Option #3: Publishers create additional content so that people hold-on to their games. The article states that this is what publishers are doing - trying to incentivize customers to hold-on to their games, thus lowering the number of people selling them. Again, nothing wrong with this.
Not only is this the only viable option, but it's also the one least likely to happen because it means that publishers will have to stop putting out crap games for fear that their developers will hold out on their next huge hit game as backlash. Which of course doesn't make sense, because if they're coming to you with utter garbage to begin with, what's their incentive to put in MORE effort into their NEXT junk software?
There's always been a market for used games, all the way back to the Atari 2600. It's just more noticible now that Gamestop and EBgames have made it a star feature of their chain. You want to know which games are bad? It's easy. Go to one of those chains, and look at which games have ten or more used copies for sale that nobody wants. You'll quickly notice a large chunk of this market is 2-3 years old sports franchises. Those are the usually also the companies that don't get it - if you want to kill second hand sales, give us games that we want to hold on to.
Even if they tried to apply this in the UK, you could probably easily short-circuit the whole process when the cops take you to court over your folder full of jpegs labelled "hot dog on dog", only to open it up in front of the judge to show your pictures of last summer's canine frisbee catching contest...
Again, they try to hit pirates hard by bludgeoning the legit customers. That's like Wal-Mart curbing shoplifting by having a couple of employees stand by the exits to beat everybody holding shopping bags with baseball bats, hoping that the pain will trickle down to the thieves.
Asus is continuing to distance itself from Android, saying it "isn't a priority."
They're probably also thinking that those long-haired young guys calling themselves the "Beatles" aren't worth the investment in signing up with their company, either.
The real problem here will start where every situation takes a turn for the worst - when everybody and their grandmother start borrowing money to get into the "surefire profit" business and get into debts, scams popping left and right to provide investment opportunities and toxic assets (like our good friend Lionel Hutz) getting into the business to collect some of the windfall. The market will collapse, leaving most small investors holding an empty bags while the usual rich people run off with the leftover money. Don't believe me? Just look at the internet.com bubble and the recent housing market collapse.
Freedom of expression on the net is a very dangerous thing. If you don't tighly rein in and control social websites, your population starts getting the impression that they don't need a benevolent communist overlord to tighly rein in and control them. We can't have that now, can we?
Usually, when the RIAA thinks they're going to lose a case, they just retract their motion so that there can't be a landmark or precedent set against them and they can keep attacking other people until they win. But since THIS motion is NOT coming from them, they're not going to be able to pull off their usual legal equivalent of "Ha ha ha just kidding" run-for-the-hills. Mediasentry's evidence, once discredited thoroughly, will leave the RIAA without any ammunition in their legal minigun to keep spray-painting students, children and dead grandmothers with a shower of unethical (if not outright unconstitutional) tactics.
So when does he think that the Wikipedia stormtroopers will march up to the scientology homes and round them all up to labour camps that have a Work is Freedom banner at the front gate? Honestly, it's the first time I've ever seen a conversation Godwin itself from the original argument. Reduction Nazium indeed.
For example, the typical 19th-century American city was crowded and smelly. The problem was horses. They created traffic jams, filled the streets with their droppings and, when they died, their carcasses.
Just replace "horses" with "cars" and "droppings" with "carbon emissions" and the premise remains unchanged. With the added irony that feeding them means going from local crops to imported arab oil.
Thank you for your first-hand experience input. This goes to show that it's a very, very bad idea to mess around with an arresting officer, no matter how small you may perceive your offense to be. Cops are trained to be aware that there's always a possibility that the guy they pull over for a broken tail light may have a corpse in his trunk, a suitcase of coke on his backseat and a semi-auto under his seat. They simply can't take this kind of chance.
When the cops come to arrest you for the bot net's hacking crimes, do you really think they'll care about your innocence pleas when they're holding you face down with a knee on your neck?
Lately there's been a LOT of attacks on military servers and data thefts of sensitive info. You do NOT want military techies to trace this back to YOUR machine that's been used as a proxy for some 15 year old script kiddie!
Pirated game = minor inconvenience + minor risk
Bought game = major inconvenience + cost + implicit insult + infuriation + CD check + having to go out and buy it in the first place
Don't forget the limited reinstalls on a "legitimate" copy and running the risk of the DRM authentication server eventually shutting down, ruining your purchased copy forever!
This is the strange world of software and movies: when you're honest, you're hassled. If you pirate, your life suddenly becomes a lot easier.
And when your PC version of Gears of War's DRM suddenly hits its arbitrary pre-set expiry date and locks out all the legitimate buyers, only the pirates are left on the servers to curbstomp each other on the multiplayer maps!
I never pirated any games until the day my storebought copy of Doom 3 flat out *refused* to work on my computer because the installer was convinced my setup meant I was going to make illegal copies of it. I got pissed off even more when movie DVDs started refusing to run in my laptop as well.
Chomsky was talking about freedom of expression, not freedom of spreading lies and using legal threats or physical violence to shut the hell up those who call out your systematic misinformation.
When I ask him, "how can you trust an institution that is so legally violent? if it wanted to be judged by its merits, it shouldn't be litigating the hell out of everyone that stands in its way!", he responds "our opponents deserve litigation because they intend to suppress us". It is quite frustrating to have these conversations with him.
I have a personal rule where I end conversations with anyone who talks about any undefined capitalized "They" or "The Man". It has never failed me so far and saved me countless hours in wasted breath.
From the same people who tried to reclassify shyness as a mental illness so they could shove more antidepressants in us! Pretty soon, every emotion imaginable will be classified as a disease, and of course there's gonna be a pill for that. Expect Grammaton Priests at your door any moment now.
Now that we've built a dice-rolling gambling robot, we just need to create a leg-breaking loanshark bookie-bot and we'll be all set to fully automize Vegas!
Slashdot Mirror
Option #3: Publishers create additional content so that people hold-on to their games. The article states that this is what publishers are doing - trying to incentivize customers to hold-on to their games, thus lowering the number of people selling them. Again, nothing wrong with this.
Not only is this the only viable option, but it's also the one least likely to happen because it means that publishers will have to stop putting out crap games for fear that their developers will hold out on their next huge hit game as backlash. Which of course doesn't make sense, because if they're coming to you with utter garbage to begin with, what's their incentive to put in MORE effort into their NEXT junk software?
There's always been a market for used games, all the way back to the Atari 2600. It's just more noticible now that Gamestop and EBgames have made it a star feature of their chain. You want to know which games are bad? It's easy. Go to one of those chains, and look at which games have ten or more used copies for sale that nobody wants. You'll quickly notice a large chunk of this market is 2-3 years old sports franchises. Those are the usually also the companies that don't get it - if you want to kill second hand sales, give us games that we want to hold on to.
Even if they tried to apply this in the UK, you could probably easily short-circuit the whole process when the cops take you to court over your folder full of jpegs labelled "hot dog on dog", only to open it up in front of the judge to show your pictures of last summer's canine frisbee catching contest...
I bet this falls off the news in a few days and will be forgotten about for years to come.
I'm pretty sure a story like this was already slashdotted about two years ago, more or less.
Again, they try to hit pirates hard by bludgeoning the legit customers. That's like Wal-Mart curbing shoplifting by having a couple of employees stand by the exits to beat everybody holding shopping bags with baseball bats, hoping that the pain will trickle down to the thieves.
Sony is asking for way more money than usual, same as usual. Nintendo will sell way more units, same as usual...
Asus is continuing to distance itself from Android, saying it "isn't a priority."
They're probably also thinking that those long-haired young guys calling themselves the "Beatles" aren't worth the investment in signing up with their company, either.
Wasn't their Eye peripheral supposed to do that already?
The real problem here will start where every situation takes a turn for the worst - when everybody and their grandmother start borrowing money to get into the "surefire profit" business and get into debts, scams popping left and right to provide investment opportunities and toxic assets (like our good friend Lionel Hutz) getting into the business to collect some of the windfall. The market will collapse, leaving most small investors holding an empty bags while the usual rich people run off with the leftover money. Don't believe me? Just look at the internet .com bubble and the recent housing market collapse.
Freedom of expression on the net is a very dangerous thing. If you don't tighly rein in and control social websites, your population starts getting the impression that they don't need a benevolent communist overlord to tighly rein in and control them. We can't have that now, can we?
It figures that some grammar nazi would call me out on the way I spelled my latin of "reduction to nazis"...
Usually, when the RIAA thinks they're going to lose a case, they just retract their motion so that there can't be a landmark or precedent set against them and they can keep attacking other people until they win. But since THIS motion is NOT coming from them, they're not going to be able to pull off their usual legal equivalent of "Ha ha ha just kidding" run-for-the-hills. Mediasentry's evidence, once discredited thoroughly, will leave the RIAA without any ammunition in their legal minigun to keep spray-painting students, children and dead grandmothers with a shower of unethical (if not outright unconstitutional) tactics.
It's about time those RIAA lawyers went after the REAL criminals - those dang RIAA lawyers!!!
So when does he think that the Wikipedia stormtroopers will march up to the scientology homes and round them all up to labour camps that have a Work is Freedom banner at the front gate? Honestly, it's the first time I've ever seen a conversation Godwin itself from the original argument. Reduction Nazium indeed.
For example, the typical 19th-century American city was crowded and smelly. The problem was horses. They created traffic jams, filled the streets with their droppings and, when they died, their carcasses.
Just replace "horses" with "cars" and "droppings" with "carbon emissions" and the premise remains unchanged. With the added irony that feeding them means going from local crops to imported arab oil.
Thank you for your first-hand experience input. This goes to show that it's a very, very bad idea to mess around with an arresting officer, no matter how small you may perceive your offense to be. Cops are trained to be aware that there's always a possibility that the guy they pull over for a broken tail light may have a corpse in his trunk, a suitcase of coke on his backseat and a semi-auto under his seat. They simply can't take this kind of chance.
When the cops come to arrest you for the bot net's hacking crimes, do you really think they'll care about your innocence pleas when they're holding you face down with a knee on your neck?
Lately there's been a LOT of attacks on military servers and data thefts of sensitive info. You do NOT want military techies to trace this back to YOUR machine that's been used as a proxy for some 15 year old script kiddie!
Pirated game = minor inconvenience + minor risk Bought game = major inconvenience + cost + implicit insult + infuriation + CD check + having to go out and buy it in the first place
Don't forget the limited reinstalls on a "legitimate" copy and running the risk of the DRM authentication server eventually shutting down, ruining your purchased copy forever!
This is the strange world of software and movies: when you're honest, you're hassled. If you pirate, your life suddenly becomes a lot easier.
And when your PC version of Gears of War's DRM suddenly hits its arbitrary pre-set expiry date and locks out all the legitimate buyers, only the pirates are left on the servers to curbstomp each other on the multiplayer maps!
I never pirated any games until the day my storebought copy of Doom 3 flat out *refused* to work on my computer because the installer was convinced my setup meant I was going to make illegal copies of it. I got pissed off even more when movie DVDs started refusing to run in my laptop as well.
Chomsky was talking about freedom of expression, not freedom of spreading lies and using legal threats or physical violence to shut the hell up those who call out your systematic misinformation.
When I ask him, "how can you trust an institution that is so legally violent? if it wanted to be judged by its merits, it shouldn't be litigating the hell out of everyone that stands in its way!", he responds "our opponents deserve litigation because they intend to suppress us". It is quite frustrating to have these conversations with him.
I have a personal rule where I end conversations with anyone who talks about any undefined capitalized "They" or "The Man". It has never failed me so far and saved me countless hours in wasted breath.
gaps in the original design
I read this as "nobody has any idea how the fusion power technology is supposed to work yet."
From the same people who tried to reclassify shyness as a mental illness so they could shove more antidepressants in us! Pretty soon, every emotion imaginable will be classified as a disease, and of course there's gonna be a pill for that. Expect Grammaton Priests at your door any moment now.
Now that we've built a dice-rolling gambling robot, we just need to create a leg-breaking loanshark bookie-bot and we'll be all set to fully automize Vegas!