They're attacking people who pirate their property. It's no different than game companies that have been fighting pirates for decades.
If they were actually going after every joe dick and mary who bought one of their products regardless of pirating it or not, then you might have a valid argument about attacking their customers.
Buying a CD and pirating it doesn't exempt you from the law simply by whining you're a "customer." You're also a pirate and that's why they're comming after you. It has nothing to do with you being a customer.
I refuse to defend the actions of those who pirate for any reason. There is no legal, ethical, or moral reason why piracy should be legal.
They broke the law and now they're facing the penalty of those laws.
That post of yours is a huge disgrace to the original author who spoke of people who were slaughtered simply because they believed in a different God than someone else.
The NKJV and NIV are nice (I prefer the KJV for the fluidness of old english) but the Gutenberg has the historical value.
Ester in the OT was the first to take the holy scriptures and put them on paper so that everyone could read them. Nothing was hidden. Everyone knew what the priests did. Everyone knew the temple. Everyone knew the ceremonies. There were no secrets. Nothing ever was really hidden from the people. But the fact it was now openly in writting instead of just oral tradition was an enormously big deal.
Then the Catholic church came and decided to take the scriptures away from the people and to try to hide the ceremonies and teachings forcing people to just trust the words of the priests. And even today they try to hide the actions of their priests.
Luther came along and destroyed their control by doing what Ester had done long before. He gave the Bible back to the people so THEY could determine what was the truth and what wasn't without having to rely on a priest.
"Finally, the Gutenberg Bible does not have an easily accessible concordance. There is a lot of cross referencing that needs to be done to truly understand the teachings of the Bible"
The Bible, like all things takes time to understand. You can rely on others to teach you or teach yourself. Or both as many do. But the idea is that you can read along with the teacher to make sure they're not putting words in God's mouth.
The Gutenburg Bible isn't so much valuable as just a Bible. There are many many Bibles that all say the same thing. It's valuable because of what it represents. A man without study guides and without a concordance who made it his duty to learn what it taught and who made sure anyone and everyone would be able to have that same opportunity. It represents a religion that was no longer based on secrets. And even more secularly it represents the struggle to make information freely available to all.
They're very expensive but Gutenburg Bibles translated to English (with Luther's original notes I believe) have been available for years. So if you want one to study with they're there.
DirectX 9 was the first to allow the use of all the latest fancy pants shader stuff of the bleeding edge graphics cards.
I believe OpenGL can do those things to an extent but at least until OpenGL 2.0 comes out, DirectX will be the top graphics API.
What really blew me away though about HL2 was the physics and wickedly creative game play like shoot the rope and the huge thingie swings down and kills everything in it's path. And those rediculously tall creatures. Things which really have nothing to do with the graphics themselves. It's phsyics and creative character design.
DooM3 relied on more corridors and darkness. HL2 brought the monsters out into the light which is so much less cliche it's actually "scarier." Plus you actually get to see the full magnitude of what it is you're shooting at.
Walking down a brightly lit street and a huge monster jumping out at you will make me jump higher than one jumping out of the shadows where they have been hiding for years.
HL2 is definitly getting my money as will ATI or nVIDIA. DooM3 I'm skeptical about.
Because somebody didn't pay to see the movie or because the movies they were in sucked or because the studio refused to give them their paycheck (*cough*Stan Lee*cough*)?
The $40 I would imagine isn't so much intended to be a fee (it's really not much at all) but as a way to deter people who would otherwise submit any crap (or just unpolished material) they can come up with.
HP had to lose the 1-800 number because so many people were calling about inane things and preventing the techs from helping people with actual problems.
By charging a relativly small fee they cut off the bottom of the bucket (like people who sing songs about Laci Peterson) and encourage better bands not to rush their album into release.
Set up a dictionary of words and phrases that will get you banned after a certain frequency of usage.
Another potential solution is to allow players to rate other players. Slashdot type moderation but with more adjectives. "Lamer," "AOL User," "asshole," etc.
For the ambitious you could also set up an automated system of stats that is affected by your words and actions. Everytime you attack something you get a point for agressivness. Everytime you use strong language you get a point for foul mouthed. Everytime you log on from an AOL based IP you get a "loser" point. Etc. Points could then decrease over time and if you manage to go over a certain threshold you get banned or warned or whatever. The "leet" speakage could be worked into that system. Everytime you use a word like "1337" you get a "lamer" point. To many lamer points and you're gone.
Such a system wouldn't be too difficult to implement. In fact, I've got a couple weeks to kill, I'm going to play with it in my on-line project.
GameDev.net uses a couple 600Mhz (give or take a hundred mhz) Celerons to serve up it's forums. You may want to consider more ram and/or checking your code for bloat. RAM is cheap and it takes a bit of physical ram for every connection which may be part of the cause of the connection errors.
I had a P200 with 96MB of ram running Win2K with Apache that pulled off 1 million page views in a month. Static pages. If you're looking to run a serious site (and by your alexa rating I'd say you're doing relativly well) it's worth the $500 or less needed to put together a more modern system. Then use the Celeron as a file server for additional web-space or whatever.
I'm now running on a 1.0Ghz Duron with 512MB of ram on a 256Kbit DSL line and even when I'm getting slammed the server is doing fine. There has only been a couple occasions where I couldn't get to the site behind the NAT. I just waited a bit and it was fine.
I'll be up to a 1Mbit line both ways late next week and I'm not expecting any problems with the system being overloaded.
You can't legally aquire an illegally gained item to replace a legally owned item you lost or broke.
How do you know the guy you're downloading from actually owns a legal copy?
Copy your CDs, movies, whatever the first time you use them. That way you can enjoy them while backing them up. Then store them on CD-R, DVD+-R, a HD, or whatever.
Then if you ever lose or break the original copy, pull out your backup and make a replacment. Doing so for your own personal use is perfectly legal.
If you can write an e-mail you can print it up and snail mail it. People who are computer illiterate can still send snail mail.
The President doesn't have time to talk to millions of people. That's why we have a representative government.
"even those with limited technical, communication, and cognitive abilities could perform."
That's why we have lawyers called "Senators" and "Representatives." People who aren't able to communicate their desires effectivly go to people who can.
Little Johnny writes the senator stating he wants a pony. The senator takes the time to consider it and gets the town a petting zoo with a pony for the kids to ride. The president would be way too busy and just say "that's nice." But if he got a proposal for a petting zoo he'd actually have something to consider.
Not that the president would consider such localized issues but it conveys the general idea of the point.
In the hierarchy of power things get escelated until they get handled. The congressman handled your wife's issue so it didn't need to go any higher.
You wouldn't have gotten a letter from Clinton either. It's not like the congressman brought the letter to Bush and Bush told him to write you back himself.
If they were forced to read EVERYTHING they probably got a lot of it from angry individuals and spam bots. I bet they weren't even legally allowed to try to block spam.
Now you have to spend a little more time thinking about what you're writing. The form stops some of the spam and thoughtless junk and the "we don't have to read everything" gives them access to a delete button so they don't have to read about how they can make their breasts bigger 100 times a day.
Can it be abused? Yes. Will it? Probably. So instead of using their web-form, type up your e-mail in a word processor, print it out and mail it. People who really want to be heard often do letter writting campaigns. I can just imagine how many people flooded the presidents e-mail address in an attempt to get noticed. Read it once you might forget. Read it a thousand times and you never will.
We constantly are looking for ways to reduce the amount of crap that comes in our own e-mailboxes. It's not surprising the US Government finally had enough of it.
You don't have to have a lawyer. If you think you know the law as well as or better than a lawyer, you can opt to represent yourself.
"Why person can't simply go to computer and state what he/she wants application to do."
I don't hire a programmer everytime I want to do something with my computer. I've learned to be a capable programmer myself.
Another good reason to get a lawyer and not represent yourself is that's not just about knowing the law. You also have to be able to present yourself. It's very difficult for a client to remove themselves from their emotions which will hurt them. Lawyers on the other hand have no emotions.
There are plenty of legal resources for sampling the latest music. Including many of the stores who sell it.
File sharing has become socially acceptible piracy and it's not surprising companies are attempting to curb it with drastic measures.
Drastic measures are obviously necessary. People aren't taking the hint. Software companies were the first to have to deal with this and now the music and movie industry.
Whinning that the punishment for the crime is too harsh and then threatening to commit a crime with a lesser punishment is just a sample of the stupidity prevelant in society these days.
Here's a crazy idea: don't break the law. If you don't like the fact it's against the law to pirate/steal things you don't own, move to the moon.
I've always considered "he" gender neutral unless otherwise specified by the context. I've always considered "she" to be gender specific. I would use it when I'm talking to or about a specific female.
If the "politically correct" camp wants to make "she" gender neutral as well, I don't care.
Just one more pointless battle for the modern age.
If someone wants to get worked up because I used the word "his" instead of contorting the sentence to allow for "their" that's their problem.
Every kid and their little sister is writting games these days and the big companies certainly aren't sweating it.
I think the OP was being drastic about "script kiddies" but I often find myself looking for Open Source solutions to replace expensive alternatives.
I think the point he was trying to make was that:
We complain about the lack of jobs available and then go on and on about how great FREE software is. Hypothetical situation Linux takes the desktop by storm, Windows goes down the tubes. Thousands of workers are out of jobs at Microsoft. Not only did thousands of job positions disappear but now you have thousands of people looking for new jobs.
1000+ more people out of work 1000+ less job positions to be filled.
Open Source replaces paid jobs that are covered by the profits created by the product with jobs that need some other way to cover the bills.
Here's the trade-off: Closed source = few developers but cost of production is distributed over many customers Open source = many developers but cost of production is distributed over a few wealthy friends
There's plenty of free software floating around but there's not much free money.
If the Open Source model isn't supporting your costs, then you need to start charging the customers. Companies tend to make investments, not give grants. And both are very difficult to get.
Open Source software needs to plan in advance for the possibility that they will need to charge for their product to cover costs. Going out whinning that nobody donated isn't going to fix things.
I liked having a totally free huge web-site that many many people utilized but there was no way I was promising it would stay that way. And of course it didn't. Free is nice but free don't pay the bills.
Project needs money? Charge for the download. Problem solved. If someone else wants to host it and not charge the fee, great. The idea of the charge is to cover bandwidth. If it's not costing you bandwidth then you don't need to get a return on it.
If the problem is more than the cost of bandwidth then you need to find a job that pays real money and work on the project that doesn't pay you on the side.
Slashdot Mirror
They're attacking people who pirate their property. It's no different than game companies that have been fighting pirates for decades.
If they were actually going after every joe dick and mary who bought one of their products regardless of pirating it or not, then you might have a valid argument about attacking their customers.
Buying a CD and pirating it doesn't exempt you from the law simply by whining you're a "customer." You're also a pirate and that's why they're comming after you. It has nothing to do with you being a customer.
Ben
Formatting your harddrive isn't going to make the charges go away and you could face additional charges.
Perjury is also not a good idea. You better be a damn good liar before you pull a stunt like that.
Format your harddrive BEFORE they collect evidence against you from it and stop downloading pirated material.
Ben
No one has a legal leg to stand on.
Many don't have an ethical leg to stand on.
And many don't have a moral leg to stand on.
I refuse to defend the actions of those who pirate for any reason. There is no legal, ethical, or moral reason why piracy should be legal.
They broke the law and now they're facing the penalty of those laws.
That post of yours is a huge disgrace to the original author who spoke of people who were slaughtered simply because they believed in a different God than someone else.
It's disgusting.
Ben
The NKJV and NIV are nice (I prefer the KJV for the fluidness of old english) but the Gutenberg has the historical value.
Ester in the OT was the first to take the holy scriptures and put them on paper so that everyone could read them. Nothing was hidden. Everyone knew what the priests did. Everyone knew the temple. Everyone knew the ceremonies. There were no secrets. Nothing ever was really hidden from the people. But the fact it was now openly in writting instead of just oral tradition was an enormously big deal.
Then the Catholic church came and decided to take the scriptures away from the people and to try to hide the ceremonies and teachings forcing people to just trust the words of the priests. And even today they try to hide the actions of their priests.
Luther came along and destroyed their control by doing what Ester had done long before. He gave the Bible back to the people so THEY could determine what was the truth and what wasn't without having to rely on a priest.
"Finally, the Gutenberg Bible does not have an easily accessible concordance. There is a lot of cross referencing that needs to be done to truly understand the teachings of the Bible"
The Bible, like all things takes time to understand. You can rely on others to teach you or teach yourself. Or both as many do. But the idea is that you can read along with the teacher to make sure they're not putting words in God's mouth.
The Gutenburg Bible isn't so much valuable as just a Bible. There are many many Bibles that all say the same thing. It's valuable because of what it represents. A man without study guides and without a concordance who made it his duty to learn what it taught and who made sure anyone and everyone would be able to have that same opportunity. It represents a religion that was no longer based on secrets. And even more secularly it represents the struggle to make information freely available to all.
They're very expensive but Gutenburg Bibles translated to English (with Luther's original notes I believe) have been available for years. So if you want one to study with they're there.
Ben
I need to get cracking on some letters and a resume...
Ben
...or
...or
Backing up LEGAL movies and music
Once again, the corporate market.
Also, if they can be produced cheaper, they'll be used in mail order systems. It's not aways about having the space.
Ben
a) she has a physical copy
b) she legally obtained the physical copy
c) she doesn't retain a copy of the one she gave you
If you don't return it, they either need to hunt you down or use another legally obtained copy.
Is it really that hard to tell the difference?
Ben
DirectX 9 was the first to allow the use of all the latest fancy pants shader stuff of the bleeding edge graphics cards.
I believe OpenGL can do those things to an extent but at least until OpenGL 2.0 comes out, DirectX will be the top graphics API.
What really blew me away though about HL2 was the physics and wickedly creative game play like shoot the rope and the huge thingie swings down and kills everything in it's path. And those rediculously tall creatures. Things which really have nothing to do with the graphics themselves. It's phsyics and creative character design.
DooM3 relied on more corridors and darkness. HL2 brought the monsters out into the light which is so much less cliche it's actually "scarier." Plus you actually get to see the full magnitude of what it is you're shooting at.
Walking down a brightly lit street and a huge monster jumping out at you will make me jump higher than one jumping out of the shadows where they have been hiding for years.
HL2 is definitly getting my money as will ATI or nVIDIA. DooM3 I'm skeptical about.
Ben
Because somebody didn't pay to see the movie or because the movies they were in sucked or because the studio refused to give them their paycheck (*cough*Stan Lee*cough*)?
Ben
The $40 I would imagine isn't so much intended to be a fee (it's really not much at all) but as a way to deter people who would otherwise submit any crap (or just unpolished material) they can come up with.
HP had to lose the 1-800 number because so many people were calling about inane things and preventing the techs from helping people with actual problems.
By charging a relativly small fee they cut off the bottom of the bucket (like people who sing songs about Laci Peterson) and encourage better bands not to rush their album into release.
Ben
..is a nice Linksys router.
Open only the ports you need and make sure the software running on them is secure.
Ben
Set up a dictionary of words and phrases that will get you banned after a certain frequency of usage.
Another potential solution is to allow players to rate other players. Slashdot type moderation but with more adjectives. "Lamer," "AOL User," "asshole," etc.
For the ambitious you could also set up an automated system of stats that is affected by your words and actions. Everytime you attack something you get a point for agressivness. Everytime you use strong language you get a point for foul mouthed. Everytime you log on from an AOL based IP you get a "loser" point. Etc. Points could then decrease over time and if you manage to go over a certain threshold you get banned or warned or whatever. The "leet" speakage could be worked into that system. Everytime you use a word like "1337" you get a "lamer" point. To many lamer points and you're gone.
Such a system wouldn't be too difficult to implement. In fact, I've got a couple weeks to kill, I'm going to play with it in my on-line project.
Ben
"You just key in the bank name and account number to transfer to, insert the cash, and it's on its way"
What are the implications of putting your bank account number on a web-site as a means to collect payments?
In other words, what information is critical for getting money OUT of an account vs INTO an account?
Ben
GameDev.net uses a couple 600Mhz (give or take a hundred mhz) Celerons to serve up it's forums. You may want to consider more ram and/or checking your code for bloat. RAM is cheap and it takes a bit of physical ram for every connection which may be part of the cause of the connection errors.
I had a P200 with 96MB of ram running Win2K with Apache that pulled off 1 million page views in a month. Static pages. If you're looking to run a serious site (and by your alexa rating I'd say you're doing relativly well) it's worth the $500 or less needed to put together a more modern system. Then use the Celeron as a file server for additional web-space or whatever.
I'm now running on a 1.0Ghz Duron with 512MB of ram on a 256Kbit DSL line and even when I'm getting slammed the server is doing fine. There has only been a couple occasions where I couldn't get to the site behind the NAT. I just waited a bit and it was fine.
I'll be up to a 1Mbit line both ways late next week and I'm not expecting any problems with the system being overloaded.
Ben
http://www.recycledrussianbrides.com: Because love deserves a second chance
Apparently you've never been around a tourist with a video/film camera.
If I see a stupid tourist trick in public and get it on tape it will be on the internet as soon as I get a chance to digitize it.
Ben
You can't legally aquire an illegally gained item to replace a legally owned item you lost or broke.
How do you know the guy you're downloading from actually owns a legal copy?
Copy your CDs, movies, whatever the first time you use them. That way you can enjoy them while backing them up. Then store them on CD-R, DVD+-R, a HD, or whatever.
Then if you ever lose or break the original copy, pull out your backup and make a replacment. Doing so for your own personal use is perfectly legal.
Ben
If you can write an e-mail you can print it up and snail mail it. People who are computer illiterate can still send snail mail.
The President doesn't have time to talk to millions of people. That's why we have a representative government.
"even those with limited technical, communication, and cognitive abilities could perform."
That's why we have lawyers called "Senators" and "Representatives." People who aren't able to communicate their desires effectivly go to people who can.
Little Johnny writes the senator stating he wants a pony. The senator takes the time to consider it and gets the town a petting zoo with a pony for the kids to ride. The president would be way too busy and just say "that's nice." But if he got a proposal for a petting zoo he'd actually have something to consider.
Not that the president would consider such localized issues but it conveys the general idea of the point.
Ben
In the hierarchy of power things get escelated until they get handled. The congressman handled your wife's issue so it didn't need to go any higher.
You wouldn't have gotten a letter from Clinton either. It's not like the congressman brought the letter to Bush and Bush told him to write you back himself.
Ben
He was simply talking about spam.
If they were forced to read EVERYTHING they probably got a lot of it from angry individuals and spam bots. I bet they weren't even legally allowed to try to block spam.
Now you have to spend a little more time thinking about what you're writing. The form stops some of the spam and thoughtless junk and the "we don't have to read everything" gives them access to a delete button so they don't have to read about how they can make their breasts bigger 100 times a day.
Can it be abused? Yes. Will it? Probably. So instead of using their web-form, type up your e-mail in a word processor, print it out and mail it. People who really want to be heard often do letter writting campaigns. I can just imagine how many people flooded the presidents e-mail address in an attempt to get noticed. Read it once you might forget. Read it a thousand times and you never will.
We constantly are looking for ways to reduce the amount of crap that comes in our own e-mailboxes. It's not surprising the US Government finally had enough of it.
Ben
The RIAA is Satan.
Ben
You don't have to have a lawyer. If you think you know the law as well as or better than a lawyer, you can opt to represent yourself.
"Why person can't simply go to computer and state what he/she wants application to do."
I don't hire a programmer everytime I want to do something with my computer. I've learned to be a capable programmer myself.
Another good reason to get a lawyer and not represent yourself is that's not just about knowing the law. You also have to be able to present yourself. It's very difficult for a client to remove themselves from their emotions which will hurt them. Lawyers on the other hand have no emotions.
Ben
You could start paying for music.
There are plenty of legal resources for sampling the latest music. Including many of the stores who sell it.
File sharing has become socially acceptible piracy and it's not surprising companies are attempting to curb it with drastic measures.
Drastic measures are obviously necessary. People aren't taking the hint. Software companies were the first to have to deal with this and now the music and movie industry.
Whinning that the punishment for the crime is too harsh and then threatening to commit a crime with a lesser punishment is just a sample of the stupidity prevelant in society these days.
Here's a crazy idea: don't break the law. If you don't like the fact it's against the law to pirate/steal things you don't own, move to the moon.
Ben
Australia.
Ben
I've always considered "he" gender neutral unless otherwise specified by the context. I've always considered "she" to be gender specific. I would use it when I'm talking to or about a specific female.
If the "politically correct" camp wants to make "she" gender neutral as well, I don't care.
Just one more pointless battle for the modern age.
If someone wants to get worked up because I used the word "his" instead of contorting the sentence to allow for "their" that's their problem.
Ben
Every kid and their little sister is writting games these days and the big companies certainly aren't sweating it.
I think the OP was being drastic about "script kiddies" but I often find myself looking for Open Source solutions to replace expensive alternatives.
I think the point he was trying to make was that:
We complain about the lack of jobs available and then go on and on about how great FREE software is. Hypothetical situation Linux takes the desktop by storm, Windows goes down the tubes. Thousands of workers are out of jobs at Microsoft. Not only did thousands of job positions disappear but now you have thousands of people looking for new jobs.
1000+ more people out of work 1000+ less job positions to be filled.
Open Source replaces paid jobs that are covered by the profits created by the product with jobs that need some other way to cover the bills.
Here's the trade-off:
Closed source = few developers but cost of production is distributed over many customers
Open source = many developers but cost of production is distributed over a few wealthy friends
There's plenty of free software floating around but there's not much free money.
If the Open Source model isn't supporting your costs, then you need to start charging the customers. Companies tend to make investments, not give grants. And both are very difficult to get.
Open Source software needs to plan in advance for the possibility that they will need to charge for their product to cover costs. Going out whinning that nobody donated isn't going to fix things.
I liked having a totally free huge web-site that many many people utilized but there was no way I was promising it would stay that way. And of course it didn't. Free is nice but free don't pay the bills.
Project needs money? Charge for the download. Problem solved. If someone else wants to host it and not charge the fee, great. The idea of the charge is to cover bandwidth. If it's not costing you bandwidth then you don't need to get a return on it.
If the problem is more than the cost of bandwidth then you need to find a job that pays real money and work on the project that doesn't pay you on the side.
Ben