If gamers violate the EULA, companies sue them...."Don't violate copyright law" would work as well as EULAs and the law, if all companies want is copyright protection.
They don't, of course.
Doctorow's EULA can't go out the door as it is for one simple reason: It doesn't have a statement about liability. The cleanest EULA I can think of would say:
Much better, though personally I think it should include a statement like
All copyrights on this work will expire no later than _____. Copyright status can be checked at http://_______.___/
I wonder, which part of "nor shall be compelled" did the honorable judge not understand?
Probably the part where the defendant had already shown the kiddie porn to the border patrol. He had already testified against himself. Remember that bit in the Miranda warning about "anything you say can be held against you?"
Border patrol: Do you have any kiddie porn?
Defendant: Yep. Here it is on this scrambled partition I will now provide you access to.
Border patrol: You're under arrest for the kiddie porn.
Laptop: It is now safe to turn off your computer.
Later
Laptop: What porn?
Defendant: Yeah, what porn?
Border patrol: The porn you willingly showed us yesterday.
Defendant: I won't show you what's on that scrambled partition.
Judge: By showing it to us before you demonstrated that you were willing to let us see it. Saying yes once means yes forever. Kinda like rape.
It was a very narrow ruling.
can vi/vim do that?!?
Well, it thought about it for a little while, then it said to itself, "You know what? I'm a text editor. Let Firefox do its job and I'll do mine."
And the both lived happily ever after.
I'm a software guy and the book gave me a bit of perspective on what hardware people do.
to say there is no UNIX IP shows your lack of imagination.
IP is not imaginary.
IP is the epitome of imaginary.
There is nothing more professionally satisfying than having a company tell you they're replacing you with a (generally Indian) Outsourcing firm (having been advised to do so by HR)
Somewhat more personally satisfying is when your old boss calls you and asks in a shaky voice "We just found out nobody's been changing tapes like you used to do every morning and, um, there was this crash...Uh, how do we get all our clients' data back?" and you get to tell them that:
And I don't know what the schadenfreude equivalent of an orgasm would be like but surely you will, a few months later, when you see their corporate obituary in the San Jose Mercury News...
If the network or all the computers are down then people can not get their work doen and big $$$ are lost very quickly.
In a modern society there are plenty of professions that can make this claim. Truck drivers, farmers, plumbers, power company linesmen, and so forth.
In IT, we're plumbers. Some of us also design plumbing systems, but the only time we're called on or even noticed is when the shit gets backed up. But we're not the reason the company exists. We're there to help the business side of the house achieve its goals. So we get called when the people who make money for the company are unable to make the money because their IT ain't working.
That said there's plenty of folks who see IT as nothing more than a cost center, something that subtracts from, rather than adds to, the bottom line. When they do that, there's resentment, there's the urge to see us as a cost that can or should be cut rather than something that contributes to the company's success.
I wish I knew the source of this quote:
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy... neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
I think a company's non-IT staff can get that way, scorning their on-staff plumbers because what we do "isn't important." But we plumbers do the same thing, looking as the company as a host organism that exists to give us something to do. Makes us sound kinda...parasitic, don't it?
Are you building a computer that'll be used by many people, or a computer for just one person? An individual's computer has to to persist user data and configuration for months or years, which means you have to configure the OS rather robustly and defensively, because while some of the age 70+ newbies I've dealt with are super-sharp, the rest have been too trusting of the computer and the Internet it connects them to. They go online and click on every ad, every popup, every possible anything. Next thing you know they've volunteered their system into every botnet under the sun and can't figure out why their Yahoo! bridge game is crashing and there's all these naked ladies popping up out of nowhere.
For computers owned by individuals, my recommendation is to sandbox things as well as possible. Get a firewalling router, a software firewall, and aggressive virus scanning and trojan detection. Give them Firefox, install or subscribe to a phishing/scam detection system. Get them a Gmail account. If they've never been exposed to Windows, consider Ubuntu or a Mac. But please respect their ability to learn while allowing for the possibility for mistakes. Same as any newbie-friendly environment.
For computers in the rec room, you can protect them from viruses and trojan damage very simply: Every night at 2:00 AM the computer reboots and reinstalls a clean OS image from a master copy somewhere. I don't know how good Windows is at this, but under Linux it's trivial: Set up a VM (even a Windows VM!), and cron a job that kills the VM, overwrites the image file, then starts the VM (maybe in full-screen mode?). You still want a firewall etc, but the scope of most newbie-inflicted damage will be the rest of the day, not the rest of the system's operational lifetime.
The last fucking thing I needed this morning was a graphic description of infant abuse.
"The main reason PCI exists is that there are tens of thousands of merchants who don't understand the basics of information security and weren't even taking the very minimum steps to secure their networks and the credit card information they stored.... PCI pushes that burden downstream and forces merchants to take on a preventative role rather than a reactive role. They have to put in a properly configured firewall, encrypt sensitive information and maintain a minimum security stance or be fined by their merchant banks. By forcing this to be an issue about prevention rather than reaction, the credit card companies have taken the bulk of the financial burden off of themselves and placed it on the merchants, which is where much of it belongs anyways.
The following statement is not true. The previous statement is true.