Can the company be held responsible, even if it's the users choice? If I tell my friend that if he drives really fast when a police offer wants to pull him over, am I responsible when he runs from the cops the next time he might be asked to pull over while driving?
The legal concept is called "tortious contract interference". Usually it's a charge levied against one company by another if the second company has an employment contract with someone, but the first company attempts to hire that person out from under them. It could conceivably be applied more broadly, although this is probably the first time it's been used in this specific context. (I've been hoping that MMOG companies would use it against gold sellers, which they quite possibly might if this case works out.)
As for your analogy, there are a few things that make it not very apt for this situation. First off, are you talking about criminal or civil liability? I'm pretty sure (I ANAL, though) that you wouldn't be criminally liable, but I have no idea about civil liability if actual damages arise. Second, you're talking about a different sort of case. Contract interference is a specific tort that's different from the damage to property or person that might arise in a car accident.
Analogies usually fall short of their intent, but I'll try to come up with one anyway: Suppose I'm contracted to fix the roof on your house, and you need me to finish the job by the weekend because it's supposed to rain. In fact, the finish date is in the contract. Now suppose that CowboyNeal (hey, why not) wants me to do some work on his house, and he pays me extra to do the work for him ahead of all the other work I'm supposed to do. As a result, I don't even get started on your house before the weekend gets here, and the rain causes a bunch of damage to the inside of your house.
Now, you could sue me and probably win, not only for any money that you paid me already (because I broke the contract) but for the water damage that was caused to the rest of your house as a foreseeable consequence of not honoring the contract. But you could also sue CowboyNeal for interfering with the contract that you and I had, and there's at least a possibility that you could claim damages against either or both of us (jointly and severally, meaning you can claim your pound of flesh from whichever of us you choose, as long as you get exactly one pound of flesh total).
In the WoW/Glider case, the idea is that the folks making Glider are interfering with the contract between Blizzard and the player, because the player (every player) has contracted with Blizzard not to cheat while playing the game (among other things). The Glider folks permit the player to violate the contract by providing a tool that allows the average person to do things they ordinarily would lack the proficiency to do (i.e., hack the game). What's more, they actually charge money for their software, meaning that they enter into their own contract with the player, which probably makes them more culpable than if they merely posted their software on the Internet for anyone to use.
(Again, I ANAL, so take what I just said with a big ol' lick of salt.)
Yes. YouTube is shaking down the Mafia. Turnabout is fair play, though, since the ??AA has been shaking down elderly/juvenile/disabled/computer illiterate people for years now.
But seriously, there's a huge difference between complying with the law for free (which YouTube is doing) and accepting an agreement to go above and beyond the call of duty (which YouTube is now offering).
The tit-for-tat response to economic warfare exercised by China would probably be a blockade/embargo of oil to China. They currently import roughly half of their oil, and this dependence is as much a weakness to them as our dependence is to us. (Perhaps even more so, if our government gets its collective head out of its ass and starts putting real effort into converting our oil-based infrastructure to something else.)
Well, you know and I know that His Noodly Appendage wasn't really responsible for cat vision, but I don't see how a discussion on the veracity of evolution theory arises from those experiments.
More specifically, HIV is a retrovirus. This means that as a standalone virus it contains RNA, but when it enters a cell, it uses reverse transcriptase to transcribe its RNA sequence into the equivalent DNA strand, which the cell's normal transcription/translation mechanism picks up and turns into the proteins and RNA that make the virus work.
It's the reverse transcription process that has a high error rate, which is why HIV's rate of mutation is so high. This results in a lot of nonviable DNA, but the virus takes years to work anyway. Eventually, some of these mutations result in a change in the proteins that are attacked by the various HIV drugs so that those drugs no longer work.
As for whether your statement about knowledge in treating various types of viruses is true or not, I don't know, but scientists do know an awful lot about HIV in particular. Each drug is meant to target a specific protein coded by the virus's genome. Being able to use drugs to target a "weak spot" (a spot that is brittle versus mutation) in the genome directly would be a major coup against the virus. This would be a great application for the grid computing mentioned in an earlier/. article.
There's too much we don't know aobut infant vision to mess with the brains early development
An interesting tidbit on this topic: Scientists have done experiments in cats where they've blocked all incoming light to the cat's eyes during early kittenhood. A portion of the visual cortex does not organize properly without this input, causing the cats to have permanent non-functional vision. A similar effect is seen in human children who are born with cataracts or develop them very shortly after birth.
(Hubel and Wiesel received part of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine for this work done through the 1960s and 70s.)
But you're taking faith as being 100% bad, and that's simply not the case. What about the people who give money to support their church's soup kitchen, or help out in other ways to provide for those who are homeless or otherwise down on their luck? They give because of their faith, in part. The charitable givers who are Christian, for example, give because they believe that Jesus told them to provide for the needy. The only "evidence" they have of that - and that Jesus was more than just some guy - is their faith.
As I said before, faith itself is neither evil nor good. It's all in what you do with it.
The problem is that moderate people who value faith let extremists off the hook. If faith is a good thing, then extreme faith must be extremely good, even if it's destructive.
If you take Democrats to be correct that the 2006 election was a referendum on the Iraq war, then people of "stronger" faith (more frequent churchgoers) supported Republicans more strongly in 2006 than other demographic groups. While the link between Iraq and terrorism was originally tenuous at best, much of the violence in Iraq today is being perpetrated by extremists, and those who support continuing our efforts in Iraq do so because they feel that Iraq would fall to extremists (a la Iran, Syria, and possibly Lebanon) if we were to leave today. That's hardly "letting extremists off the hook".
Part of the reason that this works, obviously, is that auto racing is replete with ads already, plastered all over the cars or in various spots around the track. Of course, nearly all of these advertisers are major companies or household names. If Google starts piping ads into an online racing game similar to the fly-by-night cruft you sometimes get with AdSense, I can easily see the disgust levels rising enough to turn off auto racing fans who are already strongly conditioned toward seeing advertising.
Faith keeps women from leaving abusive husbands because the hope they'll see the light.
That's not faith. It's fear, of their husbands, of not being able to take care of the kids as a single mom, and of loneliness. "Faith" is just how they rationalize it.
Faith keeps people from speaking out against the government because they hope their God will intervene.
Four out of five suicide-bombing Muslim extremists disagree.
Faith keeps people from enjoying the only life they know they have because they hope that the words in a particular book are true.
Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll are not the only way to enjoy life.
Now, I'm not saying that faith is always 100% good or 100% bad. It's a tool, of a sort, that can be used to increase the joy in your life or to piss you off at the world.
Yeah, yeah, I always whip out the SS2 when people are talking about what makes a game good. Anyway, --spoiler alert-- for anyone who hasn't played it through before.
SS2 has one of the biggest "reversals" in a game ever. You go through the first half of the game clinging to the hope that Polito, the one human who's spoken to you, will be able to help you get out of this mess of mutated humans and haywire robots. That's all shattered when it's revealed that Polito was dead all along, and it's really been SHODAN egging you on the whole time. The second half of the game involves you being her (now witting) pawn as you follow her instructions to destroy The Many.
It's an ingenious plot twist that makes you feel, despite your success in finally reaching Polito('s rotting corpse), like you actually lost. And every success you have ends up feeling a bit hollow as well, because SHODAN told you to do it. It makes the voice logs you find lying around that much more valuable, as you try to cling to whatever humanity you can, because that's the only real victory in sight.
Prof. Farnsworth: Is it true that stem cells may fight the aging process? Stem Cell Clinic Worker: Well, yes, in the same way that an infant may fight Muhammad Ali, but.... Prof. Farnsworth:(slapping down $300 Tricky Dick Fun Bill) One pound of stem cells, please! (Prof. Farnsworth begins slathering the stem cells all over his face.) Stem Cell Clinic Worker: Of course, any age-reversing effects will be purely temporary--euuugh!
using electrons for their race cars and plasma for the afterburners
And their wives still say they're compensating.
He might be on to something here
on
SCO Vs. Groklaw
·
· Score: 1, Funny
In other news, Darl McBride was overheard saying, "I don't believe that CowboyNeal actually exists. I believe that Slashdot is actually written by a bunch of SCO haters."
MS doesn't really care about DX10 adoption for its own sake. They just want to sell Vista. Unfortunately for them, leveraging DirectX isn't the way to go about it. If MS really wanted everyone to adopt DX10, they would have made it compatible with 2k/XP.
Instead, the unwillingness of people to buy Vista unless it's foisted upon them as part of a new system will make game developers that much more uninterested in trying to support DX9 and DX10 simultaneously. They'll go with whichever one has the largest install base, and since Vista ostensibly supports DX9, that means DX9 will be the focus of both game developers and hardware manufacturers once the really obvious unplayability bugs are worked out.
The Fort Knox anti-piracy measures of Vista don't help matters any when it comes to the adoption of DX10. Most gamers can't afford to upgrade their hardware, much less blow $300 on an OS of questionable upgradiness. DirectX became the de facto gaming API (sorry, OpenGL) because gamers were able to rip off Win95 and get DirectX for free.
It's when software authors decide they don't want, for example, militaries or law enforcement agencies of the world using their software due to personal moral convictions. There is no way the FSF could account for all the variations that individuals are likely to come up with on this. However, they can unify the assignment of copyright on open source software to make enforcing standard licenses like the GPL a lot easier.
This does not make sense. The Mafiaa could be suing these newly-minted millionaires into oblivion, and the more money Google pays out, the more money that can be recovered in a lawsuit. They should be encouraging Google to pay out more cash.
These website operators have the money - or the liquidatable assets - to make good on any judgment against them. Instead, they choose to sue children, old people, and disabled people, none of whom have pockets deep enough to pay out the outrageous sums the Mafiaa is claiming as damages, even though it's estimated that they lose money on every one of these lawsuits.
Actually, that's the reason it's still only an insurgency and not an all-out civil war.
We broke it, we bought it. Sure, we may have a splash of the blood of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who've killed each other (and been killed by Syrian and Iranian nationals) on our hands, but if we were to leave, it'd be the blood of hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
We want to live in peace just as much as the average Iraqi. Lots of Iraqis cooperate happily with US troops to try to make their country a better place. The problem is that some of the imams and other figures of power see a chance to rise to the position of supreme dictator that Saddam held until so recently, and they don't care who or how many they have to kill in order to get there. This insurgency isn't about opposing the US presence on principle. We're simply "in the way" of Muqtada and friends' rise to power.
Actually, this is not all that far off from an "identity clearinghouse" idea I had a while back.
You voluntarily register in person with a government agency your name, address, and certain other personally-identifiable information of the sort that is required for a bank or other lender to grant you credit. When you apply for a new credit account somewhere, that lender sends a request to the government agency containing the PII that you provided to the lender. The government agency then contacts you to verify whether the credit request is valid. Then, the government agency responds to the lender, either stating that (1) the person is not in their records, (2) the person is in their records and has confirmed verification, or (3) the person is in their records and has denied verification. It would then be illegal for the lender to open an account for which the #3 response was given by the government, and the lender would be responsible for clearing up all the resultant credit problems.
In order to modify your data with the agency, you must show up in person at the agency's office with photo ID. If such a system were implemented in coordination with local DMVs, they could use the photos on file for your driver's license.
The government already has access to this data anyway, so allowing people to voluntarily put it to good use to stop identity theft is a good thing. The banks won't do it because the losses they suffer haven't reached the amount of money they think they'll lose if they start being more vigilant about credit applications.
Mrs. White: He was deranged, he was a lunatic. He didn't actually seem to like me very much. He had threatened to kill me in public. Miss Scarlet: Why would he want to kill you in public? Wadsworth: I think she meant he threatened, in public, to kill her. Miss Scarlet: Oh.
Slashdot Mirror
Can the company be held responsible, even if it's the users choice? If I tell my friend that if he drives really fast when a police offer wants to pull him over, am I responsible when he runs from the cops the next time he might be asked to pull over while driving?
The legal concept is called "tortious contract interference". Usually it's a charge levied against one company by another if the second company has an employment contract with someone, but the first company attempts to hire that person out from under them. It could conceivably be applied more broadly, although this is probably the first time it's been used in this specific context. (I've been hoping that MMOG companies would use it against gold sellers, which they quite possibly might if this case works out.)
As for your analogy, there are a few things that make it not very apt for this situation. First off, are you talking about criminal or civil liability? I'm pretty sure (I ANAL, though) that you wouldn't be criminally liable, but I have no idea about civil liability if actual damages arise. Second, you're talking about a different sort of case. Contract interference is a specific tort that's different from the damage to property or person that might arise in a car accident.
Analogies usually fall short of their intent, but I'll try to come up with one anyway: Suppose I'm contracted to fix the roof on your house, and you need me to finish the job by the weekend because it's supposed to rain. In fact, the finish date is in the contract. Now suppose that CowboyNeal (hey, why not) wants me to do some work on his house, and he pays me extra to do the work for him ahead of all the other work I'm supposed to do. As a result, I don't even get started on your house before the weekend gets here, and the rain causes a bunch of damage to the inside of your house.
Now, you could sue me and probably win, not only for any money that you paid me already (because I broke the contract) but for the water damage that was caused to the rest of your house as a foreseeable consequence of not honoring the contract. But you could also sue CowboyNeal for interfering with the contract that you and I had, and there's at least a possibility that you could claim damages against either or both of us (jointly and severally, meaning you can claim your pound of flesh from whichever of us you choose, as long as you get exactly one pound of flesh total).
In the WoW/Glider case, the idea is that the folks making Glider are interfering with the contract between Blizzard and the player, because the player (every player) has contracted with Blizzard not to cheat while playing the game (among other things). The Glider folks permit the player to violate the contract by providing a tool that allows the average person to do things they ordinarily would lack the proficiency to do (i.e., hack the game). What's more, they actually charge money for their software, meaning that they enter into their own contract with the player, which probably makes them more culpable than if they merely posted their software on the Internet for anyone to use.
(Again, I ANAL, so take what I just said with a big ol' lick of salt.)
So, is this like a mafia shakedown?
Yes. YouTube is shaking down the Mafia. Turnabout is fair play, though, since the ??AA has been shaking down elderly/juvenile/disabled/computer illiterate people for years now.
But seriously, there's a huge difference between complying with the law for free (which YouTube is doing) and accepting an agreement to go above and beyond the call of duty (which YouTube is now offering).
The tit-for-tat response to economic warfare exercised by China would probably be a blockade/embargo of oil to China. They currently import roughly half of their oil, and this dependence is as much a weakness to them as our dependence is to us. (Perhaps even more so, if our government gets its collective head out of its ass and starts putting real effort into converting our oil-based infrastructure to something else.)
Well, you know and I know that His Noodly Appendage wasn't really responsible for cat vision, but I don't see how a discussion on the veracity of evolution theory arises from those experiments.
More specifically, HIV is a retrovirus. This means that as a standalone virus it contains RNA, but when it enters a cell, it uses reverse transcriptase to transcribe its RNA sequence into the equivalent DNA strand, which the cell's normal transcription/translation mechanism picks up and turns into the proteins and RNA that make the virus work.
/. article.
It's the reverse transcription process that has a high error rate, which is why HIV's rate of mutation is so high. This results in a lot of nonviable DNA, but the virus takes years to work anyway. Eventually, some of these mutations result in a change in the proteins that are attacked by the various HIV drugs so that those drugs no longer work.
As for whether your statement about knowledge in treating various types of viruses is true or not, I don't know, but scientists do know an awful lot about HIV in particular. Each drug is meant to target a specific protein coded by the virus's genome. Being able to use drugs to target a "weak spot" (a spot that is brittle versus mutation) in the genome directly would be a major coup against the virus. This would be a great application for the grid computing mentioned in an earlier
There's too much we don't know aobut infant vision to mess with the brains early development
An interesting tidbit on this topic: Scientists have done experiments in cats where they've blocked all incoming light to the cat's eyes during early kittenhood. A portion of the visual cortex does not organize properly without this input, causing the cats to have permanent non-functional vision. A similar effect is seen in human children who are born with cataracts or develop them very shortly after birth.
(Hubel and Wiesel received part of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine for this work done through the 1960s and 70s.)
But you're taking faith as being 100% bad, and that's simply not the case. What about the people who give money to support their church's soup kitchen, or help out in other ways to provide for those who are homeless or otherwise down on their luck? They give because of their faith, in part. The charitable givers who are Christian, for example, give because they believe that Jesus told them to provide for the needy. The only "evidence" they have of that - and that Jesus was more than just some guy - is their faith.
As I said before, faith itself is neither evil nor good. It's all in what you do with it.
The problem is that moderate people who value faith let extremists off the hook. If faith is a good thing, then extreme faith must be extremely good, even if it's destructive.
I definitely disagree with that statement. See the following set of polls: http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=174
If you take Democrats to be correct that the 2006 election was a referendum on the Iraq war, then people of "stronger" faith (more frequent churchgoers) supported Republicans more strongly in 2006 than other demographic groups. While the link between Iraq and terrorism was originally tenuous at best, much of the violence in Iraq today is being perpetrated by extremists, and those who support continuing our efforts in Iraq do so because they feel that Iraq would fall to extremists (a la Iran, Syria, and possibly Lebanon) if we were to leave today. That's hardly "letting extremists off the hook".
Part of the reason that this works, obviously, is that auto racing is replete with ads already, plastered all over the cars or in various spots around the track. Of course, nearly all of these advertisers are major companies or household names. If Google starts piping ads into an online racing game similar to the fly-by-night cruft you sometimes get with AdSense, I can easily see the disgust levels rising enough to turn off auto racing fans who are already strongly conditioned toward seeing advertising.
Faith keeps women from leaving abusive husbands because the hope they'll see the light.
That's not faith. It's fear, of their husbands, of not being able to take care of the kids as a single mom, and of loneliness. "Faith" is just how they rationalize it.
Faith keeps people from speaking out against the government because they hope their God will intervene.
Four out of five suicide-bombing Muslim extremists disagree.
Faith keeps people from enjoying the only life they know they have because they hope that the words in a particular book are true.
Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll are not the only way to enjoy life.
Now, I'm not saying that faith is always 100% good or 100% bad. It's a tool, of a sort, that can be used to increase the joy in your life or to piss you off at the world.
confirm response, accept or deny?
We've come a long way since "Abort, Retry, Fail?", haven't we.
Let's switch to the metric system while we're at it.
Pagan! Infidel! Heathen! Let all now know that the hum is truly His Noodly Appendage strumming His Gigantic Electric Guitar.
Yeah, yeah, I always whip out the SS2 when people are talking about what makes a game good. Anyway, --spoiler alert-- for anyone who hasn't played it through before.
SS2 has one of the biggest "reversals" in a game ever. You go through the first half of the game clinging to the hope that Polito, the one human who's spoken to you, will be able to help you get out of this mess of mutated humans and haywire robots. That's all shattered when it's revealed that Polito was dead all along, and it's really been SHODAN egging you on the whole time. The second half of the game involves you being her (now witting) pawn as you follow her instructions to destroy The Many.
It's an ingenious plot twist that makes you feel, despite your success in finally reaching Polito('s rotting corpse), like you actually lost. And every success you have ends up feeling a bit hollow as well, because SHODAN told you to do it. It makes the voice logs you find lying around that much more valuable, as you try to cling to whatever humanity you can, because that's the only real victory in sight.
Prof. Farnsworth: Is it true that stem cells may fight the aging process?
Stem Cell Clinic Worker: Well, yes, in the same way that an infant may fight Muhammad Ali, but....
Prof. Farnsworth: (slapping down $300 Tricky Dick Fun Bill) One pound of stem cells, please!
(Prof. Farnsworth begins slathering the stem cells all over his face.)
Stem Cell Clinic Worker: Of course, any age-reversing effects will be purely temporary--euuugh!
using electrons for their race cars and plasma for the afterburners
And their wives still say they're compensating.
In other news, Darl McBride was overheard saying, "I don't believe that CowboyNeal actually exists. I believe that Slashdot is actually written by a bunch of SCO haters."
MS doesn't really care about DX10 adoption for its own sake. They just want to sell Vista. Unfortunately for them, leveraging DirectX isn't the way to go about it. If MS really wanted everyone to adopt DX10, they would have made it compatible with 2k/XP.
Instead, the unwillingness of people to buy Vista unless it's foisted upon them as part of a new system will make game developers that much more uninterested in trying to support DX9 and DX10 simultaneously. They'll go with whichever one has the largest install base, and since Vista ostensibly supports DX9, that means DX9 will be the focus of both game developers and hardware manufacturers once the really obvious unplayability bugs are worked out.
The Fort Knox anti-piracy measures of Vista don't help matters any when it comes to the adoption of DX10. Most gamers can't afford to upgrade their hardware, much less blow $300 on an OS of questionable upgradiness. DirectX became the de facto gaming API (sorry, OpenGL) because gamers were able to rip off Win95 and get DirectX for free.
It's when software authors decide they don't want, for example, militaries or law enforcement agencies of the world using their software due to personal moral convictions. There is no way the FSF could account for all the variations that individuals are likely to come up with on this. However, they can unify the assignment of copyright on open source software to make enforcing standard licenses like the GPL a lot easier.
Asians get a bonus to mana regeneration.
What, you didn't know?
This does not make sense. The Mafiaa could be suing these newly-minted millionaires into oblivion, and the more money Google pays out, the more money that can be recovered in a lawsuit. They should be encouraging Google to pay out more cash.
These website operators have the money - or the liquidatable assets - to make good on any judgment against them. Instead, they choose to sue children, old people, and disabled people, none of whom have pockets deep enough to pay out the outrageous sums the Mafiaa is claiming as damages, even though it's estimated that they lose money on every one of these lawsuits.
Actually, that's the reason it's still only an insurgency and not an all-out civil war.
We broke it, we bought it. Sure, we may have a splash of the blood of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who've killed each other (and been killed by Syrian and Iranian nationals) on our hands, but if we were to leave, it'd be the blood of hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
We want to live in peace just as much as the average Iraqi. Lots of Iraqis cooperate happily with US troops to try to make their country a better place. The problem is that some of the imams and other figures of power see a chance to rise to the position of supreme dictator that Saddam held until so recently, and they don't care who or how many they have to kill in order to get there. This insurgency isn't about opposing the US presence on principle. We're simply "in the way" of Muqtada and friends' rise to power.
Tell it to the so-called insurgents. We'd be out of there by now if it weren't for them.
Actually, this is not all that far off from an "identity clearinghouse" idea I had a while back.
You voluntarily register in person with a government agency your name, address, and certain other personally-identifiable information of the sort that is required for a bank or other lender to grant you credit. When you apply for a new credit account somewhere, that lender sends a request to the government agency containing the PII that you provided to the lender. The government agency then contacts you to verify whether the credit request is valid. Then, the government agency responds to the lender, either stating that (1) the person is not in their records, (2) the person is in their records and has confirmed verification, or (3) the person is in their records and has denied verification. It would then be illegal for the lender to open an account for which the #3 response was given by the government, and the lender would be responsible for clearing up all the resultant credit problems.
In order to modify your data with the agency, you must show up in person at the agency's office with photo ID. If such a system were implemented in coordination with local DMVs, they could use the photos on file for your driver's license.
The government already has access to this data anyway, so allowing people to voluntarily put it to good use to stop identity theft is a good thing. The banks won't do it because the losses they suffer haven't reached the amount of money they think they'll lose if they start being more vigilant about credit applications.
Mrs. White: He was deranged, he was a lunatic. He didn't actually seem to like me very much. He had threatened to kill me in public.
Miss Scarlet: Why would he want to kill you in public?
Wadsworth: I think she meant he threatened, in public, to kill her.
Miss Scarlet: Oh.