Further, and let's be fair here, what are the chances of someone receiving three totally invalid DMCA notices if they are not file sharing? Users do have to accept at least some responsibility for their own actions here.
Says someone who apparently has never had a guest on their wireless network.
I can receive three DMCA notices and not be responsible for any file sharing. How can I be responsible for actions that I am not committing. It is an accusation made to the person who pays the bill for the connection, not to the person who may or may not be infringing. Prenda et al used to rely on that to get their trolling operations going.
But, as someone who has never received a DMCA notice, I am not sure what I would do if I did. I suspect I'd look at it, consult a lawyer, and then respond accordingly, but I am sure a lot of people would see it for what it really is, junk mail from a "legal" scam artist given the fact that many of them are junk (DMCA from someone who doesn't own what they are DMCA'ing, DMCA for something that isn't infringing, DMCA to suppress 1st Amendment, DMCA to wrong person, DMCA for items made available by a legal/non-infringing entity.)
Here in the USA, it's a high crime to rip a DVD but perfectly legal to rip a CD
It is only illegal to rip a DVD if you bypass the CSS "copy-protection" scheme (in quotes because it does neither of those things...you can create a perfect copy of the DVD without breaking CSS, and it is marginally better protection than leaving the DVD out on the sidewalk with a sign that says "please don't copy this.") Otherwise, you can rip a DVD without issue. There are quite a few companies that release titles without Digital Restrictions Management (or, as the IP-Maximalists call it, Digital Rights Management, which is just stupid...no rights are respected, only restrictions to those rights which already exist by nature/technology/culture) now. The DMCA is illogical, period, but its application here is entirely logical...you can rip whatever doesn't use encryption to prevent you from ripping.
After cutting cable 9 years ago I just signed up again this past week. This is due to it being cheaper to get cable with internet than just internet.
Does this include the cost of "fees"? My cable bill dropped by a significant amount when I cut TV out, despite the bundling, mainly because of the additional "Franchise Fee", "Universal Access Fee" and "Service Fee" that got tacked on to my cable TV bill. My internet bill is $99, with no fees, and bundled with cable TV it was closer to $150 despite the "$10 off for bundling."
Yup, it's the law. It has nothing to do with kidnapping, human trafficking, blackmail, paying down "debts" related to illegal immigration, or needing a way--any way--to support a drug habit
Ahem...most of us who work for a living in a legitimate job or industry (though I'd certainly argue that prostitution should be considered a legitimate industry if done correctly,) could be doing the same. Ask anyone standing near a Home Depot looking for a job, or ask the many people working under the table in construction, agriculture, and domestic services industries where their money is going, and I suspect you'll find they are doing the same.
Hell, I am using my paycheck to pay off my debts too. What's to say that one or more of these debts may be illegal too (though they certainly weren't when I took them on,) just because some politician somewhere felt that they should get more of the pie in order to make the system more fair for others?
I get it, let's make working illegal, and send everyone to jail because someone somewhere may be using their paycheck to do something illegal.
This income was partly used to digitise the collection, which is only 1/3 of the way through - leaving 200 000 pictures unavailable to the public domain until they can figure out a new way to pay for it.
It doesn't sound like any of it was in the public domain to begin with if they are charging people for reproduction rights on the photographs of the public domain works.
What I really don't understand about this is why NPG doesn't view this for what it is...advertising. Put the pictures up on wikipedia themselves, with attribution and a free/open license (or public domain,) and it serves as great advertising for folks visiting Germany to stop by and see the real thing in person. Of course, the real reason is that they make way too much mad-money using an unethical loophole in the copyright process to re-lock-up public domain works, but I suspect the museum probably has a big sign everywhere outlawing pictures of the works too.
Gotta lock up that culture, for the sake of everyone, so nobody gets to look at it without paying the toll (troll).
Connections was brilliant, and it's still fun to watch the delivery of the material
I still wish they would play Connections (the first season,) as mandatory material for budding IP Maximalists...and anyone who trots out the line "Why build on someone elses' stuff, build your own new concept/idea" should have Connections beamed into their head 24/7/365 until they understand that there are no new concepts/ideas, and everything in the world is built on stuff that came before it.
Kinda reminds me of the short-lived X-Files spin-off (lot of hyphens there...) The Lone Gunmen.
Sad that show only aired thirteen episodes and was cancelled after one season. At least they aired all thirteen of them before killing the show, unlike another awesome show that only had 13 episodes before it was killed, two years later.
Fox, where good shows are killed off in their infancy or left on way too long after they stopped being watchable, ahem, Simpsons, X-Files. (Though Simpsons does still have some watchability.)
I know at least one person who swore never to use Hulu again who resubscribed because they introduced this feature (though to be fair his problem was technical issues with the ad streaming, no opposition to their existence). I wonder how many more people have been considering a switch now that the majority of shows won't have ads if you pay $5/month more.
I had technical issues with them that caused me to drop supporting them too...even though I appreciated the fact that I was paying to watch advertisements on my set top box when folks who were going to Hulu via a web-browser on a computer were seeing the same advertisements for free.
My issue was that they wouldn't support any device older than a year old. My two year old LG Blu-Ray player stopped working with Hulu, and their technical support spent six months using me as a guinea pig (while I paid for the privilege) to figure out why their system wasn't working.
When my year old set-top box started to see the same issues, I could no longer use their service, and told them to stop charging me. Haven't been back (except maybe once or twice via a computer.) Won't come back until they can show that they fixed their technical support issues. In their defense, they did offer me a couple refunds for months in which I could not use their service because of technical issues, but the number of refunds was less than the amount of money I spent with no service.
I'm surprised they hadn't obtained the different variations of their name before. Domains are so cheap, you can afford 100$/year to buy the .com's .org's et all.
Maybe they would actually like to spend that money helping others, not having to be stupid and waste the money on building up huge portfolios of misspelled and potentially-fraudulent-sounding domain names? The EFF does good work. Why do you want to saddle them with huge debts just to make the domain name industry a little more money?
Looking forward to seeing Rep. Bob Goodlatte's cameo in an upcoming superhero movie as we did with Sen. Patrick Leahy.
I know its the whole high court/low court, but any employee of the government who did this stuff would be looking at an official reprimand, unemployment (with a permanent ban on any future government work,) or a stay at a state or Federal penitentiary. I don't understand how what is good for the goose isn't good for the gander. Certainly the opposite...if government employees get reprimanded for going to a dinner paid for by a third party (whether or not they in turn pay for their own meal, as is required by the law,) then I don't understand how Senators, Representatives, senior politicians, etc., are allowed to get away with it, since they may be elected, but they are still employees of the government (and should be held to a much higher standard that their plebs and peons.)
Re: Yet Blizzard still doesn't ban most of the botters
I mean literally, you CAN'T get anymore obvious then 24/7 uptime playing the game that you're botting, you'd die if you tried to play a game that much. Even the biggest fan can't be dedicated enough to play a game 24/7 for several months straight.
It would be impossible for a single person to do, but not for three people, working as a team over that time. I suspect the streamers are using several people to generate those streams, since bots would be far less up to the task. Bots are great at doing the same thing over and over again, such as mining for gold or running the same mission over and over. To keep their audience, the streamers really have to be dynamic and go after new and different things.
What is interesting is when these companies go after people selling gold/items/etc. Those tend to be the people using the bots, running the same mission over and over again to collect new items, amass gold, etc. Their only goal is to sell the items, not play the game, and they can really do this without a bot even though it becomes so monotonous for the player. When Eve Online started ejecting bots, there were still a lot of ISK sellers online, they'd just pay humans to be glorified bots, playing the same missions over and over again to collect money and items to sell. The only people who ended up being hurt were the folks paying for their own accounts using bots (not that this was a good thing)...the ISK sellers kept selling their wares unhindered.
If it is college kids with the password for their home account then that seems exactly what that is designed for. While in college they are still in most cases for legal purposed residing at their parent's house. The HBO login is designed to allow you to watch content while away from home. The fact that they are away from home for four years is only a detail.
This, and the fact that most Dorms won't allow you to wire cable or run satellite dishes. They may have cable, but in many dorms I've been to, the cable is run to a central location or a "break" area and not into the rooms themselves. Unless you are in a new or newly remodeled dorm, you don't have cable, wired internet, etc.
You have wireless, offered by the school, or you have a central area where you can sit and watch cable.
Cutting off access to HBO isn't going to make students go out and buy a connection because they can't. Just like anyone who has lived in a old apartment complex or a high-rent Home-Owners Association development...you can't just go out and buy cable unless city hall lets you, and you can't fight city hall.
By keeping the students hooked while they are in school, HBO only assures that they stay hooked when they move out. Cable CEO is the one who has lost all sense of marketing reality and just is in it for the short term greed and not looking at the long game.
I have had many discussion with people on Techdirt and do not see extremism. I do see a few copyright extremist such as yourself that get on their soapboxes and declare the "holier than thou" approach to arguing.
This is not the troll you are looking for. Check your sarcasm detector...it may need new batteries.
One easy example for lost culture is Dr. Who's missing episodes.
The story behind the destruction is as bad as the destruction themselves. They needed room and didn't think that the video would ever be wanted again after it played the first time, so they just destroyed them. Nobody ever thought that someone who came along after the video showed would ever be interested in watching it. It wasn't copyright that destroyed it...it was lack of storage space and a lack of imagination and understanding of culture. (And, as is mentioned on the wiki, legal requirements from the union for television producers to re-hire actors to perform the program again live in order for it to be re-shown.)
Sad too, since I really liked Hartnell as the Doctor, even though I wasn't born until 8 years after he stopped being the Doctor, and 1 year before he died.
we WERE going to invest $20B - but since these rules are killing us, we're only able to invest $8B... see how horrible it is? Why, we'll barely make a profit (after campaign contributions, that is...)
I know this is sarcasm, but I am not sure that companies like AT&T and Comcast *don't* actually believe this (at least their legal/political arms.)
Considering the government has already invested at least $3.5 billion (just the rural broadband subsidies, that have yet to produce many connected people as has been discussed here in the past,) but probably far more in the "information superhighway" and "connecting America" deals, I suspect that most of what the government already invested went into their coffers and what little was actually paid in campaign contributions came from that,) I am not sure why they even can make this argument with a straight face.
There have been numerous studies indicating that government subsidies of internet broadband is a waste of money, but I believe that most of these studies were flawed because elsewhere in the world, subsidies have paid off, just not here where government regulators have no backbone (or have been bribed not to,) and companies are greedy and manipulative in order to get the most handouts for the least amount of work done.
Aside from the fact that they will only be criminals for doing something they have always done, but that the government decided (with obvious manipulation from their cronies) was somehow worthy of being illegal. Police officers aren't suddenly going to start arresting people for working in the garage on their own car, and except for shutting down high-school and junior college auto-repair departments due to political/legal concerns, most people will pretty much ignore these laws.
It may be used by states to enforce their smog requirements, but unless the companies start putting intrusion prevention systems and call-home devices on their vehicles (I doubt, because it is going to be very expensive and difficult to manage,) unless you publish your findings, nothing will happen.
Where this is going to hurt, is in vulnerability disclosure. Media publishing reports in how VW is bypassing environmental tests will become hot-potatoes, since in order to discover this, someone must have discovered it, and to do that, they had to break the law by reverse engineering.
One might buy credits only to discover that someone else has claimed the first word/last word.
I've always been a fan of treating the first word/last word as a counter, where the current winner gets first or last words, and that way if I think something is a first word, but everyone else who has paid disagrees, their first word wins. I've always viewed the current model as a recipe for disaster (and even worse now) in that any spammer or troll can promote their comment to the first/last word and we are stuck with it. Don't know how easily it can be implemented, but figure this would be a good fix for the "insurance" aspect, since you aren't guaranteed to have the first or last word.
But I think a system like that would be a little too close to Reddit's...so YMMV.
"new ways to buy techdirt credits"? Techdirt isn't shy about pushing the purchase of techdrit credits.
Why not, you show up here to comment all the time...stop being a freeloader and actually pay for content.
I've got so many credits they tend to go to waste each month...but I've always liked that Mike eats his own dogfood in the CWF+RtB (Connect With Fans+Reason to Buy) model that he has always been selling. Just wish the entertainment industry would learn to follow this model instead of the EMM+FCTB+CTPA (Enforce/Extend My Monopoly+Force Customers To Buy at unreasonable prices/with unreasonable caveats+Call Them Pirates Anyway) model they currently employ.
FW and LW need better blurb as to what they are/do.
Haven't tried it, but do the FW/LW show up for people not logged in or who have no credits? Figure if they are hidden, then the folks who have credit know what the FW/LW buttons do (but it doesn't really matter, tooltips is turned on, so if you move you mouse over the button, it tells you what it means.)
I actually like the new buttons, but agree that the green buttons are too green, maybe a lighter green will make those show up better.
The people making Revision approached Square BEFORE even putting it on Steam to ensure there would be no backlash. (this, more than anything, is probably what did it)
There are quite a few examples of modders coming up to developers and asking for permission before putting on Steam, only to have the developers threaten with lawyers. In many ways, it was because of this stupidity that people stopped asking the developers for permission and just released the mods to the public, hoping that the backlash wouldn't be too bad (before the DMCA, there wasn't much a company could do to stop a mod, only try to find the modder and sue them.)
And to make matters worse, the developers tend to change policies quicker than the revolutions of most pulsars, where a developer (e.g. Majong) is really happy with a mod (craftbukkit), so much so that they eventually bring it into their fold, offering developers to it, only to DMCA it out of existence shortly after being acquired by Microsoft.
You have to own a copy of the original Deus Ex. (honestly not to big a deal; if you're getting Revision, you probably love Deus Ex anyways)
I am not aware of any mod that has not required the original game. There may be some, but I am not aware of any. The whole point of a mod is to add functionality, fix bugs, etc., in the game.
Revision is generating zero profit. (this helps too I suppose)
Probably. Though I don't understand what the heartache is with people generating money on these things. You got your money selling the original game...someone comes along and adds functionality to the game, and people buy it, and if a lot of people are interested, they buy more of your game.
But this "zero profit" even hurts, since quite a few of the modders would love to generate mods where they can pay off the costs associated with the development of the mod, and then give the profit to charity. Mods aren't that expensive to create, so the costs are quite low, and they probably won't be asking the same DLC prices the "official mods" get.
In the most cosmopolitan place I've ever lived, there aren't more than maybe FIVE local broadcast stations.
I live in southern California, and get about 20 with my antenna. More than 30 if you count the ones in Spanish.
Most major stations have one or more "sub-stations" now with digital HDTV, so channels like 7 have 7.1 and 7.2. Some come in better than others, and I occasionally have to turn my antenna to get better signal, but I get far more than 5. Maybe in Kansas you'll only get 5, but I've seen the same traveling to other parts of the country.
On the post: The Details Of Why Judge O'Grady Rejected Cox's DMCA Defense: Bad Decisions By Cox May Lead To Bad Law
Re:
Says someone who apparently has never had a guest on their wireless network.
I can receive three DMCA notices and not be responsible for any file sharing. How can I be responsible for actions that I am not committing. It is an accusation made to the person who pays the bill for the connection, not to the person who may or may not be infringing. Prenda et al used to rely on that to get their trolling operations going.
But, as someone who has never received a DMCA notice, I am not sure what I would do if I did. I suspect I'd look at it, consult a lawyer, and then respond accordingly, but I am sure a lot of people would see it for what it really is, junk mail from a "legal" scam artist given the fact that many of them are junk (DMCA from someone who doesn't own what they are DMCA'ing, DMCA for something that isn't infringing, DMCA to suppress 1st Amendment, DMCA to wrong person, DMCA for items made available by a legal/non-infringing entity.)
On the post: What Did The UK Accomplish In Revoking The Right To Rip CDs After Just One Year... Other Than Greater Disrespect For Copyright?
Re: quite logical, actually
It is only illegal to rip a DVD if you bypass the CSS "copy-protection" scheme (in quotes because it does neither of those things...you can create a perfect copy of the DVD without breaking CSS, and it is marginally better protection than leaving the DVD out on the sidewalk with a sign that says "please don't copy this.") Otherwise, you can rip a DVD without issue. There are quite a few companies that release titles without Digital Restrictions Management (or, as the IP-Maximalists call it, Digital Rights Management, which is just stupid...no rights are respected, only restrictions to those rights which already exist by nature/technology/culture) now. The DMCA is illogical, period, but its application here is entirely logical...you can rip whatever doesn't use encryption to prevent you from ripping.
On the post: ESPN Ignored Cord Cutting Threat, Paid For It With Huge Viewership Losses
Re: Re:
Does this include the cost of "fees"? My cable bill dropped by a significant amount when I cut TV out, despite the bundling, mainly because of the additional "Franchise Fee", "Universal Access Fee" and "Service Fee" that got tacked on to my cable TV bill. My internet bill is $99, with no fees, and bundled with cable TV it was closer to $150 despite the "$10 off for bundling."
On the post: L.A. Politician Proposes Bold Plan To Wreck Homes, Destroy Lives And Abuse License Plate Reader Technology
Re: Re:
Ahem...most of us who work for a living in a legitimate job or industry (though I'd certainly argue that prostitution should be considered a legitimate industry if done correctly,) could be doing the same. Ask anyone standing near a Home Depot looking for a job, or ask the many people working under the table in construction, agriculture, and domestic services industries where their money is going, and I suspect you'll find they are doing the same.
Hell, I am using my paycheck to pay off my debts too. What's to say that one or more of these debts may be illegal too (though they certainly weren't when I took them on,) just because some politician somewhere felt that they should get more of the pie in order to make the system more fair for others?
I get it, let's make working illegal, and send everyone to jail because someone somewhere may be using their paycheck to do something illegal.
On the post: German Museum Sues Wikimedia Foundation Over Photos Of Public Domain Works Of Art
Re: Double-Bind.
It doesn't sound like any of it was in the public domain to begin with if they are charging people for reproduction rights on the photographs of the public domain works.
What I really don't understand about this is why NPG doesn't view this for what it is...advertising. Put the pictures up on wikipedia themselves, with attribution and a free/open license (or public domain,) and it serves as great advertising for folks visiting Germany to stop by and see the real thing in person. Of course, the real reason is that they make way too much mad-money using an unethical loophole in the copyright process to re-lock-up public domain works, but I suspect the museum probably has a big sign everywhere outlawing pictures of the works too.
Gotta lock up that culture, for the sake of everyone, so nobody gets to look at it without paying the toll (troll).
On the post: Ted Koppel Writes Entire Book About How Hackers Will Take Down Our Electric Grid... And Never Spoke To Any Experts
Re: Re: Pshah...
I still wish they would play Connections (the first season,) as mandatory material for budding IP Maximalists...and anyone who trots out the line "Why build on someone elses' stuff, build your own new concept/idea" should have Connections beamed into their head 24/7/365 until they understand that there are no new concepts/ideas, and everything in the world is built on stuff that came before it.
On the post: Ted Koppel Writes Entire Book About How Hackers Will Take Down Our Electric Grid... And Never Spoke To Any Experts
Re: Re: Re: Pshah...
Sad that show only aired thirteen episodes and was cancelled after one season. At least they aired all thirteen of them before killing the show, unlike another awesome show that only had 13 episodes before it was killed, two years later.
Fox, where good shows are killed off in their infancy or left on way too long after they stopped being watchable, ahem, Simpsons, X-Files. (Though Simpsons does still have some watchability.)
On the post: TV Industry Starts Running Fewer Ads To Combat Netflix, Cord Cutting
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I had technical issues with them that caused me to drop supporting them too...even though I appreciated the fact that I was paying to watch advertisements on my set top box when folks who were going to Hulu via a web-browser on a computer were seeing the same advertisements for free.
My issue was that they wouldn't support any device older than a year old. My two year old LG Blu-Ray player stopped working with Hulu, and their technical support spent six months using me as a guinea pig (while I paid for the privilege) to figure out why their system wasn't working.
When my year old set-top box started to see the same issues, I could no longer use their service, and told them to stop charging me. Haven't been back (except maybe once or twice via a computer.) Won't come back until they can show that they fixed their technical support issues. In their defense, they did offer me a couple refunds for months in which I could not use their service because of technical issues, but the number of refunds was less than the amount of money I spent with no service.
On the post: WIPO Gives EFF Control Over Bogus Domain Used To Distribute Keyloggers And Other Malware
Re:
Maybe they would actually like to spend that money helping others, not having to be stupid and waste the money on building up huge portfolios of misspelled and potentially-fraudulent-sounding domain names? The EFF does good work. Why do you want to saddle them with huge debts just to make the domain name industry a little more money?
On the post: Head Of House Judiciary Committee Dines With MPAA, Joins Their Fundraiser, Following LA Copyright Hearing
Re:
I know its the whole high court/low court, but any employee of the government who did this stuff would be looking at an official reprimand, unemployment (with a permanent ban on any future government work,) or a stay at a state or Federal penitentiary. I don't understand how what is good for the goose isn't good for the gander. Certainly the opposite...if government employees get reprimanded for going to a dinner paid for by a third party (whether or not they in turn pay for their own meal, as is required by the law,) then I don't understand how Senators, Representatives, senior politicians, etc., are allowed to get away with it, since they may be elected, but they are still employees of the government (and should be held to a much higher standard that their plebs and peons.)
How is this not receiving a bribe?
On the post: Yet Again, Blizzard Looks To Twist Copyright Law To Use It To Go After Bot Makers It Considers Cheaters
Re: Yet Blizzard still doesn't ban most of the botters
It would be impossible for a single person to do, but not for three people, working as a team over that time. I suspect the streamers are using several people to generate those streams, since bots would be far less up to the task. Bots are great at doing the same thing over and over again, such as mining for gold or running the same mission over and over. To keep their audience, the streamers really have to be dynamic and go after new and different things.
What is interesting is when these companies go after people selling gold/items/etc. Those tend to be the people using the bots, running the same mission over and over again to collect new items, amass gold, etc. Their only goal is to sell the items, not play the game, and they can really do this without a bot even though it becomes so monotonous for the player. When Eve Online started ejecting bots, there were still a lot of ISK sellers online, they'd just pay humans to be glorified bots, playing the same missions over and over again to collect money and items to sell. The only people who ended up being hurt were the folks paying for their own accounts using bots (not that this was a good thing)...the ISK sellers kept selling their wares unhindered.
On the post: Cable CEO Is Really Pissed That HBO Hasn't Cracked Down On Streaming Password Sharing
Re: Which is he complaining about?
This, and the fact that most Dorms won't allow you to wire cable or run satellite dishes. They may have cable, but in many dorms I've been to, the cable is run to a central location or a "break" area and not into the rooms themselves. Unless you are in a new or newly remodeled dorm, you don't have cable, wired internet, etc.
You have wireless, offered by the school, or you have a central area where you can sit and watch cable.
Cutting off access to HBO isn't going to make students go out and buy a connection because they can't. Just like anyone who has lived in a old apartment complex or a high-rent Home-Owners Association development...you can't just go out and buy cable unless city hall lets you, and you can't fight city hall.
By keeping the students hooked while they are in school, HBO only assures that they stay hooked when they move out. Cable CEO is the one who has lost all sense of marketing reality and just is in it for the short term greed and not looking at the long game.
On the post: Copyright Terms And How Historical Journalism Is Disappearing
Re: Re:
This is not the troll you are looking for. Check your sarcasm detector...it may need new batteries.
One easy example for lost culture is Dr. Who's missing episodes.
The story behind the destruction is as bad as the destruction themselves. They needed room and didn't think that the video would ever be wanted again after it played the first time, so they just destroyed them. Nobody ever thought that someone who came along after the video showed would ever be interested in watching it. It wasn't copyright that destroyed it...it was lack of storage space and a lack of imagination and understanding of culture. (And, as is mentioned on the wiki, legal requirements from the union for television producers to re-hire actors to perform the program again live in order for it to be re-shown.)
Sad too, since I really liked Hartnell as the Doctor, even though I wasn't born until 8 years after he stopped being the Doctor, and 1 year before he died.
On the post: Sorry Net Neutrality Chicken Littles, Title II & Net Neutrality Still Haven't Hurt Broadband Investment In The Slightest
Re: Well, you see...
I know this is sarcasm, but I am not sure that companies like AT&T and Comcast *don't* actually believe this (at least their legal/political arms.)
Considering the government has already invested at least $3.5 billion (just the rural broadband subsidies, that have yet to produce many connected people as has been discussed here in the past,) but probably far more in the "information superhighway" and "connecting America" deals, I suspect that most of what the government already invested went into their coffers and what little was actually paid in campaign contributions came from that,) I am not sure why they even can make this argument with a straight face.
There have been numerous studies indicating that government subsidies of internet broadband is a waste of money, but I believe that most of these studies were flawed because elsewhere in the world, subsidies have paid off, just not here where government regulators have no backbone (or have been bribed not to,) and companies are greedy and manipulative in order to get the most handouts for the least amount of work done.
On the post: New 'Car Safety Bill' Would Make Us Less Safe, Block Security Research And Hinder FTC And Others
Re: Make hacking cars criminal...
Aside from the fact that they will only be criminals for doing something they have always done, but that the government decided (with obvious manipulation from their cronies) was somehow worthy of being illegal. Police officers aren't suddenly going to start arresting people for working in the garage on their own car, and except for shutting down high-school and junior college auto-repair departments due to political/legal concerns, most people will pretty much ignore these laws.
It may be used by states to enforce their smog requirements, but unless the companies start putting intrusion prevention systems and call-home devices on their vehicles (I doubt, because it is going to be very expensive and difficult to manage,) unless you publish your findings, nothing will happen.
Where this is going to hurt, is in vulnerability disclosure. Media publishing reports in how VW is bypassing environmental tests will become hot-potatoes, since in order to discover this, someone must have discovered it, and to do that, they had to break the law by reverse engineering.
On the post: Revamped Comment Buttons + New Ways To Buy Techdirt Credits
Re: WWKD
I've always been a fan of treating the first word/last word as a counter, where the current winner gets first or last words, and that way if I think something is a first word, but everyone else who has paid disagrees, their first word wins. I've always viewed the current model as a recipe for disaster (and even worse now) in that any spammer or troll can promote their comment to the first/last word and we are stuck with it. Don't know how easily it can be implemented, but figure this would be a good fix for the "insurance" aspect, since you aren't guaranteed to have the first or last word.
But I think a system like that would be a little too close to Reddit's...so YMMV.
On the post: Revamped Comment Buttons + New Ways To Buy Techdirt Credits
Re:
Why not, you show up here to comment all the time...stop being a freeloader and actually pay for content.
I've got so many credits they tend to go to waste each month...but I've always liked that Mike eats his own dogfood in the CWF+RtB (Connect With Fans+Reason to Buy) model that he has always been selling. Just wish the entertainment industry would learn to follow this model instead of the EMM+FCTB+CTPA (Enforce/Extend My Monopoly+Force Customers To Buy at unreasonable prices/with unreasonable caveats+Call Them Pirates Anyway) model they currently employ.
On the post: Revamped Comment Buttons + New Ways To Buy Techdirt Credits
Re: Re:
Haven't tried it, but do the FW/LW show up for people not logged in or who have no credits? Figure if they are hidden, then the folks who have credit know what the FW/LW buttons do (but it doesn't really matter, tooltips is turned on, so if you move you mouse over the button, it tells you what it means.)
I actually like the new buttons, but agree that the green buttons are too green, maybe a lighter green will make those show up better.
Other than that, the new buttons are great.
On the post: Square Enix Tries Being Cool And Embraces Fan-Conversion Of Original Deus Ex
Re: Why it's being allowed
There are quite a few examples of modders coming up to developers and asking for permission before putting on Steam, only to have the developers threaten with lawyers. In many ways, it was because of this stupidity that people stopped asking the developers for permission and just released the mods to the public, hoping that the backlash wouldn't be too bad (before the DMCA, there wasn't much a company could do to stop a mod, only try to find the modder and sue them.)
And to make matters worse, the developers tend to change policies quicker than the revolutions of most pulsars, where a developer (e.g. Majong) is really happy with a mod (craftbukkit), so much so that they eventually bring it into their fold, offering developers to it, only to DMCA it out of existence shortly after being acquired by Microsoft.
You have to own a copy of the original Deus Ex. (honestly not to big a deal; if you're getting Revision, you probably love Deus Ex anyways)
I am not aware of any mod that has not required the original game. There may be some, but I am not aware of any. The whole point of a mod is to add functionality, fix bugs, etc., in the game.
Revision is generating zero profit. (this helps too I suppose)
Probably. Though I don't understand what the heartache is with people generating money on these things. You got your money selling the original game...someone comes along and adds functionality to the game, and people buy it, and if a lot of people are interested, they buy more of your game.
But this "zero profit" even hurts, since quite a few of the modders would love to generate mods where they can pay off the costs associated with the development of the mod, and then give the profit to charity. Mods aren't that expensive to create, so the costs are quite low, and they probably won't be asking the same DLC prices the "official mods" get.
On the post: The Cable Industry Thinks Cord Cutting's A Fad That Will End Once Millennials Procreate
Re: Re: The Antenna thingie
I live in southern California, and get about 20 with my antenna. More than 30 if you count the ones in Spanish.
Most major stations have one or more "sub-stations" now with digital HDTV, so channels like 7 have 7.1 and 7.2. Some come in better than others, and I occasionally have to turn my antenna to get better signal, but I get far more than 5. Maybe in Kansas you'll only get 5, but I've seen the same traveling to other parts of the country.
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