Here's what I propose: Web publishers should get together to set up a one-stop registration process for everybody. We sign up once and would be done with it.
It exists, and is called Passport. There was a hue and cry over it because people were worried about a centralized source of information in control of Microsoft about who they are and where they're going.
Even if you fake the information, it'd be like a super cookie. The best way if he's concerned about privacy is the current way -- stop the computer from broadcasting its IP address everywhere he goes and give a different piece of fake information to every website.
Don is a lawyer with Buchanan Ingersoll PC, one of the largest 110 law firms in the nation, who represent many videogame developers on legal matters.
Which should tell you all you need to know about why this guy strongly believes in the power of EULAs: he's paid to.
Whether or not they are technically enforceable is mostly irrelevant, because when a company brings out the lawyers most people choose to cave in rather than deal with the 5+ digit lawsuit costs and associated headaches. So maybe they can be considered enforceable by the fact few can put up a defense (enforceability by fiat?)
(I am not a lawyer; this is not intended as advice in any way, shape, or form)
It does make sense to standardize on one set of intellectual property laws internationally.
It gets really confusing to try to figure out the different times at which copyright expires across different countries, or to know where your intellectual property is already protected and where you have to jump through additional hoops.
Settling on an international standard that is mutually agreed upon strengthens the companies within those nations because they don't have to cope with several sets of rules. Like the standardization on the Euro, it reduces complexity and ultimately is a good thing.
Gee, it's a good thing you didn't mention how the worship of sports in our culture helps to create and reinforce the undercurrent of hatred and resentment of the intellectual in our society from school-aged children on up and acts as yet another control on meaningful dissent.
I was under the impression that at least some of these consoles require the display of a trademark as part of a program's startup or they will refuse to run said program.
Certainly this was the case with the Gameboy, although I've noticed a lot of games seem to carry a brand. Even if the Dreamcast is effectively dead, wouldn't there be some concern about any workaround for such a device?
I mean, if somebody registers that they downloaded a whole bunch of copyright protected content and bought it later, aren't they admitting to doing something illegal?
Something to think about. Maybe this list won't cause any problems, but I wouldn't anything past **AA and their lawyers.
Re:I'm buying Fahrenheit 9/11 the day it comes out
on
Guerrilla Drive-Ins
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Consider the difference in viewership between American Idol and C-Span.
Most voters simply don't have the attention span to digest the facts. They need heaping spoonfuls of mental sugar to get even the tiniest portion of these dull facts down. That's why CNN and FOX and the rest do so well.
I'm not saying it's right, but propoganda is the lingua franca of the average citizen. You can't have a meaningful political discussion with most people because they're awash in mindless rhetoric from their radio to their television set and everything in-between.
Moore operates at that level, and I'm not surprised that he's finally encountered resounding success. And it's a good movie. Whether or not it was deliberately or indeliberately misleading takes a backseat to whether it was entertaining -- much as it does in all our major resources for information these days.
The iPos offers an extensive amount of features that the other players don't. Additionally, the user-friendly features like the wheel interface and large LCD screen probably take more electricity than the cramped interfaces some of the competitors have.
This Sony seems like a reasonable alternative so long as you don't mind the interface and are encoding directly to their proprietary format from CD rather than converting an MP3 collection. I don't know how you'd move copy-protected CDs, though most of those are pretty lousy anyway.
I wonder at what point everybody's going to slow down with the research in recognition of the fact that we haven't figured out a way to curb the serious abuses (i.e. the goo problem) that can occur with each new discovery in the field.
Einstein agonized over the ramifications of his research into the atom far too late. We can already see the writing on the wall with nanotech -- perhaps it should be considered that the threat is greater than the promise?
They want you to think different. They even make you an operating system that seems ideal for hackers.
The point Apple is trying to make is that they admire and appreciate innovation, so long as it is their own. But don't try to do anything too crazy with their hardware or software.
Re:I think is was said somewhere else...
on
P2P Leaks Surprises
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· Score: 3, Informative
He can't contact every file sharer directly. In some cases he can't be sure the sharers are the original net source for what they're posting.
This is probably the most efficient way he can get the message across: P2P has absolutely no place in a business or military environment and P2P access should be disabled at the router for security.
Unfortunately this guy could take a fall for trying to do the right thing because of the mindset that the first guy that makes the public aware of a problem is responsible for the problem. When in reality we should be looking at P2P authors.
But for that price, it should be able to handle some common storage device like CD or even DVD media. Half the reason of wanting something like this is so that you can easily watch movies or listen to music (although I suppose one could do the latter with MP3).
20GB in a handheld does sound pretty good. I always worry about how you get these things repaired, though, especially when they're on the cutting edge like this.
I was just thinking about this today during my ruminescing about
the crazy and sometimes haphazard ways in which spaceflight and NASA has returned benefits to our society against adversity from folks not unlike Van Allen. In it's own way, this is comparable to the battle
against entrenched interests that new theories must undergo before
they become the accepted norm.
Take, for example, the struggle of Galileo against the church to
permit society to recognize the fact that the world is round. Or
perhaps the modern day battleground of evolution against the
challenging new scientific theory of intelligent design, which
suggests that certain biological features such as the flagellum are
irreducibly complex and therefore could not possibly have been
developed by increments as evolutionists would have it. It's a bit
like hazing, and while people on both sides of the issue become
almost fanatical in defense of their sacred cow the end result is
good science.
There is a lot out there to be discovered, and only so much we can do with computers. It'd be nice if we could do it on the cheap, but clearly safety concerns intrude. Space is like the rainforest of the next era -- the sooner we investigate the faster we'll be able to refine its secrets into practical earthbound uses.
Yes. Sound quality is surprisingly good, but there is an unavoidable delay that comes from the latency of the Internet (which has gotten better over the years -- a ping to ftp.funet.fi gives me a faster round trip time today than a ping to www.yahoo.com gave me two years ago).
In a nutshell, you may irritate the people you're calling, but less so than if you used a cell phone.
Remember the surreptitious 'patch' to the mainstream Linux kernel that was luckily discovered by BitKeeper? Or the change to the C compiler that would compile a backdoor into binaries that was completely undetectable in the source (get clean source, compiler detects it's compiling another compiler, inserts backdoor)?
While people argue against security by obscurity, the limited access to closed software makes it much easier to vet the contributions of the developers. It's practically impossible to take something that wasn't explicitly designed for security and make it secure. Windows got a rewrite -- perhaps it's time for Linux to get one too?
Part of the secret to the success of the Internet is in allowing unfettered communication between endpoints. While I am to some degree concerned about the technical approach to solving the spam problem, because of the collateral consequences it may have, it does not raise the spectre of 1st Amendment violation that anti-spam legislation does.
That Microsoft is taking part is to their credit. Finally the Internet at large is going to actually try to apply a solution to spam at the source. Although the unsolicited commercial email problem is largely one of perception (as with violent computer games, smoking in public, or 'indecent' radio broadcasting) perhaps the solution will have less of a negative impact on society. One can only hope.
It's certainly been a while since we used BOINC, and while I don't think it's changed too radically over time I was a little harsher on it than maybe I should have been. One lab is hardly empirical evidence, and they were constantly trying all sorts of crazy things with BOINC (a plug-in system, different environments, even interface and design changes) so it's more "let's see what works" than a controlled test situation.
To be honest, a lot of folks on here would probably benefit from BOINC; it's definitely better than nothing, and it's not like there's a great deal of work involved. Just don't put too much pressure on the system by reworking everything, I guess.
We've tried deploying BOINC before for distributed biologic research on our internal workstations to create an informal cluster of sorts, with dissatisfying results. While BOINC is considered the provolone cheese of the distributed computing industry, we found that it behaves in a somewhat inconsistent manner.
For one thing, on most of the workstations BOINC would appear to work very quickly on the data only to crash out well before the computation was created. Indeed, sometimes it would actually crash before any data was processed by the application. At other points it would work for hours and hours without actually achieving anything; closing down the workstations at the end of the day without getting one computed dataset off was quite frustrating. On the workstations that were actually computing datasets we discovered a few started to become bloated past the point of peak functionality within a few months of even casual use.
While it's possible that it's the inhouse.NET code that could be creating the problem, after several weeks of debugging we're pretty sure it's BOINC related. My suggestion is to steer clear and look for a safer and more reliable API (or roll your own).
Somebody will no doubt eventually come up with another technique to thwart Microsoft's plans of content control that will work for you, given the widespread distribution of pirated Corp. XP. But maybe this is a good opportunity for your organization to get legal anyway?
I thought I heard of a way (during the similar problem created by the SP1 release) to force a new CD key into your installation -- is this possible to do with your Action Pack keys, or is the CD-key algorithm different in the Corp? It'd be a shame if you had to reinstall everything.
Part of the useful quality of RFID tags are that, aside from being small enough to embed in just about everything you'd want to manage in an inventory system, they're also extremely inexpensive. Walmart was going to make this an industry, but patents may very well sink the whole ship.
(Unwarranted?) privacy concerns aside, RFID will make goods cheaper by reducing shrinkage and the time taken from employees to hunt for a barcode. Now the money will go into someone else's pocket instead of staying in your own.
Compared to the Macintosh, which is completely standardized in software and hardware, Linux is a mess. Loading the proper GL handler for X-Windows, ensuring the proper permissions are available to audio and video, and solving the myriad problems that occur with different setups in different distributions makes it extremely difficult to support games even if you get them to run.
It's clearly possible, as Loki Software demonstrated, but the price disparity between Linux and Windows makes it a hard sell.
What's happening is people are registering nameservers with goofy names that start with the same text as an existing host.
For example, the folks at gulli.com have made 'GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.CO M' and registered it as a nameserver so that it shows up when you do a whois search for GOOGLE.COM through whois.crsnic.net or other WHOIS servers that try to be helpful when you enter part of a domain name. Not all WHOIS servers seem to do this, but apparently FreeBSD (at least) defaults to whois.crsnic.net.
It's a cute trick, and I'd hate to see it go. ICANN needs to lighten up with regards to their requirements for WHOIS information; spammers and telemarketers abuse the hell out of it no matter how many warnings are put up next to the data. The contacts are less than useful when nobody answers them because they're bombarded with marketing.
The sad thing is, while the game industry can be compared to the movie industry in terms of dollars many game programmers are virtually sweatshop workers.
Success stories like Sierra or iD or Lord British are yesterday's news. Today the money is earned by the programmer and taken by the publisher. Maybe the music industry would be a smarter comparison than the movie industry. Business is able to take the lion's share from the talent once again because a good product is nothing without advertising and distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
It exists, and is called Passport. There was a hue and cry over it because people were worried about a centralized source of information in control of Microsoft about who they are and where they're going.
Even if you fake the information, it'd be like a super cookie. The best way if he's concerned about privacy is the current way -- stop the computer from broadcasting its IP address everywhere he goes and give a different piece of fake information to every website.
Which should tell you all you need to know about why this guy strongly believes in the power of EULAs: he's paid to.
Whether or not they are technically enforceable is mostly irrelevant, because when a company brings out the lawyers most people choose to cave in rather than deal with the 5+ digit lawsuit costs and associated headaches. So maybe they can be considered enforceable by the fact few can put up a defense (enforceability by fiat?)
(I am not a lawyer; this is not intended as advice in any way, shape, or form)
It gets really confusing to try to figure out the different times at which copyright expires across different countries, or to know where your intellectual property is already protected and where you have to jump through additional hoops.
Settling on an international standard that is mutually agreed upon strengthens the companies within those nations because they don't have to cope with several sets of rules. Like the standardization on the Euro, it reduces complexity and ultimately is a good thing.
Talk about spin.
You might touch a nerve.
Certainly this was the case with the Gameboy, although I've noticed a lot of games seem to carry a brand. Even if the Dreamcast is effectively dead, wouldn't there be some concern about any workaround for such a device?
Something to think about. Maybe this list won't cause any problems, but I wouldn't anything past **AA and their lawyers.
Most voters simply don't have the attention span to digest the facts. They need heaping spoonfuls of mental sugar to get even the tiniest portion of these dull facts down. That's why CNN and FOX and the rest do so well.
I'm not saying it's right, but propoganda is the lingua franca of the average citizen. You can't have a meaningful political discussion with most people because they're awash in mindless rhetoric from their radio to their television set and everything in-between.
Moore operates at that level, and I'm not surprised that he's finally encountered resounding success. And it's a good movie. Whether or not it was deliberately or indeliberately misleading takes a backseat to whether it was entertaining -- much as it does in all our major resources for information these days.
I thought most (if not all) DVDs come with a warning about not being used for public performances.
This Sony seems like a reasonable alternative so long as you don't mind the interface and are encoding directly to their proprietary format from CD rather than converting an MP3 collection. I don't know how you'd move copy-protected CDs, though most of those are pretty lousy anyway.
Einstein agonized over the ramifications of his research into the atom far too late. We can already see the writing on the wall with nanotech -- perhaps it should be considered that the threat is greater than the promise?
The point Apple is trying to make is that they admire and appreciate innovation, so long as it is their own. But don't try to do anything too crazy with their hardware or software.
This is probably the most efficient way he can get the message across: P2P has absolutely no place in a business or military environment and P2P access should be disabled at the router for security.
Unfortunately this guy could take a fall for trying to do the right thing because of the mindset that the first guy that makes the public aware of a problem is responsible for the problem. When in reality we should be looking at P2P authors.
20GB in a handheld does sound pretty good. I always worry about how you get these things repaired, though, especially when they're on the cutting edge like this.
Take, for example, the struggle of Galileo against the church to permit society to recognize the fact that the world is round. Or perhaps the modern day battleground of evolution against the challenging new scientific theory of intelligent design, which suggests that certain biological features such as the flagellum are irreducibly complex and therefore could not possibly have been developed by increments as evolutionists would have it. It's a bit like hazing, and while people on both sides of the issue become almost fanatical in defense of their sacred cow the end result is good science.
There is a lot out there to be discovered, and only so much we can do with computers. It'd be nice if we could do it on the cheap, but clearly safety concerns intrude. Space is like the rainforest of the next era -- the sooner we investigate the faster we'll be able to refine its secrets into practical earthbound uses.
In a nutshell, you may irritate the people you're calling, but less so than if you used a cell phone.
While people argue against security by obscurity, the limited access to closed software makes it much easier to vet the contributions of the developers. It's practically impossible to take something that wasn't explicitly designed for security and make it secure. Windows got a rewrite -- perhaps it's time for Linux to get one too?
That Microsoft is taking part is to their credit. Finally the Internet at large is going to actually try to apply a solution to spam at the source. Although the unsolicited commercial email problem is largely one of perception (as with violent computer games, smoking in public, or 'indecent' radio broadcasting) perhaps the solution will have less of a negative impact on society. One can only hope.
To be honest, a lot of folks on here would probably benefit from BOINC; it's definitely better than nothing, and it's not like there's a great deal of work involved. Just don't put too much pressure on the system by reworking everything, I guess.
For one thing, on most of the workstations BOINC would appear to work very quickly on the data only to crash out well before the computation was created. Indeed, sometimes it would actually crash before any data was processed by the application. At other points it would work for hours and hours without actually achieving anything; closing down the workstations at the end of the day without getting one computed dataset off was quite frustrating. On the workstations that were actually computing datasets we discovered a few started to become bloated past the point of peak functionality within a few months of even casual use.
While it's possible that it's the inhouse .NET code that could be creating the problem, after several weeks of debugging we're pretty sure it's BOINC related. My suggestion is to steer clear and look for a safer and more reliable API (or roll your own).
I thought I heard of a way (during the similar problem created by the SP1 release) to force a new CD key into your installation -- is this possible to do with your Action Pack keys, or is the CD-key algorithm different in the Corp? It'd be a shame if you had to reinstall everything.
(Unwarranted?) privacy concerns aside, RFID will make goods cheaper by reducing shrinkage and the time taken from employees to hunt for a barcode. Now the money will go into someone else's pocket instead of staying in your own.
It's clearly possible, as Loki Software demonstrated, but the price disparity between Linux and Windows makes it a hard sell.
For example, the folks at gulli.com have made 'GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.CO M' and registered it as a nameserver so that it shows up when you do a whois search for GOOGLE.COM through whois.crsnic.net or other WHOIS servers that try to be helpful when you enter part of a domain name. Not all WHOIS servers seem to do this, but apparently FreeBSD (at least) defaults to whois.crsnic.net.
It's a cute trick, and I'd hate to see it go. ICANN needs to lighten up with regards to their requirements for WHOIS information; spammers and telemarketers abuse the hell out of it no matter how many warnings are put up next to the data. The contacts are less than useful when nobody answers them because they're bombarded with marketing.
Success stories like Sierra or iD or Lord British are yesterday's news. Today the money is earned by the programmer and taken by the publisher. Maybe the music industry would be a smarter comparison than the movie industry. Business is able to take the lion's share from the talent once again because a good product is nothing without advertising and distribution.