Copy Protection is stupid. It's that plain and simple. Any copy protection can and will be broken, usually before the pressed release hits the store shelves. Thus, anyone who wants to get illegal copies can do so with very little effort.
OTOH, those of us who like having a profesionally packaged product (with all the artwork, supposedly longer-lasting pressed media, etc), and who might just want to help feed the artists we enjoy... WE have to suffer with "CD"s that won't play in some players, that try to damage our equipment, and make us jump through nine hoops to transfer to other media.
This brings to mind the old story about how the president of Electronic Arts was giving a speech at the unveiling of Archon, about how their new copy protection wouldn't be hacked for at least 6 months... and pirated copies of the game were being distributed in the lobby outside the conference hall. Stupid.
I regularly make a point to download NO-CD cracks for every game I buy (usually about 1-2 a month)... not because I'm an Evil Hax0r Pirate, but because I have 160G of hard drive space and think having to swap around dozens of CD's is stupid. Likewise, I rip my audio CD's to mp3 format so I can play them at my desk, or in a portable without having the originals subject to wear-and-tear.
If the millions of R&D dollars that get sunk into copy protection development were redirected to actual product development, maybe we'd see a few less buggy products hit the market (Pool of Radiance? Temple of Elemental Evil?). Infocom did quite well without copy protection for most of their lifespan, and Bioware had the decency to remove the protection from Neverwinter Nights when customers complained that it didn't work with their cd drives (alignment issues).
I don't think it's an issue of trust at all. It's a matter of common sense. If you had a choice between selling a soft drink that millions would love and buy (even if some clones would appear to take some of your market), or adding an ingrediant that would make half the people who drink it slightly ill, but make it slightly harder for the clones to duplicate... would you rather have the few extra dollars for the first month and forego the long-term revenue of a satisifed customer base?
I guess maybe if you were planning on dumping your stock...
Actually, with GPS and some online maps that show restaurant locations, you might want to turn right, but your car thinks you'd much rather pull in for a Big Mac... or maybe it's time for an oil change? Of course! The big republican party pep-rally is only a few blocks away, you wouldn't want to miss that, would you citizen?
Now I'm gonna have to spend the extra cash to buy my HDTV from China and have it shipped here. Good thing they're cheaper overseas anyways.
Economics 101: Supply and Demand.
If a demand for something (sex, drugs, unencrypted video streams) exists, a supply will appear to serve that demand. By outlawing that supply, demand will rise, along with price, and profit for the "black market" supplier.
That is very true, unless the people who setup your traffic pattern timing are morons (like they are in my town). I timed the downtown lights and discovered that they are adjusted to allow people travelling 34MPH to only stop once (there are 5 sets of lights). Of course, the speed limit is 30MPH.
I hate to say it, but ALL the so-called MMORPG games are based on 12 year old technology. They used to be called MUD's, used to be free to play, and required only a telnet client to play. The had this awesome graphics engine called "imagination" that let you read efficient little text descriptions and picture scenes that have yet to be created in any 3D game to date.
SWG innovated by offering in-depth crafting and non-combat experience? Please. BatMUD did this a decade ago, and is still around and going strong. All of the things that these new graphical games are experimenting with are well-established ideas from text-based games.
I know, text games aren't COOL enough for today's kids. If it doesn't induce nausea at 120FPS or more, it's boring. Try playing one though. Yes, there are lots of them out there, and many of them are cookie-cutter garbage. But some of the larger ones really do provide good gameplay, and well crafted environments. Plus they don't cost you $50 to try.
I have also tried several of the MMORPG's, and the only one I ever went back to was DAoC, mainly because I liked the overall feel. I don't play them as much (since my cable modem is slow all too often), but I do hop on every so often when I want some eye-candy.
*I* am the favorite player of the company. I pay my $12/month and probably play about 20 hours or so, as opposed to the uber-leveler who plays 12 hours a day every day just to see if they can max out every class before the next expansion.:)
IANALE, but in all of your counter-examples the contract was viewable by both parties before any money exchanged hands. The phone company may claim you are signing a contract by paying your bill, but until you pay it, you haven't signed it.
Software is different because there's a retailer involved. If I really care about the phone company's EULA, I can talk to their representative while ordering the service (ummm, over someone else's phone I guess) and thus become aware of the terms before agreeing to them. If I walk into Best Buy and pick up a box from the shelf, I can't see the EULA until after I've purchased it. THAT is what makes shrinkwrap licensing illegal, not that the terms can be modified, but that I can't read them before I've purchased the product.
Once I've exchanged money, the First Sale doctrine applies, but the EULA is not yet enforceable since I haven't read (and implicitly agreed to) it yet. Once I open the box and read the EULA, I can either use it (thus binding myself), or return the software (thus breaking the First Sale)... except they won't accept the return. Since they refuse to release me from First Sale, I cannot be bound by the EULA unless I use the product, but I already OWN the product via First Sale. Thus the EULA is not enforceable UNLESS I'm able to return the product.
If that is NOT true, then I should be able to send you a contract in an envelope that says by accepting delivery of the envelope, you agree to pay me $1,000,000.00 USD, and that you cannot send or give the envelope away to anyone else. If I refuse to accept returns, then you can't give it back, nor can you re-address it to someone else, and therefore you have to pay me.
Again, IANAL, but it sure is fun to try and think like one!
There is a new law which, when it passes congress, will require that you DEFINE WTF ("slang, What The Fsck") an SMS ("Stupid Marketing Speech (TM)") acronym or buzzword actually IS within the first 100 words of any document describing a technology.
It's obvious that common courtesy doesn't work, nor did any of you pay attention when you were forced to take that technical writing class in college. Soooo, a law is required.
".NET remoting" means absolutely nothing to those of us who don't spend 25 hours a day in Marketroid Communion, and thus don't have every industry buzzword downloaded directly into our cerebral cortex with each new press release.
C'mon guys, that's going against the entire REASON the Sci-Fi channel was created (other than to make money, of course). Hurting NASA over something this stupid is a classic cutting off your nose to spite your face trick.
Go sue the DoD... they have lots of money from the White House. Let NASA keep what little bit they get so they can take some real photos of flying saucers that aren't on grainy black-and-white polaroids...
just died about a month ago, so I'll write it up as a near miss.
I had a venerable 486/133 which a fried keyboard controller and an 800Meg hard drive with SuSE 6.3 on it. I remember that as I had to install the OS on another machine and transfer the hard drive to it, since (1) the keyboard controller was fried, and (2) the settings for the hard drive were hard-coded and thus couldn't be changed.
It worked well as a firewall machine for many years, and has been in use since I got it back in 1995 or thereabouts.
Amazingly enough, the hard drive still works... the power supply died and since I had already had to do the duct-tape power switch trick a while back, I figured it wasn't worth the effort, since my new firewall (an OLD P2-233) is nice an quiet, and all it would do if it lived was run seti@home.
I also have an Amiga 2000 sitting on the desk in the corner, but I'd not really say that was "in-use".
Yes, I had several C64's over the years (usually buying a used one to replace broken keyboards), and they were much more fun to program than today's 100K "hello world" monsters.
Why? Because it was possible to know 95% of the machine by heart! Anyone who ever had the "Mapping the C64" book knows what I mean here, it was a guide to what every single memory location in the entire machine did, and using that you could access the hardware, reprogram parts of BASIC iteself, and just produce wonderful programs that were efficient and elegant.
Try writing something in Visual Anything that just talks to the serial port and doesn't eat up gobs of RAM for all the windows support layers.
Having learned in an environment where you know what the machine is doing, and are encourage to write solid non-bloat code so it will fit in the meagre 64K of RAM, it's probably not a surprise that I love C programnming under unix, and abhor C++ under windoze.:)
Heh, my first computer was a Commodore 64, which I managed to get WITH a disk drive. It powered up in about 2 seconds, and I did word processing (Easy Script!), good old VisiCalc, a database whose name I can't remember, and programming in BASIC, assembly, and yes.. C (with color syntax highlight, no less!).
The games for the C64 were fun. Not super-mondo first-person shooters, not photo-realistic graphics, but FUN! How often have you purchased some new game for the PeeCee, installed it (yawn), rebooted Windoze for some new directX garbage, and finally got to play your game (after a 2 minute reboot and another 3 minutes of loading background processes)... only to find out that it looks beautiful and is about as playable as a slideshow of your vacation to Jersey?
My second computer was an Amiga, and that is still my favorite (although I don't use it anymore... since it honestly is hopelessly outdated for anything but nostalga). What that machine did in 512K of RAM, my computer today has trouble doing in 512M. All I can say is, THANK YOU MICROSOFT, for teaching the children how to program UGLY, SLOW, INEFFICIENT code! May you rot in the hell that's prepared for you...
As for the internet.... I was using it before the Great Commercial Invasion (was that 1992?), and happily using gopher and ftp and usenet. A friend of mine (grad student) showed me this "new" thing called Mosaic, that ran on the Sun 3/60's we had (compiled for SunView, not X11R4 which was too bloated and slow). My reaction? "Cute. Buy what good is it? Gopher doesn't crash."
Well, I guess he was right... but I still think I got more work done when I refused to run a GUI and had a nice clean text interface.
Do I think we're better off now than in 1985? Yeah, probably. No more productive, and maybe actually LESS... but probably better overall. Do I think we're better off than in 1995? No. In 1995 I used an Amiga to play games and do word-processing, and a linux box to program, and do database stuff. Both were reliable, and both were fast. Now, I use a 1.5GHz PeeCee, and it's dog slow. I'm forced to "upgrade" my hardware every 2 years, because the bloatware industry always writes their sloppy code with the assumption that everyone will have the same bleeding-edge prototype machine they have by the time it goes gold.
Hmmmm, well that seems fair. I'll be sending an invoice to SunnComm for the $500/hour storage fee I will be charging them for their unauthorized use of my disk space and associated CPU overhead.
Oh, wait! I forgot, I've never seen their crappy product... maybe someone who actually has should do this?
0 development suite (gcc, gdb) 1 word processor (vim) 2 spreadsheet (sc) 3 database (postgres) 4 mail client (mutt or thunderbird) 5 web browser (lynx or firebird) 6 news reader (tin or thunderbird) 7 music player (mp3blaster or winamp or xmms) 8 instant messanger (zicq or gaim or trillian) 9 sanity management tool (nethack)
I can't believe no one said nethack was an essential tool for the desktop! You guys probably all sacrifice your little dog on the first alter you come across too... *grin*
Telemarketers don't generally bother with the phone book anymore, unless they're targeted calls. They usually just have an autodialer that does blocks of numbers in ranges, so it doesn't matter if you're listed or not for these types.
Since telemarketers now also use their own in-house phone switches, they don't provide caller-id data, so you can either let the machine pick up EVERY unkonwn call, or suffer with advertising.
Telemarketing is a form of harassment. It induces a state of distrust and even fear in what was created to be a means of strengthing the community, namely the ring of the phone. When I was younger, I used to look forward to phone calls, but nowadays I find I cringe every time the phone rings at home, and my thought is usually "damn telemarketers" before I even look at the caller id.
As for the first amendment... trying to claim that advertising directly to an individual in their home is protected is also saying that anyone on the street corner can not only scream their opinion at you, but can walk into your living room and do the same. Free speech means you can say what you like, it doesn't mean I have to listen to it, nor does it mean you can come to my house and say it.
They should wait to take the picture (and soon-to-follow urine sample for DNA testing, I'm sure) until AFTER you're drunk. Then they can have a whole side-business of selling photos to your employer if you don't tip enough.
I can already see them handing the list over to law enforcement with yellow highlighter markups on the people who have been in and drinking tonight. It would sure make those DUI quotas easier to fill!
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Copy Protection is stupid. It's that plain and simple. Any copy protection can and will be broken, usually before the pressed release hits the store shelves. Thus, anyone who wants to get illegal copies can do so with very little effort.
OTOH, those of us who like having a profesionally packaged product (with all the artwork, supposedly longer-lasting pressed media, etc), and who might just want to help feed the artists we enjoy... WE have to suffer with "CD"s that won't play in some players, that try to damage our equipment, and make us jump through nine hoops to transfer to other media.
This brings to mind the old story about how the president of Electronic Arts was giving a speech at the unveiling of Archon, about how their new copy protection wouldn't be hacked for at least 6 months... and pirated copies of the game were being distributed in the lobby outside the conference hall. Stupid.
I regularly make a point to download NO-CD cracks for every game I buy (usually about 1-2 a month)... not because I'm an Evil Hax0r Pirate, but because I have 160G of hard drive space and think having to swap around dozens of CD's is stupid. Likewise, I rip my audio CD's to mp3 format so I can play them at my desk, or in a portable without having the originals subject to wear-and-tear.
If the millions of R&D dollars that get sunk into copy protection development were redirected to actual product development, maybe we'd see a few less buggy products hit the market (Pool of Radiance? Temple of Elemental Evil?). Infocom did quite well without copy protection for most of their lifespan, and Bioware had the decency to remove the protection from Neverwinter Nights when customers complained that it didn't work with their cd drives (alignment issues).
I don't think it's an issue of trust at all. It's a matter of common sense. If you had a choice between selling a soft drink that millions would love and buy (even if some clones would appear to take some of your market), or adding an ingrediant that would make half the people who drink it slightly ill, but make it slightly harder for the clones to duplicate... would you rather have the few extra dollars for the first month and forego the long-term revenue of a satisifed customer base?
I guess maybe if you were planning on dumping your stock...
That means more and more people will finally wake up and start using encryption!
:)
I would say the DMCA is a problem, but nobody reads anything we Americans write anyways...
Actually, with GPS and some online maps that show restaurant locations, you might want to turn right, but your car thinks you'd much rather pull in for a Big Mac... or maybe it's time for an oil change? Of course! The big republican party pep-rally is only a few blocks away, you wouldn't want to miss that, would you citizen?
So, it really is CLOSED SOURCE. :)
(I'm not yelling you lame lameness filter, trying putting some sanity checks into your percentage calculation!)
Now I'm gonna have to spend the extra cash to buy my HDTV from China and have it shipped here. Good thing they're cheaper overseas anyways.
Economics 101: Supply and Demand.
If a demand for something (sex, drugs, unencrypted video streams) exists, a supply will appear to serve that demand. By outlawing that supply, demand will rise, along with price, and profit for the "black market" supplier.
foot.self->shoot();
Microsoft voice command parser:
;
void voice_command_dispatcher(int parsed) {
switch(parsed) {
case OP_EN__PRO_GRAM: blue_screen();
break;
case RE_BOOT:
default: ctrl_alt_delete();
}
}
They're banning Easter from Iraq? But THINK of the CHILDREN!
Hurry! Send 10,000 carmel eggs to Baghdad... before it's too late!
So that means I just crammed 1274 tons of biomass into my gas tank, I feel so empowered.
That is very true, unless the people who setup your traffic pattern timing are morons (like they are in my town). I timed the downtown lights and discovered that they are adjusted to allow people travelling 34MPH to only stop once (there are 5 sets of lights). Of course, the speed limit is 30MPH.
I hate to say it, but ALL the so-called MMORPG games are based on 12 year old technology. They used to be called MUD's, used to be free to play, and required only a telnet client to play. The had this awesome graphics engine called "imagination" that let you read efficient little text descriptions and picture scenes that have yet to be created in any 3D game to date.
:)
SWG innovated by offering in-depth crafting and non-combat experience? Please. BatMUD did this a decade ago, and is still around and going strong. All of the things that these new graphical games are experimenting with are well-established ideas from text-based games.
I know, text games aren't COOL enough for today's kids. If it doesn't induce nausea at 120FPS or more, it's boring. Try playing one though. Yes, there are lots of them out there, and many of them are cookie-cutter garbage. But some of the larger ones really do provide good gameplay, and well crafted environments. Plus they don't cost you $50 to try.
I have also tried several of the MMORPG's, and the only one I ever went back to was DAoC, mainly because I liked the overall feel. I don't play them as much (since my cable modem is slow all too often), but I do hop on every so often when I want some eye-candy.
*I* am the favorite player of the company. I pay my $12/month and probably play about 20 hours or so, as opposed to the uber-leveler who plays 12 hours a day every day just to see if they can max out every class before the next expansion.
IANALE, but in all of your counter-examples the contract was viewable by both parties before any money exchanged hands. The phone company may claim you are signing a contract by paying your bill, but until you pay it, you haven't signed it.
Software is different because there's a retailer involved. If I really care about the phone company's EULA, I can talk to their representative while ordering the service (ummm, over someone else's phone I guess) and thus become aware of the terms before agreeing to them. If I walk into Best Buy and pick up a box from the shelf, I can't see the EULA until after I've purchased it. THAT is what makes shrinkwrap licensing illegal, not that the terms can be modified, but that I can't read them before I've purchased the product.
Once I've exchanged money, the First Sale doctrine applies, but the EULA is not yet enforceable since I haven't read (and implicitly agreed to) it yet. Once I open the box and read the EULA, I can either use it (thus binding myself), or return the software (thus breaking the First Sale)... except they won't accept the return. Since they refuse to release me from First Sale, I cannot be bound by the EULA unless I use the product, but I already OWN the product via First Sale. Thus the EULA is not enforceable UNLESS I'm able to return the product.
If that is NOT true, then I should be able to send you a contract in an envelope that says by accepting delivery of the envelope, you agree to pay me $1,000,000.00 USD, and that you cannot send or give the envelope away to anyone else. If I refuse to accept returns, then you can't give it back, nor can you re-address it to someone else, and therefore you have to pay me.
Again, IANAL, but it sure is fun to try and think like one!
There is a new law which, when it passes congress, will require that you DEFINE WTF ("slang, What The Fsck") an SMS ("Stupid Marketing Speech (TM)") acronym or buzzword actually IS within the first 100 words of any document describing a technology.
It's obvious that common courtesy doesn't work, nor did any of you pay attention when you were forced to take that technical writing class in college. Soooo, a law is required.
".NET remoting" means absolutely nothing to those of us who don't spend 25 hours a day in Marketroid Communion, and thus don't have every industry buzzword downloaded directly into our cerebral cortex with each new press release.
Just what NASA needs.... a law suit.
C'mon guys, that's going against the entire REASON the Sci-Fi channel was created (other than to make money, of course). Hurting NASA over something this stupid is a classic cutting off your nose to spite your face trick.
Go sue the DoD... they have lots of money from the White House. Let NASA keep what little bit they get so they can take some real photos of flying saucers that aren't on grainy black-and-white polaroids...
Whare are these "patches" of which you speak?
:)
Just run a VAX/VMS system as your firewall... it's so old and obscure that no hacker will have any hope of remembering how to hack it.
New and exciting! AOL 10.0 "Tortilla" Version!
Big deal... it's not like I removed the firewall rules from the last time or anything... Once a spammer, always a spammer.
anyways, it's a good thing I listed my cell phone number in the do not call registry too then....
just died about a month ago, so I'll write it up as a near miss.
I had a venerable 486/133 which a fried keyboard controller and an 800Meg hard drive with SuSE 6.3 on it. I remember that as I had to install the OS on another machine and transfer the hard drive to it, since (1) the keyboard controller was fried, and (2) the settings for the hard drive were hard-coded and thus couldn't be changed.
It worked well as a firewall machine for many years, and has been in use since I got it back in 1995 or thereabouts.
Amazingly enough, the hard drive still works... the power supply died and since I had already had to do the duct-tape power switch trick a while back, I figured it wasn't worth the effort, since my new firewall (an OLD P2-233) is nice an quiet, and all it would do if it lived was run seti@home.
I also have an Amiga 2000 sitting on the desk in the corner, but I'd not really say that was "in-use".
Yes, I had several C64's over the years (usually buying a used one to replace broken keyboards), and they were much more fun to program than today's 100K "hello world" monsters.
:)
Why? Because it was possible to know 95% of the machine by heart! Anyone who ever had the "Mapping the C64" book knows what I mean here, it was a guide to what every single memory location in the entire machine did, and using that you could access the hardware, reprogram parts of BASIC iteself, and just produce wonderful programs that were efficient and elegant.
Try writing something in Visual Anything that just talks to the serial port and doesn't eat up gobs of RAM for all the windows support layers.
Having learned in an environment where you know what the machine is doing, and are encourage to write solid non-bloat code so it will fit in the meagre 64K of RAM, it's probably not a surprise that I love C programnming under unix, and abhor C++ under windoze.
Heh, my first computer was a Commodore 64, which I managed to get WITH a disk drive. It powered up in about 2 seconds, and I did word processing (Easy Script!), good old VisiCalc, a database whose name I can't remember, and programming in BASIC, assembly, and yes.. C (with color syntax highlight, no less!).
The games for the C64 were fun. Not super-mondo first-person shooters, not photo-realistic graphics, but FUN! How often have you purchased some new game for the PeeCee, installed it (yawn), rebooted Windoze for some new directX garbage, and finally got to play your game (after a 2 minute reboot and another 3 minutes of loading background processes)... only to find out that it looks beautiful and is about as playable as a slideshow of your vacation to Jersey?
My second computer was an Amiga, and that is still my favorite (although I don't use it anymore... since it honestly is hopelessly outdated for anything but nostalga). What that machine did in 512K of RAM, my computer today has trouble doing in 512M. All I can say is, THANK YOU MICROSOFT, for teaching the children how to program UGLY, SLOW, INEFFICIENT code! May you rot in the hell that's prepared for you...
As for the internet.... I was using it before the Great Commercial Invasion (was that 1992?), and happily using gopher and ftp and usenet. A friend of mine (grad student) showed me this "new" thing called Mosaic, that ran on the Sun 3/60's we had (compiled for SunView, not X11R4 which was too bloated and slow). My reaction? "Cute. Buy what good is it? Gopher doesn't crash."
Well, I guess he was right... but I still think I got more work done when I refused to run a GUI and had a nice clean text interface.
Do I think we're better off now than in 1985? Yeah, probably. No more productive, and maybe actually LESS... but probably better overall. Do I think we're better off than in 1995? No. In 1995 I used an Amiga to play games and do word-processing, and a linux box to program, and do database stuff. Both were reliable, and both were fast. Now, I use a 1.5GHz PeeCee, and it's dog slow. I'm forced to "upgrade" my hardware every 2 years, because the bloatware industry always writes their sloppy code with the assumption that everyone will have the same bleeding-edge prototype machine they have by the time it goes gold.
- Blackjack
- Hookers
On second thought, skip the blackjack.Hmmmm, well that seems fair. I'll be sending an invoice to SunnComm for the $500/hour storage fee I will be charging them for their unauthorized use of my disk space and associated CPU overhead.
Oh, wait! I forgot, I've never seen their crappy product... maybe someone who actually has should do this?
Ok, so you need:
0 development suite (gcc, gdb)
1 word processor (vim)
2 spreadsheet (sc)
3 database (postgres)
4 mail client (mutt or thunderbird)
5 web browser (lynx or firebird)
6 news reader (tin or thunderbird)
7 music player (mp3blaster or winamp or xmms)
8 instant messanger (zicq or gaim or trillian)
9 sanity management tool (nethack)
I can't believe no one said nethack was an essential tool for the desktop! You guys probably all sacrifice your little dog on the first alter you come across too... *grin*
Absolutely correct.
Telemarketers don't generally bother with the phone book anymore, unless they're targeted calls. They usually just have an autodialer that does blocks of numbers in ranges, so it doesn't matter if you're listed or not for these types.
Since telemarketers now also use their own in-house phone switches, they don't provide caller-id data, so you can either let the machine pick up EVERY unkonwn call, or suffer with advertising.
Telemarketing is a form of harassment. It induces a state of distrust and even fear in what was created to be a means of strengthing the community, namely the ring of the phone. When I was younger, I used to look forward to phone calls, but nowadays I find I cringe every time the phone rings at home, and my thought is usually "damn telemarketers" before I even look at the caller id.
As for the first amendment... trying to claim that advertising directly to an individual in their home is protected is also saying that anyone on the street corner can not only scream their opinion at you, but can walk into your living room and do the same. Free speech means you can say what you like, it doesn't mean I have to listen to it, nor does it mean you can come to my house and say it.
They should wait to take the picture (and soon-to-follow urine sample for DNA testing, I'm sure) until AFTER you're drunk. Then they can have a whole side-business of selling photos to your employer if you don't tip enough.
I can already see them handing the list over to law enforcement with yellow highlighter markups on the people who have been in and drinking tonight. It would sure make those DUI quotas easier to fill!