They have a duty to not actively attempt to harm anyone who might use their product. They fully knew that it is common for these items to be used by more people than the initial purchaser, thus they knew that the potential for this kind of harm exists. And yet, they chose to deliberately sabotage any system that accessed the disc.
So yes, those who were harmed by the malware -- which I might add installs even if you attempt to deny permission -- have grounds to sue. Or would you claim I was not liable if I aimed a gun at someone, shot them, and one of my bullets bounced and hit you? I shouldn't have been blasting away with a gun in a public area, now should I? I should have known that bystanders could get hurt!
And apparently, you just don't care about actually telling the truth in your articles and serving the people who pay to subscribe to your magazine, because I don't see anything anywhere about writing objective, fair articles but I see lots of bragging about happily filling the pages with bullshit.
I wrote to PC Gamer once to politely correct a photo error in one of their articles, and they published my letter -- and made fun of me, comparing me to a fictional character on a TV show. For politely correcting an error in the way that one is supposed to do when writing to a magazine or newspaper editor! In the same way in which I've found errors in the NY Times and Time magazine and written to them -- and either gotten a very polite, grateful response from them or seen the correction published in the errata in a future issue.
That one act meant I did not renew my subscription and I have never subscribed to a gaming magazine since -- because some asshole doing the same job you do proved that his profession didn't deserve any respect.
Grow up and do your fucking job. You know, the thing they teach in journalism school about, I don't know, following the rules of journalism ethics.
3) Gamers get actually-objective previews of new products, allowing them to make educated choices. You know, the option that is the best one, since it actually fixes the problem.
Actually, it should be a concern if the press isn't doing its duty and presenting the facts in an objective manner and disclosing all possible sources of bias, such as financial donations. A reporter has a duty to the readers of his or her stories, and a biased article that sweeps problems under the rug is very much a cause for concern -- and it's even more troublesome when it happens consistently and no one speaks up about it.
Sue 'em yourself. If you can prove their crap is on your computer, you have proof of damage. Go after them in small claims court. If enough people did the same thing, they'd be hit with too many tiny lawsuits to fight them all.
They didn't tell you or the original owner of the malware on the disk, so they are liable because they were aware of its existence.
Even a switch to 100% ethanol would likely only take a fuel map change, which isn't very hard
Wrong again. Engines are designed to run certain types of fuels. Where I live, all grades contain 10% ethanol so that the fuel burns more cleanly (fewer products of incomplete combustion) but no more, because your normal automotive engine isn't designed for any more. You have to buy a vehicle that's specifically designed to run on a particular type of fuel.
Different engines also require different octane levels, too -- I can run 87-octane fuel in my car, but another model of the same car is designed to be run on 91 or higher, due to how the engine was designed.
The governemnt further hinders by requiring that most of a fuel be gasoline, and only a small percentage be alcohol.
Cite this claim, as I don't think it's true. The requirements of fuel are based on what is required by modern automotive engines and by emissions constraints in the region where the fuel is sold.
All true. The problem here in the US is that a lot of people aren't aware of why their Taurus or whatever (many of the FFVs that are visibly badged are Fords) has a little picture of corn on it. (Ethanol is often distilled from corn).
And then the further problem is that most stations only sell conventional gasoline or diesel. If more stations sold E85, more people might choose to use that fuel.
It is quite possible to purchase a computer system that does not depend on Microsoft products. It is not, however, possible to purchase a car that does not run on gasoline or diesel fuel. If Microsoft quits selling products in Europe, someone else will take their place.
You held it up as an example of sucess. No matter how hard you wave your hands - it wasn't.
Yes, it was. It worked, didn't it? It isn't as capable as some other systems (it's not that big) and it costs more than originally planned, but it launches satellites, doesn't it? That's a success in my book. And I'm going to wave my hands all over the place because I consider something that actually does what it's designed to do to be something that is a success. Now if it consistently explodes or crashes, that's a problem, but it hasn't done that on a consistent basis any more than other rockets have -- Arianes have failed. Deltas have failed. Atlases have failed. Soyuzes have failed. Protons have failed. And all of those are considered to be successes. No system is going to work properly 100% of the time, but for the most part a successful system is going to behave as intended, and when it doesn't, a successful system can be repaired and/or modified.
Only if you have a really bad vehicle design. A typical design will use 5% or less of it's fuel between ignition and vehicle first motion.
You took me too literally. There's a lot of inertia to overcome to get moving in the first place and that takes a lot of effort/force -- that's why a lot of rockets use liquid or solid fueled boosters, but you'll notice that they use those only to get off the pad and during the initial minute or few of the flight -- then the extra effort isn't needed, so the boosters drop away. That's an indication of what I'm getting at -- that a system that doesn't have to have the hardware to do all that built into it can be a lot smaller, and aircraft are a pretty cost-effective way to do it, and we're pretty experienced at building aircraft after 103 years of experience. And it's not like dropping things off planes is a new idea -- before Orbital Sciences started doing it with an L-1011, they did it with a B-52 -- the same B-52 that did the same thing numerous times with the X-15 and many other test vehicles.
Nobody has built a high performance SSTO because there is no economic incentive to do so.
There's lots of rich people out there who would pay the money. If I won the lottery, I would. There's plenty of incentive to build it now that the interest is there -- and look at the X-Prize ideas that have been put forth -- there's air-dropped vehicles, balloon-launched vehicles, among all sorts of conventional ideas. Seems to me like there's a lot of people, who are actually building these things, who think air-launching is a plausible idea. Sure, Scaled Composites has only built a suborbital spacecraft so far -- but they're looking at going further, and I also need to point out that even the government-funded Mercury program launched a number of unmanned and manned suborbital flights before it tried going orbital.
Because air launch doesn't do a significant job of getting started in return for the costs it imposes.
Tell that, again, to Scaled Composites and NASA, both of which have done it and seem to think it works pretty well.
The AN-225 couldn't even air launch a Mercury/Atlas.
I never said that that specific design would be the one used, did I? No. My point was that if a design doesn't exist now to do the job, build one.
Fuels which are extremely corrosive, extremely toxic, and extremely difficult to work with.
And hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide aren't? Yet they are used as propellants and seem to work pretty well, and that thing called "we don't need an ignition system if we use these, saving complexity and weight" is a pretty big advantage. Take safety into account when in the design phase and the problem isn't that bad. Science research labs handle dangerous chemicals all the time -- there's a reason safety training is mandatory for the workers.
And there's no reason why you have to use expensive fuels to build a spacecraft. Hydrogen and oxygen are pretty efficient and they're pretty safe, too, and they're easy to g
However much you may dislike commercials, you need to come to terms with the fact that TV is not in fact free
Yes, I know, I've bought two of them. I had to pay, thus I know they aren't free. I also already pay for cable service, so that isn't free either.
ttempts to get TV to be free by commercial-skipping PVRs will be blocked on a large scale by the TV stations themselves under pressure from the advertisers
Uh, how exactly do they plan to do that? They don't have active control over how I play the signal back. They can make the ads more interesting or add them to programming, which they are already doing. But I watch documentaries anyway so there's not a lot of product placement; the worst I've seen is CSI where they use, say, only Nikon cameras (this makes me very happy, as I am a Nikon dSLR user; just got a new D200!). They can't stop people from skipping ads, but the key isn't to do that. It's to make people want to view them -- and it seems to be working.
Once you embrace the advertisers as the people who actually directly pay for your TV
How can I get a refund for my new HDTV, then? I want my $1,500 back!
That is the route for a successful PVR company.
As I've said before, and as is true for any company, you give the people who actually pay what they want. TiVo gets most of its revenue from monthly subscriptions. They get a bit from investment and advertisers, but their "show ads directly from the Tivo" thing is new and I haven't run into it yet peresonally, and there isn't anywhere near as much advertising on the Tivo box homepage as there once was... although maybe I'm just not seeing it as I have a button on my Harmony remote set up to jump directly to the Now Playing list.
Heaven forbid a company give its paying users what they want!. That would be people like me who bought the box and are paying for the service -- gladly; nobody makes a UI and features (like season passes) that work quite as well as Tivo's -- why? Partly to watch what they want when they want, but partly also to skip ads.
If you stop giving your customers what they bought your product for, they will throw your box in the trash (or hopefully in the nearest electronics recycling bin) and stop paying your monthly fee.
That's when you find yourself staring a bankruptcy judge in the face.
Pegasus, which costs two orders of magnitude over it's initial promise
For something never tried before. Just like the space shuttle, which also had unexpected problems and costs. Nothing new ever comes in at the expected price. That comes with doing something new, and is part of the literal cost of trying new ideas. Lessons learned from first tries at things tend to be applied later on to more successful derivatives of the original idea.
Sure, the hard work of getting off the pad and through the lower atmosphere has already been done, but the insanely freaking hard job of getting up to orbital velocity still remains to be done
Yes, but it's also true that a significant portion of the fuel a vehicle carries is used for getting off the ground in the first place. Launching from the air gives you more choices of where to launch from and is another first stage of sorts. No one's built an SSTO yet because, among other problems, the huge mass that would be required -- why do that when you can let something else do the job of getting started and then drop off?
you start talking aircraft designs where the C-5 is considered too small.
Then build a bigger aircraft. There are bigger designs than the C-5 out there - the An-225 among them. C'mon, we're innovators, we can come up with something that could do the job. Like, say, an XB-70 and smaller spaceplane?
You can blame Congressional penny-pinching for that one. They refused to spend the money for a better system when the Shuttle was under development -- and as a result has paid for that mistake many times over.
Yep. They have yet to launch, though -- that's why I cited the two I did. I hope it works, though; it's a great idea. It also has the advantage Sea Launch does in that it can be taken to the equator, where it gets a larger kick from the earth's rotation.
Actually, carrier-plane based systems are very successful. Take a look at the Pegasus booster and SpaceShipOne, for instance, and the rumored Blackstar program. Plus, with a manned aircraft launching from high altitude, the hard work of getting off the pad and through the lower atmosphere has already been done, and there's less to throw away -- the launcher simply returns to its launch site just like a normal aircraft does (and in fact the Pegasus has always used modified aircraft built for other purposes rather than needing a specialized design).
I'm sorry, but having it be on in the first place was stupid. You should NOT have had it even on you! Change your voice mail greeting to explain if you must but check your messages later and if anyone yells at you for not picking it up, you can just ask them "Did you even listen to the message? I. Was. Not. Available." Then they have to admit having been dipshits.
It would only be a scheme if they were forcing you to pay to send email to them, and even then, it's their servers, their rules. Keep on sending mail as you already do, though, and nothing will change for you.
Email delivery has never been guaranteed, though. Ever. AOL has specifically said that nothing will change from the way things are now if you don't pay the fee -- so yeah, I agree that the fuss is way too premature.
And your comments seem to completely ignore the whole fact that the entire thing is about the fact that whoever controls a server can deny access to whoever the hell they want.
I give up. I'm sick of beating my head against a brick wall.
I don't get what the problem is, though. They can still send email the exact same way they have in the past without paying the fee. Do they want to get paid for sending email, or something? I could understand opposition if you had to pay a fee to send email to AOL users, but last I knew no one was being cut off.
If I haven't signed a contract that says "I will let everyone in the world access my server in any way they see fit and I will not take it down for any reason", then yes, it is my property and I provide the service at my discretion. I have a web site myself, and I make no such statements; I have signed no such contracts; and I own the files, the site design, and the content on it. That content is provided at my whim and right now I have decided that I want to share it with anyone who cares to view it; I can and will take it down, however, if I feel that it is causing me problems in some way.
What if I want to rig my site to not be available on every Friday the 13th because of triskadekaphobia (I don't actually do such a thing... just an amusing example), and you try to view it then and find that you can't? How, exactly, would you expect to win a court case based on not being able to access my site when I never said that it would always be available? To have grounds for such a thing, I would have had to have promised constant availability or, at least, availability on that day.
Breach of contract requires that a contract exist in the first place. You can't expect to get anywhere for blaming somebody for not doing something they never said they'd do. It'd be like suing me for buying a silver car when you don't like silver cars and would rather see a black one in my garage. But I never promismed you I would buy a black one.
Slashdot Mirror
They have a duty to not actively attempt to harm anyone who might use their product. They fully knew that it is common for these items to be used by more people than the initial purchaser, thus they knew that the potential for this kind of harm exists. And yet, they chose to deliberately sabotage any system that accessed the disc.
So yes, those who were harmed by the malware -- which I might add installs even if you attempt to deny permission -- have grounds to sue. Or would you claim I was not liable if I aimed a gun at someone, shot them, and one of my bullets bounced and hit you? I shouldn't have been blasting away with a gun in a public area, now should I? I should have known that bystanders could get hurt!
And apparently, you just don't care about actually telling the truth in your articles and serving the people who pay to subscribe to your magazine, because I don't see anything anywhere about writing objective, fair articles but I see lots of bragging about happily filling the pages with bullshit.
I wrote to PC Gamer once to politely correct a photo error in one of their articles, and they published my letter -- and made fun of me, comparing me to a fictional character on a TV show. For politely correcting an error in the way that one is supposed to do when writing to a magazine or newspaper editor! In the same way in which I've found errors in the NY Times and Time magazine and written to them -- and either gotten a very polite, grateful response from them or seen the correction published in the errata in a future issue.
That one act meant I did not renew my subscription and I have never subscribed to a gaming magazine since -- because some asshole doing the same job you do proved that his profession didn't deserve any respect.
Grow up and do your fucking job. You know, the thing they teach in journalism school about, I don't know, following the rules of journalism ethics.
3) Gamers get actually-objective previews of new products, allowing them to make educated choices. You know, the option that is the best one, since it actually fixes the problem.
Actually, it should be a concern if the press isn't doing its duty and presenting the facts in an objective manner and disclosing all possible sources of bias, such as financial donations. A reporter has a duty to the readers of his or her stories, and a biased article that sweeps problems under the rug is very much a cause for concern -- and it's even more troublesome when it happens consistently and no one speaks up about it.
Sue 'em yourself. If you can prove their crap is on your computer, you have proof of damage. Go after them in small claims court. If enough people did the same thing, they'd be hit with too many tiny lawsuits to fight them all.
They didn't tell you or the original owner of the malware on the disk, so they are liable because they were aware of its existence.
E85 is not ethanol. E85 is really low quality gasoline with a small percentage (think 5%) ethanol.
Wrong.
E85 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Similarly, B5 is 5% biodiesel, and so on.
Even a switch to 100% ethanol would likely only take a fuel map change, which isn't very hard
Wrong again. Engines are designed to run certain types of fuels. Where I live, all grades contain 10% ethanol so that the fuel burns more cleanly (fewer products of incomplete combustion) but no more, because your normal automotive engine isn't designed for any more. You have to buy a vehicle that's specifically designed to run on a particular type of fuel.
Different engines also require different octane levels, too -- I can run 87-octane fuel in my car, but another model of the same car is designed to be run on 91 or higher, due to how the engine was designed.
The governemnt further hinders by requiring that most of a fuel be gasoline, and only a small percentage be alcohol.
Cite this claim, as I don't think it's true. The requirements of fuel are based on what is required by modern automotive engines and by emissions constraints in the region where the fuel is sold.
All true. The problem here in the US is that a lot of people aren't aware of why their Taurus or whatever (many of the FFVs that are visibly badged are Fords) has a little picture of corn on it. (Ethanol is often distilled from corn).
And then the further problem is that most stations only sell conventional gasoline or diesel. If more stations sold E85, more people might choose to use that fuel.
It is quite possible to purchase a computer system that does not depend on Microsoft products. It is not, however, possible to purchase a car that does not run on gasoline or diesel fuel. If Microsoft quits selling products in Europe, someone else will take their place.
You held it up as an example of sucess. No matter how hard you wave your hands - it wasn't.
Yes, it was. It worked, didn't it? It isn't as capable as some other systems (it's not that big) and it costs more than originally planned, but it launches satellites, doesn't it? That's a success in my book. And I'm going to wave my hands all over the place because I consider something that actually does what it's designed to do to be something that is a success. Now if it consistently explodes or crashes, that's a problem, but it hasn't done that on a consistent basis any more than other rockets have -- Arianes have failed. Deltas have failed. Atlases have failed. Soyuzes have failed. Protons have failed. And all of those are considered to be successes. No system is going to work properly 100% of the time, but for the most part a successful system is going to behave as intended, and when it doesn't, a successful system can be repaired and/or modified.
Only if you have a really bad vehicle design. A typical design will use 5% or less of it's fuel between ignition and vehicle first motion.
You took me too literally. There's a lot of inertia to overcome to get moving in the first place and that takes a lot of effort/force -- that's why a lot of rockets use liquid or solid fueled boosters, but you'll notice that they use those only to get off the pad and during the initial minute or few of the flight -- then the extra effort isn't needed, so the boosters drop away. That's an indication of what I'm getting at -- that a system that doesn't have to have the hardware to do all that built into it can be a lot smaller, and aircraft are a pretty cost-effective way to do it, and we're pretty experienced at building aircraft after 103 years of experience. And it's not like dropping things off planes is a new idea -- before Orbital Sciences started doing it with an L-1011, they did it with a B-52 -- the same B-52 that did the same thing numerous times with the X-15 and many other test vehicles.
Nobody has built a high performance SSTO because there is no economic incentive to do so.
There's lots of rich people out there who would pay the money. If I won the lottery, I would. There's plenty of incentive to build it now that the interest is there -- and look at the X-Prize ideas that have been put forth -- there's air-dropped vehicles, balloon-launched vehicles, among all sorts of conventional ideas. Seems to me like there's a lot of people, who are actually building these things, who think air-launching is a plausible idea. Sure, Scaled Composites has only built a suborbital spacecraft so far -- but they're looking at going further, and I also need to point out that even the government-funded Mercury program launched a number of unmanned and manned suborbital flights before it tried going orbital.
Because air launch doesn't do a significant job of getting started in return for the costs it imposes.
Tell that, again, to Scaled Composites and NASA, both of which have done it and seem to think it works pretty well.
The AN-225 couldn't even air launch a Mercury/Atlas.
I never said that that specific design would be the one used, did I? No. My point was that if a design doesn't exist now to do the job, build one.
Fuels which are extremely corrosive, extremely toxic, and extremely difficult to work with.
And hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide aren't? Yet they are used as propellants and seem to work pretty well, and that thing called "we don't need an ignition system if we use these, saving complexity and weight" is a pretty big advantage. Take safety into account when in the design phase and the problem isn't that bad. Science research labs handle dangerous chemicals all the time -- there's a reason safety training is mandatory for the workers.
And there's no reason why you have to use expensive fuels to build a spacecraft. Hydrogen and oxygen are pretty efficient and they're pretty safe, too, and they're easy to g
The detectors work by watching for the screen to go totally blank for more than a certain amount of time and/or the sound to fade out.
Tivo just does it via a 30-second skip button, which is fine with me. Automatic detection algorithms are rarely perfect anyway.
However much you may dislike commercials, you need to come to terms with the fact that TV is not in fact free
... although maybe I'm just not seeing it as I have a button on my Harmony remote set up to jump directly to the Now Playing list.
Yes, I know, I've bought two of them. I had to pay, thus I know they aren't free. I also already pay for cable service, so that isn't free either.
ttempts to get TV to be free by commercial-skipping PVRs will be blocked on a large scale by the TV stations themselves under pressure from the advertisers
Uh, how exactly do they plan to do that? They don't have active control over how I play the signal back. They can make the ads more interesting or add them to programming, which they are already doing. But I watch documentaries anyway so there's not a lot of product placement; the worst I've seen is CSI where they use, say, only Nikon cameras (this makes me very happy, as I am a Nikon dSLR user; just got a new D200!). They can't stop people from skipping ads, but the key isn't to do that. It's to make people want to view them -- and it seems to be working.
Once you embrace the advertisers as the people who actually directly pay for your TV
How can I get a refund for my new HDTV, then? I want my $1,500 back!
That is the route for a successful PVR company.
As I've said before, and as is true for any company, you give the people who actually pay what they want. TiVo gets most of its revenue from monthly subscriptions. They get a bit from investment and advertisers, but their "show ads directly from the Tivo" thing is new and I haven't run into it yet peresonally, and there isn't anywhere near as much advertising on the Tivo box homepage as there once was
Heaven forbid a company give its paying users what they want!. That would be people like me who bought the box and are paying for the service -- gladly; nobody makes a UI and features (like season passes) that work quite as well as Tivo's -- why? Partly to watch what they want when they want, but partly also to skip ads.
If you stop giving your customers what they bought your product for, they will throw your box in the trash (or hopefully in the nearest electronics recycling bin) and stop paying your monthly fee.
That's when you find yourself staring a bankruptcy judge in the face.
That would be corporate suicide.
Pegasus, which costs two orders of magnitude over it's initial promise
For something never tried before. Just like the space shuttle, which also had unexpected problems and costs. Nothing new ever comes in at the expected price. That comes with doing something new, and is part of the literal cost of trying new ideas. Lessons learned from first tries at things tend to be applied later on to more successful derivatives of the original idea.
Sure, the hard work of getting off the pad and through the lower atmosphere has already been done, but the insanely freaking hard job of getting up to orbital velocity still remains to be done
Yes, but it's also true that a significant portion of the fuel a vehicle carries is used for getting off the ground in the first place. Launching from the air gives you more choices of where to launch from and is another first stage of sorts. No one's built an SSTO yet because, among other problems, the huge mass that would be required -- why do that when you can let something else do the job of getting started and then drop off?
you start talking aircraft designs where the C-5 is considered too small.
Then build a bigger aircraft. There are bigger designs than the C-5 out there - the An-225 among them. C'mon, we're innovators, we can come up with something that could do the job. Like, say, an XB-70 and smaller spaceplane?
You can blame Congressional penny-pinching for that one. They refused to spend the money for a better system when the Shuttle was under development -- and as a result has paid for that mistake many times over.
Yep. They have yet to launch, though -- that's why I cited the two I did. I hope it works, though; it's a great idea. It also has the advantage Sea Launch does in that it can be taken to the equator, where it gets a larger kick from the earth's rotation.
Actually, carrier-plane based systems are very successful. Take a look at the Pegasus booster and SpaceShipOne, for instance, and the rumored Blackstar program. Plus, with a manned aircraft launching from high altitude, the hard work of getting off the pad and through the lower atmosphere has already been done, and there's less to throw away -- the launcher simply returns to its launch site just like a normal aircraft does (and in fact the Pegasus has always used modified aircraft built for other purposes rather than needing a specialized design).
I'm sorry, but having it be on in the first place was stupid. You should NOT have had it even on you! Change your voice mail greeting to explain if you must but check your messages later and if anyone yells at you for not picking it up, you can just ask them "Did you even listen to the message? I. Was. Not. Available." Then they have to admit having been dipshits.
Except it would be the company that goes bankrupt, not the employees of it. That's often why people incorporate -- to limit liability.
Hey, I've got an idea: let's quit wasting billions on wars and 'waste' it on more positive stuff that actually inspires people!
Anyone?
Bueller?
Bueller?
It would only be a scheme if they were forcing you to pay to send email to them, and even then, it's their servers, their rules. Keep on sending mail as you already do, though, and nothing will change for you.
Email delivery has never been guaranteed, though. Ever. AOL has specifically said that nothing will change from the way things are now if you don't pay the fee -- so yeah, I agree that the fuss is way too premature.
And your comments seem to completely ignore the whole fact that the entire thing is about the fact that whoever controls a server can deny access to whoever the hell they want.
I give up. I'm sick of beating my head against a brick wall.
Thanks for playing.
I don't get what the problem is, though. They can still send email the exact same way they have in the past without paying the fee. Do they want to get paid for sending email, or something? I could understand opposition if you had to pay a fee to send email to AOL users, but last I knew no one was being cut off.
If I haven't signed a contract that says "I will let everyone in the world access my server in any way they see fit and I will not take it down for any reason", then yes, it is my property and I provide the service at my discretion. I have a web site myself, and I make no such statements; I have signed no such contracts; and I own the files, the site design, and the content on it. That content is provided at my whim and right now I have decided that I want to share it with anyone who cares to view it; I can and will take it down, however, if I feel that it is causing me problems in some way.
... just an amusing example), and you try to view it then and find that you can't? How, exactly, would you expect to win a court case based on not being able to access my site when I never said that it would always be available? To have grounds for such a thing, I would have had to have promised constant availability or, at least, availability on that day.
What if I want to rig my site to not be available on every Friday the 13th because of triskadekaphobia (I don't actually do such a thing
Breach of contract requires that a contract exist in the first place. You can't expect to get anywhere for blaming somebody for not doing something they never said they'd do. It'd be like suing me for buying a silver car when you don't like silver cars and would rather see a black one in my garage. But I never promismed you I would buy a black one.
Gimme that ol' time religion, it's good enough for me!