Not in current settings, it isn't. Hydrogen is only a fuel if it can be acquired at less energy cost than it can be used. Currently, the hydrogen for our hydrogen fleet is gotten by electrolyzing water, which costs more power than the hydrogen in turn generates. Once we can do wacky stuff like mining the solar wind, or once we get a semipermeable membrane that can sort hydrogen out of the atmosphere at near-zero energy input, then it will be a fuel.
Brazil is absolutely HUGE, larger than the continental 48 United States.// They have plenty of room to grow more sugar cane, and they are adding refineries at a very rapid pace.
Pesky rainforests. Someone needs to investigate sugar beets. We have a pretty big sugar beet industry, mostly because they produce more sugar per acre than cane, and they'll grow in a pile of burning tires if someone goes to the trouble of planting them.
All things equal, coal is better than nothing, and it has the advantage of being the floor of Pennsylvania and eight other states. Which do you think is more dangerous: funding middle eastern princes using religion as an excuse for territorialist expansion (it's been going on for thirty years,) or losing two dozen miners a year? All things equal, yes, it's a tragedy that these good men and women are dying, but it's quite a bit better than the three thousand a year that have been added to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Yemen's death toll since the black gold started flowing in earnest.
I certainly don't want to see coal go back into use. I come from Pittsburgh. I know exactly how bad coal is. But it's better than going to an economy without energy, and I'm of the opinion that we're going to have to start finding some alternatives in 10-15 years. I don't buy into the peak oil concept, but production is going down, and demand is going up; simple market economics show that the current quadrupling of gas prices is the start of something much worse. E85 isn't viable in the long term, and it's unclear whether the political mess around nuclear can be cleared up in time to make hydrogen as a storage source a viable way to construct a portable nuclear economy. Commercial fusion is several decades away.
The simple fact is, we need options. Coal may be bad, but it's not as bad as it used to be. Natural gas isn't an option. Wind isn't a realistic option. Hydro doesn't scale to demand. Solar isn't reliable enough. Either we can go back to horses and carriages, or we can use coal and aggressive filtering to make a hydrogen economy. Hydrogen isn't a fuel, it's a storage mechanism. The power has to come from *somewhere* .
And look, if you've got a better idea, prepare to be the next Rockefeller. Find a way to stop diverting 1/8 of the US economy to Persia, and the world will beat a path to your door.
I believe my motives were quite clear from my very first comment. I was explaining how the amount of money a copyright holder has made from their creation is an important factor when considering whether it is ethical to infringe on their copyrights.
Yes, but I would like to know more. I'm not being sarcastic, I'm being quite serious; I did read what you said. It's not that I'm saying you're wrong. I just would like further detail, because I have not yet heard a complete enough picture to understand your viewpoint.
To be honest, I find it quite pathetic that I cannot disagree with the idea that copyright infringement is always unethical without being labelled "flamebait", "thief", etc.
In as regards being labelled flamebait, I agree; similarly they've marked me troll for disagreeing with you. However, please do remember that I have never spoken about you directly; what others may have said about you notwithstanding, I have not called you anything.
I find it curious too, considering I've not said that I do that. I'm explaining why a particular set of actions can be considered ethical,...
Well, I hadn't meant that actually to sound accusatory, though on second look I can see how it might be read that way. The question wasn't meant in that fashion. Still, I don't fully understand the standpoint.
I feel no need to justify myself to you
I wasn't asking you to justify yourself. I have no interest in your motivations. However, you did write what you wrote in such a fashion that suggests you have a more complex belief system than what fraction is revealed in your post.
I'm not asking why you think something is okay. I'm asking how the belief system works; I don't have enough pieces to put together the picture, and the way it was phrased strikes me as curious, and likely worthy of investigation. I'm coming to you open-handed, just asking how you see things. If you're not willing to explain, that's fine. But I'm not asking you to justify yourself.
Why not just call me "anti-American" or "terrorist" while you are at it?
Because I don't treat people in that fashion, as I have not with you. Please do not confuse others' actions with mine.
Where is this "copyright-is-unquestionably-good, anybody-who-questions-it-should-be-demonised" attitude coming from?
If I had that attitude, I wouldn't be asking you to tell me how you see things, would I? I'm genuinely interested in your viewpoint. Don't take that wrongly, please. I just want to see the rest of the picture. You suggest that the amount of funds coming into a company alters the ethics involved in making these types of selections. I would like to know why. I'm not insulting you; I'm trying to understand.
I don't understand why everyone keeps saying "it won't be e3 anymore." The media circus is recent and ancillary. E3 is and always has been about the back rooms that you have to pay boatloads extra to go to. It's going to be the same E3 it's always been, for the industry people it's always been for.
You might consider explaining your motives. I find it curious what your motivation for using software you haven't paid for might be, if something other than to get things for free.
Bahahahahhahahhahah. Owned. I r tehsux. U r teh wins. (For someone who complains as often as I do about people's low quality use of the language, that's just hella embarrassing.)
IT's a really nice, and moralistically correct response, however, this deals with companies who don't know the world moral at all.
I certainly would not go to the length of defending Microsoft's business ethics, though indeed I believe they're a mixed bag. That said, I must be clear in my resolve: there is no point at which the bad actions of another justify bad actions of one's own. Just because Microsoft have in the past been thieves does not excuse to steal from them. This isn't the world of an eye for an eye; if one wishes to look down on Microsoft, one must not engage in the same practices for which one decries Microsoft.
Ofcourse u can say, piracy is wrong, and ppl are criminals, but that's a very black and white view of things.
I can also say murder is wrong and murderers are criminals, and that's also black and white. Sure, there are (rare!) cases where this isn't the case, such as the standard issue "I killed a man to stop him from killing 20 others." That all said, it's quite a bit more difficult to imagine a justified case of software piracy. Maybe you're in Turkey, an earthquake has just hit, you're the only engineer left alive in a small town, and you need to pirate some structural safety software so that you can safely shore up a hospital; sure, things like that exist, and I'm not trying to pretend that they don't.
That said, this isn't one such situation, as are not the vast bulk. Please do remember that these comments are in a definate context, that of one slashdotter's parents trying to legitimize, and in a given single situation, "black and white" evaluations are frequently quite reasonable. There really aren't many cases where there's an overriding ethical concern giving legitimacy to pirating Windows. I'm sure you can come up with a few if you try hard; that said, I'd be highly surprised if more than a dozen such cases happened each year, and indeed modestly surprised if even two happened annually.
Are there cases where theft is moral? Sure. The canonical example is the Hebrew law that one may enter another's field to eat, but may not leave with supplies; Judeo-Christi-Islamic law recognizes many such issues concretely. (No, I'm not religious; I learned that lesson from Les Miserables. Still, there's the question of audience size, and I bet more people have read The Old Testament than Victor Hugo.)
That said, the cases where this type of software theft are moral are vanishingly few, and few enough that I feel comfortable skipping to hedge such issues. Is it black and white? No, but in my opinion, it's close enough.
And a view which is strongly influenced by the media, over the last few years. Don't bother claiming it ain't true, cause no one is wondering why this is all aimed at civilians, and not at companies, why private organisations like the RIAA are conducting business like the mafia, putting pressure on civilians, misusing the law to their own benifit, and again leaving all the medium - big sized companies alone, cause they would be able to pay the costs of the lawyers, which 'ordinary people'can not.
I agree with you that the behavior of the RIAA and MPAA is intolerable, and indeed I agree with your mobster analogy, not because it's emotionally charged, but because it's accurate; there's a reason they're being sued under RICOH in several states. It's racketeering. (I think you'd do better to refer to the Russians than the Mob, given who does what, but that's neither here nor there.) I also make no claim as regards whether the tactics they're undertaking have a media impact, though if that's their intent, I believe they've managed to go the opposite direction of their intent.
That all said, I'd like to make it clear that I've resolutely held these views for twenty years, as a result of my upbringing; it's worth noting that the RIAA's first public anti-piracy campaign began in 1993, long after I began to speak out on my beliefs. I am unable to find similar data for the
It wasn't too god-awful, actually. I worked with the S60 port of GTK+/KHTML, because it's less painful than Webcore/Webkit, and basically just followed in Nokia's footprints. I had to port several underlying libraries, including Freetype and a massively hacked Nano-X (which I've been slowly replacing with something home-grown, built on top of a platform-specific fast graphics library.)
I've got mostly-correct rendering, correct ECMA/DHTML and good (not great) font rendering. International fonts are tremendously broken. PNG works better than it does on IE. It's pretty reasonably fast, and the browser footprint is about 950k, plus another 200k from support libraries and 300k from the fonts I built in. It's enough to use to roll certain other applications, as long as I'm careful about their RAM usage.
This is actually the reason I originally started the DS WiFi Bounty. The IRC clients and whatnot that are now being built are amusing, but I have bigger plans. (No, the web browser isn't the apex of what I'm doing.)
Ouch, you're two for two. I misread and I misremembered. Tehsux.
I concede, sir, that you are correct on the latter point, and almost certainly on the former (though as I'm not the original poster, I can't be sure, your reading makes more sense than does my own.)
I don't know what definition of theft you are using, but the last time I looked, theft was the act of depriving someone of their property.
Which is why I explained how property was being stolen. Please don't reply if you're not going to read.
When using an unlicensed copy of software, you are not depriving anyone of their rightful property.
The courts, the law of the land and common sense disagree with you.
I would guess that the crime is that they said to agree to the EULA without actually following its provisions, which would make it, what, breach of contract?
Why would you even argue with someone when you don't know enough to shore up your own argument? Go find one of those stories about a big warezer bust. Follow it through to the indictment; they're all freely available online in the US since 1998..2001, depending on what state you're in. Then, look at what crime the warezers are being convicted of.
I really don't care whether you understand that it's theft; the fact is that under US law it is, and that these people wouldn't be going to jail for theft if it wasn't. Believe it or not, attorneys and judges understand the law better than you do.
The issue is simple and obvious from the moral standpoint: Company A offers a product it cost $5 to make for $10. You use said product without paying for it. That's boldly obviously theft
I definitely disagree with that. There's neither any criminal offense nor, IMNSHO, any moral sin associated with using things that one does not own.
Oh, really? Then what's your address? I have some long distance calls to make.
Look, really, nobody cares whether you agree or not. Of course you don't agree: you don't make and sell things for a living. The next time you spend $2 million creating a software product, then watch a bunch of sanctimonious nobodies going "omg there's nothing wrong with me using this without paying for it," let someone know. Just because you say it's okay doesn't mean it really is. If you doubt me, mail a copy of your registry and a list of what you didn't pay for to your local DA. You *will* go to jail, no matter how loudly you protest that you've done nothing wrong.
For all the whining people do about their personal liberties and how it's their right to set the laws of the land, it's amazing how quickly they turn around and insist it's okay for them to break the laws the other people in this country set. You don't get to steal just because you're too arrogant to admit that it's theft.
Call an attorney and ask if your opinion of something as criminal has any effect on whether it's actually criminal. Try not to take it too hard when they hang up on you, laughing.
Noone would require you to sign a form of temporary transfer of property or something like that to enter a computer store and play around with the products on display.
Uh, that's because the store paid for their copies. There's no transfer of property involved. It is for the same reason legal for you to come to my house and use software I purchased. This is a non-sequitor, and arguably a red herring.
Taking them out of the store is, of course, a completely different thing (that would be depriving the store of their rightfully owned property).
Oh, so it's okay to steal from Microsoft, just not from Fry's?
Millions of people disagree. Hundreds of millions of people agree. What's your point? Theft is theft even if 0.5% of the population have no morals. The fact of the matter is that law is not written through the voice of a small fragment of population insisting what they're doing is okay. There are more people breaking into homes than warezing. They think what they're doing is okay. Is it?
Just because you can count people in agreement doesn't mean you're in the majority, and if you're not - in this case, you're in a vanishingly small segment of the populace, right up there with molesters and people who take Jerry Falwell seriously, both heinous crimes - then naming how many people agree with you is an indictment, not a supporting argument.
The act of installing software makes a copy. That is copyright infringement unless you have authorization with the copyright holder.
This is a subtle misunderstanding. It's not the act of making a copy which infringes on copyright; it's the act of distributing a copy. In fact, US law permits you to make a certain number of copies, depending on media, for archival without copyright holder's permission. You may, for example, back up your installer CDs, no matter what the EULA wants to tell you. You may not, however, put that backup online; at that point it becomes distribution, which is copyright infringement. Similarly, you may not hand said backup to your friend Tom, because that's distribution, and that's copyright infringement.
I am certainly not suggesting that using unlicensed software is legal; you are correct to indicate that it is criminal. You are simply annoting the wrong law.
It's criminal, yes. The specific crime, however, is not copyright infringement, it's theft. Copyright infringement is when you hand the CD to someone else. Usage is not infringement; distribution is.
Considering that you are accusing great-grandparent of saying things he didn't say, that you can neither spell nor use correctly the word impugn, that you seem to have no grasp of hyphenation, that you don't seem to grasp the concept of a Straw Man, that nobody has attacked anyone's credibility but you, and that there's been no point at which anyone's even attempted to justify their disagreement (don't confuse that with inability,) I think frankly you shouldn't be calling other people idiots.
It only becomes infringement of intellectual property if they're redistributing. Intellectual property laws only cover publication and distribution. Frankly, I think you should probably watch the tone you give off; it's not a complex topic, and for you to look down on someone after making a mistake like that does not reflect well on you in public, especially given that you've reacted so badly to something that was written in a pleasant tone.
Given that I've got seventeen credits in law from Rutgers New Brunswick, which (I suspect) is 17 more than you have, I think you'd also do well to stop pretending what you learned between YRO and CSI makes you an expert.
There was neither mockery nor self righteousness involved, and I cannot be ignorant of my own opinions by definition. Who are you, and why are you attempting to condescend to me for patting someone who isn't you on the back?
The article is badly written. It cost Riken $9m, because NEC (as SGI Japan) paid for most of the hardware, and because Hitachi and Intel provided all but three of the workers.
In short, Riken had almost nothing to do with the process, except for the design of the single custom chip involved, and even then, most of the work was done by outside firms who wanted the press. And even then, it still cost the host organization $9 million!
Uh, because some people prefer being honest? There are a lot of people out there who just don't want to be thieves. Funny, that. It's one thing if you want to look the other way about "technical" theft (as if it's somehow okay.)
Don't tell other people to not do the right thing.
As an individual, how much less on your own are you if you have a retail version?
Quite a bit, actually. Microsoft provides 1-800 support for a year and email support for three years. I had to call them for support once because of a media flaw which rendered my shiny new compiler non-installable; they gave me a download link that would work for three days and sent me a new copy to my home address at their own expense. The only thing they made me do was tell them the serial number on the box. I was connected to a human less than thirty seconds after I called, and the only menu I had to go through was "If you are calling for sales, press 1; support, press 2; services, press 3; for any other reason, press 4."
It was one of the most pleasant support experiences I've ever had, actually, the only better being about the guy who was doing the support (a tech from a long-since dead computer company called Advanced Logic Research, who told some of the raunchiest jokes I've ever heard) rather than the company.
Microsoft puts a surprising amount of resources into support. I presume it's because they take so much bad PR that they have to be spit-sparkle polished to make sure their cash cows, namely the corporate world, know there's always a timely answer to catastrophe.
WGA has been required for many important upgrades for several years now. Why are you assuming they're dishonest when what they're trying to do is to pay for something they apparently didn't realize was pirated?
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Hydrogen is a fuel, and a storage mechanism.
Not in current settings, it isn't. Hydrogen is only a fuel if it can be acquired at less energy cost than it can be used. Currently, the hydrogen for our hydrogen fleet is gotten by electrolyzing water, which costs more power than the hydrogen in turn generates. Once we can do wacky stuff like mining the solar wind, or once we get a semipermeable membrane that can sort hydrogen out of the atmosphere at near-zero energy input, then it will be a fuel.
Until then, it is only a storage mechanism.
Thus the biggest problem with this process is "what do we do with the acetone"? :)
Uh. Sell it? It's a commercially and industrially useful solvent. Someone needs to get you guys a businessman. Waste is often valuable.
Brazil is absolutely HUGE, larger than the continental 48 United States. // They have plenty of room to grow more sugar cane, and they are adding refineries at a very rapid pace.
Pesky rainforests. Someone needs to investigate sugar beets. We have a pretty big sugar beet industry, mostly because they produce more sugar per acre than cane, and they'll grow in a pile of burning tires if someone goes to the trouble of planting them.
All things equal, coal is better than nothing, and it has the advantage of being the floor of Pennsylvania and eight other states. Which do you think is more dangerous: funding middle eastern princes using religion as an excuse for territorialist expansion (it's been going on for thirty years,) or losing two dozen miners a year? All things equal, yes, it's a tragedy that these good men and women are dying, but it's quite a bit better than the three thousand a year that have been added to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Yemen's death toll since the black gold started flowing in earnest.
I certainly don't want to see coal go back into use. I come from Pittsburgh. I know exactly how bad coal is. But it's better than going to an economy without energy, and I'm of the opinion that we're going to have to start finding some alternatives in 10-15 years. I don't buy into the peak oil concept, but production is going down, and demand is going up; simple market economics show that the current quadrupling of gas prices is the start of something much worse. E85 isn't viable in the long term, and it's unclear whether the political mess around nuclear can be cleared up in time to make hydrogen as a storage source a viable way to construct a portable nuclear economy. Commercial fusion is several decades away.
The simple fact is, we need options. Coal may be bad, but it's not as bad as it used to be. Natural gas isn't an option. Wind isn't a realistic option. Hydro doesn't scale to demand. Solar isn't reliable enough. Either we can go back to horses and carriages, or we can use coal and aggressive filtering to make a hydrogen economy. Hydrogen isn't a fuel, it's a storage mechanism. The power has to come from *somewhere* .
And look, if you've got a better idea, prepare to be the next Rockefeller. Find a way to stop diverting 1/8 of the US economy to Persia, and the world will beat a path to your door.
I believe my motives were quite clear from my very first comment. I was explaining how the amount of money a copyright holder has made from their creation is an important factor when considering whether it is ethical to infringe on their copyrights.
...
Yes, but I would like to know more. I'm not being sarcastic, I'm being quite serious; I did read what you said. It's not that I'm saying you're wrong. I just would like further detail, because I have not yet heard a complete enough picture to understand your viewpoint.
To be honest, I find it quite pathetic that I cannot disagree with the idea that copyright infringement is always unethical without being labelled "flamebait", "thief", etc.
In as regards being labelled flamebait, I agree; similarly they've marked me troll for disagreeing with you. However, please do remember that I have never spoken about you directly; what others may have said about you notwithstanding, I have not called you anything.
I find it curious too, considering I've not said that I do that. I'm explaining why a particular set of actions can be considered ethical,
Well, I hadn't meant that actually to sound accusatory, though on second look I can see how it might be read that way. The question wasn't meant in that fashion. Still, I don't fully understand the standpoint.
I feel no need to justify myself to you
I wasn't asking you to justify yourself. I have no interest in your motivations. However, you did write what you wrote in such a fashion that suggests you have a more complex belief system than what fraction is revealed in your post.
I'm not asking why you think something is okay. I'm asking how the belief system works; I don't have enough pieces to put together the picture, and the way it was phrased strikes me as curious, and likely worthy of investigation. I'm coming to you open-handed, just asking how you see things. If you're not willing to explain, that's fine. But I'm not asking you to justify yourself.
Why not just call me "anti-American" or "terrorist" while you are at it?
Because I don't treat people in that fashion, as I have not with you. Please do not confuse others' actions with mine.
Where is this "copyright-is-unquestionably-good, anybody-who-questions-it-should-be-demonised" attitude coming from?
If I had that attitude, I wouldn't be asking you to tell me how you see things, would I? I'm genuinely interested in your viewpoint. Don't take that wrongly, please. I just want to see the rest of the picture. You suggest that the amount of funds coming into a company alters the ethics involved in making these types of selections. I would like to know why. I'm not insulting you; I'm trying to understand.
I don't understand why everyone keeps saying "it won't be e3 anymore." The media circus is recent and ancillary. E3 is and always has been about the back rooms that you have to pay boatloads extra to go to. It's going to be the same E3 it's always been, for the industry people it's always been for.
You might consider explaining your motives. I find it curious what your motivation for using software you haven't paid for might be, if something other than to get things for free.
Bahahahahhahahhahah. Owned. I r tehsux. U r teh wins. (For someone who complains as often as I do about people's low quality use of the language, that's just hella embarrassing.)
IT's a really nice, and moralistically correct response, however, this deals with companies who don't know the world moral at all.
I certainly would not go to the length of defending Microsoft's business ethics, though indeed I believe they're a mixed bag. That said, I must be clear in my resolve: there is no point at which the bad actions of another justify bad actions of one's own. Just because Microsoft have in the past been thieves does not excuse to steal from them. This isn't the world of an eye for an eye; if one wishes to look down on Microsoft, one must not engage in the same practices for which one decries Microsoft.
Ofcourse u can say, piracy is wrong, and ppl are criminals, but that's a very black and white view of things.
I can also say murder is wrong and murderers are criminals, and that's also black and white. Sure, there are (rare!) cases where this isn't the case, such as the standard issue "I killed a man to stop him from killing 20 others." That all said, it's quite a bit more difficult to imagine a justified case of software piracy. Maybe you're in Turkey, an earthquake has just hit, you're the only engineer left alive in a small town, and you need to pirate some structural safety software so that you can safely shore up a hospital; sure, things like that exist, and I'm not trying to pretend that they don't.
That said, this isn't one such situation, as are not the vast bulk. Please do remember that these comments are in a definate context, that of one slashdotter's parents trying to legitimize, and in a given single situation, "black and white" evaluations are frequently quite reasonable. There really aren't many cases where there's an overriding ethical concern giving legitimacy to pirating Windows. I'm sure you can come up with a few if you try hard; that said, I'd be highly surprised if more than a dozen such cases happened each year, and indeed modestly surprised if even two happened annually.
Are there cases where theft is moral? Sure. The canonical example is the Hebrew law that one may enter another's field to eat, but may not leave with supplies; Judeo-Christi-Islamic law recognizes many such issues concretely. (No, I'm not religious; I learned that lesson from Les Miserables. Still, there's the question of audience size, and I bet more people have read The Old Testament than Victor Hugo.)
That said, the cases where this type of software theft are moral are vanishingly few, and few enough that I feel comfortable skipping to hedge such issues. Is it black and white? No, but in my opinion, it's close enough.
And a view which is strongly influenced by the media, over the last few years. Don't bother claiming it ain't true, cause no one is wondering why this is all aimed at civilians, and not at companies, why private organisations like the RIAA are conducting business like the mafia, putting pressure on civilians, misusing the law to their own benifit, and again leaving all the medium - big sized companies alone, cause they would be able to pay the costs of the lawyers, which 'ordinary people'can not.
I agree with you that the behavior of the RIAA and MPAA is intolerable, and indeed I agree with your mobster analogy, not because it's emotionally charged, but because it's accurate; there's a reason they're being sued under RICOH in several states. It's racketeering. (I think you'd do better to refer to the Russians than the Mob, given who does what, but that's neither here nor there.) I also make no claim as regards whether the tactics they're undertaking have a media impact, though if that's their intent, I believe they've managed to go the opposite direction of their intent.
That all said, I'd like to make it clear that I've resolutely held these views for twenty years, as a result of my upbringing; it's worth noting that the RIAA's first public anti-piracy campaign began in 1993, long after I began to speak out on my beliefs. I am unable to find similar data for the
Actually, as a point of amusement, the one in Contiki does.
It wasn't too god-awful, actually. I worked with the S60 port of GTK+/KHTML, because it's less painful than Webcore/Webkit, and basically just followed in Nokia's footprints. I had to port several underlying libraries, including Freetype and a massively hacked Nano-X (which I've been slowly replacing with something home-grown, built on top of a platform-specific fast graphics library.)
I've got mostly-correct rendering, correct ECMA/DHTML and good (not great) font rendering. International fonts are tremendously broken. PNG works better than it does on IE. It's pretty reasonably fast, and the browser footprint is about 950k, plus another 200k from support libraries and 300k from the fonts I built in. It's enough to use to roll certain other applications, as long as I'm careful about their RAM usage.
This is actually the reason I originally started the DS WiFi Bounty. The IRC clients and whatnot that are now being built are amusing, but I have bigger plans. (No, the web browser isn't the apex of what I'm doing.)
Ouch, you're two for two. I misread and I misremembered. Tehsux.
I concede, sir, that you are correct on the latter point, and almost certainly on the former (though as I'm not the original poster, I can't be sure, your reading makes more sense than does my own.)
Which is why I explained how property was being stolen. Please don't reply if you're not going to read.
When using an unlicensed copy of software, you are not depriving anyone of their rightful property.
The courts, the law of the land and common sense disagree with you.
I would guess that the crime is that they said to agree to the EULA without actually following its provisions, which would make it, what, breach of contract?
Why would you even argue with someone when you don't know enough to shore up your own argument? Go find one of those stories about a big warezer bust. Follow it through to the indictment; they're all freely available online in the US since 1998..2001, depending on what state you're in. Then, look at what crime the warezers are being convicted of.
I really don't care whether you understand that it's theft; the fact is that under US law it is, and that these people wouldn't be going to jail for theft if it wasn't. Believe it or not, attorneys and judges understand the law better than you do.
I definitely disagree with that. There's neither any criminal offense nor, IMNSHO, any moral sin associated with using things that one does not own.
Oh, really? Then what's your address? I have some long distance calls to make.
Look, really, nobody cares whether you agree or not. Of course you don't agree: you don't make and sell things for a living. The next time you spend $2 million creating a software product, then watch a bunch of sanctimonious nobodies going "omg there's nothing wrong with me using this without paying for it," let someone know. Just because you say it's okay doesn't mean it really is. If you doubt me, mail a copy of your registry and a list of what you didn't pay for to your local DA. You *will* go to jail, no matter how loudly you protest that you've done nothing wrong.
For all the whining people do about their personal liberties and how it's their right to set the laws of the land, it's amazing how quickly they turn around and insist it's okay for them to break the laws the other people in this country set. You don't get to steal just because you're too arrogant to admit that it's theft.
Call an attorney and ask if your opinion of something as criminal has any effect on whether it's actually criminal. Try not to take it too hard when they hang up on you, laughing.
Noone would require you to sign a form of temporary transfer of property or something like that to enter a computer store and play around with the products on display.
Uh, that's because the store paid for their copies. There's no transfer of property involved. It is for the same reason legal for you to come to my house and use software I purchased. This is a non-sequitor, and arguably a red herring.
Taking them out of the store is, of course, a completely different thing (that would be depriving the store of their rightfully owned property).
Oh, so it's okay to steal from Microsoft, just not from Fry's?
Your morals are inconsistant.
Millions of people disagree. Hundreds of millions of people agree. What's your point? Theft is theft even if 0.5% of the population have no morals. The fact of the matter is that law is not written through the voice of a small fragment of population insisting what they're doing is okay. There are more people breaking into homes than warezing. They think what they're doing is okay. Is it?
Just because you can count people in agreement doesn't mean you're in the majority, and if you're not - in this case, you're in a vanishingly small segment of the populace, right up there with molesters and people who take Jerry Falwell seriously, both heinous crimes - then naming how many people agree with you is an indictment, not a supporting argument.
Wake me when 51% of the population has your back.
The act of installing software makes a copy. That is copyright infringement unless you have authorization with the copyright holder.
This is a subtle misunderstanding. It's not the act of making a copy which infringes on copyright; it's the act of distributing a copy. In fact, US law permits you to make a certain number of copies, depending on media, for archival without copyright holder's permission. You may, for example, back up your installer CDs, no matter what the EULA wants to tell you. You may not, however, put that backup online; at that point it becomes distribution, which is copyright infringement. Similarly, you may not hand said backup to your friend Tom, because that's distribution, and that's copyright infringement.
I am certainly not suggesting that using unlicensed software is legal; you are correct to indicate that it is criminal. You are simply annoting the wrong law.
It's criminal, yes. The specific crime, however, is not copyright infringement, it's theft. Copyright infringement is when you hand the CD to someone else. Usage is not infringement; distribution is.
Considering that you are accusing great-grandparent of saying things he didn't say, that you can neither spell nor use correctly the word impugn, that you seem to have no grasp of hyphenation, that you don't seem to grasp the concept of a Straw Man, that nobody has attacked anyone's credibility but you, and that there's been no point at which anyone's even attempted to justify their disagreement (don't confuse that with inability,) I think frankly you shouldn't be calling other people idiots.
Glass houses, and all that noise.
It only becomes infringement of intellectual property if they're redistributing. Intellectual property laws only cover publication and distribution. Frankly, I think you should probably watch the tone you give off; it's not a complex topic, and for you to look down on someone after making a mistake like that does not reflect well on you in public, especially given that you've reacted so badly to something that was written in a pleasant tone.
Given that I've got seventeen credits in law from Rutgers New Brunswick, which (I suspect) is 17 more than you have, I think you'd also do well to stop pretending what you learned between YRO and CSI makes you an expert.
There was neither mockery nor self righteousness involved, and I cannot be ignorant of my own opinions by definition. Who are you, and why are you attempting to condescend to me for patting someone who isn't you on the back?
1) The difference between breaking and entering and home invasion is whether an assault occurs.
2) I'm not.
The article is badly written. It cost Riken $9m, because NEC (as SGI Japan) paid for most of the hardware, and because Hitachi and Intel provided all but three of the workers.
In short, Riken had almost nothing to do with the process, except for the design of the single custom chip involved, and even then, most of the work was done by outside firms who wanted the press. And even then, it still cost the host organization $9 million!
Uh, because some people prefer being honest? There are a lot of people out there who just don't want to be thieves. Funny, that. It's one thing if you want to look the other way about "technical" theft (as if it's somehow okay.)
Don't tell other people to not do the right thing.
Maybe you didn't notice, but the speciic question was "how do I fix this without reinstalling?"
As an individual, how much less on your own are you if you have a retail version?
Quite a bit, actually. Microsoft provides 1-800 support for a year and email support for three years. I had to call them for support once because of a media flaw which rendered my shiny new compiler non-installable; they gave me a download link that would work for three days and sent me a new copy to my home address at their own expense. The only thing they made me do was tell them the serial number on the box. I was connected to a human less than thirty seconds after I called, and the only menu I had to go through was "If you are calling for sales, press 1; support, press 2; services, press 3; for any other reason, press 4."
It was one of the most pleasant support experiences I've ever had, actually, the only better being about the guy who was doing the support (a tech from a long-since dead computer company called Advanced Logic Research, who told some of the raunchiest jokes I've ever heard) rather than the company.
Microsoft puts a surprising amount of resources into support. I presume it's because they take so much bad PR that they have to be spit-sparkle polished to make sure their cash cows, namely the corporate world, know there's always a timely answer to catastrophe.
WGA has been required for many important upgrades for several years now. Why are you assuming they're dishonest when what they're trying to do is to pay for something they apparently didn't realize was pirated?