I don't know where you're from or what your law might be, but where I am terms stated after the point of purchase normally are unenforceable, other things being equal. To be part of a contract there would need to be something in it for both sides, and since the sale has already been completed at that point, there's no reason for the purchaser to accept additional terms without some form of consideration in return.
The catch with a lot of modern technologies is that the additional consideration doesn't have to be very much for it to count, so you get a lot of the worst kind of legal weasel words around things an average customer might expect to be obviously included in the sale but maybe legally speaking it's not so obvious. For example, maybe you bought a copy of some software, but that didn't automatically include the right to install it on your computer's hard drive or copy it into RAM to run it, because they involve making copies and someone else still owns the copyright. Or maybe you bought a copy of some software, but that didn't automatically include the right to use the developer's servers so it's actually useful for anything, like playing against other people or even activating it on a new computer under its DRM scheme.
Fortunately, courts don't always buy that sort of blatant weaselry, and have been known to find that the contract of sale for software that would be useless without some right or access to some service must necessarily have included those things even if they weren't explicitly stated. But this is the realm where you really need either a big corporate customer or a well-resourced consumer rights organisation to bring the test cases, because it's unlikely that any private individual will do so given the limited upside even if they win and the likelihood of a long and tedious court case they're stuck with in the meantime. This problem is really why I think clear-cut consumer protection statute law or equivalently powerful regulation is the practical solution given the reasonable desire for a developer to protect their genuine interests but the wildly unequal bargaining power when it comes to contracts of sale, EULAs, and other such terms.
That all sounds perfectly reasonable, except for the part where they completely and dubiously legally cut off a genuine customer from everything they paid for. As far as I'm concerned, they should lose the resulting court case, and as compensation for damages they should have to pay the total price someone would have paid for the entire set of games at the normal current rates since their own system will generally tell you what the market value of those games is.
I'm actually a little surprised that the card schemes let them get away with this. The terms for accepting card payments are usually absurdly one-sided from a merchant's point of view, and trying to artificially prevent justified chargebacks is generally frowned upon in the industry. I very much doubt Valve is big enough to have custom terms with the likes of Visa and Mastercard, but maybe they are playing along in the recognition that Valve is still significant and genuinely trying to reduce card fraud.
In any case, we're talking about a company with in the region of a billion dollars in annual revenues. I get that they have a certain culture and it's popular with geeks, but I'm utterly lacking in sympathy for them if they can take that much money from customers yet can't manage to provide a decent customer support operation, just as I am when certain other tech giants do actually get taken to small claims court over a dispute where they clearly haven't been reasonable and then they do actually lose the case.
Of course the ideal solution is to do away with the entire crazy card payments system we rely on in a lot of countries today, which is insecure and fraud-ridden by design, imposes crazy terms on merchants as a direct result, and is generally a barrier to reasonable people doing reasonable things and paying each other reasonably for them without someone taking on unreasonable risk as part of the deal. But we're literally talking about organsations that make economies work in some of those countries, so change is going to be painfully slow.
I don't personally buy Steam games, or use other services with a similar kind of set-up, because I consider this situation an unacceptable risk. I'm far more likely to spend my money with the likes of GOG, where I pay a fair price for a game, and then once I've got my copy it's mine, lock-in and DRM-free. But in other business contexts where I've had software companies try to mess me or my businesses around in similarly their-mistakey ways, I'm afraid I'm rather black-and-white with them these days. I'll make a reasonable and polite effort to contact whatever customer support mechanism they have, and I'll play along if they seem to be reasonable and polite in return and making effective progress towards fixing the problem. However, if they start to give me the run-around, they get a registered letter straight to their official address, which coincidentally also starts the formal small claims legal process in my country (which their lawyers know, so almost always that step is where they wake up and actually take the problem seriously enough to fix it). I'm sorry if they have problems with being unable to track stock or product registrations properly, or with their commercial relationships with financial services they work with, but time is worth too much to let those become my problems instead for their convenience.
Maybe you're right. I don't use Steam so I have no personal axe to grind either way. But you have to admit that some things about the OP's situation as they reported it do sound dubious to an impartial outsider.
That pretty much requires some serious levels of threats, like threatening to find and harm someone in the real world. The kind of threat that would get you arrested if you made in person.
If those threats are serious, then why aren't they being reported to the actual police? That sounds like a pretty toxic environment that has gone beyond what any commercial organisation should be trying to control themselves.
Given what I've just told you about the level of abuse required to get banned from a game, go back and re-read the guy's comment : "my nephew said some stupid things in chat". What does that tell you? It says he doesn't think his nephew did anything wrong.
Maybe that is what he thinks. The thing is, maybe he's also right. I don't know, and based on this Slashdot discussion alone, I don't see how you can know either. Online forums are notorious for over-reacting to criticism of their own preferences and culture. Maybe Valve's are no exception.
Also "I paid for the game. I should be allowed to play it!" suggests a feeling of entitlement.
Well, yes. He paid for the game. So he's entitled to what he paid for. The thing that is very dubious about the setup some organisations, again including Valve, have adopted is that they can and demonstrably sometimes will revoke things someone already paid for, even if those things are completely unrelated to whatever is in dispute.
He feels his money is worth more than the feelings of whoever was the real victim in all of this.
But since we only seem to have one person's anecdote that's been jumped on here, it's hard to know who that real victim was, or whether there was even any serious injury to feelings at all. As I said at the start, if there was something as serious as a credible threat to find and hurt someone, Valve should have backed off and called in the actual police. If it's just some teenager mouthing off unpleasantly, sure, ban that account from whatever forum was involved, but I don't see how that justifies kicking someone off a different game they already paid for.
If someone comes in there pissing off the other customers, that costs Valve money. Why do you think this abusive shit's right to speak overrides Valve's right to make money in their own market?
I have no problem with some reasonable process that ultimately bans someone who's being seriously abusive from whatever forum is involved.
What I do have a problem with is Valve, or anyone else, thinking their right to make money in one context means they don't have to provide the fundamentals someone already paid for in a completely different context. I see no legal or ethical basis for such a broad response, and far too much scope for abuse.
It's also worth remembering that the average computer user doesn't have a dedicated "IT guy" to set up their system. That might still be true even if you only consider use at work.
Likewise here knowing a bit of history the number of cases where people were wrongfully banned from Steam and the ban wasn't quickly resolved is almost nothing, so the smart money is on guilty until proven innocent.
What do you know that I don't? As far as I know, there aren't any published figures on this kind of thing from a reliable source, and there have been enough reports of Valve doing obviously inappropriate things that I wouldn't necessarily assume they were in the right as you seem willing to do.
Do you think Microsoft wants to support Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 2008r2 server, Windows 2012, and Windows 2015 for the next 15 years?
No, but I do think they've maintained their position as the dominant desktop OS provider because they gave serious consideration to long-term support and backward compatibility.
No business or other large organisation wants to upgrade platform software every few months or even every couple of years. It's dead time that brings huge disruption, significant costs, and relatively little benefit.
No software developer wants to rewrite their entire product every few months or even every couple of years, for the same reasons.
Even regular, non-geek users seem to be getting tired of the upgrade treadmill as their phones and apps and web sites and social networks keep moving things round all the time.
For decades, Microsoft has been a clear leader in not forcing everyone to do that, and they made a lot of money anyway since it meant they were in the position that "no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft".
If Microsoft are now going to force this kind of rapid update cycle on everyone, not to mention the questionable privacy and security implications of Windows 10, then they've dropped Windows to the same level as the likes of Linux and OS X. It seems reasonable to expect that the momentum that has kept Windows the dominant OS for so long -- primarily, the software base that runs on it -- will naturally become less of an advantage for them over time in that case, and perhaps little advantage at all after a few years.
The stock price chart for MSFT over the past few years is quite interesting. They had a pattern of sustained growth through 2013-2014, but then since the reality of Windows 10 took hold in 2015 it's quite a different story, with less growth overall and much more volatility. I suspect if they don't take the hint and back off on some of the aggressive posturing within the next few months, people are going to start making more money shorting Microsoft stock than investing in it as a good long-term prospect.
Setting the update system to auto-install security fixes is a reasonable default for the average computer user who doesn't know (or want to know) any better and just wants their computer to work.
Shoving out non-security updates under the security update label is a horrible breach of trust and a line they should never have crossed. Pushing an entire new OS as an update that would be automatically installed by default isn't far behind in the scummy moves list.
What really needs to happen with contracts of adhesion is more like how in-person consumer rights are handled in some places: not only can contracts not override certain key protections, but the stores are required by law to display certain information about this at points of sale, and including certain anti-consumer terms in contracts is itself illegal. Evil terms aren't just unenforceable at this point, you can be actively punished for even trying to include them, so you can't just try to scare consumers into not enforcing their rights.
Moreover, some places have recently broadened their law to make it clear that consumer safeguards apply to any documents or representations made by a vendor in connection with a sale, not just explicit contracts. This was obviously aimed at EULAs, and also at sales terms that attempt to nullify any relevant information previously provided by the vendor in response to the consumer's questions before they decided to buy. Sometimes the contractual situation might be ambiguous, but the legislature wanted the consumer protections to be very clear.
So you're so concerned about abusive messages that you feel the need to assume the worst, swear at someone, demean their family, and support action that effectively costs them money, despite presumably having no knowledge of the actual situation?
It's a good thing we don't ban people from Slashdot for abusive messages, I guess.
If you own a bunch of Steam games, it might not be worth it since they'll ban you from playing the other games you paid for.
This is why one of the consumer protection laws we really need in 2016 but don't currently have in most jurisdictions is that businesses providing this kind of sales/distribution service have to treat each transaction independently.
It is clearly unfair for Valve (or your e-book seller, or a service providing movie or music downloads, or...) to attack a customer by retrospectively undoing other transactions or crippling other products involved in them just because one transaction was disputed or didn't work out properly in some way. If I go to a supermarket to complain because the "fresh" food they'd sold me with a use-by date some time next week had gone bad the day after I bought it, they don't get to refund me for that bad food but also make everything else I ever bought from them disappear from my kitchen. Tech firms doing the equivalent are just exploiting an imbalance of power and a controlling position in their market, not to mention abusing the kind of DRM schemes that allow that sort of control in the first place and the laws underpinning those schemes.
There are good reasons we regulate monopolies in other business contexts. We also regulate services in some important industries even though they aren't monopolies, because competition hasn't proved sufficient to keep the market balanced. As far as I can see, almost exactly the same arguments apply to a lot of modern on-line services today.
I think maybe Apple are starting to have the opposite problem. People are getting sick of devices that work well until they update to a new version of iOS, possibly pushed into doing so by apps breaking, and then don't work as well as they used to any more. Tablets aren't just the cool new toys now, people actually want something that does useful things. Once bitten, twice shy, and unlike smartphones there's nothing to promote a regular upgrade cycle for tablets that doesn't feel expensive because the cost is hidden in monthly contract fees.
Insurers, perhaps, but manufacturers, I'm not so sure. If they really wanted to, wouldn't they have done so by now?
Realistically, the two have to go in sync, because manufacturers with phone-home technology are only likely to directly profit from it once they have deals in place with insurers or other third parties.
Perhaps the cost of the cellular service per-car isn't worth the data they'd get from it.
That is extremely unlikely, particularly when high-end cars increasingly have built-in data connections for sat-nav and similar facilities and these features are slowly working their way down into the mainstream.
Finally, you're already proven my point. The systems you list do not have any kind of data connection.
Some do, some don't. Volvo cars with their Sensus scheme do, for example. As I said in my first post, I'm afraid your information is out of date.
Yeah, it's pretty simple: don't get a car with OnStar (I think there's a competing service out there like this from one of the other makers)
I'm afraid your information is out of date there. Maybe it's different where you are, but if you look through the web site of almost any mid-range or high-end brand here in the UK, connectivity features are all the rage and pretty much everyone now has them.
And the list goes on. Some of these seem, at the moment, to be primarily about things like hooking in your phone, presumably so you can do exciting things like kill someone while distracted by your car awkwardly mispronouncing the e-mail you just received. A few, the Volvo Sensus for example, sound downright creepy to me in terms of auto-updating software in your vehicle without any user interaction.
And if you think every major car manufacturer and every major car insurer isn't eyeing up the possibilities of phoning home with driver performance data whether you like it or not, I know a prince in Nigeria who has a really great offer that might interest you.
I consider the pursuit of happiness to be a worthy goal in its own right. Almost by definition, happiness is about being in a situation you like. Someone offending you probably reduces your happiness, and thus harms you, albeit perhaps only in a very small way.
The analogy I sometimes use in these discussions is mild violence. Walk through any city centre late on a Friday night, and you can see that at least some people's natural human response to being offended involves punching the person who offended them. Most of us would agree that this is not normally acceptable behaviour, and so would the law.
However, a casual punch thrown in a drunken brawl on a Friday night probably won't cause any permanent physical harm to the person who takes the hit. They probably aren't going or be unable to work the next week, or otherwise lose money. They probably won't be prevented from doing anything they were otherwise going to do on the Saturday. They're probably just going to suffer a bit of pain, a bit of embarrassment, and a minor injury from which their body will make a full recovery within a few days.
In other words, the only long-term harm, and arguably the most significant part of the damage as a whole, is mental. It's about whether someone deserves not to feel pain or threatened or victimised, because these things are unpleasant. How then is this so different to causing purely emotional distress, in whatever form that may take?
My personal view is that in many ways it isn't, and thus the moral difference between punishing deliberately causing offence and punishing minor acts of physical violence is more about the other consequences. As a subjective moral position, I don't consider the satisfaction someone gets from punching someone who offended them to be more important on balance than someone's right not to get punched and by extension not to fear being punched. I do consider that freedom of expression is more important on balance than not being offended.
Of course, these are just my personal views about greater and lesser evils, not some sort of objective truth about right and wrong. I'm quite sure some people would disagree and say that someone who took a punch after deliberately being deeply offensive just got what they deserved, and while I tend not to agree with them and probably neither does the law in most places, who is to say their position is incorrect? Indeed, in a way theirs is an even stronger position than mine, because it implies that the damage caused by the offence is equivalent or greater in some sense to the harm caused by a minor act of violent retribution.
I don't think there's anything unreasonable about arguing that these systems introduce new risks, nor that if everyone were driving properly then many of these systems would not be necessary. They do introduce new risks, including the risk that compensating for driver errors will just make drivers more willing to accept those errors in the first place. Most of these safety systems should not ever be activated, because a skilled and properly aware driver wouldn't have put their vehicle in a position where the safety system would be needed. (There are some notable exceptions, particularly new technologies based on cameras or sensors that can see more, or more at once, than any human sitting in the driver's seat.)
The regrettably unreasonable part is just the initial assumption that most people do drive properly, because empirical evidence suggests otherwise.
If you want to go down that road, I'm "damaged" every time someone says something that offends me.
You are potentially damaged every time someone says something that offends you. Your life is a little bit worse as a result of their action. However, in the case of offensive speech, the other party would also be damaged if they were gagged to protect your sensibilities, while you might also benefit in other ways as a result of being exposed to the initial offensive idea. Most Western societies have decided, to varying degrees, that the damage caused by accepting offensive speech is less than the damage caused by restricting freedom of speech and sharing of new ideas, and so their laws side with the lesser evil in most cases.
This is not some inherent universal truth, a black and white matter of right and wrong. In much of Europe, for example, holocaust denial is illegal. In most Western nations, defamation is considered harmful and can be punished by law. In particular, defamation typically doesn't require that some concrete harm has been caused to the victim; we understand that telling lies that misrepresent the good character of another human being has the potential to cause them great harm in the future, and that is enough.
The real trouble with these arguments about "actual damage" is that many issues around rights and freedom and liberties, including respect for privacy, are matters of principle and generality. In the limit, if no-one has any privacy any more, then no-one can really think or act independently any more either. Our fundamental ability to behave as we wish by default has been destroyed and we are merely part of some global machine, required to conform, never pushing boundaries, never exploring radical new ideas, never growing as a person or advancing humanity as a species and culture. You can't point to any one incremental invasion of privacy and say it was the straw that broke the camel's back, yet the camel was still broken.
The flaw with your generally reasonable arguments is that as you mentioned yourself, these systems do make driving safer under normal conditions. Modern vehicle safety systems save lives, without any doubt. Sure, you can say the driver shouldn't have been driving, and you'd be right, but that isn't going to bring your kid back to life, and it wasn't your kid's fault that the idiot had a pint at lunchtime before driving half a mile back to the office they never reached.
The legal aspect is another interesting one. If you want to couple permanent monitoring and phoning home for evidentiary purposes with a zero tolerance law that says anyone who breaks any motoring law automatically gets punished, then we can talk. At that point, the complete impracticality and inappropriateness of many technical motoring offences will become obvious, with numerous normal people with good safety records starting to lose their licences within hours of the switchover. Then the whole system will have to change, because like any other zero tolerance system, it doesn't deal well with with human beings who generally try to do the right thing but aren't perfect. However, as long as we have those technical laws, which many normal drivers wouldn't always consider reasonable, and we have selective enforcement, which means everyone does break the law from time to time but the intermittent enforcement limits the consequences, Big Brother in your car is going to be a bad idea.
Granted, a key that opens doors remotely is useful.
As an aside, is that really true? I find that for a car door to be useful, something has to pass through it. It's a reasonable bet that that thing won't be far from the car at that time. We take a lot of modern gizmos on cars for granted, and maybe sometimes we should stop and ask how useful or necessary they really are.
In any case, the solution to this whole issue "should be obvious": critical systems should be completely isolated from anything remotely accessible. Of course, that isn't as easy as it sounds with the amount of basic functionality like steering and braking that uses software in modern vehicles, often to implement genuinely useful safety features and driver aids. But we could do much better than a lot of vehicles do at the moment, where the internal software architecture basically trusts everything on the same bus, even if some of those components can be subject to external influences.
I also remember when terrorists only crashed one vehicle at once.
I'm not generally a fear-the-terrorists hawk. I think in most cases the risk is exaggerated and we have more important things to worry about. Ironically, one of those things is improving road safety, where we know that many people are killed or seriously injured every year.
However, making something as ubiquitous and dangerous as cars susceptible to remote control actually does have the potential to create a new type of weapon of mass destruction, not by causing one huge event with mass casualties but by causing many small ones. We should be extremely careful about the safeguards implemented to prevent that kind of outcome, and I don't have much faith in the auto industry to emphasize that aspect of their product given their track record.
"It is a welcome transformation, as OTA is the only way to accomplish secure management of all of a connected car's software in a seamless, comprehensive, and fully integrated manner," Beardslee said.
my first thought is that maybe cars being so connected before we have the robustness to go with it isn't such a great idea.
We can only hope. I want the old Microsoft back, with a Windows 11 that is the new Windows 7, before my current Windows 7 runs out and I have to make some tough choices.
Unfortunately, it makes all too much sense, if you consider that the GP might have trusted the Microsoft of whenever they bought Windows 7 but no longer trust the Microsoft of 2016. MS under Nadella is a very different organisation to MS under Gates and even Ballmer.
This is supposed to be the difference between employees and freelancers.
As an employee, you are essentially paid for your working hours. It's up to the employer to generate the most value from the time you give them, and they get to keep the rewards if they do well but they have to eat the loss and still pay your salary if it doesn't work out. Your time outside work is your own, as long as it doesn't interfere with your ability to do your job properly.
As a freelancer, you are essentially paid for results. Typically your contract can be terminated without notice, and you may well change positions as frequently as every few months even if you do outstanding work every time. You won't enjoy the perks or job security of an employee, and you may well be engaged to clean up the mess that the permies didn't want to touch any more. You may need to put in extra hours to get the job done on the agreed schedule. But, you effectively negotiate your terms and compensation business-to-business, and up to a point you can price according to the value you can generate, more so the better you are at the job and the fewer other people could generate that same value for your client. If you aren't generating results, you can and will get terminated, but if you are generating good results and your client's management team know it, you can command fees to match.
I don't understand the jobs market in the US. It seems that salaried staff in technical positions frequently accept negligible job security, particularly where "at will" employment applies, and very little paid time off compared to almost everywhere else in the world. And yet those same people are still giving up unpaid overtime, covering the gaps, working the deathmarch shift before the deadline, and generally suffering a poor work/life balance.
The only explanation I can think of is that in IT industries the US workers are at least paid salaries much higher than they'd get in most other places, so it's almost like much of the IT industry in the US is being paid what most of the western world would consider freelance rates anyway. Maybe there is now sufficient international freedom of movement for workers that this evens the balance up somehow. But I still don't get how accepting the IT workforce collectively seems to be over there, particularly when it's still an employee's market in most places. I would have expected market forces to drive more favourable employment terms for decent to high-end staff by now.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know where you're from or what your law might be, but where I am terms stated after the point of purchase normally are unenforceable, other things being equal. To be part of a contract there would need to be something in it for both sides, and since the sale has already been completed at that point, there's no reason for the purchaser to accept additional terms without some form of consideration in return.
The catch with a lot of modern technologies is that the additional consideration doesn't have to be very much for it to count, so you get a lot of the worst kind of legal weasel words around things an average customer might expect to be obviously included in the sale but maybe legally speaking it's not so obvious. For example, maybe you bought a copy of some software, but that didn't automatically include the right to install it on your computer's hard drive or copy it into RAM to run it, because they involve making copies and someone else still owns the copyright. Or maybe you bought a copy of some software, but that didn't automatically include the right to use the developer's servers so it's actually useful for anything, like playing against other people or even activating it on a new computer under its DRM scheme.
Fortunately, courts don't always buy that sort of blatant weaselry, and have been known to find that the contract of sale for software that would be useless without some right or access to some service must necessarily have included those things even if they weren't explicitly stated. But this is the realm where you really need either a big corporate customer or a well-resourced consumer rights organisation to bring the test cases, because it's unlikely that any private individual will do so given the limited upside even if they win and the likelihood of a long and tedious court case they're stuck with in the meantime. This problem is really why I think clear-cut consumer protection statute law or equivalently powerful regulation is the practical solution given the reasonable desire for a developer to protect their genuine interests but the wildly unequal bargaining power when it comes to contracts of sale, EULAs, and other such terms.
That all sounds perfectly reasonable, except for the part where they completely and dubiously legally cut off a genuine customer from everything they paid for. As far as I'm concerned, they should lose the resulting court case, and as compensation for damages they should have to pay the total price someone would have paid for the entire set of games at the normal current rates since their own system will generally tell you what the market value of those games is.
I'm actually a little surprised that the card schemes let them get away with this. The terms for accepting card payments are usually absurdly one-sided from a merchant's point of view, and trying to artificially prevent justified chargebacks is generally frowned upon in the industry. I very much doubt Valve is big enough to have custom terms with the likes of Visa and Mastercard, but maybe they are playing along in the recognition that Valve is still significant and genuinely trying to reduce card fraud.
In any case, we're talking about a company with in the region of a billion dollars in annual revenues. I get that they have a certain culture and it's popular with geeks, but I'm utterly lacking in sympathy for them if they can take that much money from customers yet can't manage to provide a decent customer support operation, just as I am when certain other tech giants do actually get taken to small claims court over a dispute where they clearly haven't been reasonable and then they do actually lose the case.
Of course the ideal solution is to do away with the entire crazy card payments system we rely on in a lot of countries today, which is insecure and fraud-ridden by design, imposes crazy terms on merchants as a direct result, and is generally a barrier to reasonable people doing reasonable things and paying each other reasonably for them without someone taking on unreasonable risk as part of the deal. But we're literally talking about organsations that make economies work in some of those countries, so change is going to be painfully slow.
I don't personally buy Steam games, or use other services with a similar kind of set-up, because I consider this situation an unacceptable risk. I'm far more likely to spend my money with the likes of GOG, where I pay a fair price for a game, and then once I've got my copy it's mine, lock-in and DRM-free. But in other business contexts where I've had software companies try to mess me or my businesses around in similarly their-mistakey ways, I'm afraid I'm rather black-and-white with them these days. I'll make a reasonable and polite effort to contact whatever customer support mechanism they have, and I'll play along if they seem to be reasonable and polite in return and making effective progress towards fixing the problem. However, if they start to give me the run-around, they get a registered letter straight to their official address, which coincidentally also starts the formal small claims legal process in my country (which their lawyers know, so almost always that step is where they wake up and actually take the problem seriously enough to fix it). I'm sorry if they have problems with being unable to track stock or product registrations properly, or with their commercial relationships with financial services they work with, but time is worth too much to let those become my problems instead for their convenience.
Maybe you're right. I don't use Steam so I have no personal axe to grind either way. But you have to admit that some things about the OP's situation as they reported it do sound dubious to an impartial outsider.
That pretty much requires some serious levels of threats, like threatening to find and harm someone in the real world. The kind of threat that would get you arrested if you made in person.
If those threats are serious, then why aren't they being reported to the actual police? That sounds like a pretty toxic environment that has gone beyond what any commercial organisation should be trying to control themselves.
Given what I've just told you about the level of abuse required to get banned from a game, go back and re-read the guy's comment : "my nephew said some stupid things in chat". What does that tell you? It says he doesn't think his nephew did anything wrong.
Maybe that is what he thinks. The thing is, maybe he's also right. I don't know, and based on this Slashdot discussion alone, I don't see how you can know either. Online forums are notorious for over-reacting to criticism of their own preferences and culture. Maybe Valve's are no exception.
Also "I paid for the game. I should be allowed to play it!" suggests a feeling of entitlement.
Well, yes. He paid for the game. So he's entitled to what he paid for. The thing that is very dubious about the setup some organisations, again including Valve, have adopted is that they can and demonstrably sometimes will revoke things someone already paid for, even if those things are completely unrelated to whatever is in dispute.
He feels his money is worth more than the feelings of whoever was the real victim in all of this.
But since we only seem to have one person's anecdote that's been jumped on here, it's hard to know who that real victim was, or whether there was even any serious injury to feelings at all. As I said at the start, if there was something as serious as a credible threat to find and hurt someone, Valve should have backed off and called in the actual police. If it's just some teenager mouthing off unpleasantly, sure, ban that account from whatever forum was involved, but I don't see how that justifies kicking someone off a different game they already paid for.
If someone comes in there pissing off the other customers, that costs Valve money. Why do you think this abusive shit's right to speak overrides Valve's right to make money in their own market?
I have no problem with some reasonable process that ultimately bans someone who's being seriously abusive from whatever forum is involved.
What I do have a problem with is Valve, or anyone else, thinking their right to make money in one context means they don't have to provide the fundamentals someone already paid for in a completely different context. I see no legal or ethical basis for such a broad response, and far too much scope for abuse.
It's also worth remembering that the average computer user doesn't have a dedicated "IT guy" to set up their system. That might still be true even if you only consider use at work.
Likewise here knowing a bit of history the number of cases where people were wrongfully banned from Steam and the ban wasn't quickly resolved is almost nothing, so the smart money is on guilty until proven innocent.
What do you know that I don't? As far as I know, there aren't any published figures on this kind of thing from a reliable source, and there have been enough reports of Valve doing obviously inappropriate things that I wouldn't necessarily assume they were in the right as you seem willing to do.
Do you think Microsoft wants to support Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 2008r2 server, Windows 2012, and Windows 2015 for the next 15 years?
No, but I do think they've maintained their position as the dominant desktop OS provider because they gave serious consideration to long-term support and backward compatibility.
No business or other large organisation wants to upgrade platform software every few months or even every couple of years. It's dead time that brings huge disruption, significant costs, and relatively little benefit.
No software developer wants to rewrite their entire product every few months or even every couple of years, for the same reasons.
Even regular, non-geek users seem to be getting tired of the upgrade treadmill as their phones and apps and web sites and social networks keep moving things round all the time.
For decades, Microsoft has been a clear leader in not forcing everyone to do that, and they made a lot of money anyway since it meant they were in the position that "no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft".
If Microsoft are now going to force this kind of rapid update cycle on everyone, not to mention the questionable privacy and security implications of Windows 10, then they've dropped Windows to the same level as the likes of Linux and OS X. It seems reasonable to expect that the momentum that has kept Windows the dominant OS for so long -- primarily, the software base that runs on it -- will naturally become less of an advantage for them over time in that case, and perhaps little advantage at all after a few years.
The stock price chart for MSFT over the past few years is quite interesting. They had a pattern of sustained growth through 2013-2014, but then since the reality of Windows 10 took hold in 2015 it's quite a different story, with less growth overall and much more volatility. I suspect if they don't take the hint and back off on some of the aggressive posturing within the next few months, people are going to start making more money shorting Microsoft stock than investing in it as a good long-term prospect.
Setting the update system to auto-install security fixes is a reasonable default for the average computer user who doesn't know (or want to know) any better and just wants their computer to work.
Shoving out non-security updates under the security update label is a horrible breach of trust and a line they should never have crossed. Pushing an entire new OS as an update that would be automatically installed by default isn't far behind in the scummy moves list.
What really needs to happen with contracts of adhesion is more like how in-person consumer rights are handled in some places: not only can contracts not override certain key protections, but the stores are required by law to display certain information about this at points of sale, and including certain anti-consumer terms in contracts is itself illegal. Evil terms aren't just unenforceable at this point, you can be actively punished for even trying to include them, so you can't just try to scare consumers into not enforcing their rights.
Moreover, some places have recently broadened their law to make it clear that consumer safeguards apply to any documents or representations made by a vendor in connection with a sale, not just explicit contracts. This was obviously aimed at EULAs, and also at sales terms that attempt to nullify any relevant information previously provided by the vendor in response to the consumer's questions before they decided to buy. Sometimes the contractual situation might be ambiguous, but the legislature wanted the consumer protections to be very clear.
So you're so concerned about abusive messages that you feel the need to assume the worst, swear at someone, demean their family, and support action that effectively costs them money, despite presumably having no knowledge of the actual situation?
It's a good thing we don't ban people from Slashdot for abusive messages, I guess.
If you own a bunch of Steam games, it might not be worth it since they'll ban you from playing the other games you paid for.
This is why one of the consumer protection laws we really need in 2016 but don't currently have in most jurisdictions is that businesses providing this kind of sales/distribution service have to treat each transaction independently.
It is clearly unfair for Valve (or your e-book seller, or a service providing movie or music downloads, or...) to attack a customer by retrospectively undoing other transactions or crippling other products involved in them just because one transaction was disputed or didn't work out properly in some way. If I go to a supermarket to complain because the "fresh" food they'd sold me with a use-by date some time next week had gone bad the day after I bought it, they don't get to refund me for that bad food but also make everything else I ever bought from them disappear from my kitchen. Tech firms doing the equivalent are just exploiting an imbalance of power and a controlling position in their market, not to mention abusing the kind of DRM schemes that allow that sort of control in the first place and the laws underpinning those schemes.
There are good reasons we regulate monopolies in other business contexts. We also regulate services in some important industries even though they aren't monopolies, because competition hasn't proved sufficient to keep the market balanced. As far as I can see, almost exactly the same arguments apply to a lot of modern on-line services today.
Is there an app for that?
I think maybe Apple are starting to have the opposite problem. People are getting sick of devices that work well until they update to a new version of iOS, possibly pushed into doing so by apps breaking, and then don't work as well as they used to any more. Tablets aren't just the cool new toys now, people actually want something that does useful things. Once bitten, twice shy, and unlike smartphones there's nothing to promote a regular upgrade cycle for tablets that doesn't feel expensive because the cost is hidden in monthly contract fees.
Insurers, perhaps, but manufacturers, I'm not so sure. If they really wanted to, wouldn't they have done so by now?
Realistically, the two have to go in sync, because manufacturers with phone-home technology are only likely to directly profit from it once they have deals in place with insurers or other third parties.
Perhaps the cost of the cellular service per-car isn't worth the data they'd get from it.
That is extremely unlikely, particularly when high-end cars increasingly have built-in data connections for sat-nav and similar facilities and these features are slowly working their way down into the mainstream.
Finally, you're already proven my point. The systems you list do not have any kind of data connection.
Some do, some don't. Volvo cars with their Sensus scheme do, for example. As I said in my first post, I'm afraid your information is out of date.
Yeah, it's pretty simple: don't get a car with OnStar (I think there's a competing service out there like this from one of the other makers)
I'm afraid your information is out of date there. Maybe it's different where you are, but if you look through the web site of almost any mid-range or high-end brand here in the UK, connectivity features are all the rage and pretty much everyone now has them.
Audi has Audi Connect.
BMW has various features including Teleservices and Emergency Call.
Volvo has Sensus.
Ford has Ford SYNC.
And the list goes on. Some of these seem, at the moment, to be primarily about things like hooking in your phone, presumably so you can do exciting things like kill someone while distracted by your car awkwardly mispronouncing the e-mail you just received. A few, the Volvo Sensus for example, sound downright creepy to me in terms of auto-updating software in your vehicle without any user interaction.
And if you think every major car manufacturer and every major car insurer isn't eyeing up the possibilities of phoning home with driver performance data whether you like it or not, I know a prince in Nigeria who has a really great offer that might interest you.
They did do more serious stuff as well, and it triggered quite a storm about the professional ethics of the experiment, "white hat" or not.
I consider the pursuit of happiness to be a worthy goal in its own right. Almost by definition, happiness is about being in a situation you like. Someone offending you probably reduces your happiness, and thus harms you, albeit perhaps only in a very small way.
The analogy I sometimes use in these discussions is mild violence. Walk through any city centre late on a Friday night, and you can see that at least some people's natural human response to being offended involves punching the person who offended them. Most of us would agree that this is not normally acceptable behaviour, and so would the law.
However, a casual punch thrown in a drunken brawl on a Friday night probably won't cause any permanent physical harm to the person who takes the hit. They probably aren't going or be unable to work the next week, or otherwise lose money. They probably won't be prevented from doing anything they were otherwise going to do on the Saturday. They're probably just going to suffer a bit of pain, a bit of embarrassment, and a minor injury from which their body will make a full recovery within a few days.
In other words, the only long-term harm, and arguably the most significant part of the damage as a whole, is mental. It's about whether someone deserves not to feel pain or threatened or victimised, because these things are unpleasant. How then is this so different to causing purely emotional distress, in whatever form that may take?
My personal view is that in many ways it isn't, and thus the moral difference between punishing deliberately causing offence and punishing minor acts of physical violence is more about the other consequences. As a subjective moral position, I don't consider the satisfaction someone gets from punching someone who offended them to be more important on balance than someone's right not to get punched and by extension not to fear being punched. I do consider that freedom of expression is more important on balance than not being offended.
Of course, these are just my personal views about greater and lesser evils, not some sort of objective truth about right and wrong. I'm quite sure some people would disagree and say that someone who took a punch after deliberately being deeply offensive just got what they deserved, and while I tend not to agree with them and probably neither does the law in most places, who is to say their position is incorrect? Indeed, in a way theirs is an even stronger position than mine, because it implies that the damage caused by the offence is equivalent or greater in some sense to the harm caused by a minor act of violent retribution.
I don't think there's anything unreasonable about arguing that these systems introduce new risks, nor that if everyone were driving properly then many of these systems would not be necessary. They do introduce new risks, including the risk that compensating for driver errors will just make drivers more willing to accept those errors in the first place. Most of these safety systems should not ever be activated, because a skilled and properly aware driver wouldn't have put their vehicle in a position where the safety system would be needed. (There are some notable exceptions, particularly new technologies based on cameras or sensors that can see more, or more at once, than any human sitting in the driver's seat.)
The regrettably unreasonable part is just the initial assumption that most people do drive properly, because empirical evidence suggests otherwise.
If you want to go down that road, I'm "damaged" every time someone says something that offends me.
You are potentially damaged every time someone says something that offends you. Your life is a little bit worse as a result of their action. However, in the case of offensive speech, the other party would also be damaged if they were gagged to protect your sensibilities, while you might also benefit in other ways as a result of being exposed to the initial offensive idea. Most Western societies have decided, to varying degrees, that the damage caused by accepting offensive speech is less than the damage caused by restricting freedom of speech and sharing of new ideas, and so their laws side with the lesser evil in most cases.
This is not some inherent universal truth, a black and white matter of right and wrong. In much of Europe, for example, holocaust denial is illegal. In most Western nations, defamation is considered harmful and can be punished by law. In particular, defamation typically doesn't require that some concrete harm has been caused to the victim; we understand that telling lies that misrepresent the good character of another human being has the potential to cause them great harm in the future, and that is enough.
The real trouble with these arguments about "actual damage" is that many issues around rights and freedom and liberties, including respect for privacy, are matters of principle and generality. In the limit, if no-one has any privacy any more, then no-one can really think or act independently any more either. Our fundamental ability to behave as we wish by default has been destroyed and we are merely part of some global machine, required to conform, never pushing boundaries, never exploring radical new ideas, never growing as a person or advancing humanity as a species and culture. You can't point to any one incremental invasion of privacy and say it was the straw that broke the camel's back, yet the camel was still broken.
The flaw with your generally reasonable arguments is that as you mentioned yourself, these systems do make driving safer under normal conditions. Modern vehicle safety systems save lives, without any doubt. Sure, you can say the driver shouldn't have been driving, and you'd be right, but that isn't going to bring your kid back to life, and it wasn't your kid's fault that the idiot had a pint at lunchtime before driving half a mile back to the office they never reached.
The legal aspect is another interesting one. If you want to couple permanent monitoring and phoning home for evidentiary purposes with a zero tolerance law that says anyone who breaks any motoring law automatically gets punished, then we can talk. At that point, the complete impracticality and inappropriateness of many technical motoring offences will become obvious, with numerous normal people with good safety records starting to lose their licences within hours of the switchover. Then the whole system will have to change, because like any other zero tolerance system, it doesn't deal well with with human beings who generally try to do the right thing but aren't perfect. However, as long as we have those technical laws, which many normal drivers wouldn't always consider reasonable, and we have selective enforcement, which means everyone does break the law from time to time but the intermittent enforcement limits the consequences, Big Brother in your car is going to be a bad idea.
Granted, a key that opens doors remotely is useful.
As an aside, is that really true? I find that for a car door to be useful, something has to pass through it. It's a reasonable bet that that thing won't be far from the car at that time. We take a lot of modern gizmos on cars for granted, and maybe sometimes we should stop and ask how useful or necessary they really are.
In any case, the solution to this whole issue "should be obvious": critical systems should be completely isolated from anything remotely accessible. Of course, that isn't as easy as it sounds with the amount of basic functionality like steering and braking that uses software in modern vehicles, often to implement genuinely useful safety features and driver aids. But we could do much better than a lot of vehicles do at the moment, where the internal software architecture basically trusts everything on the same bus, even if some of those components can be subject to external influences.
I also remember when terrorists only crashed one vehicle at once.
I'm not generally a fear-the-terrorists hawk. I think in most cases the risk is exaggerated and we have more important things to worry about. Ironically, one of those things is improving road safety, where we know that many people are killed or seriously injured every year.
However, making something as ubiquitous and dangerous as cars susceptible to remote control actually does have the potential to create a new type of weapon of mass destruction, not by causing one huge event with mass casualties but by causing many small ones. We should be extremely careful about the safeguards implemented to prevent that kind of outcome, and I don't have much faith in the auto industry to emphasize that aspect of their product given their track record.
Indeed. When I see this,
"It is a welcome transformation, as OTA is the only way to accomplish secure management of all of a connected car's software in a seamless, comprehensive, and fully integrated manner," Beardslee said.
my first thought is that maybe cars being so connected before we have the robustness to go with it isn't such a great idea.
We can only hope. I want the old Microsoft back, with a Windows 11 that is the new Windows 7, before my current Windows 7 runs out and I have to make some tough choices.
Unfortunately, it makes all too much sense, if you consider that the GP might have trusted the Microsoft of whenever they bought Windows 7 but no longer trust the Microsoft of 2016. MS under Nadella is a very different organisation to MS under Gates and even Ballmer.
This is supposed to be the difference between employees and freelancers.
As an employee, you are essentially paid for your working hours. It's up to the employer to generate the most value from the time you give them, and they get to keep the rewards if they do well but they have to eat the loss and still pay your salary if it doesn't work out. Your time outside work is your own, as long as it doesn't interfere with your ability to do your job properly.
As a freelancer, you are essentially paid for results. Typically your contract can be terminated without notice, and you may well change positions as frequently as every few months even if you do outstanding work every time. You won't enjoy the perks or job security of an employee, and you may well be engaged to clean up the mess that the permies didn't want to touch any more. You may need to put in extra hours to get the job done on the agreed schedule. But, you effectively negotiate your terms and compensation business-to-business, and up to a point you can price according to the value you can generate, more so the better you are at the job and the fewer other people could generate that same value for your client. If you aren't generating results, you can and will get terminated, but if you are generating good results and your client's management team know it, you can command fees to match.
I don't understand the jobs market in the US. It seems that salaried staff in technical positions frequently accept negligible job security, particularly where "at will" employment applies, and very little paid time off compared to almost everywhere else in the world. And yet those same people are still giving up unpaid overtime, covering the gaps, working the deathmarch shift before the deadline, and generally suffering a poor work/life balance.
The only explanation I can think of is that in IT industries the US workers are at least paid salaries much higher than they'd get in most other places, so it's almost like much of the IT industry in the US is being paid what most of the western world would consider freelance rates anyway. Maybe there is now sufficient international freedom of movement for workers that this evens the balance up somehow. But I still don't get how accepting the IT workforce collectively seems to be over there, particularly when it's still an employee's market in most places. I would have expected market forces to drive more favourable employment terms for decent to high-end staff by now.