Agreed. I live in a country without any mandated form of ID (Australia). In some ways it's even more chaotic than the US since we don't even have a social security number or equivalent.*
But... I'd much prefer carrying a single, secure card for ID rather than the umpteen different forms required now. Everytime I need to do something 'new' with a government agency it means yet another signed and witnessed statement, yet another certified copy of my driver's license or birth certificate etc. So a system like the German one sounds fine to me, provided the card issing authority doesn't keep the record, and there is no sharing of ID information between government agencies.
* The Australian tax file number (TFN) isn't really like a US SSN. It's not compulsory to give it to anyone (employers, banks etc)... it just complicates your tax return a bit if you choose not to since they won't know how much tax to withhold and you will have to reconcile differences with the tax office at the end of the year). Furthermore unlike the US SSN, not everyone actually has a TFN - only those who are employed. So children or people who have never been employed typically have absolutely no government record of them existing (other than perhaps a copy of a birth certificate sitting in some random hospital's archives).
Yep - I work for Oracle which is about as anti-Microsoft a company as you can get (they don't even let you run Office unless you have a real reason to... it's OpenOffice for the rest of us). Yet its corporate base image still includes IE6 (alongside FF3). Why? Well that'd be because... their own online conferencing/training/timesheet systems require it! (lol...seriously)
Yeah what the hell is wrong with Slashdot these days. I'm using Firefox (not even an 'evil' browser like IE) and Slashdot renders all weird... all this extra green space under the Slashdot logo at the top etc...
Not much... it's not revolutionary. But it does try to take the best parts of Asian and Western MMOs and put them together. So if you liked the artwork of Lineage and the questing and easy levelling of WoW, it might be a goer.
Hmm, guess this shows you can only please some of the people some of the time.
I'm the opposite. Can't stand the cartoony look and feel of games like WoW. Much prefer the stylised look of Aion (and other Korean MMOs like Lineage II). I love that the effects are 'over done'. I don't want menace. Western games are always like that it seems, dark and menacing and using a colour palette consisting of 47 million shades of grey, brown and dark green.
Oh well, luckily there are many games out there to suit all kinds of players:)
PS. And yeah I still play new Mario and Zelda games:(
Replying to myself here just to note that apparently more recent versions of GameGuard do in fact leave bits behind when the game is uninstalled, so I apologise for saying that. My experience with GG is mostly via Lineage II, which is uses an older build of GG not subject to this nastiness:)
Bleh, I guess this is another good reason to have my gaming computer separate from my 'regular use' computer.
Yeah I was surprised to find out that Aion wasn't seamless, considering the last major fantasy MMO from NCSoft (Lineage II) IS, in fact, truly seamless. You can summon a pet and walk across the whole world without it vanishing, no problems (with the exception of the new instanced zones obviously, but they weren't around for 4 out of Lineage II's 5 year history).
Must be something to do with the engines? Aion uses CryEngine and L2 used the Unreal engine...
It was like that in the L2 beta too. The beautiful thing about a completely open PvP game like L2 though, is you can just kill the bastards who are doing it;)
Yeah Aion has a pretty nice feature called 'fixed FPS' which dynamically adjusts your graphics settings up and down to maintain at least a minimum level of smoothness. It works pretty good and was sorely lacking in other NCSoft games like Lineage II in which you COULD make it run well on slow machines, but you had to be constantly going into the settings and fiddling around everytime you went to a place with lots of people/detail.
Yep, in terms of visual style and feel, that's about right.
Aion is a buttload easier than Lineage though. You can hit max level in weeks rather than years, and it's borrowed some other stuff from other 'easier' MMOs like the fact that most high end equipment is bind on equip/soulbound.
So it should appeal to both those that like Lineage for its style, but like WoW for its friendliness towards casual players. What worries me about it though is yeah, it won't have the metagame of EvE, and it won't have the awesome player-driven economy of Lineage (since soulbinding items tends to kill that, and Aion's crafting system isn't as hardcore). I'll miss those aspects.
Er...try playing, say, QuakeLive without installing PunkBuster and see how far you get. You'll get kicked from the server within 5 seconds of joining.
Also, GameGuard doesn't run as a service. It runs alongside Aion (or whatever other game uses it). When you quit that game, GameGuard also quits. I sorta prefer it that way than the PunkBuster method of loading on startup as a system service, whether you're intending on playing a game or not.
It also means that there IS no need to install/uninstall GameGuard... it's BUILT INTO the game itself. Uninstall the game, and GameGuard is also gone.
I am a Aion beta-tester and have also played retail Lineage II (Hindemith/Phoenix) for the last five years. Whether your little birdies are correct or not depends on your definition of grindy and your past MMOs, I guess.
Aion's grind is nowhere, nowhere near that of Lineage IIs or other similar Korean MMOs. In Lineage II, if you don't cheat/bot and you play, say a couple of hours a day, it will take you a couple of years to reach level 80+ (especially if you choose to subclass) and you probably will never reach the actual level cap of 85. At levels of 79 and higher in L2, you'd be lucky to get one quarter of one percent (0.25%) of a level per hour, in a good party. Often much less (notwithstanding the vitality system that is pretty meaningless at those levels anyway).
On the other hand, you can reach the current level cap in Aion (which is an admittedly low 45) in a few of weeks of casual play. Now of course one would expect future expansions to raise the cap, but the point is, you certainly couldn't reach the level cap that L2 had at its launch (75) in a few weeks. In fact, it was almost a year before the first level 75s started appearing (not counting bots).
Having said all that, Aion IS certainly considerably more grindy than WoW (but then again, WoW's grind is much easier than most/all other MMOs). It's a comfortable middle ground between say Lineage and WoW, but closer to WoW than Lineage still I'd say.
Aion is NC's big attempt at bridging the gap between eastern MMOs (grindy, not very story-focused, hard to get gear but rewarding when you do, tough death and PvP penalties) and western MMOs (easier to level up and gain gear, but generally a much richer story and a greater variety of quests and other 'side' content outside of actually killing monsters). I think they've hit upon a pretty good mix and will further tweak it as beta testing continues. It has amazingly detailed character artwork... it's simply wonderful and you can customise exactly how your character looks which should stop the cookie-cutter look of characters that has plagued other NC games like Lineage. The environments are not as spectacular as you might expect for the CryEngine, but one has to consider that it's an MMO, and besides I'd rather spend polygons on NPCs and characters than on environment (plus the environment still looks pretty good to me). Animations are also very well done... the Koreans really know how to get the art and design aspects of things done well.
It's well worth a look if you think WoW is too easy or you think Lineage is too hard. Aion attempts to take the best of both. Its big shortcoming at the moment is lack of end-game content, but that's normal for the launch release of NCSoft titles (they tend to make sure the low level stuff is in there, launch, and 'finish' the rest of with updates and patches a few months later. For instance, L2 launched without its main feature, castle seiges, even existing yet... it was added in the first main update... but this was OK since there's no point in adding the end game content until there are enough players of a high enough level to use it.
Yeah - similar in a lot of other countries (China, Japan and a fair chunk of eastern europe spring to mind). People don't game at home. They game in net cafes. This is due to one or more of the following:
- No internet connection or internet connection too slow at home; - PC at home probably not as good as the net cafe's boxes; - Social aspect of meeting your friends for some gaming after school etc.
Considering that SC1 was wildly, insanely popular in Asia (moreso than in the US), I wonder whether Blizzard have properly considered the impact of not allowing normal LAN play on their sales in this huge market.
Haha I've actually done the train thing. I've played Lineage II (not WoW, but an MMO nonetheless) on a laptop while on a train via a 3g card. Ping was 100 ms more than it would normally be but honestly other than that it was quite playable. The only problem was that using a trackpad in that game (or most games) sucks major ass.
Oh... but just make sure the train line you are on doesn't go through any long tunnels:P
The cost is substantial depending on if you want to move all your stuff with you (especially big stuff like beds, couches etc). I've moved countries a couple of times and the shipping of your stuff is generally the most expensive part (plus it will take 1-3 months to get there via ocean transport depending on where you're going). The next biggest cost is usually the visa application and processing fees (this varies from country to country, and generally you pay even if your application is not successful). All up I'd say you'd be looking at at least $10,000 USD.
Having said that, the main obstacle to moving countries is not money for most people. It's the fact that most decent countries (countries you'd actually want to live in) require you to have a valid reason for moving there (employer sponsored, family connection, or if you have a particular skill in demand, and even there there's only x places per year). You can't just wake up one day and think "hmm, I'd like to move to Germany (or whatever), let's do that!" Which is a shame... prior to World War 1, there was almost total global freedom of movement. Passports were invented during the war to control the movements of people... and have remained ever since. But even just 100 years ago, you pretty much COULD choose to just go spend a few years in Italy or whatever if you wanted to, and just up and go (provided you could afford the transport).
This is true, but the amount of bandwidth consumed by games is generally pretty small. A typical multiplayer game should consume only a few MB an hour, at most. Even if you gamed every day, that isn't going to add up to much unless your bandwidth cap is very, very small.
I used to pay 7 cents per MB when I lived on-campus and was using my university's dorm connection. That's a very, very high rate to pay. But gaming was pretty much the cheapest thing I could do with the connection. I played a variety of MMO games and these generally consumed only 1 MB per hour or even less. In fact, I forced myself to play games instead of do anything else with the connection, in order to save money. Even just browsing the web (not Youtube or anything like that, just normal forums and other sites) chewed up 20 times what gaming did (a lot of webpages are upwards of 500 kB just to load the front page these days).
Yes I have to admit the fact in the summary that ~94% of ISPs are willing to implement this struck me as being really bizarre. I usually think of New Zealanders as our friends across the pond. That is, that despite our friendly jokes at each others' expense, we are very similar countries. But this is a night and day difference. In Australia the ISPs were basically all up in arms about the proposed filter, and it was in large part due to the Internet industry's concerns that that proposal was thankfully scrapped (or at least appears to be headed for certain defeat, at least in its current form). This was on ideological, as well as technical grounds - the ISPs know full well that any filter can be trivially circumvented through a variety of means, so it's basically useless, but yet would cost them (and thus their customers) a lot of money.
I wonder why NZ ISPs are so different in their opinion (at least as reported by this article)?
I sure hope the tech-savvy New Zealand public fights this in the same way we did here in Australia. These filters might start out as benign but there is massive potential for abuse there, and more to the point, I just generally don't like the idea of artificially constraining and slowing down what has been until this day a free and open network. We already pay a lot for connectivity down here due to our isolated geographical location... don't let them make it even slower/more expensive due to this crap.
The other reason you need to fight it is that if this gets successfully implemented there, it will be used as an example here and in other countries: "Look, NZ did it... maybe we should?" That's a slippery slope we want to avoid if at all possible.
Agreed. These for-profit farmers have ruined more than one otherwise great game out there, and I would be happy to see the last of them.
I'm particularly thinking of Lineage II, which I still play, but in truth is completely dominated by cheaters at the high end (i.e. people that buy virtual currency so they can afford the best and rarest gear... and L2 is very much a gear-dependant game). L2's situation is made worse by the fact that unlike WoW, it is almost entirely non-instanced (and so the farmers are plentiful, visible and occupy vast areas of the game world, thus barring other people from that content), and the fact that it's a Korean game whose North American division runs on a bare skeleton of a few GMs and other staff who simply cannot keep up with the necessary detecting and banning of these accounts.
If this can curb such currency farming to even half of its current level, the prices will naturally have to rise a lot, and hopefully less people will cheat.
Here you go - this is what displays if I go to www.pandora.com. Only modification is removing the last 2 octets from the IP address.
* * * * *
Dear Pandora Visitor,
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
We believe that you are in Australia (your IP address appears to be 202.55.yyy.xxx). If you believe we have made a mistake, we apologize and ask that you please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com
If you are a paid subscriber, please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com and we will issue a pro-rated refund to the credit card you used to sign up. If you have been using Pandora, we will keep a record of your existing stations and bookmarked artists and songs, so that when we are able to launch in your country, they will be waiting for you.
We will be notifying listeners as licensing agreements are established in individual countries. If you would like to be notified by email when Pandora is available in your country, please enter your email address below. The pace of global licensing is hard to predict, but we have the ultimate goal of being able to offer our service everywhere.
We share your disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.
So you could listen to Pandora in France until just recently? Interesting. I haven't been able to access Pandora in close to two years (I'm in Australia). I thought they barred all other countries simultaneously several years ago. But apparently not... they must have been able to reach some interim agreement to continue to operate in France/EU that they couldn't do here.
Anyway, I recently started working at a company with US-based offices, which allows me to choose to VPN in to the US. Pandora works for me via that method, which is nice. But prior to getting that job yeah, I had to do without Pandora for 18 months which made me sad:(
The whole thing doesn't surprise me though. I'm not familiar with how copyright law in the US works, but it seems that virtually all US-based streaming media sites do this. E.g. most American TV stations websites have streaming video, but if you try and access it outside America, you get a "sorry, cannot display this content to IPs outside the US" message. Same with services like Hulu.
By comparison though, when I travel overseas I can access most Australia streaming radio stations/TV sites (for instance, JJJ radio, ABC's downloadable shows, my local commercial radio stations) from outside Australia. Must just be a difference in the law I guess. It must piss off Americans who are abroad though, when they try and tune in to their local stations over the net to get some news from home, and get denied.
America doesn't use the word 'boffins'? That's such a 'regular' word (to me) that I never even realised it was slang. (I'm Australian but have lived in America for quite a while - never occurred to me you guys didn't use that word). Well you learn something every day.
Sure enough though, you are right (according to Wiki). And the fact that most of the hits you get on Google if you search for the term are.au or.uk sites.
Having said that, I think it's pretty obvious what it means given the rest of the sentence. Plus Slashdot often uses US slang (or not even slang, but US words which have other equivalents elsewhere) all the time in headlines, but that doesn't trouble the rest of us (too much). Context is your friend.
Yes it's rather stupid isn't it. We have an R rating for movies, music, books etc...why not computer games? Surely you'd think it would be EASIER, if anything, to just have one consistent set of ratings across all media types, rather than try and deal with each type separately. I'm pretty sure that's the way they do it in Europe (and possibly the US?).
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I live in a country without any mandated form of ID (Australia). In some ways it's even more chaotic than the US since we don't even have a social security number or equivalent.*
But ... I'd much prefer carrying a single, secure card for ID rather than the umpteen different forms required now. Everytime I need to do something 'new' with a government agency it means yet another signed and witnessed statement, yet another certified copy of my driver's license or birth certificate etc. So a system like the German one sounds fine to me, provided the card issing authority doesn't keep the record, and there is no sharing of ID information between government agencies.
* The Australian tax file number (TFN) isn't really like a US SSN. It's not compulsory to give it to anyone (employers, banks etc) ... it just complicates your tax return a bit if you choose not to since they won't know how much tax to withhold and you will have to reconcile differences with the tax office at the end of the year). Furthermore unlike the US SSN, not everyone actually has a TFN - only those who are employed. So children or people who have never been employed typically have absolutely no government record of them existing (other than perhaps a copy of a birth certificate sitting in some random hospital's archives).
Yep - I work for Oracle which is about as anti-Microsoft a company as you can get (they don't even let you run Office unless you have a real reason to ... it's OpenOffice for the rest of us). Yet its corporate base image still includes IE6 (alongside FF3). Why? Well that'd be because ... their own online conferencing/training/timesheet systems require it! (lol...seriously)
Yeah what the hell is wrong with Slashdot these days. I'm using Firefox (not even an 'evil' browser like IE) and Slashdot renders all weird ... all this extra green space under the Slashdot logo at the top etc...
You can get Lineage II running in WINE, so Aion should be able to as well with a bit of fiddling around.
Not much ... it's not revolutionary. But it does try to take the best parts of Asian and Western MMOs and put them together. So if you liked the artwork of Lineage and the questing and easy levelling of WoW, it might be a goer.
Hmm, guess this shows you can only please some of the people some of the time.
I'm the opposite. Can't stand the cartoony look and feel of games like WoW. Much prefer the stylised look of Aion (and other Korean MMOs like Lineage II). I love that the effects are 'over done'. I don't want menace. Western games are always like that it seems, dark and menacing and using a colour palette consisting of 47 million shades of grey, brown and dark green.
Oh well, luckily there are many games out there to suit all kinds of players :)
PS. And yeah I still play new Mario and Zelda games :(
Replying to myself here just to note that apparently more recent versions of GameGuard do in fact leave bits behind when the game is uninstalled, so I apologise for saying that. My experience with GG is mostly via Lineage II, which is uses an older build of GG not subject to this nastiness :)
Bleh, I guess this is another good reason to have my gaming computer separate from my 'regular use' computer.
Yeah I was surprised to find out that Aion wasn't seamless, considering the last major fantasy MMO from NCSoft (Lineage II) IS, in fact, truly seamless. You can summon a pet and walk across the whole world without it vanishing, no problems (with the exception of the new instanced zones obviously, but they weren't around for 4 out of Lineage II's 5 year history).
Must be something to do with the engines? Aion uses CryEngine and L2 used the Unreal engine...
It was like that in the L2 beta too. The beautiful thing about a completely open PvP game like L2 though, is you can just kill the bastards who are doing it ;)
Yeah Aion has a pretty nice feature called 'fixed FPS' which dynamically adjusts your graphics settings up and down to maintain at least a minimum level of smoothness. It works pretty good and was sorely lacking in other NCSoft games like Lineage II in which you COULD make it run well on slow machines, but you had to be constantly going into the settings and fiddling around everytime you went to a place with lots of people/detail.
Yep, in terms of visual style and feel, that's about right.
Aion is a buttload easier than Lineage though. You can hit max level in weeks rather than years, and it's borrowed some other stuff from other 'easier' MMOs like the fact that most high end equipment is bind on equip/soulbound.
So it should appeal to both those that like Lineage for its style, but like WoW for its friendliness towards casual players. What worries me about it though is yeah, it won't have the metagame of EvE, and it won't have the awesome player-driven economy of Lineage (since soulbinding items tends to kill that, and Aion's crafting system isn't as hardcore). I'll miss those aspects.
Er...try playing, say, QuakeLive without installing PunkBuster and see how far you get. You'll get kicked from the server within 5 seconds of joining.
Also, GameGuard doesn't run as a service. It runs alongside Aion (or whatever other game uses it). When you quit that game, GameGuard also quits. I sorta prefer it that way than the PunkBuster method of loading on startup as a system service, whether you're intending on playing a game or not.
It also means that there IS no need to install/uninstall GameGuard ... it's BUILT INTO the game itself. Uninstall the game, and GameGuard is also gone.
I am a Aion beta-tester and have also played retail Lineage II (Hindemith/Phoenix) for the last five years. Whether your little birdies are correct or not depends on your definition of grindy and your past MMOs, I guess.
Aion's grind is nowhere, nowhere near that of Lineage IIs or other similar Korean MMOs. In Lineage II, if you don't cheat/bot and you play, say a couple of hours a day, it will take you a couple of years to reach level 80+ (especially if you choose to subclass) and you probably will never reach the actual level cap of 85. At levels of 79 and higher in L2, you'd be lucky to get one quarter of one percent (0.25%) of a level per hour, in a good party. Often much less (notwithstanding the vitality system that is pretty meaningless at those levels anyway).
On the other hand, you can reach the current level cap in Aion (which is an admittedly low 45) in a few of weeks of casual play. Now of course one would expect future expansions to raise the cap, but the point is, you certainly couldn't reach the level cap that L2 had at its launch (75) in a few weeks. In fact, it was almost a year before the first level 75s started appearing (not counting bots).
Having said all that, Aion IS certainly considerably more grindy than WoW (but then again, WoW's grind is much easier than most/all other MMOs). It's a comfortable middle ground between say Lineage and WoW, but closer to WoW than Lineage still I'd say.
Aion is NC's big attempt at bridging the gap between eastern MMOs (grindy, not very story-focused, hard to get gear but rewarding when you do, tough death and PvP penalties) and western MMOs (easier to level up and gain gear, but generally a much richer story and a greater variety of quests and other 'side' content outside of actually killing monsters). I think they've hit upon a pretty good mix and will further tweak it as beta testing continues. It has amazingly detailed character artwork ... it's simply wonderful and you can customise exactly how your character looks which should stop the cookie-cutter look of characters that has plagued other NC games like Lineage. The environments are not as spectacular as you might expect for the CryEngine, but one has to consider that it's an MMO, and besides I'd rather spend polygons on NPCs and characters than on environment (plus the environment still looks pretty good to me). Animations are also very well done ... the Koreans really know how to get the art and design aspects of things done well.
It's well worth a look if you think WoW is too easy or you think Lineage is too hard. Aion attempts to take the best of both. Its big shortcoming at the moment is lack of end-game content, but that's normal for the launch release of NCSoft titles (they tend to make sure the low level stuff is in there, launch, and 'finish' the rest of with updates and patches a few months later. For instance, L2 launched without its main feature, castle seiges, even existing yet ... it was added in the first main update ... but this was OK since there's no point in adding the end game content until there are enough players of a high enough level to use it.
I was more thinking of China and eastern Europe WRT those two points. Hence I said "one or more of the following".
Yeah - similar in a lot of other countries (China, Japan and a fair chunk of eastern europe spring to mind). People don't game at home. They game in net cafes. This is due to one or more of the following:
- No internet connection or internet connection too slow at home;
- PC at home probably not as good as the net cafe's boxes;
- Social aspect of meeting your friends for some gaming after school etc.
Considering that SC1 was wildly, insanely popular in Asia (moreso than in the US), I wonder whether Blizzard have properly considered the impact of not allowing normal LAN play on their sales in this huge market.
Haha I've actually done the train thing. I've played Lineage II (not WoW, but an MMO nonetheless) on a laptop while on a train via a 3g card. Ping was 100 ms more than it would normally be but honestly other than that it was quite playable. The only problem was that using a trackpad in that game (or most games) sucks major ass.
Oh ... but just make sure the train line you are on doesn't go through any long tunnels :P
The cost is substantial depending on if you want to move all your stuff with you (especially big stuff like beds, couches etc). I've moved countries a couple of times and the shipping of your stuff is generally the most expensive part (plus it will take 1-3 months to get there via ocean transport depending on where you're going). The next biggest cost is usually the visa application and processing fees (this varies from country to country, and generally you pay even if your application is not successful). All up I'd say you'd be looking at at least $10,000 USD.
Having said that, the main obstacle to moving countries is not money for most people. It's the fact that most decent countries (countries you'd actually want to live in) require you to have a valid reason for moving there (employer sponsored, family connection, or if you have a particular skill in demand, and even there there's only x places per year). You can't just wake up one day and think "hmm, I'd like to move to Germany (or whatever), let's do that!" Which is a shame ... prior to World War 1, there was almost total global freedom of movement. Passports were invented during the war to control the movements of people ... and have remained ever since. But even just 100 years ago, you pretty much COULD choose to just go spend a few years in Italy or whatever if you wanted to, and just up and go (provided you could afford the transport).
This is true, but the amount of bandwidth consumed by games is generally pretty small. A typical multiplayer game should consume only a few MB an hour, at most. Even if you gamed every day, that isn't going to add up to much unless your bandwidth cap is very, very small.
I used to pay 7 cents per MB when I lived on-campus and was using my university's dorm connection. That's a very, very high rate to pay. But gaming was pretty much the cheapest thing I could do with the connection. I played a variety of MMO games and these generally consumed only 1 MB per hour or even less. In fact, I forced myself to play games instead of do anything else with the connection, in order to save money. Even just browsing the web (not Youtube or anything like that, just normal forums and other sites) chewed up 20 times what gaming did (a lot of webpages are upwards of 500 kB just to load the front page these days).
Yes I have to admit the fact in the summary that ~94% of ISPs are willing to implement this struck me as being really bizarre. I usually think of New Zealanders as our friends across the pond. That is, that despite our friendly jokes at each others' expense, we are very similar countries. But this is a night and day difference. In Australia the ISPs were basically all up in arms about the proposed filter, and it was in large part due to the Internet industry's concerns that that proposal was thankfully scrapped (or at least appears to be headed for certain defeat, at least in its current form). This was on ideological, as well as technical grounds - the ISPs know full well that any filter can be trivially circumvented through a variety of means, so it's basically useless, but yet would cost them (and thus their customers) a lot of money.
I wonder why NZ ISPs are so different in their opinion (at least as reported by this article)?
I sure hope the tech-savvy New Zealand public fights this in the same way we did here in Australia. These filters might start out as benign but there is massive potential for abuse there, and more to the point, I just generally don't like the idea of artificially constraining and slowing down what has been until this day a free and open network. We already pay a lot for connectivity down here due to our isolated geographical location ... don't let them make it even slower/more expensive due to this crap.
The other reason you need to fight it is that if this gets successfully implemented there, it will be used as an example here and in other countries: "Look, NZ did it ... maybe we should?" That's a slippery slope we want to avoid if at all possible.
Agreed. These for-profit farmers have ruined more than one otherwise great game out there, and I would be happy to see the last of them.
I'm particularly thinking of Lineage II, which I still play, but in truth is completely dominated by cheaters at the high end (i.e. people that buy virtual currency so they can afford the best and rarest gear ... and L2 is very much a gear-dependant game). L2's situation is made worse by the fact that unlike WoW, it is almost entirely non-instanced (and so the farmers are plentiful, visible and occupy vast areas of the game world, thus barring other people from that content), and the fact that it's a Korean game whose North American division runs on a bare skeleton of a few GMs and other staff who simply cannot keep up with the necessary detecting and banning of these accounts.
If this can curb such currency farming to even half of its current level, the prices will naturally have to rise a lot, and hopefully less people will cheat.
Here you go - this is what displays if I go to www.pandora.com. Only modification is removing the last 2 octets from the IP address.
* * * * *
Dear Pandora Visitor,
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
We believe that you are in Australia (your IP address appears to be 202.55.yyy.xxx). If you believe we have made a mistake, we apologize and ask that you please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com
If you are a paid subscriber, please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com and we will issue a pro-rated refund to the credit card you used to sign up. If you have been using Pandora, we will keep a record of your existing stations and bookmarked artists and songs, so that when we are able to launch in your country, they will be waiting for you.
We will be notifying listeners as licensing agreements are established in individual countries. If you would like to be notified by email when Pandora is available in your country, please enter your email address below. The pace of global licensing is hard to predict, but we have the ultimate goal of being able to offer our service everywhere.
We share your disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.
Sincerely,
Tim Westergren
Founder
So you could listen to Pandora in France until just recently? Interesting. I haven't been able to access Pandora in close to two years (I'm in Australia). I thought they barred all other countries simultaneously several years ago. But apparently not ... they must have been able to reach some interim agreement to continue to operate in France/EU that they couldn't do here.
Anyway, I recently started working at a company with US-based offices, which allows me to choose to VPN in to the US. Pandora works for me via that method, which is nice. But prior to getting that job yeah, I had to do without Pandora for 18 months which made me sad :(
The whole thing doesn't surprise me though. I'm not familiar with how copyright law in the US works, but it seems that virtually all US-based streaming media sites do this. E.g. most American TV stations websites have streaming video, but if you try and access it outside America, you get a "sorry, cannot display this content to IPs outside the US" message. Same with services like Hulu.
By comparison though, when I travel overseas I can access most Australia streaming radio stations/TV sites (for instance, JJJ radio, ABC's downloadable shows, my local commercial radio stations) from outside Australia. Must just be a difference in the law I guess. It must piss off Americans who are abroad though, when they try and tune in to their local stations over the net to get some news from home, and get denied.
Um ... I think you are referring to Puffins.
America doesn't use the word 'boffins'? That's such a 'regular' word (to me) that I never even realised it was slang. (I'm Australian but have lived in America for quite a while - never occurred to me you guys didn't use that word). Well you learn something every day.
Sure enough though, you are right (according to Wiki). And the fact that most of the hits you get on Google if you search for the term are .au or .uk sites.
Having said that, I think it's pretty obvious what it means given the rest of the sentence. Plus Slashdot often uses US slang (or not even slang, but US words which have other equivalents elsewhere) all the time in headlines, but that doesn't trouble the rest of us (too much). Context is your friend.
Yes it's rather stupid isn't it. We have an R rating for movies, music, books etc...why not computer games? Surely you'd think it would be EASIER, if anything, to just have one consistent set of ratings across all media types, rather than try and deal with each type separately. I'm pretty sure that's the way they do it in Europe (and possibly the US?).