This is talking about additional technology: selective, voluntary, blocking.
It's not trying to roll anything back -- it's adding an option for business owners to more closely control what kind of atmosphere is on their property -- like air conditioning, or no smoking signs, or sunblocks. It's a step forward -- not a step backwards.
1) Cuba was never a first world country. It was a colony under the Spanish and then the US. You can't compare it's level of development with that of the states. Why not compare to similar carribean nations? Or even latin American nations. Then it comes out pretty good. Not the best, certainly, but towards the top in terms of literacy, life expectancy, doctors/capita, immunization rates, calories/capita, etc.
2) Cuba is a carribean country, whose main income (under Batista) was from tourism and sugar sold to the US. So the effect of an embargo is greater than for other countries. But, yes, other nations still trade with it -- but that trade is not as economically efficient (transport costs + size of market) as trade with the US was in the 50's. US tourism, of course, is much harder to replace with the European market because of the distance.
3) It's not just trade, of course, but lack of investment which hurts Cuba quite a bit.
4) Despite this, Cuba, by most standards is much better off than Peru, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, and many other latin American countries. Politically, it's a harsh dictactorship with strict controls on the press and political speech. On the other hand, the level of murder and repression can't be compared to Central or Latin America as a whole. Castro, tyrannical as he is, is a pussycat compared to the generals and juntas which rule many of his neighbors, and there are no death squads roaming the streets in Cuba. There are several dozen dissidents in jail at anyone time in Cuba, wheras many latin american nations have hundreds of political murders every year, and Peru has several thousands of political prisoners.
5) The many thousands of refugees from Cuba wishing to come to the US to avoid persecution and for a better economic life gain much spotlight in the press, and are generally allowed to stay if they reach US soil. But don't forget the millions of political and economic refugees coming from Haiti, Central America, and the Dominican Republic. Now weigh that by the fact that Cuba is relatively close to Florida, and that cuban refugees know they will be granted asylum if they can make it here, and you'll find out that the refugee flows are about the same from Cuba as from the rest of Latin America.
6) Instead of bashing this country, why not trade with it, like we do with China or Peru, and try to make the life of it's people a bit better?
We're not talking about making cell phones illegal. Just a choice that a private business can make.
You see a little sign that says "no cell phones" and make a decision as to whether to frequent that place or not. This provision just means that the sign has meaning, as opposed to being routinely ignored.
Some people would be glad to pay extra to be in a cell phone free theater/cafe. If the number of such people is substantially higher than the number of people who rely on cell phone use, the business will be willing to spend the extra cash and install jamming technology. This gives them the choice to do it.
This is no different than businesses which don't serve minors at all, or require certain dress codes.
In the extremely unlikely event that all the restaurants adopt this policy, then a vast majority of your neighbors are effectively telling you that they don't want to eat with you if you have a cell phone. In that case, it's up to you to move to a place where the neighbors share your values, or adjust to the preferences of your community.
I'd rather mobile phones never became "mission critical" for the.001% of the population that needs this stuff, since (by my guess) 1/2 the population wants the right to be able to jam them, or to frequent places which jam them.
That tells me that the surgeons-on-call, off duty Hazmat workers, and Delta force team members should use more reliable devices, even if it means carrying an extra gadget on your belt. That, or avoid certain parts of town when they are on call.
there's a lot of hollywood between us and any understanding of indian life. But some of the tribes (e.g. Pima) were very peaceful, moving away from the others and settling on plateaus, farming, etc. Then you have the Apaches, which basically lived off of raiding their neighbors.
Nevertheless, the subtext of your post seems to imply that if others kill/steal then ot's ok for me to treat them the same way, which is kinda the evil version of the golden rule -- very sick, that line of thinking.
Also noteworhy is that while there are a few examples of colonists forsaking the western way of life and living as Indians, there are no examples (in the colonial days) of the other thing happening -- Indians voluntarily joining to live in the colonies. Of course, that could be interpreted in a lot of ways (the westerners were more open-minded, or they were self-selected as explorers) other than discrimination against Indians.
I just hope that the Slashdot community will have the guts to go after AOL for this in the same way they would Microsoft.
Well, I agree with your sentiments, but what do you mean by "go after"?
Rant on slashdot? Piss on netscape 6?
Problem there is that it's built on Mozilla, so we can just use Mozilla instead. The fact that aol still sponsors Mozilla development under gpl and mpl makes people a bit more lenient in terms of what they do with their branded browser. With MS, it's a different story.
The first survey in 96-97 was of 158 students in 3 different colleges by an economics major interested in piracy. Most of these students were probably friends and/or acquaintances.
..that studying economics make you a more selfish, dishonest person. There were some sociological tests which showed that students who completed economics courses were
less likely to return found money
more likely to freeload in the face of voluntary, secret contributions to a common goal.
more likely to defect in the prisoner's game
more likely to cheat on an exam if they were certain they would not be caught.
more likely to keep goods which were shipped to them by mistake, even if they knew the intended recipient's address
These figures are higher than a control group which studied another subject (astronomy) and also the figures show an increase of dishonesty for the same students before and after they completed the class. There are a few such studies, very amusing to read. I can't find a web reference, but I read this, with footnotes to the actual studies, in Doug Henwood's "Wall Street".
China has 55 recognized minorities, and many more minor unrecognized ones. the Naaxi live around Lijiang, and are a matriarchal ethnic group. There are hundreds of miao, often called hmong, groups in southwest china, laos, and thailand. the US used miao soldiers in its proxy war in laos, I think. Many such refugees live in Minessota now. There are silver, yellow, flower, black and many other kinds of miao people in china. At one time, there was a Miao kingdom in sw china, and they used to kick ass in their heyday. The gui or ge people, also in Yunnan province, are an unrecognized minority, but nevertheless have their own language and customs. I don't think the word means anything in mandarin, since it's in their own language. I got to visit a few of their villages a while ago. There are many such interesting groups, including a tribe of hook nosed, white haired jews who were brought over by Khubilai Khan to be some of his guards. I think they've managed to avoid intermarriage, for the most part. And of course there are muslim uighers(sic) in the northwest, and the tibetans in uh Tibet. Warning that spellings are transliterations and are likely to differ from place to place. Also, my memory is not so good.
It's hard to find good references on the web, put a list of the official minorities + some more info is here
"if you do business with us, you abide by our laws"
problem is, that because of the internet, you can "do business" with the whole word. You're not sure of the citizenship status of all of your customers. They are doing business with you, by visiting your site. You may just have set up a bot to process orders and email out software. I think as the internet becomes more of a business force, more responsibiliy will shift from the seller to the buyer.
Seriously there's really not much racist slang in Chinese.... "Ghost man" is right about the most racist thing you can get there
Tell that to the minorities. As late as the 1950's Chairman Mao had to order the beaurocrats in southwest china _not_ to refer to the non-han minorities (miao, gui, naaxi, etc.) as "dogs" in official edicts i.e. laws.
This is not to say that the US didn't have/doesn't have it's own racial problems, but to pretend that mandarin is somehow exceptionally lacking in racist jargon is..well..pretty racist.
btw -- not sure what this has to do with closing down open relays in china. that seems like a pretty politically neutral common sense thing.
I brought up the cd drives in a flippant way, just to make a point. Guess I was wrong about the beta having a single player mode, too. Guess the point is that there are/will be many different ways to play cracked copies of wc, and as long as these tools have legitimate uses, blizzard shouldn't try to bully them out of the market. Kinda obvious.
If single player mode is crippled in the beta, then yes, you are right and I stand corrected.
The point about your "bottom line" post being bs, though, still holds. This is what the yale research article states, and what I said in earlier posts -- whether my lack of knowledge of the beta "ruined" it for you or not.
I still have no idea how anything at all to do with the beta could give blizzard the right to shutdown bnetd. I have no idea how you could think cracks of wc* should take away the rights of bnetd developers, or why you would call this the bottom line. It's just irrelevant.
Warcraft III will have single player mode. Look at the faq. Now it's possible (I don't have the beta) that single player mode was crippled to only test online play -- do you have the beta?
Kinda obviates your whole rant, no?
But the rant was wrong to start with, if you'd read my post. Just because something can be used to aid unauthorized copying doesn't mean it's illegal. That's why, if you'd bothered to read any of the bnetd maling lists, you'd know that the Blizzard people never once mentioned wc3b. That's because they know this is not a valid reason for shutting down the sight.
So the "bottom line" for you is something that lawyers at blizzard must have forgotten to bring up, eh?
Could it be that they understand the legal issues a bit better than you do? That my previous post was right?
Why don't you learn about the issue at hand before spouting your irrelevent and misinformed two cents.. oh right, this is slashdot.
If bnetd did not exist, then the hacked copies of WC3b would not be playable - bottom line
--online that is. And if RW-CD burners didn't exist, then WC3b couldn't be burned to them and passed around. And if phones didn't exist, people couldn't call up their friends and tell them how to get the w3cb...
bnetd wasn't created to hack wc3b, and that's not it's primary purpose or use, so your point is moot.
..how about a surcharge at the time of purchase to pay for disposal? Businesses could make a living disposing of these things according to some guidelines. They'd get paid per computer, like those who collect bottles. Just a thought.
Pretty much everything you've said relates to the flaws in the US lawmaking process
Yes:) I am an American. The little I know of the situation in the EU is that there are similar filters. There they take the form of a more class(and so wealth) based beauracracy which is so byzantine that no one can police it, and removed from popular influence by ever-increasing administrative layers. In the third world, with exceptions, politics are much more violent and dealing with popular pressures is not so much of an issue.
That's 1/177 down. The parent's post is still accurate: WIPO resolutions, like those of all other international bodies, require ratification by member-states before they have force of law. Think of WIPO et al like you would the W3C...
Here in California, we have some direct democracy in the form of propositions each election cycle. We're routinely blitzed by commercials from groups such as "Concerned Citizens for Environmental Responsibility". If you read the bylaws of these groups, they claim to be just that -- a grassroots campaign to educate the public about environmental issues. But it's easy to see that the above group, say, is actually a front for oil companies who want to enable off shore drilling. It only exists to pass/derail some resolution and has a membership which you can count on your hand. Now, you can argue that if we democratically elect members to this group of concerned citizens, that the organization might be reformed and would then serve some useful purpose. I just have no idea why anyone would want to do that (see end of rant).
This is pretty much the case with WIPO. Statements like "the US is only 1/177 of WIPO" " and "Corporations influence it only to the extent that they influence the member states" are only true in the actual WIPO bylaws, and --possibly -- some political science articles.
In reality the US must be atleast 2/3 of WIPO (in terms of influence) and Europe maybe 1/3 -- the rest of the world, including China, constitutes a rounding error. And in terms of corporate influence, it's not only that the actual proposals are negotiated/written by corporate attorneys, many of whom don't even bother to take on govt. jobs, but most top governmental officials are unaware of what these lawyers agree to. This includes congressional chairs of foreign trade, although I imagine that the Bush Administration's top trade executive is occasionally briefed on the matter.
In fact, the very existence of an orginization called "WIPO" already prejudices the situation, since the natural course of all developed countries has been to ignore (foreign) IP laws entirely -- except possibly limited rights of attribution. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that the US began to pay lip service to any foreign IP rights at all. And not until after WWI, when we confiscated many patents from Germany, did we even begin to take foreign IP rights seriously. Currently, even in the more developed countries, foreign IP rights were (and are) ignored on a selective basis. And so just the desire to codify and enforce IP laws worldwide is already a huge slap in the face of development efforts going on in the third world, and has no popular support in those countries.
This is not like W3C or the UN; and it's difficult to imagine what a "democratic" world wide IP regime might be, other than some statement to the effect of "There should not be a worldwide IP regime".
i get really sick and tired about hearing about how stupid our elected officials are..
1) I didn't say that they were stupid -- my point was that the topics of debate were limited because of these filters. It's not a personal critique one way or another. Suppose a candidate wants to, say, limit IP rights and reform patent laws significantly. Well -- who would donate to his campaign? How would he raise the money needed to run? He wouldn't and so our representatives don't hold these opinions. So they support things like WIPO. I think that's a fairly straightforward remark.
so what? i pay taxes when i buy milk at the convenience store. what's the problem?
2) I was talking about paying "taxes" which are surcharges on storage media. The money goes to the content cartels. I'm not against paying taxes either, but they shouldn't go to private, unacountable monopolies. And I should have some say in how the money is spent. And the process should be decided on democratically. Is the saying "No taxation without representation" to radical for you?
First, "countries" are not atomic entities. There are interest groups within them. The RIAA/MPAA + media giants have their allies within many of the signatory countries. They would like nothing more than to control content and the means of distributing content completely. They would also like to control prices, limit competition, and some guranteed income in the form of hardware taxes.
These groups have the advantage of money and organization, but the disadvanatge that many of them live in democratic countries. So to get what they want, they have to do an end run around the democratic process. One way to do this is with economic treaties, which are negotiated in secret, by the very groups who will benefit most from them, and are then passed on to legislatures to be rubber stamped.
Why do the legislatures rubber stamp them? Well, for one thing, the lawmakers tend to be predisposed to favor this stuff in the first place, due to a variety of filters. For instance, in the US, to even be eligable to make a run for congress requires that you raise about $1,000,000/year from wealthy individuals. This means that our representatives are not exactly a "cross-section" of the population. So the lawmakers don't view the public as some group to be served, but as an annoying constituency which should be kept quiet and under control. I'm generalizing here, but the principle is fairly accuarate. In other countries there are other filters, of varying restrictiveness.
Moreover, the media doesn't highlight these amendments. Where was the huge public debate about the Telecommunications Act? Where was the public debate about the DMCA? Why do these agreements slip under the radar? There is little discussion of them in the media -- unless through leaks or lack of control word spreads anyways, and then there is a rush to defend them. So the Nafta debate, which was caused only because Perot -- who can buy his own air time -- forced the issue onto the airwaves. And then there was a rush by the NYTimes, Washington Post, etc. to villify him and to not present the opposing views.
Finally there is the method of bundling, by which these agreements are presented to congress without possibility to amend them, as part of a larger package, for a straight up or down vote. Threats of boycotts, higher tariffs, cutting of loans/aid are big clubs than can be used against other countries to get them to sign. But the key point is that the legislatures generally want to sign these things, and the aforementioned threats are provided as cover for them to say to their citizens -- "we had to do it."
At the end of the day, you end up paying taxes when you buy a hard drive, and the police can arrest you for reverse engineering, even if your goal is to interoperate, or just provide a lower price substitute.
I recommend reading an article about the derailed Multilateral Agreement on Investements to see this dynamic at work. In the case of the MAI, media leaks, mostly on the internet, launched a grassroots effort to oppose the provisions of the MAI. This resulted in derailing the agreement as more and more of the provisions came to light, and public hearings in several countries were called. A brief excerpt:
The [Wall Street] journal goes on to urge that it will be necessary "to drum up business support" so as to beat back the hordes [of people opposed to the MAI]. Until now, business hasn't recognized the severity of the threat. And it is severe indeed. "Veteran trade diplomats" warn that with "growing demands for greater openness and accountability," it is becoming "harder for negotiators to do deals behind closed doors and submit them for rubber-stamping by parliaments." "Instead, they face pressure to gain wider popular legitimacy for their actions by explaining and defending them in public," no easy task when the hordes are concerned about "social and economic security," and when the impact of trade agreements "on ordinary people's lives...risks stirring up popular resentment" and "sensitivities over issues such as enviromental and food safety standards." It might even become impossible "to resist demands for direct participation by lobby groups in WTO decisions, which would violate one of the body's central principles": "'This is the place where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups,' says a former WTO official."
a 13 year old kid to click "agree" when it comes time to agree to the eula. And don't read it. Then you are not bound by it, since a 13 year old is not qualified to represent you, nor are they bound by any EULA themselves.
MS is still trying to use a technical trick to force people to agree to a more restrictive license after they have already purchased a product. Use a technical trick to get out of it.
Why do you think there are so many movies and books, some of them quite good, where criminals are the protagonists?
That was my point when I accused bravehamster of watching too many hollywood movies and reading too much pulp fiction.
I guess I'm just not impressed by con men. I mean, how hard is it to be phony anyways? I sort of consider manipulating others for personal gain as the default configuration for most poeple -- at least on ebay.
IMHO, used car salesmen and multi-level marketers aren't engaging in art, anymore than someone who gorges himself on hot dogs. You may be *the best* at it, but it's still pretty gross. I admit that a lot of people (everyone, sometimes) likes to watch these things from a sense of voyeurism or atavism -- hence the pulp/hollywood reference. So I was claiming, in my post, that bh let bad taste in pulp interfere with his sense of outrage. I admit, my post was kinda rude, but I did understand the point..
by VM they mean the virtual machine in which linux has to run. Not linux's virtual memory system.
And they seem to make some good points about this setup not being optimal -- i.e. you don't get IBM's legendary stability, etc. by running linux in a VM. The only obvious FUD I picked up on was the business of applications needing to be certified before they would run. Since I'm assuming that the only *technical* reason people would run linux on an ibm mainframe is to use the apps.
Any IBM hackers care to comment? Anyone run linux on a mainframe?
Slashdot Mirror
This is talking about additional technology: selective, voluntary, blocking.
It's not trying to roll anything back -- it's adding an option for business owners to more closely control what kind of atmosphere is on their property -- like air conditioning, or no smoking signs, or sunblocks. It's a step forward -- not a step backwards.
1) Cuba was never a first world country. It was a colony under the Spanish and then the US. You can't compare it's level of development with that of the states. Why not compare to similar carribean nations? Or even latin American nations. Then it comes out pretty good. Not the best, certainly, but towards the top in terms of literacy, life expectancy, doctors/capita, immunization rates, calories/capita, etc.
2) Cuba is a carribean country, whose main income (under Batista) was from tourism and sugar sold to the US. So the effect of an embargo is greater than for other countries. But, yes, other nations still trade with it -- but that trade is not as economically efficient (transport costs + size of market) as trade with the US was in the 50's. US tourism, of course, is much harder to replace with the European market because of the distance.
3) It's not just trade, of course, but lack of investment which hurts Cuba quite a bit.
4) Despite this, Cuba, by most standards is much better off than Peru, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, and many other latin American countries. Politically, it's a harsh dictactorship with strict controls on the press and political speech. On the other hand, the level of murder and repression can't be compared to Central or Latin America as a whole. Castro, tyrannical as he is, is a pussycat compared to the generals and juntas which rule many of his neighbors, and there are no death squads roaming the streets in Cuba. There are several dozen dissidents in jail at anyone time in Cuba, wheras many latin american nations have hundreds of political murders every year, and Peru has several thousands of political prisoners.
5) The many thousands of refugees from Cuba wishing to come to the US to avoid persecution and for a better economic life gain much spotlight in the press, and are generally allowed to stay if they reach US soil. But don't forget the millions of political and economic refugees coming from Haiti, Central America, and the Dominican Republic. Now weigh that by the fact that Cuba is relatively close to Florida, and that cuban refugees know they will be granted asylum if they can make it here, and you'll find out that the refugee flows are about the same from Cuba as from the rest of Latin America.
6) Instead of bashing this country, why not trade with it, like we do with China or Peru, and try to make the life of it's people a bit better?
We're not talking about making cell phones illegal. Just a choice that a private business can make.
You see a little sign that says "no cell phones" and make a decision as to whether to frequent that place or not. This provision just means that the sign has meaning, as opposed to being routinely ignored.
Some people would be glad to pay extra to be in a cell phone free theater/cafe. If the number of such people is substantially higher than the number of people who rely on cell phone use, the business will be willing to spend the extra cash and install jamming technology. This gives them the choice to do it.
This is no different than businesses which don't serve minors at all, or require certain dress codes.
In the extremely unlikely event that all the restaurants adopt this policy, then a vast majority of your neighbors are effectively telling you that they don't want to eat with you if you have a cell phone. In that case, it's up to you to move to a place where the neighbors share your values, or adjust to the preferences of your community.
I'd rather mobile phones never became "mission critical" for the .001% of the population that needs this stuff, since (by my guess) 1/2 the population wants the right to be able to jam them, or to frequent places which jam them.
That tells me that the surgeons-on-call, off duty Hazmat workers, and Delta force team members should use more reliable devices, even if it means carrying an extra gadget on your belt. That, or avoid certain parts of town when they are on call.
I think in this case, the phrase is "Moore Hookers".
there's a lot of hollywood between us and any understanding of indian life. But some of the tribes (e.g. Pima) were very peaceful, moving away from the others and settling on plateaus, farming, etc. Then you have the Apaches, which basically lived off of raiding their neighbors.
Nevertheless, the subtext of your post seems to imply that if others kill/steal then ot's ok for me to treat them the same way, which is kinda the evil version of the golden rule -- very sick, that line of thinking.
Also noteworhy is that while there are a few examples of colonists forsaking the western way of life and living as Indians, there are no examples (in the colonial days) of the other thing happening -- Indians voluntarily joining to live in the colonies. Of course, that could be interpreted in a lot of ways (the westerners were more open-minded, or they were self-selected as explorers) other than discrimination against Indians.
I just hope that the Slashdot community will have the guts to go after AOL for this in the same way they would Microsoft.
Well, I agree with your sentiments, but what do you mean by "go after"?
Rant on slashdot? Piss on netscape 6?
Problem there is that it's built on Mozilla, so we can just use Mozilla instead. The fact that aol still sponsors Mozilla development under gpl and mpl makes people a bit more lenient in terms of what they do with their branded browser. With MS, it's a different story.
..that studying economics make you a more selfish, dishonest person. There were some sociological tests which showed that students who completed economics courses were
less likely to return found money
more likely to freeload in the face of voluntary, secret contributions to a common goal.
more likely to defect in the prisoner's game
more likely to cheat on an exam if they were certain they would not be caught.
more likely to keep goods which were shipped to them by mistake, even if they knew the intended recipient's address
These figures are higher than a control group which studied another subject (astronomy) and also the figures show an increase of dishonesty for the same students before and after they completed the class. There are a few such studies, very amusing to read. I can't find a web reference, but I read this, with footnotes to the actual studies, in Doug Henwood's "Wall Street".
So this might also have skewed the study.
China has 55 recognized minorities, and many more minor unrecognized ones. the Naaxi live around Lijiang, and are a matriarchal ethnic group. There are hundreds of miao, often called hmong, groups in southwest china, laos, and thailand. the US used miao soldiers in its proxy war in laos, I think. Many such refugees live in Minessota now. There are silver, yellow, flower, black and many other kinds of miao people in china. At one time, there was a Miao kingdom in sw china, and they used to kick ass in their heyday. The gui or ge people, also in Yunnan province, are an unrecognized minority, but nevertheless have their own language and customs. I don't think the word means anything in mandarin, since it's in their own language. I got to visit a few of their villages a while ago. There are many such interesting groups, including a tribe of hook nosed, white haired jews who were brought over by Khubilai Khan to be some of his guards. I think they've managed to avoid intermarriage, for the most part. And of course there are muslim uighers(sic) in the northwest, and the tibetans in uh Tibet. Warning that spellings are transliterations and are likely to differ from place to place. Also, my memory is not so good.
It's hard to find good references on the web, put a list of the official minorities + some more info is here
Of course, then we explain that it doesn't suck, and that it's based on a perfectly sound architecture, and that it's really a work of beauty.
None of that changes the fact that it sucks.
God, it's so good to hear someone else say that.
find an open relay in the states and route all mail through it. hmm.. maybe a couple of open relays.
"if you do business with us, you abide by our laws"
problem is, that because of the internet, you can "do business" with the whole word. You're not sure of the citizenship status of all of your customers. They are doing business with you, by visiting your site. You may just have set up a bot to process orders and email out software. I think as the internet becomes more of a business force, more responsibiliy will shift from the seller to the buyer.
Seriously there's really not much racist slang in Chinese .... "Ghost man" is right about the most racist thing you can get there
/doesn't have it's own racial problems, but to pretend that mandarin is somehow exceptionally lacking in racist jargon is ..well..pretty racist.
Tell that to the minorities. As late as the 1950's Chairman Mao had to order the beaurocrats in southwest china _not_ to refer to the non-han minorities (miao, gui, naaxi, etc.) as "dogs" in official edicts i.e. laws.
This is not to say that the US didn't have
btw -- not sure what this has to do with closing down open relays in china. that seems like a pretty politically neutral common sense thing.
thanks for the link.
I brought up the cd drives in a flippant way, just to make a point. Guess I was wrong about the beta having a single player mode, too. Guess the point is that there are/will be many different ways to play cracked copies of wc, and as long as these tools have legitimate uses, blizzard shouldn't try to bully them out of the market. Kinda obvious.
If single player mode is crippled in the beta, then yes, you are right and I stand corrected.
The point about your "bottom line" post being bs, though, still holds. This is what the yale research article states, and what I said in earlier posts -- whether my lack of knowledge of the beta "ruined" it for you or not.
I still have no idea how anything at all to do with the beta could give blizzard the right to shutdown bnetd. I have no idea how you could think cracks of wc* should take away the rights of bnetd developers, or why you would call this the bottom line. It's just irrelevant.
The war3b only includes online play
check your facts.
Warcraft III will have single player mode. Look at the faq. Now it's possible (I don't have the beta) that single player mode was crippled to only test online play -- do you have the beta?
Kinda obviates your whole rant, no?
But the rant was wrong to start with, if you'd read my post. Just because something can be used to aid unauthorized copying doesn't mean it's illegal. That's why, if you'd bothered to read any of the bnetd maling lists, you'd know that the Blizzard people never once mentioned wc3b. That's because they know this is not a valid reason for shutting down the sight.
So the "bottom line" for you is something that lawyers at blizzard must have forgotten to bring up, eh?
Could it be that they understand the legal issues a bit better than you do? That my previous post was right?
Why don't you learn about the issue at hand before spouting your irrelevent and misinformed two cents.. oh right, this is slashdot.
heh.
If bnetd did not exist, then the hacked copies of WC3b would not be playable - bottom line
--online that is. And if RW-CD burners didn't exist, then WC3b couldn't be burned to them and passed around. And if phones didn't exist, people couldn't call up their friends and tell them how to get the w3cb...
bnetd wasn't created to hack wc3b, and that's not it's primary purpose or use, so your point is moot.
..how about a surcharge at the time of purchase to pay for disposal? Businesses could make a living disposing of these things according to some guidelines. They'd get paid per computer, like those who collect bottles. Just a thought.
Pretty much everything you've said relates to the flaws in the US lawmaking process
...
Yes:) I am an American. The little I know of the situation in the EU is that there are similar filters. There they take the form of a more class(and so wealth) based beauracracy which is so byzantine that no one can police it, and removed from popular influence by ever-increasing administrative layers. In the third world, with exceptions, politics are much more violent and dealing with popular pressures is not so much of an issue.
That's 1/177 down. The parent's post is still accurate: WIPO resolutions, like those of all other international bodies, require ratification by member-states before they have force of law. Think of WIPO et al like you would the W3C
Here in California, we have some direct democracy in the form of propositions each election cycle. We're routinely blitzed by commercials from groups such as "Concerned Citizens for Environmental Responsibility". If you read the bylaws of these groups, they claim to be just that -- a grassroots campaign to educate the public about environmental issues. But it's easy to see that the above group, say, is actually a front for oil companies who want to enable off shore drilling. It only exists to pass/derail some resolution and has a membership which you can count on your hand. Now, you can argue that if we democratically elect members to this group of concerned citizens, that the organization might be reformed and would then serve some useful purpose. I just have no idea why anyone would want to do that (see end of rant).
This is pretty much the case with WIPO. Statements like "the US is only 1/177 of WIPO" " and "Corporations influence it only to the extent that they influence the member states" are only true in the actual WIPO bylaws, and --possibly -- some political science articles.
In reality the US must be atleast 2/3 of WIPO (in terms of influence) and Europe maybe 1/3 -- the rest of the world, including China, constitutes a rounding error. And in terms of corporate influence, it's not only that the actual proposals are negotiated/written by corporate attorneys, many of whom don't even bother to take on govt. jobs, but most top governmental officials are unaware of what these lawyers agree to. This includes congressional chairs of foreign trade, although I imagine that the Bush Administration's top trade executive is occasionally briefed on the matter.
In fact, the very existence of an orginization called "WIPO" already prejudices the situation, since the natural course of all developed countries has been to ignore (foreign) IP laws entirely -- except possibly limited rights of attribution. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that the US began to pay lip service to any foreign IP rights at all. And not until after WWI, when we confiscated many patents from Germany, did we even begin to take foreign IP rights seriously. Currently, even in the more developed countries, foreign IP rights were (and are) ignored on a selective basis. And so just the desire to codify and enforce IP laws worldwide is already a huge slap in the face of development efforts going on in the third world, and has no popular support in those countries.
This is not like W3C or the UN; and it's difficult to imagine what a "democratic" world wide IP regime might be, other than some statement to the effect of "There should not be a worldwide IP regime".
i get really sick and tired about hearing about how stupid our elected officials are..
1) I didn't say that they were stupid -- my point was that the topics of debate were limited because of these filters. It's not a personal critique one way or another. Suppose a candidate wants to, say, limit IP rights and reform patent laws significantly. Well -- who would donate to his campaign? How would he raise the money needed to run? He wouldn't and so our representatives don't hold these opinions. So they support things like WIPO. I think that's a fairly straightforward remark.
so what? i pay taxes when i buy milk at the convenience store. what's the problem?
2) I was talking about paying "taxes" which are surcharges on storage media. The money goes to the content cartels. I'm not against paying taxes either, but they shouldn't go to private, unacountable monopolies. And I should have some say in how the money is spent. And the process should be decided on democratically. Is the saying "No taxation without representation" to radical for you?
Your argument is missing some distinctions.
First, "countries" are not atomic entities. There are interest groups within them. The RIAA/MPAA + media giants have their allies within many of the signatory countries. They would like nothing more than to control content and the means of distributing content completely. They would also like to control prices, limit competition, and some guranteed income in the form of hardware taxes.
These groups have the advantage of money and organization, but the disadvanatge that many of them live in democratic countries. So to get what they want, they have to do an end run around the democratic process. One way to do this is with economic treaties, which are negotiated in secret, by the very groups who will benefit most from them, and are then passed on to legislatures to be rubber stamped.
Why do the legislatures rubber stamp them? Well, for one thing, the lawmakers tend to be predisposed to favor this stuff in the first place, due to a variety of filters. For instance, in the US, to even be eligable to make a run for congress requires that you raise about $1,000,000/year from wealthy individuals. This means that our representatives are not exactly a "cross-section" of the population. So the lawmakers don't view the public as some group to be served, but as an annoying constituency which should be kept quiet and under control. I'm generalizing here, but the principle is fairly accuarate. In other countries there are other filters, of varying restrictiveness.
Moreover, the media doesn't highlight these amendments. Where was the huge public debate about the Telecommunications Act? Where was the public debate about the DMCA? Why do these agreements slip under the radar? There is little discussion of them in the media -- unless through leaks or lack of control word spreads anyways, and then there is a rush to defend them. So the Nafta debate, which was caused only because Perot -- who can buy his own air time -- forced the issue onto the airwaves. And then there was a rush by the NYTimes, Washington Post, etc. to villify him and to not present the opposing views.
Finally there is the method of bundling, by which these agreements are presented to congress without possibility to amend them, as part of a larger package, for a straight up or down vote. Threats of boycotts, higher tariffs, cutting of loans/aid are big clubs than can be used against other countries to get them to sign. But the key point is that the legislatures generally want to sign these things, and the aforementioned threats are provided as cover for them to say to their citizens -- "we had to do it."
At the end of the day, you end up paying taxes when you buy a hard drive, and the police can arrest you for reverse engineering, even if your goal is to interoperate, or just provide a lower price substitute.
I recommend reading an article about the derailed Multilateral Agreement on Investements to see this dynamic at work. In the case of the MAI, media leaks, mostly on the internet, launched a grassroots effort to oppose the provisions of the MAI. This resulted in derailing the agreement as more and more of the provisions came to light, and public hearings in several countries were called. A brief excerpt:
The [Wall Street] journal goes on to urge that it will be necessary "to drum up business support" so as to beat back the hordes [of people opposed to the MAI]. Until now, business hasn't recognized the severity of the threat. And it is severe indeed. "Veteran trade diplomats" warn that with "growing demands for greater openness and accountability," it is becoming "harder for negotiators to do deals behind closed doors and submit them for rubber-stamping by parliaments." "Instead, they face pressure to gain wider popular legitimacy for their actions by explaining and defending them in public," no easy task when the hordes are concerned about "social and economic security," and when the impact of trade agreements "on ordinary people's lives...risks stirring up popular resentment" and "sensitivities over issues such as enviromental and food safety standards." It might even become impossible "to resist demands for direct participation by lobby groups in WTO decisions, which would violate one of the body's central principles": "'This is the place where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups,' says a former WTO official."
a 13 year old kid to click "agree" when it comes time to agree to the eula. And don't read it. Then you are not bound by it, since a 13 year old is not qualified to represent you, nor are they bound by any EULA themselves.
MS is still trying to use a technical trick to force people to agree to a more restrictive license after they have already purchased a product. Use a technical trick to get out of it.
Why do you think there are so many movies and books, some of them quite good, where criminals are the protagonists?
That was my point when I accused bravehamster of watching too many hollywood movies and reading too much pulp fiction.
I guess I'm just not impressed by con men. I mean, how hard is it to be phony anyways? I sort of consider manipulating others for personal gain as the default configuration for most poeple -- at least on ebay.
IMHO, used car salesmen and multi-level marketers aren't engaging in art, anymore than someone who gorges himself on hot dogs. You may be *the best* at it, but it's still pretty gross. I admit that a lot of people (everyone, sometimes) likes to watch these things from a sense of voyeurism or atavism -- hence the pulp/hollywood reference. So I was claiming, in my post, that bh let bad taste in pulp interfere with his sense of outrage. I admit, my post was kinda rude, but I did understand the point..
by VM they mean the virtual machine in which linux has to run. Not linux's virtual memory system.
And they seem to make some good points about this setup not being optimal -- i.e. you don't get IBM's legendary stability, etc. by running linux in a VM. The only obvious FUD I picked up on was the business of applications needing to be certified before they would run. Since I'm assuming that the only *technical* reason people would run linux on an ibm mainframe is to use the apps.
Any IBM hackers care to comment? Anyone run linux on a mainframe?
have been warped by too many comic books/pulp fiction/hollywood movies.
Premeditated crimes are always deserving of more punishment/contempt than crimes of passion.