She did remove it. She was intimidated to remove something she had written in a public forum. Without due process.
No no no, you see, intimidation implies coersion. Intimidation implies threats. Intimidation implies nastiness and brutality. From every indication on her site, the visit she received was, if not cordial, very businesslike. If you disagree with the law that says that it's illegal to make death threats against the president, then that could be discussed in some other forum. The issue at hand right now is a simple, ten-minute investigation to determine if there's a real threat involved. There wasn't, so they left. She makes no mention of threats. She makes no mention of veiled hostilities. She makes no mention of even an official request by them to take down the site. She does, however, mention that the people came to investigate, who you claim have bullied some poor, defenseless person into taking content down, told her that no further action would happen as the result of this. Here, let me quote that one more time:
...and told me that they would not recommend that any further action be taken with my case.
Now how exactly was she "intimidated" (after also stating that she was not intimidated) "without due process" (as you put it), into taking something down by people who told her that no further action was going to take place? Yes, she did take the post down. There are many good reasons she may have decided to do so other than direct intimidation by the government, as you seem to think.
Regardless, you seem to have slipped into Godwin's Law territory here, so I guess I'll just leave it at that.
Er, of course she got scared. Anyone should be a bit scared if the Secret Service shows up on your doorstep. But did you bother to read what she actually wrote about it though? Here, I'll quote some of it for you:
After about ten minutes of talking to me and my family, they quickly came to the conclusion that I was not a threat to national security (mostly because we are the least threatening people in the entire world) and told me that they would not recommend that any further action be taken with my case.
... and...
I did not feel that my civil rights were violated by the visit, and I did not feel intimidated by the Secret Service agents.
So what's wrong with that? The SS spends ten minutes investigating what could potentially be a threat, and then leave once they find out that there's nothing to be worried about. Whose rights are being trampled on here? How was that intimidating. She even used the word "intimidated" in the post, when talking about how she wasn't.
Er, if you actually read her response to all this, you'd find out that the Secret Service spent about 10 minutes at the house, and after coming to the decision that there indeed, was no threat at all, left. Entire repercussions from posting that on a blog: 10 minutes of your time. She wasn't charged with anything and isn't even under suspicion for anything. So where in there do you infer that it's not legal to pray for someone's death?
Er, but see, if you *have* a 5 1/4" floppy drive lying around, and a computer capable of running it, then you *could* play Archon. And that's a good thing, because at least for the sake of this hypothetical situation, you paid for all of these components.
If Electronic Arts had required you to dial into some BBS to activate the game though, at the time, I'm guessing that you'd be stuck scouring the internet for a crack as opposed to actually using the product you paid for.
I'm not saying this is some social injustice or anything, of course they have a right to do this. And I've got a right to be pissed off enough about it to not purchase the game.
Yeah, sure, I've got internet access, and right now Valve is still going strong and their Steam servers still exist. How about 10 years from now when Valve may not be here, and those Steam servers may not exist anymore, and I want to pull out some old machine and play a bit of HL2? The CDs (or DVDs or whatever) that came with the game are not sufficient to play the game, and in fact in that scenario the only thing that *will* make it sufficient is the possibility that you can still find a hack to get around the activation crap.
The point is, I shouldn't have to jump through all these hoops just to play a game I purchased when all I care about is the single-player component. I'm not saying that there aren't workarounds, I'm just saying that I shouldn't have to worry about finding a workaround, and I shouldn't have to worry about the fact that Valve is releasing a game with an expiration date built into it.
It's not even really a solution if Valve eventually comes out with their own patch which causes the game to not require activation, because when I'm sitting here 10 years from now wanting to reminisce about an old game, all I'm going to have for sure are the discs the game came on.
Five minutes into the game and activation will be forgotten.
Er, right. That's why I was using phrases like "on a new installation" and "to install the game." I realize that that's certainly not as big a deal as talking to the internet every time the game is started, but for me it's still unacceptable.
Right, obviously if you either go to the trouble of hacking it yourself, or just wait a few hours for the inevitable Clever Hacker to do it for you, then you're good to go. The thing is that I shouldn't have to resort to methods which can probably be construed as illegal by our lovely judicial system just to play a game I purchased against my own computer.
I dunno, I don't think it's that minor. They've done a couple of things here which violate a couple of things I feel are integral to a single-player game. First off, a single player game just shouldn't have to talk to the internet. Suppose I didn't have a connection where I was. Suppose I just moved and my connection's not installed yet. Suppose I have restrictive firewall settings on that I don't want to have to bypass just to play a game against the computer. It's just unacceptable.
The second, and to me more annoying thnig, is that they've just made it impossible to install and play the game once they go belly-up. As soon as Steam stops becoming available, nobody can play the game on a new installation without hacking it. That's just ridiculous. I still pull out old DOS games from when I was a dorkling in junior high, and I expect them to just install and WORK (well, provided the DOS emulators are up to snuff, anyway). Would they do so if they had to dial up and talk to some server from the 80s that doesn't exist anymore? No, they wouldn't.
All in all, a horrible decision. I was so excited about this game, too.
Notice how two of those photos had the foreground added in with Photoshop? That's really lame. The last picture says that the foreground was added as the last exposure was taken, that's a much cooler way of doing it.
In the FAQ section, they claim that it can handle 10 simlutaneous presses (at least that's what it seems to say), which would mean that to do more you'd have to use more than just both your hands. So if that's true, I imagine that's quite sufficient.
Also, OSC == THE FUTURE, so meh re: lack of MIDI.:)
especially by a computer that can do almost nothing else?
There was some quote, I think it was on a live CD from some band, talking about a Chess computer, and how people were all upset that this Chess computer was beating the top chess-playing humans, and "but what if there's an Earthquake? *I* know enough to go hide under a door frame, what's the computer going to do? What if there's a fire?" Fairly amusing, whoever it was. Their phrasing was, of course, more humorous than my vague recollections as well.
I believe that the more-or-less "official" response to this has something to do with how close a spaceship is able to get to a barebones prototype Death Star in the Kessel system or something like that... Like they had just built the bare minimum of a shell and the weapons system, and the weapon systems were all set to automatic or something, so the Kessel Run was measured by how close you can get to this prototype Death Star and still make it back in one piece. I think that may have been in one of the Zahn books or something.
Of course, that measures both cojones/supidity and the actual merit of your ship, but still.
People who want to break the law are not going to be stopped by locks or web and mac address filtering.
Well, I agree with your statement, but I do think there's a huge difference between the two. Breaking a window on a car poses no significant impediment to someone who wants to steal your car radio. That's easily solved by a brick or a rock or a crowbar or whatever happens to be handy. Properly securing a wireless access point, on the other hand, poses a genuine problem to anyone who wants to break in. Not that it's necessarily impossible, but it will take a heck of a lot more determination and skill (though I suppose kiddies could substitute scripts for skill and get away with it fairly often), and unless someone's interested in hacking your wireless network in particular, as opposed to just any ol' network to snag some free net access, anyone trying to break in will likely just go for an easier target.
That theory relies on at least a statistically-significant portion of the site's users actually answering those ridiculous questions both habitually and truthfully, two prerequisites which I don't believe you'd find on your average site. Getting genuinely useful data by that methodology would require quite a bit of data, and data that's known to be at least somewhat accurate. I think you'll have a hard time getting that. I could be wrong though, I suppose.
Bah, I really hate those "was this answer useful?" questions. So very lame. There's no context to determine a useful yes/no answer! No, your answer about subject X wasn't at all helpful because I need some help on subject Y. Does that mean that the answer for subject X should be removed, or that it's bad? Of course not, it just means that I didn't find it useful in this case. Maybe I'll find it useful later. Maybe I'll never find it useful but someone else will. And there are big corporations with that question on their pages! So very very silly.
Yeah, this is pretty stupid. A year or two ago we actually spent some time developing a system to do exactly that (it ended up not being used) but the basic idea went from zero to full in an afternoon or so, and all that was left was the technical and design details. I mean, if you want to control access to an otherwise public hotspot, what else are you going to do without requiring stupid client programs to be installed on everyone's laptop first?
That's the main thing that's always bugged me about patents for this sort of thing. Arriving at the same conclusion independantly isn't the same thing as buying someone's work to be able to use it yourself. Of course, there's a bunch of sticky issues in there, but still.
Probably a good thing we didn't end up going forward with it if this kind of garbage is being thrown around now.
I see what you're talking about to be something altogether more specialized though. If you want to be able to use some kind of datastore solution for raw video files (where you'd need a hell of a lot *more* than just 1GB), that's a specialty application. That's an iDisk which belongs in a different class of service and belongs in a different pricing scheme. What.mac seems to be right now is a general purpose utility for people to have email, a homepage, an address book, and some storage to keep some documents perhaps, or the occasional album in mp3 that you want to transfer to somewhere else.
Primarily what I'm objecting to is the implication in the main article that because Apple isn't providing 1GB of space for what I see as a generalized, low-level service, they're somehow slacking off and offering a sub-par service. If someone *wants* to be using some huge amount of online service, then they should be buying a service which makes sense for their purposes, not complaining that an average-consumer-grade email/homepage/storage service doesn't have enough room to keep their entire Grateful Dead concert bootleg collection.
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Now how exactly was she "intimidated" (after also stating that she was not intimidated) "without due process" (as you put it), into taking something down by people who told her that no further action was going to take place? Yes, she did take the post down. There are many good reasons she may have decided to do so other than direct intimidation by the government, as you seem to think.
Regardless, you seem to have slipped into Godwin's Law territory here, so I guess I'll just leave it at that.
If Electronic Arts had required you to dial into some BBS to activate the game though, at the time, I'm guessing that you'd be stuck scouring the internet for a crack as opposed to actually using the product you paid for.
I'm not saying this is some social injustice or anything, of course they have a right to do this. And I've got a right to be pissed off enough about it to not purchase the game.
... with any luck, it'll be every bit as good as the comic book.
The point is, I shouldn't have to jump through all these hoops just to play a game I purchased when all I care about is the single-player component. I'm not saying that there aren't workarounds, I'm just saying that I shouldn't have to worry about finding a workaround, and I shouldn't have to worry about the fact that Valve is releasing a game with an expiration date built into it.
It's not even really a solution if Valve eventually comes out with their own patch which causes the game to not require activation, because when I'm sitting here 10 years from now wanting to reminisce about an old game, all I'm going to have for sure are the discs the game came on.
Can I do so on a new computer which never had Steam installed on it in the first place?
Right, obviously if you either go to the trouble of hacking it yourself, or just wait a few hours for the inevitable Clever Hacker to do it for you, then you're good to go. The thing is that I shouldn't have to resort to methods which can probably be construed as illegal by our lovely judicial system just to play a game I purchased against my own computer.
The second, and to me more annoying thnig, is that they've just made it impossible to install and play the game once they go belly-up. As soon as Steam stops becoming available, nobody can play the game on a new installation without hacking it. That's just ridiculous. I still pull out old DOS games from when I was a dorkling in junior high, and I expect them to just install and WORK (well, provided the DOS emulators are up to snuff, anyway). Would they do so if they had to dial up and talk to some server from the 80s that doesn't exist anymore? No, they wouldn't.
All in all, a horrible decision. I was so excited about this game, too.
Notice how two of those photos had the foreground added in with Photoshop? That's really lame. The last picture says that the foreground was added as the last exposure was taken, that's a much cooler way of doing it.
Also, OSC == THE FUTURE, so meh re: lack of MIDI. :)
*Two* stories about the same lame "show." Now I'll go download it twice!
Of course, that measures both cojones/supidity and the actual merit of your ship, but still.
What an incredibly worthless article. Words can't do it justice.
Er, except that there aren't. here's an image linked to from the auction page.
I'll take that bet too. If you look closely, there's less than ten actual games being bundled in with the deal. It's all game systems and accessories.
... it'll be every bit as good as the comic book.
That theory relies on at least a statistically-significant portion of the site's users actually answering those ridiculous questions both habitually and truthfully, two prerequisites which I don't believe you'd find on your average site. Getting genuinely useful data by that methodology would require quite a bit of data, and data that's known to be at least somewhat accurate. I think you'll have a hard time getting that. I could be wrong though, I suppose.
Bah, I really hate those "was this answer useful?" questions. So very lame. There's no context to determine a useful yes/no answer! No, your answer about subject X wasn't at all helpful because I need some help on subject Y. Does that mean that the answer for subject X should be removed, or that it's bad? Of course not, it just means that I didn't find it useful in this case. Maybe I'll find it useful later. Maybe I'll never find it useful but someone else will. And there are big corporations with that question on their pages! So very very silly.
That's the main thing that's always bugged me about patents for this sort of thing. Arriving at the same conclusion independantly isn't the same thing as buying someone's work to be able to use it yourself. Of course, there's a bunch of sticky issues in there, but still.
Probably a good thing we didn't end up going forward with it if this kind of garbage is being thrown around now.
Primarily what I'm objecting to is the implication in the main article that because Apple isn't providing 1GB of space for what I see as a generalized, low-level service, they're somehow slacking off and offering a sub-par service. If someone *wants* to be using some huge amount of online service, then they should be buying a service which makes sense for their purposes, not complaining that an average-consumer-grade email/homepage/storage service doesn't have enough room to keep their entire Grateful Dead concert bootleg collection.