I'm sure most companies would like to be the next disney. Make millions on public domain stuff, then use those millions to stop your stuff from entering the public domain so you can make more millions. Sounds good to me.
anyone can draw on the same public domain sources as Disney, but you have to make the story your own and not a derivative based on the Disney version. that's a fair enough challenge, I think.
a pre-written plot adventure is no fun to develope for several years, if you do it just for fun. it gets a bit old after you've played the bits through for the 20th time. but something like nethack gets over that by being random to a certain degree - every game is different.
each game is different only in the sense that the map changes and the placement of the monsters and traps.
these days, even the simplest solo dungeon crawl needs a stronger story, more interesting and varied environments, a more plausible set of challeges and a livelier cast of characters to hold a player's attention.
chances are, your jerry built, randomized, game, will have all the success of Indiana Jone's Desktop Adventures.
The problem, of course, is the same one you always run into in OS projects; the art.
The problem too, is that "art" is often defined too narrowly. Classic games like Fallout, Grim Fandango, System Shock, Planescape: Torment, etc., begin with a strong narrative, a richly imagined world, good writing. You need level designers with their own sense of drama and pacing who can bring that world to life in ways that entertain and challenge the player. You need competent vocal performances, music and audio effects. Ideally, players should be drawn so deeply and plausibly into the action that the graphics engine of a FPS or the die rolls of an RPG game fade into the background.
They are like the 2 year olds screaming "mine, mine, mine" without any rhyme or reason.
other than the fact that they borrowed $80-$100 million dollars to cover their production costs alone? other than the fact that their distribution rights are protected by law?
let's get real here. the most popular downloads are the most wanted, top selling, commercial releases.
If I remember correctly, I was taught in school that the government represented the people...
so maybe the people have decided that you have no right to distribute free copies of The Lord of the Rings on the Internet maybe the people represent larger and more diverse interests than Slashdot.
The neighbor should counter-sue Monsanto for damage to his land, tresspassing, interfereance with commerce, dumping, and anything else they can.
This isn't about seeds accidentally scattered about Great-Grandpa's back forty.
It is about modern, experimental, engineered, hybrids being collected and replanted on farms half the size of Connecticut. Hybrids which may save you tens of thousands of dollars in herbicide costs, tillage, etc. You do not sue Monsanto unless and until you are caught selling the "contaminated" grain.
Do you not find it worrying that the vendor of Windows (MS) is sticking band-aids over their security holes with an anti spyware program instead of actually fixing the holes that let it in in the first place?
It is as much about psychology, the art of the con, how cleverly you bait the trap, as it is about the technology of a particular O/S. So long as a user can install an executable, there will always be a way in.
A wise man once told me that the right to free speech is not the freedom to say what you want. It is the freedom someone has to say things you don't want to hear.
a wise man would also tell you to take your dog and pony show elsewhere unless you have six months to spare for an intimate tour of the county lock-up. free speech within a courthouse has very limited dimensions.
Longhorn will provide XP style rendering on older graphics cards. Systems with newer graphic chips will have full 3D accelerated graphics thereby taking the rendering work away from the CPU and improving performance.
And from their actions, do they even HAVE copyright laws in China?
For an introduction in English to the Intellectual Property Law of China: Ministry of Science and Technology: Laws and Regulations. China's IP law is modeled on that of its world trading partners, but with many opportunites for the state to intervene in the national interest.
ENTRAPMENT - A person is 'entrapped' when he is induced or persuaded...to commit a crime that he had no previous intent to commit... However, there is no entrapment where a person is ready and willing to break the law and the Government agents merely provide what appears to be a favorable opportunity... Entrapment
I work with lusers. Lusers are SpongeBob Squarepants without the personality. They are un-intelligent generally, but more so when it comes to computers.
There is nothing in the world so self-defeating as to bring an attitude like this into the workplace. Everyone picks up on it and you will be at war from the day you arrive.
I still believe you should speak to the developer first. In any case, reporting a vulneribility doesn't mean you have to publish a primer on how to exploit it.
It troubles me that Secunia upgraded a threat four days before Microsoft was scheduled to distrbute a patch. There are opportunites here for grandstand plays that can be damaging to open and closed source projects alike.
It's perfectly OK to let the coders of open source projects know about security holes because they are not going to sue you. If you find a hole in a commercial product just announce it anonymously on the usenet and let it go.
In other words, open source programmers should be warned privately when they have a problem which needs fixing. But you should be free to broadcast anonymous charges against closed source developers without fear of reprisal.
Software engineers and governments and everone just best get used to the fact that people are going to reverse engineer everything they can
engineers do not make the law, engineers are not above the law. engineers can do hard time. welcome to the world as it is and not as you would like it to be.
whistleblower protection generally means that employees should be protected against retaliation for complaints made in good faith through channels or to appropriate public authorities. Model Whistleblower Statute
"To use an analogy, it's a little bit as if Ford was selling cars with defective brakes. If I realised that there was a problem, opened the hood and took a few pictures to prove it, and published everything on my Web site. Then Ford could file a complaint against me," added Tena.
The proper analogy would be to publishing details of a manufacturing defect in a way that would make it easy and perhaps undetectable to sabotage Ford brakes, an open invitation to fraud or murder.
There are MILLIONS of Canadians who live 3+ hours away from the US border. How come those people have access to high speed internet if they want it?
It doesn't stretch the truth much to say that everyone in Canada lives within a three hour drive of the U.S. border. But more significantly, perhaps, the Canadian population is concentrated in just four urban regions: the Golden Horseshoe in southern Ontario, (Niagara Falls-Hamilton-Toronto,) Montréal, British Columbia's Lower Mainland and southern Vancouver Island, and the Calgary-Edmonton corridor. The Atlas of Canada
The penalties under Title 18 are lower (but stiff enough) if you are not making money on the deal.
Federal prosecutors usually have too much on their plate to pursue minor offenders agressively. But you do not want to be caught in a sting with the big boys with hundreds of marketable theatrical titles on your hard drive.
If you go drunk with the intent to (ie. to muster up the courage to) assault somebody in particular, then maybe. Otherwise, get real.
Get real yourself. You drink, you drive, you kill someone, the charge can still be homicide:
The most important single fact to remember about intoxication is that in most courts, intoxication will not negate the element of recklessness. In other words, if a particular element of a crime can be satisfied by a mental state of recklessness, D's intoxication will be irrelevant.Responsibility
Now we can fill up our jails with even more people who are as dangerous as marijuana smokers...
The federal government rarely has jurisdiction over crimes which have traditionally been prosecuted locally. Generally, there has to be an interstate or international dimension to the offense.
Federal drug prosecutions are almost entirely focused on the drug trade. In 2001 prison sentences for federal drug offenses looked like this:
Drug Trafficking 21,265, Other drug felonies, 1,648, Possession 276
I would take the odds that non-violent drug offenders in the federal system were resident in D.C. or in the handful of other places where the feds do have local police power, a military base, an Indian reservation.
It is unlikely that you will ever be charged with possession in the federal system, and unlikelier still that you will serve time. In 2001, 289 were found not guilty, 476 received probation only, over 100 were simply fined or had their sentenced suspended. Defendants in criminal cases terminating in U.S. District Court, fiscal year 2001
Makes one wonder how they determine the signatures of files they believe are spyware.
The program will flag executables that have legitimate names but are suspect for other reasons, such as authorship or location, for example, smss.exe, a Microsoft NT service, should be found in WINDOWS32 and nowhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
anyone can draw on the same public domain sources as Disney, but you have to make the story your own and not a derivative based on the Disney version. that's a fair enough challenge, I think.
each game is different only in the sense that the map changes and the placement of the monsters and traps.
these days, even the simplest solo dungeon crawl needs a stronger story, more interesting and varied environments, a more plausible set of challeges and a livelier cast of characters to hold a player's attention.
chances are, your jerry built, randomized, game, will have all the success of Indiana Jone's Desktop Adventures.
The problem too, is that "art" is often defined too narrowly. Classic games like Fallout, Grim Fandango, System Shock, Planescape: Torment, etc., begin with a strong narrative, a richly imagined world, good writing. You need level designers with their own sense of drama and pacing who can bring that world to life in ways that entertain and challenge the player. You need competent vocal performances, music and audio effects. Ideally, players should be drawn so deeply and plausibly into the action that the graphics engine of a FPS or the die rolls of an RPG game fade into the background.
other than the fact that they borrowed $80-$100 million dollars to cover their production costs alone? other than the fact that their distribution rights are protected by law?
let's get real here. the most popular downloads are the most wanted, top selling, commercial releases.
so maybe the people have decided that you have no right to distribute free copies of The Lord of the Rings on the Internet maybe the people represent larger and more diverse interests than Slashdot.
Not always. Corn has been selectively bred for thousands of years. It does not and can not exist in the wild.
This isn't about seeds accidentally scattered about Great-Grandpa's back forty.
It is about modern, experimental, engineered, hybrids being collected and replanted on farms half the size of Connecticut. Hybrids which may save you tens of thousands of dollars in herbicide costs, tillage, etc. You do not sue Monsanto unless and until you are caught selling the "contaminated" grain.
It is as much about psychology, the art of the con, how cleverly you bait the trap, as it is about the technology of a particular O/S. So long as a user can install an executable, there will always be a way in.
a wise man would also tell you to take your dog and pony show elsewhere unless you have six months to spare for an intimate tour of the county lock-up. free speech within a courthouse has very limited dimensions.
never let truth get in the way of a good story...
For an introduction in English to the Intellectual Property Law of China: Ministry of Science and Technology: Laws and Regulations. China's IP law is modeled on that of its world trading partners, but with many opportunites for the state to intervene in the national interest.
If I post the street address, the key to the lock, and the contents of the cash box, it is hard to feign innocence when someone cracks open the vault.
ENTRAPMENT - A person is 'entrapped' when he is induced or persuaded...to commit a crime that he had no previous intent to commit... However, there is no entrapment where a person is ready and willing to break the law and the Government agents merely provide what appears to be a favorable opportunity... Entrapment
Geeks like power. But XP Starter Edition is being localized and marketed to absolute beginners.
There is nothing in the world so self-defeating as to bring an attitude like this into the workplace. Everyone picks up on it and you will be at war from the day you arrive.
It troubles me that Secunia upgraded a threat four days before Microsoft was scheduled to distrbute a patch. There are opportunites here for grandstand plays that can be damaging to open and closed source projects alike.
In other words, open source programmers should be warned privately when they have a problem which needs fixing. But you should be free to broadcast anonymous charges against closed source developers without fear of reprisal.
engineers do not make the law, engineers are not above the law. engineers can do hard time. welcome to the world as it is and not as you would like it to be.
go public and you are on your own.
The proper analogy would be to publishing details of a manufacturing defect in a way that would make it easy and perhaps undetectable to sabotage Ford brakes, an open invitation to fraud or murder.
It doesn't stretch the truth much to say that everyone in Canada lives within a three hour drive of the U.S. border. But more significantly, perhaps, the Canadian population is concentrated in just four urban regions: the Golden Horseshoe in southern Ontario, (Niagara Falls-Hamilton-Toronto,) Montréal, British Columbia's Lower Mainland and southern Vancouver Island, and the Calgary-Edmonton corridor. The Atlas of Canada
Federal prosecutors usually have too much on their plate to pursue minor offenders agressively. But you do not want to be caught in a sting with the big boys with hundreds of marketable theatrical titles on your hard drive.
Get real yourself. You drink, you drive, you kill someone, the charge can still be homicide:
The most important single fact to remember about intoxication is that in most courts, intoxication will not negate the element of recklessness. In other words, if a particular element of a crime can be satisfied by a mental state of recklessness, D's intoxication will be irrelevant. Responsibility
The federal government rarely has jurisdiction over crimes which have traditionally been prosecuted locally. Generally, there has to be an interstate or international dimension to the offense.
Federal drug prosecutions are almost entirely focused on the drug trade. In 2001 prison sentences for federal drug offenses looked like this:
Drug Trafficking 21,265, Other drug felonies, 1,648, Possession 276
I would take the odds that non-violent drug offenders in the federal system were resident in D.C. or in the handful of other places where the feds do have local police power, a military base, an Indian reservation.
It is unlikely that you will ever be charged with possession in the federal system, and unlikelier still that you will serve time. In 2001, 289 were found not guilty, 476 received probation only, over 100 were simply fined or had their sentenced suspended. Defendants in criminal cases terminating in U.S. District Court, fiscal year 2001
The program will flag executables that have legitimate names but are suspect for other reasons, such as authorship or location, for example, smss.exe, a Microsoft NT service, should be found in WINDOWS32 and nowhere else.