I am glad to see all the people who have taken the time to save and scrimp to buy a house and a modest car. At the time you came up with that plan I cam up with a different one.
I sat down and asked myself "If everything went to sh$t over night what would be the one thing I was invested in that would save my ass." watching the nightly news that night I had my answer.
Guns, lots of guns and ammo, Their are two things that retain wealth. Gold and guns, and guns luckly can help you acquire even more wealth. So as you sit in your warm cozy homes being proud of yourselves for investing wisely to make a better safe haven for yourselves as the world spirals into the next dark age remember this. We are out in the dark watching you, and we are much better armed than you dare dream.
AK-47: $600 1000 round of ammo: $200 Never having to worry about an economic downturn again: Priceless
"... For everything else their is armed insurection..."
Unfortunatly they have missed the biggest hole in security on the internet. The average user and the default install.
It's all well and good to say that we now have a standard. The problem is that the people who are most likely to use this tool are the ones that don't need it as bad. If you are aware this tool exists then you are security minded enough to have closed all the holes yourself.
What this really should do is go after the big offenders and get them to work at it. I am not necesarily talking Microsoft here. I am talking about the builders. Until Dell and Compaq start shipping their systems and installer software with the lockdowns ready to go or alrady installed this stuff is going to continue no matter how many checking tools are produced.
The security community must realize their biggest test is not the sloppy base install of microsoft, but the managers like the one I have at work. His official policy is "If it ain't broke don't fix it." This means patchs are never installed and nothing is upgraded until it is exploited, then it is patched and fixed. Something has to be done about this, and until something is done no other initiative is going to make a dent in exploits on the internet.
I was hurt by how cheezy the plot holes in the movie where.
We have an orginization that is in control of the worlds aliens and does all check ins yet has no backup plan for a rogue alien in the terminal?
After agent K get's deneralized, and I mean as he gets out of the chair, he is talking about how he can't remember what they are looking for becuase he neralized himself to make him forget where he put it or what it was. Um what about the deneralizer you just used to get your memory back?
I am not one to bitch about a movie using suspension of disbelief to get a point across. As I have told people before I am paying $8 to see fantasy, if I wanted to see real life I would go stand on the street corner for two hours. Their is a limit of course and I feel that this movie did not do enough to try and cover for that. Something as simple as having his memory coming back over years durring the course of the movie would have worked. With him hitting the relevant information at the right moment. Could have had some great jokes embedded in it, like having him bitch that agent X neuralized him after cheating at poker for example. The lack of thinking in the writing gives the movie the feel that it is a quick cash in for a buck and that is it.
Most contractors are idiots, I am glad to see this book agrees. Remember when dealing with most "profesionals" that they usually have side deals going. While they are working for you this time, they alwasy work with their people. Their prime interests are not yours. That is why they will steer you towards certain yards and certain sub contractors. Not becuase they are the best or the cheapest but because they get a kick back.
A peice of advice not mentioned, from personal experience. While the contractor and the sub-contractors may be who you deal with they are not the ones doing the work. The work crews are the ones that are acutally attaching things to other things. A $60 investment in pizza or beer dropped by the site one day will pay of huge in the long run. If the crews personally like you then they will take more care in constructing your house and be friendlier to change requests. I have seen crews who had been taken care off take all the bad material out of the construction piles (warped or knotty studs i.e.) and place them to be moved to another site for use simply because the homeowner thought enough of them to bring them coffee in the morning. They put the good materials in this guys house and the crap went to everyone else.
they thought about the sound aspect but dammnit people want to see the video also.For someone that was concerned about using up to much bandwidth they could have made a format for download so that we could see it offline. I guess that would have taken planning and forsight. Sigh... guess I will sit here and see if it ever loads. 3 minutes to slashdot effect and counting...
Hey here is a thought, I got ten bucks that says we never see this on total request live...
First I want to say that any lengthy insert would be a disaster. I think their is no argument at all on that subject.
I can , however, see where a small insert would be helpfull to the story line. Something like a shot of jar jar watching luke meet obiwan and saying "the circle starts again" or something similar IANASW( I am not a script writer). A small item to help tie the first three with the next three. With the way that these movies were filmed, in reverse order, Something like this may be necesary to make them feel as a whole series again.
The other possibility is that he needs to add elements to tie the last three to the middle three. For an example having queen amadala show in return to say that she was never gone but hiding out and once the emporer is defeated we need to go do this. He may have excluded these parts in the original filming becuase it would have created a cliff hanger in the movie that would not be resolved for 30 to 40 years. Now he can add it and start the work, striving for a completed nine movies over three sets of three.
The point is a little dash of extra may not be so bad, have to see it to judge. Let's just hope this is not done as some marketting stunt to get us all buy the movies AGAIN.
Frankly if this was me I would still be in the "picking out the liquer to make this seem like a good idea" stage of the development. Not liquer for the conceptual and building part, that would be fun, but for the get into it and ride it part.
Well I guess Office max and Office Depot are now fubard. Overnight they have become distributers of devices used to circumvent copy protection. I hope the RIAA goes easy on them....
Looks like microsoft may have gotten into a fight with someone a little more cagy than themselves and I am laughing my butt off. Sony is an old hand at dealing with psuedo monopolies and the latest fads. Microsoft is a talented amature at this but it looks like age and cunning are about to teach youth and exuberance a lesson.
CEO of Nintendo " Sonny we were getting sued for anti-competitive behavior while you were still trying to secure your first round of VC funding. Don't try to teach this old hound how to hunt."
The rumor says that his latest round of convention apperances was to raise money for his daughter, but then does not say why. What is the problem? Maybe we can all band together to help her out as our way of saying thanks for a job well done to him after he has passed.
Claiming that they are not getting the same value for their tuition dollars.
This guy , due only to the fact that he has put up a website, is getting a free crash course in internet domain disputes and copywrite law. If the opinions in the article are correct, then he is also getting an easy one tossed across the plate so that he can win. The school is basically handing him free on hands training in how a real case works coupled with a high profile case he can win before he graduates. This means he is getting more value from his time at LSU. If I was a student at LSU I would be demanding that the school sue me also!
From the article "We're still looking for the cheapest way to answer the stupidest questions," he said. "If you go out of the script, they have no idea how to react."
This quote exemplifies the real problem that tech support faces. People computting beyond their means. I used to work tech support for an ISP. Our install software was good, Our POPs were fairly stable. Yet we still had a large call volume. The problem was the LUSERs that kept calling, and calling, and calling. Some of these people had call history logs that contained thirty to forty entrys, none of them due to anything we had done. I literally spent 15 minutes one night trying to get a woman to type her password in the same way twice.
Why this is important, These people cost money. Every minute they are on the phone money leaving the company. We had a 800 number and of course I was getting payed. We figured it out one night that if a customer was on the phone with use for 10 minutes that wiped out our profit on them for the month. With aditional months getting wiped out ever 11 minutes. Some of these customers had call logs that indicated 15 to 20 HOURS of time on the phones with us. They had wiped out their profits for the next ten years and the profits of thrity of forty other poeple also.
What tech companies have woken up to is the fact that these people make up, at worst 10% of your customer base, yet they burn up 50 to 60% of the profits a company makes.
In a defensive measure companies are trying to ditch them. Unfotunatly people with a real issue of need are ditched with them also. This is a sad state of affairs, yes, but then the level of support required to maintain this level of helpfullness is destructive to the company.
No other industry in america is expected to provide this level of support. Not car manufactures, VCR manfacturers, nobody. They are expected to replace defective product, which everyone should do, but GM does not have to have a help line to explain to idiot customers that the reason their car stopped after 300 miles is that they did not put any more gas in it.
The level of support we see now is due to the tech companies brutally shedding this dead weight. It's harsh, and unforgiving, but it needs to be done. The tech recovery cannot begin while we struggle with all the dead weight we must carry
As a further note, if you think these comments harsh go work a hell desk position. You will develope an abiding hate for human kind quickly. I am still puzzled myself on how most people managed to have ancestors smart enough to evolve to come down from the trees, let alone learn to walk upright.
Learning English is hard enough
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Time Travel
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I think this guys real motive is to keep his girlfriend in the english department employed. You thought It was bad enough to learn all the proper tenses for sentence writing now. Wait until we have to start adding stuff like the future present past tense to the language.
Try this on for size "In a little while I have completed what I did yesterday". or how about "Finished with what I am about to start."
Because of this I urge that we re-kill him now before he starts what he finished. As many of us had dreamed, when we will become grade school children, about killing Newton or Gauss before they invent their mathmatical formulas before/after they are inflicted on us we should move against him now. Someone get the pitchforks, torches, and angry villagers, I saw a labratory to have been stormed.
A very good point but I maintain that it did wreck the state. He did "prosecute" that many, exactly the way that you described. In the process though he lobotimized the country for decades to come. I am no historian, but I would bet even money that the eventual collapse of communism in russia could be directly linked back to those events.
I do apologize for that, I was trying to bang this comment out while my daughter was standing behind me begging to go to grandma's house. I did not have as much time as I would have liked for proof reading.
This will never work and has been tried before with other illegal activities (drugs spring to mind).
Here is were the problem lies. If you don't bust a good majority of the people on each iteration of the illegal activity then people are not scared. To be effective you need to get about 10% each time the crime is committed. Otherwise the chances of geting busted are to low for someone to worry about. it falls into the range of " Won't happen to me".
This means that if you download a movie ten times the chances of getting busted should be aproaching certany. Anything less and you are wasting time with this method.
This would not be hard to do if they were serious. You can grab casual users by the bushel basket all day long on Efnet or Dalnet. You could easily make a morpheus/Kazaa clone to track with. Lot's of trojan horse schemes to throw out there to grab users by the hundreds daily.
Then you hit the real problem. With millions of people everyday participating in this activity you are suddenly faced with prosecuting hundreds of thousands of cases to the full extent of the law. We are talking billions of dollars in legal costs, most likely aproaching the trillons quickly.
The hurdle comes from the fact that these are not poor intercity youth here who will get a public defender and plead guilty for the reduced charge. These are people of means, that is why they have an internet connection and a working computer, that is why they are sitting on a high speed connection at a university. If they themselves cannot afford a lawyer then you can damn bet their parents can. A lawyer who get's payed by the hour and is going to drag out this case for as long as they can. This means more work and more court time and more goverment costs. Meanwhile the citizens of the state/country are having a fit as their taxs rise and their infrastructure falls apart because all funds are being directed at internet piracy. Most people will agree that they would rather have a murder caught and prosecuted than have a pirate prosecuted. With such an overloaded court system the murders would be walking free because the prosecuters cannot handle the load.
This is the idea of Civil Disobediance put into words by Henry David Thoreau and so well put into action by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. If you swamp the system with so many targets then the system will fail. You can arrest hundreds or thousands, but you cannot arrest tens of thousands and millions of people for performing a harmless action. It will bring your state to a grinding halt.
Add to this the fact that every case is a potential reversal of the case law you find favorable. All it takes is one lucky or good lawyer to get this to an appels court, or the supreme court and all of a sudden your favoriable DMCA is being modified by the courts in ways that you cannot control with campaign contributions. Imagine an apeals court rulling that the DMCA means that the movie industry cannot decode disks to see if they are pirated once they are made and throwing all current cases out of court for lack of evidence. Stranger interpritations have been made and become law before. The politicians and the lobbiest would do a lot to keep this from happening, including making personal piracy legal.
The only course of action is to capitulate and modify your behavior so that the disobedience stops.
Piracy is consumer Disobedience on a grand scale. If your prices are gouging, your rates outragous then the consumer wil go elsewhere. This is the basis for Capitalism, just and unforseen side effect of that system. That if the alternative is Illegal the consumers wil become outlaws.
You sir have a very good mind. The point about the Odometer is right on. I agree with you, that this is simply a plan to monitor all movement of peoples around the areas. Next step I bet will be nationally issued train cards so that if you use public transportation you must use your personal card to do so, and probably track your entrance and exit from the station. Sort of like the NJ turnpike were you pay to exit not get on. Cars would be charged with credits and they would be removed when you get off, but the real value would be in tracking even more travel habits of people.
One of the issues that this article avoided is the issue of lost copyrights. This occures when a copyright is held by... No one. The copyright exists but the legal fiction called a corporation no longer exists to enforce it.
One of the best examples I have read of this is Wasteland. An Awesome RPG from the 80's. I wasted weeks on it using my apple IIC. I alwasy wondered what happened to it, why their was no sequel to it as it was much loved.
Then Fallout came out. A game that, not only played and felt a lot like Wasteland, but contained direct references to it. This was clearly stated to not be a sequal to Wasteleand, which confussed me as they were so close.
Getting Curious I followed up on this and read up on Fallout. enlightment came in an interview with the developer and producer of the game. Seems that they wanted to make a wasteland sequal and had gone looking to buy the rights to do so. They followed the trail from the original developer, who had gone out of bussiness to an IP holding company that had bought all of the developers IP when it went under. This company in turn had crashed and all their IP had been picked up by another company who had then immediatly gone bankrupt also. The IP was never moved from their, so this resource sat and died on the spot.
Great you would think, grab that IP for a song and get going. The problem is that, while the the IP is an asset of the bankrupt company and therefore saleable, their is no one to buy it from! With no corporate officers left and no truste of the bankruptcy who do you buy it from? No one is the answer so Fallout could not be released as an official followup.
This is the idea that I think the IDSA would really not like to have get around. Groups like this and the BSA bully people by making them think that they represent ALL copyright holders, which is not the case at all. A lot of software is in limbo, just like wasteland is.
Lucky underdog recognized this. They got their notice from IDSA and said, tell us which ones they are. The IDSA never replied, why? because the amount of games they actually reprsent in the abandonware genre are next to none.
The other factor in this enforcement is that groups like the BSA and IDSA charge for membership, which is were they make their money. For every title protected they charge X dollar amount. A company that has stopped selling a game is not going to continue to incur costs by maintaining a watchdog over it that drains money every year. So they remove that coverage, removing IDSA's right to enforce the copywrite, becuase IDSA does not hold any of the actual copywrites and can only act as an agent when given permission.
This is the lie of both the BSA and IDSA, they are paper tigers when it comes to abandonware, they have no enforcement rights in 99% of the cases. If they did most of the abondonware scene would have been stomped out years ago.
1. If you re-read you will notice that I was referring to cox.net at the point I mentioned two hour holds, not verizon.
2. If verizon wireless is so great, as you claim, why is the rest of this forum section filled with people agreeing to the sloppy customer service and down times, including the article that leads it off.
3. National tests may show that you are the best in the US, which makes you cream del la crud. US wireless is some of the worst in the world. For the amount of coverage garaunteed the customer the amount of dead spots and cut offs is ridiculous. try traveling to japan or europe. You can travel around bucharest all day by car and never ever lose signal. I lose singal twice just driving ten miles to work in my major city.
"I'm sure it will work just as well as Verizon's cell service does now."
Why is it that companies insist on rolling out new "services" when they never got their old services working correctly. Cox.net is doing this now by telling us all that we are going to go really fast real soon, ignorring the fact that most people can barely get online and hold times for customer service are almost 2 hours.
The reason is pure greed. To make their existing products work they would have to spend money on infrastructure and upgrades. A new service is mostly marketting and great launch parties. New serices make a CEO look good to the stock holder while hiding the fact that their network is held together by Duct tape and sneaker nets. I say boycott this crap, I have told a cox rep at my work to his face that I did not feel good about installing a T3 from them because my home service was so bogged down, telling me their network sucks.
It's time we let corporations know that we want the old stuff to work correctly before we will buy their new crap. Send a message that poor service and flawed products are not the way to win us over.
One of the reasons that many players of games have frowned on these practices in the past is that most of the time people with the cash to throw around like this are a$$Holes. Nothing makes a player madder than to have his carefully crafted player, who he has lovingly worked on for months, trashed because some 14 year old has a larger allowance than the gamers paycheck and bought a powerfull character just to kill other characters.
These kind of personalities have kept out of games like this traditionally because they did not have the personality and patience to develop a character of sufficient power to be a threat to other players. With this system it just comes down to a matter of cash, and those type of people alwasy seem to have cash.
My prediction is that this game will fail not based on game play but on the fact that most players will give up on it quickly as they become frustrated by the less socially adapted version of script kiddies that are let loose on them. While high cash players will make the game look good, it will still take 100,000 paying monthly customers. If a small percentage drive the rest off because of the type of people they are, and because they are to powerfull to be ignored, then the whole system will collapse.
I aplaud the Chinesse on this. They told a corporation that was bad mouthing them to go fly a kite. The whole reason that China is known as a haven of piracy is work done by Microsoft and it's goons at the BSA. The fact that China had some piracy, mainly due to the fact that it could not legally import much of the software, was touted several years ago as a reason that they should not be allowed into the world market. The company leading this charge? Microsoft.
Microsoft figured they would leverage their way in by calling them pirates and then simply saying you can become legal by pay as a large license fee for all of the stuff you are using. The Chinesse understood what this was. Microsoft wanted a bribe to allow China into the world markets. China told them to go f**k themselves, and rightly so.
Hopefully this will make Microsoft look twice now at how their fanning the flames of piracy histeria hurts them more than it helps them. Missing out on a multi-billion dollar market tends to do that to a company.
Slashdot Mirror
I am glad to see all the people who have taken the time to save and scrimp to buy a house and a modest car. At the time you came up with that plan I cam up with a different one.
I sat down and asked myself "If everything went to sh$t over night what would be the one thing I was invested in that would save my ass." watching the nightly news that night I had my answer.
Guns, lots of guns and ammo, Their are two things that retain wealth. Gold and guns, and guns luckly can help you acquire even more wealth. So as you sit in your warm cozy homes being proud of yourselves for investing wisely to make a better safe haven for yourselves as the world spirals into the next dark age remember this. We are out in the dark watching you, and we are much better armed than you dare dream.
AK-47: $600
1000 round of ammo: $200
Never having to worry about an economic downturn again: Priceless
"... For everything else their is armed insurection..."
Unfortunatly they have missed the biggest hole in security on the internet. The average user and the default install.
It's all well and good to say that we now have a standard. The problem is that the people who are most likely to use this tool are the ones that don't need it as bad. If you are aware this tool exists then you are security minded enough to have closed all the holes yourself.
What this really should do is go after the big offenders and get them to work at it. I am not necesarily talking Microsoft here. I am talking about the builders. Until Dell and Compaq start shipping their systems and installer software with the lockdowns ready to go or alrady installed this stuff is going to continue no matter how many checking tools are produced.
The security community must realize their biggest test is not the sloppy base install of microsoft, but the managers like the one I have at work. His official policy is "If it ain't broke don't fix it." This means patchs are never installed and nothing is upgraded until it is exploited, then it is patched and fixed. Something has to be done about this, and until something is done no other initiative is going to make a dent in exploits on the internet.
That's all well and good until our managers start making us catalogue were we spent our time , at all times, by the tick....
I was hurt by how cheezy the plot holes in the movie where.
We have an orginization that is in control of the worlds aliens and does all check ins yet has no backup plan for a rogue alien in the terminal?
After agent K get's deneralized, and I mean as he gets out of the chair, he is talking about how he can't remember what they are looking for becuase he neralized himself to make him forget where he put it or what it was. Um what about the deneralizer you just used to get your memory back?
I am not one to bitch about a movie using suspension of disbelief to get a point across. As I have told people before I am paying $8 to see fantasy, if I wanted to see real life I would go stand on the street corner for two hours. Their is a limit of course and I feel that this movie did not do enough to try and cover for that. Something as simple as having his memory coming back over years durring the course of the movie would have worked. With him hitting the relevant information at the right moment. Could have had some great jokes embedded in it, like having him bitch that agent X neuralized him after cheating at poker for example. The lack of thinking in the writing gives the movie the feel that it is a quick cash in for a buck and that is it.
Most contractors are idiots, I am glad to see this book agrees. Remember when dealing with most "profesionals" that they usually have side deals going. While they are working for you this time, they alwasy work with their people. Their prime interests are not yours. That is why they will steer you towards certain yards and certain sub contractors. Not becuase they are the best or the cheapest but because they get a kick back.
A peice of advice not mentioned, from personal experience. While the contractor and the sub-contractors may be who you deal with they are not the ones doing the work. The work crews are the ones that are acutally attaching things to other things. A $60 investment in pizza or beer dropped by the site one day will pay of huge in the long run. If the crews personally like you then they will take more care in constructing your house and be friendlier to change requests. I have seen crews who had been taken care off take all the bad material out of the construction piles (warped or knotty studs i.e.) and place them to be moved to another site for use simply because the homeowner thought enough of them to bring them coffee in the morning. They put the good materials in this guys house and the crap went to everyone else.
they thought about the sound aspect but dammnit people want to see the video also.For someone that was concerned about using up to much bandwidth they could have made a format for download so that we could see it offline. I guess that would have taken planning and forsight. Sigh... guess I will sit here and see if it ever loads. 3 minutes to slashdot effect and counting...
Hey here is a thought, I got ten bucks that says we never see this on total request live...
First I want to say that any lengthy insert would be a disaster. I think their is no argument at all on that subject.
I can , however, see where a small insert would be helpfull to the story line. Something like a shot of jar jar watching luke meet obiwan and saying "the circle starts again" or something similar IANASW( I am not a script writer). A small item to help tie the first three with the next three. With the way that these movies were filmed, in reverse order, Something like this may be necesary to make them feel as a whole series again.
The other possibility is that he needs to add elements to tie the last three to the middle three. For an example having queen amadala show in return to say that she was never gone but hiding out and once the emporer is defeated we need to go do this. He may have excluded these parts in the original filming becuase it would have created a cliff hanger in the movie that would not be resolved for 30 to 40 years. Now he can add it and start the work, striving for a completed nine movies over three sets of three.
The point is a little dash of extra may not be so bad, have to see it to judge. Let's just hope this is not done as some marketting stunt to get us all buy the movies AGAIN.
Well he is making pretty good process.
Frankly if this was me I would still be in the "picking out the liquer to make this seem like a good idea" stage of the development. Not liquer for the conceptual and building part, that would be fun, but for the get into it and ride it part.
Well I guess Office max and Office Depot are now fubard. Overnight they have become distributers of devices used to circumvent copy protection. I hope the RIAA goes easy on them....
Looks like microsoft may have gotten into a fight with someone a little more cagy than themselves and I am laughing my butt off. Sony is an old hand at dealing with psuedo monopolies and the latest fads. Microsoft is a talented amature at this but it looks like age and cunning are about to teach youth and exuberance a lesson.
CEO of Nintendo " Sonny we were getting sued for anti-competitive behavior while you were still trying to secure your first round of VC funding. Don't try to teach this old hound how to hunt."
Bill Gates " whimper"
The rumor says that his latest round of convention apperances was to raise money for his daughter, but then does not say why. What is the problem? Maybe we can all band together to help her out as our way of saying thanks for a job well done to him after he has passed.
Claiming that they are not getting the same value for their tuition dollars.
This guy , due only to the fact that he has put up a website, is getting a free crash course in internet domain disputes and copywrite law. If the opinions in the article are correct, then he is also getting an easy one tossed across the plate so that he can win. The school is basically handing him free on hands training in how a real case works coupled with a high profile case he can win before he graduates. This means he is getting more value from his time at LSU. If I was a student at LSU I would be demanding that the school sue me also!
From the article "We're still looking for the cheapest way to answer the stupidest questions," he said. "If you go out of the script, they have no idea how to react."
This quote exemplifies the real problem that tech support faces. People computting beyond their means. I used to work tech support for an ISP. Our install software was good, Our POPs were fairly stable. Yet we still had a large call volume. The problem was the LUSERs that kept calling, and calling, and calling. Some of these people had call history logs that contained thirty to forty entrys, none of them due to anything we had done. I literally spent 15 minutes one night trying to get a woman to type her password in the same way twice.
Why this is important, These people cost money. Every minute they are on the phone money leaving the company. We had a 800 number and of course I was getting payed. We figured it out one night that if a customer was on the phone with use for 10 minutes that wiped out our profit on them for the month. With aditional months getting wiped out ever 11 minutes. Some of these customers had call logs that indicated 15 to 20 HOURS of time on the phones with us. They had wiped out their profits for the next ten years and the profits of thrity of forty other poeple also.
What tech companies have woken up to is the fact that these people make up, at worst 10% of your customer base, yet they burn up 50 to 60% of the profits a company makes.
In a defensive measure companies are trying to ditch them. Unfotunatly people with a real issue of need are ditched with them also. This is a sad state of affairs, yes, but then the level of support required to maintain this level of helpfullness is destructive to the company.
No other industry in america is expected to provide this level of support. Not car manufactures, VCR manfacturers, nobody. They are expected to replace defective product, which everyone should do, but GM does not have to have a help line to explain to idiot customers that the reason their car stopped after 300 miles is that they did not put any more gas in it.
The level of support we see now is due to the tech companies brutally shedding this dead weight. It's harsh, and unforgiving, but it needs to be done. The tech recovery cannot begin while we struggle with all the dead weight we must carry
As a further note, if you think these comments harsh go work a hell desk position. You will develope an abiding hate for human kind quickly. I am still puzzled myself on how most people managed to have ancestors smart enough to evolve to come down from the trees, let alone learn to walk upright.
I think this guys real motive is to keep his girlfriend in the english department employed. You thought It was bad enough to learn all the proper tenses for sentence writing now. Wait until we have to start adding stuff like the future present past tense to the language.
Try this on for size "In a little while I have completed what I did yesterday". or how about "Finished with what I am about to start."
Because of this I urge that we re-kill him now before he starts what he finished. As many of us had dreamed, when we will become grade school children, about killing Newton or Gauss before they invent their mathmatical formulas before/after they are inflicted on us we should move against him now. Someone get the pitchforks, torches, and angry villagers, I saw a labratory to have been stormed.
A very good point but I maintain that it did wreck the state. He did "prosecute" that many, exactly the way that you described. In the process though he lobotimized the country for decades to come. I am no historian, but I would bet even money that the eventual collapse of communism in russia could be directly linked back to those events.
I do apologize for that, I was trying to bang this comment out while my daughter was standing behind me begging to go to grandma's house. I did not have as much time as I would have liked for proof reading.
This will never work and has been tried before with other illegal activities (drugs spring to mind).
Here is were the problem lies. If you don't bust a good majority of the people on each iteration of the illegal activity then people are not scared. To be effective you need to get about 10% each time the crime is committed. Otherwise the chances of geting busted are to low for someone to worry about. it falls into the range of " Won't happen to me".
This means that if you download a movie ten times the chances of getting busted should be aproaching certany. Anything less and you are wasting time with this method.
This would not be hard to do if they were serious. You can grab casual users by the bushel basket all day long on Efnet or Dalnet. You could easily make a morpheus/Kazaa clone to track with. Lot's of trojan horse schemes to throw out there to grab users by the hundreds daily.
Then you hit the real problem. With millions of people everyday participating in this activity you are suddenly faced with prosecuting hundreds of thousands of cases to the full extent of the law. We are talking billions of dollars in legal costs, most likely aproaching the trillons quickly.
The hurdle comes from the fact that these are not poor intercity youth here who will get a public defender and plead guilty for the reduced charge. These are people of means, that is why they have an internet connection and a working computer, that is why they are sitting on a high speed connection at a university. If they themselves cannot afford a lawyer then you can damn bet their parents can. A lawyer who get's payed by the hour and is going to drag out this case for as long as they can. This means more work and more court time and more goverment costs. Meanwhile the citizens of the state/country are having a fit as their taxs rise and their infrastructure falls apart because all funds are being directed at internet piracy. Most people will agree that they would rather have a murder caught and prosecuted than have a pirate prosecuted. With such an overloaded court system the murders would be walking free because the prosecuters cannot handle the load.
This is the idea of Civil Disobediance put into words by Henry David Thoreau and so well put into action by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. If you swamp the system with so many targets then the system will fail. You can arrest hundreds or thousands, but you cannot arrest tens of thousands and millions of people for performing a harmless action. It will bring your state to a grinding halt.
Add to this the fact that every case is a potential reversal of the case law you find favorable. All it takes is one lucky or good lawyer to get this to an appels court, or the supreme court and all of a sudden your favoriable DMCA is being modified by the courts in ways that you cannot control with campaign contributions. Imagine an apeals court rulling that the DMCA means that the movie industry cannot decode disks to see if they are pirated once they are made and throwing all current cases out of court for lack of evidence. Stranger interpritations have been made and become law before. The politicians and the lobbiest would do a lot to keep this from happening, including making personal piracy legal.
The only course of action is to capitulate and modify your behavior so that the disobedience stops.
Piracy is consumer Disobedience on a grand scale. If your prices are gouging, your rates outragous then the consumer wil go elsewhere. This is the basis for Capitalism, just and unforseen side effect of that system. That if the alternative is Illegal the consumers wil become outlaws.
You sir have a very good mind. The point about the Odometer is right on. I agree with you, that this is simply a plan to monitor all movement of peoples around the areas. Next step I bet will be nationally issued train cards so that if you use public transportation you must use your personal card to do so, and probably track your entrance and exit from the station. Sort of like the NJ turnpike were you pay to exit not get on. Cars would be charged with credits and they would be removed when you get off, but the real value would be in tracking even more travel habits of people.
One of the issues that this article avoided is the issue of lost copyrights. This occures when a copyright is held by... No one. The copyright exists but the legal fiction called a corporation no longer exists to enforce it.
One of the best examples I have read of this is Wasteland. An Awesome RPG from the 80's. I wasted weeks on it using my apple IIC. I alwasy wondered what happened to it, why their was no sequel to it as it was much loved.
Then Fallout came out. A game that, not only played and felt a lot like Wasteland, but contained direct references to it. This was clearly stated to not be a sequal to Wasteleand, which confussed me as they were so close.
Getting Curious I followed up on this and read up on Fallout. enlightment came in an interview with the developer and producer of the game. Seems that they wanted to make a wasteland sequal and had gone looking to buy the rights to do so. They followed the trail from the original developer, who had gone out of bussiness to an IP holding company that had bought all of the developers IP when it went under. This company in turn had crashed and all their IP had been picked up by another company who had then immediatly gone bankrupt also. The IP was never moved from their, so this resource sat and died on the spot.
Great you would think, grab that IP for a song and get going. The problem is that, while the the IP is an asset of the bankrupt company and therefore saleable, their is no one to buy it from! With no corporate officers left and no truste of the bankruptcy who do you buy it from? No one is the answer so Fallout could not be released as an official followup.
This is the idea that I think the IDSA would really not like to have get around. Groups like this and the BSA bully people by making them think that they represent ALL copyright holders, which is not the case at all. A lot of software is in limbo, just like wasteland is.
Lucky underdog recognized this. They got their notice from IDSA and said, tell us which ones they are. The IDSA never replied, why? because the amount of games they actually reprsent in the abandonware genre are next to none.
The other factor in this enforcement is that groups like the BSA and IDSA charge for membership, which is were they make their money. For every title protected they charge X dollar amount. A company that has stopped selling a game is not going to continue to incur costs by maintaining a watchdog over it that drains money every year. So they remove that coverage, removing IDSA's right to enforce the copywrite, becuase IDSA does not hold any of the actual copywrites and can only act as an agent when given permission.
This is the lie of both the BSA and IDSA, they are paper tigers when it comes to abandonware, they have no enforcement rights in 99% of the cases. If they did most of the abondonware scene would have been stomped out years ago.
Couple of rebuttal points.
1. If you re-read you will notice that I was referring to cox.net at the point I mentioned two hour holds, not verizon.
2. If verizon wireless is so great, as you claim, why is the rest of this forum section filled with people agreeing to the sloppy customer service and down times, including the article that leads it off.
3. National tests may show that you are the best in the US, which makes you cream del la crud. US wireless is some of the worst in the world. For the amount of coverage garaunteed the customer the amount of dead spots and cut offs is ridiculous. try traveling to japan or europe. You can travel around bucharest all day by car and never ever lose signal. I lose singal twice just driving ten miles to work in my major city.
"Not worth stealing. Two cds better used to rip John Tesh MP3s and archiving them for eternity"
---Internet piracy council
"I'm sure it will work just as well as Verizon's cell service does now."
Why is it that companies insist on rolling out new "services" when they never got their old services working correctly. Cox.net is doing this now by telling us all that we are going to go really fast real soon, ignorring the fact that most people can barely get online and hold times for customer service are almost 2 hours.
The reason is pure greed. To make their existing products work they would have to spend money on infrastructure and upgrades. A new service is mostly marketting and great launch parties. New serices make a CEO look good to the stock holder while hiding the fact that their network is held together by Duct tape and sneaker nets. I say boycott this crap, I have told a cox rep at my work to his face that I did not feel good about installing a T3 from them because my home service was so bogged down, telling me their network sucks.
It's time we let corporations know that we want the old stuff to work correctly before we will buy their new crap. Send a message that poor service and flawed products are not the way to win us over.
One of the reasons that many players of games have frowned on these practices in the past is that most of the time people with the cash to throw around like this are a$$Holes. Nothing makes a player madder than to have his carefully crafted player, who he has lovingly worked on for months, trashed because some 14 year old has a larger allowance than the gamers paycheck and bought a powerfull character just to kill other characters.
These kind of personalities have kept out of games like this traditionally because they did not have the personality and patience to develop a character of sufficient power to be a threat to other players. With this system it just comes down to a matter of cash, and those type of people alwasy seem to have cash.
My prediction is that this game will fail not based on game play but on the fact that most players will give up on it quickly as they become frustrated by the less socially adapted version of script kiddies that are let loose on them. While high cash players will make the game look good, it will still take 100,000 paying monthly customers. If a small percentage drive the rest off because of the type of people they are, and because they are to powerfull to be ignored, then the whole system will collapse.
Got to wonder how long until this ingredient makes it to Iron Chef....
I aplaud the Chinesse on this. They told a corporation that was bad mouthing them to go fly a kite. The whole reason that China is known as a haven of piracy is work done by Microsoft and it's goons at the BSA. The fact that China had some piracy, mainly due to the fact that it could not legally import much of the software, was touted several years ago as a reason that they should not be allowed into the world market. The company leading this charge? Microsoft.
Microsoft figured they would leverage their way in by calling them pirates and then simply saying you can become legal by pay as a large license fee for all of the stuff you are using. The Chinesse understood what this was. Microsoft wanted a bribe to allow China into the world markets. China told them to go f**k themselves, and rightly so.
Hopefully this will make Microsoft look twice now at how their fanning the flames of piracy histeria hurts them more than it helps them. Missing out on a multi-billion dollar market tends to do that to a company.