But the act of aiding and enabling those who commit a crime to do so does make them liable.
Then what about "we didn't know they were robbing the bank so we are not in fault" this doesn't work because TPB were indeed the individuals who made a door in the first place, and with that creation bares a responsibility of who goes in and who goes out. Of which they were clearly notified that some individuals were committing crimes.
You assume this is illegal in Sweden.
The court case involving The Pirate Bay is just about that. Determining if it is or not.
I must have done that to hundreds of manuals in my first year at my first job...
Most of our suppliers wouldnt give us the manuals of a myriad of products in any form other than paper.. Some went as far as to claim electronic versions didnt exist.... I wonder how they print them, movable type?:-p
I do love the multifunction office machines that can turn a 3 inch stack of paper into a neat pdf in less time than it takes to go to the loo *grins*
The Norwegian government did the same thing with "DNB" years ago. The bank basically failed completely and there were nothing left of value.
The shares were set to zero in value and the state took ownership and operated the bank. As it started doing ok the shares were slowly sold back to private investors and the bank was back on its feet:)
Works if you do it right.
Giving free money doesnt really help all that much:-p
Well, in Norway at least facebook groups do kick up a lot of dust and gets journalists interested in various causes.. Then politicians notice that someone actually care and they have to care:-p
Pictures are never deleted off disk. Their storage infrastructure doesnt do it as they use a custom filesystem (There was a talk about it published a while ago).
Or the people like myself who have spent enough of their life fixing registry keys and other buggered things that could be automated had someone just bothered writing the damn script.
The KB is very useful for a lot of things but damnit, I hate manually editing a pile of registry keys... Give me a.reg already! (At least for the common and simple problems like swapping a bit in a binary key..)
The core problem isnt really if the video games "cause" violence or not.
The problem is that it sounds logical and has been repeated so often in media that people seem to think it is "the truth".
And if a "solution" to this percieved problem is legislation we might end up with laws outright banning things that are not serious problems... I sure as hell wouldnt want my favourite FPS banned simply because it lets me blow up people in creative ways. The "problem" and the "solution" Jack Thomson wants would screw over pretty much every gamer...
You cannot legislate away crazy, immoral, illegal, or just plain stupid behavior, there will always be those that do bad things, no matter what they are or aren't exposed to, and what is and isn't illegal, to believe otherwise is to believe a fiction, and those that operate in ignorance of reality do so at their own peril.
While this makes sense what happens if the normal gamer behavior is made illegal? While the ignorance of Jack Thomson and his fanclub is immense it could seriously impact the sane people if his club gets their way. While he is a nutter, even nutters sometimes manage to get something through the system.. Working against him is important and you cant really ignore him without a certain degree of risk of him getting his way >.
Apple has been in a battle with Norwegian consumer organizations for years over these things. The Norwegian itunes store cannot change purchasing terms after the purchase has happened. It is against the law in Norway.
There is a multitude of licensing issues with iTunes but the recent removal of DRM does help a lot. They are slowly moving towards being in compliance with Norwegian law. Hopefully the EU can whip em into compliance but I wouldnt hold my breath....
Then there is the Apple warranty issues like "we only give 1 year warranty even though Norwegian law requires 2 years on our products. HA Ha Ha!"... Which has landed them in hot water repeatedly.
I long for the day when they finally end up in court and get told to fix their shit or gtfo of Norwegian commerce:-p Eventually it will happen...
Unfortunately my employer use such a script on their time-sheet website... Since the option isnt easily available (changing the identifier that is) I usually forget to reset it after submitting my weekly timesheet:(
Stupid design compounded by my laziness hurts opera I'm sure .
Most of us surf with Opera set to report as IE to bypass unintelligent browser compatibility tests...
But Opera has one drawback which is Java/javascript handling. It often doesnt handle sites that both firefox and IE handle fine. I dont know which is at fault but it is a pain >.
Unfortunately even if such a scheme were to work... It would probably just be used as a "Look how well this works!" argument for doing the same to all ISPs.
I dont know about you, but if I got slapped with another 10$ per month for my dsl in such a fashion I would be royally pissed off.
If you want me to pay for your content give it to me in a form where I dont have to spend time trying to figure out how to play the media...
And for a little rant...
Some DVDs contain intentionally damaged index files. These screw up playback on many players... Apparently the reason for doing this is to have "ripping tools" fail ripping them due to the indexes... But um.. if any player can play the media how is obscuring the index going to help? Fer fecks sake... Get your act together and either implement effective and non-invasive protection schemes or sod off. I'm not paying for bogged down crap.
1. Semester: VB 6.0 (it was in 2003)
- Doing more than the required work gave you negative points on your marks... People didnt bother learning much due to the teaching destroying interest:( 3. Semester: ASM and C for PIC-Microcontrollers
- Mostly useful, though somewhat messy since the teacher really didnt know ASM that well. 4. Semester: C++
- C++ without object oriented programming...
- We were not allowed to use string classes. All strings were to be char arrays and use the C-style string handling.
- We were not allowed to use Printf to format stuff, only cout.
- Only command line apps. 5.th Semester: C#.NET
- Teacher didnt like us using "advanced" features of the.NET libraries.
- Required us to turn in binaries in addition to source so "he wouldnt have to compile all the turn ins". (Yes, he ran unknown binaries...)
So I have a less than stellar view of the CS teaching that goes on... My degree was in automations engineering but still, computer science is a major part of it.
While this might not be your intended message it is how the business world of EA seems to think.
I would love to be able to send some sort of message to EA about their DRM but they ignore it. Just look at their usual PR replies to various tech site journalists.
This boils down to communication though. Any communication can be interpreted wrong if you are dishonest with yourself and read/hear what you want to read/hear.
Would you want an easter egg in an application that controls the running process of an oil refinery?
How about an oil rig?
I think not... When a downtime costs you about 1.5 million USD per hour of downtime you really do not want any sort of undocumented "feature" or "egg" in the system.
oh, and if you question the hours of downtime.. Think about this: If the control system becomes unresponsive the whole underlaying system goes into ESD mode.. Emergency Shutdown. Have you ever "rebooted" an oil rig? It does take a while;)
I recently went on a flight with Norwegian airlines from Bergen to Stockholm and while I was sitting in the first row the crewman made no attempt at hiding the 5 digit code....
While the door is a solid piece of work... the code that keeps it locked isnt:-p
Slashdot Mirror
I hate the accidental ripping when attempting to hold the book in one hand while reading in bed...
I hate the way my arm cramps after holding several pounds of paper above my head for an hour...
I hate that I cant find the fucker when I want to read it because it is nowhere to be found...
I hate lugging around 10 pounds of paper when I'm travelling...
Yeah... I'd love to have an e-book reader :)
But the act of aiding and enabling those who commit a crime to do so does make them liable.
Then what about "we didn't know they were robbing the bank so we are not in fault" this doesn't work because TPB were indeed the individuals who made a door in the first place, and with that creation bares a responsibility of who goes in and who goes out. Of which they were clearly notified that some individuals were committing crimes.
You assume this is illegal in Sweden.
The court case involving The Pirate Bay is just about that. Determining if it is or not.
You do not decide, the courts do ;)
Australia has some screwed up copyright law.
Dont be so sure >.
Hahaha, man I hate doing that...
I must have done that to hundreds of manuals in my first year at my first job...
Most of our suppliers wouldnt give us the manuals of a myriad of products in any form other than paper.. Some went as far as to claim electronic versions didnt exist.... I wonder how they print them, movable type? :-p
I do love the multifunction office machines that can turn a 3 inch stack of paper into a neat pdf in less time than it takes to go to the loo *grins*
The Norwegian government did the same thing with "DNB" years ago. The bank basically failed completely and there were nothing left of value.
The shares were set to zero in value and the state took ownership and operated the bank. As it started doing ok the shares were slowly sold back to private investors and the bank was back on its feet :)
Works if you do it right.
Giving free money doesnt really help all that much :-p
Pictures are -never- really deleted. They just delete the pointer into the datablock that contains the data of the picture.
So the picture isnt easily accessable anymore but the data is still there.
Well, they already process and store several billion pictures so... go ahead :-p
Well, in Norway at least facebook groups do kick up a lot of dust and gets journalists interested in various causes.. Then politicians notice that someone actually care and they have to care :-p
Pictures are never deleted off disk. Their storage infrastructure doesnt do it as they use a custom filesystem (There was a talk about it published a while ago).
Or the people like myself who have spent enough of their life fixing registry keys and other buggered things that could be automated had someone just bothered writing the damn script.
The KB is very useful for a lot of things but damnit, I hate manually editing a pile of registry keys... Give me a .reg already! (At least for the common and simple problems like swapping a bit in a binary key..)
The core problem isnt really if the video games "cause" violence or not.
The problem is that it sounds logical and has been repeated so often in media that people seem to think it is "the truth".
And if a "solution" to this percieved problem is legislation we might end up with laws outright banning things that are not serious problems... I sure as hell wouldnt want my favourite FPS banned simply because it lets me blow up people in creative ways.
The "problem" and the "solution" Jack Thomson wants would screw over pretty much every gamer...
You cannot legislate away crazy, immoral, illegal, or just plain stupid behavior, there will always be those that do bad things, no matter what they are or aren't exposed to, and what is and isn't illegal, to believe otherwise is to believe a fiction, and those that operate in ignorance of reality do so at their own peril.
While this makes sense what happens if the normal gamer behavior is made illegal? While the ignorance of Jack Thomson and his fanclub is immense it could seriously impact the sane people if his club gets their way. While he is a nutter, even nutters sometimes manage to get something through the system.. Working against him is important and you cant really ignore him without a certain degree of risk of him getting his way >.
Apple has been in a battle with Norwegian consumer organizations for years over these things. The Norwegian itunes store cannot change purchasing terms after the purchase has happened. It is against the law in Norway.
There is a multitude of licensing issues with iTunes but the recent removal of DRM does help a lot. They are slowly moving towards being in compliance with Norwegian law. Hopefully the EU can whip em into compliance but I wouldnt hold my breath....
Then there is the Apple warranty issues like "we only give 1 year warranty even though Norwegian law requires 2 years on our products. HA Ha Ha!"... Which has landed them in hot water repeatedly.
I long for the day when they finally end up in court and get told to fix their shit or gtfo of Norwegian commerce :-p Eventually it will happen...
Could be worse...
You could be seeing arrows on the bloody walls...
(At least j-pop is still fairly rare in public places in norway :-p)
Unfortunately my employer use such a script on their time-sheet website... Since the option isnt easily available (changing the identifier that is) I usually forget to reset it after submitting my weekly timesheet :(
Stupid design compounded by my laziness hurts opera I'm sure .
*hides*
Most of us surf with Opera set to report as IE to bypass unintelligent browser compatibility tests...
But Opera has one drawback which is Java/javascript handling. It often doesnt handle sites that both firefox and IE handle fine. I dont know which is at fault but it is a pain >.
All in all though it is a dang nice browser :)
Unfortunately even if such a scheme were to work... It would probably just be used as a "Look how well this works!" argument for doing the same to all ISPs.
I dont know about you, but if I got slapped with another 10$ per month for my dsl in such a fashion I would be royally pissed off.
If you want me to pay for your content give it to me in a form where I dont have to spend time trying to figure out how to play the media...
And for a little rant...
Some DVDs contain intentionally damaged index files. These screw up playback on many players...
Apparently the reason for doing this is to have "ripping tools" fail ripping them due to the indexes... But um.. if any player can play the media how is obscuring the index going to help?
Fer fecks sake... Get your act together and either implement effective and non-invasive protection schemes or sod off. I'm not paying for bogged down crap.
I dont like the word "blackmail". I much prefer Extortion, the X makes it sound cool!
How the college I attended did it....
1. Semester: VB 6.0 (it was in 2003) :( .NET .NET libraries.
- Doing more than the required work gave you negative points on your marks... People didnt bother learning much due to the teaching destroying interest
3. Semester: ASM and C for PIC-Microcontrollers
- Mostly useful, though somewhat messy since the teacher really didnt know ASM that well.
4. Semester: C++
- C++ without object oriented programming...
- We were not allowed to use string classes. All strings were to be char arrays and use the C-style string handling.
- We were not allowed to use Printf to format stuff, only cout.
- Only command line apps.
5.th Semester: C#
- Teacher didnt like us using "advanced" features of the
- Required us to turn in binaries in addition to source so "he wouldnt have to compile all the turn ins". (Yes, he ran unknown binaries...)
So I have a less than stellar view of the CS teaching that goes on... My degree was in automations engineering but still, computer science is a major part of it.
See Amazon Spore reviews.
The huge amount of bad reviews due to DRM was ignored by claiming it was a small group of people that didnt matter...
I would think snail-mail would be better. After all they cant ignore letters to their business address so they have to open em all *grin*
"If your work is so serious that you can't have a little fun, it's probably time to find a new job."
I have plenty of fun in my job. It is challenging and interesting. I get to do what I enjoy doing.
That doesnt mean I have the option to screw around with our product. Ever. You can have a fun and satisfying job without adding easter eggs...
Hell, consider Red Alert 2 and Yuri's revenge.
I downloaded a pirate version of the first decade pack and ran it for almost a year. Figured I would buy it since I love it quite a lot.
Guess what happened...
I cant play RA2 or Yuri's Revenge due to the DRM not recognizing the disc.
I cant play Generals either.
So, the box is sitting on a shelf while I reinstall my cracked version.
Fuck that.
While this might not be your intended message it is how the business world of EA seems to think.
I would love to be able to send some sort of message to EA about their DRM but they ignore it. Just look at their usual PR replies to various tech site journalists.
This boils down to communication though. Any communication can be interpreted wrong if you are dishonest with yourself and read/hear what you want to read/hear.
Would you want an easter egg in an application that controls the running process of an oil refinery?
How about an oil rig?
I think not...
When a downtime costs you about 1.5 million USD per hour of downtime you really do not want any sort of undocumented "feature" or "egg" in the system.
oh, and if you question the hours of downtime.. Think about this: If the control system becomes unresponsive the whole underlaying system goes into ESD mode.. Emergency Shutdown. Have you ever "rebooted" an oil rig? It does take a while ;)
For most europeans that is a great way to stay legal. I do that myself in Norway.
In the US though it is very much illegal. Having a legal copy doesnt seem to mean squat if you break a copy protection scheme. DMCA and all that :-p
Just punch in the 5 digit code to open the door?
I recently went on a flight with Norwegian airlines from Bergen to Stockholm and while I was sitting in the first row the crewman made no attempt at hiding the 5 digit code....
While the door is a solid piece of work... the code that keeps it locked isnt :-p