different things called 'DRM' work entirely different ways?
Some DRM fucks with your computer. It installs rootkits, it does whatever it wants. This is patently unacceptable...but Steam doesn't do that. (Someone else here thought it was relevant to point out it could...yeah, pretty much any program you have installed could install a rootkit on an update. Let's work in actual facts here.)
Some DRM often results in you getting locked out of things you've purchased. No one's run into this problem with Steam as far as I know. It helps that if something breaks, people can just switch to Offline mode and operate fine. In fact, right after I installed Dragon Age via Steam, Steam screwed up and complained about my DLCs, and I thought something was wrong with my purchase (It was wrong for all of Dragon Age.) and I just kept it offline until I had time to google about it and learned that 'Oh, that was broken all weekend, but is now fixed'.
Some DRM limits resells. Steam does do that, and if you plan to resell your games Steam is obviously a stupid choice to buy them over.
However, selling things that people can't resell, when it's patently obvious they can't resell, does not seem to me to be 'bad'. Plenty of people don't resell games, and at least Steam is upfront about it. Unlike all those games that come with 'free DLCs', forgetting to mention that those get tied to an account..you can resell the game, but the person you sell to doesn't get the DLC...and they're putting more and more content in those and less in the actual game. Unless we get some actual laws on the matter, reselling games is going away, and it doesn't have much to do with Steam at all.
That is a valid complaint when the game isn't available any other way, like FO:NV. If I resold games, I certainly wouldn't buy it.
So tell me, without using the word 'DRM' or reciting how 'DRM=bad': Why is it 'bad' for games, when they install, to check that you have an account that said game is registered on? How exactly does this cause any harm to you?
Have you, uhm, tried installing a Windows program some day?
Please read what I wrote. I did not say 'Windows program' I said 'game'.
And I just love the analogy between network authentication on install and rape. Stay classy.
I think you have to reconnect every week or so. It might depend on the game.
But, seriously, the idea that people have a computer that's not occasionally on the internet is just silly now.
I'm not ever going to install an uncracked game with a rootkit anywhere near a computer I care about.
The parent post is wrong, Fallout New Vegas is not an add-on for Fallout 3. It is a different game on mostly the same engine. New Vegas does not have any sort of rootkit. It requires Steam, even if you buy it in the store, like Half-Life.
Steam might do less damage than SecuROM, but it still sits there with administrative rights to do things beyond your back.
That's nothing. I was going to install a stand-alone game once, and the installer wanted admin rights! It could have done anything behind my back!
Jesus Christ, get a grip on yourself.
Any game actually sold has 'admin rights', at least during the install, and can do things behind your back. I've never seen a windows game willing to install in a user's home directory before.
Incidentally, do you actually have any evidence that Steam does have admin rights? It seems to be running under my user ID on my computer. (It can do this because the Steam game directories are world-writable, which is, uh, kinda stupid. Although nice for installing mods.)
I love how some people have to try to justify some reason to hate Steam. Steam is pretty much the least bad DRM we're ever going to see.
There are legit reasons to dislike Steam, like inability to resell, or even loan, games. Or the fact your computer has to be on the internet. (Which is, at this point, a silly complaint.) But don't go making up 'It could install a rootkit if it wanted' nonsense. Yeah, so could every game you've ever installed.
So apparently you have no idea how much fucking work it would be to launder a million dollars using the lottery?
Of course, in the original post, he mentions he sold 'a couple of hundred dollars a day to a somewhat disreputable person.'. A couple of hundred dollars a day in tickets...will yield you 100 dollars a day in winnings. That would plausible, sell drugs for eight hours, deal with the lottery for an hour, to justify your profits. Except that's nonsense. No one has to fucking justify $300 a day...they can walk up to a bank and simply turn it in.
Money laundering is not normally used as a 'tax justification', as I pointed out. Anyone who thinks that has no understanding of either it, or how taxes work. You do not need to justify your income to the IRS.The IRS doesn't care if you sell drugs. All you have to do is declare, and pay taxes on, all your income (or at least enough income to support your lifestyle) and they're happy. You can make the money mugging people for all they care. (I would not actually declare something actually illegal as your profession...but 'odd job contractor' will do. Also, don't try to take a business expense deductions.)
Actual money laundering is use to convert cash where you can deposit it in bank accounts with a justified origin, because you can't walk up to the bank with $30,000 in cash without getting reported.
And hence it operates on a larger scale than would be possible to launder money through a lottery. No one is running around laundering a few hundred dollars at a time! The entire concept is nonsensical.
And what's even more nonsensical is, when you win small amounts (Which 90% of the '40-50%' of winnings would be), they just get handed to you from the cashier. As cash. (Granted, this might work different in the UK.) You have to win over $500 or something to go to a lottery location and presumably get a check and actual documentation you won.
So even if you did buy $30,000 in lottery tickets, at the end of this supposed 'lottery laundering', you have ended back up with $12,000...IN CASH. (And maybe two 'big' wins totaling $2000 with documentation.)
The bank is still going to report that $12,000. Because it's still in cash.
Money laundering: YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.
So, apparently this is the Ultimate Spider-Man, not the standard one.
Gee, would have been nice to mention that at some point, beside the mention it was happening in 'Ultimate Fallout'. (I don't actually pay attention to the Ultimate universe, and half the time forget it's there.)