Oh, you mean like the insane amount of study, practice, and performance I had to do at my job to get to where I am right now?
Maybe I like my current employment? Maybe I'm fully aware that I would have had to put in equal time in both fields to make any amount of money at all? Who says acting is that much harder than writing a blockbuster video game? I'm sorry, but they're not even in the same ballpark. 2 years of practicing and you can do a damn good job of voice acting. 2 years of learning to program and I wouldn't trust you to duplicate notepad without fucking something up.
Costing someone something and stealing something from them are different. After all, I may upset you so badly from a bad breakup that it costs you a few thousand dollars in bills for seeing a therapist. You're going to be hard pressed to find any court that awards you damages for "theft of sanity".
Just so you're aware: cost != loss of property. Loss of - whether it's peace of mind or potential sale, but not property!
You're right, 1 hour of my time is nowhere near the 1000$ price difference. Not to mention the fact that I love putting it together - it's something I'd pay to do, actually, so it's not even a cost to me, it's an all round constant benefit.
Further, fuck you. Fuck you nine times you arrogant cum guzzling gutter slut prick. Go back to being a jackass.
Really? Because I've repurchased the same book about 3 times because I read it so often the cover came off, then the first and last pages, then the ones next to it, etc.
And I am most assuredly not the type to abuse books. My fiancee drives me up a wall because she's always leaving her books open face down on a desk. I just start twitching and can't seem to stop.
I just read them, a lot, and often. I've reread certain books nearly 100 times, on their own. I go through about a book a day on the weekends, and about a book every 2 days on the week. I only own about a single large bookshelf worth of books, so I'm rereading the same ones over and over again.
Plus there's space constraints. Even if I wanted more books, I wouldn't have anywhere to put them, unless I started stacking them on the floor. That single bookshelf is the max space I can use up for a book-holding piece of furniture.
No, I'd prefer if every book I owned, I had in e-book format, and it was all condensed down to one single reader. I could sell or give all those paper books away, get rid of the book shelf, and reduce some of the vast clutter in my tiny house.
Or I could do it the american way, and just buy a bigger house, and bigger bookshelves, and more books, and be your standard consumer whore.
Not just tongue-in-cheek "cost them millions", really cost them millions, in genuine money, not hypothetical money that may or may not have been in their coffers depending on whether someone would actually buy something they downloaded if they couldn't download it.
The best solution I can think of is a firebomb or two, but then you gotta form your little fight club posse and get people on the inside so you can clear the building - keep in mind you're trying to cost them money, not lives!
Re:Also tortious contract interference
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Who Owns Software?
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· Score: 1
err, star, not start.
Re:Also tortious contract interference
on
Who Owns Software?
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· Score: 1
Well, as I am one of the people of Pittsburgh, I can certainly understand the last part, but I'm also the type of person who realizes that the individual choice is his own. I would have no problem making it available for sale, but if he uses it to violate a contract, that's his own problem. If he uses it to give it to his little sister for a graduation present, that's his perogative. And if he just wants to collect fancy bikes and never use them, then what's the problem?
No, he made that choice, of his own volition. It's time to stop passing the blame for the stupidity of others - and yes, riding a motorcycle without a helmet when you're a start quarterback and hundreds of thousands of people live and die for what you do on the football field - that's just stupid and irresponsible. But it's still all his own stupidity and irresponsibility.
Very much so wrong. Look at who brought the suit the first time: UMG.
The individual record companies have to sue; the RIAA just does the legwork for "finding" who "made files available" and hands it off.
Re:Also tortious contract interference
on
Who Owns Software?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I honestly don't know this, but...
Is MDY, really, for serious, interfering with that relationship? Or are they making materials available to the user that interferes with that relationship?
Let's use the only contract example analogy I can think of right now: Take a professional football player who has signed a contract that says "you can't ride a motorcycle" (see: Kellen Winslow, Ben Roethlisberger, etc). If I sell a motorcycle to either of them, how, exactly, am I interfering with the contract? Either of them could have purchased the bike for looks, or for a friend, or maybe for their dog. Maybe they were going to take it apart and make it into an airplane. Regardless of their contract with their respective organizations, I have not directly interfered, such as by forcing one of them to ride the motorcycle by gunpoint and thereby causing them to crash.
I guess I'm just really not sold on this interference thing. How many marriage contracts are ended when one spouse cheats on the other? How many times does the aggrieved spouse get to sue the interloper for interference?
I've heard of it before in some states, but the practice seemed very few and far between and rather sketchy sounding in implementation, so maybe there is precedent, but it doesn't sound exactly commonplace.
Wrong. They do not have to prove them innocent. They merely have to state that they are innocent. There's a huge difference there.
Aside from that, I see your point, but you have to admit the other way things would have gone, ie: Google, itself, would have been libel in case of an infringement would make just about every single hosting company close up shop over night, or at least increase their monthly fee by an order of magnitude or two just so they could afford the staff and legal counsel to constantly peruse the files put on their servers, and even then it would be an incredibly risky venture.
No, no, without the DMCA, I don't see the internet working nearly as well as it does now, if at all - not unless everyone owned their own servers and hosted them out of their own homes.
Ah, the time honored tradition of forcing your users to mold to the application, rather than the application molding to them.
You talk about whether or not something is behaving correctly, as if somehow, there is a divinely inspired standard for correct behavior in a software application. Many usability experts try to say what is the correct behavior and what is not, but the bottom line is most of them do not agree.
If so many "experts" cannot agree on what is or is not _correct_ behavior, then it may be time for us to entertain the possibility that there is no _correct_ behavior, only "better than", which is to say this entire conversation is solely subjective and phrases like "correct" should be discarded.
Let's call it like it is, gentlemen: There are a group of individuals who feel they alone are qualified to dictate to others how an application should behave; if it does not behave as the user expects it to, then it is the user at fault, and not the application. For those who agree with this, this is a reasonable stance to take. Those who don't agree are subsequently wrong.
To the rest of us, configuration options are our life blood. I'm all for trying to get the application as close to "correct" behavior as one possibly can, but I also recognize that it's a subjective qualification and what I deem to be "correct" is going to be incorrect for others. Rather than tell another person that they have to change the way they work, think, and interact, I would rather offer them the ability to customize the application to THEIR specification. After all, when it comes down to changing the way people work and interact with an application, or forcing them to tweak it to their own liking, the former will fail 100% of the time and the latter will fail 66% of the time. I'd rather take the 34% success rate over the 100% failure rate any day of the week.
If you're really worried about killing the user with customizability options, then tuck it in an out of the way place. Remember: the only people looking to tweak the program are the ones who are willing to go the extra mile to make it work as they want it to work. If they don't even have the option to go that extra mile, they're just as likely to flip you the bird, uninstall the application, and tell everyone they know that ApplicationQ is a piece of garbage and anyone who likes it is an idiot.
Well, in all honesty I don't think it's over the text area so much as the fact that those in charge are adamant about allowing anyone to configure the client as they see fit. This is just a small symptom; the underlying cause is unbridled arrogance and muleheaded stubbornness.
If only I could have Adium on Windows, I'd be happy.
In the meantime, here's to hoping the new fork does better than Pidgin. After reading part of the flamewar, I'm insulted by the arrogant sons-of-bitches who work on Pidgin, and I'd really rather switch away.
That's the beauty of OSS, though; when enough people don't like something, they can always do something about it to make it better and give the other group the finger (see: X11 vs. Xorg)
And this is where we're going to have to disagree.
In our country, our individual states can make laws, and our federal government can make laws. What flies in Massachusetts may not fly in Utah (Gay Marriage, for instance). That's one of the things we love about our country; we can still be American, but go to another state that allows us to do the things we wish to do.
The Federal Government can enter into treaties; this is true. But they don't necessarily have the right to force states to comply with those treaties (depending on the situation). In this case, they'd have to pass a law stating that all gambling is illegal, and I highly doubt that would work.
So, in this case, they're stuck between a rock and a hard place...and an anvil. And another rock. Outlaw gambling on the federal level, make it a law that states have to allow gambling, allow Antigua to provide online gambling services to states who do not want gambling, or, I suppose, do nothing.
I can tell you none of these are going to happen except maybe the latter, and they're going to be blasted for it. But once you know how our government is structured, you realize compliance is a pie in the sky affair. So, by all means, the WTO can do what they need to do, and we'll just have to live with it. It sucks, but there is no solution that is reasonable for all parties involved - at least to them, and there is no solution that would pass political muster except for the standard "fuck the world, they're telling us what to do!" way that comes so easy to our self-righteous, stubborn asses.
10% of however many million Spiderman got in profit is going to end up being a pretty nice chunk of change, and if you can use it to fund your New Yacht Every 3 Months Fund, then ya gotta do what ya gotta do
Well, keep in mind that they have a completely different set of CONOPS from each other. One is a spy drone meant to be sent out for days and days on end (not coming home), and the other is for saying hello to a sniper in a sniper nest with a C4 explosive. One is supposed to be controlled via AI, and the other via a dude with an xbox controller.
I can see a use for both, but I can't see the WASP being quite as useful as the BAT - at least from a CONOPS standpoint.
That said, I don't think the BAT will ever get off the ground, so the WASP will probably win purely by virtue of being the only contestant left standing:D
I'm not badanalogyguy, but I'm going to play him on/. for right now.
If I'm in a car accident with a drunk driver, and I become paralyzed, and I sue for damages, I find it highly suspect that the drunk driver could say "I didn't do anything wrong; look at him! He was eating too many twinkies anyway, and was going to be dead in a few months regardless!" That's not a valid argument. It may be true, but it's really beside the point. The point here is "did Microsoft engage in abuse of their desktop OS monopoly". I'm not going to make a comment on that one way or another, because I frankly don't know, but I do know arguing that WordPerfect having self-inflicted issues -after- MS started engaging in some possibly illegal acts is not the issue here.
In this case, it's like someone murdering another person on the cusp of committing suicide. Just because the victim was about to end their own life doesn't mean the murderer is in the right, it means the murderer is fucking stupid for not waiting five minutes.
Look, if light isn't reflecting, it's being absorbed, and if it's being absorbed, it's going to turn into heat, which is going to make it relatively hot, which is going to make it stand out more than not doing anything at all to it ever would.
Correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation. What we have here is someone feeling that a particular viewpoint is wrong, tossing out some vague quantifications and making suppositions about whether one drives the other.
You're going to have to do a lot better than that if you really want to prove your point.
Considering I copy files, say, one time - directly after a format, no less - I really don't feel this is a problem. Maybe you're upset that your car has a shitty horn and sounds like a duck being raped by a rhinocerous, but I don't even fucking use my horn, so why would it bother me that much?
If you do enough copying, fine, get upset about it, call it a lemon, but frankly, it doesn't fucking bother me all that much. I guess I'm terribly sorry that I don't use a PC the exact same way you do and don't get fired up over the exact same things you do. I'll get right back to work being precisely like you and stop being an apologist about functions I barely use - especially now that, apparently, I'm going to be copying every 32 nanoseconds of every waking moment.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, it's the only way to be sure.
Oh, you mean like the insane amount of study, practice, and performance I had to do at my job to get to where I am right now?
Maybe I like my current employment? Maybe I'm fully aware that I would have had to put in equal time in both fields to make any amount of money at all? Who says acting is that much harder than writing a blockbuster video game? I'm sorry, but they're not even in the same ballpark. 2 years of practicing and you can do a damn good job of voice acting. 2 years of learning to program and I wouldn't trust you to duplicate notepad without fucking something up.
Costing someone something and stealing something from them are different. After all, I may upset you so badly from a bad breakup that it costs you a few thousand dollars in bills for seeing a therapist. You're going to be hard pressed to find any court that awards you damages for "theft of sanity".
Just so you're aware: cost != loss of property. Loss of - whether it's peace of mind or potential sale, but not property!
You're right, 1 hour of my time is nowhere near the 1000$ price difference. Not to mention the fact that I love putting it together - it's something I'd pay to do, actually, so it's not even a cost to me, it's an all round constant benefit.
Further, fuck you. Fuck you nine times you arrogant cum guzzling gutter slut prick. Go back to being a jackass.
Really? Because I've repurchased the same book about 3 times because I read it so often the cover came off, then the first and last pages, then the ones next to it, etc.
And I am most assuredly not the type to abuse books. My fiancee drives me up a wall because she's always leaving her books open face down on a desk. I just start twitching and can't seem to stop.
I just read them, a lot, and often. I've reread certain books nearly 100 times, on their own. I go through about a book a day on the weekends, and about a book every 2 days on the week. I only own about a single large bookshelf worth of books, so I'm rereading the same ones over and over again.
Plus there's space constraints. Even if I wanted more books, I wouldn't have anywhere to put them, unless I started stacking them on the floor. That single bookshelf is the max space I can use up for a book-holding piece of furniture.
No, I'd prefer if every book I owned, I had in e-book format, and it was all condensed down to one single reader. I could sell or give all those paper books away, get rid of the book shelf, and reduce some of the vast clutter in my tiny house.
Or I could do it the american way, and just buy a bigger house, and bigger bookshelves, and more books, and be your standard consumer whore.
But at least I'd have new books to read.
As you may be able to see, I'm conflicted.
Not just tongue-in-cheek "cost them millions", really cost them millions, in genuine money, not hypothetical money that may or may not have been in their coffers depending on whether someone would actually buy something they downloaded if they couldn't download it.
The best solution I can think of is a firebomb or two, but then you gotta form your little fight club posse and get people on the inside so you can clear the building - keep in mind you're trying to cost them money, not lives!
err, star, not start.
Well, as I am one of the people of Pittsburgh, I can certainly understand the last part, but I'm also the type of person who realizes that the individual choice is his own. I would have no problem making it available for sale, but if he uses it to violate a contract, that's his own problem. If he uses it to give it to his little sister for a graduation present, that's his perogative. And if he just wants to collect fancy bikes and never use them, then what's the problem?
No, he made that choice, of his own volition. It's time to stop passing the blame for the stupidity of others - and yes, riding a motorcycle without a helmet when you're a start quarterback and hundreds of thousands of people live and die for what you do on the football field - that's just stupid and irresponsible. But it's still all his own stupidity and irresponsibility.
Very much so wrong. Look at who brought the suit the first time: UMG.
The individual record companies have to sue; the RIAA just does the legwork for "finding" who "made files available" and hands it off.
I honestly don't know this, but...
Is MDY, really, for serious, interfering with that relationship? Or are they making materials available to the user that interferes with that relationship?
Let's use the only contract example analogy I can think of right now: Take a professional football player who has signed a contract that says "you can't ride a motorcycle" (see: Kellen Winslow, Ben Roethlisberger, etc). If I sell a motorcycle to either of them, how, exactly, am I interfering with the contract? Either of them could have purchased the bike for looks, or for a friend, or maybe for their dog. Maybe they were going to take it apart and make it into an airplane. Regardless of their contract with their respective organizations, I have not directly interfered, such as by forcing one of them to ride the motorcycle by gunpoint and thereby causing them to crash.
I guess I'm just really not sold on this interference thing. How many marriage contracts are ended when one spouse cheats on the other? How many times does the aggrieved spouse get to sue the interloper for interference?
I've heard of it before in some states, but the practice seemed very few and far between and rather sketchy sounding in implementation, so maybe there is precedent, but it doesn't sound exactly commonplace.
Does that include sales tax and shipping? If so, my sense of outrage will most likely be quelled.
Wrong. They do not have to prove them innocent. They merely have to state that they are innocent. There's a huge difference there.
Aside from that, I see your point, but you have to admit the other way things would have gone, ie: Google, itself, would have been libel in case of an infringement would make just about every single hosting company close up shop over night, or at least increase their monthly fee by an order of magnitude or two just so they could afford the staff and legal counsel to constantly peruse the files put on their servers, and even then it would be an incredibly risky venture.
No, no, without the DMCA, I don't see the internet working nearly as well as it does now, if at all - not unless everyone owned their own servers and hosted them out of their own homes.
That's probably why he paid for legal counsel; so he didn't have to understand what it said, he just listened to his lawyer.
That's kind of what most people do when their lawyer explains something to them and advises them on a course of action.
No, but you could really hurt someone if you're a few stories up and manage to knock it out.
;)
Just saying
Ah, the time honored tradition of forcing your users to mold to the application, rather than the application molding to them.
You talk about whether or not something is behaving correctly, as if somehow, there is a divinely inspired standard for correct behavior in a software application. Many usability experts try to say what is the correct behavior and what is not, but the bottom line is most of them do not agree.
If so many "experts" cannot agree on what is or is not _correct_ behavior, then it may be time for us to entertain the possibility that there is no _correct_ behavior, only "better than", which is to say this entire conversation is solely subjective and phrases like "correct" should be discarded.
Let's call it like it is, gentlemen: There are a group of individuals who feel they alone are qualified to dictate to others how an application should behave; if it does not behave as the user expects it to, then it is the user at fault, and not the application. For those who agree with this, this is a reasonable stance to take. Those who don't agree are subsequently wrong.
To the rest of us, configuration options are our life blood. I'm all for trying to get the application as close to "correct" behavior as one possibly can, but I also recognize that it's a subjective qualification and what I deem to be "correct" is going to be incorrect for others. Rather than tell another person that they have to change the way they work, think, and interact, I would rather offer them the ability to customize the application to THEIR specification. After all, when it comes down to changing the way people work and interact with an application, or forcing them to tweak it to their own liking, the former will fail 100% of the time and the latter will fail 66% of the time. I'd rather take the 34% success rate over the 100% failure rate any day of the week.
If you're really worried about killing the user with customizability options, then tuck it in an out of the way place. Remember: the only people looking to tweak the program are the ones who are willing to go the extra mile to make it work as they want it to work. If they don't even have the option to go that extra mile, they're just as likely to flip you the bird, uninstall the application, and tell everyone they know that ApplicationQ is a piece of garbage and anyone who likes it is an idiot.
Well, in all honesty I don't think it's over the text area so much as the fact that those in charge are adamant about allowing anyone to configure the client as they see fit. This is just a small symptom; the underlying cause is unbridled arrogance and muleheaded stubbornness.
If only I could have Adium on Windows, I'd be happy.
In the meantime, here's to hoping the new fork does better than Pidgin. After reading part of the flamewar, I'm insulted by the arrogant sons-of-bitches who work on Pidgin, and I'd really rather switch away.
That's the beauty of OSS, though; when enough people don't like something, they can always do something about it to make it better and give the other group the finger (see: X11 vs. Xorg)
And this is where we're going to have to disagree.
In our country, our individual states can make laws, and our federal government can make laws. What flies in Massachusetts may not fly in Utah (Gay Marriage, for instance). That's one of the things we love about our country; we can still be American, but go to another state that allows us to do the things we wish to do.
The Federal Government can enter into treaties; this is true. But they don't necessarily have the right to force states to comply with those treaties (depending on the situation). In this case, they'd have to pass a law stating that all gambling is illegal, and I highly doubt that would work.
So, in this case, they're stuck between a rock and a hard place...and an anvil. And another rock. Outlaw gambling on the federal level, make it a law that states have to allow gambling, allow Antigua to provide online gambling services to states who do not want gambling, or, I suppose, do nothing.
I can tell you none of these are going to happen except maybe the latter, and they're going to be blasted for it. But once you know how our government is structured, you realize compliance is a pie in the sky affair. So, by all means, the WTO can do what they need to do, and we'll just have to live with it. It sucks, but there is no solution that is reasonable for all parties involved - at least to them, and there is no solution that would pass political muster except for the standard "fuck the world, they're telling us what to do!" way that comes so easy to our self-righteous, stubborn asses.
10% of however many million Spiderman got in profit is going to end up being a pretty nice chunk of change, and if you can use it to fund your New Yacht Every 3 Months Fund, then ya gotta do what ya gotta do
Well, keep in mind that they have a completely different set of CONOPS from each other. One is a spy drone meant to be sent out for days and days on end (not coming home), and the other is for saying hello to a sniper in a sniper nest with a C4 explosive. One is supposed to be controlled via AI, and the other via a dude with an xbox controller.
:D
I can see a use for both, but I can't see the WASP being quite as useful as the BAT - at least from a CONOPS standpoint.
That said, I don't think the BAT will ever get off the ground, so the WASP will probably win purely by virtue of being the only contestant left standing
I'm not badanalogyguy, but I'm going to play him on /. for right now.
If I'm in a car accident with a drunk driver, and I become paralyzed, and I sue for damages, I find it highly suspect that the drunk driver could say "I didn't do anything wrong; look at him! He was eating too many twinkies anyway, and was going to be dead in a few months regardless!" That's not a valid argument. It may be true, but it's really beside the point. The point here is "did Microsoft engage in abuse of their desktop OS monopoly". I'm not going to make a comment on that one way or another, because I frankly don't know, but I do know arguing that WordPerfect having self-inflicted issues -after- MS started engaging in some possibly illegal acts is not the issue here.
In this case, it's like someone murdering another person on the cusp of committing suicide. Just because the victim was about to end their own life doesn't mean the murderer is in the right, it means the murderer is fucking stupid for not waiting five minutes.
Please, do tell.
:D
Seriously. There's no way that story can be a bad one
Look, if light isn't reflecting, it's being absorbed, and if it's being absorbed, it's going to turn into heat, which is going to make it relatively hot, which is going to make it stand out more than not doing anything at all to it ever would.
Correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation. What we have here is someone feeling that a particular viewpoint is wrong, tossing out some vague quantifications and making suppositions about whether one drives the other.
You're going to have to do a lot better than that if you really want to prove your point.
Considering I copy files, say, one time - directly after a format, no less - I really don't feel this is a problem. Maybe you're upset that your car has a shitty horn and sounds like a duck being raped by a rhinocerous, but I don't even fucking use my horn, so why would it bother me that much?
If you do enough copying, fine, get upset about it, call it a lemon, but frankly, it doesn't fucking bother me all that much. I guess I'm terribly sorry that I don't use a PC the exact same way you do and don't get fired up over the exact same things you do. I'll get right back to work being precisely like you and stop being an apologist about functions I barely use - especially now that, apparently, I'm going to be copying every 32 nanoseconds of every waking moment.