During install, display an html page saying... "The software you are about to install is made available under the following terms" "Mozilla - link to mozilla.html"
etc etc
With an "OK" box at the bottom.
It just becomes another part of the installer, and people ignore it. Displaying them all individually has the same effect of being ignored, but it would be far more annoying.
A closer version of your analogy would be... If 95% of people ate at mcdonalds for every meal of the day, then other establishments selling food would go out of business and make it very difficult for you to eat anything else.
Sure you *could* eat something else, if you looked hard enough for it, but if you ever went out to a shopping mall or travelled on a plane or train only mcdonalds would be available to you.
This would be a closer situation, windows is everywhere and is designed to keep people locked in to microsoft products, it is not designed to interoperate with users and allows users the choice to use something else... It is primarily designed to make choosing something other than microsoft as difficult as possible.
So since microsoft won't change their behaviour (and why would they, the current model is working for them), the only alternative is to get sufficiently large numbers of people migrated onto other platforms that supporting only the proprietary microsoft way of doing things becomes a burden rather than an easy option.
More and more systems are coming out without optical media drives... CD/DVD drives are large and clunky these days, and entirely impractical on a small laptop.
If you have a rack full of servers, you really should buy proper server grade equipment and not hack your own homebrew machines together... And you really should never need to enter the server room except to replace hardware. Any decent server will have a serial port or virtual serial over ethernet, through which you can power the hardware up and down, and interact with the system firmware regardless of the state of the OS.
I was able to fix a server that wasn't booting properly yesterday by sshing from my phone, attaching to the serial console and changing boot parameters. Much more convenient and quicker than driving to the data center.
Server rooms are hostile environments, cold, incredibly noisy and very uncomfortable... You don't want to spend any more time than you have to in there.
There are already such devices and have been for years... I have several servers with LCD panels on the front of them, and they display various things like hostname, IP, kernel version, loadavg etc... I think most of the old cobalt raq servers had such panels built in and a few buttons to cycle through different information.
The components have established tests to ensure they are not defective and haven't been tampered with, especially if they are off the shelf components which are also used in other devices. Since they are components, intended for third parties to use to construct larger devices, their function and interfaces will be well known and documented.
The software is presumably bespoke, and is an unknown quantity, it could also potentially be used to hide backdoors. It is not intended to be sold as a separate component for integration with other components, and is thus not fully documented if at all.
The police should really have demanded verifiability before they agreed to purchase such devices... If this vendor won't provide source code to the police for review, then there are plenty of companies who will. A contract to supply the police will be lucrative, and should be on the police's terms, not the other way round.
It's not exactly hard, i'm sure chinese companies are already manufacturing such devices... If the chinese ones are more open and verifiable, and cheaper to boot, you would be a complete fool to buy the inferior and more expensive american version.
Getting their clients liable for huge amounts of fines is hardly the outcome a lawyer would aim for... Any lawyer would probably recommend they turn over the code so as to comply with the court order. Why is it so important to them not to turn over the code? They must have something big to hide, because handing over the code to the court so the defense can examine it is hardly a huge burden... Not like they're being compelled to release it to the general public.
It's rather difficult for the protocol itself to prevent any given implementation from storing passwords in plain text. How would you go about designing a protocol so as to make it impossible for the server to store plain text passwords?
Why would they bother? Maintaining their own client is largely a waste of time, seeing as they use standard protocols anyway. Much easier to just direct users to the third party clients that are available.
Because blizzard are not relying on an artificial scarcity to charge arbitrary prices for something that costs them nothing...
They are charging for a service, and will stop being paid as soon as they stop providing the service. They also have ongoing costs to continue providing the service (bandwidth, power, maintenance etc) which justifies the ongoing subscription fee.
Charging for services makes a lot more sense, is perfectly reasonable, fair and stands on it's own merits, and does not require artificial constructs to make it viable. That's why people have charged for services for thousands of years, but have only recently tried to place artificial restrictions on the free exchange of information.
A hooker if a SERVICE, which is physically provided to you...
If you drive past, and see a highly attractive hooker who causes you to jizz your pants, would you pay her? You've still gotten the image of the hooker and got your jollies from it, but she hasn't been deprived of her time or any physical items.
Because your poor artist friends are not a part of the groups who hold all the power, the very small select group who benefit from copyright laws.
Any art they do make will ultimately be forgotten, wether it's good or not it will get lost in the sands of time... People won't want to copy it because it's from an unknown artist. If you're not part of the system, you're effectively locked out.
If money were not being poured into large multinational corporations with the weight to control the media and dictate what people see, your friends would be much better off - they would be in the same boat as any other artist, and people would be far more likely to pay them to perform.
Games and other forms of media should be priced more fairly...
People should be rewarded for work that they do, and should only continue being rewarded providing they continue working. If someone stops working, then their stream of reward should cease.
And this is exactly the situation in any other industry, a farmer has to keep farming, a cab driver has to keep driving, why should people who create media be given an easy ride and be protected by the tax paid by everyone else who is still working?
Copyright only exists as an artificial construct which is enforced by your taxes, it has no basis in reality and only serves to benefit a select few at the expense of the vast majority.
Why not? Games are information, information is free. If you want to make money, create something that people can't obtain for free.
Value comes from scarcity, if something is in abundant supply it's value is low to nonexistent.
Copyright law attempts to create an artificial scarcity where there is none. It's equivalent to making it illegal to breathe the air that's all around us, and then selling bottled air which it is legal to breathe.
Or think of it another way...
Many other games have been distributed for free for centuries, and people "copy" these games... When you tell someone else how to play football or whatever other game, you are effectively copying that game by enabling someone else to play it for free. Should people be sued for pirating the secret and copyrighted rules of football?
However people still make money from these games, people pay for equipment (balls, clothing etc), they pay for professional training, they pay to use well maintained playing areas, people who are very good are even paid to play competitively against others.
I've been hurt by copy protection numerous times, the most recent time was with a tomtom gps unit... These units come with a CD containing the software and maps, and in my case came with 2 sets of maps, a smaller one and a larger one, the smaller one came preloaded. On the back of the paper cd cover is a tiny sticker containing a registration code. I used the GPS unit for over a year before i needed to install a bigger memory card to hold some third party points of interest i had downloaded... I got the memory card, formatted it, put the software on it and tried to copy the map from the old card. It said the map was not activated, and that i needed the code... By this time i had long since lost the original cd, so i contacted tomtom... Their response was that they were unwilling to do anything, and that i had to buy a whole new device, ie the piece of hardware that i paid a lot of money for several years ago (when they were new and rather pricey) was now a worthless brick that i should throw out.
My solution was to download a keygen to enable me to use the device i had bought and paid for... People less technically inclined would probably have ended up being ripped off for the cost of a whole new device.
Not to mention control and double dipping - making paying customers pay again... The same as with music or videos, pay once to play on your home stereo, pay again to play on your ipod, pay again to play in your car...
And what happens to a game with mandatory online activation after the company making it stops supporting it, or goes bust? I have an Amiga and huge stacks of games, mostly legit (bought used for a pittance) that i play sometimes.. very few of the companies that made those games would want to hear about them today.
The right to return games that don't run is not down to the system requirements... Your statement relates to:
Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will play adequately on that computer.
So the minimum requirements should result in a game that's fully playable with no lag (assuming you turn the details down)...
The question about games that don't work relates to other issues:
Some DRM schemes will refuse to install if you have a program for mounting iso images installed, any os other than windows includes such functionality by default, its incredibly useful not just for pirating games.
Some games may run poorly on machines above minimum spec due to background garbage on your machine, arguably not the fault of the game manufacturer but it still renders the game unplayable and may not be the fault of the user either.
Some DRM schemes will refuse to install if you have a SCSI cdrom attached, because apparently some of the iso mounting programs emulate a scsi cdrom drive...
Plenty of games have compatibility problems with vista, and their system requirements request xp or later, suggesting they should work with vista - again, not the fault of the user and he should get a refund.
You may have buggy drivers that break a game.
You may have a network connection that cannot play the online portion of a game, or cannot satisfy online registration demands of a game (ie your proxied, natted, or whatever, possibly by the isp over which you have no control).
It's also possible to get away without learning anything with osx or a modern linux, you can get by using the gui for most things... In all cases, the CLI is there for those who want it and know how to use it.
And in all cases, if something breaks badly or you want to do something less mainstream, you are often forced to revert to the CLI (or registry hacking, which is actually more complicated than editing a commented text file) to get what you need done.
It doesnt so much break VPNS, as some VPNs operate by hijacking your outbound traffic, rather than creating a new logical interface and routing traffic down it. Hijacking traffic without creating a proper logical interface and ip route breaks a lot of apps...
Yes, paying for a service, and for once these companies actually have to work (ie continue providing the service) in order to continue making money, they cant just sit on their asses selling copies.
Now, if only they would give the software away for free, and sell subscriptions, i believe some games like eve online do that, i think its underhanded to double dip by selling the software and the service.
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During install, display an html page saying...
"The software you are about to install is made available under the following terms"
"Mozilla - link to mozilla.html"
etc etc
With an "OK" box at the bottom.
It just becomes another part of the installer, and people ignore it. Displaying them all individually has the same effect of being ignored, but it would be far more annoying.
And no mindshare, people migrating from windows will have no idea what it is and blame it when things go wrong...
And a different user agent string, which falls fowl of badly designed browser sniffing websites.
A closer version of your analogy would be...
If 95% of people ate at mcdonalds for every meal of the day, then other establishments selling food would go out of business and make it very difficult for you to eat anything else.
Sure you *could* eat something else, if you looked hard enough for it, but if you ever went out to a shopping mall or travelled on a plane or train only mcdonalds would be available to you.
This would be a closer situation, windows is everywhere and is designed to keep people locked in to microsoft products, it is not designed to interoperate with users and allows users the choice to use something else... It is primarily designed to make choosing something other than microsoft as difficult as possible.
So since microsoft won't change their behaviour (and why would they, the current model is working for them), the only alternative is to get sufficiently large numbers of people migrated onto other platforms that supporting only the proprietary microsoft way of doing things becomes a burden rather than an easy option.
More and more systems are coming out without optical media drives...
CD/DVD drives are large and clunky these days, and entirely impractical on a small laptop.
If you have a rack full of servers, you really should buy proper server grade equipment and not hack your own homebrew machines together...
And you really should never need to enter the server room except to replace hardware.
Any decent server will have a serial port or virtual serial over ethernet, through which you can power the hardware up and down, and interact with the system firmware regardless of the state of the OS.
I was able to fix a server that wasn't booting properly yesterday by sshing from my phone, attaching to the serial console and changing boot parameters. Much more convenient and quicker than driving to the data center.
Server rooms are hostile environments, cold, incredibly noisy and very uncomfortable... You don't want to spend any more time than you have to in there.
There are already such devices and have been for years...
I have several servers with LCD panels on the front of them, and they display various things like hostname, IP, kernel version, loadavg etc... I think most of the old cobalt raq servers had such panels built in and a few buttons to cycle through different information.
The components have established tests to ensure they are not defective and haven't been tampered with, especially if they are off the shelf components which are also used in other devices. Since they are components, intended for third parties to use to construct larger devices, their function and interfaces will be well known and documented.
The software is presumably bespoke, and is an unknown quantity, it could also potentially be used to hide backdoors. It is not intended to be sold as a separate component for integration with other components, and is thus not fully documented if at all.
The police should really have demanded verifiability before they agreed to purchase such devices...
If this vendor won't provide source code to the police for review, then there are plenty of companies who will. A contract to supply the police will be lucrative, and should be on the police's terms, not the other way round.
It's not exactly hard, i'm sure chinese companies are already manufacturing such devices...
If the chinese ones are more open and verifiable, and cheaper to boot, you would be a complete fool to buy the inferior and more expensive american version.
Getting their clients liable for huge amounts of fines is hardly the outcome a lawyer would aim for... Any lawyer would probably recommend they turn over the code so as to comply with the court order.
Why is it so important to them not to turn over the code? They must have something big to hide, because handing over the code to the court so the defense can examine it is hardly a huge burden... Not like they're being compelled to release it to the general public.
It's rather difficult for the protocol itself to prevent any given implementation from storing passwords in plain text. How would you go about designing a protocol so as to make it impossible for the server to store plain text passwords?
Why would they bother?
Maintaining their own client is largely a waste of time, seeing as they use standard protocols anyway. Much easier to just direct users to the third party clients that are available.
A decreasing percentage, as people move to 64bit and mac/linux increase market share.
Because blizzard are not relying on an artificial scarcity to charge arbitrary prices for something that costs them nothing...
They are charging for a service, and will stop being paid as soon as they stop providing the service. They also have ongoing costs to continue providing the service (bandwidth, power, maintenance etc) which justifies the ongoing subscription fee.
Charging for services makes a lot more sense, is perfectly reasonable, fair and stands on it's own merits, and does not require artificial constructs to make it viable. That's why people have charged for services for thousands of years, but have only recently tried to place artificial restrictions on the free exchange of information.
A hooker if a SERVICE, which is physically provided to you...
If you drive past, and see a highly attractive hooker who causes you to jizz your pants, would you pay her? You've still gotten the image of the hooker and got your jollies from it, but she hasn't been deprived of her time or any physical items.
Because your poor artist friends are not a part of the groups who hold all the power, the very small select group who benefit from copyright laws.
Any art they do make will ultimately be forgotten, wether it's good or not it will get lost in the sands of time... People won't want to copy it because it's from an unknown artist. If you're not part of the system, you're effectively locked out.
If money were not being poured into large multinational corporations with the weight to control the media and dictate what people see, your friends would be much better off - they would be in the same boat as any other artist, and people would be far more likely to pay them to perform.
Games and other forms of media should be priced more fairly...
People should be rewarded for work that they do, and should only continue being rewarded providing they continue working. If someone stops working, then their stream of reward should cease.
And this is exactly the situation in any other industry, a farmer has to keep farming, a cab driver has to keep driving, why should people who create media be given an easy ride and be protected by the tax paid by everyone else who is still working?
Copyright only exists as an artificial construct which is enforced by your taxes, it has no basis in reality and only serves to benefit a select few at the expense of the vast majority.
Why not?
Games are information, information is free.
If you want to make money, create something that people can't obtain for free.
Value comes from scarcity, if something is in abundant supply it's value is low to nonexistent.
Copyright law attempts to create an artificial scarcity where there is none. It's equivalent to making it illegal to breathe the air that's all around us, and then selling bottled air which it is legal to breathe.
Or think of it another way...
Many other games have been distributed for free for centuries, and people "copy" these games... When you tell someone else how to play football or whatever other game, you are effectively copying that game by enabling someone else to play it for free. Should people be sued for pirating the secret and copyrighted rules of football?
However people still make money from these games, people pay for equipment (balls, clothing etc), they pay for professional training, they pay to use well maintained playing areas, people who are very good are even paid to play competitively against others.
I've been hurt by copy protection numerous times, the most recent time was with a tomtom gps unit...
These units come with a CD containing the software and maps, and in my case came with 2 sets of maps, a smaller one and a larger one, the smaller one came preloaded.
On the back of the paper cd cover is a tiny sticker containing a registration code.
I used the GPS unit for over a year before i needed to install a bigger memory card to hold some third party points of interest i had downloaded... I got the memory card, formatted it, put the software on it and tried to copy the map from the old card. It said the map was not activated, and that i needed the code... By this time i had long since lost the original cd, so i contacted tomtom...
Their response was that they were unwilling to do anything, and that i had to buy a whole new device, ie the piece of hardware that i paid a lot of money for several years ago (when they were new and rather pricey) was now a worthless brick that i should throw out.
My solution was to download a keygen to enable me to use the device i had bought and paid for... People less technically inclined would probably have ended up being ripped off for the cost of a whole new device.
Not to mention control and double dipping - making paying customers pay again...
The same as with music or videos, pay once to play on your home stereo, pay again to play on your ipod, pay again to play in your car...
And what happens to a game with mandatory online activation after the company making it stops supporting it, or goes bust?
I have an Amiga and huge stacks of games, mostly legit (bought used for a pittance) that i play sometimes.. very few of the companies that made those games would want to hear about them today.
Yeah, so true...
Pirates don't care about DRM because the games they download don't have any.
The right to return games that don't run is not down to the system requirements... Your statement relates to:
Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will play adequately on that computer.
So the minimum requirements should result in a game that's fully playable with no lag (assuming you turn the details down)...
The question about games that don't work relates to other issues:
Some DRM schemes will refuse to install if you have a program for mounting iso images installed, any os other than windows includes such functionality by default, its incredibly useful not just for pirating games.
Some games may run poorly on machines above minimum spec due to background garbage on your machine, arguably not the fault of the game manufacturer but it still renders the game unplayable and may not be the fault of the user either.
Some DRM schemes will refuse to install if you have a SCSI cdrom attached, because apparently some of the iso mounting programs emulate a scsi cdrom drive...
Plenty of games have compatibility problems with vista, and their system requirements request xp or later, suggesting they should work with vista - again, not the fault of the user and he should get a refund.
You may have buggy drivers that break a game.
You may have a network connection that cannot play the online portion of a game, or cannot satisfy online registration demands of a game (ie your proxied, natted, or whatever, possibly by the isp over which you have no control).
It's also possible to get away without learning anything with osx or a modern linux, you can get by using the gui for most things...
In all cases, the CLI is there for those who want it and know how to use it.
And in all cases, if something breaks badly or you want to do something less mainstream, you are often forced to revert to the CLI (or registry hacking, which is actually more complicated than editing a commented text file) to get what you need done.
It doesnt so much break VPNS, as some VPNs operate by hijacking your outbound traffic, rather than creating a new logical interface and routing traffic down it. Hijacking traffic without creating a proper logical interface and ip route breaks a lot of apps...
Yes, paying for a service, and for once these companies actually have to work (ie continue providing the service) in order to continue making money, they cant just sit on their asses selling copies.
Now, if only they would give the software away for free, and sell subscriptions, i believe some games like eve online do that, i think its underhanded to double dip by selling the software and the service.