It never will, because there will always be a lag between new APIs being introduced and Wine implementing them. But OK. Let's suppose the impossible happens.
Wrong. Microsoft doesn't change the APIs very often, and neither do the game developers. It's about as difficult for a game programmer to start using a new API as it is for the Winex people to implement it. Neither is exactly easy.
Microsoft APIs are actually quite stable, and it is not a difficult task to keep up with them once all the major subsystems are fully implemented. Furthermore, there is about a one-year delay between the publication of an API spec and the publication of the first games that use it.
Your other points are quite valid, however.
I don't know what idiot contrived the bleemcast argument. The first version of Bleemcast emulated only one or two games. It was released at a time when nobody really cared about either the Dreamcast or the PS1 and the PS2 was just months away from hitting the stores. Is it any surprise that nobody bought it or the Dreamcast?
Finally, I don't see how support for Win32 APIs is a bad thing. They are good APIs, much better than many Linux equivalents. People bitch that wine is buggy and slow and will never improve. Does anyone remember how shitty Mozilla was two years ago, right around M10? It was barely usable, worse than wine is right now. Does anyone want to take bets as to how much it will improve in the next year or two? If Wine becomes as fast as the Linux APIs (quite possible, BTW), will it matter what APIs a given program uses?
Supporting them through Wine would also be a nice backwards compatibility step, both for experienced win32 programmers and for users with tons of win32 software.
Second - if you are really that concerned about high quality audio, you're not going to be listening to it via a computer sound card no matter how much money you spend on your equipment.
What makes you think so? I think that a decent soundcard hooked up to a quality external DAC would beat most sub-$2000 CD players (if you listen to well-ripped lossless audio, of course.) With a computer, you don't get the transport errors and jitter that a CD player produces -- a computer generally plays stuff from a memory buffer, not a spinning disc.
The acetone I have is in a metal can. I think you might be confusing acetone with something else. Acetone dissolves damn near every plastic; it's used as a paint remover and to clean brushes and stuff. I sure as hell wouldn't put it in a plastic bottle.
The file itself is not DRM-encumbered. iTunes places the restrictions on burning, streaming, etc. They are not built into the file in any way. There are plenty of other tools you can use to manipulate the files, because...
What, are you a retarded monkey, or have you just not been paying attention? OF COURSE the file is DRM protected (encrypted).
Are you saying that apple users are too stupid to figure out that you can play AAC with something other than iTunes? That may very well be true, but it doesn't mean that Apple or the record labels will agree.
"Lossless" means relative to CD quality, because that is the best you can do right now. I'll bet that Apple didn't use the master DATs for encoding their shitty AAC tracks. They probably just ripped the CDs.
So, their format would throw out the high frequencies, quantize to 16 bits, throw in random transport errors from audio extraction, throw out 90% of the audio information, get watermarked (thus further reducing the quality), then get piped through a shitty codec/DAC/amplifier on a shitty soundcard that picks up random noise from inside your computer case and pipes it out through a shitty jack/cable to shitty speakers or headphones.
I'd much rather prefer the original 16-bit CD, especially considering that the price of the two is less than 20% different when you take into account the cost of the physical media, box, ink, and photo paper to print the cover artwork. This does not even include the time you'll waste making a proper CD out of a bunch of shitty AAC files.
Also, the fact that he is willing to compress on his own does not show anything. The only value the compressed version would have to him would be the time spent on converting and encoding the album. This takes about 5 minutes on a modern PC.
Sure, I'd pay for that stuff if it was priced proportionally to the amount of content you get. 128K is about 1/10 of the CD bitrate, so the price should be about 10 cents a track. This is without even taking into account the nasty DRM with this method as well as the lack of the physical media and packaging you get with the CD.
The only situation in which I would be willing to pay a full album price would be if I got to download the full 650MB of the ORIGINAL CD.
Nearly imperceptible degradation? What kind of shit do you listen to? Are you using some $2 headphones? Even rap sounds worse when encoded to 128 kbps on any decent (as in >$50) set of speakers. You must be using one of those $5 wal-mart cd players if you really can't tell the difference between a low-quality 128K MP3 and a good CD.
You do know that transgaming only has 2 or 3 full-time programmers, right? AFAIK, Loki had at least a dozen, probably many more. Maybe that's why Loki went out of business a long time ago and Transgaming is doing quite well.
Also, when Transgaming ports a single game, its common Wine codebase improves. As more and more games are ported, the libraries become better and better. This is not true with native ports; you have to invest virtually the same amount of resources in each port. In a tiny niche like the Linux gaming market, you have to be extremely efficient to survive, at least until that niche becomes several times larger.
Also, care to tell me how you can play games like starcraft, GTA III, Everquest, or Counterstrike on Linux without going to Transgaming? For some reason, most hit games never get ported. Most native ports are either old or weren't that great in the first place.
My point: don't bash Transgaming until you can at least match what they have done. Their business plan is the only promising one in the Linux gaming arena.
Bullshit conspiracy theory. Standard internal combustion engines can not possibly burn anything other than gasoline or maybe alcohol. There were some experimental fuels for them, but you don't get nearly the same power density and they aren't as easy to get. Diesel engines can run on many things, but diesel fuel is pretty much a byproduct of gasoline production, so it was cheap and convenient.
Your argument is bullshit. For example, I like Linux and I absolutely can't stand Windows. Not because it's made by Microsoft, I just don't like the system -- slow, buggy, crashes a lot, bad UI. This is true to a large extent even for 2K and XP.
However, I highly dislike the Linux software options. For example, OpenOffice is slow as hell to load (takes damn near two minutes to load while MS Office under wine takes 10 seconds) and eats a lot of memory. It doesn't support many Word features. It is buggy in places. Every person I've ever asked says that they don't run Linux primarily because of its lack of software choice. If you want a decent word processor, you have to use OpenOffice (which, incidentally, works considerably better under win32). If you want a graphics editor, you have to use Gimp, even though it is buggy and lacks many essential features. I'm not even going to go into the custom proprietary Win32 software that almost any business has. What does one who needs commercial-quality software have to do? Stick to windows.
Crossover and Wine are good solutions to this problem. They allow you to use commercial software that the vendor has no intention of ever porting (like MS or Adobe products). They run at pretty much the same speed on Wine as they do on Win32. Wine is improving steadily and will soon be able to run all major Windows programs.
Expecting everyone to switch to OpenOffice and GIMP is like expecting everyone who drives a car to replace it with a bicycle. It might work for 5% of the population, but not for the other 95%. Most people who use MS Office, especially at work, cannot just start using OpenOffice and risk sending their boss Word files with wretched formatting.
Nobody has the right to a business model. I don't see anything immoral about downloading someone's song instead of paying for it. If the artists don't get the money I would have paid -- boohoo, they can always get a real job or find some other way to make money. If they are really good and I really like them, I'll go to their concerts, buy their stuff, etc. That's how many artists survive, anyhow -- the labels don't pay them too many royalties.
Most talented artists don't make music for the money anyway. Music and books existed in copious amounts way before there were copyright laws. The only thing that copyright laws gave us are shitty music and shitty books that are designed primarily to make money.
Also, "owning" information is not a natural right. You can't charge people royalties for using Newton's laws. Ownership proper can not be applied to abstract concepts and things. It is something that we as a society came up with to encourage people to create. However, this idea has been perverted to beyond belief. Corrupt governments controlled by powerful corporations have overextended copyright laws to the point where they are designed solely for making money. To the people who originally conceived copyright laws, extending them beyond the author's death would have seemed ludicrous -- you can't encourage dead people to create new works. Yet, our society does this exact thing.
Sure, it is illegal to copy copyrighted stuff. But it is not immoral. Please do not make the mistake of equating legality with morality. The two things are separate. By your logic, harboring fugitive slaves in 19th century US would have been immoral because you were stealing some Southern farmer's property. The opposite is true by any contemporary standards. Perhaps, in a few decades, we will realize that "owning" information is as ridiculous and inappropriate as "owning" people.
You can release anything that you create into the public domain, even if you originally released it under the GPL. Of course, you would have to remove any patches that people have sent in, as they are GPL-copyrighted, but if it's 100% your code, you can release it under whatever license pleases you. Code can be licensed under any number of licenses by its creator. You own the copyright, even if it's licensed under the GPL.
However, if you license it under something less restrictive than the GPL, don't expect anyone to significantly contribute to your program. They could simply take your code, change it a bit, and incorporate it in their $5000 program without even crediting you. Also, licensing your code under the GPL, but agreeing to license it under a less restrictive licensing for $$$ is a good way to make money. That's how companies like TrollTech make a living.
Public domain is very risky legally, though. You should probably use the BSD license, as it incorporates the no-warranty and no-liability conditions that people are forced to accept. Otherwise, you may be held liable if your code causes some kind of damage.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: OpenBSD is dying
One more crippling
bombshell hit the already beleaguered OpenBSD community when IDC confirmed that OpenBSD
market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of
all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states
that OpenBSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've
known all along. OpenBSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by
failing dead last [samag.com]
in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to
be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict OpenBSD's
future. The hand writing is on the wall: OpenBSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't
be any future at all for OpenBSD because OpenBSD is dying. Things are looking very
bad for OpenBSD. As many of us are already aware, OpenBSD continues to lose market share. Red
ink flows like a river of blood.
Due to the troubles of Theo de Raadt, abysmal sales and so on, OpenBSD went out
of business and was taken over by DARPA. Now OpenBSD
is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major
surveys show that OpenBSD has steadily declined in market share. OpenBSD is very sick and
its long term survival prospects are very dim. If OpenBSD is to survive at all it will
be among OS dilettante dabblers. OpenBSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle
could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, OpenBSD is dead.
Even with pirated software, don't you want to keep the (illicit) stuff you have already?
Re:A full DirectX Win32 wrapper?
on
Winex 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It doesn't have PERFECT application support. That's why you want native ports. Besides, you are probably the only person who is willing to switch to another OS and throw away the thousands of dollars invested in software for win32. Your argument is like saying that dos support in win95 held back native win32 apps. Bullshit, ain't it?
You do know that Kinko's is about $5/page, right? I found that it was cheaper to buy a scanner to scan a single document than give money to those scumbags. I would assume the same thing applies to printing.
I still have a 1990 Packard Bell color VGA monitor (I don't think there ever was a shittier brand than that). It runs beautifully and I use it every day. On the other hand, I've had 2 newer monitors die on me about 3 years after I bought them. They are cheaper now, though.
Palm sucks. It's very hard to beat something like the Dell Axim. $300 for 400MHz, color screen, cool software. I don't think the Sharp stuff can approach that, certainly not palm. If you just want a PDA to keep your appointments, a Palm m105 is fine. Otherwise, the WinCE offerings are better.
While the game source has been released under the GPL, the BUILD engine that the game builds on top of is released under a very restrictive non-commercial-use-only, strings-attached license. Thus, you can't even legally distribute the binary produced by linking the two, since AFAIK GPL software can not be statically linked with non-free stuff. Also, you can't distribute the BUILD source by any means other than through the Internet. Why do people pull these stupid licenses out of their ass?
Idiot. Hire a student, pay him $100/month or less for his services, and he/she will happily report any illegal napster usage. That's what these organizations already do.
We're talking organic chemistry, where a couple moved carbons can turn a safe sweet compound into a deadly poison -- this is why I'm a MechE and not a ChemE major!!
No shit? I think a couple of missing or rearranged bolts on a bridge would royally fuck things up too. So would rearranging a couple of different resistors on a motherboard. You know, things are usually the way they are for a reason.
First, you would have to disclose the encryption engine in use. They say stuff about the keys to spread FUD and sell commercial copies. Of course they don't fall under the GPL umbrella.
Did you notice any illegal gambling web sites accepting Visa? That's kind of the point. Visa, Mastercard, Discover, etc would not let you have a merchant account if you were operating an illegal gambling outfit or even if you merely scammed people. Paypal does exactly that.
Of course, your friendly Michigan AG is as big of a computer nerd as you are, and knows what the hell a router, NAT, or MAC address is. Besides, what reason does he have to think that the devices you mentioned are not illegal cable descramblers or something? People, WRITE TO YOUR AUDIENCE.
Slashdot Mirror
It never will, because there will always be a lag between new APIs being introduced and Wine implementing them. But OK. Let's suppose the impossible happens.
Wrong. Microsoft doesn't change the APIs very often, and neither do the game developers. It's about as difficult for a game programmer to start using a new API as it is for the Winex people to implement it. Neither is exactly easy.
Microsoft APIs are actually quite stable, and it is not a difficult task to keep up with them once all the major subsystems are fully implemented. Furthermore, there is about a one-year delay between the publication of an API spec and the publication of the first games that use it.
Your other points are quite valid, however.
I don't know what idiot contrived the bleemcast argument. The first version of Bleemcast emulated only one or two games. It was released at a time when nobody really cared about either the Dreamcast or the PS1 and the PS2 was just months away from hitting the stores. Is it any surprise that nobody bought it or the Dreamcast?
Finally, I don't see how support for Win32 APIs is a bad thing. They are good APIs, much better than many Linux equivalents. People bitch that wine is buggy and slow and will never improve. Does anyone remember how shitty Mozilla was two years ago, right around M10? It was barely usable, worse than wine is right now. Does anyone want to take bets as to how much it will improve in the next year or two? If Wine becomes as fast as the Linux APIs (quite possible, BTW), will it matter what APIs a given program uses?
Supporting them through Wine would also be a nice backwards compatibility step, both for experienced win32 programmers and for users with tons of win32 software.
Second - if you are really that concerned about high quality audio, you're not going to be listening to it via a computer sound card no matter how much money you spend on your equipment.
What makes you think so? I think that a decent soundcard hooked up to a quality external DAC would beat most sub-$2000 CD players (if you listen to well-ripped lossless audio, of course.) With a computer, you don't get the transport errors and jitter that a CD player produces -- a computer generally plays stuff from a memory buffer, not a spinning disc.
The acetone I have is in a metal can. I think you might be confusing acetone with something else. Acetone dissolves damn near every plastic; it's used as a paint remover and to clean brushes and stuff. I sure as hell wouldn't put it in a plastic bottle.
Great idea. If you want to dissolve half of the CPU package, that is. DON'T USE ACETONE ON ANYTHING THAT REMOTELY RESEMBLES PLASTIC, including CPUs.
The file itself is not DRM-encumbered. iTunes places the restrictions on burning, streaming, etc. They are not built into the file in any way. There are plenty of other tools you can use to manipulate the files, because...
What, are you a retarded monkey, or have you just not been paying attention? OF COURSE the file is DRM protected (encrypted).
Are you saying that apple users are too stupid to figure out that you can play AAC with something other than iTunes? That may very well be true, but it doesn't mean that Apple or the record labels will agree.
"Lossless" means relative to CD quality, because that is the best you can do right now. I'll bet that Apple didn't use the master DATs for encoding their shitty AAC tracks. They probably just ripped the CDs.
So, their format would throw out the high frequencies, quantize to 16 bits, throw in random transport errors from audio extraction, throw out 90% of the audio information, get watermarked (thus further reducing the quality), then get piped through a shitty codec/DAC/amplifier on a shitty soundcard that picks up random noise from inside your computer case and pipes it out through a shitty jack/cable to shitty speakers or headphones.
I'd much rather prefer the original 16-bit CD, especially considering that the price of the two is less than 20% different when you take into account the cost of the physical media, box, ink, and photo paper to print the cover artwork. This does not even include the time you'll waste making a proper CD out of a bunch of shitty AAC files.
Also, the fact that he is willing to compress on his own does not show anything. The only value the compressed version would have to him would be the time spent on converting and encoding the album. This takes about 5 minutes on a modern PC.
Sure, I'd pay for that stuff if it was priced proportionally to the amount of content you get. 128K is about 1/10 of the CD bitrate, so the price should be about 10 cents a track. This is without even taking into account the nasty DRM with this method as well as the lack of the physical media and packaging you get with the CD.
The only situation in which I would be willing to pay a full album price would be if I got to download the full 650MB of the ORIGINAL CD.
Nearly imperceptible degradation? What kind of shit do you listen to? Are you using some $2 headphones? Even rap sounds worse when encoded to 128 kbps on any decent (as in >$50) set of speakers. You must be using one of those $5 wal-mart cd players if you really can't tell the difference between a low-quality 128K MP3 and a good CD.
It won't. SCO is suing about enterprise components, such as those that IBM helped make. That does not include anything in a normal desktop distro.
You do know that transgaming only has 2 or 3 full-time programmers, right? AFAIK, Loki had at least a dozen, probably many more. Maybe that's why Loki went out of business a long time ago and Transgaming is doing quite well.
Also, when Transgaming ports a single game, its common Wine codebase improves. As more and more games are ported, the libraries become better and better. This is not true with native ports; you have to invest virtually the same amount of resources in each port. In a tiny niche like the Linux gaming market, you have to be extremely efficient to survive, at least until that niche becomes several times larger.
Also, care to tell me how you can play games like starcraft, GTA III, Everquest, or Counterstrike on Linux without going to Transgaming? For some reason, most hit games never get ported. Most native ports are either old or weren't that great in the first place.
My point: don't bash Transgaming until you can at least match what they have done. Their business plan is the only promising one in the Linux gaming arena.
Bullshit conspiracy theory. Standard internal combustion engines can not possibly burn anything other than gasoline or maybe alcohol. There were some experimental fuels for them, but you don't get nearly the same power density and they aren't as easy to get. Diesel engines can run on many things, but diesel fuel is pretty much a byproduct of gasoline production, so it was cheap and convenient.
Your argument is bullshit. For example, I like Linux and I absolutely can't stand Windows. Not because it's made by Microsoft, I just don't like the system -- slow, buggy, crashes a lot, bad UI. This is true to a large extent even for 2K and XP.
However, I highly dislike the Linux software options. For example, OpenOffice is slow as hell to load (takes damn near two minutes to load while MS Office under wine takes 10 seconds) and eats a lot of memory. It doesn't support many Word features. It is buggy in places. Every person I've ever asked says that they don't run Linux primarily because of its lack of software choice. If you want a decent word processor, you have to use OpenOffice (which, incidentally, works considerably better under win32). If you want a graphics editor, you have to use Gimp, even though it is buggy and lacks many essential features. I'm not even going to go into the custom proprietary Win32 software that almost any business has. What does one who needs commercial-quality software have to do? Stick to windows.
Crossover and Wine are good solutions to this problem. They allow you to use commercial software that the vendor has no intention of ever porting (like MS or Adobe products). They run at pretty much the same speed on Wine as they do on Win32. Wine is improving steadily and will soon be able to run all major Windows programs.
Expecting everyone to switch to OpenOffice and GIMP is like expecting everyone who drives a car to replace it with a bicycle. It might work for 5% of the population, but not for the other 95%. Most people who use MS Office, especially at work, cannot just start using OpenOffice and risk sending their boss Word files with wretched formatting.
Nobody has the right to a business model. I don't see anything immoral about downloading someone's song instead of paying for it. If the artists don't get the money I would have paid -- boohoo, they can always get a real job or find some other way to make money. If they are really good and I really like them, I'll go to their concerts, buy their stuff, etc. That's how many artists survive, anyhow -- the labels don't pay them too many royalties.
Most talented artists don't make music for the money anyway. Music and books existed in copious amounts way before there were copyright laws. The only thing that copyright laws gave us are shitty music and shitty books that are designed primarily to make money.
Also, "owning" information is not a natural right. You can't charge people royalties for using Newton's laws. Ownership proper can not be applied to abstract concepts and things. It is something that we as a society came up with to encourage people to create. However, this idea has been perverted to beyond belief. Corrupt governments controlled by powerful corporations have overextended copyright laws to the point where they are designed solely for making money. To the people who originally conceived copyright laws, extending them beyond the author's death would have seemed ludicrous -- you can't encourage dead people to create new works. Yet, our society does this exact thing.
Sure, it is illegal to copy copyrighted stuff. But it is not immoral. Please do not make the mistake of equating legality with morality. The two things are separate. By your logic, harboring fugitive slaves in 19th century US would have been immoral because you were stealing some Southern farmer's property. The opposite is true by any contemporary standards. Perhaps, in a few decades, we will realize that "owning" information is as ridiculous and inappropriate as "owning" people.
You can release anything that you create into the public domain, even if you originally released it under the GPL. Of course, you would have to remove any patches that people have sent in, as they are GPL-copyrighted, but if it's 100% your code, you can release it under whatever license pleases you. Code can be licensed under any number of licenses by its creator. You own the copyright, even if it's licensed under the GPL.
However, if you license it under something less restrictive than the GPL, don't expect anyone to significantly contribute to your program. They could simply take your code, change it a bit, and incorporate it in their $5000 program without even crediting you. Also, licensing your code under the GPL, but agreeing to license it under a less restrictive licensing for $$$ is a good way to make money. That's how companies like TrollTech make a living.
Public domain is very risky legally, though. You should probably use the BSD license, as it incorporates the no-warranty and no-liability conditions that people are forced to accept. Otherwise, you may be held liable if your code causes some kind of damage.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered OpenBSD community when IDC confirmed that OpenBSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that OpenBSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. OpenBSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict OpenBSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: OpenBSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for OpenBSD because OpenBSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for OpenBSD. As many of us are already aware, OpenBSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Due to the troubles of Theo de Raadt, abysmal sales and so on, OpenBSD went out of business and was taken over by DARPA. Now OpenBSD is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that OpenBSD has steadily declined in market share. OpenBSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If OpenBSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. OpenBSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, OpenBSD is dead.
Fact: OpenBSD is dying
Even with pirated software, don't you want to keep the (illicit) stuff you have already?
It doesn't have PERFECT application support. That's why you want native ports. Besides, you are probably the only person who is willing to switch to another OS and throw away the thousands of dollars invested in software for win32. Your argument is like saying that dos support in win95 held back native win32 apps. Bullshit, ain't it?
You do know that Kinko's is about $5/page, right? I found that it was cheaper to buy a scanner to scan a single document than give money to those scumbags. I would assume the same thing applies to printing.
I still have a 1990 Packard Bell color VGA monitor (I don't think there ever was a shittier brand than that). It runs beautifully and I use it every day. On the other hand, I've had 2 newer monitors die on me about 3 years after I bought them. They are cheaper now, though.
Palm sucks. It's very hard to beat something like the Dell Axim. $300 for 400MHz, color screen, cool software. I don't think the Sharp stuff can approach that, certainly not palm. If you just want a PDA to keep your appointments, a Palm m105 is fine. Otherwise, the WinCE offerings are better.
While the game source has been released under the GPL, the BUILD engine that the game builds on top of is released under a very restrictive non-commercial-use-only, strings-attached license. Thus, you can't even legally distribute the binary produced by linking the two, since AFAIK GPL software can not be statically linked with non-free stuff. Also, you can't distribute the BUILD source by any means other than through the Internet. Why do people pull these stupid licenses out of their ass?
Idiot. Hire a student, pay him $100/month or less for his services, and he/she will happily report any illegal napster usage. That's what these organizations already do.
We're talking organic chemistry, where a couple moved carbons can turn a safe sweet compound into a deadly poison -- this is why I'm a MechE and not a ChemE major!!
No shit? I think a couple of missing or rearranged bolts on a bridge would royally fuck things up too. So would rearranging a couple of different resistors on a motherboard. You know, things are usually the way they are for a reason.
First, you would have to disclose the encryption engine in use. They say stuff about the keys to spread FUD and sell commercial copies. Of course they don't fall under the GPL umbrella.
Did you notice any illegal gambling web sites accepting Visa? That's kind of the point. Visa, Mastercard, Discover, etc would not let you have a merchant account if you were operating an illegal gambling outfit or even if you merely scammed people. Paypal does exactly that.
Of course, your friendly Michigan AG is as big of a computer nerd as you are, and knows what the hell a router, NAT, or MAC address is. Besides, what reason does he have to think that the devices you mentioned are not illegal cable descramblers or something? People, WRITE TO YOUR AUDIENCE.