Mod parent naïve. By the way, how come it's been a long, long time since I received any mod points? Does the system stop giving them out once a user has been sufficiently contaminated by, err exposed to, slashdot?
I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person with an adequate command of the English language. I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. Thank you.
You begin by launching a colon without satisfying the grammatical prerequisites: A colon must always be preceded by a complete sentence. You followed that up with another neat trick: You inexplicably added phantom periods into some of your quotes. Periods are people too, and I’m sure they would be rather annoyed at being dragged into quotes they have no business being in. Moving along, it is also incorrect to capitalize the first word after a colon unless the word is a proper noun, or it is the first word in a complete sentence.
You'll be interested to know that you fail at using semicolons, too; semicolons must be preceded and followed by complete sentences.
Finally, your third sentence sounds like something out of a third-grader's journal, you might want to add a "there" in there.
You should probably focus less on correcting the zomg-grammars-of-the-internets, and more on solidifying your grammatical command.
Actually, MP3 players were fine before iPods. Apple may have made a lot of money with their iPod, but they didn't revolutionize any hardware (touch screens, etc were already available technologically prior to iPods). What apple is good at is taking existing technology, rebranding it, making it pretty, and finding a way to monetize it better than anyone else has (iTunes, App Store, etc).
All of which is fine. What's not fine is having to hear the masses speak of these products as innovative leaps. The iPad is a tablet computer. The iPod was an MP3 player. The iPhone was a smartphone. None of this was revolutionary. Where Apple deserves much credit is making things pretty, masterful branding and marketting campaigns, and creating revolutionary business models; Apple really hasn't invented any groundbreaking hardware in a long time.
I bought many games because I couldn't find a working cracked copy in a reasonable time. Dark Asylum comes to mind, the initial crack was shitty, I couldn't save properly, rather than dicking around on forums and waiting for new patches I just bought it.
The whole argument of "downloaded game is not a lost sale" is rather flaky by the way.
Just because something can be copied digitally infinitely, and in essence for free, it doesn't mean that the individual copies don't have value, especially for a game company that is trying to make a profit. Even if 1 in every 100 pirates would buy the game if they couldn't get it for free, on a $50 title that would add up. Hell, even if 1 in 500 pirates did, it would add up, judging by the seeds on some of the newer stuff.
PC gamers are a spoiled group. We whine about quality, graphics, bugs, story line, etc, but most of us, myself included, pirate when it's convenient and tell ourselves it's ok because the game is shit or buggy or "i don't support drm".
Eventually, publishers will move on to more lucrative platforms, especially since hardware on consoles have come a long way. Then PC gamers will whine about PC games being shitty ports of console games.
Rhetoric and justification for theft is easy. Give any kid a soap box and he'll stand on it and preach about the evils of DRM, but what I don't see the community doing very often is offering honest , actionable solutions to publishers.
As for your other points, good points.
I really do think the answer lies in hardware though, I think it's worth taking a look into. As long as crackers can get at the code, there's really no DRM that will work for very long.
Like many interested observers, I have been waiting to see how this DRM implementation would play out. Despite all the doom and gloom prophecies, I really wasn't expecting the game to be cracked in a single day, or for Ubisofts authentication servers to fail so quickly. Regardless off the reasons behind the server being down, a failure to anticipate hostile reactions in the form of DDOSs, or grossly underestimating your own authentication codes effects on the server, are Vanguard-level failures.
Which brings Ubisoft back to the drawing board. The problem they face, despite the protestations of the vast majority of/.'ers is a very real one: How do they find a way to minimize pirating without pissing off customers who pay for a copy and can't play it due to ridiculous DRM restrictions?
The "don't treat me like a criminal" line is very cute, and while everyone who posts on DRM topics always says they pay for most of their games, the truth is that many, many people pirate games and software. Publishing DRM free games is not an optimal business plan because even the most casual ThePirateBay'er will just download your game and you miss out on those sales. On the flip-side, publishing games with intrusive DRM systems is the best way to make you hated by your customer base.
So, what DRM systems can you think of that would strike some kind of middle-ground balance, but also be relatively difficult to crack?
At this point, if I ran a major game publishing house I'd probably focus on two things.
1) Console gaming: Much more difficult for the casual pirate to rip off your games. While I'm not a game developer, I think if this problem was facing me I'd approach it by using an in-house engine that was optimized for console gaming but could also be used to publish for PC in a streamlined way that, despite whatever flexibility I'd lose to streamline, would greatly cut down on the total cost of publishing for PC.
2) Pc gaming: Much has been said about dongles, but they're not around anymore (for the most part anyways) for a reason. I've lost hardware dongles, had them stop working on me, conflict with systems, etc etc, but the worst part is that the games can be stripped of DRM and dongle protection by an able group like SkidRow, and then the pirates have a better user experience than those who are stuck with the dongle. The problem here is that pirate groups just need to get their hands on the code to crack it. I think the way I would combat this is by trying to get together some of the larger publishers and maybe even ATI or Nvidia to go a different kind of hardware based software distribution (cartridges perhaps?). If enough of the big names in game publishing and graphic cards supported a standardized piece of hardware, something that would connect to your PC not as a dongle but as a means to read the new hardware game mediums, then it would be easy to spread the cost of research and development and to subsidize it at next to nothing to the gamer ("if you buy 3 Ubisoft cartridge games, the cartridge drive is yours for free", etc). The whole idea would be to stop digital copies of the game from floating around for long enough to capitalize on your game release, instead of trying to make an uncrackable game. It would require as high encryption as would be possible to protect the code, and steady streamlined firmware updates to stay ahead of the pirates. Hell, replace the actual drives every year with backwards compatible models that have new hard-coded security features, and at no cost to upgrade for any customer with an old one.
So you're going to tell him not to rely on a (sourced) wikipedia article, but to rely on an (unsourced) google search?
Logical consistency fail in aisle 3.
You don't sound elitist, you sound sadly unaware of the very basics of human psychology.
Do you realize that the most severe punishment in any United States prison is solitary confinement? The human need for socialization is the very foundation of Sociology, Psychology, Political Science, Anthropology and many other schools. This is not opinion or conjecture, it is a basic assumption of most of the soft sciences and there have been many experiments that have shown the extreme adverse effects of solitary confinement.
Do yourself a favor and read Discipline and Punish. You'll start to understand that the prison system is not in fact as old as civilization but a very new, very disturbing invention.
The stated goals of prisons are to rehabilitate, they are called "correctional facilities". You cannot rehabilitate humans if you treat them like animals. All this ruling, and many like it, achieve is: a further sense of marginalization among the inmates, further reducing the chance of rehabilitation, a loss of a very positive venue for personal expression and imagination which could greatly aid in resocialization, more institutionalized, life long criminals. Our current system does not work nor is it meant to. Prisons are big business, and just like everything else, they are run by big business.
I don't understand why he gets modded troll for this comment, he's right.
I'm tired of reading incredible claims that are just not justified by the science.
When it's done by easy to hate industries like big pharma or big oil, we all jump on it, we should show the sobriety required to do the same when it's from friendlier industries. If anything, these claims hurt the industry by setting up unreal expectations and eventually earning it a reputation of big promises that never deliver.
You'd think that a socially challenged reject like the moron who wrote this grade-school-style piece of sh!t would at the very least get his spelling and grammar right. I mean, if you're going to write a racist essay (and attempt rather vainly at humour) one would assume that at the very least you would represent the superiority of whatever race you were touting by at least knowing basic-sh!t-all-grade-9's-know, like "hoe is a garden tool".
What's most interesting about this isn't even the lack of literacy on the part of the idiot who wrote it, it's the lack of imagination on the part of the idiot who was so captivated by it's "wit" that he just couldn't wait to share it with all his pals on Slashdot, albeit anonymously.
I'd like to think if I had such strong convictions on anything I wouldn't hide behind anonymity like a 14 year old pimple-faced little boy who gets his best friend to ask out a girl he likes because he's too much of a vagina to do it himself. Just sayin.
Firstly, don't make the mistake of equating culture with race.
One of the most basic psychological perspectives is the crosscultural perspective. Psychologists learn from the very beginning that all results should be put into context against and compared to results from other cultures before deeming something as a universal human quality or trait.
The simple fact of the matter is that if you take people of equal aptitude, education and experience from Europe, Africa, Japan, Canada, America and El Salvador, they will display very similar results, with variations in creativity and approach being accounted for by cultural and personal experiences rather than some kind of racial superiority.
Hobbes, who was hardly a racial apologist, put it best: "Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto."
Even if one ignored all the rest of the bigoted idiocy in your post, you still forgot what they teach you in almost every first year research methods class: correlation does not imply causation.
Furthermore, even though I'm sure you couldn't produce a peer reviewed study that backs up your asinine assertions, such a study would be asinine in and of itself because an IQ test is something that has been widely challenge in regards to legitimacy in gauging intelligence, and is highly culturally biased. Are you going to start talking about dianetics or eugenics next? Lets skip that and just ask for Obama's birth certificate already.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you need to cling on to ethnicity or racial background for a sense of self, and allowing it to define you, you're basically stating that the most significant, most important thing about you is something you had absolutely no control over; yet it is more significant and more important than all of your life achievements.
In conclusion, you're a tool.
No where does the poster sound vengeful or envious, they are simply stating that in order to stay consistent, non-natural persons must share in both the (more significant) rights and the responsibilities of personhood. It is a perfectly reasonable argument and that you can't refute it in a meaningful way suggests that either his point went way over your head or you're willfully trying to obfuscate the issue.
A dictionary defines the meaning of a word, it does not dictate it. If a word begins to have an updated, more widely accepted definition, then the dictionary will update itself, not vice versa.
Because youre lazy ass didn't apply in time. Do you want the government to change your diaper too, reject?
Dumb right wing retard... I hope you don't make children, but the dumb ones always do.
And Twitter IS a microblogging site... full of random tweets on peoples lives. You do not have to read it or subscribe so I don't understand the fierceness of your opposition to it.
Clearly I also matter to you (as does my opinion on your obvious emotional attachment to this issue) - it is apparent by your huge wall of text.
My point still stands: why get all riled up if many people are enjoying it?
It's interesting that you are so angry about this.
If it is something that others (by the millions) find useful or entertaining why does it bother you so?
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent naïve. By the way, how come it's been a long, long time since I received any mod points? Does the system stop giving them out once a user has been sufficiently contaminated by, err exposed to, slashdot?
I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person with an adequate command of the English language. I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. Thank you.
Except you quoted periods, not commas. You have an amazing capacity for missing the point.
Leave my mother out of this, you insensitive clod.
Also, you may want to reconsult the blog you're getting your grammar lessons from.
Da Rulez, Hommie
You fail at being a Grammar Nazi.
You begin by launching a colon without satisfying the grammatical prerequisites: A colon must always be preceded by a complete sentence. You followed that up with another neat trick: You inexplicably added phantom periods into some of your quotes. Periods are people too, and I’m sure they would be rather annoyed at being dragged into quotes they have no business being in. Moving along, it is also incorrect to capitalize the first word after a colon unless the word is a proper noun, or it is the first word in a complete sentence.
You'll be interested to know that you fail at using semicolons, too; semicolons must be preceded and followed by complete sentences.
Finally, your third sentence sounds like something out of a third-grader's journal, you might want to add a "there" in there.
You should probably focus less on correcting the zomg-grammars-of-the-internets, and more on solidifying your grammatical command.
A good day to both you and your horse, sir.
Actually, MP3 players were fine before iPods. Apple may have made a lot of money with their iPod, but they didn't revolutionize any hardware (touch screens, etc were already available technologically prior to iPods). What apple is good at is taking existing technology, rebranding it, making it pretty, and finding a way to monetize it better than anyone else has (iTunes, App Store, etc).
All of which is fine. What's not fine is having to hear the masses speak of these products as innovative leaps. The iPad is a tablet computer. The iPod was an MP3 player. The iPhone was a smartphone. None of this was revolutionary. Where Apple deserves much credit is making things pretty, masterful branding and marketting campaigns, and creating revolutionary business models; Apple really hasn't invented any groundbreaking hardware in a long time.
If you don't think mapping out the human genome was a research milestone, you're sadly misinformed.
I bought many games because I couldn't find a working cracked copy in a reasonable time. Dark Asylum comes to mind, the initial crack was shitty, I couldn't save properly, rather than dicking around on forums and waiting for new patches I just bought it.
The whole argument of "downloaded game is not a lost sale" is rather flaky by the way.
Just because something can be copied digitally infinitely, and in essence for free, it doesn't mean that the individual copies don't have value, especially for a game company that is trying to make a profit. Even if 1 in every 100 pirates would buy the game if they couldn't get it for free, on a $50 title that would add up. Hell, even if 1 in 500 pirates did, it would add up, judging by the seeds on some of the newer stuff.
PC gamers are a spoiled group. We whine about quality, graphics, bugs, story line, etc, but most of us, myself included, pirate when it's convenient and tell ourselves it's ok because the game is shit or buggy or "i don't support drm".
Eventually, publishers will move on to more lucrative platforms, especially since hardware on consoles have come a long way. Then PC gamers will whine about PC games being shitty ports of console games.
Rhetoric and justification for theft is easy. Give any kid a soap box and he'll stand on it and preach about the evils of DRM, but what I don't see the community doing very often is offering honest , actionable solutions to publishers.
As for your other points, good points.
I really do think the answer lies in hardware though, I think it's worth taking a look into. As long as crackers can get at the code, there's really no DRM that will work for very long.
Like many interested observers, I have been waiting to see how this DRM implementation would play out. Despite all the doom and gloom prophecies, I really wasn't expecting the game to be cracked in a single day, or for Ubisofts authentication servers to fail so quickly. Regardless off the reasons behind the server being down, a failure to anticipate hostile reactions in the form of DDOSs, or grossly underestimating your own authentication codes effects on the server, are Vanguard-level failures.
/.'ers is a very real one: How do they find a way to minimize pirating without pissing off customers who pay for a copy and can't play it due to ridiculous DRM restrictions?
Which brings Ubisoft back to the drawing board. The problem they face, despite the protestations of the vast majority of
The "don't treat me like a criminal" line is very cute, and while everyone who posts on DRM topics always says they pay for most of their games, the truth is that many, many people pirate games and software. Publishing DRM free games is not an optimal business plan because even the most casual ThePirateBay'er will just download your game and you miss out on those sales. On the flip-side, publishing games with intrusive DRM systems is the best way to make you hated by your customer base.
So, what DRM systems can you think of that would strike some kind of middle-ground balance, but also be relatively difficult to crack?
At this point, if I ran a major game publishing house I'd probably focus on two things.
1) Console gaming: Much more difficult for the casual pirate to rip off your games. While I'm not a game developer, I think if this problem was facing me I'd approach it by using an in-house engine that was optimized for console gaming but could also be used to publish for PC in a streamlined way that, despite whatever flexibility I'd lose to streamline, would greatly cut down on the total cost of publishing for PC.
2) Pc gaming: Much has been said about dongles, but they're not around anymore (for the most part anyways) for a reason. I've lost hardware dongles, had them stop working on me, conflict with systems, etc etc, but the worst part is that the games can be stripped of DRM and dongle protection by an able group like SkidRow, and then the pirates have a better user experience than those who are stuck with the dongle. The problem here is that pirate groups just need to get their hands on the code to crack it. I think the way I would combat this is by trying to get together some of the larger publishers and maybe even ATI or Nvidia to go a different kind of hardware based software distribution (cartridges perhaps?). If enough of the big names in game publishing and graphic cards supported a standardized piece of hardware, something that would connect to your PC not as a dongle but as a means to read the new hardware game mediums, then it would be easy to spread the cost of research and development and to subsidize it at next to nothing to the gamer ("if you buy 3 Ubisoft cartridge games, the cartridge drive is yours for free", etc). The whole idea would be to stop digital copies of the game from floating around for long enough to capitalize on your game release, instead of trying to make an uncrackable game. It would require as high encryption as would be possible to protect the code, and steady streamlined firmware updates to stay ahead of the pirates. Hell, replace the actual drives every year with backwards compatible models that have new hard-coded security features, and at no cost to upgrade for any customer with an old one.
So you're going to tell him not to rely on a (sourced) wikipedia article, but to rely on an (unsourced) google search? Logical consistency fail in aisle 3.
You don't sound elitist, you sound sadly unaware of the very basics of human psychology.
Do you realize that the most severe punishment in any United States prison is solitary confinement? The human need for socialization is the very foundation of Sociology, Psychology, Political Science, Anthropology and many other schools. This is not opinion or conjecture, it is a basic assumption of most of the soft sciences and there have been many experiments that have shown the extreme adverse effects of solitary confinement.
Do yourself a favor and read Discipline and Punish. You'll start to understand that the prison system is not in fact as old as civilization but a very new, very disturbing invention.
The stated goals of prisons are to rehabilitate, they are called "correctional facilities". You cannot rehabilitate humans if you treat them like animals. All this ruling, and many like it, achieve is: a further sense of marginalization among the inmates, further reducing the chance of rehabilitation, a loss of a very positive venue for personal expression and imagination which could greatly aid in resocialization, more institutionalized, life long criminals. Our current system does not work nor is it meant to. Prisons are big business, and just like everything else, they are run by big business.
I don't understand why he gets modded troll for this comment, he's right.
I'm tired of reading incredible claims that are just not justified by the science.
When it's done by easy to hate industries like big pharma or big oil, we all jump on it, we should show the sobriety required to do the same when it's from friendlier industries. If anything, these claims hurt the industry by setting up unreal expectations and eventually earning it a reputation of big promises that never deliver.
Shouldn't you be posting racist bullsh!t and forgetting to click the AC button somewhere? Racist asshole. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1391719&cid=29633239
Shouldn't you be posting racist bullsh!t and forgetting to click the AC button somewhere? Racist asshole. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1391719&cid=29633239
You'd think that a socially challenged reject like the moron who wrote this grade-school-style piece of sh!t would at the very least get his spelling and grammar right. I mean, if you're going to write a racist essay (and attempt rather vainly at humour) one would assume that at the very least you would represent the superiority of whatever race you were touting by at least knowing basic-sh!t-all-grade-9's-know, like "hoe is a garden tool".
What's most interesting about this isn't even the lack of literacy on the part of the idiot who wrote it, it's the lack of imagination on the part of the idiot who was so captivated by it's "wit" that he just couldn't wait to share it with all his pals on Slashdot, albeit anonymously.
I'd like to think if I had such strong convictions on anything I wouldn't hide behind anonymity like a 14 year old pimple-faced little boy who gets his best friend to ask out a girl he likes because he's too much of a vagina to do it himself. Just sayin.
Firstly, don't make the mistake of equating culture with race.
One of the most basic psychological perspectives is the crosscultural perspective. Psychologists learn from the very beginning that all results should be put into context against and compared to results from other cultures before deeming something as a universal human quality or trait.
The simple fact of the matter is that if you take people of equal aptitude, education and experience from Europe, Africa, Japan, Canada, America and El Salvador, they will display very similar results, with variations in creativity and approach being accounted for by cultural and personal experiences rather than some kind of racial superiority.
Hobbes, who was hardly a racial apologist, put it best: "Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto."
Even if one ignored all the rest of the bigoted idiocy in your post, you still forgot what they teach you in almost every first year research methods class: correlation does not imply causation. Furthermore, even though I'm sure you couldn't produce a peer reviewed study that backs up your asinine assertions, such a study would be asinine in and of itself because an IQ test is something that has been widely challenge in regards to legitimacy in gauging intelligence, and is highly culturally biased. Are you going to start talking about dianetics or eugenics next? Lets skip that and just ask for Obama's birth certificate already. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you need to cling on to ethnicity or racial background for a sense of self, and allowing it to define you, you're basically stating that the most significant, most important thing about you is something you had absolutely no control over; yet it is more significant and more important than all of your life achievements. In conclusion, you're a tool.
No where does the poster sound vengeful or envious, they are simply stating that in order to stay consistent, non-natural persons must share in both the (more significant) rights and the responsibilities of personhood. It is a perfectly reasonable argument and that you can't refute it in a meaningful way suggests that either his point went way over your head or you're willfully trying to obfuscate the issue.
A dictionary defines the meaning of a word, it does not dictate it. If a word begins to have an updated, more widely accepted definition, then the dictionary will update itself, not vice versa.
And before you ignore everything else and jump on the typo, your* Dolt.
Because youre lazy ass didn't apply in time. Do you want the government to change your diaper too, reject? Dumb right wing retard... I hope you don't make children, but the dumb ones always do.
And Twitter IS a microblogging site... full of random tweets on peoples lives. You do not have to read it or subscribe so I don't understand the fierceness of your opposition to it.
Clearly I also matter to you (as does my opinion on your obvious emotional attachment to this issue) - it is apparent by your huge wall of text. My point still stands: why get all riled up if many people are enjoying it?
You didn't have to say you are angry, it's apparent in your post(s).
It's interesting that you are so angry about this. If it is something that others (by the millions) find useful or entertaining why does it bother you so?