Just so we are clear, can you tell me where you are getting this information from?
Common sense. You appear to believe that either a person is somehow physically 'tapped' or that a tap on a single phone number that happens to be a cell phone instead of a landline qualifies as a roving wiretap. Either interpretation is just utterly bizarre and nonsensical.
If you really can't find confirmation of what a roving wiretap is with google and wikipedia then I doubt anything that I could show you would convince you either.
It just seems silly to think that the anti trust laws should somehow protect us from any dick move a company makes, especially when it comes down to a $250 dollar novelty item you bought to play games. Don't the courts have better things to do?
You seem to be arguing that size of the market determines if an anti-trust action should be prosecuted. Yes it does. But just because it isn't economical to bring the judicial system into play doesn't make nvidia's actions any less illegal. It just means they will probably get away with it. Just like millions of other crimes that go unprosecuted every year for lack of resources.
No, it's more like when the first SSL offload chip was introduced into the network card market, said company did not have a "monopoly" on secure communications.
But they did have a monopoly on SSL offload chips and if they decided to disable SSL acceleration if you ran DB2 instead of Oracle because they were a start-up funded with by Oracle's venture capital wing then the analogy would be appropriate.
If your computer doesn't have the power to run uber realistic physics models in real time without PhysX then you don't have any reason to belly ache about anti trust.
Ah, so only the people who don't need a card for phsyx acceleration and thus probably have not purchased one have the right to complain that nvidia is disabling such cards? The people who actually paid for it and got screwed over, they have no standing, eh? WTF are you smoking?
Just a few hours ago I wrote my wife to say I had gotten a stain on my shirt from lunch, and google was nice enough to put up a stain remover advertisement right after I fired off the email. It is a little bit off putting.
Target (no pun intended) does something similar with your credit card.
I used to chug antacids before switching to a healthier diet. I used to buy them at Target along with other stuff because the store is in a convenient location. Now that I no longer buy antacids, everytime I use my credit-card there, the register prints out a coupon for TUMS or some house-brand antacid. Technically I knew that stores track us by CC#, but this rather minor exploitation of that data is what it took to really drive it home for me. So now I pay cash at Target and try to do so at other stores too.
However, using cash may soon not be enough, Target's in the process of installing license-plate scanning systems in all of their store parking lots. It probably won't take much effort to start correlating license plates with purchasing habits in the same way that the 'anonymized' netflix data was correlated with imdb profiles or those MIT students that came up with a way to figure out if someone was gay just by cross-referencing their facebook friends.
You think "physics GPU acceleration" is a special market. There are tons of ways to do physics acceleration,
There is only one product that the end user can go out and purchase specifically to accelerate physics in games and now the vendor of that product has tied its operation to the exclusion of another vendor's unrelated products. Why is that so hard for you to grasp? All this baloney about how developers can do this and that has nothing to do with what the consumer can do.
As another poster has pointed out, would you be so complacent if microsoft were to make windows refuse to boot if it detected a linux partition on any of the hard disks? Oh, the user can just not use windows because its a gimmick and sucks ass, oh the developers of the applications on windows can just port to linux. Those are the equivalents of the boneheaded excuses you are coming up with for nvidia's action here.
PhysX itself is used by developers. The card being capable of running it is fairly irrelevant. "Do you want shiny extra visual-only effects? Yes/No". PhysX GPU acceleration is fairly useless, and even many Nvidia users turn it off to save framerate.
Except that the part that is being disabled is the part that consumers pay extra for and is in effect being held hostage here. The fact that you can't wrap your head around that simple fact means tl;dr to the rest of your screed is all that's needed.
(A) That's not a consumer product as is an nvidia card purchased to run PhysX. Thus a completely different market - one where the customers are developers, not end users. (B) And how much of the market do they have? Effectively Zero. MS was ruled a monopoly with roughly 90% of the OS market.
That ATI and other card makers have not yet provided an API that an open source and competing (#3 behind Havok) product finds desirable, is not Nvidia's fault either.
Not only is it not Nvidia's fault, it is to Nvidia's benefit, it reinforces their monopoly position. The fact that MacOS was not available on x86 was not MS's fault and they were still ruled to be a monopoly.
Hold on. Nvidia isn't suppressing other, competing, vendors from creating hardware accelerated physics.
Is this REALLY so hard to comprehend?
Nvidia has a monopoly on hardware accelerated physics. By killing that functionality - which the customer has bought and paid for - when another vendor's hardware is used for an unrelated function, they are leveraging their monopoly in one market to reduce competition in another market. Nobody who wants hardware accelerated physics is going to purchase an another vendor's video card if it means that their physics will no longer be accelerated as soon as they plug that video card into their system.
If you want hardware acceleration for your physics calculations, design your own, or write a letter to Intel or AMD or SIS. Hell, Microsoft's been showing a steady interest in hardware these past couple years, maybe they could get in on it.
Right. The market for off the shelf hardware solutions is really a completely level playing field because some ubergeek could possibly roll their own FPGA or maybe someday, someone else might do it for them. Just like people were free to run their own local telephone networks in order to make long distance calls using a long-distance carrier other than ATT.
A roving wiretap indeed follows the target, who moves from location to location.
A roving wiretap does not follow the target.
The term "roving wiretap" is shorthand for a set of individual taps on multiple phones in series in an attempt to tap whatever phone the target is using at that point in time without a warrant specifically naming which phones will be tapped.
Comparing that to the gps tracker on a single car is misguided, a more correct analogy would be the emplacement and removal of gps trackers on any vehicle the target uses as he boards and disembarks each vehicle.
Any general-purpose computer can do physics calculations in software.
You might as well be arguing that ATT did not have a monopoly because people could communicate with each other via ham radio, in person, with a telegraph, with semaphores, smoke signals and two cups with a string.
Havok is software....that runs on hardware, exactly like what PhysX is. You could port it to an NVidia GPU using CUDA, if you so pleased.
Keep on grasping at straws - Havok on gpu is not a supported configuration. There has not been one single sale of the product for that purpose. Its not the same market as PhysX. You might as well say that MS doesn't have an OS monopoly because WINE exists.
Yes. ATI. Various custom providers. General purpose CPUs. Supercomputers.
Name one. You think you are being clever by trying to expand the definition to include "all computers." Your just proving my point by admitting there is nothing else like PhysX. The closest thing to PhysX is Havok and that's software-only.
Which is nasty and unethical to be sure, but it's not illegal unless it can be legally shown that Nvidia is a monopoly. It's amazing to me how many slashbots don't understand this distinction.
Is there another hardware-accelerated physics computing system that we are not aware of?
That statement by itself does nothing of the kind. Only if they actually used his idea and story arc, it supports his point
Really? Are you trying to be a knob? The point is that it is circumstantial evidence in favor of c64_love's point, it sure as hell does not in any fashion DISPROVE it.
A similar concept isn't copyright violation, nor should it be.
Now you are deliberately being dense. My statement was that hollywood is extremely incestous, ideas get pitched, one studio hears another studio has a hot idea and they want their own version to compete with it. That's why I said, "extrapolating hollywood's action to other industries is a leap that I think is too big to make without some other supporting evidence."
Also, he wasn't trying to pitch Babylon 5, he was trying to pitch a Star Trek series, which morphed into B5 when Paramount turned his idea down.
You do realize that point actually supports c64_love's claim that Paramount ripped off Straczynksi with DS9, right?
On the other hand, I think c64_love's referencing hollywood as a set of examples is a poor one - that business is as incestous as hell - movies and shows with similar themes come out all the time, just a few off the top of my head:
Mall Cop / Observe & Report 2009 Mission to Mars / Red Planet 2000 Antz / A Bug's Life 1998 Deep Impact / Armageddon 1998 Dante's Peak / Volcano 1997 Wyatt Earp / Tombstone 1993 The Abyss / Leviathan 1989
So extrapolating hollywood's action to other industries is a leap that I think is too big to make without some other supporting evidence.
Whether this is in fact impossible under the current system, or whether his proposal would be unworkable, I could not say.
I believe that one must have "standing" in order to bring suit and without a real or at least expected infringement on oneself, one does not have standing and will be dismissed. I don't think anyone is going to try to claim, "I commit crimes, so sooner or later the cops might try to track me" and "I'm a law-abiding citizen, so sooner or later the cops might try to track me" isn't plausible enough, yet, in this society...
Well... given that roving wiretaps are so controversial in the Patriot Act, I'm not convinced of this. A lot of people seem to think otherwise!
You are joking, right?
The wiretaps are roving, not the phones being tapped.
The roving wiretaps are not affixed to any physical place at all. In no way, shape or form could one reasonably argue that the pay phone at the shopping mall and the phone in my house 50 miles away are the same place.
I used to be like you, chomping at the bit to make sure that people knew that *I* was technically right and the world was wrong.
Yeah, about 3 posts ago you were just like me with the tough guy bullshit and everything. Then you were shown to be unequivocally wrong and you decided to play the insult game instead. You are so chill man, totally mellow and like superior brah, hang loose mongoose!
Your display of self-delusion is entertaining though, I'll give you that.
Enjoy your shortened lifespan from your high blood pressure.
Did you have a traumatic childhood? You appear to have "i need to have control of the world around me" issues.
Lol. Utterly lost the argument on all points but feel the need to protect your id so you abandon any pretense at a rational response and instead post a pathetic attempt at an insult. Yeah, you really do fit the 'tough guy' stereotype, completely oblivious to the fact that you only dig yourself in deeper with such juvenile antics.
Somehow, Penn & Teller's conclusions are always libertarian. Maybe it's a coincidence.
Maybe they only pick topics to debunk that will actually work out that way? You know, selection bias.
On this issue, there is study on romantic comedies with the same conclusions as GP:
That study compared the result of watching a rom-com with watching a David Lynch movie and their conclusion was that the rom-coms fucked you up more than David Lynch? I totally call Bullshit! on that.
I'm not worried about losing a paranoid freak's single transaction, because it saves me money in the long run.
Oh yeah tough guy? Well prepare to lose your merchant account if you do. You aren't the only one to come up with such a brilliant plan and EVERY TIME the merchant ends up the loser that fight. Even Wal-Mart and Target have backed off such policies under threat of losing their merchant accounts because that's what happens when you violate your contract with the card processor.
PS, its funny how you use the term "merchant" - you sound like a someone echoing back a term he's not really familiar with and not quite getting the subtleties of the context correct. Sure, you got the dictionary definition right, but if all you cared about was the dictionary definition it would be an unlikely term to use use the first place.
The phrase "significant reason to suspect fraud" doesn't sound too specific.
Ok. Let me be very specific and quote from the visa merchant guidelines: merchants cannot refuse to complete a purchase transaction because a cardholder refuses to provide ID. ...
If you are suspicious about the transaction or feel you need additional information to insure the identity of the cardholder, make a Code 10 call.
If merchants are accountable for fraudulent charges, why exactly do you expect to not be checked for ID?
Tough shit.
If the merchant isn't willing to abide by the rules of their contract with the card processor, they should not have agreed to it in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Target's in the process of installing license-plate scanning systems in all of their store parking lots.
Do you have a source for this? If true, Target will lose a customer.
http://wcco.com/local/target.license.plate.2.676861.html
Just so we are clear, can you tell me where you are getting this information from?
Common sense. You appear to believe that either a person is somehow physically 'tapped' or that a tap on a single phone number that happens to be a cell phone instead of a landline qualifies as a roving wiretap. Either interpretation is just utterly bizarre and nonsensical.
If you really can't find confirmation of what a roving wiretap is with google and wikipedia then I doubt anything that I could show you would convince you either.
It just seems silly to think that the anti trust laws should somehow protect us from any dick move a company makes, especially when it comes down to a $250 dollar novelty item you bought to play games. Don't the courts have better things to do?
You seem to be arguing that size of the market determines if an anti-trust action should be prosecuted. Yes it does. But just because it isn't economical to bring the judicial system into play doesn't make nvidia's actions any less illegal. It just means they will probably get away with it. Just like millions of other crimes that go unprosecuted every year for lack of resources.
No, it's more like when the first SSL offload chip was introduced into the network card market, said company did not have a "monopoly" on secure communications.
But they did have a monopoly on SSL offload chips and if they decided to disable SSL acceleration if you ran DB2 instead of Oracle because they were a start-up funded with by Oracle's venture capital wing then the analogy would be appropriate.
If your computer doesn't have the power to run uber realistic physics models in real time without PhysX then you don't have any reason to belly ache about anti trust.
Ah, so only the people who don't need a card for phsyx acceleration and thus probably have not purchased one have the right to complain that nvidia is disabling such cards? The people who actually paid for it and got screwed over, they have no standing, eh? WTF are you smoking?
Just a few hours ago I wrote my wife to say I had gotten a stain on my shirt from lunch, and google was nice enough to put up a stain remover advertisement right after I fired off the email. It is a little bit off putting.
Target (no pun intended) does something similar with your credit card.
I used to chug antacids before switching to a healthier diet. I used to buy them at Target along with other stuff because the store is in a convenient location. Now that I no longer buy antacids, everytime I use my credit-card there, the register prints out a coupon for TUMS or some house-brand antacid. Technically I knew that stores track us by CC#, but this rather minor exploitation of that data is what it took to really drive it home for me. So now I pay cash at Target and try to do so at other stores too.
However, using cash may soon not be enough, Target's in the process of installing license-plate scanning systems in all of their store parking lots. It probably won't take much effort to start correlating license plates with purchasing habits in the same way that the 'anonymized' netflix data was correlated with imdb profiles or those MIT students that came up with a way to figure out if someone was gay just by cross-referencing their facebook friends.
You think "physics GPU acceleration" is a special market. There are tons of ways to do physics acceleration,
There is only one product that the end user can go out and purchase specifically to accelerate physics in games and now the vendor of that product has tied its operation to the exclusion of another vendor's unrelated products. Why is that so hard for you to grasp? All this baloney about how developers can do this and that has nothing to do with what the consumer can do.
As another poster has pointed out, would you be so complacent if microsoft were to make windows refuse to boot if it detected a linux partition on any of the hard disks? Oh, the user can just not use windows because its a gimmick and sucks ass, oh the developers of the applications on windows can just port to linux. Those are the equivalents of the boneheaded excuses you are coming up with for nvidia's action here.
PhysX itself is used by developers. The card being capable of running it is fairly irrelevant. "Do you want shiny extra visual-only effects? Yes/No". PhysX GPU acceleration is fairly useless, and even many Nvidia users turn it off to save framerate.
Except that the part that is being disabled is the part that consumers pay extra for and is in effect being held hostage here.
The fact that you can't wrap your head around that simple fact means tl;dr to the rest of your screed is all that's needed.
Bullet Physics
(A) That's not a consumer product as is an nvidia card purchased to run PhysX. Thus a completely different market - one where the customers are developers, not end users.
(B) And how much of the market do they have? Effectively Zero.
MS was ruled a monopoly with roughly 90% of the OS market.
That ATI and other card makers have not yet provided an API that an open source and competing (#3 behind Havok) product finds desirable, is not Nvidia's fault either.
Not only is it not Nvidia's fault, it is to Nvidia's benefit, it reinforces their monopoly position.
The fact that MacOS was not available on x86 was not MS's fault and they were still ruled to be a monopoly.
Hold on. Nvidia isn't suppressing other, competing, vendors from creating hardware accelerated physics.
Is this REALLY so hard to comprehend?
Nvidia has a monopoly on hardware accelerated physics. By killing that functionality - which the customer has bought and paid for - when another vendor's hardware is used for an unrelated function, they are leveraging their monopoly in one market to reduce competition in another market. Nobody who wants hardware accelerated physics is going to purchase an another vendor's video card if it means that their physics will no longer be accelerated as soon as they plug that video card into their system.
If you want hardware acceleration for your physics calculations, design your own, or write a letter to Intel or AMD or SIS. Hell, Microsoft's been showing a steady interest in hardware these past couple years, maybe they could get in on it.
Right. The market for off the shelf hardware solutions is really a completely level playing field because some ubergeek could possibly roll their own FPGA or maybe someday, someone else might do it for them. Just like people were free to run their own local telephone networks in order to make long distance calls using a long-distance carrier other than ATT.
A roving wiretap indeed follows the target, who moves from location to location.
A roving wiretap does not follow the target.
The term "roving wiretap" is shorthand for a set of individual taps on multiple phones in series in an attempt to tap whatever phone the target is using at that point in time without a warrant specifically naming which phones will be tapped.
Comparing that to the gps tracker on a single car is misguided, a more correct analogy would be the emplacement and removal of gps trackers on any vehicle the target uses as he boards and disembarks each vehicle.
Any general-purpose computer can do physics calculations in software.
You might as well be arguing that ATT did not have a monopoly because people could communicate with each other via ham radio, in person, with a telegraph, with semaphores, smoke signals and two cups with a string.
Havok is software....that runs on hardware, exactly like what PhysX is. You could port it to an NVidia GPU using CUDA, if you so pleased.
Keep on grasping at straws - Havok on gpu is not a supported configuration. There has not been one single sale of the product for that purpose. Its not the same market as PhysX. You might as well say that MS doesn't have an OS monopoly because WINE exists.
You have heard of this technology called the cellular network, right? It involves phones you can carry around with that don't used fixed lines.
You seem to be ignorant of the definition of a "roving wiretap."
I suggest you look it up before embarrassing yourself any further.
Its not illegal to have a monopoly of your own product.
Its not illegal to make pointless remarks either, doesn't mean it adds anything to the conversation.
And yes there are.
Yeah? Name one that competes directly or even indirectly with PhysX.
Good luck.
Yes. ATI. Various custom providers. General purpose CPUs. Supercomputers.
Name one. You think you are being clever by trying to expand the definition to include "all computers."
Your just proving my point by admitting there is nothing else like PhysX.
The closest thing to PhysX is Havok and that's software-only.
Which is nasty and unethical to be sure, but it's not illegal unless it can be legally shown that Nvidia is a monopoly. It's amazing to me how many slashbots don't understand this distinction.
Is there another hardware-accelerated physics computing system that we are not aware of?
That statement by itself does nothing of the kind. Only if they actually used his idea and story arc, it supports his point
Really? Are you trying to be a knob? The point is that it is circumstantial evidence in favor of c64_love's point, it sure as hell does not in any fashion DISPROVE it.
A similar concept isn't copyright violation, nor should it be.
Now you are deliberately being dense. My statement was that hollywood is extremely incestous, ideas get pitched, one studio hears another studio has a hot idea and they want their own version to compete with it. That's why I said, "extrapolating hollywood's action to other industries is a leap that I think is too big to make without some other supporting evidence."
Also, he wasn't trying to pitch Babylon 5, he was trying to pitch a Star Trek series, which morphed into B5 when Paramount turned his idea down.
You do realize that point actually supports c64_love's claim that Paramount ripped off Straczynksi with DS9, right?
On the other hand, I think c64_love's referencing hollywood as a set of examples is a poor one - that business is as incestous as hell - movies and shows with similar themes come out all the time, just a few off the top of my head:
Mall Cop / Observe & Report 2009
Mission to Mars / Red Planet 2000
Antz / A Bug's Life 1998
Deep Impact / Armageddon 1998
Dante's Peak / Volcano 1997
Wyatt Earp / Tombstone 1993
The Abyss / Leviathan 1989
So extrapolating hollywood's action to other industries is a leap that I think is too big to make without some other supporting evidence.
Whether this is in fact impossible under the current system, or whether his proposal would be unworkable, I could not say.
I believe that one must have "standing" in order to bring suit and without a real or at least expected infringement on oneself, one does not have standing and will be dismissed. I don't think anyone is going to try to claim, "I commit crimes, so sooner or later the cops might try to track me" and "I'm a law-abiding citizen, so sooner or later the cops might try to track me" isn't plausible enough, yet, in this society...
Well... given that roving wiretaps are so controversial in the Patriot Act, I'm not convinced of this. A lot of people seem to think otherwise!
You are joking, right?
The wiretaps are roving, not the phones being tapped.
The roving wiretaps are not affixed to any physical place at all. In no way, shape or form could one reasonably argue that the pay phone at the shopping mall and the phone in my house 50 miles away are the same place.
I used to be like you, chomping at the bit to make sure that people knew that *I* was technically right and the world was wrong.
Yeah, about 3 posts ago you were just like me with the tough guy bullshit and everything.
Then you were shown to be unequivocally wrong and you decided to play the insult game instead.
You are so chill man, totally mellow and like superior brah, hang loose mongoose!
Your display of self-delusion is entertaining though, I'll give you that.
Enjoy your shortened lifespan from your high blood pressure.
Did you have a traumatic childhood? You appear to have "i need to have control of the world around me" issues.
Lol. Utterly lost the argument on all points but feel the need to protect your id so you abandon any pretense at a rational response and instead post a pathetic attempt at an insult. Yeah, you really do fit the 'tough guy' stereotype, completely oblivious to the fact that you only dig yourself in deeper with such juvenile antics.
Somehow, Penn & Teller's conclusions are always libertarian. Maybe it's a coincidence.
Maybe they only pick topics to debunk that will actually work out that way? You know, selection bias.
On this issue, there is study on romantic comedies with the same conclusions as GP:
That study compared the result of watching a rom-com with watching a David Lynch movie and their conclusion was that the rom-coms fucked you up more than David Lynch? I totally call Bullshit! on that.
I'm not worried about losing a paranoid freak's single transaction, because it saves me money in the long run.
Oh yeah tough guy? Well prepare to lose your merchant account if you do.
You aren't the only one to come up with such a brilliant plan and EVERY TIME the merchant ends up the loser that fight.
Even Wal-Mart and Target have backed off such policies under threat of losing their merchant accounts because that's what happens when you violate your contract with the card processor.
PS, its funny how you use the term "merchant" - you sound like a someone echoing back a term he's not really familiar with and not quite getting the subtleties of the context correct. Sure, you got the dictionary definition right, but if all you cared about was the dictionary definition it would be an unlikely term to use use the first place.
The phrase "significant reason to suspect fraud" doesn't sound too specific.
Ok. Let me be very specific and quote from the visa merchant guidelines:
merchants cannot refuse to complete a purchase transaction because a cardholder refuses to provide ID.
...
If you are suspicious about the transaction or feel you need additional information to insure the identity of the cardholder, make a Code 10 call.
If merchants are accountable for fraudulent charges, why exactly do you expect to not be checked for ID?
Tough shit. If the merchant isn't willing to abide by the rules of their contract with the card processor, they should not have agreed to it in the first place.