Do I have a correlation here? Or do I have a cause and effect?
That's not really an either-or situation. A correlation *does* prove that a cause-and-effect is happening somewhere, but it doesn't tell you between what two things the cause and effect is occuring. If A and B always occur together, and it's repeatble provable that this is the case (not just a statistical freak accident) then that has to be either because A causes B, or B causes A, or that both are effects of some other cause C.
It's not that a correlation doesn't imply a cause/effect relationship - it DOES. It just doesn't tell you what that relationship actually is.
The problem is that being 100% honest often has the side effect of attacking religion. By asking people to refrain from attacking relgiion, you are asking them to refrain from stating their honest opinions.
Ridicule is a right of free speech, provided it doesn't go so far as slander (which requires that you publish provably false facts about someone, not just that you publish derogatory opinions of them). You have every right to demand tolerance for your beliefs, but you do not have a right to demand respect for them.
(And you are very wrong if you assume the ridicule is only going in one direction.)
NOW almost never speaks out about the treatment of women in Muslim countries.
Not surprising, since the "N" in "NOW" stands for "national", not "world".
No, the religious are not demading just tolerance. They're demanding respect, and that's a step too far. Everyone deserves tolerance by default, but RESPECT has to be earned. You have every right to believe as you wish, and every right to demand that others allow you to believe as you wish. But you don't have a right to insist that other people must find your beliefs worthy and respectable. Ridicule is a right of free speech.
I like this one: 4) Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities.
These are comic books we are talking about, right?
The Comics Code authority had a lot of nasty underhanded stuff it in that targeted specific comics in publication - like saying comics can't have certain words from a list in the title, and then specifically picking words for that list that match the titles of your competitor's comics.
Most of the affected legitimate users were re-activated earlier today.
Of course most of the users Valve *knows* were legitimate were re-activated. Once they classify someone as KNOWN to be a legit user, they will reactivate them. That's not the problem. The problem is that they don't actually know.
have absolutely no pattern and are completely random, and only stored in some massive Steam database.
Then in that case it would be worse because it would be *guaranteed* that all fake keygen keys that worked were in fact dupilcates of legit keys, rather than just being likely to be so. (Since there's no pattern to compare against, the only way for a key to be valid is for it to be in that list of randomly generated keys that were generated for purachasable products.)
Of course. But this isn't local access we're talking about here. It's remote access to a user account. Getting root from local access would be trivial - it involves using a boot disk or if the BIOS has that disabled, then a screwdriver to get to the hard drive and remove it.
It's a bit harder to compromise a machine to the point where it propigates a virus and changes its behavior when all you have access to is one user account. It doesn't make much difference to that user whether it was just his account that got hosed or the whole machine, but it certainly matters to other people on the network that are 'near' that host and don't want to see his "owned" computer spewing pollution all over the network.
How many programs in Unix refuse to work if you run them as a normal user, as opposed to in Windows where some games and other third-party apps just don't work at all without admin rights (and no, I'm not talking about just to install them, but to keep running them each time)? There is more incentive in Windows to run as Admin than there is in Unix to run as root. Luckily for people still doing serious work in Windows, I think this is going to change for them soon. Now that Windows has a feature like 'su' that is easily accessable and works for gui apps, people won't have to log in as admin on the main console anymore even to run brain-damaged programs that inist on admin rights where they shouldn't.
If you still run as admin at all times (or as root at all times) then you deserve what you get.
No. Yes it is true that Java is the name of the whole platform. No it is not true that Sun's platform is the only thing you could possibly be talking about when you say "Java Platform", in exactly the same way that Microsoft's Visual Studio is not the only thing you could possibly be talking about when you say "C++ development IDE"
When did they jump from version 1.5 to 6? (Yeah, I know - version 1.5 is also version 5. This is one aspect of Sun I really, really hate. They did the same thing with their operating system - alternately calling it one version number when calling it "Solaris" but calling it a different number when calling it "SunOS". Confusion for no good reason.
By your argument, therefore, Slashdot WOULD become liable for the bandwidth bills.
What argument would that be? I never advocated any such thing. I just said it was false to claim the situations of a slashdotting and this situation were identical in terms of liabilty, and I still stand by that. In both cases the causer of the extra bandwith is not responsible, but it's not because the situations are identical, as you claimed. They are totally different situations, with totally difference reasons why the perpetrator is not liable.
You appear to be operating under the false assumption that the hosting company of the porn website was the one doing the redirection. That is not the case. The company doing the redirection was an ISP in Australia that people were connecting THROUGH. It was neither the host of the porn site, nor the host of the Australain Idol being redirected to. This makes a huge difference because this is a precedent against the argument that an ISP is not responsible for content you see *through* them that they are not hosting directly but are merely the conduit for. That notion (that they are a common carrier that cannot be held accountable for content they pass through) is eroded by this action.
And, the ISP that did the redirection just so happens to be part of the same company that published the incorrect URL that caused the mess in the first place.
By the way, the statement "I won't hold on to any absolutisms" is a logically impossible statement, since it is an absolutism itself. It's a bit like saying "This statement is a lie".
May seem odd, but think of all the exercise to be got from it.
Yes, your CD drive does get a lot of excercise from it. And that's the problem.
Also, don't forget the other issue, that pirated CD keys are also somebody's legitimate CD key somewhere. (What they do is find a key that works, either by having insight into the keygen algorithm, or by brute force guessing, but in either case it is highly likely that someone out there really does have that key as their legitimate purchased key. What Valve is doing is banning any key they see being used by multiple people in multiple locations at once, under the assumption that that can't happen unless it's pirated. While it's true that this is a guaranteed method to only get pirated keys, it is not guaranteed to only get the PEOPLE who are pirating. It gets the people pirating AND the legitimate user of that key. What is their response for those who's only crime was the bad luck of having a legit key that somoene hit on a guessing algorithm? Go through the effort of sending them a photo of the box with the key visible in the photo and wait for Valve to maybe reinstate you eventually by giving you a different key.
Microsoft probably benefits from piracy more than it hurts them. Because people can run illegitimate copies of their software at home, they get a large mindshare that they would otherwise not have, and so then businesses (which do pay for software) end up picking Microsoft products because of that mindshare.
I don't expect Microsoft to get serious about stopping piracy any time soon.
It would also be in their best interests to screw over, say , 0.05% of their customers if doing so would stop piracy. If only a few legit users are screwed by this, it's in their best interests to go ahead with it anyway. The dis-incentive you speak of isn't real.
People who paid for the product can enjoy it and those who didn't can't. Seems fair.
Hmmm. that would be nice. But what does that have to do with what the article is about, which is people paying for the product getting banned for disabling the annoying CD check?
Slashdot Mirror
Do I have a correlation here? Or do I have a cause and effect?
That's not really an either-or situation. A correlation *does* prove that a cause-and-effect is happening somewhere, but it doesn't tell you between what two things the cause and effect is occuring. If A and B always occur together, and it's repeatble provable that this is the case (not just a statistical freak accident) then that has to be either because A causes B, or B causes A, or that both are effects of some other cause C.
It's not that a correlation doesn't imply a cause/effect relationship - it DOES. It just doesn't tell you what that relationship actually is.
Actually it just disappeared from the public consciousness altogether, just like everything else that isn't pop. Thank you ClearChannel.
Gran Theft Auto
I now have this horrible image in my head of a granny with a walker and a pistol, creeping up to another granny and jacking her Hoveround.
The problem is that being 100% honest often has the side effect of attacking religion. By asking people to refrain from attacking relgiion, you are asking them to refrain from stating their honest opinions.
Ridicule is a right of free speech, provided it doesn't go so far as slander (which requires that you publish provably false facts about someone, not just that you publish derogatory opinions of them). You have every right to demand tolerance for your beliefs, but you do not have a right to demand respect for them.
(And you are very wrong if you assume the ridicule is only going in one direction.)
NOW almost never speaks out about the treatment of women in Muslim countries.
Not surprising, since the "N" in "NOW" stands for "national", not "world".
No, the religious are not demading just tolerance. They're demanding respect, and that's a step too far. Everyone deserves tolerance by default, but RESPECT has to be earned. You have every right to believe as you wish, and every right to demand that others allow you to believe as you wish. But you don't have a right to insist that other people must find your beliefs worthy and respectable. Ridicule is a right of free speech.
Shhhh - now some ISP is going to start redirecting the offensive site to the wholesome one.
I'll leave it as an excercise to the reader to guess which site is the offensive one.
I like this one:
4) Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities.
These are comic books we are talking about, right?
The Comics Code authority had a lot of nasty underhanded stuff it in that targeted specific comics in publication - like saying comics can't have certain words from a list in the title, and then specifically picking words for that list that match the titles of your competitor's comics.
Actually we had the same capability way before
True. And what I said is also true - the Mac OSX way is now the same as the old unix way. The Mac OS9 way of accomplishing this isn't used anymore.
Most of the affected legitimate users were re-activated earlier today.
Of course most of the users Valve *knows* were legitimate were re-activated. Once they classify someone as KNOWN to be a legit user, they will reactivate them. That's not the problem. The problem is that they don't actually know.
have absolutely no pattern and are completely random, and only stored in some massive Steam database.
Then in that case it would be worse because it would be *guaranteed* that all fake keygen keys that worked were in fact dupilcates of legit keys, rather than just being likely to be so. (Since there's no pattern to compare against, the only way for a key to be valid is for it to be in that list of randomly generated keys that were generated for purachasable products.)
Of course. But this isn't local access we're talking about here. It's remote access to a user account. Getting root from local access would be trivial - it involves using a boot disk or if the BIOS has that disabled, then a screwdriver to get to the hard drive and remove it.
It's a bit harder to compromise a machine to the point where it propigates a virus and changes its behavior when all you have access to is one user account. It doesn't make much difference to that user whether it was just his account that got hosed or the whole machine, but it certainly matters to other people on the network that are 'near' that host and don't want to see his "owned" computer spewing pollution all over the network.
How many programs in Unix refuse to work if you run them as a normal user, as opposed to in Windows where some games and other third-party apps just don't work at all without admin rights (and no, I'm not talking about just to install them, but to keep running them each time)? There is more incentive in Windows to run as Admin than there is in Unix to run as root. Luckily for people still doing serious work in Windows, I think this is going to change for them soon. Now that Windows has a feature like 'su' that is easily accessable and works for gui apps, people won't have to log in as admin on the main console anymore even to run brain-damaged programs that inist on admin rights where they shouldn't.
If you still run as admin at all times (or as root at all times) then you deserve what you get.
No. Yes it is true that Java is the name of the whole platform. No it is not true that Sun's platform is the only thing you could possibly be talking about when you say "Java Platform", in exactly the same way that Microsoft's Visual Studio is not the only thing you could possibly be talking about when you say "C++ development IDE"
When did they jump from version 1.5 to 6? (Yeah, I know - version 1.5 is also version 5. This is one aspect of Sun I really, really hate. They did the same thing with their operating system - alternately calling it one version number when calling it "Solaris" but calling it a different number when calling it "SunOS". Confusion for no good reason.
By your argument, therefore, Slashdot WOULD become liable for the bandwidth bills.
What argument would that be? I never advocated any such thing. I just said it was false to claim the situations of a slashdotting and this situation were identical in terms of liabilty, and I still stand by that. In both cases the causer of the extra bandwith is not responsible, but it's not because the situations are identical, as you claimed. They are totally different situations, with totally difference reasons why the perpetrator is not liable.
You appear to be operating under the false assumption that the hosting company of the porn website was the one doing the redirection. That is not the case. The company doing the redirection was an ISP in Australia that people were connecting THROUGH. It was neither the host of the porn site, nor the host of the Australain Idol being redirected to. This makes a huge difference because this is a precedent against the argument that an ISP is not responsible for content you see *through* them that they are not hosting directly but are merely the conduit for. That notion (that they are a common carrier that cannot be held accountable for content they pass through) is eroded by this action.
And, the ISP that did the redirection just so happens to be part of the same company that published the incorrect URL that caused the mess in the first place.
By the way, the statement "I won't hold on to any absolutisms" is a logically impossible statement, since it is an absolutism itself. It's a bit like saying "This statement is a lie".
I don't know where I saw it, but I didn't make it up myself.
May seem odd, but think of all the exercise to be got from it.
Yes, your CD drive does get a lot of excercise from it.
And that's the problem.
Also, don't forget the other issue, that pirated CD keys are also somebody's legitimate CD key somewhere. (What they do is find a key that works, either by having insight into the keygen algorithm, or by brute force guessing, but in either case it is highly likely that someone out there really does have that key as their legitimate purchased key. What Valve is doing is banning any key they see being used by multiple people in multiple locations at once, under the assumption that that can't happen unless it's pirated. While it's true that this is a guaranteed method to only get pirated keys, it is not guaranteed to only get the PEOPLE who are pirating. It gets the people pirating AND the legitimate user of that key. What is their response for those who's only crime was the bad luck of having a legit key that somoene hit on a guessing algorithm? Go through the effort of sending them a photo of the box with the key visible in the photo and wait for Valve to maybe reinstate you eventually by giving you a different key.
I want to live in your world. It sounds nicer. What color is the sky on your planet?
People like you are those "poor, victimized" members of society who sue fork makers because
I've decide to stop responding to fucking liars who claim to have ESP.
Microsoft probably benefits from piracy more than it hurts them. Because people can run illegitimate copies of their software at home, they get a large mindshare that they would otherwise not have, and so then businesses (which do pay for software) end up picking Microsoft products because of that mindshare.
I don't expect Microsoft to get serious about stopping piracy any time soon.
It would also be in their best interests to screw over, say , 0.05% of their customers if doing so would stop piracy. If only a few legit users are screwed by this, it's in their best interests to go ahead with it anyway. The dis-incentive you speak of isn't real.
People who paid for the product can enjoy it and those who didn't can't. Seems fair.
Hmmm. that would be nice. But what does that have to do with what the article is about, which is people paying for the product getting banned for disabling the annoying CD check?