29th June 2003, 12:06 PM
I totally agree Darunia. Modchips in and of themselves shouldn't be illegal. After all, many specialty game stores had their own kinds of mod chips that only allowed playing import games (so that people wouldn't stop buying games from that store), see the Tales of the Gord for example :D. And, more importantly, as you said, one should be able to modify their own property as much as they want, outside of you know, stealing stuff. However, someone managed to get a law passed outlawing modchips, and not JUST mod chips but many other modifications, because they wanted to protect security systems on computers. So, the law pretty much states that it's illegal to defeat a security system. Problem is, the companies get to decide what is and what isn't a security system on their stuff... It's a VERY stupid law that I hope gets repealed. Yeesh, under this very law ATI could one day deside those custom drivers that unlock unused pipes in some of their "dumbed down" cards (like what OB1 has) are "defeating a security mechanism", and would probably cite them not having to buy the more expensive card to show how it's making them loose money. It's all very stupid.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)