They tried to open their system, and they got slapped for it.
Bullshit. They didn't "try to open their system." If they had had a proper way for people to code emulators or legitimate games for the PSP, and they hadn't been pushing that ridiculously stupid UMD as the game storage device (yeah I know, "DS has cartridges", but the DS doesn't have a cartridge slot that eats 30% or more of your battery life) then nobody would have had to spend the insane time trying to hack into the system.
Same thing happened with OtherOS. OtherOS didn't give proper access to certain parts of the system (video hardware especially). The end result was that the Linux guys were trying to find a way to get full access to the hardware. Full access for Linux would STILL not have done the pirates any good, since the games require PS3's OS to run on, but Sony decided to crippleware OtherOS. The end result was no surprise - someone figured out a way to get behind hypervisor and get complete hardware access, and the psychotic, paranoid people at Sony decided to strip OtherOS completely in response.
I'm convinced that what's really going on is that Sony hired behind the scenes one of those paranoid motherfuckers who was responsible for all the crappy Nintendo lock-down crap that resulted in shell companies during the NES and SNES days, blinky-blinky consoles when the "security chip" didn't read properly even on a real game, and then the horrible mistake of using cartridges and then tinydiscs for the N64 and Gamecube, driving all the 3rd party developers away.
Nothing. The geeks would all be too busy figuring out ways to get the stealth bomber and ICBM onboard computers to run Pong, Tetris and then Super Mario Bros.
Not inadmissible in court. Anyone competent can file a records/discovery request now, if they are facing him in court, and the court can compel revelation of the same data.
This "ill-gotten" data can still be used to show whether or not Crossley is going back (as he's likely to do) and trying to "cleanse" his own records, as can a discovery request for the email of the recipient.
Was it gotten in a shady manner? Maybe. Is it useful? Oh, Fuck Yes.
I might think that a warrior, who has to learn or die, learns at a quicker pace than most people, and is more adept at problem solving.
Bullshit. Sad but true, soldiers are taught two contradictory things: "return fire" and "follow the Rules of Engagement." This leads to all sorts of trouble, especially since the "Rules of Engagement" for Iraq and Afghanistan are thicker than a copy of Tolstoy's War And Peace in 10-point font.
Add to that the fact that this is not a front-line duty. They're not going to be sitting there personally shot if they don't get something right. What's needed is specialists adept at detecting network intrusion, checking over the logfiles, ensuring that there aren't holes in security in the first place. This isn't reflex action, this is deliberative effort.
It's probably no different than the disgusting "call people up to settle unenforceable debt" tactics by shitty collections agencies all over the US - took me over six months after a change of phone number to get those fuckers to stop calling and admit that no, I was not the person they were looking for, and no, I did not owe them shit.
All the while, they screamed threats into the phone, threats to call employers, threats to call relatives, everything. It was ridiculous. And the local authorities, who are the only ones who can prosecute for it (did you know you can't civilly sue these dickholes for harassment of that nature?), refused to do anything even with copies of what they had left on my answering service!
The number of people who settle rather than litigate - compared with people who later litigate and get the same patents thrown out - indicates that you are full of shit.
The system isn't working, because the cost to challenge a patent is so high, and the process takes so long, that most companies just pay into the extortion racket.
You have a slow-moving animal, evolved on an island where it was the only major predator for something like, say, plants.
Now all of a sudden a pregnant ship's cat gets loose on the island. Or someone's pregnant pet dog. Or a gravid snake that was hiding out on a ship, or in someone's house because the moron likes keeping "exotic" animals as pets.
A few years later, there are 300 or more of these things just eating every one of our slow-moving, ground-nesting animal that they can find. What are you going to do about it, huh? Aside from keeping them all in zoos? Are you going to somehow eradicate all the cats or snakes or dogs in one month? Maybe ship the animal off to another deserted island, or at least "deserted for now" island?
Well?
This is what I mean. Humans are fucking stupid and arrogant to think they can "protect" every species on the goddamn planet.
First, that a major number of patents are being granted that never should have been granted. Either because they are overworked, or because they are not correctly able to evaluate patents due to lack of training in the fields they are analyzing, or because they have been indoctrinated into a "just grant it the courts can sort it out later" (and a friend I know who works in the USPTO has been told that several times by his direct superiors over the years) mentality, the USPTO is granting things that never should have been granted.
Second, that the US court system is so fucked up and overburdened that most people who get hit with a troll lawsuit choose to settle, because fighting it is going to take years upon years, resources upon resources, and probably it's cheaper for them to just pay up. The legal system has ceased to be a venue where fair and equitable analysis of this sort of thing can take place, and instead is just a bludgeon for bullies with money and shyster lawyers willing to throw away the ethical codes to beat up on everyone else.
Perhaps you weren't paying attention. Humans - aboriginal or otherwise - ARE an invasive species, introduced, predator, etc. And there are a whole host of symbiotic plants and animals that seem to just like to follow us around anywhere.
This is no different from asian carp or zebra mussels getting into waterways in North America. The only real difference is that these birds are "cute and cuddly" to some bleeding heart moron who is so arrogant as to think that they can stop the natural course of biology in its tracks, whereas we consider the other two a fucking nuisance that we want to get rid of because they're inconvenient.
I guarantee you, if the mosquito became "endangered" tomorrow because someone came up with a fogger that worked too fucking well and they started to vanish from an entire continent, nobody would shed a tear.
Addendum: Yes, humans count as an invasive species. Yes, humans count as a predator. Yes, humans have, as a species, driven other species to extinction. Steller's Sea Cow, for just one example - although by the time it was discovered in 1741, the word is that it was already on its way to extinction, having gone from massive abundance to only existing in a small area around the Commander Islands region (though again, the current theoretical guess is that it was killed off in other regions of its range by aboriginal humans anyways).
No, I don't see anything wrong with it. The greatest danger to humans is that we overbreed like crazy, and we probably should stop doing it, except for this suicidally insane "every human life is sacred" bullshit that the religionists push.
Also, one would imagine if they tasted good, New Zealand would long ago have started farming them and introduced "New Zealand Fried Kakapo" restaurants all over.
I suppose it would be bad for them to all die, but I'm not sure why, exactly.
Species go extinct all the time. They did it before humans, they'll do it after humans. Some of them do it to themselves, some succumb to natural climate shifts, some wind up as dinner due to an evolution by a predator. One good volcanic eruption can take out a whole bunch of them - and if it burns up most of the plant material on the island, the herbivores are pretty much doomed.
Humans are the most arrogant idiotic species on the planet: we're so damn arrogant we actually think we can save species of animals from the normal course of change, e.g. extinction.
It's not feasible, but that never stopped a government full of fucking morons from authorizing this kind of waste of money before.
These are the same type of people who decided there were too many insects, so they brought in toads... then they brought in cats, dogs, bunnies as pets... they brought in foxes for "recreational hunting"...brought in "pretty flowers", "garden plants", and on and on.
It's a wonder that vineweeds like "St. Augustine Grass" haven't overrun the whole fucking island. Of course, they have enough trouble with ragwort...
As I understand it, the company should be on the hook to (a) call the people who registered and say "your dog is stolen, you need to call the real owner and return it immediately, and (b) prepare the contact information in preparation for any such court-ordered action.
It sounds like, instead, they are aiding and abetting theft.
At any of the stores in my area, it's wait 10 minutes for a self-check, wait 20 for the ONE person left doing a live line.
They all used "self checkout" as a chance to de-staff, and you're right, the "savings" went straight into the pockets of upper management types rather than improving anything about the store.
You've never seen the dirty crap tricks that shithole towns in the US pull. Signs "hidden" till it's way too late to manage a 20mph-or-better slowdown (at least not without being hit by people behind you) over perhaps 50 feet abound.
For that matter, the cops in these jurisdictions just lie their ass off anyways - claim either they "paced" you, or "estimated your speed" visually so that there isn't a record you can use to contradict them. You want to fight it? Be prepared to appeal, the county judge is also the town mayor and counts on the money from the fraudulent tickets to pay for his wife and mistress.
First, traffic fines are a cash cow for cities, that's why they invest so much in fraudulent ticketing, crooked cops, impossible-to-avoid speed traps, and the enactment of identifying decals to indicate who's from the state/city whenever possible so the crooked cops know when they can get away with writing up a $1000+ ticket to some guy from three states away who will never be willing to actually show up in person on four different days just to fight it.
I love the "fuck you you're guilty" attitude fascist MafiAA shitheads have... fits quite well with "guilty until proven innocent, but fuck the idea of ever holding a trial" attitudes of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, N. Kora, Iran, and Russia.
The real question is the opportunity cost of maintenance.
If you have a home network, 2-3 machines, and a firewall on your router? Probably "good enough." Leaving the Windows firewall up and letting it automatically update, since it's free, isn't a bad thought, but anything you have to maintain/check yourself is a bit much.
Now what WOULD make sense is to have operating systems actually control ports by program, so that any new program has to actually ask permission to use and/or listen on certain ports before you allow it. That'd shut down plenty of those nasty little worms right in their tracks.
What I find more entertaining is how the MafiAA - who've been slapped back and forth for filing false testimony (perjury), filing mountains of paperwork trying to bury defendants (barratry), caught in price-fixing collusion (conspiracy), falsifying evidence (forgery), providing "evidence" that was the result of deliberate computer crime on the part of their own "investigators", using "investigators" that they knew were not licensed for the investigations, and repeatedly filing SLAPP lawsuits against groups like the EFF - have the temerity to still be pushing this garbage.
Oh, and then there's their abusive filings of dozens if not hundreds of lawsuits at once, based on nothing but "information and belief" with no actual evidence, where they try to get the identities of people and then harass and threaten them in what has been best described as an organized, big-business-sanctioned extortion ring.
What a lot of these judges in the past have written at the lower-court level, especially when they greenlight these extortion racket tactics, make me suspect bribery to be in play as well.
No kidding. It was bad enough in the days when there were all sorts of cookies throwing illegal characters (wildcards, normally path-related characters, etc) in the filename to prevent deletion. Particularly when the "cookie" itself didn't actually have data, they just tried to stick every bit of info into the fucking filename.
And of course there have been all the programs that hide "registration" data - or even, sometimes, "never work again" flags - somewhere deep in randomly-named registry keys as pure numeric values to be next-to-impossible to hunt down unless you know precisely what you're looking for. I remember one of these that had a bomb in it designed to fuck up the program if you changed your system clock more than a few hours (non-permanent license, paranoid schizophrenic fucktards at the company afraid that people would reset their clock to keep the program running...Hi SPSS!) Boy was my coworker surprised when she went overseas and tried to resync her laptop to local time.
But just wait, pretty soon someone's going to take the Everlasting Gobstopper Cookie, add in a more malicious payload, and we're off to the races. There's no possible justification for this project.
Take a look at lawn darts from your example - a perfectly feasible, fun game. Banned in most states because of a whopping three deaths that were the result of "the darts" being thrown around by a couple of drunken retards. More people are killed by drunken retards wielding cars. More people were killed by HORSESHOES that same year, but oh no, we has to ban the eeeevil lawn darts...
Or take the fear that people have towards Monosodium Glutamate - a completely safe substance, but one that every asian restaurant has to put a big "no msg added" sign up about, thanks to racist ass-hat who decided to spice up a slow news day by complaining about why he "always got a headache eating Asian food." The reality is that it occurs naturally in a ton of foods, including chicken and mushrooms, and that substitution of MSG for salt can reduce sodium intake by up to 60% in a given recipe.
Oddly, following the various FBI papers that have been declassified every 5 years ago, it turns out a lot of them WERE actually dealing info and influence in the pay of the communists...
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They tried to open their system, and they got slapped for it.
Bullshit. They didn't "try to open their system." If they had had a proper way for people to code emulators or legitimate games for the PSP, and they hadn't been pushing that ridiculously stupid UMD as the game storage device (yeah I know, "DS has cartridges", but the DS doesn't have a cartridge slot that eats 30% or more of your battery life) then nobody would have had to spend the insane time trying to hack into the system.
Same thing happened with OtherOS. OtherOS didn't give proper access to certain parts of the system (video hardware especially). The end result was that the Linux guys were trying to find a way to get full access to the hardware. Full access for Linux would STILL not have done the pirates any good, since the games require PS3's OS to run on, but Sony decided to crippleware OtherOS. The end result was no surprise - someone figured out a way to get behind hypervisor and get complete hardware access, and the psychotic, paranoid people at Sony decided to strip OtherOS completely in response.
I'm convinced that what's really going on is that Sony hired behind the scenes one of those paranoid motherfuckers who was responsible for all the crappy Nintendo lock-down crap that resulted in shell companies during the NES and SNES days, blinky-blinky consoles when the "security chip" didn't read properly even on a real game, and then the horrible mistake of using cartridges and then tinydiscs for the N64 and Gamecube, driving all the 3rd party developers away.
Nothing. The geeks would all be too busy figuring out ways to get the stealth bomber and ICBM onboard computers to run Pong, Tetris and then Super Mario Bros.
Not inadmissible in court. Anyone competent can file a records/discovery request now, if they are facing him in court, and the court can compel revelation of the same data.
This "ill-gotten" data can still be used to show whether or not Crossley is going back (as he's likely to do) and trying to "cleanse" his own records, as can a discovery request for the email of the recipient.
Was it gotten in a shady manner? Maybe. Is it useful? Oh, Fuck Yes.
I might think that a warrior, who has to learn or die, learns at a quicker pace than most people, and is more adept at problem solving.
Bullshit. Sad but true, soldiers are taught two contradictory things: "return fire" and "follow the Rules of Engagement." This leads to all sorts of trouble, especially since the "Rules of Engagement" for Iraq and Afghanistan are thicker than a copy of Tolstoy's War And Peace in 10-point font.
Add to that the fact that this is not a front-line duty. They're not going to be sitting there personally shot if they don't get something right. What's needed is specialists adept at detecting network intrusion, checking over the logfiles, ensuring that there aren't holes in security in the first place. This isn't reflex action, this is deliberative effort.
It's probably no different than the disgusting "call people up to settle unenforceable debt" tactics by shitty collections agencies all over the US - took me over six months after a change of phone number to get those fuckers to stop calling and admit that no, I was not the person they were looking for, and no, I did not owe them shit.
All the while, they screamed threats into the phone, threats to call employers, threats to call relatives, everything. It was ridiculous. And the local authorities, who are the only ones who can prosecute for it (did you know you can't civilly sue these dickholes for harassment of that nature?), refused to do anything even with copies of what they had left on my answering service!
The number of people who settle rather than litigate - compared with people who later litigate and get the same patents thrown out - indicates that you are full of shit.
The system isn't working, because the cost to challenge a patent is so high, and the process takes so long, that most companies just pay into the extortion racket.
And what REALLY sucks is that anyone who actually worked on the patent gets precisely Jack Shit.
The CEO, CFO, and the lawyers will suck up all the money. The rest get told "here's a grand or so bonus, now get back to work, slaves."
Ok, try this one.
You have a slow-moving animal, evolved on an island where it was the only major predator for something like, say, plants.
Now all of a sudden a pregnant ship's cat gets loose on the island. Or someone's pregnant pet dog. Or a gravid snake that was hiding out on a ship, or in someone's house because the moron likes keeping "exotic" animals as pets.
A few years later, there are 300 or more of these things just eating every one of our slow-moving, ground-nesting animal that they can find. What are you going to do about it, huh? Aside from keeping them all in zoos? Are you going to somehow eradicate all the cats or snakes or dogs in one month? Maybe ship the animal off to another deserted island, or at least "deserted for now" island?
Well?
This is what I mean. Humans are fucking stupid and arrogant to think they can "protect" every species on the goddamn planet.
No.
The underlying problems are twofold.
First, that a major number of patents are being granted that never should have been granted. Either because they are overworked, or because they are not correctly able to evaluate patents due to lack of training in the fields they are analyzing, or because they have been indoctrinated into a "just grant it the courts can sort it out later" (and a friend I know who works in the USPTO has been told that several times by his direct superiors over the years) mentality, the USPTO is granting things that never should have been granted.
Second, that the US court system is so fucked up and overburdened that most people who get hit with a troll lawsuit choose to settle, because fighting it is going to take years upon years, resources upon resources, and probably it's cheaper for them to just pay up. The legal system has ceased to be a venue where fair and equitable analysis of this sort of thing can take place, and instead is just a bludgeon for bullies with money and shyster lawyers willing to throw away the ethical codes to beat up on everyone else.
Perhaps you weren't paying attention. Humans - aboriginal or otherwise - ARE an invasive species, introduced, predator, etc. And there are a whole host of symbiotic plants and animals that seem to just like to follow us around anywhere.
This is no different from asian carp or zebra mussels getting into waterways in North America. The only real difference is that these birds are "cute and cuddly" to some bleeding heart moron who is so arrogant as to think that they can stop the natural course of biology in its tracks, whereas we consider the other two a fucking nuisance that we want to get rid of because they're inconvenient.
I guarantee you, if the mosquito became "endangered" tomorrow because someone came up with a fogger that worked too fucking well and they started to vanish from an entire continent, nobody would shed a tear.
Addendum:
Yes, humans count as an invasive species.
Yes, humans count as a predator.
Yes, humans have, as a species, driven other species to extinction. Steller's Sea Cow, for just one example - although by the time it was discovered in 1741, the word is that it was already on its way to extinction, having gone from massive abundance to only existing in a small area around the Commander Islands region (though again, the current theoretical guess is that it was killed off in other regions of its range by aboriginal humans anyways).
No, I don't see anything wrong with it. The greatest danger to humans is that we overbreed like crazy, and we probably should stop doing it, except for this suicidally insane "every human life is sacred" bullshit that the religionists push.
Also, one would imagine if they tasted good, New Zealand would long ago have started farming them and introduced "New Zealand Fried Kakapo" restaurants all over.
I suppose it would be bad for them to all die, but I'm not sure why, exactly.
Species go extinct all the time. They did it before humans, they'll do it after humans. Some of them do it to themselves, some succumb to natural climate shifts, some wind up as dinner due to an evolution by a predator. One good volcanic eruption can take out a whole bunch of them - and if it burns up most of the plant material on the island, the herbivores are pretty much doomed.
Humans are the most arrogant idiotic species on the planet: we're so damn arrogant we actually think we can save species of animals from the normal course of change, e.g. extinction.
It's not feasible, but that never stopped a government full of fucking morons from authorizing this kind of waste of money before.
These are the same type of people who decided there were too many insects, so they brought in toads... then they brought in cats, dogs, bunnies as pets... they brought in foxes for "recreational hunting"...brought in "pretty flowers", "garden plants", and on and on.
It's a wonder that vineweeds like "St. Augustine Grass" haven't overrun the whole fucking island. Of course, they have enough trouble with ragwort...
Next up: the zombie-killing ammunition-loaded bra, for those afraid of zombie attack.
Available in sizes from .22 A-cup "Peashooter" all the way to 500-mm EEE-cup "Big Bertha."
As I understand it, the company should be on the hook to (a) call the people who registered and say "your dog is stolen, you need to call the real owner and return it immediately, and (b) prepare the contact information in preparation for any such court-ordered action.
It sounds like, instead, they are aiding and abetting theft.
At any of the stores in my area, it's wait 10 minutes for a self-check, wait 20 for the ONE person left doing a live line.
They all used "self checkout" as a chance to de-staff, and you're right, the "savings" went straight into the pockets of upper management types rather than improving anything about the store.
You've never seen the dirty crap tricks that shithole towns in the US pull. Signs "hidden" till it's way too late to manage a 20mph-or-better slowdown (at least not without being hit by people behind you) over perhaps 50 feet abound.
For that matter, the cops in these jurisdictions just lie their ass off anyways - claim either they "paced" you, or "estimated your speed" visually so that there isn't a record you can use to contradict them. You want to fight it? Be prepared to appeal, the county judge is also the town mayor and counts on the money from the fraudulent tickets to pay for his wife and mistress.
First, traffic fines are a cash cow for cities, that's why they invest so much in fraudulent ticketing, crooked cops, impossible-to-avoid speed traps, and the enactment of identifying decals to indicate who's from the state/city whenever possible so the crooked cops know when they can get away with writing up a $1000+ ticket to some guy from three states away who will never be willing to actually show up in person on four different days just to fight it.
There, fixed that for you.
I love the "fuck you you're guilty" attitude fascist MafiAA shitheads have... fits quite well with "guilty until proven innocent, but fuck the idea of ever holding a trial" attitudes of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, N. Kora, Iran, and Russia.
The real question is the opportunity cost of maintenance.
If you have a home network, 2-3 machines, and a firewall on your router? Probably "good enough." Leaving the Windows firewall up and letting it automatically update, since it's free, isn't a bad thought, but anything you have to maintain/check yourself is a bit much.
Now what WOULD make sense is to have operating systems actually control ports by program, so that any new program has to actually ask permission to use and/or listen on certain ports before you allow it. That'd shut down plenty of those nasty little worms right in their tracks.
What I find more entertaining is how the MafiAA - who've been slapped back and forth for filing false testimony (perjury), filing mountains of paperwork trying to bury defendants (barratry), caught in price-fixing collusion (conspiracy), falsifying evidence (forgery), providing "evidence" that was the result of deliberate computer crime on the part of their own "investigators", using "investigators" that they knew were not licensed for the investigations, and repeatedly filing SLAPP lawsuits against groups like the EFF - have the temerity to still be pushing this garbage.
Oh, and then there's their abusive filings of dozens if not hundreds of lawsuits at once, based on nothing but "information and belief" with no actual evidence, where they try to get the identities of people and then harass and threaten them in what has been best described as an organized, big-business-sanctioned extortion ring.
What a lot of these judges in the past have written at the lower-court level, especially when they greenlight these extortion racket tactics, make me suspect bribery to be in play as well.
The possibilities are endless.
What are the possibilities if we fold it into a mobius strip? ;)
No kidding. It was bad enough in the days when there were all sorts of cookies throwing illegal characters (wildcards, normally path-related characters, etc) in the filename to prevent deletion. Particularly when the "cookie" itself didn't actually have data, they just tried to stick every bit of info into the fucking filename.
And of course there have been all the programs that hide "registration" data - or even, sometimes, "never work again" flags - somewhere deep in randomly-named registry keys as pure numeric values to be next-to-impossible to hunt down unless you know precisely what you're looking for. I remember one of these that had a bomb in it designed to fuck up the program if you changed your system clock more than a few hours (non-permanent license, paranoid schizophrenic fucktards at the company afraid that people would reset their clock to keep the program running...Hi SPSS!) Boy was my coworker surprised when she went overseas and tried to resync her laptop to local time.
But just wait, pretty soon someone's going to take the Everlasting Gobstopper Cookie, add in a more malicious payload, and we're off to the races. There's no possible justification for this project.
No, we Americans excel at being fucking morons.
Take a look at lawn darts from your example - a perfectly feasible, fun game. Banned in most states because of a whopping three deaths that were the result of "the darts" being thrown around by a couple of drunken retards. More people are killed by drunken retards wielding cars. More people were killed by HORSESHOES that same year, but oh no, we has to ban the eeeevil lawn darts...
Or take the fear that people have towards Monosodium Glutamate - a completely safe substance, but one that every asian restaurant has to put a big "no msg added" sign up about, thanks to racist ass-hat who decided to spice up a slow news day by complaining about why he "always got a headache eating Asian food." The reality is that it occurs naturally in a ton of foods, including chicken and mushrooms, and that substitution of MSG for salt can reduce sodium intake by up to 60% in a given recipe.
Oddly, following the various FBI papers that have been declassified every 5 years ago, it turns out a lot of them WERE actually dealing info and influence in the pay of the communists...