"I would love to move to a FOSS operating system if I could still play my proprietary games on it. Valve may actually give me a chance."
You think you need Valve to give you WINE? How strange.
The game run through WINE the same whether you set it up yourself of pay valve to do it for you. But if you let them do it, they get control of your computer in the deal.
"Back in my college days, being able to plug an external drive into a lab PC and play counterstrike was quite handy for killing time between classes."
But I have done that myself on a number of occasions. No STEAM needed.
"And the steam DRM is basically: it needs to phone home about once a month. So once a month it uses about 2 megabytes of bandwidth for DRM, big friggin deal."
It's sending 2 megabytes a month, I have no way of knowing exactly what is in that 2 megabytes, I cannot audit it, I cannot even look at the code (let alone modify it, not even a one-line edit so it will link with my kernel) and if I prevent this snitch from making it's call I will be deprived of the quiet enjoyment of a product I have bought and paid for, and to you this is no big deal?
Your definition of a big deal and mine appear to have parted ways a LONG ways back. To me that is a VERY big deal. If any company I did business with proposed a system like that to me they would be lucky to get one brief chance to back straight down and apologize before I cut all ties, permanently, and call up my lawyer to suss out our options for a lawsuit.
"I don't see how what Valve is doing is diluting the mission of Debian at all"
Debian's mission is, to boil it down just a little, to be the exact opposite of DRM. You still dont understand how bringing in new people that think STEAM DRM is just wonderful could compromise that mission?
Sure. That's basically how it works. In this case it was aggravated by the fact that my friend lived in a relatively free state, while the state next door is much more socialist. So they provide a LOT more in the way of welfare... the only part that seemed surprising was that they had no compunctions about actively recruiting dependents from out of state like that. It makes sense but it's pretty shameless.
A friend of mine had the neighboring state actually come and pursuade his wife to leave him, and bring the children. They got public housing and benefits and he had just had some major financial problems. So anyway about 2 years later he gets sued for child support. Not by his family of course, but by the state. Next thing you know any legitimate job he gets, the paycheck goes somewhere else. Last I knew he was working a taxi so at least he got paid in cash and could pay his bills and eat that way. It's not like he wasnt having trouble to begin with, but this always seemed to me pretty egregious, and clearly against public interest, but it seems to be business as usual.
"If your gaming PC does not connect to the internet, I'm guessing you don't do much multiplayer..."
Not recently but no, I've done plenty of multiplayer this way. You can hook up a LAN with no WAN you know.
"That said: Steam's DRM is the least evil of them all,"
And even if that's true it's still by your own admission evil.
"The "freedom" to not care if my gigs of games are wiped out in a hard drive failure, to copy the steam directory as-is to any PC on the same architecture and being able to straight up play, and to arbitrarily delete game files if I temporarily need the space is far more important to me than the freedom to look at arbitrary code."
The first and last of these things I can do with any game I have purchased, either via a physical disk or via a persistent login/download link from e.g. shrapnel. The middle one is the only one that is at all unique and it doesnt seem important at all in context of the DRM.
"This is a "choose your battles" scenario. Either 1) let Valve attract more people to Debian for desktop use. They'll play their closed source games when bored, and use the open source productivity software to get actual work done. Or, 2) fight them on this, they take their ball and go home, and the people they would have attracted continue to regard the FOSS movement as a bunch of loons that like to look gift horses in the mouth."
I think that is a false dichotomy. Of course Valve is welcome to use Debian here if they wish. It's Free Software. I never objected to them using it. I object to bullshit pronouncements about how the Free Software community somehow is or should be grateful to Valve for this, as if they were doing us a favor. This is no favor. Valve is simply doing what is best for their business *as they should be doing* but that is not something we should praise or be impressed with, that is just normal business.
And if "attracting more people" is cause for diluting the mission of Debian then it will be a bad, not a good thing. The ifs in the previous sentence will be optimised out by any decent compiler.
That's fine, no one is expecting them to publish the art portion of the game under a free license. It would be nice to get the actual code, but that is not the problem here either. What makes this a farce is the Digital Restrictions Management. Once I buy the game I should be able to run it without running another binary that I cannot audit or even relink and whose professed function - communicating with Valve and possibly preventing me from doing what I want with my computer if they do not send the right response - is inimical to my own interests.
If I paid for the program I should be able to install and run it on my gaming pc - which is quite deliberately NOT connectable to the internet. I will sneaker-net patches that are needed, but why on earth would I sneaker-net in a program whose only function will be to try to phone home over and over with obviously no response, and eventually effect a hostile take-over of my computer to prevent me from paying the game I bought and paid for?
You're right, the FOSS community doesnt give two squirts about this.
Valve does, however, and they would very much like you to as well. If they can generate a little buzz and fool you into thinking you should be 'praising' them for this then their marketing folks have done their job.
Although it's better to have made the speech than not, it does seem a bit of a cop out. He was in the right position, at the right place and the right time, to have really made some kind of difference, but he didnt. He just made this neat speech at the end to absolve his conscience, and left it to future generations to solve a problem that has grown so huge over the intervening decades that it seems completely intractible.
We were talking about his farewell speech, apparently you need to watch it before this will make sense to you.
He spoke eloquently and at length about the dangers of the military industrial complex. Which he had worked with closely, and done nothing to oppose, through his entire career leading up to that moment.
Technically speaking the link does not point to a webpage, and is therefore nothing but noise. I am sure a decent percentage of slashdot readers see it as such. And you are right, if they had enough organisational skills to HAVE an editorial policy, it should prohibit such 'links' from being posted like this.
Along with all the dupes and not-actually-english writeups.
Note also, however, that he did nothing notable to help us while he was in office - he went right along. He only got cold feet and started talking on his very last day.
On budget DoD isnt the entirety of empire spending, it's just a start. Afghanistan and Iraq were both handled with their own appropriations, remember, as are other 'long-term projects.' There's all this "homeland security" and the militarisation of what used to be at least nominally law enforcement agencies is not short for funding - it's actually a very visible and expanding pork barrel. Taking all this out of the budget would show large decreases not just in DoD but many other departments as well. And we have not even mentioned the "black" funding pool which is certainly enormous. All of those are direct costs and regardless of accounting tricks those are all, ultimately, paid for.
"Lefties don't understand why we can't have all the social programs of Europe, and Righties don't understand why we have to have personal income taxes that are so high, and corporate taxes that are event higher, in both cases its because we are paying to make cheap gasoline available."
And that doesnt even work so well. Sure it's cheap at the pump but as you point out the real cost is hidden - in a military budget that is by far the largest in the world, and is so large and labyrinthine it cannot be effectively audited and never has been.
If we folded up our empire and downsized the military until it was something reasonably connected with defending our shores we could save enough money to slash taxes AND increase social spending while still paying down the deficit, and gasoline would be slightly, if any, more expensive in the short run. Almost certainly less expensive in the long run.
"It worked when they were the only game in town[1], but these days you can choose to use Icinga or even Sensu; both of which are far better products than Nagios and support Nagios plugins."
So it appears their business strategy moving forward was to leverage the domain registration to allow them to present their fork as the original product, then alter the plugins to be incompatible with the competition.
Sure the original project will keep going at mobility-plugins, but the 'big fish' customers might not be able to see past the name/domain.
And if you simply allowed compensation for donors there wouldnt be a supply issue either.
I know a lot of people think it's a problem that these organs would be mostly coming from poor people, but think about it. You wouldnt get very far even with a donation system if you only allowed wealthy donors. And naturally offering money for something isnt as tempting to those that have plenty of money already as it is to those that are scraping by.
The whole point to a market is to enable trades that leave both sides better off. A has lots of money, needs a kidney. B has plenty of kidney, needs money badly. They get together and both walk away happy.
Sure, it doesnt work for the guy that has neither money nor kidneys, but then again no system would. That guy is just as screwed today as he would be if sale was allowed.
But a lot of other people, both rich and poor, would benefit. You'd rather have the rich ones die from organ failure, and the poor ones die from the diseases of poverty, rather than let them make a trade that would let both of them live longer? Why?
You should study contract law a little if you think it works that way. It does not.
At best it might allow you to sue the first owner for selling in violation of your contract, if you find out about it, but good luck covering the lawyers fees in the process. It still gives you no rights whatsoever against the second owner, who is not a party to the contract.
"And so, manufacturers write another line into a sales contract stating that by purchasing this vehicle you explicitly confer them rights of ownership over said data."
From your link: "Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again."
Yeah, Jamie hit the nail on the head with that one.
"You can instruct your browser to prompt you for every app and script, and to specifically request your permission before displaying upper-case characters if that's your thing....but when the applet is given the go-ahead to run, it either plays video or it doesn't. You only chose if you're going to execute it, and it's execution is at face value."
Again, not true. I can actually inspect the code and determine the URL to the media file myself, then download it and do whatever I want with it. AS IT SHOULD BE.
"In short, it makes sense in, like, my opinion, man. to have a link to LIVE CAMERA actually have moving pictures behind it."
I understand how it works very well, and I also understand why it should never have been done this way.
"The HTML iframe that embeds, for example, a YouTube video embeds the YouTube player. It's a feature of the YouTube player to decide what behavior to take when it starts. Your browser doesn't determine how to handle YouTube's code. It takes it at face value."
Actually, that's not true at all. I get a nice little box where youtube wants their player to show up. Only if I click it and explicitly permit it, does my browser execute their player. This is as it should be.
What's not as it should be is that my browser has had to be customized to behave this way, and the developers like to keep breaking the customizations. This means that while I, as a technically advanced user, can somewhat defend myself here, the people that need help the worst, the least technical users, are effectively locked out from exercising their rights.
'When someone clicks on the LIVE CAM link, I want the video on that page to start automatically."
When we are talking about MY browser on MY computer, your wishes are and should be entirely besides the point. If you dont want the person clicking on the link to have the power to determine how that link is interpreted, you should not be on the web, because that is simply the way it works.
Slashdot Mirror
"I would love to move to a FOSS operating system if I could still play my proprietary games on it. Valve may actually give me a chance."
You think you need Valve to give you WINE? How strange.
The game run through WINE the same whether you set it up yourself of pay valve to do it for you. But if you let them do it, they get control of your computer in the deal.
"Back in my college days, being able to plug an external drive into a lab PC and play counterstrike was quite handy for killing time between classes."
But I have done that myself on a number of occasions. No STEAM needed.
"And the steam DRM is basically: it needs to phone home about once a month. So once a month it uses about 2 megabytes of bandwidth for DRM, big friggin deal."
It's sending 2 megabytes a month, I have no way of knowing exactly what is in that 2 megabytes, I cannot audit it, I cannot even look at the code (let alone modify it, not even a one-line edit so it will link with my kernel) and if I prevent this snitch from making it's call I will be deprived of the quiet enjoyment of a product I have bought and paid for, and to you this is no big deal?
Your definition of a big deal and mine appear to have parted ways a LONG ways back. To me that is a VERY big deal. If any company I did business with proposed a system like that to me they would be lucky to get one brief chance to back straight down and apologize before I cut all ties, permanently, and call up my lawyer to suss out our options for a lawsuit.
"I don't see how what Valve is doing is diluting the mission of Debian at all"
Debian's mission is, to boil it down just a little, to be the exact opposite of DRM. You still dont understand how bringing in new people that think STEAM DRM is just wonderful could compromise that mission?
Sure. That's basically how it works. In this case it was aggravated by the fact that my friend lived in a relatively free state, while the state next door is much more socialist. So they provide a LOT more in the way of welfare... the only part that seemed surprising was that they had no compunctions about actively recruiting dependents from out of state like that. It makes sense but it's pretty shameless.
"If the code, meshes, textures, maps, scripts, and audio of a video game are Free as in Freedom"
There's your false postulate. What if the code is free but the artistic content is not? Then there is no problem on either side.
A friend of mine had the neighboring state actually come and pursuade his wife to leave him, and bring the children. They got public housing and benefits and he had just had some major financial problems. So anyway about 2 years later he gets sued for child support. Not by his family of course, but by the state. Next thing you know any legitimate job he gets, the paycheck goes somewhere else. Last I knew he was working a taxi so at least he got paid in cash and could pay his bills and eat that way. It's not like he wasnt having trouble to begin with, but this always seemed to me pretty egregious, and clearly against public interest, but it seems to be business as usual.
"If your gaming PC does not connect to the internet, I'm guessing you don't do much multiplayer..."
Not recently but no, I've done plenty of multiplayer this way. You can hook up a LAN with no WAN you know.
"That said: Steam's DRM is the least evil of them all,"
And even if that's true it's still by your own admission evil.
"The "freedom" to not care if my gigs of games are wiped out in a hard drive failure, to copy the steam directory as-is to any PC on the same architecture and being able to straight up play, and to arbitrarily delete game files if I temporarily need the space is far more important to me than the freedom to look at arbitrary code."
The first and last of these things I can do with any game I have purchased, either via a physical disk or via a persistent login/download link from e.g. shrapnel. The middle one is the only one that is at all unique and it doesnt seem important at all in context of the DRM.
"This is a "choose your battles" scenario. Either 1) let Valve attract more people to Debian for desktop use. They'll play their closed source games when bored, and use the open source productivity software to get actual work done. Or, 2) fight them on this, they take their ball and go home, and the people they would have attracted continue to regard the FOSS movement as a bunch of loons that like to look gift horses in the mouth."
I think that is a false dichotomy. Of course Valve is welcome to use Debian here if they wish. It's Free Software. I never objected to them using it. I object to bullshit pronouncements about how the Free Software community somehow is or should be grateful to Valve for this, as if they were doing us a favor. This is no favor. Valve is simply doing what is best for their business *as they should be doing* but that is not something we should praise or be impressed with, that is just normal business.
And if "attracting more people" is cause for diluting the mission of Debian then it will be a bad, not a good thing. The ifs in the previous sentence will be optimised out by any decent compiler.
That's fine, no one is expecting them to publish the art portion of the game under a free license. It would be nice to get the actual code, but that is not the problem here either. What makes this a farce is the Digital Restrictions Management. Once I buy the game I should be able to run it without running another binary that I cannot audit or even relink and whose professed function - communicating with Valve and possibly preventing me from doing what I want with my computer if they do not send the right response - is inimical to my own interests.
If I paid for the program I should be able to install and run it on my gaming pc - which is quite deliberately NOT connectable to the internet. I will sneaker-net patches that are needed, but why on earth would I sneaker-net in a program whose only function will be to try to phone home over and over with obviously no response, and eventually effect a hostile take-over of my computer to prevent me from paying the game I bought and paid for?
You're right, the FOSS community doesnt give two squirts about this.
Valve does, however, and they would very much like you to as well. If they can generate a little buzz and fool you into thinking you should be 'praising' them for this then their marketing folks have done their job.
Try to remember that we are talking about Free as in Freedom, not free as in beer.
No one is expected to work for free. But we want to pay them with money, rather than with our rights.
Why use perl when a bash script will do?
Although it's better to have made the speech than not, it does seem a bit of a cop out. He was in the right position, at the right place and the right time, to have really made some kind of difference, but he didnt. He just made this neat speech at the end to absolve his conscience, and left it to future generations to solve a problem that has grown so huge over the intervening decades that it seems completely intractible.
We were talking about his farewell speech, apparently you need to watch it before this will make sense to you.
He spoke eloquently and at length about the dangers of the military industrial complex. Which he had worked with closely, and done nothing to oppose, through his entire career leading up to that moment.
Technically speaking the link does not point to a webpage, and is therefore nothing but noise. I am sure a decent percentage of slashdot readers see it as such. And you are right, if they had enough organisational skills to HAVE an editorial policy, it should prohibit such 'links' from being posted like this.
Along with all the dupes and not-actually-english writeups.
Note also, however, that he did nothing notable to help us while he was in office - he went right along. He only got cold feet and started talking on his very last day.
And not just socialists, right wing opponents of war were not treated notably better.
The espionage act has been used against real spies on occasion, but more often it has been used as a stick against dissenters.
"All you need is opinions and you're as good as the guys in white coats"
If those particular guys in white coats are speaking the language of pseudo-science, you're probably right.
On budget DoD isnt the entirety of empire spending, it's just a start. Afghanistan and Iraq were both handled with their own appropriations, remember, as are other 'long-term projects.' There's all this "homeland security" and the militarisation of what used to be at least nominally law enforcement agencies is not short for funding - it's actually a very visible and expanding pork barrel. Taking all this out of the budget would show large decreases not just in DoD but many other departments as well. And we have not even mentioned the "black" funding pool which is certainly enormous. All of those are direct costs and regardless of accounting tricks those are all, ultimately, paid for.
"Lefties don't understand why we can't have all the social programs of Europe, and Righties don't understand why we have to have personal income taxes that are so high, and corporate taxes that are event higher, in both cases its because we are paying to make cheap gasoline available."
And that doesnt even work so well. Sure it's cheap at the pump but as you point out the real cost is hidden - in a military budget that is by far the largest in the world, and is so large and labyrinthine it cannot be effectively audited and never has been.
If we folded up our empire and downsized the military until it was something reasonably connected with defending our shores we could save enough money to slash taxes AND increase social spending while still paying down the deficit, and gasoline would be slightly, if any, more expensive in the short run. Almost certainly less expensive in the long run.
"It worked when they were the only game in town[1], but these days you can choose to use Icinga or even Sensu; both of which are far better products than Nagios and support Nagios plugins."
So it appears their business strategy moving forward was to leverage the domain registration to allow them to present their fork as the original product, then alter the plugins to be incompatible with the competition.
Sure the original project will keep going at mobility-plugins, but the 'big fish' customers might not be able to see past the name/domain.
And if you simply allowed compensation for donors there wouldnt be a supply issue either.
I know a lot of people think it's a problem that these organs would be mostly coming from poor people, but think about it. You wouldnt get very far even with a donation system if you only allowed wealthy donors. And naturally offering money for something isnt as tempting to those that have plenty of money already as it is to those that are scraping by.
The whole point to a market is to enable trades that leave both sides better off. A has lots of money, needs a kidney. B has plenty of kidney, needs money badly. They get together and both walk away happy.
Sure, it doesnt work for the guy that has neither money nor kidneys, but then again no system would. That guy is just as screwed today as he would be if sale was allowed.
But a lot of other people, both rich and poor, would benefit. You'd rather have the rich ones die from organ failure, and the poor ones die from the diseases of poverty, rather than let them make a trade that would let both of them live longer? Why?
Does the thought of death disturb you deeply?
You should study contract law a little if you think it works that way. It does not.
At best it might allow you to sue the first owner for selling in violation of your contract, if you find out about it, but good luck covering the lawyers fees in the process. It still gives you no rights whatsoever against the second owner, who is not a party to the contract.
"And so, manufacturers write another line into a sales contract stating that by purchasing this vehicle you explicitly confer them rights of ownership over said data."
Won't give them any rights with a second owner.
From your link: "Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again."
Yeah, Jamie hit the nail on the head with that one.
"You can instruct your browser to prompt you for every app and script, and to specifically request your permission before displaying upper-case characters if that's your thing. ...but when the applet is given the go-ahead to run, it either plays video or it doesn't. You only chose if you're going to execute it, and it's execution is at face value."
Again, not true. I can actually inspect the code and determine the URL to the media file myself, then download it and do whatever I want with it. AS IT SHOULD BE.
"In short, it makes sense in, like, my opinion, man. to have a link to LIVE CAMERA actually have moving pictures behind it."
Yes, it does, so why not do that?
I understand how it works very well, and I also understand why it should never have been done this way.
"The HTML iframe that embeds, for example, a YouTube video embeds the YouTube player. It's a feature of the YouTube player to decide what behavior to take when it starts. Your browser doesn't determine how to handle YouTube's code. It takes it at face value."
Actually, that's not true at all. I get a nice little box where youtube wants their player to show up. Only if I click it and explicitly permit it, does my browser execute their player. This is as it should be.
What's not as it should be is that my browser has had to be customized to behave this way, and the developers like to keep breaking the customizations. This means that while I, as a technically advanced user, can somewhat defend myself here, the people that need help the worst, the least technical users, are effectively locked out from exercising their rights.
'When someone clicks on the LIVE CAM link, I want the video on that page to start automatically."
When we are talking about MY browser on MY computer, your wishes are and should be entirely besides the point. If you dont want the person clicking on the link to have the power to determine how that link is interpreted, you should not be on the web, because that is simply the way it works.