From actually reading the post you answered to, what I wrote extrapolates quite easily. Reread the first and third paragraphs of the GP's post.
You may want to reread the second and fourth paragraphs instead, which set the fact that the post is a criticism of bnetd due to the (alleged) use by "pirates" rather than the "piracy" itself. Therefore, to extrapolate a criticism of it into a pro-"piracy" argument you'd have to ignore bnetd itself, the very subject of the whole post.
You answered a post that talks about piracy being the main argument for bnetd, and wonder why I bring the point forward to your comment? And suddenly it's my reading comprehension that's crooked?
Yes. His argument: "bnetd was used by pirates, therefore it deserved to be shut down". Mine: "your logic is as fucked up as that of the RIAA, you fail". Yours: "OMG, you pirate!". Which one does not follow? here's a hint: yours.
It was a fairly nice attempt at changing the argument discussed and appear less dickish, but it ultimately failed.
Cute ad-hominem, but if you read the whole thread you'd see that the first one to talk about "piracy" instead of bnetd, and therefore be the one attempting to change the argument at hand, was you.
And given that my taxes are paying these people's salaries (that is, you and I are "the company"), I'd really rather them not.
Personally, I'd rather they did whatever they feel like it, and simply judge their productivity(1) at the end of the month. More time spent working does not equal faster (or better) work and in fact its usually the opposite, specially if that extra time comes at the expense of breaks or distractions.
Hell, if I ran a large-ish company, one of the things I'd do is fill up an el-cheapo server with some CC-licensed music and such, set it up for on-demand streaming, and sending instructions to my employees on how to access it. It'd probably be a cheap way to improve morale and job satisfaction.
(1) We can debate *how* to measure it at a different time.
I'll tell you what's crooked: your reading comprehension skills. My point was fairly simple: trying to ban some piece of technology just because *some* of their users use it to help themselves with their illicit goals is both common from the RIAA, and completely stupid. The parallels to the GP's post ought to be pretty fucking obvious.
How in *HELL* you derived a piracy argument from my post, however, I have no clue.
There's none. Not only are the other posters correct in pointing out that trademarks and copyright are very different legal concepts, but it sounds to me that the word is being used by its casual definition, rather than the legal one.
It's as in the phrase "the Statue of Liberty is one of New York's trademarks". It doesn't mean New York will sue you for trademark infringement if you put a photo of the statue on your website, its just that its image is commonly associated with the city of New York.
This reminds me, rather, of Suprnova. Mostly because it was the MPAA's squishing of it what gave ThePirateBay the popularity it enjoys today, so the fact that the MPAA is trying the exact same tactic against the exact same enemy once again is both laughable, and more than a bit pitiful.
So the only doubt in my mind is, who's gonna be the third-generation Suprnova? my vote's on Mininova, but my vote was on them last time as well yet it was TPB who continued the legacy.
Bnetd was created to bypass Blizzard's cd key check so people could play pirated versions of Starcraft online.
No it wasn't. It was created to allow people to create their own servers providing Battle.net functionality, and that it *COULD* be used to play "pirated" versions of Starcraft "online" (TCP/IP still worked fine regardless of bnetd, bnetd at best just helped with the matchmaking) was simply a side-effect of Blizzard not sharing their CD-verification mechanisms, *NOT* the prime purpose behind it.
So unless you can prove otherwise, I'd rather you stop propagating that stupid lie.
Its funny how, if you replace Blizzard with 'the music industry', bnetd for BitTorrent and games for music, your post reads exactly like what RIAA execs often say.
Yet, since it goes in benefit of WoW's papa instead of the guys behind Britney, you get modded up instead of down as you deserve. Shameful, both for you in particular and for Slashdot in general.
The problem is that who gets to define "being a dick" is, usually, the one that has the most to win by censorship.
That's why things such as freedom of speech are defined so absolute: better to have ten dicks insulting around freely, than a single innocent in jail for "being a dick" towards the wrong person.
The responsability that comes with Free Speech is that of accepting other people's speech even when we don't like it (such as, I don't know, being called a "ho" or a "skank"), and it is going and punishing it, using the courts no less, what's running away from that responsability.
so you would never really hear the X-windows system is probably the worst piece of software ever written
ORLY? let's see you backing that up with some reliable data. Something better than the "it's 20 years old!" and "it uses the network!" idiocy that gets posted to Slashdot so often, preferably.
or that Linux drivers do not really exist as the frequent kernel changes makes vendor software drivers invalid
Carmack's argument is that he can't port it easily without relying on closed-source drivers, and you somehow derive from this that Linux needs *more* closed-source drivers? or are you just trolling out of context here?
Well, as I understand it the problem isn't "closed source drivers vs open source drivers", its "closed source NVidia drivers vs anything else" which has the secondary problem of leaving us ATI users in the dust regardless of our philosophical ideologies, reducing the potential consumer base even further. And I imagine the concept of tying your game to a specific brand of hardware, even if its unintentionally and only for a small subset of users, could be problematic from a PR standpoint as well.
Crysis looks like ass because they spent too little on art designers, not because they spent too much on 3D engine devs.
Team Fortress 2 has highly colorful, contrasty graphics yet looks *much* better than WoW: yes, it's an FPS so the engine doesn't have to draw as much stuff as that of a MMO so its not a 1:1 comparison, but it does prove it's possible to maintain the artistic style while improving the engine itself.
My guess was that lightsabers used the user's own Force to power themselves, absorbing it through the handle which is why when jedi were killed, their sabers automatically turned themselves off instead of cutting their way through the floor until they reached open space.
But I haven't seen the movies in years so dunno how well that theory holds up. Perhaps the Force is just too blunt to reliably manipulate a small, precise object like a switch.
He's not arguing that it's not stupid, he's arguing that it's not *racist*, and I can't see anything wrong with that.
Say what you will of both Bush and Obama's presidencies, there's plenty to criticize for both, but I believe anyone calling either of them "racist" is just throwing insults around to see what sticks.
Would a photo poster with the person with " is a psychotic skank" a ground for slander ? Forget the part where it is a blog. Think about what the LAW would be for the older media.
Dunno if it is, as I'm not a lawyer, but it certainly shouldn't be.
I mean really, the Aliens in Star Wars just acted like humans in latex and makeup.... basically hokey actors in rubber suits.
Which is perfectly understandable as, in the Star Wars universe, humans and aliens had been living together for thousands of years so their cultures naturally converged towards a singular point. That this point was eerily similar to our feudal Japan is the only 'leap of faith' one has to make and, relatively, a fairly minor one.
A wise man once said, "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance". Yeah, not many of us examine the source-code of each app we download, but if we don't want to inconvenience ourselves with doing that, all we can do is trust somebody else does and will let us know if something's amiss. The advantage of Open Source, however, is that those people you have to trust don't all receive their paychecks from the same corporation.
If you've paid for your software, you can usually except that they wont fuck you over with that crap.
We do. Movies, music and games we don't, but computers (and by extension, software) have become the pillars of our modern society, and books (and other printed media) are still an important necessity for education and dissemination of information.
Thankfully they don't rely on copyright as strongly as movies and music do, but we shouldn't forget them so easily either.
Most people do not actually care about this issue -- they do not care about their right to make a backup copy because they do not make backup copies, and they do not see this as having broader implications.
Also, most of the people who *do* care live in countries with saner legal systems where all this is completely legal, and so have no reason to boycott DVDs and similar legally-encumbered formats.
Slashdot Mirror
From actually reading the post you answered to, what I wrote extrapolates quite easily. Reread the first and third paragraphs of the GP's post.
You may want to reread the second and fourth paragraphs instead, which set the fact that the post is a criticism of bnetd due to the (alleged) use by "pirates" rather than the "piracy" itself. Therefore, to extrapolate a criticism of it into a pro-"piracy" argument you'd have to ignore bnetd itself, the very subject of the whole post.
You answered a post that talks about piracy being the main argument for bnetd, and wonder why I bring the point forward to your comment? And suddenly it's my reading comprehension that's crooked?
Yes. His argument: "bnetd was used by pirates, therefore it deserved to be shut down". Mine: "your logic is as fucked up as that of the RIAA, you fail". Yours: "OMG, you pirate!". Which one does not follow? here's a hint: yours.
It was a fairly nice attempt at changing the argument discussed and appear less dickish, but it ultimately failed.
Cute ad-hominem, but if you read the whole thread you'd see that the first one to talk about "piracy" instead of bnetd, and therefore be the one attempting to change the argument at hand, was you.
Well, in my experience "having actual sex" is a pretty good way to kill your interest in porn, but I guess that may not apply to all married guys ;)
And given that my taxes are paying these people's salaries (that is, you and I are "the company"), I'd really rather them not.
Personally, I'd rather they did whatever they feel like it, and simply judge their productivity(1) at the end of the month. More time spent working does not equal faster (or better) work and in fact its usually the opposite, specially if that extra time comes at the expense of breaks or distractions.
Hell, if I ran a large-ish company, one of the things I'd do is fill up an el-cheapo server with some CC-licensed music and such, set it up for on-demand streaming, and sending instructions to my employees on how to access it. It'd probably be a cheap way to improve morale and job satisfaction.
(1) We can debate *how* to measure it at a different time.
I'll tell you what's crooked: your reading comprehension skills. My point was fairly simple: trying to ban some piece of technology just because *some* of their users use it to help themselves with their illicit goals is both common from the RIAA, and completely stupid. The parallels to the GP's post ought to be pretty fucking obvious.
How in *HELL* you derived a piracy argument from my post, however, I have no clue.
There's none. Not only are the other posters correct in pointing out that trademarks and copyright are very different legal concepts, but it sounds to me that the word is being used by its casual definition, rather than the legal one.
It's as in the phrase "the Statue of Liberty is one of New York's trademarks". It doesn't mean New York will sue you for trademark infringement if you put a photo of the statue on your website, its just that its image is commonly associated with the city of New York.
This reminds me, rather, of Suprnova. Mostly because it was the MPAA's squishing of it what gave ThePirateBay the popularity it enjoys today, so the fact that the MPAA is trying the exact same tactic against the exact same enemy once again is both laughable, and more than a bit pitiful.
So the only doubt in my mind is, who's gonna be the third-generation Suprnova? my vote's on Mininova, but my vote was on them last time as well yet it was TPB who continued the legacy.
Bnetd was created to bypass Blizzard's cd key check so people could play pirated versions of Starcraft online.
No it wasn't. It was created to allow people to create their own servers providing Battle.net functionality, and that it *COULD* be used to play "pirated" versions of Starcraft "online" (TCP/IP still worked fine regardless of bnetd, bnetd at best just helped with the matchmaking) was simply a side-effect of Blizzard not sharing their CD-verification mechanisms, *NOT* the prime purpose behind it.
So unless you can prove otherwise, I'd rather you stop propagating that stupid lie.
Its funny how, if you replace Blizzard with 'the music industry', bnetd for BitTorrent and games for music, your post reads exactly like what RIAA execs often say.
Yet, since it goes in benefit of WoW's papa instead of the guys behind Britney, you get modded up instead of down as you deserve. Shameful, both for you in particular and for Slashdot in general.
The problem is that who gets to define "being a dick" is, usually, the one that has the most to win by censorship.
That's why things such as freedom of speech are defined so absolute: better to have ten dicks insulting around freely, than a single innocent in jail for "being a dick" towards the wrong person.
The responsability that comes with Free Speech is that of accepting other people's speech even when we don't like it (such as, I don't know, being called a "ho" or a "skank"), and it is going and punishing it, using the courts no less, what's running away from that responsability.
The rich and powerful can afford bodyguards to protect them from public lynching. The poor cannot.
so you would never really hear the X-windows system is probably the worst piece of software ever written
ORLY? let's see you backing that up with some reliable data. Something better than the "it's 20 years old!" and "it uses the network!" idiocy that gets posted to Slashdot so often, preferably.
or that Linux drivers do not really exist as the frequent kernel changes makes vendor software drivers invalid
Carmack's argument is that he can't port it easily without relying on closed-source drivers, and you somehow derive from this that Linux needs *more* closed-source drivers? or are you just trolling out of context here?
Well, as I understand it the problem isn't "closed source drivers vs open source drivers", its "closed source NVidia drivers vs anything else" which has the secondary problem of leaving us ATI users in the dust regardless of our philosophical ideologies, reducing the potential consumer base even further. And I imagine the concept of tying your game to a specific brand of hardware, even if its unintentionally and only for a small subset of users, could be problematic from a PR standpoint as well.
Or what, you'll cancel your account? as if.
There's no harm in asking, I know, but unless you provide an incentive for them to do so I don't see why they would just give it away.
Crysis looks like ass because they spent too little on art designers, not because they spent too much on 3D engine devs.
Team Fortress 2 has highly colorful, contrasty graphics yet looks *much* better than WoW: yes, it's an FPS so the engine doesn't have to draw as much stuff as that of a MMO so its not a 1:1 comparison, but it does prove it's possible to maintain the artistic style while improving the engine itself.
My guess was that lightsabers used the user's own Force to power themselves, absorbing it through the handle which is why when jedi were killed, their sabers automatically turned themselves off instead of cutting their way through the floor until they reached open space.
But I haven't seen the movies in years so dunno how well that theory holds up. Perhaps the Force is just too blunt to reliably manipulate a small, precise object like a switch.
Sneakernet. Yes, it sucks, but not moreso than PayPal.
He's not arguing that it's not stupid, he's arguing that it's not *racist*, and I can't see anything wrong with that.
Say what you will of both Bush and Obama's presidencies, there's plenty to criticize for both, but I believe anyone calling either of them "racist" is just throwing insults around to see what sticks.
Would a photo poster with the person with " is a psychotic skank" a ground for slander ? Forget the part where it is a blog. Think about what the LAW would be for the older media.
Dunno if it is, as I'm not a lawyer, but it certainly shouldn't be.
I mean really, the Aliens in Star Wars just acted like humans in latex and makeup.... basically hokey actors in rubber suits.
Which is perfectly understandable as, in the Star Wars universe, humans and aliens had been living together for thousands of years so their cultures naturally converged towards a singular point. That this point was eerily similar to our feudal Japan is the only 'leap of faith' one has to make and, relatively, a fairly minor one.
A wise man once said, "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance". Yeah, not many of us examine the source-code of each app we download, but if we don't want to inconvenience ourselves with doing that, all we can do is trust somebody else does and will let us know if something's amiss. The advantage of Open Source, however, is that those people you have to trust don't all receive their paychecks from the same corporation.
If you've paid for your software, you can usually except that they wont fuck you over with that crap.
In theory, yes. In practice, no.
I believe you misunderstood the GP's point about a "multi-billion dollar corporation" to mean Dell, rather than Microsoft.
We do. Movies, music and games we don't, but computers (and by extension, software) have become the pillars of our modern society, and books (and other printed media) are still an important necessity for education and dissemination of information.
Thankfully they don't rely on copyright as strongly as movies and music do, but we shouldn't forget them so easily either.
Most people do not actually care about this issue -- they do not care about their right to make a backup copy because they do not make backup copies, and they do not see this as having broader implications.
Also, most of the people who *do* care live in countries with saner legal systems where all this is completely legal, and so have no reason to boycott DVDs and similar legally-encumbered formats.
Well, the thing that'd help the most would be global genocide, but most people seem to be against the idea for some reason.
Anyone know of any carbon-neutral weapon of mass destruction?