"Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these." Ovid (Roman poet, c. 43 BC - 17 AD). If you think the American legal system didn't miscarry justice 100 and 200 years ago, you haven't read history; and if you think there is no hope for justice today, you haven't read the newspaper. The system was never perfect, and to claim it's worse (or better) than it used to be would require a lot of evidence and analysis.
Dear Bennett,
Putting a bunch of arbitrary conditions that make it difficult and time-consuming to argue against you does not make you right. To construe a lack of satisfactory response to your random ultimatum as vindication of your positions would be even more arrogant than the ultimatum itself.
Thanks,
Sir Garlon
I think literally "taking up arms" is premature and would be counter-productive, but parent is right. I'm writing to my Congressional representatives tonight to let them know that I vote and my next vote will be heavily influenced by their response to this revelation. I think I'll also write to my national political party office (I'm registered with a major party) to tell them the same thing. It's also a good time to consider joining/contributing to an organization that advocates for privacy and civil rights.
FYI, you can set offline mode as the default. I did, and that's how I found out Steam would only let you keep playing your games for about three months that way. (Maybe that's changed since I last signed in six months ago.)
I buy DRM-encumbered games from time to time myself, which is how I know about Steam's dark side, but it always makes me feel dirty and I am trying to quit.:-)
I don't think it's immoral to crack DRM so you can use content you bought. Morally, that is no worse than rolling past a stop sign at an empty intersection. I was just saying that the penalty for cracking your own game is a lot worse than the penalty for rolling through a stop sign, so for me the risk isn't worth it.
WRT GOG on Linux, they don't explicitly support Linux but a lot of the games run in DOSBox, and DOSBox definitely exists in Linux. I would think you should be able to run a GOG game on Linux if you set up your own DOSBox.conf. Have not tried that myself but I have run DOS games I bought back in the 90s on DOSBox in Linux. It takes a little fiddling with the config file but I found it doable. Hope that help.
PC games are cheaper than console games in another important way: you don't have to buy a separate device to play them on.
That's true for Steam just as it is for indie games and the other DRM-free titles I prefer.
With respect to cracking the game if Steam disappears, that's a good point, but illegal in the US due to a stupid law (the DMCA). To me the infinitesimal risk of prison time for playing a game I bought isn't worth it -- if Steam folds, I'll just quit playing those games. My approach is to buy DRM-free games 90% of the time. To each his own.
The difference between Steam and XBox One is only a matter of degree. Steam doesn't allow you to buy or sell used games. Steam needs to phone home every three months or so instead of every day, but it still locks you out after that.
So basically, if you want to play games from the major publishers, your only choice is who to bend over for. Steam uses Vaseline, Microsoft doesn't. Perhaps Sony will choose not to bugger customers at all -- I'm not really keeping up with the PS4 rumors.
You should be a lot more afraid of the government than of terrorists. Your probability of being affected by a terrorist attack is approximately zero (odds of being killed by terrorists are about one in 20 million for Americans). Your probability of being affected by your government is approximately one.
It sounds more like these settlements are paying off for the defendants. Papa John's pulled off an especially neat trick there, getting the court to accept pizza the customers don't want in lieu of statutory damages.
If the 115 employees all work the same shift and are uniformly distributed, then each would have 2086 square feet of floor space. That's a minimum spacing of 45.7 feet (13.9 meters) between employees!
Correction: 45.7 feet between the _center of mass_ of each employee. So if we further assume the employees are spherical...
Of those 10+ you claim, only five are supported by citations. The other five, I consider works of fiction. Of the five cases supported by citations, three resulted in the passengers overpowering the hijacker and the other two resulted in the hijacker being arrested on the ground. So yes, there have been two documented hijackings since 9/11 where the hijackers took control of the plane: in Mauritania and Cyrpus.
Based on the headline, I mistook this story for something that might interest me.
From TFA, it's clear that the design overhaul refers to design in the sense of "graphic design," i.e., superficial appearance, not design in the sense of software architecture. So the headline would be better phrased, "Mozilla is planning changes in how the browser looks."
I'm not a lawyer or anything, but I'm pretty sure orbit does count as outside the boundaries of the United States and therefore "export." The Eisenhower administration insisted that satellites overflying and spying on the Soviet Union were not violating Soviet sovereign territory, and that's now a precedent that's been in place for > 50 years. I infer that space is similar to international waters, from a legal point of view.
All that you say is true. If I were to venture a guess, I would say a lot of the money today goes into graphics. Gamers' expectations of visual quality keep going up: a game that was cutting-edge in the late 1990s would be ridiculed and rejected today. If you read the credits to a game like Skyrim or Mass Effect 3, you'll see a very long list of modelers and animators and so on. A staff that big can't be cheap.
It means someone else got "the scoop," the big story. It's bad grammar (turning a verb into a noun and back into a verb), which may explain some of the confusion. Scientists or news reporters are said to get scooped when they've been working on a project/story and then someone else publishes the same thing before they do and steals all the attention.
The idea that scientists are under pressure to be first depresses me. Proper science requires a lot of thought and attention to detail, and to rush the process threatens its integrity.
When Verizon advertises in my state, they advertise unlimited *residential* service. Then the ToS go on to explain what residential service is. It so happens I am a Verizon customer (not a fanboy, though doubtless I'll be accused as such) so I've read those ToS. To put it bluntly, I think their definition of "residential" service is extraordinarily narrow, and boils down to incoming HTTP and POP/IMAP only, plus a small volume of outgoing SMTP. I half expect to get a phone call from them some day myself for stepping out of bounds. Running a rack of VPN servers is clearly outside their definition.
Where I think Verizon is being misleading is not with the word "unlimited," but when they use their definition of "residential" and still call it "Internet." Internet to me means any and all protocols I want, bidirectionally. According to Verizon, that's "business" service.
I think "WTF are you doing consuming 77 terabits a month" is a legitimate question. I read TFA yesterday and I realized that Verizon probably can't afford to have a whole lot of users chewing up that kind of bandwidth. Asking him to switch to business service does not out of line to me, considering that he's running these servers for business use.
Note, also, they handled this with a short phone call rather than a nasty-gram or just cutting off his service without warning. That's more courtesy than I'd expect from a big ISP, given some of the horror stories I've heard.
Well, I'm one of the trolls -- I've complained about Steam more than once. Let's just say I prefer the model where I have a physical medium I can lend to my friend or resell. If Microsoft is abandoning that model, then my reason to prefer Xbox over Steam goes away.
I might pay $20/year for Twitter if that money bought me meaningful privacy protections. Unfortunately, I don't see that option becoming realistic. It's doubtful there are enough potential customers who value their privacy, and it would be a huge expense and a huge risk to re-configure the data centers to handle those customers.
If the will of the people of Australia, as enacted through their duly elected representatives, is to restrict gun ownership, then as an (unarmed) American I say "hooray for democracy" and "to each his own."
But I have to ask, are you comfortable with making possession of the *plans* illegal? Where does one draw the line, and is enough thought being put into drawing it in the right place?
Absolutely not. Data privacy laws in the US and EU are quite different.
The closest thing we have to consumer privacy laws are HIPPA, which makes medical records confidential, and various laws and court rulings that control wiretapping, surveillance,and random searches. There is a different legal theory at work in US privacy law: US laws aim to restrict of data collection and use by the government (I am sure to get flamed for that because there are gaping holes like email), and the EU Data Protection Directive, to the best of my limited knowledge, aims to restrict data collection and use by private entities.
What Twitter has just done is perfectly legal in the US. Also, the US respects no "right to be forgotten," (which is technically infeasible anyway in my opinion), so if you quit using Twitter they get to keep using your data forever.
Slashdot Mirror
"Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these." Ovid (Roman poet, c. 43 BC - 17 AD). If you think the American legal system didn't miscarry justice 100 and 200 years ago, you haven't read history; and if you think there is no hope for justice today, you haven't read the newspaper. The system was never perfect, and to claim it's worse (or better) than it used to be would require a lot of evidence and analysis.
P.S. Slashdot is not your personal blog, so please quit pontificating here.
Dear Bennett, Putting a bunch of arbitrary conditions that make it difficult and time-consuming to argue against you does not make you right. To construe a lack of satisfactory response to your random ultimatum as vindication of your positions would be even more arrogant than the ultimatum itself. Thanks, Sir Garlon
I think literally "taking up arms" is premature and would be counter-productive, but parent is right. I'm writing to my Congressional representatives tonight to let them know that I vote and my next vote will be heavily influenced by their response to this revelation. I think I'll also write to my national political party office (I'm registered with a major party) to tell them the same thing. It's also a good time to consider joining/contributing to an organization that advocates for privacy and civil rights.
FYI, you can set offline mode as the default. I did, and that's how I found out Steam would only let you keep playing your games for about three months that way. (Maybe that's changed since I last signed in six months ago.)
I buy DRM-encumbered games from time to time myself, which is how I know about Steam's dark side, but it always makes me feel dirty and I am trying to quit. :-)
I don't think it's immoral to crack DRM so you can use content you bought. Morally, that is no worse than rolling past a stop sign at an empty intersection. I was just saying that the penalty for cracking your own game is a lot worse than the penalty for rolling through a stop sign, so for me the risk isn't worth it.
WRT GOG on Linux, they don't explicitly support Linux but a lot of the games run in DOSBox, and DOSBox definitely exists in Linux. I would think you should be able to run a GOG game on Linux if you set up your own DOSBox.conf. Have not tried that myself but I have run DOS games I bought back in the 90s on DOSBox in Linux. It takes a little fiddling with the config file but I found it doable. Hope that help.
PC games are cheaper than console games in another important way: you don't have to buy a separate device to play them on.
That's true for Steam just as it is for indie games and the other DRM-free titles I prefer.
With respect to cracking the game if Steam disappears, that's a good point, but illegal in the US due to a stupid law (the DMCA). To me the infinitesimal risk of prison time for playing a game I bought isn't worth it -- if Steam folds, I'll just quit playing those games. My approach is to buy DRM-free games 90% of the time. To each his own.
The difference between Steam and XBox One is only a matter of degree. Steam doesn't allow you to buy or sell used games. Steam needs to phone home every three months or so instead of every day, but it still locks you out after that.
So basically, if you want to play games from the major publishers, your only choice is who to bend over for. Steam uses Vaseline, Microsoft doesn't. Perhaps Sony will choose not to bugger customers at all -- I'm not really keeping up with the PS4 rumors.
You should be a lot more afraid of the government than of terrorists. Your probability of being affected by a terrorist attack is approximately zero (odds of being killed by terrorists are about one in 20 million for Americans). Your probability of being affected by your government is approximately one.
It sounds more like these settlements are paying off for the defendants. Papa John's pulled off an especially neat trick there, getting the court to accept pizza the customers don't want in lieu of statutory damages.
With Bitcoins.
If the 115 employees all work the same shift and are uniformly distributed, then each would have 2086 square feet of floor space. That's a minimum spacing of 45.7 feet (13.9 meters) between employees!
Correction: 45.7 feet between the _center of mass_ of each employee. So if we further assume the employees are spherical ...
Of those 10+ you claim, only five are supported by citations. The other five, I consider works of fiction. Of the five cases supported by citations, three resulted in the passengers overpowering the hijacker and the other two resulted in the hijacker being arrested on the ground. So yes, there have been two documented hijackings since 9/11 where the hijackers took control of the plane: in Mauritania and Cyrpus.
Based on the headline, I mistook this story for something that might interest me.
From TFA, it's clear that the design overhaul refers to design in the sense of "graphic design," i.e., superficial appearance, not design in the sense of software architecture. So the headline would be better phrased, "Mozilla is planning changes in how the browser looks."
I'm not a lawyer or anything, but I'm pretty sure orbit does count as outside the boundaries of the United States and therefore "export." The Eisenhower administration insisted that satellites overflying and spying on the Soviet Union were not violating Soviet sovereign territory, and that's now a precedent that's been in place for > 50 years. I infer that space is similar to international waters, from a legal point of view.
All that you say is true. If I were to venture a guess, I would say a lot of the money today goes into graphics. Gamers' expectations of visual quality keep going up: a game that was cutting-edge in the late 1990s would be ridiculed and rejected today. If you read the credits to a game like Skyrim or Mass Effect 3, you'll see a very long list of modelers and animators and so on. A staff that big can't be cheap.
It means someone else got "the scoop," the big story. It's bad grammar (turning a verb into a noun and back into a verb), which may explain some of the confusion. Scientists or news reporters are said to get scooped when they've been working on a project/story and then someone else publishes the same thing before they do and steals all the attention.
The idea that scientists are under pressure to be first depresses me. Proper science requires a lot of thought and attention to detail, and to rush the process threatens its integrity.
It sounds from TFA like Google plans to make money off these customers more directly, through subscription fees for Internet service.
I don't have mod points today so I'll just say I like your attitude. :-) This is, in my opinion, a professional mentality.
When Verizon advertises in my state, they advertise unlimited *residential* service. Then the ToS go on to explain what residential service is. It so happens I am a Verizon customer (not a fanboy, though doubtless I'll be accused as such) so I've read those ToS. To put it bluntly, I think their definition of "residential" service is extraordinarily narrow, and boils down to incoming HTTP and POP/IMAP only, plus a small volume of outgoing SMTP. I half expect to get a phone call from them some day myself for stepping out of bounds. Running a rack of VPN servers is clearly outside their definition.
Where I think Verizon is being misleading is not with the word "unlimited," but when they use their definition of "residential" and still call it "Internet." Internet to me means any and all protocols I want, bidirectionally. According to Verizon, that's "business" service.
I think "WTF are you doing consuming 77 terabits a month" is a legitimate question. I read TFA yesterday and I realized that Verizon probably can't afford to have a whole lot of users chewing up that kind of bandwidth. Asking him to switch to business service does not out of line to me, considering that he's running these servers for business use.
Note, also, they handled this with a short phone call rather than a nasty-gram or just cutting off his service without warning. That's more courtesy than I'd expect from a big ISP, given some of the horror stories I've heard.
Well, I'm one of the trolls -- I've complained about Steam more than once. Let's just say I prefer the model where I have a physical medium I can lend to my friend or resell. If Microsoft is abandoning that model, then my reason to prefer Xbox over Steam goes away.
I might pay $20/year for Twitter if that money bought me meaningful privacy protections. Unfortunately, I don't see that option becoming realistic. It's doubtful there are enough potential customers who value their privacy, and it would be a huge expense and a huge risk to re-configure the data centers to handle those customers.
If the will of the people of Australia, as enacted through their duly elected representatives, is to restrict gun ownership, then as an (unarmed) American I say "hooray for democracy" and "to each his own."
But I have to ask, are you comfortable with making possession of the *plans* illegal? Where does one draw the line, and is enough thought being put into drawing it in the right place?
Absolutely not. Data privacy laws in the US and EU are quite different.
The closest thing we have to consumer privacy laws are HIPPA, which makes medical records confidential, and various laws and court rulings that control wiretapping, surveillance,and random searches. There is a different legal theory at work in US privacy law: US laws aim to restrict of data collection and use by the government (I am sure to get flamed for that because there are gaping holes like email), and the EU Data Protection Directive, to the best of my limited knowledge, aims to restrict data collection and use by private entities.
What Twitter has just done is perfectly legal in the US. Also, the US respects no "right to be forgotten," (which is technically infeasible anyway in my opinion), so if you quit using Twitter they get to keep using your data forever.