Whether they are recording file-share IPs from torrent downloads or not would be beside the point. The people who are visiting this site would be people who do file-share and my be concerned they'll be sued.
Visiting the site will confirm they're on the list and they'll be "scared straight".
It seems, to me at least, that you are "missing the point" or are being intentionally dense. A hard drive is not an entertainment product. A game is an entertainment product. The hard drive is a means of consuming the product. Same with a computer. It's the means of consumption, not the entertainment.
What is meant is that maybe you download those four movies, but the money you save by not renting or buying them instead is spent to go to the theater, or a concert, or buy other movies that you know you'll like instead of wasting the money on something you're unsure of only to find out you didn't really care for it.
Artist that sign with major labels make money off tours and concerts not record sales. That's been discussed to death. Deals signed with record labels are meant for two reasons. To keep artist in debt to the company and because of copyrights those company's make money indefinitely from royalties and suing.
I agree if you could stop artists from making that stupid decision in the first place you'd solve the problem right out.
Probably not. There are too many other countries that have ridiculous laws in place to ensure record companies get paid whether people are buying their product or not.
Canada as an example has taxes on blank media that's passed on to the recording association, whether that media is being use to rip off music or back up family photos or other data.
Originally I required authentication on purpose and didn't bother configuring the vanilla minecraft server. Mainly because I wanted to be sure my siblings actually bought a copy and didn't just pirate it. My oldest younger brother is pretty bad for pirating games and normally doesn't buy anything, which I don't agree with. My youngest brother, who's in his last year of university, also pirates games, but I know for a fact he buys anything he thinks isn't a waste of money. Which I'm ok with because his eight foot bookshelf has everything on it I can ever remember him mentioning to me and then some. As far as I know neither of my sisters pirate at all, but I don't know for sure.
Up until the last major authentication server outage I used the simple vanilla server with the default settings, but after the outage my youngest brother convinced me to move to the Bukkit server so we could install some mods. So of course I actually spent the time to configure the server this time and found out how to configure it so authentication wasn't needed.
All that being said, I understand the idea behind DRMs, but for those of us that do buy products, the DRM can be a major pain in the ass. This isn't the first time I've gotten a cracked copy of something that I had bought because the legit copy wouldn't work and I was too lazy to call, or didn't get anywhere with, customer support. My older sister was one of the ones that had a DVD player mysteriously stop working in a fairly new PC (2 years old) after installing Spore, and because of the crap service and deniles we both got from EA, we no longer by games from them. As far as I'm concerned Indie developers are the only way to go now. Large company's couldn't give a rats ass about what happens to you, your computer or the product once you've handed over money to them so I don't typically buy any thing that's not from an indie developer. Besides I've long moved over to Linux since I've stopped buying from large developers, the indie devs seem to be much better at providing Linux compatible versions of their games.
The only problem with their system is if you can't authenticate your copy of Minecraft you can't play on any servers. I have a local server that my wife, sisters, brothers and I play on. We all have paid for copies of the game, but when the authentication server goes down none of us can "legitimately" log on to my local server. Sure we can still play in single player mode which is better than nothing, but it's still a pain and is a reason we all have cracked copies of a game we each paid for.
I agree it would be interesting to have two price values. What he would have spent if he had bought the media and then what the *IAA would have claimed the "damages" were in court. I guarantee people would have some raised eyebrows being able to see the difference. Who knows, maybe the project is an incomplete and he's waiting for the *IAA to come after him so he can finish it.
That number is greater in the Atlantic provinces, but those are so small that nobody really cares who they voted for anyway.
You can stop wondering why no one in Canada likes people from Ontario. Your whole post, especially the last statement, make it painfully obvious. You managed to not only offend people from both coasts you left out all the provinces between Ontario and BC as well as Quebec and the northern provinces and territories. Ontario doesn't make up the whole country.
I buy a computer or upgrade a part for a computer once and won't be billed extra depending on how much I use it.
There's a debated going on right now in Canada whether usage based billing should be allowed or not. If it's allowed, we might see cases where ISPs will start charging extra for services like Netflix or playing an online game like WoW. I personally don't like the idea of having to pay my ISP extra so I can use a service I've already payed for, especially when the service is a game I've already bought and can play a single player version of.
I pay for my internet connection every month, but if it came down to it and I wanted to save a little money I might have it disconnected. Which would mean I'd no longer be able to play any single player games I've bought that require an "always on" connection.
One more difference is even though I have DSL internet, there are times where it goes down. I had to call my ISP three times last month alone because of some mysterious issue. Funny how the connection breaks and after spending 20 minutes on hold and 10 minutes answer questions, the issue resolves itself as soon as the customer service rep says, "Oh, I don't see a problem on our end.". My Hard drive, graphics card and other PC parts seem to work more consistently.
So do many others. As far as marijuana goes I could care less about the substance itself. I dislike smoking, which isn't illegal where I'm from, but it is illegal now to smoke in restaurants, hospitals, coffee shops and basically any public place. I prefer it that way as I can now actually sit down to a nice meal and not have the person sitting next to me light up. I think it would be a little counter productive to allow smoking marijuana, but not allow smoking.
I have to admit I only half trust game reviews. I can't count the number of times I've bought a game because of a couple good reviews and then was seriously disappointed in it. So now if I see a game with a good reviews I might want to buy and I don't know anyone fist hand that owns it, I download it and then buy it if lives up to the hype. It's the only way to be sure I'm not getting screwed over. After all I only have a finite amount of money and would rather reward good games then waste the money buying something that's crap.
Of course that hasn't been a problem lately because I don't even look at games once I find out they're using some screwed up DRM. I also don't pirate indie games, they're normally cheap anyway. I also trust that if an indie developer tried to screw over gamers with some crap DRM, saying their game does something it doesn't or is something it's not, it would be the last game they sold.
I just wanted to point out that in terms of speeding, drugs and skipping school, not everyone does those things. In fact relative to the general population I believe most people disprove of these activities, which is why they're illegal... That being said I'm not sure skipping school is so much illegal, but generally frowned upon. Also there's speeding, like 5 MPH over the limit, which no one cares about and is rarely enforced and then there's speeding, like 20 MPH over the speed limit, which people do recognize as dangerous and is enforced. I'm also assuming you mean illegal drugs and not something like Tylenol.
Prohibition on the other hand was a law put into place by a small vocal minority who knew the right people, or at least knew how to intimidate the right people. It's not an activity and it was repealed precisely because everyone (being most adults) ignored it and drank in secret anyway. Similar to how copyright is a law, but most people (most people I know anyway) ignore it and copy and download content in secret anyway. By "in secret" I mean people don't go bragging to the cops they do it, but may be quite open to discussing it with peers. IMHO it's only a matter of time before someone removes that law because it's broken and only a small vocal group wants it kept around.
If that's the case, then I've never met a GOOD project manager. Generally the project managers I've worked with seem to think their jobs are to slow me down. I had one tell me it was because when I completed my work too soon it would make the project estimates look bad. Then he proceeded to load me down with process, Quality Assurance and configuration management reports. All of which were turfed when the project managers were rotated because one took a "promotion".
I agree some management in the planning stage is good. Too much in the development and testing phases just puts the fire out and kills the project.
Marketing is the reason. I pay $130 for cable and internet. $5 more gets me another 20 channels I don't want. $5 more than that gets me another 20 channels, 1 or 2 of which I might like. It's called nickel and dimeing. Before you know it you'd be paying $50 a month and barely getting anything extra worth while.
Without a story you might as well be playing farmville. I think there's a fine balance. What I've found is developers are getting too heavy into trying to make a game look good they're leaving out the story and possible arcs from it. Story is an important element, but it's different then a book, it has to be interactive. It can be linear, but I don't want to be forced into following it until I've had a chance to explore an area.
That was the problem with FFXIII was it was cut scene, run down hall, fight, cut scene, run down hall, fight, with no option to go back. Pretty much until you're over 3/4 of the way through the game, then there's one area you can run around in for a while, then back to cut scene, run down hall, fight. I did beat it pretty easily, but I was disappointed and most likely won't pick it up again for sometime.
FFXII was an awesome game, which I've played four times and never beat because I keep getting tied up in side quests, which I like. The story line is great, but I'm not forced into it and I can do all the exploring and grinding I feel like and move easily back to area's I've already been in to make sure I didn't miss anything.
No, The RMV could have a person investigate incidents flagged by the program, which would be presuming the program could be wrong. This is despite of the fact that they know and admit the program isn't 100% accurate. Regardless they seem to be using the assumption that the statistical computer program is infallible and the people it's flagging are guilty and thus the onus is on the innocent party to prove they just happen to look like someone who did something wrong.
However, they admit that the system is flawed and frequently picks people who have done nothing wrong. The solution would be to have a physical person investigate each incident the program is reporting. Instead the program is taken as infallible, even though its users know it's not, and innocent people are assumed to be at fault until that person clears their own name.
According to the statement you're guilty until you prove your innocent, so much for innocent until proven guilty. I'm sure using tax dollars and grants to use a system that illegally convicts innocent people without a trial or hearing is considerable different then a criminal stealing someones identity.
If you look it up you'll see after killing the second hand market for PC games the sale of PC games in general dropped off and piracy became a much larger issue on the platform. Of course standard correlation/causation statement applies.
I guess the other plus side to killing the second hand market is that if consoles follow the same trend as PC games we'll see the prices drop too. I think killing the second hand market is a very stupid move on the publishers part because, as others have stated, not being able to re-sell a game decreases it's value. Overall that means less profit for the publishers. At which point they'll turn around and blame piracy again.
I think the issue really is they just realized they weren't getting anywhere with their battle against piracy. All they're doing is causing headaches for people who legitimately buy the game, which in turn is turning them to piracy. Now game companies are shifting focus. Soon they'll find that's going to cost them even more. What do you think someone waking into a store and only seeing games for $60 is going to do when they only have $40 for a game? I imagine they'll run home and download it instead of buying it.
LMAO!!! Thanks for the great laugh now I have to clean the coffee of my second monitor.
There are people out there right now developing games for free because they love doing it. There are also very cheap highly entertaining games, Minecraft is one of my favorites at the moment. I've convinced both my sisters, my brother and their significant others to play as well and for the price the entertainment can't be beet. There will always been things to play and if your industry was doing things right you'd have good profit without having to put God knows how much into DRM schemes and treating your customers like thieves.
By the time I'm ready to buy a second hand game I would also know this. For example I didn't run out and buy Dragon Age. As a result I know how buggy it is and will probably just borrow it from my sister if I ever decide I do want to play it. I believe this is a prime example of how the publishers are putting out crappy games on hype and selling them for a mint. Then thinking they'll just fix any issues later instead of fixing them in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
It is, They're called politicians. The problem is our current hamster wheel technology is to large for their stubby little legs to run on.
Whether they are recording file-share IPs from torrent downloads or not would be beside the point. The people who are visiting this site would be people who do file-share and my be concerned they'll be sued.
Visiting the site will confirm they're on the list and they'll be "scared straight".
It seems, to me at least, that you are "missing the point" or are being intentionally dense. A hard drive is not an entertainment product. A game is an entertainment product. The hard drive is a means of consuming the product. Same with a computer. It's the means of consumption, not the entertainment.
What is meant is that maybe you download those four movies, but the money you save by not renting or buying them instead is spent to go to the theater, or a concert, or buy other movies that you know you'll like instead of wasting the money on something you're unsure of only to find out you didn't really care for it.
Artist that sign with major labels make money off tours and concerts not record sales. That's been discussed to death. Deals signed with record labels are meant for two reasons. To keep artist in debt to the company and because of copyrights those company's make money indefinitely from royalties and suing.
I agree if you could stop artists from making that stupid decision in the first place you'd solve the problem right out.
Probably not. There are too many other countries that have ridiculous laws in place to ensure record companies get paid whether people are buying their product or not.
Canada as an example has taxes on blank media that's passed on to the recording association, whether that media is being use to rip off music or back up family photos or other data.
Originally I required authentication on purpose and didn't bother configuring the vanilla minecraft server. Mainly because I wanted to be sure my siblings actually bought a copy and didn't just pirate it. My oldest younger brother is pretty bad for pirating games and normally doesn't buy anything, which I don't agree with. My youngest brother, who's in his last year of university, also pirates games, but I know for a fact he buys anything he thinks isn't a waste of money. Which I'm ok with because his eight foot bookshelf has everything on it I can ever remember him mentioning to me and then some. As far as I know neither of my sisters pirate at all, but I don't know for sure.
Up until the last major authentication server outage I used the simple vanilla server with the default settings, but after the outage my youngest brother convinced me to move to the Bukkit server so we could install some mods. So of course I actually spent the time to configure the server this time and found out how to configure it so authentication wasn't needed.
All that being said, I understand the idea behind DRMs, but for those of us that do buy products, the DRM can be a major pain in the ass. This isn't the first time I've gotten a cracked copy of something that I had bought because the legit copy wouldn't work and I was too lazy to call, or didn't get anywhere with, customer support. My older sister was one of the ones that had a DVD player mysteriously stop working in a fairly new PC (2 years old) after installing Spore, and because of the crap service and deniles we both got from EA, we no longer by games from them. As far as I'm concerned Indie developers are the only way to go now. Large company's couldn't give a rats ass about what happens to you, your computer or the product once you've handed over money to them so I don't typically buy any thing that's not from an indie developer. Besides I've long moved over to Linux since I've stopped buying from large developers, the indie devs seem to be much better at providing Linux compatible versions of their games.
The only problem with their system is if you can't authenticate your copy of Minecraft you can't play on any servers. I have a local server that my wife, sisters, brothers and I play on. We all have paid for copies of the game, but when the authentication server goes down none of us can "legitimately" log on to my local server. Sure we can still play in single player mode which is better than nothing, but it's still a pain and is a reason we all have cracked copies of a game we each paid for.
I agree it would be interesting to have two price values. What he would have spent if he had bought the media and then what the *IAA would have claimed the "damages" were in court. I guarantee people would have some raised eyebrows being able to see the difference. Who knows, maybe the project is an incomplete and he's waiting for the *IAA to come after him so he can finish it.
That number is greater in the Atlantic provinces, but those are so small that nobody really cares who they voted for anyway.
You can stop wondering why no one in Canada likes people from Ontario. Your whole post, especially the last statement, make it painfully obvious. You managed to not only offend people from both coasts you left out all the provinces between Ontario and BC as well as Quebec and the northern provinces and territories. Ontario doesn't make up the whole country.
Just to note a couple of differences.
I buy a computer or upgrade a part for a computer once and won't be billed extra depending on how much I use it.
There's a debated going on right now in Canada whether usage based billing should be allowed or not. If it's allowed, we might see cases where ISPs will start charging extra for services like Netflix or playing an online game like WoW. I personally don't like the idea of having to pay my ISP extra so I can use a service I've already payed for, especially when the service is a game I've already bought and can play a single player version of.
I pay for my internet connection every month, but if it came down to it and I wanted to save a little money I might have it disconnected. Which would mean I'd no longer be able to play any single player games I've bought that require an "always on" connection.
One more difference is even though I have DSL internet, there are times where it goes down. I had to call my ISP three times last month alone because of some mysterious issue. Funny how the connection breaks and after spending 20 minutes on hold and 10 minutes answer questions, the issue resolves itself as soon as the customer service rep says, "Oh, I don't see a problem on our end.". My Hard drive, graphics card and other PC parts seem to work more consistently.
So do many others. As far as marijuana goes I could care less about the substance itself. I dislike smoking, which isn't illegal where I'm from, but it is illegal now to smoke in restaurants, hospitals, coffee shops and basically any public place. I prefer it that way as I can now actually sit down to a nice meal and not have the person sitting next to me light up. I think it would be a little counter productive to allow smoking marijuana, but not allow smoking.
I have to admit I only half trust game reviews. I can't count the number of times I've bought a game because of a couple good reviews and then was seriously disappointed in it. So now if I see a game with a good reviews I might want to buy and I don't know anyone fist hand that owns it, I download it and then buy it if lives up to the hype. It's the only way to be sure I'm not getting screwed over. After all I only have a finite amount of money and would rather reward good games then waste the money buying something that's crap.
Of course that hasn't been a problem lately because I don't even look at games once I find out they're using some screwed up DRM. I also don't pirate indie games, they're normally cheap anyway. I also trust that if an indie developer tried to screw over gamers with some crap DRM, saying their game does something it doesn't or is something it's not, it would be the last game they sold.
I just wanted to point out that in terms of speeding, drugs and skipping school, not everyone does those things. In fact relative to the general population I believe most people disprove of these activities, which is why they're illegal... That being said I'm not sure skipping school is so much illegal, but generally frowned upon. Also there's speeding, like 5 MPH over the limit, which no one cares about and is rarely enforced and then there's speeding, like 20 MPH over the speed limit, which people do recognize as dangerous and is enforced. I'm also assuming you mean illegal drugs and not something like Tylenol.
Prohibition on the other hand was a law put into place by a small vocal minority who knew the right people, or at least knew how to intimidate the right people. It's not an activity and it was repealed precisely because everyone (being most adults) ignored it and drank in secret anyway. Similar to how copyright is a law, but most people (most people I know anyway) ignore it and copy and download content in secret anyway. By "in secret" I mean people don't go bragging to the cops they do it, but may be quite open to discussing it with peers. IMHO it's only a matter of time before someone removes that law because it's broken and only a small vocal group wants it kept around.
If that's the case, then I've never met a GOOD project manager. Generally the project managers I've worked with seem to think their jobs are to slow me down. I had one tell me it was because when I completed my work too soon it would make the project estimates look bad. Then he proceeded to load me down with process, Quality Assurance and configuration management reports. All of which were turfed when the project managers were rotated because one took a "promotion".
I agree some management in the planning stage is good. Too much in the development and testing phases just puts the fire out and kills the project.
Marketing is the reason. I pay $130 for cable and internet. $5 more gets me another 20 channels I don't want. $5 more than that gets me another 20 channels, 1 or 2 of which I might like. It's called nickel and dimeing. Before you know it you'd be paying $50 a month and barely getting anything extra worth while.
Without a story you might as well be playing farmville. I think there's a fine balance. What I've found is developers are getting too heavy into trying to make a game look good they're leaving out the story and possible arcs from it. Story is an important element, but it's different then a book, it has to be interactive. It can be linear, but I don't want to be forced into following it until I've had a chance to explore an area.
That was the problem with FFXIII was it was cut scene, run down hall, fight, cut scene, run down hall, fight, with no option to go back. Pretty much until you're over 3/4 of the way through the game, then there's one area you can run around in for a while, then back to cut scene, run down hall, fight. I did beat it pretty easily, but I was disappointed and most likely won't pick it up again for sometime.
FFXII was an awesome game, which I've played four times and never beat because I keep getting tied up in side quests, which I like. The story line is great, but I'm not forced into it and I can do all the exploring and grinding I feel like and move easily back to area's I've already been in to make sure I didn't miss anything.
No, The RMV could have a person investigate incidents flagged by the program, which would be presuming the program could be wrong. This is despite of the fact that they know and admit the program isn't 100% accurate. Regardless they seem to be using the assumption that the statistical computer program is infallible and the people it's flagging are guilty and thus the onus is on the innocent party to prove they just happen to look like someone who did something wrong.
However, they admit that the system is flawed and frequently picks people who have done nothing wrong. The solution would be to have a physical person investigate each incident the program is reporting. Instead the program is taken as infallible, even though its users know it's not, and innocent people are assumed to be at fault until that person clears their own name.
Is there anything bureaucrats can't cock up?
Breathing. Otherwise they wouldn't live long enough to make our lives so difficult.
According to the statement you're guilty until you prove your innocent, so much for innocent until proven guilty. I'm sure using tax dollars and grants to use a system that illegally convicts innocent people without a trial or hearing is considerable different then a criminal stealing someones identity.
upsonp(atat)gmail
I'm in agreement with you.
If you look it up you'll see after killing the second hand market for PC games the sale of PC games in general dropped off and piracy became a much larger issue on the platform. Of course standard correlation/causation statement applies.
I guess the other plus side to killing the second hand market is that if consoles follow the same trend as PC games we'll see the prices drop too. I think killing the second hand market is a very stupid move on the publishers part because, as others have stated, not being able to re-sell a game decreases it's value. Overall that means less profit for the publishers. At which point they'll turn around and blame piracy again.
I think the issue really is they just realized they weren't getting anywhere with their battle against piracy. All they're doing is causing headaches for people who legitimately buy the game, which in turn is turning them to piracy. Now game companies are shifting focus. Soon they'll find that's going to cost them even more. What do you think someone waking into a store and only seeing games for $60 is going to do when they only have $40 for a game? I imagine they'll run home and download it instead of buying it.
LMAO!!! Thanks for the great laugh now I have to clean the coffee of my second monitor.
There are people out there right now developing games for free because they love doing it. There are also very cheap highly entertaining games, Minecraft is one of my favorites at the moment. I've convinced both my sisters, my brother and their significant others to play as well and for the price the entertainment can't be beet. There will always been things to play and if your industry was doing things right you'd have good profit without having to put God knows how much into DRM schemes and treating your customers like thieves.
By the time I'm ready to buy a second hand game I would also know this. For example I didn't run out and buy Dragon Age. As a result I know how buggy it is and will probably just borrow it from my sister if I ever decide I do want to play it. I believe this is a prime example of how the publishers are putting out crappy games on hype and selling them for a mint. Then thinking they'll just fix any issues later instead of fixing them in the first place.