Which means that is can work as whistleblower stomp:
Classical example against DRM is whistleblower leaking documents concerning illegal/unethical stuff happening inside company. DRMed document would be unreadable for outsiders, requiring DRM-breaking and if DRM system supports it, document could be remotely nuked.
This scenario is definitely not favorable for society. I for one would consider music/games DRM much better - their content, their terms, you do not really need to have access to it.
But once it starts to let people get away with illegal/unethical stuff...
Government agency is more powerful, and does not need to bother with suing you, it can be investigator-judge-jury-executioner mix.
If you have to pay fine for something (say, overdue taxes; errors in tax form), government agency does not have to bother with convicting you of your misconduct, they do simply send you "you are guilty of X, pay Y.". Count and suing happens only when you attempt to defend yourself and resist.
Private company has to sue you and has to win first. Govt agency does not have to. Unless you are to be jailed, they can issue fines and command your isp without bothering with courts.
Worked for traffic cops, would work for 'net traffic' cops. Default is guilty unless you defend yourself.
And the what will happen, indeed... Script kiddie will be found and prosecuted, politician unharmed (on contrary, getting easy sympathy/hero points for being insidiously attacked by some basement dweller that is pissed off because he can not get his dose of hentai. Word terrorist will be passed along and will not be off mark - point of terrorism is to inspire 'terror' to pressure opposition to change their politics. And this would fit perfectly, now wouldn't it.). Lets face it, for doing something as dumb as malicious and ultimately pointless, he would well deserve some rl implications. What about voting? Entering politics? Where is France Pirate Party when you need one? Where is population support against this law?
Most parliament implementations have politicians immune to prosecution so that they are harder to blackmail or persecution. It also helps with driving drunk and surely will help with someone tries to frame them of some crime because they do not like law that got passed. Basically, it will be serving its purpose.
That was private company suing people by using bended law.
We are talking government agency doing prosecution in France and government-supervised and enforced internet disconnection as punishment backed by law that was crafted only to support their actions. Only hope here is that it will be like all governments agencies - bureaucratic hell that does not manage to do anything, because otherwise, they can quite a lot of power in their hands.
What about amateur MMO / Hobbyist MMO. We have decent enough tools for anyone to pull basic WMMO with roguelike interface with as much ease as making tetris clone years ago. And even then, good mud libraries existed for decades... why do we not hear more about that? Why don't more people try that?
I, for one, find it much more fun to actually try to code one than actually play fullblown commercial MMO. Two hours a week of MMO development certainly beat two hours of grinding in WoW... you are not really getting anywhere in either, but you at least learn a thing or two if you code instead of grinding xp.
Yes, see... if you WANT to see video again or listen to song again, your option should not be to 'download it and freely listen it forever for free', it should be 'buy it or wait till we toss you another freebie'
It is attempt to create both artificial rarity and cash on the fact that people actually might be pressed to buy their products if they like it.
It is not about control - that is just tool. It is about ensuring consumer demand.
Since when did you need TPB for this kind of sharing. Ain't best place for torrent of sotware on its offical pages? Thou, http://www.legaltorrents.com/ really could use linux / opensource section.
Actually, there is a point with poisoning education.
Considering lifecycle of products, any 'education' tied specifically to commercial software product is only good for several years. After that it becomes obsolete and wasted. And regardless of huge spread, it is still one product focus.
Education which instead teaches about concepts and underlying structures will on the other had continue being useful much longer and applicable to wider array of situations.
Do you think is is worth it using school-time to do job training that will be obsolete pretty much right after they get a job?
GOTO is weapon of mass code destruction in hands of novice programmer, I'd say that is good enough reason to be vary of its use.
Alternate structures that 'hide' goto exist for reason: They increase readability of code and add semantics to what is happening. Not to just get rid of eeeevil goto, but get rid of assemblerey 'jump'.
And frankly, I have yet to see goto use that was not caused by ignorance about some constructs - i.e. break.
1) decent languages support labeled for/while cycles and apropriate "break label" constructs. It is not so different from using goto but has much better semantic meaning and thus allows neat optimalizations (with, say, paralelization in mind)
2) if you do this kind of thing, you are MUCH better off separating lookup code to method or function and simply using return statement once you find it without having to break from cycles per se. Cleaner, more structured.
transparency loss (great, there is db that can resolve links. Are browsers supposed to querry 'shortener like' urls and display proper ones?)
rot & reliability loss (tr.im claims they will be forever open and totally not sell domain to highest bidder and whatnot, but domain is still weakest link - it goes broken and tons of links get broken too)
pointless proxy (great, so it is now pointless 'open' proxy. yay).
Since when is it requirement to have bunch of distinct classes with unique functions?
After all, when content is created in mind with fact that class X will be required for encounter Y, you have problems because you force group composition. That is not ideal because unless you design to take advantage of each class, someone ends outside portal desperate for group and with groups which grudgingly take class that is useless for whole run except one specific part.
There is no need to do that. You can have as little variety and each class being damage oriented and just using different mechanics to achieve it. It can work enormously well, and untank'n'spankable fights are more fun and challenging anyway because they can not be tunel-visioned by players.
So there is just no point for pve making class too distinct in functionality.
Besides, tank'n'spank does not exactly translate well to pvp r/p/s scenario.
Anyhow, PvP where result is decided long before fight begins is going to be sucky and just gankfest because if match is decided before it starts thanks to r/p/s, there is no point in playing it. you can as well just give rock which is targeted by paper 'you lost, noob [ok to respawn]' message and be done with it.
Banks and businesses can be "certified" to allow encrypted communication or storage. After all, goal would not be to hurt businesses, but make communication of ordinary person transparent.
Eat your all grains now, you will have none to plant next year.
Sometimes, instant gratification is guaranteed to be harmful or be sub optimal. Kids from experiment are great example to what it leads eventually and demonstrate that as overall strategy, it is inferior. Because most of the time, investment will pay itself.
And its not investment strategy really. It is hunter-gatherer instinct to use resources right now because they might not be there tomorrow. Misapplied to modern world. Kids acted on instinct, not on rationale. And that same kinds probably have problems in school because there was something fun to do "right now" instead of studying for distant future, not because they decided that wasting afternoon in front of telly now is better than going to college.
Western world is moving in 1984 direction, China & co. is moving in opposite direction.
Year by year, westerner loose some rights and non-westerners gain some.
Sure, there is point in speeding things up for nations who are already on their way. But there is much bigger point that nations who are already there do every bit they can to stay that way because it is never won entirely. Freedom only thrives when people actively want to obtain and preserve it.
That is the point. Let people speak and do dumb stuff if they wish so. Just make sure their actions have consequences that mirror what they caused.
That is all we need. Smart person will not call for riot. I-have-nothing-to-loose would do so regardless of law anyway. And with your approach, it is unlikely that he would be taken in for inciting riots before they happen anyway.
Simply, it is dumb and leads to slippery slope because you can as well start taking in people who think about rioting...
It is possible that players will adapt similary: instead of reacting they will act prememptivelly. I had my share of playing on lowend machines with laggy graphics and in the end, it was matter of getting used to.
Say, you play car racing game, since you know track, you can start streering a bit before you would if you had instant control.
This gets, of couse, hard in multiplayer or in any other game where you actually need to react to enviroment. And is not really pleasant experinece as till now i always start with pushing effects/quality/resolution sliders to minimum - playing with blocky low res textures is preferable to having pretty slideshow. But over network, you do not get to do this kind of optimalization. Line simply has some base latency and nothing can magically improve it.
Slashdot Mirror
... inalienable rights of users to download content for free off the internet ...
All bet are on ...
+5 Insigtfull
-5 Troll
+5 Funny
?
Which means that is can work as whistleblower stomp:
Classical example against DRM is whistleblower leaking documents concerning illegal/unethical stuff happening inside company. DRMed document would be unreadable for outsiders, requiring DRM-breaking and if DRM system supports it, document could be remotely nuked.
This scenario is definitely not favorable for society. I for one would consider music/games DRM much better - their content, their terms, you do not really need to have access to it.
But once it starts to let people get away with illegal/unethical stuff ...
'real' university labs are nothing like 'timmy tries chemistry' playsets ... mind that
Government agency is more powerful, and does not need to bother with suing you, it can be investigator-judge-jury-executioner mix.
If you have to pay fine for something (say, overdue taxes; errors in tax form), government agency does not have to bother with convicting you of your misconduct, they do simply send you "you are guilty of X, pay Y.". Count and suing happens only when you attempt to defend yourself and resist.
Private company has to sue you and has to win first. Govt agency does not have to. Unless you are to be jailed, they can issue fines and command your isp without bothering with courts.
Worked for traffic cops, would work for 'net traffic' cops. Default is guilty unless you defend yourself.
Deep shit, man... deep shit...
And the what will happen, indeed... Script kiddie will be found and prosecuted, politician unharmed (on contrary, getting easy sympathy/hero points for being insidiously attacked by some basement dweller that is pissed off because he can not get his dose of hentai. Word terrorist will be passed along and will not be off mark - point of terrorism is to inspire 'terror' to pressure opposition to change their politics. And this would fit perfectly, now wouldn't it.). Lets face it, for doing something as dumb as malicious and ultimately pointless, he would well deserve some rl implications. What about voting? Entering politics? Where is France Pirate Party when you need one? Where is population support against this law?
Most parliament implementations have politicians immune to prosecution so that they are harder to blackmail or persecution. It also helps with driving drunk and surely will help with someone tries to frame them of some crime because they do not like law that got passed. Basically, it will be serving its purpose.
That was private company suing people by using bended law.
We are talking government agency doing prosecution in France and government-supervised and enforced internet disconnection as punishment backed by law that was crafted only to support their actions. Only hope here is that it will be like all governments agencies - bureaucratic hell that does not manage to do anything, because otherwise, they can quite a lot of power in their hands.
What about amateur MMO / Hobbyist MMO. We have decent enough tools for anyone to pull basic WMMO with roguelike interface with as much ease as making tetris clone years ago. And even then, good mud libraries existed for decades ... why do we not hear more about that? Why don't more people try that?
I, for one, find it much more fun to actually try to code one than actually play fullblown commercial MMO. Two hours a week of MMO development certainly beat two hours of grinding in WoW... you are not really getting anywhere in either, but you at least learn a thing or two if you code instead of grinding xp.
Shameless self plug: http://foh.zweistein.cz/
It deformed avatars. Basically, it looked like bug in avatar rendering code.
Anger is related to trying to 'fix' that bug for hours and/or to having several presentations fail because it looked seriously bugged.
Yes, see ... if you WANT to see video again or listen to song again, your option should not be to 'download it and freely listen it forever for free', it should be 'buy it or wait till we toss you another freebie'
It is attempt to create both artificial rarity and cash on the fact that people actually might be pressed to buy their products if they like it.
It is not about control - that is just tool. It is about ensuring consumer demand.
What about just crashing it to earth? That should put enough dust up to last centuries!
http://www.slackware.com/getslack/torrents.php
Since when did you need TPB for this kind of sharing. Ain't best place for torrent of sotware on its offical pages? Thou, http://www.legaltorrents.com/ really could use linux / opensource section.
Actually, there is a point with poisoning education.
Considering lifecycle of products, any 'education' tied specifically to commercial software product is only good for several years. After that it becomes obsolete and wasted. And regardless of huge spread, it is still one product focus.
Education which instead teaches about concepts and underlying structures will on the other had continue being useful much longer and applicable to wider array of situations.
Do you think is is worth it using school-time to do job training that will be obsolete pretty much right after they get a job?
GOTO is weapon of mass code destruction in hands of novice programmer, I'd say that is good enough reason to be vary of its use.
Alternate structures that 'hide' goto exist for reason: They increase readability of code and add semantics to what is happening. Not to just get rid of eeeevil goto, but get rid of assemblerey 'jump'.
And frankly, I have yet to see goto use that was not caused by ignorance about some constructs - i.e. break.
Ewww.
1) decent languages support labeled for/while cycles and apropriate "break label" constructs. It is not so different from using goto but has much better semantic meaning and thus allows neat optimalizations (with, say, paralelization in mind)
2) if you do this kind of thing, you are MUCH better off separating lookup code to method or function and simply using return statement once you find it without having to break from cycles per se. Cleaner, more structured.
So, what is YOUR real name and address?
So, they are going open. How is this going to solve issues that make shorteners evil ( http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/06/are-url-shorteners-a-necessary-evil-or-just-evil/ )?
transparency loss (great, there is db that can resolve links. Are browsers supposed to querry 'shortener like' urls and display proper ones?)
rot & reliability loss (tr.im claims they will be forever open and totally not sell domain to highest bidder and whatnot, but domain is still weakest link - it goes broken and tons of links get broken too)
pointless proxy (great, so it is now pointless 'open' proxy. yay).
Since when is it requirement to have bunch of distinct classes with unique functions?
After all, when content is created in mind with fact that class X will be required for encounter Y, you have problems because you force group composition. That is not ideal because unless you design to take advantage of each class, someone ends outside portal desperate for group and with groups which grudgingly take class that is useless for whole run except one specific part.
There is no need to do that. You can have as little variety and each class being damage oriented and just using different mechanics to achieve it. It can work enormously well, and untank'n'spankable fights are more fun and challenging anyway because they can not be tunel-visioned by players.
So there is just no point for pve making class too distinct in functionality.
Besides, tank'n'spank does not exactly translate well to pvp r/p/s scenario.
Anyhow, PvP where result is decided long before fight begins is going to be sucky and just gankfest because if match is decided before it starts thanks to r/p/s, there is no point in playing it. you can as well just give rock which is targeted by paper 'you lost, noob [ok to respawn]' message and be done with it.
Whatever happened to just taking ride to closest foundry and throwing disk to molten iron vat?
Banks and businesses can be "certified" to allow encrypted communication or storage. After all, goal would not be to hurt businesses, but make communication of ordinary person transparent.
What stops government from making even basic encryption illegal?
Eat your all grains now, you will have none to plant next year.
Sometimes, instant gratification is guaranteed to be harmful or be sub optimal. Kids from experiment are great example to what it leads eventually and demonstrate that as overall strategy, it is inferior. Because most of the time, investment will pay itself.
And its not investment strategy really. It is hunter-gatherer instinct to use resources right now because they might not be there tomorrow. Misapplied to modern world. Kids acted on instinct, not on rationale. And that same kinds probably have problems in school because there was something fun to do "right now" instead of studying for distant future, not because they decided that wasting afternoon in front of telly now is better than going to college.
Western world is moving in 1984 direction, China & co. is moving in opposite direction.
Year by year, westerner loose some rights and non-westerners gain some.
Sure, there is point in speeding things up for nations who are already on their way. But there is much bigger point that nations who are already there do every bit they can to stay that way because it is never won entirely. Freedom only thrives when people actively want to obtain and preserve it.
Consequences should be enough prevention.
That is the point. Let people speak and do dumb stuff if they wish so. Just make sure their actions have consequences that mirror what they caused.
That is all we need. Smart person will not call for riot. I-have-nothing-to-loose would do so regardless of law anyway. And with your approach, it is unlikely that he would be taken in for inciting riots before they happen anyway.
Simply, it is dumb and leads to slippery slope because you can as well start taking in people who think about rioting...
Because we actually have laws to deal with consequences when someone goes from talking to acting?
What you want is 'thoughtcrime'. Government wants it too. It's great crime all around for anyone in power.
It is possible that players will adapt similary: instead of reacting they will act prememptivelly. I had my share of playing on lowend machines with laggy graphics and in the end, it was matter of getting used to.
Say, you play car racing game, since you know track, you can start streering a bit before you would if you had instant control.
This gets, of couse, hard in multiplayer or in any other game where you actually need to react to enviroment. And is not really pleasant experinece as till now i always start with pushing effects/quality/resolution sliders to minimum - playing with blocky low res textures is preferable to having pretty slideshow. But over network, you do not get to do this kind of optimalization. Line simply has some base latency and nothing can magically improve it.