What jurisdiction does the FCC have over the internet?
If users are not tech savvy enough to use Firefox & Permit Cookies, then they get exactly as much protection as they deserve. Cookies aren't the problem, stupid users are.
Here's where I go slightly off topic. Stop reading if you want.
I no longer have cable (tv) - the only things I watch are things I downloaded and then put on my XBox with XBMC. I'm happy to say that commercials are no longer a part of my life! After shutting off cable for a while I can't stand to watch the TV in the break room or a friend's house because there are so many commercials. You don't realize just how many there are until you stop seeing them for a while. Try it! I do not subscribe to any advertisement packets calling themselves magazines. I use Gmail almost exclusively for personal mail and it's spam filters are pretty good.
The fundamental problem with voting machines is that a voter's act of voting is supposed to be private, but that's all. The act of counting and accumulating those votes for a particular candidate is not supposed to be a black box. It's supposed to be transparent, public, and verifiable. Which means all closed source black box voting machines will never be trustworthy. Diebold's first mistake was thinking they should step into the market in the first place. If the thing your selling is transparent, public and open, how on earth are you going to make money off of it when what's going on inside it is public knowledge? You have nothing to sell if everybody has it. And in a voting machine, everybody should know how it works.
To further clarify, Adobe makes you jump through several of hoops to buy their $750 product.
First off, you have to choose your region. Fine, that's not a big deal. Then if you're not allowing cookies, you're required to. Ok, I enabled those for that site. Now? Nope, site doesn't work in firefox. I get a blank page. So I open it in Internet Exploder and what do I get? No it still won't let me buy Photoshop. Instead, it tries to make you buy the suite. "Before you choose, consider getting Adobe Photoshop as part of Adobe Creative Suite Standard." No, that's not what I came here for, fuckers. So you click "add to cart". What do you think happens? It adds Photoshop to your cart? No, it doesn't. It throws a popup window in your face asking your to reconsider getting it as part of their stupid Suite for an additional $150. NO DAMMIT! I already told you I don't want your stupid suite! Finally you can check out. A process I imagine is similar to most online stores from here out. I don't know, I'm not actually buying it as I have all the creative talent of a brick in the mud. I just wanted to see what it would be like.
So let's review: Required to select region (other sites can accurately detect this). Required to enable cookies. Required to use Internet Explorer. Required to select region (again). Presented with a page that has no option to select "Adobe Photoshop" by itself. The only highly visible link is for buying their stupid suite. Forced to hunt for the elusive product that I really wanted (I clicked a link that went to www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/) originally, but you can see where that got me. Click on Products -> Photoshop Family. Click on Adobe Photoshop CS2. Click Add to Cart. Get smacked in the face by a popup asking me if I'm sure I don't want some stupid suite for $900 instead of what I originally clicked on for $749.
In short, it's probably easier to download for free (illegally) than to buy it. And of course, cheaper.
If we had it in us to be cold hearted bastards for a short period of time, we'd beat it.
Instead we'd rather be nice to people and let them cause the deaths of others. At least that's what it boils down to. We just don't have it in us to do what it takes to solve the problem given what we already have. We'd rather tough it out, hoping for a cure.
It's kind of like sending food to starving lands instead of contraceptives. In the short term it's nice of us, but it's really treating the symptom rather than the problem and is only making things worse in the long run.
No, it's not. The point is to prevent illegal distribution of copyrighted material. The drawbacks of its implementation may include preventing a legitimate licensee from playing the audio or video files on his/her various devices, but that is most definitely not the original intent.
Bullshit. The point is to get more money from people and to keep their obsolete business model propped up a little while longer.
If there's anything I've learned about corporations - and worse, media conglomerates - it's that they'll do absolutely anything they can get away with to get as much of your money as possible for as little as possible. The same is actually true for people, which makes sense since corporations are made of people.*
If they could use DRM to force you to buy another copy of the content for each device you want to play it on, you bet your ass they would. To the *AA, DRM is really just another tool to get more money from people and to keep doing it. That's what it all boils down to.
*If you find that interesting, read Adiamante by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. and The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert. They are both good reads besides.
I'm only referring to the part about removal by default, but I don't think it's as sinister as our kneejerk reaction would indicate.
Microsoft is aiming that default - accurately I would contend - at "Joe 'my-box-is-a-zombie' six-pack". Your average user just accepts defaults. And in this case we need defaults that protect the rest of us from the machines of non-tech savvy users.
There are a number of things that Windows has done forever and continues to do that I would have thought would have been addressed by now but remain all the way through XP SP2.
What about these problems:
Explorer windows defaulting to worthless column widths and window sizes
Not autoresizing columns in explorer (you can do it with ctrl+numpadPlus, but why doesn't it do it automatically?)
Not selecting a word AND THE SPACE AFTER IT when you double click a word
Focus stealing. No application, for any reason, should be allowed to steal focus.
Showing a blinking cursor in an application, yet keystrokes do not go where the cursor is, but to some other application that REALLY has focus (Surprisingly, this is not related to focus stealing.)
Having hundreds of useful settings that are only accessible by altering the registry directly. This is only slightly better than having to configure an application in linux through a text file
Having 9347234 different places something could be set to load on startup
There are more, but I just can't think of them right now.
I won't be pretty, and it won't be nice, but it could work.
If you starve them to the point that even the soldiers begin feeling the effects, they'll eventually turn on their own government and topple it in order to get food. Especially if we bombard them with propaganda to counter the inevitable "those westerners are evil and they're the ones starving you!" propaganda.
Like I said, not pretty, and not nice, but it could work. I don't think anyone is willing to go that far though.
Most of your points I can neither add credence to, nor counter, but the "June 4th Incident of 1989"? Now you're just being cryptic. Most of us here know it as the "Tianamen Square Incident/protest/massacre/whatever". I've definitely heard of that, and so have many people. That said, it puts doubt on your other points. I don't know if "insightful" is appropriate here. Care to cite anything?
I don't like the fact that WoW is called a Massively Multiplayer ORPG when it's got tons servers. Not one massive one. So it's very difficult to play with your friends if they started on server Y and you started on server X and you're not allowed to transfer your character to their server, and they're unwillling to play on yours - or some other scenario. Whereas EVE has one server. Tranquility. If you play EVE, you play with everybody else playing eve. One economy, one server with all your friends and enemeies.
And for the record, I'm currently subscribed to - and playing - both EVE and WoW.
The defended never showed up; nay, could not show up for court.
You know what happens when one party doesn't show up? Either the case is dismissed, or they lose.
This isn't some landmark sensational case that proves you can't libel someone on the internet, only that under certain circumstances you can work the system into doing almost anything for you. Something we already knew.
This statement from the defendant sums it up: "I don't feel like I can express my opinions," Bock says. "Only one side of the story was told in court. Nobody heard my side."
She lost because she wasn't even there.
Secondly, no one, not even the plaintiff actually expects her to pay. The article even says the plaintiff knows the defendant doesn't even have $1M, let alone $11M.
This story is nothing more than a series of vindictive acts by both sides. It reminds me of that video where two women in a parking lot bang their doors into each others' cars, then it escalates to totalling both vehicles through a series of deliberate acts (not real events).
The fact that you can be a "content owner" rankles.
Back in the old days, the only way to get music was to have musicians in house. The only way to have a play was to have players in house. The performers had control of the content.
Thanks to recording and physical media became distributable without the original producers. Tough break for the musicians and players. The performers lost control of the content, the distributers gained it. Do you really think the distributers gave a shit about the performers?
Now, thanks to electronic media, the music is distributable without even the distributers. Tough break for the distributers. They lost control of the content. Do you really think the public cares about the distributers?
Your business model is obsolete. Grow up and find a new one instead of lobbying for laws to prop it up with.
All people are doing is cutting out the middleman - evil or not, technology has passed them on and they don't like it one bit that the shoe is now on the other foot.
Most viruses are just malicious programs that get executed by the user. They don't hack in to the system, the are downloaded with another program. They come in the front door not the back one.
These are called trojan horses.
Viruses and worms replicate themselves and redistribute through backdoors. Typically "worm" carries connotations of being particularly aggressive and requiring no faults of the user. But I think, originally virus meant little more than self replication, not even necessarily malicious - just that you could be "infected" (hence the term virus). Virus carries connotations of being prolific (even within one host system).
Ones that depend on tricking the user or stupid users are trojan horses.
At least those were the definitions back in the day. The media has done a lot to muddy the waters.
In short (and IMHO):
virus - prolific replication
trojan (horse) - tricks the user
worm - finds its own way in
The problem is many cases of malware combine some or all of these rather than just one of them, and the media flounders without having a short, easily digestable label to slap on them, so they confuse things with generalizations.
Slashdot Mirror
For the SNES w/multitap or on the XBox with XBMC and an emulator.
What jurisdiction does the FCC have over the internet?
If users are not tech savvy enough to use Firefox & Permit Cookies, then they get exactly as much protection as they deserve. Cookies aren't the problem, stupid users are.
Here's where I go slightly off topic. Stop reading if you want.
I accept that advertisers are scum and will do whatever they can to make money off of me, so I fight back. I use Firefox, Permit Cookies, Flashblock, Adblock Plus, and Filterset.G Updater.
I no longer have cable (tv) - the only things I watch are things I downloaded and then put on my XBox with XBMC. I'm happy to say that commercials are no longer a part of my life! After shutting off cable for a while I can't stand to watch the TV in the break room or a friend's house because there are so many commercials. You don't realize just how many there are until you stop seeing them for a while. Try it! I do not subscribe to any advertisement packets calling themselves magazines. I use Gmail almost exclusively for personal mail and it's spam filters are pretty good.
I recommend trying all of the above.
Or have it stolen by an adolescent or adult who will trade it for food, toys, weapons, drugs, sex, or money. Medicine my ass.
Let's be realistic. People are not nice.
Bluetooth is only 1Mbit or so.
Wireless USB is reputed to be as fast as regular USB.
I for one welcome wireless devices. I'm tired of the spaghetti.
The fundamental problem with voting machines is that a voter's act of voting is supposed to be private, but that's all. The act of counting and accumulating those votes for a particular candidate is not supposed to be a black box. It's supposed to be transparent, public, and verifiable. Which means all closed source black box voting machines will never be trustworthy. Diebold's first mistake was thinking they should step into the market in the first place. If the thing your selling is transparent, public and open, how on earth are you going to make money off of it when what's going on inside it is public knowledge? You have nothing to sell if everybody has it. And in a voting machine, everybody should know how it works.
To further clarify, Adobe makes you jump through several of hoops to buy their $750 product.
First off, you have to choose your region. Fine, that's not a big deal. Then if you're not allowing cookies, you're required to. Ok, I enabled those for that site. Now? Nope, site doesn't work in firefox. I get a blank page. So I open it in Internet Exploder and what do I get? No it still won't let me buy Photoshop. Instead, it tries to make you buy the suite. "Before you choose, consider getting Adobe Photoshop as part of Adobe Creative Suite Standard." No, that's not what I came here for, fuckers. So you click "add to cart". What do you think happens? It adds Photoshop to your cart? No, it doesn't. It throws a popup window in your face asking your to reconsider getting it as part of their stupid Suite for an additional $150. NO DAMMIT! I already told you I don't want your stupid suite! Finally you can check out. A process I imagine is similar to most online stores from here out. I don't know, I'm not actually buying it as I have all the creative talent of a brick in the mud. I just wanted to see what it would be like.
So let's review:
Required to select region (other sites can accurately detect this).
Required to enable cookies.
Required to use Internet Explorer.
Required to select region (again).
Presented with a page that has no option to select "Adobe Photoshop" by itself. The only highly visible link is for buying their stupid suite.
Forced to hunt for the elusive product that I really wanted (I clicked a link that went to www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/) originally, but you can see where that got me.
Click on Products -> Photoshop Family.
Click on Adobe Photoshop CS2.
Click Add to Cart.
Get smacked in the face by a popup asking me if I'm sure I don't want some stupid suite for $900 instead of what I originally clicked on for $749.
In short, it's probably easier to download for free (illegally) than to buy it. And of course, cheaper.
He's right.
If we had it in us to be cold hearted bastards for a short period of time, we'd beat it.
Instead we'd rather be nice to people and let them cause the deaths of others. At least that's what it boils down to. We just don't have it in us to do what it takes to solve the problem given what we already have. We'd rather tough it out, hoping for a cure.
It's kind of like sending food to starving lands instead of contraceptives. In the short term it's nice of us, but it's really treating the symptom rather than the problem and is only making things worse in the long run.
Bullshit. The point is to get more money from people and to keep their obsolete business model propped up a little while longer.
If there's anything I've learned about corporations - and worse, media conglomerates - it's that they'll do absolutely anything they can get away with to get as much of your money as possible for as little as possible. The same is actually true for people, which makes sense since corporations are made of people.*
If they could use DRM to force you to buy another copy of the content for each device you want to play it on, you bet your ass they would. To the *AA, DRM is really just another tool to get more money from people and to keep doing it. That's what it all boils down to.
*If you find that interesting, read Adiamante by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. and The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert. They are both good reads besides.
How will they know who did it if they're anonymous?
I'm only referring to the part about removal by default, but I don't think it's as sinister as our kneejerk reaction would indicate.
Microsoft is aiming that default - accurately I would contend - at "Joe 'my-box-is-a-zombie' six-pack". Your average user just accepts defaults. And in this case we need defaults that protect the rest of us from the machines of non-tech savvy users.
I had 2.0 crash on me at home too.
I wasn't doing anything outlandish either.
What about these problems:
There are more, but I just can't think of them right now.
Sanctions could work.
I won't be pretty, and it won't be nice, but it could work.
If you starve them to the point that even the soldiers begin feeling the effects, they'll eventually turn on their own government and topple it in order to get food. Especially if we bombard them with propaganda to counter the inevitable "those westerners are evil and they're the ones starving you!" propaganda.
Like I said, not pretty, and not nice, but it could work. I don't think anyone is willing to go that far though.
Most of your points I can neither add credence to, nor counter, but the "June 4th Incident of 1989"? Now you're just being cryptic. Most of us here know it as the "Tianamen Square Incident/protest/massacre/whatever". I've definitely heard of that, and so have many people. That said, it puts doubt on your other points. I don't know if "insightful" is appropriate here. Care to cite anything?
I have no sympathy either. Their products suck. Plain and simple. For the full rant, read here.
It's not a good article and it's not something that just happened.
See this for a good article (and it's from 2003).
You can even buy them here or here, or just read the wired article and check up on the companies mentioned in it.
They have 7 milllion customers eagerly waiting to buy the expansion. They don't need the christmas rush.
I hate blog links. Here's the real deal: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topi cId=38244050&sid=1.
I vote we call it deathentary.
-1 idiot
/. discussion.
Did you see the part that said, "How many shards is Warhammer Online going to have?"
Apparently not.
The rest wast just for the sake of a
How many shards the game will have is important, because it's the reason about 10 of my friends and I quit WoW.
Idiot.
How many shards is Warhammer Online going to have?
/.ers:
One, like EVE Online, or eleventy bajillion, like World of Warcraft?
Side rant for
I don't like the fact that WoW is called a Massively Multiplayer ORPG when it's got tons servers. Not one massive one. So it's very difficult to play with your friends if they started on server Y and you started on server X and you're not allowed to transfer your character to their server, and they're unwillling to play on yours - or some other scenario. Whereas EVE has one server. Tranquility. If you play EVE, you play with everybody else playing eve. One economy, one server with all your friends and enemeies.
And for the record, I'm currently subscribed to - and playing - both EVE and WoW.
The defended never showed up; nay, could not show up for court.
You know what happens when one party doesn't show up? Either the case is dismissed, or they lose.
This isn't some landmark sensational case that proves you can't libel someone on the internet, only that under certain circumstances you can work the system into doing almost anything for you. Something we already knew.
This statement from the defendant sums it up: "I don't feel like I can express my opinions," Bock says. "Only one side of the story was told in court. Nobody heard my side."
She lost because she wasn't even there.
Secondly, no one, not even the plaintiff actually expects her to pay. The article even says the plaintiff knows the defendant doesn't even have $1M, let alone $11M.
This story is nothing more than a series of vindictive acts by both sides. It reminds me of that video where two women in a parking lot bang their doors into each others' cars, then it escalates to totalling both vehicles through a series of deliberate acts (not real events).
The fact that you can be a "content owner" rankles.
Back in the old days, the only way to get music was to have musicians in house. The only way to have a play was to have players in house. The performers had control of the content.
Thanks to recording and physical media became distributable without the original producers. Tough break for the musicians and players. The performers lost control of the content, the distributers gained it. Do you really think the distributers gave a shit about the performers?
Now, thanks to electronic media, the music is distributable without even the distributers. Tough break for the distributers. They lost control of the content. Do you really think the public cares about the distributers?
Your business model is obsolete. Grow up and find a new one instead of lobbying for laws to prop it up with.
All people are doing is cutting out the middleman - evil or not, technology has passed them on and they don't like it one bit that the shoe is now on the other foot.
What winnings?
These are called trojan horses.
Viruses and worms replicate themselves and redistribute through backdoors. Typically "worm" carries connotations of being particularly aggressive and requiring no faults of the user. But I think, originally virus meant little more than self replication, not even necessarily malicious - just that you could be "infected" (hence the term virus). Virus carries connotations of being prolific (even within one host system).
Ones that depend on tricking the user or stupid users are trojan horses.
At least those were the definitions back in the day. The media has done a lot to muddy the waters.
In short (and IMHO):
The problem is many cases of malware combine some or all of these rather than just one of them, and the media flounders without having a short, easily digestable label to slap on them, so they confuse things with generalizations.