This happened to me back around 1999 or so IIRC. I bought a game at Best Buy and took it home and there was no disk in the box, so I took it back and they said I could exchange it but they wouldn't give me my money back. Unfortunately this was the only copy of the game left in the store (it was an older game, Heretic II I think). I told them there was nothing to exchange it for and they said pick out another game then because they would not give me my money back. I raised hell, but they wouldn't budge. I didn't buy anything from them for a couple years after that.
I'm not sure if this will meet your needs, but when I did my high energy physics Ph.D. dissertation work at the D0 experiment at Fermilab we mainly used PAW http://paw.web.cern.ch/paw/ for our analysis/visualization IIRC. It is, I think, freely downloadable for multiple platforms and worked quite nicely for me back in 1988-1996. I've been out of the HEP field since so I haven't followed its development, but since it's still available, my guess is it's even more powerful now, although as I said, I'm not sure if it will meet your needs. Hope this helps and good luck.
A lot of people have mentioned potential terrorist uses of long-range RFID scanning here, but how about usage by simple thieves? If OEMs started putting the RFIDs in the products themselves (do they or will they?) like TVs, computers, etc. rather than in the packaging, it seems this might make it incredibly easy for criminals to walk/drive down a street and pick out the most lucrative houses to rob no? I'm assuming of course that the radio freqs used in RFID can go through walls like wireless does, I didn't RTFA though...
No they won't, I once bought a game from Best Buy and when I got it home there was no disc in the jewel case! So I went and bought the game from a different store that night because it was getting late and I wanted to play the game that night.
I took the game with no disc back to Best Buy and complained that they sold me a box with no disc and asked for my money back. They refused claiming that they had a posted policy on software that said they would not refund money on software sales. I bitched up a storm demanded to see the manager and they basically ignored me and told me that I could exchange the game for another copy, but they had no other copy of that game in the store (which is why I went and rebought the game the previous night from a different store)! So I ended up having to pick out some other game I wasn't even interested in as my only recourse short of suing them and my time is worth more to me than $40 which is probably what they were counting on...
you need to allow people to relink your code with new versions of the library.
Could someone clarify this statement? What if I release a non-open source app that links to a LGPL lib and am perfectly willing to let users replace the old jar with a new version of the LGPL lib, but when they do so it breaks my app due to some change in the interface of LGPL lib (or whatever)? Am I somehow obligated then to either a) fix my app if the new lib version breaks it or b) release my non-open code so someone else can fix it?
I haven't seen anybody refer to this in any posts yet, but I seem to remember that Microsoft requiring hardware OEMs to include Windows on all PCs they sell in order to get their volume discount was one of the points in the original anti-trust case against MS (which MS lost). So my guess is they modified their OEM license to change "Windows" to "OS" in the hopes that the OEMs would still ship Windows and pay them their cut. Obviously Dell is smarter than that, although it's a shame that they don't pass that savings along as I saw one post claim, but that hasn't been my prior experience with Dell, I was able to get rid of software options and save some money. I seriously doubt MS will try to do anything about this since 1) it might be illegal for them to do it if I remember correctly and 2) it would be bad PR.
I'm wonder if M$'s apparent apathy regarding what seems to be blatant online software pirating is really due to a monetary value threshold not being reached or perhaps due to "special" deals they have with some vendors.
Here's my experience:
I needed to buy two copies of MS Visual Studio 6 Enterprise. I did an internet search for Visual Studio (using the M$ search button on the toolbar in IE 5) and the top listed result was www.office2000pro.com. So I go there and am amazed to find it on sale for $899 with free shipping, woohoo! One of my employees (who does a lot of purchasing for us) then makes a bet with me that he can beat the price by calling a person he frequently deals with a Micro-Warehouse. I take the bet. They can't beat the price and she wants to talk to me. She says that the software is likely pirated and I shouldn't buy it and I should report the site to M$. I tell her it was the top search result and to report them herself and she gives me some line about how I should do it so I can get rewarded by M$ (pfft, yeah right). My bullshit/FUD-o-meter is dinging away at this point, so I decide to check for myself. So I tell her I'll call her back if I find out it's a pirate site.
I call up the M$ pirate line and give them the URL www.office2000pro.com and tell them the almost half-price rate for VS6 Ent. The guy tells me he's taking down the info, checks the site himself, and tells me 80-90% of the M$ software sold online is pirated. So I ask him to tell me whether this site is legit. He claims they will have to check it out. I say fine, here's my email contact me when you guys decide if they are legit, because if they are, I want to pay the $899 price instead almost twice that. He says they can't contact me to let me know, it's some other division that does the checking, yada, yada, yada, and feeds me some bullshit.
Well by this time I figure if M$ doesn't care enough to contact me to keep me from purchasing pirated versions of their software, I don't really care if it's pirated either. So I wait a couple weeks to see if the site stays up so I won't be ripped off, and sure enough it's still there. So I buy the software and it promptly arrives in nice shrink-wrapped boxes and surely looks legit to me. I haven't tried to register it yet so I guess I'm not sure it's legit, but it looks the same as my registered version (only newer).
Anyway my point is, this seems like it might be:
1) Price fixing amongst all the people that sell M$ software and one company decided not to go along
2) M$ has some "special" deal with this site because they move super high volume or sell only M$ software.
3) A pirate site that M$ is too lazy to prosecute (but if their client list is for real, they're likely WAY over $50,000 in sales).
4) It's a front for M$ to sell their software online at a big discount and get a lot of direct sales with a BIG restocking fee (30%) without pissing off their sales partners or their big corporate clients for gouging on the restocking fees.
Or maybe it's something else altogether, I dunno, but if you want to buy M$ software cheap, www.office200pro.com has the best prices I've seen and the shipping is free and it's been over two months since I reported them and they've not been taken down yet, curious...
What if any new DRM laws also had to apply to every individual's personal info as well as whatever corporations want to protect (like music)? The corporations might think twice about whether they want DRM. If they had to license your personal info FROM you in order to market TO you, I'll bet it would seriously impact their marketing. "Oh you marketed to me without licensing my info? That'll be $10K please".
I hear ya. I'm not really even that much in the sticks, I live about 1 mile from Williamston, MI where they have DSL (Verizon) and cable modems (Millenium Digital Media) but because I'm 1 mile away I cannot get either service. Well, that's not quite right, I can get cable if I'm willing to pay the $17,000 to run the underground cable from the nearest access point. Of course all my neighbors would benefit from me doing that, but they're not willing to pitch in since they've all got satellite for TV and don't care enough about broadband to fork over the cash:-/.
I'm glad to see that all the previous comments that got modded up so far were pro-privacy. Katz needs to wait for a good long while and then see how he feels about giving up his freedoms, he's obviously letting his emotions get the best of him. Let me address a few points he made:
Yes, people online have the right to keep their communications private and people have the right -- I believe -- to move online and travel in the real world without their movements being monitored and recorded by governmental authorities. But people have the right to go to work without buildings falling on them, too.
Not necessarily, the risk of having buildings falling on people due to terrorist attacks may in fact be the price of freedom in our world. We have recently gotten far too enamored with our security IMHO, and the result is we have a plethora of "nanny government" laws to keep us from hurting ourselves and others (seat belt laws, helmet laws, incredibly strict drunk driving laws, gun laws, and endless laws to "protect" children to name a few). Apparently a majority of Americans think these laws are a good thing(tm), I personally would rather have my freedoms back and take my chances. Please don't allow an emotional response to this tragedy to make things even worse.
If terrorists are proven to be using encrypted files, aren't government agents entitled -- even obligated, on behalf of the thousands of innocent victims and many more future victims -- to get warrants to intercept them? Would we really rather that our water systems be poisoned, or our cities choked with gas, or planes flown into schools and City Halls?
Intercepting criminal communications obviously does nothing to help victims, they are still dead. To prevent future victimization, we already have laws in place to allow government agents to get warrants to perform wire-tapping. If we give any additional powers to any government agencies we might consider removing the assassination ban from the CIA, I think the Israeli Mossad have been pretty effective against terrorists and war criminals, although these methods may go against our collective ideals, getting rid of the wealthy and charismatic leaders of these terrorist groups would likely be the most effective way of reducing overall terrorism.
This would have seemed silly hyperbole to me a month ago, but all of these things are now plausible in the post-World Trade Center world.
Nothing has changed, all these things were plausible MANY YEARS BEFORE the WTC attack. They are no more possible now than they were then, it's just that a particularly nasty possibility has been realized. I would rather the U.S. citizenry take it upon themselves to help alert the appropriate authorities if they see something suspicious than give those authorities sweeping freedoms to monitor our citizens. I fear I cannot trust the authorities not to abuse that kind of power even though I generally respect them.
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This happened to me back around 1999 or so IIRC. I bought a game at Best Buy and took it home and there was no disk in the box, so I took it back and they said I could exchange it but they wouldn't give me my money back. Unfortunately this was the only copy of the game left in the store (it was an older game, Heretic II I think). I told them there was nothing to exchange it for and they said pick out another game then because they would not give me my money back. I raised hell, but they wouldn't budge. I didn't buy anything from them for a couple years after that.
I'm not sure if this will meet your needs, but when I did my high energy physics Ph.D. dissertation work at the D0 experiment at Fermilab we mainly used PAW http://paw.web.cern.ch/paw/ for our analysis/visualization IIRC. It is, I think, freely downloadable for multiple platforms and worked quite nicely for me back in 1988-1996. I've been out of the HEP field since so I haven't followed its development, but since it's still available, my guess is it's even more powerful now, although as I said, I'm not sure if it will meet your needs. Hope this helps and good luck.
A lot of people have mentioned potential terrorist uses of long-range RFID scanning here, but how about usage by simple thieves? If OEMs started putting the RFIDs in the products themselves (do they or will they?) like TVs, computers, etc. rather than in the packaging, it seems this might make it incredibly easy for criminals to walk/drive down a street and pick out the most lucrative houses to rob no? I'm assuming of course that the radio freqs used in RFID can go through walls like wireless does, I didn't RTFA though...
Make a stink, and they'll accept it.
No they won't, I once bought a game from Best Buy and when I got it home there was no disc in the jewel case! So I went and bought the game from a different store that night because it was getting late and I wanted to play the game that night.
I took the game with no disc back to Best Buy and complained that they sold me a box with no disc and asked for my money back. They refused claiming that they had a posted policy on software that said they would not refund money on software sales. I bitched up a storm demanded to see the manager and they basically ignored me and told me that I could exchange the game for another copy, but they had no other copy of that game in the store (which is why I went and rebought the game the previous night from a different store)! So I ended up having to pick out some other game I wasn't even interested in as my only recourse short of suing them and my time is worth more to me than $40 which is probably what they were counting on...
No, this is the business model of the present.
you need to allow people to relink your code with new versions of the library.
Could someone clarify this statement? What if I release a non-open source app that links to a LGPL lib and am perfectly willing to let users replace the old jar with a new version of the LGPL lib, but when they do so it breaks my app due to some change in the interface of LGPL lib (or whatever)? Am I somehow obligated then to either a) fix my app if the new lib version breaks it or b) release my non-open code so someone else can fix it?
I haven't seen anybody refer to this in any posts yet, but I seem to remember that Microsoft requiring hardware OEMs to include Windows on all PCs they sell in order to get their volume discount was one of the points in the original anti-trust case against MS (which MS lost). So my guess is they modified their OEM license to change "Windows" to "OS" in the hopes that the OEMs would still ship Windows and pay them their cut. Obviously Dell is smarter than that, although it's a shame that they don't pass that savings along as I saw one post claim, but that hasn't been my prior experience with Dell, I was able to get rid of software options and save some money. I seriously doubt MS will try to do anything about this since 1) it might be illegal for them to do it if I remember correctly and 2) it would be bad PR.
I'm wonder if M$'s apparent apathy regarding what seems to be blatant online software pirating is really due to a monetary value threshold not being reached or perhaps due to "special" deals they have with some vendors.
Here's my experience:
I needed to buy two copies of MS Visual Studio 6 Enterprise. I did an internet search for Visual Studio (using the M$ search button on the toolbar in IE 5) and the top listed result was www.office2000pro.com. So I go there and am amazed to find it on sale for $899 with free shipping, woohoo! One of my employees (who does a lot of purchasing for us) then makes a bet with me that he can beat the price by calling a person he frequently deals with a Micro-Warehouse. I take the bet. They can't beat the price and she wants to talk to me. She says that the software is likely pirated and I shouldn't buy it and I should report the site to M$. I tell her it was the top search result and to report them herself and she gives me some line about how I should do it so I can get rewarded by M$ (pfft, yeah right). My bullshit/FUD-o-meter is dinging away at this point, so I decide to check for myself. So I tell her I'll call her back if I find out it's a pirate site.
I call up the M$ pirate line and give them the URL www.office2000pro.com and tell them the almost half-price rate for VS6 Ent. The guy tells me he's taking down the info, checks the site himself, and tells me 80-90% of the M$ software sold online is pirated. So I ask him to tell me whether this site is legit. He claims they will have to check it out. I say fine, here's my email contact me when you guys decide if they are legit, because if they are, I want to pay the $899 price instead almost twice that. He says they can't contact me to let me know, it's some other division that does the checking, yada, yada, yada, and feeds me some bullshit.
Well by this time I figure if M$ doesn't care enough to contact me to keep me from purchasing pirated versions of their software, I don't really care if it's pirated either. So I wait a couple weeks to see if the site stays up so I won't be ripped off, and sure enough it's still there. So I buy the software and it promptly arrives in nice shrink-wrapped boxes and surely looks legit to me. I haven't tried to register it yet so I guess I'm not sure it's legit, but it looks the same as my registered version (only newer).
Anyway my point is, this seems like it might be:
1) Price fixing amongst all the people that sell M$ software and one company decided not to go along
2) M$ has some "special" deal with this site because they move super high volume or sell only M$ software.
3) A pirate site that M$ is too lazy to prosecute (but if their client list is for real, they're likely WAY over $50,000 in sales).
4) It's a front for M$ to sell their software online at a big discount and get a lot of direct sales with a BIG restocking fee (30%) without pissing off their sales partners or their big corporate clients for gouging on the restocking fees.
Or maybe it's something else altogether, I dunno, but if you want to buy M$ software cheap, www.office200pro.com has the best prices I've seen and the shipping is free and it's been over two months since I reported them and they've not been taken down yet, curious...
What if any new DRM laws also had to apply to every individual's personal info as well as whatever corporations want to protect (like music)? The corporations might think twice about whether they want DRM. If they had to license your personal info FROM you in order to market TO you, I'll bet it would seriously impact their marketing. "Oh you marketed to me without licensing my info? That'll be $10K please".
I hear ya. I'm not really even that much in the sticks, I live about 1 mile from Williamston, MI where they have DSL (Verizon) and cable modems (Millenium Digital Media) but because I'm 1 mile away I cannot get either service. Well, that's not quite right, I can get cable if I'm willing to pay the $17,000 to run the underground cable from the nearest access point. Of course all my neighbors would benefit from me doing that, but they're not willing to pitch in since they've all got satellite for TV and don't care enough about broadband to fork over the cash :-/.
I'm glad to see that all the previous comments that got modded up so far were pro-privacy. Katz needs to wait for a good long while and then see how he feels about giving up his freedoms, he's obviously letting his emotions get the best of him. Let me address a few points he made: Yes, people online have the right to keep their communications private and people have the right -- I believe -- to move online and travel in the real world without their movements being monitored and recorded by governmental authorities. But people have the right to go to work without buildings falling on them, too. Not necessarily, the risk of having buildings falling on people due to terrorist attacks may in fact be the price of freedom in our world. We have recently gotten far too enamored with our security IMHO, and the result is we have a plethora of "nanny government" laws to keep us from hurting ourselves and others (seat belt laws, helmet laws, incredibly strict drunk driving laws, gun laws, and endless laws to "protect" children to name a few). Apparently a majority of Americans think these laws are a good thing(tm), I personally would rather have my freedoms back and take my chances. Please don't allow an emotional response to this tragedy to make things even worse. If terrorists are proven to be using encrypted files, aren't government agents entitled -- even obligated, on behalf of the thousands of innocent victims and many more future victims -- to get warrants to intercept them? Would we really rather that our water systems be poisoned, or our cities choked with gas, or planes flown into schools and City Halls? Intercepting criminal communications obviously does nothing to help victims, they are still dead. To prevent future victimization, we already have laws in place to allow government agents to get warrants to perform wire-tapping. If we give any additional powers to any government agencies we might consider removing the assassination ban from the CIA, I think the Israeli Mossad have been pretty effective against terrorists and war criminals, although these methods may go against our collective ideals, getting rid of the wealthy and charismatic leaders of these terrorist groups would likely be the most effective way of reducing overall terrorism. This would have seemed silly hyperbole to me a month ago, but all of these things are now plausible in the post-World Trade Center world. Nothing has changed, all these things were plausible MANY YEARS BEFORE the WTC attack. They are no more possible now than they were then, it's just that a particularly nasty possibility has been realized. I would rather the U.S. citizenry take it upon themselves to help alert the appropriate authorities if they see something suspicious than give those authorities sweeping freedoms to monitor our citizens. I fear I cannot trust the authorities not to abuse that kind of power even though I generally respect them.