You sign on to your Steam account using your username and password, and download the game again.
For that matter, you can install it on a second PC that way, and play it on both of 'em at the same time (provided you disable the network connection on one of 'em).
(Is it legal/ethical to do so? Like I want to start that conversation here again for the billionth time)
From ScienceBlog (and others, if you google for it):
People who use their computers to find information about their chronic disease often wind up in worse condition than if they had listened to their doctor, according to a University College London review of studies on Internet health. Using interactive computer tools does improve the medical knowledge of people with diabetes, asthma or other chronic conditions, and does provide them with positive feelings of social support, according to researchers reviewing 28 randomized controlled trials involving 4,042 participants. But there was no evidence that cyber-medicine helps people change their behavior and startling evidence that it may leave them in worse health.
Yeah, or going to the airport, and having to stand in the long-ass slow line, while the frequent fliers get a special check-in line that's WAY shorter!
NCO is a collections company. Odds are they're calling to collect on an outstanding bill; have you tried giving 'em your cell# (since they obviously already have it) to try and find out what the hell they're calling for?
Also, keep in mind, they already have your cell number -- it's not like it'd be all that hard for 'em to get your name anyway. After all, you gave your credit card info to your cell provider, right? Yes? Well, your info's already in the system, then, so quit worrying about what *might* happen, 'cause it already *has*.
OK, in my initial reply, I was just being sarcastic (I know that if your stereo is stolen, and it's located, that you get it back, regardless of who bought it / sold it / whatever); I was trying to make a point by suggesting a ludicrous situation.
However, when you start throwing terms like "primary estoppel" around, you very clearly a) more than just get any point that I might be trying to make, and b) are going to kick my ass, hard, if I try and argue against you any further on this, 'cause I'm clearly way out of my depth.
Yeah, life sucks sometimes. But why should the poor bastard who's had his stereo stolen have to suffer; he's just as innocent as you, after all. This is a case where the law has to come down on the side of one of two innocent parties who've both been wronged by a third, and the rule that the law has adopted in this case is caveat emptor.
Good point. So, if that's the case, why should SCO be denied their right to control the use of their code (assuming, for the sake of argument, that their claims are all true)?
Or was the original Ask/. question just as flawed as my stereo analogy?
I don't know that my argument is baseless -- however, I won't complain if you tell me it's pointless (as if there's a point to any post on/. that's IANAL in spirit).
Whether it's full-blown "Property" or not, you can't deny that Microsoft has considerable rights, and thus considerable say, about who can / can't use WindowsXP.
I don't think the minor semantic issues invalidate my point. I do apologize, however, for actually thinking, and occasionally coming to the conclusion that, from time to time, some of the anti-establishment, pro-Linux ideas that people present might have a slight flaw in them here or there.
Say you buy a used stereo you find listed in the classified ads of your local newspaper. Then, a week later, the cops knock on your door to tell you it was originally stolen. What do you think happens then?
If you bought it in good faith, you don't get arrested, no. But the cops take the stereo, and you're left to try and get your money back from the sleazeball that sold it to you.
"Intellectual Property" isn't an accidental name -- it's property. If, instead of a stereo, it was a piece of software, I'd be very surprised if the actual owner who's work was ripped off would actually be so hamstrung; rather, I'll bet they could very easily drag you into court and demand that you either a) pay up, or b) stop using the software.
Gee, kinda like SCO's doing right now! If we discover we actually ARE in some weird bent universe where SCO wins out in all this, fifty bucks says we WILL have to pay them or be branded pirates. But, we'll get to sue the hell out of RedHat, IBM, etc, to the extent that we actually paid them in the first place.
Now, this DOESN'T mean that I think SCO has a case here, at all. I'm merely suggesting that this argument doesn't strike me as holding much water (otherwise, an Ask Slashdot wouldn't be the first place we heard about it -- it's an angle the more legally attuned Bigs would be pounding SCO with in much more public fashion).
No, SCO is going to wind up in a world of hurt because they've ALREADY given their code away under the GPL.
Further, five bucks says there's a handful greybeards out there who have full sets of circa 1974 unix source code, fresh from their personal archives, ready and waiting to be grep'ed for whatever code SCO is claiming is theirs. Given Unix's long, crufty evolution, there's doubtless TONS of code in there that SCO is assuming is theirs, but in actuality isn't.
That, and they already gave away all their damn code under the GPL anyway. But then, I already said that:)
Yep, it's just like when you buy a used stereo from a guy, and find out later that he stole it from someone else. Since you bought it in good faith, and in legal fashion, you get to keep it! After all, you didn't do anything wrong, why should YOU get screwed?
Boy, this legal stuff is fun -- hit me with another one!
When you listen to it, it downloads the song to your cache, where you can pull it out, and have an MP3 with a simple file rename. You should never have to 'listen' to a song more than once unless you are somewhere south of decomposing monkey on the IQ scale.
Looks like P2P filesharing, smells like P2P filesharing.
As for the person dropping off, does kazaa crash when a single source out of the 12 you are sucking a file from logs off? Get the idea now?
I must be a little thick here -- could you explain to me what Kazaa has to do with webcasts of audio streams? I'm still not seeing how the broadcaster --> listener stream can possibly keep flowing if the broadcaster goes away. E.g., if channel 41 blows their transmitter during Monday Night Football, my TV doesn't instantly pick up the feed from tv-13 (the other ABC affiliate hereabouts). I have to change the channel, and the broadcast is interrupted.
When I wrote the article, I was trying to get a discussion going, and hopefully plant a seed or 12.
Well hey, we're participating in the discussion right now, so mission accomplished! (After this, can we have a discussion about downloading candy from websites? I could really go for some Reese's Pieces right now, yum!)
If a loophole got exploited, all the better.
If progress were actually made towards exploiting a chink in the legal armor, you can bet your sweet bippy that they'd change the license terms faster than you can say "Napster."
Let's do some math. Say you have music of some sort playing most of the time during the day while you're working at your PC, either at home or at the office. To make the math easy, let's say 10 hours a day, 10 songs every hour, 25 days out of month. (this is typical for me, at least)
So.... 2500 * $0.0007 = $1.75. Let's call it two bucks, just to make things easy.
On top of that two bucks, what other fees would be involved? Let's see... if we're streaming the feeds at 64kbps, over 250 hours, I'm using 8GB of bandwidth. If we're paying, say, $0.25/GB bandwidth for broadcast, that's another two bucks per month.
So, we're already at four bucks per month, just for bandwidth and music licensing. What about the other overhead costs -- servers? Software? Sysadmin detail? Even if we're doing this in an open source fashion, our time still has value; let's say that by distributing the work amongst Free 'net community, we manage to keep it down to another two bucks of cpu/server/development/admin per user.
So, we're at six dollars per month for the ability to listen to audio webcasts. Which, by the terms of the RIAA's license agreement, means we're talking web radio here -- someone sets the playlist, and you get to listen to it. You don't get to control the feed. You *can* switch feeds, though, so you could conceivably maintain a central server list of what's playing where, and what's upcoming, and automatically hop from feed to feed -- but, that's either gonna be choppy, or you're going to have delays while you're waiting for "Lose Yourself" to start playing on JoeBob's homebrewradio after "Mmmmmbop" finishes up 17 seconds from now.
What if JoeBob decides to shut his webcast service down so he can max his framerate in Halflife2? *foop!* your song just cut out halfway through.
What if you want to listen to Pepesito Reyes' La Guantanamera, but nobody else is streaming it?
How does all the music get into the system in the first place? Or does it rely on people's own personal collections?
So... $6 per month can get a fair amount of music broadcasts, but not without a fair amount of headaches.
Contrast this with Pressplay and Rhapsody, which provide access to hundreds of thousands of songs on demand, through easily installed software, for $10 per month. Download, install, listen to whatever you want.
Are the commercial stream-on-demand services enough better to justify the extra $4/month?
Yes folks thats right, some people actually have their Xbox's somewhere OTHER than their computer desk!
Sure, if you're talking home entertainment PC, the Walmart $200 cheapies aren't up to snuff. My only point was that the Walmart boxes are great if your sole criteria is "cheapest useable PC available"; wasn't pretending to claim that they're ready for your home theater.
If all you want is a cheap PC, just get this instead. Useable PC for $200, including keyboard, mouse, & speakers. Hell, they'll even ship you one with Linux (Lycoris) on it for the same price.
Granted, it doesn't quite have the same graphics horsepower, but hey, it's cheap!
Wildcat strike. Band together with a sufficient number of your colleagues, and everyone spontaneously call in "sick" the same day. Then, without overtly threatening, point out that while y'all are more than willing to put in the time, some measure of additional compensation would be appreciated.
Man, we had a bunch of the ST4096's at the place I was working back in '89; dunno if we just got a bad batch or what, but the spindles on those sonsabitches would lock solid so that the platters flat-out wouldn't turn.
Most unreliable drives I've ever seen. Which just goes to prove the great Internet Rule of Hard Drives: no matter how specific or obscure the drive, someone will show up and share their catastrophic multiple failure story about it.
My NEC 1550M that I have hooked up to my SS51G (w/Geforce4 4400, same WD 120GB HD, etc) works pretty slick. Response time is *very* good; close enough to a regular monitor that I really don't notice at all, at least not in the UT2003 demo or BattleField 1942.
That said, when I'm at home, the 15" LCD is only my auxiliary display--still using my 19" trinitron as my main one. Want an 18" LCD though:)
They're running the trailer before showings of Minority Report (at least, they were yesterday at the matinee I went to). Only names mentioned in the trailer were James Cameron, Steven Soderbergh, and George Clooney.
Needless to say, those three names along with some beautiful deep-space type footage definitely piqued my interest.
Story == good thing, yes. However, interrupting the extremely linear gameplay every three minutes to show Yet Another Badly Voice Acted CGI Video Clip was, for me, annoying.
On the whole, FFX was fun, but there was more than once when I got sick of the damn movies interrupting the actual gameplay.
This site [cinema.com] puts Spiderman's birth year at 1977.
No, that site says that the syndicated Spider-Man newspaper comic strip started in 1977. Lee created him 15 years earlier (ie, for the subtraction-impaired, in 1962).
Slashdot Mirror
You sign on to your Steam account using your username and password, and download the game again.
For that matter, you can install it on a second PC that way, and play it on both of 'em at the same time (provided you disable the network connection on one of 'em).
(Is it legal/ethical to do so? Like I want to start that conversation here again for the billionth time)
From ScienceBlog (and others, if you google for it):
People who use their computers to find information about their chronic disease often wind up in worse condition than if they had listened to their doctor, according to a University College London review of studies on Internet health. Using interactive computer tools does improve the medical knowledge of people with diabetes, asthma or other chronic conditions, and does provide them with positive feelings of social support, according to researchers reviewing 28 randomized controlled trials involving 4,042 participants. But there was no evidence that cyber-medicine helps people change their behavior and startling evidence that it may leave them in worse health.
Yeah, or going to the airport, and having to stand in the long-ass slow line, while the frequent fliers get a special check-in line that's WAY shorter!
No way could that ever happen!
NCO is a collections company. Odds are they're calling to collect on an outstanding bill; have you tried giving 'em your cell# (since they obviously already have it) to try and find out what the hell they're calling for?
Also, keep in mind, they already have your cell number -- it's not like it'd be all that hard for 'em to get your name anyway. After all, you gave your credit card info to your cell provider, right? Yes? Well, your info's already in the system, then, so quit worrying about what *might* happen, 'cause it already *has*.
OK, in my initial reply, I was just being sarcastic (I know that if your stereo is stolen, and it's located, that you get it back, regardless of who bought it / sold it / whatever); I was trying to make a point by suggesting a ludicrous situation.
However, when you start throwing terms like "primary estoppel" around, you very clearly a) more than just get any point that I might be trying to make, and b) are going to kick my ass, hard, if I try and argue against you any further on this, 'cause I'm clearly way out of my depth.
Game, set, and match!
Yeah, life sucks sometimes. But why should the poor bastard who's had his stereo stolen have to suffer; he's just as innocent as you, after all. This is a case where the law has to come down on the side of one of two innocent parties who've both been wronged by a third, and the rule that the law has adopted in this case is caveat emptor.
/. question just as flawed as my stereo analogy?
Good point. So, if that's the case, why should SCO be denied their right to control the use of their code (assuming, for the sake of argument, that their claims are all true)?
Or was the original Ask
I don't know that my argument is baseless -- however, I won't complain if you tell me it's pointless (as if there's a point to any post on /. that's IANAL in spirit).
Whether it's full-blown "Property" or not, you can't deny that Microsoft has considerable rights, and thus considerable say, about who can / can't use WindowsXP.
I don't think the minor semantic issues invalidate my point. I do apologize, however, for actually thinking, and occasionally coming to the conclusion that, from time to time, some of the anti-establishment, pro-Linux ideas that people present might have a slight flaw in them here or there.
My bad.
Gee, there appears to be a flaw to this line of reasoning. Thanks for pointing that out.
Um, I was being sarcastic.
:)
Say you buy a used stereo you find listed in the classified ads of your local newspaper. Then, a week later, the cops knock on your door to tell you it was originally stolen. What do you think happens then?
If you bought it in good faith, you don't get arrested, no. But the cops take the stereo, and you're left to try and get your money back from the sleazeball that sold it to you.
"Intellectual Property" isn't an accidental name -- it's property. If, instead of a stereo, it was a piece of software, I'd be very surprised if the actual owner who's work was ripped off would actually be so hamstrung; rather, I'll bet they could very easily drag you into court and demand that you either a) pay up, or b) stop using the software.
Gee, kinda like SCO's doing right now! If we discover we actually ARE in some weird bent universe where SCO wins out in all this, fifty bucks says we WILL have to pay them or be branded pirates. But, we'll get to sue the hell out of RedHat, IBM, etc, to the extent that we actually paid them in the first place.
Now, this DOESN'T mean that I think SCO has a case here, at all. I'm merely suggesting that this argument doesn't strike me as holding much water (otherwise, an Ask Slashdot wouldn't be the first place we heard about it -- it's an angle the more legally attuned Bigs would be pounding SCO with in much more public fashion).
No, SCO is going to wind up in a world of hurt because they've ALREADY given their code away under the GPL.
Further, five bucks says there's a handful greybeards out there who have full sets of circa 1974 unix source code, fresh from their personal archives, ready and waiting to be grep'ed for whatever code SCO is claiming is theirs. Given Unix's long, crufty evolution, there's doubtless TONS of code in there that SCO is assuming is theirs, but in actuality isn't.
That, and they already gave away all their damn code under the GPL anyway. But then, I already said that
Boy, this legal stuff is fun -- hit me with another one!
When you listen to it, it downloads the song to your cache, where you can pull it out, and have an MP3 with a simple file rename. You should never have to 'listen' to a song more than once unless you are somewhere south of decomposing monkey on the IQ scale.
Looks like P2P filesharing, smells like P2P filesharing.
As for the person dropping off, does kazaa crash when a single source out of the 12 you are sucking a file from logs off? Get the idea now?
I must be a little thick here -- could you explain to me what Kazaa has to do with webcasts of audio streams? I'm still not seeing how the broadcaster --> listener stream can possibly keep flowing if the broadcaster goes away. E.g., if channel 41 blows their transmitter during Monday Night Football, my TV doesn't instantly pick up the feed from tv-13 (the other ABC affiliate hereabouts). I have to change the channel, and the broadcast is interrupted.
When I wrote the article, I was trying to get a discussion going, and hopefully plant a seed or 12.
Well hey, we're participating in the discussion right now, so mission accomplished! (After this, can we have a discussion about downloading candy from websites? I could really go for some Reese's Pieces right now, yum!)
If a loophole got exploited, all the better.
If progress were actually made towards exploiting a chink in the legal armor, you can bet your sweet bippy that they'd change the license terms faster than you can say "Napster."
Let's do some math. Say you have music of some sort playing most of the time during the day while you're working at your PC, either at home or at the office. To make the math easy, let's say 10 hours a day, 10 songs every hour, 25 days out of month. (this is typical for me, at least)
So.... 2500 * $0.0007 = $1.75. Let's call it two bucks, just to make things easy.
On top of that two bucks, what other fees would be involved? Let's see... if we're streaming the feeds at 64kbps, over 250 hours, I'm using 8GB of bandwidth. If we're paying, say, $0.25/GB bandwidth for broadcast, that's another two bucks per month.
So, we're already at four bucks per month, just for bandwidth and music licensing. What about the other overhead costs -- servers? Software? Sysadmin detail? Even if we're doing this in an open source fashion, our time still has value; let's say that by distributing the work amongst Free 'net community, we manage to keep it down to another two bucks of cpu/server/development/admin per user.
So, we're at six dollars per month for the ability to listen to audio webcasts. Which, by the terms of the RIAA's license agreement, means we're talking web radio here -- someone sets the playlist, and you get to listen to it. You don't get to control the feed. You *can* switch feeds, though, so you could conceivably maintain a central server list of what's playing where, and what's upcoming, and automatically hop from feed to feed -- but, that's either gonna be choppy, or you're going to have delays while you're waiting for "Lose Yourself" to start playing on JoeBob's homebrewradio after "Mmmmmbop" finishes up 17 seconds from now.
What if JoeBob decides to shut his webcast service down so he can max his framerate in Halflife2? *foop!* your song just cut out halfway through.
What if you want to listen to Pepesito Reyes' La Guantanamera, but nobody else is streaming it?
How does all the music get into the system in the first place? Or does it rely on people's own personal collections?
So... $6 per month can get a fair amount of music broadcasts, but not without a fair amount of headaches.
Contrast this with Pressplay and Rhapsody, which provide access to hundreds of thousands of songs on demand, through easily installed software, for $10 per month. Download, install, listen to whatever you want.
Are the commercial stream-on-demand services enough better to justify the extra $4/month?
Sure, if you're talking home entertainment PC, the Walmart $200 cheapies aren't up to snuff. My only point was that the Walmart boxes are great if your sole criteria is "cheapest useable PC available"; wasn't pretending to claim that they're ready for your home theater.
Granted, it doesn't quite have the same graphics horsepower, but hey, it's cheap!
Wildcat strike. Band together with a sufficient number of your colleagues, and everyone spontaneously call in "sick" the same day. Then, without overtly threatening, point out that while y'all are more than willing to put in the time, some measure of additional compensation would be appreciated.
Spammunition. It's free.
Or, head over to mini-itx.com and dig around for info on other cases and whatnot.
The concept of memes didn't exactly originate with Stephenson.
Let's call it McGodwin's Law. And this whole discussion thread is in flagrant violation.
Man, we had a bunch of the ST4096's at the place I was working back in '89; dunno if we just got a bad batch or what, but the spindles on those sonsabitches would lock solid so that the platters flat-out wouldn't turn.
Most unreliable drives I've ever seen. Which just goes to prove the great Internet Rule of Hard Drives: no matter how specific or obscure the drive, someone will show up and share their catastrophic multiple failure story about it.
My NEC 1550M that I have hooked up to my SS51G (w/Geforce4 4400, same WD 120GB HD, etc) works pretty slick. Response time is *very* good; close enough to a regular monitor that I really don't notice at all, at least not in the UT2003 demo or BattleField 1942.
:)
That said, when I'm at home, the 15" LCD is only my auxiliary display--still using my 19" trinitron as my main one. Want an 18" LCD though
Uh, wouldn't that make you an Evangelical Atheist, rather?
They're running the trailer before showings of Minority Report (at least, they were yesterday at the matinee I went to). Only names mentioned in the trailer were James Cameron, Steven Soderbergh, and George Clooney.
Needless to say, those three names along with some beautiful deep-space type footage definitely piqued my interest.
Story == good thing, yes. However, interrupting the extremely linear gameplay every three minutes to show Yet Another Badly Voice Acted CGI Video Clip was, for me, annoying.
On the whole, FFX was fun, but there was more than once when I got sick of the damn movies interrupting the actual gameplay.
No, that site says that the syndicated Spider-Man newspaper comic strip started in 1977. Lee created him 15 years earlier (ie, for the subtraction-impaired, in 1962).