Among those signing the letter were: Delaware Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden
Hmmm...this would be the same Joesph Biden who's 1988 Presidential bid was abruptly curtailed when it was revealed that he'd plagiarized passages in several of his speeches, and had also been involved in a serious plagiarism incident when he was at law school?
The reason some of us are more concerned about abuse of government power than about abuse of corporate power is that Coke very rarely sends fighter planes to strafe villages full of Pepsi drinkers.
It's easy to distinguish trolls from legitimate newbies, 'cause legitimate newbies don't start each round by shooting up the rest of their team. The first time you get killed 'cause you killed a teammate, you learn to IFF. If you keep doing it, newbie or not, you should probably find a non-FF server to play on.
Last I checked, there were around 30,000 of those.
I've seen several different ways to handle this on various FF CS servers.
One way is if you kill a teammate, you insta-die at the start of the next round. Another way is if you kill more than X teammates, you get kicked, or kbanned for a period of time. Another way is mirror-damage, where if you inflict 25 points of damage on a teammate, your health is reduced by 25 points.
FF CS servers that use none of these methods are unplayable because of TKers. But any one of them generally keeps things under control, unless you get a very determined asshole. Then it's simple matter for the rest of your team to take turns fragging him at the start of each round.
Since the agents don't announce their presence or intent, anyone who is unknown to a group could be an agent fishing for leads. Thus the chilling effect occurs even in the absence of an actual agent, and groups are encouraged to be more suspicious of outsiders.
I don't see a particularly big delta between "That new guy in the group could be an FBI agent with an official warrant to investigate us" and "That new guy in the group could be an FBI agent checking us out on a hunch." Seems to me that you'd be equally chilled either way, no?
Seems to me the Thought Police can't be far behind.
That's completely asinine.
According to the Washington Post, "The new guidelines state simply that FBI agents may enter public places and forums, including publically accessible Internet sites, to observe, develop leads, and investigate."
What's intrusive or scary about this? If you're engaged in public activity, you don't have much of an expectation of privacy, do you? Previously, FBI agents were restricted from doing things you and I can already do, like walk into a mosque and look around on a whim.
If you think that changing the rules to allow FBI agents to/join #killtheusa without having to get a warrant first is the penultimate step towards Thought Police, you're friggin' insane.
For example, a case hits the California district court, where a case is one that sets a precedent.
So, there you are, in Oregon, 10 miles from the California border. Think that District court decision applies?
Yes, of course it does. Every court decision is a precedent, and a legal ruling by a District court somewhere in Jersey needs to be taken into account by all other courts ruling on similar issues all across the country, up to and including the Supreme Court.
Judges don't get to go around ignoring other judges just because they're in a different judicial district. Law is supposed to be consistent, equally and evenly applied. Now, clearly if one state has a law that another state doesn't, that's one thing, but this is a ruling about the protection afforded by the First Amendment, so yes, this district court in California's ruling is certainly relevant in courts across the land.
Glass doesn't even flow on geological time scales. Glass will not flow, period, unless it rises above its transition temperature, Tg. For plain old window glass, and in the limiting case of infinite time, Tg is over 250 degrees C. On shorter time scales, it's over 500 C.
Glass does not flow. It is an amorphous solid with a shear viscosity well, well in excess of 1014.6 Poise, placing it well, well within the solid regime. If it flowed on even geologic time scales, flow would certainly be observed in telescope mirrors and other optics that are precise down to fractional wavelengths.
Jesus. Go read the link that was posted earlier. There's nothing pisses me off like people who ignore readily available information in favor of propagating the same old misinformation.
You can't say "I shut my eyes everytime I drove past a speed limit sign" and expect a judge to let you off the hook for going 120.
The difference is that the speed limit is a law, and EULAs certainly aren't.
How do you suggest people be bound to the terms of contracts they never agreed to? While a click-through license is something of a legal grey area, unagreed-to contracts don't seem to be; the day after you buy a new car, Ford can send someone to your house demanding you sign a contract that says "Everytime you drive over the speed limit, you pay for $100," but if you don't sign it, there's no way that you're going to be bound by it.
The software manufacturers tried to set things up so that you must "agree" to their contract before you install their software. This script allows yo to install the software without agreeing to the license. So how can you be bound by the terms of the license?
The entire area is on economic hard times, caused (in part) by the fall of the Coal industry, thanks to the Evironmentalist Wackos.
Huh?
I don't think I've ever heard the switch to easily strip-mined-but-dirty high-sulfur bituminous instead of deep-veined anthracite blamed on "Environmentalist Wackos" before.
The Pennsylvania coal industry died because there's lots of cheaper coal out there.
I went to school in Wilkes-Barre. My father's side of the family is from Wilkes-Barre. So if that qualifies me to pass judgement, I'll declare that Wilkes-Barre is indeed a festering shitpile.
Going to school in Wilkes-Barre is a soul-crushing experience. See, the town is such a cultural mecca that the McDonald's in public square, the main center of town, closes at 4pm on Fridays. There's nothing to do on the weekends, because all the students go home, and all the students go home on the weekends 'cause there's nothing to do in town. If there's ever a town that could be improved by a 100-kiloton airburst, Wilkes-Barre is it.
And it's not desperately trying to recover from its coal mining days. It already did that, back when the river flooded the town away and a truckload of Federal disaster relief money came pouring in. At that point, basically everyone who could leave town, left town. All that's left is genetically inbred hangers-on. Walk down main street at noon, right through public square, and I'll guarantee you've never seen such a collection of human wreckage in your life. Just about everyone you'll see if missing one or more items from the following list:
a. arms b. legs c. teeth d. a chromosome e. sanity
Trust me, a PC network intended to replace an AS/400, implemented by a corrupt and incompetent government, is the absolute least of this town's worries. I'd say the raw sewage that gets dumped into the drinking water supply is a bit higher on the list.
New non-parody works, though (like fanfiction), which utilize the characters to create original fiction, are legally problematic. If Lucas acquiesced in the creation of these, then he would be yielding his copyright into the public domain.
That is completely and utterly untrue.
Copyright gives the rightholder the power to determine who does or does not get to create derivative works. Lucas would be acting completely within his powers as rightsholder to say "Okay, you can make these works, that's fine. You other people, you can't make these other works." Being able to exercise control and selectivity is part of the entire point of copyright in the first place; suggesting that actually exercising that control requires the rightsholder to surrender his copyright is just stoopit.
What you might be thinking of is trademark law, where if you don't actively defend your trademarks, you lose them. Copyright law is entirely different; the only way your work can end up in the public domain prior to the natural expiration of the copyright is for the rightsholder to expressly declare "I surrender my copyright and place this work in the public domain."
but I do believe the price listed was made in error
What about the phone conversations with actual humans confirming the price? Error?
obviously they wouldn't sell the card below cost
Obviously you don't know what you're talking about.
Keep in mind this was back ~1993-1997, so equations may have changed since then, but here's some personal experience:
We frequently sold computers and selected peripherals at below cost. Margin was so thin on computers anyway, the store would pocket maybe $30 on a $2,000 computer. If you could get the guy in the store by selling a computer $100 below cost, and then sell him a $60 surge protector, $30 worth of floppy disks, a $5 mouse pad, a $50 game to play on it, and a $99 4-year extended warranty, you'd be well well ahead compared to having him sit at home and ignore your ad advertising your computer at a price that was $20 above cost.
Sure. But you've got to choose between honoring it for everybody who chose to buy based on that price, or refusing to honor it for everybody who chose to buy at that price.
You don't get to honor the typo price for some folks and refuse to honor it for others. Of course, what you're actually going to choose depends on your cost/benefit analysis; honoring a price on a TV that's $10 below cost, for 4 people who are standing in your store waving ads is a no-brainer. Honoring a price on a video card that's $100 below your cost for 3,000 people who saw an ad on the net is less clear.
Re:oh really?
on
Worst Buy
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· Score: 5, Informative
You're on crack.
If the price read "129.99" instead of "329.99," that's a typo.
"SPECIAL PRE-ORDER! 129.99 $200 SAVINGS!!" is most obviously not a typo.
In addition, if it's a typo, then you don't honor it. You don't honor it for some people, turn other people away, and have other people arrested for trying to get what they ordered at the price they ordered it at.
I used to work at Incredible Universe, an electronics store where the television department alone was roughly the size of a Best Buy. All the ones that made money were bought out by Fry's, and I was at one of the ones that made money. The way it was always explained to me was that we actually weren't responsible for the physical price tags on the items on the self; people could switch those, alter those, and so forth. We also weren't responsible for misprints or out-of-stocks on the newspaper ads; the ads are run for the whole country, and so long as one of the stores has the item in stock, it's a legal ad and not bait-and-switch. Misprints, of course, are the responsibility of the printer.
So people'd buy an item, take it to the register, and the clerk'd scan the UPC. We were responsible for the price the item scans at the register, and if it was wrong, tough titty, we'd have to sell it anyway. We'd change the price in the system pretty damned fast, but we'd at least have to sell it to that guy.
Yes, I know it doesn't contain a CD keycheck. But for one thing, it's not required to, even by the DMCA:
(3) Nothing in this section shall require that the design of, or design and selection of parts and components for, a consumer
electronics, telecommunications, or computing product provide for a response to any particular technological measure, so long as such part or component, or the product in which such part or component is integrated, does not otherwise fall within the prohibitions of subsection (a)(2) or (b)(1).
Second of all, bnetd doesn't assist in copying the software at all, because they keycheck has absolutely zero ability to prevent copying the software. You can put the disk in a drive and produce copy after copy, all day long, without ever running into the keycheck. In fact, the keycheck is only relevant once piracy has already occurred.
You are simply jaded if you think Hollings is any different than any other politician.
Actually, that wouldn't be the result of being jaded, but of being naive. "Jaded" actually means the exact opposite of what you're using it to mean.
But in any event, no, I don't think he's any different than any other politician. I just don't feel it is advisable to "make friends" with people who have already demonstrated a willingness to sell me out; that simply encourages future sell-outs.
Listen, if Hollings is sponsering this bill because he wants to "make-up" with the tech-community, then the worst thing the tech-community can do...
is make up with him.
Look, this bill or not, the fact is that he's still in the pocket of the MPAA, still supports awful legislation like the DMCA and CPDPTBPDAPDPDA or whatever it's called this week, and still is Not Our Friend.
You can "make up" with someone who places the financial contributions from Disney on a higher level than his oath to uphold and defend the Constitution if you want to. I'm going to continue to feel that I'd be perfectly happy if he got run over by a bus.
Slashdot Mirror
Among those signing the letter were: Delaware Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden
Hmmm...this would be the same Joesph Biden who's 1988 Presidential bid was abruptly curtailed when it was revealed that he'd plagiarized passages in several of his speeches, and had also been involved in a serious plagiarism incident when he was at law school?
What an asshole.
Piracy is copying, but it's also a kind of theft.
In the same way that skipping commercials with you Tivo is also a kind of theft.
The reason some of us are more concerned about abuse of government power than about abuse of corporate power is that Coke very rarely sends fighter planes to strafe villages full of Pepsi drinkers.
There are many used book stores that don't report to anybody.
Is the IRS aware of this?
It's easy to distinguish trolls from legitimate newbies, 'cause legitimate newbies don't start each round by shooting up the rest of their team. The first time you get killed 'cause you killed a teammate, you learn to IFF. If you keep doing it, newbie or not, you should probably find a non-FF server to play on.
Last I checked, there were around 30,000 of those.
I don't know how you combat this, really.
I've seen several different ways to handle this on various FF CS servers.
One way is if you kill a teammate, you insta-die at the start of the next round. Another way is if you kill more than X teammates, you get kicked, or kbanned for a period of time. Another way is mirror-damage, where if you inflict 25 points of damage on a teammate, your health is reduced by 25 points.
FF CS servers that use none of these methods are unplayable because of TKers. But any one of them generally keeps things under control, unless you get a very determined asshole. Then it's simple matter for the rest of your team to take turns fragging him at the start of each round.
Wrong question.
Better question:
Ever watch Apocalypse Now on a 9" black-and-white?
Since the agents don't announce their presence or intent, anyone who is unknown to a group could be an agent fishing for leads. Thus the chilling effect occurs even in the absence of an actual agent, and groups are encouraged to be more suspicious of outsiders.
I don't see a particularly big delta between "That new guy in the group could be an FBI agent with an official warrant to investigate us" and "That new guy in the group could be an FBI agent checking us out on a hunch." Seems to me that you'd be equally chilled either way, no?
Seems to me the Thought Police can't be far behind.
/join #killtheusa without having to get a warrant first is the penultimate step towards Thought Police, you're friggin' insane.
That's completely asinine.
According to the Washington Post, "The new guidelines state simply that FBI agents may enter public places and forums, including publically accessible Internet sites, to observe, develop leads, and investigate."
What's intrusive or scary about this? If you're engaged in public activity, you don't have much of an expectation of privacy, do you? Previously, FBI agents were restricted from doing things you and I can already do, like walk into a mosque and look around on a whim.
If you think that changing the rules to allow FBI agents to
Instead of using the term 'kicks ass' (which will translate as abusing a donkey...), use the term 'defeat'."
Which will translate as "I am going to chop off both of your feet."
For example, a case hits the California district court, where a case is one that sets a precedent.
So, there you are, in Oregon, 10 miles from the California border. Think that District court decision applies?
Yes, of course it does. Every court decision is a precedent, and a legal ruling by a District court somewhere in Jersey needs to be taken into account by all other courts ruling on similar issues all across the country, up to and including the Supreme Court.
Judges don't get to go around ignoring other judges just because they're in a different judicial district. Law is supposed to be consistent, equally and evenly applied. Now, clearly if one state has a law that another state doesn't, that's one thing, but this is a ruling about the protection afforded by the First Amendment, so yes, this district court in California's ruling is certainly relevant in courts across the land.
Glass doesn't even flow on geological time scales. Glass will not flow, period, unless it rises above its transition temperature, Tg. For plain old window glass, and in the limiting case of infinite time, Tg is over 250 degrees C. On shorter time scales, it's over 500 C.
Glass does not flow. It is an amorphous solid with a shear viscosity well, well in excess of 1014.6 Poise, placing it well, well within the solid regime. If it flowed on even geologic time scales, flow would certainly be observed in telescope mirrors and other optics that are precise down to fractional wavelengths.
Jesus. Go read the link that was posted earlier. There's nothing pisses me off like people who ignore readily available information in favor of propagating the same old misinformation.
You can't say "I shut my eyes everytime I drove past a speed limit sign" and expect a judge to let you off the hook for going 120.
The difference is that the speed limit is a law, and EULAs certainly aren't.
How do you suggest people be bound to the terms of contracts they never agreed to? While a click-through license is something of a legal grey area, unagreed-to contracts don't seem to be; the day after you buy a new car, Ford can send someone to your house demanding you sign a contract that says "Everytime you drive over the speed limit, you pay for $100," but if you don't sign it, there's no way that you're going to be bound by it.
The software manufacturers tried to set things up so that you must "agree" to their contract before you install their software. This script allows yo to install the software without agreeing to the license. So how can you be bound by the terms of the license?
The entire area is on economic hard times, caused (in part) by the fall of the Coal industry, thanks to the Evironmentalist Wackos.
Huh?
I don't think I've ever heard the switch to easily strip-mined-but-dirty high-sulfur bituminous instead of deep-veined anthracite blamed on "Environmentalist Wackos" before.
The Pennsylvania coal industry died because there's lots of cheaper coal out there.
Why don't you go to the Woodlands on the weekend if you're so God damned bored?
I did. All-you-can-drink specials, however, tend to get a bit boring after the 10th or so time.
Are you currently in Wilkes-Barre? Did you leave? Do you regret leaving?
I went to school in Wilkes-Barre. My father's side of the family is from Wilkes-Barre. So if that qualifies me to pass judgement, I'll declare that Wilkes-Barre is indeed a festering shitpile.
Going to school in Wilkes-Barre is a soul-crushing experience. See, the town is such a cultural mecca that the McDonald's in public square, the main center of town, closes at 4pm on Fridays. There's nothing to do on the weekends, because all the students go home, and all the students go home on the weekends 'cause there's nothing to do in town. If there's ever a town that could be improved by a 100-kiloton airburst, Wilkes-Barre is it.
And it's not desperately trying to recover from its coal mining days. It already did that, back when the river flooded the town away and a truckload of Federal disaster relief money came pouring in. At that point, basically everyone who could leave town, left town. All that's left is genetically inbred hangers-on. Walk down main street at noon, right through public square, and I'll guarantee you've never seen such a collection of human wreckage in your life. Just about everyone you'll see if missing one or more items from the following list:
a. arms
b. legs
c. teeth
d. a chromosome
e. sanity
Trust me, a PC network intended to replace an AS/400, implemented by a corrupt and incompetent government, is the absolute least of this town's worries. I'd say the raw sewage that gets dumped into the drinking water supply is a bit higher on the list.
New non-parody works, though (like fanfiction), which utilize the characters to create original fiction, are legally problematic. If Lucas acquiesced in the creation of these, then he would be yielding his copyright into the public domain.
That is completely and utterly untrue.
Copyright gives the rightholder the power to determine who does or does not get to create derivative works. Lucas would be acting completely within his powers as rightsholder to say "Okay, you can make these works, that's fine. You other people, you can't make these other works." Being able to exercise control and selectivity is part of the entire point of copyright in the first place; suggesting that actually exercising that control requires the rightsholder to surrender his copyright is just stoopit.
What you might be thinking of is trademark law, where if you don't actively defend your trademarks, you lose them. Copyright law is entirely different; the only way your work can end up in the public domain prior to the natural expiration of the copyright is for the rightsholder to expressly declare "I surrender my copyright and place this work in the public domain."
but I do believe the price listed was made in error
What about the phone conversations with actual humans confirming the price? Error?
obviously they wouldn't sell the card below cost
Obviously you don't know what you're talking about.
Keep in mind this was back ~1993-1997, so equations may have changed since then, but here's some personal experience:
We frequently sold computers and selected peripherals at below cost. Margin was so thin on computers anyway, the store would pocket maybe $30 on a $2,000 computer. If you could get the guy in the store by selling a computer $100 below cost, and then sell him a $60 surge protector, $30 worth of floppy disks, a $5 mouse pad, a $50 game to play on it, and a $99 4-year extended warranty, you'd be well well ahead compared to having him sit at home and ignore your ad advertising your computer at a price that was $20 above cost.
Sure. But you've got to choose between honoring it for everybody who chose to buy based on that price, or refusing to honor it for everybody who chose to buy at that price.
You don't get to honor the typo price for some folks and refuse to honor it for others. Of course, what you're actually going to choose depends on your cost/benefit analysis; honoring a price on a TV that's $10 below cost, for 4 people who are standing in your store waving ads is a no-brainer. Honoring a price on a video card that's $100 below your cost for 3,000 people who saw an ad on the net is less clear.
You're on crack.
If the price read "129.99" instead of "329.99," that's a typo.
"SPECIAL PRE-ORDER! 129.99 $200 SAVINGS!!" is most obviously not a typo.
In addition, if it's a typo, then you don't honor it. You don't honor it for some people, turn other people away, and have other people arrested for trying to get what they ordered at the price they ordered it at.
I used to work at Incredible Universe, an electronics store where the television department alone was roughly the size of a Best Buy. All the ones that made money were bought out by Fry's, and I was at one of the ones that made money. The way it was always explained to me was that we actually weren't responsible for the physical price tags on the items on the self; people could switch those, alter those, and so forth. We also weren't responsible for misprints or out-of-stocks on the newspaper ads; the ads are run for the whole country, and so long as one of the stores has the item in stock, it's a legal ad and not bait-and-switch. Misprints, of course, are the responsibility of the printer.
So people'd buy an item, take it to the register, and the clerk'd scan the UPC. We were responsible for the price the item scans at the register, and if it was wrong, tough titty, we'd have to sell it anyway. We'd change the price in the system pretty damned fast, but we'd at least have to sell it to that guy.
How?
Yes, I know it doesn't contain a CD keycheck. But for one thing, it's not required to, even by the DMCA:
Second of all, bnetd doesn't assist in copying the software at all, because they keycheck has absolutely zero ability to prevent copying the software. You can put the disk in a drive and produce copy after copy, all day long, without ever running into the keycheck. In fact, the keycheck is only relevant once piracy has already occurred.
You are simply jaded if you think Hollings is any different than any other politician.
Actually, that wouldn't be the result of being jaded, but of being naive. "Jaded" actually means the exact opposite of what you're using it to mean.
But in any event, no, I don't think he's any different than any other politician. I just don't feel it is advisable to "make friends" with people who have already demonstrated a willingness to sell me out; that simply encourages future sell-outs.
Listen, if Hollings is sponsering this bill because he wants to "make-up" with the tech-community, then the worst thing the tech-community can do...
is make up with him.
Look, this bill or not, the fact is that he's still in the pocket of the MPAA, still supports awful legislation like the DMCA and CPDPTBPDAPDPDA or whatever it's called this week, and still is Not Our Friend.
You can "make up" with someone who places the financial contributions from Disney on a higher level than his oath to uphold and defend the Constitution if you want to. I'm going to continue to feel that I'd be perfectly happy if he got run over by a bus.
Quoting Ambrose Bierce, "With all due respect to an enlightened lexicographer, I submit that it is the first."
Actually, true geeks photomask and etch their own silicon. Careful with the HF, now.