If you signed any sort of NDA, you might be liable for any information you gained while on the job (for example, architecture, business logic, algorithms.) If you didn't, you still might (theft of intellectual property.) I imagine you'd be quite safe if you could somehow prove that you had never inspected the code in any way. Since I'm guessing at least one of you was a programmer, I imagine you can't prove this. I, personally, would find the whole thing dubious and recommend avoiding it, but if you want to try anyway - get a lawyer.
The DMCA is kind of a red herring. Presumably, that group themselves is hosting it. If they get hit by a DMCA for their own project, they're probably not going to roll over and play dead - they're probably going to say "uh, this is ours, go away".
Things might be a little more dubious if their site vanished off the face of the planet and it was down to fans to host it. But as long as the creators of the code actually want it kept up, they're quite, quite able to do so, bogus DMCA claims or not.
If someone wants to shut down one of these projects, all they have to do is claim that they wrote it.
Proof of identity besides, how exactly would this work? All major open-source licenses (including the GPL) are irrevocable for the code they were distributed with. They can claim they wrote it all they want - they can't force anyone to take it off their sites.
If someone wanted to shut down the project, they'd have to:
* Claim it was theirs * Claim that they never intended for it to be distributed * Explain how it is that this group, which has been distributing it for a long, long time, managed to be the sole source of distributed binaries for months (years?) without the original authors ever caring * Explain how this group got ahold of the sourcecode in the first place
There's enough laugh-test issues in there to make any such attempt essentially impossible.
Basically, put it this way. If these people, the actual developers, want to de-GPL it in the future . . . they can't. Cat's out of the bag, ain't going back in. If they can't do it, what makes you think an impostor could?
That's a very poor analogy. Most software isn't based on a service (unless it's well..a service) and you only have to pay for it once.
And that's why I can play Left 4 Dead on Windows 3.1.
Oh wait, no I can't. Windows needs to be upgraded constantly - I'm running on XP, and there's games I actually can't play since I'm not running on Vista (though not many of them.)
If a company wants to survive, they need for you to keep buying their product. If they don't do so, they go out of business. Any company that releases a single product that you buy once and never buy again will quickly go out of business. Open-source, of course, doesn't have this issue.
Most software needs occasional updates, one way or another, and a lot of people decide to make a "new version" and sell the software again, 'cause, hey, you need it, right? You'll pay it.
The world provides no guarantee that you can forever be profitable at the thing you currently make money on.
Many years ago, people spent their lives painstakingly copying books. Today, we have printers that can do the same thing at a tiny, miniscule fraction of the cost.
More recently, people made money doing repetitive calculations, over and over again, and compiling the results into books. Now, obviously, computers can do it faster, cheaper, and more reliably.
Perhaps you're used to writing operating systems for a living. Well, operating systems are now valuable enough that people are willing to spend effort to make them free - CEOs realized, hey, I *could* spend $100,000 on licenses of an operating system. Or, I could spend the equivalent amount of money by taking an existing operating system and improving it for me . . . and for all future users . . . and then not have to spend $100,000 on next year's licenses, but instead just spend a relatively tiny amount of money maintaining our local patches.
And, hell, I could submit those to the central repository too. And now they'll maintain it for us.
Here's what it all comes down to. The core software in a computer is now too important to pay for. If you pay for it once, that implies you can be asked to pay for it again . . . and again, and again, and again . . . and if it's that important, you may simply have no choice. You don't want to contract out the necessities to someone who can withhold them on a whim - you want them available to you, for free, whenever you desire.
I don't know about you, but if I had to pay some dude $50 every time I wanted to flush my toilet, I'd be buying my own toilet with free flushes pretty damn fast. And, at the risk of stretching the analogy, I think people are tired of putting up with Microsoft's - or any other large company's - shit.
So she's good at math. There's nothing that forces her to go into something math-related.
Tell her to follow her dreams. If her dreams happen to intersect with her skills, which also happen to intersect with profitability, she's be rich, successful, and happy. If they don't, you might have to cut out the "rich" or "successful" part.
Why do you want her to go into math or science if she has no interest? What makes you think she'll put the effort into something she finds deathly dull?
The government doesn't care about illegal material in the slightest. They just want more power over what people can see and experience. This gives them more power, and they're using "illegal filtering" as the way to get it past people who might otherwise be critical.
They're certainly not against filtering illegal stuff - they simply don't care about it.
It's almost like Moore didn't think things through. Why, the wood furnace and turbine I need to run my billion-vacuum-tube computer takes up the entire city block!
No, I think you don't realize what the logical conclusion of your idea is.
If you give people the ability to vote for anything, you will, almost inevitably, get a dictatorship. People elect dictators. Constantly. Do you think there aren't a significant number of people who would have elected GWB President for Life seven years ago? Because there were a lot who would have.
Either your system allows for this, in which case it will quickly obliterate itself in dictatorship, or it doesn't, in which case it's already a dictatorship.
The key to the US system of government - and the part that's being slowly annihilated - is that it allows virtually all changes, explicitly, but most of them are incredibly hard to pass, and intentionally so. Of course that all breaks down when you end up with a 1.5-party-system like we have now. Such is life.
So, basically, here's my question:
A disaster occurs. A charismatic leader steps up and says "Hey! I can save you from terrorists. Just give me complete power over the nation, forever!" How does your system prevent this person from being elected Dictator of America, as 75% of the nation's citizens vote for him and vote to obliterate the existing system?
Because legally, it's not a gun, but the TSA considers it to be one. This means you don't have to worry about gun laws in whatever state you're traveling to (or from, or through) but you still get the full TSA protection designed for people carrying shotguns around.
That said: Girl Genius Online is a 9? Megatokyo is an 8? Are you insane?
Now, I actually like Girl Genius's art, but the fact is that Phil Foglio's grasp of anatomy is shaky at best. He tends to lose sight of proportions, his heads don't act like heads actually do, and speaking of heads, 9/10 of his characters are microcephalic gorillas. It's *pretty*, but it's not a 9. It's nowhere near a 9.
Megatokyo has fantastic architecture. Meanwhile, every single character apparently suffers from Down's Syndrome. I'm serious. Look at the eyes. You don't have eyes that widely spread without an extra chromosome. Also, despite N billion years on the internet, he still doesn't have the concept of "backgrounds" down, and he doesn't even understand what "lighting" is (unless it's on a building, he gets buildings just fine.)
Penny Arcade is cartoony, but it's competent.
XKCD does a surprisingly good job of expression emotion in stick figures, but, I mean, it's stick figures.
I'd call PA a 7, GGO a 5, and Megatokyo and XKCD both 3's (because XKCD tries for very little and succeeds with flying colors, and Megatokyo tries for a lot and faceplants in the mud.) Tintin . . . man, I don't know. Can you even get less imaginative?
I guess I'll call it a 5. At least he has anatomy down.
I think the top 10% richest people should have to give all their money to the bottom 90% poorest people. All in favor? Motion passes, 90% to 10%.
I think the 5% of left-handed people shouldn't be allowed to vote. There's something wrong with them! Also, they should give us all their money. All in favor? Motion passes, 95% to 5%.
This new government is working out great! Man, I love democracy!
There is a reason we live in a republic, and not a democracy. Remember that a substantial fraction of Americans still thinks that a nigger in the white house means we'll all be eating fried chicken within a month. Democracies turn into dictatorships instantly, and what you have listed there is basically democracy-by-proxy.
My mom left the teaching profession because she was tired of fighting with the unions. Teachers with seniority got to choose what they taught first, even if they were grossly unsuited. Teachers with seniority got paid more, even if they were blisteringly incompetent. If there were budget cuts, and someone had to be fired, guess who it was? I'll give you a hint: it wasn't the teachers with seniority.
Start teaching at a school early on, and relax! Once you've been there for three years you'll just never be fired, no matter how awful of a teacher you are.
The teaching unions are a blight upon the country.
Now, I'm not blaming them for all the problems. You're right - the painful lack of funding is an issue also. But I find it hard to believe the situation would be *worse* without them, given what I heard about what it was like with them.
That's not how I interpret it at all. I suspect that the three plotlines are running in parallel - there's no cliffhangers because they all run from the beginning of the Starcraft 2 plotline to the end of the Starcraft 2 plotline, they just focus on different races.
I'm going to invent some hypothetical plotline here: perhaps one part of the Terran side's ending involves some allied Protoss buddies showing up and saying "hey hey, we successfully managed our side mission, which we're not going to talk about in detail, let's do the end battle now!". Later, when they release the Protoss game, you'd get to play that side mission, and later you'd also play a detachment of Protoss defending against an unexpected attack that would have slaughtered the first "end battle" group (which you never knew of the existence of the first time you played through, but hey!)
There's lots of ways to structure this that lets them release three games in series, and still not have any cliffhangers. Instead of extending the original plotline, you just layer extra stuff on top of it. As long as you're reasonably careful beforehand you can pull this off without needing to retcon anything.
As I see it, they really want to make a series of games called "Starcraft 2". So there's Starcraft 2 1, Starcraft 2 2, and Starcraft 2 3. Each one, I suspect, is going to be the size of a full-fledged game.
At which point, a year after your laptop was taken, you're awarded the value that your now-obsolete laptop would fetch on eBay. (Or, probably, $1000.) Your data is gone, you had to buy a new laptop a year ago to continue your work, and the dude who swiped your laptop is using it to jerk off to transvestite goat porn.
If criminals had those kinds of penalties, you'd see crime rates many, many times higher than we currently have. "If you commit a crime, and you're caught, then you have a year to hold on to whatever you got, and then you have to pay them the current value of that stuff! No more." Yeah. That's not exactly a deterrent.
I'd also like to know what measures the bill takes to prevent the border guards from saying "well, we lost it, sucks to be you". Does it have guarantees spelled out? If my laptop gets "lost" while they have it, will they buy me a new one? Will someone lose their job or go to jail over it?
Because if the answer is "no", then at this point I just plain don't believe it will matter.
Yes. 20/20 is another example. There's a few more, but in many cases the formula that the filter was designed against no longer works - a good way to intentionally bypass the filter is to add 1* to the beginning of whatever you're trying to enter.
Obviously, most people searching for 9/11 and 20/20 aren't thinking about the mathematical formula.
Apple? Abusing their power to keep people from talking about their product in any way that is not authorized by the Apple marketing department? Why, I can't tell you how long it's been since I've heard a similar story about them doing this sort of thing!
No, I don't mean it's been a long time. I mean I literally can't tell you. I'm not legally allowed to.
Slashdot Mirror
Get a lawyer.
Long answer:
If you signed any sort of NDA, you might be liable for any information you gained while on the job (for example, architecture, business logic, algorithms.) If you didn't, you still might (theft of intellectual property.) I imagine you'd be quite safe if you could somehow prove that you had never inspected the code in any way. Since I'm guessing at least one of you was a programmer, I imagine you can't prove this. I, personally, would find the whole thing dubious and recommend avoiding it, but if you want to try anyway - get a lawyer.
The DMCA is kind of a red herring. Presumably, that group themselves is hosting it. If they get hit by a DMCA for their own project, they're probably not going to roll over and play dead - they're probably going to say "uh, this is ours, go away".
Things might be a little more dubious if their site vanished off the face of the planet and it was down to fans to host it. But as long as the creators of the code actually want it kept up, they're quite, quite able to do so, bogus DMCA claims or not.
If someone wants to shut down one of these projects, all they have to do is claim that they wrote it.
Proof of identity besides, how exactly would this work? All major open-source licenses (including the GPL) are irrevocable for the code they were distributed with. They can claim they wrote it all they want - they can't force anyone to take it off their sites.
If someone wanted to shut down the project, they'd have to:
* Claim it was theirs
* Claim that they never intended for it to be distributed
* Explain how it is that this group, which has been distributing it for a long, long time, managed to be the sole source of distributed binaries for months (years?) without the original authors ever caring
* Explain how this group got ahold of the sourcecode in the first place
There's enough laugh-test issues in there to make any such attempt essentially impossible.
Basically, put it this way. If these people, the actual developers, want to de-GPL it in the future . . . they can't. Cat's out of the bag, ain't going back in. If they can't do it, what makes you think an impostor could?
That's a very poor analogy. Most software isn't based on a service (unless it's well..a service) and you only have to pay for it once.
And that's why I can play Left 4 Dead on Windows 3.1.
Oh wait, no I can't. Windows needs to be upgraded constantly - I'm running on XP, and there's games I actually can't play since I'm not running on Vista (though not many of them.)
If a company wants to survive, they need for you to keep buying their product. If they don't do so, they go out of business. Any company that releases a single product that you buy once and never buy again will quickly go out of business. Open-source, of course, doesn't have this issue.
Most software needs occasional updates, one way or another, and a lot of people decide to make a "new version" and sell the software again, 'cause, hey, you need it, right? You'll pay it.
The world provides no guarantee that you can forever be profitable at the thing you currently make money on.
Many years ago, people spent their lives painstakingly copying books. Today, we have printers that can do the same thing at a tiny, miniscule fraction of the cost.
More recently, people made money doing repetitive calculations, over and over again, and compiling the results into books. Now, obviously, computers can do it faster, cheaper, and more reliably.
Perhaps you're used to writing operating systems for a living. Well, operating systems are now valuable enough that people are willing to spend effort to make them free - CEOs realized, hey, I *could* spend $100,000 on licenses of an operating system. Or, I could spend the equivalent amount of money by taking an existing operating system and improving it for me . . . and for all future users . . . and then not have to spend $100,000 on next year's licenses, but instead just spend a relatively tiny amount of money maintaining our local patches.
And, hell, I could submit those to the central repository too. And now they'll maintain it for us.
Here's what it all comes down to. The core software in a computer is now too important to pay for. If you pay for it once, that implies you can be asked to pay for it again . . . and again, and again, and again . . . and if it's that important, you may simply have no choice. You don't want to contract out the necessities to someone who can withhold them on a whim - you want them available to you, for free, whenever you desire.
I don't know about you, but if I had to pay some dude $50 every time I wanted to flush my toilet, I'd be buying my own toilet with free flushes pretty damn fast. And, at the risk of stretching the analogy, I think people are tired of putting up with Microsoft's - or any other large company's - shit.
So she's good at math. There's nothing that forces her to go into something math-related.
Tell her to follow her dreams. If her dreams happen to intersect with her skills, which also happen to intersect with profitability, she's be rich, successful, and happy. If they don't, you might have to cut out the "rich" or "successful" part.
Why do you want her to go into math or science if she has no interest? What makes you think she'll put the effort into something she finds deathly dull?
No, he said that one group was "thinkers". :D
4. A lot of Windows users just haven't bothered updating.
I'm still using a pre-3.0 version. Works fine, haven't touched it yet. Linux tends to auto-update, Windows not so much.
Nope, it's simple.
The government doesn't care about illegal material in the slightest. They just want more power over what people can see and experience. This gives them more power, and they're using "illegal filtering" as the way to get it past people who might otherwise be critical.
They're certainly not against filtering illegal stuff - they simply don't care about it.
It's almost like Moore didn't think things through. Why, the wood furnace and turbine I need to run my billion-vacuum-tube computer takes up the entire city block!
Anyone who has the Windows file sharing port exposed to the outside world is an idiot.
No, I think you don't realize what the logical conclusion of your idea is.
If you give people the ability to vote for anything, you will, almost inevitably, get a dictatorship. People elect dictators. Constantly. Do you think there aren't a significant number of people who would have elected GWB President for Life seven years ago? Because there were a lot who would have.
Either your system allows for this, in which case it will quickly obliterate itself in dictatorship, or it doesn't, in which case it's already a dictatorship.
The key to the US system of government - and the part that's being slowly annihilated - is that it allows virtually all changes, explicitly, but most of them are incredibly hard to pass, and intentionally so. Of course that all breaks down when you end up with a 1.5-party-system like we have now. Such is life.
So, basically, here's my question:
A disaster occurs. A charismatic leader steps up and says "Hey! I can save you from terrorists. Just give me complete power over the nation, forever!" How does your system prevent this person from being elected Dictator of America, as 75% of the nation's citizens vote for him and vote to obliterate the existing system?
Because legally, it's not a gun, but the TSA considers it to be one. This means you don't have to worry about gun laws in whatever state you're traveling to (or from, or through) but you still get the full TSA protection designed for people carrying shotguns around.
Tintin is a 10? Are you insane?
That said: Girl Genius Online is a 9? Megatokyo is an 8? Are you insane?
Now, I actually like Girl Genius's art, but the fact is that Phil Foglio's grasp of anatomy is shaky at best. He tends to lose sight of proportions, his heads don't act like heads actually do, and speaking of heads, 9/10 of his characters are microcephalic gorillas. It's *pretty*, but it's not a 9. It's nowhere near a 9.
Megatokyo has fantastic architecture. Meanwhile, every single character apparently suffers from Down's Syndrome. I'm serious. Look at the eyes. You don't have eyes that widely spread without an extra chromosome. Also, despite N billion years on the internet, he still doesn't have the concept of "backgrounds" down, and he doesn't even understand what "lighting" is (unless it's on a building, he gets buildings just fine.)
Penny Arcade is cartoony, but it's competent.
XKCD does a surprisingly good job of expression emotion in stick figures, but, I mean, it's stick figures.
I'd call PA a 7, GGO a 5, and Megatokyo and XKCD both 3's (because XKCD tries for very little and succeeds with flying colors, and Megatokyo tries for a lot and faceplants in the mud.) Tintin . . . man, I don't know. Can you even get less imaginative?
I guess I'll call it a 5. At least he has anatomy down.
I think the top 10% richest people should have to give all their money to the bottom 90% poorest people. All in favor? Motion passes, 90% to 10%.
I think the 5% of left-handed people shouldn't be allowed to vote. There's something wrong with them! Also, they should give us all their money. All in favor? Motion passes, 95% to 5%.
This new government is working out great! Man, I love democracy!
There is a reason we live in a republic, and not a democracy. Remember that a substantial fraction of Americans still thinks that a nigger in the white house means we'll all be eating fried chicken within a month. Democracies turn into dictatorships instantly, and what you have listed there is basically democracy-by-proxy.
Don't worry, "political party" will be carefully defined so it only applies to Democrats and Republicans.
My mom left the teaching profession because she was tired of fighting with the unions. Teachers with seniority got to choose what they taught first, even if they were grossly unsuited. Teachers with seniority got paid more, even if they were blisteringly incompetent. If there were budget cuts, and someone had to be fired, guess who it was? I'll give you a hint: it wasn't the teachers with seniority.
Start teaching at a school early on, and relax! Once you've been there for three years you'll just never be fired, no matter how awful of a teacher you are.
The teaching unions are a blight upon the country.
Now, I'm not blaming them for all the problems. You're right - the painful lack of funding is an issue also. But I find it hard to believe the situation would be *worse* without them, given what I heard about what it was like with them.
That's not how I interpret it at all. I suspect that the three plotlines are running in parallel - there's no cliffhangers because they all run from the beginning of the Starcraft 2 plotline to the end of the Starcraft 2 plotline, they just focus on different races.
I'm going to invent some hypothetical plotline here: perhaps one part of the Terran side's ending involves some allied Protoss buddies showing up and saying "hey hey, we successfully managed our side mission, which we're not going to talk about in detail, let's do the end battle now!". Later, when they release the Protoss game, you'd get to play that side mission, and later you'd also play a detachment of Protoss defending against an unexpected attack that would have slaughtered the first "end battle" group (which you never knew of the existence of the first time you played through, but hey!)
There's lots of ways to structure this that lets them release three games in series, and still not have any cliffhangers. Instead of extending the original plotline, you just layer extra stuff on top of it. As long as you're reasonably careful beforehand you can pull this off without needing to retcon anything.
As I see it, they really want to make a series of games called "Starcraft 2". So there's Starcraft 2 1, Starcraft 2 2, and Starcraft 2 3. Each one, I suspect, is going to be the size of a full-fledged game.
At which point, a year after your laptop was taken, you're awarded the value that your now-obsolete laptop would fetch on eBay. (Or, probably, $1000.) Your data is gone, you had to buy a new laptop a year ago to continue your work, and the dude who swiped your laptop is using it to jerk off to transvestite goat porn.
If criminals had those kinds of penalties, you'd see crime rates many, many times higher than we currently have. "If you commit a crime, and you're caught, then you have a year to hold on to whatever you got, and then you have to pay them the current value of that stuff! No more." Yeah. That's not exactly a deterrent.
I'd also like to know what measures the bill takes to prevent the border guards from saying "well, we lost it, sucks to be you". Does it have guarantees spelled out? If my laptop gets "lost" while they have it, will they buy me a new one? Will someone lose their job or go to jail over it?
Because if the answer is "no", then at this point I just plain don't believe it will matter.
How about Ireland instead?
Battlefield 2 did. This is why the third thing I did after installing it was "crack it", and is also one of the reasons I haven't bought the sequel.
(The first thing I did after installing was "try to run it", and the second was "swear at EA".)
Yes. 20/20 is another example. There's a few more, but in many cases the formula that the filter was designed against no longer works - a good way to intentionally bypass the filter is to add 1* to the beginning of whatever you're trying to enter.
Obviously, most people searching for 9/11 and 20/20 aren't thinking about the mathematical formula.
It's floating-point.
Apple? Abusing their power to keep people from talking about their product in any way that is not authorized by the Apple marketing department? Why, I can't tell you how long it's been since I've heard a similar story about them doing this sort of thing!
No, I don't mean it's been a long time. I mean I literally can't tell you. I'm not legally allowed to.
Sorry.
(Joking . . . mostly.)