Everyone says 7+1DVD... That's not entirely true. 7+1 is only for the Professional series. It comes on 3 CDs in the Personal series, which is not much (if any) different from the other major distros.
Driving them out of business is capitalism, not anticompetitive practices. Microsoft forces companies to put Windows on every PC they sell or not get the cheap rate; they put hidden instructions in their operating system so that alternative software/os's can't run their software, etc. There is a difference. Has Wal-mart actually done such anticompetitive things?
If you have a tree who's root is the current board position and the leaves are all "mate" or "draw" positions (where the mates give you the game) then it certainly WOULD be possible to force a draw or win for yourself in every game. Starting from some arbitrary board position, of course you couldn't, because there are then board positions which will not/can not happen. But FROM THE BEGINNING, a program could enumerate every possible move, and eliminate those which end in its loss.
Now, that said, it's not true that from a given board position, there is any move that will guarantee a loss. In some positions this is true, but not for any given position (take the first move of the game, for example. Presumably you can win no matter what first move you make.) The early game would likely need to be a series of moves to bring you to a board position in which the rest of the game is deterministic based on the tree. This is because eliminating all initial moves that can result in a loss will eliminate all initial moves.
Getting to that deterministic position is not guaranteed, either. If it was, the entire match would be deterministic based on the computer player's moves. So there would still be strategy involved. But the computer could still look ahead to prevent moves that result in mate (for example, the 4 move mate that's such a common ploy against new players). And in doing so, it could look for ways to get to a board position that's in its lookup table.
Oh well. That's what free software is there for. You know when you write free software that some people aren't going to "give back" and it's not a stretch to assume that some people are going to use it for nefarious purposes. Consider Microsoft running their anti-unix website on FreeBSD, for example. It's sort of the point. We give the world quality software that they can do with as they please (for the most part).
Then you're the idiot. The code for BNetD is SERVER CODE. It has nothing to do with the games that are played. All the games are STILL Windows-based.
People would still connect to blizzards server!
Then who would care? The point here is NOT to connect to Blizzard's servers, but to be able to host our own.
Besides, your whole idea is based on the fact that Transgaming says they'd support battle.net. Who says Blizzard would agree to give them the information to do so anyway?
Anyway, what's the point then? I like the idea of BNetD because it means I can tweak the way things work in the games. If I want my item drops to be better, I can do it. If I want to make some of the enemies harder, I can do that too. If it's closed source, I may as well be using Blizzard's slow-as-hell servers.
Acting fast is only important in trademark disputes. If you don't actively defent your trademark, you can easily lose it. Other intellectual property rights aren't handled like this, and thus you can act 10 years down the road and still have a chance of winning. In fact, that's been a common thing to do lately. Get people using your IP for free/cheap/etc by not prosecuting pirates until such time as you're so deeply entrenched in the market that you can begin the prosecution phase, win, and get even more money.
This is almost always going to apply to some form of site-wide license, which you have to get directly from Microsoft. It's true, that if a rep from Microsoft came to my door and demanded to audit my house, I'd tell them to get a warrant. But in this case, someone probably already signed a contract of some sort with them. Probably.
As I stated in an earlier post, it would be trivial to use BDE's software which executes arbitrary code to automatically update every user's Kazaa--at least, all the ones using a legit version. Then Kazaa would be splitting their P2P into two networks: one that uses hacked and free clients, and one that uses "official" clients. They can prevent legit versions from connecting to hacked versions in said update, and the updates would propogate every time a legit user checked for an update or "allowed" the BDE software to update Kazaa.
And they could do it all without a centralized server.
That said, it should be easy to block specific files in the same way, meaning that the defense of "it's p2p, we can't control it" was moot the second they added any code into the client that allowed for some form of RPC.
How about supporting quality software? I realize that they offer the free version, but I still believe in supporting software/media/etc. that I use regularly.
It would be difficult to block Kazaa Lite clients from accessing the Kazaa network simply because of the openness of the system which lets millions of users log on simultaneously.
I'm not so sure about this. BDE's license says that it can execute code on the machine. Presumably this means that some form of RPC is implemented in Kazaa-bloat / BDE. As such, they could execute code that does a check for a "legal" version of Kazaa and, after a week or so, block clients that don't have the most recent version. Further hacking to get around this would definately be "circumvention" and subject to the DMCA.
This also breaks free, open source clients, but then, I doubt people who worship the almighty dollar really care.
My big tv show right now is Buffy. I never watched it until the start of this season, but FX rerunning it I was able to catch up real fast. I'd be pretty pissed to read a headline on any news site that said "Willow Foregoes Magic Ban, Kills all Geeks and Attacks Friends" or something.
If he wanted to get the headline out because he was so shocked by it and wanted to see other people's feedback (something that hasn't happened because there's been so much bitching about the spoiler) then he was inconsiderate. If he didn't realize that the world does not revolve around east-coast time, he was stupid.
You then get into the question of when does it become common knowledge? I mean, there *are* people who haven't seen Star Wars. Do we protect them from the spoiler that Vader is Luke's father, that Luke and Leia are siblings, etc?
A year or two ago, Chewbacca was killed off in one of the novels (not cannon). Does that deserve spoiler protection?
Silly, by 24 hours someone else might have posted the article. Remember, the goal is not to inform, but to get the post out as quickly as possible (possibly explaining the frequent "oops" posts of late--better to post a retraction than to be scooped).
Child pornography is illegal for a number of reasons.. exploitation of children being the primary one. But unlike most laws, this one has a second, more obscure reason for existing. Pornographic pictures of children creates a market for..pornographic pictures of children. Even if the images come from another country where such depictions are legal, the transmittal and possession of them in the US are illegal.
It's that secondary statement that is the basis for "virtual" child porn laws. No actual children were exploited, but some government officials think that the fake images might create demand for real images, or even lead to molestation. "We have to protect the children!"
That said, setting a hard age limit for anything doesn't do justice. There are plenty of naive 18-22 and beyond year-olds who don't fully realize the consequences of their actions, just as there are "children" (usually on the upper end of what's considered a minor") who are more than capable of understanding and cognating the consequences of their actions. There are also differing levels of physical development--I've know 15 year olds who were more physically and biologically developed than 20 year olds[1]. It's completely arbitrary and is only in place this way because psychological evaluations in every case would be nigh impossible for the government to handle.
[1] Background. When I was 18 and just entered college, I met a 15 year old girl through a group of us that played Magic: The Gathering. Her entire family played, and we all got to know each other. She was more physically, biologically and emotionally developed than just about all of the girls in my freshman courses. I ended up dating her, with the complete approval of her family, when I was 20 and she was 17. Does that make me a pedophile? I don't think so. Physically she looked much older. Emotionally she was much older. You see the problems...
According to the X-Men universe, Adamantium is not an element. Rather it's an alloy. Which is, of course, absurd, since a real alloy will not be stronger than the elements it's composed of. But hey, it's a comic book:)
And.. what would they say if your roommate takes the CD (that happens to lie on your desk without case and booklet) and tries to play it on the computer you both own... crashing it... causing you to loose all data of your term paper one day before it's due... oh, wait... they'll sue YOU... letting your roommate listen to music he hasn't paid for;-)
Read the article. The same label is on the CD itself, too.
So will you pay for the legal fees? Or maybe Best Buy should, since they sold the computer in the first place.
Computers are only as inexpensive as they are due to Microsoft and the standardization of a user-interface/api. Sad but true. And if everyone who wanted to use the computer actually had to hire a lawyer first, computers wouldn't have become as prevalent, the internet wouldn't be what it is, most likely we would not be here.
Nice knee-jerk reaction, but there is really a lot more behind this situation.
Deserve to get screwed? Bullshit. EULAs are written by lawyers, for lawyers. Most people who run Kazaa wouldn't even understand that particular clause in the EULA if they'd even gotten to it with all the legalese in there. Furthermore, contracts aren't legal if one or more of the parties did not fully understand the implications of the contract (read up on cases where people just signed on the X without reading the contract in full view of a notary public--in almost all cases the contract was declared null and void). If EULAs are found to be legal contracts, this should apply, should it not?
If you're using Kazaa, you did consent. Read the EULA sometime.
4. Upgrades and Access. (a) You acknowledge that BDE may from time to time provide future programming fixes, updates and upgrades to you ("b3d Updates"), including automatic updates to KaZaA and other software bundled with KaZaA, through automatic electronic dissemination and other means. You consent to such automatic updates and agree that the terms and conditions of this Agreement will apply to all such b3d Updates. (b) You hereby grant BDE the right to access and use the unused computing power and storage space on your computer/s and/or internet access or bandwidth for the aggregation of content and use in distributed computing. The user acknowledges and authorizes this use without the right of compensation. Notwithstanding the above, in the event usage of your computer is initiated by a party other than you, BDE will grant you the ability to deny access.
Of course, EULAs have yet to be stress-tested in our court system, but are *you* going to have the money to win the court case?
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone says 7+1DVD... That's not entirely true. 7+1 is only for the Professional series. It comes on 3 CDs in the Personal series, which is not much (if any) different from the other major distros.
Driving them out of business is capitalism, not anticompetitive practices. Microsoft forces companies to put Windows on every PC they sell or not get the cheap rate; they put hidden instructions in their operating system so that alternative software/os's can't run their software, etc. There is a difference. Has Wal-mart actually done such anticompetitive things?
Let me interpret for the original poster:
If you have a tree who's root is the current board position and the leaves are all "mate" or "draw" positions (where the mates give you the game) then it certainly WOULD be possible to force a draw or win for yourself in every game. Starting from some arbitrary board position, of course you couldn't, because there are then board positions which will not/can not happen. But FROM THE BEGINNING, a program could enumerate every possible move, and eliminate those which end in its loss.
Now, that said, it's not true that from a given board position, there is any move that will guarantee a loss. In some positions this is true, but not for any given position (take the first move of the game, for example. Presumably you can win no matter what first move you make.) The early game would likely need to be a series of moves to bring you to a board position in which the rest of the game is deterministic based on the tree. This is because eliminating all initial moves that can result in a loss will eliminate all initial moves.
Getting to that deterministic position is not guaranteed, either. If it was, the entire match would be deterministic based on the computer player's moves. So there would still be strategy involved. But the computer could still look ahead to prevent moves that result in mate (for example, the 4 move mate that's such a common ploy against new players). And in doing so, it could look for ways to get to a board position that's in its lookup table.
Oh well. That's what free software is there for. You know when you write free software that some people aren't going to "give back" and it's not a stretch to assume that some people are going to use it for nefarious purposes. Consider Microsoft running their anti-unix website on FreeBSD, for example. It's sort of the point. We give the world quality software that they can do with as they please (for the most part).
Then you're the idiot.
The code for BNetD is SERVER CODE. It has nothing to do with the games that are played. All the games are STILL Windows-based.
People would still connect to blizzards server!
Then who would care? The point here is NOT to connect to Blizzard's servers, but to be able to host our own.
Besides, your whole idea is based on the fact that Transgaming says they'd support battle.net. Who says Blizzard would agree to give them the information to do so anyway?
Anyway, what's the point then? I like the idea of BNetD because it means I can tweak the way things work in the games. If I want my item drops to be better, I can do it. If I want to make some of the enemies harder, I can do that too. If it's closed source, I may as well be using Blizzard's slow-as-hell servers.
Acting fast is only important in trademark disputes. If you don't actively defent your trademark, you can easily lose it. Other intellectual property rights aren't handled like this, and thus you can act 10 years down the road and still have a chance of winning.
In fact, that's been a common thing to do lately. Get people using your IP for free/cheap/etc by not prosecuting pirates until such time as you're so deeply entrenched in the market that you can begin the prosecution phase, win, and get even more money.
This *was* on /. just a few days ago.
2 13 &mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/20/149
It's still cool, though you only get the speed boost if both the transmitter and receiver are USR.
This is almost always going to apply to some form of site-wide license, which you have to get directly from Microsoft. It's true, that if a rep from Microsoft came to my door and demanded to audit my house, I'd tell them to get a warrant. But in this case, someone probably already signed a contract of some sort with them.
Probably.
As I stated in an earlier post, it would be trivial to use BDE's software which executes arbitrary code to automatically update every user's Kazaa--at least, all the ones using a legit version. Then Kazaa would be splitting their P2P into two networks: one that uses hacked and free clients, and one that uses "official" clients. They can prevent legit versions from connecting to hacked versions in said update, and the updates would propogate every time a legit user checked for an update or "allowed" the BDE software to update Kazaa.
And they could do it all without a centralized server.
That said, it should be easy to block specific files in the same way, meaning that the defense of "it's p2p, we can't control it" was moot the second they added any code into the client that allowed for some form of RPC.
How about supporting quality software? I realize that they offer the free version, but I still believe in supporting software/media/etc. that I use regularly.
It would be difficult to block Kazaa Lite clients from accessing the Kazaa network simply because of the openness of the system which lets millions of users log on simultaneously.
I'm not so sure about this. BDE's license says that it can execute code on the machine. Presumably this means that some form of RPC is implemented in Kazaa-bloat / BDE. As such, they could execute code that does a check for a "legal" version of Kazaa and, after a week or so, block clients that don't have the most recent version. Further hacking to get around this would definately be "circumvention" and subject to the DMCA.
This also breaks free, open source clients, but then, I doubt people who worship the almighty dollar really care.
My big tv show right now is Buffy. I never watched it until the start of this season, but FX rerunning it I was able to catch up real fast. I'd be pretty pissed to read a headline on any news site that said "Willow Foregoes Magic Ban, Kills all Geeks and Attacks Friends" or something.
He was either stupid or inconsiderate.
If he wanted to get the headline out because he was so shocked by it and wanted to see other people's feedback (something that hasn't happened because there's been so much bitching about the spoiler) then he was inconsiderate. If he didn't realize that the world does not revolve around east-coast time, he was stupid.
Oh, and Anakin dies at the end of Episode 6.
You then get into the question of when does it become common knowledge? I mean, there *are* people who haven't seen Star Wars. Do we protect them from the spoiler that Vader is Luke's father, that Luke and Leia are siblings, etc?
A year or two ago, Chewbacca was killed off in one of the novels (not cannon). Does that deserve spoiler protection?
Silly, by 24 hours someone else might have posted the article. Remember, the goal is not to inform, but to get the post out as quickly as possible (possibly explaining the frequent "oops" posts of late--better to post a retraction than to be scooped).
Child pornography is illegal for a number of reasons.. exploitation of children being the primary one. But unlike most laws, this one has a second, more obscure reason for existing. Pornographic pictures of children creates a market for..pornographic pictures of children. Even if the images come from another country where such depictions are legal, the transmittal and possession of them in the US are illegal.
It's that secondary statement that is the basis for "virtual" child porn laws. No actual children were exploited, but some government officials think that the fake images might create demand for real images, or even lead to molestation. "We have to protect the children!"
That said, setting a hard age limit for anything doesn't do justice. There are plenty of naive 18-22 and beyond year-olds who don't fully realize the consequences of their actions, just as there are "children" (usually on the upper end of what's considered a minor") who are more than capable of understanding and cognating the consequences of their actions. There are also differing levels of physical development--I've know 15 year olds who were more physically and biologically developed than 20 year olds[1]. It's completely arbitrary and is only in place this way because psychological evaluations in every case would be nigh impossible for the government to handle.
[1] Background. When I was 18 and just entered college, I met a 15 year old girl through a group of us that played Magic: The Gathering. Her entire family played, and we all got to know each other. She was more physically, biologically and emotionally developed than just about all of the girls in my freshman courses. I ended up dating her, with the complete approval of her family, when I was 20 and she was 17. Does that make me a pedophile? I don't think so. Physically she looked much older. Emotionally she was much older. You see the problems...
That's gotta be a first...someone who reads the story but no the description!
According to the X-Men universe, Adamantium is not an element. Rather it's an alloy. Which is, of course, absurd, since a real alloy will not be stronger than the elements it's composed of. But hey, it's a comic book :)
Then again, there still needs to be a way to track playback. mpg123 doesn't send that sort of information :)
Stop propogating that myth, it has absolutely no basis in law.
And .. what would they say if your roommate takes the CD (that happens to lie on your desk without case and booklet) and tries to play it on the computer you both own ... crashing it ... causing you to loose all data of your term paper one day before it's due ... oh, wait ... they'll sue YOU ... letting your roommate listen to music he hasn't paid for ;-)
Read the article. The same label is on the CD itself, too.
So will you pay for the legal fees? Or maybe Best Buy should, since they sold the computer in the first place.
Computers are only as inexpensive as they are due to Microsoft and the standardization of a user-interface/api. Sad but true. And if everyone who wanted to use the computer actually had to hire a lawyer first, computers wouldn't have become as prevalent, the internet wouldn't be what it is, most likely we would not be here.
Nice knee-jerk reaction, but there is really a lot more behind this situation.
Not likely, although they could shut off your access to Kazaa because of the file deletion.
Then again, if you're out of hard drive space, that probably wouldn't matter.
Deserve to get screwed? Bullshit. EULAs are written by lawyers, for lawyers. Most people who run Kazaa wouldn't even understand that particular clause in the EULA if they'd even gotten to it with all the legalese in there.
Furthermore, contracts aren't legal if one or more of the parties did not fully understand the implications of the contract (read up on cases where people just signed on the X without reading the contract in full view of a notary public--in almost all cases the contract was declared null and void).
If EULAs are found to be legal contracts, this should apply, should it not?
If you're using Kazaa, you did consent. Read the EULA sometime.
4. Upgrades and Access.
(a) You acknowledge that BDE may from time to time provide future programming fixes, updates and upgrades to you ("b3d Updates"), including automatic updates to KaZaA and other software bundled with KaZaA, through automatic electronic dissemination and other means. You consent to such automatic updates and agree that the terms and conditions of this Agreement will apply to all such b3d Updates.
(b) You hereby grant BDE the right to access and use the unused computing power and storage space on your computer/s and/or internet access or bandwidth for the aggregation of content and use in distributed computing. The user acknowledges and authorizes this use without the right of compensation. Notwithstanding the above, in the event usage of your computer is initiated by a party other than you, BDE will grant you the ability to deny access.
Of course, EULAs have yet to be stress-tested in our court system, but are *you* going to have the money to win the court case?
Erik