You just need to let people know that the reason they can't receive email from Grandma is that her "Internet Company" is doing things incorrectly.
Explain to your customers that her company is targetting child-pornography and other offensive/illegal spam at your users and it's impossible for you to tell the difference between these offensive emails and the legit ones. Then, for bonus marks, ask "Do you want us to set your account to receive all these kiddy-porn spams.... so that you can talk to Grandma?"
What we really should do is completely blackhole spam friendly ISPs, not just for email. If they couldn't reach half the webpages (and received a page explaining why when they tried) they'd leave these companies sooner.
It's unfortunate that people are caught in the middle, but you're voting with your dollars. If you choose to patronize a company that makes it harder for everyone else on the net to provide service, you shouldn't expect a free ride just because it's all so confusing and so much trouble to switch.
If I sold your car to someone, would you give it to them because it really wasn't their fault and they just wanted to drive and not be concerned with all this fiddly legality? I know some companies that have to hire extra techs to handle spam and virus-related DoSs, this isn't just a matter of hurting the users out of spite. Stopping spam is a matter of life and death for smaller companies.
This also ignores the large number of cases where Hilter or Nazis are on topic. Gun control, Eugenics, Politican shenanigans, Genocide, etc.
The corollary to Godwin's law is only relevant where a topic that isn't in any way related to Hitler, eventually gravitates that way, usually with a direct personal comparison.
To forbid all discussion of the Nazis is to lose an important part of our history.
And that, quite clearly, is why all Godwin trolls should be thrown in a concentration camp and sold organ-leggers when they are unable to work anymore.
Ahhh yes, the completely solid ground of "Let's hope that we don't get so much spam that the internet buckles and collapses under the strain.
You say that vicious sack-beatings of spammers is a slippery slope. I say not, it's the intended destination. People who abuse their fellow humans for a quick buck should get shown the door, as it were. Are you making me pay to clean up after you, with absolutely no benefit to me? Well guess what, I refuse. If the only way to make you stop is violence, I thing it's by your choice. If you'd stopped when *everyone* asked you to, it wouldn't have come to this.
It doesn't have to be cut and dried. An ISP could filter attack packets (malformed RPCs, or Code-Red, etc) without filtering all access to those ports.
ISPs should scan outgoing packets for attacks though, and shut down users who are sending them.
Since when is making sure their clients email is received by other hosts not an important part of their job? It's a tough job, but if they slack off it creates a thousand times as much work because admins around the world have to clean up after the criminals the first ISP is hosting. And everyone else has to do it for free.
You don't have the right to send my clients email, you have the privilege of asking if we wish to receive email from you.
There's a few simple things to do that would stop 95% of the spammers. Block outgoing port 25 by default, and limit the ammount of outgoing email (and the number of CCs each) by default. If anyone needs to connect to a different server, open it up for their IP. If anyone needs to run a mailing list, remove the restriction for them.
I want a blacklist with maximum collateral damage. People should know that the company they pay for hosting is providing bad service and is unable to send email to much of the internet because they provide a safe-house from criminals.
But, I want this black-list to be responsive and take companies off when they clean up their act. Otherwise there's no incentive.
Hit people with a really big stick when they sell the rest of us out for a back, stop as soon as they do. Hmmm, taken literally this could work really well!
Stopping spam *must* involve the ISP. It's too easy for spammers to hide and bounce from ISP to ISP to catch them without one of the companies involved helping. If the ISP never feels any heat for letting people spam why would they "waste" time stopping it?
Unfortunately, the only way to put pressure on companies is financially, and that means to make the people who pay them (the customers) tell them to change.
Sure, this hurts the customer, but sometimes there's no other solution.
What should I do, if for instance, a company cracked into my webserver and started selling web hosting? If I shut down and clean the machine it hurts the customers who paid for web hosting, but it's not my fault they bought a product from someone who didn't have the right to sell it.
All the black-hole lists do is say "I'm not willing to sort through all the crap that comes from your hosting company - they're selling service to criminals and expecting me to foot the bill." What other choice do people have?
Instead of squashing spammers as you find them, why not make the service spammer-unfriendly to start with?
Block outgoing port 25 connections by default. Limit the number of emails your mail server will send in a day, and the number of CCs on each. Again, by default. If someone needs more, let them ask for it. Run a spam-filter on outgoing mail, hold suspicious email for inspection before delivering it.
(Hell, you could even inspect it without "reading" it. ROT13 it, before looking at it. Spam should still be bloody obvious while actual content remains private.)
You need to avoid the conflict of interest. Don't let the police department keep the good, or the money from the auction.
Having the tools of your crime confiscated seems to make sense. If I rob a store with a gun, should I get to keep the gun? If you use the computer primarily for an unlawful purpose, you should have it taken away.
But, I think spam is a *very* serious crime. Nothing speeds the decay of a society faster than abuse of the commons or being encouraged to sell out your neighbors for a quick buck. These spammers are doing something they *know* nobody else wants them to do, charging the victims for it, and then whining about free speech...
We really should bring back corporal punishment. This guy deserves a couple days in the stocks and a good harm whipping. We need to make it really clear that we won't tolerate people pulling this kind of anti-social bullshit.
Makes perfect sense. Why should one minor site like LinuxSucks come up to the top in your search results when it's not that relevant?
When you search for Linux, Google is giving you a sampling of what people are saying about Linux. If not many people are going to LinuxSucks, or saying that it sucks, you're not going to get a lot of negative press.
For a counter-example, search for Gigli and you won't see anything positive. It's all about what the popular sites (as defined by the number of links to them on independent sites) have to say. Why should Google go out of their way to provide a balanced view of something that everyone things is shit? Or to dredge of some shit on something that 99% of the users love?
Most people who say consoles are better are trying to say that the same type of game, RPG, or Racing game, or whatever, are better on a console, which simply isn't true.
If you're talking about party games I think a console probably is better. If you're talking about side-scrollers there probably isn't much of a difference.
You can get gamepads for the PC for $10 if you want one. But you aren't forced to play Counterstrike with it.
And yeah, the Zelda saves games. Sure. Zelda64 had a pathetic savegame feature. It knew what time you'd opened up, and which bosses you'd beaten, but that was about it. Walk across a cleaned out area and it's full of monsters again, walk into a dungeon and it's full of monsters again, etc. How many bytes did they put into this cool feature? 8, maybe? Ditto with games like Metal Gear solid, they simply store which save point you've reached.
Sure, a TV is better, but you sit closer to the computer and it looks a hell of a lot better. I can play PC games in 1600x1200 with high-res textures. The TV gets "free anti-aliasing" because the quality is so low, but that's about it. Blurry, or detailed. Take your pick.
That's a shame if they did. One quick domain hijacking and you've got a way to run arbitrary code on a user's machine. Being that it's a by-design weakness in AOL's products they'd be pretty much completely liable for bypassing your security and enabling it. Hello massive class-action lawsuit.
The DMCA's reverse-engineering provision may not even be required for this. In Sega vs Accolade, Accolade was being sued for using Sega's trademark, which was required to load a game on the Genesis (A trademarked and copyrighted Sega logo was requred to reside on the cart, and was then displayed). The court ruled that because this was required to let Accolade's product function, that the logo was neither a trademark, because it was functional, nor was copyrightable, because it wasn't creative. (Or rather, in this circumstance, it couldn't be treated as trademarked or copyrighted, so Accolade hadn't infringed under either law.)
The judge even hinted that this could, if continued, dilute Sega's trademark...
So, there's precedent for including in your product, an otherwise copyrighted work, purely for the required interoperability.
Some console company tried this BS and lost badly in court.
Their boot-loader checked the first sector of the CD or Cart for "This is a legally licensed game for the Foo Corp - ConsoleMatic (tm)". They then sued makers of unlicensed games (a perfectly legal activity) for trademark violation, claiming that because the game companies duplicated, without license, their trademark.
The defense argued that because you were required to put that string there it wasn't a trademark, but instead a functional description.
I don't remember the results exactly, but the console company lost and I think the judge made a comment about them needing to be careful that they didn't invalidate their trademark by doing this in the future.
Anyways, the long and short of it is that you've got a good argument that the executable of MSN, used in the context of a challenge/response key, isn't a creative work, it's part of a login procedure for the MSN protocol and thus the copyright isn't enforceable.
The moral of the story is that you shouldn't tie your copyrights or trademarks to anything else because you might lose not just the specific case, but also the copyright or trademark itself.
Ahhh, here's the details. It was Sega, and it was a copy of their logo. http://www.brianrowland.com/PDF/Sega%20v%20 Accolad e%20II.pdf
I search google for "console legal trademark functional", there may be more documents about this.
Really, shouldn't all programs run this way? Why should my email client know anything about my machine and what's running? It should know of two directories, my incoming attachments folder, and my mail spool. Any attachments I want to send can be drag-and-dropped into the program.
Same with my work processor. Why should it even know I've got a net connection, let alone see my email program? If I want them to share an address-book it should be a seperate program that I can give limited access to/from both programs.
Viewing an email, even an HTML one, should be a seperate process. Same the content as a temp file and get the system to pass it to your HTML viewer to open. If desired, the viewer can run in the window the email program asks for, without the programs actually interacting. Any changes to the window would be proxied by the OS. The email program wouldn't even know what program was viewing the HTML, merely that the system reported that it was being done. This way, even if the post did have some nasty javascript or whatever, it'd be run in this sandboxed browser, and of course a browser is a read-only thing, it doesn't need to write to your filesystem so the worst the malicious attachment could do would be, if you enabled your email to load content from the net, link to some sick pictures.
There's a lot of overheard in sandboxing, and in making every type of action (view HTML email, etc) into a new process, but computers are getting really fast and the security from this would be incredible.
The lid on the dumpster is to benefit you, by keeping water and animals out. The ignition on your car is to keep thieves from taking YOUR car. Need I go on?
You probably wouldn't accept it if I modified your computer to ask for a CD (different for every program) for IE/Mozilla, Notepad, Explorer, etc. Why is it okay with games? How about if you had to fetch the activation key to get your toilet lid up? Lost the key? Hope you can hold it...
I've got over a hundred games, from Q1 to Morrowind, and they're take almost a full CD binder. I can't just click on an icon to run a game, I have to pull the binder out, flip to the right CD, swap it with the one in the drive, and put the book away. Then if I want to play something else I have to do the same thing again. So it's no wonder I crack them all. I paid for them. I *own* my copy. I want to play them, when, where, and how I want.
People on consoles have been brainwashed into using stupid little gamepads and claiming they like it. They don't even complain about the lack of save-game ability on most consoles.
If they'll put up with all the other console crap, keeping the CD around is the least of their worries. Poor bastards who can't buy a PC.
So do the work outside of countries with fucked up laws. Make protocols a modular part of gaim, and everyone who wants to connect to MSN can grab the protocol library from the Penguin Liberation Front's website, like we do for all our other terrorist activities, like watching DVDs in Linux.
If you actually obey stupid laws they'll start passing more and enforcing the ones we already have. Disobey them at every turn. I'm not saying to be a martyr, don't let the programmers do caught doing this, but the users should all flaunt their disobedience of it.
That said, if anyone could afford to go to court with MS, the DMCA obviously doesn't apply. The DMCA is about copyrights, having only one program connect the the MSN network has nothing to do with copyrights.
How is he damning Debian to hell? He simply said that they didn't share his main goal, to be 100% free software with no exceptions, so he moved on to another distro and doesn't promote Debian anymore.
A middle ground in your beliefs would be like saying "I'm against murder, but as long as you only do a little I don't mind..." For large issues, people are very often polarized. That doesn't mean they don't recognize that the world doesn't always work their way, and that circumstances don't dictate painful consequences, but they still feel strongly one way or another.
RMS is willing to work with people who don't share his views, but he's not willing to endorse their product because it's not everything he wants it to be. He's willing to let other people do what they want (and you say he's like Bush?!) but holds himself to a higher standard.
There's a difference between "different because of the physical properties of the machine" and "different from version to version on the same OS and hardware".
Most unixes are very standard. You run the install script (or make the package manually) and it compiles the source on that machine, for its specific hardware. As long as they're posix compliant, most non-game programs transfer quite easily.
And "take the source package" isn't a bad thing. VMWare ships with source for a few components and the user doing the install doesn't notice anything different than a binary-only install. (All properly configured machines come with a compiler.)
When the only thing standing between two Word docs from some old version, and a new version like Office XP, is that they changed from 16 to 32 bit ints, I'll write a trivial conversion program and call the formats compatible. Until then though....
Yes, it is impossible to avoid error while using floating point numbers.
That's why financial packages don't deal in fractional dollars, they deal in smaller integer units. (cents, usually.)
This isn't to say that floats can never be used, but you have to understand that at every calculation you lose accuracy. Errors accumulate. You should try to go to floating point at the end of a calculation, not the beginning. This isn't just a limitation of current systems either. Irrational numbers (pi, for example) can't be represented in any finite string of digits.
Console ports tend to suck because it's like console developers live in a world without hard drives. Where people never want to stop playing in the middle of a level and come back the next day, to the exact spot, not a "save spot" half a map away.
Consoles games also tend to do things like auto-aim because as much as you like them, game pads aren't as accurate as mice. Because of this, console games seem to be more about figuring out patterns of movement, not doing the movement skillfully. Metal Gear Solid isn't as much about twitch, it's about dying over and over again on things you can't see until you go the room where it kills you, and remembering the correct sequence of actions. Yet this one of the most popular games on a console.
Console games also tend to have silly traits because of the limited storage. If you kill everything in a dungeon it'll be marked as empty, but leave one little guy cowering in the corner and it'll be repopulated when you go back.
It seems not to be that console games are intended to be different, just that there's so much you can't do, so you avoid whole types of games.
And then there's that Nintendo just can't make a 3D game to save their lives. What did they do, hire the guy who did the chase-cam for Tomb Raider? Ugh!
The XBox fixes a lot of this, but ruins the experience by taking away the keyboard and mouse and high-res monitor and replacing it with an awkward gamepad and low resolution.
Slashdot Mirror
You just need to let people know that the reason they can't receive email from Grandma is that her "Internet Company" is doing things incorrectly.
Explain to your customers that her company is targetting child-pornography and other offensive/illegal spam at your users and it's impossible for you to tell the difference between these offensive emails and the legit ones. Then, for bonus marks, ask "Do you want us to set your account to receive all these kiddy-porn spams.... so that you can talk to Grandma?"
What we really should do is completely blackhole spam friendly ISPs, not just for email. If they couldn't reach half the webpages (and received a page explaining why when they tried) they'd leave these companies sooner.
It's unfortunate that people are caught in the middle, but you're voting with your dollars. If you choose to patronize a company that makes it harder for everyone else on the net to provide service, you shouldn't expect a free ride just because it's all so confusing and so much trouble to switch.
If I sold your car to someone, would you give it to them because it really wasn't their fault and they just wanted to drive and not be concerned with all this fiddly legality? I know some companies that have to hire extra techs to handle spam and virus-related DoSs, this isn't just a matter of hurting the users out of spite. Stopping spam is a matter of life and death for smaller companies.
This also ignores the large number of cases where Hilter or Nazis are on topic. Gun control, Eugenics, Politican shenanigans, Genocide, etc.
The corollary to Godwin's law is only relevant where a topic that isn't in any way related to Hitler, eventually gravitates that way, usually with a direct personal comparison.
To forbid all discussion of the Nazis is to lose an important part of our history.
And that, quite clearly, is why all Godwin trolls should be thrown in a concentration camp and sold organ-leggers when they are unable to work anymore.
Ahhh yes, the completely solid ground of "Let's hope that we don't get so much spam that the internet buckles and collapses under the strain.
You say that vicious sack-beatings of spammers is a slippery slope. I say not, it's the intended destination. People who abuse their fellow humans for a quick buck should get shown the door, as it were. Are you making me pay to clean up after you, with absolutely no benefit to me? Well guess what, I refuse. If the only way to make you stop is violence, I thing it's by your choice. If you'd stopped when *everyone* asked you to, it wouldn't have come to this.
It doesn't have to be cut and dried. An ISP could filter attack packets (malformed RPCs, or Code-Red, etc) without filtering all access to those ports.
ISPs should scan outgoing packets for attacks though, and shut down users who are sending them.
Since when is making sure their clients email is received by other hosts not an important part of their job? It's a tough job, but if they slack off it creates a thousand times as much work because admins around the world have to clean up after the criminals the first ISP is hosting. And everyone else has to do it for free.
You don't have the right to send my clients email, you have the privilege of asking if we wish to receive email from you.
There's a few simple things to do that would stop 95% of the spammers. Block outgoing port 25 by default, and limit the ammount of outgoing email (and the number of CCs each) by default. If anyone needs to connect to a different server, open it up for their IP. If anyone needs to run a mailing list, remove the restriction for them.
I want a blacklist with maximum collateral damage. People should know that the company they pay for hosting is providing bad service and is unable to send email to much of the internet because they provide a safe-house from criminals.
But, I want this black-list to be responsive and take companies off when they clean up their act. Otherwise there's no incentive.
Hit people with a really big stick when they sell the rest of us out for a back, stop as soon as they do. Hmmm, taken literally this could work really well!
Stopping spam *must* involve the ISP. It's too easy for spammers to hide and bounce from ISP to ISP to catch them without one of the companies involved helping. If the ISP never feels any heat for letting people spam why would they "waste" time stopping it?
Unfortunately, the only way to put pressure on companies is financially, and that means to make the people who pay them (the customers) tell them to change.
Sure, this hurts the customer, but sometimes there's no other solution.
What should I do, if for instance, a company cracked into my webserver and started selling web hosting? If I shut down and clean the machine it hurts the customers who paid for web hosting, but it's not my fault they bought a product from someone who didn't have the right to sell it.
All the black-hole lists do is say "I'm not willing to sort through all the crap that comes from your hosting company - they're selling service to criminals and expecting me to foot the bill." What other choice do people have?
Instead of squashing spammers as you find them, why not make the service spammer-unfriendly to start with?
Block outgoing port 25 connections by default. Limit the number of emails your mail server will send in a day, and the number of CCs on each. Again, by default. If someone needs more, let them ask for it. Run a spam-filter on outgoing mail, hold suspicious email for inspection before delivering it.
(Hell, you could even inspect it without "reading" it. ROT13 it, before looking at it. Spam should still be bloody obvious while actual content remains private.)
You need to avoid the conflict of interest. Don't let the police department keep the good, or the money from the auction.
Having the tools of your crime confiscated seems to make sense. If I rob a store with a gun, should I get to keep the gun? If you use the computer primarily for an unlawful purpose, you should have it taken away.
But, I think spam is a *very* serious crime. Nothing speeds the decay of a society faster than abuse of the commons or being encouraged to sell out your neighbors for a quick buck. These spammers are doing something they *know* nobody else wants them to do, charging the victims for it, and then whining about free speech...
We really should bring back corporal punishment. This guy deserves a couple days in the stocks and a good harm whipping. We need to make it really clear that we won't tolerate people pulling this kind of anti-social bullshit.
Makes perfect sense. Why should one minor site like LinuxSucks come up to the top in your search results when it's not that relevant?
When you search for Linux, Google is giving you a sampling of what people are saying about Linux. If not many people are going to LinuxSucks, or saying that it sucks, you're not going to get a lot of negative press.
For a counter-example, search for Gigli and you won't see anything positive. It's all about what the popular sites (as defined by the number of links to them on independent sites) have to say. Why should Google go out of their way to provide a balanced view of something that everyone things is shit? Or to dredge of some shit on something that 99% of the users love?
Most people who say consoles are better are trying to say that the same type of game, RPG, or Racing game, or whatever, are better on a console, which simply isn't true.
If you're talking about party games I think a console probably is better. If you're talking about side-scrollers there probably isn't much of a difference.
You can get gamepads for the PC for $10 if you want one. But you aren't forced to play Counterstrike with it.
And yeah, the Zelda saves games. Sure. Zelda64 had a pathetic savegame feature. It knew what time you'd opened up, and which bosses you'd beaten, but that was about it. Walk across a cleaned out area and it's full of monsters again, walk into a dungeon and it's full of monsters again, etc. How many bytes did they put into this cool feature? 8, maybe? Ditto with games like Metal Gear solid, they simply store which save point you've reached.
Sure, a TV is better, but you sit closer to the computer and it looks a hell of a lot better. I can play PC games in 1600x1200 with high-res textures. The TV gets "free anti-aliasing" because the quality is so low, but that's about it. Blurry, or detailed. Take your pick.
That's a shame if they did. One quick domain hijacking and you've got a way to run arbitrary code on a user's machine. Being that it's a by-design weakness in AOL's products they'd be pretty much completely liable for bypassing your security and enabling it. Hello massive class-action lawsuit.
The DMCA's reverse-engineering provision may not even be required for this. In Sega vs Accolade, Accolade was being sued for using Sega's trademark, which was required to load a game on the Genesis (A trademarked and copyrighted Sega logo was requred to reside on the cart, and was then displayed). The court ruled that because this was required to let Accolade's product function, that the logo was neither a trademark, because it was functional, nor was copyrightable, because it wasn't creative. (Or rather, in this circumstance, it couldn't be treated as trademarked or copyrighted, so Accolade hadn't infringed under either law.)
The judge even hinted that this could, if continued, dilute Sega's trademark...
So, there's precedent for including in your product, an otherwise copyrighted work, purely for the required interoperability.
Some console company tried this BS and lost badly in court.
0 Accolad e%20II.pdf
Their boot-loader checked the first sector of the CD or Cart for "This is a legally licensed game for the Foo Corp - ConsoleMatic (tm)". They then sued makers of unlicensed games (a perfectly legal activity) for trademark violation, claiming that because the game companies duplicated, without license, their trademark.
The defense argued that because you were required to put that string there it wasn't a trademark, but instead a functional description.
I don't remember the results exactly, but the console company lost and I think the judge made a comment about them needing to be careful that they didn't invalidate their trademark by doing this in the future.
Anyways, the long and short of it is that you've got a good argument that the executable of MSN, used in the context of a challenge/response key, isn't a creative work, it's part of a login procedure for the MSN protocol and thus the copyright isn't enforceable.
The moral of the story is that you shouldn't tie your copyrights or trademarks to anything else because you might lose not just the specific case, but also the copyright or trademark itself.
Ahhh, here's the details. It was Sega, and it was a copy of their logo.
http://www.brianrowland.com/PDF/Sega%20v%2
I search google for "console legal trademark functional", there may be more documents about this.
Really, shouldn't all programs run this way? Why should my email client know anything about my machine and what's running? It should know of two directories, my incoming attachments folder, and my mail spool. Any attachments I want to send can be drag-and-dropped into the program.
Same with my work processor. Why should it even know I've got a net connection, let alone see my email program? If I want them to share an address-book it should be a seperate program that I can give limited access to/from both programs.
Viewing an email, even an HTML one, should be a seperate process. Same the content as a temp file and get the system to pass it to your HTML viewer to open. If desired, the viewer can run in the window the email program asks for, without the programs actually interacting. Any changes to the window would be proxied by the OS. The email program wouldn't even know what program was viewing the HTML, merely that the system reported that it was being done. This way, even if the post did have some nasty javascript or whatever, it'd be run in this sandboxed browser, and of course a browser is a read-only thing, it doesn't need to write to your filesystem so the worst the malicious attachment could do would be, if you enabled your email to load content from the net, link to some sick pictures.
There's a lot of overheard in sandboxing, and in making every type of action (view HTML email, etc) into a new process, but computers are getting really fast and the security from this would be incredible.
The lid on the dumpster is to benefit you, by keeping water and animals out. The ignition on your car is to keep thieves from taking YOUR car. Need I go on?
You probably wouldn't accept it if I modified your computer to ask for a CD (different for every program) for IE/Mozilla, Notepad, Explorer, etc. Why is it okay with games? How about if you had to fetch the activation key to get your toilet lid up? Lost the key? Hope you can hold it...
I've got over a hundred games, from Q1 to Morrowind, and they're take almost a full CD binder. I can't just click on an icon to run a game, I have to pull the binder out, flip to the right CD, swap it with the one in the drive, and put the book away. Then if I want to play something else I have to do the same thing again. So it's no wonder I crack them all. I paid for them. I *own* my copy. I want to play them, when, where, and how I want.
People on consoles have been brainwashed into using stupid little gamepads and claiming they like it. They don't even complain about the lack of save-game ability on most consoles.
If they'll put up with all the other console crap, keeping the CD around is the least of their worries. Poor bastards who can't buy a PC.
So do the work outside of countries with fucked up laws. Make protocols a modular part of gaim, and everyone who wants to connect to MSN can grab the protocol library from the Penguin Liberation Front's website, like we do for all our other terrorist activities, like watching DVDs in Linux.
If you actually obey stupid laws they'll start passing more and enforcing the ones we already have. Disobey them at every turn. I'm not saying to be a martyr, don't let the programmers do caught doing this, but the users should all flaunt their disobedience of it.
That said, if anyone could afford to go to court with MS, the DMCA obviously doesn't apply. The DMCA is about copyrights, having only one program connect the the MSN network has nothing to do with copyrights.
How is he damning Debian to hell? He simply said that they didn't share his main goal, to be 100% free software with no exceptions, so he moved on to another distro and doesn't promote Debian anymore.
A middle ground in your beliefs would be like saying "I'm against murder, but as long as you only do a little I don't mind..." For large issues, people are very often polarized. That doesn't mean they don't recognize that the world doesn't always work their way, and that circumstances don't dictate painful consequences, but they still feel strongly one way or another.
RMS is willing to work with people who don't share his views, but he's not willing to endorse their product because it's not everything he wants it to be. He's willing to let other people do what they want (and you say he's like Bush?!) but holds himself to a higher standard.
What a terrible guy.
That doesn't mean that they use floating-point before the end. And you checking account certainly isn't stored in floating-point.
And yes, I know the FP calculations are done, but you do them at the end, after doing all the integer calculations.
There's a difference between "different because of the physical properties of the machine" and "different from version to version on the same OS and hardware".
Most unixes are very standard. You run the install script (or make the package manually) and it compiles the source on that machine, for its specific hardware. As long as they're posix compliant, most non-game programs transfer quite easily.
And "take the source package" isn't a bad thing. VMWare ships with source for a few components and the user doing the install doesn't notice anything different than a binary-only install. (All properly configured machines come with a compiler.)
When the only thing standing between two Word docs from some old version, and a new version like Office XP, is that they changed from 16 to 32 bit ints, I'll write a trivial conversion program and call the formats compatible. Until then though....
Do you have *any* evidence that EULAs are binding? Contract law and hundreds of years of precedents say they aren't.
Yes, it is impossible to avoid error while using floating point numbers.
That's why financial packages don't deal in fractional dollars, they deal in smaller integer units. (cents, usually.)
This isn't to say that floats can never be used, but you have to understand that at every calculation you lose accuracy. Errors accumulate. You should try to go to floating point at the end of a calculation, not the beginning. This isn't just a limitation of current systems either. Irrational numbers (pi, for example) can't be represented in any finite string of digits.
Console ports tend to suck because it's like console developers live in a world without hard drives. Where people never want to stop playing in the middle of a level and come back the next day, to the exact spot, not a "save spot" half a map away.
Consoles games also tend to do things like auto-aim because as much as you like them, game pads aren't as accurate as mice. Because of this, console games seem to be more about figuring out patterns of movement, not doing the movement skillfully. Metal Gear Solid isn't as much about twitch, it's about dying over and over again on things you can't see until you go the room where it kills you, and remembering the correct sequence of actions. Yet this one of the most popular games on a console.
Console games also tend to have silly traits because of the limited storage. If you kill everything in a dungeon it'll be marked as empty, but leave one little guy cowering in the corner and it'll be repopulated when you go back.
It seems not to be that console games are intended to be different, just that there's so much you can't do, so you avoid whole types of games.
And then there's that Nintendo just can't make a 3D game to save their lives. What did they do, hire the guy who did the chase-cam for Tomb Raider? Ugh!
The XBox fixes a lot of this, but ruins the experience by taking away the keyboard and mouse and high-res monitor and replacing it with an awkward gamepad and low resolution.