Honestly, they're screwed either way. This is a class action lawsuit....if they refund her money, they must do so for everyone else named in the suit who desires it. This also sets a bad precedent for them as people could now buy copies and windows, install or copy them, then return it for a full refund stating rejection of the EULA.
If it DOES go to court, chances are pretty good that she's going to win as when you boil down the nature of a EULA, it's basically a one-sided contract that you cannot see before you complete the transaction (i.e. buy the software) and that the other side can change at will. It's not a good thing for the consumer in any way, and I'm glad it's finally being tested in court for real.
If you have a big crunch, the boundary conditions at both ends are zero, and it's harder to imagine why anything would happen in the first place.
Why? Who says it's not just a harmonic cycle? A cosine wave from origin to the end of one cycle both starts and ends at zero, yet there is most certainly "something happening" between those boundries.
Or you could think of it as infinitely small instead of zero...imaging an asymptote approaching the X-axis. I certainly wouldn't call it zero at any point but it's sure awful close after a while. Graph 1/X and you'll see how something can go from infintessimal to infinite and back to infintessimal as it crosses a time threshhold.
That said, this is the kind of shit that I think about when I'm all stoned and trying to disprove to myself the existance of a creating force in the multiverse. Ah, the torment of agnosticism.
Stephen King's "IT" was just on the other day. What a great flick!
If you read IT prior to seeing the movie, you'd have a different opinion. IT is probably the only Stephen King book that actually scared me (not that some of his others aren't good, they're just not as spooky) hell, it's the only BOOK that's ever scared me. Granted I was 15 when I read it, but still.
Having read the book, the movie paled in comparison. So much detail was left out, interactions between the protagonists as children and things that happened to them were much more detailed and set the stage quite well for the later reckoning.
I'd go the other route for Dune though...much like Tolkien's novels, Dune was a collection of fascinating, unique, and pioneering ideas written by someone who's basically a big blowhard. Dune and the Lord of the Rings read like textbooks to me. The information, while new and useful, was not presented in an exciting context. The Silmarillion was even worse, it was about as amusing as reading the Bible.
Good thing Herbert's kid can write. Too bad Tolkien's kid can't.
Colorado has pretty progressive privacy laws for a mostly Republican state. The do-not-call list for telemarketers here is working famously...I have not received a single telemarketer call since it was implemented, and very few from the "permissible" organizations. (i.e. charities and politicians looking for handouts, which I dont mind as much anyway)
Aside from the Denver Police Department spying on peaceful protestors and sending the information they collect to the FBI as well as keeping their own records, they tend to respect the privacy of their citizens.
I can see an anti-spam law passed here easily...the hard part will be enforcing it, especially with overseas spammers. Aside from a state firewall that null-routes traffic from China (this is sarcasm, laugh) I don't see it being nearly as effective as the telemarketing ban.
If that were Microsoft that released an operating system that used significant chunks of the Linux kernel, there would already be a paypal donation site already set up to fund the legal battle to get them to comply with the GPL.
Copyright violations by individuals at home for private use are quite debatable...a company violating a copyright in order to make a profit is not debatable in the least...it is PRECISELY in the spirit of copyright and why it was invented in the first place.
They're SOL as far as you having to return the item but they can still fire the person at the register or take them to court if its a big ticket item they just let walk away for pennies.
And if that person who gets taken to court implicates you in exchange for a lighter sentence, you're fucked...you were just party to a fraud and grand larceny. (It's a felony if the item was over $500) Chances are pretty good that if someone rings up a $1500 item for $5, that you're a friend and they're doing you a "favor" and the court would see it as such.
Create a webmail account and email it to yourself. Then download it from the school computer. This is how I get all my papers from home to the computer lab. Had I put it on a floppy, I probably would have zapped the disk unusable by the time I got to school...I have a weird magnetic field or something, I seriously cannot hold a floppy for more than 5 minutes without it dying.
I haven't owned a floppy drive in like 3 years, and I don't miss it one bit. I have not needed it once.
Re:its a matter of pricing
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Sim-Dud?
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their target audience doesnt have 50 bucks plus 10 bucks a month to fork over just to play the sims What, as in kids and teenagers? Do you gave any idea what percentage of Everquest players are under 18? I'd venture at least 25%. It's amazing what kids parents' will buy them if it keeps them in the house and out of trouble.
How are they planning on implementing this technology? Are they only going to build it into new houses? I got news for you, there ain't much space left in the US for new homes anywhere near a metropolitan or suburb area. Upgrade existing houses? That will probably cost more than building one from scratch....you're talking rewiring the phone/electrical system, installing wall mounted speakers, screens, and sensors, and lord knows what else. The house I live in right now was built in 1925...it barely has any 3 prong electrical outlets.
I won't even get started on the security and privacy issues of this whole concept, but I'm betting that the cost could be subsidized by advertisers and manufacturers interested in paying through the nose for the marketing data and advertising oppurtunities available in something like this.
This article scared the hell out of me. I am not excited by this technology in the least.
This could actually be a good thing for two reasons:
1) Game makers would make games that are actually worth playing. Nothing's worse than shelling out $50 for a stinker and being stuck with selling it back as a used game for $15 if you;re lucky.
2) Making games with longer playing times and/or high replayability. As you said, a 20 hour game can be beaten easily within a rental period. This is not so with longer, more involved games that have a lot of hidden content in addition to the main story, such as Grand Theft Auto. (Companies like Gamefly.com that offer unlimited game rentals for $20 a month change that argument though, it's still cheaper to rent two games and keep them for 2 months than it is to buy both and then resell them)
I dont see Blockbuster putting anyone out of business until they can a) offer a monthly unlimited rental plan and b) keep games that are actually worth playing in stock. (And don't forget that there are like 2000+ blockbuster stores un the US, with each of them buying 50-90% of the games for every available console...that's a pretty good subsidy, many of those games are awful and wouldn't have sold near that many copies)
$10 says when money starts getting really tight, AOL sells off the rights of AIM to another company for many millions of dollars. The advertising they can push through the AIM client is worth quite a bit to the right people. I don't see AIM going anywhere, AOL's fate aside.
If companies want to move their employee base out of the country, taking jobs away from Americans, take away the nice cushy tax breaks that they get from the American government if they off-shore a certain dollar amount worth of salaries. (American not 3rd world salary)
It now becomes prohibitively expensive for them to do so. The only reason they give away jobs to foreign workers is because they'll work for 1/4 the salaries of Americans, so make it NOT worth their while to do so. Easy solution. Watch the corporate lobbyists go nuts.
Just because this guy is too much of a spineless sycophant to give out average or even failing grades does NOT mean that the entire academic world is degenerating into huggy everyone-gets-an-A daycare system.
I go to a cheap state school in Denver (Metropolitan State College) and while it's not been too terribly difficult for me to hold a 4.0, it's still been a LOT of work. I've always been a good student. I see people in my classes getting B, C, D, and even F grades. Just about every class I've had has a Gaussian distribution of grades. (Except organic chemistry where over half the class failed or got a D)
My girlfriend was a TA for Sociology at Denver University, the local rich-kid babysitting college. The entire sociology department made those kids bust their asses for A's, (most got C's, many failed) even to the point of some of them calling their lawyer parents in to bitch at the professors for not giving them good grades automatically.
The academic world is still working as intended. Some professors are easier than others for various reasons, and I suspect now that this douchebag's class enrollments are going to rise at Duke once word gets out that he doesnt give grades below a B.
Re:Does that mean Websense, etc. will go ,too?
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Shutting down Kazaa
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Websense was around before Napster even, and were doing just fine then. A good network administrator should know what type of traffic is crossing his network, p2p or not. Of course, newer network hardware that has better reporting capabilities may make some of Websense functionality obselete, but one area Websense still wins out is that their reports are awfully pretty and look really nice to the pointy-haired types.
Well, here's what we do around these parts with old hard drives....take em up to the range and put a clip of.762 into each one. (or.223, depends on whether the AK or the AR15 is out that day)
I promise you, you will NOT have to worry about someone getting your data after that.
Yeah, it costs money. Fine them, maybe a night or two in jail to scare em, but damn, these kids are not even remotely terrorist acts unless they're intruding into sensitive government systems. (In which case, wtf are those systems doing connected to the internet anyway)
Haven't you ever worked in the industry? A sales engineer is basically a tech that comes along with the sales droids to field any questions from customers that require an iota of brain power or technical skills. They also generally assist in installation/configuration of the product once someone buys it.
Sometimes this term is used on sales people that have technical skills themselves (or techs who are roped into becoming sales people) but usually the two skill sets are mutually exclusive.
There's a difference though....an incompentent lawyer gets you thrown in jail or executed, an incompetent doctor can kill or disable you, incompetent architects/engineers can make structures that can cause injury or death...
but an incompetent PC repair tech isn't going to do anything except fuck up your computer, maybe cost you a little money. People's lives aren't on the line with the average home PC. Medical, defense, and airport computers, sure, but I'd wager they don't take their shit to CompUSA when it breaks.
I don't think the PC repair industry should have to regulate or certify....that's a field where capitalism can and does weed out the wastoids.
In Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, one of the characters that pops up is an alien from a race that is breeding human beings to be nice fat delicious food purely through advanced sociological manipulation on a large scale. One of his quotes is something along the lines of "A society which does not comprehend sociology cannot be considered truly intelligent."
I say we devote more resources towards truly understand the nature of our behavior and social interactions.
Fact: Videogames aren't just for "fun" anymore, the videogame industry made a net income of $6.3 billion in 2002, surpassing even the movie industry. Developers profit and continue to take advantage of today's youth with cute, loveable, addictive, and recognizable franchise characters. A practice and strategy similar to those used by the tobacco industry.
Fact: Videogames have been proven to prevent the development of the proper social skills and interaction needed for a long happy and enjoyable life. Young gamers are prone to being burdened with depression and sadness all throughout their life
Fact: Health studies have found that even those casual gamers suffer from low self-esteem and self-pride compared to their athletic and more socially accepted peers in their same age group. Young gamers were found to be more likely to become lifetime gaming addicts and becoming social outcasts.
Fact: Hardcore gaming not only leads to videogame addiction and abrupt lifestyle changes, but to crime and felony as well. Hardcore gamers never buy computer videogames. Instead, downloading illegally copied videogames or "warez" is the only method acceptable by the underground. Buying a legit copy is grounds for abandonment by community groups. You may not be buying your child videogames, but they can illegally obtain them off the internet.
Wouldn't it be nice if they could back these claims up with some references? Wouldn't it be nice if people would think about the source of their children's problems rather than dogmatically blame every way they manifest these issues?
Video games are no more of a cause of violence and anti social behavior among kids than television is. Let me tell you what the real problems are:
- baby boomer parents who are too self absorbed to be bothered to get involved in their child's life (note that these same parents are the first to blame anything but themselves when their child turns out to be a social outcast, prone to violence, on drugs, gay, or *gasp* libertarian) - poor role models in schools because teachers are grossly underpaid and mistreated, especially in urban schools where positive role models are needed the most - the emphasis on conformity, beauty, and fitting in that our society places on our kids, the destructive criticism of all that makes a truly unique kid special - political and corporate leaders that so obviously don't care about the earth, the economy, or fellow human beings and yet they are allowed to stay in power because our typical adult US citizen is too apathetic to get out and vote for change
And you wonder why kids constantly want to escape from reality. Why do you blame things you have no firsthand knowledge of for your own lack of parental skills.
I've been telling people this for years...thank fucking god someone else understands this, I was going to have to kill myself the next time I heard some DSL retard brag about paying $100 a month more than me for the same speed connection because he "doesn't share his bandwidth so it's faster"
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Honestly, they're screwed either way. This is a class action lawsuit....if they refund her money, they must do so for everyone else named in the suit who desires it. This also sets a bad precedent for them as people could now buy copies and windows, install or copy them, then return it for a full refund stating rejection of the EULA.
If it DOES go to court, chances are pretty good that she's going to win as when you boil down the nature of a EULA, it's basically a one-sided contract that you cannot see before you complete the transaction (i.e. buy the software) and that the other side can change at will. It's not a good thing for the consumer in any way, and I'm glad it's finally being tested in court for real.
If you have a big crunch, the boundary conditions at both ends are zero, and it's harder to imagine why anything would happen in the first place.
Why? Who says it's not just a harmonic cycle? A cosine wave from origin to the end of one cycle both starts and ends at zero, yet there is most certainly "something happening" between those boundries.
Or you could think of it as infinitely small instead of zero...imaging an asymptote approaching the X-axis. I certainly wouldn't call it zero at any point but it's sure awful close after a while. Graph 1/X and you'll see how something can go from infintessimal to infinite and back to infintessimal as it crosses a time threshhold.
That said, this is the kind of shit that I think about when I'm all stoned and trying to disprove to myself the existance of a creating force in the multiverse. Ah, the torment of agnosticism.
Stephen King's "IT" was just on the other day. What a great flick!
If you read IT prior to seeing the movie, you'd have a different opinion. IT is probably the only Stephen King book that actually scared me (not that some of his others aren't good, they're just not as spooky) hell, it's the only BOOK that's ever scared me. Granted I was 15 when I read it, but still.
Having read the book, the movie paled in comparison. So much detail was left out, interactions between the protagonists as children and things that happened to them were much more detailed and set the stage quite well for the later reckoning.
I'd go the other route for Dune though...much like Tolkien's novels, Dune was a collection of fascinating, unique, and pioneering ideas written by someone who's basically a big blowhard. Dune and the Lord of the Rings read like textbooks to me. The information, while new and useful, was not presented in an exciting context. The Silmarillion was even worse, it was about as amusing as reading the Bible.
Good thing Herbert's kid can write. Too bad Tolkien's kid can't.
Colorado has pretty progressive privacy laws for a mostly Republican state. The do-not-call list for telemarketers here is working famously...I have not received a single telemarketer call since it was implemented, and very few from the "permissible" organizations. (i.e. charities and politicians looking for handouts, which I dont mind as much anyway)
Aside from the Denver Police Department spying on peaceful protestors and sending the information they collect to the FBI as well as keeping their own records, they tend to respect the privacy of their citizens.
I can see an anti-spam law passed here easily...the hard part will be enforcing it, especially with overseas spammers. Aside from a state firewall that null-routes traffic from China (this is sarcasm, laugh) I don't see it being nearly as effective as the telemarketing ban.
If that were Microsoft that released an operating system that used significant chunks of the Linux kernel, there would already be a paypal donation site already set up to fund the legal battle to get them to comply with the GPL.
Copyright violations by individuals at home for private use are quite debatable...a company violating a copyright in order to make a profit is not debatable in the least...it is PRECISELY in the spirit of copyright and why it was invented in the first place.
They're SOL as far as you having to return the item but they can still fire the person at the register or take them to court if its a big ticket item they just let walk away for pennies.
And if that person who gets taken to court implicates you in exchange for a lighter sentence, you're fucked...you were just party to a fraud and grand larceny. (It's a felony if the item was over $500) Chances are pretty good that if someone rings up a $1500 item for $5, that you're a friend and they're doing you a "favor" and the court would see it as such.
Create a webmail account and email it to yourself. Then download it from the school computer. This is how I get all my papers from home to the computer lab. Had I put it on a floppy, I probably would have zapped the disk unusable by the time I got to school...I have a weird magnetic field or something, I seriously cannot hold a floppy for more than 5 minutes without it dying.
I haven't owned a floppy drive in like 3 years, and I don't miss it one bit. I have not needed it once.
their target audience doesnt have 50 bucks plus 10 bucks a month to fork over just to play the sims What, as in kids and teenagers? Do you gave any idea what percentage of Everquest players are under 18? I'd venture at least 25%. It's amazing what kids parents' will buy them if it keeps them in the house and out of trouble.
How are they planning on implementing this technology? Are they only going to build it into new houses? I got news for you, there ain't much space left in the US for new homes anywhere near a metropolitan or suburb area. Upgrade existing houses? That will probably cost more than building one from scratch....you're talking rewiring the phone/electrical system, installing wall mounted speakers, screens, and sensors, and lord knows what else. The house I live in right now was built in 1925...it barely has any 3 prong electrical outlets.
I won't even get started on the security and privacy issues of this whole concept, but I'm betting that the cost could be subsidized by advertisers and manufacturers interested in paying through the nose for the marketing data and advertising oppurtunities available in something like this.
This article scared the hell out of me. I am not excited by this technology in the least.
This could actually be a good thing for two reasons:
1) Game makers would make games that are actually worth playing. Nothing's worse than shelling out $50 for a stinker and being stuck with selling it back as a used game for $15 if you;re lucky.
2) Making games with longer playing times and/or high replayability. As you said, a 20 hour game can be beaten easily within a rental period. This is not so with longer, more involved games that have a lot of hidden content in addition to the main story, such as Grand Theft Auto. (Companies like Gamefly.com that offer unlimited game rentals for $20 a month change that argument though, it's still cheaper to rent two games and keep them for 2 months than it is to buy both and then resell them)
I dont see Blockbuster putting anyone out of business until they can a) offer a monthly unlimited rental plan and b) keep games that are actually worth playing in stock. (And don't forget that there are like 2000+ blockbuster stores un the US, with each of them buying 50-90% of the games for every available console...that's a pretty good subsidy, many of those games are awful and wouldn't have sold near that many copies)
$10 says when money starts getting really tight, AOL sells off the rights of AIM to another company for many millions of dollars. The advertising they can push through the AIM client is worth quite a bit to the right people. I don't see AIM going anywhere, AOL's fate aside.
He also said that he's pushing legislation to improve the environment and the economy. What Mr. Bush says is not always what Mr. Bush does.
The space program will probably continue along just fine, but I don't think the president's going to do anything to help that.
If companies want to move their employee base out of the country, taking jobs away from Americans, take away the nice cushy tax breaks that they get from the American government if they off-shore a certain dollar amount worth of salaries. (American not 3rd world salary)
It now becomes prohibitively expensive for them to do so. The only reason they give away jobs to foreign workers is because they'll work for 1/4 the salaries of Americans, so make it NOT worth their while to do so. Easy solution. Watch the corporate lobbyists go nuts.
Just because this guy is too much of a spineless sycophant to give out average or even failing grades does NOT mean that the entire academic world is degenerating into huggy everyone-gets-an-A daycare system.
I go to a cheap state school in Denver (Metropolitan State College) and while it's not been too terribly difficult for me to hold a 4.0, it's still been a LOT of work. I've always been a good student. I see people in my classes getting B, C, D, and even F grades. Just about every class I've had has a Gaussian distribution of grades. (Except organic chemistry where over half the class failed or got a D)
My girlfriend was a TA for Sociology at Denver University, the local rich-kid babysitting college. The entire sociology department made those kids bust their asses for A's, (most got C's, many failed) even to the point of some of them calling their lawyer parents in to bitch at the professors for not giving them good grades automatically.
The academic world is still working as intended. Some professors are easier than others for various reasons, and I suspect now that this douchebag's class enrollments are going to rise at Duke once word gets out that he doesnt give grades below a B.
Websense was around before Napster even, and were doing just fine then. A good network administrator should know what type of traffic is crossing his network, p2p or not. Of course, newer network hardware that has better reporting capabilities may make some of Websense functionality obselete, but one area Websense still wins out is that their reports are awfully pretty and look really nice to the pointy-haired types.
yeah good point, thank god my guns dont have electronics in them.
Well, here's what we do around these parts with old hard drives....take em up to the range and put a clip of .762 into each one. (or .223, depends on whether the AK or the AR15 is out that day)
I promise you, you will NOT have to worry about someone getting your data after that.
Yeah, it costs money. Fine them, maybe a night or two in jail to scare em, but damn, these kids are not even remotely terrorist acts unless they're intruding into sensitive government systems. (In which case, wtf are those systems doing connected to the internet anyway)
Haven't you ever worked in the industry? A sales engineer is basically a tech that comes along with the sales droids to field any questions from customers that require an iota of brain power or technical skills. They also generally assist in installation/configuration of the product once someone buys it.
Sometimes this term is used on sales people that have technical skills themselves (or techs who are roped into becoming sales people) but usually the two skill sets are mutually exclusive.
There's a difference though....an incompentent lawyer gets you thrown in jail or executed, an incompetent doctor can kill or disable you, incompetent architects/engineers can make structures that can cause injury or death...
but an incompetent PC repair tech isn't going to do anything except fuck up your computer, maybe cost you a little money. People's lives aren't on the line with the average home PC. Medical, defense, and airport computers, sure, but I'd wager they don't take their shit to CompUSA when it breaks.
I don't think the PC repair industry should have to regulate or certify....that's a field where capitalism can and does weed out the wastoids.
Several days? Doesn't this guy know how to fucking use grep? Jesus. Let me guess, he was paid by the hour...
In Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, one of the characters that pops up is an alien from a race that is breeding human beings to be nice fat delicious food purely through advanced sociological manipulation on a large scale. One of his quotes is something along the lines of "A society which does not comprehend sociology cannot be considered truly intelligent."
I say we devote more resources towards truly understand the nature of our behavior and social interactions.
"Facts" from their website:
Fact: Videogames aren't just for "fun" anymore, the videogame industry made a net income of $6.3 billion in 2002, surpassing even the movie industry. Developers profit and continue to take advantage of today's youth with cute, loveable, addictive, and recognizable franchise characters. A practice and strategy similar to those used by the tobacco industry.
Fact: Videogames have been proven to prevent the development of the proper social skills and interaction needed for a long happy and enjoyable life. Young gamers are prone to being burdened with depression and sadness all throughout their life
Fact: Health studies have found that even those casual gamers suffer from low self-esteem and self-pride compared to their athletic and more socially accepted peers in their same age group. Young gamers were found to be more likely to become lifetime gaming addicts and becoming social outcasts.
Fact: Hardcore gaming not only leads to videogame addiction and abrupt lifestyle changes, but to crime and felony as well. Hardcore gamers never buy computer videogames. Instead, downloading illegally copied videogames or "warez" is the only method acceptable by the underground. Buying a legit copy is grounds for abandonment by community groups. You may not be buying your child videogames, but they can illegally obtain them off the internet.
Wouldn't it be nice if they could back these claims up with some references? Wouldn't it be nice if people would think about the source of their children's problems rather than dogmatically blame every way they manifest these issues?
Dead MAVAV,
Video games are no more of a cause of violence and anti social behavior among kids than television is. Let me tell you what the real problems are:
- baby boomer parents who are too self absorbed to be bothered to get involved in their child's life
(note that these same parents are the first to blame anything but themselves when their child turns out to be a social outcast, prone to violence, on drugs, gay, or *gasp* libertarian)
- poor role models in schools because teachers are grossly underpaid and mistreated, especially in urban schools where positive role models are needed the most
- the emphasis on conformity, beauty, and fitting in that our society places on our kids, the destructive criticism of all that makes a truly unique kid special
- political and corporate leaders that so obviously don't care about the earth, the economy, or fellow human beings and yet they are allowed to stay in power because our typical adult US citizen is too apathetic to get out and vote for change
And you wonder why kids constantly want to escape from reality. Why do you blame things you have no firsthand knowledge of for your own lack of parental skills.
I've been telling people this for years...thank fucking god someone else understands this, I was going to have to kill myself the next time I heard some DSL retard brag about paying $100 a month more than me for the same speed connection because he "doesn't share his bandwidth so it's faster"