When I said "use" I meant it in the sense of companies using the source in their own works, through modification or inclusion into their codebase, which would need to be sanctioned by the copyright holder, not "use" in the sense of compile and use the program.
So, if GPL was decreed unenforceable, what would it actually mean?
As near as I can tell, it would mean that lacking any permission to use the copyrighted source, anyone who used it without obtaining (non-GPL) permission from the copyright holder stood in violation of copyright law. IANAL, though.
The idea that people should, for whatever reason, react the same way towards a convicted illegal monopolist as they do towards one of it's extremely small competitors is too mind-numbingly stupid for words.
Besides, even if this were caused by a Microsoft product, the simple fact of the matter is that software should never be able to fry hardware in the manner we're seeing here. Period.
This is not a request for "public or declassified" information - Sci-Fi is requesting that classified information be de-classified. How they think suing the gov't will help, I don't know.
Because one of the reasons for the FOIA is to allow people to bring the government to court and have the legitimacy of the classification verified by the courts. Is a UFO sighting from 1965 legitimately still a matter of national security?
Government agencies can rarely be trusted to make these judgements themselves. See, for example, the classified CIA files identifying Santa Claus as a possible terrorist target. Despite the fact they'd been given a presidential order to declassify this (obviously humorous) memo along with thousands of other documents, they reluctantly released only a few sentences of the five page report. Which was when others noticed that the whole report, in its entirety, was available in the Gerald Ford Presidential Library.
Was their any legitimate reason for the CIA to consider this farcical document a matter of national security? No. It was purely the result of the contempt towards allowing the average citizen access to any information at all that this document was concealed.
you can just look at Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories for the Gameboy advance to see that developers for that system have yet to even use a tenth of its potential (the game has shown to be just slightly lower in quality than the PS2 original!!!!)
Now, I'm as much of a fan of the GBA as anyone, and I too think the N-Gage is a hunk of crap, but let's not go crazy here. Chain of Memories may well be a fine game, but the graphics aren't even in the same universe as the PS2 game; it's a purely sprite based, 2D game. Look for your self.
The software on it's not your property. It's MS'. You simply have a license to use it.
What you own is several pounds of plastic, metal, and semiconductor. Do what you want with it.
And, presumably, the notional under 18 year old of which we speak would like to do what he wants with it -- but the software (which, you are correct, he merely licenses, although from the publisher or developer who released it, and not necessarily from MS) monkeyed with the hardware (which he does own) without his permission. This *might* have been legal, under the unseen-before-purchase x-box EULA, but that can't be legally held to apply to him, since he is, as we said, under 18.
Sues for what? The XBox is doing everything it was advertised to do--it plays XBox games.
Illegally tampering with his property. The contract that would have made their silently mucking around with it legal wouldn't be binding, because the purchaser was under 18, and thus unable to legally enter into a contract.
Have you played them? Zelda games were always about action, screen filled with enemies attacking you from all sides. Clear it, move to the next one.
Are you, by chance, confusing Zelda with, say, Robotron? The Zelda games have always been, first and formost, Adventure-RPGs with heavy puzzle elements. I wouldn't call any of them primarily an action game.
Re:ynlo gcramblins eht tirsf dna tasl setterl
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
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· Score: 1
Eht sbviouo txperimene ot monfirc eht yheort si ot ees thaw sappenh nhew uoy ecrambls ynlo eht tirsf dna tasl setterl dna eeavl eht eiddlm setterl eht eams. Eompletc Kobbledegoog.
I ton'd wnok, ti eadm eenss ot em.
Re:Does this work for non native speakers?
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
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· Score: 1
My guess would be that, although she is fluent in spoken english, she's not as good at reading it as a native speaker would be, and is still sounding out the words mentally in order to determine the content.
My reasoning being that it's fairly well know that anyone experienced in reading english (or any other language with an alphabet-based writing system) actually identifies (known) words by their shape, and not by their letter order. It would take us forever to read if we had to serially process each letter, after all. My bet is that this "ticrk" is just exploiting that aspect of our visual processing capabilities.
Yes, the parents are to blame for buying the kids a game with "mature" rating. But if the game is the cause of the shooting, you still can't blame only the parents for it. The game had a part in all this.
The "Son of Sam" killer said that he killed because his neighbour's dog told him to. Should we blame the dog, then, for the murders? Or is it more the case that crazy people can be set off by anything? That's why they're crazy, after all.
My only reaction to this is to think: "Oh no!!! If this keeps up, I won't be able to buy any shitty games at all for my GameCube!! Oh woe is me".
Seriously, outside of Timesplitters 2, were there any games released by Eidos for the Cube that either weren't complete crap, weren't ports released far later than they were on other platforms, or both? And given that, is it Nintendo's fault that the games didn't sell, or Eidos' fault for having a shitty business plan?
Didn't Apple sue Microsoft (over a decade ago) for copying UI elements and lose?
Yes, but not for the reasons you think they did. Apple lost because the judge ruled that the license which MS had acquired from Apple for the GUI "look-and-feel" concepts in Windows 1.0 applied to all future versions as well, and not simply the single version Apple felt they had licensed it for.
In other words, Apple lost because the judge said their patent license to MS was broader than they thought it was, and not because the license/patent was itself invalid.
Re:Rules for crappy movies (slightly off topic)
on
Remember The Wizard?
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· Score: 1
Movies based on Saturday Night Live characters or skits will suck.
Wayne's Corollary: Unless the movie stars Mike Myers.
Re:SCO still packs a punch?
on
SCO SCO SCO!
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· Score: 4, Funny
Confucius: Man who italicizes word its spelling should respect lest moderators invite all to see folly.
Confucius say: Hey, I don't talk like Yoda. Give me some credit.
"It's not my fault I got burned by this McDonald's coffee, nobody told me it was hot!"
This one usually gets cited and laughed at, but what folks don't know is that the coffee in question was actually OBSCENELY hot, beyond the point of being safe because McDonalds likes to cut corners and keep an old pot of coffee around as long as they can by overheating it. Plus the suit was only for medical damages (to cover extensive skin grafts needed, not just a 'Oh, that hurt!' whine) and the jury are the ones who decided to inflate that to millions of dollars in order to punish McDonalds.
This is an important point, because that case is so often used to decry the legal system, even though the people using it are almost totally ignorant of the facts.
She was a 79 year old woman in the passenger side of the car, who opened the lid of the coffee to add cream (while the car was stationary) and spilled it, causing third degree (full-thickness) burns to 6% of her body, mostly in the genital and groin regions. It was shown during the trial that McDonald's had recieved more than 700 complaints about the temperature of their coffee within the proceeding ten years, that it was served well above industry standard temperatures, and that it was served a full 40 to 50 degrees above safe temperatures. McDonalds claimed that they needed to serve it that hot because people don't drink it until they arrive at their destination, but during trial it was shown that they had performed studies indicating that the majority of people intended to consume it immediately after purchase. She also did not make "millions" off the case, as many claim; McDonalds settled the case with her, presumably for less than the $480,000 that the judge had reduced the jury's award to.
Ironically, well before it went to trial she had offered to settle her claim with them for $20,000 - but McDonald's refused.
That's why the typical argument (I play video games, and I've never killed people) fails. Most people who are going to kill are deeply disturbed. The argument is whether the video games bring out latent homocidal tendencies. Culture can have negative effects on people's behavior.
No, that's why the argument that restricting media violence will decrease violent murders fails. A deeply disturbed person with latent homicidal tendencies can be set off by anything - that's why they're disturbed.
David 'Son of Sam' Berkowitz killed a bunch of people because his neighbor's dog told him to. So obviously dogs have the ability to influence the actions of (crazy) people by bringing out their latent homicidal tendencies, and should be restricted?
Yeah, because MAC address locking is all that difficult. Hell, most 802.11 access points turn it on by default.
Spoofing a MAC address is as easy as changing the value of a registry entry in Windows. All you'd need to do is sniff a MAC address off the network with the aforementioned pringles can. An unsecured physical layer is rife with possibilities for exploitation.
And even with you scenerio of a nosy neighbor, I hope you're using an SSL/HTTPS website, so your credit card number is secured through that interface.
Encrypting the physical layer is just silly. If you want your packets to stay private, use the appropriate encryption on proper level.
Leaving anyone with a pringles can and a bit of know-how able to use your internet connection to post child porn, contact terrorist cells, or hack into a corporate server. Smart!
Sheep Raider for the playstation (one). You play Ralph Wolf, trying to steal the sheep from Sam Sheepdog's herd, just like in the old Looney Tunes cartoons.
I know, it sounds like a stupid kid's game, but it's actually a thinking man's puzzle/stealth game(in the vein of MGS). I think the cognitive dissonance between its play style and subject/theme is the reason most people never gave this excellent game a shot.
No, actually. Lacking Control and Delete buttons, you have to push five 9's on the phone to get Windows PE to reboot whenever your call freezes on you.
I dunno what institution of higher learning you went to, but mine has a "Computing Ethics" course as a requirement for CS.
No, it isn't. I know what school I'm going to (it's the same as yours), and CMPUT 300 is not a requirement for a CS degree. It is only a requirement of the Specialization - Software Quality option. It is optional for all other programs, include Honours Comp. Sci.
Slashdot Mirror
When I said "use" I meant it in the sense of companies using the source in their own works, through modification or inclusion into their codebase, which would need to be sanctioned by the copyright holder, not "use" in the sense of compile and use the program.
So, if GPL was decreed unenforceable, what would it actually mean?
As near as I can tell, it would mean that lacking any permission to use the copyrighted source, anyone who used it without obtaining (non-GPL) permission from the copyright holder stood in violation of copyright law. IANAL, though.
The idea that people should, for whatever reason, react the same way towards a convicted illegal monopolist as they do towards one of it's extremely small competitors is too mind-numbingly stupid for words.
Besides, even if this were caused by a Microsoft product, the simple fact of the matter is that software should never be able to fry hardware in the manner we're seeing here. Period.
This is not a request for "public or declassified" information - Sci-Fi is requesting that classified information be de-classified. How they think suing the gov't will help, I don't know.
Because one of the reasons for the FOIA is to allow people to bring the government to court and have the legitimacy of the classification verified by the courts. Is a UFO sighting from 1965 legitimately still a matter of national security?
Government agencies can rarely be trusted to make these judgements themselves. See, for example, the classified CIA files identifying Santa Claus as a possible terrorist target. Despite the fact they'd been given a presidential order to declassify this (obviously humorous) memo along with thousands of other documents, they reluctantly released only a few sentences of the five page report. Which was when others noticed that the whole report, in its entirety, was available in the Gerald Ford Presidential Library.
Was their any legitimate reason for the CIA to consider this farcical document a matter of national security? No. It was purely the result of the contempt towards allowing the average citizen access to any information at all that this document was concealed.
you can just look at Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories for the Gameboy advance to see that developers for that system have yet to even use a tenth of its potential (the game has shown to be just slightly lower in quality than the PS2 original!!!!)
Now, I'm as much of a fan of the GBA as anyone, and I too think the N-Gage is a hunk of crap, but let's not go crazy here. Chain of Memories may well be a fine game, but the graphics aren't even in the same universe as the PS2 game; it's a purely sprite based, 2D game. Look for your self.
This is the craziest post I've read on Slashdot in a long time.
The software on it's not your property. It's MS'. You simply have a license to use it. What you own is several pounds of plastic, metal, and semiconductor. Do what you want with it.
And, presumably, the notional under 18 year old of which we speak would like to do what he wants with it -- but the software (which, you are correct, he merely licenses, although from the publisher or developer who released it, and not necessarily from MS) monkeyed with the hardware (which he does own) without his permission. This *might* have been legal, under the unseen-before-purchase x-box EULA, but that can't be legally held to apply to him, since he is, as we said, under 18.
Sues for what? The XBox is doing everything it was advertised to do--it plays XBox games.
Illegally tampering with his property. The contract that would have made their silently mucking around with it legal wouldn't be binding, because the purchaser was under 18, and thus unable to legally enter into a contract.
It seems to me that not connecting the damn thing to the network cable when using the x-box for game playing would solve this problem.
Have you played them? Zelda games were always about action, screen filled with enemies attacking you from all sides. Clear it, move to the next one.
Are you, by chance, confusing Zelda with, say, Robotron? The Zelda games have always been, first and formost, Adventure-RPGs with heavy puzzle elements. I wouldn't call any of them primarily an action game.
Eht sbviouo txperimene ot monfirc eht yheort si ot ees thaw sappenh nhew uoy ecrambls ynlo eht tirsf dna tasl setterl dna eeavl eht eiddlm setterl eht eams. Eompletc Kobbledegoog.
I ton'd wnok, ti eadm eenss ot em.
My guess would be that, although she is fluent in spoken english, she's not as good at reading it as a native speaker would be, and is still sounding out the words mentally in order to determine the content.
My reasoning being that it's fairly well know that anyone experienced in reading english (or any other language with an alphabet-based writing system) actually identifies (known) words by their shape, and not by their letter order. It would take us forever to read if we had to serially process each letter, after all. My bet is that this "ticrk" is just exploiting that aspect of our visual processing capabilities.
IIRC, every Zelda game going back to Link to the Past does the same thing.
Actually, the more I think about it, most games put out by Nintendo that involve dialog use the same technique.
Yes, the parents are to blame for buying the kids a game with "mature" rating. But if the game is the cause of the shooting, you still can't blame only the parents for it. The game had a part in all this.
The "Son of Sam" killer said that he killed because his neighbour's dog told him to. Should we blame the dog, then, for the murders? Or is it more the case that crazy people can be set off by anything? That's why they're crazy, after all.
My only reaction to this is to think: "Oh no!!! If this keeps up, I won't be able to buy any shitty games at all for my GameCube!! Oh woe is me".
Seriously, outside of Timesplitters 2, were there any games released by Eidos for the Cube that either weren't complete crap, weren't ports released far later than they were on other platforms, or both? And given that, is it Nintendo's fault that the games didn't sell, or Eidos' fault for having a shitty business plan?
Didn't Apple sue Microsoft (over a decade ago) for copying UI elements and lose?
Yes, but not for the reasons you think they did. Apple lost because the judge ruled that the license which MS had acquired from Apple for the GUI "look-and-feel" concepts in Windows 1.0 applied to all future versions as well, and not simply the single version Apple felt they had licensed it for.
In other words, Apple lost because the judge said their patent license to MS was broader than they thought it was, and not because the license/patent was itself invalid.
Movies based on Saturday Night Live characters or skits will suck.
Wayne's Corollary: Unless the movie stars Mike Myers.
Confucius: Man who italicizes word its spelling should respect lest moderators invite all to see folly.
Confucius say: Hey, I don't talk like Yoda. Give me some credit.
"It's not my fault I got burned by this McDonald's coffee, nobody told me it was hot!"
This one usually gets cited and laughed at, but what folks don't know is that the coffee in question was actually OBSCENELY hot, beyond the point of being safe because McDonalds likes to cut corners and keep an old pot of coffee around as long as they can by overheating it. Plus the suit was only for medical damages (to cover extensive skin grafts needed, not just a 'Oh, that hurt!' whine) and the jury are the ones who decided to inflate that to millions of dollars in order to punish McDonalds.
This is an important point, because that case is so often used to decry the legal system, even though the people using it are almost totally ignorant of the facts.
She was a 79 year old woman in the passenger side of the car, who opened the lid of the coffee to add cream (while the car was stationary) and spilled it, causing third degree (full-thickness) burns to 6% of her body, mostly in the genital and groin regions. It was shown during the trial that McDonald's had recieved more than 700 complaints about the temperature of their coffee within the proceeding ten years, that it was served well above industry standard temperatures, and that it was served a full 40 to 50 degrees above safe temperatures. McDonalds claimed that they needed to serve it that hot because people don't drink it until they arrive at their destination, but during trial it was shown that they had performed studies indicating that the majority of people intended to consume it immediately after purchase. She also did not make "millions" off the case, as many claim; McDonalds settled the case with her, presumably for less than the $480,000 that the judge had reduced the jury's award to.
Ironically, well before it went to trial she had offered to settle her claim with them for $20,000 - but McDonald's refused.
That's why the typical argument (I play video games, and I've never killed people) fails. Most people who are going to kill are deeply disturbed. The argument is whether the video games bring out latent homocidal tendencies. Culture can have negative effects on people's behavior.
No, that's why the argument that restricting media violence will decrease violent murders fails. A deeply disturbed person with latent homicidal tendencies can be set off by anything - that's why they're disturbed.
David 'Son of Sam' Berkowitz killed a bunch of people because his neighbor's dog told him to. So obviously dogs have the ability to influence the actions of (crazy) people by bringing out their latent homicidal tendencies, and should be restricted?
Yeah, because MAC address locking is all that difficult. Hell, most 802.11 access points turn it on by default.
Spoofing a MAC address is as easy as changing the value of a registry entry in Windows. All you'd need to do is sniff a MAC address off the network with the aforementioned pringles can. An unsecured physical layer is rife with possibilities for exploitation.
And even with you scenerio of a nosy neighbor, I hope you're using an SSL/HTTPS website, so your credit card number is secured through that interface. Encrypting the physical layer is just silly. If you want your packets to stay private, use the appropriate encryption on proper level.
Leaving anyone with a pringles can and a bit of know-how able to use your internet connection to post child porn, contact terrorist cells, or hack into a corporate server. Smart!
Sheep Raider for the playstation (one). You play Ralph Wolf, trying to steal the sheep from Sam Sheepdog's herd, just like in the old Looney Tunes cartoons.
I know, it sounds like a stupid kid's game, but it's actually a thinking man's puzzle/stealth game(in the vein of MGS). I think the cognitive dissonance between its play style and subject/theme is the reason most people never gave this excellent game a shot.
Five 9's as in 9.9999%?
No, actually. Lacking Control and Delete buttons, you have to push five 9's on the phone to get Windows PE to reboot whenever your call freezes on you.
I dunno what institution of higher learning you went to, but mine has a "Computing Ethics" course as a requirement for CS.
No, it isn't. I know what school I'm going to (it's the same as yours), and CMPUT 300 is not a requirement for a CS degree. It is only a requirement of the Specialization - Software Quality option. It is optional for all other programs, include Honours Comp. Sci.