Why won't the U.S. ratify this treaty? - $$$
on
Cybercrime Treaty Signed
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Sayeth the article:
That's the prospect that has pushed AT&T Corporation and other high-technology companies into feverishly trying to stop, or at least soften, the treaty. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Information Technology Association of America also oppose it.
IANAL, but I've been watching the progress of the Cybercrime treaty as it's evolved. I've never had very much fear of it being ratified precisely because of the above statement.
The same forces that most civil libretarians usually hate, ie... heavy corporate soft-money donations in order to influence laws that favor them, will actually work *for* those who care about seeing this treaty fall by the wayside.
It's very simple. If the treaty is ratified and the U.S. passes laws in order to uphold its obligations under the treaty, then the monetary cost to business such as the big telecom carriers like ATT and MCI-Worldcom, ISP's, biggie conglomerates such as AOL-TW, MSFT, and others will be very high. These costs will come from having to hire many, many extra individuals to perform the kind of monitoring and checking necessary, installing the hardware and software to make that monitoring possible, and a host of other, unforseen costs.
These companies will spend a lot of money on Congress in the short run in order to block this treaty's ratification... and the Bush administration will probably be very receptive as well. So far the Bush administration has heavily favored these businesses. Bill G. can attest to this. This same kind of thing has happened before... notably with the Kyoto accords. Don't think that it can't happen here just because of the pressure the DOJ is putting behind it.
99% of the fun of watching Iron Chef is the intensity the Japanese cast gives the show. Even if it's faked, they display such an incredible depth of passion for what they're doing that it verges on being ridiculous.
And can we get Shatner into a Rhinestone-studded, sequined suit like Kaga? Well, maybe.
Americans just don't get that passionate about simple things like that, whereas I can (almost) really believe all the old grudges and tests of honor that happen on Iron Chef Japan.
Well, unlike most Japanese shows that come to the U.S. (America's Funniest Videos, ?!?!) we USians have fairly broad access to Iron Chef, both through Food Network and through the episodes that float around on FT and Gnutella. I wouldn't be suprised to see the Iron Chef Japan get quite a bit more recognition by the major players in the U.S.
Now that I've finally weaned myself completely away from the GIF file format, PNG is having patent problems. Let's add another line to "Software Patents are bad, M'kay?"
From what I understand, this patent tries to over-broadly apply to all in-file 'Alpha-channel' blending techniques.
My suggestion is to create an open-patent free protocol that replaces one file transparency with two-file transparency. IE, one file is the base image, and the second file acts as a transparency mask. Since it uses two files, this technique should be free and clear of the Apple patent, right?
An HTML tage for something like this would read something like
...Or any other of a hundred disasters waiting to happen.
One of the big, big problems I see with interplanetary mining is the inherent possibilities for danger in the celestial shipment process.
Say you mine an Iron-rich asteroid, and then send the packets of ore back home to earth via a cheap, long-trajectory orbit. How easy would it be to hijack huge chunks of ore from their trajectories and then fire them at the enemy of your choice on the planet with the aid of a rail gun.
I'm not a engineer, but I've seen enough 'build your own railgun' pages out there to know that it would be fairly easy and cheap for any given interplanetary free-lancer to build such a weapon in orbit.
There is also a high probability of space accidents. With all that ore just floating around, someone is bound to hit it sooner or later. Worse, suppose that the mining activities send large-enough chunks of poorly aimed metal-rich debris toward earth? Worse, suppose mining activities affect the orbit of certain Near-Earth Asteroids.
Asteroid and Planetary mining is a very good thing, because it will help save the Earth's environment, provide massive amounts of employment and wealth on Earth. Unfortuneately, there are very serious risks that should be addressed before mining begins.
I think that most people just want to use the servicies to get free music, but the question you're asking here boils down to a very basic ethic and moral question:
When is it okay to share information and when is it not.
First of all, we have to recognize the fact that, unlike property or personal saftey, information is not a finite resource. It can be duplicated infinitely, first in people's minds, and now in digital format.
It's almost always better to give information away freely than it is to keep it hidden. This is a subjective viewpoint, but one that's very easily defendable. Look at the growing AIDS holocaust in Africa right now. The pharma companies are all doing their damndest to keep from from having their AIDS drugs, or at least the intellectual property rights to those drugs, taken away, nationalized, so that those drugs can be made more freely and be used to treat individuals.
Sure, it will hurt those companies if their patents are violated, but then how many lives would it save?
Yesterday, we talked about Hillary Rosen of the RIAA saying that online piracy hurt small-time artists. Any artist you talk to will tell you that the best way to 'get big' is to give your music away, getting it into the most hands and ears possible. There are dozens and dozens of examples I could cite here.
The GPL was written with this kind of sharing in mind. The overall purpose of the GPL is not to put restrictions on information, programming code in this case, but to make it as available to as many people as possible. Sure, restrictions exist, but now that the GPL is in existance, we have a wide, open body of programming code that anyone can draw on. The BSD license is probably a more perfect example of a 'Free' software license, but the GPL does a good job of preventing people or companies from becoming information hoarders, and encourages them to release their code back to the world at large.
The GPL would not have to exist, however, if there was no such thing as copyright law. The code could be as free as you like, without the need to protect it from companies that would otherwise hoarde it.
It's moral and ethical to distribute your code, and because of the GPL, you're also granted legal protections. It's unethical to violate the GPL because it harms everyone else, not just the person who originated the code.
The same kind of logic *ought* to be applied to music, but it's not. Instead, most music is protected in exactly the opposite manner. When individuals buy music, the sale doesn't benefit everyone. Instead, it benefits the very few. The record company, the record executive, and if he or she is very, very lucky, the artist who originated the music.
Even then, these same companies are going even further, trying to prohibit their customers from redistributing that information, music in this case, to anyone else.
In my opinion, placing an artificial scarcity on the music in this manner is immoral. It keeps people from doing what is in their best interest, namely sharing information, enjoying it, and quite possibly learning from it. It may be illegal to share music in this manner, but it is not unethical .
Let's all repeat the mantra, just so we don't forget it.
Legal is not the same thing as ethical.
Illegal is not the same thing as unethical.
But as long as you?re looking for whom piracy really hurts, ask the guitarist
in the coffee shop, or the group scratching out a living touring in a beat-up van.
Oh bullshit.
It's precisley these people that the wantonly open trading of music helps most.
I saw an interview with the Offspring a little bit ago. They were asked the question 'How can my garage band make it big'.
They gave several suggestions, but the one they harped on most was giving away the music to anyone who would listen to it, be it kids, dj's, or record executives. I think they were talking about free tapes and CD's, but it amounts to the same thing.
Look at Rammstein (sp?) with their hit 'Du Hast'. Rammstein would never have been as big in NA with a German-titled song without the power of MP3 piracy. Nobody knew who they were in the U.S. before their tracks started showing up on Scour, Napster, and Usenet.
Hillary Rosen is a lying bitch. She's not worried one little bit about money, for herself or for the artists. She's worried about the music industry losing control of their golden goose, which has already happened to a great degree.
Jack Jackster into the castle, has the singing harp and the golden goose, and now the evil giant Hillary has to keep him from getting out alive. Here's hoping she falls off the beanstalk and makes a big hole in the ground when she lands.
I like to think of Linux development as sort of a modified IETF style: rough consensus and running code, with a sprinkle of holy penguin pee when Linus thinks it's ready to ship.
This is perhaps the most beautiful description of the process I have ever heard.
I agree with you. People are used to dealing with a companies like MS, Apple, and Oracle, who are built from the ground up to never admit deficiency or the need for change even though that is a crucial aspect of any kind of upgrade cycle.
When a group of firebrands come around that can freely admit deficiency, it does cause some waves.
About 2 years into my CS education, I realized that I had an active dislike for mathmatics, and only limited patience for the rigors involved in logic design and the debugging headaches that go along with any programming project.
The thing that saved me, however, was the fact that the field of computer science is so varied and vast that I didn't really have to specialize in programming to do what I really wanted to.
Look at all aspects of CS, and not just coding. That means networking, graphics, engineering, etc...
When I realized that I really wasn't cut out to be a coder, I started taking art classes and registerd a minor specilization in computer generated art. Now I'm a webmaster/graphics guru for a mid-sized financial company in texas. Part of my duties include administering servers and writing the occasional script, but most of what I get to do is purely creative. I take photos, paint, draw, and even write occasionally, being paid like a server administrator the entire time.
I know guys who hate coding, but love to build hardware. I know of guys who have gone into the electronics aspect of CS, actually engineering and building computer components.
It may be difficult to find a CS field you like, but there is almost certainly one out there for you.
... that got so much interest a while back. I remember reading something that the producer of that trailer said... that mostly he just looked for various 'head turn' shots, and incorporated them into his trailer.
Really download pr0n straight to our underpants! Yay!
Seriously, I can think of all kinds of uses for smart fabrics. The first that comes to mind is clothing for 'Medic Alert' people. Instead of scrambling for the 'Help, I've fallen and I can't get up button', their clothing notifies the nearest ambulance station that grandpa is laying down, and it doesn't think he's taking a nap.
Also great for concerned parents. A lot of missing child cases could be solved before they became missing/abused/homicide cases if you could ping your child's clothing.
If code is speech, and I think that will be found to be legitmate sooner or later, can one not legitimately publish a Free DVD Player Suite as speech against the DVDCAA's restrictive licensing scheme?
Either way, cow's out of the barn. People have been ripping, compressing, and trading DVD's in person via CDR and over Usenet and P2P apps for many, many months now. Even if this is overturned, detonated, whatever... the tools are out there, and they're being used.
Sorry guys. Play again!
PPG is very much an anime parody. Genndy Tartovsky's (sp?) anime fandom shows in his cartoons. The girls themselves are ver obviously 'Mahou Shojou' (Magical Girls), albeit a bit younger than Card Captor Sakura or the Bishoujo Sailor Senshi.
Mojo Jojo is a parody of all the badly dubbed imports like Speed Racer and the Godzilla movies, in which the characters spoke two or three times as long as they needed to so that the words would approximate matching the mouths.
I'm sure we've all heard of the arcade game from 1982, but there is actually a DVD version that you play with your DVD remote control
Damn, that would suck! My Apex 600a has something like a.5-2.0 second response time to any given remote operation. I remember how hard it was to time the moves around the *regular* aracade controls. Could they possibly make it any harder?
Man... I would really like to infect the Powerpuff girls with my fun love...
Man, you need to seriously get out and meet some real (adult) women. Besides being anthropomorphic ink splotches, they're kindergartners for heaven's sake!
Mojo: Hahaha! Now the powerpuff girls cannot sell their DVD because the software contained inside it is infected with the virus I infected the software contained inside the DVD with. Now the Powerpuff girls' goody-goody reputation will be tarnished because nobody would beleive that the goody-goody Powerpuff Girls would do something that would tarnish their reputation like distributing a DVD that was infected with a virus!
Blossom: Not so fast, Mojo! The DVD runs just fine under linux if you use DeCSS!
Moral of the story - tech support is worthless so it really doesn't matter what they say they'll support.
So much of it really is these days. When I did tech support, I was quite disgusted at the slow shift from 'Let's take the time on each call necessary to make sure our customers are happy' to 'Let's get those call times down so that our customers don't have to wait on hold for more than 2 minutes!'
Wow. The last Cox tech I talked to seemed to be reading off a script.
Me: I'm getting frequent timeouts when I try to connect to your usenet server. (Which is a Supernews corp account link)
Tech: Uhh... What URL are you using?
Me:...
Me: I'm using XNews and connecting directly to the server. I'm not using a browser. XNews is reporting a timeout error about once a minute.
Tech: I'm pretty sure we don't support that.
Me: Can you tell me if you are having any connectivity issues with Supernews?
Tech: Uh.... Have you contacted XReader's technical support?
Me: Not Really. XNews is a one-man project. Still, I can replicate the error in any news reader. You can't tell me anything about any network connectivity problems you may or may not be having? Perhaps there's a machine that I need to allow to ping me through my firewall?
Tech: Just a second.... (5 minutes pass) What are you doing that's causing that error.
Me: Connecting to your usenet server or downloading binaries from it. I get the error when I connect, download headers, or download messages.
Tech: I'm pretty sure we don't support that. Wait a second...
This is the same kind of hassle I had to go through at the ISP where I was putting my time in on the Tech Support trenches when Win98 came out.
Poor driver support, poor working knowledge of the OS, and poor availability of the OS (The ISP wouldn't buy us copies. Those of use who had it had pirate versions), led to a pretty overall piss-poor level of customer support for Win98 users for several months.
Unlike RR, however, our ISP never said, 'We can't really offer support on this until our staff is fully trained'.
NetHack is a single player dungeon exploration game that runs on a wide variety of computer systems, with a variety of graphical and text interfaces all using the same game engine.
Hmm... While Nethack and all it's Rogue-esque descendants are quite entertaining, I just don't see much excitement in a non-multiplayer tournament.
Bill G.: Steve, my faithful servant, tell me how well you have spread my corrupting influence.
Steve B.: Far and Wide, my master. Even now, copies of Windows XP fly off the shelves.
Bill G.: As quickly as Windows 95?
Steve B.:...
Bill G.: You dissapoint me, Steve.
Steve B.: No, my lord. Not as quickly as Windows 95. Still, many have already installed. Many more will follow. Every new computer user will have a copy. In days, you will have complete and almost untraceable access to more computers that we ever thought possible.
Bill G.: You may live, Steve... for now at least. Soon, soon I will unleash my master plan and turn the entire world to my bidding. All will bow down before me! BWAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
Despite how everyone on/. talks a big storm about bucking the government, it's got to be pretty damn scary when the feds come knocking at your door. You've no doubt made some powerful, big-time enemies in both the private sector and the government.
Do you ever fear for your own or your family's saftey because of this. Have you ever been threatened? By whom, government agents or private individuals?
If you don't fear for your saftey, what factors about what you do make you feel 'immune' from being 'removed' clandestinely?
Slashdot Mirror
Sayeth the article:
That's the prospect that has pushed AT&T Corporation and other high-technology companies into feverishly trying to stop, or at least soften, the treaty. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Information Technology Association of America also oppose it.
IANAL, but I've been watching the progress of the Cybercrime treaty as it's evolved. I've never had very much fear of it being ratified precisely because of the above statement.
The same forces that most civil libretarians usually hate, ie... heavy corporate soft-money donations in order to influence laws that favor them, will actually work *for* those who care about seeing this treaty fall by the wayside.
It's very simple. If the treaty is ratified and the U.S. passes laws in order to uphold its obligations under the treaty, then the monetary cost to business such as the big telecom carriers like ATT and MCI-Worldcom, ISP's, biggie conglomerates such as AOL-TW, MSFT, and others will be very high. These costs will come from having to hire many, many extra individuals to perform the kind of monitoring and checking necessary, installing the hardware and software to make that monitoring possible, and a host of other, unforseen costs.
These companies will spend a lot of money on Congress in the short run in order to block this treaty's ratification... and the Bush administration will probably be very receptive as well. So far the Bush administration has heavily favored these businesses. Bill G. can attest to this. This same kind of thing has happened before... notably with the Kyoto accords. Don't think that it can't happen here just because of the pressure the DOJ is putting behind it.
It's worse than that! You're toupee's in the soup, Jim!
I agree.
99% of the fun of watching Iron Chef is the intensity the Japanese cast gives the show. Even if it's faked, they display such an incredible depth of passion for what they're doing that it verges on being ridiculous.
And can we get Shatner into a Rhinestone-studded, sequined suit like Kaga? Well, maybe.
Americans just don't get that passionate about simple things like that, whereas I can (almost) really believe all the old grudges and tests of honor that happen on Iron Chef Japan.
Well, unlike most Japanese shows that come to the U.S. (America's Funniest Videos, ?!?!) we USians have fairly broad access to Iron Chef, both through Food Network and through the episodes that float around on FT and Gnutella. I wouldn't be suprised to see the Iron Chef Japan get quite a bit more recognition by the major players in the U.S.
Now that I've finally weaned myself completely away from the GIF file format, PNG is having patent problems. Let's add another line to "Software Patents are bad, M'kay?"
From what I understand, this patent tries to over-broadly apply to all in-file 'Alpha-channel' blending techniques.
My suggestion is to create an open-patent free protocol that replaces one file transparency with two-file transparency. IE, one file is the base image, and the second file acts as a transparency mask. Since it uses two files, this technique should be free and clear of the Apple patent, right?
An HTML tage for something like this would read something like
< img src="file.jpg" mask="mask.jpg" >
...Or any other of a hundred disasters waiting to happen.
One of the big, big problems I see with interplanetary mining is the inherent possibilities for danger in the celestial shipment process.
Say you mine an Iron-rich asteroid, and then send the packets of ore back home to earth via a cheap, long-trajectory orbit. How easy would it be to hijack huge chunks of ore from their trajectories and then fire them at the enemy of your choice on the planet with the aid of a rail gun.
I'm not a engineer, but I've seen enough 'build your own railgun' pages out there to know that it would be fairly easy and cheap for any given interplanetary free-lancer to build such a weapon in orbit.
There is also a high probability of space accidents. With all that ore just floating around, someone is bound to hit it sooner or later. Worse, suppose that the mining activities send large-enough chunks of poorly aimed metal-rich debris toward earth? Worse, suppose mining activities affect the orbit of certain Near-Earth Asteroids.
Asteroid and Planetary mining is a very good thing, because it will help save the Earth's environment, provide massive amounts of employment and wealth on Earth. Unfortuneately, there are very serious risks that should be addressed before mining begins.
I think that most people just want to use the servicies to get free music, but the question you're asking here boils down to a very basic ethic and moral question:
When is it okay to share information and when is it not.
First of all, we have to recognize the fact that, unlike property or personal saftey, information is not a finite resource. It can be duplicated infinitely, first in people's minds, and now in digital format.
It's almost always better to give information away freely than it is to keep it hidden. This is a subjective viewpoint, but one that's very easily defendable. Look at the growing AIDS holocaust in Africa right now. The pharma companies are all doing their damndest to keep from from having their AIDS drugs, or at least the intellectual property rights to those drugs, taken away, nationalized, so that those drugs can be made more freely and be used to treat individuals.
Sure, it will hurt those companies if their patents are violated, but then how many lives would it save?
Yesterday, we talked about Hillary Rosen of the RIAA saying that online piracy hurt small-time artists. Any artist you talk to will tell you that the best way to 'get big' is to give your music away, getting it into the most hands and ears possible. There are dozens and dozens of examples I could cite here.
The GPL was written with this kind of sharing in mind. The overall purpose of the GPL is not to put restrictions on information, programming code in this case, but to make it as available to as many people as possible. Sure, restrictions exist, but now that the GPL is in existance, we have a wide, open body of programming code that anyone can draw on. The BSD license is probably a more perfect example of a 'Free' software license, but the GPL does a good job of preventing people or companies from becoming information hoarders, and encourages them to release their code back to the world at large.
The GPL would not have to exist, however, if there was no such thing as copyright law. The code could be as free as you like, without the need to protect it from companies that would otherwise hoarde it.
It's moral and ethical to distribute your code, and because of the GPL, you're also granted legal protections. It's unethical to violate the GPL because it harms everyone else, not just the person who originated the code.
The same kind of logic *ought* to be applied to music, but it's not. Instead, most music is protected in exactly the opposite manner. When individuals buy music, the sale doesn't benefit everyone. Instead, it benefits the very few. The record company, the record executive, and if he or she is very, very lucky, the artist who originated the music.
Even then, these same companies are going even further, trying to prohibit their customers from redistributing that information, music in this case, to anyone else.
In my opinion, placing an artificial scarcity on the music in this manner is immoral. It keeps people from doing what is in their best interest, namely sharing information, enjoying it, and quite possibly learning from it. It may be illegal to share music in this manner, but it is not unethical .
Let's all repeat the mantra, just so we don't forget it.
Legal is not the same thing as ethical.
Illegal is not the same thing as unethical.
But as long as you?re looking for whom piracy really hurts, ask the guitarist
in the coffee shop, or the group scratching out a living touring in a beat-up van.
Oh bullshit.
It's precisley these people that the wantonly open trading of music helps most.
I saw an interview with the Offspring a little bit ago. They were asked the question 'How can my garage band make it big'.
They gave several suggestions, but the one they harped on most was giving away the music to anyone who would listen to it, be it kids, dj's, or record executives. I think they were talking about free tapes and CD's, but it amounts to the same thing.
Look at Rammstein (sp?) with their hit 'Du Hast'. Rammstein would never have been as big in NA with a German-titled song without the power of MP3 piracy. Nobody knew who they were in the U.S. before their tracks started showing up on Scour, Napster, and Usenet.
Hillary Rosen is a lying bitch. She's not worried one little bit about money, for herself or for the artists. She's worried about the music industry losing control of their golden goose, which has already happened to a great degree.
Jack Jackster into the castle, has the singing harp and the golden goose, and now the evil giant Hillary has to keep him from getting out alive. Here's hoping she falls off the beanstalk and makes a big hole in the ground when she lands.
I like to think of Linux development as sort of a modified IETF style: rough consensus and running code, with a sprinkle of holy penguin pee when Linus thinks it's ready to ship.
This is perhaps the most beautiful description of the process I have ever heard.
I agree with you. People are used to dealing with a companies like MS, Apple, and Oracle, who are built from the ground up to never admit deficiency or the need for change even though that is a crucial aspect of any kind of upgrade cycle.
When a group of firebrands come around that can freely admit deficiency, it does cause some waves.
About 2 years into my CS education, I realized that I had an active dislike for mathmatics, and only limited patience for the rigors involved in logic design and the debugging headaches that go along with any programming project.
The thing that saved me, however, was the fact that the field of computer science is so varied and vast that I didn't really have to specialize in programming to do what I really wanted to.
Look at all aspects of CS, and not just coding. That means networking, graphics, engineering, etc...
When I realized that I really wasn't cut out to be a coder, I started taking art classes and registerd a minor specilization in computer generated art. Now I'm a webmaster/graphics guru for a mid-sized financial company in texas. Part of my duties include administering servers and writing the occasional script, but most of what I get to do is purely creative. I take photos, paint, draw, and even write occasionally, being paid like a server administrator the entire time.
I know guys who hate coding, but love to build hardware. I know of guys who have gone into the electronics aspect of CS, actually engineering and building computer components.
It may be difficult to find a CS field you like, but there is almost certainly one out there for you.
... that got so much interest a while back. I remember reading something that the producer of that trailer said... that mostly he just looked for various 'head turn' shots, and incorporated them into his trailer.
Really download pr0n straight to our underpants! Yay!
Seriously, I can think of all kinds of uses for smart fabrics. The first that comes to mind is clothing for 'Medic Alert' people. Instead of scrambling for the 'Help, I've fallen and I can't get up button', their clothing notifies the nearest ambulance station that grandpa is laying down, and it doesn't think he's taking a nap.
Also great for concerned parents. A lot of missing child cases could be solved before they became missing/abused/homicide cases if you could ping your child's clothing.
It seems that with the aid of a mask, this kind of process could be used to lithograph very, very tiny chips. Anyone know differently?
If code is speech, and I think that will be found to be legitmate sooner or later, can one not legitimately publish a Free DVD Player Suite as speech against the DVDCAA's restrictive licensing scheme?
Either way, cow's out of the barn. People have been ripping, compressing, and trading DVD's in person via CDR and over Usenet and P2P apps for many, many months now. Even if this is overturned, detonated, whatever... the tools are out there, and they're being used.
Sorry guys. Play again!
PPG is very much an anime parody. Genndy Tartovsky's (sp?) anime fandom shows in his cartoons. The girls themselves are ver obviously 'Mahou Shojou' (Magical Girls), albeit a bit younger than Card Captor Sakura or the Bishoujo Sailor Senshi.
Mojo Jojo is a parody of all the badly dubbed imports like Speed Racer and the Godzilla movies, in which the characters spoke two or three times as long as they needed to so that the words would approximate matching the mouths.
I'm sure we've all heard of the arcade game from 1982, but there is actually a DVD version that you play with your DVD remote control
.5-2.0 second response time to any given remote operation. I remember how hard it was to time the moves around the *regular* aracade controls. Could they possibly make it any harder?
Damn, that would suck! My Apex 600a has something like a
Man... I would really like to infect the Powerpuff girls with my fun love...
Man, you need to seriously get out and meet some real (adult) women. Besides being anthropomorphic ink splotches, they're kindergartners for heaven's sake!
Mojo: Hahaha! Now the powerpuff girls cannot sell their DVD because the software contained inside it is infected with the virus I infected the software contained inside the DVD with. Now the Powerpuff girls' goody-goody reputation will be tarnished because nobody would beleive that the goody-goody Powerpuff Girls would do something that would tarnish their reputation like distributing a DVD that was infected with a virus!
Blossom: Not so fast, Mojo! The DVD runs just fine under linux if you use DeCSS!
Moral of the story - tech support is worthless so it really doesn't matter what they say they'll support.
So much of it really is these days. When I did tech support, I was quite disgusted at the slow shift from 'Let's take the time on each call necessary to make sure our customers are happy' to 'Let's get those call times down so that our customers don't have to wait on hold for more than 2 minutes!'
Wow. The last Cox tech I talked to seemed to be reading off a script.
Me: I'm getting frequent timeouts when I try to connect to your usenet server. (Which is a Supernews corp account link)
Tech: Uhh... What URL are you using?
Me:...
Me: I'm using XNews and connecting directly to the server. I'm not using a browser. XNews is reporting a timeout error about once a minute.
Tech: I'm pretty sure we don't support that.
Me: Can you tell me if you are having any connectivity issues with Supernews?
Tech: Uh.... Have you contacted XReader's technical support?
Me: Not Really. XNews is a one-man project. Still, I can replicate the error in any news reader. You can't tell me anything about any network connectivity problems you may or may not be having? Perhaps there's a machine that I need to allow to ping me through my firewall?
Tech: Just a second.... (5 minutes pass) What are you doing that's causing that error.
Me: Connecting to your usenet server or downloading binaries from it. I get the error when I connect, download headers, or download messages.
Tech: I'm pretty sure we don't support that. Wait a second...
(Lather, rinse, repeat...)
This is the same kind of hassle I had to go through at the ISP where I was putting my time in on the Tech Support trenches when Win98 came out.
Poor driver support, poor working knowledge of the OS, and poor availability of the OS (The ISP wouldn't buy us copies. Those of use who had it had pirate versions), led to a pretty overall piss-poor level of customer support for Win98 users for several months.
Unlike RR, however, our ISP never said, 'We can't really offer support on this until our staff is fully trained'.
Good move on RR's part.
NetHack is a single player dungeon exploration game that runs on a wide variety of computer systems, with a variety of graphical and text interfaces all using the same game engine.
Hmm... While Nethack and all it's Rogue-esque descendants are quite entertaining, I just don't see much excitement in a non-multiplayer tournament.
Ah, well. That's what DiabloII's for I guess.
Bill G.: Steve, my faithful servant, tell me how well you have spread my corrupting influence.
...
Steve B.: Far and Wide, my master. Even now, copies of Windows XP fly off the shelves.
Bill G.: As quickly as Windows 95?
Steve B.:
Bill G.: You dissapoint me, Steve.
Steve B.: No, my lord. Not as quickly as Windows 95. Still, many have already installed. Many more will follow. Every new computer user will have a copy. In days, you will have complete and almost untraceable access to more computers that we ever thought possible.
Bill G.: You may live, Steve... for now at least. Soon, soon I will unleash my master plan and turn the entire world to my bidding. All will bow down before me! BWAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
Despite how everyone on /. talks a big storm about bucking the government, it's got to be pretty damn scary when the feds come knocking at your door. You've no doubt made some powerful, big-time enemies in both the private sector and the government.
Do you ever fear for your own or your family's saftey because of this. Have you ever been threatened? By whom, government agents or private individuals?
If you don't fear for your saftey, what factors about what you do make you feel 'immune' from being 'removed' clandestinely?
Will someone please explain what a quantum hall effect is, and how it relates to superconductivity and/or electron spin?
Double negatives lead to proof positive.