You should hav [sic] simply returned the game 6 months ago.
Which retail outlets will take back an opened game? Every one I've been to assumes you're a pirate, so the only option you have is exchange for another copy of the same title. That accomplishes precisely nothing.
You're committing your own fallacy: assuming Open vs. Closed == $0 vs. Costly.
The little hypothetical mp3 renamer you mention could just as easily be closed-source freeware, and may just as likely do all the things you attribute to it.
Also, most EULAs disavow any liability for anything that happens to your PC, hamster, or toilet. In most cases, you'll be lucky to get your $10 back. (Granted, it isn't cut-and-dry that EULAs are enforceable, but good luck finding someone who will take it to court over a ten dollar POS.)
You know, I was going to give an intelligent, well-thought-out rebuttal to your original post, but this kind of childishness just shows me it'd be a wasted effort.
Nobody cares that you got modded down, and no one gives a damn what you think about it.
One always needs a study to prove the "obvious." To a lot people, it's obvious that violent movies and videogames induce violent behavior in children, or that seeing an exposed breast on television is traumatic.
"Common sense" is the name we give to our personal prejudices.
As far as sending documents that need to look a certain way, have you considered other formats then.doc? (PDF, HTML, TeX, RTF (hahahahah ok I'm only kidding on that one)
HTML is a horrible choice for documents that need to look a certain way. "The Web is not WYSIWYG."
As far as I'm concerned, you can do it. I just thought I'd point out that there's a lot more to it than "static". And, I wanted to vent. Working with half a million lines of crap isn't fun.
Procedural programming is a mindset, not a choice of syntax. I know this because--despite being on a team of Java developers--it's pretty clear that only a small minority of us understand what OO code is.
Procedural programming is more than just making everything static (although, if one was doing so deliberately, one would want to do that). It's giving MyDataObject public members, or at best a bunch of public getters/setters that do just this.member=foo; and return this.member;. And instead of putting any methods that exclusively act on MyDataObject inside that class, you create a separate "utility" class that has a public method which takes MyDataObject as a parameter, so instead of...
MyDataObject foo = new MyDataObject(); foo.doSomething();
you end up with...
MyDataObject foo = new MyDataObject(); MyUtil bar = new MyUtil(); bar.doSomething(foo);
I don't have an X-Box, but since it's Microsoft we're talking about, I think the odds are pretty good the "contract" is either a EULA or other electronic form. Those are still in a legal limbo as regards enforceability.
Bottom line: without a signature, it's hard to prove the account wasn't opened with a stolen credit card number; if the card holder is also disputing the charge, I think the burden shifts back to Microsoft.
It's the insidious stuff that I might not notice that I worry about: cross-site scripting, third-party cookies, malicious javascript, Real Player-style phoning home.
Here's my personal favorite so far...
I'm trying to diagnose my ex-wife problems via AIM (she lives in another state), and I finally discover that some piece of spyware is invisibly putting "http://some-suspicious-ip/?url=" in front of every URL in IE. Aside from tracking browsing habits, though, I'm not sure what it would be used for.
...so long as you agree to give the government 40% of your money in the form of taxes
Which government do you live under? I just filed my taxes this past weekend, and between federal income tax, social security, medicare, state income tax, and city income tax, "The Man" took a little under 24% of my income. That's a lot, no question about it, but a far cry from 40%.
I didn't include sales tax in my figures, because I obviously don't have any numbers handy, but even if I spent every other penny the government didn't take in direct taxes, it would only come to about 28%.
Your biggest concern with this will be what sort of device you're using for performing your NAT.
Not to downplay what you're saying, but I think the biggest concern is that moving away from a telco means you can't get a dialtone during a power outage. It's one of the three remaining reasons I keep traditional phone service.
DISCLAIMER: I work for a telco, but not the one the submitter linked to.
Like everyone else on Slashdot, TheSunborn didn't preview before posting, and lost a bunch of angle brackets that might have caused the post to make some kind of sense.
I tend to go with the notion that Fermat was mistaken. He was idly scribbling in the margins of one of his books, so if he later realized he was wrong, it's not like he needed to print a retraction.
And, oh yeah, I guess it would've cleared things up much earlier if I'd said "Fermat" several posts back.
If that one proof I linked to is faulty, it wouldn't be the first time. I've seen lots of "simple" proofs of FLT on the Web over the years, and whenever I sit down and work them through, there's always something wrong.
I'm not sure it lends itself to a "gist" type of proof. In 1993, Andrew Wiles presesnted an indirect proof at some sort of mathematical conference, but it was based in graduate-level maths.
(I should point out that the original statement of the problem required x, y, and z to be positive integers. From there, it's trivial to show if true, it must also hold for all non-zero rationals, but most people stick with the original formulation because it's easier to work with.)
This page claims to have a brief proof that they say should have been discovered long ago, if only mathematicians had considered it. I'm having trouble wrapping my head around their peculiar wording, but it seems to go something like this:
Because of the effect of exponents on the last digit of a number, one must only prove the theorem holds for n from 3 to 6.
These cases were already shown to be true several hundred years ago.
QED
I'm not entirely sure I buy into that first point, though. Their "proof" seems to involve a bunch of hand-waving.
This page seems a little more promising. It's an outline of Dr. Wiles's proof, but it, too, shoves in my face the fact that I'm losing all the higher math I learned at college.
Or organize a book swap a few days before/after classes start and post fliers around so that everyone knows about it. Previous students can trade books with new students etc.
They tried doing something like that where I went to school. Student A turns in his textbooks the last week of the term. Student B buys them the first week of next term for less than it would cost at the bookstore (but more than Student A would have received for selling it at the bookstore). Student A shows up around week 2 or 3 and picks up what Student B paid for the books, less a dollar per for the organizers.
It failed miserably.
Problems included:
If the bookstore won't buy a book back at all, Student B doesn't want it.
If the bookstore does offer to buy it back, Student A will take the quick cash, since he's a poor college student.
Advertising. Or rather, the complete and utter lack of it. I only found out about this service because the gaming club's office was adjacent to the office where this service was being offered.
If Student A was graduating, he didn't want to return to campus (possibly from out of town) for a couple of bucks.
Summer break meant you sometimes had to wait three months for money.
If you really are thinking about doing something like this, keep these potential pitfalls in mind.
It's not a monopoly -- even though most colleges have their own bookstores, there's nothing forcing you to shop there.
Not to be pedantic, but U.S. law doesn't use "there is no alternative" as the defining characteristic of a monopoly. If it did, Microsoft wouldn't have been found to have an OS monopoly.
The standard used is fuzzier, and more along the lines of, "the average consumer perceives that there is no alternative." Given this, it's not unreasonable to call campus bookstores a monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
Which retail outlets will take back an opened game? Every one I've been to assumes you're a pirate, so the only option you have is exchange for another copy of the same title. That accomplishes precisely nothing.
Not to start a religious flamewar, but that makes it sound like he's got more of a legitimate target in the BSD license than the GPL.
You're committing your own fallacy: assuming Open vs. Closed == $0 vs. Costly.
The little hypothetical mp3 renamer you mention could just as easily be closed-source freeware, and may just as likely do all the things you attribute to it.
Also, most EULAs disavow any liability for anything that happens to your PC, hamster, or toilet. In most cases, you'll be lucky to get your $10 back. (Granted, it isn't cut-and-dry that EULAs are enforceable, but good luck finding someone who will take it to court over a ten dollar POS.)
On the first of the month, no doubt.
You know, I was going to give an intelligent, well-thought-out rebuttal to your original post, but this kind of childishness just shows me it'd be a wasted effort.
Nobody cares that you got modded down, and no one gives a damn what you think about it.
One always needs a study to prove the "obvious." To a lot people, it's obvious that violent movies and videogames induce violent behavior in children, or that seeing an exposed breast on television is traumatic.
"Common sense" is the name we give to our personal prejudices.
There are ways to run binaries, too. My point stands: mounting a partition noexec doesn't prevent execution of files on that partition.
There are ways around noexec. For example, if I type /bin/sh foo, then foo will run, regardless of the options passed to mount.
How much does Microsoft's support cost? I'm pretty sure it's more than a "one-off payment."
Apples and oranges.
HTML is a horrible choice for documents that need to look a certain way. "The Web is not WYSIWYG."
As far as I'm concerned, you can do it. I just thought I'd point out that there's a lot more to it than "static". And, I wanted to vent. Working with half a million lines of crap isn't fun.
Procedural programming is a mindset, not a choice of syntax. I know this because--despite being on a team of Java developers--it's pretty clear that only a small minority of us understand what OO code is.
Procedural programming is more than just making everything static (although, if one was doing so deliberately, one would want to do that). It's giving MyDataObject public members, or at best a bunch of public getters/setters that do just this.member=foo; and return this.member;. And instead of putting any methods that exclusively act on MyDataObject inside that class, you create a separate "utility" class that has a public method which takes MyDataObject as a parameter, so instead of...
MyDataObject foo = new MyDataObject();
foo.doSomething();
you end up with...
MyDataObject foo = new MyDataObject();
MyUtil bar = new MyUtil();
bar.doSomething(foo);
But hey, at least I'm not bitter... right?
"Huh. I must have somehow overlooked that one at the time. Go ahead and remove it, too."
I don't have an X-Box, but since it's Microsoft we're talking about, I think the odds are pretty good the "contract" is either a EULA or other electronic form. Those are still in a legal limbo as regards enforceability.
Bottom line: without a signature, it's hard to prove the account wasn't opened with a stolen credit card number; if the card holder is also disputing the charge, I think the burden shifts back to Microsoft.
Here's my personal favorite so far...
I'm trying to diagnose my ex-wife problems via AIM (she lives in another state), and I finally discover that some piece of spyware is invisibly putting "http://some-suspicious-ip/?url=" in front of every URL in IE. Aside from tracking browsing habits, though, I'm not sure what it would be used for.
Which government do you live under? I just filed my taxes this past weekend, and between federal income tax, social security, medicare, state income tax, and city income tax, "The Man" took a little under 24% of my income. That's a lot, no question about it, but a far cry from 40%.
I didn't include sales tax in my figures, because I obviously don't have any numbers handy, but even if I spent every other penny the government didn't take in direct taxes, it would only come to about 28%.
If your analogy were accurate, no one but the most die hard fanatics would be using computers.
Maybe I'm not understanding the social aspects of the game, but I fear what you describe would quickly degenerate into people pestering you:
"dood, i need the aswner to this puzzel"; and ruining your attempts to figure things out yourself: "just click the btns in this order: 5 4 2 6 1 3".
Not to downplay what you're saying, but I think the biggest concern is that moving away from a telco means you can't get a dialtone during a power outage. It's one of the three remaining reasons I keep traditional phone service.
DISCLAIMER: I work for a telco, but not the one the submitter linked to.
Like everyone else on Slashdot, TheSunborn didn't preview before posting, and lost a bunch of angle brackets that might have caused the post to make some kind of sense.
Or, maybe s/he's crazy.
"Back"?! Some of us are still using it.
I tend to go with the notion that Fermat was mistaken. He was idly scribbling in the margins of one of his books, so if he later realized he was wrong, it's not like he needed to print a retraction.
And, oh yeah, I guess it would've cleared things up much earlier if I'd said "Fermat" several posts back.
If that one proof I linked to is faulty, it wouldn't be the first time. I've seen lots of "simple" proofs of FLT on the Web over the years, and whenever I sit down and work them through, there's always something wrong.
I'm not sure it lends itself to a "gist" type of proof. In 1993, Andrew Wiles presesnted an indirect proof at some sort of mathematical conference, but it was based in graduate-level maths.
(I should point out that the original statement of the problem required x, y, and z to be positive integers. From there, it's trivial to show if true, it must also hold for all non-zero rationals, but most people stick with the original formulation because it's easier to work with.)
This page claims to have a brief proof that they say should have been discovered long ago, if only mathematicians had considered it. I'm having trouble wrapping my head around their peculiar wording, but it seems to go something like this:
I'm not entirely sure I buy into that first point, though. Their "proof" seems to involve a bunch of hand-waving.
This page seems a little more promising. It's an outline of Dr. Wiles's proof, but it, too, shoves in my face the fact that I'm losing all the higher math I learned at college.
I hope that's helpful.
They tried doing something like that where I went to school. Student A turns in his textbooks the last week of the term. Student B buys them the first week of next term for less than it would cost at the bookstore (but more than Student A would have received for selling it at the bookstore). Student A shows up around week 2 or 3 and picks up what Student B paid for the books, less a dollar per for the organizers.
It failed miserably.
Problems included:
If you really are thinking about doing something like this, keep these potential pitfalls in mind.
Not to be pedantic, but U.S. law doesn't use "there is no alternative" as the defining characteristic of a monopoly. If it did, Microsoft wouldn't have been found to have an OS monopoly.
The standard used is fuzzier, and more along the lines of, "the average consumer perceives that there is no alternative." Given this, it's not unreasonable to call campus bookstores a monopoly.