By law, "All taxes must be uniform". Not that the government pays attention to that requirement.
Re:Best Buy = Best Fraud
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 2
I'm not a moron, and I'm not a troll. You, on the other hand are a complete moron AND a troll. Your opening sentence is proof of your trollness. What you say afterwards proves your stupidity.
For your information, I have purchased copyable medium and returned it, just not at Best Buy.
Stores generally can not sell NEW merchandise "as-is". There are certain legal requirements pertaining to "fitness of product". If something is adverstised as being able to do something, then it damn well better be able to do it. No, don't bother pulling out a standard EULA (or the back of a recipt). The courts have already said those are overriden by the point-of-sale contract laws.
Legally, I could have sued and won, economically, it wouldn't make sense to do so over a $30 game. Instead, I eat the $30 and find a business who actually gives a rat's ass about customer satisfaction.
As for your suggestion to beat the system. Won't work. They mark up the receipt to prevent you from doing exactly that.
Re:Best Buy = Best Fraud
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 2
BTW, I just wanted to comment that I appreciate you buying your daughter another game. It really sucks learning a lesson when you're a kid. I think that was a wonderful thing that you did for her.
What could I do? I challenge anyone to look in an eleven year old girl's eyes and say, "The store ripped you off, you lost your allowance, life sucks." Excluding Best Buy managers, since they are professional assholes.
Re:Best Buy = Best Fraud
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 2
Nice retort. You saved me the trouble of saying it myself. In fact, your statement applies equally to the wanker who called me a troll. Yeah, some people steal software. I don't.
Best Buy = Best Fraud
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Several months ago I my daughter spent her allowance on a game at best buy. When we got it home I installed the game and found it would not run (crashed on startup). This was on my wife's HP Pavilion (about as generic a consumer computer as you can find). I then tried it on my own computer, a bastard, self-built, multi-booting geek box from hell. Same exact problem, failed on startup.
We went back to the store to exchange it for a different game. No chance. They will not exchange a game unless the media is damage, and then only for another copy of the same game.
I spent far too long arguing with the manager. I pointed out that they would lose a regular customer over a $30 game. He would not budge.
I have not been back to that store since then. So as not to disappoint my daughter, I let her buy another game (from a different store, of course) as it would have been cruel to tell her she lost her allowance.
Unfortunately, this refusal to exchange software is a growing trend. Eventually, I will be forced to pirate all software for testing before I make an actual purchase.
For several decades we have tried being more tolerant of other cultures. As t.v. brings other nations into our homes, we see the results of our tolerance. We see the murder of innocent civilians by religious fantatics in the name of their god. We see women flogged by the police because they were raped. We see teachers sentenced to death for discussing historical facts in the classroom.
We aren't less tolerant. We our outraged by barbarism.
I've spent the day fooling around with WineX and Diablo II/LOD. It was a pain, but worth it.
1. Uninstalled WineX 1.03 2. Nuked my Diablo directory 3. Installed WineX 2.0 4. Installed Diablo II and LOD 5. Failed to get it to run, banged head against wall 6. Realized it wouldn't run because I didn't have 640x480 and 800x600 resolutions defined for my xserver. 7. Added the additional resolutions. 8. Ran the game! w00t!
Not being happy with the way things were, I then reconfigured everything to run the game on a second xserver at:1.0. Now it's perfect. No window manager to interfere with the game (the ALT meta key was a particular annoyance), it runs using the full screen, and doesn't interfere with my KDE desktop at all.
Performance it's bad, about 30 fps compared to 50 on Windoze. The font used to display status info (type "fps" in the chat box) is much too small, but other than that, it seems solid.
I love books a lot. I have more books than I have shelfspace for. They are crammed into every bit of spare space in three different rooms. My wife and daughter are just as bad. Actually, my wife is worse than me because she will buy the same book in two different languages.
Putting a book online will not prevent me from buying a real paper version of the book. It might get me interested in it enough to buy it.
As for Stephen King's experiment. He went about it the wrong way. Replacing a book with an electronic copy just isn't going to work. I can't lay in bed on a lazy Sunday afternoon and read an ebook. I can't bring it along when I'm going somewhere where I know there will be a wait (e.g. doctor's office) or when I go in that little room with so much privacy.
Sometimes I go through my shelves without anything in mind and run across a book I haven't read in years. It's like bumping into an old friend. You just don't get the same feeling browsing through a directory listing.
Great script. I hope the ny times enjoys my personal information. I never realized I lived in South Africa.
I book marked it for future use. Thanks.
btw, does your script handle passing the ny times link to it? It would be great to reference nytimes stuff directly through your script when making postings here on/. While you're at it, include an option to just generate the info randomly and immediately send the reader to the ny times url.
I've never once pirated music. However, I play most of my music CDs on a computer. If they continue to implement "play prevention" schemes into CDs, I will be forced to pirate any music I want to be able to play it on my computer.
Next they will have to shut down DiabloII.Net since they post screen shots. Also, any magazine that plans on doing a review of the game better think twice before printing screen shots.
You must be a troll, or just really stupid. bnetd has nothing to do with pirating the game.
Reverse engineering is a fact of life. As soon as you release a successful product, someone is going to start reverse engineering it. This is true whether it is software or hardware. It is also perfectly legal.
As of a few days ago, the fan website has been banned any discussion of the legality of bnetd in their chatroom, #diabloii on irc.wiregrass.com. Furthermore, when many of the regular members protested this action by included [censored] or [oppressed] in their nicknames, they were banned. The nickname modifications that resulted in being banned include: [bnetd], [censored], [oppressed], and [not_battle_net] (there may have been others).
A posting to their forums mentioning the censorship was deleted, and the account of the poster (myself) is no longer allowed to post (not a big deal, I created the account specifically for that purpose). Don't petty tyrants surpress news of censorship, too?
As it stands, discussing bnetd is forbidden in the chat room. Protesting the censorship in any way is forbidden. Discussing bnetd or the censorship in the forums is forbidden.
Under a different account, I posted a rebuttal to their recent anti-bnetd article. I wonder if they will censor that as well?
At least improve the handling of the CD drive. The system is perfectly capable of detecting when a CD has been inserted. Mount it for me damn it! And when I press the eject button, it can umount automatically. Why am I having to go through the trouble of doing this manually?
LOL. Close. I know of less than a dozen specialists.
I'm not very tolerant of crappy installers. All too often I'm pissed not just because it's crap, but because they didn't hire me to write something that works. With the tech industry in the dumps at the moment, companies are cutting corners. My services turned out to be one of those corners.
I'm an installation speciliast. That is, I write installers for many different platforms. One of my biggest complaints about software is installers written by amatures. Typically, the manager tosses a copy of InstallShield at the junior programmer and says, "why don't you deal with this when you have a moment". This is usually said a few days before the release date. The result is a mediocre installer that runs ok most of the time, but often the installer will have a basic flaw, such as replacing important system files with an old version.
On Linux/Unix platforms, it's even worse. The installer is almost always a horrid shell script that has been hacked on by a dozen different people over several years. No one really knows what that script is actually doing. The script works great, so long as you are running RH 7.1, because that's the distro the programmer uses.
As for standards, they do exist on Windoze platforms and people familiar with writing installers deal with them. In the Linux/Unix world, it's a free for all. There are some general standards, but all too often they are ignored.
When it comes to "stealth" installing, I wouldn't do it. If the component isn't necessary to run, then it is an option with a checkbox. If it's pretty good idea to install it, it will be checked by default. If it's just eye candy, it will be unchecked. If the primary software won't run without it, it will not be an optional component.
In summary, hire the right person for the right job. Stick to standards where they exist, fight for reasonable standards where they don't. Never forceably install unecessary components. Most important, don't ever change basic system functionality.
How much do you want to bet this breaks samba. How much do you want to bet that Microsoft won't release enough information for the samba team to quickly support the new file system. How much do you want to bet this has nothing to do with making a better file system and more to do with killing non-Microsoft servers. I would give any other company the benefit of the doubt. Microsoft's history, however, proves everything they do is to increase marketshare and nothing to do with making a better OS.
What follows is my personal response and does not necessarily represent the beliefs of any persons working on the bnetd project. Also, although I am not currently a member of the bnetd project, Blizzard's actions have prompted me to support this open source program in whatever way I am able.
"Although these programs might have been made with good intentions, they directly promote software piracy..."
The software, bnetd, no more promotes piracy than a crowbar promotes breaking and entering. Just as a crowbar can be misused, bnetd emulator can also be misused. A lock pick set is illegal here in California without a license because its primary purpose is to circumvent security. No license is required to own a crowbar or hacksaw just because these devices might be used in an illegal manner.
"...thereby eliminating Blizzard's ability to protect legitimate consumers..."
I'm a legitimate consumer. I own just about everything ever made by Blizzard. Your disrupting the development of bnetd has interfered with my ability to play the game. Shutting down bnetd is a violation of my fair use of software I legally own. Please explain the logic used to derive at the conclusion that disrupting my ability to play is actually helping me.
"we are well within our legal rights to protect our products from software piracy"
No one disputes this right, but you have not gone after the pirates any more than the police would by going after the manufacturer of crowbars.
"In order for us to keep our proprietary CD-key algorithms secure, we cannot allow outside servers to query for the validity of CD keys."
Security through obscurity is no security at all. Your algorithm with be reverse-engineered, eventually. When that happens, the inherent weakness will be public knowledge. CD key generators are already floating around the web. Obviously, the security of the CD keys has been seriously compromised. If you make the CD key verification code public, it can be implemented into bnetd and most users of the program will, no doubt, implement. In truth, the CD key verification should not be necessary. The game will not run without a valid game CD in the drive. If something is circumventing this verification, is is completely unrelated to bnetd. We are not pirates and we do not like pirates.
"Unfortunately, software pirates have spoiled this situation for hobbyists."
No, Blizzard - you have. The pirates are always going to be there, regardless of what you do to legitimate owners of the games.
"We are constantly working to improve Battle.net, and we sincerely hope that one day, no one will see any reason to seek alternatives to Battle.net for playing Blizzard games.
You have? When did this happen? Diablo 2:LoD has been virtually unplayable for several months now. Why do you think we seek an alternate closed realm? Since Blizzard has obviously abandoned the game to the hackers and cheaters, we have been forced by you to come up with our own solution. If you actually made an attempt to do something about the horrid condition of the realms, we might not be setting up our own realms. We want a nice place to play the game, free of cheaters and dupers. You won't give this to us; so, like an abandoned step-child, we must try to go our own way.
With the state of the realms in a perpetual state of self-destruction due to Blizzard's neglect, and with Blizzard's complete lack of interest in making existing customers happy, I have decided there is no reason to purchase another Blizzard product ever again. You have lost a customer. How many will you have to lose before you realize you must SUPPORT YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMERS.
During the previous duping exploit a few weeks ago, a Blizzard talking head said they had "come up with a solution that should be satisfactory to most people." We're still waiting. When is this mythical solution going to be implemented? Perhaps when he said "most people" he was referring to the Blizzard marketing division and the dupers. I'm sure the the only people satisfied with Blizzard's non-solution will be the marketing people (they are hoping it will drive people to their new game) and the dupers (they are free to abuse the realms to their heart's content).
Blizzard has gone to great lengths to try to limit cheating
You obviously haven't been playing Diablo II on the realms. The realms are currently in complete dissarray because of out of control cheating. Blizzard does virutally nothing to stop this. Cheaters are not punished in any way. So when someone figures out a way to duplicate the most powerful and rare items, Blizzard makes a patch (eventually), but they don't delete the accounts of the cheaters even though it is a violation of their AUP. Since there is no downside to cheating (for the cheaters), next week they come out with a new way of cheating.
It is my opinion that Blizzard is purposely letting the Diablo realms self destruct so that they can push their newest online game, World of Warcraft. I have already decided to completely boycott all future Blizzard products. They have lost a loyal customer, and I'm not the only one.
I've enjoyed almost every book written by Brin, with the exception of the book "Earth". In this world of tomorrow, privacy is a thing of the past. Virtually everything you say and do is open to public scrutiny. It was a frightening world, one in which I would not wish to live in.
Every now and then someone says something so outrageous that it demands the response, "Are you on crack!?" The American entertainmenet business must be shooting for a monopoly on this question.
Slashdot Mirror
Their next step will be to pass a law for guaranteed tax payer funded profits.
Oh, wait, they already have that. Never mind.
By law, "All taxes must be uniform". Not that the government pays attention to that requirement.
I'm not a moron, and I'm not a troll. You, on the other hand are a complete moron AND a troll. Your opening sentence is proof of your trollness. What you say afterwards proves your stupidity.
For your information, I have purchased copyable medium and returned it, just not at Best Buy.
Stores generally can not sell NEW merchandise "as-is". There are certain legal requirements pertaining to "fitness of product". If something is adverstised as being able to do something, then it damn well better be able to do it. No, don't bother pulling out a standard EULA (or the back of a recipt). The courts have already said those are overriden by the point-of-sale contract laws.
Legally, I could have sued and won, economically, it wouldn't make sense to do so over a $30 game. Instead, I eat the $30 and find a business who actually gives a rat's ass about customer satisfaction.
As for your suggestion to beat the system. Won't work. They mark up the receipt to prevent you from doing exactly that.
What could I do? I challenge anyone to look in an eleven year old girl's eyes and say, "The store ripped you off, you lost your allowance, life sucks." Excluding Best Buy managers, since they are professional assholes.
Nice retort. You saved me the trouble of saying it myself. In fact, your statement applies equally to the wanker who called me a troll. Yeah, some people steal software. I don't.
Several months ago I my daughter spent her allowance on a game at best buy. When we got it home I installed the game and found it would not run (crashed on startup). This was on my wife's HP Pavilion (about as generic a consumer computer as you can find). I then tried it on my own computer, a bastard, self-built, multi-booting geek box from hell. Same exact problem, failed on startup.
We went back to the store to exchange it for a different game. No chance. They will not exchange a game unless the media is damage, and then only for another copy of the same game.
I spent far too long arguing with the manager. I pointed out that they would lose a regular customer over a $30 game. He would not budge.
I have not been back to that store since then. So as not to disappoint my daughter, I let her buy another game (from a different store, of course) as it would have been cruel to tell her she lost her allowance.
Unfortunately, this refusal to exchange software is a growing trend. Eventually, I will be forced to pirate all software for testing before I make an actual purchase.
For several decades we have tried being more tolerant of other cultures. As t.v. brings other nations into our homes, we see the results of our tolerance. We see the murder of innocent civilians by religious fantatics in the name of their god. We see women flogged by the police because they were raped. We see teachers sentenced to death for discussing historical facts in the classroom.
We aren't less tolerant. We our outraged by barbarism.
would be "Stating the fucking obvious."
Jeez. Why is this on slashdot?
I've spent the day fooling around with WineX and Diablo II/LOD. It was a pain, but worth it.
:1.0. Now it's perfect. No window manager to interfere with the game (the ALT meta key was a particular annoyance), it runs using the full screen, and doesn't interfere with my KDE desktop at all.
1. Uninstalled WineX 1.03
2. Nuked my Diablo directory
3. Installed WineX 2.0
4. Installed Diablo II and LOD
5. Failed to get it to run, banged head against wall
6. Realized it wouldn't run because I didn't have 640x480 and 800x600 resolutions defined for my xserver.
7. Added the additional resolutions.
8. Ran the game! w00t!
Not being happy with the way things were, I then reconfigured everything to run the game on a second xserver at
Performance it's bad, about 30 fps compared to 50 on Windoze. The font used to display status info (type "fps" in the chat box) is much too small, but other than that, it seems solid.
Time to kill Baal for the billionth time.
I love books a lot. I have more books than I have shelfspace for. They are crammed into every bit of spare space in three different rooms. My wife and daughter are just as bad. Actually, my wife is worse than me because she will buy the same book in two different languages.
Putting a book online will not prevent me from buying a real paper version of the book. It might get me interested in it enough to buy it.
As for Stephen King's experiment. He went about it the wrong way. Replacing a book with an electronic copy just isn't going to work. I can't lay in bed on a lazy Sunday afternoon and read an ebook. I can't bring it along when I'm going somewhere where I know there will be a wait (e.g. doctor's office) or when I go in that little room with so much privacy.
Sometimes I go through my shelves without anything in mind and run across a book I haven't read in years. It's like bumping into an old friend. You just don't get the same feeling browsing through a directory listing.
Great script. I hope the ny times enjoys my personal information. I never realized I lived in South Africa.
/. While you're at it, include an option to just generate the info randomly and immediately send the reader to the ny times url.
I book marked it for future use. Thanks.
btw, does your script handle passing the ny times link to it? It would be great to reference nytimes stuff directly through your script when making postings here on
I've never once pirated music. However, I play most of my music CDs on a computer. If they continue to implement "play prevention" schemes into CDs, I will be forced to pirate any music I want to be able to play it on my computer.
Next they will have to shut down DiabloII.Net since they post screen shots. Also, any magazine that plans on doing a review of the game better think twice before printing screen shots.
You must be a troll, or just really stupid. bnetd has nothing to do with pirating the game.
Reverse engineering is a fact of life. As soon as you release a successful product, someone is going to start reverse engineering it. This is true whether it is software or hardware. It is also perfectly legal.
As of a few days ago, the fan website has been banned any discussion of the legality of bnetd in their chatroom, #diabloii on irc.wiregrass.com. Furthermore, when many of the regular members protested this action by included [censored] or [oppressed] in their nicknames, they were banned. The nickname modifications that resulted in being banned include: [bnetd], [censored], [oppressed], and [not_battle_net] (there may have been others).
A posting to their forums mentioning the censorship was deleted, and the account of the poster (myself) is no longer allowed to post (not a big deal, I created the account specifically for that purpose). Don't petty tyrants surpress news of censorship, too?
As it stands, discussing bnetd is forbidden in the chat room. Protesting the censorship in any way is forbidden. Discussing bnetd or the censorship in the forums is forbidden.
Under a different account, I posted a rebuttal to their recent anti-bnetd article. I wonder if they will censor that as well?
At least improve the handling of the CD drive. The system is perfectly capable of detecting when a CD has been inserted. Mount it for me damn it! And when I press the eject button, it can umount automatically. Why am I having to go through the trouble of doing this manually?
LOL. Close. I know of less than a dozen specialists.
I'm not very tolerant of crappy installers. All too often I'm pissed not just because it's crap, but because they didn't hire me to write something that works. With the tech industry in the dumps at the moment, companies are cutting corners. My services turned out to be one of those corners.
I'm an installation speciliast. That is, I write installers for many different platforms. One of my biggest complaints about software is installers written by amatures. Typically, the manager tosses a copy of InstallShield at the junior programmer and says, "why don't you deal with this when you have a moment". This is usually said a few days before the release date. The result is a mediocre installer that runs ok most of the time, but often the installer will have a basic flaw, such as replacing important system files with an old version.
On Linux/Unix platforms, it's even worse. The installer is almost always a horrid shell script that has been hacked on by a dozen different people over several years. No one really knows what that script is actually doing. The script works great, so long as you are running RH 7.1, because that's the distro the programmer uses.
As for standards, they do exist on Windoze platforms and people familiar with writing installers deal with them. In the Linux/Unix world, it's a free for all. There are some general standards, but all too often they are ignored.
When it comes to "stealth" installing, I wouldn't do it. If the component isn't necessary to run, then it is an option with a checkbox. If it's pretty good idea to install it, it will be checked by default. If it's just eye candy, it will be unchecked. If the primary software won't run without it, it will not be an optional component.
In summary, hire the right person for the right job. Stick to standards where they exist, fight for reasonable standards where they don't. Never forceably install unecessary components. Most important, don't ever change basic system functionality.
How much do you want to bet this breaks samba. How much do you want to bet that Microsoft won't release enough information for the samba team to quickly support the new file system. How much do you want to bet this has nothing to do with making a better file system and more to do with killing non-Microsoft servers. I would give any other company the benefit of the doubt. Microsoft's history, however, proves everything they do is to increase marketshare and nothing to do with making a better OS.
You can view the letter in its entirety here at Blizzard Takes Action to Protect.
The software, bnetd, no more promotes piracy than a crowbar promotes breaking and entering. Just as a crowbar can be misused, bnetd emulator can also be misused. A lock pick set is illegal here in California without a license because its primary purpose is to circumvent security. No license is required to own a crowbar or hacksaw just because these devices might be used in an illegal manner. I'm a legitimate consumer. I own just about everything ever made by Blizzard. Your disrupting the development of bnetd has interfered with my ability to play the game. Shutting down bnetd is a violation of my fair use of software I legally own. Please explain the logic used to derive at the conclusion that disrupting my ability to play is actually helping me. No one disputes this right, but you have not gone after the pirates any more than the police would by going after the manufacturer of crowbars. Security through obscurity is no security at all. Your algorithm with be reverse-engineered, eventually. When that happens, the inherent weakness will be public knowledge. CD key generators are already floating around the web. Obviously, the security of the CD keys has been seriously compromised. If you make the CD key verification code public, it can be implemented into bnetd and most users of the program will, no doubt, implement. In truth, the CD key verification should not be necessary. The game will not run without a valid game CD in the drive. If something is circumventing this verification, is is completely unrelated to bnetd. We are not pirates and we do not like pirates. No, Blizzard - you have. The pirates are always going to be there, regardless of what you do to legitimate owners of the games. You have? When did this happen? Diablo 2:LoD has been virtually unplayable for several months now. Why do you think we seek an alternate closed realm? Since Blizzard has obviously abandoned the game to the hackers and cheaters, we have been forced by you to come up with our own solution. If you actually made an attempt to do something about the horrid condition of the realms, we might not be setting up our own realms. We want a nice place to play the game, free of cheaters and dupers. You won't give this to us; so, like an abandoned step-child, we must try to go our own way. With the state of the realms in a perpetual state of self-destruction due to Blizzard's neglect, and with Blizzard's complete lack of interest in making existing customers happy, I have decided there is no reason to purchase another Blizzard product ever again. You have lost a customer. How many will you have to lose before you realize you must SUPPORT YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMERS. During the previous duping exploit a few weeks ago, a Blizzard talking head said they had "come up with a solution that should be satisfactory to most people." We're still waiting. When is this mythical solution going to be implemented? Perhaps when he said "most people" he was referring to the Blizzard marketing division and the dupers. I'm sure the the only people satisfied with Blizzard's non-solution will be the marketing people (they are hoping it will drive people to their new game) and the dupers (they are free to abuse the realms to their heart's content).You obviously haven't been playing Diablo II on the realms. The realms are currently in complete dissarray because of out of control cheating. Blizzard does virutally nothing to stop this. Cheaters are not punished in any way. So when someone figures out a way to duplicate the most powerful and rare items, Blizzard makes a patch (eventually), but they don't delete the accounts of the cheaters even though it is a violation of their AUP. Since there is no downside to cheating (for the cheaters), next week they come out with a new way of cheating.
It is my opinion that Blizzard is purposely letting the Diablo realms self destruct so that they can push their newest online game, World of Warcraft. I have already decided to completely boycott all future Blizzard products. They have lost a loyal customer, and I'm not the only one.
I've enjoyed almost every book written by Brin, with the exception of the book "Earth". In this world of tomorrow, privacy is a thing of the past. Virtually everything you say and do is open to public scrutiny. It was a frightening world, one in which I would not wish to live in.
Every now and then someone says something so outrageous that it demands the response, "Are you on crack!?" The American entertainmenet business must be shooting for a monopoly on this question.
Extremely well said.