Actually, an ancient Roman emperor did just that (with the laws, not the abacus). He saw what was the legal equivalent of spaghetti code and trashed it. He had the laws rewritten from scratch, in a concise manner.
And that's one reason why Rome remains the thriving intellectual and cultural center of Europe to this day.
You could get away with it if you happen to be reading/. from a country that (a) doesn't have an extradition treaty with the United States or (b) doesn't extradite people who do things that are secretly amusing to members of your own government.
No, you might get away with it. The U.S. government can put a tremendous amount of pressure on a country and extradition without a treaty is clearly within the realm of possibility.
If they are going to punish someone, it should be the.mil nic admins.
An interesting theory, but not one that is likely to prevail in court. While there is no clear law against making an insecure web site, there are laws against "computer fraud and abuse."
Ahhhh. the land of the free.... sailing into NY harbour....the statue of liberty......freedom of speech......guantanamo bay......
We don't have freedom to commit illegal acts and computer fraud and abuse falls into that category. It is a crime and, unfortunately, the punishment does not always fit the crime (e.g., 3-strikes laws, Kevin Mitnick, etc.).
I went to that link and it requires that you indicate a sponsoring agency. Since none of us have one, registering a domain would require entering false information into a DoD computer in order to gain unauthorized access. That is just a very bad idea.
While it might be funny to register al-qaeda.mil, grain.mil, or saddam.mil, you don't want to find yourself occupying Kevin Mitnick's old cell. The Department of Defense is not renowned for their lighthearted sense of humor and fun. They may very well decide to make an example of someone. Or they might just decide to hold someone for months or years prior to even filing charges.
It's not worth risking your freedom and your future livelihood for a prank.
Ooo, you *really* don't like the idea of non-root users being able to run server programs, without kissing your butt, do you?
I really don't care what they run. But I have not seen a lot of HTTP servers on ports other than 80 that provide web pages that professionals need to access. I believe that you're just being a lazy sysadmin and leaving all ports open because it makes your life easier, not because of some overwhelming need by your users to access non-standard ports.
No way in hell are you going to get that "upstream provider" of Internet services to impose a "you gotta, in general, firewall outgoing ports from your users' network" condition on their customers.
I never said that they would. Try reading what I said (and what you quoted) again:
If you can do that without a firewall, good for you. But if your users piss on my networks, I'll do everything I can to get your upstream provider to shut you down until you resolve the problem.
Was there anything in there that said that I would get your upstream provider to make you block outgoing ports? No.
P.S. For someone so experienced at this, I'm amazed that you would find the term "upstream provider" so new that you would feel the need to put it in quotes when replying. It's a term that has been in common use for years.
I run my own mail server and can tell you just about anything you want to know regarding e-mail. Just ask.
Generally, the "Reply-To" field is worthless. Some applications use it and some do not. Just make the From: field whatever you want your mail to go to and everything should be hunky-dory. While there are some ISPs that don't want you to have a From: address that's not their domain, most don't care at all.
Piss off! {...} FWIW, I pretty much agree with you on most of the other things you said though.
Mighty fine way of letting me know.
I don't know about the other guy, but I choose to use a separate email service because over the past few years, I (well, my family) have had to change ISP several times for one reason or another- ISPs closing down for instance. I spotted this trend (us changing, I mean) over a year ago and so twigged it was a good idea for me to pay for an address that would stay constant even if we had to change again.
And there I think is the misunderstanding that is at issue. Normally, your address has nothing to do with the SMTP server you use to send your e-mail. Your return address is unrelated to the server you use to send mail. So you could use smtp.current-isp.com and have your address be me@mypermanentaddress.com.
For example, one of my employers blocked port 25 outbound but provided their own SMTP servers. When I wanted to send a personal e-mail, I sent it through their servers, but my return/from address was my normal mail server address.
You do have a right to ask another network admin to change his rules if they're affecting your network, but he has just as much of a right to tell you to get your own firewall and set it up properly.
If my incoming bandwidth is being wasted by attacks from your network, tell me how changing my firewall rules will get that bandwidth back.
Kind of messes up your users when they need to access a URL that specifies a port number (other than the default 80), doesn't it?
Such cases are rare and you can adjust your firewall to open holes for those must-access services (e.g., www.im-running-a-warez-server-on-my-cable-modem.co m:8181).
Don't try to tell me I have an obligation to shove it down the throats of mine.
You have an obligation to see that your network is not used to propagate worms and participate in DDOS attacks. If you can do that without a firewall, good for you. But if your users piss on my networks, I'll do everything I can to get your upstream provider to shut you down until you resolve the problem.
Umm, no. It's idiots not patching their severs. If everyone had patched their servers, the worm would never have gotten in anywhere. The best way to protect others is to not get infected yourself.
Yeah, that's obviously a real practical solution. Just look at how well it worked to stem the flow of traffic from Code Red and all of the various Outlook-based worms. Face it: end users don't patch stuff when they should. My copy of Apache is completely up to date and all of the security patches available for MS apps are installed on my systems, but I am woefully in the minority.
So how would you like me to send my mails then? I am not sending it using my ISP's mail server
Go through your ISP's mail server to send.
Please explain to me why I should be prevented from connecting to that server.
Because the potential harm done by spammers outweighs your personal preference of using an outgoing mail server (SMTP) other than the one provided by your ISP.
No, firewalls are for use as your needs require. I, for instance allow no incoming, but don't restrict outgoing.
Firewalls are not just for your needs. They are also for the protection of others, too. It's the all-ports-open-on-outgoing stuff that allows worms like this to spread and wreak so much havoc. It's dial-up Internet providers leaving port 25 open on outgoing that allow spammers to use throwaway accounts for spamming.
I don't think you should tell people what firewall rules they should be running.
Hey, if it's my network being affected by your lack of rules, I've got a moral right to tell you what rules your firewall needs.
it was a total waste of time was total worth having to look at that bloody ad that popped up for/. referrers.
You accept pop-ups and, by default, report referrers? What are you thinking? Go download Proxomitron. It runs on just about any flavor of Windows from 9x to XP. If you are running some operating system that you feel is superior to Windows, then good luck finding any package that performs a similar function with the grace and power of Proxomitron. It's one of those must-have packages that explains why my Linux machine is turned off most of the time.
There are no similiarites between a subscription service, and a video card... You did the same thing you are accusing me of.
You may feel that my analogy is flawed, but it is not the same as claiming that you said something that you did not.
driving their profit margins lower, and subsequently making their position unsustainable
There you go again, claiming that I said lower profits would make the company go out of business. I never said that.
Ah, and you meant what, when you said the following?
Many companies are surviving on razor-thin profit margins in the PC hardware sector
That they could not simply absorb the loss and would be forced to raise prices or adopt a new business strategy. See this post from me in the same thread. I specifically outline how ATI might need to respond.
Then, in case that wasn't already clear enough:
many companies older than ATI have gone belly-up.
That was countering your claim that the age of ATI meant that their business decisions would be sound.
And just a little more...
the company cannot lower the price below $X and remain profitable.
That was in response to your unsubstantiated claim that ATI could "simply drop the price of the 9700 to reasonable levels." The full quote was: Are you privy to information about ATI's fab costs that the rest of us are not? Pricing is constrained by market demand at the upper end and by product costs at the lower end. If a product has a burdened cost of $X, the company cannot lower the price below $X and remain profitable.
You didn't answer the question, but you sure did your best to quote out of context.
You changed your own position, the argued in favor of it (the new position).
I never changed my position. My initial message to which you responded read:
"Many companies are surviving on razor-thin profit margins in the PC hardware sector and this kind of thing is going to hurt them if it's done by people who would have otherwise bought the more expensive card."
You somehow twisted that into me proclaiming that this would bankrupt ATI and even destroy capitalism itself. I stand by my original statement -- not the ones you made and attempted to attribute to me. Even if ATI is forced to reduce the price of their 9700 as you suggested, that hurts them financially.
It's utterly useless to debate with someone when they have no sense of rationality.
And yet I keep trying to.
You look like an idiot because of what you said, not what I've said.
No, I do not. I look like someone who has tried to debate you in an intellectually sound manner while you have resorted to ad hominem attacks and straw man arguments. Your attempts to make me look bad are transparent and unsuccessful.
You can start name-calling
You claimed that I called you names before and could not cite a single instance when challenged to. Now I will call you one: You are a despicable liar.
You claimed that I said this would put ATI out of business, which I never did. Then you strung together a bunch of out-of-context sentence fragment quotes in order to try to back up your false claim.
So, I'll let you have the last word. {snip} but I wont read it
I posted this so that those who have followed this thread aren't taken in by your lies and out-of-context quotes. Whether you read it or not makes little difference.
You say that the modification of a video card will drive ATI out of business.
I did not say that the modification of "a video card" would drive ATI out of business. I said that it "is going to hurt them if it's done by people who would have otherwise bought the more expensive card." What's so tough to understand about that?
Since ATI is a capitalistic company, that statement applies quite well.
I said that it would hurt ATI financially and you are now claiming that I said it would destroy capitalism. That is a textbook example of a straw man argument.
You call what I say "Straw man arguments", then say:
I did not buy a low tier of DirecTV service and then "mod" my DirecTV receiver to get premium channels without paying for them.
Don't you know the difference between an analogy and a straw man argument? With an analogy, someone expresses an opinion that two things have similarities (as I did above). With your straw man argument, you claimed that I said something that I did not (i.e., that modifying video cards would bring capitalism "to a crashing halt") and then argued against the thing you falsely accused me of saying.
Gee, I guess if I modify my VCR to record at a slower speed I will single-handedly bring the blank-tape industry to a crashing halt... Maybe I should leave all my electrical appliances on all the time or else the power companies will be comming to a crasing halt... Maybe I should buy the least fuel-effecient vehicle, or else the gas industry will come to a crashing halt... These are all perfectly valid analogies of you arguement, and do a good job of illustrating the fallacies in your arguement.
No, they are just more examples of your straw man arguments. I never said that anyone could "single-handedly" bring anything to a "crashing halt." You made that up and then argued against it.
I think you should take a look at your own messages before you start name-calling.
I did not call you any names. I defy you to point out any time during this discussion where I called you names.
---
In closing, I did not say:
1. That these mods would drive ATI out of business.
2. That these mods would bring capitalism to a "crashing halt."
3. That anyone, single-handedly, would be able to drive ATI out of business by modifying their card.
These are all part of the straw man argument that you cooked up.
Try debating in an intellectually honest manner and quit trying to make me look like an idiot by claiming that I made outrageous statements that I never made.
Yes. It did not beep to tell me when to turn. I could not download a route to it. It could not be updated over the web. Yeah. It sucked.
or setting your alarm clock a little sooner?
If you have to be at client A at 9:00AM, client B at noon, and client C at 3:00PM, how does setting your alarm clock sooner help you get to clients B and C on time?
How about the people who would rather have bluetooth then gps becuase they work in there city?
How about people who would rather have a socket wrench because they work in a garage? What the f*** kind of dumb-assed question is that? This device is obviously aimed at people who need GPS. Duh!
Here's a clue for you: Garmin builds GPSs. It's what they do. Complaining that Garmin included GPS rather than Bluetooth is is like being pissed off that McDonalds meal came with fries rather than socks.
Capitalism has worked incredibly well for hundreds of years, all across the world. Some geeks modifying a videocard is not going to bring the system to a crashing halt.
I do not recall stating that modifying video cards would bring capitalism to a "crashing halt." Could you please quote the passage where you believe that I made that claim?
Likewise, if you think ATI needs your charity, you are gravely mistaken.
I do not believe that paying for what you want is charity. I did not buy a low tier of DirecTV service and then "mod" my DirecTV receiver to get premium channels without paying for them.
If you feel the need to reply, please address the points that I made in the parent post rather than creating straw man arguments.
Since ATI has been around long enough to know how the world works, I am sure they know what they are doing.
You may be unaware of this, but many companies older than ATI have gone belly-up.
If this hack results in lost sales, they can simply drop the price of the 9700 to reasonable levels, and it will no longer be worth the risk of modding your current card.
Are you privy to information about ATI's fab costs that the rest of us are not? Pricing is constrained by market demand at the upper end and by product costs at the lower end. If a product has a burdened cost of $X, the company cannot lower the price below $X and remain profitable.
Welcome to capitalism... Stay around a while, and you might learn something.
It sounds like your learning still has quite a way to go.
how is their inability to make more profits my fault?
I never claimed that it was your fault.
so because they waste money/sell their products too cheap, how is that my fault?
Again, I never claimed that it was your fault. But I must contest that entire premise. They are selling the Radeon 9500 cards at a price dictated by their costs and what the market will bear. They are not selling them "too cheap." If they were, demand would outstrip supply.
why again should i feel wrong or even bad if i buy a product of theirs and maximize its use?
Because you are raising the cost of products for all of us and/or injuring the vendor. It's real simple: Let's hypothesize that you have $400 to spend on a high-end video card but you decide to buy a $200 card and modify it as per some article you saw.
To compensate, the vendor would have only a few choices:
1. Create unique silicon for the low-end cards. They would also have to destroy the silicon that they now use for those cards --- chips that failed in testing for the high-end usage. That would, of course, cost money and drive the cost of all of their cards up.
2. Raise the price of all cards so that they can cover the revenue loss from you and people like you.
3. Stop selling low-end cards, destroying ICs that would have gone into low-end cards. They would have to raise the price of their remaining product line to cover these costs.
Your arguments remind me of the people that steal cable TV. They buy the low-end product and then get a modified converter so that they can see all of the content that they are not paying for -- so that they can "maximize its use."
This looks like stealing. Does it look like stealing to anyone else?
Bringing up ethics on Slashdot? Prepare to be seriously flamed.
I would not go so far as to call it stealing, but I would question the ethics of it (just as you did). Many companies are surviving on razor-thin profit margins in the PC hardware sector and this kind of thing is going to hurt them if it's done by people who would have otherwise bought the more expensive card.
On the other hand, I think that it's likely that this procedure will result in a lot of incompetent people destroying their cards, so maybe it won't hurt ATI so badly in the long run.
I still haven't heard a bit of positive, i. e. not all amateur radio operators are overcompensating boobs who carelessly ionize birds for miles around for self-gratification.
Then I'll say this:
Many ham radio operators have been instrumental in saving lives and aiding relief workers in times of disaster.
Now it's your turn. You have portrayed everyone who is not a ham radio operator as some kind of ignorant buffoon who has an axe to grind against ham radio operators. How about admitting that not all people who complain about ham radio RFI are in the wrong, stupid, and unreasonable.
Life goes on, and I'm afraid so will your silly assault on a group of mostly decent people.
"Silly assualt"? Please! Quit playing the victim. I just stated my opinion that 802.11b over ham radio does not serve a justifiable purpose. Why risk interference with everything from SETI experiments to television sets to do something over radio that you could do interference-free, and more reliably, over the Internet 99.99% of the time?
I'm moving on. Can you?
Yep.
P.S. I have a marine radio in my boat, a pair of business-band radios, and a pair of FRS radios. Over the years, I have come to realize that every time I key the mic, I risk interfering with someone else. Because of that, I try to only use transmitters when necessary and never for idle chit-chat.
And of course, your solution is to paint us all with the same tar brush because somebody gave your dad a ration of shit many years ago.
You completely missed the point of the story. I was showing that hams do cause interference and that they are often not the saintly people that you would have us believe. The interference was more of a pain to me than it was to my father and I was the one that had to confront the irate I'll-do-whatever-I-want ham radio operator. So don't go assuming that I'm another G.W. Bush trying to get even for what someone did to my father years ago.
I maintain that there are still a sturdy contingent of clueless folks who blame every belch of their electronics on the 'guy with the big antenna'.
And I maintain that not every person who blames a ham radio operator for interference is wrong and that not every ham radio operator is a good, responsible person.
I don't own an amplifier. Maybe that makes me content with the pecker that God issued me (at least in your world).
Have you got a better explanation of why someone would use a kilowatt amp with a high-gain, directional antenna to talk to someone 15 miles away -- expecially when he later proved that he could do so with less than 50 watts? He's obviously trying to compensate for something.
Moral: there are a lot of folks that are given to overcompensating. A few of them do it here.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, an ancient Roman emperor did just that (with the laws, not the abacus). He saw what was the legal equivalent of spaghetti code and trashed it. He had the laws rewritten from scratch, in a concise manner.
And that's one reason why Rome remains the thriving intellectual and cultural center of Europe to this day.
My favorite line from the article:
One man almost lost an eye
You could get away with it if you happen to be reading /. from a country that (a) doesn't have an extradition treaty with the United States or (b) doesn't extradite people who do things that are secretly amusing to members of your own government.
No, you might get away with it. The U.S. government can put a tremendous amount of pressure on a country and extradition without a treaty is clearly within the realm of possibility.
If they are going to punish someone, it should be the .mil nic admins.
An interesting theory, but not one that is likely to prevail in court. While there is no clear law against making an insecure web site, there are laws against "computer fraud and abuse."
wow. what a shitty country you live in.
So tell me, in your country, is breaking in to government military computers legal? If so, in what country do you live?
Ahhhh. the land of the free.... sailing into NY harbour....the statue of liberty......freedom of speech......guantanamo bay......
We don't have freedom to commit illegal acts and computer fraud and abuse falls into that category. It is a crime and, unfortunately, the punishment does not always fit the crime (e.g., 3-strikes laws, Kevin Mitnick, etc.).
I went to that link and it requires that you indicate a sponsoring agency. Since none of us have one, registering a domain would require entering false information into a DoD computer in order to gain unauthorized access. That is just a very bad idea.
While it might be funny to register al-qaeda.mil, grain.mil, or saddam.mil, you don't want to find yourself occupying Kevin Mitnick's old cell. The Department of Defense is not renowned for their lighthearted sense of humor and fun. They may very well decide to make an example of someone. Or they might just decide to hold someone for months or years prior to even filing charges.
It's not worth risking your freedom and your future livelihood for a prank.
I really don't care what they run. But I have not seen a lot of HTTP servers on ports other than 80 that provide web pages that professionals need to access. I believe that you're just being a lazy sysadmin and leaving all ports open because it makes your life easier, not because of some overwhelming need by your users to access non-standard ports.
No way in hell are you going to get that "upstream provider" of Internet services to impose a "you gotta, in general, firewall outgoing ports from your users' network" condition on their customers.
I never said that they would. Try reading what I said (and what you quoted) again:
Was there anything in there that said that I would get your upstream provider to make you block outgoing ports? No.
P.S. For someone so experienced at this, I'm amazed that you would find the term "upstream provider" so new that you would feel the need to put it in quotes when replying. It's a term that has been in common use for years.
I run my own mail server and can tell you just about anything you want to know regarding e-mail. Just ask.
Generally, the "Reply-To" field is worthless. Some applications use it and some do not. Just make the From: field whatever you want your mail to go to and everything should be hunky-dory. While there are some ISPs that don't want you to have a From: address that's not their domain, most don't care at all.
Piss off!
{...}
FWIW, I pretty much agree with you on most of the other things you said though.
Mighty fine way of letting me know.
I don't know about the other guy, but I choose to use a separate email service because over the past few years, I (well, my family) have had to change ISP several times for one reason or another- ISPs closing down for instance. I spotted this trend (us changing, I mean) over a year ago and so twigged it was a good idea for me to pay for an address that would stay constant even if we had to change again.
And there I think is the misunderstanding that is at issue. Normally, your address has nothing to do with the SMTP server you use to send your e-mail. Your return address is unrelated to the server you use to send mail. So you could use smtp.current-isp.com and have your address be me@mypermanentaddress.com.
For example, one of my employers blocked port 25 outbound but provided their own SMTP servers. When I wanted to send a personal e-mail, I sent it through their servers, but my return/from address was my normal mail server address.
You do have a right to ask another network admin to change his rules if they're affecting your network, but he has just as much of a right to tell you to get your own firewall and set it up properly.
If my incoming bandwidth is being wasted by attacks from your network, tell me how changing my firewall rules will get that bandwidth back.
Kind of messes up your users when they need to access a URL that specifies a port number (other than the default 80), doesn't it?
o m:8181).
Such cases are rare and you can adjust your firewall to open holes for those must-access services (e.g., www.im-running-a-warez-server-on-my-cable-modem.c
Don't try to tell me I have an obligation to shove it down the throats of mine.
You have an obligation to see that your network is not used to propagate worms and participate in DDOS attacks. If you can do that without a firewall, good for you. But if your users piss on my networks, I'll do everything I can to get your upstream provider to shut you down until you resolve the problem.
Umm, no. It's idiots not patching their severs. If everyone had patched their servers, the worm would never have gotten in anywhere. The best way to protect others is to not get infected yourself.
Yeah, that's obviously a real practical solution. Just look at how well it worked to stem the flow of traffic from Code Red and all of the various Outlook-based worms. Face it: end users don't patch stuff when they should. My copy of Apache is completely up to date and all of the security patches available for MS apps are installed on my systems, but I am woefully in the minority.
So how would you like me to send my mails then? I am not sending it using my ISP's mail server
Go through your ISP's mail server to send.
Please explain to me why I should be prevented from connecting to that server.
Because the potential harm done by spammers outweighs your personal preference of using an outgoing mail server (SMTP) other than the one provided by your ISP.
Yeah, the parent is flamebait because I didn't wildly praise Linux. Get a life, loser-boy.
No, firewalls are for use as your needs require.
I, for instance allow no incoming, but don't restrict outgoing.
Firewalls are not just for your needs. They are also for the protection of others, too. It's the all-ports-open-on-outgoing stuff that allows worms like this to spread and wreak so much havoc. It's dial-up Internet providers leaving port 25 open on outgoing that allow spammers to use throwaway accounts for spamming.
I don't think you should tell people what firewall rules they should be running.
Hey, if it's my network being affected by your lack of rules, I've got a moral right to tell you what rules your firewall needs.
it was a total waste of time was total worth having to look at that bloody ad that popped up for /. referrers.
You accept pop-ups and, by default, report referrers? What are you thinking? Go download Proxomitron. It runs on just about any flavor of Windows from 9x to XP. If you are running some operating system that you feel is superior to Windows, then good luck finding any package that performs a similar function with the grace and power of Proxomitron. It's one of those must-have packages that explains why my Linux machine is turned off most of the time.
There are no similiarites between a subscription service, and a video card... You did the same thing you are accusing me of.
You may feel that my analogy is flawed, but it is not the same as claiming that you said something that you did not.
driving their profit margins lower, and subsequently making their position unsustainable
There you go again, claiming that I said lower profits would make the company go out of business. I never said that.
Ah, and you meant what, when you said the following?
Many companies are surviving on razor-thin profit margins in the PC hardware sector
That they could not simply absorb the loss and would be forced to raise prices or adopt a new business strategy. See this post from me in the same thread. I specifically outline how ATI might need to respond.
Then, in case that wasn't already clear enough:
many companies older than ATI have gone belly-up.
That was countering your claim that the age of ATI meant that their business decisions would be sound.
And just a little more...
the company cannot lower the price below $X and remain profitable.
That was in response to your unsubstantiated claim that ATI could "simply drop the price of the 9700 to reasonable levels." The full quote was: Are you privy to information about ATI's fab costs that the rest of us are not? Pricing is constrained by market demand at the upper end and by product costs at the lower end. If a product has a burdened cost of $X, the company cannot lower the price below $X and remain profitable.
You didn't answer the question, but you sure did your best to quote out of context.
You changed your own position, the argued in favor of it (the new position).
I never changed my position. My initial message to which you responded read:
"Many companies are surviving on razor-thin profit margins in the PC hardware sector and this kind of thing is going to hurt them if it's done by people who would have otherwise bought the more expensive card."
You somehow twisted that into me proclaiming that this would bankrupt ATI and even destroy capitalism itself. I stand by my original statement -- not the ones you made and attempted to attribute to me. Even if ATI is forced to reduce the price of their 9700 as you suggested, that hurts them financially.
It's utterly useless to debate with someone when they have no sense of rationality.
And yet I keep trying to.
You look like an idiot because of what you said, not what I've said.
No, I do not. I look like someone who has tried to debate you in an intellectually sound manner while you have resorted to ad hominem attacks and straw man arguments. Your attempts to make me look bad are transparent and unsuccessful.
You can start name-calling
You claimed that I called you names before and could not cite a single instance when challenged to. Now I will call you one: You are a despicable liar.
You claimed that I said this would put ATI out of business, which I never did. Then you strung together a bunch of out-of-context sentence fragment quotes in order to try to back up your false claim.
So, I'll let you have the last word. {snip} but I wont read it
I posted this so that those who have followed this thread aren't taken in by your lies and out-of-context quotes. Whether you read it or not makes little difference.
You say that the modification of a video card will drive ATI out of business.
I did not say that the modification of "a video card" would drive ATI out of business. I said that it "is going to hurt them if it's done by people who would have otherwise bought the more expensive card." What's so tough to understand about that?
Since ATI is a capitalistic company, that statement applies quite well.
I said that it would hurt ATI financially and you are now claiming that I said it would destroy capitalism. That is a textbook example of a straw man argument.
You call what I say "Straw man arguments", then say:
I did not buy a low tier of DirecTV service and then "mod" my DirecTV receiver to get premium channels without paying for them.
Don't you know the difference between an analogy and a straw man argument? With an analogy, someone expresses an opinion that two things have similarities (as I did above). With your straw man argument, you claimed that I said something that I did not (i.e., that modifying video cards would bring capitalism "to a crashing halt") and then argued against the thing you falsely accused me of saying.
Gee, I guess if I modify my VCR to record at a slower speed I will single-handedly bring the blank-tape industry to a crashing halt... Maybe I should leave all my electrical appliances on all the time or else the power companies will be comming to a crasing halt... Maybe I should buy the least fuel-effecient vehicle, or else the gas industry will come to a crashing halt... These are all perfectly valid analogies of you arguement, and do a good job of illustrating the fallacies in your arguement.
No, they are just more examples of your straw man arguments. I never said that anyone could "single-handedly" bring anything to a "crashing halt." You made that up and then argued against it.
I think you should take a look at your own messages before you start name-calling.
I did not call you any names. I defy you to point out any time during this discussion where I called you names.
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In closing, I did not say:
1. That these mods would drive ATI out of business.
2. That these mods would bring capitalism to a "crashing halt."
3. That anyone, single-handedly, would be able to drive ATI out of business by modifying their card.
These are all part of the straw man argument that you cooked up.
Try debating in an intellectually honest manner and quit trying to make me look like an idiot by claiming that I made outrageous statements that I never made.
ever try a map?
Yes. It did not beep to tell me when to turn. I could not download a route to it. It could not be updated over the web. Yeah. It sucked.
or setting your alarm clock a little sooner?
If you have to be at client A at 9:00AM, client B at noon, and client C at 3:00PM, how does setting your alarm clock sooner help you get to clients B and C on time?
How about the people who would rather have bluetooth then gps becuase they work in there city?
How about people who would rather have a socket wrench because they work in a garage? What the f*** kind of dumb-assed question is that? This device is obviously aimed at people who need GPS. Duh!
Here's a clue for you: Garmin builds GPSs. It's what they do. Complaining that Garmin included GPS rather than Bluetooth is is like being pissed off that McDonalds meal came with fries rather than socks.
Capitalism has worked incredibly well for hundreds of years, all across the world. Some geeks modifying a videocard is not going to bring the system to a crashing halt.
I do not recall stating that modifying video cards would bring capitalism to a "crashing halt." Could you please quote the passage where you believe that I made that claim?
Likewise, if you think ATI needs your charity, you are gravely mistaken.
I do not believe that paying for what you want is charity. I did not buy a low tier of DirecTV service and then "mod" my DirecTV receiver to get premium channels without paying for them.
If you feel the need to reply, please address the points that I made in the parent post rather than creating straw man arguments.
Since ATI has been around long enough to know how the world works, I am sure they know what they are doing.
You may be unaware of this, but many companies older than ATI have gone belly-up.
If this hack results in lost sales, they can simply drop the price of the 9700 to reasonable levels, and it will no longer be worth the risk of modding your current card.
Are you privy to information about ATI's fab costs that the rest of us are not? Pricing is constrained by market demand at the upper end and by product costs at the lower end. If a product has a burdened cost of $X, the company cannot lower the price below $X and remain profitable.
Welcome to capitalism... Stay around a while, and you might learn something.
It sounds like your learning still has quite a way to go.
how is their inability to make more profits my fault?
I never claimed that it was your fault.
so because they waste money/sell their products too cheap, how is that my fault?
Again, I never claimed that it was your fault. But I must contest that entire premise. They are selling the Radeon 9500 cards at a price dictated by their costs and what the market will bear. They are not selling them "too cheap." If they were, demand would outstrip supply.
why again should i feel wrong or even bad if i buy a product of theirs and maximize its use?
Because you are raising the cost of products for all of us and/or injuring the vendor. It's real simple: Let's hypothesize that you have $400 to spend on a high-end video card but you decide to buy a $200 card and modify it as per some article you saw.
To compensate, the vendor would have only a few choices:
1. Create unique silicon for the low-end cards. They would also have to destroy the silicon that they now use for those cards --- chips that failed in testing for the high-end usage. That would, of course, cost money and drive the cost of all of their cards up.
2. Raise the price of all cards so that they can cover the revenue loss from you and people like you.
3. Stop selling low-end cards, destroying ICs that would have gone into low-end cards. They would have to raise the price of their remaining product line to cover these costs.
Your arguments remind me of the people that steal cable TV. They buy the low-end product and then get a modified converter so that they can see all of the content that they are not paying for -- so that they can "maximize its use."
This looks like stealing. Does it look like stealing to anyone else?
Bringing up ethics on Slashdot? Prepare to be seriously flamed.
I would not go so far as to call it stealing, but I would question the ethics of it (just as you did). Many companies are surviving on razor-thin profit margins in the PC hardware sector and this kind of thing is going to hurt them if it's done by people who would have otherwise bought the more expensive card.
On the other hand, I think that it's likely that this procedure will result in a lot of incompetent people destroying their cards, so maybe it won't hurt ATI so badly in the long run.
I still haven't heard a bit of positive, i. e. not all amateur radio operators are overcompensating boobs who carelessly ionize birds for miles around for self-gratification.
Then I'll say this:
Many ham radio operators have been instrumental in saving lives and aiding relief workers in times of disaster.
Now it's your turn. You have portrayed everyone who is not a ham radio operator as some kind of ignorant buffoon who has an axe to grind against ham radio operators. How about admitting that not all people who complain about ham radio RFI are in the wrong, stupid, and unreasonable.
Life goes on, and I'm afraid so will your silly assault on a group of mostly decent people.
"Silly assualt"? Please! Quit playing the victim. I just stated my opinion that 802.11b over ham radio does not serve a justifiable purpose. Why risk interference with everything from SETI experiments to television sets to do something over radio that you could do interference-free, and more reliably, over the Internet 99.99% of the time?
I'm moving on. Can you?
Yep.
P.S. I have a marine radio in my boat, a pair of business-band radios, and a pair of FRS radios. Over the years, I have come to realize that every time I key the mic, I risk interfering with someone else. Because of that, I try to only use transmitters when necessary and never for idle chit-chat.
And of course, your solution is to paint us all with the same tar brush because somebody gave your dad a ration of shit many years ago.
You completely missed the point of the story. I was showing that hams do cause interference and that they are often not the saintly people that you would have us believe. The interference was more of a pain to me than it was to my father and I was the one that had to confront the irate I'll-do-whatever-I-want ham radio operator. So don't go assuming that I'm another G.W. Bush trying to get even for what someone did to my father years ago.
I maintain that there are still a sturdy contingent of clueless folks who blame every belch of their electronics on the 'guy with the big antenna'.
And I maintain that not every person who blames a ham radio operator for interference is wrong and that not every ham radio operator is a good, responsible person.
I don't own an amplifier. Maybe that makes me content with the pecker that God issued me (at least in your world).
Have you got a better explanation of why someone would use a kilowatt amp with a high-gain, directional antenna to talk to someone 15 miles away -- expecially when he later proved that he could do so with less than 50 watts? He's obviously trying to compensate for something.
Moral: there are a lot of folks that are given to overcompensating. A few of them do it here.
We'll forgive you.