Better analogy would be: Someone sells lockpicks online that will only work with their own car. Instead of using OnStar to unlock their car when they inevitably lock their keys in their car (for a fee, of course) they unstrap the lockpick kit from the bottom of their car and open the door. Of course this violates the DMCA because the lock required an RFID chip to operate normally, but since you circumvented it, you're now on the hook for DMCA violations.
You have a car. This car's CPU has been programmed to fit a certain performance profile. Namely, of a cheap econo-car. The maker also comes out with a 'sport' version with no 'underclocking' of the engine, giving it the illusion of having better hardware than the vanilla model. Is it REALLY stealing if you remove that underclocking programming from your own car? Of course the car company wants their shoddy business model to be protected artificially.
Utility analogy.
The water company installs a small pipe to your house. About the size of your navel. Of course, they had to seriously downgrade pipe sizes from their main connection to your house. You go in and install pipes of your own that match the main outlet. Of course the water company doesn't like it, since they would have charged you thousands to do it. Is that stealing, because you did it yourself?
Really? Shoplifting? This stuff is as much of a crime as it is to refill your water bottle out of some company's water fountain they have in their lobby.
You're right. If I used it, I would have no say as to what went into their updates. Would you 'update' your car's tires to support fewer makes/models of tire?
I've never heard of a case where a company has removed functionality from pay-software, that isn't considered a dick move. What's to keep them from saying, "Well, we don't really think our x line of laptops is good enough for this OS anymore, ya'know? We're just going to block those too. But you can buy 10.6.5.x codenamed Retro for another $200."
Depends on what you call a customer. They have NO RIGHT to tell me what I can or can't install their OS on. They try to with EULAs, but it wouldn't hold up in court if they tried to sue over it. As long as someone is paying Apple for the OS, then they're a customer.
This right after the 'people who don't update because we've been known to harass and accuse them via patches have more malware' article. It's like Microsoft and Apple are trying to compete and see who can belittle and harass their customers the most.
The very same program that's well-known for marking valid copies as pirated and then holding people's data/work environment hostage until they cough up another $200+. Yeah, I'm leery of that kind of thing too. Why should I let them install a program that takes up a good 20MB of RAM when it's running to make me prove that I'm not a pirate?
Children have been pulling this scam since money existed and they were given money. Give them some lunch money and watch them go and spend it on something non-lunch related, then come back and cry to their parents saying they don't have lunch money. So you can be a heartless parent and make them go hungry and get laughed at by their friends but learn their lesson, or you can give them some more money so that their behavior is reinforced.
Obviously a child being hungry for one day is somewhat less on the 'bad things' scale than thousands of people having to drive an hour away to get across the bay. We can't throw all of these civilians to the wolves and fuck up their lives for years to come, but we can't reward the behavior by just giving them more money. Perhaps the governator needs to install an oversight group to make sure that earmarked funds are used for exactly what they're earmarked for.
No longer can you say, "I didn't know it had installed itself and started downloading all the new movies in music, and then saved them to my 'Movies' folder." and have a reasonable doubt. Now you'll have to prove that the software in question didn't tell you that it was installing, and if it's true, the company will get nailed to the wall for it.
We'd have a bunch of one-in-one-out 'corporate neighborhoods' that would guarantee that you'd have to drive 50 miles to get to a competitor's store. Much like how strip malls and other things in urban areas will forgo the money required to add an extra two feet to one part of their parking lot to make it connect to someone else's. So you realize you missed the turn off, and now you have to cross traffic two more times to get to a parking lot literally two feet away from you.
Steam IS the best example of digital distribution of video games that the world has seen to date. They have a huge selection of games, efficient software, good prices, sales all the time to keep you coming back, and they really do have something for everyone. There are a few horrible problems with it though, which I'll elaborate on.
1. Bandwidth costs: With many ISPs setting download caps in the USA, a game from Steam can easily run 2-4GB, which is 1-2% of your monthly allowance according to Comcast. Not that much by itself, but if you add in movie downloads, streaming music, streaming movies, etc...
2. Nonportability: Let's say I have the game on my PC, but I need to format to get rid of a horrible virus. I currently cannot back up the games to DVD or another drive and then reinstall them back when I get done. I have to download them all or play around with Steam to get it to accept the data again. You should be able to back up the install files to different media.
3. Same price on Steam as in stores: Why would I want to pay $50 for a game on Steam when I can pay $50 for a game at Wal-Mart and have a CD, box, book, etc. With Steam I get to pay extra for my bandwidth and again if I ever need to reinstall.
Some isotopes of them might be stable. The properties of these stable isotopes might be desirable. Imagine if we found an exotic super-heavy element that was stable and easy to fission? We might be able to work it into the nuclear reprocessing chain and squeeze some more energy out.
It's not random, it's very calculated. Microsoft is getting tired of people coming out with products cheaper than they are, and so they're going to lock them out, and file it under 'For Your Protection' after saying that using unauthorized memory cards rapes your children and kills your pets. I can't stand how entitled the game companies think they are to push an update to remove features.
What if World of Warcraft released a patch that removed all support for non-Blizzard-sanctioned input hardware? What if Ford decided that your warranty was void because you used non-Ford wipers? (Oh, wait, the law protects us against that..) What if printers didn't let you use unauthorized print cartridges? (Oh, wait, they don't..)
People don't put adequate weight on things, depending on when they're going to happen. A monthly fee of $20, to many many people, is much better than a one time fee of $40, which has to be paid right now. Also, a one-year-deferred-payment living room set for $1000 is much better than a pay-now version of the same set for $500. It's one of the reasons the loan industry has collapsed.
Mowing the yard today is 10x worse than mowing the yard in a week.
See if you can have a heart to heart with a live person, hopefully person to person, that represents your lender. Maybe they'll be sympathetic, since this really is a unique era. So many people are raising their rates and raising the bar to get credit that a lot of juniors/seniors can't find money to get those last few hours in..
In the first stage of evolution (under 20,000 generations) a random mutation had a higher chance of being fatal. The E.Coli they used were already pretty specialized for general survival. They probably didn't fish this E.Coli out of hot springs or out of glacial ice. They then put the bacteria into an environment that they probably haven't encountered before, with no way out. A culling happens, where the ones that cannot handle the citric acid die off. So now we have a batch of reproducing survivors that can handle citric acid, at the very least.
At this point, they're general survivors with citric acid resistance. A random mutation is more likely here than at any other time to lead to disaster, but if it somehow leads to an advantage in terms of survival fitness, then that bacteria will show up more and more. Basically, you're only seeing the 'right' answers. Like a test that filters out applicants on a per-question basis (you get one wrong, you're out) for the first half of the test.
In the second stage of evolution, random mutations are less likely to lead to disaster, as you now have a citric acid friendly strain of E.Coli, and while you might remove one wing of its E.Coli adaptation, there are still others in place. This is the second part of the test, which is graded based on the most popular answer that people select.
A car analogy: If Ford could decide to add a part to your car next time you took it to be serviced, without asking or telling you what it did, and they had a history of shitty engineering, would you really want to have to take your car back in a week because the unauthorized add-on was found to cause the vehicle to burst into flames, or the doors not to be able to latch shut?
No, if it happened in China, we'd just steal it from them and use it, like they steal patents from us and use them. We'd tell them to get fucked if they wanted royalties. If Japan developed it, we'd probably license it for a token amount, since we want to stay friendly with them, and they want to stay friendly with us.
Look at it on the reverse side. Imagine if we found the technology and built plants for it. Guess where a lot of parts would come from? Yeah, China. Either they could piece it together like a puzzle, or just send some grad students over to help work with the technology and have the specifics within a few years anyway. Then there would be fusion plants in China, never mind the patent.
I think it's awesome that our universities have a lot of foreign students. I don't think it's awesome that my tax dollars are paying for them to go there, so they can go back to their home countries and live the high lives while we foot the bill. Cut the number of foreign scholarships and grants in half, and increase the number of domestic grants and scholarships.
It's a great time to do it since there's so many people sitting around jobless.
The nuclear option just opened up again recently. They were all stuck in licensing hell, where a plant-in-progress would license one part of the plant, which would take so long to be approved, that two more parts of the plant would go out of their licensing range, rinse and repeat. Thankfully, this is coming to an end with some new regulations and changes in licensing rules. I believe there are several plants being built with full licenses right now, in the USA.
Would her updates appearing on his web page get her arrested for 'contacting' him? What about if he were subscribed to a mailing list or newsgroup that she posted in? What about if she had one of those Facebook apps that likes to spam send him a message saying something like, "I know a secret about you! Click here to learn it!"?
There are gray areas for technology, but this isn't one of them, unless the program 'poked' him automatically. Also, if they're still 'friends' on Facebook, the restraining order should be nullified.
DAoC is now, for most intents and purposes, one server. The cluster is called Ywain, and I think it goes from Ywain-1 to Ywain-9. Each server shares its RvR (realm versus realm) areas with the other servers, so all Ywain players go to the same RvR instance. The main cities do as well. However, outside and in dungeons, the servers are independent. This is to keep 1,000 people from showing up in the same area.
You can change the server in main cities and other important areas by means of an NPC.
It's a nice way to do things. If Ywain-1 is too populated, go to Ywain-2. It lets the player decide how full or empty they want their experience to be.
As much as I like Steam, they'll always be anti-competitive as long as you cannot unlink and resale games to other people. It ensures that Steam NEVER has to compete with itself for a sale, that is, no one can get a Steam-exclusive game and then resell it to another person, without selling their entire account off.
I have no issues with letting them dominate the market if they'd allow games to be resold or transferred between accounts. They haven't, to my knowledge, been anti-competitive towards other companies. There have been many attempts to set up a decent network like it, but many have failed. Why? They want to encrypt/encode your games, but limit their bandwidth to a T-1 that serves hundreds of thousands of customers, AND tell you to fuck off when the game doesn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
Think of it from the wife's perspective.
They've been good and faithful for ten years, and BAM, syphyllis, HIV, and herpes.
Because they KNEW their husband wasn't a dirty cheating bastard.
Bad analogy.
Better analogy would be: Someone sells lockpicks online that will only work with their own car. Instead of using OnStar to unlock their car when they inevitably lock their keys in their car (for a fee, of course) they unstrap the lockpick kit from the bottom of their car and open the door. Of course this violates the DMCA because the lock required an RFID chip to operate normally, but since you circumvented it, you're now on the hook for DMCA violations.
Car analogy.
You have a car. This car's CPU has been programmed to fit a certain performance profile. Namely, of a cheap econo-car. The maker also comes out with a 'sport' version with no 'underclocking' of the engine, giving it the illusion of having better hardware than the vanilla model. Is it REALLY stealing if you remove that underclocking programming from your own car? Of course the car company wants their shoddy business model to be protected artificially.
Utility analogy.
The water company installs a small pipe to your house. About the size of your navel. Of course, they had to seriously downgrade pipe sizes from their main connection to your house. You go in and install pipes of your own that match the main outlet. Of course the water company doesn't like it, since they would have charged you thousands to do it. Is that stealing, because you did it yourself?
Really? Shoplifting? This stuff is as much of a crime as it is to refill your water bottle out of some company's water fountain they have in their lobby.
You're right. If I used it, I would have no say as to what went into their updates. Would you 'update' your car's tires to support fewer makes/models of tire?
I've never heard of a case where a company has removed functionality from pay-software, that isn't considered a dick move. What's to keep them from saying, "Well, we don't really think our x line of laptops is good enough for this OS anymore, ya'know? We're just going to block those too. But you can buy 10.6.5.x codenamed Retro for another $200."
Depends on what you call a customer. They have NO RIGHT to tell me what I can or can't install their OS on. They try to with EULAs, but it wouldn't hold up in court if they tried to sue over it. As long as someone is paying Apple for the OS, then they're a customer.
This right after the 'people who don't update because we've been known to harass and accuse them via patches have more malware' article. It's like Microsoft and Apple are trying to compete and see who can belittle and harass their customers the most.
The very same program that's well-known for marking valid copies as pirated and then holding people's data/work environment hostage until they cough up another $200+. Yeah, I'm leery of that kind of thing too. Why should I let them install a program that takes up a good 20MB of RAM when it's running to make me prove that I'm not a pirate?
Where did they go? Elsewhere.
Children have been pulling this scam since money existed and they were given money. Give them some lunch money and watch them go and spend it on something non-lunch related, then come back and cry to their parents saying they don't have lunch money. So you can be a heartless parent and make them go hungry and get laughed at by their friends but learn their lesson, or you can give them some more money so that their behavior is reinforced.
Obviously a child being hungry for one day is somewhat less on the 'bad things' scale than thousands of people having to drive an hour away to get across the bay. We can't throw all of these civilians to the wolves and fuck up their lives for years to come, but we can't reward the behavior by just giving them more money. Perhaps the governator needs to install an oversight group to make sure that earmarked funds are used for exactly what they're earmarked for.
That bill is there so that someone has to fry.
No longer can you say, "I didn't know it had installed itself and started downloading all the new movies in music, and then saved them to my 'Movies' folder." and have a reasonable doubt. Now you'll have to prove that the software in question didn't tell you that it was installing, and if it's true, the company will get nailed to the wall for it.
We'd have a bunch of one-in-one-out 'corporate neighborhoods' that would guarantee that you'd have to drive 50 miles to get to a competitor's store. Much like how strip malls and other things in urban areas will forgo the money required to add an extra two feet to one part of their parking lot to make it connect to someone else's. So you realize you missed the turn off, and now you have to cross traffic two more times to get to a parking lot literally two feet away from you.
Steam IS the best example of digital distribution of video games that the world has seen to date. They have a huge selection of games, efficient software, good prices, sales all the time to keep you coming back, and they really do have something for everyone. There are a few horrible problems with it though, which I'll elaborate on.
1. Bandwidth costs: With many ISPs setting download caps in the USA, a game from Steam can easily run 2-4GB, which is 1-2% of your monthly allowance according to Comcast. Not that much by itself, but if you add in movie downloads, streaming music, streaming movies, etc...
2. Nonportability: Let's say I have the game on my PC, but I need to format to get rid of a horrible virus. I currently cannot back up the games to DVD or another drive and then reinstall them back when I get done. I have to download them all or play around with Steam to get it to accept the data again. You should be able to back up the install files to different media.
3. Same price on Steam as in stores: Why would I want to pay $50 for a game on Steam when I can pay $50 for a game at Wal-Mart and have a CD, box, book, etc. With Steam I get to pay extra for my bandwidth and again if I ever need to reinstall.
Some isotopes of them might be stable. The properties of these stable isotopes might be desirable. Imagine if we found an exotic super-heavy element that was stable and easy to fission? We might be able to work it into the nuclear reprocessing chain and squeeze some more energy out.
It's not random, it's very calculated. Microsoft is getting tired of people coming out with products cheaper than they are, and so they're going to lock them out, and file it under 'For Your Protection' after saying that using unauthorized memory cards rapes your children and kills your pets. I can't stand how entitled the game companies think they are to push an update to remove features.
What if World of Warcraft released a patch that removed all support for non-Blizzard-sanctioned input hardware?
What if Ford decided that your warranty was void because you used non-Ford wipers? (Oh, wait, the law protects us against that..)
What if printers didn't let you use unauthorized print cartridges? (Oh, wait, they don't..)
People don't put adequate weight on things, depending on when they're going to happen. A monthly fee of $20, to many many people, is much better than a one time fee of $40, which has to be paid right now. Also, a one-year-deferred-payment living room set for $1000 is much better than a pay-now version of the same set for $500. It's one of the reasons the loan industry has collapsed.
Mowing the yard today is 10x worse than mowing the yard in a week.
See if you can have a heart to heart with a live person, hopefully person to person, that represents your lender. Maybe they'll be sympathetic, since this really is a unique era. So many people are raising their rates and raising the bar to get credit that a lot of juniors/seniors can't find money to get those last few hours in..
In the first stage of evolution (under 20,000 generations) a random mutation had a higher chance of being fatal. The E.Coli they used were already pretty specialized for general survival. They probably didn't fish this E.Coli out of hot springs or out of glacial ice. They then put the bacteria into an environment that they probably haven't encountered before, with no way out. A culling happens, where the ones that cannot handle the citric acid die off. So now we have a batch of reproducing survivors that can handle citric acid, at the very least.
At this point, they're general survivors with citric acid resistance. A random mutation is more likely here than at any other time to lead to disaster, but if it somehow leads to an advantage in terms of survival fitness, then that bacteria will show up more and more. Basically, you're only seeing the 'right' answers. Like a test that filters out applicants on a per-question basis (you get one wrong, you're out) for the first half of the test.
In the second stage of evolution, random mutations are less likely to lead to disaster, as you now have a citric acid friendly strain of E.Coli, and while you might remove one wing of its E.Coli adaptation, there are still others in place. This is the second part of the test, which is graded based on the most popular answer that people select.
A car analogy: If Ford could decide to add a part to your car next time you took it to be serviced, without asking or telling you what it did, and they had a history of shitty engineering, would you really want to have to take your car back in a week because the unauthorized add-on was found to cause the vehicle to burst into flames, or the doors not to be able to latch shut?
No, if it happened in China, we'd just steal it from them and use it, like they steal patents from us and use them. We'd tell them to get fucked if they wanted royalties. If Japan developed it, we'd probably license it for a token amount, since we want to stay friendly with them, and they want to stay friendly with us.
Look at it on the reverse side. Imagine if we found the technology and built plants for it. Guess where a lot of parts would come from? Yeah, China. Either they could piece it together like a puzzle, or just send some grad students over to help work with the technology and have the specifics within a few years anyway. Then there would be fusion plants in China, never mind the patent.
I think it's awesome that our universities have a lot of foreign students. I don't think it's awesome that my tax dollars are paying for them to go there, so they can go back to their home countries and live the high lives while we foot the bill. Cut the number of foreign scholarships and grants in half, and increase the number of domestic grants and scholarships.
It's a great time to do it since there's so many people sitting around jobless.
The nuclear option just opened up again recently. They were all stuck in licensing hell, where a plant-in-progress would license one part of the plant, which would take so long to be approved, that two more parts of the plant would go out of their licensing range, rinse and repeat. Thankfully, this is coming to an end with some new regulations and changes in licensing rules. I believe there are several plants being built with full licenses right now, in the USA.
"Hey, man, I found a USB drive in the parking lot."
"Fuck yeah, plug it in and see what's on it!"
Actually, I'm glad they had common sense here.
Would her updates appearing on his web page get her arrested for 'contacting' him? What about if he were subscribed to a mailing list or newsgroup that she posted in? What about if she had one of those Facebook apps that likes to spam send him a message saying something like, "I know a secret about you! Click here to learn it!"?
There are gray areas for technology, but this isn't one of them, unless the program 'poked' him automatically. Also, if they're still 'friends' on Facebook, the restraining order should be nullified.
DAoC is now, for most intents and purposes, one server. The cluster is called Ywain, and I think it goes from Ywain-1 to Ywain-9. Each server shares its RvR (realm versus realm) areas with the other servers, so all Ywain players go to the same RvR instance. The main cities do as well. However, outside and in dungeons, the servers are independent. This is to keep 1,000 people from showing up in the same area.
You can change the server in main cities and other important areas by means of an NPC.
It's a nice way to do things. If Ywain-1 is too populated, go to Ywain-2. It lets the player decide how full or empty they want their experience to be.
As much as I like Steam, they'll always be anti-competitive as long as you cannot unlink and resale games to other people. It ensures that Steam NEVER has to compete with itself for a sale, that is, no one can get a Steam-exclusive game and then resell it to another person, without selling their entire account off.
I have no issues with letting them dominate the market if they'd allow games to be resold or transferred between accounts. They haven't, to my knowledge, been anti-competitive towards other companies. There have been many attempts to set up a decent network like it, but many have failed. Why? They want to encrypt/encode your games, but limit their bandwidth to a T-1 that serves hundreds of thousands of customers, AND tell you to fuck off when the game doesn't work.