WoW is a subscription game with a contract and 3rd parties who interfere with that service could be sued with that position.
IANAL, but I've read quite a bit about both the history and practice of law. I don't remember any tort that involves a party C being sued for making a tool that B might use a violate a contract with A. There are limited criminal examples , but in general, the producer of an item cannot be held responsible for its use.
So what is Blizzard smoking with the judge out back? I fail to understand how the maker of a tool can be held liable. What's next, suing the developers of GDB and Wireshark?
I love living in Buffalo, but I have to say that the public transportation system sucks. We have a subway, but it's a one-line system that connects downtown (in the south-west) to the University at Buffalo's south campus (in the north-east corner of the city).
It's a shame. First of all, there are thousands of potential users at the university's north campus, but the subway was never completed that far due to suburbanites being afraid of "urban" riff-raff taking the train.
Second, the subway line runs through an area that's been depopulated and depressed for 30 years. Main Street is not a place most people in Buffalo want to go. The prosperous north-south Elmwood corridor lies in the western part of the city, and getting from there to the subway just isn't worth the time.
The end result is that the train is almost deserted on most days, except when there's a public event, like a Sabres game or (like this weekend) a large public festival. Then, the limited downtown parking makes it worthwhile to part at UB's south campus and take the train to the event.
The original plan for the train also included a line going to the airport, which was scrapped for the same reason. During my university years, I would have loved to hop on the train on north campus (where the majority of students live), ride it downtown, grab a bite to eat, then ride it to the airport. I did that kind of thing all the time when I lived in New York City; the airtrain is overpriced, but very convenient.
The whole New York area public transit system works very well, including the Long Island Rail Road, Metro North, and even Jersey Transit. People on Long Island even take the train to different destinations on the island without traveling all the way to the city center.
I'd love to see a sample return mission from Titan. The delta-v requirements would be stupendous, but just imagine finding a whole alternative biochemistry based on liquid methane.
Let's suppose you're right about smoking pot being harmful. Even so, what right do we have to prevent someone from harming himself? Shall we make overeating illegal too?
And nobody is proposing that driving high -- or drunk, for that matter -- be legal. There, we have a clear danger to others.
The bandwidth argument is lame though. ISPs own the channel between their usenet servers and their users, so they don't have to pay for bandwidth. If these users then go to an external provider, suddenly the ISP has to cough up for them.
CENSORSHIP IS NEVER THE ANSWER. WHAT YOU PROPOSE IS STILL CENSORSHIP.
Information can never hurt anyone. If you want to stop harmful acts, then stop harmful acts. As a Supreme Court justice one said, the answer to bad speech is more speech. Not banning what you personally find offensive. Banning things is the way to a repressive, stagnated culture.
Also, what ISPs are doing, although reprehensible, is perfectly legal. Stop the sloppy thinking already. Learn to separate the concept of "right" from that of "legal". You'll get bitten in the ass time and again.
The answer to "why shouldn't I do this?" should always be "because it's wrong", not "because it's illegal."
First of all, you're confusing a network protocol and a community. The Usenet of NNTP is the same as the Usenet that used to be propagated via UUCP. Some people might still get their messages via UUCP - how would you know?
Second of all, we don't have many things we took for granted at the height of Usenet:
Multiple competing clients for a single discussion venue
Downloading messages for offline viewing
Cross-posting between multiple groups, storing only a single copy of the message
Reliable and accurate flagging of read messages
Reading a cross-posted message once and seeing it marked read everywhere
Ability to delete (err, cancel) posts
Extensive filtering and archival, depending on client
Real, nested, arbitrary deep threads. Most online discussion venues on the web have dumbed-down linear threads that are a pain to read
Today's fragmented web has nothing that can approach Usenet, and every time somebody wants to add these features to some web app or another, he has to do it from scratch, and often incompatibly and poorly.
As an aside, here's the famous "don't use kill -9" letter:
No no no. Don't use kill -9.
It doesn't give the process a chance to cleanly:
1) shut down socket connections
2) clean up temp files
3) inform its children that it is going away
4) reset its terminal characteristics
and so on and so on and so on.
Generally, send 15, and wait a second or two, and if that doesn't work, send 2, and if that doesn't work, send 1. If that doesn't, REMOVE THE BINARY because the program is badly behaved!
Don't use kill -9. Don't bring out the combine harvester just to tidy up the flower pot.
Soft limits can actually mitigate bugs. If we limit processes by default to 1,024 file descriptors, and one of them hits the limit, that process probably has a bug, and would have brought the system to its knees had it continued to allocate file descriptors. Programs designed to use more descriptors could to increase the limit.
No matter how we choose to generate power in the future, we have very few options for switching to anything other than gasoline for transporting that power.
Gasoline has a fantastic energy density. A 14 gallon tank of the stuff contains 491.2 kilowatt-hours of energy ($68 in electricity at New York rates), and the gasoline itself only weighs 81 pounds. If you fill up the tank in five minutes, you're transferring power at 7.368 megawatts. Can you imagine what kind of electrical infrastructure you would need to transfer the same power over mere wires?
About the only alternative I can imagine that would be comparable would be to hot-swap whole huge batteries at gas stations.
No, I think we'll be using gasoline, or at least a similar liquid fuel, for quite a while.
This is just yet another way in which Google demonstrates that it is suffering from NIH syndrome. Instead of improving existing tools, they have to go off and re-invent all the bad mistakes of past, including non-relational databases, clunky binary encodings, and a bizarre non-POSIX filesystem.
Just imagine how far we ahead we would be today if Google had put the same effort into creating tools the rest of the SQL-writing, open(2)-using world could use.
Let's say we have a widget Q that is manufactured using substance F. F is deemed harmful to the environment, and it put under a cap-and-trade program. The price of F skyrockets. And yes, that cost is passed on the consumer.
But the process doesn't end there. Market forces are more subtle than that.
Assuming we have a market with competition, one competitor will figure out how to make a Q using less F, or no F at all. Since that competitor can sell his product at a lower cost, he will gain marketshare, forcing other companies to either make a similar change or be pushed out of the market.
In the worst case, if a Q can't be made with less F, then the high price of F will discourage consumption of Q. That's a good thing if F is bad for society.
I can't believe I have to explain this stuff.
And for what it's worth - the American colonies didn't rebel because taxes were too high. We rebelled because taxes were unfair and arbitrary, and George III was acting like a petty despot.
There's a test I like to apply to environmentalists:
Suppose that scientists discovered a cheap, waste-free way to generate practically limitless energy, would you
1) Embrace the technology as being able to help mankind 2) Protest the technology so as to prevent it being used for more human growth.
People who choose the first option are people with whom I can reason. People choosing the second option are members of the lunatic fringe who are as out of touch with reality as Apocalyptic Evangelicals.
By the way: only about a third of our fossil fuels are consumed by automobiles. A bigger portion is used for power generation. Without cities to concentrate people, we'd need to generate even more power to overcome rural transmission losses.
People are more important than nature. Yes, we should preserve nature when we can, but always keep in mind that we do so for our own benefit. We have cities for a reason. They're quite useful in bringing many specialized people together in the same place-and often, being physically in the same place is useful. They're centers of culture and trade.
So what if they wipe out the environment over a couple square miles? That land is far more useful to us as city than as forest or farmland.
A criticism of the supply chain is not the same as a criticism of the technology. The fact is that all progress depends on extraction at some point. You can't look at option A alone. You need to compare options A, B, and C against each other, because we have to decide on something.
Fischer-Tropsch? Now I know you're either an idiot or a troll, and quite possibly both. Do you have any idea how much extra carbon dioxide that process emits? Perhaps if you could spell its name, you would.
I find it hard to believe that battery production can be more environmentally (and politically!) harmful than fuel consumption. Remember, battery production is centralized, and what harmful outputs the production facility produces can be contained and disposed of properly. On the other hand, there's no helping millions of internal combustion engines on the road.
No, it really isn't. The Supreme Court has repeatedly drawn a distinction between political and commercial speech, with restrictions on the latter being acceptable. I agree with its reasoning. Do we really want to repeat the days of patent medicine?
Slashdot Mirror
How did we ever get into this mess? Why haven't programs been treated like books?
IANAL, but I've read quite a bit about both the history and practice of law. I don't remember any tort that involves a party C being sued for making a tool that B might use a violate a contract with A. There are limited criminal examples , but in general, the producer of an item cannot be held responsible for its use.
So what is Blizzard smoking with the judge out back? I fail to understand how the maker of a tool can be held liable. What's next, suing the developers of GDB and Wireshark?
Prosperity does more to curb fertility than withholding of medical care, you cruel, cruel man.
I love living in Buffalo, but I have to say that the public transportation system sucks. We have a subway, but it's a one-line system that connects downtown (in the south-west) to the University at Buffalo's south campus (in the north-east corner of the city).
It's a shame. First of all, there are thousands of potential users at the university's north campus, but the subway was never completed that far due to suburbanites being afraid of "urban" riff-raff taking the train.
Second, the subway line runs through an area that's been depopulated and depressed for 30 years. Main Street is not a place most people in Buffalo want to go. The prosperous north-south Elmwood corridor lies in the western part of the city, and getting from there to the subway just isn't worth the time.
The end result is that the train is almost deserted on most days, except when there's a public event, like a Sabres game or (like this weekend) a large public festival. Then, the limited downtown parking makes it worthwhile to part at UB's south campus and take the train to the event.
The original plan for the train also included a line going to the airport, which was scrapped for the same reason. During my university years, I would have loved to hop on the train on north campus (where the majority of students live), ride it downtown, grab a bite to eat, then ride it to the airport. I did that kind of thing all the time when I lived in New York City; the airtrain is overpriced, but very convenient.
The whole New York area public transit system works very well, including the Long Island Rail Road, Metro North, and even Jersey Transit. People on Long Island even take the train to different destinations on the island without traveling all the way to the city center.
I'd love to see a sample return mission from Titan. The delta-v requirements would be stupendous, but just imagine finding a whole alternative biochemistry based on liquid methane.
Let's suppose you're right about smoking pot being harmful. Even so, what right do we have to prevent someone from harming himself? Shall we make overeating illegal too?
And nobody is proposing that driving high -- or drunk, for that matter -- be legal. There, we have a clear danger to others.
Well, to be fair, Odysseus was a general of sorts too. :-)
How can smoking up harm society if it has no impact on others?
Why don't you support legalization if you oppose criminalization?
Usenet is better in almost every respect than your ordinary web forum.
The bandwidth argument is lame though. ISPs own the channel between their usenet servers and their users, so they don't have to pay for bandwidth. If these users then go to an external provider, suddenly the ISP has to cough up for them.
CENSORSHIP IS NEVER THE ANSWER. WHAT YOU PROPOSE IS STILL CENSORSHIP.
Information can never hurt anyone. If you want to stop harmful acts, then stop harmful acts. As a Supreme Court justice one said, the answer to bad speech is more speech. Not banning what you personally find offensive. Banning things is the way to a repressive, stagnated culture.
Also, what ISPs are doing, although reprehensible, is perfectly legal. Stop the sloppy thinking already. Learn to separate the concept of "right" from that of "legal". You'll get bitten in the ass time and again.
The answer to "why shouldn't I do this?" should always be "because it's wrong", not "because it's illegal."
Not all usenet groups are unmoderated, thank goodness. Consider comp.lang.c++.moderated, or alt.sex.stories.moderated.
First of all, you're confusing a network protocol and a community. The Usenet of NNTP is the same as the Usenet that used to be propagated via UUCP. Some people might still get their messages via UUCP - how would you know?
Second of all, we don't have many things we took for granted at the height of Usenet:
Today's fragmented web has nothing that can approach Usenet, and every time somebody wants to add these features to some web app or another, he has to do it from scratch, and often incompatibly and poorly.
As an aside, here's the famous "don't use kill -9" letter:
No no no. Don't use kill -9.
It doesn't give the process a chance to cleanly:
1) shut down socket connections
2) clean up temp files
3) inform its children that it is going away
4) reset its terminal characteristics
and so on and so on and so on.
Generally, send 15, and wait a second or two, and if that doesn't
work, send 2, and if that doesn't work, send 1. If that doesn't,
REMOVE THE BINARY because the program is badly behaved!
Don't use kill -9. Don't bring out the combine harvester just to tidy
up the flower pot.
Soft limits can actually mitigate bugs. If we limit processes by default to 1,024 file descriptors, and one of them hits the limit, that process probably has a bug, and would have brought the system to its knees had it continued to allocate file descriptors. Programs designed to use more descriptors could to increase the limit.
On modern systems, find -name 'a*' -exec ls -l {} +
Personally, however, I prefer find -name a\* -exec ls -l {} +
Also, you probably want to add a -type f before the -exec, unless you also want to list directories.
Either that, or make the command ls -ld to not list the contents of directories.
I'm not trolling. I genuinely believe what I've written above.
No matter how we choose to generate power in the future, we have very few options for switching to anything other than gasoline for transporting that power.
Gasoline has a fantastic energy density. A 14 gallon tank of the stuff contains 491.2 kilowatt-hours of energy ($68 in electricity at New York rates), and the gasoline itself only weighs 81 pounds. If you fill up the tank in five minutes, you're transferring power at 7.368 megawatts. Can you imagine what kind of electrical infrastructure you would need to transfer the same power over mere wires?
About the only alternative I can imagine that would be comparable would be to hot-swap whole huge batteries at gas stations.
No, I think we'll be using gasoline, or at least a similar liquid fuel, for quite a while.
This is just yet another way in which Google demonstrates that it is suffering from NIH syndrome. Instead of improving existing tools, they have to go off and re-invent all the bad mistakes of past, including non-relational databases, clunky binary encodings, and a bizarre non-POSIX filesystem.
Just imagine how far we ahead we would be today if Google had put the same effort into creating tools the rest of the SQL-writing, open(2)-using world could use.
"That's not right. Hell, that's not even wrong!"
Let's say we have a widget Q that is manufactured using substance F. F is deemed harmful to the environment, and it put under a cap-and-trade program. The price of F skyrockets. And yes, that cost is passed on the consumer.
But the process doesn't end there. Market forces are more subtle than that.
Assuming we have a market with competition, one competitor will figure out how to make a Q using less F, or no F at all. Since that competitor can sell his product at a lower cost, he will gain marketshare, forcing other companies to either make a similar change or be pushed out of the market.
In the worst case, if a Q can't be made with less F, then the high price of F will discourage consumption of Q. That's a good thing if F is bad for society.
I can't believe I have to explain this stuff.
And for what it's worth - the American colonies didn't rebel because taxes were too high. We rebelled because taxes were unfair and arbitrary, and George III was acting like a petty despot.
Also, you're wrong about cigarettes. In fact, demand for cigarettes decreases as price rises.
There's a test I like to apply to environmentalists:
Suppose that scientists discovered a cheap, waste-free way to generate practically limitless energy, would you
1) Embrace the technology as being able to help mankind
2) Protest the technology so as to prevent it being used for more human growth.
People who choose the first option are people with whom I can reason. People choosing the second option are members of the lunatic fringe who are as out of touch with reality as Apocalyptic Evangelicals.
By the way: only about a third of our fossil fuels are consumed by automobiles. A bigger portion is used for power generation. Without cities to concentrate people, we'd need to generate even more power to overcome rural transmission losses.
People are more important than nature. Yes, we should preserve nature when we can, but always keep in mind that we do so for our own benefit. We have cities for a reason. They're quite useful in bringing many specialized people together in the same place-and often, being physically in the same place is useful. They're centers of culture and trade.
So what if they wipe out the environment over a couple square miles? That land is far more useful to us as city than as forest or farmland.
A criticism of the supply chain is not the same as a criticism of the technology. The fact is that all progress depends on extraction at some point. You can't look at option A alone. You need to compare options A, B, and C against each other, because we have to decide on something.
Fischer-Tropsch? Now I know you're either an idiot or a troll, and quite possibly both. Do you have any idea how much extra carbon dioxide that process emits? Perhaps if you could spell its name, you would.
I find it hard to believe that battery production can be more environmentally (and politically!) harmful than fuel consumption. Remember, battery production is centralized, and what harmful outputs the production facility produces can be contained and disposed of properly. On the other hand, there's no helping millions of internal combustion engines on the road.
No, it really isn't. The Supreme Court has repeatedly drawn a distinction between political and commercial speech, with restrictions on the latter being acceptable. I agree with its reasoning. Do we really want to repeat the days of patent medicine?