Well, that you aren't giving up your leisure time in another life in order to live your real life. And you don't pay a monthly fee for life.
> My goodness, a game where money, prestige, > status and experience expand the opportunities > for advancement. That's practically > revolutionary!
And whenever it has been tried before in an MMORPG the result has been the same; those who got an early start can win every time, so there is no point in others playing and they quickly quit. Just look at Castle Marrach for an example.
It also sounds like it could have a bad case of lock-in - where the players who get there first and thus are most experienced (both IC and OOC) form guilds, which nobody who gets there later can compete with; thus a status quo quickly forms and your entire gameplay experience is determined by it.
Is a browser that detects HTML errors in the pages it reads. If it finds any, it will display/fix up the pages just like all current browsers do, but it will also add a big banner at the top of the page that says "WE DO NOT KNOW HOW TO WRITE WEB PAGES PROPERLY."
> That's the whole point. She was NOT "put into > the situation." She voluntarily entered the > situation with several indicators, of equal or > greater size than the text of the EULA, > pointing to the end result she suffered. She > could have chosen to NOT purchase at any time > and learn more about what it was she was > buying. She didn't.
But it may be considered not to be fair that she'd have to withdraw from purchasing. Especially if learning more was difficult or impossible (can't look on the net if you don't have an OS yet..)
>The purpose for which it is sold is this "To >perform some task within the terms of use which >you must agree to, but cannot yet see." That is >written on the box. Had she accepted the terms >it would have performed the purpose for which >it was sold.
And it didn't. And this was because of a property of the product - the terms.
>She knowingly and in full capacity bought a > potential LEMON. She choose to ignore the oil > spilling out of the bottom of the car, then > tried to return it because the engine made > funny noises.
EVERY good is a "potential lemon". That's why consumers are protected against them. In particular your analogy would only be appropriate if ALL cars were sold with oil spilling out of them, since after all, ALL software has the hidden EULA.
>She can't choose to ignore the outside and then > complain about the inside. If the bread has > MOLD ON IT when you buy it AND IT SAYS SO ON > THE LABEL "Moldy Bread for sale" you can't > return it because the fluff beyond the crust > was also moldy.
But the shop can't stick up a sign saying "Potentially moldy bread for sale" and then say that any customer who buys a loaf, which later turns out to be moldy, can't return it.
> 4. She returns to vendor who points at the > receipts and signs (which she again apparently > cannot read or refuses to accept, just like > the EULA) and smiles. She was warned. She > didn't take the warning.
Nope. The fact that legally you have done nothing wrong doesn't mean that she's wrong to sue. The law isn't a logic game. She only needs to persuade the judge that it's reasonably unfair that she should be put into such a catch-22 situation.
Another point is that the goods you sell have to be fit for the purpose for which they're sold. Well, you DIDN'T sell her the software - "this software is licensed, not sold", remember? You sold her the license. So "no returns on opened software" doesn't affect her - she's returning the license, she can't return the software because you never sold her it.
And she could easily argue that if the license isn't acceptable to her, then the license you sold her isn't fit for the purpose for which it was sold (to be accepted by her), in which case Sale of Goods legislation blows your "no refunds" sign right off the wall.
> 2) Agreement, offer and acceptance (huh? When > did I agree to the contract? Oh, after I > bought the software and opened up the box. But > if I don't accept, that doesn't change the > fact that I own the software and can use it as > I please, within the bounds of copyright law)
I'm sure you've heard the old response to this. You can't use it without the EULA, because when you use it you will inevitably create a copy in your PC's memory which will violate copyright law if you don't have a license to do so.
It's worth noting, though, that 90% of EULAs I've read would - if interpreted this way - make it impossible to install the software because of the large number of copies active at the point of installation..
I have to agree on at least some of his points, and also have to point out that user interfaces have, IMHO, gotten worse. The real problem is (apparantly) a rush to make users think 'hey cool, I'm using a computer!' rather than to make it actually easy to do things.
For example. Progress Bars. Progress Bars are very neat and useful. However, Progress Bars that do not rise at a constant real-time rate are useless to the user. What do they care that your program is 75% through the list of necessary operations, when the ones done so far took 5 seconds but the last one might take 2 hours? This is combined with the stupidity of the progress bar at 100% - you should NEVER SEE that, as when the progess is 100% the task is done and the progress bar should disappear. And yet one of the worst culprits for both of these is InstallShield, which has been around for years and puts this stupid convention onto almost EVERY PIECE OF COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE.
Another one is the abuse of words in user interfaces. Having an "OK" button is fine, if you're asking me for settings or to confirm an operation. But "This application has failed and will close." errors should not have an OK button on them, because the user should not be requied to indicate than this sort of thing is OK - it isn't! Yea, I know, any techie will tell you that it's 'just a convention' but why use that convention? Why not use the totally neutral "Dismiss", as used by UNIX? Likewise, in just about every application, pressing the "Help" key actually causes information, rather than help, to appear - so why not call the button "Info"?
Even worse is the responsibility shifting. Get a bluescreen on WinME and hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, and you get: "The system is busy waiting for the Close Programs dialog box to be displayed." That sounds a bit like me saying "I'm waiting for my leg to move." What, other than "the system", is going to display the dialog - the CRT fairies?
When this sort of thing is sorted out, then we can start talking about apps being user friendly. Until then, I'll be doubtful.
One of the points they mention in their act is the modification of the DMCA so that it allows copy protection to be broken for fair use purposes.
I vaguely recall, during one of the DVD cases, that it was stated in court that the DMCA does NOT forbid breaking copy protection for fair use at the moment.
The PROBLEM is that it forbids distribution of tools for breaking copy protection, regardless of what they will be used for. Having permission to break the protection for fair use is no good unless you are actually able to do it, and unless the tools are distributable very few people who wish to make fair use will be able to.
This is exactly the problem that came up in one of the appeals in the DVD case; that it is not sufficient to simply ensure that people are permitted to make fair use, because even if they have permission, "nothing in law obligates manufacturers to make it easy for people to exercise fair use rights" (paraphrased from the appeal verdict). Thus, they can simply make it so hard that the vast majority of people can't do it, and the tools distribution clause will prevent people who CAN do it from helping others do so.
To ensure fair use, the proposed act would have to include a specification that no IP owner must unduly impede the exercise of fair use rights, technologically or otherwise. If technology is too restricted at the moment to do this without losing protection against illegal use then, well, they're big companies with big bucks: they can innovate new technology, or at least sponsor others to do so. (At the moment, such technology is unlikely to ever get developed because it's actually to the firms' advantage for it not to be - they can carry on getting away with blocking everything.)
> Don't forget that you can use DRM goes both > ways. If you create something for free > distribution with DRM, you can ensure that no > one can use it for commercial purposes.
Not at all. If there was ANY copy protection system that could detect the intent with which a copy was made, we'd have no problems - the system could detect whether a copy was going to be used for illegal piracy or for the music owner to be listened to in the car.
This also ignores the fact that most of the time, in order to get the tools to apply DRM to stuff you produce, you have to pay - and normally you have to pay an amount of money so great that a non-commercial business wouldn't be able to do so (which of course is exactly what the DRM vendors intend, so that pirates can't obtain the application kit and reverse engineer it)
> watch them start to wield that large arm of > the DMCA, saying that there is copyprotection > in the BIOS, so modding the Xbox violates the > DMCA... wait I shouldn't have said that...
Since you can't run Xbox games - pirated or otherwise - under Linux, I doubt that's an issue in this case..
This I think is a very good point. Although it is true that publishers perform a useful filtering service, the problem is the means by which they perform that filtering.
The most obvious duffer case is the publisher who refuses to take on new authors simply because they don't need to - a new author would be a risk, and as they're making money now and nothing bad happens if they don't take that risk, why should they? And they can say with confidence there is no risk because they know other publishers have the same attitude.
Or the fact that works that differ from the norm don't get published because there's no evidence yet that they'll sell.
All the ranting about marketing fails to address a basic point: that marketing is changing nowadays, and in practise SHOULD be becoming irrelevant. Any smart person knows that product descriptions mentioned in adverts - especially for entertainment art - generally mean nothing. So the only use of smart advertising is to announce that products exist, but then, do I really need to be told that in the modern world? If I want to read a thriller, I know there's a thrillers section in my local bookstore. If you've written a thriller I pretty much know it will be there without needing to be told. And if I'm smart, nothing you can possibly do in direct advertising will encourage me to pick your thriller over anyone else's - what, you're going to say that your book isn't very good? In a connected world, if your thriller is good, I'll hear about it on the net or on any one of numerous grapevines.
In short, the problem with complaining about marketing is that there is nothing in marketing which couldn't be eliminated PROVIDED the entire industry agreed to eliminate it at once. If NOBODY was prepared to pay for POP presentations (for example), there'd be no need to pay for them because nobody would need them to compete. Also IMHO, eliminating marketing would have a significantly beneficial effect on free enterprise by eliminating the marketing cost risk to publishers and distributors, and the marketing cost requirement which makes it impossible for new businesses to compete on an even footing.
It's worth remembering that the basis of capitalism is defined in terms of perfect information. Marketing violates this by allowing people with lots of money to pay to have their products treated as more desirable than they would be under their own merits, which only increases the tendancy of capitalism to turn into corporatism within a few generations.
> A shame that the relaunch of Llamasoft > [llamasoft.co.uk] doesn't seem to have taken > off.
Hasn't it? As far as I've heard he's had lots of sales from those games and has now gotten a contract from a console company and is writing a game for them. (Although he isn't allowed to say which console it is, it is one of the "big three".)
The point that seems to be being missed here is that paying anything for the web is a fundamental shift regarding what the web is about, and continuing with it could lead to disasterous results.
The most obvious result is that the ability to put information up on the web for others to access FOR FREE will go poof. Pick and choose your own reason:
- ISPs increasing their bandwidth or hosting charge, because their clients are now getting payments for their pages and thus have more money;
- ISP hosting agreements based on a share of the micropayments recieved;
- Copy protection becoming standard on web pages to prevent free reposting of charged-for material; protection including a measure that bars viewing of unprotected content to prevent cracking; tools for creating viewable content too expensive for free creators or not for sale to non-businesses because they "can't be trusted";
- Linking becoming a commercial deal, in which free users can't participate because sites will pay linkers to hide links to the free competition;
- Search engines likewise charging a fee for users AND making money for sending them preferentially to charged content.
And then, of course, the web dies very quickly. Because if you can't reasonably display stuff for free, nobody can read your stuff without paying. But they don't want to buy a cat in a bag (especially not after the inevitable initial race of $1-to-view lots-of-bogus-keywords pages)- so they go off to a site they already know. No new site can get started, because nobody wants to be the guy who takes the risk of the first hit, and that isn't going to change because it's just peachy as far as all those sites are concerned and the ISPs aren't bothered either. Search engines die because nobody searches anymore.
In other words, it's the PageRank Effect writ large and with money. Heck, next thing, those sites will start to offer to save the user the price of their internet connection by providing one themselves, for accessing their site only, that's bunded with their micropayments. Congratulations, we have just rolled back to BBSs.
> Now to get one point of a skill (say creativity > by playing a guitar) I have to sit and watch my > Sim play.. for an hour. AN HOUR.
Yikes. This was exactly my problem with the original Sims. I'd be thinking, "Well, I can sit watching this guy playing the guitar to increase his stats. Or I can go play my guitar and increase MY stats. Which sounds better?"
I agree that calling viewing pages in a popup blocker "theft" is pretty silly really; you might as well argue that displaying popup ads is theft because the bits used to represent them on my screen are made out of my electricity and I never gave you permission to use it for that.
But "the protocol is the law" is a very risky model. For example, under that model it could be argued that if you sent your credit card number by SSL, then if someone sniffs the packet and decrypts it they're not doing anything illegal. After all, you chose to send the number to the person who sniffed it - you knew that IP doesn't do direct connections and you could have hopchecked the site anytime. And the protocol doesn't guarantee that the message is secure, only that it's encrypted, which may or may not provide security. Thus you voluntarily sent the sniffer your credit card number. Uhh, I think that's not the kind of interpretation I'd like to deal with.
Hey, you want to complain about region coding - consider the plight of people who live in Asia but not in Japan.
In most cases, these folks get Japanese consoles that can only run Japanese games, in Japanese. They then get Japanese games, with stickers on the front saying "this is an official release, ignore the 'for Japan only' bit in the license". Sometimes there will be a translated manual in Chinese and English slipped into the box.
But the entire game will be in Japanese. NONE of the big consoles have ANY support for games in Chinese, Urdu, or in any number of languages you might care to name. And - I HAVE HEARD BUT NOT CONFIRMED THAT people in Australia speak English but still get Japanese games because they're considered to be in the Asia region - and they can't buy the English language ones because their consoles are Japanese and won't play them. (If this is true it would certainly explain why their government nearly outlawed region locking at one point.)
In other words, for these people, EVERY major console game is IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
Oh, and do I need to mention that until recently people in Europe were forced to play games 20% slower than everyone else because game manufacturers refused to support 60hz PAL displays?
> But they probably are using encryption and are > using a key to sign the serial numbers. You > don't have any ammo against that.
Umm, not necessarily. Non-nonced encryption is no defence against a replay attack.
If your password is "sesame" and a hacker sniffs that, they can pass on "sesame" to the server and connect as you.
If your password is encrypted to "f73hr89", a hacker sniffs that, and the encryption doesn't include a nonce, they can just connect to the server and send "f73hr89" again. After all, the server's expecting encrypted data, and the hacker doesn't need to understand the password, just to repeat it.
However, one hopes that even MS wouldn't manage a big enough security hole that it would be possible to sniff another user's GUID, username and password. A better use for that proxy would be to replay the responses an unmodded XBOX gave to the login sequence when a modded one is actually connected.
> you shall be paid participation equal to 10% of > the profits derived during your life by Marvel > (including subsidiaries and affiliates) from > the profits of any live action or..
> Note that profits are explicitly mentioned.
That's exactly the trick, apparantly: they're not. The above doesn't say he'll be paid 10% of the profits, it says that he'll be paid 10% of "the profits derived from the profits". Of course, this is meaningless so they can fiddle it however they like.
> The record companies play two important role - > 1) They are distributors. This role is less > important these days,
Not at all - this is exactly what gives them their power.
> but 2) They are arbitrators of taste. They help > seperate the crap from the cream.
I've seen this posted a load here. Look, when it comes to music, NOBODY CAN ARBITRATE TASTE. It's that simple. Yea, probably YOU INDIVIDUALLY aren't going to like 60% of the music out there, BUT I can bet that at least 80% of the music out there IS liked by SOMEBODY.
Record firms don't pick "good" music, they can't. They pick music that will either sell now (because it's similar to music that sells now), or that they can make sell (because it can be associated with an image that matches popular culture). Even then they're often wrong. Remember how The Beatles got turned down by 11+ recording firms before one gave them a shot?
> entity. I was at the movies last week and saw a > pre-film ad (ug!) for FREE MUSIC from COKE. No > there is how the record companies get kicked in > the teeth - not by Bob's web site - but by a > commercial giant like Coke - with Millions to > spend pushing their ideas of good music.
Except that Coke's idea of good music is exactly the same as the record companies'. Also bear in mind, they don't need or want to sell music. They want to sell Coke by looking cool in front of the filesharing generation.
The point is basically here that SOMEBODY NEEDS TO SELL THE MUSIC THAT WON'T SELL. Somebody needs to sell the music that isn't going to be wildly popular but is still going to be liked by enough people.
- Are now so well-established now labels compete for them, thus meaning they can get extremely beneficial contracts;
- When they started, the industry was not so deeply entrenched in the "we're making money without you, so just try to convince us" mentality, so they weren't so screwed from the beginning.
What's sad is that the original limitation on copyright term (fixed term, unrelated to life) was *EXACTLY* supposed to prevent this sort of thing happening (Printers refusing to print new books because they could always make money by selling old works to new generations).
My favourite case mod of that kind has to be a guy who worked as a technician and who had a rather high hardware turnover on his home machine (he tended to use it for testing stuff). He also often needed to change plugs around in the back of the machine. So what did he do?
He sawed the case in half!
He literally sawed the front off the case, leaving the mobo and all the mountings and similar attached to the back portion of the case (except for the cage stuff which was still on the front). He then maneuvered them around so that the old front and back of the case were now adjacent and pointing at him, and then pushed the whole lot under a shelf to cover the exposed back from dust.
The result was a PC where both the front and back were at the front, and there *was* no back. Just bizarre.
> 2) smalltime and wannabe developers could > create demos and games with them without > forking out big money for the official GBA dev > hardware
Actually, that ISN'T the problem they face. The problem is that Nintendo won't sell the GBA development hardware to smalltime or wannabe developers - at *any* price.
This is a universal problem that almost all entrants to all new industries face: the controllers of things of which there is a limited supply won't take the risk of selling to them. They don't need to (they are making money anyway) and they see it as a major risk.
If you want to write for a handheld, write for Palm or GP32. Lik-Sang still sell GP32's I assume?
Slashdot Mirror
> And how is this different from real life?
Well, that you aren't giving up your leisure time in another life in order to live your real life. And you don't pay a monthly fee for life.
> My goodness, a game where money, prestige,
> status and experience expand the opportunities
> for advancement. That's practically
> revolutionary!
And whenever it has been tried before in an MMORPG the result has been the same; those who got an early start can win every time, so there is no point in others playing and they quickly quit. Just look at Castle Marrach for an example.
It also sounds like it could have a bad case of lock-in - where the players who get there first and thus are most experienced (both IC and OOC) form guilds, which nobody who gets there later can compete with; thus a status quo quickly forms and your entire gameplay experience is determined by it.
Is a browser that detects HTML errors in the pages it reads. If it finds any, it will display/fix up the pages just like all current browsers do, but it will also add a big banner at the top of the page that says "WE DO NOT KNOW HOW TO WRITE WEB PAGES PROPERLY."
> That's the whole point. She was NOT "put into
> the situation." She voluntarily entered the
> situation with several indicators, of equal or
> greater size than the text of the EULA,
> pointing to the end result she suffered. She
> could have chosen to NOT purchase at any time
> and learn more about what it was she was
> buying. She didn't.
But it may be considered not to be fair that she'd have to withdraw from purchasing. Especially if learning more was difficult or impossible (can't look on the net if you don't have an OS yet..)
>The purpose for which it is sold is this "To
>perform some task within the terms of use which
>you must agree to, but cannot yet see." That is
>written on the box. Had she accepted the terms
>it would have performed the purpose for which
>it was sold.
And it didn't. And this was because of a property of the product - the terms.
>She knowingly and in full capacity bought a
> potential LEMON. She choose to ignore the oil
> spilling out of the bottom of the car, then
> tried to return it because the engine made
> funny noises.
EVERY good is a "potential lemon". That's why consumers are protected against them. In particular your analogy would only be appropriate if ALL cars were sold with oil spilling out of them, since after all, ALL software has the hidden EULA.
>She can't choose to ignore the outside and then
> complain about the inside. If the bread has
> MOLD ON IT when you buy it AND IT SAYS SO ON
> THE LABEL "Moldy Bread for sale" you can't
> return it because the fluff beyond the crust
> was also moldy.
But the shop can't stick up a sign saying "Potentially moldy bread for sale" and then say that any customer who buys a loaf, which later turns out to be moldy, can't return it.
> So, somethings got to give: Either the EULA is
> enforceable and you CAN return the product for
> a full refund, or the EULA isn't enforceable.
Nope, sadly not. Even if the EULA was enforcable, the vendor hasn't agreed to it, so it doesn't affect them.
> 4. She returns to vendor who points at the
> receipts and signs (which she again apparently
> cannot read or refuses to accept, just like
> the EULA) and smiles. She was warned. She
> didn't take the warning.
Nope. The fact that legally you have done nothing wrong doesn't mean that she's wrong to sue. The law isn't a logic game. She only needs to persuade the judge that it's reasonably unfair that she should be put into such a catch-22 situation.
Another point is that the goods you sell have to be fit for the purpose for which they're sold. Well, you DIDN'T sell her the software - "this software is licensed, not sold", remember? You sold her the license. So "no returns on opened software" doesn't affect her - she's returning the license, she can't return the software because you never sold her it.
And she could easily argue that if the license isn't acceptable to her, then the license you sold her isn't fit for the purpose for which it was sold (to be accepted by her), in which case Sale of Goods legislation blows your "no refunds" sign right off the wall.
> 2) Agreement, offer and acceptance (huh? When
> did I agree to the contract? Oh, after I
> bought the software and opened up the box. But
> if I don't accept, that doesn't change the
> fact that I own the software and can use it as
> I please, within the bounds of copyright law)
I'm sure you've heard the old response to this. You can't use it without the EULA, because when you use it you will inevitably create a copy in your PC's memory which will violate copyright law if you don't have a license to do so.
It's worth noting, though, that 90% of EULAs I've read would - if interpreted this way - make it impossible to install the software because of the large number of copies active at the point of installation..
I have to agree on at least some of his points, and also have to point out that user interfaces have, IMHO, gotten worse. The real problem is (apparantly) a rush to make users think 'hey cool, I'm using a computer!' rather than to make it actually easy to do things.
For example. Progress Bars. Progress Bars are very neat and useful. However, Progress Bars that do not rise at a constant real-time rate are useless to the user. What do they care that your program is 75% through the list of necessary operations, when the ones done so far took 5 seconds but the last one might take 2 hours? This is combined with the stupidity of the progress bar at 100% - you should NEVER SEE that, as when the progess is 100% the task is done and the progress bar should disappear. And yet one of the worst culprits for both of these is InstallShield, which has been around for years and puts this stupid convention onto almost EVERY PIECE OF COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE.
Another one is the abuse of words in user interfaces. Having an "OK" button is fine, if you're asking me for settings or to confirm an operation. But "This application has failed and will close." errors should not have an OK button on them, because the user should not be requied to indicate than this sort of thing is OK - it isn't! Yea, I know, any techie will tell you that it's 'just a convention' but why use that convention? Why not use the totally neutral "Dismiss", as used by UNIX? Likewise, in just about every application, pressing the "Help" key actually causes information, rather than help, to appear - so why not call the button "Info"?
Even worse is the responsibility shifting. Get a bluescreen on WinME and hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, and you get: "The system is busy waiting for the Close Programs dialog box to be displayed." That sounds a bit like me saying "I'm waiting for my leg to move." What, other than "the system", is going to display the dialog - the CRT fairies?
When this sort of thing is sorted out, then we can start talking about apps being user friendly. Until then, I'll be doubtful.
One of the points they mention in their act is the modification of the DMCA so that it allows copy protection to be broken for fair use purposes.
I vaguely recall, during one of the DVD cases, that it was stated in court that the DMCA does NOT forbid breaking copy protection for fair use at the moment.
The PROBLEM is that it forbids distribution of tools for breaking copy protection, regardless of what they will be used for. Having permission to break the protection for fair use is no good unless you are actually able to do it, and unless the tools are distributable very few people who wish to make fair use will be able to.
This is exactly the problem that came up in one of the appeals in the DVD case; that it is not sufficient to simply ensure that people are permitted to make fair use, because even if they have permission, "nothing in law obligates manufacturers to make it easy for people to exercise fair use rights" (paraphrased from the appeal verdict). Thus, they can simply make it so hard that the vast majority of people can't do it, and the tools distribution clause will prevent people who CAN do it from helping others do so.
To ensure fair use, the proposed act would have to include a specification that no IP owner must unduly impede the exercise of fair use rights, technologically or otherwise. If technology is too restricted at the moment to do this without losing protection against illegal use then, well, they're big companies with big bucks: they can innovate new technology, or at least sponsor others to do so. (At the moment, such technology is unlikely to ever get developed because it's actually to the firms' advantage for it not to be - they can carry on getting away with blocking everything.)
> Don't forget that you can use DRM goes both
> ways. If you create something for free
> distribution with DRM, you can ensure that no
> one can use it for commercial purposes.
Not at all. If there was ANY copy protection system that could detect the intent with which a copy was made, we'd have no problems - the system could detect whether a copy was going to be used for illegal piracy or for the music owner to be listened to in the car.
This also ignores the fact that most of the time, in order to get the tools to apply DRM to stuff you produce, you have to pay - and normally you have to pay an amount of money so great that a non-commercial business wouldn't be able to do so (which of course is exactly what the DRM vendors intend, so that pirates can't obtain the application kit and reverse engineer it)
> watch them start to wield that large arm of ... wait I shouldn't have said that ...
> the DMCA, saying that there is copyprotection
> in the BIOS, so modding the Xbox violates the
> DMCA
Since you can't run Xbox games - pirated or otherwise - under Linux, I doubt that's an issue in this case..
> Instead of trying to push a policy from the
> bench, the court erred on the side of caution.
Nope. If the system was working, they'd have erred on the side of caution when considering the original extension.
This I think is a very good point. Although it is true that publishers perform a useful filtering service, the problem is the means by which they perform that filtering.
The most obvious duffer case is the publisher who refuses to take on new authors simply because they don't need to - a new author would be a risk, and as they're making money now and nothing bad happens if they don't take that risk, why should they? And they can say with confidence there is no risk because they know other publishers have the same attitude.
Or the fact that works that differ from the norm don't get published because there's no evidence yet that they'll sell.
All the ranting about marketing fails to address a basic point: that marketing is changing nowadays, and in practise SHOULD be becoming irrelevant. Any smart person knows that product descriptions mentioned in adverts - especially for entertainment art - generally mean nothing. So the only use of smart advertising is to announce that products exist, but then, do I really need to be told that in the modern world? If I want to read a thriller, I know there's a thrillers section in my local bookstore. If you've written a thriller I pretty much know it will be there without needing to be told. And if I'm smart, nothing you can possibly do in direct advertising will encourage me to pick your thriller over anyone else's - what, you're going to say that your book isn't very good? In a connected world, if your thriller is good, I'll hear about it on the net or on any one of numerous grapevines.
In short, the problem with complaining about marketing is that there is nothing in marketing
which couldn't be eliminated PROVIDED the entire industry agreed to eliminate it at once. If NOBODY was prepared to pay for POP presentations (for example), there'd be no need to pay for them because nobody would need them to compete.
Also IMHO, eliminating marketing would have a significantly beneficial effect on free enterprise by eliminating the marketing cost risk to publishers and distributors, and the marketing cost requirement which makes it impossible for new businesses to compete on an even footing.
It's worth remembering that the basis of capitalism is defined in terms of perfect information. Marketing violates this by allowing people with lots of money to pay to have their products treated as more desirable than they would be under their own merits, which only increases the tendancy of capitalism to turn into corporatism within a few generations.
> A shame that the relaunch of Llamasoft
> [llamasoft.co.uk] doesn't seem to have taken
> off.
Hasn't it? As far as I've heard he's had lots of sales from those games and has now gotten a contract from a console company and is writing a game for them. (Although he isn't allowed to say which console it is, it is one of the "big three".)
The point that seems to be being missed here is that paying anything for the web is a fundamental shift regarding what the web is about, and continuing with it could lead to disasterous results.
The most obvious result is that the ability to put information up on the web for others to access FOR FREE will go poof. Pick and choose your own reason:
- ISPs increasing their bandwidth or hosting charge, because their clients are now getting payments for their pages and thus have more money;
- ISP hosting agreements based on a share of the micropayments recieved;
- Copy protection becoming standard on web pages to prevent free reposting of charged-for material; protection including a measure that bars viewing of unprotected content to prevent cracking; tools for creating viewable content too expensive for free creators or not for sale to non-businesses because they "can't be trusted";
- Linking becoming a commercial deal, in which free users can't participate because sites will pay linkers to hide links to the free competition;
- Search engines likewise charging a fee for users AND making money for sending them preferentially to charged content.
And then, of course, the web dies very quickly. Because if you can't reasonably display stuff for free, nobody can read your stuff without paying. But they don't want to buy a cat in a bag (especially not after the inevitable initial race of $1-to-view lots-of-bogus-keywords pages)- so they go off to a site they already know. No new site can get started, because nobody wants to be the guy who takes the risk of the first hit, and that isn't going to change because it's just peachy as far as all those sites are concerned and the ISPs aren't bothered either. Search engines die because nobody searches anymore.
In other words, it's the PageRank Effect writ large and with money. Heck, next thing, those sites will start to offer to save the user the price of their internet connection by providing one themselves, for accessing their site only, that's bunded with their micropayments. Congratulations, we have just rolled back to BBSs.
> Now to get one point of a skill (say creativity
> by playing a guitar) I have to sit and watch my
> Sim play.. for an hour. AN HOUR.
Yikes. This was exactly my problem with the original Sims. I'd be thinking, "Well, I can sit watching this guy playing the guitar to increase his stats. Or I can go play my guitar and increase MY stats. Which sounds better?"
I agree that calling viewing pages in a popup blocker "theft" is pretty silly really; you might as well argue that displaying popup ads is theft because the bits used to represent them on my screen are made out of my electricity and I never gave you permission to use it for that.
But "the protocol is the law" is a very risky model. For example, under that model it could be argued that if you sent your credit card number by SSL, then if someone sniffs the packet and decrypts it they're not doing anything illegal. After all, you chose to send the number to the person who sniffed it - you knew that IP doesn't do direct connections and you could have hopchecked the site anytime. And the protocol doesn't guarantee that the message is secure, only that it's encrypted, which may or may not provide security. Thus you voluntarily sent the sniffer your credit card number. Uhh, I think that's not the kind of interpretation I'd like to deal with.
Hey, you want to complain about region coding - consider the plight of people who live in Asia but not in Japan.
In most cases, these folks get Japanese consoles that can only run Japanese games, in Japanese. They then get Japanese games, with stickers on the front saying "this is an official release, ignore the 'for Japan only' bit in the license". Sometimes there will be a translated manual in Chinese and English slipped into the box.
But the entire game will be in Japanese. NONE of the big consoles have ANY support for games in Chinese, Urdu, or in any number of languages you might care to name. And - I HAVE HEARD BUT NOT CONFIRMED THAT people in Australia speak English but still get Japanese games because they're considered to be in the Asia region - and they can't buy the English language ones because their consoles are Japanese and won't play them. (If this is true it would certainly explain why their government nearly outlawed region locking at one point.)
In other words, for these people, EVERY major console game is IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
Oh, and do I need to mention that until recently people in Europe were forced to play games 20% slower than everyone else because game manufacturers refused to support 60hz PAL displays?
> But they probably are using encryption and are
> using a key to sign the serial numbers. You
> don't have any ammo against that.
Umm, not necessarily. Non-nonced encryption is no defence against a replay attack.
If your password is "sesame" and a hacker sniffs that, they can pass on "sesame" to the server and connect as you.
If your password is encrypted to "f73hr89", a hacker sniffs that, and the encryption doesn't include a nonce, they can just connect to the server and send "f73hr89" again. After all, the server's expecting encrypted data, and the hacker doesn't need to understand the password, just to repeat it.
However, one hopes that even MS wouldn't manage a big enough security hole that it would be possible to sniff another user's GUID, username and password. A better use for that proxy would be to replay the responses an unmodded XBOX gave to the login sequence when a modded one is actually connected.
> you shall be paid participation equal to 10% of
> the profits derived during your life by Marvel
> (including subsidiaries and affiliates) from
> the profits of any live action or..
> Note that profits are explicitly mentioned.
That's exactly the trick, apparantly: they're not. The above doesn't say he'll be paid 10% of the profits, it says that he'll be paid 10% of "the profits derived from the profits". Of course, this is meaningless so they can fiddle it however they like.
> The record companies play two important role -
> 1) They are distributors. This role is less
> important these days,
Not at all - this is exactly what gives them their power.
> but 2) They are arbitrators of taste. They help
> seperate the crap from the cream.
I've seen this posted a load here. Look, when it comes to music, NOBODY CAN ARBITRATE TASTE. It's that simple. Yea, probably YOU INDIVIDUALLY aren't going to like 60% of the music out there, BUT I can bet that at least 80% of the music out there IS liked by SOMEBODY.
Record firms don't pick "good" music, they can't. They pick music that will either sell now (because it's similar to music that sells now), or that they can make sell (because it can be associated with an image that matches popular culture). Even then they're often wrong. Remember how The Beatles got turned down by 11+ recording firms before one gave them a shot?
> entity. I was at the movies last week and saw a
> pre-film ad (ug!) for FREE MUSIC from COKE. No
> there is how the record companies get kicked in
> the teeth - not by Bob's web site - but by a
> commercial giant like Coke - with Millions to
> spend pushing their ideas of good music.
Except that Coke's idea of good music is exactly the same as the record companies'. Also bear in mind, they don't need or want to sell music. They want to sell Coke by looking cool in front of the filesharing generation.
The point is basically here that SOMEBODY NEEDS TO SELL THE MUSIC THAT WON'T SELL. Somebody needs to sell the music that isn't going to be wildly popular but is still going to be liked by enough people.
That's because many of the "old hands":
- Are now so well-established now labels compete for them, thus meaning they can get extremely beneficial contracts;
- When they started, the industry was not so deeply entrenched in the "we're making money without you, so just try to convince us" mentality, so they weren't so screwed from the beginning.
What's sad is that the original limitation on copyright term (fixed term, unrelated to life) was *EXACTLY* supposed to prevent this sort of thing happening (Printers refusing to print new books because they could always make money by selling old works to new generations).
My favourite case mod of that kind has to be a guy who worked as a technician and who had a rather high hardware turnover on his home machine (he tended to use it for testing stuff). He also often needed to change plugs around in the back of the machine. So what did he do?
He sawed the case in half!
He literally sawed the front off the case, leaving the mobo and all the mountings and similar attached to the back portion of the case (except for the cage stuff which was still on the front). He then maneuvered them around so that the old front and back of the case were now adjacent and pointing at him, and then pushed the whole lot under a shelf to cover the exposed back from dust.
The result was a PC where both the front and back were at the front, and there *was* no back. Just bizarre.
> 2) smalltime and wannabe developers could
> create demos and games with them without
> forking out big money for the official GBA dev
> hardware
Actually, that ISN'T the problem they face. The problem is that Nintendo won't sell the GBA development hardware to smalltime or wannabe developers - at *any* price.
This is a universal problem that almost all entrants to all new industries face: the controllers of things of which there is a limited supply won't take the risk of selling to them. They don't need to (they are making money anyway) and they see it as a major risk.
If you want to write for a handheld, write for Palm or GP32. Lik-Sang still sell GP32's I assume?
Heh.
The irony is, in a world with indefinate copyright, Rand could have been sued for making unauthorised use of Atlas.