If you think companies aren't in the business of getting sued you'd better look again. They'll do anything they can as long as the court case would be cheaper than not doing it. When it looks like they'll lose, they settle.
It's foolproof unless the customers have millions to fight back with.
Class action. One person being screwed may not be able to fight back, but hundreds, if not thousands, can. The lawyers still get most of the money, but Valve is no Microsoft, they don't have all the money in the world to play around with.
That's why I suggested hucking a flaming brick through the windows of their foreign cars. Nobody at the company is going to notice a lawsuit, but if you revoked their foreign products something might happen. Fighting them in court is one way, but personally I think justice would be handled better if everyone who got screwed by them screwed them back - the court system doesn't penalize companies effectively.
And this statement shows you where your true colors are. Anyone with an ounce of moral integrity knows that two wrongs don't make a right, but when you are percieved to be wronged by a company, you have no second thoughts about reacting violently through vandalism. It really undermines your position, and has sociopathic undertones, so I'm expecting you'll reply with "Oh come on, I didn't really mean that." which places you squarely with the rest of the internet tough-guy population.
Either way, you seem to be living a sheltered life, not realizing that the world of business is cutthroat and not a nice place, and that any sufficently large business sometimes screws the little guy or the clever guy, and there's nothing anybody can do about it. Think about it, for all of the supposed consumer activism going on, there are only sweeping policy changes when a proportionally large enough part of the population becomes screwed by it. If DRM is so bad, then why are we still dealing with it (because it works fine in the large majority of cases, only raising a fuss when you have situations like Sony's rootkit, and if you really want to copy it you can always download it). If Comcast loves to screw its customers with torrent blocking, then why isn't it out of business yet from the customer complaints? (because 90% of the people who use their service don't use it to download Transformers the Movie, and there are alternatives like usenet for people who really want it).
Your only escape from the corporate machine is threefold:
Start a small business which promises not to screw their customers (which runs the chance of the big guys changing their business model to run you out of business. Don't worry though, if you survive long enough, you can grow to the point where you can start screwing people too)
Join it, and work your ass off to be in a position where you can do a little screwing yourself.
Move somewhere else where instead of large businesses screwing you, the government screws you instead.
In the end, you're still occationally getting screwed somewhere. Welcome to reality, which 99% of the world seems to adjust around and still live a happy life. The advent of the internet, however, seems to have given rise to an persecution complex, where people feel oppressed when their ISP blocks their downloading of Transformers the Movie, who have no idea what it's like to live in South Africa or Iraq or any number of other shitholes where people actually DO have something to worry about, like if they're going to live long enough to see the sun rise tomorrow.
*whew* Did I really write that entire wall of text. I'm done.
EULAs are a shaky principle, one worthy perhaps of steering something into arbitration before court, or limiting your privacy rights towards character data, etc. They certainly do not override fundamentals of ownership.
If you're so damn sure about it, then take part in a class action lawsuit and get some clear legal precident so companies like Valve will understand that they can't do that sort of thing. If Valve agreed with your assesment, then they wouldn't have had the balls to remotely disable hundreds of supposedly "legally purchased" copies of Orange Box. Companies are not in the business of getting sued, and clearly your armchair lawyering assesment is incomplete in some fashion if they took this tremendous risk.
Me? I'll simply avoid buying things from Thailand in an attempt to try and beat the system.
Sigh. Selling something for different prices isn't illegal. Terminating those products because the wrong person ended up with them is.
Oops. That's illegal - they don't own the rights to it anymore.
Software is still a legal grey area. These days, you are not sold software, but are sold a licence to use said software that can be revolked. The thing is, with disk and CD-based media, there was no way that software houses could actually enforce their EULA's. Now they can. Despite how you might try to spin it, however, it's not illegal unless there is some legal precedent saying it is. You can say it is all day long, but that doesn't actually mean it is until a court of law actually figures it out. Currently, EULA's themselves don't have that much legal precident.
To be honest, I don't know what's so evil about EULA's. They're just a set of agreements that you implicitly agree to adhere to upon use. If you don't like it, then don't use it. And what really tickles me is why people were expecting a legitimate product from a seller in thailand/russia who was specificly targeting western customers. Anyone who has spent five minutes on ebay knows that damn near anything that comes out of that part of the world is probably pirated or at the very least shady.
They're hypocrits, willing to take advantage of globalization to increase their own profits, but they sabotage the product to prevent you from doing the same.
What's the value of having more money if everything you want to buy is proportionally more expensive?
That's actually the reason that they sell it for cheaper in different companies. They know that not as many people can afford such things in the russian bloc, so they make the prices lower to get what sales they can. If you're from one of those countries, I doubt you think it's an unfair situation, because they're being charged what they can afford instead of something prohibitively expensive.
So you're right, they should keep the price the same in all countries. Or they should at least stop their illegal actions of sabotaging products of those who import.
Anything less is criminal.
Except it's not actually illegal. It's called price discrimination, and it's been used to give us senior citizen discounts and airline fares that go up the closer you get to departure time for as long as an economy has existed.
It's easy to feel empowered on an internet forum and wave a damning finger at a company. But really, what Valve is doing is perfectly legal, if you don't like it, vote with your wallet. Not that your singular wallet or any protest or petition that you and 10 other people adhere to is going to make a dent in the tens of thousands of sales they're getting already, but it's worth it for your piece of mind, right? Right?
Kids, time for some ECON 1010. This tactic is called Price Discrimination, selling the same product for different prices to different people. As mentioned in the article, this tactic has been around as long as "kids menus" and "elderly discounts" have been around. A great example that the article doesn't mention is airline companies, the reason that their prices go up the closer you get to the day of flight isn't because they're running out of seats, it's because they know they can catch business travelers who often have to make last minute plans for a flight, as opposed to families on vacation that plan months in advance.
It's reigion locking, after a fashion. If there's a problem with Steam, it's that there is no easy way to "unregister" a game that is tied to an account. Of course, this opens up a whole new can of worms, where it might be possible to hack a steam account and then unregister every game associated with it, which is probably why they haven't implemented such a feature yet. Mark my words, it'll be in in a few months, and before then you can probably email valve support and have them do something about your account.
Thanks for telling me about that. Warsow in Gutsy is only 0.31 for some reason.
That's really the most annoying thing with package systems like Ubuntu's. If you only update versions every time a new version of the OS is released, then for certain things (like games), it becomes impossible to play online simply by doing things the easy way.
Games for Windows. So which Games for Windows did MS release to launch its bold new initative? A crappy port of a two year old game with subpar graphics, crappy performance and loads of bugs. And a worse port of a overpriced game with crippled controls, crappy performance, and metric fucktons of bugs. IGN reported it wouldn't even run on half their PCs. Wow. WTF? This is the bold new world of MS enforced console-style QA for the PC? But hey, it supported the 360 gamepad.
This is what really burned me. I was really looking forward to finally playing Halo 2 for my PC after my Xbox and Halo 2 wound up in parts unknown. Unfortuniatly, requiring vista to play when it wasn't even required (see: Halo 2 XP patches) and games for windows live for matchmaking (Matchmaking was the best part of Halo 2, and making it subscriber only with a free option is just about the best way of ensuring nobody plays it on PC) was a dealbreaker for me. And now everyone is playing Halo 3, which I really want to play, but I have no intention of investing almost 500 dollars in a console that dies after six months for a handfull of games that I happen to want to play.
It's a shame. Microsofts handling of the Halo series on PC has just been tragic, with two years-late, unoptimized, unsupported ports. Hopefully Gears of War will end up being a higher quality conversion.
Half Life 2 and its ilk already run reasonably well in Wine these days. All you have to do is have the Taholma font installed in ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts and Steam ought to work great, and from there CS:Source works great too. I notice maybe a 10fps difference between Windows and Linux, and I have a shitty throwaway Geforce FX.
Wow, killing most powerful being in Azeroth in only two expansions? Where are they going to go, lorewise, after this? Kil'Jaden is only one 'tier' up from Arthas, and after that there's only Sarganes, who seems to be the ultimate evil in the entire universe, not to mention that there's almost no locational lore associated with either of those two. Warcraft 1 was Azeroth, Warcraft 2 was Azeroth and Lorderan, Warcraft 3 was Lorderan, Northend, Kalimdor and Outland, and having already visted all of those places takes any "Oh wow, neat, I remember that place" feeling out of visiting any new content they plan to make afterwards.
The RTS games created the lore. WoW is "destroying" it, after a fashion. Essentially, with the release of Northend, they will have about 3/4 elimated almost 10+ years worth of content and lore by shoehorning all of the major villians into "gotta kill them for epic loots" fodder, which is fine, but what happens when it all the lore runs dry and they run out of bad guys to kill? I hope they don't resort to Everquest-ish "You may bave killed the bad guys, but then there are also SUPER DUPER bad guys that are even badder than the other bad guys who were just controlling them", but with the pace that they're killing off the major villians, I hope this isn't true.
They have been promising this since before 2 came out, just one of the many places where they dropped the ball on 2.
I'm calling bullshit. Show me someplace where Bungie specificly said that they were 'promising' online coop. I really highly doubt they ever did, and it was just something the entire fanbase wished they could do instead of something they could actually do.
And I'm sorry that Halo 2 left you on a Half Life 2-esque cliffhanger and didn't have a 3 shot pistol in Multiplayer, but the rest of the world is still enjoying the hell out of Halo 2 as one of the most played Xbox Live titles ever and is eagerly anticipating Halo 3.
It's because EVE Online is about as exciting as a spreadsheet 90% of the time mining asteroids or doing PvE quests, doing or reciving a one-sided gank 5% of the time, being in a slideshow of a gigantic fleet battle 4% of the time, and being a victem of an in-game exploit (Well, it's only an exploit if YOU do it, when a huge corp does it it's AOK, and you're not allowed to discuss GM decisions in the forums, so any kind of peer review is doomed to be inherantly either fabircated or not taken seriously) the remaining 1% of the time.
So that's....4% fun maybe (if you enjoy ganking and being ganked, which I happen to enjoy both)? The only reason you hear about EVE Online at all is because the big corperations want newbies to lord over, so you hear a lot of 'word of mouth grassroots' exposure making it sound fun and like you do exciting fleet battles every single moment of your time ingame. Don't be fooled, EVE Online is not fun.
He was JAILED for writing software in a country where it's legal that violates what should be a CIVIL LAW in the USA. Upon arrival in the USA he was arrested at the behest of Adobe for circumventing their DRM scheme... in Russia.
Adobe came out against the FBI's roughshod methods. And a couple of months later, the charges were dropped. Law enforcement is not a science, and the simple fact is that sometimes people get locked up for shit they shouldn't be. But instead of being tossed in a hole and forgotten about in order for the government to save face, like he would have in any police state, he was released. How do you figure that?
Ok, how about this, I'll strip you of your freedom for 4 months at a time because, um, you watched a DVD in Linux. See how that works out for you. The DMCA is just an example of how the government is bending over for the benefit of big corporations. Don't mind the fact that the law is wholly unconstitutional. No, never you mind. Those amendments are just suggestions.
Jaywalking is also illegal, technically it's against the law in some jurisdictions to cross the street outside of a designated crosswalk. How many people do you hear about getting dicked by this law....not many. Laws are not hard and fast orders followed to a T by a program, but instead are used with discrestion. Find me one single example where someone was jailed for watching a DVD on Linux using DeCSS, and maybe I'll start drinking some of your kool-aid.
Next you'll tell me that states like Detroit have lax car size tax laws for no apparent reason. Fo rizzle? In reality, 99% of car drivers need nothing larger than a V4, yet per capita V8/V6 represent basically the entirety of cars on the road, even when they're empty and have a single occupant. Yeah, you're right. The government is out to help you out. Never mind that most large cities have a layer of unbreathable smog that tints the blue sky dark orange. That's for *your* benefit. We shouldn't as a society pressure people to be more responsible. Never.
Market preference. If people want a V4 car, they will buy V4 cars. And I don't know where you're pulling those statistics from, there are tons of 4 cylender cars being sold, ever hear of the Honda Civic? Miata? Lancer Evo?
Right up there with that corn syrup used in, let me count, EVERYTHING, as opposed to sugar. No lobbying there.
So you're saying that the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup as an alternative to Sugar means we're in a police state? And no, it's not used in 'everything', ever hear of eating fruits and vegitables?
And of course, Diebold kept their promise about winning an election for the home team after securing contracts to run various states voting machines.
And also kept their promise of bringing in the 06' house and senate elections....wait, no they didn't. And many states are putting Diebold under intense scrutiny because of their voting machine failures.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what happens when someone spends all their time on the internet busy figuring out ways that the government and corperations are dicking them, while the rest of us live our lives free of paranoia. You can either keep worrying yourself to death over what are essentially non-issues, or you can accept the fact that everything in the United States is not roses and move on with your life.
'We're moving from a Linux platform to an IBM AIX environment we did that to address some stability issues we were having'
That's why it's a good idea for them. Sounds to me like they're having genuine problems, if they moved to Windows Server 2003 complete with a crowing from Microsoft Headquarters, that might be something to worry about, but I doubt IBM has anything to gain from them moving from Linux to AIX, both of which they have a substantial amount of investment in.
Oh man, a forigner being incarcerated for four months before being released and having the charges against him dropped (which the EFF FAQ seems to conveniently leave out). We might as well cower in our homes now while we wait for the execution busses to stop by our house.
The US system of laws is not perfect. It's also not written in stone. Change takes time, and you need time to lose the goodwill of the people before change happens. The current president of the United States was a power-hungry crook, and look at what is happening to the presidency, it's collapsing in on itself. Those who sponsered the bill are seeing enormous amounts of bad press about the bill stack up and are seeing most of their consumer goodwill vanish, to the point where you have Joe College Kid downloading movies instead of buying it on Ultra High Digital DVD Ray with DMCA Copy Protection ++ (that was comprimised 5 minutes ago). And there are still plenty of outlets for things of questionable legality, the DMCA never stopped DeCSS or VLC, that's why we have the internet, which lawmakers are still trying to figure out.
Relax. Things change. You'd do yourself a huge favor if you would think about things practically for a few seconds before overreacting. Like I said, earlier, if we were truely in a secrative police state, you would be dead by now.
Wait a second, are you seriously trying to equate a bunch of kids getting (rightfully) fined for downloading music for free that they haven't paid for with fascism or totalitarian? Forget for a second that you're reframing the argument from "King George" over to "King Corperation", but your assertion is still ludacris.
And if you haven't noticed, in cases where the RIAA was truely overstepping their legal bounds, they are getting the shit kicked out of them in the court system for not being damned sure that the IP addresses that they aggregated actually belonged to the people they said they did. Consumer reaction to DRM was exceedingly poor and is the reason why Jobs was able to sell EMI on DRM-free music from iTunes.
I will admit that they are complete assholes about "circumvention devices", but chances are it's not anything you're ever going to have to worry about, to my knowledge nobody has ever gotten locked up for using a circumvention device on a product they legally own, and quite honestly the MPAA and RIAA probably don't give a shit if you rip your movies and music to your hard drive as long as you don't participate in copyright infringment by sharing it with the rest of the internet.
(See, I even called it copyright infringment so if you respond to me you can't just simply pick out that one sentatnce and scream "COPYRIGHT INFRIGNEMENT ISNT THEFT" without actually responding to any of my points)
Name one person who was locked up soley because of something critical they said of the president.
Don't get me wrong, he's incompetant and his entire administration is crooked, but if the US was really like the Chinese, you would be in jail right about......
And suddenly Adobe has an urge to either sue the GNU foundation, sue any distro who includes gnash in a linux distribution, or sue any computer vendor that sells computers with linux preinstalled and gnash included.
Softawre Patents are the great GPL equalizer. You can reverse engineer something all you want, but it doesn't matter when the patent holders have deep pockets and software and hardware vendors are scared shitless of litegation.
That's unfortuniatly pretty much what every Fallout fan wants.
I've seen a lot of fan communities, and Fallout lovers are undoubtedly the worst of the lot. Yeah, after Brotherhood of Steel some of it might be justified, but personally, I think BS makes awesome, if flawed, games. Besides, if Fallout 3 gets the level of mod support that the TES games have gotten, the Fallout community can simply mod in or out anything they feel like.
I didn't make a statement on CodeWavers precisely becauase I haven't checked them out personally, due to me not particularly needing many Windows productivity applications since the Linux ones are almost as nice.
However, I'll take your word for it unless someone posts to the contrary. In fact, since you say such nice things about them, I might have to give Codeweavers a spin out of principle. =)
...they're pure slime. They threatened debian maintainers with a licence change unless they withdrew a free, easy to install debian package from debian repoisotories. And they at one time had a promise on their page that said as soon as they crossed a certain number of licenses, that they would reopen the code and contribute back to wine. That promise has since been taken down.
And on top of that, according to reliable reports, cedega is only marginally more stable than Wine ever was. Which in my opinion is not worth five bucks, especially given how much progress Wine has made in the last year or so in terms of compatability. Heck, the latest version can even run WoW with minimal amounts of fuss (according to its rank, which is Gold). And I'd rather wait for someone to brute-force copy protection in a free way instead of having to be at the mercy of those that provide it.
Cedega doesn't need your support. Wine does. Give the latest version a spin, download it, and provide bug reports for your favorite games so the remaining bugaboos can be fixed up.
Many of the new zones now have a world PvP objective, in which one side, Horde/Alliance, needs to capture and hold certain points. Some of these objectives have interesting mechanics - the PvP point Halla in Nagrand has gryphon roosts that allow you to bomb out the center of the flag point before moving in. Fighting at these points rewards you with battle tokens that can be turned in for good armor and the like, and the side that holds a PvP objective often gains a zone-wide buff for their side as long as they hold it, like a +5% damage bonus. It's a bit of a pain on some PvE servers where the Alliance has a large population side, but it's otherwise good times with less BG queue.
I heard about that. It sounds fun, but that seems to me like more of a distraction than anything else, because you still have to level up somehow.
You might think this is nuts, but Guild Wars pulled this off excillently... Ah, yes, because everyone knows about another MMO that does things better than WoW.
And I don't see how lumping me in with everyone else is a valid point at all. Seriously, would you want to pay 15 dollars a month for a game that was simple enough to the point of a bot being able to play, unaided?
Slashdot Mirror
Either way, you seem to be living a sheltered life, not realizing that the world of business is cutthroat and not a nice place, and that any sufficently large business sometimes screws the little guy or the clever guy, and there's nothing anybody can do about it. Think about it, for all of the supposed consumer activism going on, there are only sweeping policy changes when a proportionally large enough part of the population becomes screwed by it. If DRM is so bad, then why are we still dealing with it (because it works fine in the large majority of cases, only raising a fuss when you have situations like Sony's rootkit, and if you really want to copy it you can always download it). If Comcast loves to screw its customers with torrent blocking, then why isn't it out of business yet from the customer complaints? (because 90% of the people who use their service don't use it to download Transformers the Movie, and there are alternatives like usenet for people who really want it).
Your only escape from the corporate machine is threefold:
- Start a small business which promises not to screw their customers (which runs the chance of the big guys changing their business model to run you out of business. Don't worry though, if you survive long enough, you can grow to the point where you can start screwing people too)
- Join it, and work your ass off to be in a position where you can do a little screwing yourself.
- Move somewhere else where instead of large businesses screwing you, the government screws you instead.
In the end, you're still occationally getting screwed somewhere. Welcome to reality, which 99% of the world seems to adjust around and still live a happy life. The advent of the internet, however, seems to have given rise to an persecution complex, where people feel oppressed when their ISP blocks their downloading of Transformers the Movie, who have no idea what it's like to live in South Africa or Iraq or any number of other shitholes where people actually DO have something to worry about, like if they're going to live long enough to see the sun rise tomorrow.*whew* Did I really write that entire wall of text. I'm done.
Me? I'll simply avoid buying things from Thailand in an attempt to try and beat the system.
To be honest, I don't know what's so evil about EULA's. They're just a set of agreements that you implicitly agree to adhere to upon use. If you don't like it, then don't use it. And what really tickles me is why people were expecting a legitimate product from a seller in thailand/russia who was specificly targeting western customers. Anyone who has spent five minutes on ebay knows that damn near anything that comes out of that part of the world is probably pirated or at the very least shady.
It's easy to feel empowered on an internet forum and wave a damning finger at a company. But really, what Valve is doing is perfectly legal, if you don't like it, vote with your wallet. Not that your singular wallet or any protest or petition that you and 10 other people adhere to is going to make a dent in the tens of thousands of sales they're getting already, but it's worth it for your piece of mind, right? Right?
Kids, time for some ECON 1010. This tactic is called Price Discrimination, selling the same product for different prices to different people. As mentioned in the article, this tactic has been around as long as "kids menus" and "elderly discounts" have been around. A great example that the article doesn't mention is airline companies, the reason that their prices go up the closer you get to the day of flight isn't because they're running out of seats, it's because they know they can catch business travelers who often have to make last minute plans for a flight, as opposed to families on vacation that plan months in advance.
It's reigion locking, after a fashion. If there's a problem with Steam, it's that there is no easy way to "unregister" a game that is tied to an account. Of course, this opens up a whole new can of worms, where it might be possible to hack a steam account and then unregister every game associated with it, which is probably why they haven't implemented such a feature yet. Mark my words, it'll be in in a few months, and before then you can probably email valve support and have them do something about your account.
Thanks for telling me about that. Warsow in Gutsy is only 0.31 for some reason.
That's really the most annoying thing with package systems like Ubuntu's. If you only update versions every time a new version of the OS is released, then for certain things (like games), it becomes impossible to play online simply by doing things the easy way.
This is what really burned me. I was really looking forward to finally playing Halo 2 for my PC after my Xbox and Halo 2 wound up in parts unknown. Unfortuniatly, requiring vista to play when it wasn't even required (see: Halo 2 XP patches) and games for windows live for matchmaking (Matchmaking was the best part of Halo 2, and making it subscriber only with a free option is just about the best way of ensuring nobody plays it on PC) was a dealbreaker for me. And now everyone is playing Halo 3, which I really want to play, but I have no intention of investing almost 500 dollars in a console that dies after six months for a handfull of games that I happen to want to play.
It's a shame. Microsofts handling of the Halo series on PC has just been tragic, with two years-late, unoptimized, unsupported ports. Hopefully Gears of War will end up being a higher quality conversion.
Half Life 2 and its ilk already run reasonably well in Wine these days. All you have to do is have the Taholma font installed in ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts and Steam ought to work great, and from there CS:Source works great too. I notice maybe a 10fps difference between Windows and Linux, and I have a shitty throwaway Geforce FX.
Oh, and his supporters will mindlessly digg up any article about him on said website, no matter what the article actually says about him.
The RTS games created the lore. WoW is "destroying" it, after a fashion. Essentially, with the release of Northend, they will have about 3/4 elimated almost 10+ years worth of content and lore by shoehorning all of the major villians into "gotta kill them for epic loots" fodder, which is fine, but what happens when it all the lore runs dry and they run out of bad guys to kill? I hope they don't resort to Everquest-ish "You may bave killed the bad guys, but then there are also SUPER DUPER bad guys that are even badder than the other bad guys who were just controlling them", but with the pace that they're killing off the major villians, I hope this isn't true.
I'm calling bullshit. Show me someplace where Bungie specificly said that they were 'promising' online coop. I really highly doubt they ever did, and it was just something the entire fanbase wished they could do instead of something they could actually do.
And I'm sorry that Halo 2 left you on a Half Life 2-esque cliffhanger and didn't have a 3 shot pistol in Multiplayer, but the rest of the world is still enjoying the hell out of Halo 2 as one of the most played Xbox Live titles ever and is eagerly anticipating Halo 3.
*points back in the direction of NMA* Shoo!
Rack'em.
The spammers are chinese, and the chinese have a reputation of "not giving a fuck", so I have no idea how you expect the BSA to fix things.
So that's....4% fun maybe (if you enjoy ganking and being ganked, which I happen to enjoy both)? The only reason you hear about EVE Online at all is because the big corperations want newbies to lord over, so you hear a lot of 'word of mouth grassroots' exposure making it sound fun and like you do exciting fleet battles every single moment of your time ingame. Don't be fooled, EVE Online is not fun.
Adobe came out against the FBI's roughshod methods. And a couple of months later, the charges were dropped. Law enforcement is not a science, and the simple fact is that sometimes people get locked up for shit they shouldn't be. But instead of being tossed in a hole and forgotten about in order for the government to save face, like he would have in any police state, he was released. How do you figure that?
Ok, how about this, I'll strip you of your freedom for 4 months at a time because, um, you watched a DVD in Linux. See how that works out for you. The DMCA is just an example of how the government is bending over for the benefit of big corporations. Don't mind the fact that the law is wholly unconstitutional. No, never you mind. Those amendments are just suggestions.
Jaywalking is also illegal, technically it's against the law in some jurisdictions to cross the street outside of a designated crosswalk. How many people do you hear about getting dicked by this law....not many. Laws are not hard and fast orders followed to a T by a program, but instead are used with discrestion. Find me one single example where someone was jailed for watching a DVD on Linux using DeCSS, and maybe I'll start drinking some of your kool-aid.
Next you'll tell me that states like Detroit have lax car size tax laws for no apparent reason. Fo rizzle? In reality, 99% of car drivers need nothing larger than a V4, yet per capita V8/V6 represent basically the entirety of cars on the road, even when they're empty and have a single occupant. Yeah, you're right. The government is out to help you out. Never mind that most large cities have a layer of unbreathable smog that tints the blue sky dark orange. That's for *your* benefit. We shouldn't as a society pressure people to be more responsible. Never.
Market preference. If people want a V4 car, they will buy V4 cars. And I don't know where you're pulling those statistics from, there are tons of 4 cylender cars being sold, ever hear of the Honda Civic? Miata? Lancer Evo?
Right up there with that corn syrup used in, let me count, EVERYTHING, as opposed to sugar. No lobbying there.
So you're saying that the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup as an alternative to Sugar means we're in a police state? And no, it's not used in 'everything', ever hear of eating fruits and vegitables?
And of course, Diebold kept their promise about winning an election for the home team after securing contracts to run various states voting machines.
And also kept their promise of bringing in the 06' house and senate elections....wait, no they didn't. And many states are putting Diebold under intense scrutiny because of their voting machine failures.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what happens when someone spends all their time on the internet busy figuring out ways that the government and corperations are dicking them, while the rest of us live our lives free of paranoia. You can either keep worrying yourself to death over what are essentially non-issues, or you can accept the fact that everything in the United States is not roses and move on with your life.
That's why it's a good idea for them. Sounds to me like they're having genuine problems, if they moved to Windows Server 2003 complete with a crowing from Microsoft Headquarters, that might be something to worry about, but I doubt IBM has anything to gain from them moving from Linux to AIX, both of which they have a substantial amount of investment in.
And no, AIX is not dead, not any more than BSD is anyway.
The US system of laws is not perfect. It's also not written in stone. Change takes time, and you need time to lose the goodwill of the people before change happens. The current president of the United States was a power-hungry crook, and look at what is happening to the presidency, it's collapsing in on itself. Those who sponsered the bill are seeing enormous amounts of bad press about the bill stack up and are seeing most of their consumer goodwill vanish, to the point where you have Joe College Kid downloading movies instead of buying it on Ultra High Digital DVD Ray with DMCA Copy Protection ++ (that was comprimised 5 minutes ago). And there are still plenty of outlets for things of questionable legality, the DMCA never stopped DeCSS or VLC, that's why we have the internet, which lawmakers are still trying to figure out.
Relax. Things change. You'd do yourself a huge favor if you would think about things practically for a few seconds before overreacting. Like I said, earlier, if we were truely in a secrative police state, you would be dead by now.
And if you haven't noticed, in cases where the RIAA was truely overstepping their legal bounds, they are getting the shit kicked out of them in the court system for not being damned sure that the IP addresses that they aggregated actually belonged to the people they said they did. Consumer reaction to DRM was exceedingly poor and is the reason why Jobs was able to sell EMI on DRM-free music from iTunes.
I will admit that they are complete assholes about "circumvention devices", but chances are it's not anything you're ever going to have to worry about, to my knowledge nobody has ever gotten locked up for using a circumvention device on a product they legally own, and quite honestly the MPAA and RIAA probably don't give a shit if you rip your movies and music to your hard drive as long as you don't participate in copyright infringment by sharing it with the rest of the internet.
(See, I even called it copyright infringment so if you respond to me you can't just simply pick out that one sentatnce and scream "COPYRIGHT INFRIGNEMENT ISNT THEFT" without actually responding to any of my points)
Name one person who was locked up soley because of something critical they said of the president.
Don't get me wrong, he's incompetant and his entire administration is crooked, but if the US was really like the Chinese, you would be in jail right about......
*knock knock*
Oh shi....
Softawre Patents are the great GPL equalizer. You can reverse engineer something all you want, but it doesn't matter when the patent holders have deep pockets and software and hardware vendors are scared shitless of litegation.
I've seen a lot of fan communities, and Fallout lovers are undoubtedly the worst of the lot. Yeah, after Brotherhood of Steel some of it might be justified, but personally, I think BS makes awesome, if flawed, games. Besides, if Fallout 3 gets the level of mod support that the TES games have gotten, the Fallout community can simply mod in or out anything they feel like.
I didn't make a statement on CodeWavers precisely becauase I haven't checked them out personally, due to me not particularly needing many Windows productivity applications since the Linux ones are almost as nice.
However, I'll take your word for it unless someone posts to the contrary. In fact, since you say such nice things about them, I might have to give Codeweavers a spin out of principle. =)
And on top of that, according to reliable reports, cedega is only marginally more stable than Wine ever was. Which in my opinion is not worth five bucks, especially given how much progress Wine has made in the last year or so in terms of compatability. Heck, the latest version can even run WoW with minimal amounts of fuss (according to its rank, which is Gold). And I'd rather wait for someone to brute-force copy protection in a free way instead of having to be at the mercy of those that provide it.
Cedega doesn't need your support. Wine does. Give the latest version a spin, download it, and provide bug reports for your favorite games so the remaining bugaboos can be fixed up.
I heard about that. It sounds fun, but that seems to me like more of a distraction than anything else, because you still have to level up somehow. You might think this is nuts, but Guild Wars pulled this off excillently... Ah, yes, because everyone knows about another MMO that does things better than WoW.
And I don't see how lumping me in with everyone else is a valid point at all. Seriously, would you want to pay 15 dollars a month for a game that was simple enough to the point of a bot being able to play, unaided?