When speaking of "copyrighted content" on torrent sites (especially TPB), it is assumed one is speaking of copyrighted content for which authorization has not been provided. I don't believe any one of us was under the perception of anything else.
Correct. And if the community knew that the founders were just going to duplicate the exact thing elsewhere, the entire community would move over to whatever project or site that was, undermining the value of the brand that was just purchased. Anyone spending $8m to buy a torrent site has a lawyer or two who are surely going to have an eye on preventing devaluation of the purchase in such a manner.
Those aren't quite the same things. Those are established companies doing bad things. We're talking about a business plan that is established on what courts and corporations keep insisting are illegal practices that then become legitimized as a direct result of the popularity gained by those practices. Additionally, the hypocrisy of anti-sharing and anti-fair-use businesses supporting sharing and fair-use (in their terminology, "copyright infringement") by rewarding them when they get enough eyeballs to warrant being desirable for a company on legitimate intentions.
A much better analogy than those you offered above would be when Interscope Records bought Death Row Records, which was started with drug money. The initial capitol and cash flow for Death Row Records came from the convicted Michael Harris, of course.
I don't believe they said they were donating all the money. Frankly, I hope they don't. I'd say donate just enough to kick the foundation off and keep the rest so you never have to work another day in your life. Then you can spend that time doing whatever you really love. I have no qualms with that. In fact, I have no qualms if they just take all the money and go live on an island somewhere.
My only gripe is that yet another service attempts to go legit through support of traditional business only after building itself up on "questionable" methods. In no other industry would this sort of business model be legitimized, yet it happens repeatedly on the internet.
The blog entry is a bunch of meaningless drivel. I don't care what TPB guys say about the sale and how nothing will change, except for the better and the right guys will still be around running things -- the fact of the matter is that no publicly held business is going to buy a torrent website that facilitates in the transmission of almost exclusively copyrighted content and then continue to operate the site in the same way.
The only way they would buy it is if they transformed it into a "legitimate" service, thereby losing any interest any of the audience had in it and therefore contradicting everything stated in the blog.
I doubt that there would not be some clause whereby they agree in the sale not to directly compete by starting up yet another service that does the exact same thing under a different name. Otherwise there wouldn't be much value in the transaction to begin with.
Agreed. Nobody cares about these "legitimate services", because they are always expensive, locked-down, and have too many conditions and hoops to jump through.
I understand that the guys are fighting an uphill battle in the courts, so they probably had no choice but to do this so they could pay their legal fees and judgments and hopefully walk away with a few bucks to start a new life and go on to something new.
However, I have a major problem with how this story always plays out. The same way it played out with Napster and Suprnova and other services. It's a major hypocrisy on all sides. Corporations which usually are completely draconian and absurd essentially buy the structure and eyeballs of a service formerly facilitating "questionable" delivery of content. On the other side, proponents of sharing and haters of extreme intellectual property laws, selling out to the corporations they've been fighting the whole time.
The only loser in these things is always the audience.
Think about this business plan. How is it even legally? It's certainly not ethical, no matter what side of the fence you're on (and I'm a huge TPB fan).
Site (such as Napster, etc) gains enormous fame and attention and audience providing what is supposedly a very questionable service using mostly content that they do not own and is not free to give away.
Once they have enough attention and eyeballs, corporations come a knocking.
Corporations make the founders of the service extremely wealth and then pervert the service by turning it into something "legit", thereby losing 98% of the audience (seriously, who has ever used Napster once they went "legit"?).
This seems similar to the following proposed business plan:
I want to start a movie company, but I don't have any money or infrastructure. Instead, I decide to start stealing movie reels from Warner Brothers down the street. Then I promote and sell those movies as if they were mine. After a few years, I've stolen enough of someone else's product and sold it as my own that I've made enough money to finally go legit.
Now, using ill-gotten finances from someone else's products, I become a fully legitimate movie producing powerhouse. And everyone in the business and industry regard me as legitimate.
How can these even be allowed to happen? Isn't there someone regulating this stuff? How can a legitimate company have beginnings doing questionable things and not pay for it? It's like the Mafia suddenly deciding "Hey, we're tired of laundering money and killing people, so we're going to start a string of burger franchises". And everyone just saying "okay, cool".
No, as I mentioned in my post, this is a multi-platform issue. It seemed to have gone away on OSX until a few updates ago at which point it began occurring again, just like it always has on Windows. I've experienced it repeatedly on almost every install I've tested it on and even in virtual machines and both in 3x and back in 2x. As I say, it seemed to behave MUCH better shortly after 3.0 (even on Windows to some degree) but has returned with a vengeance in the last few minor updates.
It is frequently exacerbated with extensions, but also occurs without any installed in a slower and less severe basis.
I worked at Netscape doing plenty of QA work in the late 90s, so I'm not exactly an inexperience neophyte, either. My initial assumption was toward sloppy extensions which some profiling proved can make it worse, but is not necessary for the problem to appear.
The standard line from the Firefox camp has usually been "that's a feature!" and explained away as your browser needing 1.5gb of memory for "back button functionality".
It should speak to the legacy of Firefox/Mozilla that despite this ridiculous problem, almost nobody who experiences is is willing to dump it as our go-to browser.
Too bad it won't stop all the "what memory problem?" trolls.
Remember how 3.0 was touted to solve all the memory problems? I still get 1.5gb of usage *regularly* on multiple platforms with 3.0.11 without any installed extensions after a few hours. In fact, I'm on Firefox 3.0.11 on OSX 10.5.7 right now and it's at 1.3gb. You can tell when it's being a memory hog again, because videos won't play without stopping and stuttering and pages take longer to load and switching tabs feels glacial.
So, considering 3.0 originally was supposed to solve everything, I think I'll not hold my breath on 3.5. Especially for a problem that continues to happen across platforms.
Of course, this analogy only goes so far, since Doctor Who (as stated in Season 15, with Tom Baker) only has a total of thirteen regenerations and then death is permanent.
Except that those funds are usually not acquired from the personal bank account of the breeders, but from society in general who subsidizes them through various avenues, such as their medical plan. It's amazing what's covered and what isn't in a lot of plans.
My point is that society is hypocritical to take the stance that one unnatural alteration of the gene-pool through modern facilities is "a beautiful gift" while another is an abhorrent affront to mankind and nature alike.
Also, nobody is reproducing with their car and your analogy is disastrous since it in no way implies the dramatic change to the gene-pool in the short period that either of the above procedures can.
I'm just saying, be consistent. Although, yes, I would prefer that you stop spending $200,000 to squirt out eight fucking duplicates of your dumbass self.
We're already fucking things up by ensuring that people who naturally wouldn't be able to reproduce do so at a greater rate (multiple birth frequency for fertilization treatments). If there's no complaint about the shit that's doing to the gene-pool, then there's no valid basis for any other alteration, unless it's on the "merits" of some idiotic religious trappings (in which case they should guide the individual in their individual decision and not enforce what others in a country of free choice are doing for themselves).
I'm not saying that I think screening out trivial things is a good idea (though perhaps screening out diabetes and parkinsons is not so bad). The truth is, none of us can currently know the long-term implications of any of these things. However, if it's okay to take two people who couldn't reproduce and jam them together to produce genetic combination that aren't supposed to be, then why not also let them pick the hair color while they're at it? Otherwise it seems arbitrary and unfounded to place a limitation on one but not the other.
Intelligence is determined almost entirely (with minor variation) by heredity. If you have a very low IQ (and those with low IQs tend to breed most frequently) then your children will likely be very limited, intellectually. The same goes for a high IQ. Certain environmental factors contribute toward the maximization of whatever intellectual potential is there, but no maximization will make a bicycle perform like a speed boat.
This is a stupid argument. Every time I choose to blast a load on my girlfriend's belly instead of inside her vagina, I'm choosing which ones will have a chance and which won't.
Or you could just not have kids and you won't end up contributing any warp to anything. It's okay. We're not going to vanish from existence just because we didn't get your seed.
Fertility clinics are already contributing to that by increasing the number of children produced from genetic combination (parents) that are not naturally able to produce off-spring together. You can't tell me that choosing green eyes and black hair is a significantly greater risk than taking Parent A and Parent B that are not capable of having children together (or at all in some cases) and making it possible, anyway.
We've already decided that there's no harm in defying the natural order of things by spending six figures to make sure two people who are not supposed to reproduce together c*can* reproduce. And in abnormal quantities (the high occurrence of litter-sized pregnancies in fertility-assisted pregnancies).
I don't have a problem if society deems one to be off the table (for now at least) as long as BOTH are off the table. It is incredibly hypocritical to say that it's okay to take two genetic lines that are not able to breed together and FORCE them to reproduce anyway.... but then say "but choosing green eyes is just too damn far!".
Which is so hypocritical that it's absurd. Parents foist themselves and their children on the world and then try to persuade us that being a parent equates one to being a saint and that there is nothing more altruistic than xeroxing yourself a few times.
Yet they can't be bothered to do the right thing and, if they absolutely must have a diaper to change or a college tuition to pay, do it for some poor parentless soul out there that truly needs it *now*.
The hypocrisy of such people is simply astounding.
So let me get this straight (I'm not aiming this necessarily at you, AC - just the "other side" in general). It's wrong and unnatural to choose traits about your future child, but it's absolutely beautiful and wonderful and natural to defy nature by using modern medicine to make two people whom nature has deemed unfit to reproduce (in their particular combination/coupling, at least) squirt out an ungodly number of children?
That's my primary problem with it. I don't have any problem with choosing the traits of your child per se -- it's just that I can't possibly foresee all of the potential complications of this that could arise in the overall gene-pool after a few centuries of this.
On the other hand, I also don't feel to great about the potential ramifications of taking couples who are biologically incapable of reproducing together (as nature has for some reason deemed) not only reproducing, but often squirting out three, five, or even eight kids in defiance of nature (which of course is what all of those people will reference in addition to GAAAAAWDUH, when saying why choosing *traits* is wrong).
Yeah, this is a lot of re-inventing the wheel. What a waste of time. Unless they're really going to somehow improve on it. I use TabKit which lets me re-arrange my tabs and everything. Group them. Tree them. Organize them. The only thing that would be better is if I could rename them (there is a tab renamer out there but it doesn't stick between sessions).
The reason people usually ask for help on topics like this online is that finding a specialized lawyer is difficult if you're a nobody. Worse, if you find one you probably can't afford one.
The sad fact here is that whether it is fair use or not is entirely irrelevant. Let's say that it *is* fair use. Great. Now what happens when their lawyers sue you? Do you have the thousands or possibly tens of thousands of dollars to defend yourself in a court of law on such a complex topic?
When it comes to the law, people with money can afford to be bullies. In fact, even people without money can afford it. If you run a site and it's not a commercial venture (or even if it is but it doesn't make millions of dollars), you can't really afford to defend yourself in any way whatsoever. Not against DMCA/copyright complaints. Not against libel/slander. You can't even afford to defend yourself against someone using your company or website name for their own. Even if you can afford the thousand bucks and year waiting to file a trademark, you will still have to DEFEND that trademark.
In fact, I've been in that very situation. I had a small-time site with about 100,000 subscribers for more than a full decade. It was entirely non-profit. I put a ton of money into it and never got a dime out of it. Never charged a dime, either. It is a service of sorts through which individuals all around the world make money and some even fully support themselves through it by doing business with each other via my services.
Awhile back, we had one user who was so vicious and harassing and threatening and disruptive that I banned them. This mentally unstable person then made it their mission to slander me everywhere they could for banning them. Instead of just going on and doing something else with their time. What could I do? Well, since I don't have a huge stack of many thousands of dollars for a lawyer -- I couldn't do a fucking thing. So that person who probably doesn't have a dime to their name could freely damage me because I dont' have the massive resources needed to take action.
Likewise, someone took my site's name -- even the domain name -- and changed one letter on it and performed the exact sames services I already ahd been for years. It was very misleading and problematic. I'd get dozens of messages every week from people angry at me for something this other site/service did -- but because the names were one letter off, they didn't realize that they were complaining to the wrong person and site and that I had nothing to do with their problem. What could I do? Absolutely nothing. The law is fucking prohibitively expensive. Eventually, I just gave up and quit caring about the site and service I performed. For all the time and money from my life that I poured into it with a passion, all I was getting out of it was grief that I could not afford neither as a reputation or financially.
If this person had the money and access to simply phone up a lawyer and ask for help on this, they wouldn't have come to slashdot. This tells me that they can't afford to defend themselves, even if they are in the right -- which they probably are. And if you can't afford to defend yourself when you're right, then you essentially have to suck it up and do the bidding of whatever some other company or entity tells you. If they tell you to jump -- ask them how high.
I also suspect that as long as they can get Transgaming to produce a reasonable experience wrapping around the Windows client for OSX, they'll continue to support OSX. Once that doesn't work for them any longer (it has been over a year and OSX will only now be getting the new graphics in march), I fully expect that they'll drop OSX support as well. Not because the market isn't ther, but because it's too much work for them.
Ideally, they'd probably rather be a Microsoft-only house in and out. And you know what? The HPC stuff they're working with MS on seems pretty damned impressive and so is the stuff they're working with NVIDIA on. I just wish they'd try expanding boundaries when it comes to OSX and/or Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
When speaking of "copyrighted content" on torrent sites (especially TPB), it is assumed one is speaking of copyrighted content for which authorization has not been provided. I don't believe any one of us was under the perception of anything else.
Correct. And if the community knew that the founders were just going to duplicate the exact thing elsewhere, the entire community would move over to whatever project or site that was, undermining the value of the brand that was just purchased. Anyone spending $8m to buy a torrent site has a lawyer or two who are surely going to have an eye on preventing devaluation of the purchase in such a manner.
Those aren't quite the same things. Those are established companies doing bad things. We're talking about a business plan that is established on what courts and corporations keep insisting are illegal practices that then become legitimized as a direct result of the popularity gained by those practices. Additionally, the hypocrisy of anti-sharing and anti-fair-use businesses supporting sharing and fair-use (in their terminology, "copyright infringement") by rewarding them when they get enough eyeballs to warrant being desirable for a company on legitimate intentions.
A much better analogy than those you offered above would be when Interscope Records bought Death Row Records, which was started with drug money. The initial capitol and cash flow for Death Row Records came from the convicted Michael Harris, of course.
I don't believe they said they were donating all the money. Frankly, I hope they don't. I'd say donate just enough to kick the foundation off and keep the rest so you never have to work another day in your life. Then you can spend that time doing whatever you really love. I have no qualms with that. In fact, I have no qualms if they just take all the money and go live on an island somewhere.
My only gripe is that yet another service attempts to go legit through support of traditional business only after building itself up on "questionable" methods. In no other industry would this sort of business model be legitimized, yet it happens repeatedly on the internet.
The blog entry is a bunch of meaningless drivel. I don't care what TPB guys say about the sale and how nothing will change, except for the better and the right guys will still be around running things -- the fact of the matter is that no publicly held business is going to buy a torrent website that facilitates in the transmission of almost exclusively copyrighted content and then continue to operate the site in the same way.
The only way they would buy it is if they transformed it into a "legitimate" service, thereby losing any interest any of the audience had in it and therefore contradicting everything stated in the blog.
I doubt that there would not be some clause whereby they agree in the sale not to directly compete by starting up yet another service that does the exact same thing under a different name. Otherwise there wouldn't be much value in the transaction to begin with.
Agreed. Nobody cares about these "legitimate services", because they are always expensive, locked-down, and have too many conditions and hoops to jump through.
I understand that the guys are fighting an uphill battle in the courts, so they probably had no choice but to do this so they could pay their legal fees and judgments and hopefully walk away with a few bucks to start a new life and go on to something new.
However, I have a major problem with how this story always plays out. The same way it played out with Napster and Suprnova and other services. It's a major hypocrisy on all sides. Corporations which usually are completely draconian and absurd essentially buy the structure and eyeballs of a service formerly facilitating "questionable" delivery of content. On the other side, proponents of sharing and haters of extreme intellectual property laws, selling out to the corporations they've been fighting the whole time.
The only loser in these things is always the audience.
Think about this business plan. How is it even legally? It's certainly not ethical, no matter what side of the fence you're on (and I'm a huge TPB fan).
Site (such as Napster, etc) gains enormous fame and attention and audience providing what is supposedly a very questionable service using mostly content that they do not own and is not free to give away.
Once they have enough attention and eyeballs, corporations come a knocking.
Corporations make the founders of the service extremely wealth and then pervert the service by turning it into something "legit", thereby losing 98% of the audience (seriously, who has ever used Napster once they went "legit"?).
This seems similar to the following proposed business plan:
I want to start a movie company, but I don't have any money or infrastructure. Instead, I decide to start stealing movie reels from Warner Brothers down the street. Then I promote and sell those movies as if they were mine. After a few years, I've stolen enough of someone else's product and sold it as my own that I've made enough money to finally go legit.
Now, using ill-gotten finances from someone else's products, I become a fully legitimate movie producing powerhouse. And everyone in the business and industry regard me as legitimate.
How can these even be allowed to happen? Isn't there someone regulating this stuff? How can a legitimate company have beginnings doing questionable things and not pay for it? It's like the Mafia suddenly deciding "Hey, we're tired of laundering money and killing people, so we're going to start a string of burger franchises". And everyone just saying "okay, cool".
No, as I mentioned in my post, this is a multi-platform issue. It seemed to have gone away on OSX until a few updates ago at which point it began occurring again, just like it always has on Windows. I've experienced it repeatedly on almost every install I've tested it on and even in virtual machines and both in 3x and back in 2x. As I say, it seemed to behave MUCH better shortly after 3.0 (even on Windows to some degree) but has returned with a vengeance in the last few minor updates.
It is frequently exacerbated with extensions, but also occurs without any installed in a slower and less severe basis.
I worked at Netscape doing plenty of QA work in the late 90s, so I'm not exactly an inexperience neophyte, either. My initial assumption was toward sloppy extensions which some profiling proved can make it worse, but is not necessary for the problem to appear.
The standard line from the Firefox camp has usually been "that's a feature!" and explained away as your browser needing 1.5gb of memory for "back button functionality".
It should speak to the legacy of Firefox/Mozilla that despite this ridiculous problem, almost nobody who experiences is is willing to dump it as our go-to browser.
Too bad it won't stop all the "what memory problem?" trolls.
Remember how 3.0 was touted to solve all the memory problems? I still get 1.5gb of usage *regularly* on multiple platforms with 3.0.11 without any installed extensions after a few hours. In fact, I'm on Firefox 3.0.11 on OSX 10.5.7 right now and it's at 1.3gb. You can tell when it's being a memory hog again, because videos won't play without stopping and stuttering and pages take longer to load and switching tabs feels glacial.
So, considering 3.0 originally was supposed to solve everything, I think I'll not hold my breath on 3.5. Especially for a problem that continues to happen across platforms.
Of course, this analogy only goes so far, since Doctor Who (as stated in Season 15, with Tom Baker) only has a total of thirteen regenerations and then death is permanent.
Except that those funds are usually not acquired from the personal bank account of the breeders, but from society in general who subsidizes them through various avenues, such as their medical plan. It's amazing what's covered and what isn't in a lot of plans.
Comprehension fail.
My point is that society is hypocritical to take the stance that one unnatural alteration of the gene-pool through modern facilities is "a beautiful gift" while another is an abhorrent affront to mankind and nature alike.
Also, nobody is reproducing with their car and your analogy is disastrous since it in no way implies the dramatic change to the gene-pool in the short period that either of the above procedures can.
I'm just saying, be consistent. Although, yes, I would prefer that you stop spending $200,000 to squirt out eight fucking duplicates of your dumbass self.
We're already fucking things up by ensuring that people who naturally wouldn't be able to reproduce do so at a greater rate (multiple birth frequency for fertilization treatments). If there's no complaint about the shit that's doing to the gene-pool, then there's no valid basis for any other alteration, unless it's on the "merits" of some idiotic religious trappings (in which case they should guide the individual in their individual decision and not enforce what others in a country of free choice are doing for themselves).
I'm not saying that I think screening out trivial things is a good idea (though perhaps screening out diabetes and parkinsons is not so bad). The truth is, none of us can currently know the long-term implications of any of these things. However, if it's okay to take two people who couldn't reproduce and jam them together to produce genetic combination that aren't supposed to be, then why not also let them pick the hair color while they're at it? Otherwise it seems arbitrary and unfounded to place a limitation on one but not the other.
Intelligence is determined almost entirely (with minor variation) by heredity. If you have a very low IQ (and those with low IQs tend to breed most frequently) then your children will likely be very limited, intellectually. The same goes for a high IQ. Certain environmental factors contribute toward the maximization of whatever intellectual potential is there, but no maximization will make a bicycle perform like a speed boat.
What else are you going to do when you're a pregnant teenage girl that spends all her time playing The Sims?
This is a stupid argument. Every time I choose to blast a load on my girlfriend's belly instead of inside her vagina, I'm choosing which ones will have a chance and which won't.
Or you could just not have kids and you won't end up contributing any warp to anything. It's okay. We're not going to vanish from existence just because we didn't get your seed.
Fertility clinics are already contributing to that by increasing the number of children produced from genetic combination (parents) that are not naturally able to produce off-spring together. You can't tell me that choosing green eyes and black hair is a significantly greater risk than taking Parent A and Parent B that are not capable of having children together (or at all in some cases) and making it possible, anyway.
We've already decided that there's no harm in defying the natural order of things by spending six figures to make sure two people who are not supposed to reproduce together c*can* reproduce. And in abnormal quantities (the high occurrence of litter-sized pregnancies in fertility-assisted pregnancies).
I don't have a problem if society deems one to be off the table (for now at least) as long as BOTH are off the table. It is incredibly hypocritical to say that it's okay to take two genetic lines that are not able to breed together and FORCE them to reproduce anyway.... but then say "but choosing green eyes is just too damn far!".
Which is so hypocritical that it's absurd. Parents foist themselves and their children on the world and then try to persuade us that being a parent equates one to being a saint and that there is nothing more altruistic than xeroxing yourself a few times.
Yet they can't be bothered to do the right thing and, if they absolutely must have a diaper to change or a college tuition to pay, do it for some poor parentless soul out there that truly needs it *now*.
The hypocrisy of such people is simply astounding.
So let me get this straight (I'm not aiming this necessarily at you, AC - just the "other side" in general). It's wrong and unnatural to choose traits about your future child, but it's absolutely beautiful and wonderful and natural to defy nature by using modern medicine to make two people whom nature has deemed unfit to reproduce (in their particular combination/coupling, at least) squirt out an ungodly number of children?
That's my primary problem with it. I don't have any problem with choosing the traits of your child per se -- it's just that I can't possibly foresee all of the potential complications of this that could arise in the overall gene-pool after a few centuries of this.
On the other hand, I also don't feel to great about the potential ramifications of taking couples who are biologically incapable of reproducing together (as nature has for some reason deemed) not only reproducing, but often squirting out three, five, or even eight kids in defiance of nature (which of course is what all of those people will reference in addition to GAAAAAWDUH, when saying why choosing *traits* is wrong).
Netscape did this over a decade ago with Mission Control.
Yeah, this is a lot of re-inventing the wheel. What a waste of time. Unless they're really going to somehow improve on it. I use TabKit which lets me re-arrange my tabs and everything. Group them. Tree them. Organize them. The only thing that would be better is if I could rename them (there is a tab renamer out there but it doesn't stick between sessions).
The reason people usually ask for help on topics like this online is that finding a specialized lawyer is difficult if you're a nobody. Worse, if you find one you probably can't afford one.
The sad fact here is that whether it is fair use or not is entirely irrelevant. Let's say that it *is* fair use. Great. Now what happens when their lawyers sue you? Do you have the thousands or possibly tens of thousands of dollars to defend yourself in a court of law on such a complex topic?
When it comes to the law, people with money can afford to be bullies. In fact, even people without money can afford it. If you run a site and it's not a commercial venture (or even if it is but it doesn't make millions of dollars), you can't really afford to defend yourself in any way whatsoever. Not against DMCA/copyright complaints. Not against libel/slander. You can't even afford to defend yourself against someone using your company or website name for their own. Even if you can afford the thousand bucks and year waiting to file a trademark, you will still have to DEFEND that trademark.
In fact, I've been in that very situation. I had a small-time site with about 100,000 subscribers for more than a full decade. It was entirely non-profit. I put a ton of money into it and never got a dime out of it. Never charged a dime, either. It is a service of sorts through which individuals all around the world make money and some even fully support themselves through it by doing business with each other via my services.
Awhile back, we had one user who was so vicious and harassing and threatening and disruptive that I banned them. This mentally unstable person then made it their mission to slander me everywhere they could for banning them. Instead of just going on and doing something else with their time. What could I do? Well, since I don't have a huge stack of many thousands of dollars for a lawyer -- I couldn't do a fucking thing. So that person who probably doesn't have a dime to their name could freely damage me because I dont' have the massive resources needed to take action.
Likewise, someone took my site's name -- even the domain name -- and changed one letter on it and performed the exact sames services I already ahd been for years. It was very misleading and problematic. I'd get dozens of messages every week from people angry at me for something this other site/service did -- but because the names were one letter off, they didn't realize that they were complaining to the wrong person and site and that I had nothing to do with their problem. What could I do? Absolutely nothing. The law is fucking prohibitively expensive. Eventually, I just gave up and quit caring about the site and service I performed. For all the time and money from my life that I poured into it with a passion, all I was getting out of it was grief that I could not afford neither as a reputation or financially.
If this person had the money and access to simply phone up a lawyer and ask for help on this, they wouldn't have come to slashdot. This tells me that they can't afford to defend themselves, even if they are in the right -- which they probably are. And if you can't afford to defend yourself when you're right, then you essentially have to suck it up and do the bidding of whatever some other company or entity tells you. If they tell you to jump -- ask them how high.
Welcome to the freedom of the internet.
Exactly.
I also suspect that as long as they can get Transgaming to produce a reasonable experience wrapping around the Windows client for OSX, they'll continue to support OSX. Once that doesn't work for them any longer (it has been over a year and OSX will only now be getting the new graphics in march), I fully expect that they'll drop OSX support as well. Not because the market isn't ther, but because it's too much work for them.
Ideally, they'd probably rather be a Microsoft-only house in and out. And you know what? The HPC stuff they're working with MS on seems pretty damned impressive and so is the stuff they're working with NVIDIA on. I just wish they'd try expanding boundaries when it comes to OSX and/or Linux.