Well, in a nutshell, MS has a nice cash-cow selling software twice, and tries to protect it. The scam is sorta like this:
1. Thanks to MS anti-piracy lobbying and differential pricing, it's not even possible to buy a PC without Windows on it from a major OEM any more. Or not without paying for Windows anyway: see Dell's Linux PCs or PCs without an OS, that cost exactly as much or more than the same with Windows. (And if you managed to get one without an OS anyway, it would get added to BSA's piracy statistics anyway.) And
2. Most corporations prefer to have a small numbers of standard configurations, to minimize support and training costs. Mom and pop shops may just leave whatever OS was on that PC, but for a corporation supporting 10,000 PCs or more, they prefer to install their version of Windows, Outlook, Office, etc, on each of them. So they buy a corporate version of all that stuff.
The problem is that in the process that corporation has paid twice for Windows and maybe for a few other programs too. E.g., they bought 100 new Dell computers with Windows XP Home on them, and then went and installed their corporate Windows 2000 image on each of them. It paid for both.
And this is just one of the many episodes where MS tries to defend its right to fleece them twice. It tried repeatedly to get it its way that you can't stop paying twice by either:
1. just buying your computers without an OS, if you have your corporate license anyway. (Believe it or not, it actually went on record as saying that the corporate licenses were some sort of "upgrade" to the Windows OEM license bought with the computer, and hence illegal to install on a blank machine.)
2. selling your unwanted and unused OEM licenses (Like the bank in TFA did. This is all that this BS about COA not proving purchase is: being told that, nope, you're not allowed to sell those unwanted OEM licenses that you were forced to buy.)
It's a money grab. Plain and simple. It's fucking stupid to pay for an OS twice. (And it's even more fucking stupid to pay for an OS once when you don't use it: e.g., being unable to sell that Windows OEM license that came with the computer, when you really wanted to install Linux on it.) But for MS it's more money if they can keep forcing you to do just that.
And as long as they can, they and the BSA will do all they can to prevent people from finding a way out of this stupidity.
And don't think that such lawsuits are the only thrust in that war. The BSA isn't just the enforcing arm, it's also a useful source of BS and FUD in that campaign. As I may have mentioned before, even if you did manage to establish your right to buy a PC without an OS, the BSA will write it as a PC running pirated software anyway. That's how they make their infamous statistics: pull an assumption of how many PCs should have also caused a sell of Software X, and anything lower than that is automatically piracy. So if your company bought 1000 PCs without Windows, Office, etc (e.g., because you're installing Linux and OpenOffice on them), it _will_ be written by the BSA as 1000 PCs that are running pirated software.
Cue inflated statistics about rampant piracy and appeals to the governments and courts to give them more power.
How about acting dignified in the first place?
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Gangs on the Internet
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· Score: 1
You know, I'd have more respect for Wicca if it wasn't just an attention-whoring device. In other words, if you want respect, how about respecting yourself first? Because all that trolling for attention strikes me as pretty much forfeiting any claim to respect.
I have nothing against new religions (because that's what it is), but some are at least decent about it. Wicca is little more than trolling for attention. It's just a sad collection of just enough satan-worship trappings, conotations and words (including claiming the word "witch") to bait half the Christians in town. It's something that's not even designed as a religion, but as a means to shock, annoy and irritate people. It's not a religion, it's just one of the many sub-cultures built around trolling for attention.
And if that wasn't enough, add some more annoyance factor in the form of pretending it has some right... nay, _duty_... to redefine words and complain about everyone using that word as what it meant all along. Let's also throw some of the lamest guilt-tripping attempts in the mix, while we're at it.
You want to be treated in a dignified way? Start by acting dignified. If you choose to adher to a group that's just one of the many emo attention-whoring groups, you've already told the world how much you respect yourself. Expect that to be pretty much the high water mark. Few people will show you much more respect than that.
You want to be treated as a religion? Then how about acting like a serious religion, instead of all that actively trolling for attention? You don't see, say, the Asatru (an actual old "pagan" religion, or at least based on one) shoving themselves in the public eye and posing as victims all the time, do you? In fact, unless you happen to stumble upon the word, you might not even know that they exist at all. Did you know that the word "Hell" comes from their "Hel"? Yet you don't see the Asatru taking every occurence of the word "Hell" as some invitation to educate the masses about their religion, do you? Now compare it to Wicca taking every single occurence of the word "witch" as an opportunity to troll for attention and pose as some oppressed victim.
In other words: grow up, get a life, realize that there's more to life than shocking the neighbours, etc. _Then_ you'll get respect.
I didn't say it was bad to play games. Sure, knock yourself out. Play GTA or CS or whatever keeps you happy.
What I _do_ ridicule are the posers pretending they're something they're really not. And not in a game, but mis-representing their sorry _RL_ ass as being some big bad nigga mofo or whatever else. You know, the "Pretty Fly For A White Guy" kinda poser given online anonymity. I find them funny.
And I'll bet that at least half the supposed gangstas on MySpace are just that: some pasty white kid pretending to be a big bad nigga from the worst side of town.
What I'm really making fun of there isn't games, but this kind of posers. The whole "yeah, let's make the next GTA about this kind of wannabe pseudo-gangstas" isn't really about games, it's just for sarcasm sake.
In which you play the role of a pale pimple-faced nerd with an inhaler, posing as a big bad nigga online. Spend days photoshopping a grand theft auto or grafitti, instead of actually doing it. Brag about your bad-mofo inner-city gangsta exploits, from the safety of your parents' basement in the suburbs. Spend hours playing CS and GTA while listening to wannabe wigger rappers, as material for those bad-mofo gangsta stories. Throw in some porn late at night, after your parents went to sleep, as material for some gangland rape story. Spend a couple of days trying to get the Audigy 2 you got for your birthday to make you sound like a bad-mofo gangsta on voice chat, then give up and revert to typing pseudo-ebonics. Etc.
Yup, the high-tech law-breakin' game of the future. I can just see it.
Lay advised employees to buy shares in the company because it's going to rebound... at a time when he was selling his stock. Now one can argue that anyone that fell for that and invested in a company in free fall is stupid and had it coming, and that was probably Lay's view too, but still... it shows that that respect was a pretty one-way street. He certainly didn't show the same respect towards his employees as we see the GGP post showing toward him.
Reminds me of: Mohammed is the most common first name in the world. Chang is the most common family name. Therefore there must be a lot of people named Mohammed Chang.
No, see, the F/OSS approach will be more along the rational and logical lines of pointing out that you:
A) should quit whining and fix it yourself already, since you already have the source, B) are an idiot (doubly so if what you needed is related in any way to user interface, reading existing files, etc). We should have mandatory IQ tests to prevent idiots like you from getting anywhere near a computer, C) should RTFM already. In fact, you should write the RTFM, since it doesn't exist yet. Get to it already. D) are an idiot E) are a MS fanboy and/or paid to call their favourite program crap F) are an idiot. Even by MS shill/fanboy/etc standards. G) should stop doing anything that can't be done with their program. In fact, you should feel _proud_ to abandon any work you need done, or spend a few months learning command-line ways to do it, just to show the middle finger to MS. H) are an idiot for needing that, or for doing it like that, in the first place I) are only using a closed-source program instead because you've pirated it. We just know you did. J) did we mention that you're an idiot yet? K) all the above L) like K, and you're an idiot too
Well, let's put it like this. If Joe Sucker is stupid enough to click on spam, what would his motivation be?
A) spam promising to sell you something (viagra, shares, etc): if you don't intend to buy that, no point in clicking on the link at all.
B) spam promising free porn: well, it might actually have some free pics. You can always close the window later if they start asking for your credit card, email address, etc.
So basically I suspect there's a massive difference in what kind of users they get there. For category A it's probably less clicks, but more of those clicks result in a sale. For category B, I wouldn't be surprised if it generated a lot more clicks, but most of them don't result in anything.
So I don't know if actually 5.6% of people click on porn spam, but you can probably bet that at _least_ 90% of those won't actually buy anything from that site. They'll click, get there, be presented with some attempt to sell them a membership (or a dialer or be asked for their email address), say "no thanks", and close the window. When you correct for this factor, sex probably doesn't _sell_ that great after all.
Sure, complaining about the users is easy and a favourite geek passtime, but how about educating the programmers before we let them loose on something that important?
The classic newbie mistake is thinking, basically, "I know, I'll take the password as it is, run it through MD5 and store the hash. It's uber-secure because it's MD5, right?" Turns out: wrong. An attacker can, yes:
1) download a program that will try every word in the dictionary until it finds a match, like this guy did. (And it _will_ find a match. There'll always be someone who took a password like "kitten" or "sex" or whatever, no matter how much you tried to educated them.) Or, better yet,
2) use so-called "rainbow tables" which are basically key-value pairs. The key is a hash value, and the value is one password that's known to hash to the key. Hackers have been building such tables for a long while, so there are a _ton_ of passwords which can be instantly un-hashed. It doesn't matter if the user's password is "kitten" or "1+l0v3+b00b13z". If that password has been harvested once (e.g., he's also used it on some warez site), it can be de-hashed for ever after by a simple lookup.
So what smart programmers do is "salt" the password first. Add some arbitrary value before MD5-ing it. E.g., add the hash of the user name at the end of the password, _then_ MD5 it. Add your program's name. Whatever.
Yes, it's "security by obscurity", because essentially you rely on an attacker not knowing wth you've salted the passwords with. But it tends to work nevertheless. A generic de-hashing program downloaded over the net can run through a dictionary all it wants, and it still won't decrypt your passwords unless it was created for exactly your salting method. Ditto for rainbow table lookups.
Basically, seriously. Before picking on the users, I wish someone educated their programmers about even the basics of security. If this guy could pull this stunt, then chances are so could anyone else having any access to that building. So there is no excuse to have such vulnerabilities. Did anyone even do a security review there?
That's what I was thinking. Hire some people to carefully watch every European porn flick, so they can properly rate it. As an European, and thus familiar with said movies and the culture that created them, I'd like to offer my services and expertise to the Australian government for a small consulting fee. All in the interest of the public good and protecting the children from smut, you understand;)
Reinventing the past is common for psychopaths
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Enron's Kenneth Lay Dies
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Now I don't know enough about Ken Lay to proclaim whether he was a psychopath or not, but it sorta makes me wonder. I mean we already know that he had no remorse in shafting the investors, the employees and everyone, but the GP's moving testimony just makes some more pieces fall into place.
Here are some relevant paragraphs:
In contrast, corporate psychopaths typically grew up in stable, loving families that were middle class or affluent. But because they're pathological liars, they tell romanticized tales of rising from tough, impoverished backgrounds. Dunlap pretended that he grew up as the son of a laid-off dockworker; in truth, his father worked steadily and raised his family in suburban comfort.
Does it sound yet like Ken Lay telling employees a rags-to-riches story about creating the company from nothing?
Also worth remembering:
Psychopaths succeed in conventional society in large measure because few of us grasp that they are fundamentally different from ourselves. We assume that they, too, care about other people's feelings. This makes it easier for them to "play" us. Although they lack empathy, they develop an actor's expertise in evoking ours. While they don't care about us, "they have an element of emotional intelligence, of being able to see our emotions very clearly and manipulate them," says Michael Maccoby, a psychotherapist who has consulted for major corporations.
Psychopaths are typically very likable. They make us believe that they reciprocate our loyalty and friendship. When we realize that they were conning us all along, we feel betrayed and foolish.
So in a way I'm not surprised that someone would be manipulated to the point of respecting the guy who shafted him. Psychopaths are _good_ at that kind of thing. Damn good. _Incredibly_ good. Unless you happen to be the direct target of their mind games or power games or intimidation games (they do all that a lot), you could live next to one for a decade and respect the heck out of him.
We had made a fat client app for a company with a metric buttload of regional offices all over Germany. Each office had their own database, and it was replicated daily against the central database. (Short story: each office only needed the data for their region, so it really didn't need the whole central database. And conversely the "mother" corporation didn't need their data immediately either.)
So this woman (afaik, a sorta boss for that particular office too) calls that the application stopped working on her machine. The tech-support guys can't solve it, so they forward the call to us programmers, namely to the guy next to me. Turns out that she had heard about evil hackers and whatnot, and someone recommended that she installs ZoneAlarm and forbid any programs to connect if she doesn't know what they are and what they do. So she installs it on her work computer too. And forbids our application from talking to the database.
Let's say that one day I come to work and decide to park my car right under a "no parking" sign. Hey, it beats walking all the way from the parking ground, and surely I'm so big and important that such laws and city ordinances don't apply to me. So a cop comes around and writes me a parking ticket. Let's say (as a number pulled out of the butt) for 25$. So I ignore it and park my car in the same place tomorrow. So I get the same fine tomorrow. And ignore it again the next day.
So after almost two years I look at the total bill and go "whaaa? A whole 14,000$ for just parking my car??? It's so wrong and unjust! I'm being victimized by the police!"
I'm sure then you'd say, "well then you should have fucking stopped doing that earlier. If for a whole 19 months you decided to ignore the fine, it's _your_ fault that it added up to such a large sum."
The same applies to MS. It's been given a daily fine for each day when they don't comply with the court's order. And they continued to ignore the court's order for 19 months straight. So now it's added up to 1.4 billion dollars.
Well I say the same thing: "then they should have fucking stopped doing it earlier."
It's that simple. It's not some number that was pulled out of the hat now. It's been the daily fine that MS knew about all along. If MS chose to ignore it for so long, tough shit, but it's their problem then.
Heck, in this case the EU had been kinder than even the cop in my example. MS only had to comply at any point in the last 19 months, to be forgiven of the whole fine retroactively. Imagine a cop giving you the same deal: "dude, if you stop parking your car there, I'm going to forgive you of the whole last year's worth of parking tickets." Because seriously that's the deal that MS was given.
So excuse me if I don't see it as disproportionate or anything. They could have stopped at any time, if the total sum was getting too high for their taste.
1. About tyranny, monarchy and non-representative rule: While they do make for some emotional arguments, let's remember that England was a parliamentary monarchy at the time. Maybe not in the same sense of the word as today, but let's remember that that parliament _did_ repel some taxes (e.g., the stamp act) when the colonists protested them. So how much more representation _do_ you want, if even being able to repel laws and taxes isn't enough for you?
2. Comparing it to India is pretty much bullshit, since India was under foreign occupation. The american colonies were British citizens, no less favoured than those in the UK.
3. Taxes. Ah-ha. Now we're getting somewhere. I hope you do, however, understand that an average citizen in the colonies paid insignifficant taxes compared to the citizens back home in the UK. As in, IIRC somewhere between 20 to 30 times less per capita. It also didn't help that the colonists threatened any tax collectors with tarring and feathering.
A lot of the special tax acts, e.g., the stamp act, weren't just to fleece the colonists, but because they paid almost nothing else. So the UK government just tried to figure out ways to keep it fair. Ok, so you don't want to pay other taxes, but, seriously, you're not _that_ special to pay nothing whatsoever. How about you pay this other tax instead, if the old one isn't to your liking?
The Boston Tea Party? Let's remember that that wasn't about some new tax, but about elliminating a tax. Smugglers like John Hancock were making a small fortune by smuggling tea into the USA without paying customs, and thus being able to undercut the prices of the East India Company. So when the British government allowed the East India Company to stop paying that tax too, oh looky, the smugglers were outraged at losing their own unfair advantage.
So exactly what oppressive taxation are we talking about? If paying 20-30 times less taxes than a mainland British citizen was too oppressive, exactly how much tax would be OK for their liking? Zero? Are you still paying that much?
Tyranny and taxation without representation? Heh. Try doing the same today in your land of the free, and see if you'd get away with that. No, seriously. Get your own village (most colonies were about that size) suddenly saying that you don't want to pay taxes any more and threatening violence against the IRS. Or deciding that you can stop paying customs taxes. See how long it would take for your representative and democratic government's men to show up on your doorsteps with flak vests and M16's.
In this case, I believe it's the market for media players in question, and Microsoft was supposed to separate out Windows Media Player. It may sound like a small thing
Actually, it sounds like a small thing because that's not the whole thing, and it's the least of the non-compliance problems too. MS was basically ordered there to _also_ sell a version without it, which isn't even much of a punishment when they can keep selling the version _with_ Media Player too.
The current fighting is over the other, and more important part there, namely APIs and protocols. MS has been given a list of stuff it must provide adequate documentation for, and to everyone. That's all.
Basically what the EU is saying is "wtf? A situation where only Windows workstations can talk to a Windows server is a recipe for a monopoly. Do be so kind and provide the documentation for those protocols." It's just telling MS that its products should compete with others on their merits, not on being the only thing that can interoperate with their other products. It shouldn't be years of guesswork and reverse engineering just to get a Linux or Solaris box to talk to a Windows server.
And MS so far has been playing hardball and turning it into a media battle. It started by pulling stunts like selling some libraries and docs preferentially and putting some stupid conditions on getting them. (E.g., literally, you can't use them in an OSS product. Literally.) Then it offered a bunch of undocumented and incomplete implementation code. (The EU says: sorry guys, we asked for protocol documentation. Be so kind and provide the docs.) And so on. And, again, it's been busy astroturfing and turning it into a media posing contest.
And IMHO the court has played pretty nice so far. Even the fine is "backdated" and thus so large, because, seriously that was the final date at which MS was ordered to provide those docs. At some point, after giving MS ample time and letting them delay for years, the court basically said, "No, this is final. At date X you must provide those docs or pay a fine per day." It still gave MS more timeouts even after that, and a chance to not pay those fines, but under the explicit condition that, seriously, if MS still doesn't comply than the original date still stands.
Basically, seriously, if I did half that shit in a court of law, I'd be in contempt and probably facing some quality time behind bars. I'm not anti-MS or anything, but at some point a court of law must be able to enforce compliance or it becomes just a joke. You can't allow someone to basically just refuse to obey for years.
You've mis-read it. One guy had bought a TV _for_ his new apartment. As in, he had just bought a home from somewhere else, and then discovered that he also needs a TV, furniture, etc. So he joined such a group and bought them at wholesale prices.
As for what you could buy in the USA that way, well, I don't know about the USA, but here in Germany most retailers have pretty large margins on anything. Just look on how much they can cut the prices periodically on some stuff, for no other reason than the doctrine that people coming to buy that will also buy something else.
In part that extra money goes on "shelf space" and the like. I.e., it costs you money in rent and salaries to keep something on the shelves or in the warehouse for months. You can also calculate a sort of a cost for slow selling products in money lost by not stocking something else that sells faster.
So I don't know if showing up unexpected would work, but if you called in advance only a complete PHB would refuse to give you a 10% wholesale discount on something that they marked up by 50%. It's a lot of profit in a burst, and if he's smart he'll realize that it's 100% profit. At that large size of an order you could have contacted the wholesaler directly instead, and bypassed the retailer completely. E.g., if you wanted to buy 100 kitchen furniture sets, like in the article, you could probably have contacted Ikea directly instead and taken it at their wholesale prices.
But at the very least it's stuff which:
A) otherwise would cost him shelf space for months or even sit on the shelf until it's outdated. Such a burst sale is pretty much as good as selling it directly from the truck.
B) otherwise would have been spread between him and all the competition. E.g., here if you wanted to buy a TV, you can go to Saturn, Media Markt, Pro Markt, or a dozen others, and that's not even counting the hundreds of online shops. Heck, you can get a TV from Aldi, which is mostly a cheap grocery store chain. So 500 people coming together to buy from, say, Saturn are better than 50 coming to Saturn and 450 going to buy from somewhere else, which is what would realistically happen otherwise. Selling at half the profit margin, but to 10 times more people, can be pretty good business. (After all, Aldi built a retail empire on that doctrine.)
Of course, I've never heard of people doing that here, but I have a strong suspicion that it would work if anyone tried.
Just as a quick clarification, mines designed to wound (e.g., minelets that just blow your foot off) aren't designed so for humane reasons, but because they do much more damage that way. If you killed a poor bastard, his mates will just chuck him in a hole and push some dirt over him. That's it. Score: 1 man down. If you blow his leg off, you took not only him out, but also made some buggers carry him, some medics patch him up, etc. Plus he still needs food, clothing, etc.
And they can actually be pretty well calibrated to that end, since they only need to blow someone's foot off. E.g., the Soviets scattered tons and tons of small pebbles, afaik made of rubber, that exploded when someone stepped on them. Think your childhood's water bombs made of a glove finger filled with water. Now think that with nitroglycerin instead, and it looks like a pebble on a mountain road. Almost no shrapnel effect (a piece of rubber won't cause too deep a wound). In fact, the taliban had fun picking those up and throwing them against the ground. That safe unless it's under your foot. But if you do step on it, you're almost _guaranteed_ to be alive, but without that foot.
At any rate, there was exactly _zero_ humanity and compassion in designing such things. It's just a cold blooded return-on-investment calculation. Those cause more damage to the enemy. That's all.
Well, bingo: then it's those citizens who are to blame, and not the site/shop/casino/brothel/whatever that gets tried under US laws. That's the way the chain of responsibility points.
If it was Johnny Hornyguy that travelled to Holland to smoke pot, then sue Johnny Horny guy, don't try extending US laws to a cafe in Holland. And if Jack Pirate goes to the USSR to buy pirated music, by all means, sue Jack Pirate, don't try pretending that US or UK laws apply to a Russian site. It wasn't the cafe or shop that decidet to go to the US or UK and harrass someone out of their money, and they weren't breaking any laws of their own country. That's the whole point.
The BPI trying to sue a Russian site under UK laws strikes me as just stupid.
Yes, but that's exactly the point. The idea that a bunch of engineers wouldn't be able to speak coherent or articulate Eglish, strikes me as pure unadulterated PHB stupidity. People who spend their day in meetings flinging around words just to sound cool, end up imagining that precise technical terms are just the same thing: a bunch of engineers inventing words to sound cool.
Frankly, I haven't yet met an engineer who was as inarticulate as a bunch of managers would like you to believe. It might take some technical knowledge to understand what they're talking about, but that's just it: it's technical stuff, not inarticulate gibberish. And often it's not possible to explain that stuff in layman's terms, or not without ending up needing a month or sounding indeed like an inarticulate clown.
What I did meet a lot is a bunch of managers liking to pretend that it's the engineers' fault when they choose to believe the nice snake oil vendor instead. Or who just use that as a cheap excuse when they just don't want to rock the boat, and just nod along hoping someone else would take the blame. And, hey, if noone else comes along to take the blame, the engineers always make a good scapegoat. It beats personally going to a boss and saying, "nope, this won't work." Better wait until the shit hits the fan and then pretend you've been missled all along. You wouldn't believe how often _that_ happens in a corporation.
Heck, it's been only last week that I've been in a meeting where noone wants to take responsibility for telling the higher management that a project isn't in the "green" zone. So they're going to go productive with something _completely_ untested rather than dare tell someone higher up that something doesn't go as planned.
What I've also seen a lot is people trying to rationalize their own stupidity and/or ignorance. Everything they've never learned or don't understand, must be just some clowns acting pretentious. You can see that from arts graduates badmouthing sciend (and viceversa) to managers belittling precise technical terms to god knows what else. The more someone is completely clueless about a domain, the more they'll like to pretend that the whole domain is just some farce where some pretentious ass-clowns just try to look smart.
Even then it still seems to me like the sane thing to do is stop the launch until you can understand what _are_ they trying to say, how did this new interpretation come to pass, and maybe ask some other engineers to look at that new interpretation and get a competent opinion of it.
Basically I don't think that any engineer worth his salt would do something like that based on "my horoscope said 'don't launch any shuttles today'" or similar. If they did change their mind or interpretation, there must be some scientific reason there. That it's not "articulate" in management gibberish is pretty irrelevant there. Then get another engineer to hear it.
Also bear in mind that "new data" can actually come in a variety of forms and shapes. I can take the same measurements and reach a different conclusion, because now I've read a different theory about how to apply those. The measurements are the same, but the new data there is the new set of rules or formulas or some anecdotal evidence about some other case where in similar conditions something went wrong or whatever.
Thats like saying a person with a highpowered rifle shooting across borders is not culpable for murder (note to slashdot fanatics - Im not comparing copyright infringement with murder) if the killing didnt happen in the country hes shooting from.
Let's try a more apropriate comparison, because that comparison turns the whole chain of responsibility on its head. It wasn't some UK citizens who got mugged across the borders, but it was they who decided to reach across the border (even if through the Internet) and buy stuff from AllOfMP3.
So let's compare it to, I don't know, gambling. Let's say you're from a country or US state that forbids gambling, so you hop in a plane to Las Vegas and gamble your pants off. Does the casino have to comply with your state's laws, or is it enough that it's legal in Las Vegas? Most people would say it's the latter.
Or let's compare it to buying marijuana. In the US and UK and most of the world it's illegal, but let's say in Elbonia it's perfectly legal and can spend a week there higher than a kite. Sky high. (And I'm taking Elbonia as an example just to not get bogged into discussing the legal subtleties and limits of Holland, which is a RL example of a country where it's legal to buy and smoke pot.) So let's say that Johnny Dope hops on a plane and goes there and does just that: buys himself some pot, from a cafe that's perfectly legal under the local laws. Does the cafe have to comply with the USA or UK laws, or is it enough that it complies with the laws of the country it's in? I think it's pretty clearly the latter.
Or let's say you go to Russia and buy a CD-R with pirated music from a shop. (I don't know the subtleties of Russian law, but just for the sake of the example, let's assume it were legal.) Does that shop have to comply with the laws of _your_ country, or is it enough if it's legal under Russian law? I'd say it's pretty clearly the latter.
It doesn't matter if the shop/cafe/casino owner knew you're a foreigner, and it's not their job to ask for your pass and say "nope, in _your_ country this is illegal." In their own country it isn't. That's all that matters.
Basically I find sorta stupid the notion that if a site is accessible from the UK or China or Iran, then it must comply with laws of UK, China _and_ Iran.
AllOfMP3 didn't send someone to the UK to sell music. They set their (web-based) shop in Russia, and only have to comply with Russian law. Just because the Internet is linked everywhere doesn't make the shop exist simultaneously all over the world. It still exists just in Russia. If Johnny Pirate goes to AllOfMP3 to buy his pirated music, then it's Johnny Pirate who decided to go to a Russian shop, in Russia. Yeah, the internet makes that trip a lot easier than physically going there, but, nevertheless, it's Johnny who visited a (virtual) piece of Russia, not the Russians who came to his home.
And at any rate, the decision and responsibility lie squarely with Johnny. He wasn't just a helpless victim shot across the border. (Or hit by a CD packed with MP3's thrown across the border.) It was he who decided to go buy it.
I remember some anecdote about Gandhi. Someone asked him how come his stance on something is now the exact opposite of what it was last week. Gandhi said something like, "because this week I know better."
Now I'm no Gandhi, but I can think of a lot of situations when learning something new made me reverse my stance on something. In fact, I consider it to be what every sane human does all the time. Only zealots have one absolute truth and stick to it for ever, no matter what. A scientist (either theoretical or engineer) should have no such things by definition. If you learn some new fact, or do another calculation, or run another simulation, or whatever, and it contradicts what you previously believed, yes, as an engineer I'd _expect_ you to be ready and willing to change your mind about it. Maybe you'll run some extra tests, do more calculations or whatever first, that's ok, but you shouldn't ever have the last week's stance as something set in stone and unchangeable for any reason.
So, well, I won't argue a your point B for lack of enough data, but point A leaves me scratching my head in disbelief. So someone decided that those engineers aren't trustworthy... because they changed their mind? Seems like a pretty weird attitude. I definitely expected that at NASA even management would be a bit more open-minded than that. They're pretty much one continuous experiment and using experimental equipment, so it's exactly the kind of thing that should be _expected_.
We're not talking stuff like designing a bike, where you can just do it all by the book and know the same today as you knew last week. We're talking crazy experimental stuff that noone else has done before, and a lot of it is tried for the first time. Someone calculated that this valve should be perfectly safe, or that foam can't break this time, but essentially it's the first time anyone actually put that valve or that new foam on a rocket and blast it into space. There's a lot of stuff that could act differently than in the simulation, or than in whatever lab tests were done.
So, yes, stuff like someone doing some new calculations and deciding, "teh oops, this thing is gonna blow up" are the kind of thing I'd _expect_.
That's exactly what I'm wondering, and I don't think I want a precedent saying that, yup, if in East Bumfuckistan it's illegal to publish something, you can be extradited to East Bumfuckistan if you published it in the UK.
I mean, seriously, almost every dictatorship somewhere has some things that are forbidden to publish or to even read.
E.g., China doesn't like anything that contradicts its propaganda. I don't just mean anti-communist stuff, but for example they forbade the game Hearts Of Iron 2 because it presented Manchuria as a separate puppet-state of Japan in 1936. Which is historically accurate, ffs: Japan had occupied a bunch of Chinese territory, called it "Manchuria" and installed a puppet emperor there that was little more than a figurehead with no power whatsoever. But someone in China decided that it's illegal to even mention China being, or ever having been, anything else than one unified state.
So could now the developpers be tried and imprisoned in China for publishing something like that in Sweden? I'm sure there's a lot of stuff on their site (maps, info, game patches containing those lists of countries and provinces) that can be accessed over the Internet from China. Does that mean that suddenly a site in Sweden has to abide by China's laws?
What about posts on that topic? Between Europa Universalis 1 and 2, Victoria, and Hearts Of Iron 1 and 2, there are a lot of talks about historical and ahistorical scenarios on Paradox's boards involving China. E.g., right this morning there was a post in the "Hearts Of Iron 2: Doomsday" forum where someone posted a screenshot of the game saying Mao Zhedong died in battle, somewhere in the 40's. (In HOI2 any general can be killed in combat, so if you use one in a lot of battle, yeah, something like that can happen.) And some tomfoolery ensued, with jokes about the party just hiding his death from the people, and similar. I'm sure some PRC party official can take offense at that idea, especially if taken out of context by someone who's never actually played the game. So can they now enforce the swift Chinese justice upon some posters from all over Europe and the USA, just because that info can be accessed from China?
E.g., in a couple of Islamist countries you can be tried and sentenced to death (yes, literally) just for saying that you don't believe in the official religion. Can they now sue everyone who's proclaimed themselves a Christian or atheist on Slashdot? Just because that info is available over the internet from their country? Oooer.
I don't think I want to see that kind of a precedent established.
It's because celebrity names sell. At some point people go see a movie just because it has some celebrity in it. And I don't just mean celebrity actors, like Tom Hanks, which could at least be defended as "well, he acts well, and people like a movie that's well acted." I mean look at your average rapper, sports star, boy-band/girl-band celebrity manufactured by the recording industry, etc, starring in some movie. Most can't even act at all, yet people go to the movie anyway, just because it has their favourite celebrity in it.
It's, if you will, like merchandising. People will buy a T-Shirt with Darth Vader's head on it, not because it actually does anything to make the t-shirt better, but just because it's Darth Vader. Or insert some band's mug shots instead of Darth Vader. And some company is very happy to use that kind of merchandising to take their money.
So what you're seeing here is the same effect. "Acted by Tom Hanks" is something that makes people fork over the cash. "Animated by Neon Noodle" doesn't quite work the same.
It could work the same (after all, yes, we do give credit to the painter and not to whoever posed for them), but (A) it would require taking some risks and making a loss until the public is educated enough to accept Neon Noodle as an equally cool celebrity, and (B) then you'd ask for more money. So, well, I just can't see anyone making that move.
A mistake that seems to be somehow built-in people's heads is that a MMORPG is sorta like a marriage. "Until death do us part."
This is reflected in two major falsehoods that get posted again and again:
1. "If I got tired of a game after 6 months, it's a sign that the game now sucks and deserves to be shut down."
2. "If people I know left after 6 months, it's a sign that the game is dying."
In reality, 6 months is (or was in the EQ days) the average time a player stays on a MMO. Sure, it depends on the player and the MMO too, but the vast majority of players don't stay for ever. It's just a game. At some point you've seen the content, got sick of doing the same thing over and over again, and move on or at least take a break.
In reality, WoW is still doing pretty damn well, as reflected by both the number of active subscriptions and the queues. You'd notice it if there was a massive exodus, because there would be no more full servers in the list, and no more queues.
It does, however, show the turnover mentioned before. Some people get sick and tired of it and leave, some new people join, and some people come back after taking a break. And some just start a new character or whatever. It's enough to see your old pals leaving, or your old guild needing new members, but not really enough to sink the game yet. And yes, it means you too at some point will get sick and tired of WoW.
(Note that I'm not saying that this is automatically the case with all games. Some do have poorer quality or sprout some uninspired change that does cause an exodus. Just saying that WoW doesn't seem to be there (yet).)
And a lot of guilds are recombining not only because they've lost level 60 players. (Though they certainly do lose them: guess what level will someone be after 6 months?) They're recombining because they're finally reaching the point where they need to take part in those 40-man raids. A lot of people form some casual guild at level 10, make lots of alts, play solo or in small groups, and are as happy as a clam... until they reach the tier 2 dungeons at level 60. Then they suddenly discover that the old system won't get them alive through the end-game dungeons. Suddenly being the casual guild with 10 people at level 60, and half the rest alts under level 20, just doesn't work any more.
Enter a round of policy changes, "stop inviting people below level 60!!!" posts on the guild boards, and recombining with other guilds to get a viable mix of 40 players that have the level and equipment to take part in those raids.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in a nutshell, MS has a nice cash-cow selling software twice, and tries to protect it. The scam is sorta like this:
1. Thanks to MS anti-piracy lobbying and differential pricing, it's not even possible to buy a PC without Windows on it from a major OEM any more. Or not without paying for Windows anyway: see Dell's Linux PCs or PCs without an OS, that cost exactly as much or more than the same with Windows. (And if you managed to get one without an OS anyway, it would get added to BSA's piracy statistics anyway.) And
2. Most corporations prefer to have a small numbers of standard configurations, to minimize support and training costs. Mom and pop shops may just leave whatever OS was on that PC, but for a corporation supporting 10,000 PCs or more, they prefer to install their version of Windows, Outlook, Office, etc, on each of them. So they buy a corporate version of all that stuff.
The problem is that in the process that corporation has paid twice for Windows and maybe for a few other programs too. E.g., they bought 100 new Dell computers with Windows XP Home on them, and then went and installed their corporate Windows 2000 image on each of them. It paid for both.
And this is just one of the many episodes where MS tries to defend its right to fleece them twice. It tried repeatedly to get it its way that you can't stop paying twice by either:
1. just buying your computers without an OS, if you have your corporate license anyway. (Believe it or not, it actually went on record as saying that the corporate licenses were some sort of "upgrade" to the Windows OEM license bought with the computer, and hence illegal to install on a blank machine.)
2. selling your unwanted and unused OEM licenses (Like the bank in TFA did. This is all that this BS about COA not proving purchase is: being told that, nope, you're not allowed to sell those unwanted OEM licenses that you were forced to buy.)
It's a money grab. Plain and simple. It's fucking stupid to pay for an OS twice. (And it's even more fucking stupid to pay for an OS once when you don't use it: e.g., being unable to sell that Windows OEM license that came with the computer, when you really wanted to install Linux on it.) But for MS it's more money if they can keep forcing you to do just that.
And as long as they can, they and the BSA will do all they can to prevent people from finding a way out of this stupidity.
And don't think that such lawsuits are the only thrust in that war. The BSA isn't just the enforcing arm, it's also a useful source of BS and FUD in that campaign. As I may have mentioned before, even if you did manage to establish your right to buy a PC without an OS, the BSA will write it as a PC running pirated software anyway. That's how they make their infamous statistics: pull an assumption of how many PCs should have also caused a sell of Software X, and anything lower than that is automatically piracy. So if your company bought 1000 PCs without Windows, Office, etc (e.g., because you're installing Linux and OpenOffice on them), it _will_ be written by the BSA as 1000 PCs that are running pirated software.
Cue inflated statistics about rampant piracy and appeals to the governments and courts to give them more power.
You know, I'd have more respect for Wicca if it wasn't just an attention-whoring device. In other words, if you want respect, how about respecting yourself first? Because all that trolling for attention strikes me as pretty much forfeiting any claim to respect.
I have nothing against new religions (because that's what it is), but some are at least decent about it. Wicca is little more than trolling for attention. It's just a sad collection of just enough satan-worship trappings, conotations and words (including claiming the word "witch") to bait half the Christians in town. It's something that's not even designed as a religion, but as a means to shock, annoy and irritate people. It's not a religion, it's just one of the many sub-cultures built around trolling for attention.
And if that wasn't enough, add some more annoyance factor in the form of pretending it has some right... nay, _duty_... to redefine words and complain about everyone using that word as what it meant all along. Let's also throw some of the lamest guilt-tripping attempts in the mix, while we're at it.
You want to be treated in a dignified way? Start by acting dignified. If you choose to adher to a group that's just one of the many emo attention-whoring groups, you've already told the world how much you respect yourself. Expect that to be pretty much the high water mark. Few people will show you much more respect than that.
You want to be treated as a religion? Then how about acting like a serious religion, instead of all that actively trolling for attention? You don't see, say, the Asatru (an actual old "pagan" religion, or at least based on one) shoving themselves in the public eye and posing as victims all the time, do you? In fact, unless you happen to stumble upon the word, you might not even know that they exist at all. Did you know that the word "Hell" comes from their "Hel"? Yet you don't see the Asatru taking every occurence of the word "Hell" as some invitation to educate the masses about their religion, do you? Now compare it to Wicca taking every single occurence of the word "witch" as an opportunity to troll for attention and pose as some oppressed victim.
In other words: grow up, get a life, realize that there's more to life than shocking the neighbours, etc. _Then_ you'll get respect.
I didn't say it was bad to play games. Sure, knock yourself out. Play GTA or CS or whatever keeps you happy.
What I _do_ ridicule are the posers pretending they're something they're really not. And not in a game, but mis-representing their sorry _RL_ ass as being some big bad nigga mofo or whatever else. You know, the "Pretty Fly For A White Guy" kinda poser given online anonymity. I find them funny.
And I'll bet that at least half the supposed gangstas on MySpace are just that: some pasty white kid pretending to be a big bad nigga from the worst side of town.
What I'm really making fun of there isn't games, but this kind of posers. The whole "yeah, let's make the next GTA about this kind of wannabe pseudo-gangstas" isn't really about games, it's just for sarcasm sake.
GTA: Web Banger
In which you play the role of a pale pimple-faced nerd with an inhaler, posing as a big bad nigga online. Spend days photoshopping a grand theft auto or grafitti, instead of actually doing it. Brag about your bad-mofo inner-city gangsta exploits, from the safety of your parents' basement in the suburbs. Spend hours playing CS and GTA while listening to wannabe wigger rappers, as material for those bad-mofo gangsta stories. Throw in some porn late at night, after your parents went to sleep, as material for some gangland rape story. Spend a couple of days trying to get the Audigy 2 you got for your birthday to make you sound like a bad-mofo gangsta on voice chat, then give up and revert to typing pseudo-ebonics. Etc.
Yup, the high-tech law-breakin' game of the future. I can just see it.
Lay advised employees to buy shares in the company because it's going to rebound... at a time when he was selling his stock. Now one can argue that anyone that fell for that and invested in a company in free fall is stupid and had it coming, and that was probably Lay's view too, but still... it shows that that respect was a pretty one-way street. He certainly didn't show the same respect towards his employees as we see the GGP post showing toward him.
Reminds me of: Mohammed is the most common first name in the world. Chang is the most common family name. Therefore there must be a lot of people named Mohammed Chang.
No, see, the F/OSS approach will be more along the rational and logical lines of pointing out that you:
A) should quit whining and fix it yourself already, since you already have the source,
B) are an idiot (doubly so if what you needed is related in any way to user interface, reading existing files, etc). We should have mandatory IQ tests to prevent idiots like you from getting anywhere near a computer,
C) should RTFM already. In fact, you should write the RTFM, since it doesn't exist yet. Get to it already.
D) are an idiot
E) are a MS fanboy and/or paid to call their favourite program crap
F) are an idiot. Even by MS shill/fanboy/etc standards.
G) should stop doing anything that can't be done with their program. In fact, you should feel _proud_ to abandon any work you need done, or spend a few months learning command-line ways to do it, just to show the middle finger to MS.
H) are an idiot for needing that, or for doing it like that, in the first place
I) are only using a closed-source program instead because you've pirated it. We just know you did.
J) did we mention that you're an idiot yet?
K) all the above
L) like K, and you're an idiot too
Well, let's put it like this. If Joe Sucker is stupid enough to click on spam, what would his motivation be?
A) spam promising to sell you something (viagra, shares, etc): if you don't intend to buy that, no point in clicking on the link at all.
B) spam promising free porn: well, it might actually have some free pics. You can always close the window later if they start asking for your credit card, email address, etc.
So basically I suspect there's a massive difference in what kind of users they get there. For category A it's probably less clicks, but more of those clicks result in a sale. For category B, I wouldn't be surprised if it generated a lot more clicks, but most of them don't result in anything.
So I don't know if actually 5.6% of people click on porn spam, but you can probably bet that at _least_ 90% of those won't actually buy anything from that site. They'll click, get there, be presented with some attempt to sell them a membership (or a dialer or be asked for their email address), say "no thanks", and close the window. When you correct for this factor, sex probably doesn't _sell_ that great after all.
Sure, complaining about the users is easy and a favourite geek passtime, but how about educating the programmers before we let them loose on something that important?
The classic newbie mistake is thinking, basically, "I know, I'll take the password as it is, run it through MD5 and store the hash. It's uber-secure because it's MD5, right?" Turns out: wrong. An attacker can, yes:
1) download a program that will try every word in the dictionary until it finds a match, like this guy did. (And it _will_ find a match. There'll always be someone who took a password like "kitten" or "sex" or whatever, no matter how much you tried to educated them.) Or, better yet,
2) use so-called "rainbow tables" which are basically key-value pairs. The key is a hash value, and the value is one password that's known to hash to the key. Hackers have been building such tables for a long while, so there are a _ton_ of passwords which can be instantly un-hashed. It doesn't matter if the user's password is "kitten" or "1+l0v3+b00b13z". If that password has been harvested once (e.g., he's also used it on some warez site), it can be de-hashed for ever after by a simple lookup.
So what smart programmers do is "salt" the password first. Add some arbitrary value before MD5-ing it. E.g., add the hash of the user name at the end of the password, _then_ MD5 it. Add your program's name. Whatever.
Yes, it's "security by obscurity", because essentially you rely on an attacker not knowing wth you've salted the passwords with. But it tends to work nevertheless. A generic de-hashing program downloaded over the net can run through a dictionary all it wants, and it still won't decrypt your passwords unless it was created for exactly your salting method. Ditto for rainbow table lookups.
Basically, seriously. Before picking on the users, I wish someone educated their programmers about even the basics of security. If this guy could pull this stunt, then chances are so could anyone else having any access to that building. So there is no excuse to have such vulnerabilities. Did anyone even do a security review there?
That's what I was thinking. Hire some people to carefully watch every European porn flick, so they can properly rate it. As an European, and thus familiar with said movies and the culture that created them, I'd like to offer my services and expertise to the Australian government for a small consulting fee. All in the interest of the public good and protecting the children from smut, you understand
Now I don't know enough about Ken Lay to proclaim whether he was a psychopath or not, but it sorta makes me wonder. I mean we already know that he had no remorse in shafting the investors, the employees and everyone, but the GP's moving testimony just makes some more pieces fall into place.
Here are some relevant paragraphs:
Does it sound yet like Ken Lay telling employees a rags-to-riches story about creating the company from nothing?
Also worth remembering:
So in a way I'm not surprised that someone would be manipulated to the point of respecting the guy who shafted him. Psychopaths are _good_ at that kind of thing. Damn good. _Incredibly_ good. Unless you happen to be the direct target of their mind games or power games or intimidation games (they do all that a lot), you could live next to one for a decade and respect the heck out of him.
We had made a fat client app for a company with a metric buttload of regional offices all over Germany. Each office had their own database, and it was replicated daily against the central database. (Short story: each office only needed the data for their region, so it really didn't need the whole central database. And conversely the "mother" corporation didn't need their data immediately either.)
So this woman (afaik, a sorta boss for that particular office too) calls that the application stopped working on her machine. The tech-support guys can't solve it, so they forward the call to us programmers, namely to the guy next to me. Turns out that she had heard about evil hackers and whatnot, and someone recommended that she installs ZoneAlarm and forbid any programs to connect if she doesn't know what they are and what they do. So she installs it on her work computer too. And forbids our application from talking to the database.
Let me tell you a fable.
Let's say that one day I come to work and decide to park my car right under a "no parking" sign. Hey, it beats walking all the way from the parking ground, and surely I'm so big and important that such laws and city ordinances don't apply to me. So a cop comes around and writes me a parking ticket. Let's say (as a number pulled out of the butt) for 25$. So I ignore it and park my car in the same place tomorrow. So I get the same fine tomorrow. And ignore it again the next day.
So after almost two years I look at the total bill and go "whaaa? A whole 14,000$ for just parking my car??? It's so wrong and unjust! I'm being victimized by the police!"
I'm sure then you'd say, "well then you should have fucking stopped doing that earlier. If for a whole 19 months you decided to ignore the fine, it's _your_ fault that it added up to such a large sum."
The same applies to MS. It's been given a daily fine for each day when they don't comply with the court's order. And they continued to ignore the court's order for 19 months straight. So now it's added up to 1.4 billion dollars.
Well I say the same thing: "then they should have fucking stopped doing it earlier."
It's that simple. It's not some number that was pulled out of the hat now. It's been the daily fine that MS knew about all along. If MS chose to ignore it for so long, tough shit, but it's their problem then.
Heck, in this case the EU had been kinder than even the cop in my example. MS only had to comply at any point in the last 19 months, to be forgiven of the whole fine retroactively. Imagine a cop giving you the same deal: "dude, if you stop parking your car there, I'm going to forgive you of the whole last year's worth of parking tickets." Because seriously that's the deal that MS was given.
So excuse me if I don't see it as disproportionate or anything. They could have stopped at any time, if the total sum was getting too high for their taste.
1. About tyranny, monarchy and non-representative rule: While they do make for some emotional arguments, let's remember that England was a parliamentary monarchy at the time. Maybe not in the same sense of the word as today, but let's remember that that parliament _did_ repel some taxes (e.g., the stamp act) when the colonists protested them. So how much more representation _do_ you want, if even being able to repel laws and taxes isn't enough for you?
2. Comparing it to India is pretty much bullshit, since India was under foreign occupation. The american colonies were British citizens, no less favoured than those in the UK.
3. Taxes. Ah-ha. Now we're getting somewhere. I hope you do, however, understand that an average citizen in the colonies paid insignifficant taxes compared to the citizens back home in the UK. As in, IIRC somewhere between 20 to 30 times less per capita. It also didn't help that the colonists threatened any tax collectors with tarring and feathering.
A lot of the special tax acts, e.g., the stamp act, weren't just to fleece the colonists, but because they paid almost nothing else. So the UK government just tried to figure out ways to keep it fair. Ok, so you don't want to pay other taxes, but, seriously, you're not _that_ special to pay nothing whatsoever. How about you pay this other tax instead, if the old one isn't to your liking?
The Boston Tea Party? Let's remember that that wasn't about some new tax, but about elliminating a tax. Smugglers like John Hancock were making a small fortune by smuggling tea into the USA without paying customs, and thus being able to undercut the prices of the East India Company. So when the British government allowed the East India Company to stop paying that tax too, oh looky, the smugglers were outraged at losing their own unfair advantage.
So exactly what oppressive taxation are we talking about? If paying 20-30 times less taxes than a mainland British citizen was too oppressive, exactly how much tax would be OK for their liking? Zero? Are you still paying that much?
Tyranny and taxation without representation? Heh. Try doing the same today in your land of the free, and see if you'd get away with that. No, seriously. Get your own village (most colonies were about that size) suddenly saying that you don't want to pay taxes any more and threatening violence against the IRS. Or deciding that you can stop paying customs taxes. See how long it would take for your representative and democratic government's men to show up on your doorsteps with flak vests and M16's.
Actually, it sounds like a small thing because that's not the whole thing, and it's the least of the non-compliance problems too. MS was basically ordered there to _also_ sell a version without it, which isn't even much of a punishment when they can keep selling the version _with_ Media Player too.
The current fighting is over the other, and more important part there, namely APIs and protocols. MS has been given a list of stuff it must provide adequate documentation for, and to everyone. That's all.
Basically what the EU is saying is "wtf? A situation where only Windows workstations can talk to a Windows server is a recipe for a monopoly. Do be so kind and provide the documentation for those protocols." It's just telling MS that its products should compete with others on their merits, not on being the only thing that can interoperate with their other products. It shouldn't be years of guesswork and reverse engineering just to get a Linux or Solaris box to talk to a Windows server.
And MS so far has been playing hardball and turning it into a media battle. It started by pulling stunts like selling some libraries and docs preferentially and putting some stupid conditions on getting them. (E.g., literally, you can't use them in an OSS product. Literally.) Then it offered a bunch of undocumented and incomplete implementation code. (The EU says: sorry guys, we asked for protocol documentation. Be so kind and provide the docs.) And so on. And, again, it's been busy astroturfing and turning it into a media posing contest.
And IMHO the court has played pretty nice so far. Even the fine is "backdated" and thus so large, because, seriously that was the final date at which MS was ordered to provide those docs. At some point, after giving MS ample time and letting them delay for years, the court basically said, "No, this is final. At date X you must provide those docs or pay a fine per day." It still gave MS more timeouts even after that, and a chance to not pay those fines, but under the explicit condition that, seriously, if MS still doesn't comply than the original date still stands.
Basically, seriously, if I did half that shit in a court of law, I'd be in contempt and probably facing some quality time behind bars. I'm not anti-MS or anything, but at some point a court of law must be able to enforce compliance or it becomes just a joke. You can't allow someone to basically just refuse to obey for years.
You've mis-read it. One guy had bought a TV _for_ his new apartment. As in, he had just bought a home from somewhere else, and then discovered that he also needs a TV, furniture, etc. So he joined such a group and bought them at wholesale prices.
As for what you could buy in the USA that way, well, I don't know about the USA, but here in Germany most retailers have pretty large margins on anything. Just look on how much they can cut the prices periodically on some stuff, for no other reason than the doctrine that people coming to buy that will also buy something else.
In part that extra money goes on "shelf space" and the like. I.e., it costs you money in rent and salaries to keep something on the shelves or in the warehouse for months. You can also calculate a sort of a cost for slow selling products in money lost by not stocking something else that sells faster.
So I don't know if showing up unexpected would work, but if you called in advance only a complete PHB would refuse to give you a 10% wholesale discount on something that they marked up by 50%. It's a lot of profit in a burst, and if he's smart he'll realize that it's 100% profit. At that large size of an order you could have contacted the wholesaler directly instead, and bypassed the retailer completely. E.g., if you wanted to buy 100 kitchen furniture sets, like in the article, you could probably have contacted Ikea directly instead and taken it at their wholesale prices.
But at the very least it's stuff which:
A) otherwise would cost him shelf space for months or even sit on the shelf until it's outdated. Such a burst sale is pretty much as good as selling it directly from the truck.
B) otherwise would have been spread between him and all the competition. E.g., here if you wanted to buy a TV, you can go to Saturn, Media Markt, Pro Markt, or a dozen others, and that's not even counting the hundreds of online shops. Heck, you can get a TV from Aldi, which is mostly a cheap grocery store chain. So 500 people coming together to buy from, say, Saturn are better than 50 coming to Saturn and 450 going to buy from somewhere else, which is what would realistically happen otherwise. Selling at half the profit margin, but to 10 times more people, can be pretty good business. (After all, Aldi built a retail empire on that doctrine.)
Of course, I've never heard of people doing that here, but I have a strong suspicion that it would work if anyone tried.
Just as a quick clarification, mines designed to wound (e.g., minelets that just blow your foot off) aren't designed so for humane reasons, but because they do much more damage that way. If you killed a poor bastard, his mates will just chuck him in a hole and push some dirt over him. That's it. Score: 1 man down. If you blow his leg off, you took not only him out, but also made some buggers carry him, some medics patch him up, etc. Plus he still needs food, clothing, etc.
And they can actually be pretty well calibrated to that end, since they only need to blow someone's foot off. E.g., the Soviets scattered tons and tons of small pebbles, afaik made of rubber, that exploded when someone stepped on them. Think your childhood's water bombs made of a glove finger filled with water. Now think that with nitroglycerin instead, and it looks like a pebble on a mountain road. Almost no shrapnel effect (a piece of rubber won't cause too deep a wound). In fact, the taliban had fun picking those up and throwing them against the ground. That safe unless it's under your foot. But if you do step on it, you're almost _guaranteed_ to be alive, but without that foot.
At any rate, there was exactly _zero_ humanity and compassion in designing such things. It's just a cold blooded return-on-investment calculation. Those cause more damage to the enemy. That's all.
Well, bingo: then it's those citizens who are to blame, and not the site/shop/casino/brothel/whatever that gets tried under US laws. That's the way the chain of responsibility points.
If it was Johnny Hornyguy that travelled to Holland to smoke pot, then sue Johnny Horny guy, don't try extending US laws to a cafe in Holland. And if Jack Pirate goes to the USSR to buy pirated music, by all means, sue Jack Pirate, don't try pretending that US or UK laws apply to a Russian site. It wasn't the cafe or shop that decidet to go to the US or UK and harrass someone out of their money, and they weren't breaking any laws of their own country. That's the whole point.
The BPI trying to sue a Russian site under UK laws strikes me as just stupid.
Yes, but that's exactly the point. The idea that a bunch of engineers wouldn't be able to speak coherent or articulate Eglish, strikes me as pure unadulterated PHB stupidity. People who spend their day in meetings flinging around words just to sound cool, end up imagining that precise technical terms are just the same thing: a bunch of engineers inventing words to sound cool.
Frankly, I haven't yet met an engineer who was as inarticulate as a bunch of managers would like you to believe. It might take some technical knowledge to understand what they're talking about, but that's just it: it's technical stuff, not inarticulate gibberish. And often it's not possible to explain that stuff in layman's terms, or not without ending up needing a month or sounding indeed like an inarticulate clown.
What I did meet a lot is a bunch of managers liking to pretend that it's the engineers' fault when they choose to believe the nice snake oil vendor instead. Or who just use that as a cheap excuse when they just don't want to rock the boat, and just nod along hoping someone else would take the blame. And, hey, if noone else comes along to take the blame, the engineers always make a good scapegoat. It beats personally going to a boss and saying, "nope, this won't work." Better wait until the shit hits the fan and then pretend you've been missled all along. You wouldn't believe how often _that_ happens in a corporation.
Heck, it's been only last week that I've been in a meeting where noone wants to take responsibility for telling the higher management that a project isn't in the "green" zone. So they're going to go productive with something _completely_ untested rather than dare tell someone higher up that something doesn't go as planned.
What I've also seen a lot is people trying to rationalize their own stupidity and/or ignorance. Everything they've never learned or don't understand, must be just some clowns acting pretentious. You can see that from arts graduates badmouthing sciend (and viceversa) to managers belittling precise technical terms to god knows what else. The more someone is completely clueless about a domain, the more they'll like to pretend that the whole domain is just some farce where some pretentious ass-clowns just try to look smart.
Even then it still seems to me like the sane thing to do is stop the launch until you can understand what _are_ they trying to say, how did this new interpretation come to pass, and maybe ask some other engineers to look at that new interpretation and get a competent opinion of it.
Basically I don't think that any engineer worth his salt would do something like that based on "my horoscope said 'don't launch any shuttles today'" or similar. If they did change their mind or interpretation, there must be some scientific reason there. That it's not "articulate" in management gibberish is pretty irrelevant there. Then get another engineer to hear it.
Also bear in mind that "new data" can actually come in a variety of forms and shapes. I can take the same measurements and reach a different conclusion, because now I've read a different theory about how to apply those. The measurements are the same, but the new data there is the new set of rules or formulas or some anecdotal evidence about some other case where in similar conditions something went wrong or whatever.
Let's try a more apropriate comparison, because that comparison turns the whole chain of responsibility on its head. It wasn't some UK citizens who got mugged across the borders, but it was they who decided to reach across the border (even if through the Internet) and buy stuff from AllOfMP3.
So let's compare it to, I don't know, gambling. Let's say you're from a country or US state that forbids gambling, so you hop in a plane to Las Vegas and gamble your pants off. Does the casino have to comply with your state's laws, or is it enough that it's legal in Las Vegas? Most people would say it's the latter.
Or let's compare it to buying marijuana. In the US and UK and most of the world it's illegal, but let's say in Elbonia it's perfectly legal and can spend a week there higher than a kite. Sky high. (And I'm taking Elbonia as an example just to not get bogged into discussing the legal subtleties and limits of Holland, which is a RL example of a country where it's legal to buy and smoke pot.) So let's say that Johnny Dope hops on a plane and goes there and does just that: buys himself some pot, from a cafe that's perfectly legal under the local laws. Does the cafe have to comply with the USA or UK laws, or is it enough that it complies with the laws of the country it's in? I think it's pretty clearly the latter.
Or let's say you go to Russia and buy a CD-R with pirated music from a shop. (I don't know the subtleties of Russian law, but just for the sake of the example, let's assume it were legal.) Does that shop have to comply with the laws of _your_ country, or is it enough if it's legal under Russian law? I'd say it's pretty clearly the latter.
It doesn't matter if the shop/cafe/casino owner knew you're a foreigner, and it's not their job to ask for your pass and say "nope, in _your_ country this is illegal." In their own country it isn't. That's all that matters.
Basically I find sorta stupid the notion that if a site is accessible from the UK or China or Iran, then it must comply with laws of UK, China _and_ Iran.
AllOfMP3 didn't send someone to the UK to sell music. They set their (web-based) shop in Russia, and only have to comply with Russian law. Just because the Internet is linked everywhere doesn't make the shop exist simultaneously all over the world. It still exists just in Russia. If Johnny Pirate goes to AllOfMP3 to buy his pirated music, then it's Johnny Pirate who decided to go to a Russian shop, in Russia. Yeah, the internet makes that trip a lot easier than physically going there, but, nevertheless, it's Johnny who visited a (virtual) piece of Russia, not the Russians who came to his home.
And at any rate, the decision and responsibility lie squarely with Johnny. He wasn't just a helpless victim shot across the border. (Or hit by a CD packed with MP3's thrown across the border.) It was he who decided to go buy it.
I remember some anecdote about Gandhi. Someone asked him how come his stance on something is now the exact opposite of what it was last week. Gandhi said something like, "because this week I know better."
Now I'm no Gandhi, but I can think of a lot of situations when learning something new made me reverse my stance on something. In fact, I consider it to be what every sane human does all the time. Only zealots have one absolute truth and stick to it for ever, no matter what. A scientist (either theoretical or engineer) should have no such things by definition. If you learn some new fact, or do another calculation, or run another simulation, or whatever, and it contradicts what you previously believed, yes, as an engineer I'd _expect_ you to be ready and willing to change your mind about it. Maybe you'll run some extra tests, do more calculations or whatever first, that's ok, but you shouldn't ever have the last week's stance as something set in stone and unchangeable for any reason.
So, well, I won't argue a your point B for lack of enough data, but point A leaves me scratching my head in disbelief. So someone decided that those engineers aren't trustworthy... because they changed their mind? Seems like a pretty weird attitude. I definitely expected that at NASA even management would be a bit more open-minded than that. They're pretty much one continuous experiment and using experimental equipment, so it's exactly the kind of thing that should be _expected_.
We're not talking stuff like designing a bike, where you can just do it all by the book and know the same today as you knew last week. We're talking crazy experimental stuff that noone else has done before, and a lot of it is tried for the first time. Someone calculated that this valve should be perfectly safe, or that foam can't break this time, but essentially it's the first time anyone actually put that valve or that new foam on a rocket and blast it into space. There's a lot of stuff that could act differently than in the simulation, or than in whatever lab tests were done.
So, yes, stuff like someone doing some new calculations and deciding, "teh oops, this thing is gonna blow up" are the kind of thing I'd _expect_.
That's exactly what I'm wondering, and I don't think I want a precedent saying that, yup, if in East Bumfuckistan it's illegal to publish something, you can be extradited to East Bumfuckistan if you published it in the UK.
I mean, seriously, almost every dictatorship somewhere has some things that are forbidden to publish or to even read.
E.g., China doesn't like anything that contradicts its propaganda. I don't just mean anti-communist stuff, but for example they forbade the game Hearts Of Iron 2 because it presented Manchuria as a separate puppet-state of Japan in 1936. Which is historically accurate, ffs: Japan had occupied a bunch of Chinese territory, called it "Manchuria" and installed a puppet emperor there that was little more than a figurehead with no power whatsoever. But someone in China decided that it's illegal to even mention China being, or ever having been, anything else than one unified state.
So could now the developpers be tried and imprisoned in China for publishing something like that in Sweden? I'm sure there's a lot of stuff on their site (maps, info, game patches containing those lists of countries and provinces) that can be accessed over the Internet from China. Does that mean that suddenly a site in Sweden has to abide by China's laws?
What about posts on that topic? Between Europa Universalis 1 and 2, Victoria, and Hearts Of Iron 1 and 2, there are a lot of talks about historical and ahistorical scenarios on Paradox's boards involving China. E.g., right this morning there was a post in the "Hearts Of Iron 2: Doomsday" forum where someone posted a screenshot of the game saying Mao Zhedong died in battle, somewhere in the 40's. (In HOI2 any general can be killed in combat, so if you use one in a lot of battle, yeah, something like that can happen.) And some tomfoolery ensued, with jokes about the party just hiding his death from the people, and similar. I'm sure some PRC party official can take offense at that idea, especially if taken out of context by someone who's never actually played the game. So can they now enforce the swift Chinese justice upon some posters from all over Europe and the USA, just because that info can be accessed from China?
E.g., in a couple of Islamist countries you can be tried and sentenced to death (yes, literally) just for saying that you don't believe in the official religion. Can they now sue everyone who's proclaimed themselves a Christian or atheist on Slashdot? Just because that info is available over the internet from their country? Oooer.
I don't think I want to see that kind of a precedent established.
It's because celebrity names sell. At some point people go see a movie just because it has some celebrity in it. And I don't just mean celebrity actors, like Tom Hanks, which could at least be defended as "well, he acts well, and people like a movie that's well acted." I mean look at your average rapper, sports star, boy-band/girl-band celebrity manufactured by the recording industry, etc, starring in some movie. Most can't even act at all, yet people go to the movie anyway, just because it has their favourite celebrity in it.
It's, if you will, like merchandising. People will buy a T-Shirt with Darth Vader's head on it, not because it actually does anything to make the t-shirt better, but just because it's Darth Vader. Or insert some band's mug shots instead of Darth Vader. And some company is very happy to use that kind of merchandising to take their money.
So what you're seeing here is the same effect. "Acted by Tom Hanks" is something that makes people fork over the cash. "Animated by Neon Noodle" doesn't quite work the same.
It could work the same (after all, yes, we do give credit to the painter and not to whoever posed for them), but (A) it would require taking some risks and making a loss until the public is educated enough to accept Neon Noodle as an equally cool celebrity, and (B) then you'd ask for more money. So, well, I just can't see anyone making that move.
A mistake that seems to be somehow built-in people's heads is that a MMORPG is sorta like a marriage. "Until death do us part."
This is reflected in two major falsehoods that get posted again and again:
1. "If I got tired of a game after 6 months, it's a sign that the game now sucks and deserves to be shut down."
2. "If people I know left after 6 months, it's a sign that the game is dying."
In reality, 6 months is (or was in the EQ days) the average time a player stays on a MMO. Sure, it depends on the player and the MMO too, but the vast majority of players don't stay for ever. It's just a game. At some point you've seen the content, got sick of doing the same thing over and over again, and move on or at least take a break.
In reality, WoW is still doing pretty damn well, as reflected by both the number of active subscriptions and the queues. You'd notice it if there was a massive exodus, because there would be no more full servers in the list, and no more queues.
It does, however, show the turnover mentioned before. Some people get sick and tired of it and leave, some new people join, and some people come back after taking a break. And some just start a new character or whatever. It's enough to see your old pals leaving, or your old guild needing new members, but not really enough to sink the game yet. And yes, it means you too at some point will get sick and tired of WoW.
(Note that I'm not saying that this is automatically the case with all games. Some do have poorer quality or sprout some uninspired change that does cause an exodus. Just saying that WoW doesn't seem to be there (yet).)
And a lot of guilds are recombining not only because they've lost level 60 players. (Though they certainly do lose them: guess what level will someone be after 6 months?) They're recombining because they're finally reaching the point where they need to take part in those 40-man raids. A lot of people form some casual guild at level 10, make lots of alts, play solo or in small groups, and are as happy as a clam... until they reach the tier 2 dungeons at level 60. Then they suddenly discover that the old system won't get them alive through the end-game dungeons. Suddenly being the casual guild with 10 people at level 60, and half the rest alts under level 20, just doesn't work any more.
Enter a round of policy changes, "stop inviting people below level 60!!!" posts on the guild boards, and recombining with other guilds to get a viable mix of 40 players that have the level and equipment to take part in those raids.