And unsurprisingly more people pay to eat in restaurants than give to charity, both in real life and your analogy.
Very true. Usually people give money to such projects because they would like to contribute, but don't have the skill, time, etc. This isn't about trying to find a way to make a living for OS programmers, but rather a way for those that want to contribute to be able to do so.
Patching when a vulnerability is possible is one thing. But when a person can't get his computer connected to the net without getting a nasty virus, you can be fairly certain that that person will try to find and install the patch that fixes the vulnerability. Just because people are not generally proactive, it does not mean that they are also not generally reactive.
We're talking about ownership of intellectual property... If you can't have any sort of property rights in ideas, you can't have an economy based on ideas, only on tangentially related physical products.
That's not true. Companies still work on shared standards and open source projects, even when they are not the sole benefactors. Companies still fund academic research, even if they can't "own" the fact that certain chemicals work a certain way.
That's not enough to get the job done.
I think this needs to be elaborated. Which job? If it's a job that requires intellectual property, I don't want it done. Luckily, most do not.
Stop for a moment to think about the fact that the U.S. is the greatest creator of IP in the world by far.
The issue at hand is whether this law is moral or not, i.e., whether it should exist. If the original poster could have ended his argument at the appeal to current law, it would have been a very short post. Of course piracy is against the law. No one is arguing that it isn't. But whether it, or the laws that forbid it, are moral is another issue.
Intrinsic or not, the right is currently granted by law. If you believe the rights granted by law should not exist, then you should petition to have them revoked. The original post never claimed anything about intrinsic rights at all... it only argued based upon currently established law.
You are begging the question since the very issue at hand is whether this law should exist.
Now as far as a monopoly on concepts and ideas, that's not what the original poster was arguing about.
Without a monopoly there is no such thing as music piracy. I think you misunderstand my use of "monopoly".
Do you think open source software would get along just as well if licences like the GPL weren't enforcable because copyright didn't exist?
The GPL exists to use the copyright system against itself. If the copyright system is no longer, there is also no more need for the GPL. Some of the nicer provisions, such as the need to redistribute source code, will no longer be there. However, this will be outweighed by all the nasty provisions on other works going away, such as anti-reverse engineering clauses, and the inevitable destruction of monopolies that do nothing but pool money to those who were in the right place at the right time.
I know you were trying to be concise, but would you mind explaining why you believe that the progress of sciences and arts no longer depends on intellectual property? I don't quite see it.
Well, the argument I was trying to make is more that we should only hold copyrights necessary to the extent that progress of science and arts depends upon them. Whether copyrights and other intellectual property concepts are, in fact, necessary, is another question. But I also feel that they are not. For example, some sciences have applications to business needs, such as genetic engineering, while some do not, such as astronomy. And while there has been much more business interest in biotechnology and related scientific endeavors of late, the attention paid to those that do not share such business interests is, in my view, sufficient.
It depends largely on how you define "progress". But I know that people will still be singing, writing, or learning whether copyrights exist or not. That there may not be anymore "blockbuster" sized games or movies is not a loss, or an insignificant loss compared to the curtailment of freedoms that their existence requires.
So, instead of trying to take other people's music and distributing it without their permission, how about you actually try and create music people want and give it away under terms like the GPL, much in the same way you do with software now?
It was done, more or less, and called mp3.com. I am not an artist myself, but I willingly give up what I produce (code, pedestrian essays, perhaps some photos) under the GPL or similar. Though slightly tangential, I also buy exclusively from artists that are not RIAA affiliated, and do not myself pirate music.
If it costs you $100 million to create a feature film, what incentive...
Well, why should there be any such incentive? I know this is an extreme example, but it is a suitable analogy: The slave owners used to say something very similar--"How will I be able to run a plantation without slaves? The Southern economy will just collapse!" From my perspective, a government enforced monopoly on some idea or concept is a greater wrong than any profitable venture that the lack of such enforcement prevents. Just as a moral plantation owner will learn to have to function without slaves, a moral artist will learn to have to function without "ownership" of ideas. We may not have the Matrix or Microsoft Windows, but then again, perhaps the price we pay for such things is too much.
Wow, I tried to see every argument you made, but there can be no expectation that I read all of that. You should come up with a more concise summary and link the overly verbose rebuttal of the 30 random comments that pissed you off. Regardless, I don't believe in copyright, and I can tell you why without using 30,000 words:
Copyright was created, at least in this country, for the extrinsic purpose of promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Note that the exclusive rights granted are only done so for a specific end. I am not one to say that just because it is in the Constitution, that makes it right. Rather, it is just a tidy summary of my views on intellectual property. If the consequent is no longer contingent on the antecedent, we can remove the antecedent as extraneous. That is, if the "progress of sciences and useful arts" no longer depends on intellectual "property", then there is no need for this legal entity.
Many believe, and I'm sure you're one of them, that copyright and other intellectual "properties" are intrinsic rights of the author. I just disagree. There is no Archimedian point from which such disparate views can be arbitrated, so I don't see this debate being resolved anytime soon. However, I am quite certain that my position is coherence and cogent. You can only contradict it by assuming intellectual rights are intrinsic. Which is fine, but I can simply assume the opposite. And there's no way you can say that my view is wrong because of X, because whatever X you choose, I choose my view to trump it. So please, go ahead and try.
I don't complain of either personally. Outsourcing is fine for both consumers and businesses in my book.
As has been said many times before, not all of slashdot speaks with one voice. When you see those topics with 800-2000 comments, it's because there is significant disagreement. If everyone agreed, there wouldn't be much to say.
You are right that there can be a certain hypocricy in saying that consumers should be able to get cheap wares from Russian markets, yet that our jobs should not be outsourced there. However, the charitable thing to do is to assume that no one holds both those positions until seeing someone that does. What makes you think otherwise?
Yes, you are right that I misread your previous post. But then, simply controlling the game doesn't make it right either. I've accidentally come across games where the admins were playing in God mode. Were they fair to play this way just because they controlled the server?
Glad you brought up the chess analogy because it's exactly what I had in mind. There are plenty of extra rules in chess. For example, no one is allowed to use a computer to aid them. And even in the seemingly strict rules of board moves, there are changes as well. It used to be that a draw was declared after X number of moves. But it was found that a certain set of pieces could force a mate only after X+N moves, so this rule had to be changed.
So the community of players should always follow the rules as intended by the authors of the game, even if they disagree with them? I don't see how the author of the game has more authority to write the rules than the players do.
By appealing to professional organizations such as the ITF, you are undermining your point. These organizations evolve and change rules as the community of players and professionals sees that it should be. The makers of tennis balls, rackets, nets, or even courts do not write the rules of tennis.
I think a more appropriate analogy would be if you were allowed to bring a tennis-ball cannon to the game. You could sit there, aim it perfectly, and the opponent would risk his life to even try to return it. If such was allowed, the game would become as exciting at tic-tac-toe.
Again, the basic question is who defines what's acceptable or not? How are the reasons for which, i.e., aimbotting is not acceptable different from the reasons for which other physically possible but "cheese"-like moves are?
When developers change the subsequent version of the game to undo behavior in the first one that was universally reviled, it's safe to call it a mistake. And I never said I couldn't overcome spawn campers. Just that they ruined the game, because it turned it into a game about who could spawn camp best.
In general, your arguments should not be contingent upon any specific facts of the person you are debating with. One, it's invalid reasoning, and two, it makes you look especially silly when those assumptions turn out incorrect.
It all comes down to morality. How do you distinguish between aimbots and spawn camping? Both are physical possibilities. Why does one violate the rules of the game while the other does not? Any answer you give will have to rely on the shared community standards by which the game is played. And so, yes, they are playing a different game when "extra" rules are imposed. But no game is static. Physical games are a good example of this. Take break aways in soccer/football. If someone had a breakaway, the rules of the game dictated that the most rational choice was to simply take the player out, by tripping him up or tugging his shirt. But the community of soccer/football players came to regard this as unfair. So they made the consequences for such "cheese" more severe.
Similarly, communities evolve in online games and video games in general. Sometimes the communities greatly outlast the maintenance of the code by the company that created it. In this case, changing evolving technical codes is impossible, and external enforcement is necessary. The "rules" of the game become amended and refined, not by the game's technical code, but by the people that play it. Is this unacceptable? I don't see how.
I've been playing FPS's for over 10 years, so I think your ad hominem is a little off the mark. I am also fairly decent at it, usually scoring within the top 2 spots while at the same time avoiding turning team based games into death matches.
Largely because I play team based games, I had them in mind when typing my post. There were certain known flaws, especially with CTF-Face on the original UT. One was spawn camping, another was piston camping. Spawn camping could not easily be avoided, especially on very large servers, because there were only 3 spawn points on each team, two of which could be sniped from the enemy base. On large servers you could basically point your sniper rifle at exactly where players would spawn and double, monster, etc. kills.
In this case, various mods were introduced to stop the insanity, and some went as far as actually recoding the map so that, i.e., piston camping was impossible. But I think it's fair to say that one who "cheesed" with spawn or piston camping was ruining the game so to speak. Obviously, such behaviors would only continue if left unpunished, and so the technical or administrative solutions were required.
In general for video games, it is indeed common practice to code rules into the game, so that it is literally impossible to break them. But no one is fully prescient, and sometimes consequences of the game's programming reveal themselves after the game is no longer maintained. For games that end up on the console, this maintenance stops often as soon as the game is released, and community programmed corrective mods are almost impossible.
So, for such situations, it seems obvious to me that the rules required for honest and fun gameplay that are not coded in the game should be followed by a gentleman's agreement much as physical sports are played. Certainly, if olympic committees could literally make it impossible not to cheat, they would. But human freedoms cannot be fully restricted, and so the rules must be enforced externally to the game.
Similarly, it is ideal to simply make cheating impossible in a video game. But sometimes, due to lack of foresight or inherent limitations of given game architectures, this is impossible. So we must rely on external enforcement, and this external enforcement requires a moral code.
Finally, I see little difference between cheating via wallhacks or other client side aids and cheating via actions that, while possible under the assumptions of the game engine, violate moral assumptions of the community in which is played. Both represent actions that are physically possible, but morally reproachable. My point basically boils down to this: Just because you can, it doesn't mean you should.
Note that the writer didn't offer an effective counter-strategy to spawn sniping/camping. I can't speak to the other "cheese" moves he's talking about, but I can certainly understand why people complain about spawn camping. The reason why it is universally reviled is because it degrades the quality and enjoyment of the game. When the game comes down to who can spawn camp the best, then it's really no fun at all. The solution to spawn camping is temporary invincibility. That is, a newly spawned player cannot be injured for 5-10 seconds after spawning unless he or she engages in an offensive attack. (This last part is to stop those that are newly spawned from tipping the balance of power in reverse.)
Absent such technical solutions, admins are free to kick or ban players they see as using cheap moves, and players are free to discontinue playing with those they feel can't play fair. There is no a priori reason that video games have to be anarchistic. What does this mean? Well, it seems the writer of the article assumes that just because something can be done in a video game, that it is perfectly acceptable to do so. But I disagree. Suppose I was playing a real-life tennis match with Sampras, pulled out a gun, and shot him in the knee. Would my subsequent win (assuming I wasn't arrested or handcuffed) be honest or fair? Certainly not.
Similarly, just because we are used to being able to get away with anything in video games doesn't make those things we get away with right. There are already rules against automated helpers in most games. There is thus no reason to assume that just because an action is possible in a game that it should be allowable or rewarded.
"Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld."
Sounds like the opposite of evidence to me. Care to elaborate?
That for which there is an evidental relationship relating observation to hypothesis is scientific. And to the degree that the observations determine the hypothesis, we say that the hypothesis is based on evidence and not faith. If you are defining "faith" such that is falls under this usage of "evidence", then faith simply is evidence and there is nothing that distigushes it from scientific practice. But, this also means that the search for empirical basis of our faith, which would be implied here, would simply be science. So that which cannot be studied by science wouldn't be evidence or faith, if they were similar in such a way. And this would make the faith unjustified, so far as it is not scientific.
So you can accept things on faith with ignorance to or denial of evidence, or you can simply say that faith is empirically justified, in which case you must defer to science to tell you that which you should take on faith.
But even if so, the money isn't going to someone who will litigate your market, and potentially you again in the future. Let's say I was a famous person (I'm not.) I'd rather pay significant money for security if I needed it, rather than simply paying off those that threaten me. Think about it.
Totally agree. In my case, I never see the popup as I have those blocked. But when I was shopping for a dedicated host, I took one breeze through their site and left it. They don't show any prices, they only say, "Contact a sales agent now!!!" If they can't show the prices up front, then they don't deserve my business. I'll speak to someone when I'm ready to speak to someone. That was one of the great things about shopping on the web: the ability to make deliberate, informed decisions without any pressure.
As has been discussed in length already, it is impossible to trust the client unless you send each frame prerendered to every client pixel for pixel. Because of this, the only real solution is to ban the cheaters. The way this works is that the people running servers and Epic trust each other. When a client tries to connect to the server, it will check the CD key against Epic's master ban list. If you are banned, you will not be allowed to join the server. Someone could hack the server code as well as the client code to make sure this check is not done (actually, it's configurable), but the cheaters will not be able to play on servers that do such authentication. And as people prefer to play in a cheat-free environment, these servers will natually be more popular.
Of course, someone can always come up with a better cheat or a new handle, but each time they are banned they will have to buy a new game to play again. That's an expensive mistake for the cheater. Making cheating economically prohibitive is the only way, as far as I can see.
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And unsurprisingly more people pay to eat in restaurants than give to charity, both in real life and your analogy.
Very true. Usually people give money to such projects because they would like to contribute, but don't have the skill, time, etc. This isn't about trying to find a way to make a living for OS programmers, but rather a way for those that want to contribute to be able to do so.
Microsoft Way: I pay to eat at a restaurant.
Open Source Way: I donate to a charity so that everyone can eat (including me).
Patching when a vulnerability is possible is one thing. But when a person can't get his computer connected to the net without getting a nasty virus, you can be fairly certain that that person will try to find and install the patch that fixes the vulnerability. Just because people are not generally proactive, it does not mean that they are also not generally reactive.
I think this needs to be elaborated. Which job? If it's a job that requires intellectual property, I don't want it done. Luckily, most do not.
Done. Didn't change my mind.
The issue at hand is whether this law is moral or not, i.e., whether it should exist. If the original poster could have ended his argument at the appeal to current law, it would have been a very short post. Of course piracy is against the law. No one is arguing that it isn't. But whether it, or the laws that forbid it, are moral is another issue.
Without a monopoly there is no such thing as music piracy. I think you misunderstand my use of "monopoly".
Well, the argument I was trying to make is more that we should only hold copyrights necessary to the extent that progress of science and arts depends upon them. Whether copyrights and other intellectual property concepts are, in fact, necessary, is another question. But I also feel that they are not. For example, some sciences have applications to business needs, such as genetic engineering, while some do not, such as astronomy. And while there has been much more business interest in biotechnology and related scientific endeavors of late, the attention paid to those that do not share such business interests is, in my view, sufficient.
It depends largely on how you define "progress". But I know that people will still be singing, writing, or learning whether copyrights exist or not. That there may not be anymore "blockbuster" sized games or movies is not a loss, or an insignificant loss compared to the curtailment of freedoms that their existence requires.
Well, why should there be any such incentive? I know this is an extreme example, but it is a suitable analogy: The slave owners used to say something very similar--"How will I be able to run a plantation without slaves? The Southern economy will just collapse!" From my perspective, a government enforced monopoly on some idea or concept is a greater wrong than any profitable venture that the lack of such enforcement prevents. Just as a moral plantation owner will learn to have to function without slaves, a moral artist will learn to have to function without "ownership" of ideas. We may not have the Matrix or Microsoft Windows, but then again, perhaps the price we pay for such things is too much.
"Which premise is incorrect?"
That artists have an intrinsic right to a government enforced monopoly on concepts and ideas.
Wow, I tried to see every argument you made, but there can be no expectation that I read all of that. You should come up with a more concise summary and link the overly verbose rebuttal of the 30 random comments that pissed you off. Regardless, I don't believe in copyright, and I can tell you why without using 30,000 words:
Copyright was created, at least in this country, for the extrinsic purpose of promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Note that the exclusive rights granted are only done so for a specific end. I am not one to say that just because it is in the Constitution, that makes it right. Rather, it is just a tidy summary of my views on intellectual property. If the consequent is no longer contingent on the antecedent, we can remove the antecedent as extraneous. That is, if the "progress of sciences and useful arts" no longer depends on intellectual "property", then there is no need for this legal entity.
Many believe, and I'm sure you're one of them, that copyright and other intellectual "properties" are intrinsic rights of the author. I just disagree. There is no Archimedian point from which such disparate views can be arbitrated, so I don't see this debate being resolved anytime soon. However, I am quite certain that my position is coherence and cogent. You can only contradict it by assuming intellectual rights are intrinsic. Which is fine, but I can simply assume the opposite. And there's no way you can say that my view is wrong because of X, because whatever X you choose, I choose my view to trump it. So please, go ahead and try.
I don't complain of either personally. Outsourcing is fine for both consumers and businesses in my book.
As has been said many times before, not all of slashdot speaks with one voice. When you see those topics with 800-2000 comments, it's because there is significant disagreement. If everyone agreed, there wouldn't be much to say.
You are right that there can be a certain hypocricy in saying that consumers should be able to get cheap wares from Russian markets, yet that our jobs should not be outsourced there. However, the charitable thing to do is to assume that no one holds both those positions until seeing someone that does. What makes you think otherwise?
Yes, you are right that I misread your previous post. But then, simply controlling the game doesn't make it right either. I've accidentally come across games where the admins were playing in God mode. Were they fair to play this way just because they controlled the server?
Glad you brought up the chess analogy because it's exactly what I had in mind. There are plenty of extra rules in chess. For example, no one is allowed to use a computer to aid them. And even in the seemingly strict rules of board moves, there are changes as well. It used to be that a draw was declared after X number of moves. But it was found that a certain set of pieces could force a mate only after X+N moves, so this rule had to be changed.
So the community of players should always follow the rules as intended by the authors of the game, even if they disagree with them? I don't see how the author of the game has more authority to write the rules than the players do.
By appealing to professional organizations such as the ITF, you are undermining your point. These organizations evolve and change rules as the community of players and professionals sees that it should be. The makers of tennis balls, rackets, nets, or even courts do not write the rules of tennis.
I think a more appropriate analogy would be if you were allowed to bring a tennis-ball cannon to the game. You could sit there, aim it perfectly, and the opponent would risk his life to even try to return it. If such was allowed, the game would become as exciting at tic-tac-toe.
Again, the basic question is who defines what's acceptable or not? How are the reasons for which, i.e., aimbotting is not acceptable different from the reasons for which other physically possible but "cheese"-like moves are?
Is using an aimbot within the rules of online games? Who writes the rules? What makes them valid?
When developers change the subsequent version of the game to undo behavior in the first one that was universally reviled, it's safe to call it a mistake. And I never said I couldn't overcome spawn campers. Just that they ruined the game, because it turned it into a game about who could spawn camp best.
In general, your arguments should not be contingent upon any specific facts of the person you are debating with. One, it's invalid reasoning, and two, it makes you look especially silly when those assumptions turn out incorrect.
It all comes down to morality. How do you distinguish between aimbots and spawn camping? Both are physical possibilities. Why does one violate the rules of the game while the other does not? Any answer you give will have to rely on the shared community standards by which the game is played. And so, yes, they are playing a different game when "extra" rules are imposed. But no game is static. Physical games are a good example of this. Take break aways in soccer/football. If someone had a breakaway, the rules of the game dictated that the most rational choice was to simply take the player out, by tripping him up or tugging his shirt. But the community of soccer/football players came to regard this as unfair. So they made the consequences for such "cheese" more severe.
Similarly, communities evolve in online games and video games in general. Sometimes the communities greatly outlast the maintenance of the code by the company that created it. In this case, changing evolving technical codes is impossible, and external enforcement is necessary. The "rules" of the game become amended and refined, not by the game's technical code, but by the people that play it. Is this unacceptable? I don't see how.
I've been playing FPS's for over 10 years, so I think your ad hominem is a little off the mark. I am also fairly decent at it, usually scoring within the top 2 spots while at the same time avoiding turning team based games into death matches.
Largely because I play team based games, I had them in mind when typing my post. There were certain known flaws, especially with CTF-Face on the original UT. One was spawn camping, another was piston camping. Spawn camping could not easily be avoided, especially on very large servers, because there were only 3 spawn points on each team, two of which could be sniped from the enemy base. On large servers you could basically point your sniper rifle at exactly where players would spawn and double, monster, etc. kills.
In this case, various mods were introduced to stop the insanity, and some went as far as actually recoding the map so that, i.e., piston camping was impossible. But I think it's fair to say that one who "cheesed" with spawn or piston camping was ruining the game so to speak. Obviously, such behaviors would only continue if left unpunished, and so the technical or administrative solutions were required.
In general for video games, it is indeed common practice to code rules into the game, so that it is literally impossible to break them. But no one is fully prescient, and sometimes consequences of the game's programming reveal themselves after the game is no longer maintained. For games that end up on the console, this maintenance stops often as soon as the game is released, and community programmed corrective mods are almost impossible.
So, for such situations, it seems obvious to me that the rules required for honest and fun gameplay that are not coded in the game should be followed by a gentleman's agreement much as physical sports are played. Certainly, if olympic committees could literally make it impossible not to cheat, they would. But human freedoms cannot be fully restricted, and so the rules must be enforced externally to the game.
Similarly, it is ideal to simply make cheating impossible in a video game. But sometimes, due to lack of foresight or inherent limitations of given game architectures, this is impossible. So we must rely on external enforcement, and this external enforcement requires a moral code.
Finally, I see little difference between cheating via wallhacks or other client side aids and cheating via actions that, while possible under the assumptions of the game engine, violate moral assumptions of the community in which is played. Both represent actions that are physically possible, but morally reproachable. My point basically boils down to this: Just because you can, it doesn't mean you should.
Note that the writer didn't offer an effective counter-strategy to spawn sniping/camping. I can't speak to the other "cheese" moves he's talking about, but I can certainly understand why people complain about spawn camping. The reason why it is universally reviled is because it degrades the quality and enjoyment of the game. When the game comes down to who can spawn camp the best, then it's really no fun at all. The solution to spawn camping is temporary invincibility. That is, a newly spawned player cannot be injured for 5-10 seconds after spawning unless he or she engages in an offensive attack. (This last part is to stop those that are newly spawned from tipping the balance of power in reverse.)
Absent such technical solutions, admins are free to kick or ban players they see as using cheap moves, and players are free to discontinue playing with those they feel can't play fair. There is no a priori reason that video games have to be anarchistic. What does this mean? Well, it seems the writer of the article assumes that just because something can be done in a video game, that it is perfectly acceptable to do so. But I disagree. Suppose I was playing a real-life tennis match with Sampras, pulled out a gun, and shot him in the knee. Would my subsequent win (assuming I wasn't arrested or handcuffed) be honest or fair? Certainly not.
Similarly, just because we are used to being able to get away with anything in video games doesn't make those things we get away with right. There are already rules against automated helpers in most games. There is thus no reason to assume that just because an action is possible in a game that it should be allowable or rewarded.
That for which there is an evidental relationship relating observation to hypothesis is scientific. And to the degree that the observations determine the hypothesis, we say that the hypothesis is based on evidence and not faith. If you are defining "faith" such that is falls under this usage of "evidence", then faith simply is evidence and there is nothing that distigushes it from scientific practice. But, this also means that the search for empirical basis of our faith, which would be implied here, would simply be science. So that which cannot be studied by science wouldn't be evidence or faith, if they were similar in such a way. And this would make the faith unjustified, so far as it is not scientific.
So you can accept things on faith with ignorance to or denial of evidence, or you can simply say that faith is empirically justified, in which case you must defer to science to tell you that which you should take on faith.
But even if so, the money isn't going to someone who will litigate your market, and potentially you again in the future. Let's say I was a famous person (I'm not.) I'd rather pay significant money for security if I needed it, rather than simply paying off those that threaten me. Think about it.
Totally agree. In my case, I never see the popup as I have those blocked. But when I was shopping for a dedicated host, I took one breeze through their site and left it. They don't show any prices, they only say, "Contact a sales agent now!!!" If they can't show the prices up front, then they don't deserve my business. I'll speak to someone when I'm ready to speak to someone. That was one of the great things about shopping on the web: the ability to make deliberate, informed decisions without any pressure.
As has been discussed in length already, it is impossible to trust the client unless you send each frame prerendered to every client pixel for pixel. Because of this, the only real solution is to ban the cheaters. The way this works is that the people running servers and Epic trust each other. When a client tries to connect to the server, it will check the CD key against Epic's master ban list. If you are banned, you will not be allowed to join the server. Someone could hack the server code as well as the client code to make sure this check is not done (actually, it's configurable), but the cheaters will not be able to play on servers that do such authentication. And as people prefer to play in a cheat-free environment, these servers will natually be more popular.
Of course, someone can always come up with a better cheat or a new handle, but each time they are banned they will have to buy a new game to play again. That's an expensive mistake for the cheater. Making cheating economically prohibitive is the only way, as far as I can see.
Serverbeach and Dreamhost both suck compared to managed.com. Just compare bandwidth and price.