There's formalities, then there's the way things really work. The formality is he plead Not Guilty. The reality is, he did it. A few things are worth a prosecutor cutting a deal. A body gives closure to the family, that's not trivial. But the big thing is, the cops and the prosecutor's office couldn't find the body. As much other stuff as he screwed up, he pulled that part off. Telling the cops how he did it means they get better at finding the bodies, they get better at knowing how to recognize signs someone's tried to destroy evidence; these things improve the police's hand in future cases, and are worth consideration.
More clearly illegal than traffic forging? Traffic forging to create bogus traffic in the name not only of the subscriber, but the other party (with whom Comcast has no contractual relationship, and thus, no waiver)? If anything I would say straight-up blocking is clearly less illegal, not more.
No, their study is fine, it just doesn't address that question. They even specifically disclaim that, they say they can't draw any conclusions on whether catering to niches will be made more possible by the long tail. Being that this is perhaps the most interesting question to be found, this says that the study is of limited usefulness.
It's too bad, really, because blockbuster hits tend to have similar qualities across the board. They are also the subject of hype and peer pressure, both of which are totally ignored by this study. The need for blockbuster hits brings with it a homogeneity; there are good and bad aspects to this sameness. The good is, well, it's a reliable way to make something most people consider good; the bad is that it's very hard to break new ground. Most hits owe big to something somewhere in the tail; it's possible making the tail more viable could therefore create more hits. But this interconnection is totally unaddressed by the paper.
You can't get good data unless you control the makeup of your data population. Even if you applied this technique to all the data in the cloud, it wouldn't mean the "end of the scientific method", it would be scientifically studying the cloud.
So no. Even if everything he wrote is all true, you still apply science to study things, just in a different way. The internet doesn't make science obsolete any more than it made economics obsolete, and saying otherwise is as much hubris now as it was then.
These are not independent. Look at this from the game publisher's perspective: why publish for a console (with these added costs)? What are the benefits compared to publishing for a PC, where these fees don't exist? I've never heard any company say "well, we were gonna release a console version of the game... but the fees were just too much, so we're going PC".
The benefit to the game makers are several fold; lower cost of development (single target hardware platform, instead of variable), and low piracy. It's much harder to pirate console games, so piracy is much less prevalent. The perception is that the sales distinction between PC and console is because of the piracy issue.
So it seems to me that part of the reason console makers can get away with charging these fees, without publisher backlash, is the fact that the lockdowns prevent piracy.
Generally I agree with everything said here, but there is one small nit, and I must pick it: mitochondrial eve is pretty conclusive evidence there in fact was a single woman who is the ancestor of everyone now living.
It suggests you don't know that this is common practice: offer some sentence reduction to get the guy to talk, about how he did it and tried to get away with it. It offers closure to the family of the victim (note here his son wrote asking him why he 'hid mommy'), it also helps the police with future investigations, and it ensures time and effort aren't wasted when, two years later, some hiker finds the body and raises a stink.
Yeah. After all, look at how little the ban on hit men has accomplished. They're all over the place, they're so easy to find some even have ads in the phone book! Why, this one time a hit man was in a cafeteria, and someone dropped a spoon...
Seriously, this argument comes up all the time, and it always amazes me because it's completely missing the point. Because it's impossible to stamp something out completely, we shouldn't crack down? That's like saying deadbolts won't stop a determined burglar, so they're worthless. Whenever you're dealing with en masse volumes, a barrier reduces the total amount of material getting past. All those nifty police investigatory powers Slashdotters like to dismiss by saying "circumventable, therefore useless"? They exist so that when a perp doesn't have perfect knowledge of police procedure, or makes a mistake, or even has bad luck... they get caught, by any one of a dozen different techniques. *
* (Not to imply I think it's always a good idea to give cops more powers. Clearly it's not. But these powers do have legitimate usages, that's why the police want them. Not all police are powermongering totalitarianist thugs.)
More to the point, whether or not it was before, it became unauthorized access when Revision3 locked down the server. Then it got DoS'ed? I'm sorry, but I don't buy this explanation. If you see a lot of unauthorized activity from a tracker, then you take it thru the proper channels -- contact the admins, send proper DMCA takedown notices, etc. As much as everyone here hates the DMCA, if this kind of situation isn't what takedown notices are for, then they really are *totally* useless (and not just mostly useless). You don't simply assume it's a bad-guy tracker.
And then there's the part where they openly admit to using DoS attacks against trackers. That part is really brilliant. I'd like to see what law they're looking at where that's a "grey area".
Yeah. Violating laws while on the job, using company materials, is a good way to get fired. Period. Doing so in a high profile way? On a controvertial topic (political fundraising is the art of funding controversy)? "Just a few clicks" is a misleading attempt to make something seem innocent, when it's not. A sysadmin can do immeasurable damage with "just a few keystrokes".
Indeed. He should talk to Sony and Nintendo and Microsoft, if he wants to find out how effective hardware precautions are. Sure, they're quite effective... but people WILL work around them, and dodgy chip fabs in questionable parts of the world WILL make 'mod chips', no matter how illegal they are.
I'm actually kind of surprised a games industry person would say such a thing. Console mod chips have existed ever since game consoles that used CD drives were released, ten years ago. Would the TPM make game piracy go down? Sure, it'd be hard to argue that. Is it going to make it go away? No, of course not. I don't think it would even be nearly as effective as console protections have been, since the TPM isn't a common feature and probably won't be.
Law of *conservation* of H's? No, no, no. See, this is Japan. They create H all the time -- one of the most common formulas is Schoolgirl + 6Tentacle -> Schoolgirl +12Tentacle + H
In some cases, yes, this is 100% correct. But not for all games, and this is in fact changing. Consider a game like Contra 4 -- the voice acting is limited to grunts that the guy makes when a new life is used. It doesn't really matter who records that line, as long as they don't go completely overboard.
But would GTA4 really be the same game if they stripped out the voice acting? How about Mass Effect? I say no, these games would be hurt by the loss of quality voice work; the mood they work so hard to create would be harmed. To make the point clearer -- supposing you "vocalized" all the game's dialog using one of those really bad synthesized-voice programs from the nineties; all the characters sound like a really primitive variant of Stephen Hawking's communication device. Keep everything else the same. Would the game still be as good? Doubtful.
It's certainly true that the balance between VA work quality, and game quality, is very different from the balance between actor quality and movie quality. Voice acting is far less important in games; however, for certain games, it's clearly an important consideration.
It's not free, when you total up the opportunity cost of time spent watching adverts (this time is essentially wasted). I'd be curious to see whether the sum total of all the ads you watch for this 'free' service total more than 30 hours' time. I'd be very surprised if it didn't; that's slightly less than five minutes' worth of ad breaks per day.
No, they won't. From a cost/benefit point of view, there's no point in getting an eight or nine figure judgement from someone who's already under one and hasn't got any money to pay THAT one. You'd be throwing bad money after good: your firm would personally be spending a huge amount on legal costs, only to get a worthless judgement (worthless because they will have already been picked clean by the people who won the first time). No, that would only happen if something ridiculous were to transpire (like some crazy people buying TorrentSpy and paying off the judgement) and they somehow paid it all off and reopened for business.
It was a default judgement. That's what happens when you don't show up to defend yourself, so the court assumes everything remotely plausible the other guy says must be true. Baaaaad things happen to you when that happens. Just ask Spamhaus.
Here it looks like they showed up in the penalty phase, but by that point they'd already 'conceded' all the main points -- like that Orion is protectable, and that using it in keyword advertising is a trademark infringement. Both of these are points of law, that they could have fought (and likely won) but conceded by default. Can't overturn these in the penalty phase of a trial, just try to mitigate.
Well that's kind of what happens when the interviewer asks you a question, and you respond by saying "I'm not going to tell you that". (I believe it was 'which law enforcement agencies are you working with?') I mean, the whole point of appearing on the show in the first place is to answer the interviewer's questions! You shouldn't be surprised when, after you say you're not answering their questions, they throw you off the show.
Slashdot Mirror
There's formalities, then there's the way things really work. The formality is he plead Not Guilty. The reality is, he did it. A few things are worth a prosecutor cutting a deal. A body gives closure to the family, that's not trivial. But the big thing is, the cops and the prosecutor's office couldn't find the body. As much other stuff as he screwed up, he pulled that part off. Telling the cops how he did it means they get better at finding the bodies, they get better at knowing how to recognize signs someone's tried to destroy evidence; these things improve the police's hand in future cases, and are worth consideration.
You need to lay off the thiotimoline, man.
More clearly illegal than traffic forging? Traffic forging to create bogus traffic in the name not only of the subscriber, but the other party (with whom Comcast has no contractual relationship, and thus, no waiver)? If anything I would say straight-up blocking is clearly less illegal, not more.
No, their study is fine, it just doesn't address that question. They even specifically disclaim that, they say they can't draw any conclusions on whether catering to niches will be made more possible by the long tail. Being that this is perhaps the most interesting question to be found, this says that the study is of limited usefulness.
It's too bad, really, because blockbuster hits tend to have similar qualities across the board. They are also the subject of hype and peer pressure, both of which are totally ignored by this study. The need for blockbuster hits brings with it a homogeneity; there are good and bad aspects to this sameness. The good is, well, it's a reliable way to make something most people consider good; the bad is that it's very hard to break new ground. Most hits owe big to something somewhere in the tail; it's possible making the tail more viable could therefore create more hits. But this interconnection is totally unaddressed by the paper.
It'll be the best research ever. In fact, forget Harvard. And the research!
Sounds like a whorrible idea to me.
You can't get good data unless you control the makeup of your data population. Even if you applied this technique to all the data in the cloud, it wouldn't mean the "end of the scientific method", it would be scientifically studying the cloud.
So no. Even if everything he wrote is all true, you still apply science to study things, just in a different way. The internet doesn't make science obsolete any more than it made economics obsolete, and saying otherwise is as much hubris now as it was then.
These are not independent. Look at this from the game publisher's perspective: why publish for a console (with these added costs)? What are the benefits compared to publishing for a PC, where these fees don't exist? I've never heard any company say "well, we were gonna release a console version of the game ... but the fees were just too much, so we're going PC".
The benefit to the game makers are several fold; lower cost of development (single target hardware platform, instead of variable), and low piracy. It's much harder to pirate console games, so piracy is much less prevalent. The perception is that the sales distinction between PC and console is because of the piracy issue.
So it seems to me that part of the reason console makers can get away with charging these fees, without publisher backlash, is the fact that the lockdowns prevent piracy.
> Does the vast majority of the world-wide-web count for nothing?
... actually, now that you mention it ...
Err
Don't worry. If they can make a patch for smoking I'm sure they can make some kind of patch for this compulsive upgrade disorder.
We are talking about EA here ...
Generally I agree with everything said here, but there is one small nit, and I must pick it: mitochondrial eve is pretty conclusive evidence there in fact was a single woman who is the ancestor of everyone now living.
It suggests you don't know that this is common practice: offer some sentence reduction to get the guy to talk, about how he did it and tried to get away with it. It offers closure to the family of the victim (note here his son wrote asking him why he 'hid mommy'), it also helps the police with future investigations, and it ensures time and effort aren't wasted when, two years later, some hiker finds the body and raises a stink.
Yeah. After all, look at how little the ban on hit men has accomplished. They're all over the place, they're so easy to find some even have ads in the phone book! Why, this one time a hit man was in a cafeteria, and someone dropped a spoon ...
... they get caught, by any one of a dozen different techniques. *
Seriously, this argument comes up all the time, and it always amazes me because it's completely missing the point. Because it's impossible to stamp something out completely, we shouldn't crack down? That's like saying deadbolts won't stop a determined burglar, so they're worthless. Whenever you're dealing with en masse volumes, a barrier reduces the total amount of material getting past. All those nifty police investigatory powers Slashdotters like to dismiss by saying "circumventable, therefore useless"? They exist so that when a perp doesn't have perfect knowledge of police procedure, or makes a mistake, or even has bad luck
* (Not to imply I think it's always a good idea to give cops more powers. Clearly it's not. But these powers do have legitimate usages, that's why the police want them. Not all police are powermongering totalitarianist thugs.)
Perhaps it's just me, but I am generally using other body parts to pick up the flowers and the wine.
More to the point, whether or not it was before, it became unauthorized access when Revision3 locked down the server. Then it got DoS'ed? I'm sorry, but I don't buy this explanation. If you see a lot of unauthorized activity from a tracker, then you take it thru the proper channels -- contact the admins, send proper DMCA takedown notices, etc. As much as everyone here hates the DMCA, if this kind of situation isn't what takedown notices are for, then they really are *totally* useless (and not just mostly useless). You don't simply assume it's a bad-guy tracker.
And then there's the part where they openly admit to using DoS attacks against trackers. That part is really brilliant. I'd like to see what law they're looking at where that's a "grey area".
Yeah. Violating laws while on the job, using company materials, is a good way to get fired. Period. Doing so in a high profile way? On a controvertial topic (political fundraising is the art of funding controversy)? "Just a few clicks" is a misleading attempt to make something seem innocent, when it's not. A sysadmin can do immeasurable damage with "just a few keystrokes".
Indeed. He should talk to Sony and Nintendo and Microsoft, if he wants to find out how effective hardware precautions are. Sure, they're quite effective ... but people WILL work around them, and dodgy chip fabs in questionable parts of the world WILL make 'mod chips', no matter how illegal they are.
I'm actually kind of surprised a games industry person would say such a thing. Console mod chips have existed ever since game consoles that used CD drives were released, ten years ago. Would the TPM make game piracy go down? Sure, it'd be hard to argue that. Is it going to make it go away? No, of course not. I don't think it would even be nearly as effective as console protections have been, since the TPM isn't a common feature and probably won't be.
Law of *conservation* of H's? No, no, no. See, this is Japan. They create H all the time -- one of the most common formulas is Schoolgirl + 6Tentacle -> Schoolgirl +12Tentacle + H
In some cases, yes, this is 100% correct. But not for all games, and this is in fact changing. Consider a game like Contra 4 -- the voice acting is limited to grunts that the guy makes when a new life is used. It doesn't really matter who records that line, as long as they don't go completely overboard.
But would GTA4 really be the same game if they stripped out the voice acting? How about Mass Effect? I say no, these games would be hurt by the loss of quality voice work; the mood they work so hard to create would be harmed. To make the point clearer -- supposing you "vocalized" all the game's dialog using one of those really bad synthesized-voice programs from the nineties; all the characters sound like a really primitive variant of Stephen Hawking's communication device. Keep everything else the same. Would the game still be as good? Doubtful.
It's certainly true that the balance between VA work quality, and game quality, is very different from the balance between actor quality and movie quality. Voice acting is far less important in games; however, for certain games, it's clearly an important consideration.
Why, what have you got against cinnamon rolls?
It's not free, when you total up the opportunity cost of time spent watching adverts (this time is essentially wasted). I'd be curious to see whether the sum total of all the ads you watch for this 'free' service total more than 30 hours' time. I'd be very surprised if it didn't; that's slightly less than five minutes' worth of ad breaks per day.
No, they won't. From a cost/benefit point of view, there's no point in getting an eight or nine figure judgement from someone who's already under one and hasn't got any money to pay THAT one. You'd be throwing bad money after good: your firm would personally be spending a huge amount on legal costs, only to get a worthless judgement (worthless because they will have already been picked clean by the people who won the first time). No, that would only happen if something ridiculous were to transpire (like some crazy people buying TorrentSpy and paying off the judgement) and they somehow paid it all off and reopened for business.
It was a default judgement. That's what happens when you don't show up to defend yourself, so the court assumes everything remotely plausible the other guy says must be true. Baaaaad things happen to you when that happens. Just ask Spamhaus.
Here it looks like they showed up in the penalty phase, but by that point they'd already 'conceded' all the main points -- like that Orion is protectable, and that using it in keyword advertising is a trademark infringement. Both of these are points of law, that they could have fought (and likely won) but conceded by default. Can't overturn these in the penalty phase of a trial, just try to mitigate.
Well that's kind of what happens when the interviewer asks you a question, and you respond by saying "I'm not going to tell you that". (I believe it was 'which law enforcement agencies are you working with?') I mean, the whole point of appearing on the show in the first place is to answer the interviewer's questions! You shouldn't be surprised when, after you say you're not answering their questions, they throw you off the show.