This is all just too much, please explain using a car analogy.
Well, imagine a car driven by an angry man. That's cuba. Now imagine a semi truck. That's me. Now imagine you're standing in the middle of the road. You're the flash drive. Cuba tries to take the flash drive, but it's no match for my semi truck, so I run it over. Then I run you over, for asking for a car analogy. And everyone is satisfied, the end.
but having to swap forbidden books using flash drives dwarfs whatever first-world problem crawled up your posterior and made you feel like you could ever possibly understand what it is like to live in a mind-controlling, life-or-death, blighted country like Cuba.
We have your friend. He didn't want to give up your name at first, but after we broke a few of his fingers, he was able to provide us with a description and your whereabouts. We've decided not to pursue the matter, as trying to get first post on an imperialist dog's website isn't a problem for us. However, your friend would appreciate it if next time you didn't use his "no questions asked" courier service for such a trifling matter. When he gets out of jail in three years, you may wish to discuss this with him further.
More and more, Iâ(TM)m seeing that games are mining good, old-fashioned human anxieties for their drama,
One of the most popular games right now is Minecraft. Is the most compelling aspect of the game the idea that a scary creeper could break into your house while you're asleep? Another recent high-profile release was SimCity. The only anxiety that game produced was a nearly limitless supply of frustration and anger because nobody could login to it. As I understand it, the CEO recently was forced to resign, and afterwords will drive to the nearest unoccupied house. (shrugs) One of the most popular Facebook games is Farmville... Anxiety over not getting back online to harvest in time? Or how about Angry Birds... Does the thought of an oversized cardinal levelling the building you're working in keep you up at night?
I think the problem here is the author's choice of games, not the variety of games.
Games, more and more, are not just about shooting and fighting, and for that reason Iâ(TM)m optimistic and heartened about where the medium is heading,
Yet, what's the example you quoted? Gears of War 4. I wonder what it's about...
At the same time, though, pure storytelling is never going to be the thing that games do better than anything.
Clearly you've never played D&D. I've had gaming sessions that had more plot, depth, and character development than anything you're going to read in a book or see on the big screen. There are a lot of immersive games based on the idea of a lone adventurer, or a party, saving the world. Look at Skyrim for example. Find me a geek that hasn't uttered "... but then I took an arrow to the knee." I doubt they exist.
If anything, games are moving away from what you're describing. And why wouldn't they? Games are a form of escapism. Who wants to confront their anxieties as a form of relaxation? Nobody. IRS Auditors 2013: Paperworks Of War? Not a best seller. Oh My God, I Might Be Pregnant II: Condoms Of Injustice? The opening scene was great, but after that, the plot went really downhill. Turn Left And Cough? Would probably sell better than the next EA game... but you get the idea.
I think it's incorrect to assert that the rise in dual-income households is not partially attributable to an increase in equality between the sexes.
I was stating that there has been a change; I have said nothing about its cause.
How do you get from no COPPA to no red lights? You attacked Darkness for being "Slippery Slope Internet Guy(tm)" when he suggested that COPPA is a step on the path to killing the internet with regulation. But at least those two things are dealing with regulation of the same thing.
The original poster was saying that "regulation will kill the internet". Not this regulation, but any regulation. This is stupid: Traffic laws are regulations, and they didn't kill the automobile. They didn't kill transportation.
And could you please tone down the insults, some?
I'm pointing out egregious failures in basic logic. If that's insulting to you, then I suggest you describe your position better and/or not defend a position so obviously flawed.
I can't imagine that they can put a police officer on every corner to see who has a flash drive and who doesn't.'"
Why not? The United States does. We already have given the police broad authority to stop and search people for flash drives, mobile phones, or other electronic gear without warrant or cause. If a "free" country like the United States can do this, what makes people think Cuba can't (or won't)?
This is like taking slices of 80% of a computer's memory once a second. Sure, you might be able to get an idea of what's going on, but until you can see the whole picture, a lot of things are not going to make sense...
The 1950s saw the rise of the United States as an economic superpower. Our economy grew by 30% in a decade, a radical change over today's sluggish quarter-percentage improvements. However, it's clear by the fact you got modded up and my post down, that slashdot is increasingly a place where people are apparently oblivious to historical realities, preferring instead revisionist history that makes all times in the past the same as they are in the present.
And how much of this has to do with wanting to work outside the house or your perceptions or what really qualifies as "nice?"
It has nothing to do with either. In the 50s, most families were single-income, not dual-income as they are today. That means that there was a full time parent present. That's not nearly as true today as it was then. That was my only observation. You're trying to turn it into something more.
Would you accept an argument that regulation is bad because even though it won't end the world as we know it, it's just one more small step the wrong way that we don't need to take?
No, I would not. Regulation is necessary. Imagine trying to drive on the roads if there were no rules. Red means stop, green means go... that's all regulation, and it enables us to function as a society. Take that away, and what you've got is anarchy. So yes, I think saying all regulation is bad is about the stupidest thing you can say. But this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone -- statements which include the words always or never are dead-ringers that the statement is going to be false. I'm the only one here apparently who realizes that some regulation is necessary, and although I stated in the OP that the some part is debatable, none is not.
Slashdot has become a den of hipsters and half-witted IT wannabes, too inexperienced or dense to realize that the larger society is one of compromise and negotiation, not idealism and absolutes. Children do need to be protected online. There has to be regulation online. The discussion is not whether to regulate, but how and how much. That may not be a politically popular statement to make on a website that increasingly caters to extremist and idiosyncratic viewpoints, but it is the most reasonable one.
How about we stop it with the nanny-state crap and FUD about online and have parents -gasp- parent?
Because the times have changed. In the "roaring 50s" you could be a single-earner household and support the spouse and two kids, and live in a nice house and drive a nice car. These days, however, dual-income families are the norm, and you don't usually get the nice house and nice car either. Parents cannot be full-time in this economy. As a result, the government is stepping in with greater regulation. Ideally, yes, "parents should parent". Ideally, all children and their families should be shipped to a special state called Crotch Fruit too. However, this is not an ideal world.
You know, like tell you kids basic stuff like don't give out addresses online, don't go meet people online, etc
And you always did what you were told as a kid, right?
This will be a never ending battle, anytime a kid does something stupid and gets hurt because of it people will petition the government to "do something" and slowly the internet gets regulated to death.
Imminent Death of the Internet Predicted! Whoa there, Slippery Slope Internet Guy(tm). People have been doing stupid shit and getting hurt and then petitioning the government to do something about it since the first government was formed. It didn't result in the end of society as we know it. It does result in hilarity however, like the woman who spilled hot coffee in her crotch and then sued McDonald's, or proposed anti-assault rifle legislation that says gluing a stick to your shotgun makes it a "military-style" weapon. Strangely, McDonald's didn't go out of business, coffee didn't become illegal, and shotguns are still in the households of millions of Americans, including the "military-style" ones with a stick duct taped to it.
Now I will grant you that this piece of legislation has some problems, but let's discuss those problems rather than having a knee-jerk "regulation is bad! It'll cause the end of the world as we know it!" reaction.
I would argue that golf requires a level of focus when you're hitting that those other sports do not require.
You're saying that it takes less concentration to throw an oddly-shaped chunk of leather at an erratically moving target, in a wide variety of weather conditions, while a half dozen people who are built like a brick house try to attack you, while wearing a face mask and forty pounds of protective gear, and quite possibly doing this while in a degree of physical pain that would cause many to curl up in a corner and whimper "make it stop", than it does to hit a ball with a club on a warm sunny day, wearing naught but some light cotton clothing and a hat?
You'll pardon me if I'm somewhat incredulous at your claim.
Basically though, it really just comes down to respect.
I don't think you're showing very much respect at all to the people that take concussions, broken bones, and all manner of other physical injury, just so you can be entertained. A golfer is usually an affluent white guy, walking around a giant park, and the only hazards he faces are inanimate natural objects that, in the worst case, will cause him to lose his ball. In football, the hazards are angry men who want to crush your bones into dust and scream obscenities while they chase you.
The purpose of DRM is to supplement the diminishing profit that the content makers have traditionally placed in the strength of the copyright claim alone to keep people from excercising their fair use rights.
FTFY.
As copying has gotten easier and easier, the mere business contract between publisher and community, which essentially says that the latter will not copy it for personal use, effectively granting the publisher a form of monopoly, has started to break down... people are no longer adhering to unfair and restrictive business practices, and so it is inevitable that publishers will seek alternative means to protect their interests.
FTFY (again)
This is hardly the circumstance today, where it's pretty much an an everyday occurrence to see movies that wer3e [sic] just released up on Pirate Bay within days or sometimes hours of release, for download by anybody who simply doesn't want to pay the cash to watch something once and decide they don't like it because most movies are shit today.
I was misled! I was told that DRM would help me to manage my rights. Is this no longer the case?
Well, there's a reason they call copyright owners "rights owners", and they call you a "consumer". Because otherwise, you'd own your personal digital devices, and you'd do whatever you want with them, and we can't have that. There's money to be made in taking away your rights and then selling them back to you as a privilege that can be taken away at any time.
From the video on the page, the sound roughly equals about 10,000 angry hornets. No way anyone could focus on a golf swing with that thing hovering right behind them.
In pro football, you're trained to ignore the sounds of fifty thousand screaming fans, which on the field can be louder than standing next to a DC-10 at lift off. That's true of just about every other televised professional sport, to varying degrees, except Golf, where apparently the players are incapable of tolerating even minimal amounts of noise.
DRM is an attempt to circumvent one of the primary functions of a computational device: Copying of data. The reason for this is money and power. One group thinks they deserve money or power over another group. This is the simple truth of all DRM, and I can explain it shorter than the article, and even the summary of the article. It is what it is.
20 Mbps for $20? Easier said than done in the United States of Monopolies.
How dare you say that, you unamerican, unpatriotic slime ball! You're just feeding into communist propaganda! Capitalism works because capitalism works, dammit. The only monopolies are the ones created by the government, blame them, not the capitalists who are the makers, not the takers. (pukes up on floor) The reason we don't have cheap broadband is because there's no demand! (pukes some more) Supply and demand mean that if enough people wanted it, someone would get up and do it, and it would be priced competitively. (dies of laughter)
The funny thing, at least to me as a Christian, is that none of the other Christians I know would take issue with anything said in the summary, other than the use of "evolution" to describe natural selection and adaptation: principles with which they have no problems.
Dude, I gotta ask, how can you be on the internet and not have seen them?
Lighten up, will you? This is no place for picking on newbies. Or, for treating old timers as newbies. Or for recycling lame jokes.
No, but it is THE place where sarcasm is interpreted literally, to the great amusement of those whose sense of humor hasn't been surgically removed. Also, every joke has been recycled. I mean, they've made entire TV series out of recycled jokes. Like The Big Bang Theory (vomits in mouth)...
Scott Thompson, fired from Yahoo. Hired on by Shoprunner.
Fired for lying on his resume, not because he ran the company into the ground. Despite this, he went from being the man in charge of a company on the Fortune 500 list (barely, at 483), to being in charge of a company that, uhh... doesn't even have a wikipedia page. I had to dig this up to find out what the company even did. It's a startup company nobody's ever heard of.
HP: Ranked the 10th largest company on the Fortune 500 list. Lost over $300 billion in market capitalization under Apotheker's leadership. DMK: Doesn't exist. KMD: Does exist... and is a Danish IT firm with 3,000 employees. Is not on the list. Also... Chairman of a board is not the same as CEO of a company, so it's a false analogue anyway! But let's say he was the CEO -- he went from one of the largest companies on Earth to some tiny po-dunk company in another country.
Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, went on to work at Matrix Advisors and Legend Securities.
Lehman Brothers: Suffered a total existance failure under Dick's fearless leadership. Was only publicly traded for about a decade before folding. In other words, a nothing commanded by a nobody.
Matrix Advisors and Legend Securities: A hedge fund. It's not even a proper company. And it's primary source of income? The money that Dick was able to hide from creditors when he bankrupted both himself and his former company. Like, for example, the mansion he purchased just before it went under that he sold to his wife for $100 to evade creditors.
So as you can see, each of these people didn't get to "keep their cushy jobs"... every mistake led to a dramatic downward step in their cash flow. Far from proving me wrong, you've managed to brilliantly prove my point: CEOs get just as big of a black mark when they're fired as "the peons" do. All three of the examples you provided resulted in someone being a CEO on paper only -- they were never given a real company, with real money, to play with again.
D3 had a Real-Money auction house... so a lot of the code was kept on their servers, to hopefully prevent enterprising hackers from exploiting bugs to make millions of real dollars.
Real money transactions, or RMT, have a simple, proven method of mitigating fraud: Auditing, and a fraud department that can contact the police and get your ass arrested. And there's no reason for "a lot of the code" to be kept on their servers for RMT. The only code that would be needed would be the API to conduct the transaction (half-dozen method calls), and then securing the database behind a robust series of calls to ensure world interactions conform to defined parameters... which is what you do for any MMO. The RMT portion is a tiny fragment of the overall codebase. Or at least, it should be unless the programmers were total morons.
I highly doubt EA's quarterly report includes Sim City already. More likely it was every game except for Sim City--and had nothing to do with DRM in the slightest.
Maybe it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back? After coming in below target on multiple projects, they may have been considering it, but seeing how this latest one completely cratered to the point they're having to give away their product in an attempt to maintain credibility with their customers while warding off massive amounts of bad PR... the board may simply have said enough is enough. SimCity may not be on the ledger, but when your latest failure in a string of them is by far the worst, and most publicized, it's foolish to think it wasn't given serious weight in the decision.
He just took one for the team is all. The team being the rest of the board of directors. He'll get a nice departure bonus, and end up on the board of some other company.
Citation needed. You need to back it up with a study or something if you're going to claim that with the vast majority of job titles, if you screw up and get fired, it hurts your career, yet for this specific job title, the rules do not apply. What you're describing is a popular myth. While it is true that there is an "elite" club of very wealthy individuals who control much of the wealth and resources in this country, it is possible to fall out of that circle if you cause others in it to lose money, especially in a dramatic fashion like this. Simple logic demands this outcome -- how else would they remain wealthy if they continually made bad investment decisions?
I can't agree with this. You can't tell me that the latest boy band single that comes out is your birthright. It is a paradoxically impossible question
No, it isn't a paradox, it's just misunderstood. The OP was clearly going for emotional appeal at the expense of clarity. Birthright may be a strong word, however, consider that most of a society's culture is defined by its art. Our popular media -- television, radio, movies, books, etc., are not just consumables like tomatoes, cars, or mobile phones. They also are part of the foundation of our definition of self, and our relation to the larger society. One could even argue that participation in our culture requires access to these artistic expressions. The President of this country recently joked that his detractors were trying to use a "jedi mind meld trick", and while the juxtaposition of two geek cultural icons caused many to cringe, the real point here is -- without having seen either of those creative works, you'd have no context upon which to understand what the President was saying.
So it may not be a "birthright" per-se, but it does seem to be essential to be able to participate in our society. Without access, you are an outsider. You're not a "real" american, in the same way people who immigrate to this country and screw up speaking idioms or fail to catch "inside" jokes and references wind up being on the wrong side of the glass.
If you put the punishment for copyright infrigement at a "reasonable" amount - say, 10 times the price of the CD/whatever it comes on, then it costs more to chase the punishment than it does to get it back. If you put the punishment at a level where it potentially becomes financially feasible for the copyright owner to chase it down, then it is an asinine figure for the actual infringement.
There is no obligation in our justice system that punishment be "financially feasible". Our justice system is supposed to be fair, impartial, and reasonable. This financial feasibility test exists nowhere but in the minds of exploitative industry executives. We have to look at things as they affect society as a whole, not a tiny minority and ask ourselves which public policy serves the greatest good? I do not think you will find very many people at all who think suing an impoverished mother for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, with the end result being to impoverish her further and reduce her quality of life in a dramatic fashion, in order to justify a propaganda war enacted by industry executives who will never fear hunger, sickness, or poverty, to be the greatest possible good. However, I welcome you to attempt to advance such an argument.
The only solution that I see is for the media companies to make their products so accessible that it is simply no longer WORTH bothering to download it illegally, but the problem is that the folks who put torrents or downloads online do such a damn good job that is makes competing with them very difficult.
Study after study have shown that pirates are the largest consumers of these products. They may download thousands of files, but they also spend hundreds of dollars in legitimate sales as well. You're making a false equivocation here -- that the market for "pirated" goods mirrors that of legitimate goods. The markets serve different needs, and with different products. The incongruity is made plain by looking at the runaway success of the online streaming website Netflix, who for a small monthly fee allows realtime access to much of the same material that is pirated. Curiously, Netflix sales continue to rise while traditional distribution of things like CDs, music, etc., continue to fall. It's clear then that pirated products don't compete on an even playing field with legitimate alternative distribution formats -- but where you see a disadvantage, I see a clear market advantage. Pirated products can't compete with the simplicity and ease of access of a service like Netflix.
Besides, DRM for a single game sounds way more like a CEO decision at best and not a board decision.
You mean a strategic decision to incorporate DRM into all of its products, and its long history of using always-on DRM, is a decision that was made without any input from people responsible for the financial success of the company?
I don't think so. No, the board was told. They may not have been told SimCity was traditionally single player. They may not have been given crucial details about this particular product... but they most definately knew DRM was being put into all of its products "to combat piracy", which they took to mean "increased revenues".
See, the problem here is that "combat piracy" didn't translate to "increased revenues" in this case, and that's why he's getting shitcanned. He's the fall guy so they can go to investors and say "Well, it worked all the other times, and he assured us it would be the same with this product!" Yeah. Right. CYA strategy 101: Either place the blame on one person, or blame an overly complex process that nobody was individually responsible for. Guess which one they went with?
It's not like departing under good conditions pays worse than departing under bad ones.
His career just got derailed. Who's gonna hire a guy who presided over the biggest disaster ever at his previous company? Leaving on good terms, or quitting, or resigning, all have the potential for later career opportunities. Getting fired and told you're a complete and abject failure? Not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
This is all just too much, please explain using a car analogy.
Well, imagine a car driven by an angry man. That's cuba. Now imagine a semi truck. That's me. Now imagine you're standing in the middle of the road. You're the flash drive. Cuba tries to take the flash drive, but it's no match for my semi truck, so I run it over. Then I run you over, for asking for a car analogy. And everyone is satisfied, the end.
but having to swap forbidden books using flash drives dwarfs whatever first-world problem crawled up your posterior and made you feel like you could ever possibly understand what it is like to live in a mind-controlling, life-or-death, blighted country like Cuba.
forbidden books, mind-controlling, life-or-death, blighted...
whatever first-world problem crawled up your posterior
I rest my case, your honor.
Dear Anonymous Cuban,
We have your friend. He didn't want to give up your name at first, but after we broke a few of his fingers, he was able to provide us with a description and your whereabouts. We've decided not to pursue the matter, as trying to get first post on an imperialist dog's website isn't a problem for us. However, your friend would appreciate it if next time you didn't use his "no questions asked" courier service for such a trifling matter. When he gets out of jail in three years, you may wish to discuss this with him further.
Thank you Comrade,
The Cuban Government
More and more, Iâ(TM)m seeing that games are mining good, old-fashioned human anxieties for their drama,
One of the most popular games right now is Minecraft. Is the most compelling aspect of the game the idea that a scary creeper could break into your house while you're asleep? Another recent high-profile release was SimCity. The only anxiety that game produced was a nearly limitless supply of frustration and anger because nobody could login to it. As I understand it, the CEO recently was forced to resign, and afterwords will drive to the nearest unoccupied house. (shrugs) One of the most popular Facebook games is Farmville... Anxiety over not getting back online to harvest in time? Or how about Angry Birds... Does the thought of an oversized cardinal levelling the building you're working in keep you up at night?
I think the problem here is the author's choice of games, not the variety of games.
Games, more and more, are not just about shooting and fighting, and for that reason Iâ(TM)m optimistic and heartened about where the medium is heading,
Yet, what's the example you quoted? Gears of War 4. I wonder what it's about...
At the same time, though, pure storytelling is never going to be the thing that games do better than anything.
Clearly you've never played D&D. I've had gaming sessions that had more plot, depth, and character development than anything you're going to read in a book or see on the big screen. There are a lot of immersive games based on the idea of a lone adventurer, or a party, saving the world. Look at Skyrim for example. Find me a geek that hasn't uttered "... but then I took an arrow to the knee." I doubt they exist.
If anything, games are moving away from what you're describing. And why wouldn't they? Games are a form of escapism. Who wants to confront their anxieties as a form of relaxation? Nobody. IRS Auditors 2013: Paperworks Of War? Not a best seller. Oh My God, I Might Be Pregnant II: Condoms Of Injustice? The opening scene was great, but after that, the plot went really downhill. Turn Left And Cough? Would probably sell better than the next EA game... but you get the idea.
I think it's incorrect to assert that the rise in dual-income households is not partially attributable to an increase in equality between the sexes.
I was stating that there has been a change; I have said nothing about its cause.
How do you get from no COPPA to no red lights? You attacked Darkness for being "Slippery Slope Internet Guy(tm)" when he suggested that COPPA is a step on the path to killing the internet with regulation. But at least those two things are dealing with regulation of the same thing.
The original poster was saying that "regulation will kill the internet". Not this regulation, but any regulation. This is stupid: Traffic laws are regulations, and they didn't kill the automobile. They didn't kill transportation.
And could you please tone down the insults, some?
I'm pointing out egregious failures in basic logic. If that's insulting to you, then I suggest you describe your position better and/or not defend a position so obviously flawed.
I can't imagine that they can put a police officer on every corner to see who has a flash drive and who doesn't.'"
Why not? The United States does. We already have given the police broad authority to stop and search people for flash drives, mobile phones, or other electronic gear without warrant or cause. If a "free" country like the United States can do this, what makes people think Cuba can't (or won't)?
This is like taking slices of 80% of a computer's memory once a second. Sure, you might be able to get an idea of what's going on, but until you can see the whole picture, a lot of things are not going to make sense...
That was never true for everyone just like
The 1950s saw the rise of the United States as an economic superpower. Our economy grew by 30% in a decade, a radical change over today's sluggish quarter-percentage improvements. However, it's clear by the fact you got modded up and my post down, that slashdot is increasingly a place where people are apparently oblivious to historical realities, preferring instead revisionist history that makes all times in the past the same as they are in the present.
And how much of this has to do with wanting to work outside the house or your perceptions or what really qualifies as "nice?"
It has nothing to do with either. In the 50s, most families were single-income, not dual-income as they are today. That means that there was a full time parent present. That's not nearly as true today as it was then. That was my only observation. You're trying to turn it into something more.
Would you accept an argument that regulation is bad because even though it won't end the world as we know it, it's just one more small step the wrong way that we don't need to take?
No, I would not. Regulation is necessary. Imagine trying to drive on the roads if there were no rules. Red means stop, green means go... that's all regulation, and it enables us to function as a society. Take that away, and what you've got is anarchy. So yes, I think saying all regulation is bad is about the stupidest thing you can say. But this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone -- statements which include the words always or never are dead-ringers that the statement is going to be false. I'm the only one here apparently who realizes that some regulation is necessary, and although I stated in the OP that the some part is debatable, none is not.
Slashdot has become a den of hipsters and half-witted IT wannabes, too inexperienced or dense to realize that the larger society is one of compromise and negotiation, not idealism and absolutes. Children do need to be protected online. There has to be regulation online. The discussion is not whether to regulate, but how and how much. That may not be a politically popular statement to make on a website that increasingly caters to extremist and idiosyncratic viewpoints, but it is the most reasonable one.
How about we stop it with the nanny-state crap and FUD about online and have parents -gasp- parent?
Because the times have changed. In the "roaring 50s" you could be a single-earner household and support the spouse and two kids, and live in a nice house and drive a nice car. These days, however, dual-income families are the norm, and you don't usually get the nice house and nice car either. Parents cannot be full-time in this economy. As a result, the government is stepping in with greater regulation. Ideally, yes, "parents should parent". Ideally, all children and their families should be shipped to a special state called Crotch Fruit too. However, this is not an ideal world.
You know, like tell you kids basic stuff like don't give out addresses online, don't go meet people online, etc
And you always did what you were told as a kid, right?
This will be a never ending battle, anytime a kid does something stupid and gets hurt because of it people will petition the government to "do something" and slowly the internet gets regulated to death.
Imminent Death of the Internet Predicted! Whoa there, Slippery Slope Internet Guy(tm). People have been doing stupid shit and getting hurt and then petitioning the government to do something about it since the first government was formed. It didn't result in the end of society as we know it. It does result in hilarity however, like the woman who spilled hot coffee in her crotch and then sued McDonald's, or proposed anti-assault rifle legislation that says gluing a stick to your shotgun makes it a "military-style" weapon. Strangely, McDonald's didn't go out of business, coffee didn't become illegal, and shotguns are still in the households of millions of Americans, including the "military-style" ones with a stick duct taped to it.
Now I will grant you that this piece of legislation has some problems, but let's discuss those problems rather than having a knee-jerk "regulation is bad! It'll cause the end of the world as we know it!" reaction.
I would argue that golf requires a level of focus when you're hitting that those other sports do not require.
You're saying that it takes less concentration to throw an oddly-shaped chunk of leather at an erratically moving target, in a wide variety of weather conditions, while a half dozen people who are built like a brick house try to attack you, while wearing a face mask and forty pounds of protective gear, and quite possibly doing this while in a degree of physical pain that would cause many to curl up in a corner and whimper "make it stop", than it does to hit a ball with a club on a warm sunny day, wearing naught but some light cotton clothing and a hat?
You'll pardon me if I'm somewhat incredulous at your claim.
Basically though, it really just comes down to respect.
I don't think you're showing very much respect at all to the people that take concussions, broken bones, and all manner of other physical injury, just so you can be entertained. A golfer is usually an affluent white guy, walking around a giant park, and the only hazards he faces are inanimate natural objects that, in the worst case, will cause him to lose his ball. In football, the hazards are angry men who want to crush your bones into dust and scream obscenities while they chase you.
The purpose of DRM is to supplement the diminishing profit that the content makers have traditionally placed in the strength of the copyright claim alone to keep people from excercising their fair use rights.
FTFY.
As copying has gotten easier and easier, the mere business contract between publisher and community, which essentially says that the latter will not copy it for personal use, effectively granting the publisher a form of monopoly, has started to break down... people are no longer adhering to unfair and restrictive business practices, and so it is inevitable that publishers will seek alternative means to protect their interests.
FTFY (again)
This is hardly the circumstance today, where it's pretty much an an everyday occurrence to see movies that wer3e [sic] just released up on Pirate Bay within days or sometimes hours of release, for download by anybody who simply doesn't want to pay the cash to watch something once and decide they don't like it because most movies are shit today.
FTFY (yet again)
I was misled! I was told that DRM would help me to manage my rights. Is this no longer the case?
Well, there's a reason they call copyright owners "rights owners", and they call you a "consumer". Because otherwise, you'd own your personal digital devices, and you'd do whatever you want with them, and we can't have that. There's money to be made in taking away your rights and then selling them back to you as a privilege that can be taken away at any time.
From the video on the page, the sound roughly equals about 10,000 angry hornets. No way anyone could focus on a golf swing with that thing hovering right behind them.
In pro football, you're trained to ignore the sounds of fifty thousand screaming fans, which on the field can be louder than standing next to a DC-10 at lift off. That's true of just about every other televised professional sport, to varying degrees, except Golf, where apparently the players are incapable of tolerating even minimal amounts of noise.
DRM is an attempt to circumvent one of the primary functions of a computational device: Copying of data. The reason for this is money and power. One group thinks they deserve money or power over another group. This is the simple truth of all DRM, and I can explain it shorter than the article, and even the summary of the article. It is what it is.
20 Mbps for $20? Easier said than done in the United States of Monopolies.
How dare you say that, you unamerican, unpatriotic slime ball! You're just feeding into communist propaganda! Capitalism works because capitalism works, dammit. The only monopolies are the ones created by the government, blame them, not the capitalists who are the makers, not the takers. (pukes up on floor) The reason we don't have cheap broadband is because there's no demand! (pukes some more) Supply and demand mean that if enough people wanted it, someone would get up and do it, and it would be priced competitively. (dies of laughter)
The funny thing, at least to me as a Christian, is that none of the other Christians I know would take issue with anything said in the summary, other than the use of "evolution" to describe natural selection and adaptation: principles with which they have no problems.
Dude, I gotta ask, how can you be on the internet and not have seen them?
Lighten up, will you? This is no place for picking on newbies. Or, for treating old timers as newbies. Or for recycling lame jokes.
No, but it is THE place where sarcasm is interpreted literally, to the great amusement of those whose sense of humor hasn't been surgically removed. Also, every joke has been recycled. I mean, they've made entire TV series out of recycled jokes. Like The Big Bang Theory (vomits in mouth)...
Scott Thompson, fired from Yahoo. Hired on by Shoprunner.
Fired for lying on his resume, not because he ran the company into the ground. Despite this, he went from being the man in charge of a company on the Fortune 500 list (barely, at 483), to being in charge of a company that, uhh... doesn't even have a wikipedia page. I had to dig this up to find out what the company even did. It's a startup company nobody's ever heard of.
Léo Apotheker, fired from HP. Hired on as Chairman of the Board for DMK.
HP: Ranked the 10th largest company on the Fortune 500 list. Lost over $300 billion in market capitalization under Apotheker's leadership.
DMK: Doesn't exist.
KMD: Does exist... and is a Danish IT firm with 3,000 employees. Is not on the list. Also... Chairman of a board is not the same as CEO of a company, so it's a false analogue anyway! But let's say he was the CEO -- he went from one of the largest companies on Earth to some tiny po-dunk company in another country.
Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, went on to work at Matrix Advisors and Legend Securities.
Lehman Brothers: Suffered a total existance failure under Dick's fearless leadership. Was only publicly traded for about a decade before folding. In other words, a nothing commanded by a nobody.
Matrix Advisors and Legend Securities: A hedge fund. It's not even a proper company. And it's primary source of income? The money that Dick was able to hide from creditors when he bankrupted both himself and his former company. Like, for example, the mansion he purchased just before it went under that he sold to his wife for $100 to evade creditors.
So as you can see, each of these people didn't get to "keep their cushy jobs"... every mistake led to a dramatic downward step in their cash flow. Far from proving me wrong, you've managed to brilliantly prove my point: CEOs get just as big of a black mark when they're fired as "the peons" do. All three of the examples you provided resulted in someone being a CEO on paper only -- they were never given a real company, with real money, to play with again.
D3 had a Real-Money auction house... so a lot of the code was kept on their servers, to hopefully prevent enterprising hackers from exploiting bugs to make millions of real dollars.
Real money transactions, or RMT, have a simple, proven method of mitigating fraud: Auditing, and a fraud department that can contact the police and get your ass arrested. And there's no reason for "a lot of the code" to be kept on their servers for RMT. The only code that would be needed would be the API to conduct the transaction (half-dozen method calls), and then securing the database behind a robust series of calls to ensure world interactions conform to defined parameters... which is what you do for any MMO. The RMT portion is a tiny fragment of the overall codebase. Or at least, it should be unless the programmers were total morons.
You need an excuse not to RTFA?
Sorry, he meant to say "Finally an excuse that isn't the default!"
$SLASHDOT_DEFAULT_RTFA_REASON = "TL;DR"
I highly doubt EA's quarterly report includes Sim City already. More likely it was every game except for Sim City--and had nothing to do with DRM in the slightest.
Maybe it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back? After coming in below target on multiple projects, they may have been considering it, but seeing how this latest one completely cratered to the point they're having to give away their product in an attempt to maintain credibility with their customers while warding off massive amounts of bad PR... the board may simply have said enough is enough. SimCity may not be on the ledger, but when your latest failure in a string of them is by far the worst, and most publicized, it's foolish to think it wasn't given serious weight in the decision.
He just took one for the team is all. The team being the rest of the board of directors. He'll get a nice departure bonus, and end up on the board of some other company.
Citation needed. You need to back it up with a study or something if you're going to claim that with the vast majority of job titles, if you screw up and get fired, it hurts your career, yet for this specific job title, the rules do not apply. What you're describing is a popular myth. While it is true that there is an "elite" club of very wealthy individuals who control much of the wealth and resources in this country, it is possible to fall out of that circle if you cause others in it to lose money, especially in a dramatic fashion like this. Simple logic demands this outcome -- how else would they remain wealthy if they continually made bad investment decisions?
I can't agree with this. You can't tell me that the latest boy band single that comes out is your birthright. It is a paradoxically impossible question
No, it isn't a paradox, it's just misunderstood. The OP was clearly going for emotional appeal at the expense of clarity. Birthright may be a strong word, however, consider that most of a society's culture is defined by its art. Our popular media -- television, radio, movies, books, etc., are not just consumables like tomatoes, cars, or mobile phones. They also are part of the foundation of our definition of self, and our relation to the larger society. One could even argue that participation in our culture requires access to these artistic expressions. The President of this country recently joked that his detractors were trying to use a "jedi mind meld trick", and while the juxtaposition of two geek cultural icons caused many to cringe, the real point here is -- without having seen either of those creative works, you'd have no context upon which to understand what the President was saying.
So it may not be a "birthright" per-se, but it does seem to be essential to be able to participate in our society. Without access, you are an outsider. You're not a "real" american, in the same way people who immigrate to this country and screw up speaking idioms or fail to catch "inside" jokes and references wind up being on the wrong side of the glass.
If you put the punishment for copyright infrigement at a "reasonable" amount - say, 10 times the price of the CD/whatever it comes on, then it costs more to chase the punishment than it does to get it back. If you put the punishment at a level where it potentially becomes financially feasible for the copyright owner to chase it down, then it is an asinine figure for the actual infringement.
There is no obligation in our justice system that punishment be "financially feasible". Our justice system is supposed to be fair, impartial, and reasonable. This financial feasibility test exists nowhere but in the minds of exploitative industry executives. We have to look at things as they affect society as a whole, not a tiny minority and ask ourselves which public policy serves the greatest good? I do not think you will find very many people at all who think suing an impoverished mother for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, with the end result being to impoverish her further and reduce her quality of life in a dramatic fashion, in order to justify a propaganda war enacted by industry executives who will never fear hunger, sickness, or poverty, to be the greatest possible good. However, I welcome you to attempt to advance such an argument.
The only solution that I see is for the media companies to make their products so accessible that it is simply no longer WORTH bothering to download it illegally, but the problem is that the folks who put torrents or downloads online do such a damn good job that is makes competing with them very difficult.
Study after study have shown that pirates are the largest consumers of these products. They may download thousands of files, but they also spend hundreds of dollars in legitimate sales as well. You're making a false equivocation here -- that the market for "pirated" goods mirrors that of legitimate goods. The markets serve different needs, and with different products. The incongruity is made plain by looking at the runaway success of the online streaming website Netflix, who for a small monthly fee allows realtime access to much of the same material that is pirated. Curiously, Netflix sales continue to rise while traditional distribution of things like CDs, music, etc., continue to fall. It's clear then that pirated products don't compete on an even playing field with legitimate alternative distribution formats -- but where you see a disadvantage, I see a clear market advantage. Pirated products can't compete with the simplicity and ease of access of a service like Netflix.
Besides, DRM for a single game sounds way more like a CEO decision at best and not a board decision.
You mean a strategic decision to incorporate DRM into all of its products, and its long history of using always-on DRM, is a decision that was made without any input from people responsible for the financial success of the company?
I don't think so. No, the board was told. They may not have been told SimCity was traditionally single player. They may not have been given crucial details about this particular product... but they most definately knew DRM was being put into all of its products "to combat piracy", which they took to mean "increased revenues".
See, the problem here is that "combat piracy" didn't translate to "increased revenues" in this case, and that's why he's getting shitcanned. He's the fall guy so they can go to investors and say "Well, it worked all the other times, and he assured us it would be the same with this product!" Yeah. Right. CYA strategy 101: Either place the blame on one person, or blame an overly complex process that nobody was individually responsible for. Guess which one they went with?
It's not like departing under good conditions pays worse than departing under bad ones.
His career just got derailed. Who's gonna hire a guy who presided over the biggest disaster ever at his previous company? Leaving on good terms, or quitting, or resigning, all have the potential for later career opportunities. Getting fired and told you're a complete and abject failure? Not so much.