With regards to those penny squishing machines - the company that makes those is not violating the law even in the most strict sense of the word. They are essentially fancy hammers. We don't outlaw hammers.
A strict reading of the law would make the person putting the penny through the machine the actual defacer.
As far as I can tell, the Secret Service has better things to do than to go after millions of tourists.
Not even close. It's a real coin. If you hollowed it out entirely, just leaving the outside nickel plate, It would still be worth its face value.
As far as I can tell, to make a hollow quarter, you take _two_ regular quarters of similar quality and you cut off the back of one and hollow out the center of another then mate the two.
You can get a carbide end mill of sufficient size to mill out the center, no problem, without resorting to using two coins. You can also abrasively grind a slot in the coin to do the same thing. As a matter of fact, since it's not steel you're working, a diamond coated end mill or a diamond wheel would make short work of clearing out the slot.
it'd be weird to get charged for failing to find a way to obtain some.
No, actually. There are plenty of ways of being convicted of a crime if you fail to suceed. They call it conspiracy.
"Vadim has hit the server 50 times this year. We should get a warrant to search his computer for illegal activity that wasn't stopped by the server. Also, we should get a warrant to arrest him for conspiracy to acquire child pornography"
Or...
"Vadim has been blocked by the server 50 times this year. Let's look at the logs of where he goes. Oh, this looks interesting. Let's see if it needs to be blocked or not. *visits site* Hmmm... illegal content. Call Judge Judy to cut a warrant to search his computer"
Honeypots already exist for this purpose. This is something that the East German Stasi only wish they had. This will be a nice centralized honeypot with all your internet activity neatly filed away, sorted and scored by "relative illegality" and when you hit a certain score, you're hosed.
It won't end with CP. As we've seen with Australia, a whole bunch of things are censored in the name of "Protecting the children". Scope creep happens. Scope creep in government (or bureaucracies in general) is a foregone conclusion.
It sounds like tinfoil, but if you told me 15 years ago countries would be doing national firewalls and censoring, I would have accused you of shiny haberdashery.
I'd gladly DL this game on a torrent out of spite.
Don't.
Don't waste your time. Give the other publishers on the market your attention. If you pirate it, you don't let the rest of the market have its chance, and Ubisoft is "validated" in its opinion of software piracy.
This has been all over the net. If you didn't see it, you were living under a rock. All the gaming sites covered it. It was on reddit, digg, boing boing, 4chan, etc, ad nauseam.
Similarly with the shutdown of Microsoft's "Plays For Sure" servers.
It's just that people *choose* to ignore the warnings and say "Oh, it can't be that bad." Then they find out to their consternation that the people who told them (us geeks) were right.
No excuses. You got burned by DRM? Tough. Wake up.
It's as if nobody learned the first time about DRM when Microsoft shut off its MSN Music Store DRM servers, thus having people locked out of their own music they bought legitimately.
For those who got burned, it's not like people weren't warned. If you bought the game, you got what you deserved.
>If am I correct about what he meant, then he is correct. Free Speech does not give you a right to publish in my magazine, or walk into my living room, to deliver your manifesto.
I reread what he wrote. Taken that way you're correct. All this spouting off of "intellectual property" over the years has warped the definition of property, I think. Apologies to GP if I was wrong.
>.. does not give you the right to use someone's property to express it.
Yes it does. It's called the fair use doctrine. Without which there would probably be no academic papers at all. There would be no movie or book reviews. There would be no informed criticism at all. There would be no parody.
How about not pirating software at all? Ever think of that?
*begin rant*
Get a nice package, like CATIA or CS4. Put your nastiness in the.iso files along with the "crack." Upload to a bunch of bittorrent trackers.
???
Profit.
What, you think people *scan* their pirated software? Ever get into a discussion with a warez weenie? "Oh, those are just false positives. I _know_ it's not infected"
There is no honor in the warez scene anymore. Oh, sure, private trackers, you say. But Joe User doesn't have access to private trackers. The concept of an md5 sum flies straight over Joe User's head and makes his eyes glaze over when you try to explain what it is. Joe User is the perfect mark for this kind of stuff.
If you run pirated software, you're likely part of the problem.
ACTA is anti free market. It's kleptocracy enshrined in law, if it get ratified.
All copyright law is essentially the antithesis of a free market (as are all monopoly grants), and strengthening copyright is even more so. ACTA is a collusion between countries and corporations that can't compete in a truly free market to eliminate the free market.
I said: "Indeed, Bill Gates said as much 12 years ago when he said that Microsoft will get the Chinese "sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
I totally trimmed out the sentence before it that said strong DRM/copy protection doesn't allow the market distortion that piracy allows.
If you don't like it, don't buy it. Copy protection goes through cycles. Companies think it's a great thing, start implementing it, and then customers stay away in droves. If anyone here remembers the copy protections of the 1980's involving induced bad sectors and other things, you'll remember that it pissed off customers and it died by the time the 1990's showed up, because they simply wouldn't buy the games.
Then the industry largely forgot about it and here we are with another round. Do the same thing - don't buy DRMed media and it will die the same death.
Don't break the DRM. Don't pirate, either. Pirating the game/software/media only skews the market in favor of the incumbents and locks out alternatives. Give your money and market share to the alternatives if you don't like DRM/copy protection. That part of the market will grow and favor companies that don't treat their customers like potential thieves. Indeed, Bill Gates said as much 12 years ago when he said that Microsoft will get the Chinese "sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
Strong copy protection and DRM in a free market always fails eventually, if you let it.
>Both groups made their decisions based on the same information.
No they didn't.
They based their decisions on information gathered from outside the experiment - their own life experiences, and applied those experiences to their arguments.
>No, the internet is not a baby sitter, but I am the one who showed them slashdot.
Let me clue you into something:
If it's in the New York Times and it's Internet related, it's no longer news. Associating the any internet phenomena with sexual assault is not helpful, because even in your own article you just posted, I will bet you that the *vast* majority of those sexual assaults are between people who know each other in real life and would have happened with or without the Internet.
You cannot "protect" your kids from the Internet. They will see stuff you don't approve of at friends' houses. They will see stuff you don't approve of while at the Library. They will see and do stuff in real life that you don't approve of. The only thing you can do is to teach common sense, and better yet, maybe even enroll them into a self-defense or martial arts course if Alaska is the "rape capital of the US."
Enrollment in a self defense course is useful. Getting all excited over perceived threats is not.
If you wrap your kids in a cocoon, you are doing nothing but harming them. The kids who grow up that way do not learn any coping skills whatsoever.
I have the sneaking suspicion that you are a troll instead of simply misinformed, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
"To Catch A Predator" is not informative. It's not reality. It's a skewed picture of reality, because sensationalism sells.
Date rape is more prevalent. Sexual abuse by those with "power" over kids is more prevalent, c.f., Boston Diocese and Irish Catholic Church sex scandals (and that's just the tip of the iceberg). Abuse by a relative is more likely than you think.
But the last bit never gets much play in the news, because it gets hidden away, because nobody listens to the kids it happens to.
But hey, what do I know. Go ask a social worker or child advocate. Stop watching so much Teevee. It's bad for your brain.
Slashdot Mirror
With regards to those penny squishing machines - the company that makes those is not violating the law even in the most strict sense of the word. They are essentially fancy hammers. We don't outlaw hammers.
A strict reading of the law would make the person putting the penny through the machine the actual defacer.
As far as I can tell, the Secret Service has better things to do than to go after millions of tourists.
--
BMO
Counterfeit?
No.
Maybe on a technicality
Not even close. It's a real coin. If you hollowed it out entirely, just leaving the outside nickel plate, It would still be worth its face value.
As far as I can tell, to make a hollow quarter, you take _two_ regular quarters of similar quality and you cut off the back of one and hollow out the center of another then mate the two.
You can get a carbide end mill of sufficient size to mill out the center, no problem, without resorting to using two coins. You can also abrasively grind a slot in the coin to do the same thing. As a matter of fact, since it's not steel you're working, a diamond coated end mill or a diamond wheel would make short work of clearing out the slot.
--
BMO
it'd be weird to get charged for failing to find a way to obtain some.
No, actually. There are plenty of ways of being convicted of a crime if you fail to suceed. They call it conspiracy.
"Vadim has hit the server 50 times this year. We should get a warrant to search his computer for illegal activity that wasn't stopped by the server. Also, we should get a warrant to arrest him for conspiracy to acquire child pornography"
Or...
"Vadim has been blocked by the server 50 times this year. Let's look at the logs of where he goes. Oh, this looks interesting. Let's see if it needs to be blocked or not. *visits site* Hmmm... illegal content. Call Judge Judy to cut a warrant to search his computer"
Honeypots already exist for this purpose. This is something that the East German Stasi only wish they had. This will be a nice centralized honeypot with all your internet activity neatly filed away, sorted and scored by "relative illegality" and when you hit a certain score, you're hosed.
It won't end with CP. As we've seen with Australia, a whole bunch of things are censored in the name of "Protecting the children". Scope creep happens. Scope creep in government (or bureaucracies in general) is a foregone conclusion.
It sounds like tinfoil, but if you told me 15 years ago countries would be doing national firewalls and censoring, I would have accused you of shiny haberdashery.
You know it's going to happen.
"The DIA say that the filter will not be used for law enforcement."
AHAHAHAHAH AHAHAHAHAH AHAHAHAHAH AHAHAHAHAH AHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAH H AHAHAHAHAH AHAHAHAHAH AHAAHAHAHAHAH HAHAHAH AHAHAHAHAH AHAHAHAHAHAH AHAHAHAHAH AHAHAHAH
*breathe* AHAHAHAHAH AHAHAHAHAH
HAHAAHAHAH *wipes eyes*
The entire justification for the filter is CP with a side order of bestiality.
And it won't be used for prosecution. That's rich.
*Snort*
--
BMO
This made me laugh. Thanks. I needed it. :-D
--
BMO
This message is a protest. I mistakenly posted it in the Aussie Linux thread, but I am reposting it in its proper place.
I am shitposting here because this is a shitpost thread, started with a shitpost summary of a non-story.
You are a plague upon Slashdot.
You're a cunt.
Eat a bowl of dicks.
Do your job.
Sincerely,
--
BMO
Mod Parent into the ground, please.
It belongs in the XKCD thread.
However, I don't take back what I said.
*grumble*
--
BMO
I am shitposting here because this is a shitpost thread, started with a shitpost summary of a non-story.
You are a plague upon Slashdot.
You're a cunt.
Eat a bowl of dicks.
Sincerely,
--
BMO
The point of the joke went so far over your head all you saw was a contrail.
--
BMO
I'd gladly DL this game on a torrent out of spite.
Don't.
Don't waste your time. Give the other publishers on the market your attention. If you pirate it, you don't let the rest of the market have its chance, and Ubisoft is "validated" in its opinion of software piracy.
--
BMO
This has been all over the net. If you didn't see it, you were living under a rock. All the gaming sites covered it. It was on reddit, digg, boing boing, 4chan, etc, ad nauseam.
Similarly with the shutdown of Microsoft's "Plays For Sure" servers.
It's just that people *choose* to ignore the warnings and say "Oh, it can't be that bad." Then they find out to their consternation that the people who told them (us geeks) were right.
No excuses. You got burned by DRM? Tough. Wake up.
--
BMO
you simply never get an AC3 at all
Big deal. Let them take their ball and go home.
I'm sure the world will continue to rotate upon its axis and revolve around the Sun.
I suggest to you that if Ubisoft goes bankrupt because of DRM, all the better.
--
BMO
It's as if nobody learned the first time about DRM when Microsoft shut off its MSN Music Store DRM servers, thus having people locked out of their own music they bought legitimately.
For those who got burned, it's not like people weren't warned. If you bought the game, you got what you deserved.
--
BMO
>If am I correct about what he meant, then he is correct. Free Speech does not give you a right to publish in my magazine, or walk into my living room, to deliver your manifesto.
I reread what he wrote. Taken that way you're correct. All this spouting off of "intellectual property" over the years has warped the definition of property, I think. Apologies to GP if I was wrong.
Guys, feel free to mod me down.
--
BMO
>.. does not give you the right to use someone's property to express it.
Yes it does. It's called the fair use doctrine. Without which there would probably be no academic papers at all. There would be no movie or book reviews. There would be no informed criticism at all. There would be no parody.
Bad troll. No cookie.
People who modded you up are tools.
--
BMO
How about not pirating software at all? Ever think of that?
*begin rant*
Get a nice package, like CATIA or CS4. Put your nastiness in the .iso files along with the "crack." Upload to a bunch of bittorrent trackers.
???
Profit.
What, you think people *scan* their pirated software? Ever get into a discussion with a warez weenie? "Oh, those are just false positives. I _know_ it's not infected"
There is no honor in the warez scene anymore. Oh, sure, private trackers, you say. But Joe User doesn't have access to private trackers. The concept of an md5 sum flies straight over Joe User's head and makes his eyes glaze over when you try to explain what it is. Joe User is the perfect mark for this kind of stuff.
If you run pirated software, you're likely part of the problem.
*end rant*
--
BMO
>it's far from a free market
ACTA is anti free market. It's kleptocracy enshrined in law, if it get ratified.
All copyright law is essentially the antithesis of a free market (as are all monopoly grants), and strengthening copyright is even more so. ACTA is a collusion between countries and corporations that can't compete in a truly free market to eliminate the free market.
--
BMO
I said: "Indeed, Bill Gates said as much 12 years ago when he said that Microsoft will get the Chinese "sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
I totally trimmed out the sentence before it that said strong DRM/copy protection doesn't allow the market distortion that piracy allows.
Hurr. But you get the idea.
Oh well.
--
BMO
If you don't like it, don't buy it. Copy protection goes through cycles. Companies think it's a great thing, start implementing it, and then customers stay away in droves. If anyone here remembers the copy protections of the 1980's involving induced bad sectors and other things, you'll remember that it pissed off customers and it died by the time the 1990's showed up, because they simply wouldn't buy the games.
Then the industry largely forgot about it and here we are with another round. Do the same thing - don't buy DRMed media and it will die the same death.
Don't break the DRM. Don't pirate, either. Pirating the game/software/media only skews the market in favor of the incumbents and locks out alternatives. Give your money and market share to the alternatives if you don't like DRM/copy protection. That part of the market will grow and favor companies that don't treat their customers like potential thieves. Indeed, Bill Gates said as much 12 years ago when he said that Microsoft will get the Chinese "sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
Strong copy protection and DRM in a free market always fails eventually, if you let it.
--
BMO
>Which is why religion and all other straight-faced magical thinking should be abolished
As if religion is the only place this occurs or the only reason why people think what they think.
I put it to you that some fringes of environmentalism are *exactly* like religions.
--
BMO
>Both groups made their decisions based on the same information.
No they didn't.
They based their decisions on information gathered from outside the experiment - their own life experiences, and applied those experiences to their arguments.
This is surprising?
--
BMO
Robert Enderle still gets playtime on NPR.
Maybe it's better to just be an asshole than to be an asshole and try to hide behind a nom de plume.
--
BMO
True. Once it hits the NYT, it's no longer innovative and news for nerds.
It's been a long time since Slashdot actually had stories ahead of the NYT.
--
BMO
>No, the internet is not a baby sitter, but I am the one who showed them slashdot.
Let me clue you into something:
If it's in the New York Times and it's Internet related, it's no longer news. Associating the any internet phenomena with sexual assault is not helpful, because even in your own article you just posted, I will bet you that the *vast* majority of those sexual assaults are between people who know each other in real life and would have happened with or without the Internet.
You cannot "protect" your kids from the Internet. They will see stuff you don't approve of at friends' houses. They will see stuff you don't approve of while at the Library. They will see and do stuff in real life that you don't approve of. The only thing you can do is to teach common sense, and better yet, maybe even enroll them into a self-defense or martial arts course if Alaska is the "rape capital of the US."
Enrollment in a self defense course is useful. Getting all excited over perceived threats is not.
If you wrap your kids in a cocoon, you are doing nothing but harming them. The kids who grow up that way do not learn any coping skills whatsoever.
--
BMO
I have the sneaking suspicion that you are a troll instead of simply misinformed, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
"To Catch A Predator" is not informative. It's not reality. It's a skewed picture of reality, because sensationalism sells.
Date rape is more prevalent.
Sexual abuse by those with "power" over kids is more prevalent, c.f., Boston Diocese and Irish Catholic Church sex scandals (and that's just the tip of the iceberg).
Abuse by a relative is more likely than you think.
But the last bit never gets much play in the news, because it gets hidden away, because nobody listens to the kids it happens to.
But hey, what do I know. Go ask a social worker or child advocate. Stop watching so much Teevee. It's bad for your brain.
--
BMO