> Regarding a programmatic check, would they have to explicitly disallow every objectionable domain-forwarder individually? Or could they stop them en masse? But what about links from legit sources like search engines that they do want? (I honestly don't know how it works, these aren't rhetorical questions).
No, you can do a programmatic check which would reject only those coming from the domain in question (generalmotorssucks.com) in this case.
In that sense, it really doesn't matter if people think Bill Gates is 'pulling' rather than me 'pushing', because Bill Gates could just as easily redirect all those requests to SirSludSucks.com or whatever he/she pleases (or just drop the connection entirely, or reidrect to a page that decries my actions, or any other choice that a free-speech enabled country will allow.. )
Well, you're not forwarding mail, you're forwarding visitors to your house to Bill Gates' house. And Bill Gates can simply lock his gate.
Same with a domain pointer. A simple programmatic check on the front page of Ford's site (about 3 lines of code) would turn away 99.99% of all the people coming through that domain. Ford chose not to deny those visitors, which would have accomplished everything they wanted.. they chose to sue the person telling everyone to g there.
There's no problem, because the target can always diffuse the pointer. Ford was simply trying to use bully tactics to dissuade people from doing similar things even if its totally preventable by the alleged 'victim' of this terrible terrible crime - uncool, and like any company hypocritically attempting to keep their image cleaner than a bus full of Kumbaya-singin nuns, they deserved to lose.
-2 points for abuse of the word 'take'. Remember, I'm copying here, not taking.
I've written a few songs.
Lets hold an experiment.
I'll find somebody to 'borrow' them, illegally (because I'm not going to give them permission to use it) and have them sell it. Next, you take my car, which I am currently not using.
Then, my friend and you can go to court, and we'll see who gets in trouble.
I fail to understand why you cant wrap your head around 'borrowing' a physical object, and an idea. I really feel bad for your myopic stance, which no doubt includes some sort of sad notion that we _finally_ figured out that IP and ideas are commodities which must be protected just like physical property or the world will collapse... sigh. Would it be disrespectful of me to ask your age, and what your job is?
And the game companies dont seem to mind. The guy who invented Tetris never saw a cent from a game company for the original Tetris game. Companies only push for IP protection when they have it - when somebody else has it, they are all too happy to steal it. And they can, cause they be big, with big lawyers.
I fail to see the difference between their 'copying' of ideas and mine.
I agree with you, man! If the endgame here is to improve quality of life (ie, protecting IP to fuel capitalism to raise quality of living), I won't support a system where I'm living an extra 30 years in great conditions unhappily. Its like cutting off the nose to spite the face.
I never once said it was my right. Its not my right. I'm just going to do it, because I think it _should_ be legal (or fairuse, or ignored, but I prefer to have laws reflect behaviour rather than a smoke and mirrons sytem people are always attempting to work around a la grey market) and I know enough other people to do it not to be putting myself at great legal jeopardy. Judging by other people, they will do it too. At some point, those who desire control will have to lock us all up or give up.. or do the sane thing and have the copyright laws reflect human behaviour and changing social opinion (what a radical concept!)
I'm all for short term protection of copyright. 10 years. 15 years TOPS.
I'm not claiming the moral high ground here (morals are subjective by nature, anyhow).. I'm expressing my opinion.
MAME should be left alone and not considered a piracy-enabling machine. Chasing after its users does more harm to the public than the good that comes from protecting the copyright owners of those old, already-been-paid-for games.
Again, I just stick by my opinion that the grey market has always existed, always will, and has always operated _fairly_ independantly (for the most part) from the economy. I dont know anybody that would outright PAY lots of money for those games, but I sure know that letting people keep playing them for years will immortalize the creators and contributors of the games (nevermind the games themselves); and that is much more significant repayment to society than allowing a company to milk some nostalgic game players for a piddly little revenue stream that goes to one company.
Isn't anyone afraid we wont have a history and culture 30 years from now, because companies will hold all the copyrights to our childhoods' cultures? ("Yes, son, we used to play this game called Asteroids, but I cant show it to you, because its not profitable for Activision to sell it anymore. I could get it myself, but their lawyers are afraid of letting it into the commons on the off-chance that they decide to release another version of it any year now and our little father/son fun will dillute the value of their brand... trust me son, its for the good of us all *coughcough*.")
Well, thats kinda sticky. When copyright ad inifinitum is in the hands of a coperation, it benifits a few, although the contention is made that by doing so, we encourage investment into new developments. The biggest cultural successes have always come at times when the rights of the author were not very very strong. When it is copyright ad inifitum a la GPL, whos purpose is to force work back into the public commons, I'm far more lenient, because the ideas behind the GPL are pro public, not pro private.
But yes, that makes me somewhat of a hypocrite. I suppose if people support the drive companies have to exercise total control over thier IP, then I dont think its that hypocritical to simply say, "I suppose ad inifitum when it benifits the commons, but not when it benifits a private entity."
Personally, I think if Disney et all hadn't successfully fucked up copyright law, Stallman wouldn't have have percieved the need to make the GPL so 'Stallmaneque'. No man is an island, and Stallman is clearly just a fight fire with fire kinda guy, even if it makes him less credible to the crowd that believes that the private sector's love for draconian author rights. Without such a pro-private climate, I highly doubt there would be such a pro-commons camp, because the law would balance everyones interests sufficiently (as it did in the 1700s, and up to the late 1800s).
Both America and Russia, during the cold war, had each other to thank for their righteousness and unblinking uncompromising positions regarding their social and political stances. The Stallman camp vs the Private camp is the same deal. I just happen to side with Stallman, since it makes no sense to me to defend the rights of the private when so many people who are supposed to be benifiting under that system are not happy with its fruits.
If you can find me a publisher and programmer of any of those titles who depends on royalties from those games to live, please contact me.
Otherwise, who the hell cares. The best part is, the only people that get up in arms are the companies and their lawyers. Ive yet to hear the designer of Astroids complain bitterly that he didn't get repaid for every Asteroids rip off out there.
Microsoft (and old videogame authors, publishers) can kiss my fucking ass. They'd been paid in spades. Look at the gaming industry right now.. did the fact that PacAMan, Asteroids, etc were copied by thousands upon thousands of clones (freeware, shareware, and commercial) somehow hurt the game industry and prevent its ability to invest in games? Looking at the market these days, I cant really believe they are detremental to the point of requiring vigilent lawyer-based protection. If they dont need it, they cant have it. Sorry.
Its like a next door neighbour with a house 4,000,000 bigger than mine who's pissed off because I'm blocking the sun to one tiny basement window at the corner of the mansion.
Yes, there is a smidgen of irony in there, but if these games' royalties are so valuable, they'd be advertising them and selling them in bundles other than "Top 20 Arcade Hits" etc bundles. Even then, thats 'recycled' innovation, not something I want to support monetarily. Anyone that wants to play Joust, Centipede, etc has undoubedly paid their dues at the quarter-eating-boxes, etc years ago.
Compare this to books: do you really think you should have to buy your favorite books every 10 years, because the paper you read it on becomes obsolete and unavailable every decade?
No really, mod chips let me import games (which I purchase) from Japan. Pure and simple.
What the fuck is the point of globalization and "the international market" if they are selling neutered hardware that wont let you even USE the stuff you can now have access to in other markets?
It's a fucking joke. Anyone who supports increased global trade, but opposes mod-chips is a total hypocrite. We are not becoming a global community, but a two tiered society - powerful producers and powerless consumers.
Well, fuck that. Like the Boston Tea Party, sometimes you gotta break the rules when they've been sufficiently and effectively stacked up against you.
Yes, others have addressed this, but let me say, how dare that computer do something more accurately, with more precise numbers than you wanted it to!;)
Re:Self deprecating reference
on
Pet Bugs?
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· Score: 2
Its fairly useful when you want to assign the tokens to ptrs.. all ptrs will be null terminated without your intervention.
If you know what it does, and thats what you want, then its all good.
There are alternatives, no need to pick on an oldie but goodie..
People who arnt in the business of comparing (ie, not techies or wannabe techies) rarely make that comparison. Doubly so for products they would never even be comparing when making purchasing decisions.
Its just a number for sales people to rattle off to parents, who invariably think one of two things:
- gee, that number's higher than the last time I heard it
or even worse
- gee, that number's high
It was like MMX - it was a useless feature when salespeople were pushing it, but shoppers really seem to be fooled by numbers and acronyms. The only part that ticks me off is how hard it is to teach a non-technical person to never put stock into what they hear, and more importantly, never put stock in their own ability to interpret it. For some reason, people dont all seem to act like they can talk the talk with cars, planes, other technical things - but there is something about technology that makes lots of newbies think they can get some sense of perspective in the jungle of specs and features out there. I know I might sound somewhat elitist, but I hope for my sake a mechanic knocks some shit into me if I ever go off on engine specs and prepare to drop serious money on my assesment of the sales lingo I'm presented.
well, I'd say that a well equipped gaming PC will blow an Xbox or Gamecube (sorry, I dont put the PS2 in the same league, but thats for another flame-ridden thread;) away in terms of:
- FPS - resolution - online play - saved game complexity
but the consoles win with:
- FPS consistancy (games designed at a 'lowest denominator' level in terms of performance, so you dont slow down as much as PC games do when stuff gets really messy) - control - $-per-unit-of-performance
Also, dont forget the suitability of certain types of games:
- online lends itself to PC - fps to PC - PC games more editable - loading times on consoles usually better (or at least Gamecube just blows everything away with its cute lil miniDVD media) - multiple people at the same time.. duh, console:)
I dunno. As always, it depends on what you like to play. Some people need their Quake, others their Platformers. Console games are often designed to be more pickup-and-play than PC games too.
The fact that most people have larger televisions than monitors helps the console in terms of display real estate in most homes too..
Well, if your parent poster is American, he can stick to the tried and true American rebuttal.. judging from his objective assesment of Wil Wheaton's site, I'm guessing it will be along the lines of "Because he's a fucking baby and deserves it."
I, for one, want to see him in the movie. It was the TNG writers who were incapable of making Wil Wheaton look like anything above a Boy Scout who'd won the "Travel With the Enterprise" contest.
This is why software, by law, should explode like an atom bomb when a sigfault occurrs.;)
.. if we were developing bridges, etc, you'd see alot more caution and listening on the part of management and achitects (nevermind that for *some* reason, more managers in the engineering biz are.. gasp, actually engineers!) if there were physical costs to buggy software, rather than (mostly) economic costs.
Anyhow, I'm glibly musing, but for the record, I totally agree with you.
Except the kid throwing the brick isnt a vandal in this case - its IT and software companies. And while, yes, "the broken window fallacy" applies, I'm under the impression that lots of people would actually support the superficial window-breaking of buggy software over altnatives in economic output; be it traditional goods or intellectual development in the social sciences, history, etc.. course, I guess people would want that money to go back into making more software and gee-wiz gadgets.
It's just a shame - I really don't think alot of people believe that that grocer should spend his 100$ on art and culture rather than a new security system to make sure the window can never be broken in the future. =)
Course, my point is more about allocation of resources, but I only meant to illustrate that if we valued the act of 'fixing windows' as some sort of religious activity or sacred tradition (or maybe there was value placed on having been a customer to a 'window fixer'.. like a status symbol), its not impossible to justify breaking windows unless one gets very macroscopic in ones analysis.:)
What about breast enhancements? They create jobs, spurn some kind of innovation, I'm sure... but isn't that money that could go to more important things? Isn't the "broken window fallacy" just an example of how it is impposible to place an objective analysis of value of goods and services as they befit humanity? You could almost rename it the "I think my breasts are honestly too small" fallacy - that by judging something a problem, you are in effect reducing resources that could go towards something more people value greater... and how does this couple with the 'capitalism is not a zero sum game'.. can you on one hand argue that that 100$ could have gone to something else without contradicting the pundits who claim there is, in effect, limitless resources so long as we keep being capitalists?
This isn't a bait, I'm just kinda thinking out loud here..
I think people latched on to his rather shaky use of the word 'market' - listening to some people, a market is transparent regardless of who's got what power, who's paying what, who owns how much, etc. Posts like his sound like a round about way of saying:
"A market is free until you hold a gun to a consumers head."
If I had infinate time, infinate capability to travel, to read, to research, etc, I might (*maybe*) start to agree. As it stands, "buyer beware" is fair to a point, but at some point we consumers have to start thinking about ourselves as that - consumers! Many of us go to work and dream up ways of fooling or influcing ourselves (or consumers like us) into acting this way or that (otherwise we wouldn't have a marketing dept, no?)... but come home spewing over simplifications about the complexity and difficulty of being an astute and well informed consumer. I know how to choose something off the menu, thank you very much.. I am just not cool with that menu being selected by a single party with vested economic interests with respect to my familliarity with my choices.
Well, if 30% of all humans are supporting the payola-type of radio (and the rest have tuned out), fuck those 30 percent. 70 percent are ready to have their air waves back.
Your erroneous assumption is that its more profitable for the company to cater to the majority of consumers rather than a small percentage. WRONG! (Ask any marketer - the crowd you wish to please is usually quite small out of the potential customers.. you go after your heavy users, or in the case of radio, consumers that you can cross-market to other mediums... ) Radio companies could give less than a fuck about meeting the needs of 'the market' - if I tune out, I'm not a lost customer, I'm just a guy who wouldn't have made them much money had I been listening anyways.. cause I'm capable of making my own decisions and thinking for myself, certainly not the demographic you're after in a payola-pre-packaged culture market.
Considering that the air waves are public, and that we like the _concept_ of radio (the technology), but not whats being played on it, I absolutely support getting the government to break the control these large entities have in catering to a small percentage of the population that makes their little cartel economically profitable.
how the hell is a market considered free when content producers pay off content distributors to limit (yes, LIMIT) the selection of what they play?
> No one is "owed" access to my ears.
Calling Mr.Stupid. Of course nobody is 'owed' access to your ears. But guess what? You won't stop using them. They are there. And sometimes, you pay money to someone for what they put in there.
All that is well and good, but its not much of a free market unless I have a moderately fair opporunity to get near your ears. As it stands, large companies are bribing other large companies to make sure that when your ears are being "accessed" (you dont have to make the concious effort to open them up - they tend to work 24/7, while you're at work, in the store, etc, etc) by pre-selected goods.
This is the opposite of a free market. The way you talk, nothing on this planet is unfair, because clearly "the market" (or "God", as some people like to think of it as) would fix it if it were. What a broken and apathetic way of looking at things.
If you count the amount of online gag orders for trademark and copyright infringement (read: fan sites, etc) in the US, I'll bet they come out equal relatively equal.. or maybe with the lawyers on top.
Some places are ruled by ideology and authority, and so ideology or anti-authority speech will be powerful and thus controlled by the ruling body. Some places are ruled by money, and so money-affecting speech will be controlled by the ruling body.
It all depends on what you constitute as 'free speech', methinks.
id be very interested in knowing how the law does or should apply in this situation.. are car companies held responsible for bugs? hobbiests?
this is one of the first situations that I know of where the result of bad programming on the party of a hobbiest could really fuck shit up physically... and are you talking about using the car on tracks or my streets?:)
Slashdot Mirror
This is fantabulous. Yay. MS will not own yet another chunk of the architecture I rely on. Woot. Etc. :)
> Regarding a programmatic check, would they have to explicitly disallow every objectionable domain-forwarder individually? Or could they stop them en masse? But what about links from legit sources like search engines that they do want? (I honestly don't know how it works, these aren't rhetorical questions).
.. )
No, you can do a programmatic check which would reject only those coming from the domain in question (generalmotorssucks.com) in this case.
In that sense, it really doesn't matter if people think Bill Gates is 'pulling' rather than me 'pushing', because Bill Gates could just as easily redirect all those requests to SirSludSucks.com or whatever he/she pleases (or just drop the connection entirely, or reidrect to a page that decries my actions, or any other choice that a free-speech enabled country will allow
Well, you're not forwarding mail, you're forwarding visitors to your house to Bill Gates' house. And Bill Gates can simply lock his gate.
.. they chose to sue the person telling everyone to g there.
Same with a domain pointer. A simple programmatic check on the front page of Ford's site (about 3 lines of code) would turn away 99.99% of all the people coming through that domain. Ford chose not to deny those visitors, which would have accomplished everything they wanted
There's no problem, because the target can always diffuse the pointer. Ford was simply trying to use bully tactics to dissuade people from doing similar things even if its totally preventable by the alleged 'victim' of this terrible terrible crime - uncool, and like any company hypocritically attempting to keep their image cleaner than a bus full of Kumbaya-singin nuns, they deserved to lose.
>So taking property owned by others
... sigh. Would it be disrespectful of me to ask your age, and what your job is?
-2 points for abuse of the word 'take'. Remember, I'm copying here, not taking.
I've written a few songs.
Lets hold an experiment.
I'll find somebody to 'borrow' them, illegally (because I'm not going to give them permission to use it) and have them sell it. Next, you take my car, which I am currently not using.
Then, my friend and you can go to court, and we'll see who gets in trouble.
I fail to understand why you cant wrap your head around 'borrowing' a physical object, and an idea. I really feel bad for your myopic stance, which no doubt includes some sort of sad notion that we _finally_ figured out that IP and ideas are commodities which must be protected just like physical property or the world will collapse
And the game companies dont seem to mind. The guy who invented Tetris never saw a cent from a game company for the original Tetris game. Companies only push for IP protection when they have it - when somebody else has it, they are all too happy to steal it. And they can, cause they be big, with big lawyers.
I fail to see the difference between their 'copying' of ideas and mine.
I agree with you, man! If the endgame here is to improve quality of life (ie, protecting IP to fuel capitalism to raise quality of living), I won't support a system where I'm living an extra 30 years in great conditions unhappily. Its like cutting off the nose to spite the face.
.. or do the sane thing and have the copyright laws reflect human behaviour and changing social opinion (what a radical concept!)
I never once said it was my right. Its not my right. I'm just going to do it, because I think it _should_ be legal (or fairuse, or ignored, but I prefer to have laws reflect behaviour rather than a smoke and mirrons sytem people are always attempting to work around a la grey market) and I know enough other people to do it not to be putting myself at great legal jeopardy. Judging by other people, they will do it too. At some point, those who desire control will have to lock us all up or give up
I'm all for short term protection of copyright. 10 years. 15 years TOPS.
.. I'm expressing my opinion.
... trust me son, its for the good of us all *coughcough*.")
I'm not claiming the moral high ground here (morals are subjective by nature, anyhow)
MAME should be left alone and not considered a piracy-enabling machine. Chasing after its users does more harm to the public than the good that comes from protecting the copyright owners of those old, already-been-paid-for games.
Again, I just stick by my opinion that the grey market has always existed, always will, and has always operated _fairly_ independantly (for the most part) from the economy. I dont know anybody that would outright PAY lots of money for those games, but I sure know that letting people keep playing them for years will immortalize the creators and contributors of the games (nevermind the games themselves); and that is much more significant repayment to society than allowing a company to milk some nostalgic game players for a piddly little revenue stream that goes to one company.
Isn't anyone afraid we wont have a history and culture 30 years from now, because companies will hold all the copyrights to our childhoods' cultures? ("Yes, son, we used to play this game called Asteroids, but I cant show it to you, because its not profitable for Activision to sell it anymore. I could get it myself, but their lawyers are afraid of letting it into the commons on the off-chance that they decide to release another version of it any year now and our little father/son fun will dillute the value of their brand
Well, thats kinda sticky. When copyright ad inifinitum is in the hands of a coperation, it benifits a few, although the contention is made that by doing so, we encourage investment into new developments. The biggest cultural successes have always come at times when the rights of the author were not very very strong. When it is copyright ad inifitum a la GPL, whos purpose is to force work back into the public commons, I'm far more lenient, because the ideas behind the GPL are pro public, not pro private.
But yes, that makes me somewhat of a hypocrite. I suppose if people support the drive companies have to exercise total control over thier IP, then I dont think its that hypocritical to simply say, "I suppose ad inifitum when it benifits the commons, but not when it benifits a private entity."
Personally, I think if Disney et all hadn't successfully fucked up copyright law, Stallman wouldn't have have percieved the need to make the GPL so 'Stallmaneque'. No man is an island, and Stallman is clearly just a fight fire with fire kinda guy, even if it makes him less credible to the crowd that believes that the private sector's love for draconian author rights. Without such a pro-private climate, I highly doubt there would be such a pro-commons camp, because the law would balance everyones interests sufficiently (as it did in the 1700s, and up to the late 1800s).
Both America and Russia, during the cold war, had each other to thank for their righteousness and unblinking uncompromising positions regarding their social and political stances. The Stallman camp vs the Private camp is the same deal. I just happen to side with Stallman, since it makes no sense to me to defend the rights of the private when so many people who are supposed to be benifiting under that system are not happy with its fruits.
If you can find me a publisher and programmer of any of those titles who depends on royalties from those games to live, please contact me.
.. did the fact that PacAMan, Asteroids, etc were copied by thousands upon thousands of clones (freeware, shareware, and commercial) somehow hurt the game industry and prevent its ability to invest in games? Looking at the market these days, I cant really believe they are detremental to the point of requiring vigilent lawyer-based protection. If they dont need it, they cant have it. Sorry.
Otherwise, who the hell cares. The best part is, the only people that get up in arms are the companies and their lawyers. Ive yet to hear the designer of Astroids complain bitterly that he didn't get repaid for every Asteroids rip off out there.
Microsoft (and old videogame authors, publishers) can kiss my fucking ass. They'd been paid in spades. Look at the gaming industry right now
Its like a next door neighbour with a house 4,000,000 bigger than mine who's pissed off because I'm blocking the sun to one tiny basement window at the corner of the mansion.
Yes, there is a smidgen of irony in there, but if these games' royalties are so valuable, they'd be advertising them and selling them in bundles other than "Top 20 Arcade Hits" etc bundles. Even then, thats 'recycled' innovation, not something I want to support monetarily. Anyone that wants to play Joust, Centipede, etc has undoubedly paid their dues at the quarter-eating-boxes, etc years ago.
Compare this to books: do you really think you should have to buy your favorite books every 10 years, because the paper you read it on becomes obsolete and unavailable every decade?
Commencing flame.
No really, mod chips let me import games (which I purchase) from Japan. Pure and simple.
What the fuck is the point of globalization and "the international market" if they are selling neutered hardware that wont let you even USE the stuff you can now have access to in other markets?
It's a fucking joke. Anyone who supports increased global trade, but opposes mod-chips is a total hypocrite. We are not becoming a global community, but a two tiered society - powerful producers and powerless consumers.
Well, fuck that. Like the Boston Tea Party, sometimes you gotta break the rules when they've been sufficiently and effectively stacked up against you.
Funny, and here I thought the immature, ill-educated fanboys only _played_ the consoles .. who knew some of them programmed them too?
> more than I'd care about
;)
Yes, others have addressed this, but let me say, how dare that computer do something more accurately, with more precise numbers than you wanted it to!
Its fairly useful when you want to assign the tokens to ptrs .. all ptrs will be null terminated without your intervention.
..
If you know what it does, and thats what you want, then its all good.
There are alternatives, no need to pick on an oldie but goodie
People who arnt in the business of comparing (ie, not techies or wannabe techies) rarely make that comparison. Doubly so for products they would never even be comparing when making purchasing decisions.
Its just a number for sales people to rattle off to parents, who invariably think one of two things:
- gee, that number's higher than the last time I heard it
or even worse
- gee, that number's high
It was like MMX - it was a useless feature when salespeople were pushing it, but shoppers really seem to be fooled by numbers and acronyms. The only part that ticks me off is how hard it is to teach a non-technical person to never put stock into what they hear, and more importantly, never put stock in their own ability to interpret it. For some reason, people dont all seem to act like they can talk the talk with cars, planes, other technical things - but there is something about technology that makes lots of newbies think they can get some sense of perspective in the jungle of specs and features out there. I know I might sound somewhat elitist, but I hope for my sake a mechanic knocks some shit into me if I ever go off on engine specs and prepare to drop serious money on my assesment of the sales lingo I'm presented.
well, I'd say that a well equipped gaming PC will blow an Xbox or Gamecube (sorry, I dont put the PS2 in the same league, but thats for another flame-ridden thread ;) away in terms of:
.. duh, console :)
..
:)
- FPS
- resolution
- online play
- saved game complexity
but the consoles win with:
- FPS consistancy (games designed at a 'lowest denominator' level in terms of performance, so you dont slow down as much as PC games do when stuff gets really messy)
- control
- $-per-unit-of-performance
Also, dont forget the suitability of certain types of games:
- online lends itself to PC
- fps to PC
- PC games more editable
- loading times on consoles usually better (or at least Gamecube just blows everything away with its cute lil miniDVD media)
- multiple people at the same time
I dunno. As always, it depends on what you like to play. Some people need their Quake, others their Platformers. Console games are often designed to be more pickup-and-play than PC games too.
The fact that most people have larger televisions than monitors helps the console in terms of display real estate in most homes too
Okay, thats all I can think of. Spewing over.
better shmetter. the coolness factor (which doesnt seem that popular around slashdot in these sombre times) is off the chizz-arts!
Probably when it can be proven that the act was to intentionally degrade service, not to download a file.
Well, if your parent poster is American, he can stick to the tried and true American rebuttal .. judging from his objective assesment of Wil Wheaton's site, I'm guessing it will be along the lines of "Because he's a fucking baby and deserves it."
I, for one, want to see him in the movie. It was the TNG writers who were incapable of making Wil Wheaton look like anything above a Boy Scout who'd won the "Travel With the Enterprise" contest.
Hey, so long as they dont turn a profit on that waste, waste away.
People with faults are tolerable, so long as they arnt getting richer off me while they are doing it.
This is why software, by law, should explode like an atom bomb when a sigfault occurrs. ;)
.. if we were developing bridges, etc, you'd see alot more caution and listening on the part of management and achitects (nevermind that for *some* reason, more managers in the engineering biz are .. gasp, actually engineers!) if there were physical costs to buggy software, rather than (mostly) economic costs.
Anyhow, I'm glibly musing, but for the record, I totally agree with you.
Except the kid throwing the brick isnt a vandal in this case - its IT and software companies. And while, yes, "the broken window fallacy" applies, I'm under the impression that lots of people would actually support the superficial window-breaking of buggy software over altnatives in economic output; be it traditional goods or intellectual development in the social sciences, history, etc .. course, I guess people would want that money to go back into making more software and gee-wiz gadgets.
.. like a status symbol), its not impossible to justify breaking windows unless one gets very macroscopic in ones analysis. :)
... but isn't that money that could go to more important things? Isn't the "broken window fallacy" just an example of how it is impposible to place an objective analysis of value of goods and services as they befit humanity? You could almost rename it the "I think my breasts are honestly too small" fallacy - that by judging something a problem, you are in effect reducing resources that could go towards something more people value greater ... and how does this couple with the 'capitalism is not a zero sum game' .. can you on one hand argue that that 100$ could have gone to something else without contradicting the pundits who claim there is, in effect, limitless resources so long as we keep being capitalists?
..
It's just a shame - I really don't think alot of people believe that that grocer should spend his 100$ on art and culture rather than a new security system to make sure the window can never be broken in the future. =)
Course, my point is more about allocation of resources, but I only meant to illustrate that if we valued the act of 'fixing windows' as some sort of religious activity or sacred tradition (or maybe there was value placed on having been a customer to a 'window fixer'
What about breast enhancements? They create jobs, spurn some kind of innovation, I'm sure
This isn't a bait, I'm just kinda thinking out loud here
I think people latched on to his rather shaky use of the word 'market' - listening to some people, a market is transparent regardless of who's got what power, who's paying what, who owns how much, etc. Posts like his sound like a round about way of saying:
... but come home spewing over simplifications about the complexity and difficulty of being an astute and well informed consumer. I know how to choose something off the menu, thank you very much .. I am just not cool with that menu being selected by a single party with vested economic interests with respect to my familliarity with my choices.
"A market is free until you hold a gun to a consumers head."
If I had infinate time, infinate capability to travel, to read, to research, etc, I might (*maybe*) start to agree. As it stands, "buyer beware" is fair to a point, but at some point we consumers have to start thinking about ourselves as that - consumers! Many of us go to work and dream up ways of fooling or influcing ourselves (or consumers like us) into acting this way or that (otherwise we wouldn't have a marketing dept, no?)
Well, if 30% of all humans are supporting the payola-type of radio (and the rest have tuned out), fuck those 30 percent. 70 percent are ready to have their air waves back.
.. you go after your heavy users, or in the case of radio, consumers that you can cross-market to other mediums ... ) Radio companies could give less than a fuck about meeting the needs of 'the market' - if I tune out, I'm not a lost customer, I'm just a guy who wouldn't have made them much money had I been listening anyways .. cause I'm capable of making my own decisions and thinking for myself, certainly not the demographic you're after in a payola-pre-packaged culture market.
Your erroneous assumption is that its more profitable for the company to cater to the majority of consumers rather than a small percentage. WRONG! (Ask any marketer - the crowd you wish to please is usually quite small out of the potential customers
Considering that the air waves are public, and that we like the _concept_ of radio (the technology), but not whats being played on it, I absolutely support getting the government to break the control these large entities have in catering to a small percentage of the population that makes their little cartel economically profitable.
how the hell is a market considered free when content producers pay off content distributors to limit (yes, LIMIT) the selection of what they play?
> No one is "owed" access to my ears.
Calling Mr.Stupid. Of course nobody is 'owed' access to your ears. But guess what? You won't stop using them. They are there. And sometimes, you pay money to someone for what they put in there.
All that is well and good, but its not much of a free market unless I have a moderately fair opporunity to get near your ears. As it stands, large companies are bribing other large companies to make sure that when your ears are being "accessed" (you dont have to make the concious effort to open them up - they tend to work 24/7, while you're at work, in the store, etc, etc) by pre-selected goods.
This is the opposite of a free market. The way you talk, nothing on this planet is unfair, because clearly "the market" (or "God", as some people like to think of it as) would fix it if it were. What a broken and apathetic way of looking at things.
If you count the amount of online gag orders for trademark and copyright infringement (read: fan sites, etc) in the US, I'll bet they come out equal relatively equal .. or maybe with the lawyers on top.
Some places are ruled by ideology and authority, and so ideology or anti-authority speech will be powerful and thus controlled by the ruling body. Some places are ruled by money, and so money-affecting speech will be controlled by the ruling body.
It all depends on what you constitute as 'free speech', methinks.
id be very interested in knowing how the law does or should apply in this situation .. are car companies held responsible for bugs? hobbiests?
... and are you talking about using the car on tracks or my streets? :)
this is one of the first situations that I know of where the result of bad programming on the party of a hobbiest could really fuck shit up physically