The builder can always build better, faster, or cheaper than the competition, bringing them constant business for their investment (the time and money they put into building your house).
If you invest thousands of man-hours into software, and some other shit steals it--the work itself, not the product--and calibrates his cost based on not having had to pay for thouse thousands of man-hours, you will be undercut, if you even have a business left at all.
Re:Even local monopolies?
on
Window Pain
·
· Score: 1
If they're monopolizing your area AND making absolutely terrible business / PR decisions like that, maybe you should start up a competing company. Something tells me some percentage of their customers will not be unwilling to switch.
Or to spell it out more clearly, unless every programmer who's ever looked at the source is part of some kind of conspiracy, in spite of it being out in the freaking open, there's nothing there.
Although, if I recall correctly (and I may not), Chrome is slightly different from Chromium; aside from Google engineers vetting what modifications get into Chrome proper, and branding, they probably have at least some trivial things, optimizations or whatever, that get into Chrome but not Chromium.
You know, you really could have made those points without being an asshole about it.
I totally acknowledge the point about flash video, although frankly, I find it all fucking annoying which is why it didn't spring to mind. Also, the iPhone store does have applications such as "AP Mobile" which will play (in this example news-related) video, and many (such as the one given as example) are free, and (potentially) better formatted than a webpage.
You're confusing ignorance (a novice) with stupidity (someone who can't check email without breaking the computer).
No, I'm "confusing" people who haven't yet learned the ins and outs of computing with those who have no intent to do so and probably never will.
Except that I really just used the wrong word and meant the latter, because the former can be guided into computer use relatively easily.
Even then, you have given no argument except your own infuriation as to why people who can't use computers shouldn't be allowed access to utilities such as email.
So with an iPad she could email, browse the 75% or so of the web that doesn't involve Flash, and not be able to do video calls on Skype. I can sure see the benefit in paying more money for a device that does 75% of what you want it to do just because it's so hard to set up automatic updates....
Do note "or a similar locked-down appliance".
No part of your objection really seems likely to be a problem except the lack of video chat, so your "75% of what you want it to do" is seven kinds of bogus. Someone whose entire experience with computers can be mostly summed up as "email, web, and skype" is probably not going to have 25% reduction in quality of life because there are websites that haven't designed for the mobile market yet, nor because people she skypes with can't see her (keep in mind they can certainly send HER video, of grandkids etc).
And frankly, yes, giving a novice user an unlocked computer is a retarded idea in the first place, as they'll abuse it out of ignorance, but even if you don't (guessing by your tone) have any loyalty to anyone who's needed help with computer troubles, doesn't mean the GP is going to be a complete asshole and not care. There are email-only solutions out there, and probably email-and-web-only ones, but an iPad that has 3G access and a large library of cheap apps is going to be significantly more useful than that.
Incorrect. It SHOULD be gray, which means for the GP, it was working. With all of the gray pixels in the original image, scaling it down makes you lose almost all the detail instantly.
I just saw the image incorrectly resized and I think I get what he's saying, which is that some of the color data that should be lost (in that example) isn't, presumably because of the gamma error.
I dunno whether TinyPic is slashdot-proof, but this is a screenshot with what I assume the error is (no points for telling me to find a new image host): http://i45.tinypic.com/imuo40.png
When I viewed the page in Chrome, those thumbs were essentially pure gray rectangles. Considering even on the browser that rendered this (Firefox), the hlaf size was also a gray block, albeit one with a faint outline, these images would have to be errors.
The first production project I ever did using PHP, I was making a sort of hack-together forum for a small web-based game community. I was on the project less than 6 months, and I had never made a serious site up to that time. I had no technical expert to help me, just the woman who ran the site, who mostly didn't do much more than monitor and tell me what she wanted. I wasn't getting paid anything; it was an academic internship.
Staring at the GET request in the url, with all of my inexperience, I said, "that's not secure," and added checks to make sure you were authorized to see what you were getting.
Took all of a few hours to make that change, even accounting for porting it to several other related systems.
No, today is a time when you must especially dismiss reports like this out of hand. And there are several reasons:
I agree with your reasons but I disagree with your premise, and that's actually my point. "Out of hand" means "without looking into the facts of the case," which you clearly have done, based on your comments.
Read it, then punch holes in it, not the other way around. Preferably, punch holes in it in a very public, very verifiable way, so that they look like friggin' idiots and get taken to task by stakeholders, law enforcement, and others in the industry.
This is just marketing to increase sales of their "security" products.
The reason conflict of interest is a problem is because we don't know whether it is "just" marketing or not.
It's clearly marketing; whether it's true or not is a completely independent matter. Unless you have data which shows something to the contrary, don't dismiss it out of hand, just like you (clearly) don't accept it on their word.
I disagree with a couple of the things you said, but I'm going to sum it up with only a couple replies because I really, really dislike heated arguments.
Many of your points are not objections in principle, they're objections given that people can't be trusted as shown from experience, such as businesses cutting each other off at the knees, or Microsoft et al treating customers like criminals by default. I get that; that's not the point. My point is that the law should be doing something about all of it, and what should be done isn't quite clear yet.
Whatever the solution eventually is, it should be made in such a way that it prevents businesses from being cutthroat, prevents them from doing heinous things that would make boycotts a reasonable response, should prevent them from treating users like criminals from default, and should protect them from malicious users, etc--in other words, it should be fair, a concept that doesn't get enough play in many discussions of law. You can dismiss that easily by saying that it's unrealistic, but if you keep searching for a solution, maybe someday you'll find one; and maybe not, but frankly, it's not like it's an imposition to keep searching.
I also disagree that IP doesn't and shouldn't exist, but only with the one caveat that the protection of IP should only last until you finish recouping loss, or a certain window of time passes. The RIAA/MPAA rake in enormous quantities of income on things that were done decades ago and which have no maintenance costs, and they defend those profits as though they were recouping investment, which they're not. They should be allowed a business model that encourages other artists and studios to sign with them, but they shouldn't be allowed to bilk consumers endlessly. IP protection is--or rather should only be there to encourage people to innovate without fear that someone bigger will completely and utterly steal their thunder. In other words, it should be benefiting startups, not big businesses who themselves have the money to innovate with little risk.
Also... it occurred to me lately that computers are in some way their own "service" industry, which is to say, it is a way for someone else to do something for you. I think that that's behind a lot of the feeling that people who mod or alter hardware feel betrayed--they were offering you a way that they would be useful to you, and you spat on it. Granted, that's their mistake, not yours, but it still seems kind of sleazy in that way.
It's your mentality that has the problem. Being disruptive to a business model is not and should not be against the law, and no one can "force" them to implement anything.
I don't entirely agree with the concept that businesses are entities in the view of the law, but you're making a strong case why they should be. If going out of your way to make your neighbor lose money or sanity via harassment, assault, theft, stalking, or just by criminal negligence , is illegal--and well it ought to be--then doing so to a business is equally heinous, irrespective of whether you are a direct competitor or just an average Joe.
That doesn't by any means suggest that they should be allowed to harass, assault, steal from, stalk, or be negligent to you, either.
What they shouldn't be able to do is prevent one from making modifications to a physical device which one purchased outright. If you sell me a piece of physical property, it is now mine. That means I may use, abuse, modify, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, fold, spindle, mutilate, and whatever the hell else I might want to do with it. You can certainly void the warranty and refuse to offer support if I do such things, but you shouldn't be in any way able to stop me.
That doesn't make any sense, for one specific reason: any modification, and in particular reverse engineering, has the potential to amount to industrial espionage in a way that there is no feasible way to contractually forbid (except by EULA). They spent millions of dollars making a system like that--when nobody else would have or could have--gathered the people necessary to create a market, found exactly the right combination of everything involved, and then someone with your mindset comes in, provides the plans that took millions of dollars to produce, and churns it out with a couple hundred bucks of R&D in total, maybe a few thousand if you count lost hours of productivity. You are technically capable of distributing these plans to the lowest bidder or even for free, at which point equivalent but significantly cheaper hardware could undercut the company. If this were a person instead of a company, they'd have you in chains, because you just stole millions of dollars from them.
Is the US likely to spawn such a cutthroat market? Well, it's no Russia or China, and frankly the law favors business interests too much to jeopardize the entire IP market like that. In the end, those millions in hardware design have to come from somewhere, and whoever invests is going to be expecting ROI--in other words, if it stops being an investment, there will be no capital for innovators, and we WILL be a China in the sense that we won't be producing our own designs.
I mean, I get your point, I do. But it seems more like, "I should be able to get away with anything as long as I'm alone in my house, no matter who I hurt with it." Yeah, it's right there in your hands, you own it. But you only own the last.01% of the process that went into making it, and the money you payed goes into paying off the rest. If you screw with that by whatever means, after all they went through to get it to your door, then they get mad, and that's not unreasonable. That's all I'm saying.
As long as by "loyalty" you mean a retardedly small portion of the situations in which loyalty comes into play, yes--to your first point. I'm not even touching the second.
When you don't rat on your friend for a minor mistake because you know they'd be punished beyond their crime, and they don't deserve that, that's loyalty.
When you keep coming back to your religious ideals or leaders every week or whatever, because they give you stability in a world that shits on you, that's loyalty.
When you refuse to spill some dirty secret of a person who's never betrayed you, that's loyalty.
When you treat your parents with care when they're 90+ years old and have become infirm, that's loyalty.
To the GP's point, when a company you work for has variable income, possibly seasonal, possibly market-based, but it or the owner has always come through for you, and you push forward to try to keep them afloat, and they pay you back for your trouble, especially with a bonus--that's loyalty, in both directions.
All of these things happen all the time. I dare say only a tiny fraction of people won't fall into one of the above categories at various times. The idea that mercenariness is the only loyalty shows your character more than your worldliness.
I wonder if it wouldn't be best for Google to spin off a series of independent companies if they start those kind of services, who are explicitly required by their charter to not coordinate business interests with the others, and also have serious wording in their charter to try to keep them on the "don't be evil" mobile. Or, you know, something like that.
The point of it would be to keep all the positive aspects of being Google while forbidding any exec anywhere from bringing the whole Google Empire down on someone who disagrees.
I'm not sure it's practical, but in the end, there's gotta be something...
I'm not entirely up to speed on the whole thing, but I think that that mentality (which frankly is pretty stuck on itself in the first place) is upset when the company provides a service, such as online play; if your unauthorized additions may cause tremendous upset in online play, such as by allowing hacking in online play, then those people are detrimental to the future of your platform, not merely game sales.
You see it a lot in online games on the PC; in order to prevent cheating on multiplayer, they have to have draconian addons running in the background to monitor for hacks, memory viewers/editors, etc. These systems are also themselves imperfect and have in many cases caused PCs to crash, etc. I don't for a moment believe that popularity of gaming on the console as opposed to PC is unrelated to this. Frankly, the existence of a console that it is forbidden to mod is also the reason why they don't have crippling DRM; they simply assume that a cartridge is either good or it isn't, and that's that.
So by all means, force them to implement harsher and harsher restrictions in software merely so that they can keep their platform's reputation and game sales. What possible repercussions could there be?
You see, cars are actually made up of smaller pieces (I know, right? Science has advanced so far). But the funny thing is that you can take these "car parts" apart and get even more, smaller parts, especially when you use force. But the smaller the pieces get, the more we begin to wonder how it all ended up making a car in the first place.
That's why they're throwing really tiny minced-up bits of car at each other at really high speeds to see what happens.
Yeah, no, that analogy breaks down pretty quickly.
I've commented on this before, but you can NOT use a touchscreen with windowing system features designed for mouse and keyboard, and mouseovers are a good example of this. The effect of a mouseover is to make something happen exactly where you're pointing, so that's a strike against the touch interface even if you do something like variable pressure, double click, or click and hold.
It might be better to have a dedicated button that turns part of the screen into a faux-trackpad strictly for times when you need mouseover capability, which can be turned off the rest of the time--or, you know, just not designing sites to need that kind of ability.
I think that what you're arguing against is how loaded the word "Morality" is, and in particular, how loaded certain people, possibly including you, will take it to be. I think you would agree that a system of law could be crafted that most people would agree was immoral, while still legitimately protecting rights and providing for common interest, for example, one that sentenced convicted criminals to be carved up and eaten by the victims, or something. That is an issue that has nothing to do with human rights and everything to do with our sqeamishness on the subject.
It's not really a moral issue either, to be clear; only certain cultures believe that that would be something immoral or creepy, and I'm sure you can find some civilizations in history who would find it wholly appropriate. Let's call it more "consensus values;" and again, that's kind of the point at hand. You don't mind when you're part of the consensus, you just acknowledge that when you aren't part of that consensus, it can be unfair.
Unfortunately there are only so many options. You can do social engineering to try to make the values match the law, you can try to craft laws that appease every set of values, or you can try to craft laws that exist independent of values or with as few values at its base as possible.
If you take the first route, people will accuse you of screwing with people and being totalitarian every time you try to change their values, even if you do it almost entirely right. It would take an absolute genius to do it without people rioting.
If you take the second route, you get something like what we have, which sometimes seems like it's wavering on the edge of abject failure.
If you take the third route, you have to start absolutely from scratch in your body of law, which is something no existing country will willingly do. It's only likely to happen if you start a new country, and then you have to worry about every single new precedent your legislature and judicial branches might create.
I agree with you. GP has a point that this comes rather close to attacking someone for something that isn't illegal--which sets a terrible precedent--but at the same time, stopping people and corporations from doing bad things IS his job.
In the end, you or I or any other IANAL-er is not qualified to say that these companies AREN'T doing something illegal. It's possible that there is some corruption or deceit somewhere in the chain of things that is normally hidden, which is itself not only illegal but majorly illegal, and once the AG figures that out, people will never be able to get away with this again. I doubt that, but law is a huge field, and there's probably room for something like that to be discovered.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/public/options
Which is not to give assurance that they will be better, but...
Maybe? We can hope and dream?
The builder can always build better, faster, or cheaper than the competition, bringing them constant business for their investment (the time and money they put into building your house).
If you invest thousands of man-hours into software, and some other shit steals it--the work itself, not the product--and calibrates his cost based on not having had to pay for thouse thousands of man-hours, you will be undercut, if you even have a business left at all.
If they're monopolizing your area AND making absolutely terrible business / PR decisions like that, maybe you should start up a competing company. Something tells me some percentage of their customers will not be unwilling to switch.
Or to spell it out more clearly, unless every programmer who's ever looked at the source is part of some kind of conspiracy, in spite of it being out in the freaking open, there's nothing there.
Although, if I recall correctly (and I may not), Chrome is slightly different from Chromium; aside from Google engineers vetting what modifications get into Chrome proper, and branding, they probably have at least some trivial things, optimizations or whatever, that get into Chrome but not Chromium.
You know, you really could have made those points without being an asshole about it.
I totally acknowledge the point about flash video, although frankly, I find it all fucking annoying which is why it didn't spring to mind. Also, the iPhone store does have applications such as "AP Mobile" which will play (in this example news-related) video, and many (such as the one given as example) are free, and (potentially) better formatted than a webpage.
You're confusing ignorance (a novice) with stupidity (someone who can't check email without breaking the computer).
No, I'm "confusing" people who haven't yet learned the ins and outs of computing with those who have no intent to do so and probably never will.
Except that I really just used the wrong word and meant the latter, because the former can be guided into computer use relatively easily.
Even then, you have given no argument except your own infuriation as to why people who can't use computers shouldn't be allowed access to utilities such as email.
So with an iPad she could email, browse the 75% or so of the web that doesn't involve Flash, and not be able to do video calls on Skype. I can sure see the benefit in paying more money for a device that does 75% of what you want it to do just because it's so hard to set up automatic updates....
Do note "or a similar locked-down appliance".
No part of your objection really seems likely to be a problem except the lack of video chat, so your
"75% of what you want it to do" is seven kinds of bogus. Someone whose entire experience with computers can be mostly summed up as "email, web, and skype" is probably not going to have 25% reduction in quality of life because there are websites that haven't designed for the mobile market yet, nor because people she skypes with can't see her (keep in mind they can certainly send HER video, of grandkids etc).
And frankly, yes, giving a novice user an unlocked computer is a retarded idea in the first place, as they'll abuse it out of ignorance, but even if you don't (guessing by your tone) have any loyalty to anyone who's needed help with computer troubles, doesn't mean the GP is going to be a complete asshole and not care. There are email-only solutions out there, and probably email-and-web-only ones, but an iPad that has 3G access and a large library of cheap apps is going to be significantly more useful than that.
Where are politicians with guts who care more about the future of the country than getting elected with phony promises and posturing?
Maybe all the decent people are not masochistic enough to get involved in politics.
Incorrect. It SHOULD be gray, which means for the GP, it was working. With all of the gray pixels in the original image, scaling it down makes you lose almost all the detail instantly.
I just saw the image incorrectly resized and I think I get what he's saying, which is that some of the color data that should be lost (in that example) isn't, presumably because of the gamma error.
I dunno whether TinyPic is slashdot-proof, but this is a screenshot with what I assume the error is (no points for telling me to find a new image host):
http://i45.tinypic.com/imuo40.png
When I viewed the page in Chrome, those thumbs were essentially pure gray rectangles. Considering even on the browser that rendered this (Firefox), the hlaf size was also a gray block, albeit one with a faint outline, these images would have to be errors.
Makes sense to me.
The first production project I ever did using PHP, I was making a sort of hack-together forum for a small web-based game community. I was on the project less than 6 months, and I had never made a serious site up to that time. I had no technical expert to help me, just the woman who ran the site, who mostly didn't do much more than monitor and tell me what she wanted. I wasn't getting paid anything; it was an academic internship.
Staring at the GET request in the url, with all of my inexperience, I said, "that's not secure," and added checks to make sure you were authorized to see what you were getting.
Took all of a few hours to make that change, even accounting for porting it to several other related systems.
End of story.
Ah, ZT.
Any common sense must first be stoned to death before it can be allowed to affect the students.
No, today is a time when you must especially dismiss reports like this out of hand. And there are several reasons:
I agree with your reasons but I disagree with your premise, and that's actually my point. "Out of hand" means "without looking into the facts of the case," which you clearly have done, based on your comments.
Read it, then punch holes in it, not the other way around. Preferably, punch holes in it in a very public, very verifiable way, so that they look like friggin' idiots and get taken to task by stakeholders, law enforcement, and others in the industry.
This is just marketing to increase sales of their "security" products.
The reason conflict of interest is a problem is because we don't know whether it is "just" marketing or not.
It's clearly marketing; whether it's true or not is a completely independent matter. Unless you have data which shows something to the contrary, don't dismiss it out of hand, just like you (clearly) don't accept it on their word.
You guys should join the military.
They sit around on their asses for years only to enter a 30-second engagement and die.
I disagree with a couple of the things you said, but I'm going to sum it up with only a couple replies because I really, really dislike heated arguments.
Many of your points are not objections in principle, they're objections given that people can't be trusted as shown from experience, such as businesses cutting each other off at the knees, or Microsoft et al treating customers like criminals by default. I get that; that's not the point. My point is that the law should be doing something about all of it, and what should be done isn't quite clear yet.
Whatever the solution eventually is, it should be made in such a way that it prevents businesses from being cutthroat, prevents them from doing heinous things that would make boycotts a reasonable response, should prevent them from treating users like criminals from default, and should protect them from malicious users, etc--in other words, it should be fair, a concept that doesn't get enough play in many discussions of law. You can dismiss that easily by saying that it's unrealistic, but if you keep searching for a solution, maybe someday you'll find one; and maybe not, but frankly, it's not like it's an imposition to keep searching.
I also disagree that IP doesn't and shouldn't exist, but only with the one caveat that the protection of IP should only last until you finish recouping loss, or a certain window of time passes. The RIAA/MPAA rake in enormous quantities of income on things that were done decades ago and which have no maintenance costs, and they defend those profits as though they were recouping investment, which they're not. They should be allowed a business model that encourages other artists and studios to sign with them, but they shouldn't be allowed to bilk consumers endlessly. IP protection is--or rather should only be there to encourage people to innovate without fear that someone bigger will completely and utterly steal their thunder. In other words, it should be benefiting startups, not big businesses who themselves have the money to innovate with little risk.
Also... it occurred to me lately that computers are in some way their own "service" industry, which is to say, it is a way for someone else to do something for you. I think that that's behind a lot of the feeling that people who mod or alter hardware feel betrayed--they were offering you a way that they would be useful to you, and you spat on it. Granted, that's their mistake, not yours, but it still seems kind of sleazy in that way.
It's your mentality that has the problem. Being disruptive to a business model is not and should not be against the law, and no one can "force" them to implement anything.
I don't entirely agree with the concept that businesses are entities in the view of the law, but you're making a strong case why they should be. If going out of your way to make your neighbor lose money or sanity via harassment, assault, theft, stalking, or just by criminal negligence , is illegal--and well it ought to be--then doing so to a business is equally heinous, irrespective of whether you are a direct competitor or just an average Joe.
That doesn't by any means suggest that they should be allowed to harass, assault, steal from, stalk, or be negligent to you, either.
What they shouldn't be able to do is prevent one from making modifications to a physical device which one purchased outright. If you sell me a piece of physical property, it is now mine. That means I may use, abuse, modify, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, fold, spindle, mutilate, and whatever the hell else I might want to do with it. You can certainly void the warranty and refuse to offer support if I do such things, but you shouldn't be in any way able to stop me.
That doesn't make any sense, for one specific reason: any modification, and in particular reverse engineering, has the potential to amount to industrial espionage in a way that there is no feasible way to contractually forbid (except by EULA). They spent millions of dollars making a system like that--when nobody else would have or could have--gathered the people necessary to create a market, found exactly the right combination of everything involved, and then someone with your mindset comes in, provides the plans that took millions of dollars to produce, and churns it out with a couple hundred bucks of R&D in total, maybe a few thousand if you count lost hours of productivity. You are technically capable of distributing these plans to the lowest bidder or even for free, at which point equivalent but significantly cheaper hardware could undercut the company. If this were a person instead of a company, they'd have you in chains, because you just stole millions of dollars from them.
Is the US likely to spawn such a cutthroat market? Well, it's no Russia or China, and frankly the law favors business interests too much to jeopardize the entire IP market like that. In the end, those millions in hardware design have to come from somewhere, and whoever invests is going to be expecting ROI--in other words, if it stops being an investment, there will be no capital for innovators, and we WILL be a China in the sense that we won't be producing our own designs.
I mean, I get your point, I do. But it seems more like, "I should be able to get away with anything as long as I'm alone in my house, no matter who I hurt with it." Yeah, it's right there in your hands, you own it. But you only own the last .01% of the process that went into making it, and the money you payed goes into paying off the rest. If you screw with that by whatever means, after all they went through to get it to your door, then they get mad, and that's not unreasonable. That's all I'm saying.
I believe the point was less "You better not start" and more "you better not start here," as in, work up to it as you get more experience.
As long as by "loyalty" you mean a retardedly small portion of the situations in which loyalty comes into play, yes--to your first point. I'm not even touching the second.
When you don't rat on your friend for a minor mistake because you know they'd be punished beyond their crime, and they don't deserve that, that's loyalty.
When you keep coming back to your religious ideals or leaders every week or whatever, because they give you stability in a world that shits on you, that's loyalty.
When you refuse to spill some dirty secret of a person who's never betrayed you, that's loyalty.
When you treat your parents with care when they're 90+ years old and have become infirm, that's loyalty.
To the GP's point, when a company you work for has variable income, possibly seasonal, possibly market-based, but it or the owner has always come through for you, and you push forward to try to keep them afloat, and they pay you back for your trouble, especially with a bonus--that's loyalty, in both directions.
All of these things happen all the time. I dare say only a tiny fraction of people won't fall into one of the above categories at various times. The idea that mercenariness is the only loyalty shows your character more than your worldliness.
I wonder if it wouldn't be best for Google to spin off a series of independent companies if they start those kind of services, who are explicitly required by their charter to not coordinate business interests with the others, and also have serious wording in their charter to try to keep them on the "don't be evil" mobile. Or, you know, something like that.
The point of it would be to keep all the positive aspects of being Google while forbidding any exec anywhere from bringing the whole Google Empire down on someone who disagrees.
I'm not sure it's practical, but in the end, there's gotta be something...
I'm not entirely up to speed on the whole thing, but I think that that mentality (which frankly is pretty stuck on itself in the first place) is upset when the company provides a service, such as online play; if your unauthorized additions may cause tremendous upset in online play, such as by allowing hacking in online play, then those people are detrimental to the future of your platform, not merely game sales.
You see it a lot in online games on the PC; in order to prevent cheating on multiplayer, they have to have draconian addons running in the background to monitor for hacks, memory viewers/editors, etc. These systems are also themselves imperfect and have in many cases caused PCs to crash, etc. I don't for a moment believe that popularity of gaming on the console as opposed to PC is unrelated to this. Frankly, the existence of a console that it is forbidden to mod is also the reason why they don't have crippling DRM; they simply assume that a cartridge is either good or it isn't, and that's that.
So by all means, force them to implement harsher and harsher restrictions in software merely so that they can keep their platform's reputation and game sales. What possible repercussions could there be?
For a moment, I thought you said
It makes it harder to identify the phlegmatic company
Maybe if they found a nice, juicy, spittle-laden name, word of mouth wouldn't spread, because nobody would want to say it.
You see, cars are actually made up of smaller pieces (I know, right? Science has advanced so far). But the funny thing is that you can take these "car parts" apart and get even more, smaller parts, especially when you use force. But the smaller the pieces get, the more we begin to wonder how it all ended up making a car in the first place.
That's why they're throwing really tiny minced-up bits of car at each other at really high speeds to see what happens.
Yeah, no, that analogy breaks down pretty quickly.
That's a crappy solution and you know it.
I've commented on this before, but you can NOT use a touchscreen with windowing system features designed for mouse and keyboard, and mouseovers are a good example of this. The effect of a mouseover is to make something happen exactly where you're pointing, so that's a strike against the touch interface even if you do something like variable pressure, double click, or click and hold.
It might be better to have a dedicated button that turns part of the screen into a faux-trackpad strictly for times when you need mouseover capability, which can be turned off the rest of the time--or, you know, just not designing sites to need that kind of ability.
I think that what you're arguing against is how loaded the word "Morality" is, and in particular, how loaded certain people, possibly including you, will take it to be. I think you would agree that a system of law could be crafted that most people would agree was immoral, while still legitimately protecting rights and providing for common interest, for example, one that sentenced convicted criminals to be carved up and eaten by the victims, or something. That is an issue that has nothing to do with human rights and everything to do with our sqeamishness on the subject.
It's not really a moral issue either, to be clear; only certain cultures believe that that would be something immoral or creepy, and I'm sure you can find some civilizations in history who would find it wholly appropriate. Let's call it more "consensus values;" and again, that's kind of the point at hand. You don't mind when you're part of the consensus, you just acknowledge that when you aren't part of that consensus, it can be unfair.
Unfortunately there are only so many options. You can do social engineering to try to make the values match the law, you can try to craft laws that appease every set of values, or you can try to craft laws that exist independent of values or with as few values at its base as possible.
If you take the first route, people will accuse you of screwing with people and being totalitarian every time you try to change their values, even if you do it almost entirely right. It would take an absolute genius to do it without people rioting.
If you take the second route, you get something like what we have, which sometimes seems like it's wavering on the edge of abject failure.
If you take the third route, you have to start absolutely from scratch in your body of law, which is something no existing country will willingly do. It's only likely to happen if you start a new country, and then you have to worry about every single new precedent your legislature and judicial branches might create.
I love how these ads are being modded informative as opposed to funny.
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I agree with you. GP has a point that this comes rather close to attacking someone for something that isn't illegal--which sets a terrible precedent--but at the same time, stopping people and corporations from doing bad things IS his job.
In the end, you or I or any other IANAL-er is not qualified to say that these companies AREN'T doing something illegal. It's possible that there is some corruption or deceit somewhere in the chain of things that is normally hidden, which is itself not only illegal but majorly illegal, and once the AG figures that out, people will never be able to get away with this again. I doubt that, but law is a huge field, and there's probably room for something like that to be discovered.