Sadly, most of them have been completely ignored by other companies who make said games.
The 'Tex Murphy' games spring to mind. They combined full motion video and a first person 360 degree perspective, with everything you'd expect in an adventure game.
That's what I do, too. I give them my real name and, this is the important bit, my email address, the on they spammed. (The spammer *already* has it, anyway, and as people like to give them lots of junk info, might be filtering that the email is one they sent the message to.)
If I'm not busy, I'll tell them they are doing business with criminals who committed felonies while representing their company.
If I am busy, I'll pretend to have no idea what they are talking about. Yes that is my name, and that is my email. However, I do not own a house, and do not want a mortgage.
And there was the time I pretended someone had paid me to answer the phone and pretend to be interested...
Why do we have to reduce it to all businesses that are using spam?
Well, that's easy enough. You said: How many businesses do you think are in the United States? How many in the world? How much time does it take to opt-out from all of their mailing lists?
I said that you cannot count all of those businesses. Only those that are in fact using spam pose a problem in the first place! There's no need to opt out of nonexistant spam. Thus the number of businesses overall is irrelevant; what's relevant is the number of businesses using spam.
You don't quite seem to understand the logic here. Before, spam was forbidden. Not it's been ofically sanctions by the government as OK if you follow certain rules.
Spam, until this law was passed, was illegal.
Well, I cannot speak for the UK, not knowing about their laws. But in the US at least, things aren't illegal until they're made illegal. Some things are difficult to make illegal. I suspect that spam is one of these.
No, spam was illegal before this, it was just illegal under various trespass laws, and very hard to sue for. Then some states outlawed it, so it was more illegal. And it's always been against every AUP in existence, so it's at least fraud when you get your account.
Then an explicit law was made OKing it if you follow certain rules, invalidating state laws and any trespassing arguments.
As for giving notice, with a per domain opt out list...that will never happen, at least not in the next ten years.
Well, 1) just to be clear, the sort of opt-out list I'm talking about is one where you provide constructive notice to the world. Provided it's prominent enough that spammers are reasonably likely to see it in the course of their actions (which to me implies that it'll be in the email address itself, or perhaps in the mail protocols) it's sufficient. 2) It is possible that there does not need to be a law permitting such opt out, though the government could perhaps help it along. Even if done privately, so long as the notice is prominent enough, I think it ought to be enough. Actual notice -- i.e. notice a specific spammer is in fact aware of as opposed to having knowledge imputed to him, is also good of course.
Providing it in the mail addess has been done for years, or have you never seen mail addresses with 'NOSPAM' in them. It didn't work.
As for providing it in the protocol, that won't work for half a dozen reasons, the last of which is that mail clients do not connect to your server, they connect to other servers which pass the mail on, and then don't know if it's spam or not, so don't know to stop sending it when they get the 'I do not accept spam.'
The real reason they don't work, of course, is that years ago California said something like this could be used to block spam, so the standard was invented of putting 'NO UBE NO UCE' in the SMTP connection banner. No spamware checks for it. There already is a standard for that, and no spammer cares.
At least, that's assuming that there are no issues of prior restraint, which I'm growing a little bit worried about.
Well, you can worry about thaty all you want, but I fail to see how I cannot use prior restraint against someone contacting me. That's something the government can't do. The internet is not government property.
Basically, the concept of a 'no solicitors' sign on the gate to your door is long-established, widely honored, and usually can be backed up through means such as suits or prosecution for trespassing. I'm merely advocating an equivalent.
Yes, and we've had versions of that for years. Not only do spammers not follow it, they don't listen to 'no such user' errors anymore, which is basically walking past my no solicting sign to stomp through my flower bed to walk up to a non-existence door...over and over and over.
But do note that in the absence of such a sign, people are deemed to have consented to solicitation at
Why do we have to reduce it to all businesses that are using spam? Spam, until this law was passed, was illegal. It was illegal under various state laws, it was illegal in other countries, it was an AUP violation everywhere.
But the US has just said it was legal. Pretending there's not going to be people jumping on that bandwagon is crazy.
As for giving notice, with a per domain opt out list...that will never happen, at least not in the next ten years. (And after about three years there will functioanly be no email.) The exact same direct marketers who pushed the piece of shit CAN SPAM law down our throats would never let AOL and Hotmail and everyone opt out.
It may be that way, and part of it makes sense, but part doesn't.
If I go out to the telephone pole and rig myself a drop, I am stealing cable service, that is correct.
If I get it from a friend, he is commiting copyright infringement, though, or at least should be. He's copying the copyrighted content over to me.
There's no theft of service in the second circumstances, the service is 'string up a wire between your house and the cable company, and send TV down it'. You didn't steal that in the latter case, and you did in the first.
In fact, in the latter case, I fail to see how the cable company has a valid complaint at all. (Although, of course, they could suspend the service of the guy you're copying it from for contract violations.) The only people with complaints are the stations broadcast, and quite a lot of those, even 'cable channels', are freely available with a satelite dish, so it would be rather hard to prove any sort of damages. And, in fact, I doubt they would want to...USA Network, for an example of a 'free' cable station, would love every single house in the country to get their station magically for free. It's not like they're paid anything by the cable companies or satelite dish owners, they're ad supported just like broadcast stations.
So the answer to 'how many' and 'how much time' is 'I think it's pretty easy'?
Well, that's certainly an odd answer. The correct answer is 'over a hundred million businesses exist in the US along'. Not only that, but there's a 'churn' of about a third of these, a year. So you'd have to opt out of at least thirty million lists a year, once you get off all the established businesses's lists. So, often do we have to opt out of these lists?
Every.95 seconds. That's right. There's a new business created in this country about every.95 seconds, day or night. (Obviously averaged out.)
There's plenty of evidence that recent viruses delibrately attack various blacklists, and, no, it's not from just randomly guessing, it's by just looking at the viruses.
And even then, you can't guarantee that the file saved is the newest version, the version you want. All you can do is guarantee that it's not half a file and some random gibberish.
Even the old version, without ext3 support, can resize it, because they can resize ext2, and it's trivially easy to turn a cleanly (And if you didn't cleanly unmount it you really shouldn't be resizing it.) unmounted ext3 filesystem into ext2, resize it, and turn it back. In fact, I suspect that's what the new versions of parted do, they just do it automatically.
That's the main reason I'm for a moon base...you can expand it willy-nilly, either outward or just by going down, which if we're drilling for materials seems very logical.
And once the mode of operations switches from 'maintain' to 'expand', it's pretty much permanent.
And, yes, I know a space station can be expanded, but it's a lot harder and requires large shipments from earth.
I think it's a lot more impressive that it functioned poorly for fifteen year than it would have been if we had built it for ten times the money, ran it for a third as long, and deorbited when it started to get old and broken down, and it had functioned perfectly the entire time.
That's like being impressed a new car works. That's not impressive at all, the impressive thing is keeping a junky car running while it's falling to pieces. We know we can do space travel by throwing toons of money and manpower at it, you can do anything that way.
But sometimes things don't function perfectly, and you need to know how to deal. Sometimes you don't have infinite money, and when you don't, NASA just gives up, whereas the Russians just fix problems with duct tape and it works.
Yeah, the Russian approach is apparently more dangerous, but so what? Losing a few people in outer space will not kill us, more people die of aspirin overdoses in a year than have died in the entire history of the space program (And I'm including rocket experimentation here.), for all countries combined.
And, on top of that, fraudulent practices are already illegal. Duh.
So not only is 1/3 of it recursive, the 'fraudulent' part of it is redundant.
So basically this says 'X is defined as Y, X, or a subset of Y.'. Really good law there, thanks a lot for that one.
Come to think of it, why do you need a law against doing unlawful things in the first place? That's a rather metaphysical concept, saying that by breaking the law you can be breaking the law. Of course, they appear to be talking about two different laws...so a business that breaks the law to gain an unfair advantage can be called unfair...but exactly what other reasons would a business have for breaking the law? It's akin to outlawing theft for the purposes of gain.
This is why the post office needs to invent COD, but only for the shipping. You should be able to ship something postage due.
I'd pick that just to know i'm paying the real amount for shipping.
And 'handling' is a fucking nonsensical charge. I'm not paying someone to put something in a box, stick a label on it, and walk it to the dropbox, that's normal business overhead! Hell, it probably cost less than having a clerk behind the counter, and someone fixing the shelves after you've had customers poking at them, and they don't bill me seperately for that.
911 service is a government service available for all. It's not like the number of phones you have has anything to do with the amount you cost 911. In fact, half the time you're probably calling on behalf of someone else anyway!
I'm all for a 911 tax, be it sucked out of general revenue or just a flat head tax on everyone living there. Hell, I'd even be okay with billing people for calling it, assuming there's some way to bill the correct people...I'm not paying because I phoned in a traffic accident I discovered. (Actually, a good revenue stream would be to just bill people for incorrectly dialing 911. That would probably get you the same amount as the 911 tax currently does, if you billed 10 dollars or so.)
But putting it on the phone bill, just because phones are used to call 911, makes no sense.
The University of Florida is not Congress and is therefore not restricted by the First Amendment.
In what country have you been living in? The first amendment has been held to apply to states for years. The Universiry of Florida is a state school, run and operated by the statge government. The 1st amendment certainly applies to its actions.
Or did you somehow miss the entire sixties? Students have first amendment rights at school that cannot be taken away from them, otherwise colleges would have started banning protests. And, yes, they tried. Private schools can, state schools cannot.
And - exactly how is a p2p connection a First Amendment freedom anyway?
The ability to talk to someone is speech, be it through their computer or in person. The government cannot restrict your computer connections because it doesn't like who you are talking to, or what you are talking about, just like it can't do the same thing to your phone or physically restrict your movements.
Now, don't misinterpet that as me saying the government is requires to set up such access. They don't have to provide the ability to communicate with random people, but once they do, they cannot filter based on who you speak to, and they certainly cannot punish you for that.
Also, it appears students agree not to do this stuff as a prerequisite to using the school's network - apparently they also consent to network monitoring.
You cannot consent to have your rights taken away by the government except under very limited circumstances.
If that was so, all the government would have to do is print up waivers to the bill of rights and make us sign them to use the roads, or pay our legally required taxes, or even live in the country. They simply cannot require us to give up rights to use something of theirs.
About the only time you can end up with the government restricting your rights legally is when you are in the military and acting as a member of the military.
What right do I have to "use everyone else's bandwidth up"? I run the network here - downloading ISO images from software vendors and government distribution points is in my job description. When I mentioned targeting "offenders" I was talking about my network, not UofF's network.
Yes, and if you want to punish people for anything at all, you can do so. You are not the government.
Someone using up all the bandwidth on p2p cannot have broken any more rules at a state run college than someone using up all the bandwidth on an ISO download, because the government is simply not allowed to set rules on what content of speech is and is not acceptable, under any normal circumstances. (The only non-military circumstance I can think of is when you are testifying in court.)
Anyway, it's clear we're not gonna see eye to eye on this, since it's clear you believe students have a right to connect to anything they want to on a publicly funded network and I disagree with that premise. It's a pretty fundamental difference - so I'm gonna move on. Thanks for the conversation:)
If they can't connect anywhere they want on a public funded network, they can't talk to anyone they want on a publicly funded sidewalk. Or drive to talk to any person they want on a public road. It's as simple as that.
Compuserve is partly to blame, as they came out with the fucking GIF standard without noticing that it was patented by someone else, or bothering to mention that to anyone as it became the standard for web browsers.
Whatever the law says, it's perfectly legal under the First Sale Doctrine.
And once you replace the parts you snipped, that applies to music and software, and nothing else, so renting out your videos is legal anyway/B, pretending the First Sale Doctrine didn't allow it in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
The 'Tex Murphy' games spring to mind. They combined full motion video and a first person 360 degree perspective, with everything you'd expect in an adventure game.
If I'm not busy, I'll tell them they are doing business with criminals who committed felonies while representing their company.
If I am busy, I'll pretend to have no idea what they are talking about. Yes that is my name, and that is my email. However, I do not own a house, and do not want a mortgage.
And there was the time I pretended someone had paid me to answer the phone and pretend to be interested...
Well, that's easy enough. You said: How many businesses do you think are in the United States? How many in the world? How much time does it take to opt-out from all of their mailing lists?
I said that you cannot count all of those businesses. Only those that are in fact using spam pose a problem in the first place! There's no need to opt out of nonexistant spam. Thus the number of businesses overall is irrelevant; what's relevant is the number of businesses using spam.
You don't quite seem to understand the logic here. Before, spam was forbidden. Not it's been ofically sanctions by the government as OK if you follow certain rules.
Spam, until this law was passed, was illegal.
Well, I cannot speak for the UK, not knowing about their laws. But in the US at least, things aren't illegal until they're made illegal. Some things are difficult to make illegal. I suspect that spam is one of these.
No, spam was illegal before this, it was just illegal under various trespass laws, and very hard to sue for. Then some states outlawed it, so it was more illegal. And it's always been against every AUP in existence, so it's at least fraud when you get your account.
Then an explicit law was made OKing it if you follow certain rules, invalidating state laws and any trespassing arguments.
As for giving notice, with a per domain opt out list...that will never happen, at least not in the next ten years.
Well, 1) just to be clear, the sort of opt-out list I'm talking about is one where you provide constructive notice to the world. Provided it's prominent enough that spammers are reasonably likely to see it in the course of their actions (which to me implies that it'll be in the email address itself, or perhaps in the mail protocols) it's sufficient. 2) It is possible that there does not need to be a law permitting such opt out, though the government could perhaps help it along. Even if done privately, so long as the notice is prominent enough, I think it ought to be enough. Actual notice -- i.e. notice a specific spammer is in fact aware of as opposed to having knowledge imputed to him, is also good of course.
Providing it in the mail addess has been done for years, or have you never seen mail addresses with 'NOSPAM' in them. It didn't work.
As for providing it in the protocol, that won't work for half a dozen reasons, the last of which is that mail clients do not connect to your server, they connect to other servers which pass the mail on, and then don't know if it's spam or not, so don't know to stop sending it when they get the 'I do not accept spam.'
The real reason they don't work, of course, is that years ago California said something like this could be used to block spam, so the standard was invented of putting 'NO UBE NO UCE' in the SMTP connection banner. No spamware checks for it. There already is a standard for that, and no spammer cares.
At least, that's assuming that there are no issues of prior restraint, which I'm growing a little bit worried about.
Well, you can worry about thaty all you want, but I fail to see how I cannot use prior restraint against someone contacting me. That's something the government can't do. The internet is not government property.
Basically, the concept of a 'no solicitors' sign on the gate to your door is long-established, widely honored, and usually can be backed up through means such as suits or prosecution for trespassing. I'm merely advocating an equivalent.
Yes, and we've had versions of that for years. Not only do spammers not follow it, they don't listen to 'no such user' errors anymore, which is basically walking past my no solicting sign to stomp through my flower bed to walk up to a non-existence door...over and over and over.
But do note that in the absence of such a sign, people are deemed to have consented to solicitation at
Wait, I forgot, we're supposed to pretend that the country was designed that way from the start.
But the US has just said it was legal. Pretending there's not going to be people jumping on that bandwagon is crazy.
As for giving notice, with a per domain opt out list...that will never happen, at least not in the next ten years. (And after about three years there will functioanly be no email.) The exact same direct marketers who pushed the piece of shit CAN SPAM law down our throats would never let AOL and Hotmail and everyone opt out.
If I go out to the telephone pole and rig myself a drop, I am stealing cable service, that is correct.
If I get it from a friend, he is commiting copyright infringement, though, or at least should be. He's copying the copyrighted content over to me.
There's no theft of service in the second circumstances, the service is 'string up a wire between your house and the cable company, and send TV down it'. You didn't steal that in the latter case, and you did in the first.
In fact, in the latter case, I fail to see how the cable company has a valid complaint at all. (Although, of course, they could suspend the service of the guy you're copying it from for contract violations.) The only people with complaints are the stations broadcast, and quite a lot of those, even 'cable channels', are freely available with a satelite dish, so it would be rather hard to prove any sort of damages. And, in fact, I doubt they would want to...USA Network, for an example of a 'free' cable station, would love every single house in the country to get their station magically for free. It's not like they're paid anything by the cable companies or satelite dish owners, they're ad supported just like broadcast stations.
Well, that's certainly an odd answer. The correct answer is 'over a hundred million businesses exist in the US along'. Not only that, but there's a 'churn' of about a third of these, a year. So you'd have to opt out of at least thirty million lists a year, once you get off all the established businesses's lists. So, often do we have to opt out of these lists?
Every .95 seconds. That's right. There's a new business created in this country about every .95 seconds, day or night. (Obviously averaged out.)
Opt-out cannot work, period.
How much time does it take to opt-out from all of their mailing lists?
Spam is bad because it's theft, period. It's using someone else's resources to send them a commercial.
The fraud is just a side effect of the stealing being 'legit'.
And making a global opt-out list is akin to make a global do-not-steal-from-me list.
What, exactly, is 'legitimate unsolicited commercial e-mail'?
That's a brave stand for someone without a visible email address.
There's plenty of evidence that recent viruses delibrately attack various blacklists, and, no, it's not from just randomly guessing, it's by just looking at the viruses.
And even then, you can't guarantee that the file saved is the newest version, the version you want. All you can do is guarantee that it's not half a file and some random gibberish.
Even the old version, without ext3 support, can resize it, because they can resize ext2, and it's trivially easy to turn a cleanly (And if you didn't cleanly unmount it you really shouldn't be resizing it.) unmounted ext3 filesystem into ext2, resize it, and turn it back. In fact, I suspect that's what the new versions of parted do, they just do it automatically.
They're scared it's going to happen...so they're angry it's not? Huh?
And once the mode of operations switches from 'maintain' to 'expand', it's pretty much permanent.
And, yes, I know a space station can be expanded, but it's a lot harder and requires large shipments from earth.
We don't have anything to build a space elevator out of yet.
That's like being impressed a new car works. That's not impressive at all, the impressive thing is keeping a junky car running while it's falling to pieces. We know we can do space travel by throwing toons of money and manpower at it, you can do anything that way.
But sometimes things don't function perfectly, and you need to know how to deal. Sometimes you don't have infinite money, and when you don't, NASA just gives up, whereas the Russians just fix problems with duct tape and it works.
Yeah, the Russian approach is apparently more dangerous, but so what? Losing a few people in outer space will not kill us, more people die of aspirin overdoses in a year than have died in the entire history of the space program (And I'm including rocket experimentation here.), for all countries combined.
RTFA.
So not only is 1/3 of it recursive, the 'fraudulent' part of it is redundant.
So basically this says 'X is defined as Y, X, or a subset of Y.'. Really good law there, thanks a lot for that one.
Come to think of it, why do you need a law against doing unlawful things in the first place? That's a rather metaphysical concept, saying that by breaking the law you can be breaking the law. Of course, they appear to be talking about two different laws...so a business that breaks the law to gain an unfair advantage can be called unfair...but exactly what other reasons would a business have for breaking the law? It's akin to outlawing theft for the purposes of gain.
I'd pick that just to know i'm paying the real amount for shipping.
And 'handling' is a fucking nonsensical charge. I'm not paying someone to put something in a box, stick a label on it, and walk it to the dropbox, that's normal business overhead! Hell, it probably cost less than having a clerk behind the counter, and someone fixing the shelves after you've had customers poking at them, and they don't bill me seperately for that.
911 service is a government service available for all. It's not like the number of phones you have has anything to do with the amount you cost 911. In fact, half the time you're probably calling on behalf of someone else anyway!
I'm all for a 911 tax, be it sucked out of general revenue or just a flat head tax on everyone living there. Hell, I'd even be okay with billing people for calling it, assuming there's some way to bill the correct people...I'm not paying because I phoned in a traffic accident I discovered. (Actually, a good revenue stream would be to just bill people for incorrectly dialing 911. That would probably get you the same amount as the 911 tax currently does, if you billed 10 dollars or so.)
But putting it on the phone bill, just because phones are used to call 911, makes no sense.
In what country have you been living in? The first amendment has been held to apply to states for years. The Universiry of Florida is a state school, run and operated by the statge government. The 1st amendment certainly applies to its actions.
Or did you somehow miss the entire sixties? Students have first amendment rights at school that cannot be taken away from them, otherwise colleges would have started banning protests. And, yes, they tried. Private schools can, state schools cannot.
And - exactly how is a p2p connection a First Amendment freedom anyway?
The ability to talk to someone is speech, be it through their computer or in person. The government cannot restrict your computer connections because it doesn't like who you are talking to, or what you are talking about, just like it can't do the same thing to your phone or physically restrict your movements.
Now, don't misinterpet that as me saying the government is requires to set up such access. They don't have to provide the ability to communicate with random people, but once they do, they cannot filter based on who you speak to, and they certainly cannot punish you for that.
Also, it appears students agree not to do this stuff as a prerequisite to using the school's network - apparently they also consent to network monitoring.
You cannot consent to have your rights taken away by the government except under very limited circumstances.
If that was so, all the government would have to do is print up waivers to the bill of rights and make us sign them to use the roads, or pay our legally required taxes, or even live in the country. They simply cannot require us to give up rights to use something of theirs.
About the only time you can end up with the government restricting your rights legally is when you are in the military and acting as a member of the military.
What right do I have to "use everyone else's bandwidth up"? I run the network here - downloading ISO images from software vendors and government distribution points is in my job description. When I mentioned targeting "offenders" I was talking about my network, not UofF's network.
Yes, and if you want to punish people for anything at all, you can do so. You are not the government.
Someone using up all the bandwidth on p2p cannot have broken any more rules at a state run college than someone using up all the bandwidth on an ISO download, because the government is simply not allowed to set rules on what content of speech is and is not acceptable, under any normal circumstances. (The only non-military circumstance I can think of is when you are testifying in court.)
Anyway, it's clear we're not gonna see eye to eye on this, since it's clear you believe students have a right to connect to anything they want to on a publicly funded network and I disagree with that premise. It's a pretty fundamental difference - so I'm gonna move on. Thanks for the conversation :)
If they can't connect anywhere they want on a public funded network, they can't talk to anyone they want on a publicly funded sidewalk. Or drive to talk to any person they want on a public road. It's as simple as that.
Compuserve is partly to blame, as they came out with the fucking GIF standard without noticing that it was patented by someone else, or bothering to mention that to anyone as it became the standard for web browsers.
Presto. All machines that can read FAT drives are copyright circumvention devices.
And, yes, the DMCA truely is that stupid.
And once you replace the parts you snipped, that applies to music and software, and nothing else, so renting out your videos is legal anyway/B, pretending the First Sale Doctrine didn't allow it in the first place.