Taking a likely -1 Offtopic mod for violating "Do not feed the trolls"......But I have to speak on this.
Companies that want to be commercial dickheads and force you to pay for content you already own are at fault here, not linux.
First we have the patent holders on the codecs. They get royalties, both from the media stampers that produce the media, as well as the companies that make the hardware that plays said media. You pay for both of these, on top of the part of the sales $$$ that actually goes to the companies that create the content. A classic case of rent seeking, let alone how much the actual creative people themselves are getting screwed over and are effectively sharecroppers using the company roster as a field.
Then we have the content producers themselves. By making outlandish EULA's and enforcing abusive DRM, they force you to buy the same material multiple times if you want to move it around between formats. That's what DRM does, it makes it a pain in the ass to do anything but bend over and pay $$$ for multiple copies of the same stuff, just in different formats. Yet more rent seeking.
Linux, by being FOSS, is shut out in the cold because it doesn't dirty itself with such stupid palm-greasing fiddle faddle.
Unfortunately, if you're a saint in a corrupt world, you will be left out of lots of stuff if you aren't willing to play dirty.
So rant and rave all you like, but don't blame linux. It's just an innocent bystander in the civil war that is corporate america.
Personally, I'm glad linux isn't getting involved in it.
I think any game store who pulls this crap is committing FRAUD.
For starters they are LYING.
Anyone who knowingly sells a game that has been played is complicit and should be jailed.
Sounds extreme? It is, and it should be. Trust is not something that should be taken lightly. It's a much smaller scale version of Enron. Dishonesty is so rampant everywhere, and when it rises to fraud, it must be punished.
Oh, that's right. What about OEM limited warranty on quality? By selling it new, aren't you holding the vendor accountable for damage that might have been done by a store employee? I'm sure everyone's noticed in the back about Limited Warranty. Who honors that? The vendor, not the store. If employees damage goods that are later sold as new, and returned as defective, and then returned to the vendor for a wholesale refund, then the store is defrauding the vendor by sticking it with a fraudulent return, fraudulent because the defect was caused by the store.
Also, there's another reason.
If employees are allowed to front-run like this, they are also not held accountable to the same standards that regular customers are. If an employee checks out a game, damages it, and returns it to the shrinkwrap machine, then the unlucky customer that gets stuck buying it is pretty much SOL because he can't prove it wasn't him that broke it, let alone that it was the employee.
I repeat, letting employees borrow new games, and then selling them as new, is fraud, with a capital F. It is fraud against the customer, and if the store returns defective products to the vendor, it is fraud against the vendor as well.
Not to mention that actually doing enough research to nail a *gasp* guilty party would reap loads of benefits.
For one, your reputation would be safe because you'd have a rock solid case in court, and people will know that you don't just fuck around and try to bullshit/extort people.
Litigation itself isn't hurting the RIAA. It's the lame, dumb-ass collateral damage they cause that gets them in deep shit with the public. If they only went after guilty people, I'd have a lot more respect for them. I would completely support the RIAA...IF they had perfect aim. But since they don't even care they hurt innocent bystanders, they are scum. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if they deliberately target innocent people just for the sake of getting them to cough up settlement dough.
The RIAA is a bag of shit because they are reckless and apathetic even in the best light.
What needs to happen is for ISP's to not be tiered. And make it fraud to sell out more bandwidth than you actually can provide just because "nobody uses it all". hello? If you tier your lightweights to more than they need, you don't get to bitch if they actually use what they bought when you were expecting them to be less.
So, first problem: Stop ISPs from advertising or selling more than they can deliver.
If I were the ISP czar, and I were making policy...
ASSERT(!greedy && !lobbyable && !bound_by_special_interests)/* face it, people are corruptable */
1. Prices would be based upon...
a. How fat your pipe is (guaranteed throughput, and woe unto you if you oversell btw)
b. Don't do metering unless you can do a damn good job of bringing charges inline with actual costs.
i. Since the cost of keeping your equipment up doens't much depend on how heavily it's used
charging on volume is probably stupid.
ii. At least have the sense to charge less for local traffic, since it costs you less to carry it. 2. It is forbidden to discriminate based on anything other than:
a. IP address (determined by account holder)
i. Quarantining a malware infected house is a Good Thing (tm), and as long as you just quarantine
temporarily, you are causing no more harm to the inconveineced customer than you are negating. First
the customer is alerted to a malware problem, and second your customer is prevented from causing
damage to other computers. A reasonable policy for an ISP, IMO. Just don't fuck it up or exploit
it for profit.
ii. Full Disclosure (tm) though is a must. You must say this in your TOS.
b. Service level
i. You don't pay for it, it's OK to not get as big a slice
ii. Throttling based on congestion is NOT ok, because if you have choke points, you're not maintaining
your network correctly to begin with, and you are either incompetent or dishonest or both, because
if a customer hits congestion by using BW they paid for, you didn't keep up your end of the bargain.
c. Under special circumstances, service ports.
i. Good examples are SMTP out and IRC in. Both are symptoms of malware
ii. Make every restriction opt-out at no charge. 3. Infrastructure should be either competitively provided or government owned.
a. With competition, service takes care of itself. Simple market dynamics reward and punish automatically
b. You auction off the right to provide service to your citizens
i. Contract goes to the highest bidder, funds raised go towards maintenance and improvements.
ii. If you
I doubt special interest groups would let it rest.
Besides, we at/. know that Microsuck can't make a decent secure product. Why should using them even be an option? Let alone mandated by a team of techies that were probably cherry picked by MS friendlies in the first place?
And how does that compare relative to market share?
If 99 percent of cracked boxen are windows, yet boxen in general are only 90 percent windows, then a given windows boxes are 10 times more likely to be cracked than the others.
If america wasn't so damned litigious against benevolent mavericks, I would be happy to release a benign worm that screams at the user to get their damn box patched. Except that it could be piggybacked upon by a malicious worm.
I would rather ireland be dictatorial about IE than have some half-assed international committee try to worm its way in...particularly since that committee is likely to have hidden wolves of corporate interest backing it up.
Actually, we can leave the finger pointed at the government for making it an issue of national security, threatening to brand any non-cooperators as terrorists, and make sure that anyone who didn't play ball would disappear.
AT&T probably didn't have any choice in the matter, in so far as the execs were probably damned if they did and damned if they didn't.
This is the reason we like our police to arrest people publicly. I would rather be shamed and embarrased as I walk away in cuffs, then taken quietly and then never heard from again.
Slashdot Mirror
selling used games and saying they're new is FRAUD.
Taking a likely -1 Offtopic mod for violating "Do not feed the trolls"... ...But I have to speak on this.
Companies that want to be commercial dickheads and force you to pay for content you already own are at fault here, not linux.
First we have the patent holders on the codecs. They get royalties, both from the media stampers that produce the media, as well as the companies that make the hardware that plays said media. You pay for both of these, on top of the part of the sales $$$ that actually goes to the companies that create the content. A classic case of rent seeking, let alone how much the actual creative people themselves are getting screwed over and are effectively sharecroppers using the company roster as a field.
Then we have the content producers themselves. By making outlandish EULA's and enforcing abusive DRM, they force you to buy the same material multiple times if you want to move it around between formats. That's what DRM does, it makes it a pain in the ass to do anything but bend over and pay $$$ for multiple copies of the same stuff, just in different formats. Yet more rent seeking.
Linux, by being FOSS, is shut out in the cold because it doesn't dirty itself with such stupid palm-greasing fiddle faddle.
Unfortunately, if you're a saint in a corrupt world, you will be left out of lots of stuff if you aren't willing to play dirty.
So rant and rave all you like, but don't blame linux. It's just an innocent bystander in the civil war that is corporate america.
Personally, I'm glad linux isn't getting involved in it.
I think any game store who pulls this crap is committing FRAUD.
For starters they are LYING.
Anyone who knowingly sells a game that has been played is complicit and should be jailed.
Sounds extreme? It is, and it should be. Trust is not something that should be taken lightly. It's a much smaller scale version of Enron. Dishonesty is so rampant everywhere, and when it rises to fraud, it must be punished.
Oh, that's right. What about OEM limited warranty on quality? By selling it new, aren't you holding the vendor accountable for damage that might have been done by a store employee? I'm sure everyone's noticed in the back about Limited Warranty. Who honors that? The vendor, not the store. If employees damage goods that are later sold as new, and returned as defective, and then returned to the vendor for a wholesale refund, then the store is defrauding the vendor by sticking it with a fraudulent return, fraudulent because the defect was caused by the store.
Also, there's another reason.
If employees are allowed to front-run like this, they are also not held accountable to the same standards that regular customers are. If an employee checks out a game, damages it, and returns it to the shrinkwrap machine, then the unlucky customer that gets stuck buying it is pretty much SOL because he can't prove it wasn't him that broke it, let alone that it was the employee.
I repeat, letting employees borrow new games, and then selling them as new, is fraud, with a capital F. It is fraud against the customer, and if the store returns defective products to the vendor, it is fraud against the vendor as well.
Not to mention that actually doing enough research to nail a *gasp* guilty party would reap loads of benefits.
For one, your reputation would be safe because you'd have a rock solid case in court, and people will know that you don't just fuck around and try to bullshit/extort people.
Litigation itself isn't hurting the RIAA. It's the lame, dumb-ass collateral damage they cause that gets them in deep shit with the public. If they only went after guilty people, I'd have a lot more respect for them. I would completely support the RIAA...IF they had perfect aim. But since they don't even care they hurt innocent bystanders, they are scum. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if they deliberately target innocent people just for the sake of getting them to cough up settlement dough.
The RIAA is a bag of shit because they are reckless and apathetic even in the best light.
I disagree with you to some extent.
What needs to happen is for ISP's to not be tiered. And make it fraud to sell out more bandwidth than you actually can provide just because "nobody uses it all". hello? If you tier your lightweights to more than they need, you don't get to bitch if they actually use what they bought when you were expecting them to be less.
So, first problem: Stop ISPs from advertising or selling more than they can deliver.
If I were the ISP czar, and I were making policy...
ASSERT(!greedy && !lobbyable && !bound_by_special_interests) /* face it, people are corruptable */
1. Prices would be based upon...
a. How fat your pipe is (guaranteed throughput, and woe unto you if you oversell btw)
b. Don't do metering unless you can do a damn good job of bringing charges inline with actual costs.
i. Since the cost of keeping your equipment up doens't much depend on how heavily it's used
charging on volume is probably stupid.
ii. At least have the sense to charge less for local traffic, since it costs you less to carry it.
2. It is forbidden to discriminate based on anything other than:
a. IP address (determined by account holder)
i. Quarantining a malware infected house is a Good Thing (tm), and as long as you just quarantine
temporarily, you are causing no more harm to the inconveineced customer than you are negating. First
the customer is alerted to a malware problem, and second your customer is prevented from causing
damage to other computers. A reasonable policy for an ISP, IMO. Just don't fuck it up or exploit
it for profit.
ii. Full Disclosure (tm) though is a must. You must say this in your TOS.
b. Service level
i. You don't pay for it, it's OK to not get as big a slice
ii. Throttling based on congestion is NOT ok, because if you have choke points, you're not maintaining
your network correctly to begin with, and you are either incompetent or dishonest or both, because
if a customer hits congestion by using BW they paid for, you didn't keep up your end of the bargain.
c. Under special circumstances, service ports.
i. Good examples are SMTP out and IRC in. Both are symptoms of malware
ii. Make every restriction opt-out at no charge.
3. Infrastructure should be either competitively provided or government owned.
a. With competition, service takes care of itself. Simple market dynamics reward and punish automatically
b. You auction off the right to provide service to your citizens
i. Contract goes to the highest bidder, funds raised go towards maintenance and improvements.
ii. If you
-Components: V, S, M
+Components: V, S, M, F
-Material Components: a large amount of money and a Legal team
+Material Components: a large amount of money
+Focus: Legal team
Legal teams aren't consumed when you use them, money is.
But I interpret my programs you insensitive clod!
Dodging payment can become contempt of court or fraud.
I think a censored google is better than no google at all.
I'm sure Google would pull out of china in a heartbeat if they were asked to be chinese spies.
The only problems with putting down our nukes is that we can't trust everyone else who might hate us not to do the same.
MAD is the only way to assure peace in a world where nobody can be trusted.
Anyone running even a rudimentary game theory analysis of the situation would probably agree with me.
Dodging a subpoena is contempt of court, and that IS a crime.
Also, if there is a scam or a fraud at the root of the non-payment, that too is a crime. They call that theft of services.
That middle one's supposed to be(RI|MP)AA you insensitive clod!
Given MS's track record they are hardly going to win me over.
Considering the hijinx they pulled with OOXML, I don't trust a stinkin license from them any further than I can throw it.
They have much to do before they can be trustworthy.
And until then, presuming guilt is entirely reasonable.
I doubt special interest groups would let it rest.
Besides, we at /. know that Microsuck can't make a decent secure product. Why should using them even be an option? Let alone mandated by a team of techies that were probably cherry picked by MS friendlies in the first place?
I think it's "+1 Underrated"
To smite the mod, be a metamod.
What about SELinux?
Isn't it NSA sponsored?
Sorry, but The Onion is prior art.
Maybe it should?
What portion of cracked boxes are Windows boxes?
And how does that compare relative to market share?
If 99 percent of cracked boxen are windows, yet boxen in general are only 90 percent windows, then a given windows boxes are 10 times more likely to be cracked than the others.
If america wasn't so damned litigious against benevolent mavericks, I would be happy to release a benign worm that screams at the user to get their damn box patched. Except that it could be piggybacked upon by a malicious worm.
You do realize that most 9-5 jobs are only 8 hours a day?
Bump it up to 25 bucks an hour and you'll be mroe on the mark.
Call the waaahmbulance?
Seriously, this is a case of "my TLD, my rules".
Sounds like a case of "my turf my rules".
I would rather ireland be dictatorial about IE than have some half-assed international committee try to worm its way in...particularly since that committee is likely to have hidden wolves of corporate interest backing it up.
It probably got banned already.
And...what if MS tries to assert trademark ownership of .ie?
FYI, "wontfix" is used on a routine basis for fedora.
They also have "notabug" "notourbug" and "worksforme"
Actually, we can leave the finger pointed at the government for making it an issue of national security, threatening to brand any non-cooperators as terrorists, and make sure that anyone who didn't play ball would disappear.
AT&T probably didn't have any choice in the matter, in so far as the execs were probably damned if they did and damned if they didn't.
This is the reason we like our police to arrest people publicly. I would rather be shamed and embarrased as I walk away in cuffs, then taken quietly and then never heard from again.
I agree.
The current bug party with screen garbage is absolutely UGLY, as well as being a security risk.
KDE's beta testing dropped the ball, because a bug this atrocious should not have made it past the testers.