Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
on
Diablo III Released
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· Score: 2
In this case, I'm pretty sure there is more than just activation/validation being processed on the servers. Certain aspects of item generation (read: loot drops) is not local to your machine, to prevent cloning/forgery/imbalance in the marketplace.
So cracked Diablo III (if possible) is likely to be Diablo III without exclusive, sweet loot. There's no telling how much of the game is on the server, and replacing that server code is going to be far trickier than no-opping over some validation checks.
Just the opposite. It means he's using internal Republican party workings to align state nominating bodies and amass delegates, instead of appealing to the popular vote. Delegates are not always chosen by popular vote. In some states, the popular vote is irrelevant. He is working more closely with Republican officials, state by state, and using the Republican nominating rules to his advantage.
The negative spin, of course, is that he is using back room deals and gaming the bureaucracy to override the "will of the people."
But as I see it, there are all sorts of forces messing with the mythical "will of the people," the writers of TFA included. He is not "in effect" or actually suspending anything other than unnecessary expenditures in respect to his campaign strategy. He is certainly not "effectively ending... [his] campaign." He is not going to "stop spending money" on the primaries, he's going to stop spending money on things like whistle stop tours courting the general electorate in the primaries, because there is no point to it. He's not going to win any more of the popular vote that way.
IHMO, all this will do, if successful, is cause the Republicans to revise the rules of the nominating process after he loses, so that it can't happen again. He can't win the nomination this way, but securing delegates can give him bargaining power on the floor this year at the convention where the party platform is determined. If he is deemed enough of an annoyance, and party officials think they can get away with it, Republicans will change the rules for the next presidential nomination.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
In the event that you make a ridiculous, delusional statement that demands laughter as an appropriate and natural response, you are not on step 2 and therefore destined to win. It is only a reasonable response, and will be followed by an immediate return to step 1. You must strip yourself of your misconceptions before Gandhi's theorem applies.
Didn't the EU force Microsoft to unbundle this stuff from Windows anyway? Maybe it's just good version control, which was very messy in Windows 7. Besides, not including all these licensing and patent issues limits their legal exposure. If anything, I think this demonstrates a further ratcheting up of the patent warfare climate. I don't blame them for wanting to take some cover, even if they might be grabbing some more ammo back there, rather than trying to pacify the situation. I think they're very sensitive to patent encumbrances which media is fraught with, and this can only simplify their potential legal headaches.
It's far easier to kill a $7 add-on than it is to redistribute the court-ordered fixed install set for your flagship product. I imagine all they need to charge is the DVD/h.264, etc. license fees, plus insist on WGA validation as they did for WMP 11, and they can call it a win.
Perhaps if we started coining the term "hacker++" (to indicate the fuzzy and lovable hackers), it would amend the fundamental flaws of our language choices?
In a fictional analogy, this sounds a bit like the Linux kernel and an accompanying distribution being open sourced and freely distributable/modifiable via the GPL, but somehow POSIX winds up as the copyright of an interested party, taking away the ability to write anything that uses the APIs for the next 95-120 years? Am I getting this right? They're coming after professional developers for reading and implementing the specification? And they want to draw license fees for that standard corporate copyright term?
If that's the case, this lawsuit is a radical departure that deeply concerns anyone who develops or hopes to develop software. Oracle has to lose this. What a mess.
Because right now, the real April Fool's day joke is the entire U.S. Patent Office, and they seem to think April first lasts all year.
It's sad that I thought of that as gallows humor at first, but quickly came to the conclusion that it's roughly congruent with my actual opinion about all these legal entities girding their loins for patent wars. The system was meant to foster invention by protecting the private rewards of individual ingenuity, and the will to bring a product to market (not necessarily by the inventor). Patents were never intended to be stockpiled in this fashion. The system is being abused, and the USPTO is legally bound to obey laws desperately in need of legislative review and reform. Maybe it's Congress that is the joke here.
Of course, Google's leadership is smart enough that it's just possible they're trying to demonstrate how broken this is, by hastening its collapse. No CEO or board can possibly like the escalating Mutual Assured Destruction environment that is brewing in corporate conglomerate patent holdings. It's extremely volatile, and an unstable way to do business.
These people are making climate predictions. 30 years is about the amount of time it takes before we can decide the dart is even likely to hit the board, let alone arrive incontrovertibly at the board, or score a bull's-eye. The remaining dozens of throws, over the interceding decades, mostly haven't had enough time to bear fruit, but I suspect it will all look a lot less like "monkeys" in 20 years. For better or for worse.
That's the scale of climatology. I would say its greatest flaw is that it is too ambitious, not that it's aimless.
It's incredible how this all started with Jeremy asking EA to "suck his balls," way back in 2004. Who knew they listened to customer feedback?
Well, EA can still suck my balls, and there's no religious group that will intimidate me from making such a request.
http://www.purepwnage.com/ has the full video, but there's egregious ad-portals in front of them. So you only have to sit through one, it's Season 1, Episode 3. The whole thing's worth watching, but the quote is at 4:14.
As for fundamentalist family groups, they can suck my balls too. I can only hate on EA so much.
Really, who cares? Here is what happens with credit card number fraud. It is used once or twice, the bank catches it early because they watch for unusual spending patterns, sometimes even the vendor does (at places like jewelry or electronics merchants where fraud is more common, and insurance against theft becomes expensive), they expire the number and reissue you a card. The vendor gets reimbursed from insurance against theft. Sometimes you get a phone call, asking if it's really you, based on contact information at the bank, not given at the POS. I don't know a card issuer in the world that would hold you liable for "forensic recovery and fraudulent use of a number recovered from a discarded electronic device." It gets added to the premiums of the vendor's theft insurance, if they don't catch it, and they often do.
As for the "stolen" number, they can have it for as far as it will get them. If you're deeply concerned about this "problem," you should consider waiters and cashiers with eidetic memories to be a more clear-and-present danger than forensic analysis of discarded hard disks.
Exactly. I hope to Science he resigned for other sensible reasons and wasn't forced into it because of his demanding that the data from the experiment which did not seem to match accepted theory be acknowledged and retested for. If that is what solely caused his resignation, I fear for the future of scientific inquiry. In fact, if that is the case, I'm pretty sure we don't have scientists at CERN but instead have politicians, and the only goal of a politician in such matters is to hide dissent and error. Science forbid we adopt politics instead of honest inquiry.
I'm banking that the politics is in press sensationalism, though. I seriously doubt there's even a correlative link between the experiment and his resignation.
Goodbye Magnuson-Moss, it was nice knowing you! A service pack for your car. Good luck with that. What if it bricks your car? How much does a replacement dashboard computer cost after warranty, due to a faulty update? Who is liable for that if it happens?
Has anyone seen the EULA for this thing? If it isn't significantly different from normal software EULAs, I'm avoiding this sort of technology like the plague.
First off, I'm reassured at all the "get another device" replies. That's about the only sensible option you have, if you're reading your employment agreement properly (read it closely if you haven't already, as some have suggested).
Secondly, this is not remotely a "Your Rights On-line" issue, as it has been tagged by someone. This is contract law. You agreed to rights and restrictions under that contract when you signed the employment agreement. You waived any rights you think you had when you signed it. If you want to violate that contract, you need to renegotiate (or should have negotiated better terms in the first place), or should cancel the contract as per its terms (or via a legal defense like fraud, duress, or mistake) and find something else to do. Or, you pay the penalty for breach. Your choice.
Regardless, what you are asking shows a remarkable ignorance of "your rights" anywhere, and you should look to secure better terms in the future if an agreement is unpalatable to your lifestyle.
I see this as a brazen shift from public policy matters being handled by the elected government of the people, to policy being determined by corporate entities, and therefore only by the propertied owner.
Which would finally return us to the grand old system of the landed property owner exclusively having a vote.
But this is worse. In a stockholder scenario, those with more property have a proportionally greater vote, rather than an equal vote like the landed property owner model.
So, what we are telling people is re: net neutrality, your government representation vote does not matter. You must buy stock to have a vote on the matter, and your vote is proportional to the amount you can spend on the stock, and the company's stock-issuance policies, for that matter.
This is a bad precedent. Governmental policy decisions should never be handed over to a stockholder vote. Ever. You can forget about American democracy if they are. If this is the result of obstruction in Congress, the obstructionists have won.
Finally, at this late hour, they realize that they do not like freedom of speech, they do not enjoy liberty, that special interests and the unjust exercise of power are harmed or defeated by such blessings. They want the old system back, where the individual could scream into the wind and no one would hear it. Where only large media conglomerates had the coverage, and the privilege, to control "public opinion." They long for the days when "public opinion" was their opinion, and not off-message as it is now.
Well, I have five words for them: Too late. Too damn bad.
Dear antediluvian governments: Enjoy your newly empowered citizenry. You don't get an Arab Spring without this, and you can't control the people at home if you decide to treat us as they did in the Middle East, or Soviet Russia. Good luck with that.
And if you may be a terrorist, or appear to be supporting terrorism in any way, you legally can be detained indefinitely by the military, without trial, according to the NDAA.
SO DON'T STAND SO CLOSE TO THE ATM, YOU TERRORISTS.
Just curious, why are folks spelling it the "Straight of Hormuz" instead of the "Strait." Is that a Queen's English spelling? In the US the correct spelling is definitely "strait," as in: "a narrow channel." Also, the linked articles spell it as "strait."
Not meaning to be a pedant here, I'm actually genuinely curious. Either it's a common spelling error or a cultural standards difference, and I was wondering which.
Patent law, by design, has always been a circular firing squad in the tech sector. In any sector really, it's meant to be a last resort against extreme foul play. It is understood that if one company files patent claims against another, there will be reciprocation, eventually grinding your entire industry to a halt. What is concerning in the Microsoft/Android case is that there has to be some fundamental weakness in the profitability of operating software engineering, as a business model, to introduce this sort of behavior. Microsoft is literally cannibalizing its own markets, and its clients. Since MS must know that, it's disturbing to watch them clutch at it to remain profitable, while they figure out what their actual, sustainable business model is going to be.
I imagine they feel justified, because FOSS undermined the profitability of software licensing and copyright monopolies, justifiably or no, and put it squarely into genuine software innovation and quality support services. So they are serving it right back to Stallman, in their book, by going after Android. But the fact is: Microsoft has neither innovation nor good support services any longer, and so they really are forced to eat themselves alive.
I would argue they never had those traits. They started up as Quick-and-Dirty OS, and that's all they've ever been. An expediency driving the ultimate commoditization of software and hardware alike. We all ran it because it was cheap (or free) and it worked (mostly). Now, with FOSS, the method of software is essentially valueless to anything but the furtherance of software itself, and the value is in what people can actually do with it. A hammer should not have a copyright, the act of driving in a nail shouldn't be patentable.
What's disturbing to me is what this says about the profitability of the entire sector, as it now stands, once you get past "boutique" electronics like Apple products, and into a larger, sustainable software economy and ecosystem. All the major software houses are in a scramble to find their own relevancy. In the end-user markets, the majors seem to have settled on "look and feel." But that's a failure too. If we keep trending towards patent law in this way, denying each other simple tools like a "menu grid of rounded boxes," "ribbons," "swiping a finger," or even the use of the word "app," everyone is going to suffer. Microsoft isn't alone in this one, not by a long shot, and it's hard to tell who started it.
But now that the battlefield has moved away from copyright and licensing, and toward patents, what we have is a very deliberate circular firing squad. Patent law is designed that way. It doesn't matter who started it, because in the same stroke they're all finishing it. It's like Jonestown. Do not drink the Kool-Aid of acrimony. That's cheap and plentiful, and deadly. It's a far better idea that we take stock of where we are, figure out where we're going, and carefully decide if that's really some place we can live.
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In this case, I'm pretty sure there is more than just activation/validation being processed on the servers. Certain aspects of item generation (read: loot drops) is not local to your machine, to prevent cloning/forgery/imbalance in the marketplace.
So cracked Diablo III (if possible) is likely to be Diablo III without exclusive, sweet loot. There's no telling how much of the game is on the server, and replacing that server code is going to be far trickier than no-opping over some validation checks.
Just the opposite. It means he's using internal Republican party workings to align state nominating bodies and amass delegates, instead of appealing to the popular vote. Delegates are not always chosen by popular vote. In some states, the popular vote is irrelevant. He is working more closely with Republican officials, state by state, and using the Republican nominating rules to his advantage.
The negative spin, of course, is that he is using back room deals and gaming the bureaucracy to override the "will of the people."
But as I see it, there are all sorts of forces messing with the mythical "will of the people," the writers of TFA included. He is not "in effect" or actually suspending anything other than unnecessary expenditures in respect to his campaign strategy. He is certainly not "effectively ending... [his] campaign." He is not going to "stop spending money" on the primaries, he's going to stop spending money on things like whistle stop tours courting the general electorate in the primaries, because there is no point to it. He's not going to win any more of the popular vote that way.
IHMO, all this will do, if successful, is cause the Republicans to revise the rules of the nominating process after he loses, so that it can't happen again. He can't win the nomination this way, but securing delegates can give him bargaining power on the floor this year at the convention where the party platform is determined. If he is deemed enough of an annoyance, and party officials think they can get away with it, Republicans will change the rules for the next presidential nomination.
Corollary to:
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
In the event that you make a ridiculous, delusional statement that demands laughter as an appropriate and natural response, you are not on step 2 and therefore destined to win. It is only a reasonable response, and will be followed by an immediate return to step 1. You must strip yourself of your misconceptions before Gandhi's theorem applies.
Didn't the EU force Microsoft to unbundle this stuff from Windows anyway? Maybe it's just good version control, which was very messy in Windows 7. Besides, not including all these licensing and patent issues limits their legal exposure. If anything, I think this demonstrates a further ratcheting up of the patent warfare climate. I don't blame them for wanting to take some cover, even if they might be grabbing some more ammo back there, rather than trying to pacify the situation. I think they're very sensitive to patent encumbrances which media is fraught with, and this can only simplify their potential legal headaches.
It's far easier to kill a $7 add-on than it is to redistribute the court-ordered fixed install set for your flagship product. I imagine all they need to charge is the DVD/h.264, etc. license fees, plus insist on WGA validation as they did for WMP 11, and they can call it a win.
Perhaps if we started coining the term "hacker++" (to indicate the fuzzy and lovable hackers), it would amend the fundamental flaws of our language choices?
In a fictional analogy, this sounds a bit like the Linux kernel and an accompanying distribution being open sourced and freely distributable/modifiable via the GPL, but somehow POSIX winds up as the copyright of an interested party, taking away the ability to write anything that uses the APIs for the next 95-120 years? Am I getting this right? They're coming after professional developers for reading and implementing the specification? And they want to draw license fees for that standard corporate copyright term?
If that's the case, this lawsuit is a radical departure that deeply concerns anyone who develops or hopes to develop software. Oracle has to lose this. What a mess.
Because right now, the real April Fool's day joke is the entire U.S. Patent Office, and they seem to think April first lasts all year.
It's sad that I thought of that as gallows humor at first, but quickly came to the conclusion that it's roughly congruent with my actual opinion about all these legal entities girding their loins for patent wars. The system was meant to foster invention by protecting the private rewards of individual ingenuity, and the will to bring a product to market (not necessarily by the inventor). Patents were never intended to be stockpiled in this fashion. The system is being abused, and the USPTO is legally bound to obey laws desperately in need of legislative review and reform. Maybe it's Congress that is the joke here.
Of course, Google's leadership is smart enough that it's just possible they're trying to demonstrate how broken this is, by hastening its collapse. No CEO or board can possibly like the escalating Mutual Assured Destruction environment that is brewing in corporate conglomerate patent holdings. It's extremely volatile, and an unstable way to do business.
These people are making climate predictions. 30 years is about the amount of time it takes before we can decide the dart is even likely to hit the board, let alone arrive incontrovertibly at the board, or score a bull's-eye. The remaining dozens of throws, over the interceding decades, mostly haven't had enough time to bear fruit, but I suspect it will all look a lot less like "monkeys" in 20 years. For better or for worse.
That's the scale of climatology. I would say its greatest flaw is that it is too ambitious, not that it's aimless.
It's incredible how this all started with Jeremy asking EA to "suck his balls," way back in 2004. Who knew they listened to customer feedback?
Well, EA can still suck my balls, and there's no religious group that will intimidate me from making such a request.
http://www.purepwnage.com/ has the full video, but there's egregious ad-portals in front of them. So you only have to sit through one, it's Season 1, Episode 3. The whole thing's worth watching, but the quote is at 4:14.
As for fundamentalist family groups, they can suck my balls too. I can only hate on EA so much.
Really, who cares? Here is what happens with credit card number fraud. It is used once or twice, the bank catches it early because they watch for unusual spending patterns, sometimes even the vendor does (at places like jewelry or electronics merchants where fraud is more common, and insurance against theft becomes expensive), they expire the number and reissue you a card. The vendor gets reimbursed from insurance against theft. Sometimes you get a phone call, asking if it's really you, based on contact information at the bank, not given at the POS. I don't know a card issuer in the world that would hold you liable for "forensic recovery and fraudulent use of a number recovered from a discarded electronic device." It gets added to the premiums of the vendor's theft insurance, if they don't catch it, and they often do.
You all should be more worried about all those bank people and vendors tracking and monitoring all your purchases, and perhaps sending your daughter expectant mother mailers.
As for the "stolen" number, they can have it for as far as it will get them. If you're deeply concerned about this "problem," you should consider waiters and cashiers with eidetic memories to be a more clear-and-present danger than forensic analysis of discarded hard disks.
Exactly. I hope to Science he resigned for other sensible reasons and wasn't forced into it because of his demanding that the data from the experiment which did not seem to match accepted theory be acknowledged and retested for. If that is what solely caused his resignation, I fear for the future of scientific inquiry. In fact, if that is the case, I'm pretty sure we don't have scientists at CERN but instead have politicians, and the only goal of a politician in such matters is to hide dissent and error. Science forbid we adopt politics instead of honest inquiry.
I'm banking that the politics is in press sensationalism, though. I seriously doubt there's even a correlative link between the experiment and his resignation.
He should have his lawyers delay the trial a few months until the iPhone 5 comes out, then the thing will be completely worthless.
Goodbye Magnuson-Moss, it was nice knowing you! A service pack for your car. Good luck with that. What if it bricks your car? How much does a replacement dashboard computer cost after warranty, due to a faulty update? Who is liable for that if it happens?
Has anyone seen the EULA for this thing? If it isn't significantly different from normal software EULAs, I'm avoiding this sort of technology like the plague.
You forgot "In Soviet Russia..."
First off, I'm reassured at all the "get another device" replies. That's about the only sensible option you have, if you're reading your employment agreement properly (read it closely if you haven't already, as some have suggested).
Secondly, this is not remotely a "Your Rights On-line" issue, as it has been tagged by someone. This is contract law. You agreed to rights and restrictions under that contract when you signed the employment agreement. You waived any rights you think you had when you signed it. If you want to violate that contract, you need to renegotiate (or should have negotiated better terms in the first place), or should cancel the contract as per its terms (or via a legal defense like fraud, duress, or mistake) and find something else to do. Or, you pay the penalty for breach. Your choice.
Regardless, what you are asking shows a remarkable ignorance of "your rights" anywhere, and you should look to secure better terms in the future if an agreement is unpalatable to your lifestyle.
School up, brother, and good luck.
I see this as a brazen shift from public policy matters being handled by the elected government of the people, to policy being determined by corporate entities, and therefore only by the propertied owner.
Which would finally return us to the grand old system of the landed property owner exclusively having a vote.
But this is worse. In a stockholder scenario, those with more property have a proportionally greater vote, rather than an equal vote like the landed property owner model.
So, what we are telling people is re: net neutrality, your government representation vote does not matter. You must buy stock to have a vote on the matter, and your vote is proportional to the amount you can spend on the stock, and the company's stock-issuance policies, for that matter.
This is a bad precedent. Governmental policy decisions should never be handed over to a stockholder vote. Ever. You can forget about American democracy if they are. If this is the result of obstruction in Congress, the obstructionists have won.
fnord fnord fnord
What about snow leopards and lions?
Human, I will commune with the cyber-controller about providing you with a pet cyber-mat. DELETE DELETE. ;^)
Finally, at this late hour, they realize that they do not like freedom of speech, they do not enjoy liberty, that special interests and the unjust exercise of power are harmed or defeated by such blessings. They want the old system back, where the individual could scream into the wind and no one would hear it. Where only large media conglomerates had the coverage, and the privilege, to control "public opinion." They long for the days when "public opinion" was their opinion, and not off-message as it is now.
Well, I have five words for them: Too late. Too damn bad.
Dear antediluvian governments: Enjoy your newly empowered citizenry. You don't get an Arab Spring without this, and you can't control the people at home if you decide to treat us as they did in the Middle East, or Soviet Russia. Good luck with that.
Ugh. Not "silly" enough to fix your funny bone. ;^)
And if you may be a terrorist, or appear to be supporting terrorism in any way, you legally can be detained indefinitely by the military, without trial, according to the NDAA.
SO DON'T STAND SO CLOSE TO THE ATM, YOU TERRORISTS.
I had the same thought. Google is almost, but not quite, evil.
Then I thought of the adorable Pokemon character and slept well.
Just curious, why are folks spelling it the "Straight of Hormuz" instead of the "Strait." Is that a Queen's English spelling? In the US the correct spelling is definitely "strait," as in: "a narrow channel." Also, the linked articles spell it as "strait."
Not meaning to be a pedant here, I'm actually genuinely curious. Either it's a common spelling error or a cultural standards difference, and I was wondering which.
Patent law, by design, has always been a circular firing squad in the tech sector. In any sector really, it's meant to be a last resort against extreme foul play. It is understood that if one company files patent claims against another, there will be reciprocation, eventually grinding your entire industry to a halt. What is concerning in the Microsoft/Android case is that there has to be some fundamental weakness in the profitability of operating software engineering, as a business model, to introduce this sort of behavior. Microsoft is literally cannibalizing its own markets, and its clients. Since MS must know that, it's disturbing to watch them clutch at it to remain profitable, while they figure out what their actual, sustainable business model is going to be.
I imagine they feel justified, because FOSS undermined the profitability of software licensing and copyright monopolies, justifiably or no, and put it squarely into genuine software innovation and quality support services. So they are serving it right back to Stallman, in their book, by going after Android. But the fact is: Microsoft has neither innovation nor good support services any longer, and so they really are forced to eat themselves alive.
I would argue they never had those traits. They started up as Quick-and-Dirty OS, and that's all they've ever been. An expediency driving the ultimate commoditization of software and hardware alike. We all ran it because it was cheap (or free) and it worked (mostly). Now, with FOSS, the method of software is essentially valueless to anything but the furtherance of software itself, and the value is in what people can actually do with it. A hammer should not have a copyright, the act of driving in a nail shouldn't be patentable.
What's disturbing to me is what this says about the profitability of the entire sector, as it now stands, once you get past "boutique" electronics like Apple products, and into a larger, sustainable software economy and ecosystem. All the major software houses are in a scramble to find their own relevancy. In the end-user markets, the majors seem to have settled on "look and feel." But that's a failure too. If we keep trending towards patent law in this way, denying each other simple tools like a "menu grid of rounded boxes," "ribbons," "swiping a finger," or even the use of the word "app," everyone is going to suffer. Microsoft isn't alone in this one, not by a long shot, and it's hard to tell who started it.
But now that the battlefield has moved away from copyright and licensing, and toward patents, what we have is a very deliberate circular firing squad. Patent law is designed that way. It doesn't matter who started it, because in the same stroke they're all finishing it. It's like Jonestown. Do not drink the Kool-Aid of acrimony. That's cheap and plentiful, and deadly. It's a far better idea that we take stock of where we are, figure out where we're going, and carefully decide if that's really some place we can live.