Yes, it's open. That doesn't necessarily mean it can be distributed without breaking other laws. From the wikipedia article I linked earlier:
In many countries it is forbidden to sell or document programs that provide ways around copy prevention systems. CSS is not a copy prevention system, but rather primarily a region-control market segmentation system.[citation needed] Despite this fact, many Linux distributions do not contain libdvdcss (for example Debian, SUSE Linux, and Ubuntu) due to fears of running afoul of DMCA-style laws.
And I see WTF right there, as proprietary drivers are not required to play DVD. You can play DVDs very well with readily available open source drivers. What are you trying to say, bberens? That spreading FUD is fun for you? Are you malicious or just ignorant? Proprietary drivers are not required to play DVDs, but this library is.
The logging machine doesn't have to be compromised. The machine with the actual logs just has to _think_ that it's sending logs straight to the logging machine, when it is actually sending them to a man in the middle.
In terms of technology, the mod-chip's only function is to circumvent protection put there by the console makers. For it to have substantial non-infringing use, it would have to have another technological purpose outside of circumventing protection; it doesn't. My xbox is modded. I use it to run GNU/Linux so that other family members can use it for simple webbrowsing and instant messaging. The "protection" put in place stops any form of unsigned code from running, as well as copied games. You might have a case if the protection ONLY prevented me from playing copies of copyrighted material, but it doesn't (and even if it did, the fair use argument could still be made). The protection is designed to protect Microsoft's business model--they don't want you to run anything but games on your xbox--not to protect their copyrights. How is circumventing this type of "protection" wrong? I own the physical hardware and I ought to be able to modify it. I'm not even infringing on any firmware/bios copyrights, as the Cromwell bios used to boot GNU/Linux is not based on MS' bios as some of the others are.
An SSL certificate has to be signed by a CA, Verisign for example. There's nothing stopping someone from telling the system creating the logs to accept certificates from another CA (yourself), and using this CA to sign the man in the middle's SSL certificate. SSL won't provide any protection when the attacker has access to the software involved.
Please correct me if I am wrong... So a/b/tard decides the image boards are his personal raiding army, becomes a target and has a fit about it? Then, instead of just dissapearing and letting the hoard find a new target of the week, he tries to sabotage them; resulting in an escalation. Yep, you got it. Alex is both the Former Anonymous Turned Good and the guy whining about his myspace getting hacked (even though he was the one to post it to/b/). And the woman in the video? His mother. Very convenient that Fox didn't mention that these seemingly separate cases of "internet terrorism" are all the same case, isn't it?
On the other hand, imagine that you get an MBA. You'll have an office decorated with expensive furniture. Attractive well-dressed women will bring you free coffee. You'll get a high salary. You'll live in a nice house in a nice neighborhood and chances are that you'll even be able to convince a very attractive women to marry you. In short, with an MBA you'll be treated like you actually matter; like you're important. Whether you actually do matter is another question entirely but it sure will feel good the way you're treated. And that's part of the problem. American culture values the MBA more highly than scientists and other people who actually matter. As someone else said earlier, as a culture we have made fun of scientists, valued the steroid-pumped athlete and the slash and burn executive. But innovators, researchers, teachers, etc - all of the professions that would have been able to prepare this country for the future - have been basically discarded.
Even there the emphasis is less and less on the actual science and more on business and so called leadership skills. People are being trained less in hard science and more in corporate ways. If you take an engineering class, from my experience, half the people don't care about being an engineer and want to get their MBA and be a manager and "make money". I've got the same impression from looking into top engineering schools and talking with others about them. MIT rejected one person I talked to because he didn't have enough "entrepreneurial spirit". Checking for this is apparently part of their screening process and something the interviewers are told to look for. What the hell does science have to do with "entrepreneurial spirit"? The goal ought to be to further science, not to start a business and make money off of it, yet even the top engineering schools seem to look for students that want to make money.
You can't retroactively change a license agreement. I can license *you* my code under the BSD license and then license *Microsoft* the same code under the GPL. That doesn't make *you* bound to the GPL or anything. Read the second part of his post. The point is that new versions of the software will be released as GPLv3 and make it into SUSE.
2 - People who have those vouchers from MS For copies of SUSE may hold on to them until parts of the linux kernel and other related software is actually released under GPLv3. Once that happens then they'll redeem those vouchers for the version of SUSE that has the GPLv3 code in it.
There are lots of guys out there running software companies that produce crappier software than MS and are less ethical. Since they aren't rich, however, nobody gives a shit. No, we give less of a shit because they're not as widespread (which is directly related to Gates being rich).
Not to be too picky, but Qt and GTK+ in fact have changed plenty. Qt is up to its 4th major version, and GTK+ is up to its second. Technically the GTK 1.x branch still exists, even if nobody willingly uses it. True, but all the distros I've used still provide packages for the older versions of those toolkits, and in such a way that GTK 1.x and 2.x can both be installed.
1) Distributions get outdated fairly quickly. Package maintainers don't have time to be backporting every package to older versions of the distribution. This means you, as a user, either have to keep updating to the latest stable distribution (or potentially suffer the consequenses of going "unstable" to get what you want) or you have to compile the stuff from source yourself. As opposed to Windows.. where there is no package management and you're forced to install everything manually anyway?
2) If you can't afford to be upgrading every single time a new major release comes out or run unstable (say you have hundreds of workstations or dozens of servers, for example), then you end up with a bunch of custom compiled apps which actually subverts that packaging system. Now you have to worry about breaking all the custom compiled stuff when you DO finally get round to upgrading the base distribution... which makes the upgrade that much more daunting. This is why I run Debian on servers. Upgrades from one Debian stable release to another are, in my experience, completely painless. If I want to deploy custom compiled code to the servers, I create a proper.deb (correct dependencies, etc) and let apt handle it, just as it handles 'official' packages. Yes, that's more work than just using a package from the official repositories, but it's less work than anything else I've seen and it's a situation I rarely encounter.
3) Commercial/close source software. Commercial vendors can't offload the package management onto distribution maintainers. Not only do third-party vendors need to package and test their software on dozen's of different linux flavors, but they h ave to *support* it. They could, of course, just pick one or two major distributions to support, but then people who've chosen something else, for whatever reason, are left out in the cold. That is something you need to think about as a corporate user. Honestly, if a company isn't going to release source, I don't give a shit how hard it is for them to package it. If they want others to do the work for them, they're welcome to release the code. I'm not interested in having unfree software on my system and I really don't care if that makes the system less attractive to corporations. The system works fine for free software.
Sure it is an issue. You're just offloading the issue onto distribution maintainers. The work still needs to be done. And because of the massive fragmentation in the Linux world, it is often redundant. Yes, and it's the distribution maintainers' job to do it. They expect to take care of it. You provide the source and they will be happy to package it (and place it in a testing repository so it can be tested before being released into a stable repository). What's wrong with that? It may be redundant, but you're not doing the work so I see no reason to complain if the distribution maintainers don't. It was their choice to create the distribution.
There's no need to prevent you from running a modified executable. You only need to be prevented from connecting to the game's server with a modified executable.
If a dev hears about a petition saying that an ISD is abusing his position, I see no problem with the dev resolving the petition immediately instead of going through the petition queue and reviewing every petition before it first. Petitions of that importance probably are already prioritized more highly internally, but CCP obviously can't do anything about the petition until they get to it and read it. It makes sense for the devs to take care of a petition like that as soon as they become aware of it. Now, if the petition were over something minor and it was handled that quickly, I agree that would be abuse. It's true that BoB may gain an advantage because devs in its ranks hear of the petitions that way, but CCP claims that there are devs in other major alliances as well, so it's not an exclusive advantage. It's more a side effect of how the game works, and the alternatives (not allowing the devs to play the game or forcing them to ignore petitions that should have priority if they learn about them through their alliance) aren't any better.
This said, I'm giving CCP the benefit of the doubt and assuming that this petition was handled so quickly only because of its potentially serious nature. Again, if the petition was over something minor handling it so quickly would be irresponsible.
They've completely ignored one of the very serious accusations (the one that said that players have the msn contact details of devs - sure they had a petition, but 5 minutes turn around on a petition resulting in the dismissal of a volunteer has to be a speed record in the world of MMORPGs), and actually more or less acknowledged the one about rigging story lines.
Isn't it more likely that one of the devs was in BoB and heard about the petition ingame? It's no secret that the devs are encouraged to play the game, and that explanation is a bit more reasonable and less sensationalist.
Disclaimer: I have yet to rtfa.
Gentoo breaks as often as it does because portage's handling of dependancies is a bad joke. Actually, I don't know if it's portage itself or poor quality ebuilds, but "emerge --update world" breaks for me about 40% of the time (no, I'm not running the unstable ~x86).
You want emerge -uD world (or --update --deep). Without --deep, portage checks only the immediate dependencies as opposed to the dependencies for the entire portage tree. This is in the documentation, so you can't really blame Gentoo for it. I run both x86 and ~x86 on various machines, update no less than once every two weeks, and have never had any serious problems.
concrete, n.: 2. (Logic)
(a) Standing for an object as it exists in nature,
invested with all its qualities, as distinguished from
standing for an attribute of an object; -- opposed to
abstract.
Nothing physical is lost. You can argue about abstract losses that may or may not exist (e.g. money that would have been made if the game wasn't copied) all you want, but you cannot say that the company has lost anything physical. That's why the law doesn't consider it stealing.
I spend thousands of dollars a year on groceries. Am I entitled to steal the odd packet of biscuits? If the biscuits really *rock*, then I might buy some of them next time.
It's ok right?
Taking stuff you haven't paid for is morally wrong. you can call it what you like, it doesn't change the fact that its a dirty low-down thing to do.
The difference being that when you steal a packet of biscuits, the store is now missing a packet of biscuits that could have been sold to someone else. When you copy electronic media, no one loses anything concrete. The best you can do is to argue that copying electronic media deprives the producer of revenue, but to say that everyone who copies a game would have bought the game if they hadn't copied it simply isn't true.
Is it copyright infringement? sure. Is it illegal? sure. Is it morally wrong? good question.
If we have a genetic disposition to need God, why is atheism more common among the young people that I have known and still know?
The older one becomes, the more attractive the idea of an afterlife gets.
Slashdot Mirror
From the wikipedia article I linked earlier: In many countries it is forbidden to sell or document programs that provide ways around copy prevention systems. CSS is not a copy prevention system, but rather primarily a region-control market segmentation system.[citation needed] Despite this fact, many Linux distributions do not contain libdvdcss (for example Debian, SUSE Linux, and Ubuntu) due to fears of running afoul of DMCA-style laws.
The logging machine doesn't have to be compromised. The machine with the actual logs just has to _think_ that it's sending logs straight to the logging machine, when it is actually sending them to a man in the middle.
An SSL certificate has to be signed by a CA, Verisign for example. There's nothing stopping someone from telling the system creating the logs to accept certificates from another CA (yourself), and using this CA to sign the man in the middle's SSL certificate. SSL won't provide any protection when the attacker has access to the software involved.
Hmm, I don't know. I like the name IPSEC better.
There's no need to prevent you from running a modified executable. You only need to be prevented from connecting to the game's server with a modified executable.
No, the GPL is about guaranteeing users' freedom. It does this by taking away their "freedom" to make the code unfree for other users.
If a dev hears about a petition saying that an ISD is abusing his position, I see no problem with the dev resolving the petition immediately instead of going through the petition queue and reviewing every petition before it first. Petitions of that importance probably are already prioritized more highly internally, but CCP obviously can't do anything about the petition until they get to it and read it. It makes sense for the devs to take care of a petition like that as soon as they become aware of it. Now, if the petition were over something minor and it was handled that quickly, I agree that would be abuse.
It's true that BoB may gain an advantage because devs in its ranks hear of the petitions that way, but CCP claims that there are devs in other major alliances as well, so it's not an exclusive advantage. It's more a side effect of how the game works, and the alternatives (not allowing the devs to play the game or forcing them to ignore petitions that should have priority if they learn about them through their alliance) aren't any better.
This said, I'm giving CCP the benefit of the doubt and assuming that this petition was handled so quickly only because of its potentially serious nature. Again, if the petition was over something minor handling it so quickly would be irresponsible.
They've completely ignored one of the very serious accusations (the one that said that players have the msn contact details of devs - sure they had a petition, but 5 minutes turn around on a petition resulting in the dismissal of a volunteer has to be a speed record in the world of MMORPGs), and actually more or less acknowledged the one about rigging story lines.
Isn't it more likely that one of the devs was in BoB and heard about the petition ingame? It's no secret that the devs are encouraged to play the game, and that explanation is a bit more reasonable and less sensationalist.
Disclaimer: I have yet to rtfa.
I don't know.. maybe people who value their freedom?
Dear sir,
Your mention of an "actress having sex on the beach" intrigues me.
I like your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Gentoo breaks as often as it does because portage's handling of dependancies is a bad joke. Actually, I don't know if it's portage itself or poor quality ebuilds, but "emerge --update world" breaks for me about 40% of the time (no, I'm not running the unstable ~x86).
You want emerge -uD world (or --update --deep). Without --deep, portage checks only the immediate dependencies as opposed to the dependencies for the entire portage tree. This is in the documentation, so you can't really blame Gentoo for it. I run both x86 and ~x86 on various machines, update no less than once every two weeks, and have never had any serious problems.
IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that copyrighted material isn't considered a "service"
No, it isn't.
concrete, n.: 2. (Logic)
(a) Standing for an object as it exists in nature,
invested with all its qualities, as distinguished from
standing for an attribute of an object; -- opposed to
abstract.
Nothing physical is lost. You can argue about abstract losses that may or may not exist (e.g. money that would have been made if the game wasn't copied) all you want, but you cannot say that the company has lost anything physical. That's why the law doesn't consider it stealing.
I spend thousands of dollars a year on groceries. Am I entitled to steal the odd packet of biscuits? If the biscuits really *rock*, then I might buy some of them next time.
It's ok right?
Taking stuff you haven't paid for is morally wrong. you can call it what you like, it doesn't change the fact that its a dirty low-down thing to do.
The difference being that when you steal a packet of biscuits, the store is now missing a packet of biscuits that could have been sold to someone else. When you copy electronic media, no one loses anything concrete. The best you can do is to argue that copying electronic media deprives the producer of revenue, but to say that everyone who copies a game would have bought the game if they hadn't copied it simply isn't true.
Is it copyright infringement? sure. Is it illegal? sure. Is it morally wrong? good question.
If we have a genetic disposition to need God, why is atheism more common among the young people that I have known and still know?
The older one becomes, the more attractive the idea of an afterlife gets.