The arrogance is not in telling them to talk directly. The arrogance is in combining that with a censoring of the topic in the forum, which they DO - which isn't just doing it for customer support, it's doing it for propoganda purposes.
Some of those being screwed are going to be screwed because the only "wrong" thing they did was to have the audacity to buy a copy of the game just just so happened to be one that matches one of the CD keys generated by a keygen program. The purpose of the keygen piracy technique is, after all, to create a key that actually fits the pattern being used by Valve to generate *their* legitimate keys, so obviously there will be clashes. In these caess Valve cut off the legit as well as piracy versions of the key since they can't tell which is which.
Scenario 1: One CD drive on the computer. Try to play a game while playing a music CD as well.
Scenario 2: Taking a laptop on a trip. Space is at a premium. Now you have to bring CD's of all your games just to activate them even though you installed their contents to your hard drive with full installations.
Scenario 3: CD gets a scratch. Without CD keys, you just play anyway since you installed it already. With CD keys now you can't play until you wait to prove your case to the company, and get a replacement sent to you via snail-mail.
Given how financially successful HL2 looks like it is going to be, I don't think this practice will go away. One of the frustratingly thick-headed facets of the pointy-haired mentality is the notion that if a product is successful, then that must mean consumers liked absolutely every aspect of the product, including the ad campaign, the terms of service, and so on. The notion that people might be putting up with something really annoying just because they like other aspects of the product enough to compensate just doesn't seem to register with them.
3) In addition to the DRM, the company lobbies for laws cracking down on "copy technology." Of course, these are a "BFG-900" which, in addition to having some affect on the pirates, has the side-effect of causing a lot of collateral damage do the honest consumer. Bad for us.
It's far worse than that. It doesn't stop BOTH the honest consumer and the pirates. It stops JUST the honest consumer and NOT the pirates.
Oh, and it is perfectly reasonable to moderate based on a sig. Content is content. You don't get to absolve yourself of responsibility for what you say based on where you say it.
I think you should have said WINDOWS users. Lots of PC users have this option and they read slashdot. What you are seeing on your Mac is just a happy user interface on top of the good old fashioned Unix concept of mounting a raw image as a filesystem. Not all PC users are Windows users.
Not necessarily. If there is a pattern to what makes a key legit versus not legit, then someone could just "randomly" pick a legit key number using that pattern and end up with the same number as a legitimate purchaser of a product.
Will the grocer give you a discount because you had to go to the trouble of getting to the store?
Will they sell you a can of peaches that when you get it home turns out it contains no peaches and instead has a money-back guarantee that you can get your purchase price back if you like? Is that practice okay? I'd say no - and that is exactly like what is happening when you buy a piece of software that doesn't work unless you also sign on to a service, and don't find this out until you get it home.
So would I. But that is YOUR choice. This wasn't. As to your second point, none of the major differences I can think of between phone and internet service make any relevant difference to this issue. What did you have in mind?
No. I'd say your company is especially lacking the ineptitude and laziness that is common everywhere else. A CIO that knows the GPL? That's not normal. Normal CIOs only understand what they read in trade magazines.
RTFA. The images showed up on Google's search because of the fact that they were republished by OTHER people on OTHER rouge sites around the world. Now, of course, that brings up a different problem that it's not google's fault then that the images got out. It's the fault of those other rouge sites.
Question: How long is the wait on the redirection page? I can't safely test it from where I'm sitting (on a watched network). See, the sort of text you describe is commonplace when doing a web redirection, and is often the message that appears ONLY if the browser doesn't immediately redirect. It's the fallback if the browser doesn't support automatic redirection. If it does support it, then the message flashes only for the briefest moment, sometimes so fast the browser doesn't even bother displaying it. So, the relevant question is, did they give the reader the time to actually read the message, or is the redirection instantaneous?
If it was a revenue-generating site (not sure if it was or not), then they've lost a lot more than the uptime bill.
If I produce a TV show in which there was a phone number given and I didn't do the common practice of using a "555" number, and therefore got a real person's number, would it be right for the phone company to make that person's phone number stop working without even TELLING THEM in order to stem the flood?
I couldn't disagree more strongly. When a site gets slashdotted, it is getting a higher than expected bandwith, but it IS bandwith of the expected type, by the expected target audience - it's just a lot of it at once. A gay porn site wouldn't be expecting every aussie pop-culture fan to be visiting them all of a sudden, and shouldn't be expecting that. Therefore they are getting bandwith that is unsolicited AND off-topic. In other words, they are getting spammed, so to speak. Whereas a site being slashdotted is just getting a lot more of what it was ASKING to get than it expected to.
You're approaching this from the standpoint that the company is TRYING to do something sneaky and underhanded and usurp GPL code. I'm approaching it from the standpoint that they aren't trying to, but end up violating the GPL anyway because it's so broadly phrased that it's tough to tell what counts and what doesn't. In order to catch the cheaters, the GPL got phrased in a way that also catches the unsuspecting. And this is why some companies are very worried about using GPL code at all. The LGPL is a lot more clear on the matter, but the GPL is fuzzy. (Taken in the context of comparasin to the LGPL, and that the LGPL was writted explicitly to be different from the GPL, some of those fuzzy things can maybe be resolved by inferrence. (i.e. that the person releasing this software went with the GPL instead of the LGPL probably infers that they do NOT want you to be able to do those things the LGPL says are okay but the GPL neither says are okay nor says are not okay.))
The problem is the other way around. Not trying to make a feeble attempt to be independant of the GPL, but making a genuine attempt and not knowing if it was successful or not, and therefore not knowing if it is legal to distribute your product without source code or not. You don't want to wait until after a court case has been filed to find out.
That isn't the slightest bit clear at all. What if my code COULD call sometehing other than gzip, but it doesn't work because I used a command-line flag that only gzip supports? Is it then a derivative work? And, from a legalistic point of view, is there any difference between calling a piece of code by command-line versus calling it as a library function call? The GPL says library calls into a GPL'ed library file make your work derivitive, and the LGPL says they don't. But how does calling a program from command-line differ from calling it's main() as a function call, in terms of this legality of it?
Publicly visible in a way tied to the product. If you have a product package that says "This is a toothbrush" and then when you open it up it's actually a q-tip, it doesn't matter if there exists some external website somewhere that says the package doesn't really contain a toothbrush. It's still not the product that it claimed to be. The license for a thing should be visible before you buy it, and it should be available right there as you make the purchasing decision. Anything less is pure deception. Putting it up on some external website and expecting the user to check it there is not reasonable. Do you double-check with a google search every time you buy something to see if maybe the package isn't what it says it is?
Apparently you missed the fact that I acknowleged at the end of my post that the situation I described is how it SHOULD be, not how the legal system recognizes it to be. I am well aware of the stupid way the law interprets EULAs. When there are no alternative choices of how to use the product, a EULA isn't much of an agreement at all. When they are industry standard, it's not a matter of voting with your wallet by going to a competitor. It's a matter of voting with your wallet by withdrawing from technology altogether and becoming a hermit.
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The arrogance is not in telling them to talk directly. The arrogance is in combining that with a censoring of the topic in the forum, which they DO - which isn't just doing it for customer support, it's doing it for propoganda purposes.
Unlike the vast majority of the people here who don't like Steam, I actually do believe in giving people money for what they produce.
People are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Where did you get this power of ESP you claim to have?
Some of those being screwed are going to be screwed because the only "wrong" thing they did was to have the audacity to buy a copy of the game just just so happened to be one that matches one of the CD keys generated by a keygen program. The purpose of the keygen piracy technique is, after all, to create a key that actually fits the pattern being used by Valve to generate *their* legitimate keys, so obviously there will be clashes. In these caess Valve cut off the legit as well as piracy versions of the key since they can't tell which is which.
If you have the CD, stick it in.
Scenario 1:
One CD drive on the computer.
Try to play a game while playing a music CD as well.
Scenario 2:
Taking a laptop on a trip. Space is at a premium. Now you have to bring CD's of all your games just to activate them even though you installed their contents to your hard drive with full installations.
Scenario 3:
CD gets a scratch. Without CD keys, you just play anyway since you installed it already. With CD keys now you can't play until you wait to prove your case to the company, and get a replacement sent to you via snail-mail.
Given how financially successful HL2 looks like it is going to be, I don't think this practice will go away. One of the frustratingly thick-headed facets of the pointy-haired mentality is the notion that if a product is successful, then that must mean consumers liked absolutely every aspect of the product, including the ad campaign, the terms of service, and so on. The notion that people might be putting up with something really annoying just because they like other aspects of the product enough to compensate just doesn't seem to register with them.
For some people, getting a better bandwith connection means moving to a new home in a new city. This isn't like just buying a simple appliance here.
3) In addition to the DRM, the company lobbies for laws cracking down on "copy technology." Of course, these are a "BFG-900" which, in addition to having some affect on the pirates, has the side-effect of causing a lot of collateral damage do the honest consumer. Bad for us.
It's far worse than that. It doesn't stop BOTH the honest consumer and the pirates. It stops JUST the honest consumer and NOT the pirates.
Oh, and it is perfectly reasonable to moderate based on a sig. Content is content. You don't get to absolve yourself of responsibility for what you say based on where you say it.
Too bad PC users don't also have this option.
I think you should have said WINDOWS users. Lots of PC users have this option and they read slashdot. What you are seeing on your Mac is just a happy user interface on top of the good old fashioned Unix concept of mounting a raw image as a filesystem. Not all PC users are Windows users.
Not necessarily. If there is a pattern to what makes a key legit versus not legit, then someone could just "randomly" pick a legit key number using that pattern and end up with the same number as a legitimate purchaser of a product.
Will the grocer give you a discount because you had to go to the trouble of getting to the store?
Will they sell you a can of peaches that when you get it home turns out it contains no peaches and instead has a money-back guarantee that you can get your purchase price back if you like? Is that practice okay? I'd say no - and that is exactly like what is happening when you buy a piece of software that doesn't work unless you also sign on to a service, and don't find this out until you get it home.
Then that's not enough time, unless you are a speed reader.
The FSF isn't in charge of that.
Tell that to the FSF. The GPL attempts to define what a derivative work is, for the purpose of the license.
I would probably disconnect my phonecord anyway.
So would I. But that is YOUR choice. This wasn't. As to your second point, none of the major differences I can think of between phone and internet service make any relevant difference to this issue. What did you have in mind?
No. I'd say your company is especially lacking the ineptitude and laziness that is common everywhere else. A CIO that knows the GPL? That's not normal. Normal CIOs only understand what they read in trade magazines.
RTFA. The images showed up on Google's search because of the fact that they were republished by OTHER people on OTHER rouge sites around the world. Now, of course, that brings up a different problem that it's not google's fault then that the images got out. It's the fault of those other rouge sites.
Bad analogy - 100% of the people on that bus were known to be headed to a different destination, instead of something like 98%.
Question: How long is the wait on the redirection page? I can't safely test it from where I'm sitting (on a watched network). See, the sort of text you describe is commonplace when doing a web redirection, and is often the message that appears ONLY if the browser doesn't immediately redirect. It's the fallback if the browser doesn't support automatic redirection. If it does support it, then the message flashes only for the briefest moment, sometimes so fast the browser doesn't even bother displaying it. So, the relevant question is, did they give the reader the time to actually read the message, or is the redirection instantaneous?
If it was a revenue-generating site (not sure if it was or not), then they've lost a lot more than the uptime bill.
If I produce a TV show in which there was a phone number given and I didn't do the common practice of using a "555" number, and therefore got a real person's number, would it be right for the phone company to make that person's phone number stop working without even TELLING THEM in order to stem the flood?
I couldn't disagree more strongly. When a site gets slashdotted, it is getting a higher than expected bandwith, but it IS bandwith of the expected type, by the expected target audience - it's just a lot of it at once. A gay porn site wouldn't be expecting every aussie pop-culture fan to be visiting them all of a sudden, and shouldn't be expecting that. Therefore they are getting bandwith that is unsolicited AND off-topic. In other words, they are getting spammed, so to speak. Whereas a site being slashdotted is just getting a lot more of what it was ASKING to get than it expected to.
You're approaching this from the standpoint that the company is TRYING to do something sneaky and underhanded and usurp GPL code. I'm approaching it from the standpoint that they aren't trying to, but end up violating the GPL anyway because it's so broadly phrased that it's tough to tell what counts and what doesn't. In order to catch the cheaters, the GPL got phrased in a way that also catches the unsuspecting. And this is why some companies are very worried about using GPL code at all. The LGPL is a lot more clear on the matter, but the GPL is fuzzy. (Taken in the context of comparasin to the LGPL, and that the LGPL was writted explicitly to be different from the GPL, some of those fuzzy things can maybe be resolved by inferrence. (i.e. that the person releasing this software went with the GPL instead of the LGPL probably infers that they do NOT want you to be able to do those things the LGPL says are okay but the GPL neither says are okay nor says are not okay.))
The problem is the other way around. Not trying to make a feeble attempt to be independant of the GPL, but making a genuine attempt and not knowing if it was successful or not, and therefore not knowing if it is legal to distribute your product without source code or not. You don't want to wait until after a court case has been filed to find out.
It sounds like your hypothetical comapny is too lazy to any of that.
In other words, my hypothetical company is a rather representative example of the whole.
That isn't the slightest bit clear at all. What if my code COULD call sometehing other than gzip, but it doesn't work because I used a command-line flag that only gzip supports? Is it then a derivative work? And, from a legalistic point of view, is there any difference between calling a piece of code by command-line versus calling it as a library function call? The GPL says library calls into a GPL'ed library file make your work derivitive, and the LGPL says they don't. But how does calling a program from command-line differ from calling it's main() as a function call, in terms of this legality of it?
Publicly visible in a way tied to the product. If you have a product package that says "This is a toothbrush" and then when you open it up it's actually a q-tip, it doesn't matter if there exists some external website somewhere that says the package doesn't really contain a toothbrush. It's still not the product that it claimed to be. The license for a thing should be visible before you buy it, and it should be available right there as you make the purchasing decision. Anything less is pure deception. Putting it up on some external website and expecting the user to check it there is not reasonable. Do you double-check with a google search every time you buy something to see if maybe the package isn't what it says it is?
Apparently you missed the fact that I acknowleged at the end of my post that the situation I described is how it SHOULD be, not how the legal system recognizes it to be. I am well aware of the stupid way the law interprets EULAs. When there are no alternative choices of how to use the product, a EULA isn't much of an agreement at all. When they are industry standard, it's not a matter of voting with your wallet by going to a competitor. It's a matter of voting with your wallet by withdrawing from technology altogether and becoming a hermit.