We're very much in the same boat as you, with the exception of the activex thing - fortunately, we dodged that bullet.
You know the main reason _I_ don't want to switch to vista? (besides the resource drag, the UI changeover confusing the users and the app and hardware compatibility issues, which are all user problems really)
The DRM. Windows XP; we chuck on our VLK code, it works, and we're done forever. No internet access or server required. Works lovely with our cloning system. Vista volume activation has a separate keyserver, which has to have a minimum 50 clients connect to it for it to function, and then that server has to activate on the internet. Plus the clients have to check into the keyserver at least every 6 months. Plus we have to buy extra licences to replace the OEM ones we already have. There's no way to practically use the OEM codes on the back of the machines, there's no way I'm retyping 200 different licence numbers in every time we reimage a campus. Plus the students just steal them off the back of the cases and get them invalidated anyway.
Laptops are a pain in the arse under this scheme too, with the checking requirements, so we'd use the OEM codes instead, which requires keeping track of the OEM CDs for every single laptop type, because the users sure as shit won't keep track of their restore discs.
Vista DRM requires a whole crapload of extra work, an extra server and an extra 2008 server licence to run the keyserver. OK, we don't need any actual extra tin as we're virtualised, but it's still a crapload of extra effort for something which benefits us not at all.
XP on the desktop for us for as long as I can get away with it. The users certainly prefer it, it's still getting security updates, so who the hell cares if we carry on using downgrade rights?
The reason you have to take the laptop out in the first place is because it's so big and dense it blocks the x-ray machine from scanning the rest of the bag behind it effectively.
A flip out laptop bag that allows it to be scanned, and the other half to be scanned, while not having any pockets in that section that could conceal other items easily does make sense. Whether it's worth $100 for the few seconds effort is another question.
You can thank Richard Reid filling his shoes with explosives and trying to set it off with his shoelaces for the shoe business.
The liquids ban because of that binary explosive 'threat'? That's complete horseshit though. If they were banning white powders, that would make a lot more sense.
Compact Oxford English Dictionary: police state
â noun - a totalitarian state in which political police secretly supervise and control citizensâ(TM) activities.
freedictionary.com: police state Noun a state in which a government controls people's freedom through the police
wikipedia.org: The term police state is a term for a state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of the population... One way to view the concept of the police state and the free state is through the medium of a seesaw, where any law focused on removing liberty is seen as moving toward a police state, and any law which limits government oversight is seen as moving toward a Free state.
Making up the laws as you go is not required, nor does it have to be a secret police force doing it. It makes you a more extreme police state, but is not fundamental. South Africa under apartheid was a police state run as a democracy under the rule of law, even if those laws were abhorant.
Having all people under constant police surveillance and enforcement regardless of their innocence sounds like pretty rigid and repressive control of freedom to me.
We've had automatic number recognition camera systems in the UK for a while now, and they're repidly growing in number. There's already many on major roads, and of course the London congestion charge (daily fee to drive into the city centre) is enforced by saturating the city centre with them. The police use them too, though I'm not aware of them being routined fitted to patrol vehicles yet, just special DVLA enforcement squads.
They mean the government has the growing power to watch and record everywhere that ordinary people drive, and keep that information for years. It's very similar to having everyones DNA on a police database, another thing the UK government is doing by adding virtually everyone that is arrested, regardless of whether they are found guilty of an offence or even charged.
It's part of a growing, automated and routine state invasion of ordinary innocent (and guilty) people's lives, on the off chance they might catch them up to something wrong at the time - or provide tracking data on them after the event.
No doubt it helps them catch the odd extra civil offence.
Yet what about false positives? Databases are only as good as the data handling, and the UK DNA database alone is known to be riddled with inaccurate records. Heaven knows what happens if the record of your number plate being tagged ends up recorded in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or, as is happening in the UK, those records become available to people with less than pure motives.
Having a policeman follow you round everywhere you go while in public, watching what you do and where you go to catch you if you break any laws would be one way to try and catch criminals. Yet we'd legitimately call that a police state. Cameras, including ANR cameras allow the police to do much more of this without deploying actual policemen.
We both live in supposedly free civil societies, where innocent people expect to be able to go about their lives in privacy. Police supposedly have to work by rules regarding searches, invasion of our homes, tapping of phones, and reading our mail because we as a society value our right as free men to go about our business without suspicion, with good cause being needed to pull us over, and "papers please".
ANR cameras and state CCTV systems, along with phone taps and email monitoring are just some examples of the state ignoring our civil liberties in exchange for 'security' in recent years. You guys threw off British tyranny once. Please don't go importing our worst ideas now and allow your own government to impose tyranny on innocent people slowly "for your own good, citizen".
This is a government ordered process. As I've gone into more here, the UK government has already told the ISPs to bend over and do what the BPI and other copyright cartel representatives want, or they'll pass a law forcing them to in the autumn session. Remember, this is a 'private' initiative for one set of companies to spend time and money propping up the business model of another set, with potentially innocent customer's privacy being invaded and service degraded purely on the say so of the music labels - no court, no judge, no oversight of any kind.
I don't use torrents for copyright infringement (my existing old CD collection is far better than the crap on p2p these days) but I'll going to still be caught up in this as all customers will be. What if my IP is spoofed, or my wireless hacked? What right of appeal will I have with this 'private' agreement? my ISP is MY ISP, not the record companies. The labels can gather evidence and go to court like everybody else to have their evidence examined - the british court system is nowhere near as supine as the US one, which is why you've not seen the vast swell of lawsuits. They might actually lose because of crap evidence techniques and barratry.
Remember the outrage over youtube handing all their logs over to viacom? Now imagine if google had done that voluntarily without a court order. That's how I feel right now.
UK government business minister Baroness Vadera is expected to announce a deal she brokered...
The UK government has stated that they will bring in legislation, starting after the summer, to force all ISPs to co-operate with the music labels on copyright infringement if they can't come up with a self-regulation scheme that satifies the labels' agency, the BPI. The UK government is working hand in hand with the french government, who've already started the implementation of the 3-warnings-and-cut-off setup the french government favours.
A number of UK ISP's, with the notable exception of virgin, have been telling the music business to piss off, that policing their customers for potential infringing content and invading their privacy without any say-so from a court or judge is not their responsibility. Unfortunately, the UK government disagress, and is piling on the pressure to co-operate voluntarily before they are forced to do so by laws very much in favour of the copyright cartel.
UK ISP's are already required to keep records on users email and web-traffic due to the RIP act; it wouldn't take much for that system to be expanded substantially and the government have already ballooned the idea of having it all stored in a giant government database instead of at the ISP.
A conservative government would likely be no better; they mooted the idea of extending the duration of copyright for music recordings in exchange for more 'family-friendly' lyrics from rappers for example.
Be under no illusion - this is a direct result of government threats against the ISP industry to spend their time and money to prop up the existing business model of the copyright cartels.
Vista SP1 runs slower than XP SP3 on the same hardware for network operations (copy, unrar etc). It's noticeably 'laggier' for general UI interfaces. There were some benches around a while back showing the disparity.
I've noticed it on a number of systems, I have 4 pcs currently with dual or triple boot (vista, xp, ubuntu) - all with 2-4GB of RAM, dual or quad core 2's etc, so it's not hardware lacking.
Mind you, if your hardware is anything less than ninja, vista will CRAWL.
I sysadmin a 1200 user network. Virtually every staff member that's had a vista laptop issued over the last year has come in and asked us to switch it back to XP. It's noticeably slower for what they do with it, and the amount of drivers for printers, cameras and other user devices is still severely lacking. Whole swathes of user devices are not supported by the vendors for vista, and never will be. "Buy our new version instead". Sucks if you wanted to carry on using that wifi card, or printer, or camera, or scanner, or webcam etc etc you already had that worked fine on XP.
Worse, there's plenty of applications that don't run, and never will. Windows 98 or 2000 era apps that users love and can't live without are ample in the real world, and the worst case, but there's plenty of XP-era apps that don't run either.
Vista can't do many things that XP can, and is sluggish in many operations for many users. I use it where I must, but otherwise it is a failure.
Oops. I meant to say, reverse engineering the IBM firmware back in the day would probably have fallen afoul of the DMCA if it were done today. They might have won in court eventually, but the threat would have been a big chilling effect on the reverse engineering.
Doctrine of first sale. Once a copyrighted work is sold, no further terms can be applied to that work post-sale by the copyright holder.
Unless the EULA is avaiable to be read, agreed upon and signed before the sale is completed at the till, all further terms are non binding. A contract of adhesion - by reading this, you agree to etc etc - are generally considered unconscionable. A contract is supposed to be a meeting of the minds, not one side dicating extra terms after the sale has already been made.
They get round this by calling copies made into RAM/onto disc copyright infringement. In my country, there is a specific exemption for this meaning you have the right to do this without the permission of the copyright holder.
Now, licences agreed as part of an ongoing service; as part of an online game for example, are indeed valid as long as they are agreed as part of the subscription.
Non-commercial software terms are usually made clear prior to the sale, often as part of a separate pre-sale contract (MOLP licences spring to mind for microsoft). These are clearly contract licences agreed pre-sale, so first sale doctrine doesn't apply.
breaking the DRM to use the software? Yes, that's very likely a DMCA violation. Reverse engineering the IBM fir
But the EULA itself doesn't stand unless you specifically force them to be valid (UCITA states in the US, which have a law to make them valid post-sale) or have it agreed prior to sale, or allow the 'copy-to-RAM' argument to count as copyright infringement.
Changes in the sun are not responsible for the majority of the observed global warming. They're just too small.
Solar forcing (11 year solar flare cycle, increase in brightness etc) is already accounted for in current climate modeling - the 2007 IPCC report put the maximum effect of solar increases at 20%, lower than previous years. Volcanism is even lower.
Solar forcing was responsible for a lot of warming in the pre-industrial age, and the science is still being looked into for other mechanisms - but at this point, at this time, man-emitted greenhouse gases are the only candidate for the vast majority of the increase in temperature. CO2 and methane from industry, fossil fuels and agriculture are having a big impact on the global climate.
What the exact impacts will be, and what we can do to mitigate them is a hot topic, but that man is responsible for the sudden and sharp increase in overal global temperature since the industrial age? That's no longer in serious dispute.
It's been well over a year since the 1 TB drives came out; no size increases since then. Consider hard-drive sizes used to increase every month or less, I was wondering when drives were going to start increasing again. So it's more like 'hard-drives getting bigger, after a much longer than usual period of not getting bigger'.
I think it's great - it'll push down the prices of 1TB drives even further.
Part of it is the feeling that someone with asperger's may not be treated fairly by the court system. Something that seems rational to an aspergers sufferer, such as buying a book on police investigations when you're under police investigation, makes you look guilty.
In this case Hans is guilty - but up until now, I wasn't *certain* he hadn't been railroaded by a justice system ill suited to dealing with those who think differently to the majority.
The poor sod on the mass effect forums is on 10 days and counting on trying to get EA tech support to give him another activation for his own property.
As far as I know, no-one has actually been helped yet with the activation problems by EA tech support.
It may well be that this is another lie from bioware PR up there with 'uninstalling it will give you back an activation' and 'you can reinstall on the same pc without using a new activation'* and 'you won't need multiple activations for each user account' - all of which have been shown to be lies, just as they were when Elizabeth on the bioshock forums trotted them out.
According to the error message from the securom DRM, you need to buy another copy after 3 installs/windows reinstalls/hardware upgrades - and so far, EA tech support appear to be following that line.
*only true if you uninstall and then reinstall into the same user account on the same install of windows on the same pc - it looks for the registry hardware/serial checksum saved from the last install, and if it doesn't find it, it'll count it as a new install and use up an activation credit.
You can log in to the same steam account concurrently on different pc's but only the last one logged in is 'online' - the others are effective in offline mode, though you still appear to be logged in until you try to use online stuff.
You should be able to play any single player offline or lan games ok, but going into online games will likely fail on steam auth; so you could play tf2 while your brother plays portal, but you won't both be able to play tf2 and hl2 deathmatch online at the same time, for example.
As you say, lending or gifting games from one account to another isn't possible - that's steam's biggest weakness in my book.
The IP tracking scheme is not that aggressive; if you shared it out with a LOT of different people who use it at the same time, you run the risk of getting banned.
Steam does restrict a lot of the rights you're used to with cd-based games, like the right of resale; on the other hand you can install as many times as you like, on as many machines as you like, anywhere in the world without needing any of the original discs, codes or other paraphenalia, nor disc to play. The number of times I've reinstalled windows, and relinked into my steam folder and all my games 'just work' without having to do anything - it's a real convenience compared to digging out all the discs and reinstalling just to get the right registry keys installed with the licence code. Plus, steam games priced in dollars are WAY cheaper than normal UK retail price for me personally. I hated steam for years when it first came out, but it has grown on me (like fungus), and now i can live with it even if I don't love it.
Basically, you're getting poked in the ass by steam, but at least they're gracious enough to give you a reach-around to compensate. Whether the ease of use is enough to compensate or not, is up to you.
Assuming it's the same securom restriction as mass effect (and previously bioshock) - which it's been said it will be - you'll get 3 install activation 'credits', which must be done online. Uninstalling/reinstalling on the same computer and the same copy of windows will re-use the activation already made, as of course will having your activation checked when you retrieve more creatures.
Reinstalling windows on your pc, or upgrading hardware will then cost you another of your three activations.
Once you've hit the limit, you'll need to phone EA tech support - a premium rate phone call in my country - and request permission to install your game, most likely then having to provide proof of purchase. Permission is granted on a case-by-case basis, and not guaranteed.
They caved only insomuch as providing a more restrictive limitation than bioshock, rather than a more restrictive limit than bioshock plus constant 10 day online activation.
It's not a purchase. It's a rental. I for one have cancelled my pre-order.
British ISPs are required to keep email header logs for later inspection under RIPA, soon to be joined by website requests. Contents of emails are supposedly not recorded, just the header sender/destination trail etc. It's supposed to be somewhat analogous to phone logs, which are also available on demand by lots of different organisations under RIPA.
The primary purpose the councils are putting it to are establishing 'known contacts' of someone they already have under investigation, or simple identifying of someone when they only have an email address or a phone number. To go and confiscate a home computer would require a proper warrant, and calling in the police.
That said - councils can sign off these investigations on their own with no oversight from the courts at all, until they gather enough evidence to start a prosecution of some sort, or hand over to the police. That low level non-elected beaurocrats can pull up all sorts of information on people, or even establish physical surveillance with no input from the police or courts, or even oversight within their own organisation is truly scary.
Same reason than people refer to going from gutsy to hardy when upgrading ubuntu - many people find the code names easier to remember than the version number. See DNS for a more extreme example.
Some types of engineering still rely very heavily on trig and calculus - microelectronic and electrical engineering use multivariable calculus and complex numbers constantly for signal analysis and design. Circuit design and transistor study would be impossible without them. I'd hazard that anything involving analog flows of something over time would rely on calculus, and calculus simplification quite heavily.
I did study vectors and matrixes, and programming at school. They have proved very handy. More statistics would have been very handy, but we did cover them a little during business studies, and if I'd gone that route I could have studied them as part of that.
I'll agree that calculus isn't that useful in great depth to most people, but I still think it's of value to cover the basics. An understanding of geometrics and the maths to describe and manipulate them is still a useful base point for a lot of different areas, and shouldn't be abandoned entirely. A focus on more modeling and finite maths would definitely be a plus though, so I'm broadly in agreement.
Good luck with your exam! I did my A-levels in the early 90's. A shrinking syallabus was in full flow back then too - I compared my papers to past papers from the 80's that my sister took, and the difference was astounding - my papers were so much easier because the range of material had shrunk too.
It's depressing to think what's covered in current A levels, if the papers I took are much broader and harder. Probably the same stuff I had to take at GCSE, and my sister took before that.
It disenfranchises students. Rather than pushing current students to do their best, the curriculum scope is constantly narrowed so more time can be spent on a given section, making it defacto easier to learn, with less needing to be remembered for an exam. I did my final A level exam after two years of study, and almost all my marks hinged on that final paper that covered every topic I'd done over those two years.
So students spend more time than ever doing exams, on a smaller and smaller amount of material, and universities are expected to make up the difference. My engineering department professors would quietly complain about the lack of knowledge of maths of recent entrants back when I was there 15 years ago, god knows what it's like now.
It devalues education, it penalises decent students who could learn more faster, because everything goes at the pace, and is designed to accomodate the slowest - and all the while, the government crows about how their education policy is working because exam results improve year on year, and claiming the exams are as hard as they ever were.
Employers are increasingly requiring a degree because GCSE's and A levels are known to be worth less than they used to be. It's students that end up being punished in the job market for government failings. Even universities are having trouble choosing candidates; when 50% have all A's, and you can only take 10%, how do you tell who has actual talent, and who was just coasting?
it's further segregating the internet into something that you "visit" and limit your usage of, rather than something that you simply participate in.
Yup. That's the entire point. Time Warner don't want an open free 'net where new applications, media and ideas can spring up the edges, thought up, controlled and distributed by users. They want a central, content-controlled setup where they decide what you watch and listen to, and fine-tune the billing groups to squeeze every last possible penny out of you for minimum service.
A bioshock PR flack went on record as saying they were happy with the week and a half that the DRM lasted. DRM that still inflicts pain on everyone who bought it, but not anybody who waited for the dodgy version.
It takes real talent to create a product that's both expensive and inferior to the free competition, and it takes real chutzpah to turn around and be proud of screwing over paying customers for years in order to spend a few days annoying people who were never paying customers.
Most PC game publishers manage both with ease these days, with some very noticeable exceptions (I'm looking at you with pride, stardock)
Unfortunately, with EA putting ever worse securom DRM in every PC release from now on, it's only going to get worse for anybody left in the PC gaming crowd.
Full-on trusted computing requires a certfying process from bootup to application launch. Literally no operation can take place without being verified. The OS and hardware stack is nowhere near in this state yet. Yes, it's something to be very wary of for the future, but that's not what they'll implement.
They'll use the TPM chip to say, do a unique online activation combined with a CD key. Tie it to the hardware in a way that can't easily be faked, then check that signature online every time you launch the game. Same principle as the new bioshock and mass effect securom*, but tied to the TPM instead of a registry key. This will have the nice effect of tieing the game to 1 install only. Want to reinstall? Go ask permission of tech support. Don't forget to email that digital photo of your disc, case, serial number, receipt and you bent over in the 'present' position.
Which will then be cracked the same way bioshock was; fake the code that does the authentication check with a patched.exe.
The only way to truly 'secure' the system (for media distributors) is to put the DRM in complete charge of the PC, so that even the physical owner of it does not have access to the keys. The PC will literally be owned and run by the key-holder, which will not be you and me. I've no doubt many corporate copyright holders are salivating at the thought, but it ain't here yet.
* yes, I know mass effect dropped the 10 day thing. Still only got those 3 installs before begging permission, and it still checks online every chance it gets to see if you can be branded a pirate yet.
Swapping motherboard requires a reactivation without fail on windows xp, with the one exception where it has an absolutely identical chipset. The automated activation then of course fails for OEM licenced PCs. Having repaired hundreds of windows PCs, I've encounted reactivation constantly from pretty trivial hardware changes.
I therefore assume the rest of that microsoft article is a similar load of bullshit. That said, no, changing RAM alone will not usually trigger a reactivation.
We take advantage of this, especially for laptops (toshiba do this across virtually their entire line). What's funny is that doing this was actually slightly cheaper than buying XP pro COA licences directly instead.
And yes, that's counted as a vista sale, for precisely that reason. Still. We get an XP pro licence, a cheaper price, XP supported hardware, XP pre-installed and a free vista upgrade if it ever actually improves speedwise, so we can live with that. And no, linux is not suitable on the desktop for most users, though it does run much of our server gear, despite that bloody debian openssl patch.
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We're very much in the same boat as you, with the exception of the activex thing - fortunately, we dodged that bullet.
You know the main reason _I_ don't want to switch to vista? (besides the resource drag, the UI changeover confusing the users and the app and hardware compatibility issues, which are all user problems really)
The DRM. Windows XP; we chuck on our VLK code, it works, and we're done forever. No internet access or server required. Works lovely with our cloning system. Vista volume activation has a separate keyserver, which has to have a minimum 50 clients connect to it for it to function, and then that server has to activate on the internet. Plus the clients have to check into the keyserver at least every 6 months. Plus we have to buy extra licences to replace the OEM ones we already have.
There's no way to practically use the OEM codes on the back of the machines, there's no way I'm retyping 200 different licence numbers in every time we reimage a campus. Plus the students just steal them off the back of the cases and get them invalidated anyway.
Laptops are a pain in the arse under this scheme too, with the checking requirements, so we'd use the OEM codes instead, which requires keeping track of the OEM CDs for every single laptop type, because the users sure as shit won't keep track of their restore discs.
Vista DRM requires a whole crapload of extra work, an extra server and an extra 2008 server licence to run the keyserver. OK, we don't need any actual extra tin as we're virtualised, but it's still a crapload of extra effort for something which benefits us not at all.
XP on the desktop for us for as long as I can get away with it. The users certainly prefer it, it's still getting security updates, so who the hell cares if we carry on using downgrade rights?
The reason you have to take the laptop out in the first place is because it's so big and dense it blocks the x-ray machine from scanning the rest of the bag behind it effectively.
A flip out laptop bag that allows it to be scanned, and the other half to be scanned, while not having any pockets in that section that could conceal other items easily does make sense. Whether it's worth $100 for the few seconds effort is another question.
You can thank Richard Reid filling his shoes with explosives and trying to set it off with his shoelaces for the shoe business.
The liquids ban because of that binary explosive 'threat'? That's complete horseshit though. If they were banning white powders, that would make a lot more sense.
Compact Oxford English Dictionary:
police state
â noun - a totalitarian state in which political police secretly supervise and control citizensâ(TM) activities.
freedictionary.com:
police state
Noun
a state in which a government controls people's freedom through the police
wikipedia.org:
The term police state is a term for a state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of the population... One way to view the concept of the police state and the free state is through the medium of a seesaw, where any law focused on removing liberty is seen as moving toward a police state, and any law which limits government oversight is seen as moving toward a Free state.
Making up the laws as you go is not required, nor does it have to be a secret police force doing it.
It makes you a more extreme police state, but is not fundamental. South Africa under apartheid was a police state run as a democracy under the rule of law, even if those laws were abhorant.
Having all people under constant police surveillance and enforcement regardless of their innocence sounds like pretty rigid and repressive control of freedom to me.
We've had automatic number recognition camera systems in the UK for a while now, and they're repidly growing in number. There's already many on major roads, and of course the London congestion charge (daily fee to drive into the city centre) is enforced by saturating the city centre with them. The police use them too, though I'm not aware of them being routined fitted to patrol vehicles yet, just special DVLA enforcement squads.
They mean the government has the growing power to watch and record everywhere that ordinary people drive, and keep that information for years. It's very similar to having everyones DNA on a police database, another thing the UK government is doing by adding virtually everyone that is arrested, regardless of whether they are found guilty of an offence or even charged.
It's part of a growing, automated and routine state invasion of ordinary innocent (and guilty) people's lives, on the off chance they might catch them up to something wrong at the time - or provide tracking data on them after the event.
No doubt it helps them catch the odd extra civil offence.
Yet what about false positives? Databases are only as good as the data handling, and the UK DNA database alone is known to be riddled with inaccurate records. Heaven knows what happens if the record of your number plate being tagged ends up recorded in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or, as is happening in the UK, those records become available to people with less than pure motives.
Having a policeman follow you round everywhere you go while in public, watching what you do and where you go to catch you if you break any laws would be one way to try and catch criminals. Yet we'd legitimately call that a police state. Cameras, including ANR cameras allow the police to do much more of this without deploying actual policemen.
We both live in supposedly free civil societies, where innocent people expect to be able to go about their lives in privacy. Police supposedly have to work by rules regarding searches, invasion of our homes, tapping of phones, and reading our mail because we as a society value our right as free men to go about our business without suspicion, with good cause being needed to pull us over, and "papers please".
ANR cameras and state CCTV systems, along with phone taps and email monitoring are just some examples of the state ignoring our civil liberties in exchange for 'security' in recent years. You guys threw off British tyranny once. Please don't go importing our worst ideas now and allow your own government to impose tyranny on innocent people slowly "for your own good, citizen".
This is a government ordered process. As I've gone into more here, the UK government has already told the ISPs to bend over and do what the BPI and other copyright cartel representatives want, or they'll pass a law forcing them to in the autumn session. Remember, this is a 'private' initiative for one set of companies to spend time and money propping up the business model of another set, with potentially innocent customer's privacy being invaded and service degraded purely on the say so of the music labels - no court, no judge, no oversight of any kind.
I don't use torrents for copyright infringement (my existing old CD collection is far better than the crap on p2p these days) but I'll going to still be caught up in this as all customers will be. What if my IP is spoofed, or my wireless hacked? What right of appeal will I have with this 'private' agreement? my ISP is MY ISP, not the record companies. The labels can gather evidence and go to court like everybody else to have their evidence examined - the british court system is nowhere near as supine as the US one, which is why you've not seen the vast swell of lawsuits. They might actually lose because of crap evidence techniques and barratry.
Remember the outrage over youtube handing all their logs over to viacom? Now imagine if google had done that voluntarily without a court order. That's how I feel right now.
UK government business minister Baroness Vadera is expected to announce a deal she brokered...
The UK government has stated that they will bring in legislation, starting after the summer, to force all ISPs to co-operate with the music labels on copyright infringement if they can't come up with a self-regulation scheme that satifies the labels' agency, the BPI. The UK government is working hand in hand with the french government, who've already started the implementation of the 3-warnings-and-cut-off setup the french government favours.
A number of UK ISP's, with the notable exception of virgin, have been telling the music business to piss off, that policing their customers for potential infringing content and invading their privacy without any say-so from a court or judge is not their responsibility. Unfortunately, the UK government disagress, and is piling on the pressure to co-operate voluntarily before they are forced to do so by laws very much in favour of the copyright cartel.
UK ISP's are already required to keep records on users email and web-traffic due to the RIP act; it wouldn't take much for that system to be expanded substantially and the government have already ballooned the idea of having it all stored in a giant government database instead of at the ISP.
A conservative government would likely be no better; they mooted the idea of extending the duration of copyright for music recordings in exchange for more 'family-friendly' lyrics from rappers for example.
Be under no illusion - this is a direct result of government threats against the ISP industry to spend their time and money to prop up the existing business model of the copyright cartels.
Vista SP1 runs slower than XP SP3 on the same hardware for network operations (copy, unrar etc). It's noticeably 'laggier' for general UI interfaces. There were some benches around a while back showing the disparity.
I've noticed it on a number of systems, I have 4 pcs currently with dual or triple boot (vista, xp, ubuntu) - all with 2-4GB of RAM, dual or quad core 2's etc, so it's not hardware lacking.
Mind you, if your hardware is anything less than ninja, vista will CRAWL.
I sysadmin a 1200 user network. Virtually every staff member that's had a vista laptop issued over the last year has come in and asked us to switch it back to XP. It's noticeably slower for what they do with it, and the amount of drivers for printers, cameras and other user devices is still severely lacking. Whole swathes of user devices are not supported by the vendors for vista, and never will be. "Buy our new version instead". Sucks if you wanted to carry on using that wifi card, or printer, or camera, or scanner, or webcam etc etc you already had that worked fine on XP.
Worse, there's plenty of applications that don't run, and never will. Windows 98 or 2000 era apps that users love and can't live without are ample in the real world, and the worst case, but there's plenty of XP-era apps that don't run either.
Vista can't do many things that XP can, and is sluggish in many operations for many users. I use it where I must, but otherwise it is a failure.
Oops. I meant to say, reverse engineering the IBM firmware back in the day would probably have fallen afoul of the DMCA if it were done today. They might have won in court eventually, but the threat would have been a big chilling effect on the reverse engineering.
Doctrine of first sale. Once a copyrighted work is sold, no further terms can be applied to that work post-sale by the copyright holder.
Unless the EULA is avaiable to be read, agreed upon and signed before the sale is completed at the till, all further terms are non binding. A contract of adhesion - by reading this, you agree to etc etc - are generally considered unconscionable. A contract is supposed to be a meeting of the minds, not one side dicating extra terms after the sale has already been made.
They get round this by calling copies made into RAM/onto disc copyright infringement. In my country, there is a specific exemption for this meaning you have the right to do this without the permission of the copyright holder.
Now, licences agreed as part of an ongoing service; as part of an online game for example, are indeed valid as long as they are agreed as part of the subscription.
Non-commercial software terms are usually made clear prior to the sale, often as part of a separate pre-sale contract (MOLP licences spring to mind for microsoft). These are clearly contract licences agreed pre-sale, so first sale doctrine doesn't apply.
breaking the DRM to use the software? Yes, that's very likely a DMCA violation. Reverse engineering the IBM fir
But the EULA itself doesn't stand unless you specifically force them to be valid (UCITA states in the US, which have a law to make them valid post-sale) or have it agreed prior to sale, or allow the 'copy-to-RAM' argument to count as copyright infringement.
Changes in the sun are not responsible for the majority of the observed global warming. They're just too small.
Solar forcing (11 year solar flare cycle, increase in brightness etc) is already accounted for in current climate modeling - the 2007 IPCC report put the maximum effect of solar increases at 20%, lower than previous years. Volcanism is even lower.
Solar forcing was responsible for a lot of warming in the pre-industrial age, and the science is still being looked into for other mechanisms - but at this point, at this time, man-emitted greenhouse gases are the only candidate for the vast majority of the increase in temperature. CO2 and methane from industry, fossil fuels and agriculture are having a big impact on the global climate.
What the exact impacts will be, and what we can do to mitigate them is a hot topic, but that man is responsible for the sudden and sharp increase in overal global temperature since the industrial age? That's no longer in serious dispute.
It's been well over a year since the 1 TB drives came out; no size increases since then. Consider hard-drive sizes used to increase every month or less, I was wondering when drives were going to start increasing again. So it's more like 'hard-drives getting bigger, after a much longer than usual period of not getting bigger'.
I think it's great - it'll push down the prices of 1TB drives even further.
Part of it is the feeling that someone with asperger's may not be treated fairly by the court system. Something that seems rational to an aspergers sufferer, such as buying a book on police investigations when you're under police investigation, makes you look guilty.
In this case Hans is guilty - but up until now, I wasn't *certain* he hadn't been railroaded by a justice system ill suited to dealing with those who think differently to the majority.
The poor sod on the mass effect forums is on 10 days and counting on trying to get EA tech support to give him another activation for his own property.
As far as I know, no-one has actually been helped yet with the activation problems by EA tech support.
It may well be that this is another lie from bioware PR up there with 'uninstalling it will give you back an activation' and 'you can reinstall on the same pc without using a new activation'* and 'you won't need multiple activations for each user account' - all of which have been shown to be lies, just as they were when Elizabeth on the bioshock forums trotted them out.
According to the error message from the securom DRM, you need to buy another copy after 3 installs/windows reinstalls/hardware upgrades - and so far, EA tech support appear to be following that line.
*only true if you uninstall and then reinstall into the same user account on the same install of windows on the same pc - it looks for the registry hardware/serial checksum saved from the last install, and if it doesn't find it, it'll count it as a new install and use up an activation credit.
You can log in to the same steam account concurrently on different pc's but only the last one logged in is 'online' - the others are effective in offline mode, though you still appear to be logged in until you try to use online stuff.
You should be able to play any single player offline or lan games ok, but going into online games will likely fail on steam auth; so you could play tf2 while your brother plays portal, but you won't both be able to play tf2 and hl2 deathmatch online at the same time, for example.
As you say, lending or gifting games from one account to another isn't possible - that's steam's biggest weakness in my book.
The IP tracking scheme is not that aggressive; if you shared it out with a LOT of different people who use it at the same time, you run the risk of getting banned.
Steam does restrict a lot of the rights you're used to with cd-based games, like the right of resale; on the other hand you can install as many times as you like, on as many machines as you like, anywhere in the world without needing any of the original discs, codes or other paraphenalia, nor disc to play. The number of times I've reinstalled windows, and relinked into my steam folder and all my games 'just work' without having to do anything - it's a real convenience compared to digging out all the discs and reinstalling just to get the right registry keys installed with the licence code. Plus, steam games priced in dollars are WAY cheaper than normal UK retail price for me personally. I hated steam for years when it first came out, but it has grown on me (like fungus), and now i can live with it even if I don't love it.
Basically, you're getting poked in the ass by steam, but at least they're gracious enough to give you a reach-around to compensate. Whether the ease of use is enough to compensate or not, is up to you.
Assuming it's the same securom restriction as mass effect (and previously bioshock) - which it's been said it will be - you'll get 3 install activation 'credits', which must be done online. Uninstalling/reinstalling on the same computer and the same copy of windows will re-use the activation already made, as of course will having your activation checked when you retrieve more creatures.
Reinstalling windows on your pc, or upgrading hardware will then cost you another of your three activations.
Once you've hit the limit, you'll need to phone EA tech support - a premium rate phone call in my country - and request permission to install your game, most likely then having to provide proof of purchase. Permission is granted on a case-by-case basis, and not guaranteed.
They caved only insomuch as providing a more restrictive limitation than bioshock, rather than a more restrictive limit than bioshock plus constant 10 day online activation.
It's not a purchase. It's a rental. I for one have cancelled my pre-order.
British ISPs are required to keep email header logs for later inspection under RIPA, soon to be joined by website requests. Contents of emails are supposedly not recorded, just the header sender/destination trail etc. It's supposed to be somewhat analogous to phone logs, which are also available on demand by lots of different organisations under RIPA.
The primary purpose the councils are putting it to are establishing 'known contacts' of someone they already have under investigation, or simple identifying of someone when they only have an email address or a phone number. To go and confiscate a home computer would require a proper warrant, and calling in the police.
That said - councils can sign off these investigations on their own with no oversight from the courts at all, until they gather enough evidence to start a prosecution of some sort, or hand over to the police. That low level non-elected beaurocrats can pull up all sorts of information on people, or even establish physical surveillance with no input from the police or courts, or even oversight within their own organisation is truly scary.
Same reason than people refer to going from gutsy to hardy when upgrading ubuntu - many people find the code names easier to remember than the version number. See DNS for a more extreme example.
Then: Sally is 24.
Now: Chloe has 7 apples.
Future: 6.
Some types of engineering still rely very heavily on trig and calculus - microelectronic and electrical engineering use multivariable calculus and complex numbers constantly for signal analysis and design. Circuit design and transistor study would be impossible without them. I'd hazard that anything involving analog flows of something over time would rely on calculus, and calculus simplification quite heavily.
I did study vectors and matrixes, and programming at school. They have proved very handy. More statistics would have been very handy, but we did cover them a little during business studies, and if I'd gone that route I could have studied them as part of that.
I'll agree that calculus isn't that useful in great depth to most people, but I still think it's of value to cover the basics. An understanding of geometrics and the maths to describe and manipulate them is still a useful base point for a lot of different areas, and shouldn't be abandoned entirely. A focus on more modeling and finite maths would definitely be a plus though, so I'm broadly in agreement.
Good luck with your exam! I did my A-levels in the early 90's. A shrinking syallabus was in full flow back then too - I compared my papers to past papers from the 80's that my sister took, and the difference was astounding - my papers were so much easier because the range of material had shrunk too.
It's depressing to think what's covered in current A levels, if the papers I took are much broader and harder. Probably the same stuff I had to take at GCSE, and my sister took before that.
It disenfranchises students. Rather than pushing current students to do their best, the curriculum scope is constantly narrowed so more time can be spent on a given section, making it defacto easier to learn, with less needing to be remembered for an exam. I did my final A level exam after two years of study, and almost all my marks hinged on that final paper that covered every topic I'd done over those two years.
So students spend more time than ever doing exams, on a smaller and smaller amount of material, and universities are expected to make up the difference. My engineering department professors would quietly complain about the lack of knowledge of maths of recent entrants back when I was there 15 years ago, god knows what it's like now.
It devalues education, it penalises decent students who could learn more faster, because everything goes at the pace, and is designed to accomodate the slowest - and all the while, the government crows about how their education policy is working because exam results improve year on year, and claiming the exams are as hard as they ever were.
Employers are increasingly requiring a degree because GCSE's and A levels are known to be worth less than they used to be. It's students that end up being punished in the job market for government failings. Even universities are having trouble choosing candidates; when 50% have all A's, and you can only take 10%, how do you tell who has actual talent, and who was just coasting?
it's further segregating the internet into something that you "visit" and limit your usage of, rather than something that you simply participate in.
Yup. That's the entire point. Time Warner don't want an open free 'net where new applications, media and ideas can spring up the edges, thought up, controlled and distributed by users. They want a central, content-controlled setup where they decide what you watch and listen to, and fine-tune the billing groups to squeeze every last possible penny out of you for minimum service.
Just like the rest of their businesses.
A bioshock PR flack went on record as saying they were happy with the week and a half that the DRM lasted. DRM that still inflicts pain on everyone who bought it, but not anybody who waited for the dodgy version.
It takes real talent to create a product that's both expensive and inferior to the free competition, and it takes real chutzpah to turn around and be proud of screwing over paying customers for years in order to spend a few days annoying people who were never paying customers.
Most PC game publishers manage both with ease these days, with some very noticeable exceptions (I'm looking at you with pride, stardock)
Unfortunately, with EA putting ever worse securom DRM in every PC release from now on, it's only going to get worse for anybody left in the PC gaming crowd.
Full-on trusted computing requires a certfying process from bootup to application launch. Literally no operation can take place without being verified. The OS and hardware stack is nowhere near in this state yet. Yes, it's something to be very wary of for the future, but that's not what they'll implement.
.exe.
They'll use the TPM chip to say, do a unique online activation combined with a CD key. Tie it to the hardware in a way that can't easily be faked, then check that signature online every time you launch the game. Same principle as the new bioshock and mass effect securom*, but tied to the TPM instead of a registry key. This will have the nice effect of tieing the game to 1 install only. Want to reinstall? Go ask permission of tech support. Don't forget to email that digital photo of your disc, case, serial number, receipt and you bent over in the 'present' position.
Which will then be cracked the same way bioshock was; fake the code that does the authentication check with a patched
The only way to truly 'secure' the system (for media distributors) is to put the DRM in complete charge of the PC, so that even the physical owner of it does not have access to the keys. The PC will literally be owned and run by the key-holder, which will not be you and me. I've no doubt many corporate copyright holders are salivating at the thought, but it ain't here yet.
* yes, I know mass effect dropped the 10 day thing. Still only got those 3 installs before begging permission, and it still checks online every chance it gets to see if you can be branded a pirate yet.
Swapping motherboard requires a reactivation without fail on windows xp, with the one exception where it has an absolutely identical chipset. The automated activation then of course fails for OEM licenced PCs. Having repaired hundreds of windows PCs, I've encounted reactivation constantly from pretty trivial hardware changes.
I therefore assume the rest of that microsoft article is a similar load of bullshit. That said, no, changing RAM alone will not usually trigger a reactivation.
We take advantage of this, especially for laptops (toshiba do this across virtually their entire line). What's funny is that doing this was actually slightly cheaper than buying XP pro COA licences directly instead.
And yes, that's counted as a vista sale, for precisely that reason. Still. We get an XP pro licence, a cheaper price, XP supported hardware, XP pre-installed and a free vista upgrade if it ever actually improves speedwise, so we can live with that. And no, linux is not suitable on the desktop for most users, though it does run much of our server gear, despite that bloody debian openssl patch.