And what right do YOU have to say that a corporate entity (or any other entity for that matter) should be destroyed simply because you don't like it.
As to the appropriateness of a society (through its government) restricting behavior that doesn't harm citizens, on whether or not ClearChannel is potentially causing harm, that's a much more complex issue and one I can see the merits of both sides on.
And what right do YOU have to say that a corporate entity (or any other entity for that matter) should be destroyed simply because you don't like it.
Corporations are artificial creations that exist at the whim of the state (and therefore the people).
(And heck, as you say, it's a free society. I'm free to say that all sort of things and people should be destroyed. It damn well is my right to say such things. The real trick is getting other people to agree and help. Feel free to say that he's wrong, but challenging his right to say it is an insult to the very free society you seem to like.)
But since when, in a free society, are people allowed to destroy someone's livelihood simply because they don't agree with it?
Yeah, that would be like making the sale of alcohol illegal. Or sale of marijuana. Or sale of sex. Or sale of porn. Or making junk faxes. Or making telemarketting calls at 1 in the morning.
Most countries, even "free" ones, have alot of laws restricting potential livelihoods (and in many cases destroyed existing industries when those laws took effect). I'm not saying that this is right, just that it has happened and will likely continue to happen.
We have some of the most distinctive currency on the planet. The green and black bills we print are recognized everywhere, in part because no one else is willing to print currency quite that ugly. If you quickly flash a mess of bills from most countries in front of someone, they would be unable to identify the source country. It's just a patchwork of bright colors without any key identifying characteristic. Flash some US dollars and the heavy green markings instantly identifies it.
By being (basically) one color and using the needlessly closed and old fashioned design, we end up with currency that just looks evil. When you look at a good ol' US greenback, you know you're looking at the root of all evil. You have to respect it, in much the same way you might respect a court summons. It's dark and gritty, suitable for underhanded bribes and black market deals. When you frame the first dollar your business earns it remains an ugly green mark on your wall, no one will confuse it for some piece of nice art, it evokes the blood sweat and tears that went into starting the company.
Adding more colors is a mistake. So is opening up the design (Jackson is no longer imprisoned in a bubble). Our currency is starting to look open, friendly. This is an insult to our bill's heritage as something that looks evil and is widely identifiable.
I don't like the idea that if I wrote Moby Dick when I was 30 I'd have to relinquish my copyright or fork over my retirement money when I was 70.
I don't know, you might try working for the intervening forty years, just like the rest of the world. I didn't write my first computer program then retire on the proceeds. No, I keep writing new software. Movie makers film new movies, musician record new albums, and writers write more books. Maybe sometime in those forty years you could manage at least one more book? Is it that bloody hard? Melville wrote a number of books after Moby Dick, why can't you?
In fact, if IP is truly property it should also be inheritable.
Any copyrights that continue to exist are inherited. That would be why copyright is Life + 70 years for human copyright holders. Of course, shouldn't you spend some time raising your kids to get their own jobs, or at least write their own books?
This about a legal agreement. As much as I dislike clickthru EULA agreements they are perfectly valid.
This is about an attempted legal agreement. There are at least two possible problems.
Microsoft, a company convicted of abusing its operating system monopoly, might want to reconsider license terms that effectively bind their customers to their operating system.
Second, clickwrap EULAs remain an open legal debate. There has been weak precident set in a number of cases, but no case has national jurisdiction yet, and no case has clearly said, "clickwrap EULAs are enforceable" (even the famous, erm, Washington I believe, case was more about the legality of a contractor agreeing to a license but the contractee not doing so.) If you were to start selling any other copyright protected work, say a book, but add a wrapper around it that most people won't notice until they get home that says, "To read this book you must agree to the following," your EULA would be laughed out of court. That this is done for consumer software flies in the face of two hundred years of modern copyright law.
I hate to say it but people that complain about an EULA, should also complain about GPL, and other source code licenses.
The only reason you should hate to say it is because it exposes your ignorance.
You do not need to agree to the GPL to use it for any purpose (personal or business), or to make additional copies for personal use. (Yes there is some GPLed software that tries to make you agree to the GPL before you use the software. I suspect this is because the person who packaged it is clueless and doesn't understand this point.) The only thing putting any restrictions on you with GPLed software is not the GPL, but good old copyright law. Under copyright you you are not allowed to give copies to other people. The GPL is a grant of additional rights you didn't have (because copyright law restricted them). If you're willing to agree to the GPL, you gain these additional rights. If not, you can treat the GPLed software like any other copyright protected work like a book or CD.
The original poster hints at the the problems with Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, but if anyone doesn't know, I've written up a page on
why Microsoft Visual SourceSafe is unsuitable for real world use. (Yeah, I've been pimping it in my sig for a while, but it's just so on topic....)
What to replace it with? At home and at work I use
CVS. Sure, CVS has lots of problems, but at least they're well known problems with easy workarounds. At its core CVS is solid, if dated, software. There are other products I've heard good things about other packages, but I lack the experience with them to judge them. What I do know is that CVS is far and away superior to SourceSafe.
"I've never been able to get into American live-action works.
I mean, it's all just mindless gun fights and porn."
A foolish, clueless statement that ignores the vast wealth of
American live-action works, both cinematic and television? Yup.
Yet people will make similar statements about anime. It's just
as silly to say, "I've never been able to get into Japanese
animated works. I mean its all giggling girls, giant mecha, and
tentacle porn."
Anime is just Japanese animation, it covers a huge number of
genres and styles, just like American live-action. There are
historical dramas, modern action movies, cyberpunk films, science
fiction, epic fantasy, soap operas, and more. I expect there is
at least one Anime work that someone will like.
Part of the problem is the American generalization that
cartoons are for children. So most of the anime we import tends
to be targetted at children. It's a shame since there is such a
wealth of brilliant anime available.
So, take a look at the list below. See if one of the
descriptions would have sounded interested if it was live action
and filmed in the US. Give it a whirl, you might be surprised.
Of the movies I list, only two have giant robots (and only one of
them focuses on the robots), no magical girls, no naughty
tentacles, no high school hijinks.
(And feel free to get a dub. Sure, the voice acting often isn't
very good, but if you're not comfortable reading subtitles you'll
be needless irritated. By and large the selections I've listed
have at least adequete dubs.)
Historical: While us American's obsess about
a variety of wars (particularlly Vietnam and World War II), the
Japanese appear to have a slight fixation on World War II.
Having lost badly and gotten nuked might have that effect on
people. Barefoot
Gen is a brilliant film about Hiroshima written by a man
who was present for it. It simultaneously addresses the foolish
futility of Japan's continued war and the horror of life after
the blast. Grave
of the Fireflies addresses similar issues.
Science Fiction: For cyberpunk you want Akira. What
else can you say. It's a story about some bike gang members who
accidentally get involved in a government experiment. The story
gets a bit loopy near the end, but this movie oozes style. For a
bit of space faring drama, check out the series (not the movie)
Cowboy
Bebop. It's a series about several bounty hunters with
unresolved pasts. It has its cute parts, but it's also got
rocking action, a great soundtrack of varied musical styles,
fascinating characters, and a dose of angst. For something a bit
unusual and pretty funny (but with a darker side), try Trigun a
western feeling story set in a decaying science fiction future on
a desolate planet. Ghost in the
Shell is a great action film about a pair of cyborg cops
after a computer hacker with a touch of reflection on what being
human means in an increasingly technological world. Rojin Z is
a quirky movie set in the near future about an out of control
high-tech hospital bed and government-corporate conspiracies.
It's unusual, but fun with a fair amount of action (and features
crotchety old hackers:-). Of all of these, only Rojin
Z has anything approaching the mecha so commonly associated
with anime, and in Rojin Z the mecha aren't a key story element.
Women are worse at spatial orientation. Who cares?
Who cares? Those exact same researchers you're so eager to protect.
The question is why tests find women are worse at spatial orientation. Is it a sex linked biological trait? Is it because society encourages girls to be interested in doing certain behaviors that deemphasize spatial orentation? Is it because women actually have a more baseline spatial orientation and men have an unusually strong spatial orentation because boys are encouraged to persue activities that emphasize the trait? We don't know for sure and it's worth considering.
I'm quite sure there's something they're also _better_ at than men.
Sure. Some of these things are known to be fundamentally biological. No amount of social pressure will cause men to be able to bear children. However, if there are mental traits that men are weaker at I would be just as interested in studying why. Take the questions above, swap the sexes, and replace "spatial orientation" with whatever trait women exhibit more strongly.
Too many people seem inclined to look at the human world as it exists today and declare, "this is the natural order of things." That's silly. We exist in a complex world where our upbringing and the society around us stringly influences who we grow up to be. We need to step back and ask why. Perhaps we'll find out that this really is the natural order of things, but at least we'll know for certain.
Sometimes, the overlap between your two groups, and the two genders, (regardless of how you phrase things), just comes out too high to ignore. In such cases, it seems *more* unethical to pretend no gender difference exists, than to admit "gee, men and women *don't* perform 100% identically on all possible tasks".
The problem is that the data points we're looking at might be fundamentally skewed by society.
That women (in general) can bear children and men can't is a simple fact. There is no chance that with different upbringing or training that a man will be able to bear a child.
Ultimately it's part of the definitions of female and woman!
If we come up with a way for a man to bear a child (it doesn't seem likely, but who knows), we'll either need to revise our definitions, or more likely simply declare that the person is now a woman (as is already done for our existing sex change operations). So to say, "It is much smarter to make a difference between people with wombs and without," is clearly silly. But you knew that.
You're making a mistake is assuming that the mental differences between men and woman are every bit as proven as the biological differences. We simply don't understand the brain that well. We do know that boys and girls are subjected to a great deal of social pressure, both intentional and unintentional. We also know that otherwise similar children (even identical twins) can become very different people based on how they are raised and the environment they are raised in. While certain traits, abilities, and attitudes have a strong correlation to sex, these things often have a strong correlation to other things. Sure, looking at my technical co-workers, there is a strong sex correlation. But there is also an extremely strong correlation to relatively introverted childhoods. Interestingly this correlation cuts across sex lines. None of this proves that upbringing and environment are the source of these differences, but they do provide reasonable doubt that these things are strictly sex linked. Similarlly, there is reasonable doubt against upbringing and environment being the key factors.
This isn't about political correctness (well, maybe for some people, but that's just wrong). This is about admitting that we just don't know, and that it's way too early to start making final declarations.
The result: right now we don't know and we ought to keep an open mind. By shrugging our shoulders and declaring, "that's just the way men/women are," we're reinforcing the environment that may well be tainting our ability to measure these things!
For example, accounts must be locked out after a certain number of
illegal tries. This may seem a no-brainer...
Indeed, it does seem like someone without a brain might sugegst such a bad
idea.
The idea between locking out an account after a certain number of tries is a
reasonable one. You want to make it impossible for an attacker to repeatedly try passwords.
There are two big problems.
1. Who can try the password? Anyone with access to your web site? Great, anyone in the world can denial of service attack you by doing a few back login attempts. Anyone in your company? Hope no one in the department thinks playing the "get Bob locked out of his computer" joke is funny. On a cryptocard? You better lock the card up safely so the nosy kid your coworker brought in to work today doesn't mess with it and lock you out.
2. It encourages people to write down passwords. Sometimes people just
briefly forget their passwords, or they're feeling fumblefingered today. So you try and try again. If you get a limited number of tries, after the first two you're going to stop and look it up. To look it up, you'll want it written down. This is all the more likely if you juggle a dozen or so passwords on a daily basis (infrequent for most people, but common for techies). If I know I can keep trying I'm more likely to just keep guessing until my brain kicks in and reminds me.
While lockout systems can make sense, in most cases they are overkill and cause more problems than they fix. There are better ways to solutions. Most notably: log all bad access attempts and check the logs. Set up your system to throttle login attempts (say, no more than 5 per minute). Given those two rules, an attacker won't be able to guess any strong passwords because it will take forever to search, and within a day or two his pattern of attack will be noted and he can be tracked down.
I see a hell of alot of posts to the effect "they kept the default password, they deserve the charges."
That's just stupid and shortsighted.
People balance security against realistic perceived risk. Realistic worst case risk for failing to reset my voice mail password: someone else hears my voice mail messages, deletes them without my ever hearing them, then records something embarrassing or damaging for my outgoing message. Bad, but perhaps I'm willing to live with that risk.
Getting hit with a $12,000 bill (or a $8,000 bill after AT&T generously reduces it) is completely unreasonable. Prior to reading this article, I didn't realize that this was a potential attack at all. I would have assumed that no company was stupid enough to let an answering machine accept charges on a phone call! You can't assess risks on attacks you aren't aware of. It's simply not possible to protect against all attacks (is your computer TEMPEST secure? Do you shred any documents you throw out with your social security number on them?). People need to balance risks against the cost to defend against them. Some people apparently decided against changing their password. They misjudged the risks because they were unaware that AT&T was doing something insanely stupid that could cost them alot of money.
Also remember that in many cases people are actively encouraged by their employers or service providers to not change the default passwords. I've specifically been told that in a number of cases. Depending on the reasonable risk level, I sometimes change the password anyway. I distinctly remember an ISP I was dealing with being shocked that I would want to change the factory standard password on the ISDN modem they sold us. If I changed it, how could they debug it remotely?)
They send you a check in return for the marketing information that you provide them. If they don't send a check, complain until they do. How is this a scandal, again?
The evidence strongly suggests than many companies running rebates have no intention of paying out rebates they owe. They use delaying tactics, forms that cannot be correctly completed, internal mistakes, and any other technique possible to pay late or avoid paying at all. Sure, if you complain most will actually pay out, but the simple act of complaining often destroys any value for the rebate. The simple act of calling to complain may take an hour between explaining your problem, getting an unsatisfactory answer from the front line phone monkey, getting an supervisor, repeating your story, then arguing that they really owe you the money. If they can come up with another bogus reason to deny your rebate, you can easily repeat the process two or three times. How much is your time worth?
This is fraud. Consumers are being harmed. There are entire businesses founded on this fraud and many large companies rely on the system. It's damn well a scandal. It's a stunning example of how much corporations as a whole hold consumers in comtempt, in the long run it harms our economy, it's unproductive work.
How do these places stay in business? The one near me (about 1 mile if it's any comfort) is in a mall with rather onerous rent. There is a comic book store a few miles away that seems to have the lock on geeks wanting to play games. But how do you pay mall rent by selling a a couple of miniatures? Is there really that much money in these things?
If you're selling miniatures for typical, reasonable prices (typically $2-3 per metal figure), you're going to have a problem. But when you're a Games Workshop corporate store, you're avoiding the costs of distributors, you're paying less for the actual product (because it's usually plastic instead of metal), and you're charging $5-6 for a figure.
Games Workshop gouges customers. That's why they survive.
Games Workship is a scummy company perfectly willing to damage the industry as a whole and screw their customer base to further their own bottom line.
As has been mentioned in many other posts, for your local store to be allowed to purchase Games Workshop products at anything approaching a reasonable price, they are required to carry the entire line. Their lines are quite large. As a result, when they release a new line (like Gorkamorka, or the starship combat game, or Mordheim), the local store needs to purchase everything just to test the waters. Sure enough, a year later when Games Workshop abandons the line the poor local shop has a backstock of the unwanted products that they can't get rid of. They're pretty much the only people in the industry pulling this crap.
Interestingly, Games Workship is the only gaming company I'm aware of that is actively trying to distance themselves from the industry. Sure, every company wants to be the biggest and dominate the industry. Most companies also realize that helping the industry grow as a whole is good for everyone involved. Games Workshop doesn't believe in the "Gaming Hobby", no, it's the "Games Workshop Hobby." They attend gaming conventions, but one gets a very stand-offish feeling from them. They even run their own stores so they can preserve their little closed world. (The stores are creepy. Most gaming stores are little things to keep rent down, jam packed with product to give you the best selection possible. Games Workshop's stores are mostly empty, their product line entirely fitting on the outer walls. I never get a sense that they're run for the love of the industry, instead I get the same polished sense of sleeze I get from those weird hyper-specialized mall stores that sell a single product (like one specific mattress).)
Games Workshop doesn't really like their customers either. For example, to participate in a tournament, you need official Games Workshop (Citadel) miniatures. And not just any Games Workship miniatures, but only miniatures from the latest edition. Given that a typical army could run several hundred dollars, it seems a bit mean spirited to expect players to buy (and spend hours painting) an entirely new army with ever new rules revision.
Add to this some of the most overpriced minatures ever. Games Workshop's plastic miniatures are often more expensive than nice metal miniatures from other companies. Sure, GW puts out good quality minis, but they're not worth the 50% or more premium. Fortunately we seem to have having a bit of a rebirth of smaller miniature producers, so we're seeing a wealth of high quality, reasonably priced minis.
Yes, all of this is legal, but I think it's wrong. Games Workshop would happily destroy the rest of the industry, kill popular genres of gaming, and establish a restrictive monopoly if they could figure out how. They're bad for gaming on the whole, gamers should steer clear.
Well, if Anonymous Coward says so, it must be true.
Well, I'm willing to yield that you're not trolling, but for some reason have ignored the approximately three hundred previous posts on the subject...
I honestly just want to know - why would you want to boot Linux on an XBox?
It will vary from person to person. Here is just a handful of the many, many possible reasons why. You might not agree with all of them, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that the person who believes in them agrees with it.
Because you can. Geeks like pushing things to their limits. I'm sure many of the geeks involved love their X-Boxes and just want to mess with them because they can. The same reason people put jumping hydralics on their cars, the same reason people put neon tubes in their computer cases, the same reason people recreate Star Wars in ASCII,
the same reason people climb mountains. It's a challenge in an area they know. It's a chance to match wits, indirectly, against Microsoft's presumably smart security people. People often set strange challenges for themselves, let them enjoy themselves.
It tweaks Microsoft. Some geeks just love the opportunity to thumb their noses at Microsoft and this is a chance. You get to do something Microsoft really doesn't want you to do. You get a box valued at something like $300 for $200, subsidized by Microsoft. That gives some people a kick. It's not harmful (in the way, say, vandalizing Microsoft's property would), so what's the harm?
For some specialized tasks it's a suitable box. Sure, you can build a similarlly powered box for a similar price, but you'd be hard pressed to build a box with a stereo component form factor and as quiet as the X-Box. It would make a good network media player for videos and music. It would make a good station for running things like MAME or other emulators. It's not an awesome deal (and as technology continues to advance, it will be less of a deal), but for now it's a pretty good deal.
To play illegally copied games. Sure it's illegal, and I'm sure you would never do something like that. But some people don't care and want to.
For all the hype in the media about running Linux on an XBox, why isn't there similar press about running Linux on, say, a Nintendo Cube (or, does that one already run Linux? or Unix?) I believe that Playstation already runs Linux... right?
Indeed, Sony did release a version of Linux for the Playstation 2. The
initial rumors were announced on Slashdot, the initial announcement made it onto Slashdot, and the ship date got announced on Slashdot. We got an in depth review, and an annoucement of a new distribution for PS2 Linux. That seems to have been reasonably well covered. Why no more announcements? Well, given that Sony handed the community a working version, there wasn't as much incentive to spend time hacking on it. Also, it was much harder to port given the lack of a hard drive. Notably, Sony's Linux for PS2 includes a hard drive.
No society depends on disclosure or peer review of trade secrets. Every company is entitled to keep trade secrets.
Fair enough.
But this is about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Perhaps there is an argument about how the prohibiting reverse engineering prohibiting EULA that the software ships with constitutes valid protection of trade secrets. Like all trade secret law, it has a foundation in contract law, not copyright law. But that's an entirely different case. The student is seeking a judgement that he can legally decrypt the files without running afoul of copyright law. If a copyright law is being used to protect a trade secret, there is a problem.
IANAL, but it's not just obnoxious, it's illegal- regardless of whether you obscure the names. Unless I specify otherwise, any communication I send you is intended for you, and you only.
That's nice.
But why do I give a crap?
If you've made the mistake of sending me something you'd not have me share, it's not my job to protect you. I'm free to share the information with anyone I want.
Unless you really trust someone, don't send them anything you wouldn't want to see on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper. News media have reported on "private" communications leaked by one of the participants for years. It's legal and an essential part of both democracy and capitalism. Without this right criminal secrets could be squelched forever. You would never see whistleblower reports on companies that knowingly have unsafe working conditions, or just knowingly ship crap product.
However...
Anything non-trivial you send to me is protected by copyright, and under copyright law I cannot redistribute copies. So you do have some minimal amount of protection. But's it's not much protection, and effectively worthless. Of course, I am still free to show other people the copy I legally have. I'm free to redistribute small portions (quotes) for various far use purposes (including showing that you've done something wrong or stupid). I'm free to factually describe what you sent to me.
(The other notable protection is Trade Secret law, but that really requires that everyone involved have agreed to keep the secret (typically through Non-Disclosure Agreements). If the information is passed to a single person who hasn't agreed (and no NDA's were broken in doing so), they the information ceases to be a Trade Secret and all bets are off. But it's not really relevant, I doubt the author has an NDA with Microsoft.)
If you'd like to argue otherwise, I'd appreciate seeing a some of the details of the law in question.
It's quite similar to how you may not tape-record a conversation without my permission.
Erm, under which law would that be?
In the 39 "One Party Recording" states, if we're having a phone conversation, I'm allowed to record it without your knowledge (Only one party involved needs to know, and I'm that one party.)
Unless the content is quite obviously harmless, I ask the permission of the sender before forwarding a message from them to a mailing list(or cc'ing others in a reply that contains part of their comments, quoted.) It is at the very least considered good manners.
Now that I agree with. You may not need to do so, but it's darn polite to do so, especially if you want to have future conversations with this person. I've specifically done so when I reposted portions of email conversations I've had on my web site.
If you want to engage in civil disobedience, get about 500 people
who are willing to go to Walmart at the same time, and each of you walk out of
the store with a CD - holding it in the air as you do to broadcast to the world
that you going to steal the CD.
Never, ever use the "making an infringing copy is
exactly the same as stealing a CD" argument. It's incorrect and misleading.
Even if someone believes that copyright law should be abolished, that does not
in any way suggest that they are against physical property law. Copyright
law and physical property law are totally different things.. If you make
an illegal copy of one of my photographs, I still have my original to enjoy and
anyone I've given legal copies can still enjoy their copies. If you steal one
of those copies, the person who had it long longer can enjoy it. It's an
essential difference.
For the sake of all that is good, this is Slashdot, what are you doing here
if you're not a nerd. Isn't a traditional trait of nerds an insistence upon
accurate, precise speech? Aren't nerds supposed to be against using language
to mislead and arguments of emotion over fact?
Now, it you're really interested in using civil disobedience to try and
change copyright law, and not interested in encouraging confusion between
copyright and physical property, check out Robert X. Cringely's column "Steal This
Column" for the proper way.
The company has to take some responsiblity knowing that 99.9% of the people that buy this our going to do illegal things with it.
And what exactly is their responsibility? Especially if that 0.1% really appreciates the legal uses? Perhaps many emulator users are just interested in piracy, but I'm happy that I can again
play old Lucasarts games that I've purchased over the years. I love my Dreamcast, but I know that it will eventually wear out and I'm glad that I'll be able to use emulators to continue enjoying the games I'm purchased for it.
If the developer genuinely wants its product used in a legal and ethical way, and there are customers who want the product to use in a legal and ethical way, the existance of people who would use it illegally is irrelevant, no matter if there is just one such person or a million. It's a free country (well, it used to be), demanding that I stop doing something that is legal and that I feel is ethical is an insult to that freedom. Insisting that the developer spent time and money to add "features" that complicate the product and remove options is just stupid.
I just want to mention that April Fools to me has always been to make up BELIEVABLE stories that you can gloat over later - which really adds to more of the fun.
Only up to a point. Ultimately the joke should be funny on its own merit. Simply telling a believable lie, then saying "Hey, I got you!" is stupid. Anyone can do that. As a modern civilization we rely on each other to provide largely accurate information. Misleading someone with a believable, otherwise non-funny lie doesn't require any skill. You're just abusing the core trust that allows society to function. You're not creating something that everyone involved will laugh at (boy, it sure was funny when you told me my spouse had died), you're laughing at someone's lack of omniscience. This is the sort of retarded humor I expect from insecure teenagers and morning "Krazy Krew" DJs, not mature human beings.
I can't locate the source, I recently stumbled across an article where someone had gone into a coffee shop and asked for an espresso. The kid behind the counter replied that they were out. As the potential customer turned away to leave, the kid announced that he was just kidding. Kidding about what? Restaurants are often out of various things. Congrats, you fooled someone into believing something entirely plausable and completely unverifiable (unless you're planning on heading into their stockroom to check). Shall I start challenging my server every time I'm told a restaurant is out of a given item?
April Fools jokes can be funny, it carefully done. The "Evil Bit" RFC was kinda funny, it pokes fun at the RFC process and lack of understanding on security issues. My favorite April Fool's joke is
Bjarne Stroustrup's "Generalizing Overloading for C++." It's inspired. It's something Bjarne would never do, but starts out extremely plausibly. It slowly devolves into absurdity. That's funny.
What's next, comparing a toaster oven to a graphics card?
Interesting you should say that. As it happens I just did such a comparision. To summarize my results, I found that the GeForce generates way more heat than a toaster over, and I now use my GeForce for heating all of my PopTarts and pizza slizes.
Its nice that Bioware did make the game playable on Linux, but shelling out for a copy of windows to be able to play it seems counter-productive.
1. This is just the beta. Things will be different in the final release. They've previously announced that a download (a very large download) would be available for people who needed it.
2. You can reasonably expect someone to put together an extractor.
Do you actually need to have windows installed, or can you just copy the files from some other installation, or maybe from the game CD?
You need the data files for Neverwinter Nights. Windows itself is not needed, but getting those files without Windows might be tricky. The easiest source is to copy the files from an existing installation of the Windows version. You can try to get them off the game CD, but they're in proprietary InstallShield cab files. There are tools that claim to be able to extract from those files, but I don't know how well they'll work in this case. Wine might be willing to run the installer.
While a couple of articles back these same people were defending the virtues of file "sharing" networks, where users are comfortably ignoring the fact that they have agreed *not* to redistribute the copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holders.
If by "agree" you mean "happen to live in a country with copyright laws," I guess. I personally agreed to nothing. The decision to respect the law or not is an entirely different question.
Really, make up your minds: either file sharing a la KaZaa is ok and the people who bought these devices shouldn't pay for the content they "downloaded" for free or file sharing a la KaZaa is *not* ok and the people who bought these devices should pay for the content they downloaded.
They're different situations and it's reasonable to come to different conclusions about how to handle these situations. When you get cable television service (or satellite service), you sign a contract limiting what you can do. Attempting to avoid Pay Per View fees amounts to Breach of Contract, one set of laws. When you purchase a CD of music no contract, explicit or implied, exists. If you chose to make copies available online you are enganging in Copyright Infringement, a completely different set of laws. Some people may decide that one law is just and worthy of being obeyed while the other is not.
It's very simple: you want content X? You pay for it. Why? Because the content provider says so and we have given them the power to be like that.
Actually, if someone can successfully get the content without paying for it, that would suggest that that don't really have the power to be like that.:-)
And cache links themselves include magic numbers, which implies that you can't just come up with a default conversion of a URL into a google cache link.
They don't advertise it, but the "cache:" prefix works just like you think it does. Strip off the "http://" from the front of desired url, replace it with "cache:" and you'll get the cache. For example, a minimal URL to link to a cache of Slashdot's
about page at http://slashdot.org/about.shtml is
http://google.com/search?q=cache:slashdot.org/abou t.shtml. (The space in the URL is courtesy of Slashdot's borken anti-page widening defenses.)
Slashdot Mirror
As to the appropriateness of a society (through its government) restricting behavior that doesn't harm citizens, on whether or not ClearChannel is potentially causing harm, that's a much more complex issue and one I can see the merits of both sides on.
Corporations are artificial creations that exist at the whim of the state (and therefore the people).
(And heck, as you say, it's a free society. I'm free to say that all sort of things and people should be destroyed. It damn well is my right to say such things. The real trick is getting other people to agree and help. Feel free to say that he's wrong, but challenging his right to say it is an insult to the very free society you seem to like.)
Yeah, that would be like making the sale of alcohol illegal. Or sale of marijuana. Or sale of sex. Or sale of porn. Or making junk faxes. Or making telemarketting calls at 1 in the morning.
Most countries, even "free" ones, have alot of laws restricting potential livelihoods (and in many cases destroyed existing industries when those laws took effect). I'm not saying that this is right, just that it has happened and will likely continue to happen.
We have some of the most distinctive currency on the planet. The green and black bills we print are recognized everywhere, in part because no one else is willing to print currency quite that ugly. If you quickly flash a mess of bills from most countries in front of someone, they would be unable to identify the source country. It's just a patchwork of bright colors without any key identifying characteristic. Flash some US dollars and the heavy green markings instantly identifies it.
By being (basically) one color and using the needlessly closed and old fashioned design, we end up with currency that just looks evil. When you look at a good ol' US greenback, you know you're looking at the root of all evil. You have to respect it, in much the same way you might respect a court summons. It's dark and gritty, suitable for underhanded bribes and black market deals. When you frame the first dollar your business earns it remains an ugly green mark on your wall, no one will confuse it for some piece of nice art, it evokes the blood sweat and tears that went into starting the company.
Adding more colors is a mistake. So is opening up the design (Jackson is no longer imprisoned in a bubble). Our currency is starting to look open, friendly. This is an insult to our bill's heritage as something that looks evil and is widely identifiable.
Keep our money evil!
I don't know, you might try working for the intervening forty years, just like the rest of the world. I didn't write my first computer program then retire on the proceeds. No, I keep writing new software. Movie makers film new movies, musician record new albums, and writers write more books. Maybe sometime in those forty years you could manage at least one more book? Is it that bloody hard? Melville wrote a number of books after Moby Dick , why can't you?
Any copyrights that continue to exist are inherited. That would be why copyright is Life + 70 years for human copyright holders. Of course, shouldn't you spend some time raising your kids to get their own jobs, or at least write their own books?
This is about an attempted legal agreement. There are at least two possible problems.
Microsoft, a company convicted of abusing its operating system monopoly, might want to reconsider license terms that effectively bind their customers to their operating system.
Second, clickwrap EULAs remain an open legal debate. There has been weak precident set in a number of cases, but no case has national jurisdiction yet, and no case has clearly said, "clickwrap EULAs are enforceable" (even the famous, erm, Washington I believe, case was more about the legality of a contractor agreeing to a license but the contractee not doing so.) If you were to start selling any other copyright protected work, say a book, but add a wrapper around it that most people won't notice until they get home that says, "To read this book you must agree to the following," your EULA would be laughed out of court. That this is done for consumer software flies in the face of two hundred years of modern copyright law.
The only reason you should hate to say it is because it exposes your ignorance. You do not need to agree to the GPL to use it for any purpose (personal or business), or to make additional copies for personal use. (Yes there is some GPLed software that tries to make you agree to the GPL before you use the software. I suspect this is because the person who packaged it is clueless and doesn't understand this point.) The only thing putting any restrictions on you with GPLed software is not the GPL, but good old copyright law. Under copyright you you are not allowed to give copies to other people. The GPL is a grant of additional rights you didn't have (because copyright law restricted them). If you're willing to agree to the GPL, you gain these additional rights. If not, you can treat the GPLed software like any other copyright protected work like a book or CD.
What to replace it with? At home and at work I use CVS. Sure, CVS has lots of problems, but at least they're well known problems with easy workarounds. At its core CVS is solid, if dated, software. There are other products I've heard good things about other packages, but I lack the experience with them to judge them. What I do know is that CVS is far and away superior to SourceSafe.
"I've never been able to get into American live-action works. I mean, it's all just mindless gun fights and porn."
A foolish, clueless statement that ignores the vast wealth of American live-action works, both cinematic and television? Yup. Yet people will make similar statements about anime. It's just as silly to say, "I've never been able to get into Japanese animated works. I mean its all giggling girls, giant mecha, and tentacle porn."
Anime is just Japanese animation, it covers a huge number of genres and styles, just like American live-action. There are historical dramas, modern action movies, cyberpunk films, science fiction, epic fantasy, soap operas, and more. I expect there is at least one Anime work that someone will like.
Part of the problem is the American generalization that cartoons are for children. So most of the anime we import tends to be targetted at children. It's a shame since there is such a wealth of brilliant anime available.
So, take a look at the list below. See if one of the descriptions would have sounded interested if it was live action and filmed in the US. Give it a whirl, you might be surprised. Of the movies I list, only two have giant robots (and only one of them focuses on the robots), no magical girls, no naughty tentacles, no high school hijinks. (And feel free to get a dub. Sure, the voice acting often isn't very good, but if you're not comfortable reading subtitles you'll be needless irritated. By and large the selections I've listed have at least adequete dubs.)
Historical: While us American's obsess about a variety of wars (particularlly Vietnam and World War II), the Japanese appear to have a slight fixation on World War II. Having lost badly and gotten nuked might have that effect on people. Barefoot Gen is a brilliant film about Hiroshima written by a man who was present for it. It simultaneously addresses the foolish futility of Japan's continued war and the horror of life after the blast. Grave of the Fireflies addresses similar issues.
Science Fiction: For cyberpunk you want Akira . What else can you say. It's a story about some bike gang members who accidentally get involved in a government experiment. The story gets a bit loopy near the end, but this movie oozes style. For a bit of space faring drama, check out the series (not the movie) Cowboy Bebop . It's a series about several bounty hunters with unresolved pasts. It has its cute parts, but it's also got rocking action, a great soundtrack of varied musical styles, fascinating characters, and a dose of angst. For something a bit unusual and pretty funny (but with a darker side), try Trigun a western feeling story set in a decaying science fiction future on a desolate planet. Ghost in the Shell is a great action film about a pair of cyborg cops after a computer hacker with a touch of reflection on what being human means in an increasingly technological world. Rojin Z is a quirky movie set in the near future about an out of control high-tech hospital bed and government-corporate conspiracies. It's unusual, but fun with a fair amount of action (and features crotchety old hackers :-). Of all of these, only Rojin
Z has anything approaching the mecha so commonly associated
with anime, and in Rojin Z the mecha aren't a key story element.
Modern: Gun Smith Cats , light fluffy action, fairly entertaining. Castle of Cagliostro 's animation is
Who cares? Those exact same researchers you're so eager to protect.
The question is why tests find women are worse at spatial orientation. Is it a sex linked biological trait? Is it because society encourages girls to be interested in doing certain behaviors that deemphasize spatial orentation? Is it because women actually have a more baseline spatial orientation and men have an unusually strong spatial orentation because boys are encouraged to persue activities that emphasize the trait? We don't know for sure and it's worth considering.
Sure. Some of these things are known to be fundamentally biological. No amount of social pressure will cause men to be able to bear children. However, if there are mental traits that men are weaker at I would be just as interested in studying why. Take the questions above, swap the sexes, and replace "spatial orientation" with whatever trait women exhibit more strongly.
Too many people seem inclined to look at the human world as it exists today and declare, "this is the natural order of things." That's silly. We exist in a complex world where our upbringing and the society around us stringly influences who we grow up to be. We need to step back and ask why. Perhaps we'll find out that this really is the natural order of things, but at least we'll know for certain.
The problem is that the data points we're looking at might be fundamentally skewed by society.
That women (in general) can bear children and men can't is a simple fact. There is no chance that with different upbringing or training that a man will be able to bear a child. Ultimately it's part of the definitions of female and woman! If we come up with a way for a man to bear a child (it doesn't seem likely, but who knows), we'll either need to revise our definitions, or more likely simply declare that the person is now a woman (as is already done for our existing sex change operations). So to say, "It is much smarter to make a difference between people with wombs and without," is clearly silly. But you knew that.
You're making a mistake is assuming that the mental differences between men and woman are every bit as proven as the biological differences. We simply don't understand the brain that well. We do know that boys and girls are subjected to a great deal of social pressure, both intentional and unintentional. We also know that otherwise similar children (even identical twins) can become very different people based on how they are raised and the environment they are raised in. While certain traits, abilities, and attitudes have a strong correlation to sex, these things often have a strong correlation to other things. Sure, looking at my technical co-workers, there is a strong sex correlation. But there is also an extremely strong correlation to relatively introverted childhoods. Interestingly this correlation cuts across sex lines. None of this proves that upbringing and environment are the source of these differences, but they do provide reasonable doubt that these things are strictly sex linked. Similarlly, there is reasonable doubt against upbringing and environment being the key factors.
This isn't about political correctness (well, maybe for some people, but that's just wrong). This is about admitting that we just don't know, and that it's way too early to start making final declarations.
The result: right now we don't know and we ought to keep an open mind. By shrugging our shoulders and declaring, "that's just the way men/women are," we're reinforcing the environment that may well be tainting our ability to measure these things!
Indeed, it does seem like someone without a brain might sugegst such a bad idea.
The idea between locking out an account after a certain number of tries is a reasonable one. You want to make it impossible for an attacker to repeatedly try passwords. There are two big problems.
1. Who can try the password? Anyone with access to your web site? Great, anyone in the world can denial of service attack you by doing a few back login attempts. Anyone in your company? Hope no one in the department thinks playing the "get Bob locked out of his computer" joke is funny. On a cryptocard? You better lock the card up safely so the nosy kid your coworker brought in to work today doesn't mess with it and lock you out.
2. It encourages people to write down passwords. Sometimes people just briefly forget their passwords, or they're feeling fumblefingered today. So you try and try again. If you get a limited number of tries, after the first two you're going to stop and look it up. To look it up, you'll want it written down. This is all the more likely if you juggle a dozen or so passwords on a daily basis (infrequent for most people, but common for techies). If I know I can keep trying I'm more likely to just keep guessing until my brain kicks in and reminds me.
While lockout systems can make sense, in most cases they are overkill and cause more problems than they fix. There are better ways to solutions. Most notably: log all bad access attempts and check the logs. Set up your system to throttle login attempts (say, no more than 5 per minute). Given those two rules, an attacker won't be able to guess any strong passwords because it will take forever to search, and within a day or two his pattern of attack will be noted and he can be tracked down.
I see a hell of alot of posts to the effect "they kept the default password, they deserve the charges."
That's just stupid and shortsighted.
People balance security against realistic perceived risk. Realistic worst case risk for failing to reset my voice mail password: someone else hears my voice mail messages, deletes them without my ever hearing them, then records something embarrassing or damaging for my outgoing message. Bad, but perhaps I'm willing to live with that risk.
Getting hit with a $12,000 bill (or a $8,000 bill after AT&T generously reduces it) is completely unreasonable. Prior to reading this article, I didn't realize that this was a potential attack at all. I would have assumed that no company was stupid enough to let an answering machine accept charges on a phone call! You can't assess risks on attacks you aren't aware of. It's simply not possible to protect against all attacks (is your computer TEMPEST secure? Do you shred any documents you throw out with your social security number on them?). People need to balance risks against the cost to defend against them. Some people apparently decided against changing their password. They misjudged the risks because they were unaware that AT&T was doing something insanely stupid that could cost them alot of money.
Also remember that in many cases people are actively encouraged by their employers or service providers to not change the default passwords. I've specifically been told that in a number of cases. Depending on the reasonable risk level, I sometimes change the password anyway. I distinctly remember an ISP I was dealing with being shocked that I would want to change the factory standard password on the ISDN modem they sold us. If I changed it, how could they debug it remotely?)
The evidence strongly suggests than many companies running rebates have no intention of paying out rebates they owe. They use delaying tactics, forms that cannot be correctly completed, internal mistakes, and any other technique possible to pay late or avoid paying at all. Sure, if you complain most will actually pay out, but the simple act of complaining often destroys any value for the rebate. The simple act of calling to complain may take an hour between explaining your problem, getting an unsatisfactory answer from the front line phone monkey, getting an supervisor, repeating your story, then arguing that they really owe you the money. If they can come up with another bogus reason to deny your rebate, you can easily repeat the process two or three times. How much is your time worth?
This is fraud. Consumers are being harmed. There are entire businesses founded on this fraud and many large companies rely on the system. It's damn well a scandal. It's a stunning example of how much corporations as a whole hold consumers in comtempt, in the long run it harms our economy, it's unproductive work.
If you're selling miniatures for typical, reasonable prices (typically $2-3 per metal figure), you're going to have a problem. But when you're a Games Workshop corporate store, you're avoiding the costs of distributors, you're paying less for the actual product (because it's usually plastic instead of metal), and you're charging $5-6 for a figure.
Games Workshop gouges customers. That's why they survive.
Games Workship is a scummy company perfectly willing to damage the industry as a whole and screw their customer base to further their own bottom line.
As has been mentioned in many other posts, for your local store to be allowed to purchase Games Workshop products at anything approaching a reasonable price, they are required to carry the entire line. Their lines are quite large. As a result, when they release a new line (like Gorkamorka, or the starship combat game, or Mordheim), the local store needs to purchase everything just to test the waters. Sure enough, a year later when Games Workshop abandons the line the poor local shop has a backstock of the unwanted products that they can't get rid of. They're pretty much the only people in the industry pulling this crap.
Interestingly, Games Workship is the only gaming company I'm aware of that is actively trying to distance themselves from the industry. Sure, every company wants to be the biggest and dominate the industry. Most companies also realize that helping the industry grow as a whole is good for everyone involved. Games Workshop doesn't believe in the "Gaming Hobby", no, it's the "Games Workshop Hobby." They attend gaming conventions, but one gets a very stand-offish feeling from them. They even run their own stores so they can preserve their little closed world. (The stores are creepy. Most gaming stores are little things to keep rent down, jam packed with product to give you the best selection possible. Games Workshop's stores are mostly empty, their product line entirely fitting on the outer walls. I never get a sense that they're run for the love of the industry, instead I get the same polished sense of sleeze I get from those weird hyper-specialized mall stores that sell a single product (like one specific mattress).)
Games Workshop doesn't really like their customers either. For example, to participate in a tournament, you need official Games Workshop (Citadel) miniatures. And not just any Games Workship miniatures, but only miniatures from the latest edition. Given that a typical army could run several hundred dollars, it seems a bit mean spirited to expect players to buy (and spend hours painting) an entirely new army with ever new rules revision.
Add to this some of the most overpriced minatures ever. Games Workshop's plastic miniatures are often more expensive than nice metal miniatures from other companies. Sure, GW puts out good quality minis, but they're not worth the 50% or more premium. Fortunately we seem to have having a bit of a rebirth of smaller miniature producers, so we're seeing a wealth of high quality, reasonably priced minis.
Yes, all of this is legal, but I think it's wrong. Games Workshop would happily destroy the rest of the industry, kill popular genres of gaming, and establish a restrictive monopoly if they could figure out how. They're bad for gaming on the whole, gamers should steer clear.
Well, if Anonymous Coward says so, it must be true.
Well, I'm willing to yield that you're not trolling, but for some reason have ignored the approximately three hundred previous posts on the subject...
It will vary from person to person. Here is just a handful of the many, many possible reasons why. You might not agree with all of them, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that the person who believes in them agrees with it.
Because you can. Geeks like pushing things to their limits. I'm sure many of the geeks involved love their X-Boxes and just want to mess with them because they can. The same reason people put jumping hydralics on their cars, the same reason people put neon tubes in their computer cases, the same reason people recreate Star Wars in ASCII, the same reason people climb mountains. It's a challenge in an area they know. It's a chance to match wits, indirectly, against Microsoft's presumably smart security people. People often set strange challenges for themselves, let them enjoy themselves.
It tweaks Microsoft. Some geeks just love the opportunity to thumb their noses at Microsoft and this is a chance. You get to do something Microsoft really doesn't want you to do. You get a box valued at something like $300 for $200, subsidized by Microsoft. That gives some people a kick. It's not harmful (in the way, say, vandalizing Microsoft's property would), so what's the harm?
For some specialized tasks it's a suitable box. Sure, you can build a similarlly powered box for a similar price, but you'd be hard pressed to build a box with a stereo component form factor and as quiet as the X-Box. It would make a good network media player for videos and music. It would make a good station for running things like MAME or other emulators. It's not an awesome deal (and as technology continues to advance, it will be less of a deal), but for now it's a pretty good deal.
To play illegally copied games. Sure it's illegal, and I'm sure you would never do something like that. But some people don't care and want to.
Indeed, Sony did release a version of Linux for the Playstation 2. The initial rumors were announced on Slashdot, the initial announcement made it onto Slashdot, and the ship date got announced on Slashdot. We got an in depth review, and an annoucement of a new distribution for PS2 Linux. That seems to have been reasonably well covered. Why no more announcements? Well, given that Sony handed the community a working version, there wasn't as much incentive to spend time hacking on it. Also, it was much harder to port given the lack of a hard drive. Notably, Sony's Linux for PS2 includes a hard drive.
Linux on the Gamecube? People are interested. The lack of a hard dr
Fair enough.
But this is about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Perhaps there is an argument about how the prohibiting reverse engineering prohibiting EULA that the software ships with constitutes valid protection of trade secrets. Like all trade secret law, it has a foundation in contract law, not copyright law. But that's an entirely different case. The student is seeking a judgement that he can legally decrypt the files without running afoul of copyright law. If a copyright law is being used to protect a trade secret, there is a problem.
That's nice.
But why do I give a crap?
If you've made the mistake of sending me something you'd not have me share, it's not my job to protect you. I'm free to share the information with anyone I want.
Unless you really trust someone, don't send them anything you wouldn't want to see on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper. News media have reported on "private" communications leaked by one of the participants for years. It's legal and an essential part of both democracy and capitalism. Without this right criminal secrets could be squelched forever. You would never see whistleblower reports on companies that knowingly have unsafe working conditions, or just knowingly ship crap product.
However...
Anything non-trivial you send to me is protected by copyright, and under copyright law I cannot redistribute copies. So you do have some minimal amount of protection. But's it's not much protection, and effectively worthless. Of course, I am still free to show other people the copy I legally have. I'm free to redistribute small portions (quotes) for various far use purposes (including showing that you've done something wrong or stupid). I'm free to factually describe what you sent to me.
(The other notable protection is Trade Secret law, but that really requires that everyone involved have agreed to keep the secret (typically through Non-Disclosure Agreements). If the information is passed to a single person who hasn't agreed (and no NDA's were broken in doing so), they the information ceases to be a Trade Secret and all bets are off. But it's not really relevant, I doubt the author has an NDA with Microsoft.)
If you'd like to argue otherwise, I'd appreciate seeing a some of the details of the law in question.
Erm, under which law would that be? In the 39 "One Party Recording" states, if we're having a phone conversation, I'm allowed to record it without your knowledge (Only one party involved needs to know, and I'm that one party.)
Now that I agree with. You may not need to do so, but it's darn polite to do so, especially if you want to have future conversations with this person. I've specifically done so when I reposted portions of email conversations I've had on my web site.
Never, ever use the "making an infringing copy is exactly the same as stealing a CD" argument. It's incorrect and misleading. Even if someone believes that copyright law should be abolished, that does not in any way suggest that they are against physical property law. Copyright law and physical property law are totally different things.. If you make an illegal copy of one of my photographs, I still have my original to enjoy and anyone I've given legal copies can still enjoy their copies. If you steal one of those copies, the person who had it long longer can enjoy it. It's an essential difference.
For the sake of all that is good, this is Slashdot, what are you doing here if you're not a nerd. Isn't a traditional trait of nerds an insistence upon accurate, precise speech? Aren't nerds supposed to be against using language to mislead and arguments of emotion over fact?
Now, it you're really interested in using civil disobedience to try and change copyright law, and not interested in encouraging confusion between copyright and physical property, check out Robert X. Cringely's column "Steal This Column" for the proper way.
And what exactly is their responsibility? Especially if that 0.1% really appreciates the legal uses? Perhaps many emulator users are just interested in piracy, but I'm happy that I can again play old Lucasarts games that I've purchased over the years. I love my Dreamcast, but I know that it will eventually wear out and I'm glad that I'll be able to use emulators to continue enjoying the games I'm purchased for it.
If the developer genuinely wants its product used in a legal and ethical way, and there are customers who want the product to use in a legal and ethical way, the existance of people who would use it illegally is irrelevant, no matter if there is just one such person or a million. It's a free country (well, it used to be), demanding that I stop doing something that is legal and that I feel is ethical is an insult to that freedom. Insisting that the developer spent time and money to add "features" that complicate the product and remove options is just stupid.
Only up to a point. Ultimately the joke should be funny on its own merit. Simply telling a believable lie, then saying "Hey, I got you!" is stupid. Anyone can do that. As a modern civilization we rely on each other to provide largely accurate information. Misleading someone with a believable, otherwise non-funny lie doesn't require any skill. You're just abusing the core trust that allows society to function. You're not creating something that everyone involved will laugh at (boy, it sure was funny when you told me my spouse had died), you're laughing at someone's lack of omniscience. This is the sort of retarded humor I expect from insecure teenagers and morning "Krazy Krew" DJs, not mature human beings.
I can't locate the source, I recently stumbled across an article where someone had gone into a coffee shop and asked for an espresso. The kid behind the counter replied that they were out. As the potential customer turned away to leave, the kid announced that he was just kidding. Kidding about what? Restaurants are often out of various things. Congrats, you fooled someone into believing something entirely plausable and completely unverifiable (unless you're planning on heading into their stockroom to check). Shall I start challenging my server every time I'm told a restaurant is out of a given item?
April Fools jokes can be funny, it carefully done. The "Evil Bit" RFC was kinda funny, it pokes fun at the RFC process and lack of understanding on security issues. My favorite April Fool's joke is Bjarne Stroustrup's "Generalizing Overloading for C++." It's inspired. It's something Bjarne would never do, but starts out extremely plausibly. It slowly devolves into absurdity. That's funny.
Interesting you should say that. As it happens I just did such a comparision. To summarize my results, I found that the GeForce generates way more heat than a toaster over, and I now use my GeForce for heating all of my PopTarts and pizza slizes.
1. This is just the beta. Things will be different in the final release. They've previously announced that a download (a very large download) would be available for people who needed it.
2. You can reasonably expect someone to put together an extractor.
You need the data files for Neverwinter Nights. Windows itself is not needed, but getting those files without Windows might be tricky. The easiest source is to copy the files from an existing installation of the Windows version. You can try to get them off the game CD, but they're in proprietary InstallShield cab files. There are tools that claim to be able to extract from those files, but I don't know how well they'll work in this case. Wine might be willing to run the installer.
If by "agree" you mean "happen to live in a country with copyright laws," I guess. I personally agreed to nothing. The decision to respect the law or not is an entirely different question.
They're different situations and it's reasonable to come to different conclusions about how to handle these situations. When you get cable television service (or satellite service), you sign a contract limiting what you can do. Attempting to avoid Pay Per View fees amounts to Breach of Contract, one set of laws. When you purchase a CD of music no contract, explicit or implied, exists. If you chose to make copies available online you are enganging in Copyright Infringement, a completely different set of laws. Some people may decide that one law is just and worthy of being obeyed while the other is not.
Actually, if someone can successfully get the content without paying for it, that would suggest that that don't really have the power to be like that. :-)
They don't advertise it, but the "cache:" prefix works just like you think it does. Strip off the "http://" from the front of desired url, replace it with "cache:" and you'll get the cache. For example, a minimal URL to link to a cache of Slashdot's about page at http://slashdot.org/about.shtml is http://google.com/search?q=cache:slashdot.org/abou t.shtml . (The space in the URL is courtesy of Slashdot's borken anti-page widening defenses.)