When you purchase a game such as SPORE, you purchase it with the sole point of playing it online (well, you probably don't, but nobody can prove otherwise). Then they ban you from using the game online, therefore it becomes completely useless to you and, theoretically, since you can't use it any more for the scope of the purchase, you should be able to send it back and get a refund. They say it will work on Windows X with 500 MB of RAM. You have Windows X and 500 MB of RAM and there's also no other software that can stop you from running it, except for EA's account manager. It's pretty clear to me that after buying something, if you aren't able to use it for whatever you bought it for, so you should be able to get a replacement (new account) or refund. Unless EA accounts or the game have an expiry date.
If you want to argue with this, then you should also easily argue with the fact that if you buy a DVD writer and it breaks two days later, you should be forced to keep it and the seller doesn't have to fix/replace/refund it. Sure, you bought it because you wanted to play games, watch movies or whatever, but you can still use it as a coffee cup holder.
I'm pretty sure it's not difficult to come up with a good argument you can use when suing them. Unfortunately, to the average user, battling with these guys is practically impossible; we might have to look into a class action suit or individuals will have to sell their homes and families in order to have enough money for lawyers.
I'm throwing away mod points because of this so you better read it, mr AC.
The guys is trying to keep his job. How would sabotaging this help him keep his job if his boss ends up behind bars or, worse, his company goes bankrupt. Did you ever consider his boss is probably one of those guys that always finds someone to blame for anything that goes wrong? If the system fails in any way, the guy is clearly fired. The whole point of this discussion is to help him keep his job and show some compassion for the morally wrong things he's about to do - he'll do it anyway, he just hopes that some of us will give him a good excuse.
I know, because I've been there!
Excellent point. The fact that Twitter is a possible terrorist "Operation Tool" as the headline suggest is nothing surprising. In fact, it's common sense! Those guys just try to evaluate everything they can get their hands on and see what can be used for dangerous activities. I don't see any problem with this, it's a job. The real problem which should appear on the front page (in fact, on any page) would be if they'd take down Twitter.
Come on, editors, please stop wasting our time with things that can't be considered news in any way. This is definitely not information that's worth bothering to read. If you want to keep your users who may click on ads and who may even become subscribers, start posting the real stuff.
A few years ago/. used to be so cool that you would forget about reading the comments because you'd go through all the links in the summary and study the articles but now we just see things that are, as I've said before, common sense. This is even lower than common knowledge.
The damage has already been done. FTFS, her address has already been publicly posted and associated with the scammers. The main issue here is they're guilty and they need to be punished.
This is the same as saying, after a bank robbery, "why didn't they just use a stronger safe?"
I hate it when idiots just read the headline, a couple of sentences FTFS and find a way for the people to ignore the problem in the future. I understand TFAs are usually long and you/. at work and don't have time to RTFA but in all the gods' names, if you open your mouth, make sure you know what you're saying?
People come to http://ask.slashdot.org/ because they have a problem and they're asking us for help on how to fix it, not justignore it.
(I know I'm risking a "troll" mod for this post, but is it not true?)
Have you tried validating Google's pages? It's like "Oh, My Gawd, It's Full Of Errors!"
They have plenty of resources to make their pages standards compliant but they don't and I think their company is doing pretty well. There must be a reason for this and I think it's the fact that their pages work in all the popular browsers; maybe the cost of validating them is just too high or it simply doesn't justify any cost! Really, I don't understand, why on Earth would I try to make my pages 100% standards compliant when nobody really cares about that. I don't think Average Joe gives a shit if www.myemailproviderhostnamehere.com validates correctly as long as it works in his web browser. This "our products are w3c valid" is only for marketing and has absolutely no other practical purpose.
And how would this fix things? It would only make the companies that own A.*.*.* keep those addresses instead of releasing them to the public.
The problem: we're out of ipv4 ips
The cause: many of them are allocated but unused
The short-term solution: release unused addresses
Long-term solution: ipv6
How would raising prices help?
You forgot to give a clear example of what you meant by that learning curve. If anyone has trouble with that, try to picture the difference between C and C# with.NET. Good luck using C to do what you can do in C# using just a few clicks.
Finding the proper name is work, for the marketing department. Unfortunately, you're probably a software developer and name your applications "vi" or "fsck" because you don't bother that much to improve your image. You sell software, the company sells a product. Software needs good lines of code, the product needs a good name and wrapping.
Also, "Windows 7" may have a small impact on geeks but let's not forget MS's target is Average Joe to whom it may sound nicer than "Longhorn" or "Fiesty" which also don't mean much to me. What the hell are Fiesty and Gusty and which one is better? What's the difference between them? Now look at it like this: We have Windows 7, there were 6 other versions before it and that alone makes it "better", which means it's cool! I know this isn't true but it's the way Joe thinks and it's what MS is trying to sell.
MS is choosing a name for their product and people complain that there are more important things? It depends what your job is, but software developers should actually take a few moments and think about this and try to avoid naming their applications like cat, fsck, vi, nice, apt, sudo, etc. You have to admit, "type" is more intuitive than "cat."
In other words: Application names are a lot more important than you might think.
Don't they still have the right to retain it and look at it? And it's suspicious to me, why mail yourself your own laptop if you're going home? That might give them just the reasons they need to do it.
The whole point is that you can say you don't know the password and that the information stored there are just some documents from work or a movie you made. They can't prove you don't know something and they can't erase it because it is your data even if nobody can use it; you might even "remember" the password some day. Anyway, they're still your bits. You own those 1s and 0s and they can't understand what they mean nor force you to show them. It may very well be something completely meaningless, just random data but it's still yours.
That's what good encryption software is for, turning your data into trash, helping you "forget" the password and later, when you're alone, recompose your data when you "remember" it.
Excellent point... If they want to see your pictures, just give them the notebook and never look back. Now worries, you'll probably get it back in five years. What a great deal!
How is it different, you ask? http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=988461&cid=25292293
That's ^ what makes it different. The fact that you like Juno Reactor and Sex will remain here FOREVER. The fact that I tell some drunk chick at a bar about my fetishes will stay with her. The fact that I was seen in that bar with her will stay with the people who've seen it, be those 10 or 100. When it comes to the Internet, the problem is that the information will remain here for a very very long time (see http://web.archive.org/ about that) and that others can search for you and see things that you've done while you were drunk at your 18-yr old birthday party and what others have to say about that. We all do stupid things from time to time but it's mostly those stupid things that are out of the ordinary enough to be posted on Facebook by someone who thought you were funny holding a cherry between your butt cheeks and running around with a pint of beer on your head.
People will see the stupid things you've done which are stored there forever (almost). You also do freelancing in your free time and work on open-source projects (if you're a geek) or you paint or write poetry (if you're an artist). Those things are boring! Who cares about those? You may publish all that on some obscure website but when you google for your name, Facebook will be the first to pop up, of course, and on Facebook you'll find pictures of you that you didn't know about. Your future employer will probably stop after reading the first couple of result links which pose you as a drunk marijuana addict.
There are so many things you haven't considered when you wrote that post that I don't think I can write about all of them today. Besides, I'm at work right now and I only have three more hours of work remaining, then I have to go home and actually do something productive (like cooking). Hopefully, my boss won't see this post.
That's just it, the common laws of physics don't apply normally in this case because we're dealing with micro particles. Newton's laws are perfect for computing how much time it will take for a car to travel from Paris to Budapest but they're not precise enough when dealing with extreme speeds (near the speed of light). The same goes for the physics we know when working with atoms. "Energy doesn't magically come from nowhere" is true, but have you considered that the atom may hold huge quantities of energy inside it which are suddenly released under certain circumstances? For crying out loud, think about things like nuclear fission where you put in some energy, you get out more but you lose the state of the matter you initially had. The same thing could apply in this case: you put a bit of energy using a magnetic field and you get an explosion that could completely destroy half of the galaxy. Now THAT is what these people are really afraid of. It is possible. Unlikely? Yes. Possible? Yes. It may be unlikely but why take any chances? While we're at it, let's destroy the whole Universe just to find out how old it is.
Yes, you should lose access to it in some cases. Maybe you get online with other players and start harassing them. The servers must have some 'ban' option, to protect the regular players from the trolls and they say something about it in the license. If they didn't reserve the right to ban people, they would find themselves in another class-action suit because people would say the game wouldn't be safe.
Slashdot is not the place for hot news. Slashdot is a community forum dedicated to discussions regarding "news for nerds." The point of Slashdot is not to present you with news but to allow you and other nerds to debate yesterday's news.
Slashdot Mirror
When you purchase a game such as SPORE, you purchase it with the sole point of playing it online (well, you probably don't, but nobody can prove otherwise). Then they ban you from using the game online, therefore it becomes completely useless to you and, theoretically, since you can't use it any more for the scope of the purchase, you should be able to send it back and get a refund. They say it will work on Windows X with 500 MB of RAM. You have Windows X and 500 MB of RAM and there's also no other software that can stop you from running it, except for EA's account manager. It's pretty clear to me that after buying something, if you aren't able to use it for whatever you bought it for, so you should be able to get a replacement (new account) or refund. Unless EA accounts or the game have an expiry date.
If you want to argue with this, then you should also easily argue with the fact that if you buy a DVD writer and it breaks two days later, you should be forced to keep it and the seller doesn't have to fix/replace/refund it. Sure, you bought it because you wanted to play games, watch movies or whatever, but you can still use it as a coffee cup holder.
I'm pretty sure it's not difficult to come up with a good argument you can use when suing them. Unfortunately, to the average user, battling with these guys is practically impossible; we might have to look into a class action suit or individuals will have to sell their homes and families in order to have enough money for lawyers.
Fuck that.
You've been banned from Slashdot for this. Oh, I forgot to mention, a ban from Slashdot will also earn you a ban from the geek community.
</sarcasm>
And your children would starve if you couldn't find another job in time.
I'm throwing away mod points because of this so you better read it, mr AC.
The guys is trying to keep his job. How would sabotaging this help him keep his job if his boss ends up behind bars or, worse, his company goes bankrupt. Did you ever consider his boss is probably one of those guys that always finds someone to blame for anything that goes wrong? If the system fails in any way, the guy is clearly fired. The whole point of this discussion is to help him keep his job and show some compassion for the morally wrong things he's about to do - he'll do it anyway, he just hopes that some of us will give him a good excuse.
I know, because I've been there!
Excellent point. The fact that Twitter is a possible terrorist "Operation Tool" as the headline suggest is nothing surprising. In fact, it's common sense! Those guys just try to evaluate everything they can get their hands on and see what can be used for dangerous activities. I don't see any problem with this, it's a job. The real problem which should appear on the front page (in fact, on any page) would be if they'd take down Twitter.
/. used to be so cool that you would forget about reading the comments because you'd go through all the links in the summary and study the articles but now we just see things that are, as I've said before, common sense. This is even lower than common knowledge.
Come on, editors, please stop wasting our time with things that can't be considered news in any way. This is definitely not information that's worth bothering to read. If you want to keep your users who may click on ads and who may even become subscribers, start posting the real stuff.
A few years ago
I'm going to get myself some beer. Laters.
Damn it, now I have to take off my tinfoil hat and use the tinfoil to protect my RFID!
...why doesn't she just change her phone number?!
...why doesn't she just change her address?!
/. at work and don't have time to RTFA but in all the gods' names, if you open your mouth, make sure you know what you're saying?
The damage has already been done. FTFS, her address has already been publicly posted and associated with the scammers. The main issue here is they're guilty and they need to be punished.
This is the same as saying, after a bank robbery, "why didn't they just use a stronger safe?"
I hate it when idiots just read the headline, a couple of sentences FTFS and find a way for the people to ignore the problem in the future. I understand TFAs are usually long and you
People come to http://ask.slashdot.org/ because they have a problem and they're asking us for help on how to fix it, not just ignore it.
(I know I'm risking a "troll" mod for this post, but is it not true?)
Cool! I didn't know that, it's great when you make mistakes like this and someone corrects you. I've just checked it out and you were right. Thanks :)
Have you tried validating Google's pages? It's like "Oh, My Gawd, It's Full Of Errors!"
They have plenty of resources to make their pages standards compliant but they don't and I think their company is doing pretty well. There must be a reason for this and I think it's the fact that their pages work in all the popular browsers; maybe the cost of validating them is just too high or it simply doesn't justify any cost! Really, I don't understand, why on Earth would I try to make my pages 100% standards compliant when nobody really cares about that. I don't think Average Joe gives a shit if www.myemailproviderhostnamehere.com validates correctly as long as it works in his web browser. This "our products are w3c valid" is only for marketing and has absolutely no other practical purpose.
And how would this fix things? It would only make the companies that own A.*.*.* keep those addresses instead of releasing them to the public.
The problem: we're out of ipv4 ips
The cause: many of them are allocated but unused
The short-term solution: release unused addresses
Long-term solution: ipv6
How would raising prices help?
You forgot to give a clear example of what you meant by that learning curve. If anyone has trouble with that, try to picture the difference between C and C# with .NET. Good luck using C to do what you can do in C# using just a few clicks.
golden geese of the economy
Wow!
Finding the proper name is work, for the marketing department. Unfortunately, you're probably a software developer and name your applications "vi" or "fsck" because you don't bother that much to improve your image. You sell software, the company sells a product. Software needs good lines of code, the product needs a good name and wrapping.
Also, "Windows 7" may have a small impact on geeks but let's not forget MS's target is Average Joe to whom it may sound nicer than "Longhorn" or "Fiesty" which also don't mean much to me. What the hell are Fiesty and Gusty and which one is better? What's the difference between them? Now look at it like this: We have Windows 7, there were 6 other versions before it and that alone makes it "better", which means it's cool! I know this isn't true but it's the way Joe thinks and it's what MS is trying to sell.
MS is choosing a name for their product and people complain that there are more important things? It depends what your job is, but software developers should actually take a few moments and think about this and try to avoid naming their applications like cat, fsck, vi, nice, apt, sudo, etc. You have to admit, "type" is more intuitive than "cat."
In other words: Application names are a lot more important than you might think.
Don't they still have the right to retain it and look at it? And it's suspicious to me, why mail yourself your own laptop if you're going home? That might give them just the reasons they need to do it.
The whole point is that you can say you don't know the password and that the information stored there are just some documents from work or a movie you made. They can't prove you don't know something and they can't erase it because it is your data even if nobody can use it; you might even "remember" the password some day. Anyway, they're still your bits. You own those 1s and 0s and they can't understand what they mean nor force you to show them. It may very well be something completely meaningless, just random data but it's still yours.
That's what good encryption software is for, turning your data into trash, helping you "forget" the password and later, when you're alone, recompose your data when you "remember" it.
Excellent point... If they want to see your pictures, just give them the notebook and never look back. Now worries, you'll probably get it back in five years. What a great deal!
How is it different, you ask?
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=988461&cid=25292293
That's ^ what makes it different. The fact that you like Juno Reactor and Sex will remain here FOREVER. The fact that I tell some drunk chick at a bar about my fetishes will stay with her. The fact that I was seen in that bar with her will stay with the people who've seen it, be those 10 or 100. When it comes to the Internet, the problem is that the information will remain here for a very very long time (see http://web.archive.org/ about that) and that others can search for you and see things that you've done while you were drunk at your 18-yr old birthday party and what others have to say about that. We all do stupid things from time to time but it's mostly those stupid things that are out of the ordinary enough to be posted on Facebook by someone who thought you were funny holding a cherry between your butt cheeks and running around with a pint of beer on your head.
People will see the stupid things you've done which are stored there forever (almost). You also do freelancing in your free time and work on open-source projects (if you're a geek) or you paint or write poetry (if you're an artist). Those things are boring! Who cares about those? You may publish all that on some obscure website but when you google for your name, Facebook will be the first to pop up, of course, and on Facebook you'll find pictures of you that you didn't know about. Your future employer will probably stop after reading the first couple of result links which pose you as a drunk marijuana addict.
There are so many things you haven't considered when you wrote that post that I don't think I can write about all of them today. Besides, I'm at work right now and I only have three more hours of work remaining, then I have to go home and actually do something productive (like cooking). Hopefully, my boss won't see this post.
Good point. This is news to Slashdot? It's been going on for twenty million years now.
That's just it, the common laws of physics don't apply normally in this case because we're dealing with micro particles. Newton's laws are perfect for computing how much time it will take for a car to travel from Paris to Budapest but they're not precise enough when dealing with extreme speeds (near the speed of light). The same goes for the physics we know when working with atoms. "Energy doesn't magically come from nowhere" is true, but have you considered that the atom may hold huge quantities of energy inside it which are suddenly released under certain circumstances? For crying out loud, think about things like nuclear fission where you put in some energy, you get out more but you lose the state of the matter you initially had. The same thing could apply in this case: you put a bit of energy using a magnetic field and you get an explosion that could completely destroy half of the galaxy. Now THAT is what these people are really afraid of. It is possible. Unlikely? Yes. Possible? Yes. It may be unlikely but why take any chances? While we're at it, let's destroy the whole Universe just to find out how old it is.
No, it won't be infinite. The cascade will end when we find the one that can patented fire.
what does this one make it so special?
It made it to Slashdot.
Yes, you should lose access to it in some cases. Maybe you get online with other players and start harassing them. The servers must have some 'ban' option, to protect the regular players from the trolls and they say something about it in the license. If they didn't reserve the right to ban people, they would find themselves in another class-action suit because people would say the game wouldn't be safe.
Yeah, just one question: how do you qualify an error message as being "great" or "not great?"
Slashdot is not the place for hot news. Slashdot is a community forum dedicated to discussions regarding "news for nerds." The point of Slashdot is not to present you with news but to allow you and other nerds to debate yesterday's news.
It seems they've tried that about three years ago but I guess it didn't went well, considering that after three years they still don't have a product.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-auctions-to-rival-ebay-and-yahoo/2322/