Let's play fair, shall we? Let's examine things in equal terms rather than pretending they're equal.
Acid: 2-4 years
Knifing: 2-4 years
Machine-gunning: 4-12 years
Sending a piece of spam:
471 years / 160,000 counts = 0.00294375 years (<1 day)
The fine for it:
$117 million / 160,000 counts = 0.00073125 million (~$731)
Seems more reasonable, don't you think? And as others have stated before, those are the maximum penalties available, hardly likely what he will actually receive.
He broke the law, he deserves to be punished according to the law. If you want to say the penalties are too harsh, at least compare things properly before you present the results.
He owes respectful behavior to those who give it in return.
For 2.5 years, I ran a fan website for a music artist. I donated well over 40 hours per week of my time, donated money for things like various domain names (a friend provided free box and colo via a contact he had for which I am eternally grateful), and eventually watched the site grow to supplant all other fan sites for the artist. It even become bigger and more popular than any of his officially sanctioned sites.
We developed good contacts with the artist's management, published our appreciation for his talents, created free advertising for him (on and off the Internet medium), and in return even got both he and his managers posting on our message boards instead of their official ones.
People still gave me crap about how I chose to run my website. Everybody decided they knew how to do it better than I did despite the success. The rest of the staff and I carefully met and discussed each of our rules, not only to establish them but to establish their limits. For instance, one rule was that we wouldn't permit swearing. It's not because I don't swear or mind seeing it, but the artist was twelve years old when he entered his contract and it seemed best to instate the rule. We decided exactly what we considered swearing. But when I said "hell"--a word we had explicitly determined was not considered swearing and that most people don't consider to be--I took shit about how I break my own rules and I'm a terrible moderator and blah blah blah.
In addition to the website, I also wrote a piece of GPL'd message board software. Again, I get dozens of complaints. I'm not talking feature requests here, I am talking about people telling me that my documentation sucks and my support--which I stated I would not offer but gave some support responses anyway--sucked, or that it just wasn't good enough for them. Then they were shocked when I told them "if it does not meet your standards, find another piece of software."
Where am I going with this? Quite simply, I was donating my time and services--both to the artist and, more directly, to the fans that took advantage of what I offered, and then to the users of my software--and I was not about to bend over backwards being respectful to people who wanted nothing more than to run their mouths at me. If anything, they owed me respectful behavior--respect for what I had done, the success I had, and even the fact that they used the service I provided them to bitch about the service I provided them. They did not deliver that respect and I certainly did not oblige them what they did not give me. I would not dare tell somebody else they need to.
"Either help, stop griping or find an alternative" seems an exceptionally reasonable response to me. Frustrated, maybe, but reasonable. And as far as this--
You forgot "I can't program, so i'd like you to do this"
--you're right, that request does enter in, but it is all the more reason to be respectful and patient. Not only is one taking advantage of a free product offered, created with donated time, but they are requesting that the author alter the program to suit them. Nagging or bitching that things aren't going your way are disrespectful and will almost certainly be met by an equal level of disrespect.
Did you read the newsgroup comments Ian replied to? Things like, "they have led a lot of people to have some expectation of usefulness despite the fact that it is clearly alpha software yet they have a release called 'stable'." Aside from being a crappy sentence, it is complaining that they just aren't doing things right, that they are misleading people and that, most annoyingly, their program is not useful. Of course, not doing thigns "right" is from the perspective person doing the bitching and, so far as I can tell, not anybody actually contributing to the project development.
Are they staying out of public service just because they're so damn disgusted by the whole system? Are we as a society doing something that are actively keeping these people out?
I think that the truly intelligent and civic-minded people would generally be more likely to do things like vote or run for public office. But yes, we as a society are doing something to keep them out. Maybe not as a society, that may be poor wording. The problem, as I see it, is money.
In order to become elected to office, you generally need gobs of money. At the very least, you need to be very good at raising gobs of money if you're not rolling in your own. The average person is not going to be good at either making or raising huge sums of money and I can't imagine that intelligence alone would be enough to change that. Many of our most intelligent people have often been rather shy and withdrawn in their own ways.
But assuming Ben Genius does get enough money to compete in national elections, money enters into play again. Because either:
1) He spent his own money, in which case the man essentially spent, let's say, two million dollars (a low estimate) on a campaign that won him a job that pays $400,000 a year. Do the math; he loses $400,000 over the term of a presidency--according to the math. Logically, one may assume that there are other perks that can very much make up for that money. And I'm not talking about power alone, but rather what power can get you.
2) If he didn't spend his own money, he raised funds and it will, at least in some part, make him beholden to their interests. Let's face it: Companies give the biggest sums and they only do so if they feel a candidate is going to advance their own goals. I don't think I need to go much further than that for people to agree politicians are, to some extent, held by the balls by their contributors.
On the flip side of the coin, money also keeps people out of the race. A high proportion of truly brilliant people are successful in the private sector. Why should I give up my simple office job raking it $120,000 a year to become the president, get my brains beat in on national television for every "wrong" (a subjective term) move I make and make only slightly more money? Or if $120k is low, maybe even less money than I could otherwise.
And as I intimated, one thing we SURELY are doing as a society are accepting the political smears. I'm not only talking about the "attack ads" run around elections, but the entire atmosphere on Capital Hill. Think about it. Congress is little more than two charged, polar opposite masses of people. Sometimes one side or another has so many more members that they can steam-roll their agendas through; sometimes it is so even that there must be compromise. But it's disgusting to see how often votes go straight down party lines. I would like to believe there are some free-thinkers in Congress but they don't seem to show themselves. And any time one party gets its way over the objection of the other, there will be harsh comments back and forth for further political gain. Why get in the middle of that?
Can independents win? I believe there are five independents currently in the whole of Congress. One senator, who was a Republican but switch parties after he was re-elected: Could he have won reelection as an independent? That leaves four members of the House who I assume were all elected as independents. Four out of 400+ is still a heck of a minority. And yeah, there are a handful of independent governors and state legislatures around. I hope they are part of a trend and not simply an exception, but I don't suppose I'm holding my breath about it.
All of these things keep civic-minded people away from politics in one form or another. Frankly, in my estimation, the people who would make the best politicans are the ones who lay aside their political affiliations and simply think and act and vote out of pure logical deduction. Sure, it will still produce disagreements, but at least we can be sure that a vote is truly what a candidate believes in and not simply what his party told him to vote.
Can we say that is true today?
The real problem, as I see it, is not trustworthy computing, it is certainly not protecting the users, and it is not even corporations--rightly or not--seeking to protect their investments by invasive means.
Instead, the problem is a generally uneducated user base. I don't mean "uneducated" in the sense that they are in any way unintelligent, but that for some reason they are simply not interested in learning the intricacies of computers and related topics. They simply want things to <I>work</I>, they don't care <I>how</I> they work. And the truth is it would take an immense amount of invasion of privacy before the average computer user noticed, much less began to raise a fuss that might stop a company from heading in that direction.
The question, then, becomes how do we educate people who do not wish to be educated? If we write them off, is the cause lost? It seems even vocal critics such as the EFF go mostly ignored by companies even as the hordes of us behind them applaud. Bill Gates just smirks and buys himself another ivory back scratcher.
Can the tech-savvy win in a world of technological indifference?
And frankly I think you have shown youreselve to be extremly naive to believe that hushing this up is even going to work or have any effect.
And you've shown you can't write worth a damn. Though but, well though again, I suppose everybody should just call it even now?
I don't see why all the arguments about this exist. The code is out there and it will be used however it will be used. None of us can change either of those facts, so why work ourselves up? We'll all deal with whatever consequences arise from the leak when the game is released. Legal issues are Valve's to deal with, not ours to speculate on.
The wait-and-see approach works wonders. Unless, of course, some one out there has any real solutions I haven't seen? Pissing and moaning does little good.
The most important thing to do is get word out. Word of mouth is by far your best bet and of course, it is best received through the words of satisfied users. Don't be too surprised if you don't have a huge "opening day." That's not important. What's important is do you grow AFTER that? Longevity is not guaranteed by a quick open. Get yourself in search engines. Get yourself on websites that relate. If you're going to be competing with another product, and they have a website with some sort of community forum, slip yourself a plug there. (Sure, it will probably be deleted, but the damage may well have been done before it is!)
If your product is a unique entity--that is, something new or relatively new that people haven't seen before--you may just be able to stand on your own.
If not, which is more likely the case (to some degree and in some regard), you need to offer something that others don't offer. Maybe it's ease of use, maybe it's a new feature. If you don't offer any of that, well, hopefully it's on par with the competition. The price is certainly right.
If Blizzard's issue is that bnetd does not provide the same sort of authentication of legal copies of the software that battle.net does, the obvious question becomes, "why not help them do so?" That would be a fine solution to all involved, as far as I am concerned. Bnetd could continue to exist and provide the services it was meant to. Blizzard can be assured that bnetd is not contributing to the pirating of their software, and in fact, it may even mean MORE sales for their products. What's the problem?
Open source, of course. The fact that anybody can download it and change the source code. Of course, people are going to do that anyway. Rather than pissing of its loyal customers, with no benefit to themselves, Blizzard should try working with bnetd to reach some amiable compromise. DVDs were originally encrypted to help prevent piracy, but it took approximately six seconds for somebody out there to crack it. What makes Blizzard think that threatening the manifestation of a program is going to stop the perceived problem? It won't. It will just turn everybody against them.
Blizzard certainly has a right to protect their copyright. Problem is, bnetd does not infringe upon it. The DMCA is bloated legislation that just won't work.
The whole thing is purely ridiculous, and Blizzard will be receiving my nastygram.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's play fair, shall we? Let's examine things in equal terms rather than pretending they're equal.
Acid: 2-4 years
Knifing: 2-4 years
Machine-gunning: 4-12 years
Sending a piece of spam:
471 years / 160,000 counts = 0.00294375 years (<1 day)
The fine for it:
$117 million / 160,000 counts = 0.00073125 million (~$731)
Seems more reasonable, don't you think? And as others have stated before, those are the maximum penalties available, hardly likely what he will actually receive.
He broke the law, he deserves to be punished according to the law. If you want to say the penalties are too harsh, at least compare things properly before you present the results.
No, he owes everybody respectful behaviour.
He owes respectful behavior to those who give it in return.
For 2.5 years, I ran a fan website for a music artist. I donated well over 40 hours per week of my time, donated money for things like various domain names (a friend provided free box and colo via a contact he had for which I am eternally grateful), and eventually watched the site grow to supplant all other fan sites for the artist. It even become bigger and more popular than any of his officially sanctioned sites.
We developed good contacts with the artist's management, published our appreciation for his talents, created free advertising for him (on and off the Internet medium), and in return even got both he and his managers posting on our message boards instead of their official ones.
People still gave me crap about how I chose to run my website. Everybody decided they knew how to do it better than I did despite the success. The rest of the staff and I carefully met and discussed each of our rules, not only to establish them but to establish their limits. For instance, one rule was that we wouldn't permit swearing. It's not because I don't swear or mind seeing it, but the artist was twelve years old when he entered his contract and it seemed best to instate the rule. We decided exactly what we considered swearing. But when I said "hell"--a word we had explicitly determined was not considered swearing and that most people don't consider to be--I took shit about how I break my own rules and I'm a terrible moderator and blah blah blah.
In addition to the website, I also wrote a piece of GPL'd message board software. Again, I get dozens of complaints. I'm not talking feature requests here, I am talking about people telling me that my documentation sucks and my support--which I stated I would not offer but gave some support responses anyway--sucked, or that it just wasn't good enough for them. Then they were shocked when I told them "if it does not meet your standards, find another piece of software."
Where am I going with this? Quite simply, I was donating my time and services--both to the artist and, more directly, to the fans that took advantage of what I offered, and then to the users of my software--and I was not about to bend over backwards being respectful to people who wanted nothing more than to run their mouths at me. If anything, they owed me respectful behavior--respect for what I had done, the success I had, and even the fact that they used the service I provided them to bitch about the service I provided them. They did not deliver that respect and I certainly did not oblige them what they did not give me. I would not dare tell somebody else they need to.
"Either help, stop griping or find an alternative" seems an exceptionally reasonable response to me. Frustrated, maybe, but reasonable. And as far as this--
You forgot "I can't program, so i'd like you to do this"
--you're right, that request does enter in, but it is all the more reason to be respectful and patient. Not only is one taking advantage of a free product offered, created with donated time, but they are requesting that the author alter the program to suit them. Nagging or bitching that things aren't going your way are disrespectful and will almost certainly be met by an equal level of disrespect.
Did you read the newsgroup comments Ian replied to? Things like, "they have led a lot of people to have some expectation of usefulness despite the fact that it is clearly alpha software yet they have a release called 'stable'." Aside from being a crappy sentence, it is complaining that they just aren't doing things right, that they are misleading people and that, most annoyingly, their program is not useful. Of course, not doing thigns "right" is from the perspective person doing the bitching and, so far as I can tell, not anybody actually contributing to the project development.
Continuing, "I suspect part of the proble
Are they staying out of public service just because they're so damn disgusted by the whole system? Are we as a society doing something that are actively keeping these people out? I think that the truly intelligent and civic-minded people would generally be more likely to do things like vote or run for public office. But yes, we as a society are doing something to keep them out. Maybe not as a society, that may be poor wording. The problem, as I see it, is money. In order to become elected to office, you generally need gobs of money. At the very least, you need to be very good at raising gobs of money if you're not rolling in your own. The average person is not going to be good at either making or raising huge sums of money and I can't imagine that intelligence alone would be enough to change that. Many of our most intelligent people have often been rather shy and withdrawn in their own ways. But assuming Ben Genius does get enough money to compete in national elections, money enters into play again. Because either: 1) He spent his own money, in which case the man essentially spent, let's say, two million dollars (a low estimate) on a campaign that won him a job that pays $400,000 a year. Do the math; he loses $400,000 over the term of a presidency--according to the math. Logically, one may assume that there are other perks that can very much make up for that money. And I'm not talking about power alone, but rather what power can get you. 2) If he didn't spend his own money, he raised funds and it will, at least in some part, make him beholden to their interests. Let's face it: Companies give the biggest sums and they only do so if they feel a candidate is going to advance their own goals. I don't think I need to go much further than that for people to agree politicians are, to some extent, held by the balls by their contributors. On the flip side of the coin, money also keeps people out of the race. A high proportion of truly brilliant people are successful in the private sector. Why should I give up my simple office job raking it $120,000 a year to become the president, get my brains beat in on national television for every "wrong" (a subjective term) move I make and make only slightly more money? Or if $120k is low, maybe even less money than I could otherwise. And as I intimated, one thing we SURELY are doing as a society are accepting the political smears. I'm not only talking about the "attack ads" run around elections, but the entire atmosphere on Capital Hill. Think about it. Congress is little more than two charged, polar opposite masses of people. Sometimes one side or another has so many more members that they can steam-roll their agendas through; sometimes it is so even that there must be compromise. But it's disgusting to see how often votes go straight down party lines. I would like to believe there are some free-thinkers in Congress but they don't seem to show themselves. And any time one party gets its way over the objection of the other, there will be harsh comments back and forth for further political gain. Why get in the middle of that? Can independents win? I believe there are five independents currently in the whole of Congress. One senator, who was a Republican but switch parties after he was re-elected: Could he have won reelection as an independent? That leaves four members of the House who I assume were all elected as independents. Four out of 400+ is still a heck of a minority. And yeah, there are a handful of independent governors and state legislatures around. I hope they are part of a trend and not simply an exception, but I don't suppose I'm holding my breath about it. All of these things keep civic-minded people away from politics in one form or another. Frankly, in my estimation, the people who would make the best politicans are the ones who lay aside their political affiliations and simply think and act and vote out of pure logical deduction. Sure, it will still produce disagreements, but at least we can be sure that a vote is truly what a candidate believes in and not simply what his party told him to vote. Can we say that is true today?
The real problem, as I see it, is not trustworthy computing, it is certainly not protecting the users, and it is not even corporations--rightly or not--seeking to protect their investments by invasive means.
Instead, the problem is a generally uneducated user base. I don't mean "uneducated" in the sense that they are in any way unintelligent, but that for some reason they are simply not interested in learning the intricacies of computers and related topics. They simply want things to <I>work</I>, they don't care <I>how</I> they work. And the truth is it would take an immense amount of invasion of privacy before the average computer user noticed, much less began to raise a fuss that might stop a company from heading in that direction.
The question, then, becomes how do we educate people who do not wish to be educated? If we write them off, is the cause lost? It seems even vocal critics such as the EFF go mostly ignored by companies even as the hordes of us behind them applaud. Bill Gates just smirks and buys himself another ivory back scratcher.
Can the tech-savvy win in a world of technological indifference?
And frankly I think you have shown youreselve to be extremly naive to believe that hushing this up is even going to work or have any effect.
And you've shown you can't write worth a damn. Though but, well though again, I suppose everybody should just call it even now?
I don't see why all the arguments about this exist. The code is out there and it will be used however it will be used. None of us can change either of those facts, so why work ourselves up? We'll all deal with whatever consequences arise from the leak when the game is released. Legal issues are Valve's to deal with, not ours to speculate on.
The wait-and-see approach works wonders. Unless, of course, some one out there has any real solutions I haven't seen? Pissing and moaning does little good.
Now, now. I don't think even Satan wants anything to do with Bill Gates.
"Fuck, man, I'm not touching that guy with a ten foot pitch-fork!"
The most important thing to do is get word out. Word of mouth is by far your best bet and of course, it is best received through the words of satisfied users. Don't be too surprised if you don't have a huge "opening day." That's not important. What's important is do you grow AFTER that? Longevity is not guaranteed by a quick open. Get yourself in search engines. Get yourself on websites that relate. If you're going to be competing with another product, and they have a website with some sort of community forum, slip yourself a plug there. (Sure, it will probably be deleted, but the damage may well have been done before it is!)
If your product is a unique entity--that is, something new or relatively new that people haven't seen before--you may just be able to stand on your own.
If not, which is more likely the case (to some degree and in some regard), you need to offer something that others don't offer. Maybe it's ease of use, maybe it's a new feature. If you don't offer any of that, well, hopefully it's on par with the competition. The price is certainly right.
Good luck.
If Blizzard's issue is that bnetd does not provide the same sort of authentication of legal copies of the software that battle.net does, the obvious question becomes, "why not help them do so?" That would be a fine solution to all involved, as far as I am concerned. Bnetd could continue to exist and provide the services it was meant to. Blizzard can be assured that bnetd is not contributing to the pirating of their software, and in fact, it may even mean MORE sales for their products. What's the problem? Open source, of course. The fact that anybody can download it and change the source code. Of course, people are going to do that anyway. Rather than pissing of its loyal customers, with no benefit to themselves, Blizzard should try working with bnetd to reach some amiable compromise. DVDs were originally encrypted to help prevent piracy, but it took approximately six seconds for somebody out there to crack it. What makes Blizzard think that threatening the manifestation of a program is going to stop the perceived problem? It won't. It will just turn everybody against them. Blizzard certainly has a right to protect their copyright. Problem is, bnetd does not infringe upon it. The DMCA is bloated legislation that just won't work. The whole thing is purely ridiculous, and Blizzard will be receiving my nastygram.