Sadly, greedy people have always been able to use FUD to bully the majority into accepting the rulership of a government. You are showing a prime example,"Without _us_ you wouldn't have roads. Without _us_ you wouldn't have water. Without _us_ you wouldn't have electricity."
Since the majority of the population is either gullible or apathetic you win by default.
Using the same tactics one could argue that, without Microsoft, no one could possibly use a computer.
If you're so 'leet and know all about the motives and actions of warez groups would you mind pointing me to some reliable warez sources? I haven't been able to find any with real working versions that aren't blatantly backdoored.
Or are you still fighting with the BSOD and reboots three times a day from all the warez'd software that you pick up off of USENET and popular web sites?
----- Why do I notice just the opposite ----- Because you want to argue.
You're implying that you've actively searched through warez sites. Unless you're referring to spam ads that you get in your mailbox which are in no way representative of real warez sites. If that's the case then you're calling shots from a vantage point of ignorance.
I know, I know, armchair perfectionists run the nation.
How do you even begin to quantify the "most wanted" software? Is this your own personal perception of an industry that has thousands of people in marketing departments across the nation working on predicting the next blockbuster? I'm glad someone has the crystal ball. Now I know who to come pirate it from.
Running water and electricity are products of people, not of the government. Heck, if the government would keep its imperialist paws out of it, we'd probably have better water and electric services, cheaper, without the blackouts, brownouts, or the added fluoride.
What added value do you think that the government has ever added to technology? Edison, Franklin, and Tesla all worked on electricity. It caught on, people liked it, and eventually it would be everywhere--with or without government meddling.
Running water? Like no one has ever possibly made a running water or irrigation system before your lord and savior government showed up?
Here... let me wake you up. *slap* *slap* *slap* Maybe you're just one of those people that's so pitifully clueless that _you_ never would've thought of these things on your own. I guarantee you that me and at least 70% of the population wouldn't have needed the government to tell us "running water and electricity are a good thing."
Don't give me any bull about "infrastructure" either. People build infrastructure as it's needed. It's the nature of civilization. The only thing the government does is appoint headmasters and levy taxes to feed its own bloated select elite.
You may not be a troll but you're definitely delusional.
Ripping apart all the freebie-seekers from the podium of OSS self-righteousness still doesn't validate the blatant lopsidedness and anti-competitive behavior of the reigning software giants.
I agree, there are lots of lazy snobs out there that feel that everything should be given to them on a silver platter without requiring any effort on their part. However, it is still a moral fact that the current laws and regulations favor people who already have enormous bank accounts, squash any newcomers with better ideas (or force them to be absorbed), and continue to feed wealth to companies who pattern themselves using the bully tactics of _real_ syndicates like Microsoft.
There is no way that you can possibly argue that the current laws foster progressive competition, positive diversification or a "share the wealth" attitude. It's all a pyramid scheme.
It's all about the money. The clique at the top, at the federal level, gets first dibs on the largest cut of taxpayer money. While the states are supposed to have sovereignty over the federal law there's no way that the states can compete when they're dependent upon federal handouts to keep their deficits at a level that doesn't send their economies plummeting into ruin. The guys at the top, at the federal level, are, by and large, a group of old self-righteous farts who take a keen pleasure and perverse enjoyment out of seeing people carted off for minor infractions. There are also the considerations of strings--strings held by large organizations such as the incarceration industry and the prescription drug industry which make enormous amounts of money off of the illegal status of marijuana.
Imagine, if everyone in the US stopped to smoke a few doobies, how much less stress there would be in society? Stress is the #1 contributing factor to the breakdown of a biological system resulting in disease. Certainly there's no direct link which can be correlated from everyday life to the number of prescription drugs you buy but you can bet that the statistical analysts in the major marketing departments are all WELL aware of this economic correlation.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a "cartel" but, basically, yeah. Any time there are multiple distributors it's possible for one fat rich guy to get controlling interest in at different levels. By adjusting the flow rate from one warehouse to the next he can figure out which segment of his supply chain will pay the highest prices.
----- Theif, ----- They shot themselves in the foot by bundling Thief with the SB Live! audio card.
Maybe they were hoping for free advertising but I saw a game bundled with my card and thought,"Who made such a crappy game that they couldn't sell it on their own?" I never even played it.
----- The FBI will then calculate bogus, ficticious damages on the basis of those numbers (just like they do with proprietary software) and go after them. ----- This only happens if you have a big enough bank account to encourage them away from chasing down 14-year old easy targets.
Seriously, even if you could get the FBI to launch an investigation into a hardware company that's stealing OSS/GPL code, what makes you think the outcome would be any different than the DoJ's failed trial with MS? "Don't do that again and you owe them $15."
'Cuz it's trojaned and you'll provide entertainment for The Game?
Anyone who downloads a pirated edition of AutoCAD probably has no clue how to use it. It's a status symbol for the warez site, eats up bandwidth, and the original author isn't losing anything on it.
People are so touchy these days. Would you be bothered to the point of legal action if a script kiddie came to you on the street and said,"I slept with your Mom last night?"
Brush it off. You have more important things to worry about.
----- They're just enforcing the laws that keep capitalism afloat ----- Capitalism existed a long time before these laws.
People throw the word "capitalism" around like it has so much meaning. Some people hate "capitalist pigs". Other people love "capitalist society".
Get over it people. Capitalism is the natural progression out of barter and trade--a standardization of currency into a system which allows conversion to and from capital holdings like stock and property. Nothing more. Capitalism is not your own personal vaporous collection of ideals to be used to troll for people who agree or disagree with you.
Freely dubbing audio tapes in the 80s brought Metallica to the forefront by giving them free advertising to millions of listeners. Look who's side they're on now.
----- properly subject to sanction would be if they distributed, sold or bartered binaries for derivative works of GPLed software in violation of the GPL. ----- There are already people who do this. They have bank accounts and legal rosters. They're corporate pirates, not basement pirates. In terms of year-end goals and feeding the media with success stories the basement pirates are much easier to catch and prosecute. Corporate pirates are immune because there's no real person to blame. As we've seen with MS, the US DoJ doesn't have the resources or the teeth to be able to sue a corporation.
----- But keep in mind that the same law that works for them works for everyone else too ----- The mplayer page, and a number of others, list corporate entities which have illegally pirated open source or GPL code. Who can afford the legal process to obtain reparations?
Who can challenege MS when the core of their "system administrator tools" was stolen from open source projects? It's illegal to decompile and check it. No, I don't have proof for that, because I'm not in any rush to attract the attention of a corporation with a legal budget that's 100x larger than what I make in a year.
But if you bother to think about it you know it's true.
"Pirates" have a very real purpose to serve in the cycle of software development and that's to weed out all the useless crap. Software pirates have internal ethical codes. The best software gets shared only with friends. Only the crappiest software gets shared freely. Publicly exposing exploits is a good way to encourage the developers to improve or go find a different job.
For too many years we've seen the government guidos protecting half-assed hacks with big legal bank accounts when slimmer, faster, more efficient, and more elegant alternatives got squashed for infringing on intellectual property.
I've got my boots so I'll go ahead and say it: Living in a world which subsidizes 'tards with money while punishing intellectual excellence with threats of "insubordination" keeps me disdainful of the entire planet. I suppose the standard was set thousands of years ago by the bloodline theory of royalty. They may have two lazy eyes and an inferiority complex but they have money and authority to burn anyone that's better suited for life on this planet.
Rigging elections is a very complicated process that relies more on massaging statistics than it does on any particular machine. I'm more curious to see the results of India's recounts. A carefully controlled data acquisition system could give concrete proof to suspicions about human irregularity and consistency. What percentage of people who voted up four months ago will vote down now? Which media outlets producing which news stories have the greatest effect in swaying votes up, down, or inverse?
No one's ever going to get caught doing it. In a system that is so complicated it's too easy to disavow all knowledge or shuffle the focus to the next person in line. Diebold may not ever produce legitimate voting machines but that certainly won't stop them from gathering patents on intellectual property and demanding payments from any other company that does eventually produce validated and accepted systems.
I empathize with your views and, in general, agree. The "bad precedent for the future" was set a long time ago--around 1900 by my reckoning at the time when the US gov't sold the citizenry into an impossible debt to the gold standard set and controlled by the banks. How is it ever going to be possible to pay off a debt when the creditor is allowed to change the rules of repayment at a whim? We just have to suffer through the results as they stand today.
In related news, the stock prices of Alcoa and Reynold's skyrocketed by over 30 points each as the American public finally came to the realization that the military DOES know how to monitor all networks in real time and IS actively watching the populance using exploits that they DON'T tell anyone else about.
Government should never be redundant. It's a waste of taxpayer dollars.
Since we have no say in how our tax dollars are collected or spent then I guess, if DHS must exist, this would be something they should do.
Nobody's a "good guy" if they're spending my money based on implied consent. Once again, one of those things that we have no real say in. Politicians are going to spend money no matter who you elect and they haven't shown any sign of slowing down in the last 100 years.
On August 18th, 1999, the planets of our solar system are going to line up into the shape of a cross. They're going to line up with the ends of the cross lying in the constellations of aquarius, leo, taurus and scorpio, which just happen to correspond to the four beasts of the apocolypse as mentioned in the Book of Daniel.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, greedy people have always been able to use FUD to bully the majority into accepting the rulership of a government. You are showing a prime example,"Without _us_ you wouldn't have roads. Without _us_ you wouldn't have water. Without _us_ you wouldn't have electricity."
Since the majority of the population is either gullible or apathetic you win by default.
Using the same tactics one could argue that, without Microsoft, no one could possibly use a computer.
If you're so 'leet and know all about the motives and actions of warez groups would you mind pointing me to some reliable warez sources? I haven't been able to find any with real working versions that aren't blatantly backdoored.
Or are you still fighting with the BSOD and reboots three times a day from all the warez'd software that you pick up off of USENET and popular web sites?
-----
Why do I notice just the opposite
-----
Because you want to argue.
You're implying that you've actively searched through warez sites. Unless you're referring to spam ads that you get in your mailbox which are in no way representative of real warez sites. If that's the case then you're calling shots from a vantage point of ignorance.
I know, I know, armchair perfectionists run the nation.
How do you even begin to quantify the "most wanted" software? Is this your own personal perception of an industry that has thousands of people in marketing departments across the nation working on predicting the next blockbuster? I'm glad someone has the crystal ball. Now I know who to come pirate it from.
You're seriously hoodwinked.
Running water and electricity are products of people, not of the government. Heck, if the government would keep its imperialist paws out of it, we'd probably have better water and electric services, cheaper, without the blackouts, brownouts, or the added fluoride.
What added value do you think that the government has ever added to technology? Edison, Franklin, and Tesla all worked on electricity. It caught on, people liked it, and eventually it would be everywhere--with or without government meddling.
Running water? Like no one has ever possibly made a running water or irrigation system before your lord and savior government showed up?
Here... let me wake you up. *slap* *slap* *slap* Maybe you're just one of those people that's so pitifully clueless that _you_ never would've thought of these things on your own. I guarantee you that me and at least 70% of the population wouldn't have needed the government to tell us "running water and electricity are a good thing."
Don't give me any bull about "infrastructure" either. People build infrastructure as it's needed. It's the nature of civilization. The only thing the government does is appoint headmasters and levy taxes to feed its own bloated select elite.
I barely make enough to cover the basic cost of living in a modest apartment but, if you're a cute Indian lady, maybe we could split the bill.
You may not be a troll but you're definitely delusional.
Ripping apart all the freebie-seekers from the podium of OSS self-righteousness still doesn't validate the blatant lopsidedness and anti-competitive behavior of the reigning software giants.
I agree, there are lots of lazy snobs out there that feel that everything should be given to them on a silver platter without requiring any effort on their part. However, it is still a moral fact that the current laws and regulations favor people who already have enormous bank accounts, squash any newcomers with better ideas (or force them to be absorbed), and continue to feed wealth to companies who pattern themselves using the bully tactics of _real_ syndicates like Microsoft.
There is no way that you can possibly argue that the current laws foster progressive competition, positive diversification or a "share the wealth" attitude. It's all a pyramid scheme.
It's all about the money. The clique at the top, at the federal level, gets first dibs on the largest cut of taxpayer money. While the states are supposed to have sovereignty over the federal law there's no way that the states can compete when they're dependent upon federal handouts to keep their deficits at a level that doesn't send their economies plummeting into ruin. The guys at the top, at the federal level, are, by and large, a group of old self-righteous farts who take a keen pleasure and perverse enjoyment out of seeing people carted off for minor infractions. There are also the considerations of strings--strings held by large organizations such as the incarceration industry and the prescription drug industry which make enormous amounts of money off of the illegal status of marijuana.
Imagine, if everyone in the US stopped to smoke a few doobies, how much less stress there would be in society? Stress is the #1 contributing factor to the breakdown of a biological system resulting in disease. Certainly there's no direct link which can be correlated from everyday life to the number of prescription drugs you buy but you can bet that the statistical analysts in the major marketing departments are all WELL aware of this economic correlation.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a "cartel" but, basically, yeah. Any time there are multiple distributors it's possible for one fat rich guy to get controlling interest in at different levels. By adjusting the flow rate from one warehouse to the next he can figure out which segment of his supply chain will pay the highest prices.
-----
Theif,
-----
They shot themselves in the foot by bundling Thief with the SB Live! audio card.
Maybe they were hoping for free advertising but I saw a game bundled with my card and thought,"Who made such a crappy game that they couldn't sell it on their own?" I never even played it.
-----
The FBI will then calculate bogus, ficticious damages on the basis of those numbers (just like they do with proprietary software) and go after them.
-----
This only happens if you have a big enough bank account to encourage them away from chasing down 14-year old easy targets.
Seriously, even if you could get the FBI to launch an investigation into a hardware company that's stealing OSS/GPL code, what makes you think the outcome would be any different than the DoJ's failed trial with MS? "Don't do that again and you owe them $15."
'Cuz it's trojaned and you'll provide entertainment for The Game?
Anyone who downloads a pirated edition of AutoCAD probably has no clue how to use it. It's a status symbol for the warez site, eats up bandwidth, and the original author isn't losing anything on it.
People are so touchy these days. Would you be bothered to the point of legal action if a script kiddie came to you on the street and said,"I slept with your Mom last night?"
Brush it off. You have more important things to worry about.
-----
They're just enforcing the laws that keep capitalism afloat
-----
Capitalism existed a long time before these laws.
People throw the word "capitalism" around like it has so much meaning. Some people hate "capitalist pigs". Other people love "capitalist society".
Get over it people. Capitalism is the natural progression out of barter and trade--a standardization of currency into a system which allows conversion to and from capital holdings like stock and property. Nothing more. Capitalism is not your own personal vaporous collection of ideals to be used to troll for people who agree or disagree with you.
-----
Who are these people really benefiting
-----
Have you asked that of the government?
Other than tax, fine, and fee you to death what has your government done for you lately?
Freely dubbing audio tapes in the 80s brought Metallica to the forefront by giving them free advertising to millions of listeners. Look who's side they're on now.
-----
properly subject to sanction would be if they distributed, sold or bartered binaries for derivative works of GPLed software in violation of the GPL.
-----
There are already people who do this. They have bank accounts and legal rosters. They're corporate pirates, not basement pirates. In terms of year-end goals and feeding the media with success stories the basement pirates are much easier to catch and prosecute. Corporate pirates are immune because there's no real person to blame. As we've seen with MS, the US DoJ doesn't have the resources or the teeth to be able to sue a corporation.
-----
But keep in mind that the same law that works for them works for everyone else too
-----
The mplayer page, and a number of others, list corporate entities which have illegally pirated open source or GPL code. Who can afford the legal process to obtain reparations?
Who can challenege MS when the core of their "system administrator tools" was stolen from open source projects? It's illegal to decompile and check it. No, I don't have proof for that, because I'm not in any rush to attract the attention of a corporation with a legal budget that's 100x larger than what I make in a year.
But if you bother to think about it you know it's true.
-----
Because ALL laws should be enforced
-----
Hitler felt the same way. As did Stalin. As did Hussein.
In some cultures it's acceptable to challenge and break laws which are abusive or which unfairly protect an established elite social class.
Come to think of it that summarizes the sentiment that caused the US to tell the British to suck eggs.
"Pirates" have a very real purpose to serve in the cycle of software development and that's to weed out all the useless crap. Software pirates have internal ethical codes. The best software gets shared only with friends. Only the crappiest software gets shared freely. Publicly exposing exploits is a good way to encourage the developers to improve or go find a different job.
For too many years we've seen the government guidos protecting half-assed hacks with big legal bank accounts when slimmer, faster, more efficient, and more elegant alternatives got squashed for infringing on intellectual property.
I've got my boots so I'll go ahead and say it: Living in a world which subsidizes 'tards with money while punishing intellectual excellence with threats of "insubordination" keeps me disdainful of the entire planet. I suppose the standard was set thousands of years ago by the bloodline theory of royalty. They may have two lazy eyes and an inferiority complex but they have money and authority to burn anyone that's better suited for life on this planet.
Rigging elections is a very complicated process that relies more on massaging statistics than it does on any particular machine. I'm more curious to see the results of India's recounts. A carefully controlled data acquisition system could give concrete proof to suspicions about human irregularity and consistency. What percentage of people who voted up four months ago will vote down now? Which media outlets producing which news stories have the greatest effect in swaying votes up, down, or inverse?
No one's ever going to get caught doing it. In a system that is so complicated it's too easy to disavow all knowledge or shuffle the focus to the next person in line. Diebold may not ever produce legitimate voting machines but that certainly won't stop them from gathering patents on intellectual property and demanding payments from any other company that does eventually produce validated and accepted systems.
I empathize with your views and, in general, agree. The "bad precedent for the future" was set a long time ago--around 1900 by my reckoning at the time when the US gov't sold the citizenry into an impossible debt to the gold standard set and controlled by the banks. How is it ever going to be possible to pay off a debt when the creditor is allowed to change the rules of repayment at a whim? We just have to suffer through the results as they stand today.
In related news, the stock prices of Alcoa and Reynold's skyrocketed by over 30 points each as the American public finally came to the realization that the military DOES know how to monitor all networks in real time and IS actively watching the populance using exploits that they DON'T tell anyone else about.
This from tcpdump:
.vz.Q..O....=.." .#F..}..i.i.u... .J..%o...\..p_.. ...r.....%4..... ..
10:56:39.661362 IP 65.60.141.106.1811 > 10.204.176.8.17300: S 2017536030:2017536030(0) win 64240
11:09:18.113766 IP 68.121.17.158.2049 > 10.204.176.8.1026: UDP, length 683
11:13:32.026978 31:e5:f0:85:7b:c5 > e3:c3:b8:72:68:b6, ethertype Unknown (0x0924), length 2354:
0x0000: ff76 7a88 51c5 8f4f d6ed 80aa 3db3 8722
0x0010: b723 469c 927d 90e5 699c 6919 7511 8f02
0x0020: 2935 1647 741c 2a8f b71f 1f30 ef12 0821 )5.Gt.*....0...!
0x0030: 064a 09ab 256f f02e f95c bc15 705f c594
0x0040: fe1d b972 c31c d0a2 d525 34ea 9f05 cf02
0x0050: b5f4
Accompanied by this in sys.log
Apr 20 11:14:05 g0lem kernel: spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7.
Apparently that length 2354 packet was malicious.
Government should never be redundant. It's a waste of taxpayer dollars.
Since we have no say in how our tax dollars are collected or spent then I guess, if DHS must exist, this would be something they should do.
Nobody's a "good guy" if they're spending my money based on implied consent. Once again, one of those things that we have no real say in. Politicians are going to spend money no matter who you elect and they haven't shown any sign of slowing down in the last 100 years.
On August 18th, 1999, the planets of our solar system are going to line up into the shape of a cross. They're going to line up with the ends of the cross lying in the constellations of aquarius, leo, taurus and scorpio, which just happen to correspond to the four beasts of the apocolypse as mentioned in the Book of Daniel.
ANOTHER FACT!
But the world didn't end on 18-Aug-1999.
Facts are useless.
Can ISPs filter spoofed packets at the /24 level or would that break VPNs?