Hi, sorry I was joking - I was just pastiching all the standard arguments you see here about how copyright infringement isn't piracy and it isn't stealing and in any case all pirates are just 'trying before they buy'
You're not too far off the mark here. Most MMO game servers are very restricted, and deliberately so, in order to force players to pay over and over again for a subscription. Third parties have attempted to write their own servers. This would allow more freedom, creativity in world design/rules/etc., and would reduce or even eliminate the need for game companies to run their own servers.
It would also let people who hadn't paid play, if these third party servers didn't check for genuine copies
But the game companies don't like that, and CHOOSE to force people to use their (often relatively limited) servers instead, eventually phasing them out, and the game's existence along with it.
Actually if they are using the company's servers without paying then they are taking a limited resource.
From what I've read the pirate copies are effectively DDOSing the servers so the people who paid can't play, and the company had to spend time and money improving their server infrastructure to let paying customers play.
Funnily enough back in the 80's in the UK, before hacking into servers was illegal the hackers were prosecuted for theft of electricity because of the additional load they put on servers. Or trespass, or later on fraud.
The law surrounding hacking is vague. Two men were arrested in March last year, in connection with the long-running problems at Prestel involving hackers, and charged with forgery.
The use of the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act of 1981 against the pair came as a shock to the hacking community, one of whom commented at the time: "Theft of electricity would have been a more appropriate charge. In the USA, hackers have been charged with theft of computer time and trespass, but nothing like this." The case has yet to come to trial.
Since no ruling on hacking has yet reached the statute book, it is hard for hackers to know where they stand. What are they allowed to do? We asked Scotland Yard.
Spokesman Nick Jordan says: "We have a problem with this sort of query as we have one man who is an expert in hacking and he has a list of queries the length of his arm. He is a detective inspector in the fraud squad and all queries go to him."
Maggie Adams, at Scotland Yard, comments: "There is no specific legislation to cover hacking, so it's very much a grey area. The view of the police is that they consider hacking a crime rather than a prank, and if anyone was found to be indulging in it we would charge them with a criminal offence.
"People would be charged under existing legislation, like forgery or false accounting. We consider hacking very much a crime, as do many other people. We discourage it altogether."
Eventually the Computer Misuse Act was passed to make unauthorized use of a server explicitly criminal
Now now, let's not jump to conclusions. I'm sure all of those 100000 pirates just want to test the game before buying. All of them will either stop playing, or they'll buy a legal copy.
What, you think they won't? Ooh, but that would be... stealing? They'd never!
It's not stealing - stealing is taking something away from someone. The software house still have a copy of the game on their servers. And it's not piracy, that would be attacking ships on the high seas. Apart from that your post is accurate. Ever one of these non stealing pirates will buy the game eventually because they are all opposed to stealing and piracy. Oh wait it's neither, whatever it is they are opposed to it and that's why they're only doing for a short time, say a few years until they pay up or stop playing.
These sorts of conversations scare me frankly. If public transport is allowed to compete with private transport, private transport will win for exactly the reasons you describe. People that think that public transport is better for some reason know this, and you have to wonder if rather than making it truly better they will instead try to sabotage private transport by taxes or by regulation.
>>> [Fortunately,] this will very likely drive a large chunk of people away from using it, and will make a lot of users think that MS is just being a dick.
Fixed.;-)
And I'm not just being anti-MS here. The computer industry was a lot better when we had multiple manufacturers (Atari, TI, Commodore, Apple, IBM) and multiple OSes (GEOS, TOS, Workbench, MS-DOS, MacOS) because it promoted innovation. Since Microsoft became dominant circa 1998, innovation has slowed to a crawl, and I think the weakening of Microsoft so people can explore alternative companies would be a good thing ("fortunate").
Actually right now it's possible to get Dells with Linux or Freedos. And it's Apple stopping Dell selling MacOS systems, not Microsoft. Plus there are lots of hardware vendors, most of them selling more than one OS. Look at the netbook market - Vista won't run on them so the hardware vendors used Linux until Microsoft offered to keep XP alive and discount the license cost. That they were forced to do that shows me they are not a monopoly.
Plus of course most computers sold in the world are based on neither Windows nor x86. There are actually more Arm processors sold than x86 and very few of them are running any Microsoft software.
Of course in the desktop world Microsoft is very dominant, but it's not a monopoly like it was ten years ago where manufacturers weren't allowed to bundle alternative OSs.
The whole meme about Microsoft being a monopoly that limits progress is bogus.
You know what I don't get. The way so many women in porn look pissed off. In the above example I'd say subjectively she'd be much more attractive if she was smiling. Imagine if she was in a bar or something, if she was smiling you'd strike up a conversation. If she looked pissed off you'd pass.
I think it's a cultural difference between the two sites. People here take moderation much more seriously than they do at reddit for some reason. If you like a comment there you can just mod it up yourself too.
I like the idea of humans making contact with aliens and both ships having stupid names due to internet tricksters. That would be a sign that things are going to turn out just fine.
Of course the the alien ship is called something like The Dear Leader, then we've probably got a problem on our hands. Either that or those green bastards on the alien equivalent of 4chan have a sick sense of humour.
When PCs do this it's because they are part of a botnet. When Macs do it it's because they have a mischievous sense of humour and are ironically subverting the stereotype of 'machines behaving badly'.
I worked on an embedded system which did this. It run the CPU at a high frequency initially and measured how much time was spent on the idle task. More time idle meant dropping the clock frequency. Less time idle meant increasing it. Most embedded ARMs have a few PLLs and you can switch between them to get different frequencies. Actually most of them let you power down the CPU almost completely in the idle task too, e.g. a sleep instruction. You can put the RAM into self refresh too.
Actually all desktop OSs support Intel SpeedStep and AMD PowerNow too which can switch processor speed and even disable parts of the cache if the system is not too busy. In the idle task itself you can put most things to sleep with ACPI sleep methods. And Windows boosts the priority of the foreground applicaton.
I don't see the need for a UI button quite frankly, it seems like the OS can switch between high power/ high performance mode and low power/low performance mode automagically.
Fox would though. Where's the fun in cancelling a show if you can't use your IP rights to stop the fans mentioning it/naming things after ships in it later.
Windows supports the USB Hid class, and that allows pretty much anything in terms of mice and keyboards. So n buttons, scrolling, zooming etc is all supported by the drivers in the OS in mice. Most keyboard functions are handled pretty well too - there are dedicated scancodes for multimedia functions, sleep and so on. All this stuff works with the Microsoft drivers in the OS.
Of course, if you want to differentiate your product, you're supposed to invent some functionality which is unique, and then you probably need at least a user mode application to glue things together - basically it needs to listen for events from the device and translate them into API calls.
And companies tend to be obsessed with branding and insist on developing in the latest.Net so you tend to end up with a 'driver' CD that installs a fairly large application. Even worse it will often use hooks and inject a DLL into every process, layer drivers above or below hidclass.sys and so on. Now in my experience big vendors get this more or less right eventually - there's overhead to be sure, but it is stable. Small manufaturers get this completely wrong.
But if all you want is a scroll mouse or a multimedia keyboard, don't install the 'value added' software and all the unorginal features will work.
Teenage defectors spend two months to two years at nearby Hangyoreh Middle-High School, a remedial boarding school the government built three years ago to help the increasing number of newly arrived youngsters who are unfit for public schools. Many have been out of school for years and have difficulty with basic reading and math.
"All I learned in school in North Korea was that Kim Jong Il was the best leader and that North Korea was the best country," said Lee, who is in her final year at Hangyoreh and hopes to become an English teacher.
"Education in North Korea is useless for life in this country," said the school's principal, Gwak Jong-moon. "When you are too hungry, you don't go to learn and teachers don't go to teach. Many children have been hiding in China for years with no access to schools."
I think the problem with the literacy figures is that a country like North Korea can always cheat by only showing the inspectors the schools for the elite and claiming they are typical. Actually they are far from typical - NK had a famine relatively recently and still has chronic shortages of everything. It's highly unlikely that the non elite education system is particularly high performance.
South Korea isn't like that - rich capitalist asian countries (SK, Japan and Taiwan) have an incredibly high pressure education system and most children seem to go along with it. Thus when North Koreans arrive in South Korea they are far behind as the WaPo article describes.
Slashdot Mirror
That depends on who "we" is.
The user can choose which version, so they will presumably pick the most favourable one. The authors of the code can't.
So it would be possible for a future version of the GPL to force the authors to do something that they don't want to do.
That reminds of a joke
"Windows ME? Windows is now a verb?"
It's about market segmentation.
Let's say a normal Windows license costs $50. XP costs $15 and they want to get rid of it. Hence Windows 7 Starter Edition.
The idea is that most netbook customers won't mind the 3 app limit. Or maybe they will and they will upgrade.
5.4 yottawatts = 1 wholelottawatts.
Hi, sorry I was joking - I was just pastiching all the standard arguments you see here about how copyright infringement isn't piracy and it isn't stealing and in any case all pirates are just 'trying before they buy'
I actually agree with you.
the reason they went on to use only capitals? apparently you can't write the name of the christian deity in all lowercase.
Yes you can. It's not like he's going to strike you down with lighting bolts or something.
god
See, nothing ha
You're not too far off the mark here. Most MMO game servers are very restricted, and deliberately so, in order to force players to pay over and over again for a subscription. Third parties have attempted to write their own servers. This would allow more freedom, creativity in world design/rules/etc., and would reduce or even eliminate the need for game companies to run their own servers.
It would also let people who hadn't paid play, if these third party servers didn't check for genuine copies
But the game companies don't like that, and CHOOSE to force people to use their (often relatively limited) servers instead, eventually phasing them out, and the game's existence along with it.
Imagine that!
Actually if they are using the company's servers without paying then they are taking a limited resource.
From what I've read the pirate copies are effectively DDOSing the servers so the people who paid can't play, and the company had to spend time and money improving their server infrastructure to let paying customers play.
Funnily enough back in the 80's in the UK, before hacking into servers was illegal the hackers were prosecuted for theft of electricity because of the additional load they put on servers. Or trespass, or later on fraud.
http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/048/hacker.htm
The law surrounding hacking is vague. Two men were arrested in March last year, in connection with the long-running problems at Prestel involving hackers, and charged with forgery.
The use of the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act of 1981 against the pair came as a shock to the hacking community, one of whom commented at the time: "Theft of electricity would have been a more appropriate charge. In the USA, hackers have been charged with theft of computer time and trespass, but nothing like this." The case has yet to come to trial.
Since no ruling on hacking has yet reached the statute book, it is hard for hackers to know where they stand. What are they allowed to do? We asked Scotland Yard.
Spokesman Nick Jordan says: "We have a problem with this sort of query as we have one man who is an expert in hacking and he has a list of queries the length of his arm. He is a detective inspector in the fraud squad and all queries go to him."
Maggie Adams, at Scotland Yard, comments: "There is no specific legislation to cover hacking, so it's very much a grey area. The view of the police is that they consider hacking a crime rather than a prank, and if anyone was found to be indulging in it we would charge them with a criminal offence.
"People would be charged under existing legislation, like forgery or false accounting. We consider hacking very much a crime, as do many other people. We discourage it altogether."
Eventually the Computer Misuse Act was passed to make unauthorized use of a server explicitly criminal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Misuse_Act
Now now, let's not jump to conclusions. I'm sure all of those 100000 pirates just want to test the game before buying. All of them will either stop playing, or they'll buy a legal copy.
What, you think they won't? Ooh, but that would be... stealing? They'd never!
It's not stealing - stealing is taking something away from someone. The software house still have a copy of the game on their servers. And it's not piracy, that would be attacking ships on the high seas. Apart from that your post is accurate. Ever one of these non stealing pirates will buy the game eventually because they are all opposed to stealing and piracy. Oh wait it's neither, whatever it is they are opposed to it and that's why they're only doing for a short time, say a few years until they pay up or stop playing.
These sorts of conversations scare me frankly. If public transport is allowed to compete with private transport, private transport will win for exactly the reasons you describe. People that think that public transport is better for some reason know this, and you have to wonder if rather than making it truly better they will instead try to sabotage private transport by taxes or by regulation.
Even now evil green scientists are working on massive, six legged, walking weigh stations.
>>> [Fortunately,] this will very likely drive a large chunk of people away from using it, and will make a lot of users think that MS is just being a dick.
Fixed. ;-)
And I'm not just being anti-MS here. The computer industry was a lot better when we had multiple manufacturers (Atari, TI, Commodore, Apple, IBM) and multiple OSes (GEOS, TOS, Workbench, MS-DOS, MacOS) because it promoted innovation. Since Microsoft became dominant circa 1998, innovation has slowed to a crawl, and I think the weakening of Microsoft so people can explore alternative companies would be a good thing ("fortunate").
Actually right now it's possible to get Dells with Linux or Freedos. And it's Apple stopping Dell selling MacOS systems, not Microsoft. Plus there are lots of hardware vendors, most of them selling more than one OS. Look at the netbook market - Vista won't run on them so the hardware vendors used Linux until Microsoft offered to keep XP alive and discount the license cost. That they were forced to do that shows me they are not a monopoly.
Plus of course most computers sold in the world are based on neither Windows nor x86. There are actually more Arm processors sold than x86 and very few of them are running any Microsoft software.
Of course in the desktop world Microsoft is very dominant, but it's not a monopoly like it was ten years ago where manufacturers weren't allowed to bundle alternative OSs.
The whole meme about Microsoft being a monopoly that limits progress is bogus.
You know what I don't get. The way so many women in porn look pissed off. In the above example I'd say subjectively she'd be much more attractive if she was smiling. Imagine if she was in a bar or something, if she was smiling you'd strike up a conversation. If she looked pissed off you'd pass.
I think it's a cultural difference between the two sites. People here take moderation much more seriously than they do at reddit for some reason. If you like a comment there you can just mod it up yourself too.
If you install the lordpwnalot toolbar it blocks other toolbars, and ads and spam. Also your computer has a virus and it will fix that.
I like the idea of humans making contact with aliens and both ships having stupid names due to internet tricksters. That would be a sign that things are going to turn out just fine.
Of course the the alien ship is called something like The Dear Leader, then we've probably got a problem on our hands. Either that or those green bastards on the alien equivalent of 4chan have a sick sense of humour.
When PCs do this it's because they are part of a botnet. When Macs do it it's because they have a mischievous sense of humour and are ironically subverting the stereotype of 'machines behaving badly'.
It looks ok to me in Opera apart from an ugly gap at the top of the page.
I worked on an embedded system which did this. It run the CPU at a high frequency initially and measured how much time was spent on the idle task. More time idle meant dropping the clock frequency. Less time idle meant increasing it. Most embedded ARMs have a few PLLs and you can switch between them to get different frequencies. Actually most of them let you power down the CPU almost completely in the idle task too, e.g. a sleep instruction. You can put the RAM into self refresh too.
Actually all desktop OSs support Intel SpeedStep and AMD PowerNow too which can switch processor speed and even disable parts of the cache if the system is not too busy. In the idle task itself you can put most things to sleep with ACPI sleep methods. And Windows boosts the priority of the foreground applicaton.
I don't see the need for a UI button quite frankly, it seems like the OS can switch between high power/ high performance mode and low power/low performance mode automagically.
Fox would though. Where's the fun in cancelling a show if you can't use your IP rights to stop the fans mentioning it/naming things after ships in it later.
Windows supports the USB Hid class, and that allows pretty much anything in terms of mice and keyboards. So n buttons, scrolling, zooming etc is all supported by the drivers in the OS in mice. Most keyboard functions are handled pretty well too - there are dedicated scancodes for multimedia functions, sleep and so on. All this stuff works with the Microsoft drivers in the OS.
Of course, if you want to differentiate your product, you're supposed to invent some functionality which is unique, and then you probably need at least a user mode application to glue things together - basically it needs to listen for events from the device and translate them into API calls.
And companies tend to be obsessed with branding and insist on developing in the latest .Net so you tend to end up with a 'driver' CD that installs a fairly large application. Even worse it will often use hooks and inject a DLL into every process, layer drivers above or below hidclass.sys and so on. Now in my experience big vendors get this more or less right eventually - there's overhead to be sure, but it is stable. Small manufaturers get this completely wrong.
But if all you want is a scroll mouse or a multimedia keyboard, don't install the 'value added' software and all the unorginal features will work.
Sure they say that now. Once the company has financial problems, I'm sure they'll change their tune when they're hunting for a bailout.
Maybe they plan to make it Too Dangerous To Fail.
That's probably not true. This WaPo article describes North Korean defectors struggling with reading and math.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/11/AR2009041100766_pf.html
Teenage defectors spend two months to two years at nearby Hangyoreh Middle-High School, a remedial boarding school the government built three years ago to help the increasing number of newly arrived youngsters who are unfit for public schools. Many have been out of school for years and have difficulty with basic reading and math.
"All I learned in school in North Korea was that Kim Jong Il was the best leader and that North Korea was the best country," said Lee, who is in her final year at Hangyoreh and hopes to become an English teacher.
"Education in North Korea is useless for life in this country," said the school's principal, Gwak Jong-moon. "When you are too hungry, you don't go to learn and teachers don't go to teach. Many children have been hiding in China for years with no access to schools."
I think the problem with the literacy figures is that a country like North Korea can always cheat by only showing the inspectors the schools for the elite and claiming they are typical. Actually they are far from typical - NK had a famine relatively recently and still has chronic shortages of everything. It's highly unlikely that the non elite education system is particularly high performance.
South Korea isn't like that - rich capitalist asian countries (SK, Japan and Taiwan) have an incredibly high pressure education system and most children seem to go along with it. Thus when North Koreans arrive in South Korea they are far behind as the WaPo article describes.
Frosted Soju would have fit better. Not that I'm criticizing it as a drink.
Ok, I am criticizing it as a drink. Basically imagine vodka cut 50% with water, and you know what soju tastes like.