I played EVE for nearly 2 years, WoW for the same and in total have been an avid video game fanatic for about 15 years.
It's virtually a given that cheats, exploits/hacks, and with the rise of MMOGs, RMT, will never ever be eliminated from the gaming world. In fact, the former two is what makes some games totally great (perma beserker mode in Doom, and DK mode in Goldeneye spring immediately to mind) and developers include these 'features' on purpose, often taking suggestions from the community at large.
In EVE, like all other MMOs, RMT is a big problem. Corporations and alliances farming materials purely for real world money-making, often hogging research and manufacturing slots aswell; although the cost of holding such slots increases expontially with time now I believe.
CCP (the developer) used to 'unofficially' allow trading of game time cards, sold in increments of 30 days unlimited play time, for in game currency, but as time when on and more people tricked by unscrupulous businessmen, it became clear that regulation was required in order to prevent the cut-throat ingame attitude spilling out into real world, real money, scamming. The current system involves buying a game time card and putting the code with a set price in 'escrow' for another player to purchase with ingame currency. The player checks his account page and accepts the trade, the game time is added to his account automatically and the seller gets the ingame ISK.
This system is win-win-win for everyone, with no moral issues to contend with (unless someone is so addicted they are using their food money to buy game time cards, of course), CCP gets paid for the game time card, the buyer gets to pay for an MMO by playing more, and the seller gets to bypass boring grinding.
My grandfather still swears by his Quad ESL-57 electrostatics, from the late 50s.
About 5 or 6 years ago the power supply units were rebuilt and the panels were cleared of crap that had settled on them over the years, and they sound better than ever.
Are Toshiba and the DVD6C group really suffering at the hands of solid state memory devices so badly that they need to reduce Imation's market share through a costly lawsuit? With Imation also owning TDK and Memorex, surely they could sell their products through their licences instead anyway? Or at least, 'rent' their facilities to them?
I'd like to know what the 'real' catalyst was for this situation...
I stand firm that it was a very well thought-out and useful resource for kids, but it's obviously being misinterpreted by a lot of people
Misinterpreted? Children colouring in a terrorist attack... This doesn't worry anyone?
I'm sorry but I think exposing children to this sort of material will desensitise them to such actions if (when) they happen again... Is that what we really want?
And more importantly, is this really news for nerds?
It is actually called predatory pricing - where the supplier deliberately sets a low price to screw the competition.
Obviously it is not Intel's fault that AMD is not as successful financially, but with only two major PC processor manufacturers, what other reason for selling components at a loss would there be than trying to screw the competition? Computer manufacturers aren't going to start churning out more machines just because a single component is cheaper.
And that is not even mentioning the large rewards they offered for using their product lines.
At the end of the day, if you do not want to get fined for this crap, either do not do it, or do not be the market leader.
So this software can recognise a face shown in a screenshot or video clip. So what?
You could simply hold up a picture to the thing to fool it, or an iPhone with the first season of Star Trek playing it would seem.
What a waste of time. The only facial recognition worth mentioning is the pattern projection method (gah, can't find link), which actually requires you have a 3D face for it work, but even then you can always trick it
Why are digital copies of games bought online via Steam, Direct2Drive and so on nearly always the same price (if not sometimes more expensive) than a retail box version?
It can't be a bandwidth thing, not for Steam at least, since retail versions activated on your Steam account can be downloaded without the media as well.
Why the big swindle? This applies to digital music as well I've noticed. iTunes charges 99p or more for a song in the UK, which equates to 10-15 pound an album depending on the amount of inspiration the writer had at the time. When you can buy a new release at 9.99 in your local food store, why bother with online purchases?
It does make me believe that some people may have genuine intentions to legally purchase digital products without leaving their homes, but pirate them instead when they realise they are being conned.
Most of the people I know are not familiar with the intricacies of today's technology. If they think for one minute they are being monitored, watched and spied upon by anyone, let alone government and telecoms companies, they'll stop internet shopping, social networking and wikipedia surfing immediately (which lets face it, is all most normal people use a PC for nowadays anyway). Just look at how much people kicked off over Facebook wanting to protect people's email inbox after the sender deleted their copy...
If this even get close to being passed, mainstream media will have a field day, especially given that most UK tabloids despise Europe in its entirety already.
Perhaps this is a ploy to stimulate high street sales amirite?
I work in an environment where the 'IT support' lives 500 miles away and visits once every few months if we are lucky. As with everything in a small company, problems need to be solved by the individual who has them and I'm sorry but from my albeit limited experience with it (at the risk of flamebaiting) nothing in any of the mainstream linux distros seems to be easy.
There may be a wealth of high quality, reliable applications available for nothing, but one of main reasons Microsoft and Apple, especially Apple, are successful is due to simplicity. Most employees can't spend half a day searching for 'font packs' or screwing around with wine or virtual machines to get a single proprietary software package to run in order to be compatible with the other 90% of the planet.
They are by no means perfect, but you can't really fault their compatibility for virtually anything a normal user would do.
The whole attitude regarding climate change is totally bizarre, with pseudo scientists cropping up all over the place to give their opinions which virtually never corroborate one another.
1."Climate change will result in more extreme temperatures" is a classic one. Every time there is freak weather the reports say "it's the coldest it's been since 18XX" and so on. What the hell? Our carbon footprint must have been massive before the industrial revolution then. It was all those windmills I reckon... Hold on a minute...
2."The gulf stream being diluted with fresh water from melting ice" being used as an excuse why the summers aren't as hot in the UK. Umm, see number 1?
With all due respect to the scientific community, if it's as good at predicting the weather (which it isn't) as the financial community is at predicting the economy, then how the hell do we even know reducing CO2 emissions is a good thing? It could be causing more problems.
We need more data. Too bad there's too much money in renewable energy sources and forcing Asia to seek expensive energy alternatives via Kyoto for people to change their minds now.
Just a few months age a researcher in the US noticed two identical samples, one was from a black man, one from a white man. I know this is highly improbable - but it happened.
Law enforcement should not rely on a single piece of evidence, be that a witness statement, fingerprint, DNA or otherwise.
Everyone knows what The Pirate Bay is all about. The creators of the website CLEARLY knew what it was going to be used for, infact they moved their servers to Sweden specifically to avoid the risk of copyright infringement charges being brought against them.
There are cases where copyright legislation is clearly out of line, or where it's used against genuinely innocent people this for example. Defending people like The Pirate Bay portrays the 'free' culture as a bunch of criminals.
And honestly, if there was a scumbag at the end of your street telling passers by where they could find a pimp, you are saying you wouldn't expect the cops to get rid of them? Give me a break.
The prosecutions claim that TPB 'made available copyrighted content' is tenuous at best, due to the defendants actually only sharing torrent files.
Were these guys really innocent (morally or otherwise) in all of this, though? If they had even glanced at their own website for more than a second they could see what it is being used for (whether or not this was their original intention is of course conjecture).
The repeated requests to delete torrent files that were clearly being used to infringe on copyright were ignored, so the courts had to step in.
TPB is crammed with ads as well, which they obviously used as a revenue stream.
So lets summarise: They ran a site that people could use to locate copyrighted material for procurement. They made money from it. Hmm.
Basically a ballute is a large, inflatable device that takes advantage of atmospheric drag to decelerate and capture a spacecraft into orbit around a planet
NASA are clearly taking the idea of the space hopper far too literally.
A tiny (often unheard of) developer attempts to create an instant hit by churning out an [insert genre] game, or worse, they try and create an MMO of a popular (non video game) franchise.
The marketing execs over-hype the product, demand unreasonable or prohibitive deadlines and after an initial surge of uptake, the game is a clear flop a month after release.
I realise it's asking the impossible, but perhaps the solution is for games developers to stop trying to make money, and start trying to make good games? Churning out games may have worked in the 80s when 'every' video game idea was a unique one, but relying on the tried, tested and worn out formulas no longer fools the savvy gamer.
At a modest resolution of 1024x768 and a playably smooth 25fps, we're talking 20Mbps bandwidth uncompressed.
Adding compression to the mix will reduce the overhead sure, but seriously sacrifice the image quality.
I don't believe the internet infrastructure could support more than even a handful of gamers in the same street playing lag free, not to mention being totally prohibitively expensive for those on metered or 'traffic shaped' broadband solutions.
It's a nice idea (old) idea though.
Slashdot Mirror
I played EVE for nearly 2 years, WoW for the same and in total have been an avid video game fanatic for about 15 years.
It's virtually a given that cheats, exploits/hacks, and with the rise of MMOGs, RMT, will never ever be eliminated from the gaming world. In fact, the former two is what makes some games totally great (perma beserker mode in Doom, and DK mode in Goldeneye spring immediately to mind) and developers include these 'features' on purpose, often taking suggestions from the community at large.
In EVE, like all other MMOs, RMT is a big problem. Corporations and alliances farming materials purely for real world money-making, often hogging research and manufacturing slots aswell; although the cost of holding such slots increases expontially with time now I believe.
CCP (the developer) used to 'unofficially' allow trading of game time cards, sold in increments of 30 days unlimited play time, for in game currency, but as time when on and more people tricked by unscrupulous businessmen, it became clear that regulation was required in order to prevent the cut-throat ingame attitude spilling out into real world, real money, scamming. The current system involves buying a game time card and putting the code with a set price in 'escrow' for another player to purchase with ingame currency. The player checks his account page and accepts the trade, the game time is added to his account automatically and the seller gets the ingame ISK.
This system is win-win-win for everyone, with no moral issues to contend with (unless someone is so addicted they are using their food money to buy game time cards, of course), CCP gets paid for the game time card, the buyer gets to pay for an MMO by playing more, and the seller gets to bypass boring grinding.
I much prefer this system than the alternative.
My grandfather still swears by his Quad ESL-57 electrostatics, from the late 50s.
About 5 or 6 years ago the power supply units were rebuilt and the panels were cleared of crap that had settled on them over the years, and they sound better than ever.
Imation have been offereing DVD media since at least 2002.
Why the delay?
Are Toshiba and the DVD6C group really suffering at the hands of solid state memory devices so badly that they need to reduce Imation's market share through a costly lawsuit? With Imation also owning TDK and Memorex, surely they could sell their products through their licences instead anyway? Or at least, 'rent' their facilities to them?
I'd like to know what the 'real' catalyst was for this situation...
It is estimated it will cost at least $150 million to resume making the 11 pounds per year that is needed for space probes
And people moan about gas prices!
This isn't about us pretending, it's about children pretending. Learning about the futility of existence should be a suprise saved for later in life.
I stand firm that it was a very well thought-out and useful resource for kids, but it's obviously being misinterpreted by a lot of people
Misinterpreted? Children colouring in a terrorist attack... This doesn't worry anyone?
I'm sorry but I think exposing children to this sort of material will desensitise them to such actions if (when) they happen again... Is that what we really want?
And more importantly, is this really news for nerds?
It is actually called predatory pricing - where the supplier deliberately sets a low price to screw the competition.
Obviously it is not Intel's fault that AMD is not as successful financially, but with only two major PC processor manufacturers, what other reason for selling components at a loss would there be than trying to screw the competition? Computer manufacturers aren't going to start churning out more machines just because a single component is cheaper.
And that is not even mentioning the large rewards they offered for using their product lines.
At the end of the day, if you do not want to get fined for this crap, either do not do it, or do not be the market leader.
Hell yeah!
Related to the parent, although not the article, I only recently discovered that Mace is also trademarked.
So this software can recognise a face shown in a screenshot or video clip. So what?
You could simply hold up a picture to the thing to fool it, or an iPhone with the first season of Star Trek playing it would seem.
What a waste of time. The only facial recognition worth mentioning is the pattern projection method (gah, can't find link), which actually requires you have a 3D face for it work, but even then you can always trick it
oh please /b/ehave
lolol
Why are digital copies of games bought online via Steam, Direct2Drive and so on nearly always the same price (if not sometimes more expensive) than a retail box version?
It can't be a bandwidth thing, not for Steam at least, since retail versions activated on your Steam account can be downloaded without the media as well.
Why the big swindle? This applies to digital music as well I've noticed. iTunes charges 99p or more for a song in the UK, which equates to 10-15 pound an album depending on the amount of inspiration the writer had at the time. When you can buy a new release at 9.99 in your local food store, why bother with online purchases?
It does make me believe that some people may have genuine intentions to legally purchase digital products without leaving their homes, but pirate them instead when they realise they are being conned.
Surely the primary objective of a combustion engine is to provide a means of propulsion, not heat generation?
Perhaps I'm missing something?
Most of the people I know are not familiar with the intricacies of today's technology. If they think for one minute they are being monitored, watched and spied upon by anyone, let alone government and telecoms companies, they'll stop internet shopping, social networking and wikipedia surfing immediately (which lets face it, is all most normal people use a PC for nowadays anyway). Just look at how much people kicked off over Facebook wanting to protect people's email inbox after the sender deleted their copy...
If this even get close to being passed, mainstream media will have a field day, especially given that most UK tabloids despise Europe in its entirety already.
Perhaps this is a ploy to stimulate high street sales amirite?
I work in an environment where the 'IT support' lives 500 miles away and visits once every few months if we are lucky. As with everything in a small company, problems need to be solved by the individual who has them and I'm sorry but from my albeit limited experience with it (at the risk of flamebaiting) nothing in any of the mainstream linux distros seems to be easy.
There may be a wealth of high quality, reliable applications available for nothing, but one of main reasons Microsoft and Apple, especially Apple, are successful is due to simplicity. Most employees can't spend half a day searching for 'font packs' or screwing around with wine or virtual machines to get a single proprietary software package to run in order to be compatible with the other 90% of the planet.
They are by no means perfect, but you can't really fault their compatibility for virtually anything a normal user would do.
Being forced to sign the Magna Carta by his subjects was England's first referendum :P
+1 democracy
The whole attitude regarding climate change is totally bizarre, with pseudo scientists cropping up all over the place to give their opinions which virtually never corroborate one another.
1."Climate change will result in more extreme temperatures" is a classic one. Every time there is freak weather the reports say "it's the coldest it's been since 18XX" and so on. What the hell? Our carbon footprint must have been massive before the industrial revolution then. It was all those windmills I reckon... Hold on a minute...
2."The gulf stream being diluted with fresh water from melting ice" being used as an excuse why the summers aren't as hot in the UK. Umm, see number 1?
With all due respect to the scientific community, if it's as good at predicting the weather (which it isn't) as the financial community is at predicting the economy, then how the hell do we even know reducing CO2 emissions is a good thing? It could be causing more problems.
We need more data. Too bad there's too much money in renewable energy sources and forcing Asia to seek expensive energy alternatives via Kyoto for people to change their minds now.
Just a few months age a researcher in the US noticed two identical samples, one was from a black man, one from a white man. I know this is highly improbable - but it happened.
Law enforcement should not rely on a single piece of evidence, be that a witness statement, fingerprint, DNA or otherwise.
Everyone knows what The Pirate Bay is all about. The creators of the website CLEARLY knew what it was going to be used for, infact they moved their servers to Sweden specifically to avoid the risk of copyright infringement charges being brought against them.
There are cases where copyright legislation is clearly out of line, or where it's used against genuinely innocent people this for example. Defending people like The Pirate Bay portrays the 'free' culture as a bunch of criminals.
And honestly, if there was a scumbag at the end of your street telling passers by where they could find a pimp, you are saying you wouldn't expect the cops to get rid of them? Give me a break.
The prosecutions claim that TPB 'made available copyrighted content' is tenuous at best, due to the defendants actually only sharing torrent files.
Were these guys really innocent (morally or otherwise) in all of this, though? If they had even glanced at their own website for more than a second they could see what it is being used for (whether or not this was their original intention is of course conjecture).
The repeated requests to delete torrent files that were clearly being used to infringe on copyright were ignored, so the courts had to step in.
TPB is crammed with ads as well, which they obviously used as a revenue stream.
So lets summarise: They ran a site that people could use to locate copyrighted material for procurement. They made money from it. Hmm.
Basically a ballute is a large, inflatable device that takes advantage of atmospheric drag to decelerate and capture a spacecraft into orbit around a planet
NASA are clearly taking the idea of the space hopper far too literally.
Over the past few days there have been a number of stories highlighting the idiocy of the British government... HA! Take that USA!
It's the same old story...
A tiny (often unheard of) developer attempts to create an instant hit by churning out an [insert genre] game, or worse, they try and create an MMO of a popular (non video game) franchise.
The marketing execs over-hype the product, demand unreasonable or prohibitive deadlines and after an initial surge of uptake, the game is a clear flop a month after release.
I realise it's asking the impossible, but perhaps the solution is for games developers to stop trying to make money, and start trying to make good games? Churning out games may have worked in the 80s when 'every' video game idea was a unique one, but relying on the tried, tested and worn out formulas no longer fools the savvy gamer.
At a modest resolution of 1024x768 and a playably smooth 25fps, we're talking 20Mbps bandwidth uncompressed. Adding compression to the mix will reduce the overhead sure, but seriously sacrifice the image quality. I don't believe the internet infrastructure could support more than even a handful of gamers in the same street playing lag free, not to mention being totally prohibitively expensive for those on metered or 'traffic shaped' broadband solutions. It's a nice idea (old) idea though.
Yeah, let's block TCP and UDP, problem solved. Sighface.