they don't simulate the bombing of Dresden, generic carpet bombing on cities either, even when it was the main activity of the planes in the actual war (B-17, B-24)
That's False. The B-17 and B-24 were daylight bombers - used against specific targets like factories. Granted, these were in the middle of cities often enough, and they did it anyway even knowing that maby bombs would damage the area around the targets, but that is still not what generic carpet bombing is. Generic carpet bombing was carried out at night when aiming was harder, and those planes that did it were almost exclusively RAF bombers, which had better nighttime navigation abilities, but less accurate bombsights (not that it would have done much good at night anyway).
The problem is over just what does and doesn't constitute "derivative code". If I publish a product in which my code has a shell script that calls out to gzip, just how derivative is my work? The fear companies have is over this feature. The LGPL is a bit clearer, but the GPL isn't too clear one way or the other. Some ways to read it might give the impression that as long as you ship a GPL tool alongside your own tool, and make any sort of call from your tool to the GPL tool (i.e. a shell script calling gzip), that your own tool is now GPL too.
They can have it one way or another, but not both. Either EULAs are enforcable contracts entered into willingly and knowingly by both parties, in which case they [b]must[/b] be publicly visible to the consumer BEFORE they make the purchase, or they aren't. If you hide a contract from one of the parties involved until after it is agreed to, then it should not be enforcable.
Of course, that was me living in my fantasy world where the courts are doing their job with fair minded justice and honesty. I now return you to reality, in which EULAs are both proprietary secret documents and enforcable documents.
It's ironic that you would use the car's diagnostic computer as an analogy, because there IS an economic incentive to keeping that info from you. It means the car manufacturer gets to create a market for licensed/certified mechanics, and gets to dictate where you can get your car fixed. And no, I'm nut just talking out my ass here. I personally experienced this. My Jeep Cherokee had a "check engine" problem that it turns out was pre-programmed to go off when the odometer hit 85,000, and could only be turned off by a mechanic using the specialty computer. It was because there exists an oxygen sensor in the exhaust that they didn't know how to tell if it was going bad or not, so they just preprogrammed an engine light to come on when it *might* theoretically start having a risk of failing - at about 85,000 miles. This was NOT a problem that could be fixed at any generic location, even if they had the parts to replace the sensor. It had to be done at a properly licesed location in order to have the right to toggle that flag in the car's computer to turn off that light. And turning off that light is mandatory becuase it will make the car fail emissions testing even if the car's exhaust is fine (if the check engine light is on, they won't let you pass no matter what the results are.)
So, yes, there is an incentive to keep this information from you. I had to go to an official Jeep Dealership to get this stupid light turned off that THEY preprogrammed to turn on at a certain odometer reading.
If I want to look at it and my insurance company doesn't want me to, I'll take my business elsewhere!
"Industrialized countries" is a euphamism for "highest bracket" in that bracketed system I was talking about. Make sure the facts say what you think they say before pretending to get all high and mighty.
many of these companies have existed for decades and they didn't accomplish that by consistently being stupid.
In the business world, appeal to popularity is more useful than intelligence. You can't accomplish much by being consistently stupid, but you *can* accomplish a lot by being consistently mediocre. (And I never did say that these guys were stupid - just that they don't have longevity as a goal. It's a nice side-effect if you can get it, but if you can't, eh.. so what.) So if this is so important then the government should fund research to mature the technology so no-one takes a risk. That is NOT a stance I would expect to hear from someone advocating your position. It is very rare indeed to find someone like you who isn't being a hypocrite on this. Usually, the people who speak of there being nothing wrong with how companies are doing things simultaneously advocate against government funding of technology research, leading to the situation where NO research is done because it's being left to the corporate sector where nobody wants to be the first adaptor.
But you need to recognize that your stance on this is not the same as the stance being taken by other people who take the coporations-can-do-no-wrong attitude.
There, was that a useful line to write? No? Do you understand why it was not useful? Yes, that's right, because sometimes more precise terms are neeeded. "Crashed" is imprecise. "De-orbit" describes a little bit more about the reason it crashed. De-orbit means it decellerates itself so it is no longer going fast enough to orbit and thus falls. (As opposed to, say, accellerating itself off at some angle such that it was still going fast enough to orbit, but was going in the wrong direction to miss the earth, or say, "crashing" by hitting some other object in space, or "crashing" by failing to get out to orbit in the first place.)
The problem is that the information isn't available for YOU to see. It's available for insurance companies and the authorities, but not for YOU. That is something that should concern a libertarian. If it was totally open-book, visible to everyone, then it would be like what you describe.
Does it allow the CUSTOMER to make one-stop config changes to affect all games? Well, it could if everyone was using it, yes, but they aren't yet. As always, in complex systems people find great value in doing things the same way as everyone else does, and despite the fact that this often ends up unfairly propping up the popularity of the most mediocre solutions, it still is a factor to be reckoned with. DirectX is popular for the same reason Windows itself is popular - it's popular because it was popular in the past - a phenomenon that keeds recursively getting stronger.
According to the treaty you have to reduce your CO2 output by a certain percentage compared to earlier values. You do not have to lower it to a certain absolute number.
That percentage is not constant. It's a graduated scale (like tax brackets). It is thus punative on large outputters.
As to your other point, Industries are fueled by consumer demand. The customers buying that oil and putting it in cars are the cause of the CO2 emissions, so the fact that the output would hit them more than it would hit the suppliers makes perfect sense. (after all, if that oil is used for making plastic, or being a lubricant, then it doesn't cause CO2, so it's not the oil supplier's "fault".)
if that were the case then the companies would make the investments in newer plants just to gain that additional efficiency and increase profits.
I don't live in this alternate universe of yours where companies always look several years down the road. For a large number of companies, making money next quarter to keep shareholders happy a little longer is all that matters, and the capacity to make money in the far off future just doesn't matter to them. This is sufficient explanation to show why power companies wouldn't be doing this even if it would be profitable in the long run. That, plus the problem of early adapters always getting the shaft. Even if a technology will eventually be usefully profitable, it won't be to the first few companies that try it, and when you have an industry with a small number of large companies (like the electricity business), nobody wants to be that first innovator that gets hosed. They want the others to try it first.
This would all be rather moot if environmentalists weren't so opposed to building new nuclear power plants. It's the least pollutive, and cheapest, and most efficient electrical production method available. It only creates a pollution disaster under the MOST EXTREME circumstances (bad designs that would never pass the drawing board in a country with public scrutiny (unlike in the former Soviet Union), directors afraid to teach their employees how the technology works, scheduling tests that are known to trigger a meltdown, turning off the safety mechanisms beforehand to allow the test to happen, etc. The one example the world has of a nuclear disaster only happened because ALL of the above were present at the same time. (And that design would never be used on a new plant.) Basically, Nuclear power only pollutes signifigantly if everything goes totally wrong, whereas other techniques pollute constantly, when everything is working RIGHT.
I am an environmentalist, but I fear using that term because most other people who use it are luddites more so than they are environmentalists. Technology creates problems, but it solves more of them than it creates, and should not be viewed as inherently evil.
By your ideas, we should just cut all the forest raw in the entire planet to make lumber and paper.
I don't live in this alternate universe you are picturing where demand is an infinite quantity. Making as much paper as you possibly can will not maximize economic output. People will stop buying it after their demand is saturated. The goal of a company selling a good is NOT to produce as much of it as they possibly can. It's to produce exactly as much as they think they can sell and NO MORE. Producing more than that wastes money.
I don't know if Congress understood the technology or not when it passed the DMCA,
If they *did* understand it, then that's even worse, because it means the abusive nature of that law was deliberate.
But I will concede that incompetence and maliciousness often look the same to the outside observer, and so I can't tell which it is. However the notion that they could be both competent and benevolent, and have passed the DMCA, is disproven by the evidence.
I don't understand what you're saying. I cite the changes to show that Congress DOES think about technology and the interplay between tech and the law.
That's not enough to refute my point, which was two-pronged. Prong 1 was that the copyright law was not written with this technology in mind. Citing changes from 1970 doesn't refute this since the law was written a long time before that. Prong 2 was that the changes they have made since then show incompetence in understanding the technology. Pointing out that attempts have been made to update the law also does not refute this since it doesn't show that those changes were made in a competent fashion.
The best strategy when you don't like your country's laws is NOT to leave, but to try to fix them. Leaving is the absolute last resort. Leaving is only appropriate when there's no hope of changing people's minds. The love it or leave it attitude is extremely stupid. Yes, I just called you stupid. Your post proves you are.
The argument goes (and I'm not saying I agree with it, in fact I don't) like this: If you upgrade a plant to new technology, it will become more efficient than it was. So along with the pollution controls, which are a waste from an economy point of view, you also get better efficiency to offset this. So the new plant would NOT cost $120B per 100,000 consumers served (100 as before, plus 20 in wasted overhead) to serve 100,000 consumers. It would cost about $100 still (80 or so for improved efficiency, plus 20 in wasted overhead). (Again, just like yours, these numbers of mine are made up.)
If you are going to criticize a point, you really should criticize the actual point being made, not an invented strawman of it. In this case the right way to critisize it would be to shoot down the premise that the newer plants would be efficient enough to have that effect.
My problem with Kyoto is that it measures pollution produced but doesn't compare it to products produced. When a Canadian buys an automobile made in Detroit, he is contributing just as much to the US industrial pollution figures by doing so as a US citizen buying an automobile made in Detroit is.
I do think an environmental treaty was needed, but Kyoto wasn't it. By being punative toward countries with large pollution, it is simultaneously punative toward countries with large economies. What would be better would be if the punative measures were based on the RATIO of pollution to economic benefit produced. If one small factory only outputs $100,000 into the economy, and yet it pollutes just as much as a factory that outputs $5,000,000 into the economy, then its pollution is less justifiable. We should be looking at pollution as being like a cash payment - how much benefit will this pollution buy us? If it is a large enough benefit, it becomes more justifiable.
The worst thing about game patches is that they have created a mentality in the industry that the program doesn't really need to work very well when you first release it in stores. Any remaining bugs can be dealt with in later patches. Therefore patches are no longer the optional thing they once were. Now you need them if you want a game that is a 100% finished sellable product, instead of one that's only 95% finished.
If the TOS or the requirements of Steam change too drastically, then
then you can't get your money back. Any game that won't work right without maintaining a network connection to a server, and that connection is subject to terms of service that might change, should have this fact explicitly mentioned in a prominent location that is visible BEFORE the purchase is made. I refuse to play MMORPGs largely because I don't like making my continued use of the game I already paid for be dependant on unspecified terms that change after the purchase is done and the product is no longer returnable because it got used once. If the terms are allowed to be different from one month to the next, then you are purchasing a game on the HOPE that the terms will stay agreeable to you long enough for you to get your money's worth out of the game.
Wine cannot reach 100% compatability unless Windows remains completely frozen for several years with no new changes. That has never happened yet, and I don't predict it happening in the future.
Don't forget that DirectX is a combination of many different gaming drivers, including keyboard, mouse, and sound in addition to video. That subset of DirectX called Direct3D (which is just video rendering) is what you should be talking about when comparing it to OpenGL (which is just video rendering). When you do *that*, then it becomes a little more clear why a company would produce software with DirectX. With DirectX it's one-stop shopping for all your peripheral drivers. With OpenGL you still have to then get other drivers from other sources for other peripherals.
the racism of the early 20th century was worse than that of the late 19th century. Before evolution, slaves were just animals, savages. Elitist, yes, but not racist.
You just lost all credibility. I was right, you are an idiot. No, I won't bother reading to the end of your message.
I hate egotists who assume that everyone in disagreement with them must be doing so out of ignorance. If I was to do the same, I would have to call you ignorant for not knowing about the existence of the DMCA, which renders those previous changes you speak of entirely defunct if enforced literally and uniformly. But instead, I'll just assume you are aware of the DMCA, and just don't agree with me that this is the effect it would have if interpreted literally. (And citing changes from 1970 and 1980 in no way refutes the claim that the copyright law was not written with this technology in mind.)
What's to stop someone from putting a sniffer on the machine that is running the software, spooling off the bytes as they get transferred at a level underneath the application software? Any security that depends on the client machine playing along nicely is no security at all.
There is always a copy being sent that could be cached, even if it's only in the form of bytes inside TCP packets that don't live very long.
Slashdot Mirror
How long could this game possibly last?? You climb into a building, get up to a window, wait, take two shots, and the game is done.
Even taking all the ethical questions aside, how the hell could this even be marketable? There's nothing much to *do*.
they don't simulate the bombing of Dresden, generic carpet bombing on cities either, even when it was the main activity of the planes in the actual war (B-17, B-24)
That's False. The B-17 and B-24 were daylight bombers - used against specific targets like factories. Granted, these were in the middle of cities often enough, and they did it anyway even knowing that maby bombs would damage the area around the targets, but that is still not what generic carpet bombing is. Generic carpet bombing was carried out at night when aiming was harder, and those planes that did it were almost exclusively RAF bombers, which had better nighttime navigation abilities, but less accurate bombsights (not that it would have done much good at night anyway).
The problem is over just what does and doesn't constitute "derivative code". If I publish a product in which my code has a shell script that calls out to gzip, just how derivative is my work? The fear companies have is over this feature. The LGPL is a bit clearer, but the GPL isn't too clear one way or the other. Some ways to read it might give the impression that as long as you ship a GPL tool alongside your own tool, and make any sort of call from your tool to the GPL tool (i.e. a shell script calling gzip), that your own tool is now GPL too.
They can have it one way or another, but not both. Either EULAs are enforcable contracts entered into willingly and knowingly by both parties, in which case they [b]must[/b] be publicly visible to the consumer BEFORE they make the purchase, or they aren't. If you hide a contract from one of the parties involved until after it is agreed to, then it should not be enforcable.
Of course, that was me living in my fantasy world where the courts are doing their job with fair minded justice and honesty. I now return you to reality, in which EULAs are both proprietary secret documents and enforcable documents.
Why doesn't Lockheed Martin or Boeing or British Aerospace or _______ have a commercial space launch business?
They do. Next complaint?
It's ironic that you would use the car's diagnostic computer as an analogy, because there IS an economic incentive to keeping that info from you. It means the car manufacturer gets to create a market for licensed/certified mechanics, and gets to dictate where you can get your car fixed. And no, I'm nut just talking out my ass here. I personally experienced this. My Jeep Cherokee had a "check engine" problem that it turns out was pre-programmed to go off when the odometer hit 85,000, and could only be turned off by a mechanic using the specialty computer. It was because there exists an oxygen sensor in the exhaust that they didn't know how to tell if it was going bad or not, so they just preprogrammed an engine light to come on when it *might* theoretically start having a risk of failing - at about 85,000 miles. This was NOT a problem that could be fixed at any generic location, even if they had the parts to replace the sensor. It had to be done at a properly licesed location in order to have the right to toggle that flag in the car's computer to turn off that light. And turning off that light is mandatory becuase it will make the car fail emissions testing even if the car's exhaust is fine (if the check engine light is on, they won't let you pass no matter what the results are.)
So, yes, there is an incentive to keep this information from you. I had to go to an official Jeep Dealership to get this stupid light turned off that THEY preprogrammed to turn on at a certain odometer reading.
If I want to look at it and my insurance company doesn't want me to, I'll take my business elsewhere!
Your world sounds like a nice place.
"Industrialized countries" is a euphamism for "highest bracket" in that bracketed system I was talking about. Make sure the facts say what you think they say before pretending to get all high and mighty.
many of these companies have existed for decades and they didn't accomplish that by consistently being stupid.
In the business world, appeal to popularity is more useful than intelligence. You can't accomplish much by being consistently stupid, but you *can* accomplish a lot by being consistently mediocre. (And I never did say that these guys were stupid - just that they don't have longevity as a goal. It's a nice side-effect if you can get it, but if you can't, eh.. so what.)
So if this is so important then the government should fund research to mature the technology so no-one takes a risk.
That is NOT a stance I would expect to hear from someone advocating your position. It is very rare indeed to find someone like you who isn't being a hypocrite on this. Usually, the people who speak of there being nothing wrong with how companies are doing things simultaneously advocate against government funding of technology research, leading to the situation where NO research is done because it's being left to the corporate sector where nobody wants to be the first adaptor.
But you need to recognize that your stance on this is not the same as the stance being taken by other people who take the coporations-can-do-no-wrong attitude.
Thing adjective verb thing. Verb Thing. Thing verb?
There, was that a useful line to write? No? Do you understand why it was not useful? Yes, that's right, because sometimes more precise terms are neeeded. "Crashed" is imprecise. "De-orbit" describes a little bit more about the reason it crashed. De-orbit means it decellerates itself so it is no longer going fast enough to orbit and thus falls. (As opposed to, say, accellerating itself off at some angle such that it was still going fast enough to orbit, but was going in the wrong direction to miss the earth, or say, "crashing" by hitting some other object in space, or "crashing" by failing to get out to orbit in the first place.)
The problem is that the information isn't available for YOU to see. It's available for insurance companies and the authorities, but not for YOU. That is something that should concern a libertarian. If it was totally open-book, visible to everyone, then it would be like what you describe.
Does it allow the CUSTOMER to make one-stop config changes to affect all games? Well, it could if everyone was using it, yes, but they aren't yet. As always, in complex systems people find great value in doing things the same way as everyone else does, and despite the fact that this often ends up unfairly propping up the popularity of the most mediocre solutions, it still is a factor to be reckoned with. DirectX is popular for the same reason Windows itself is popular - it's popular because it was popular in the past - a phenomenon that keeds recursively getting stronger.
According to the treaty you have to reduce your CO2 output by a certain percentage compared to earlier values. You do not have to lower it to a certain absolute number.
That percentage is not constant. It's a graduated scale (like tax brackets). It is thus punative on large outputters.
As to your other point,
Industries are fueled by consumer demand. The customers buying that oil and putting it in cars are the cause of the CO2 emissions, so the fact that the output would hit them more than it would hit the suppliers makes perfect sense. (after all, if that oil is used for making plastic, or being a lubricant, then it doesn't cause CO2, so it's not the oil supplier's "fault".)
if that were the case then the companies would make the investments in newer plants just to gain that additional efficiency and increase profits.
I don't live in this alternate universe of yours where companies always look several years down the road. For a large number of companies, making money next quarter to keep shareholders happy a little longer is all that matters, and the capacity to make money in the far off future just doesn't matter to them. This is sufficient explanation to show why power companies wouldn't be doing this even if it would be profitable in the long run. That, plus the problem of early adapters always getting the shaft. Even if a technology will eventually be usefully profitable, it won't be to the first few companies that try it, and when you have an industry with a small number of large companies (like the electricity business), nobody wants to be that first innovator that gets hosed. They want the others to try it first.
This would all be rather moot if environmentalists weren't so opposed to building new nuclear power plants. It's the least pollutive, and cheapest, and most efficient electrical production method available. It only creates a pollution disaster under the MOST EXTREME circumstances (bad designs that would never pass the drawing board in a country with public scrutiny (unlike in the former Soviet Union), directors afraid to teach their employees how the technology works, scheduling tests that are known to trigger a meltdown, turning off the safety mechanisms beforehand to allow the test to happen, etc. The one example the world has of a nuclear disaster only happened because ALL of the above were present at the same time. (And that design would never be used on a new plant.) Basically, Nuclear power only pollutes signifigantly if everything goes totally wrong, whereas other techniques pollute constantly, when everything is working RIGHT.
I am an environmentalist, but I fear using that term because most other people who use it are luddites more so than they are environmentalists. Technology creates problems, but it solves more of them than it creates, and should not be viewed as inherently evil.
By your ideas, we should just cut all the forest raw in the entire planet to make lumber and paper.
I don't live in this alternate universe you are picturing where demand is an infinite quantity. Making as much paper as you possibly can will not maximize economic output. People will stop buying it after their demand is saturated. The goal of a company selling a good is NOT to produce as much of it as they possibly can. It's to produce exactly as much as they think they can sell and NO MORE. Producing more than that wastes money.
I don't know if Congress understood the technology or not when it passed the DMCA,
If they *did* understand it, then that's even worse, because it means the abusive nature of that law was deliberate.
But I will concede that incompetence and maliciousness often look the same to the outside observer, and so I can't tell which it is. However the notion that they could be both competent and benevolent, and have passed the DMCA, is disproven by the evidence.
I don't understand what you're saying. I cite the changes to show that Congress DOES think about technology and the interplay between tech and the law.
That's not enough to refute my point, which was two-pronged. Prong 1 was that the copyright law was not written with this technology in mind. Citing changes from 1970 doesn't refute this since the law was written a long time before that. Prong 2 was that the changes they have made since then show incompetence in understanding the technology. Pointing out that attempts have been made to update the law also does not refute this since it doesn't show that those changes were made in a competent fashion.
The best strategy when you don't like your country's laws is NOT to leave, but to try to fix them. Leaving is the absolute last resort. Leaving is only appropriate when there's no hope of changing people's minds. The love it or leave it attitude is extremely stupid. Yes, I just called you stupid. Your post proves you are.
The argument goes (and I'm not saying I agree with it, in fact I don't) like this: If you upgrade a plant to new technology, it will become more efficient than it was. So along with the pollution controls, which are a waste from an economy point of view, you also get better efficiency to offset this. So the new plant would NOT cost $120B per 100,000 consumers served (100 as before, plus 20 in wasted overhead) to serve 100,000 consumers. It would cost about $100 still (80 or so for improved efficiency, plus 20 in wasted overhead). (Again, just like yours, these numbers of mine are made up.)
If you are going to criticize a point, you really should criticize the actual point being made, not an invented strawman of it. In this case the right way to critisize it would be to shoot down the premise that the newer plants would be efficient enough to have that effect.
My problem with Kyoto is that it measures pollution produced but doesn't compare it to products produced. When a Canadian buys an automobile made in Detroit, he is contributing just as much to the US industrial pollution figures by doing so as a US citizen buying an automobile made in Detroit is.
I do think an environmental treaty was needed, but Kyoto wasn't it. By being punative toward countries with large pollution, it is simultaneously punative toward countries with large economies. What would be better would be if the punative measures were based on the RATIO of pollution to economic benefit produced. If one small factory only outputs $100,000 into the economy, and yet it pollutes just as much as a factory that outputs $5,000,000 into the economy, then its pollution is less justifiable. We should be looking at pollution as being like a cash payment - how much benefit will this pollution buy us? If it is a large enough benefit, it becomes more justifiable.
The worst thing about game patches is that they have created a mentality in the industry that the program doesn't really need to work very well when you first release it in stores. Any remaining bugs can be dealt with in later patches. Therefore patches are no longer the optional thing they once were. Now you need them if you want a game that is a 100% finished sellable product, instead of one that's only 95% finished.
They added offline mode. You can do it.
In your universe maybe, But in the real world where the rest of us live, you can't play a computer game that won't finish installing.
If the TOS or the requirements of Steam change too drastically, then
then you can't get your money back. Any game that won't work right without maintaining a network connection to a server, and that connection is subject to terms of service that might change, should have this fact explicitly mentioned in a prominent location that is visible BEFORE the purchase is made. I refuse to play MMORPGs largely because I don't like making my continued use of the game I already paid for be dependant on unspecified terms that change after the purchase is done and the product is no longer returnable because it got used once. If the terms are allowed to be different from one month to the next, then you are purchasing a game on the HOPE that the terms will stay agreeable to you long enough for you to get your money's worth out of the game.
Wine cannot reach 100% compatability unless Windows remains completely frozen for several years with no new changes. That has never happened yet, and I don't predict it happening in the future.
Don't forget that DirectX is a combination of many different gaming drivers, including keyboard, mouse, and sound in addition to video. That subset of DirectX called Direct3D (which is just video rendering) is what you should be talking about when comparing it to OpenGL (which is just video rendering). When you do *that*, then it becomes a little more clear why a company would produce software with DirectX. With DirectX it's one-stop shopping for all your peripheral drivers. With OpenGL you still have to then get other drivers from other sources for other peripherals.
the racism of the early 20th century was worse than that of the late 19th century. Before evolution, slaves were just animals, savages. Elitist, yes, but not racist.
You just lost all credibility. I was right, you are an idiot. No, I won't bother reading to the end of your message.
I hate egotists who assume that everyone in disagreement with them must be doing so out of ignorance. If I was to do the same, I would have to call you ignorant for not knowing about the existence of the DMCA, which renders those previous changes you speak of entirely defunct if enforced literally and uniformly. But instead, I'll just assume you are aware of the DMCA, and just don't agree with me that this is the effect it would have if interpreted literally. (And citing changes from 1970 and 1980 in no way refutes the claim that the copyright law was not written with this technology in mind.)
What's to stop someone from putting a sniffer on the machine that is running the software, spooling off the bytes as they get transferred at a level underneath the application software? Any security that depends on the client machine playing along nicely is no security at all.
There is always a copy being sent that could be cached, even if it's only in the form of bytes inside TCP packets that don't live very long.