To the wonderful person who modded me troll, and everyone who thinks, I'm an idiot, I suggest you read this summary, especially "The second section, 18 U.S.C. Â 1832, criminalizes the misappropriation of trade secrets related to or included in a product that is produced for or placed in interstate (including international) commerce, with the knowledge or intent that the misappropriation will injure the owner of the trade secret. Penalties for violation of section 1832 are imprisonment for up to 10 years for individuals (no fines) and fines of up to US$5 million for organizations." So as I said, the picture was evidence, thus could be confiscated with a warrant, which would be granted based on eye witness testimony of him taking the picture, then the rest follows. It is not an implausible situation. I know everyone here loves their freedom and having everything open, but wake the fuck up and don't be idiots. It's private property, the same rules *do* apply. There's simply basis to challenge some of the rules based on the fact a company owns it vs. a private person. Thus, an individual could exclude people from their homes based on race, but a company would have a damned hard time.
I think that could work as long as there was a way to play single-player games with no internet connection. Even Steam allows you to play in offline mode for a period of time.
I'm pretty sure no console game's ever required you to put in a serial number, or install a downloader, etc. Until recently, the biggest preventer of console piracy was everything was on the disc. There simply wasn't a way to put anything on the console, so you had to mod the system to read non-standard discs. With consoles now having storage enough to fit games, you're going to see a huge push for digital distribution so that there's no physical discs to copy, making it insanely more difficult to make a copy, as you'd have to connect your PC to the console, find a way to read the data, replicate it, move it off, then on to the new console, and make it work. However, a large portion of consoles aren't connected to the internet still, so creating a DRM solution that requires an internet connection would absolutely destroy sales, because a chunk of the user-base wouldn't be able to play it. Their only option is to abandon discs and go to pure digital delivery, to try and force people's consoles online.
The problem is they see these big numbers of copies out there and get dollar signs in their eyes. They think "Man, if we had been paid for each of those copies we'd be RICH!" They are right too. Games are heavily copied. If every person who ever downloaded a copy instead paid for the game, they'd probably make 5-10x the money. What they don't consider, of course, is that not everyone would. There's a lot that people will take for free that they won't take at any price, much less a $50 price. You offer it for free, they say "Yes I'd like that." You want any money for it, they'll pass.
Ain't that the truth. There's been some games I knew would be absolutely horrible-nasty. There was no way I was going to spend any money on them. But there was the train-wreck factor. So I downloaded it, played for an hour, laughed my ass off, and uninstalled it.
Then there's been times where a friend bought a game, and I wanted to borrow it. But whoops! It's a CD-Key'd game, and he's already registered it! Key-gen time. No way I'd pay for it, and I'm not sitting on my friend's computer for hours at a time.
And then there's times I just can't be arsed to switch the disks, so I get the no-CD crack.
Three different scenarios where it can inflate apparent piracy numbers, but they wouldn't have gained any cash.
What's more, since you can't rent a PC game, or return it if it's defective, people are more leery of getting a game which may or may not be good. After all, if you open the package, and it doesn't run on your system, that's your new shiny coaster. So how many people use piracy as a free "rental" system? I know my best friend did exactly that. He'd played DoWII every day for 2 weeks, so he went out and bought a legit copy. But that piracy at the start still "counts as a lost sale" in the large numbers they use to support DRM, even though it got them a sale.
Re:first weeks is exclusively "warez"
on
Why Bother With DRM?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I wanna know how you're getting 50% back on your used games. Around here, you're getting maybe 10-20 PERCENT back, and they're selling it for maybe 5-10 DOLLARS less than new. Unless you do one of the special deals, where you trade in 4 games, and get the game on special free. Or if it's a big-name game they're really trying to push, they might even make it trade 3 get it free. That's still only a 33% return on your investment, assuming all the games are the same price. And then they turn around and sell it at 80% of it's new price. So they're getting 40% of the price of the game as profit for themselves. Now, for an extra $5, I'd rather support the developer directly, rather than through an intermediary, who might be jacking up the prices on new games, rather than lowering what they're charging on used ones to make them more attractive.
Why is it that network providers are working their hardest to stop bittorrent, yet are perfectly willing to let the viruses, the botnets, the port scans, and untold mountains of spam propagate on their networks.
Was that rhetorical? Because we know why. The spammers pay for connections, and the *AA's pay them to crack down on bittorrent. No one's paying them to stop botnets.
"hydrogen fuel cells are too efficient to allow to freely come to the market"
Followed by: "They would require too much electricity and they realize that a bunch of windfarms wouldn't be able to produce it" If it was as efficient as you're saying, then a bunch of wind farms *should* be able to take care of it.
Secondly, since they still haven't found an efficient way to dispose of the radioactive waste from nuclear reactors that goes beyond "bury it in a deep hole." That's not exactly clean.
Then there's the obvious bias in your post, making me think this could just be a flamebait post.
Except a store is private property. And if the store has a no photography policy, and the ATM company has industrial secrets or something, then they can have the picture confiscated, and the police would need to take the person in to custody to ensure no copies of the picture were created.
The problem I have with the exclusion rule is that it only "punishes" the police when they violate the rights of someone who is actually guilty.
I believe you mean "convicted." Or perhaps "charged." Since the evidence was improperly obtained, there's no reason to assume the individual is actually guilty.
However, despite the semantical difference, I do agree that there needs to be more in place to prevent abuses that don't lead to charges being filed. Ever tried filing a police harrassment complaint? Good freaking luck having any kind of impact.
If slapping a GPS on your car without a warrant is acceptable for law enforcement, then it would also have to be acceptable for your neighbor.
No, as law enforcement is often granted powers beyond that of "the common citizen," so that's all they'd argue. "Regular people can't do it, since they're not agents of the State."
You and I know it's still a crap argument, but that's what they'd say.
You are aware that there's a lot of offices (apparently California in particular) that won't do anything in person, anymore? And with the EU being usually more socialist than anywhere in the US, I can't see that being reasonably different.
Which is why in an earlier post, I suggested Squeenix purchase it, and polish it up themselves. It wouldn't be that difficult (compared to making a whole new game) to redo some dialogue. Heck, Crono's lines would all stay the same anyways. "..." Just come up with new reasons for going to the dungeons they've already programmed. The fact that CT did well on the DS proves people wouldn't care about use of similar art assets.
However, my original point still stands. How can we judge the story in this romhack, when Squeenix themselves continually churn out the same story with different spikey-haired youths?
How about jail for incorrect expenses and graft 3 times. That's more than a mistake, that's fraud. Yet politicians get away with this shit way too often, regardless of country. Can anyone name a politician that was even *fired* for it, let alone charged? They're all allowed to resign, step down, or otherwise voluntarily leave office. I think that's wrong. Most jobs, you're caught pulling that stuff, you're escorted out of the building.
Actually, until very recently, none of them shared any universe elements in common (no direct sequels), and most have severely altered gameplay mechanics from one to the next. For instance, Final Fantasy VI, you equipped an item that would allow you to gain access to spells as you fought battles, and you'd still have the spells you learned after you equipped something else. Final Fantasy VII, you equipped items that gave you spells and abilities, but only so long as you had that item equipped. Obviously, it was more complicated than that, and it was only one example, but it's a decent one.
If you break it down, the storyline NEVER made actual sense in Square's RPGs. "Young lad leaves home, meets bizarre friends, makes powerful enemies, saves world." Which game of theirs was that?
Oh right. All of them.
I have a better idea than just "take 10%" or "kill project all together." It's called "offer the makers $1,000,000 to split, take the game, polish it to Squeenix's standards, and release." Most games take a few million to make now, correct? So 1 mill for the makers, another 1 to polish, and you've got a relatively cheap game that people are likely to buy, and if they don't, you're not out as much as you'd otherwise be.
I think it would be a huge injustice if you were fired for posting. I hadn't heard of the game until Konami pulled out, unfortunately, but after looking in to it, I'm quite looking forward to it, and I normally detest shooters based on modern times (Rainbow 6, "Modern Warfare," etc). But this game struck me as different. So, when it's released, you've got a guaranteed sale here.
I suggest you look at the stats about the number of people still on dial-up before you start throwing around seemingly tiny ad sizes. 24K would be almost half of the max speed of a 56K connection. Throw 3 or 4 of those banners on a site, and that's a significant delay.
Furthermore, I didn't see him bitching about "static banners." Almost no one bitches about those. It's the flashing, vibrating, noisy, pop-over ads that people bitch about. You should be careful about putting words in people's mouth, too.
As with many others, if ads were unobtrusive, I wouldn't block them. What's obtrusive for an ad?
1. Flashing. 2. Hell, any movement 3. Sound 4. Pop-overs, pop-ups, expanding on roll-over.
If advertisers went back to plain text ads that didn't cause slow-down, or visual jarring, etc etc, I'd have no problems letting them back on. However, I've no interest in policing my web usage on a case by case basis. Until they make a *massive* move to plain-text/jpg ads, they all get put in the hole.
Actually, there's a number of advertising... schemes? Structures. Let's go with that. There's advertising structures that pay for "eyeballs" or "impressions." They don't promise click-throughs, they just want the ad displayed to X# of visitors. They usually get bonuses on click-throughs though.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Espionage_Act_of_1996
To the wonderful person who modded me troll, and everyone who thinks, I'm an idiot, I suggest you read this summary, especially "The second section, 18 U.S.C. Â 1832, criminalizes the misappropriation of trade secrets related to or included in a product that is produced for or placed in interstate (including international) commerce, with the knowledge or intent that the misappropriation will injure the owner of the trade secret. Penalties for violation of section 1832 are imprisonment for up to 10 years for individuals (no fines) and fines of up to US$5 million for organizations." So as I said, the picture was evidence, thus could be confiscated with a warrant, which would be granted based on eye witness testimony of him taking the picture, then the rest follows. It is not an implausible situation. I know everyone here loves their freedom and having everything open, but wake the fuck up and don't be idiots. It's private property, the same rules *do* apply. There's simply basis to challenge some of the rules based on the fact a company owns it vs. a private person. Thus, an individual could exclude people from their homes based on race, but a company would have a damned hard time.
Tried Opera? Only issues I've run across are where some retarded company's only built their site to work in IE, giving a big ol' finger to standards.
I'm an Opera user, you insensitive clod!
I think that could work as long as there was a way to play single-player games with no internet connection. Even Steam allows you to play in offline mode for a period of time.
I'm pretty sure no console game's ever required you to put in a serial number, or install a downloader, etc. Until recently, the biggest preventer of console piracy was everything was on the disc. There simply wasn't a way to put anything on the console, so you had to mod the system to read non-standard discs. With consoles now having storage enough to fit games, you're going to see a huge push for digital distribution so that there's no physical discs to copy, making it insanely more difficult to make a copy, as you'd have to connect your PC to the console, find a way to read the data, replicate it, move it off, then on to the new console, and make it work. However, a large portion of consoles aren't connected to the internet still, so creating a DRM solution that requires an internet connection would absolutely destroy sales, because a chunk of the user-base wouldn't be able to play it. Their only option is to abandon discs and go to pure digital delivery, to try and force people's consoles online.
The problem is they see these big numbers of copies out there and get dollar signs in their eyes. They think "Man, if we had been paid for each of those copies we'd be RICH!" They are right too. Games are heavily copied. If every person who ever downloaded a copy instead paid for the game, they'd probably make 5-10x the money. What they don't consider, of course, is that not everyone would. There's a lot that people will take for free that they won't take at any price, much less a $50 price. You offer it for free, they say "Yes I'd like that." You want any money for it, they'll pass.
Ain't that the truth. There's been some games I knew would be absolutely horrible-nasty. There was no way I was going to spend any money on them. But there was the train-wreck factor. So I downloaded it, played for an hour, laughed my ass off, and uninstalled it.
Then there's been times where a friend bought a game, and I wanted to borrow it. But whoops! It's a CD-Key'd game, and he's already registered it! Key-gen time. No way I'd pay for it, and I'm not sitting on my friend's computer for hours at a time.
And then there's times I just can't be arsed to switch the disks, so I get the no-CD crack.
Three different scenarios where it can inflate apparent piracy numbers, but they wouldn't have gained any cash.
What's more, since you can't rent a PC game, or return it if it's defective, people are more leery of getting a game which may or may not be good. After all, if you open the package, and it doesn't run on your system, that's your new shiny coaster. So how many people use piracy as a free "rental" system? I know my best friend did exactly that. He'd played DoWII every day for 2 weeks, so he went out and bought a legit copy. But that piracy at the start still "counts as a lost sale" in the large numbers they use to support DRM, even though it got them a sale.
I wanna know how you're getting 50% back on your used games. Around here, you're getting maybe 10-20 PERCENT back, and they're selling it for maybe 5-10 DOLLARS less than new. Unless you do one of the special deals, where you trade in 4 games, and get the game on special free. Or if it's a big-name game they're really trying to push, they might even make it trade 3 get it free. That's still only a 33% return on your investment, assuming all the games are the same price. And then they turn around and sell it at 80% of it's new price. So they're getting 40% of the price of the game as profit for themselves. Now, for an extra $5, I'd rather support the developer directly, rather than through an intermediary, who might be jacking up the prices on new games, rather than lowering what they're charging on used ones to make them more attractive.
Why is it that network providers are working their hardest to stop bittorrent, yet are perfectly willing to let the viruses, the botnets, the port scans, and untold mountains of spam propagate on their networks.
Was that rhetorical? Because we know why. The spammers pay for connections, and the *AA's pay them to crack down on bittorrent. No one's paying them to stop botnets.
There is so much wrong with your post.
First, there's your contradiction.
"hydrogen fuel cells are too efficient to allow to freely come to the market"
Followed by: "They would require too much electricity and they realize that a bunch of windfarms wouldn't be able to produce it" If it was as efficient as you're saying, then a bunch of wind farms *should* be able to take care of it.
Secondly, since they still haven't found an efficient way to dispose of the radioactive waste from nuclear reactors that goes beyond "bury it in a deep hole." That's not exactly clean.
Then there's the obvious bias in your post, making me think this could just be a flamebait post.
Except a store is private property. And if the store has a no photography policy, and the ATM company has industrial secrets or something, then they can have the picture confiscated, and the police would need to take the person in to custody to ensure no copies of the picture were created.
Wait. They still do that? Ugh. *faith in humanity -50*
The problem I have with the exclusion rule is that it only "punishes" the police when they violate the rights of someone who is actually guilty.
I believe you mean "convicted." Or perhaps "charged." Since the evidence was improperly obtained, there's no reason to assume the individual is actually guilty.
However, despite the semantical difference, I do agree that there needs to be more in place to prevent abuses that don't lead to charges being filed. Ever tried filing a police harrassment complaint? Good freaking luck having any kind of impact.
"There is no court, anywhere in the world, that has the power to overrule this decision.
US Supreme Court couldn't overrule? (Canadian, so I honestly don't know the full extent of the interactions.)
If slapping a GPS on your car without a warrant is acceptable for law enforcement, then it would also have to be acceptable for your neighbor.
No, as law enforcement is often granted powers beyond that of "the common citizen," so that's all they'd argue. "Regular people can't do it, since they're not agents of the State."
You and I know it's still a crap argument, but that's what they'd say.
Sorry, just remembered, also, a majority of British unemployment offices are particularly bad for that, just to add to my point.
You are aware that there's a lot of offices (apparently California in particular) that won't do anything in person, anymore? And with the EU being usually more socialist than anywhere in the US, I can't see that being reasonably different.
Which is why in an earlier post, I suggested Squeenix purchase it, and polish it up themselves. It wouldn't be that difficult (compared to making a whole new game) to redo some dialogue. Heck, Crono's lines would all stay the same anyways. "..." Just come up with new reasons for going to the dungeons they've already programmed. The fact that CT did well on the DS proves people wouldn't care about use of similar art assets.
However, my original point still stands. How can we judge the story in this romhack, when Squeenix themselves continually churn out the same story with different spikey-haired youths?
How about jail for incorrect expenses and graft 3 times. That's more than a mistake, that's fraud. Yet politicians get away with this shit way too often, regardless of country. Can anyone name a politician that was even *fired* for it, let alone charged? They're all allowed to resign, step down, or otherwise voluntarily leave office. I think that's wrong. Most jobs, you're caught pulling that stuff, you're escorted out of the building.
Actually, until very recently, none of them shared any universe elements in common (no direct sequels), and most have severely altered gameplay mechanics from one to the next. For instance, Final Fantasy VI, you equipped an item that would allow you to gain access to spells as you fought battles, and you'd still have the spells you learned after you equipped something else. Final Fantasy VII, you equipped items that gave you spells and abilities, but only so long as you had that item equipped. Obviously, it was more complicated than that, and it was only one example, but it's a decent one.
If you break it down, the storyline NEVER made actual sense in Square's RPGs. "Young lad leaves home, meets bizarre friends, makes powerful enemies, saves world." Which game of theirs was that?
Oh right. All of them.
I have a better idea than just "take 10%" or "kill project all together." It's called "offer the makers $1,000,000 to split, take the game, polish it to Squeenix's standards, and release." Most games take a few million to make now, correct? So 1 mill for the makers, another 1 to polish, and you've got a relatively cheap game that people are likely to buy, and if they don't, you're not out as much as you'd otherwise be.
I think it would be a huge injustice if you were fired for posting. I hadn't heard of the game until Konami pulled out, unfortunately, but after looking in to it, I'm quite looking forward to it, and I normally detest shooters based on modern times (Rainbow 6, "Modern Warfare," etc). But this game struck me as different. So, when it's released, you've got a guaranteed sale here.
pissing and moaning about a 24K static banner.
I suggest you look at the stats about the number of people still on dial-up before you start throwing around seemingly tiny ad sizes. 24K would be almost half of the max speed of a 56K connection. Throw 3 or 4 of those banners on a site, and that's a significant delay.
Furthermore, I didn't see him bitching about "static banners." Almost no one bitches about those. It's the flashing, vibrating, noisy, pop-over ads that people bitch about. You should be careful about putting words in people's mouth, too.
As with many others, if ads were unobtrusive, I wouldn't block them. What's obtrusive for an ad?
1. Flashing.
2. Hell, any movement
3. Sound
4. Pop-overs, pop-ups, expanding on roll-over.
If advertisers went back to plain text ads that didn't cause slow-down, or visual jarring, etc etc, I'd have no problems letting them back on. However, I've no interest in policing my web usage on a case by case basis. Until they make a *massive* move to plain-text/jpg ads, they all get put in the hole.
Hey, I have that too! Only it doesn't block the comments of someone else who's using it, I assume.
Actually, there's a number of advertising... schemes? Structures. Let's go with that. There's advertising structures that pay for "eyeballs" or "impressions." They don't promise click-throughs, they just want the ad displayed to X# of visitors. They usually get bonuses on click-throughs though.