The fact that you don't like an argument does not make it bullshit.
Specifically, the fact that someone is not prepared to pay a say $50 price for a specific game, and as a result would nnever have bought it is not bullshit.
The direct consequence is that not every pirated copy equals a lost sale.
Actually, there are situations where a pirated copy can result in a sale.
In the very early 80s Firebird released a game called Elite.
I first got it as a pirated copy, and after looking at it and playing it for a bit, I found it to be so good that I wanted to buy it, despite it costing more money then I would get in a month as a 14 year old at the time. Here a pirated copy resulted in a gained sale. Just an incident? maybe, but not one that is entirely unique from what I have seen.
Saying that every pirated copy is a lost sale is BS. Not because I don't like the statement, but because it can be shown to be wrong.
But while marijuana has long been touted as a gateway drug, if this were actually the case, then we should have a lot more people who get fucked up on a daily basis.
You are quite right there.
If it indeed was a gateway drug, then the Netherlands and Canada would be full of heroin users. I do not know about Canada, but I do know that heroin usage in the Netherlands is definitely not higher then in surrounding countries which do not permit sale and use of marijuana, and in many cases it is actually lower.
Personally, I think alcohol abuse is much more of a problem then marijuana, but after the U.S. Government botched Prohibition, I don't think we're going to return to that....
As with any potentially dangerous drug, it is a matter of using instead of abusing.
Preventing people from gaining experience with alcohol and other drugs while they have a high learning capacity still is one of the main causes of abuse of drugs. While the average 17 year old that is allowed to drink alcohol might at first get utterly drunk a few times (which in itself is harmless untill they start driving a car or such), they have a much better chance of learning to not abuse it.
What is really messed up is allowing 17 year old kids to drive a car, and then at 21 allowing them to use alcohol. They have no experience with the potential danger and have an extremely high likelyhood of messing up.
Last but not least, it is noone elses business whatever I decide to do to my own body, as long as I don't make others pay for the consequences.
So one may ask again, how likely would it have been that a hacker would have discovered this vulnerability without having had access to the source code?
Considering the number of security vulnerabilities found in closed source applications and systems, yes, it would most likely have been discovered at some point.
WTF? Seriously, what's hard to understand here, you should buy the product that is the best value, not the product which is made by your favourite idiological organisation.
Buying products made by companies that act in a responsible way is not exactly the same as only buying only from your favourite idiological organisation, stop confusing the 2.
A company that does not consider the social and/or environmental consequences of what they are doing is causing hidden cost for me (and everyone else).
That cost is hidden but is definitely there. Not considering that fact is extremely short sighted.
I prefer dealing with companies that confront me with the price for that upfront instead.
Worst of all are the people who buy a more expensive product because x% of the purchase price goes to charity. For fuck sake, just buy the cheaper product and donate the money to charity yourself if that's what you want to do.
Nice try, but that was not what was being argued here at all, stop confusing the issues. If I were to counter your argument with a similarely irrelevant hyperbole, I could say that we need to allow slavery again, the way in which something is produced is irrelevant, only value counts, and it is a much cheaper way to get such value.
The argument was to not buy from companies that do things that are not desirable to society (because of those things being destructive to society)
I'm not fucking up the system. The system works because people buy the best value product. How they value the product varies from person to person but it is not debatable that valuing the product is a different and seperate concern from valuing the process used to make the product. If two products are identical except one is cheaper than the other you should buy the one that is cheaper.
You sir (or madam) are extremely short sighted.
You ARE fucking up the system because of not considering the hidden cost of such cheaper products.
You do not seem to realize that the price for messing up environment and society will have to be payed anyway.
If a product is really cheaper while equal in all other aspects (that means INCLUDING the hidden cost of environmental and social damage) then you are right that you should take it.
At least, when I hear or see an error, I feel a real sense of physical discomfort that won't really go away until the error is corrected
Maybe you should try to realize 2 things:
1. Natural language serves as a means of communications, annd changes with time. There is accepted use of a language, but not correct use. Hennce, people can use it in a way that is not gennerally accepted, but that does not make for their use being in error.
2. Humanns are for now a lot better at understanding fuzzy use of language then computers are. This means that humans won't "bomb" on "mistakes", rather, they will almost always interpret them correctly.
You might want to point out something to your French friend...
France, French etc, are named after a famous Germanic tribe, that of the Franks.
The Franks spoke a language extremely similar to Flamish, which is a Germanic language.
In the time since the late 800s, more and more Latin got mixed in, but it is in the days of Louis XVI that French similar to what we have now appeared.
All ancient (pre 1400s) "French" literature is a lot easier to read for a German or Dutch speaking person then for any Frenchman.
English has quite a bit of a language in it tthat was spoken in a specific area of France, but was not French at all. It was Normandic.
First of all, the grantparent is a bit off. In Dutch, plural is made either by adding a s or en to the end of a word. (for his information, the plural of huisje is huisjes, not huisje's, the plural of tafel is tafels, not tafel's etc.)
Which one of the two options you use is something you have to know, there is no strict rule for it.
's denotes possesive in Dutch just like it does in English.
the Germans are generally looking for any opportunity to try out their English. Ask one if they speak English, and they'll tell you that they only speak a little, and then amaze you with a very high standard. What really astounds me is how many English phrases they know that you wouldn't expect a non-native to know, including lots of double meanings and so on.
I disagree.
I live in Berlin for about 50% of the time (other half I spend in Utrecht, the Netherlands).
I have learnned to expect people here (Berlin) to understand English somewhat, and barely speak it. Those who do better are the exception really.
You are right about them mixing in quite a few English words annd phrases intto their language, something which results in what is called 'Denglish' overhere. Usually they end up using words incorrectly (ie: the word 'handy' for a mobile phone)
First generation WRT54G from Linksys appears to use a broadcom based pccard for wifi. This card is definitely capable of transmitting at more then 100mw (tho not with the stock firmware)
For that matter, the sitecom (RaLink) based card in my laptop cann be configured to transmit at 100mw with the stock drivers for Windows, and can be configured tot do a bit more when using some of the alternative drivers (on Linux and FreeBSD)
So.. I would say there are cards around that go in laptops that can transmit at over 100mw
got me hooked for a while to Team Fortress, and I happen to know her from back in the 90s when we were both playing MUDs.. Might be I ran into a somewhat unusual woman there tho..
I was thinking more of Lindows and Microsoft's argument that to even sound like "windows" was not allowed
Well, Lindows was not just a software product, it was a name used for branding an operating system. One could argue that the name was specifically intended to be similar to that of a competing product from Microsoft.
Had it been the name for a product like cygwin for example, it is far less likely that MS would have won their case.
The name comes from when it was targeted at the Intel i860, a RISC processor. In those days, Intel's chip was behind schedule, so Microsoft had to use an i860 emulator called the N10. NT was so named because it worked on the "N-Ten."
Uhm...
In 1989 I obtained a (microchannel) card from IBM containing an Intel i860 cpu and 8mb sram.
While it was somewhat expensive, I could get that as a normal customer. I really really doubt the claim that MS could not have gotten it at the same time (or a few years earlier)
I still have the card and it is still functional. Its a fun toy, tho completely outclassed by comodity CPUs since the days of the P133.
Yep, but to have him declared a vexatious litigant is actually more trouble for the courts, since they then have to review every bullshit case he wants to file, and decide whether to let him file it.
Courts are here to serve society, not the other way around. Part of that is preventing such a burden on society, so the argument that it is easier for courts is not valid.
Also, after having gone through this a few times, and having shown that this behavior only gets you trouble with no chance on success will help preventing this kind of thing, which in the end reduces workload for courts, not increase it.
A trademark allows the owner to dictate its use in identifying a particular type of product.
While you are right there, there are limitations to that.
You can't trademark the word 'oil' for a product that is basicly just oil and hope to protect it. What is more, when you have a trademark and it becomes the word that people use for any such product then you still lose trademark protection.
These are difficult issues, and resolving them is really not the purview of government anyway. Most of us are more than happy to let them try, because it's easier to just slap on a few more penalties than to address the underlying causes.
First of all, thanks for the serious reply, I did not really expect one. What follows is a bit of a rant, don't take it personal:)
I am also dissapointed (besides surprised) by it. Eventho I am not an American, I care deeply about the ideas and concepts that the US constitution and the USA as a nation and society are built upon. Seeing them being forgotten or possibly consiously ignored nowadays is quite sad. Worse even are the arguments that are used for ignoring those ideas and concepts.
You are probably right that education is important in this, but this seems to be so deeply ingrainded that I wonder.. Even when ignoring world history and only looking at the USA itself, there is a lot to learn about this. The founding fathers have written lots of letters that are now publicly available, which document many of their choices and the reasoning behind those.
Just readinng those will tell you about concepts like justice instead of retaliation, why it is better to have a criminal not being caught then having an innocent person in jail etc etc.
Those same people knew they were a part of this world, and while having to concentrate on building a nation, they realized that that would not work without involving the outside world, and learning from mistakes made by others.
Ah well.. to me it seems that at least in the last few decades, arrogance and ignorance are key and actual knowledge is irrelevant... or is it?
Many of the 'ignorant' people are very noisy, whereas many of the people who actually know a bit about this are not very noisy at all, which just means that ignorance is being heard, the rest is not. Doesn't mean everyone is ignorant.
Logically, you make sense. Historically you don't.
Putting up extreme punnishment as deterent was the norm during much of history.
In ancient times, the Romans (among others) found out that it is a lot more effective to try to 'do justice' instead. (effective as in, reducing crime)
An absolute prerequisite for that is that crime and punnishment are proportional. There MUST be a direct relationn between the severeness of the crime. The first problem you get when ignoring this is what to do with a worse crime then the one you just punnished severely. The second problem is that in the end people (not just criminals) will not except this.
This was considered pretty important when the USA was founded and is reflected in how its justice system works.
People like you who just look at the potential deterent while ignoring the justice aspect seem to me to want to go back to the situation that was there before the French and American revolutions, which I find rather hard to understand. I am also rather surprised how your way of looking at this seems to be very popular in the USA, could that be because it is a young nation still that lacks the historical experience?
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that you don't like an argument does not make it bullshit.
Specifically, the fact that someone is not prepared to pay a say $50 price for a specific game, and as a result would nnever have bought it is not bullshit.
The direct consequence is that not every pirated copy equals a lost sale.
Actually, there are situations where a pirated copy can result in a sale.
In the very early 80s Firebird released a game called Elite.
I first got it as a pirated copy, and after looking at it and playing it for a bit, I found it to be so good that I wanted to buy it, despite it costing more money then I would get in a month as a 14 year old at the time. Here a pirated copy resulted in a gained sale. Just an incident? maybe, but not one that is entirely unique from what I have seen.
Saying that every pirated copy is a lost sale is BS. Not because I don't like the statement, but because it can be shown to be wrong.
But while marijuana has long been touted as a gateway drug, if this were actually the case, then we should have a lot more people who get fucked up on a daily basis.
You are quite right there.
If it indeed was a gateway drug, then the Netherlands and Canada would be full of heroin users. I do not know about Canada, but I do know that heroin usage in the Netherlands is definitely not higher then in surrounding countries which do not permit sale and use of marijuana, and in many cases it is actually lower.
Personally, I think alcohol abuse is much more of a problem then marijuana, but after the U.S. Government botched Prohibition, I don't think we're going to return to that....
As with any potentially dangerous drug, it is a matter of using instead of abusing.
Preventing people from gaining experience with alcohol and other drugs while they have a high learning capacity still is one of the main causes of abuse of drugs. While the average 17 year old that is allowed to drink alcohol might at first get utterly drunk a few times (which in itself is harmless untill they start driving a car or such), they have a much better chance of learning to not abuse it.
What is really messed up is allowing 17 year old kids to drive a car, and then at 21 allowing them to use alcohol. They have no experience with the potential danger and have an extremely high likelyhood of messing up.
Last but not least, it is noone elses business whatever I decide to do to my own body, as long as I don't make others pay for the consequences.
Where I live that is indeed not copyright infringement, provided they are stored on media on which levy has been payed.
I am allowed to make a single copy for private use of any audio and video material I happen to get a hold of, REGARDLESS of how I got a hold of it.
This has been confirmed by courts and the government of the country I live in.
So one may ask again, how likely would it have been that a hacker would have discovered this vulnerability without having had access to the source code?
Considering the number of security vulnerabilities found in closed source applications and systems, yes, it would most likely have been discovered at some point.
I suggest you follow bugtraq for a few months.
Ah :) and there your comment makes a lot of sense indeed (imho)
Checking the anon box does indeed not allow you to post and moderate in the same discussion. Logging off does.
There is a reason for not allowing posting and moderating in the same discussion....
WTF? Seriously, what's hard to understand here, you should buy the product that is the best value, not the product which is made by your favourite idiological organisation.
Buying products made by companies that act in a responsible way is not exactly the same as only buying only from your favourite idiological organisation, stop confusing the 2.
A company that does not consider the social and/or environmental consequences of what they are doing is causing hidden cost for me (and everyone else).
That cost is hidden but is definitely there. Not considering that fact is extremely short sighted.
I prefer dealing with companies that confront me with the price for that upfront instead.
Worst of all are the people who buy a more expensive product because x% of the purchase price goes to charity. For fuck sake, just buy the cheaper product and donate the money to charity yourself if that's what you want to do.
Nice try, but that was not what was being argued here at all, stop confusing the issues. If I were to counter your argument with a similarely irrelevant hyperbole, I could say that we need to allow slavery again, the way in which something is produced is irrelevant, only value counts, and it is a much cheaper way to get such value.
The argument was to not buy from companies that do things that are not desirable to society (because of those things being destructive to society)
I'm afraid you missed a bit of sarcasm there...
I'm not fucking up the system. The system works because people buy the best value product. How they value the product varies from person to person but it is not debatable that valuing the product is a different and seperate concern from valuing the process used to make the product. If two products are identical except one is cheaper than the other you should buy the one that is cheaper.
You sir (or madam) are extremely short sighted.
You ARE fucking up the system because of not considering the hidden cost of such cheaper products.
You do not seem to realize that the price for messing up environment and society will have to be payed anyway.
If a product is really cheaper while equal in all other aspects (that means INCLUDING the hidden cost of environmental and social damage) then you are right that you should take it.
"for pete's sake" was referring to St. Peter. Also a substitute for God or anyone else.
I am pretty sure St. Peter would object to this...
Valid or not, that's why the courts are so reluctant to do it.
Well, I understand that, but that really comes down to them being reluctant to do their job.
At least, when I hear or see an error, I feel a real sense of physical discomfort that won't really go away until the error is corrected
Maybe you should try to realize 2 things:
1. Natural language serves as a means of communications, annd changes with time. There is accepted use of a language, but not correct use. Hennce, people can use it in a way that is not gennerally accepted, but that does not make for their use being in error.
2. Humanns are for now a lot better at understanding fuzzy use of language then computers are. This means that humans won't "bomb" on "mistakes", rather, they will almost always interpret them correctly.
"English is just badly pronounced French."
You might want to point out something to your French friend...
France, French etc, are named after a famous Germanic tribe, that of the Franks.
The Franks spoke a language extremely similar to Flamish, which is a Germanic language.
In the time since the late 800s, more and more Latin got mixed in, but it is in the days of Louis XVI that French similar to what we have now appeared.
All ancient (pre 1400s) "French" literature is a lot easier to read for a German or Dutch speaking person then for any Frenchman.
English has quite a bit of a language in it tthat was spoken in a specific area of France, but was not French at all. It was Normandic.
First of all, the grantparent is a bit off.
In Dutch, plural is made either by adding a s or en to the end of a word. (for his information, the plural of huisje is huisjes, not huisje's, the plural of tafel is tafels, not tafel's etc.)
Which one of the two options you use is something you have to know, there is no strict rule for it.
's denotes possesive in Dutch just like it does in English.
the Germans are generally looking for any opportunity to try out their English. Ask one if they speak English, and they'll tell you that they only speak a little, and then amaze you with a very high standard. What really astounds me is how many English phrases they know that you wouldn't expect a non-native to know, including lots of double meanings and so on.
I disagree.
I live in Berlin for about 50% of the time (other half I spend in Utrecht, the Netherlands).
I have learnned to expect people here (Berlin) to understand English somewhat, and barely speak it. Those who do better are the exception really.
You are right about them mixing in quite a few English words annd phrases intto their language, something which results in what is called 'Denglish' overhere. Usually they end up using words incorrectly (ie: the word 'handy' for a mobile phone)
First generation WRT54G from Linksys appears to use a broadcom based pccard for wifi. This card is definitely capable of transmitting at more then 100mw (tho not with the stock firmware)
For that matter, the sitecom (RaLink) based card in my laptop cann be configured to transmit at 100mw with the stock drivers for Windows, and can be configured tot do a bit more when using some of the alternative drivers (on Linux and FreeBSD)
So.. I would say there are cards around that go in laptops that can transmit at over 100mw
got me hooked for a while to Team Fortress, and I happen to know her from back in the 90s when we were both playing MUDs.. Might be I ran into a somewhat unusual woman there tho..
I was thinking more of Lindows and Microsoft's argument that to even sound like "windows" was not allowed
Well, Lindows was not just a software product, it was a name used for branding an operating system. One could argue that the name was specifically intended to be similar to that of a competing product from Microsoft.
Had it been the name for a product like cygwin for example, it is far less likely that MS would have won their case.
Hmmm....
the X windows system?
Windowmaker?
just to name 2...
The name comes from when it was targeted at the Intel i860, a RISC processor. In those days, Intel's chip was behind schedule, so Microsoft had to use an i860 emulator called the N10. NT was so named because it worked on the "N-Ten."
Uhm...
In 1989 I obtained a (microchannel) card from IBM containing an Intel i860 cpu and 8mb sram.
While it was somewhat expensive, I could get that as a normal customer. I really really doubt the claim that MS could not have gotten it at the same time (or a few years earlier)
I still have the card and it is still functional. Its a fun toy, tho completely outclassed by comodity CPUs since the days of the P133.
Yep, but to have him declared a vexatious litigant is actually more trouble for the courts, since they then have to review every bullshit case he wants to file, and decide whether to let him file it.
Courts are here to serve society, not the other way around. Part of that is preventing such a burden on society, so the argument that it is easier for courts is not valid.
Also, after having gone through this a few times, and having shown that this behavior only gets you trouble with no chance on success will help preventing this kind of thing, which in the end reduces workload for courts, not increase it.
A trademark allows the owner to dictate its use in identifying a particular type of product.
While you are right there, there are limitations to that.
You can't trademark the word 'oil' for a product that is basicly just oil and hope to protect it. What is more, when you have a trademark and it becomes the word that people use for any such product then you still lose trademark protection.
These are difficult issues, and resolving them is really not the purview of government anyway. Most of us are more than happy to let them try, because it's easier to just slap on a few more penalties than to address the underlying causes.
:)
First of all, thanks for the serious reply, I did not really expect one. What follows is a bit of a rant, don't take it personal
I am also dissapointed (besides surprised) by it. Eventho I am not an American, I care deeply about the ideas and concepts that the US constitution and the USA as a nation and society are built upon. Seeing them being forgotten or possibly consiously ignored nowadays is quite sad. Worse even are the arguments that are used for ignoring those ideas and concepts.
You are probably right that education is important in this, but this seems to be so deeply ingrainded that I wonder.. Even when ignoring world history and only looking at the USA itself, there is a lot to learn about this. The founding fathers have written lots of letters that are now publicly available, which document many of their choices and the reasoning behind those.
Just readinng those will tell you about concepts like justice instead of retaliation, why it is better to have a criminal not being caught then having an innocent person in jail etc etc.
Those same people knew they were a part of this world, and while having to concentrate on building a nation, they realized that that would not work without involving the outside world, and learning from mistakes made by others.
Ah well.. to me it seems that at least in the last few decades, arrogance and ignorance are key and actual knowledge is irrelevant... or is it?
Many of the 'ignorant' people are very noisy, whereas many of the people who actually know a bit about this are not very noisy at all, which just means that ignorance is being heard, the rest is not. Doesn't mean everyone is ignorant.
The fines need to be high to act as a deterrent.
Logically, you make sense. Historically you don't.
Putting up extreme punnishment as deterent was the norm during much of history.
In ancient times, the Romans (among others) found out that it is a lot more effective to try to 'do justice' instead. (effective as in, reducing crime)
An absolute prerequisite for that is that crime and punnishment are proportional. There MUST be a direct relationn between the severeness of the crime. The first problem you get when ignoring this is what to do with a worse crime then the one you just punnished severely. The second problem is that in the end people (not just criminals) will not except this.
This was considered pretty important when the USA was founded and is reflected in how its justice system works.
People like you who just look at the potential deterent while ignoring the justice aspect seem to me to want to go back to the situation that was there before the French and American revolutions, which I find rather hard to understand. I am also rather surprised how your way of looking at this seems to be very popular in the USA, could that be because it is a young nation still that lacks the historical experience?
No, the bug was already known when I encountered it. (just google for netbsd sparc smp crash)