"but I still can't believe they expect that phrases like 'complete albums,' 'full-length movies,' and 'Napster lives' are to be interpreted as '100% legal.'"
It's all about context. I can say that I "would never download complete albums and full length movies from the internet no matter how long napster lives." and that statement is 100% legal to make--and it contains all three phrases which the original poster questions as "100% legal".
The RIAA is suing the same people who buy their music. I'm sure that will drive record sales up, oh yeah, totally. What the fuck?
If you sue the people who buy your products, they're going to stop buying your products. You can't screw somebody over once and expect them to come to you for anything other than getting screwed over.
So after a few thousand lawsuits, I'm sure the RIAA's short-sightedness will continue, and when CD sales drop again they'll say it's because of file sharing. When in reality, they're a bunch of fuckwits who don't know how to run a business, who have totally alienated their entire userbase by SUING THEM.
Seriously, what do they hope to accomplish? Hey, wait a second! This is terrorism! They're using fear as a means to accomplish a goal other than fear itself; they're using these lawsuits to scare people into stopping file trading and buying more records. The said it themselves, "fear and awe"... It's simple domestic terrorism, purported from an industry association. I wonder if we can get them under the patriot act... some kind of class action lawsuit involving lots of fear and emotional distress...
I think that the scroll wheel should've been like this in the first place. Or even better; like the little eraser-looking nub that was used on laptops as a pointing device for a while. You can move it in any two-dimensional direction you want. The scroll wheel is kinda-sorta neat, sure, but what if you just had to lightly pull down on the little "nub" and hold it there to scroll down multiple pages? Sure beats repeatedly flicking at the wheel with your finger... I think that the entire moving-wheel thing is outdated; I want a mouse with no spinning parts, dammit.
The client I mentioned earlier who is very sweet but not very bright was one of those clients who refused to learn, and a client I had to let go. She's very young, too, in her early twenties. I believe she was perfectly capable of learning what she needed to know, with a little bit of effort, but she constantly called on the same issues. And I constantly had to recite the same solutions over and over. She refused to be educated (see below for more about client- and self-education). She's one of those people who are used to relying too much on others, and are happy with being told there are no stupid questions.
Hmm. Sweet young lady calling every day about the same stupid issues. hmmmm. I'd like to venture a guess here that maybe she's turned on by your intellect and wanted to screw you eight ways from tuesday. Now that, my friend, is the kind of client you pass on to another reasonably intelligent tech, unless you're willing to take it yourself.;)
I could be mistaken...
on
FCC Goes WiFi
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· Score: 2, Funny
If I'm trying to decide whether or not I want to go see The Hulk, the question of how much it will cost me comes into play. I may go see it at a $4.00 matinee price, but definitely not at $8.00. $8 is way too much money to spend on an hour or two of disposable entertainment; I'd rather go pick up a couple magazines or a book for that price... I can go back and re-read those over and over again, long after I've initially purchased them. Now, if somebody offers to take me to a movie (ie, it's free for me) and pay the $8 admission for me, then the chance is much greater that I will go.
What I'm getting at here is that there isn't money in my budget to go see a movie that costs $8 and leaves me at the end with nothing more than break-room gossip. There is however room in my budget for what is free. If there were no sources available for me to get a movie from for free, I'm still not coughing up the 8 bucks to see it in a theater, though, and I believe that's where the MPAA's reasoning has gone awry.
The MPAA seems to believe that for every time a movie is downloaded off the internet, there is at least one person not paying the $8 that they would otherwise pay if the movie were not available for download; but this is just not the case. If the movie isn't available for download, it doesn't get downloaded; however if people don't have room in their budget for an $8 movie, they still won't spend the money on the movie even if they can't get it for free.
Now, if I downloaded some movie and I gave it rave reviews to all of my peers, maybe some of them will have the $8 required to go out and see the movie in a theater; or the $3.50 to rent it; or the $20 to buy the DVD, or whatever. I'm just pointing this out because I know that it does happen from time to time, and it is probably a phenomenon that the MPAA is ignoring. This puts movie downloaders in the same seat as movie critics; people who see movies for free and then pass on their opinions. If I tell a buddy of mine that I know is into sci-fi movies that there's a sci-fi movie that I saw that he might enjoy; he may just rent it and check it out, because he respects my judgement of sci-fi films. It would probably never stand up in court, but if each movie downloader can drag some witnesses up onto the stand to testify that the movie downloader's recommendation is what solely motivated a ticket / dvd purchase, that might take the ball out of the MPAA's court.
So back to the subject of the comment: theft. What am I stealing? There was never $8 set aside to go see a given movie in the first place, so by my downloading it and watching it, what have I stolen from anyone?
I'm pretty sure that Radio Broadcasting is what has given consumers the idea that listening to music at a lessened quality (mp3 is "almost" cd quality, and FM radio is "just less than" cd quality) is a right, and one they get to enjoy every day. Few people are familiar with the way marketing works on a radio station, and that commercials and advertisers are actually paying the bills (read: RIAA royalty fees and FCC broadcast license fees and of course, electricity) that allow all of the music the station plays to be played. Most people change the station when a commercial comes on anyhow, which is the rough equivalent of loading up another song in the playlist. I really do honestly believe that a combination of radio broadcasting and listener ignorance is responsible for the feeling that copyright laws don't "matter."
When we listen to the radio we aren't given a PSA that says "The songs played on this station are licensed by the RIAA under [insert name of contract/act/law here] and the next hour of music has been paid for by the advertisers [list of advertisers here]. Please remember that it's these advertisers that enable us to play all of today's hottest music; we can't play this stuff for free!"... although if there were (or there were something like it) the listener might just be tempted to fire a couple of neurons and put it together that this widely broadcast "free to us" music is actually costing somebody money, so it really isn't wholly "free" and maybe shouldn't be taken and distributed so freely.
The question that really remains to be answered is whether or not average people are indeed the copyright-ignoring file traders in question; with the reasoning that the average person only puts 2 and 2 together when they're told to do so, and they may just not figure out that [some] music isn't free.
It doesn't matter that machines lack manual dexterity and may take three times as long to complete simple tasks compared to a human being; you can run a machine for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. What used to take 8 hours now takes 24, but you don't have to provide lighting or heating or restrooms or a break room or sick time off or maternity leave or smoke breaks or disobedience or ineptitude, or ANYTHING; All you need is an outlet to plug the robots into and "stuff" with which to build whatever product needs building.
It'd still be a cost cutter, even if it isn't a biomechanical replica of a human body capable of human body tasks like grasping with fingers. It will grasp with calipers and take a little more time to do so, but you only have to pay for a robot once. A good robot, anyhow; I do realize that all machines need maintenance, but a quart of motor oil pales in comparison to a weekly salary for a normal assembly line worker.
A housecleaning robot can clean the kitchen at night, in near darkness, slowly and silently while you sleep; maybe you'll even wake up to an omelette and four strips of bacon (if you got the high end model)...
I do agree with your last point though; once the prices are right the menial jobs will all disappear. What I'm waiting for, though, is the day when I can buy a robot who will hunt rabbits for me on a ranch in Montana. I can sell the rabbit pelts on e-bay (once my hunting robot tans and cures and does whatever else that needs doing to a pelt to make it saleable) in order to pay my land taxes, and eat the meat from my huntin' robot's successes in order to keep me alive. Then, everybody wins. Hopefully he'll have an upgradeable firmware so I can teach him how to synthesize a lubricating oil substitute from rabbit parts so I never even have to run into town to get Johnny 5 a quart of oil again. It's nice to dream...
There's a difference between over-the-phone technical support and going to somebody's house to make sure they have the latest virus definitions installed and showing them how to press alt-F4 to quickly close popup windows before they become irritating.
Trust me, I know, I've done both for a living, and they are very very different things. When somebody offers you a glass of iced tea because it's a hot day outside and then asks you about the latest update for Internet Explorer, you're already ahead of any corporate job outside of Microsoft: a free cold drink and a conversation about something you're familiar with and can illustrate if necessary because you are right there with the person you're explaining things to.
If I leave my front door open and somebody walks into my house, grabs my television, and walks off with it, will the police arrest me for leaving my door open or the thief for taking the TV?... It seems to me like the RIAA's new practice of suing those who "leave the front door open" is ludicrous, and it shouldn't stand up in court. It's not the sharer who is breaking the law, but the person who decides to actually download the file.
I'm also curious how they're going about verifying that the shared song is indeed a new Michael Jackson single; do they just guess based on the filename? I can put 5 megabytes of random garbage into a file and call it "Michael Jackson - Supaleet New Single.mp3" in less than ten seconds. OR, is the RIAA going around downloading the files named as such in order to find out if they're actually copies of the music they are supposed to protect? If so, wouldn't they in essence be the thieves walking off with the aformentioned television? I would find it ironic if, in their policing of the internet, they are rampantly breaking the law they are claiming to try and uphold. It almost makes me want to set up a honeypot of sorts on the fasttrack network to attract the RIAA hounds; just to see what they're up to.
And finally, my very last point (although a very nitpicky one that I hope I don't get modded down for) is that you cannot digitally COPY audio from an analog source. Way back when I had my first Digital Music class in college, I learned that analog sound (like on a vinyl record or cassette tape--remember those?) is stored in a very pure and very clean wave, while digital sound is stored as a stair-stepped approximation of the sound which is (depending on the sampling rate) a pretty close *approximation* of the original source analog sound. Digitally recording any analog audio source guarantees that you end up with a likeness of the original audio, but not a true copy. This "likeness" becomes even less like the original when you compress the data with MP3 or OGG Vorbis algorithms. At that point it isn't just digital audio, either--it is raw binary data which needs an appropriate interpreter in order to re-create the audible approximation of the original analog source. Of course, I'm sure the working legal definition of copy includes the synonyms of: impersonate, approximate, make a likeness of, imitate, and etc. Oh yes, "etc" is most-likely part of the definition--this is America we're talking about, after all.;) I'm not totally certain on the legal definition of "copy" when it comes to music, though, is anyone able to shed some light on it?
The threat of being accosted by the RIAA is reduced significantly when one has a dynamic IP. Even moreso, when one has a dynamic IP that changes on an hourly basis, and is not tracked by the ISP providing IP services. One feasible way to foil the RIAA's plans to track down users based on IP, are for ISPs to band together and establish a new "anonymous" internet access standard. ISPs which don't keep logs of which IP belonged to which user at which time, and then forcing a new IP on every user on an hourly (or hourly + random number of minutes) basis.
Then when the RIAA with their lawyers and their hounds and their warrants show up on the doorstep at SomeISP.com, SomeISP.com can shrug and say "Sorry, we don't know who was using those IPs at those times; we don't log that information. Oh and those IPs that you're curious about aren't unique to a single user from one hour to the next, either."
Although such an extravagant system is hardly required if ISPs will just...not keep logs of who has which IPs at what times. That right there is really all that's necessary in order to put a stop to the threat of the RIAA. If they've got no way to "lookup" your IP and "resolve" it to your name and address, they're up the creek without a paddle. heh. Unfortunately I think that this kind of tracking is required by law. =\
An intermediate proxy layer is probably required to protect peoples' identities while maintaining responsibility to the law. If no data were transferred directly from peer to peer, but all data passed through an anonymizing proxy service, then there would be no way to track individual IPs to individual users. The proxy service would have a range of IPs that it would block from using the service; mostly overseas numbers and government agencies. But the proxy service would have to be generically available for any level and type of data transfer on the internet, so nobody can say "That proxy network that soandso developed is just there to make piracy easier!".. the proxy network needs to be depolyed as an anonymous internet access service, it needs to be marketed like that, and if need be it needs to be defended in court like that.
To make an analogy, creating this proxy service is much like becoming a gun manufacturer. People will show up on your doorstep (the RIAA, their hounds, their lawyers) and proclaim loudly that you are irresponsible and you make only tools of destruction (destruction of their capitalistic heirarchy which dictates that they get boatloads of cash and the music creators themselves get jack). But when you refute their claims you need to make sure that you do so from a platform of freedom and independence, a platform of neutrality that doesn't advocate breaking the law, but one that does acknowledge that it may be possible for the law to be broken through the use of its products. Care must be taken to portray the proxy service as a simple anonymizing service without advocating any one single use or purpose. Smith & Wesson don't say that their guns are only good for killing people; but they do say that they make damn fine guns. It's all in the marketing and the picture you paint for people to see.
more people are doing it at a faster rate and not researching the risks that come with it.
Thank you for hitting the nail on the head. This is the main problem with just about every aspect of human society: everybody is doing more and thinking less.
Everything is risky. Alcohol is risky, driving is risky, wireless networks are risky; hell, getting out of bed is risky. But more people are willing to just jump right in and figure things out as they go along instead of planning ahead and doing the research. Maybe they see it as reinventing the wheel to spend all that time thinking instead of doing, but I'd rather have a museum of reinvented wheels than a museum of really dumb people.
People don't think before they act anymore, unless there's some large amount of money on the line. If (as another commenter suggested) there were harsh financial penalties for allowing sensitive data to be stolen, then more people would take the issue seriously. (by "allowing" I mean "making available to access without a key or other form of secure authorization")
It's really a shame that an incident like this has to pop up and remind us that the majority of people in control of sensitive information are too stupid to police their own actions and treat responsibly the sensitive information that they have been given in confidence.
Gauntlet II, for the NES. Don't play this game with the intent of beating it, because IT NEVER ENDS. I read a guide which said it ended at 100, and me and some buddies played it up to level 102 and it didn't end. After more hunting I found a FAQ which said level 250 was the end. NOPE! We played the game up to level 372 (yes, that's three hundred and seventy two!) and it didn't end.
Somewhere around there the NES froze (probably because we'd had it on for about two weeks straight while we played the game off and on trying to get to the freaking end of it...) and then we decided to call it quits.
But I must know; anybody go higher than 372? How much liquor/drugs/cheez product did it require?
Oh, to stay on-topic, get an old NES and pick up a copy of Battletoads, or any of the Double Dragon games, or Nemesis; they're all two-player simultaneous in a non-pvp kind of way.
It sounds a lot to me like they're just trying to gauge how much more they can TAX US to give us more lanes on our freeways or increase bus service or whatever. If they find out how much money people are willing to shell out, they can apply those statistics to ANYTHING THEY WANT. I speak as a Washington state resident, and I know for a fact that the city government in Seattle is filled with corruption; people who don't listen to the public, who will go against what the public desires, and will of course raise our taxes at every fucking opportunity. The more we prove that we've got money to spare for something like this, the more they're going to take advantage of us. I don't like it.
Just about everybody who pays attention to the world around them knows that the first three digits of a SSN represent the state and year of issue. Getting the first three digits only requires that you know somebody's place and date of birth. You don't even need to shell out $26 for that much information, because it's usually on record when it comes to public officials.
This is a scare tactic, nothing more. If they'd have posted the entire numbers, then they'd have my attention.
Seems like these days all that society wants from itself is conformity; we all have to think alike, we all have to act alike, etc. All disorders can be coped with naturally, through your own determination; although the popular "solution" is a quick fix so people can be "normal"; this quick fix is usually found in some innocuous-looking white pill. "Accepting" ADHD and medicating yourself is just another form of self-denial. People are different and diverse, and yet this recent desire for us all to be absolutely identical to one another is apparently only appalling to me.
For a while, my mother was (and if you bring it up in conversation, still is) an ADD/ADHD evangelist. She thinks everyone has it, or has it in combination with some "emotional component" or whatever-the-fuck. It's just another label which helps us as a society to cope with this diversity present within society. Why people feel a need to flee this diversity and conform is beyond me; probably a search for acceptance?
Fuck that; I want to be different. I've always been borderline in any analysis of my ADHD-ness, and about all of this matter I have only this to say: To hell with lab-created and guinea-pig tested medications; to hell with becoming a robot; to hell with thinking INSIDE the box! I'm going to be fucking quirky--and if you don't like it, then you can fuck right off.
Am I the only one that's a little unsettled by this? No need for suicidal terrorist hijackers to go to flight school and get their names written down on paper and entered into databases for tracking; when a paltry $30,000 investment gets them a damn good flight simulator.
I'm not trying to be funny, I'm trying to be dead serious. As it stands, since 9/11, the US government has been able to track down some of the hijackers and tell which flight schools they attended, and etc. But what about when a hijacker doesn't need to attend flight school; never even has to put his name down on paper, or enter it into a database, or even interact with anyone at all? If some fellow in his garage can throw this together on a $30k budget, what can an oil baron with $2M to throw at it create? They say that the terrorist cells that planned 9/11 were at it for upwards of 7 years, so it is surely obvious to everyone that they'd be willing to throw down the time and effort to build one of these simulators. (No doubt in the trailer of a large truck, so it can tour all over the country and train every single last cell there is...)
Am I paranoid, or spot-on? Should this be cause for concern, or not?
A smaller outfit, much like Nullsoft was--prior to being eaten by the corporate giant which is now the international media conglomerate of AOL/Time Warner.
But I think we'll all raise our glasses to toast him in his new adventures. Here's to Llamasoft. (or whatever he wants to call it...)
This has nothing to do with misplaced orcs. This has to do with an invasion of private property, known as "hacking" or "criminal trespass" or even under the Homeland Security act, "cyber terrorism"... Who knows what trade secrets they stole about the game engine or server or network or security or etc while they were inside of the system? So in reality, it could be both criminal cyber-tresspass and theft. Also harassment... also..... C'mon, use your frickin' head.
This isn't "just a fucking game"; It's a business. When a serious security flaw is discovered in an application and that flaw is made public knowledge, the application publisher's reputation takes a beating--as does its' stock. Not to mention the loss of investor confidence and the loss of the customer base and etc. Most pay-for-play subscription based MMORPGs rely upon recurring income; even if only 10% of their customers say "fuck this" in response to this hack, that's 10% of their recurring income down the drain.
The players have no recourse. For them, yes, it is just a game. The admins can roll everything back 24 hours and let the players play on. On the business side of things though, it's much more complicated; for the reasons outlined above.
Slashdot Mirror
"but I still can't believe they expect that phrases like 'complete albums,' 'full-length movies,' and 'Napster lives' are to be interpreted as '100% legal.'"
It's all about context. I can say that I "would never download complete albums and full length movies from the internet no matter how long napster lives." and that statement is 100% legal to make--and it contains all three phrases which the original poster questions as "100% legal".
The RIAA is suing the same people who buy their music. I'm sure that will drive record sales up, oh yeah, totally. What the fuck?
... It's simple domestic terrorism, purported from an industry association. I wonder if we can get them under the patriot act... some kind of class action lawsuit involving lots of fear and emotional distress...
If you sue the people who buy your products, they're going to stop buying your products. You can't screw somebody over once and expect them to come to you for anything other than getting screwed over.
So after a few thousand lawsuits, I'm sure the RIAA's short-sightedness will continue, and when CD sales drop again they'll say it's because of file sharing. When in reality, they're a bunch of fuckwits who don't know how to run a business, who have totally alienated their entire userbase by SUING THEM.
Seriously, what do they hope to accomplish? Hey, wait a second! This is terrorism! They're using fear as a means to accomplish a goal other than fear itself; they're using these lawsuits to scare people into stopping file trading and buying more records. The said it themselves, "fear and awe"
hushmail.com you mean?
I think that the scroll wheel should've been like this in the first place. Or even better; like the little eraser-looking nub that was used on laptops as a pointing device for a while. You can move it in any two-dimensional direction you want. The scroll wheel is kinda-sorta neat, sure, but what if you just had to lightly pull down on the little "nub" and hold it there to scroll down multiple pages? Sure beats repeatedly flicking at the wheel with your finger... I think that the entire moving-wheel thing is outdated; I want a mouse with no spinning parts, dammit.
The client I mentioned earlier who is very sweet but not very bright was one of those clients who refused to learn, and a client I had to let go. She's very young, too, in her early twenties. I believe she was perfectly capable of learning what she needed to know, with a little bit of effort, but she constantly called on the same issues. And I constantly had to recite the same solutions over and over. She refused to be educated (see below for more about client- and self-education). She's one of those people who are used to relying too much on others, and are happy with being told there are no stupid questions.
;)
Hmm. Sweet young lady calling every day about the same stupid issues. hmmmm. I'd like to venture a guess here that maybe she's turned on by your intellect and wanted to screw you eight ways from tuesday. Now that, my friend, is the kind of client you pass on to another reasonably intelligent tech, unless you're willing to take it yourself.
...but I think we just slashdotted the FCC.
Is this something we should be concerned about?
If I'm trying to decide whether or not I want to go see The Hulk, the question of how much it will cost me comes into play. I may go see it at a $4.00 matinee price, but definitely not at $8.00. $8 is way too much money to spend on an hour or two of disposable entertainment; I'd rather go pick up a couple magazines or a book for that price... I can go back and re-read those over and over again, long after I've initially purchased them. Now, if somebody offers to take me to a movie (ie, it's free for me) and pay the $8 admission for me, then the chance is much greater that I will go.
What I'm getting at here is that there isn't money in my budget to go see a movie that costs $8 and leaves me at the end with nothing more than break-room gossip. There is however room in my budget for what is free. If there were no sources available for me to get a movie from for free, I'm still not coughing up the 8 bucks to see it in a theater, though, and I believe that's where the MPAA's reasoning has gone awry.
The MPAA seems to believe that for every time a movie is downloaded off the internet, there is at least one person not paying the $8 that they would otherwise pay if the movie were not available for download; but this is just not the case. If the movie isn't available for download, it doesn't get downloaded; however if people don't have room in their budget for an $8 movie, they still won't spend the money on the movie even if they can't get it for free.
Now, if I downloaded some movie and I gave it rave reviews to all of my peers, maybe some of them will have the $8 required to go out and see the movie in a theater; or the $3.50 to rent it; or the $20 to buy the DVD, or whatever. I'm just pointing this out because I know that it does happen from time to time, and it is probably a phenomenon that the MPAA is ignoring. This puts movie downloaders in the same seat as movie critics; people who see movies for free and then pass on their opinions. If I tell a buddy of mine that I know is into sci-fi movies that there's a sci-fi movie that I saw that he might enjoy; he may just rent it and check it out, because he respects my judgement of sci-fi films. It would probably never stand up in court, but if each movie downloader can drag some witnesses up onto the stand to testify that the movie downloader's recommendation is what solely motivated a ticket / dvd purchase, that might take the ball out of the MPAA's court.
So back to the subject of the comment: theft. What am I stealing? There was never $8 set aside to go see a given movie in the first place, so by my downloading it and watching it, what have I stolen from anyone?
I'm pretty sure that Radio Broadcasting is what has given consumers the idea that listening to music at a lessened quality (mp3 is "almost" cd quality, and FM radio is "just less than" cd quality) is a right, and one they get to enjoy every day. Few people are familiar with the way marketing works on a radio station, and that commercials and advertisers are actually paying the bills (read: RIAA royalty fees and FCC broadcast license fees and of course, electricity) that allow all of the music the station plays to be played. Most people change the station when a commercial comes on anyhow, which is the rough equivalent of loading up another song in the playlist. I really do honestly believe that a combination of radio broadcasting and listener ignorance is responsible for the feeling that copyright laws don't "matter."
... although if there were (or there were something like it) the listener might just be tempted to fire a couple of neurons and put it together that this widely broadcast "free to us" music is actually costing somebody money, so it really isn't wholly "free" and maybe shouldn't be taken and distributed so freely.
When we listen to the radio we aren't given a PSA that says "The songs played on this station are licensed by the RIAA under [insert name of contract/act/law here] and the next hour of music has been paid for by the advertisers [list of advertisers here]. Please remember that it's these advertisers that enable us to play all of today's hottest music; we can't play this stuff for free!"
The question that really remains to be answered is whether or not average people are indeed the copyright-ignoring file traders in question; with the reasoning that the average person only puts 2 and 2 together when they're told to do so, and they may just not figure out that [some] music isn't free.
Note to RIAA: we will dance on your grave.
And we shall dance to whatever we happen to get off kazaa at the time...
It sounds like you're forgetting one thing: Time.
It doesn't matter that machines lack manual dexterity and may take three times as long to complete simple tasks compared to a human being; you can run a machine for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. What used to take 8 hours now takes 24, but you don't have to provide lighting or heating or restrooms or a break room or sick time off or maternity leave or smoke breaks or disobedience or ineptitude, or ANYTHING; All you need is an outlet to plug the robots into and "stuff" with which to build whatever product needs building.
It'd still be a cost cutter, even if it isn't a biomechanical replica of a human body capable of human body tasks like grasping with fingers. It will grasp with calipers and take a little more time to do so, but you only have to pay for a robot once. A good robot, anyhow; I do realize that all machines need maintenance, but a quart of motor oil pales in comparison to a weekly salary for a normal assembly line worker.
A housecleaning robot can clean the kitchen at night, in near darkness, slowly and silently while you sleep; maybe you'll even wake up to an omelette and four strips of bacon (if you got the high end model)...
I do agree with your last point though; once the prices are right the menial jobs will all disappear. What I'm waiting for, though, is the day when I can buy a robot who will hunt rabbits for me on a ranch in Montana. I can sell the rabbit pelts on e-bay (once my hunting robot tans and cures and does whatever else that needs doing to a pelt to make it saleable) in order to pay my land taxes, and eat the meat from my huntin' robot's successes in order to keep me alive. Then, everybody wins. Hopefully he'll have an upgradeable firmware so I can teach him how to synthesize a lubricating oil substitute from rabbit parts so I never even have to run into town to get Johnny 5 a quart of oil again. It's nice to dream...
There's a difference between over-the-phone technical support and going to somebody's house to make sure they have the latest virus definitions installed and showing them how to press alt-F4 to quickly close popup windows before they become irritating.
Trust me, I know, I've done both for a living, and they are very very different things. When somebody offers you a glass of iced tea because it's a hot day outside and then asks you about the latest update for Internet Explorer, you're already ahead of any corporate job outside of Microsoft: a free cold drink and a conversation about something you're familiar with and can illustrate if necessary because you are right there with the person you're explaining things to.
If I leave my front door open and somebody walks into my house, grabs my television, and walks off with it, will the police arrest me for leaving my door open or the thief for taking the TV? ... It seems to me like the RIAA's new practice of suing those who "leave the front door open" is ludicrous, and it shouldn't stand up in court. It's not the sharer who is breaking the law, but the person who decides to actually download the file.
;) I'm not totally certain on the legal definition of "copy" when it comes to music, though, is anyone able to shed some light on it?
I'm also curious how they're going about verifying that the shared song is indeed a new Michael Jackson single; do they just guess based on the filename? I can put 5 megabytes of random garbage into a file and call it "Michael Jackson - Supaleet New Single.mp3" in less than ten seconds. OR, is the RIAA going around downloading the files named as such in order to find out if they're actually copies of the music they are supposed to protect? If so, wouldn't they in essence be the thieves walking off with the aformentioned television? I would find it ironic if, in their policing of the internet, they are rampantly breaking the law they are claiming to try and uphold. It almost makes me want to set up a honeypot of sorts on the fasttrack network to attract the RIAA hounds; just to see what they're up to.
And finally, my very last point (although a very nitpicky one that I hope I don't get modded down for) is that you cannot digitally COPY audio from an analog source. Way back when I had my first Digital Music class in college, I learned that analog sound (like on a vinyl record or cassette tape--remember those?) is stored in a very pure and very clean wave, while digital sound is stored as a stair-stepped approximation of the sound which is (depending on the sampling rate) a pretty close *approximation* of the original source analog sound. Digitally recording any analog audio source guarantees that you end up with a likeness of the original audio, but not a true copy. This "likeness" becomes even less like the original when you compress the data with MP3 or OGG Vorbis algorithms. At that point it isn't just digital audio, either--it is raw binary data which needs an appropriate interpreter in order to re-create the audible approximation of the original analog source. Of course, I'm sure the working legal definition of copy includes the synonyms of: impersonate, approximate, make a likeness of, imitate, and etc. Oh yes, "etc" is most-likely part of the definition--this is America we're talking about, after all.
The threat of being accosted by the RIAA is reduced significantly when one has a dynamic IP. Even moreso, when one has a dynamic IP that changes on an hourly basis, and is not tracked by the ISP providing IP services. One feasible way to foil the RIAA's plans to track down users based on IP, are for ISPs to band together and establish a new "anonymous" internet access standard. ISPs which don't keep logs of which IP belonged to which user at which time, and then forcing a new IP on every user on an hourly (or hourly + random number of minutes) basis.
.. the proxy network needs to be depolyed as an anonymous internet access service, it needs to be marketed like that, and if need be it needs to be defended in court like that.
Then when the RIAA with their lawyers and their hounds and their warrants show up on the doorstep at SomeISP.com, SomeISP.com can shrug and say "Sorry, we don't know who was using those IPs at those times; we don't log that information. Oh and those IPs that you're curious about aren't unique to a single user from one hour to the next, either."
Although such an extravagant system is hardly required if ISPs will just...not keep logs of who has which IPs at what times. That right there is really all that's necessary in order to put a stop to the threat of the RIAA. If they've got no way to "lookup" your IP and "resolve" it to your name and address, they're up the creek without a paddle. heh. Unfortunately I think that this kind of tracking is required by law. =\
An intermediate proxy layer is probably required to protect peoples' identities while maintaining responsibility to the law. If no data were transferred directly from peer to peer, but all data passed through an anonymizing proxy service, then there would be no way to track individual IPs to individual users. The proxy service would have a range of IPs that it would block from using the service; mostly overseas numbers and government agencies. But the proxy service would have to be generically available for any level and type of data transfer on the internet, so nobody can say "That proxy network that soandso developed is just there to make piracy easier!"
To make an analogy, creating this proxy service is much like becoming a gun manufacturer. People will show up on your doorstep (the RIAA, their hounds, their lawyers) and proclaim loudly that you are irresponsible and you make only tools of destruction (destruction of their capitalistic heirarchy which dictates that they get boatloads of cash and the music creators themselves get jack). But when you refute their claims you need to make sure that you do so from a platform of freedom and independence, a platform of neutrality that doesn't advocate breaking the law, but one that does acknowledge that it may be possible for the law to be broken through the use of its products. Care must be taken to portray the proxy service as a simple anonymizing service without advocating any one single use or purpose. Smith & Wesson don't say that their guns are only good for killing people; but they do say that they make damn fine guns. It's all in the marketing and the picture you paint for people to see.
Xvid, man. Xvid.
more people are doing it at a faster rate and not researching the risks that come with it.
Thank you for hitting the nail on the head. This is the main problem with just about every aspect of human society: everybody is doing more and thinking less.
Everything is risky. Alcohol is risky, driving is risky, wireless networks are risky; hell, getting out of bed is risky. But more people are willing to just jump right in and figure things out as they go along instead of planning ahead and doing the research. Maybe they see it as reinventing the wheel to spend all that time thinking instead of doing, but I'd rather have a museum of reinvented wheels than a museum of really dumb people.
People don't think before they act anymore, unless there's some large amount of money on the line. If (as another commenter suggested) there were harsh financial penalties for allowing sensitive data to be stolen, then more people would take the issue seriously. (by "allowing" I mean "making available to access without a key or other form of secure authorization")
It's really a shame that an incident like this has to pop up and remind us that the majority of people in control of sensitive information are too stupid to police their own actions and treat responsibly the sensitive information that they have been given in confidence.
Oh, don't be silly.
.torrent file; duh. ;)
It should be a link to a
Since you mentioned it, I have to bring it up.
Gauntlet II, for the NES. Don't play this game with the intent of beating it, because IT NEVER ENDS. I read a guide which said it ended at 100, and me and some buddies played it up to level 102 and it didn't end. After more hunting I found a FAQ which said level 250 was the end. NOPE! We played the game up to level 372 (yes, that's three hundred and seventy two!) and it didn't end.
Somewhere around there the NES froze (probably because we'd had it on for about two weeks straight while we played the game off and on trying to get to the freaking end of it...) and then we decided to call it quits.
But I must know; anybody go higher than 372? How much liquor/drugs/cheez product did it require?
Oh, to stay on-topic, get an old NES and pick up a copy of Battletoads, or any of the Double Dragon games, or Nemesis; they're all two-player simultaneous in a non-pvp kind of way.
It sounds a lot to me like they're just trying to gauge how much more they can TAX US to give us more lanes on our freeways or increase bus service or whatever. If they find out how much money people are willing to shell out, they can apply those statistics to ANYTHING THEY WANT. I speak as a Washington state resident, and I know for a fact that the city government in Seattle is filled with corruption; people who don't listen to the public, who will go against what the public desires, and will of course raise our taxes at every fucking opportunity. The more we prove that we've got money to spare for something like this, the more they're going to take advantage of us. I don't like it.
aye, and it's probably taking every ounce of his willpower to keep from smashing their heads into one another. heh.
Just about everybody who pays attention to the world around them knows that the first three digits of a SSN represent the state and year of issue. Getting the first three digits only requires that you know somebody's place and date of birth. You don't even need to shell out $26 for that much information, because it's usually on record when it comes to public officials.
This is a scare tactic, nothing more. If they'd have posted the entire numbers, then they'd have my attention.
Seems like these days all that society wants from itself is conformity; we all have to think alike, we all have to act alike, etc. All disorders can be coped with naturally, through your own determination; although the popular "solution" is a quick fix so people can be "normal"; this quick fix is usually found in some innocuous-looking white pill. "Accepting" ADHD and medicating yourself is just another form of self-denial. People are different and diverse, and yet this recent desire for us all to be absolutely identical to one another is apparently only appalling to me.
For a while, my mother was (and if you bring it up in conversation, still is) an ADD/ADHD evangelist. She thinks everyone has it, or has it in combination with some "emotional component" or whatever-the-fuck. It's just another label which helps us as a society to cope with this diversity present within society. Why people feel a need to flee this diversity and conform is beyond me; probably a search for acceptance?
Fuck that; I want to be different. I've always been borderline in any analysis of my ADHD-ness, and about all of this matter I have only this to say: To hell with lab-created and guinea-pig tested medications; to hell with becoming a robot; to hell with thinking INSIDE the box! I'm going to be fucking quirky--and if you don't like it, then you can fuck right off.
Am I the only one that's a little unsettled by this? No need for suicidal terrorist hijackers to go to flight school and get their names written down on paper and entered into databases for tracking; when a paltry $30,000 investment gets them a damn good flight simulator.
I'm not trying to be funny, I'm trying to be dead serious. As it stands, since 9/11, the US government has been able to track down some of the hijackers and tell which flight schools they attended, and etc. But what about when a hijacker doesn't need to attend flight school; never even has to put his name down on paper, or enter it into a database, or even interact with anyone at all? If some fellow in his garage can throw this together on a $30k budget, what can an oil baron with $2M to throw at it create? They say that the terrorist cells that planned 9/11 were at it for upwards of 7 years, so it is surely obvious to everyone that they'd be willing to throw down the time and effort to build one of these simulators. (No doubt in the trailer of a large truck, so it can tour all over the country and train every single last cell there is...)
Am I paranoid, or spot-on? Should this be cause for concern, or not?
A smaller outfit, much like Nullsoft was--prior to being eaten by the corporate giant which is now the international media conglomerate of AOL/Time Warner.
But I think we'll all raise our glasses to toast him in his new adventures. Here's to Llamasoft. (or whatever he wants to call it...)
This has nothing to do with misplaced orcs. This has to do with an invasion of private property, known as "hacking" or "criminal trespass" or even under the Homeland Security act, "cyber terrorism" ... Who knows what trade secrets they stole about the game engine or server or network or security or etc while they were inside of the system? So in reality, it could be both criminal cyber-tresspass and theft. Also harassment... also..... C'mon, use your frickin' head.
This isn't "just a fucking game"; It's a business. When a serious security flaw is discovered in an application and that flaw is made public knowledge, the application publisher's reputation takes a beating--as does its' stock. Not to mention the loss of investor confidence and the loss of the customer base and etc. Most pay-for-play subscription based MMORPGs rely upon recurring income; even if only 10% of their customers say "fuck this" in response to this hack, that's 10% of their recurring income down the drain.
The players have no recourse. For them, yes, it is just a game. The admins can roll everything back 24 hours and let the players play on. On the business side of things though, it's much more complicated; for the reasons outlined above.
exactly. We should only do these kinds of experiments on Mars.
[insert Doom reference here]