Heck, call the number and start the process to order a new computer. But, before you give away any personal information, ask the operator what license agreements you'll need to agree to in order to use the product you purchase. Insist that you know the terms of the license before you buy - and thus the operator needs to read the EULA to you in its entirely and let you verbally agree.
At worst, you can waste 15-30 minutes of their time, costing Gateway money. At best, you could blow an hour or three while a gullible operator finds and reads you the EULA. Then you verbally disagree, and hang up.
Oh, of course Gateway records these calls, so you can, too. At the start of the call say "This call may be recorded, correct?" If they say yes, you've clearly notified them that a recording is being made.
If you find yourself wounded in the middle of a firefight, which will make you feel more comfortable - being carried out by a carebear that wouldn't hurt a fly, or being carried out by something that looks like it will decimate any opposition in its path?
Actually, I'd rather be carried out of the battle by something with a big Red Cross or Red Crescent symbol on the side, with no offensive armaments at all. While certainly some foes ignore the conventions of war, any foe is justified in shooting an armed piece of technology with an RPG.
The big problem is that there is an entire generation of college kids that think everything digital is free for the taking unless it is properly secured, and if it is not properly secured then it is basically an invitation to take it.
Yes, but 40 years ago there was an entire generation of college kids that thought love and sex and drugs and rock and roll were free to be taken and shared, and now that generation packs mega churches and votes for George W. Bush. People change as they age.
I don't think it's appropriate to claim that a generation "has no honor" and thus will not use an honor-based system. Even if it is partially true at one point in time, it can change.
Anyone can play nice for their grandmother or for the cameras. However, there are some things that a person simply does not do if they are a polite, non-asshole person.
It's not like the film editors put words in his mouth, or manipulated long continuously-filmed scenes where he acts like a dick. It doesn't matter how many kittens he saves during the day, if he does certain things, he's an asshole.
though I suppose those people don't really care what Consumer Reports says about the product they just have to have today
On the contrary, I desperately need a new string trimmer this year, but both decent plug-in electric models from their last review are out-of-production. Lowe's website temps me with one of them, but then tells you they are out of stock when you are halfway through the checkout process.
The last thing I want to do is buy yet another crappy string trimmer that is hard to use, can't cut grass, and breaks in a couple years. I'm going to try to limp through this season with my current one, I guess, and see if Consumer Reports updates their ratings.
A) It has been months since I was there customer. Their ability to spam me ends after X months. (X = 6 if I recall correctly).
B) The law that gives them the right to spam for X months does not give them the right to harass, or to ignore specific requests to be dropped from call lists. Those laws existed long before the national Do Not Call list, and were supplemented by that list, not replaced by it.
I've got no issue with a law requiring that consoles have parental controls so that parents can decide what rating level is appropriate for their kids and lock out the rest.
What the hell is a "console"? Right from Sony's website, the PlayStation 3 is a "computer entertainment system". Is a Commodore 64 a "console" or a computer? What about a Dell?
So it is now illegal to sell any computing device without parental controls? What if those parental controls can be easily circumvented? Does the device have to include anti-circumvention features such as hardware-based "Trusted computing"? How else would you keep someone from booting their PS3 into Linux and using that to play the latest version of "Naked Tux Racer"?
Sure, the legislation could attempt to define "console". But, I guarantee, if that definition isn't already stupid (such not handling Commodore 64), it will be stupid within a generation or two of computing hardware.
I don't see anyone whining about the V-chip
Just wait until the think-of-the-children types realize software-based televisions, running on computers, perhaps with an IPTV connection, can have their V-chip software disabled or removed. You just don't see it because it hasn't started yet.
Since the responses so far seem to not understand, let me put it in context. I saw this at the SXSW Film Festival in March. It was one of the best films of the festival, and one of the best documentaries I've seen.
This is a documentary about Steve Wiebe, a down-on-his luck man who tries to achieve the high score in Donkey Kong. He picked this particular game almost at random, noting that the old high score had stood for almost 20 years. The old score was set by Billy Mitchell as a teenager in the early 80s.
Twin Galaxies is the organization that "officially" tracks world record scores in video games. (I say officially because they are recognized in the field, and because Guinness "subcontracts" this record tracking to them.)
In the film, Billy Mitchell is not portrayed as an asshole. Billy Mitchell is an asshole. The film just portrays him in his natural habitat. It also shows how Twin Galaxies has its own "Good Ol' Boy Network" to identify who it trusts regarding scoring. This comes into play because most high scores are earned at homes, where the proof is a video camera pointed at the screen. Theoretically, someone could modify their boards so that the game acts differently, thereby cheating to win.
Wiebe is portrayed as a very nice, down-to-earth man. I have no reason to believe otherwise. He seems the same way in person. And yet, his attempts are continually scorned, while Mitchell's new, shady high scores are immediately accepted without question. Put this together with Mitchell's on-screen arrogance, and you'll agree that these documentary film makers filmed more drama than a weeknight on TNT.
In my history of video games book (which I just happened to be reading during SXSW), on the Donkey Kong page, you'll find the signature of man who has earned the highest score ever in Donkey Kong. It's signed Steve Wiebe.
--------- If you see the movie: At one point a film of Billy Mitchell's game is submitted to Twin Galaxies, and almost immediately accepted. Yet, the film has static and glitches that make it hard to see the score, and at one point the score seems to jump while covered by static. After the movie, during Q&A, the film makers noted that they have viewed the original tape of the game (not just copies), and the static and jump are present there as well.
This wouldn't matter so much if Twin Galaxies hadn't already explained up how strict they were when judging tapes, and rejected Wiebe tapes with much less uncertainty.
After I switched my cell phone from Cingular to Virgin Mobile last year, I continued to get spam text messages and automated calls reminding me to "buy a new phone and pay up my account or lose my number" due to their impending termination of AT&T Wireless' old TDMA network.
Eventually it was enough that I called Cingular to bitch at them, since it had been months since I was their customer, and I had no intention of switching back to them.
After chatting with her supervisor, the service rep I talked to told me to put my number on the national Do Not Call list and wait six weeks for it to take effect. I asked to be put on their internal Do Not Call list right away, and I was told they no longer had one.
* Don't forget, Cingular is now the new AT&T. Same shit, different name.
** Virgin Mobile sends me text mail spam, but I don't mind as much because the prices and convenience are much better.
They don't ban knitting needles. My wife takes several pairs with her everywhere she flies, and that includes 18+ hour international flights where the planes are loaded with passengers and fuel.
Three-inch box cutter blades can do a world of hurt, but five pairs of six-to-twelve-inch spikes could never harm anyone. Besides, the knitting lobby would raise hell if they couldn't work on planes...
For reference, for the 99% of us out here who have no frickin' clue what something like XBMC might stand for, it would be nice to spell out the whole abbreviation at least once in summaries.
Though in this case, if you just mouse over the first link in the summary, you see that it leads to xboxmediacenter.com. There's no need to even follow the link to see what it stands for.
I think that what's most likely to happen is we'll see the emergence of a new programming model, which allows us to specify an algorithm in a form resembling a Hasse diagram [wikipedia.org], where each point represent a step and each edge represents a dependency, so that a compiler can recognize what can and cannot be done in parallel and set up multiple threads of execution (or some similar construct) according to that.
You just described LabVIEW. It is a dataflow graphical programming language, meaning that each component executes when all of its inputs are ready. Multiple components that are ready simultaneously can be processed simultaneously. Programs can even consist of completely separate functional dataflows, and both will execute in parallel.
Yes, I believe it already supports multiple processors.
Dude, if you had a time machine to go back to 1789, tell them "Hey, even though corporations might be illegal in most states, it most definitely is worth it to include some redundant restrictions on their power in the Constitution. Just make sure y'all are ready with an industrial machine around, say, 1940, and everything else will come out fine."
Well, before we can move away from net-CA2 fuels. We *have* to move the transportation sector to something new.
Biodiesel produces more particulate pollution than ethanol. It's still a viable alternate, though.
Electric has battery life issues. It's still a viable alternative, though.
Hydrogen will get there, but it won't be ready for another 15 years.
Why do you think we have to pick just one? There no reason why biodiesel and ethanol and fry oil can't coexist, all complemented by hybrid electrics to compensate for their shortcomings. Electric motors can cold-start ethanol vehicles, avoiding ethanol's shortcomings in northern climates. Diesel engines run best at one RPM, so using a smaller diesel engine to complement / recharge an otherwise electric car sounds good, too.
Why are we spending all these resources on something we know a priori is not the most efficient use of carbon? It sounds like you're saying "technology isn't quite there yet, but it's getting closer. Let's throw up our hands and do nothing for another 10 years until we get there."
That's an awful idea. The technology will move faster when there's money in it, and demand is what generates money. Even now, rising corn prices are leading some young genius to think of better, more efficient (and more cost-effective) ways to produce ethanol. Integrating over the next two decades, I think net CO2 emissions will be less if we accept a small spike now to get the tech rolling.
I didn't intend to imply that the new charge-more-for-fair-use scheme is a response to cracking/ripping though. Sounds more like a simple bald-faced attempt to get more money.
Ahh, yes, ok. I didn't intend to imply that they planned all along, from way back in the mid-1990s, to use this as a scheme to introduce pricing tiers. They are just taking advantage of it now.
And I think my organic food analogy is better than you asserted as well. Consumers did "circumvent" the GM (genetically modified) foods, by choosing independent organic producers instead. When the major food companies realized this, they introduced (or acquired) the second tier foods to sell at higher prices, such as GM (General Mills) owning Cascadian Farms.
You are assuming they decided this due to the cracking.
It's very possible this happened through other channels - the EMI deal with Apple over music, general customer complaints about DRM, the recent issue with the media server company that had a license that allowed deciphering DVDs to rip them.
I think you give far too much credit to the hacker community in this case. Only then is the basic analogy flawed.
That's how business works. I don't see that as any different than the organic food market, where they introduced foods that were irradiated or genetically modified, then charged us more to buy foods that didn't contain the new technology.
It's how business creates tiers of product quality in a system where the original tier was already high-quality. A) downgrade quality on product sold B) introduce new high-quality version, similar to original product, at a higher price.
Heck, didn't Linksys do this exact thing with their Linux-enabled router?
I'm not claiming this is good or bad, it's just how the system works.
In my state at least (Texas), there is no charge on internet service. There is tax on my phone bill, yes, due to the other components, but the internet service portion is not taxed.
Now, Texas does have a tax on internet gaming, passed before the tax moratorium. Thus I am charged tax on my World of Warcraft and (before that) EverQuest accounts set up with a credit card while I lived in Texas. Our first EQ account, set up while we still lived in Tennessee, never was charged the tax.
One onerous requirement might be for a patent holder to maintain a credible product in commercial production in order to sue others for royalties.
Really Bad Idea. This breaks the basic premise that a non-obvious improvement to an existing design may itself be patentable, even if the existing design is patented by someone else. You may be able to patent it, sure, but you would never profit from it.
Take the old example of the automobile. It's a good idea, and was at one point patentable. Then, someone else invests the automatic transmission. It's a non-obvious improvement to the design, and is separately patentable. But the guy who invented the automatic transmission cannot build cars, because that would violate the patent held by the car inventor. The guy could try to sell the automatic transmission alone, but he would probably go out of business unless the car inventor chose to buy those transmissions. Why would the car inventor do that? If he just waits a few years, the automatic transmission inventor will go out of business, and, using your proposal, the car inventor could exploit the patent without fear of repercussion.
The basic premise for patents is not just to grant a monopoly in exchange for publishing your data eventually. The data is published up front in part to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.
Your proposal breaks that incentive, because, until your patent expires, no one else can build on your design without forfeiting their improvements to you.
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Heck, call the number and start the process to order a new computer. But, before you give away any personal information, ask the operator what license agreements you'll need to agree to in order to use the product you purchase. Insist that you know the terms of the license before you buy - and thus the operator needs to read the EULA to you in its entirely and let you verbally agree.
At worst, you can waste 15-30 minutes of their time, costing Gateway money. At best, you could blow an hour or three while a gullible operator finds and reads you the EULA. Then you verbally disagree, and hang up.
Oh, of course Gateway records these calls, so you can, too. At the start of the call say "This call may be recorded, correct?" If they say yes, you've clearly notified them that a recording is being made.
If you find yourself wounded in the middle of a firefight, which will make you feel more comfortable - being carried out by a carebear that wouldn't hurt a fly, or being carried out by something that looks like it will decimate any opposition in its path?
Actually, I'd rather be carried out of the battle by something with a big Red Cross or Red Crescent symbol on the side, with no offensive armaments at all. While certainly some foes ignore the conventions of war, any foe is justified in shooting an armed piece of technology with an RPG.
The big problem is that there is an entire generation of college kids that think everything digital is free for the taking unless it is properly secured, and if it is not properly secured then it is basically an invitation to take it.
Yes, but 40 years ago there was an entire generation of college kids that thought love and sex and drugs and rock and roll were free to be taken and shared, and now that generation packs mega churches and votes for George W. Bush. People change as they age.
I don't think it's appropriate to claim that a generation "has no honor" and thus will not use an honor-based system. Even if it is partially true at one point in time, it can change.
You've clearly not seen the film.
Anyone can play nice for their grandmother or for the cameras. However, there are some things that a person simply does not do if they are a polite, non-asshole person.
It's not like the film editors put words in his mouth, or manipulated long continuously-filmed scenes where he acts like a dick. It doesn't matter how many kittens he saves during the day, if he does certain things, he's an asshole.
though I suppose those people don't really care what Consumer Reports says about the product they just have to have today
On the contrary, I desperately need a new string trimmer this year, but both decent plug-in electric models from their last review are out-of-production. Lowe's website temps me with one of them, but then tells you they are out of stock when you are halfway through the checkout process.
The last thing I want to do is buy yet another crappy string trimmer that is hard to use, can't cut grass, and breaks in a couple years. I'm going to try to limp through this season with my current one, I guess, and see if Consumer Reports updates their ratings.
Thus, the general advice is to bring needles you don't care about (chopsticks make great makeshift ~size 6)
Aye, she won't fly with the knitting needles she inherited from her great aunt, in case she runs into Mr. Stupid. But she's had no problems so far.
Dude, read what I posted.
A) It has been months since I was there customer. Their ability to spam me ends after X months. (X = 6 if I recall correctly).
B) The law that gives them the right to spam for X months does not give them the right to harass, or to ignore specific requests to be dropped from call lists. Those laws existed long before the national Do Not Call list, and were supplemented by that list, not replaced by it.
I pay for access. My ISP pays taxes on their revenue. Does that not count?
No, your ISP pays taxes on its profit, if it makes one. It doesn't pay taxes on its revenue.
All of your later lines follow the same flaw.
I've got no issue with a law requiring that consoles have parental controls so that parents can decide what rating level is appropriate for their kids and lock out the rest.
What the hell is a "console"? Right from Sony's website, the PlayStation 3 is a "computer entertainment system". Is a Commodore 64 a "console" or a computer? What about a Dell?
So it is now illegal to sell any computing device without parental controls? What if those parental controls can be easily circumvented? Does the device have to include anti-circumvention features such as hardware-based "Trusted computing"? How else would you keep someone from booting their PS3 into Linux and using that to play the latest version of "Naked Tux Racer"?
Sure, the legislation could attempt to define "console". But, I guarantee, if that definition isn't already stupid (such not handling Commodore 64), it will be stupid within a generation or two of computing hardware.
I don't see anyone whining about the V-chip
Just wait until the think-of-the-children types realize software-based televisions, running on computers, perhaps with an IPTV connection, can have their V-chip software disabled or removed. You just don't see it because it hasn't started yet.
Since the responses so far seem to not understand, let me put it in context. I saw this at the SXSW Film Festival in March. It was one of the best films of the festival, and one of the best documentaries I've seen.
This is a documentary about Steve Wiebe, a down-on-his luck man who tries to achieve the high score in Donkey Kong. He picked this particular game almost at random, noting that the old high score had stood for almost 20 years. The old score was set by Billy Mitchell as a teenager in the early 80s.
Twin Galaxies is the organization that "officially" tracks world record scores in video games. (I say officially because they are recognized in the field, and because Guinness "subcontracts" this record tracking to them.)
In the film, Billy Mitchell is not portrayed as an asshole. Billy Mitchell is an asshole. The film just portrays him in his natural habitat. It also shows how Twin Galaxies has its own "Good Ol' Boy Network" to identify who it trusts regarding scoring. This comes into play because most high scores are earned at homes, where the proof is a video camera pointed at the screen. Theoretically, someone could modify their boards so that the game acts differently, thereby cheating to win.
Wiebe is portrayed as a very nice, down-to-earth man. I have no reason to believe otherwise. He seems the same way in person. And yet, his attempts are continually scorned, while Mitchell's new, shady high scores are immediately accepted without question. Put this together with Mitchell's on-screen arrogance, and you'll agree that these documentary film makers filmed more drama than a weeknight on TNT.
In my history of video games book (which I just happened to be reading during SXSW), on the Donkey Kong page, you'll find the signature of man who has earned the highest score ever in Donkey Kong. It's signed Steve Wiebe.
---------
If you see the movie:
At one point a film of Billy Mitchell's game is submitted to Twin Galaxies, and almost immediately accepted. Yet, the film has static and glitches that make it hard to see the score, and at one point the score seems to jump while covered by static. After the movie, during Q&A, the film makers noted that they have viewed the original tape of the game (not just copies), and the static and jump are present there as well.
This wouldn't matter so much if Twin Galaxies hadn't already explained up how strict they were when judging tapes, and rejected Wiebe tapes with much less uncertainty.
After I switched my cell phone from Cingular to Virgin Mobile last year, I continued to get spam text messages and automated calls reminding me to "buy a new phone and pay up my account or lose my number" due to their impending termination of AT&T Wireless' old TDMA network.
Eventually it was enough that I called Cingular to bitch at them, since it had been months since I was their customer, and I had no intention of switching back to them.
After chatting with her supervisor, the service rep I talked to told me to put my number on the national Do Not Call list and wait six weeks for it to take effect. I asked to be put on their internal Do Not Call list right away, and I was told they no longer had one.
* Don't forget, Cingular is now the new AT&T. Same shit, different name.
** Virgin Mobile sends me text mail spam, but I don't mind as much because the prices and convenience are much better.
They don't ban knitting needles. My wife takes several pairs with her everywhere she flies, and that includes 18+ hour international flights where the planes are loaded with passengers and fuel.
Three-inch box cutter blades can do a world of hurt, but five pairs of six-to-twelve-inch spikes could never harm anyone. Besides, the knitting lobby would raise hell if they couldn't work on planes...
The entertainment industry is obsessed with the idea of "casual piracy," or the occasional sharing of content between friends.
Sad, because non-evil labels actually encourage sharing your music with friends.
I just wish I had friends to share my music with. =( No one else I know can stand Artemis, whose music sounds like a mix of Enya and trip-hop to me.
For reference, for the 99% of us out here who have no frickin' clue what something like XBMC might stand for, it would be nice to spell out the whole abbreviation at least once in summaries.
Though in this case, if you just mouse over the first link in the summary, you see that it leads to xboxmediacenter.com. There's no need to even follow the link to see what it stands for.
No, I didn't know what it meant until then.
I think that what's most likely to happen is we'll see the emergence of a new programming model, which allows us to specify an algorithm in a form resembling a Hasse diagram [wikipedia.org], where each point represent a step and each edge represents a dependency, so that a compiler can recognize what can and cannot be done in parallel and set up multiple threads of execution (or some similar construct) according to that.
You just described LabVIEW. It is a dataflow graphical programming language, meaning that each component executes when all of its inputs are ready. Multiple components that are ready simultaneously can be processed simultaneously. Programs can even consist of completely separate functional dataflows, and both will execute in parallel.
Yes, I believe it already supports multiple processors.
Dude, if you had a time machine to go back to 1789, tell them "Hey, even though corporations might be illegal in most states, it most definitely is worth it to include some redundant restrictions on their power in the Constitution. Just make sure y'all are ready with an industrial machine around, say, 1940, and everything else will come out fine."
I think there's a good reason my electronics store has a banner that reads "Your best buys are always at Fry's".
Well, before we can move away from net-CA2 fuels. We *have* to move the transportation sector to something new.
Biodiesel produces more particulate pollution than ethanol. It's still a viable alternate, though.
Electric has battery life issues. It's still a viable alternative, though.
Hydrogen will get there, but it won't be ready for another 15 years.
Why do you think we have to pick just one? There no reason why biodiesel and ethanol and fry oil can't coexist, all complemented by hybrid electrics to compensate for their shortcomings. Electric motors can cold-start ethanol vehicles, avoiding ethanol's shortcomings in northern climates. Diesel engines run best at one RPM, so using a smaller diesel engine to complement / recharge an otherwise electric car sounds good, too.
Why are we spending all these resources on something we know a priori is not the most efficient use of carbon?
It sounds like you're saying "technology isn't quite there yet, but it's getting closer. Let's throw up our hands and do nothing for another 10 years until we get there."
That's an awful idea. The technology will move faster when there's money in it, and demand is what generates money. Even now, rising corn prices are leading some young genius to think of better, more efficient (and more cost-effective) ways to produce ethanol. Integrating over the next two decades, I think net CO2 emissions will be less if we accept a small spike now to get the tech rolling.
I didn't intend to imply that the new charge-more-for-fair-use scheme is a response to cracking/ripping though. Sounds more like a simple bald-faced attempt to get more money.
Ahh, yes, ok. I didn't intend to imply that they planned all along, from way back in the mid-1990s, to use this as a scheme to introduce pricing tiers. They are just taking advantage of it now.
And I think my organic food analogy is better than you asserted as well. Consumers did "circumvent" the GM (genetically modified) foods, by choosing independent organic producers instead. When the major food companies realized this, they introduced (or acquired) the second tier foods to sell at higher prices, such as GM (General Mills) owning Cascadian Farms.
I saw Star Wars in the theater... or at least the first half. I'm told I started crying and my mom had to carry me out.
I would have been about 8-9 months old, depending on when after release they took me.
You are assuming they decided this due to the cracking.
It's very possible this happened through other channels - the EMI deal with Apple over music, general customer complaints about DRM, the recent issue with the media server company that had a license that allowed deciphering DVDs to rip them.
I think you give far too much credit to the hacker community in this case. Only then is the basic analogy flawed.
I'm not giving them my money until they've made it possible for me to exercise my rights.
In my case, it's not copying I care about so much as ability to play on an HDTV with component video input, not HDMI.
Any word on if this proposal would allow that?
That's how business works. I don't see that as any different than the organic food market, where they introduced foods that were irradiated or genetically modified, then charged us more to buy foods that didn't contain the new technology.
It's how business creates tiers of product quality in a system where the original tier was already high-quality. A) downgrade quality on product sold B) introduce new high-quality version, similar to original product, at a higher price.
Heck, didn't Linksys do this exact thing with their Linux-enabled router?
I'm not claiming this is good or bad, it's just how the system works.
In my state at least (Texas), there is no charge on internet service. There is tax on my phone bill, yes, due to the other components, but the internet service portion is not taxed.
Now, Texas does have a tax on internet gaming, passed before the tax moratorium. Thus I am charged tax on my World of Warcraft and (before that) EverQuest accounts set up with a credit card while I lived in Texas. Our first EQ account, set up while we still lived in Tennessee, never was charged the tax.
One onerous requirement might be for a patent holder to maintain a credible product in commercial production in order to sue others for royalties.
Really Bad Idea. This breaks the basic premise that a non-obvious improvement to an existing design may itself be patentable, even if the existing design is patented by someone else. You may be able to patent it, sure, but you would never profit from it.
Take the old example of the automobile. It's a good idea, and was at one point patentable. Then, someone else invests the automatic transmission. It's a non-obvious improvement to the design, and is separately patentable. But the guy who invented the automatic transmission cannot build cars, because that would violate the patent held by the car inventor. The guy could try to sell the automatic transmission alone, but he would probably go out of business unless the car inventor chose to buy those transmissions. Why would the car inventor do that? If he just waits a few years, the automatic transmission inventor will go out of business, and, using your proposal, the car inventor could exploit the patent without fear of repercussion.
The basic premise for patents is not just to grant a monopoly in exchange for publishing your data eventually. The data is published up front in part to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.
Your proposal breaks that incentive, because, until your patent expires, no one else can build on your design without forfeiting their improvements to you.