Absent a court ruling to back that up, it isn't anything. It's a hypothetical because there is no case law to establish anything.
Note that copyright infringement is a civil matter. So, aiding and abetting doesn't apply.
Maybe if you did it on a commercial scale, for profit, you could make that point. Helping people to install software to perform what is considered to be fair use... that has yet to be determined.
Would I want to make a business out of selling this kind of stuff without legal precedent? Nope. But, neither does your summary decision that it's a aiding and abetting a crime have anything to support it.
Also I get annoyed by people who absolutely want to pin a 'meaning' on things that don't have and don't need them. The meaning of life ? Mu. The meaning of life is to perpetuate life. Period. But when I have this argument with some people, they claim that they wouldn't be able to go through life if there was no purpose to it.
*shrug* I've mostly chosen to take Pascal's Wager. I choose to try to act as if there was some significance, because it's too easy to act like a dick if you don't think there's any bigger-scale consequences. Too far down the "nothing matters" route and you reach Nihilism -- that's pretty dark and depressing, and might be what people mean when they say they just need to have a little more concept of meaning and purpose. It certainly was what made me decide to look elsewhere.
You may not find that you have that problem. Fine. For those of us who like to have a little of the mystical and "bigger picture" stuff, we choose the other route.
Your choice to have any form a morality boils down to "appear to higher authority" or "because it logically seems like a good idea and everyone else should see it my way" -- both are fairly arbitrary, and in neither case will the people who disagree with you give a damn about how you think the world should operate. There is no inherent law of the universe from which we derive morality in my opinion.
As if the lowly ant needs a purpose in order to exist. How arrogant is that ?
Well, in all likelihood the ant has never had to contemplate his place in the universe. An ant doesn't have moral issues or dilemmas. We, however, do find ourselves pondering such things and this is where we find ourselves -- debating metaphysics and morality on Slashdot.;-)
Russian space technology tend to be simple, inefficient, based on the oldest technology they can get away with, and remains unchanged pretty much as long as they aren't forced to improve it.
Russian engineering in general has done that. Their technology has been dictated by their resources (or lack thereof) -- often their resourcefulness allows them to come up with a solution we wouldn't have thought of, simply because it can be a little low-tech.
However, their simpler, more robust technology has worked for longer and been through the test of time. Brute force technology may not be as elegant as we'd like, but, arguably if it works and is easier to maintain, it has a lot going for it.
In three years, the Russians will still have the capability to launch people into space. That says something.
However now religion has become obsolete and more accurate and scientific things are taking its place. This is obvious to me. I don't understand why all the Republicans don't get it.
Science and Religion cover different aspects of human endeavors. Science didn't make religion obsolete.
Heck, I'm mostly an atheist and I'm not sure why you'd think that. I know someone with a BSc, two MSc's, and a PhD -- he's still a practicing catholic. He just doesn't rely on the bible to explain the structure of the universe (he's a computational astrophysicist). He also doesn't use science to inform his morality and understanding of how we find meaning in all of it.
They really are different disciplines, and they're not as fundamentally incompatible as people around here seem to think.
Cheers
Re:It gives you something just as bad...
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 1
But have you owned a console recently? The disks _do_ in fact update your firmware once in awhile, and will not let you play a game unless you update it.
I don't think I was aware of that.
But, here is my question... are games distributing official firmware provided by the hardware vendor because they are built against that version and need it? Or, are individual software houses doing custom firmware changes in which they can arbitrarily do what they wish?
I think the difference is significant. On the one hand, if it's an "official" firmware from the hardware vendor, then it seems reasonable -- this game has a dependency on rev x of the system, if you don't have it we'll get you there. On the other hand, if EA (for example) could upload a firmware of their own choosing, then I should think you'd end up with a very scary problem where any game could potentially brick your console with a poorly designed/tested upgrade made by the software maker.
To me, the difference between distributing a version provided by the people who maintain the hardware as a pre-requisite is different from installing your own DRM and other chicanery. As much as people will complain this breaks their mod-chips or what have you, as someone who writes software, I do understand that if you compiled/tested against a library, you need to be sure that is the one present at run time. (I assume here that the primary reason to objecting to the upgrade is that you want to exploit a hole, but I could also be overlooking an actual reason to do so. Meaning, primarily running "backup" copies.)
Without knowing the specifics, it's tough to equate a firmware upgrade which is basically a pre-requisite to ensure the game is running against what it was written for, and DRM in the form of a rootkit.
Cheers
Re:It gives you something just as bad...
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm interested - do you guys complaining about the DRM (and I don't like it either) have an issue with buying the console versions?
He's the fundamental difference: on a console you put in the CD which is needed to authenticate that you have the disk, but it doesn't actually update the firmware of your system. When you eject the disk, the system is exactly the same as it was before.
On a PC, if the grandparent is correct, then the DRM appears to be fundamentally altering the way your operating system works, possibly making it more unstable/insecure. Installing rootkits is just plain bad.
If you can do DRM without breaking the host operating system, fine. But if you can't, then everyone should yell very loudly about why you shouldn't buy this game.
This is like buying some bling "Type R" headrests for your car and having to pour sand into your engine to make sure you don't also put the headrests into a different car. It's stupid, and shouldn't be tolerated.
Been there, done that. If you manage to put a permanently-manned base on the moon or Mars, then I'll be impressed.
Well, given that it's projected that in about 2-3 years the Americans will no longer have the ability to put someone in space to do anything (unless they rent space from the Russians), I'd say it's a pretty big deal for China to be ready to do this.
Don't underestimate how big of an achievement it actually is to do this. It's a pretty small club.
Men think primarily with the logical part. Women primarily with the emotional part.
I thought men thought with the dangly part?;-)
One result of this is, that women like to enjoy every emotion there is. Sometimes they want to argue, just for the feeling of it. Or cry while watching a movie, just to feel that emotion. It's fun to them. And I must admit, playing with your own emotions and training them like that, starts to be fun for me too.
What an odd notion.
Seriously, I don't know where this stereo-type comes from of the completely spun woman who is only operating on an emotional level and who does it for the sake of doing it or can't hope to turn it off.
I've known quite a lot of normal women in my life, and generally you're not navigating through an emotional mind-field with someone who is just short of being irrational most of the time. I've also known both men and women who are rather quite unstable most of the time.
I think trying to reduce either gender into a single set of pithy statements that cover all the bases is basically a bad starting point.
I want it to work the other way, as a backup mechanism. Every day I get older, and a bit of my RAM seems to fizz & burn and takes away the bytes that were stored in there.
That sounds more like collateral damage from living through the 70's.;-) [ I assume so, because if you didn't live through the 70's and you're already losing your memory, then you have big problems. ]
I accept the irreplaceable loss of the memory but I wish I didn't forget things too. I could easily page out the least-used memories and store them safely off-site.
I wonder if memory is even structured that way. Is it some construct where each memory is like a discrete file, or if it's more a case that the memories are linked together in really weird and jumbled ways. Like, everything to do with apples is linked with everything else that has to do with apples or something.
Backups of ones brain, however, would be kinda neat. Of course, I wouldn't want anyone else to have access to the raw data -- I'm fairly sure there's some things I don't quite remember that I'd just as soon not have anyone else have access to.
Make fun of the AC if you want, but the AC's post describes the whole point of Protestantism. So, if he is a "backs away without making eye contact" kind of loon, then you must place all Protestants either into the same category as the AC, or into the "Too stupid to even know their own religion" category.
As someone who was raised protestant, but is no longer a Christian... I honestly have no farking idea what 'whore of Babylon' means, or why I wouldn't think anyone spouting off about it isn't batshit crazy. Oddly enough, I don't recall ever hearing those words in Church, and the points of disagreement between the various denominations mostly strikes me as arcane and meaningless. I tuned out the animosity between Protestants and Catholics decades ago.
I may be too stupid to know their religion, but that kind of stuff to an outsider just comes across like a nut job who is standing on a street corner screeching out gibberish that most of us haven't a clue what the fuck it means.
Talking about the "truth" and then mentioning the catholic church essentially destroys your credibility. The whore church of babylon has NO credibility to be speaking of the truth of God's will.
backs away without making eye contact... OK, sure thing there chief. Whatever works for 'ya.
'and then watch latest movie'... if only. What you do then is watch the mandatory adverts. Which start over again if any of the authorised viewers mover out of range of the telescreen.
There are some people who think their girlfriends are pretty, their children are smart, their opinions matter and that they are significant in the light of 60 years on a planet of 6.6 billion people.
There are some things which aren't a matter of "opinion", and holding an opinion contrary to measurable fact is, well, senseless.
People who claim the Earth is flat may have an "opinion", but since their opinion is directly falsifiable, it's not a very good opinion. It's one they hold onto irrationally in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The people who haven't been able to adapt their view of their creator god to actually encompass reality... well, that just makes no sense. Heck, if the Catholic Church can accept that fossils are real and actually millions of years old, anyone fanatically clinging to the notion that the Earth is 6000 years old... well, they're not even trying to be rational. They're just holding onto a notion and saying "la la la" when someone tries to tell them truth.
This isn't about respecting differences in subjective things. This is about claiming that objective reality has been faked. That's just plain irrational.
So expect that in a few years you will insert a CF card or USB stick into your media station and watch the latest movie.
More like... "insert your (authorized by MPAA) storage device into your (authorized and locked down) media station, wait for the authentication and DRM layers to churn away, enter the number of viewers and pay for each present person and their Viewer ID, and then watch latest movie."
The way it's going, the DRM will be a lot more cumbersome, and the *AA's will have made sure you can't buy a device of playing a movie without a blood oath and a retinal scan to verify that you have a legit copy which has been duly paid up to be viewed today. Any subsequent thing is going to be more locked down than only requiring HDMI cables for instance.
Joe Bob may be better qualified. Code changes from year to year, and I doubt an electrical engineer is going to be up one specifics of what gauge wire is appropriate for a given number of electrical outlets to feed, or how far the circuit breaker must be from the gas line. The electrical engineer undoubtedly would have a better theoretical understanding, but I would not want him wiring my house.
I dunno, it depends entirely on the EE. A friend of my brother is an EE, and he works for a major consulting firm -- his job is to design, oversee, and physically participate in wiring electrical systems for commercial buildings.
His job, day in day out, is to build and deploy real-live electrical systems in real buildings, according to code. He doesn't have a purely theoretical knowledge, he's got the high-end knowledge to design building electricalsystems, as well as intimate, hands on knowledge of doing the physical work.
It depends entirely on the EE. Some of them straddle the line between being an engineer and an industrial electrician.
Generally, yes, if someone has purely theoretical knowledge, I don't want them wiring my house. In some cases, they're exactly who I'd like to be wiring my house. In fact, he's helped my brother remove some old aluminum wiring which was in his house and was no longer compatible with new components.
It's not the PATRIOT act because the PATRIOT act is published. But there is proof of such law in Gilmore v. Gonzales.
No, you're absolutely correct. I didn't mean to imply that you literally couldn't know the text of the law, only that we might be moving in that direction.
But, you can't know about the application of the law, and I question how long before people might start trying to pass laws you're not allowed to know anything about.
There's been more than a few things done over the last 7-8 years which seem to against both the letter and spirit of the constitution.
Uwe Boll's movies are filmed in Canada and funded primarily by European investors. The Clone Wars was self-funded and created in-house by Lucasfilm, which is not Hollywood-based. Not all movies are made by Hollywood.
All very true, but I've never been clear on the demarcation. Once one of the major companies based out of Hollywood is involved at some level in the distribution and production, in my mind it becomes Hollywood.
Probably all very incorrect. I realize it's not necessarily made "in" Hollywood, but I tend to think of it as being made by or for Hollywood.
That would mean that "ignorance of the law" IS a valid excuse.
No, it's just an indication of which way we're going.
You've broken a law we can't tell you about, but you're guilty anyway. You're not allowed to tell someone else we've arrested you for the law, since the law precludes that. We can't give your lawyer a description of the law or the charges against you because the law precludes that.
Slashdot Mirror
True, the shuttles are still capable of launch even if they've been deemed unsafe and nobody is willing to risk it.
I should have phrased that better.
Cheers
Absent a court ruling to back that up, it isn't anything. It's a hypothetical because there is no case law to establish anything.
Note that copyright infringement is a civil matter. So, aiding and abetting doesn't apply.
Maybe if you did it on a commercial scale, for profit, you could make that point. Helping people to install software to perform what is considered to be fair use ... that has yet to be determined.
Would I want to make a business out of selling this kind of stuff without legal precedent? Nope. But, neither does your summary decision that it's a aiding and abetting a crime have anything to support it.
Cheers
*shrug* I've mostly chosen to take Pascal's Wager. I choose to try to act as if there was some significance, because it's too easy to act like a dick if you don't think there's any bigger-scale consequences. Too far down the "nothing matters" route and you reach Nihilism -- that's pretty dark and depressing, and might be what people mean when they say they just need to have a little more concept of meaning and purpose. It certainly was what made me decide to look elsewhere.
You may not find that you have that problem. Fine. For those of us who like to have a little of the mystical and "bigger picture" stuff, we choose the other route.
Your choice to have any form a morality boils down to "appear to higher authority" or "because it logically seems like a good idea and everyone else should see it my way" -- both are fairly arbitrary, and in neither case will the people who disagree with you give a damn about how you think the world should operate. There is no inherent law of the universe from which we derive morality in my opinion.
Well, in all likelihood the ant has never had to contemplate his place in the universe. An ant doesn't have moral issues or dilemmas. We, however, do find ourselves pondering such things and this is where we find ourselves -- debating metaphysics and morality on Slashdot. ;-)
Cheers
Russian engineering in general has done that. Their technology has been dictated by their resources (or lack thereof) -- often their resourcefulness allows them to come up with a solution we wouldn't have thought of, simply because it can be a little low-tech.
However, their simpler, more robust technology has worked for longer and been through the test of time. Brute force technology may not be as elegant as we'd like, but, arguably if it works and is easier to maintain, it has a lot going for it.
In three years, the Russians will still have the capability to launch people into space. That says something.
Cheers
Science and Religion cover different aspects of human endeavors. Science didn't make religion obsolete.
Heck, I'm mostly an atheist and I'm not sure why you'd think that. I know someone with a BSc, two MSc's, and a PhD -- he's still a practicing catholic. He just doesn't rely on the bible to explain the structure of the universe (he's a computational astrophysicist). He also doesn't use science to inform his morality and understanding of how we find meaning in all of it.
They really are different disciplines, and they're not as fundamentally incompatible as people around here seem to think.
Cheers
I don't think I was aware of that.
But, here is my question ... are games distributing official firmware provided by the hardware vendor because they are built against that version and need it? Or, are individual software houses doing custom firmware changes in which they can arbitrarily do what they wish?
I think the difference is significant. On the one hand, if it's an "official" firmware from the hardware vendor, then it seems reasonable -- this game has a dependency on rev x of the system, if you don't have it we'll get you there. On the other hand, if EA (for example) could upload a firmware of their own choosing, then I should think you'd end up with a very scary problem where any game could potentially brick your console with a poorly designed/tested upgrade made by the software maker.
To me, the difference between distributing a version provided by the people who maintain the hardware as a pre-requisite is different from installing your own DRM and other chicanery. As much as people will complain this breaks their mod-chips or what have you, as someone who writes software, I do understand that if you compiled/tested against a library, you need to be sure that is the one present at run time. (I assume here that the primary reason to objecting to the upgrade is that you want to exploit a hole, but I could also be overlooking an actual reason to do so. Meaning, primarily running "backup" copies.)
Without knowing the specifics, it's tough to equate a firmware upgrade which is basically a pre-requisite to ensure the game is running against what it was written for, and DRM in the form of a rootkit.
Cheers
He's the fundamental difference: on a console you put in the CD which is needed to authenticate that you have the disk, but it doesn't actually update the firmware of your system. When you eject the disk, the system is exactly the same as it was before.
On a PC, if the grandparent is correct, then the DRM appears to be fundamentally altering the way your operating system works, possibly making it more unstable/insecure. Installing rootkits is just plain bad.
If you can do DRM without breaking the host operating system, fine. But if you can't, then everyone should yell very loudly about why you shouldn't buy this game.
This is like buying some bling "Type R" headrests for your car and having to pour sand into your engine to make sure you don't also put the headrests into a different car. It's stupid, and shouldn't be tolerated.
Cheers
Well, given that it's projected that in about 2-3 years the Americans will no longer have the ability to put someone in space to do anything (unless they rent space from the Russians), I'd say it's a pretty big deal for China to be ready to do this.
Don't underestimate how big of an achievement it actually is to do this. It's a pretty small club.
Cheers
I thought men thought with the dangly part? ;-)
What an odd notion.
Seriously, I don't know where this stereo-type comes from of the completely spun woman who is only operating on an emotional level and who does it for the sake of doing it or can't hope to turn it off.
I've known quite a lot of normal women in my life, and generally you're not navigating through an emotional mind-field with someone who is just short of being irrational most of the time. I've also known both men and women who are rather quite unstable most of the time.
I think trying to reduce either gender into a single set of pithy statements that cover all the bases is basically a bad starting point.
Cheers
That sounds more like collateral damage from living through the 70's. ;-) [ I assume so, because if you didn't live through the 70's and you're already losing your memory, then you have big problems. ]
I wonder if memory is even structured that way. Is it some construct where each memory is like a discrete file, or if it's more a case that the memories are linked together in really weird and jumbled ways. Like, everything to do with apples is linked with everything else that has to do with apples or something.
Backups of ones brain, however, would be kinda neat. Of course, I wouldn't want anyone else to have access to the raw data -- I'm fairly sure there's some things I don't quite remember that I'd just as soon not have anyone else have access to.
Cheers
Instead, you must try to realize the truth ... there is no face. :-P
Cheers
Yes, the group that thinks that if your religion focuses on being divisive, and can't accept reality, then it's fundamentally wrong.
Cheers
And, far less to sit through an explanation of spherical astronomy and how the phases of the moon work and how shadows get cast on spheres.
You don't need to be personally brought into space to have all the evidence you need.
Cheers
As someone who was raised protestant, but is no longer a Christian ... I honestly have no farking idea what 'whore of Babylon' means, or why I wouldn't think anyone spouting off about it isn't batshit crazy. Oddly enough, I don't recall ever hearing those words in Church, and the points of disagreement between the various denominations mostly strikes me as arcane and meaningless. I tuned out the animosity between Protestants and Catholics decades ago.
I may be too stupid to know their religion, but that kind of stuff to an outsider just comes across like a nut job who is standing on a street corner screeching out gibberish that most of us haven't a clue what the fuck it means.
Sounds like an incoherent loon to me. :-P
Cheers
backs away without making eye contact ... OK, sure thing there chief. Whatever works for 'ya.
Cheers
I never said he was doing it well. Merely that a complete idiot seems to be holding the job now.
Cheers
*laugh* I forgot that part. Thanks. :-P
Cheers
Look who's running it now. Apparently, you can.
Cheers
There are some things which aren't a matter of "opinion", and holding an opinion contrary to measurable fact is, well, senseless.
People who claim the Earth is flat may have an "opinion", but since their opinion is directly falsifiable, it's not a very good opinion. It's one they hold onto irrationally in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The people who haven't been able to adapt their view of their creator god to actually encompass reality ... well, that just makes no sense. Heck, if the Catholic Church can accept that fossils are real and actually millions of years old, anyone fanatically clinging to the notion that the Earth is 6000 years old ... well, they're not even trying to be rational. They're just holding onto a notion and saying "la la la" when someone tries to tell them truth.
This isn't about respecting differences in subjective things. This is about claiming that objective reality has been faked. That's just plain irrational.
Cheers
More like ... "insert your (authorized by MPAA) storage device into your (authorized and locked down) media station, wait for the authentication and DRM layers to churn away, enter the number of viewers and pay for each present person and their Viewer ID, and then watch latest movie."
The way it's going, the DRM will be a lot more cumbersome, and the *AA's will have made sure you can't buy a device of playing a movie without a blood oath and a retinal scan to verify that you have a legit copy which has been duly paid up to be viewed today. Any subsequent thing is going to be more locked down than only requiring HDMI cables for instance.
Cheers
I dunno, it depends entirely on the EE. A friend of my brother is an EE, and he works for a major consulting firm -- his job is to design, oversee, and physically participate in wiring electrical systems for commercial buildings.
His job, day in day out, is to build and deploy real-live electrical systems in real buildings, according to code. He doesn't have a purely theoretical knowledge, he's got the high-end knowledge to design building electricalsystems, as well as intimate, hands on knowledge of doing the physical work.
It depends entirely on the EE. Some of them straddle the line between being an engineer and an industrial electrician.
Generally, yes, if someone has purely theoretical knowledge, I don't want them wiring my house. In some cases, they're exactly who I'd like to be wiring my house. In fact, he's helped my brother remove some old aluminum wiring which was in his house and was no longer compatible with new components.
Cheers
Unless you're the original author, I don't see how you could go around copyrighting works you didn't write or produce.
That'd be like me copyrighting your post. :-P
Cheers
No, you're absolutely correct. I didn't mean to imply that you literally couldn't know the text of the law, only that we might be moving in that direction.
But, you can't know about the application of the law, and I question how long before people might start trying to pass laws you're not allowed to know anything about.
There's been more than a few things done over the last 7-8 years which seem to against both the letter and spirit of the constitution.
Cheers
All very true, but I've never been clear on the demarcation. Once one of the major companies based out of Hollywood is involved at some level in the distribution and production, in my mind it becomes Hollywood.
Probably all very incorrect. I realize it's not necessarily made "in" Hollywood, but I tend to think of it as being made by or for Hollywood.
Cheers
No, it's just an indication of which way we're going.
You've broken a law we can't tell you about, but you're guilty anyway. You're not allowed to tell someone else we've arrested you for the law, since the law precludes that. We can't give your lawyer a description of the law or the charges against you because the law precludes that.
Sadly, I think that's the PATRIOT act. :(
Cheers