> You're propagating the false myth that imprisoning file-sharers will result in a pay increase for the inventors and creators, who are the just recipients of the laws' protection.
> It's a false myth. Accept it. The laws aren't helping anyone to pay bills. The laws are only helping CEOs and Directors buy bigger ranches.
Right, and maybe if we keep repeating this mantra, it becomes true.
You avoided the question completely, good job. How do you pay your bills? Are you compensated for professional services? A salary of some form? Why don't you just work for free, what makes you so special that you deserve to get paid but others do not?
Piracy is a real crime, it costs real people real money. Saying over and over that you wouldn't have bought my software anyway is getting really fucking old.
Seriously, are you trolling here?
> Fake. Artists will always make art. Painters will always paint. Musicians will always make music. Programmers will always write programs. Society will always survive. If it were any other way we'd be extinct or living in caves.
Wrong. Some artists will always make art, some painters will always paint, SOME musicians will always make music. The majority WOULD NOT.
> Because without the act now known as "piracy" we wouldn't even have a recorded history.
What are you saying, this doesn't even make any sense.
Let's get the semantics out of the way, since that seems to be such a common point of defense. Stealing means to appropriate without right, ergo this includes physical property as well as intellectual property. But that aside, what's the point of being pendantic about it, the word "stealing" used in this context is obvious in its intent-- feigning personal insult that someone would use language in this manner is not only rediculous, it's becoming tedious.
> And if you want to talk about moral high ground show me one moral code in all of recorded history that even took a stance on this intellectual fraud known as "intellectual property"
To duplicate another's labors has always been ethically suspect, quick case in point when cartographers and chart makers were granted their first formal copyright protection under the US government in the 1700s. Is that historical enough? No wait, it was probably the MPAA lobbyists that turned the tide right, god knows those founding fathers weren't concerned about personal liberties and ethical considerations.
One of the companies I work for built a similar system recently.
We typically build patio sunrooms out of plywood laminate and foam-core insulation (Styrofoam in the middle), but as it turns out, the material also can be used to provide extremely inexpensive housing for Mexicans whose houses were destroyed in an intense storm.
So yes, American corporations are behind such technology. It's very profitable.
Could such a product be used in the united states? No, you're probably correct, such a product would likely not pass building code. It's hard enough to get the patio rooms to pass code in most of Florida, but to prove safety in actually living in the thing would prove impossible.
> Form a corporation who releases a software product with an insane licensing agreement (you give up your first born, etc.) then have people buy the software. Try to enforce the agreement, and have these people sue.
Your heart is in the right place, however if a portion of a contract is deemed "Unfair", under a reasonably vague set of guidelines, than that part of the contract becomes null. It doesn't lessen the legal weight of the act of the contract itself.
So in this case, giving up your firstborn would be determined to be unreasonable, it wouldn't effect the legal status of the EULA itself.
> If we could convince EA (doubt it but worth a shot) to release the Server/Client, people could setup their own servers.
That would be nice, but like you said, it's doubtful. They'd prefer that people switched to another online game, rather than sticking with an unprofitable 'off-network' game for years.
The difference being that we can reliably emulate the legacy host systems for these old titles.
I have a number of old DOS games that I run through emulation. Not to mention all my Commodore 64 and Atari 800 games.
An MMORPG like this might survive through a server emulator, but for a relatively esoteric game with a small userbase, that seems unlikely. Kind of sad, almost like seeing a universe die.
It's like the difference between the archetypal silent-but-deadly martial arts master compared to the street punk who beats people up because he can.
No. I wouldn't hire this guy because he wrote the sasser worm.
I played the entire game on a 4200/64MB, however I have an Athlon 2000. The gameplay, while not silky smooth, was more than acceptable. I even turned up the resolution and options a bit.
That's an excellent idea.
After the incident with the Belkin home routers redirecting HTTP traffic to an advertisement for some services, I was in a Fry's a month or two later where the salesman tried to sell me one. He was very insistent on the Belkin products. I explained why I wouldn't purchase a Belkin product again, and he sort of nodded resignedly towards his feet and agreed.
Clearly, I don't believe that 170,000 people bought card programmers just to play with the technology, but surely some percentage of those users purchased them for uses other than piracy-- however as a someone who has no experience with DirecTV, I can't imagine what they are?
So what exactly are the legitimate uses of having a card programmer?
I'm forced to use e-mail the same way I'm forced to answer the phone and conform to society. I need to make money. I do business over the Internet. I must sort e-mail and occasionally I delete a legitimate message by mistake.
I want my nine year old nephew to experience the same joy of world wide communication that I experienced ten years ago, when I first discovered the Internet, but he is unable. His e-mail address is flooded with pictures of people fucking horses.
There's enough ills in this world to keep us all busy. Not everyone can be working on cancer research and tracking rapists.
I'm assuming it works by appending an invisible image that references back to their servers. Spammers do this often to verify if an account is "live".
Most e-mail and webmail clients do not have any functionality for disabling remote images, so that would explain how it works "most of the time". Mozilla thunderbird, among others, allows you to disable remote image loading. Of course a text-based client running on any Linux system is not going to be succeptable to this method of tracking either.
Technologies like this are typically doomed to failure, because they violate one key precept- computers should work for us, not the other way around.
Few people will bother with the effort of semantically marking up their documents, and fewer still will do so in a way that is consistent in any way to be useful.
Computers / programmers will need to become better at analyzing human communication, anything else hardly seems worth the effort.
Let's estimate and say Federal tax + state tax + social security + medicaid tax is around 50-55% (Someone feel free to correct me)
Now we're talking $68K per episode, or around a million and a half dollars a year. Another poster mentioned that there are four main voice actors. This is chump change for the studio.
Contrast that to how much Fox makes on a season of the Simpsons and it does seem awfully unfair.
> You don't have time to make a backup (a one time thing) but you have time to help them every single time they want to play a game? That's odd.
If I was going to even start trying to make backups, I'd need to spend a few hours researching MOD chips, a few hours learning how to make backups, and the time spent working to pay for all these bills. When it's all done, I've spent a couple days of my life making backups for a game that will probably never be broken. (Most scratches can be polished off anyway)
The poster said that children under nine generally ask for assistance. That doesn't mean that they come bug daddy everytime, it sounds like there are other older children available to help.
There's no reason you should actively violate RFC like this. If the referrer becomes a useless value to a web application, then these sites will simply require a session variable to be set before displaying the article, think 'You must login first'. Then we'll be back at step 1, except now we'll have a legion of 'broken' browsers to contend with, destroying legitimate uses of the referer header.
> If Valve tries to make the claim in court that HL2 was postponed until April because of the source code theft, that will become fraud on their part.
Wrong. Charging Valve with fraud would require that they were somehow illegaly profiting from delaying the release date. Since the product isn't for sale, pray tell how this can be considered fraud under any aspect of law!
Golly I completely forgot about the 1987 Digital Entertainment act that required game makers to hold to tentative release dates! Bastards!
>Until now it was just harmless marketing lies.
What's this? Oh no! A company that markets their product! Where is the justice!
> Someday I would like to see a game company create a game in an open way. They should have all their engine code out in the open so anybody could follow the progress and even contribute if they felt like it.
And some day I would like to see all commercial ventures opened up under the watchful eye of a high council of elves, leprechauns, and magical wood faries! Using their arcane magics for the betterment of mankind, we will transform the world into an utopian paridise, where every jack-ninny can voice their opinion equally, even in private commercial and private forums! Lo, in this brave new future disease will be cured, everyone will earn $50K USD annual salary because knowledge is intrinsically designed to be free and open to everyone!
> Here's some more free clue, for those clueless marketroid types: a web site is not a publicity clip, nor a marketing brochure.
I mean, really, who are you to dictate what a website is? There are perfectly valid instances of websites with scripting and intense graphics that are done tastefully with interesting layouts. The web is now a graphical medium, and as such, you're going to find some sites done poorly, and some done very well.
Just because the technocrats that read slashdot like stoic interfaces, doesn't mean that defines the world of web users. There's a vocal minority of technical users that long for the days when everything worked in Lynx, but that's not the real world anymore. Many people want interactive, userful, and interesting interfaces, and god forbid, sometimes that means using javascript or flash. And if the site is graphically appealing, all the better.
If using javascript or more than 50KB of images on a page loses the sale to a lynx user on a 14.4 modem really is unimportant if it's pleasing to the 99% of the users that otherwise come to the site.
Just because you haven't found instances where these technologies can add to the experience, doesn't mean they don't exist.
> But do _not_ force-feed your ego to the customer.
The opposite of what you're doing.. right?
Slashdot Mirror
> You're propagating the false myth that imprisoning file-sharers will result in a pay increase for the inventors and creators, who are the just recipients of the laws' protection.
> It's a false myth. Accept it. The laws aren't helping anyone to pay bills. The laws are only helping CEOs and Directors buy bigger ranches.
Right, and maybe if we keep repeating this mantra, it becomes true.
You avoided the question completely, good job. How do you pay your bills? Are you compensated for professional services? A salary of some form? Why don't you just work for free, what makes you so special that you deserve to get paid but others do not?
Piracy is a real crime, it costs real people real money. Saying over and over that you wouldn't have bought my software anyway is getting really fucking old.
Seriously, are you trolling here?
>
Fake. Artists will always make art. Painters will always paint. Musicians will always make music. Programmers will always write programs. Society will always survive. If it were any other way we'd be extinct or living in caves.
Wrong. Some artists will always make art, some painters will always paint, SOME musicians will always make music. The majority WOULD NOT.
Bye.
> I only wish that the laws allowed someone to sue for lost time/income from the "basic" errors that shouldn't have been present.
Be careful what you wish for. Such a law would place the small-time software developer in a highly actionable position.
I for one would quite writing cheap shareware if I could get sued into oblivion for every little bug that was in my software.
What?
No seriously, I was going to reply to this, but I just don't know where to start.
WTF
> Because without the act now known as "piracy" we wouldn't even have a recorded history.
What are you saying, this doesn't even make any sense.
Let's get the semantics out of the way, since that seems to be such a common point of defense. Stealing means to appropriate without right, ergo this includes physical property as well as intellectual property. But that aside, what's the point of being pendantic about it, the word "stealing" used in this context is obvious in its intent-- feigning personal insult that someone would use language in this manner is not only rediculous, it's becoming tedious.
> And if you want to talk about moral high ground show me one moral code in all of recorded history that even took a stance on this intellectual fraud known as "intellectual property"
To duplicate another's labors has always been ethically suspect, quick case in point when cartographers and chart makers were granted their first formal copyright protection under the US government in the 1700s. Is that historical enough? No wait, it was probably the MPAA lobbyists that turned the tide right, god knows those founding fathers weren't concerned about personal liberties and ethical considerations.
One of the companies I work for built a similar system recently.
We typically build patio sunrooms out of plywood laminate and foam-core insulation (Styrofoam in the middle), but as it turns out, the material also can be used to provide extremely inexpensive housing for Mexicans whose houses were destroyed in an intense storm.
So yes, American corporations are behind such technology. It's very profitable.
Could such a product be used in the united states? No, you're probably correct, such a product would likely not pass building code. It's hard enough to get the patio rooms to pass code in most of Florida, but to prove safety in actually living in the thing would prove impossible.
Theft - The act or an instance of stealing;
Steal - To take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully
http://www.m-w.com/
Anyway, arguing semantics is boring and makes you look like an fool without a real case. Suggestion: Drop it.
> Form a corporation who releases a software product with an insane licensing agreement (you give up your first born, etc.) then have people buy the software. Try to enforce the agreement, and have these people sue.
Your heart is in the right place, however if a portion of a contract is deemed "Unfair", under a reasonably vague set of guidelines, than that part of the contract becomes null. It doesn't lessen the legal weight of the act of the contract itself.
So in this case, giving up your firstborn would be determined to be unreasonable, it wouldn't effect the legal status of the EULA itself.
> If we could convince EA (doubt it but worth a shot) to release the Server/Client, people could setup their own servers. That would be nice, but like you said, it's doubtful. They'd prefer that people switched to another online game, rather than sticking with an unprofitable 'off-network' game for years.
The difference being that we can reliably emulate the legacy host systems for these old titles.
I have a number of old DOS games that I run through emulation. Not to mention all my Commodore 64 and Atari 800 games.
An MMORPG like this might survive through a server emulator, but for a relatively esoteric game with a small userbase, that seems unlikely. Kind of sad, almost like seeing a universe die.
Yes.
In fact that's why you hardly see pirated DVD movies these days. Chalk it up to those obscure DVD formats.
It's like the difference between the archetypal silent-but-deadly martial arts master compared to the street punk who beats people up because he can. No. I wouldn't hire this guy because he wrote the sasser worm.
I played the entire game on a 4200/64MB, however I have an Athlon 2000. The gameplay, while not silky smooth, was more than acceptable. I even turned up the resolution and options a bit.
That's an excellent idea. After the incident with the Belkin home routers redirecting HTTP traffic to an advertisement for some services, I was in a Fry's a month or two later where the salesman tried to sell me one. He was very insistent on the Belkin products. I explained why I wouldn't purchase a Belkin product again, and he sort of nodded resignedly towards his feet and agreed.
Clearly, I don't believe that 170,000 people bought card programmers just to play with the technology, but surely some percentage of those users purchased them for uses other than piracy-- however as a someone who has no experience with DirecTV, I can't imagine what they are?
So what exactly are the legitimate uses of having a card programmer?
Just because it is not perfect does not mean it is flawed or undeserving of effort. 99.9% accurate is 99.9% better than 0%
I'm forced to use e-mail the same way I'm forced to answer the phone and conform to society. I need to make money. I do business over the Internet. I must sort e-mail and occasionally I delete a legitimate message by mistake.
I want my nine year old nephew to experience the same joy of world wide communication that I experienced ten years ago, when I first discovered the Internet, but he is unable. His e-mail address is flooded with pictures of people fucking horses.
There's enough ills in this world to keep us all busy. Not everyone can be working on cancer research and tracking rapists.
I'm assuming it works by appending an invisible image that references back to their servers. Spammers do this often to verify if an account is "live".
Most e-mail and webmail clients do not have any functionality for disabling remote images, so that would explain how it works "most of the time". Mozilla thunderbird, among others, allows you to disable remote image loading. Of course a text-based client running on any Linux system is not going to be succeptable to this method of tracking either.
Actually XYZZY first referenced in the text game Adventure / Colossal Caves.
http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/c_xyzzy.html
Technologies like this are typically doomed to failure, because they violate one key precept-
computers should work for us, not the other way around.
Few people will bother with the effort of semantically marking up their documents, and
fewer still will do so in a way that is consistent in any way to be useful.
Computers / programmers will need to become better at analyzing human communication, anything else
hardly seems worth the effort.
Nice idea though.
$125,000 an episode
What, 23ish episodes per season
Let's estimate and say Federal tax + state tax + social security + medicaid tax is around 50-55% (Someone feel free to correct me)
Now we're talking $68K per episode, or around a million and a half dollars a year. Another poster mentioned that there are four main voice actors. This is chump change for the studio.
Contrast that to how much Fox makes on a season of the Simpsons and it does seem awfully unfair.
> You don't have time to make a backup (a one time thing) but you have time to help them every single time they want to play a game? That's odd. If I was going to even start trying to make backups, I'd need to spend a few hours researching MOD chips, a few hours learning how to make backups, and the time spent working to pay for all these bills. When it's all done, I've spent a couple days of my life making backups for a game that will probably never be broken. (Most scratches can be polished off anyway) The poster said that children under nine generally ask for assistance. That doesn't mean that they come bug daddy everytime, it sounds like there are other older children available to help.
There's no reason you should actively violate RFC like this. If the referrer becomes a useless value to a web application, then these sites will simply require a session variable to be set before displaying the article, think 'You must login first'. Then we'll be back at step 1, except now we'll have a legion of 'broken' browsers to contend with, destroying legitimate uses of the referer header.
> If Valve tries to make the claim in court that HL2 was postponed until April because of the source code theft, that will become fraud on their part.
Wrong. Charging Valve with fraud would require that they were somehow illegaly profiting from delaying the release date. Since the product isn't for sale, pray tell how this can be considered fraud under any aspect of law!
Golly I completely forgot about the 1987 Digital Entertainment act that required game makers to hold to tentative release dates! Bastards!
>Until now it was just harmless marketing lies.
What's this? Oh no! A company that markets their product! Where is the justice!
> Someday I would like to see a game company create a game in an open way. They should have all their engine code out in the open so anybody could follow the progress and even contribute if they felt like it.
And some day I would like to see all commercial ventures opened up under the watchful eye of a high council of elves, leprechauns, and magical wood faries! Using their arcane magics for the betterment of mankind, we will transform the world into an utopian paridise, where every jack-ninny can voice their opinion equally, even in private commercial and private forums! Lo, in this brave new future disease will be cured, everyone will earn $50K USD annual salary because knowledge is intrinsically designed to be free and open to everyone!
Viva la revolution!
Duh, it's not FUNNY until it's modded insightful. Sheesh.
> Here's some more free clue, for those clueless marketroid types: a web site is not a publicity clip, nor a marketing brochure.
I mean, really, who are you to dictate what a website is? There are perfectly valid instances of websites with scripting and intense graphics that are done tastefully with interesting layouts. The web is now a graphical medium, and as such, you're going to find some sites done poorly, and some done very well.
Just because the technocrats that read slashdot like stoic interfaces, doesn't mean that defines the world of web users. There's a vocal minority of technical users that long for the days when everything worked in Lynx, but that's not the real world anymore. Many people want interactive, userful, and interesting interfaces, and god forbid, sometimes that means using javascript or flash. And if the site is graphically appealing, all the better.
If using javascript or more than 50KB of images on a page loses the sale to a lynx user on a 14.4 modem really is unimportant if it's pleasing to the 99% of the users that otherwise come to the site.
Just because you haven't found instances where these technologies can add to the experience, doesn't mean they don't exist.
> But do _not_ force-feed your ego to the customer.
The opposite of what you're doing.. right?