Sorry to see you got modded offtopic. Judging from the comments on theodp's recent equally-BS posts, almost everyone on Slashdot would wholeheartedly agree.
This is exactly why Blizzard's EULA says addon authors can not profit from their creations. Blizzard regularly incorporates functionality "from" addons into the game, since that's their job as a game maker. They've also had to regularly block addons from doing things that interfere with the game (whether servers or gameplay). Not to mention deprecating old APIs.
Everything you mentioned Second Life doing sounds totally reasonable from the perspective of a game developer, and only sounds bad when you frame it from the perspective of a company trying to profit off a platform. Does Linden Labs pitch SL as a platform for for-pay items and scripts?
Apple is obviously pitching their app store as a platform for for-profit applications. That puts them in a very bad light when they end up effectively saying "spend money building an app specifically for our app store, THEN we'll tell you whether or not it's allowed on our store".
How can a company be prepared to invest into a platform that can change at any time, cutting you off and kicking you out, with no course of action but to whine on some no-name blog[?]
Until it impacts their bottom line, no company will take the blog whining very seriously. Once enough developers have lost a substantial investment to an app store rejection, you might see developers shy away from the app store or be able to effect change in Apple's rules.
Until then, companies seem to be happily profiting from it.
Consumers can be a stop-gap measure, but are a terrible solution for keeping corporations safe. If consumers have to pick a more expensive "safe" option than other unsafe consumers, the safe consumers are going to select themselves out of existence.
Let's continue OP's analogy, and say that the only consumers of apples are apple pie factories. There are two factories, Bob's Apple Pies and Jim's Apple Pies.
If Bob switched to safe apples, he's now forced to charge $10 per pie instead of the $7 that Jim is charging. Bob goes out of business because no one is buying his pies, and your "safe" apple picker has probably gone out of business too.
Whether Bob tries to do the right thing or not, the end result is that the unsafe practice will take over the market. The only question for Bob is whether he's going to continue his Apple Pie business by being unsafe, or give up the entire market to Jim.
You could try to say it's still the consumer's fault for buying Pies from Jim. In a world of perfect world, sure. Maybe if Jim's apple pies said "27 apple pickers died to make this pie". Few consumers, if any, will know that Jim is selling unsafely-made apple pies. Jim may even refuse to disclose where he gets his applies from, making it impossible for consumers to pick safe products without government intervention.
Consumers will buy if the prices are cheap, and generally regardless of safety or other long term impacts. One of the reasons is lack of expertise and knowledge, but I think consumers will buy cheap even knowing about dangers.
Corporations will cut every corner possible to undercut competitors regardless of safety.
Capitalism does not work without the government interfering on behalf of safety and preventing collusion and monopolies. If there is a way to achieve safety and lack of monopolistic behavior without government, I'd love to hear about it.
Ideally, the government should have been requiring and enforcing reasonable safety on the oil drilling. If this drives prices of oil up, then that's what needs to happen. Unless you consider total destruction of the environment an acceptable risk to keep costs slightly lower.
Realistically, you have the additional issue of enforcement. It sounds like drilling was being done sloppily to save costs, making the existing (and perhaps already adequate) regulation pointless. This is a scenario we see again and again with government - existing regulations aren't enforced, a bad outcome occurs, and the "solution" is more unenforced regulation.
It still comes down to the government though. Consumers and corporations are never going to "do whats right" without the government creating an economy where the consumers' and corporations' selfish desires are also what is best for the community as a whole.
*sigh* Thanks for making a good response to the awful summary. It's too bad this place doesn't have editors to weed out bad summaries that draw inane conclusions from totally out of context quotes.
In the case of a closed network with the SSID broadcast, we have an even more obvious analogy. You're broadcasting that the SSID exists, but demanding a key to authorize access.
So what you're suggesting is that it should be illegal to walk down the street writing down the addresses written on mailboxes or store fronts. That's obviously absurd.
Eh, it's definitely not "stealing". But people say it anyway because there is no terse term of "made unauthorized copies of a copyrighted work". I suppose "pirating" is the closest verb we have so far, and that's still considered slang.
This is why Blizzard is adding DRM and removing LAN play because people can easily pirate the game with friends and play locally with one copy. Battle.net eliminates this which is why I think they did it.
This. It's a DRM method that is not very onerous at all for customers, and that is near-impossible to break for non-customers. It is contingent on multiplayer being a core element of the game in question.
That's all well and good for Starcraft 2: Base Edition (whatever they end up calling it).
It will be interesting to see if they release 2 additional single-player-only expansions without any more cumbersome DRM protecting those releases.
It is DRM, that's absolutely the only reason they do it.
DRM may be their primary reason. In Diablo and Diablo2 though, I would say hacking is the primary reason. They provided "open battlenet" that uses save files on your computer, and not many people use it. It's full of cheaters and exploits.
I'm not sure how much that applies to Starcraft2, but there are many benefits to a centralized server architecture besides DRM.
For clarity, you should specify what's being restricted in terms of LAN play. There is nothing in Starcraft 2 that prevents you from playing SC2 on a LAN with friends. The restriction is that your LAN needs internet access, and your friends need to own the game. Neither of those sound all that cumbersome, do they?
So are you upset that your LAN party has no internet access?
Or are you upset that there's no Spawn Installation, where friends can play on a LAN without buying the game?
5 years ago when Half-life 2 came out and required online activation for single player mode? Or 10 years ago when Quake3 required cd-key checks for online play, every time you play?
Not saying whether its a good place to be, but one-time online activation is not considered "restrictive" by most people. Compare that one-time activation to the ridiculous things Ubisoft, Sony, and the like are trying to force on consumers.
But following your line of thought, I should reason that if I don't want Google to film me in my own street, then I shouldn't go outside.
No. By follow his line of thought, you should reason that if you go outside yelling "free money" and throwing dollar bills on the ground, that people will follow you and pick them up.
Don't publicly advertise a service if you don't want it open to the public. Duh.
operating a device — which 'may be placed in a vehicle' — in a 'sniffer' or 'monitor' mode and analyzing them on a server?
As scary as the poster tries to make this sound, this is how you listen for public access points. This post is a scare-mongering dupe.
Yellow journalism is getting to be awfully common here on Slashdot. For instance this troll of a story which just so happens to be from the same author:
Re:Don't understand the hate
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I didn't go back and watch it or even read your link, since the answer is still the same regardless. No matter how hard you troll.
Re:Don't understand the hate
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Jacob didn't write down those numbers on the girl's jerseys.
How many thousands or millions of other numbers did Hurley ignore on that same drive before he saw the girl's jerseys? Add on the handful of places Jacob (indirectly or directly) caused the numbers to show up, and it only takes a handful more coincidences to make Hurley think he's crazy.
It doesn't help that Jacob has made appearances off-island interfering with lives and performing totally random supernatural tricks. The lotto could easily have been Jacob waving his magic wand for Hurley and Hurley's-crazy-buddy. Maybe crazy buddy was even a name crossed off the cave wall?
Regardless of the writers' answer for all that, I agree it's one of the places we could have used a more explicit answer in the show.
Re:Don't understand the hate
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Hm, good point. Could factor in with the back-and-forth "don't let him talk to you or it's already over" between Jacob and Mr Smokie when instructing their followers to avoid the other brother.
Re:As someone who has not watched and is proud of
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I feel justified in commenting because this is the kind of show I would have watched and enjoyed and ultimately been annoyed by had I not been warned off.
Make-it-up-as-you-go storytelling with the writers acting smug that you never figured it out as it went along.
Since you don't know anything about the show, let me fill you in on the show's history. The writers had the story arc planned out from the beginning, and never expected the show to be so popular and go on for so long. By season 2, ABC wanted to pull an x-files/bsg/etc. and drag the show out forever. The writers fought it and negotiated to do 6 seasons, but to have every season be 16 hours episodes instead of 24 hours. Combined with the writer's strike back in the 2nd or 3rd season, the show ended up being around 4 seasons long in total length.
If you watch the show, you'll find there are probably 1 season worth of "bad" filler content, and possibly another 1 season worth of extended content that worked out well. It's hard to know exactly how much of the story was injected into the originally planned story arc. We can guess though, based on what worked well and felt meaningful and what didn't.
Whether you enjoyed the show or not, I think it's pretty hard to deny that the show did answer almost every question it raised. If you look at the first season's "dudes in a jungle" and compare it to season 6, the mythology they built up and questions they answered are very extensive.
For anyone wanting to try the show out, watching season 1 and the first episode of season 2 should be enough to tell whether you'll like it or not. That includes a huge answer to one of the biggest questions from season 1, and is demonstrative of the answers you continue to get for big questions throughout the rest of the show. There are some rocky "filler" patches in season 2 but it's mostly smooth sailing after that.
Re:the only thing worse than a lost fan
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oh who am i kidding... this is the internet. mindless negativity seems like that's what the internet was created for
carry on then, aggressively ultranegative losers. the internet is yours, unfortunately
Sadly, a great summary of both this thread and the internet as a whole.
It's amazing how many people who never watched LOST came by to rant about a show they know nothing about, and to spend modpoints modding up people who never watched the show. It makes it look like no one who actually watched the show had any criticism!
Re:Don't understand the hate
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Wasn't the sickness the "evilness" that infected Sayid, Claire, Ben, and Rousseau's pals? Now that we know the light was the source of life, I guess you could say these people were resuscitated after the life and goodness left them, making them heartless bad-people?
In Ben, Claire, and Sayid's cases they all "got better" for some reason. Not sure if that'd be a hand-waving "oh the island made them better", or a cheesy "people loved them / helped them / shared some of their lifesource with them".
Re:Don't understand the hate
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How did they show up everywhere, then? Why did playing them in the lotto cause a meteorite to fall on Hurley's chicken stand?
Hurley's "bad luck" was coincidence not fate. The numbers showed up in various places because they were the numbers of the candidates remaining who made it onto the plane to crash on the island. IE: Jacob physically wrote the numbers down which led to them being written and used in various places. (the hatch door, for one) Remember the people who had seen the numbers towards the end of the show, were the same people who went back in time to before the numbers were on various Dharma equipment (the button). Time loop, hand wave, voi-la.
Why was Kate there if she gets crossed out when she becomes a mother?
As Jacob said explicitly, the names were just chalk in a cave, not anything magical. She could still have been The Candidate if she wanted to, since she happened to still be around at the end.
The "disease" wasn't a disease. The smoker monster was the disease Russo referred to - he corrupted her people just like Sayid was corrupted. Still not sure how Sayid became happy-helpful Sayid again, I guess Desmond is just that charismatic?
That's one take on it, a rather cynical one. I took it as that being a red herring meant to eat up half a season and throw us off track from the (relatively simple) ending we ended up with. I guess my idea was equally cynical actually.
To the idea that they were trying to make the flash sideways sync up to the main timeline: I don't think this idea ever made sense, we (as fans) were trying to shoehorn it in despite obvious flaws in that idea. In particular, the whole idea was predicated on Desmond as "the key" being able to see both timelines and alert the losties about the original timeline. That is flawed reasoning from the start, as *Charlie* was the one to first see into the original timeline and alert Desmond. I think Libbie and Hurley may have hooked back up independent of Desmond too, but can't recall for sure.
I'm curious since I keep seeing this, what answers did you miss? I got plenty of answers from the show: we know what was in the hatch, who made it, why they made it, what the button did.
We know who Benjamin Linus really is, why he was on the island, what he was doing and why, we even know why he's a screwed up little puppy from seeing his family life growing up.
We know how Alpert is immortal, where he came from, what he's doing on the island.
We know who Jacob is, whether he's real, what he wanted, what he's doing, etc.
I'm sure there are some outstanding questions, but by and large most of our questions DID get answered.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to see you got modded offtopic. Judging from the comments on theodp's recent equally-BS posts, almost everyone on Slashdot would wholeheartedly agree.
Seriously. Another worthless post trying to scare-monger about Google from the author theodp. Why is Slashdot posting this crap on the front page?
This is exactly why Blizzard's EULA says addon authors can not profit from their creations. Blizzard regularly incorporates functionality "from" addons into the game, since that's their job as a game maker. They've also had to regularly block addons from doing things that interfere with the game (whether servers or gameplay). Not to mention deprecating old APIs.
Everything you mentioned Second Life doing sounds totally reasonable from the perspective of a game developer, and only sounds bad when you frame it from the perspective of a company trying to profit off a platform. Does Linden Labs pitch SL as a platform for for-pay items and scripts?
Apple is obviously pitching their app store as a platform for for-profit applications. That puts them in a very bad light when they end up effectively saying "spend money building an app specifically for our app store, THEN we'll tell you whether or not it's allowed on our store".
How can a company be prepared to invest into a platform that can change at any time, cutting you off and kicking you out, with no course of action but to whine on some no-name blog[?]
Until it impacts their bottom line, no company will take the blog whining very seriously. Once enough developers have lost a substantial investment to an app store rejection, you might see developers shy away from the app store or be able to effect change in Apple's rules.
Until then, companies seem to be happily profiting from it.
Consumers can be a stop-gap measure, but are a terrible solution for keeping corporations safe. If consumers have to pick a more expensive "safe" option than other unsafe consumers, the safe consumers are going to select themselves out of existence.
Let's continue OP's analogy, and say that the only consumers of apples are apple pie factories. There are two factories, Bob's Apple Pies and Jim's Apple Pies.
If Bob switched to safe apples, he's now forced to charge $10 per pie instead of the $7 that Jim is charging. Bob goes out of business because no one is buying his pies, and your "safe" apple picker has probably gone out of business too.
Whether Bob tries to do the right thing or not, the end result is that the unsafe practice will take over the market. The only question for Bob is whether he's going to continue his Apple Pie business by being unsafe, or give up the entire market to Jim.
You could try to say it's still the consumer's fault for buying Pies from Jim. In a world of perfect world, sure. Maybe if Jim's apple pies said "27 apple pickers died to make this pie". Few consumers, if any, will know that Jim is selling unsafely-made apple pies. Jim may even refuse to disclose where he gets his applies from, making it impossible for consumers to pick safe products without government intervention.
Consumers will buy if the prices are cheap, and generally regardless of safety or other long term impacts. One of the reasons is lack of expertise and knowledge, but I think consumers will buy cheap even knowing about dangers.
Corporations will cut every corner possible to undercut competitors regardless of safety.
Capitalism does not work without the government interfering on behalf of safety and preventing collusion and monopolies. If there is a way to achieve safety and lack of monopolistic behavior without government, I'd love to hear about it.
Ideally, the government should have been requiring and enforcing reasonable safety on the oil drilling. If this drives prices of oil up, then that's what needs to happen. Unless you consider total destruction of the environment an acceptable risk to keep costs slightly lower.
Realistically, you have the additional issue of enforcement. It sounds like drilling was being done sloppily to save costs, making the existing (and perhaps already adequate) regulation pointless. This is a scenario we see again and again with government - existing regulations aren't enforced, a bad outcome occurs, and the "solution" is more unenforced regulation.
It still comes down to the government though. Consumers and corporations are never going to "do whats right" without the government creating an economy where the consumers' and corporations' selfish desires are also what is best for the community as a whole.
*sigh* Thanks for making a good response to the awful summary. It's too bad this place doesn't have editors to weed out bad summaries that draw inane conclusions from totally out of context quotes.
In the case of a closed network with the SSID broadcast, we have an even more obvious analogy. You're broadcasting that the SSID exists, but demanding a key to authorize access.
So what you're suggesting is that it should be illegal to walk down the street writing down the addresses written on mailboxes or store fronts. That's obviously absurd.
Intellectual property is only called such so as to conflate it with real property, despite it being very different.
The dictionary definition does not specify "intellectual property" and can not be assumed to include non-physical definitions of property.
The dictionary definition also uses the word "taking", not "copying".
Eh, it's definitely not "stealing". But people say it anyway because there is no terse term of "made unauthorized copies of a copyrighted work". I suppose "pirating" is the closest verb we have so far, and that's still considered slang.
This is why Blizzard is adding DRM and removing LAN play because people can easily pirate the game with friends and play locally with one copy. Battle.net eliminates this which is why I think they did it.
This. It's a DRM method that is not very onerous at all for customers, and that is near-impossible to break for non-customers. It is contingent on multiplayer being a core element of the game in question.
That's all well and good for Starcraft 2: Base Edition (whatever they end up calling it).
It will be interesting to see if they release 2 additional single-player-only expansions without any more cumbersome DRM protecting those releases.
It is DRM, that's absolutely the only reason they do it.
DRM may be their primary reason. In Diablo and Diablo2 though, I would say hacking is the primary reason. They provided "open battlenet" that uses save files on your computer, and not many people use it. It's full of cheaters and exploits.
I'm not sure how much that applies to Starcraft2, but there are many benefits to a centralized server architecture besides DRM.
For clarity, you should specify what's being restricted in terms of LAN play. There is nothing in Starcraft 2 that prevents you from playing SC2 on a LAN with friends. The restriction is that your LAN needs internet access, and your friends need to own the game. Neither of those sound all that cumbersome, do they?
So are you upset that your LAN party has no internet access?
Or are you upset that there's no Spawn Installation, where friends can play on a LAN without buying the game?
5 years ago when Half-life 2 came out and required online activation for single player mode? Or 10 years ago when Quake3 required cd-key checks for online play, every time you play?
Not saying whether its a good place to be, but one-time online activation is not considered "restrictive" by most people. Compare that one-time activation to the ridiculous things Ubisoft, Sony, and the like are trying to force on consumers.
But following your line of thought, I should reason that if I don't want Google to film me in my own street, then I shouldn't go outside.
No. By follow his line of thought, you should reason that if you go outside yelling "free money" and throwing dollar bills on the ground, that people will follow you and pick them up.
Don't publicly advertise a service if you don't want it open to the public. Duh.
operating a device — which 'may be placed in a vehicle' — in a 'sniffer' or 'monitor' mode and analyzing them on a server?
As scary as the poster tries to make this sound, this is how you listen for public access points. This post is a scare-mongering dupe.
Yellow journalism is getting to be awfully common here on Slashdot. For instance this troll of a story which just so happens to be from the same author:
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/05/21/1427245
I didn't go back and watch it or even read your link, since the answer is still the same regardless. No matter how hard you troll.
Jacob didn't write down those numbers on the girl's jerseys.
How many thousands or millions of other numbers did Hurley ignore on that same drive before he saw the girl's jerseys? Add on the handful of places Jacob (indirectly or directly) caused the numbers to show up, and it only takes a handful more coincidences to make Hurley think he's crazy.
It doesn't help that Jacob has made appearances off-island interfering with lives and performing totally random supernatural tricks. The lotto could easily have been Jacob waving his magic wand for Hurley and Hurley's-crazy-buddy. Maybe crazy buddy was even a name crossed off the cave wall?
Regardless of the writers' answer for all that, I agree it's one of the places we could have used a more explicit answer in the show.
Hm, good point. Could factor in with the back-and-forth "don't let him talk to you or it's already over" between Jacob and Mr Smokie when instructing their followers to avoid the other brother.
I feel justified in commenting because this is the kind of show I would have watched and enjoyed and ultimately been annoyed by had I not been warned off.
Make-it-up-as-you-go storytelling with the writers acting smug that you never figured it out as it went along.
Since you don't know anything about the show, let me fill you in on the show's history. The writers had the story arc planned out from the beginning, and never expected the show to be so popular and go on for so long. By season 2, ABC wanted to pull an x-files/bsg/etc. and drag the show out forever. The writers fought it and negotiated to do 6 seasons, but to have every season be 16 hours episodes instead of 24 hours. Combined with the writer's strike back in the 2nd or 3rd season, the show ended up being around 4 seasons long in total length.
If you watch the show, you'll find there are probably 1 season worth of "bad" filler content, and possibly another 1 season worth of extended content that worked out well. It's hard to know exactly how much of the story was injected into the originally planned story arc. We can guess though, based on what worked well and felt meaningful and what didn't.
Whether you enjoyed the show or not, I think it's pretty hard to deny that the show did answer almost every question it raised. If you look at the first season's "dudes in a jungle" and compare it to season 6, the mythology they built up and questions they answered are very extensive.
For anyone wanting to try the show out, watching season 1 and the first episode of season 2 should be enough to tell whether you'll like it or not. That includes a huge answer to one of the biggest questions from season 1, and is demonstrative of the answers you continue to get for big questions throughout the rest of the show. There are some rocky "filler" patches in season 2 but it's mostly smooth sailing after that.
oh who am i kidding... this is the internet. mindless negativity seems like that's what the internet was created for
carry on then, aggressively ultranegative losers. the internet is yours, unfortunately
Sadly, a great summary of both this thread and the internet as a whole.
It's amazing how many people who never watched LOST came by to rant about a show they know nothing about, and to spend modpoints modding up people who never watched the show. It makes it look like no one who actually watched the show had any criticism!
Wasn't the sickness the "evilness" that infected Sayid, Claire, Ben, and Rousseau's pals? Now that we know the light was the source of life, I guess you could say these people were resuscitated after the life and goodness left them, making them heartless bad-people?
In Ben, Claire, and Sayid's cases they all "got better" for some reason. Not sure if that'd be a hand-waving "oh the island made them better", or a cheesy "people loved them / helped them / shared some of their lifesource with them".
How did they show up everywhere, then? Why did playing them in the lotto cause a meteorite to fall on Hurley's chicken stand?
Hurley's "bad luck" was coincidence not fate. The numbers showed up in various places because they were the numbers of the candidates remaining who made it onto the plane to crash on the island. IE: Jacob physically wrote the numbers down which led to them being written and used in various places. (the hatch door, for one) Remember the people who had seen the numbers towards the end of the show, were the same people who went back in time to before the numbers were on various Dharma equipment (the button). Time loop, hand wave, voi-la.
Why was Kate there if she gets crossed out when she becomes a mother?
As Jacob said explicitly, the names were just chalk in a cave, not anything magical. She could still have been The Candidate if she wanted to, since she happened to still be around at the end.
The "disease" wasn't a disease. The smoker monster was the disease Russo referred to - he corrupted her people just like Sayid was corrupted. Still not sure how Sayid became happy-helpful Sayid again, I guess Desmond is just that charismatic?
That's one take on it, a rather cynical one. I took it as that being a red herring meant to eat up half a season and throw us off track from the (relatively simple) ending we ended up with. I guess my idea was equally cynical actually.
To the idea that they were trying to make the flash sideways sync up to the main timeline: I don't think this idea ever made sense, we (as fans) were trying to shoehorn it in despite obvious flaws in that idea. In particular, the whole idea was predicated on Desmond as "the key" being able to see both timelines and alert the losties about the original timeline. That is flawed reasoning from the start, as *Charlie* was the one to first see into the original timeline and alert Desmond. I think Libbie and Hurley may have hooked back up independent of Desmond too, but can't recall for sure.
I'm curious since I keep seeing this, what answers did you miss? I got plenty of answers from the show: we know what was in the hatch, who made it, why they made it, what the button did.
We know who Benjamin Linus really is, why he was on the island, what he was doing and why, we even know why he's a screwed up little puppy from seeing his family life growing up.
We know how Alpert is immortal, where he came from, what he's doing on the island.
We know who Jacob is, whether he's real, what he wanted, what he's doing, etc.
I'm sure there are some outstanding questions, but by and large most of our questions DID get answered.