Blizzard doesn't allow people to changes servers. So if I play on one of these "scaled back" servers, am I trapped there? If not, at the very least they would become gold farmer havens, which is something Blizzard would hate. You're right about the appeal of being able to experience the world with a little more solitude, but since I don't think many want to play that way all the time (or it basically becomes a bad co-op rpg, because the appeal of MMORPGs is not really in the quality of the story, characters, etc), and Blizzard doesn't want to dilute their "world" model by letting people shift around where they play, the idea is DOA. And also, in all seriousness, Blizzard is already making far more than a "killing" the way things are now, i.e. >billion a year from subscriptions. So unfortunately, they'll probably get by.
this doesn't get more attention. For all the writings about the incredible (and consistent) success of Blizzard, no one ever points out what I think is one of the obvious causes. Blizzard does not release buggy games. They know that people play games to have fun, and buggy games are never fun. Blizzard continues to reap rewards for that belief, but for some reason other companies are slow to catch on.
Bugs, glitches, crashes, and general poor performance are deal breakers. Look at what they did to the Gothic series: a couple of great RPGs (particularly the second one) that didn't sell that well because they weren't playable until many months after the release date when they had been patched several times.
Think beyond the next 8 weeks of your company's future, and finish games before you release them!
Is that 20 years is a lot longer than it used to be. Shutting off an entire line of technology for 20 years may have been a reasonable trade till as recent as 20-50 years ago, but I think it should be obvious that this is no longer a good trade. AND good ideas can be monetized much more effectively these days, with the internet, fast shipping, larger markets, etc. So I'm all for striking an intelligent balance, but I think patent length needs to be tied to some metric of how quickly technology evolves. Watching, for instance, the huge evolutions in computing, leads me to believe that 20 years is simply too long to hold back a given idea.
And all of what you say is true, but I don't think the AG doesn't still have a case. BB is publishing a _weekly_ ad, and they know (as you came to know) from experience that sale items tend to sell out on the first or second day. So if I'm a higher-up at BB, and I'm setting a policy in which I know on half if not more of the days of a given sale the item in question won't be available, isn't that still pretty much bait and switch on half the days? If BB intentionally runs a sale in which it knows it will run out of items far before consumers stop coming looking for said items, that doesn't sound ok. I suppose the law will come down on whether it can be proven "intentional" or not, and maybe it can't, but I can't imagine that leadership isn't at least aware of the situation, and choosing not to order more units, or warn customers, etc. So good luck to the AG.
Because if you go read the visa-merchant agreement you see that Visa does not allow merchants to make showing ID a condition sale, i.e. merchants are SOL when it comes to stopping fraud. I guess that's the golden rule for you, along the "he who has the gold makes the rules" line.
>>No, it's criminal negligence, just the same as if they put on a blindfold and got into their car. That doesn't mean that owning opaque pieces of cloth should be a crime.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the law is supposed to work. It's not a question about what is "right" or "wrong." It's a bottom line it for me, what set of policies and rights exchanges make for the best society to live in. As an obvious example, I support a prohibition on murder, even though that technically is a restriction on my freedom.
In the case of drugs, the attitude needs to remain the same, i.e. bottom line it for me. I don't give a damn whether not all people that take meth commit a crime. I care that compared to the benefit some gain from its use, it contributes to far too much crime to justify itself. So technically, possession is a victimless crime. But that is irrelevant. We prohibit certain chemicals because having them around is bad for society; it is reckless. Clearly the DEA gets it wrong on many fronts; for instance, I don't think the case for marijuana being schedule I even exists, but thems the facts. It's not any different from disallowing possession of machine guns, or disallowing drunk driving, or any number of other crimes that are victimless in and of themselves, but clearly are too dangerous to be allowed.
Don't get caught up in thinking that laws should be made on principle rather than on practice.
Some group of savvy students simply needs to start spamming the Stanford president (or other relevant authority figure) with baseless DMCA notices, and do it in a fashion that gets noticed publicly. Near as I can tell, it would be easy to do anonymously (because ANYONE can get a copyright), and maybe it would clue some people in as to why _checking_ whether the complaint is valid might be important.
Could be a fun project for some annoyed and intrepid college students.
From what I read a while back, you are essentially correct. Not only is the driver less dangerously distracted because people tend to be willing to pause the conversation when they are getting on and off the highway, or making a turn at a bad intersection, etc, but because (apparently) the passenger tends to compensate for most of the lost awareness of the driver by paying attention to the road themselves. Both of those - pausing to allow full attention during difficult spans of driving and having another physical person with you who is paying attention to traffic - are why talking on a cell tends to be so much more dangerous than talking to the person next to you.
I suspect there are other factors involved as well, like the distraction of deciphering what someone is saying over a bad connection, but those are the two that I remember the study directly referencing.
The analogy isn't referring to anchoring a ship (which is where you point out it's not very good), but more to, say, rock climbing or something. So in that context its something that will keep you safe and catch you if you make mistakes while (you are implying) attempting bolder and more difficult works.
I don't know whether you care or not, but there it is.
Idea is still a bust for other reasons, but you should know petty theft constitutes a non-trivial amount of theft. Of course, the majority of department store theft is done by employees, and you can guess pretty easily how much this device would slow THAT down, but even if only 10-15 percent of DVD etc theft is done by dumb kids, it still ads up to 10s of millions of dollars a year in lost profit. You can ask yourself whether that's worth all the issues of failed validation, training and infrastructure investment that it would cost to reduce that number, and probably suspect the answer is no, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people stealing media that wouldn't have whatever device it takes to circumvent this thing.
Even the state vs. federal thing aside (as I suspect these machines are used in states that have similar laws to the FOIA), they are made by contractors, not the government itself, so that's a big sticking point. And then of course you'll have them claiming trade secrets etc etc and everything under the sun they can thing of to avoid opening the code, and it's in no way painless or quick any way you look at it.
Interesting, and not altogether surprising when you think about it, but I suspect the researchers are being a little to narrow minded about this (maybe they need higher ceilings). I think it's pretty reasonable to suspect (although I obviously don't have the data to prove it) that a wide variety of environments influence human thinking in non-subtle ways. I can imagine people being more or less optimistic depending on how white (color, not race just to head that one off...) their surroundings are, or more ecofriendly depending on how urban their surroundings are. I can at least speak from personal experience that I find myself less likely to speak my mind when I am in rooms where the walls are nearly all glass, where perhaps the underlying mechanism is one of being overly watched or scrutinized. Either way, I always appreciate studies that show a link between quality of work environment and quality of performance (which is what this essentially is). Here's to the death of stuffy and suffocating rooms!
Well but the idea is that people have souls. I don't know about you (technically speaking) but I am conscious... so that makes me different than just a chemical aggregate. But while I'm willing to extend that same uniqueness to you, because you are similar enough to me, it's not obvious whether it should be extended to animals.
thats half my point. Do they have those emotion, or are they just really good actors? If you think of an animal as a huge chemical aggregate, and you don't think it has a soul or any other related exceptional qualities, its not much different from a robot programmed to look sad when you don't play with it. The animal is programmed to.
Not that I don't have pets and wouldn't feel different if they died vs some battlefield robot died, but I'm just saying the thought experiment is clean, and that feeling of mine may be irrational.
To the extent that there's no reason to think animal pets have "souls" or any some such, how are they any different from robots? Because if the only answer is they're made of soft gooey parts and robots are made of hard metal and plastic, then I can't see why that should dictate that an emotional attachment to them is reasonable but one to the robot is not. The parent is right. If a reasonably complex robot is essentially a metallic pet, then developed human attachment is pretty reasonable.
If the brick and mortar establishments weren't an improvement in some regard over online selling (even if that improvement is simply consumer awareness), then they wouldn't be in business. So the answer is nothing, but that doesn't mean that the law doesn't still make the world (well... Florida and Utah at least) a worse place to live. Thanks again legislators!
Clearly Newton's work is important enough to call for exemption, but I for one wouldn't read OJ's book (had it come to fruition) and that would have had nothing to do with what its literary quality was. I guess this case here would fall somewhere between the two, but I don't think its unreasonable for people to find using the product of a murderer distasteful, and then seeking to recreate a "clean" version if the amount of work involved is reasonable.
It only comes off as _fundamentally_ flawed if you think drm's purpose is to prevent person B from reading his own information, and I don't think that's accurate. DRM's purpose is to make it _unreasonably difficult_ for B, and that's a different thing. The real way I think DRM is fundamentally flawed is that it is has an issue with "one chink in the armor and the whole thing goes down," i.e. only one person needs to decrypt a file and post it for any number of people to have access to the decrypted file.
That may all be fairly obvious, but from the standpoint of convincing companies not to support it, I think it's important. Their problem is not that DRM can't prevent the vast majority of users from completing certain tasks, because it does in fact prevent many B's from reading their own info, but that it can't restrict _all_ users, and after a certain amount of time the two become indistinguishable. DRM works on the premise that the creators are better hiders than the crackers are finders, and that is its fundamental flaw. The balance might change with trusted computing and other hardware solutions, but maybe by then they will notice that the expenditures don't justify the gains.
At the least the idea that an extortionist has to carry out the DoS when after being denied payment doesn't make much sense. Since I assume they (the extortionist) are essentially remaining anonymous, there really isn't any need to prove anything, particularly after you know you aren't getting any money from the person you're attacking. As long as there are others still carrying out the attacks, so that they remain a believable threat, there's no reason for you personally to get involved.
So while I think that part is specious, the author is probably right about it coming down to simple terms of risk and profitability. Even if the extortion was marginally more profitable, committing crime completely anonymously, a la pump and dump spam, I suspect is very very appealing and now that the concept has worked its way through the black hat community, many are changing their game. Whether that's ultimately a good thing, in the sense of whether it's better to have many people bled than a few people shot, I don't know.
the point of having the card in the first place then? Maybe I'm mistaking your suggestion for something else, but what role exactly is the actual card playing here?
Yeah I don't know what this is all about either. Anyone think they might just constantly adjust expectations so they always beat them by a fair margin?
Wake me when they exceed someone _else_'s expectations. But that won't happen because everyone else is smart enough to say, gee, you force OEM's to put Vista on all new computers they sell. You think that might sell a bunch of licenses? Anyone that didn't expect Vista to sell when consumers really don't have a choice in the matter obviously needs their head checked. But of course if MS was honest and said, well, we expect to sell a lot of copies of Vista because we told Dell et al to put it on all new PCs they ship, well then they wouldn't get to write these nice pieces about how WOWZOR! Vista is doing even better than even we could expect! WOW, please buy our stock now kthx.
If no one was taken but the six that were then traded for weapons, you did prove that hostage taking is not an issue, but also that the "appeasement" didn't really embolden anything. The rest of your post was good, but you did sort of try to have your cake and eat it there.
Don't bring up Gore's house. A home that consumes 10 time the average amount of electricity in a country of 300 million people is so beyond irrelevant as to be ridiculous. If you want to make a point about hypocrisy, fine, but I don't think he's asked people to use less electricity in their homes. And anyway, to the extent that global warming will be solved through new technology and higher efficiency rather than voluntary altruism (which never works I might point out), I don't really care whether he heats his house to 82 in the winter or 68. If Gore came out and said people need to stop using so much energy in their homes, I could understand your annoyance. But since he says things like "let's implement a carbon cap and trade system (which albeit has its own problems) his house's energy consumption isn't really an issue.
And to the jet, if I had to pollute 10 times as much as 1 guy to convince 10,000 people to pollute half as much, I'm very obviously doing the planet a service. It might rankle you that he gets to enjoy all the benefits of high consumption and pollution in that scenario, but since there aren't really any other viable alternative for touring the world to promote a cause, I don't know what you would prefer he do.
Anyhow I felt like I needed to clarify that, the rest of your insights are quite good.
Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard doesn't allow people to changes servers. So if I play on one of these "scaled back" servers, am I trapped there? If not, at the very least they would become gold farmer havens, which is something Blizzard would hate. You're right about the appeal of being able to experience the world with a little more solitude, but since I don't think many want to play that way all the time (or it basically becomes a bad co-op rpg, because the appeal of MMORPGs is not really in the quality of the story, characters, etc), and Blizzard doesn't want to dilute their "world" model by letting people shift around where they play, the idea is DOA. And also, in all seriousness, Blizzard is already making far more than a "killing" the way things are now, i.e. >billion a year from subscriptions. So unfortunately, they'll probably get by.
this doesn't get more attention. For all the writings about the incredible (and consistent) success of Blizzard, no one ever points out what I think is one of the obvious causes. Blizzard does not release buggy games. They know that people play games to have fun, and buggy games are never fun. Blizzard continues to reap rewards for that belief, but for some reason other companies are slow to catch on.
Bugs, glitches, crashes, and general poor performance are deal breakers. Look at what they did to the Gothic series: a couple of great RPGs (particularly the second one) that didn't sell that well because they weren't playable until many months after the release date when they had been patched several times.
Think beyond the next 8 weeks of your company's future, and finish games before you release them!
Is that 20 years is a lot longer than it used to be. Shutting off an entire line of technology for 20 years may have been a reasonable trade till as recent as 20-50 years ago, but I think it should be obvious that this is no longer a good trade. AND good ideas can be monetized much more effectively these days, with the internet, fast shipping, larger markets, etc. So I'm all for striking an intelligent balance, but I think patent length needs to be tied to some metric of how quickly technology evolves. Watching, for instance, the huge evolutions in computing, leads me to believe that 20 years is simply too long to hold back a given idea.
And all of what you say is true, but I don't think the AG doesn't still have a case. BB is publishing a _weekly_ ad, and they know (as you came to know) from experience that sale items tend to sell out on the first or second day. So if I'm a higher-up at BB, and I'm setting a policy in which I know on half if not more of the days of a given sale the item in question won't be available, isn't that still pretty much bait and switch on half the days? If BB intentionally runs a sale in which it knows it will run out of items far before consumers stop coming looking for said items, that doesn't sound ok. I suppose the law will come down on whether it can be proven "intentional" or not, and maybe it can't, but I can't imagine that leadership isn't at least aware of the situation, and choosing not to order more units, or warn customers, etc. So good luck to the AG.
Because if you go read the visa-merchant agreement you see that Visa does not allow merchants to make showing ID a condition sale, i.e. merchants are SOL when it comes to stopping fraud. I guess that's the golden rule for you, along the "he who has the gold makes the rules" line.
>>No, it's criminal negligence, just the same as if they put on a blindfold and got into their car. That doesn't mean that owning opaque pieces of cloth should be a crime.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the law is supposed to work. It's not a question about what is "right" or "wrong." It's a bottom line it for me, what set of policies and rights exchanges make for the best society to live in. As an obvious example, I support a prohibition on murder, even though that technically is a restriction on my freedom.
In the case of drugs, the attitude needs to remain the same, i.e. bottom line it for me. I don't give a damn whether not all people that take meth commit a crime. I care that compared to the benefit some gain from its use, it contributes to far too much crime to justify itself. So technically, possession is a victimless crime. But that is irrelevant. We prohibit certain chemicals because having them around is bad for society; it is reckless. Clearly the DEA gets it wrong on many fronts; for instance, I don't think the case for marijuana being schedule I even exists, but thems the facts. It's not any different from disallowing possession of machine guns, or disallowing drunk driving, or any number of other crimes that are victimless in and of themselves, but clearly are too dangerous to be allowed.
Don't get caught up in thinking that laws should be made on principle rather than on practice.
Some group of savvy students simply needs to start spamming the Stanford president (or other relevant authority figure) with baseless DMCA notices, and do it in a fashion that gets noticed publicly. Near as I can tell, it would be easy to do anonymously (because ANYONE can get a copyright), and maybe it would clue some people in as to why _checking_ whether the complaint is valid might be important.
Could be a fun project for some annoyed and intrepid college students.
From what I read a while back, you are essentially correct. Not only is the driver less dangerously distracted because people tend to be willing to pause the conversation when they are getting on and off the highway, or making a turn at a bad intersection, etc, but because (apparently) the passenger tends to compensate for most of the lost awareness of the driver by paying attention to the road themselves. Both of those - pausing to allow full attention during difficult spans of driving and having another physical person with you who is paying attention to traffic - are why talking on a cell tends to be so much more dangerous than talking to the person next to you.
I suspect there are other factors involved as well, like the distraction of deciphering what someone is saying over a bad connection, but those are the two that I remember the study directly referencing.
The analogy isn't referring to anchoring a ship (which is where you point out it's not very good), but more to, say, rock climbing or something. So in that context its something that will keep you safe and catch you if you make mistakes while (you are implying) attempting bolder and more difficult works.
I don't know whether you care or not, but there it is.
Idea is still a bust for other reasons, but you should know petty theft constitutes a non-trivial amount of theft. Of course, the majority of department store theft is done by employees, and you can guess pretty easily how much this device would slow THAT down, but even if only 10-15 percent of DVD etc theft is done by dumb kids, it still ads up to 10s of millions of dollars a year in lost profit. You can ask yourself whether that's worth all the issues of failed validation, training and infrastructure investment that it would cost to reduce that number, and probably suspect the answer is no, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people stealing media that wouldn't have whatever device it takes to circumvent this thing.
Cheers.
Even the state vs. federal thing aside (as I suspect these machines are used in states that have similar laws to the FOIA), they are made by contractors, not the government itself, so that's a big sticking point. And then of course you'll have them claiming trade secrets etc etc and everything under the sun they can thing of to avoid opening the code, and it's in no way painless or quick any way you look at it.
Interesting, and not altogether surprising when you think about it, but I suspect the researchers are being a little to narrow minded about this (maybe they need higher ceilings). I think it's pretty reasonable to suspect (although I obviously don't have the data to prove it) that a wide variety of environments influence human thinking in non-subtle ways. I can imagine people being more or less optimistic depending on how white (color, not race just to head that one off...) their surroundings are, or more ecofriendly depending on how urban their surroundings are. I can at least speak from personal experience that I find myself less likely to speak my mind when I am in rooms where the walls are nearly all glass, where perhaps the underlying mechanism is one of being overly watched or scrutinized. Either way, I always appreciate studies that show a link between quality of work environment and quality of performance (which is what this essentially is). Here's to the death of stuffy and suffocating rooms!
Well but the idea is that people have souls. I don't know about you (technically speaking) but I am conscious... so that makes me different than just a chemical aggregate. But while I'm willing to extend that same uniqueness to you, because you are similar enough to me, it's not obvious whether it should be extended to animals.
thats half my point. Do they have those emotion, or are they just really good actors? If you think of an animal as a huge chemical aggregate, and you don't think it has a soul or any other related exceptional qualities, its not much different from a robot programmed to look sad when you don't play with it. The animal is programmed to.
Not that I don't have pets and wouldn't feel different if they died vs some battlefield robot died, but I'm just saying the thought experiment is clean, and that feeling of mine may be irrational.
To the extent that there's no reason to think animal pets have "souls" or any some such, how are they any different from robots? Because if the only answer is they're made of soft gooey parts and robots are made of hard metal and plastic, then I can't see why that should dictate that an emotional attachment to them is reasonable but one to the robot is not. The parent is right. If a reasonably complex robot is essentially a metallic pet, then developed human attachment is pretty reasonable.
If the brick and mortar establishments weren't an improvement in some regard over online selling (even if that improvement is simply consumer awareness), then they wouldn't be in business. So the answer is nothing, but that doesn't mean that the law doesn't still make the world (well... Florida and Utah at least) a worse place to live. Thanks again legislators!
Clearly Newton's work is important enough to call for exemption, but I for one wouldn't read OJ's book (had it come to fruition) and that would have had nothing to do with what its literary quality was. I guess this case here would fall somewhere between the two, but I don't think its unreasonable for people to find using the product of a murderer distasteful, and then seeking to recreate a "clean" version if the amount of work involved is reasonable.
It only comes off as _fundamentally_ flawed if you think drm's purpose is to prevent person B from reading his own information, and I don't think that's accurate. DRM's purpose is to make it _unreasonably difficult_ for B, and that's a different thing. The real way I think DRM is fundamentally flawed is that it is has an issue with "one chink in the armor and the whole thing goes down," i.e. only one person needs to decrypt a file and post it for any number of people to have access to the decrypted file.
That may all be fairly obvious, but from the standpoint of convincing companies not to support it, I think it's important. Their problem is not that DRM can't prevent the vast majority of users from completing certain tasks, because it does in fact prevent many B's from reading their own info, but that it can't restrict _all_ users, and after a certain amount of time the two become indistinguishable. DRM works on the premise that the creators are better hiders than the crackers are finders, and that is its fundamental flaw. The balance might change with trusted computing and other hardware solutions, but maybe by then they will notice that the expenditures don't justify the gains.
Starts to make Google's Doubleclick purchase look like a steal eh?
At the least the idea that an extortionist has to carry out the DoS when after being denied payment doesn't make much sense. Since I assume they (the extortionist) are essentially remaining anonymous, there really isn't any need to prove anything, particularly after you know you aren't getting any money from the person you're attacking. As long as there are others still carrying out the attacks, so that they remain a believable threat, there's no reason for you personally to get involved.
So while I think that part is specious, the author is probably right about it coming down to simple terms of risk and profitability. Even if the extortion was marginally more profitable, committing crime completely anonymously, a la pump and dump spam, I suspect is very very appealing and now that the concept has worked its way through the black hat community, many are changing their game. Whether that's ultimately a good thing, in the sense of whether it's better to have many people bled than a few people shot, I don't know.
the point of having the card in the first place then? Maybe I'm mistaking your suggestion for something else, but what role exactly is the actual card playing here?
Yeah I don't know what this is all about either. Anyone think they might just constantly adjust expectations so they always beat them by a fair margin?
Wake me when they exceed someone _else_'s expectations. But that won't happen because everyone else is smart enough to say, gee, you force OEM's to put Vista on all new computers they sell. You think that might sell a bunch of licenses? Anyone that didn't expect Vista to sell when consumers really don't have a choice in the matter obviously needs their head checked. But of course if MS was honest and said, well, we expect to sell a lot of copies of Vista because we told Dell et al to put it on all new PCs they ship, well then they wouldn't get to write these nice pieces about how WOWZOR! Vista is doing even better than even we could expect! WOW, please buy our stock now kthx.
Anyhow. Cheers.
Do people read anymore? Why was this modded flamebait? It's not even rude.
If no one was taken but the six that were then traded for weapons, you did prove that hostage taking is not an issue, but also that the "appeasement" didn't really embolden anything. The rest of your post was good, but you did sort of try to have your cake and eat it there.
Cheers.
Don't bring up Gore's house. A home that consumes 10 time the average amount of electricity in a country of 300 million people is so beyond irrelevant as to be ridiculous. If you want to make a point about hypocrisy, fine, but I don't think he's asked people to use less electricity in their homes. And anyway, to the extent that global warming will be solved through new technology and higher efficiency rather than voluntary altruism (which never works I might point out), I don't really care whether he heats his house to 82 in the winter or 68. If Gore came out and said people need to stop using so much energy in their homes, I could understand your annoyance. But since he says things like "let's implement a carbon cap and trade system (which albeit has its own problems) his house's energy consumption isn't really an issue.
And to the jet, if I had to pollute 10 times as much as 1 guy to convince 10,000 people to pollute half as much, I'm very obviously doing the planet a service. It might rankle you that he gets to enjoy all the benefits of high consumption and pollution in that scenario, but since there aren't really any other viable alternative for touring the world to promote a cause, I don't know what you would prefer he do.
Anyhow I felt like I needed to clarify that, the rest of your insights are quite good.