Quote - God had super duper access to all her stuff.

:: Wonders how long it will be before some website hosts photos showing a comparison between TamelaJ's textures and a picture of Adam, as evidence that god stole those textures in creating Adam ::

But what if she said that, when you look up at the sky, you're seeing a texture that was stolen from her?

I'm not sure what you mean by different versions of Linux. Virtually all distributions conform to the Linux Standard Base (LSB), so that's what you program to.

Maybe you're referring to whether KDE or Gnome should be used (because obviously Poser would be a GUI app). But again, I can't think of a distro that doesn't have both sets of libs available for it.

Or maybe you mean using RPM or Deb for packaging. (But many commercial apps use custom installers anyway).

You could try to have TamelaJ find you. I think you just have to make a merchant texture resource, and then sell it.

When you're dealing with people who absolutely refuse to turn nudity off, but can't handle dealing with anything but a very subjective concept of "tasteful nudity", well, you've got problems. You have to deal with people who want the world to be an impossibly ideal place where everyone else has to somehow unreasonably anticipate what are the limitations/capabilities of every single one of those people, and accomodate it all. If the world really could be ideal, the way it would be ideal is if people simply didn't get so uptight and worked up about silly things.

Maybe Rendo ought to consider forcing new arrivals to view a page full of images of varying amounts of nudity. Next to each button would two checkboxes labeled "Acceptable" and "Unacceptable". When the user finishes "judging" the images, that user would be assigned a "nudity rating" (say, a value between 1 and 10, where 1 = "prude who would complain about the scantily clad figures on the sistine chapel" and 10 = "I'll look at anything without feeling the need to complain to Rendo about it"). Then an artist could assign a value to each of his images. Folks who have a rating less than that value would not be permitted to view it. Ultimately, only folks with a rating of 10 would be allowed to view everything.

The only way to convince some people how dangerous it is to start "judging" others and their work, is to give them a taste of their own medicine and judge the "judges". Once people start getting rated by their own choices, and given or denied freedoms based upon how tolerant they're willing to be, then you'll see these folks stop judging and complaining so much.

People tend to do things only when they think they can do it without impunity. As soon as they receive a taste of their own medicine, they back off really quickly.

Someone stated that the problem with PerfectN painting a bikini on his thumbnail (only) is because it "misrepresents" the actual image. In fact, a thumbnail that crops out the nudity part of the full image is just as much a "misrepresentation" of the nudity as is a thumbnail with a painted on bikini. In both cases, a viewer wouldn't know there was nudity until he either saw it flagged as "contains nudity", or clicked upon the actual image. For example, if I saw Acadia's version of the thumbnail, I'd have no idea that the full image contained nudity, any moreso than if it was a thumbnail with a painted on bikini. Indeed, because Rendo allows thumbnails that are a partial clip of the full image, THERE IS NO WAY TO PREDETERMINE THE CONTENT OF THE ACTUAL IMAGE WITHOUT VIEWING IT. And that includes predetermining  nude content via the thumbnail.

Rendo's thumbnail policy is totally illogical. Note: I'm not discussing the issue of "fairness" or anything else. I'm discussing logic only. It's illogical.

Who thinks these things up?

The policy should be changed to "A thumbnail may not contain nudity, and an image with nudity must be specifically tagged as so. In the thumbnail image, either cover up the nudity, or clip it  out of the thumbnail". Anything beyond that (like saying "covering up the nudity in the thumbnail is not acceptable, whereas clipping it out is") has no logical basis in helping the viewer to predetermine nude content.

The weirdest name for a Poser character is George W. Bush.

Have to agree with lemur01. The original proposal was so misguided in its effort to police trademark/copyright infringment (ie, the fact that Renderosity has no direct control of the content of the freestuff servers means they have no direct control over such trademark/copyright infringement -- plus, Renderosity has no legal obligation to police the content of 3rd party sites), that I suspect the original motivation was from too many Rendo vendors who felt that freestuff authors were "encroaching" upon the vendors' turf, and shouldn't have the "advantage" of being able to announce freebies in any forum. I suspect the vendors probably complained and said "Hey, look at these freestuff authors giving away stuff that may compete with our commercial offerings. And they've got the advantage of announcing their stuff in any forum, whereas we've been restricted to this Product Showcase forum. At the very least, you should restrict their announcements to a particular forum too. And how about if you limit them to talking about only freestuff on Rendo's server? That way, we can eliminate competition from lots of those freestuff authors because most of them use 3rd party servers".

Out of all the stated reasoning so far, this is the only one that makes plausible sense to me, in that it explains why the security loopholes, and legal irrelevancies, went unquestioned/unanswered (and apparently still do so) in the new policy.

But the bottom line is that Rendo is a business. And you have to expect a business to place priority first upon making money. That's how it works. So really, no one should be surprised or upset when policies favor the business. If you want something beyond business (ie, community, sharing, freedom, and all that "intrinsic stuff"), they you MUST obtain it from a non-commercial source. I'm not saying that all business is evil. I'm just saying that all business is about making money.

I think it's quite clear that the new policy has been chosen primarily because the Renderosity staff is concerned that some freestuff will contain trademark/copyright infringements (perhaps even violations of Renderosity Merchants' stuff). By requiring that all submitted items be "pre-approved" by the staff before a link can be supplied, the staff is hoping that it can prevent any link to such violations. And by restricting links to a specific forum, the staff is hoping that it will be easier to police for posting of links that haven't been "pre-approved".

But as someone has rightfully point out earlier, since the freestuff is hosted upon servers not controlled by Renderosity, then there is ultimately no control over the content of the freestuff. Violations can occur at any time, even after the "pre-approval", by whomever does control the freestuff server. In other words, this is not a very secure screening policy.

But the obvious question is, why should Renderosity be policing the content of servers it doesn't even control? A trademark/copyright violation upon such a server should have no legal bearing upon Renderosity. It's not like Renderosity is going to be sued because someone else violated the law. And there is even some precedence where site operators have not been held legally accountable for the content that DOES appear on their own sites when the operators haven't generated that content themselves. (For example, there has been a case where a web site operator was sued for some libel posted on its bulletin board from an anonymous member. The judge found that the site operators were not responsible for the content of that posting. So why then would a judge find a site operator liable for content that isn't even on his own server?)

And a more dangerous question one can ask is: Could Renderosity's pre-approval of freestuff imply any sort of guarantee that there is no copyright violation? Could someone who obtains some freestuff via a link upon Renderosity, and is sued for copyright violation due to use of that freestuff, now have a legal standing to say "This freestuff was supposed to be pre-approved by Renderosity staff to be assured of copyright compliance. They exhibited negligence in evaluating this freestuff. Therefore, I'm suing them for their negligence which caused me to mistakenly believe that the material was in compliance."? You have to be careful when you start to take on responsibility, particularly if you're taking on responsibility for that which you really do not have any control over. It may be better to let the public (ie, members) police instances of trademark/copyright violations by third parties, rather than accept responsibility for policing something that one isn't in a position to effectively police.

Of course, it would be a whole different ballgame if the freestuff really was being hosted by Renderosity servers.

Just an aside as an ex-OS/2 user. The company that really killed OS/2 was IBM. They simply didn't know how to promote/market it, and didn't pay enough attention to developer support. (MS has always been about developers, and that is really what have gotten them where they are today).

If you're using Windows XP, before you do any changes mentioned in this thread, first go to your start menu and look for something called "System Restore" (probably under the Accessories -> System Tools menu). This will pop open a window asking if you want to restore your system, or create a restore point. Choose to create a restore point.

Then make your system changes. If you don't like them, go back and run System Restore. This time, choose to restore your system. You'll be presented with a calendar listing all of the dates upon which system restore points were created. Choose the day upon which you created the above system restore point. Your system will be restored to the way it was before the changes were made.

In your first post, you refer to a "ream me file". I presumed that this was a typo, but now I'm not sure.

One thing folks may not be considering is, those who paid for the items may have made it possible for the person to create such items in the first place. If the creator has to buy Poser, and other materials, in order to create the things that the rest of you use, then he has to come up with the money somehow to obtain what he needs, and dedicate time away from other, perhaps more lucrative pursuits.

Think of it like a "site donation" -- as if you got the items "free", but you also made a "donation" to the creator to encourage him to continue with his work, and to cover some of his costs.

I release a lot of free software myself (most of it not related to Poser or 3D work), and I know that it costs me time and money to do so. I do not ask anyone to donate anything to compensate me in any way, and I don't expect it. I just like writing software, and figure that if it's useful to me, it may be useful to someone else so why not give it away. But that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong when people do actually give someone money for something of value. Sometimes, it's a good thing to nuture what you want and need.

Attached Link: http://www.borg.com/~jglatt/poser/poser.htm

www.codeproject.com is a very, very well-known and reputable site among developers. So a quick search in Google's newsgroups would turn up plenty of evidence that this is a legitimate and serious site. (And it's never a bad thing to check out a web site before you surf to it, if you have any doubt at all).

But if you have your IE security settings as described in that URL I posted in my first message here, then it wouldn't matter since the highest security setting disables activeX scripting. So definitely do read that previous article and utilize IE's Trusted Sites feature.

Unfortunately, if you have a site in your Trusted list, and that site is hacked, then you're completely vulnerable. I could easily deliver a malicious payload in the time that you took to read RuntimeDNA's joke. Easily. It's especially bad if that site uses passwords, and you have credit card info stored there. That's why RuntimeDNA's joke was very ill-advised. I don't know the people who run/moderate that site, and I'm not commenting upon their performance the other 364 days of the year. But this particular day showed the site in a very unfavorable way. I don't know if any of the people who posted above are representatives of the site, but if they are, instead of defending the "humor" of the "joke" and depicting people who appreciate the serious nature of online crime as overreacting (and other much less flattering depictions above), I would have advised them simply to say "We're sorry if we caused any concern to our merchants and customers. We didn't really consider all the ramifications of our April Fool's joke, and after due consideration, understand why it would cause concern.". That would at least show a much less cavalier attitude toward security.

Frankly, if the sysadmin of a serious business had done this stunt, he would have been admonished by the site's owner at least, and perhaps fired if the institution handled personal/financial information of numerous people. (The likelihood of firing would increase dramatically if the "apology" for the joke remotely resembled the total lack of contrition and seriousness like what I've read above). I've seen this sort of stuff happen.

Message edited on: 04/02/2006 13:31

Message edited on: 04/02/2006 13:35