It's long, but it's awesome. I'm a programmer, not a lawyer, but after reading that deposition and all the stuff about "MediaDefender" I wonder why the RIAA has gotten as far as it has. If I were a judge my reaction to an RIAA lawsuit landing in my court would be more along the lines of uncontrolled laughter than anything else. I suppose that's why I'm a programmer, not a lawyer.
Their methods are unsound and sooner or later those RIAA lawyers are going to get Jack Thompsoned.
That was _Airframe_ and no, the circumstances there were backwards. The man flying the plane was the pilot's son and not certified on flying that particular model of aircraft. A counterfeit part failed, causing a warning light to appear in the cockpit. The pilot panicked and took over manual control of the plane. Not knowing how to control the plane under those circumstances, the plane then porpoised three times before the pilot lost consciousness and the autopilot could take over and resume normal flight.
To really answer the question, the computer has to OCR the text, read and understand it, then interpret the picture and put the correct text into the box. It's an interesting and pretty hard problem.
It's still broken by having a network of humans attempting to get into pr0n sites answer the questions.
That would make it difficult for non-native speakers of the language to deal with. Once you try to put a lower limit on language comprehension, you will effectively put an end to "Web 2.0" websites.
Come to think of it, that might not be such a bad thing...
I do not think a technological solution exists and it will always be an unwinnable arms race.
After numerous discussions with marketing about implementing CAPTCHAs, we decided to simply put a text box on the form that says "leave this blank", with the HTML form field named "comment". Humans leave it blank. And sure enough, the spammers cram their links into all form fields, so we can ignore their crap.
Most brilliant. That will "scale up" better than a CAPTCHA too.
It's rather difficult[1] at the moment. I've outlined possible steps we can take in recent Blizzard articles, but I would not take a form letter as the last possible word.
I did my part by responding to a Blizzard customer survey and reporting that I was using their games on Unix and (better for them) telling my friends that they should do it for the same reason.
I'm not sure how else we can get through, but I do know that Blizzard is our best potential ally and we should not diss them. If ever the Microsoft computer gaming monopoly is to be broken, Blizzard is the company that can do it.
[1] Difficult[n] - Derived from the Japanese word muzukashii meaning impossible.
Re:Great, but how about clicking and carpal tunnel
on
Blizzcon 2008 Wrap-Up
·
· Score: 1
I had to give up the hardcore playing because clicking the mouse like a maniac for hours killed my hand.
Blizzard was forced to change the interface by Amazon.com who were threatening to sue them for patent infringement on their one-click patent.
One of the other major items to have come out of Blizzcon is the possibility in the near future (post-Wrath-release) of PvE arenas where teams would square off against bosses from instances who would gain or lose ranking just like players
Just when I thought I would never be interested in the Arena... Wow. What an awesome sounding idea.
Now, if I only had enough time to play to actually be able to join an arena team...
I fail to understand why Blizzard keeps designing their new content with end-game as the sole thing that keeps people interested.
Because they don't. I have two level 70s and the only single piece of purple gear I have is a burning axe that dropped in STV (currently being used by a level 43 Shaman alt).
I'm a WoW player because Blizzard does keep in mind the more casual player with family, job, etc.
I assume you'd be OK with the locals starving instead, because at least there would be no "unfair" employment practices in play. Am I correct?
Are you addressing me, or the guy I responded to? If me, you completely missed my point.
My sympathies are firmly with the locals and if ever I am in a position to do so, I will open an outsourcing shop on Mindanao, hire as many locals as I can, train them as necessary and pay them as much as is profitable. Or my sons will do so if they follow in Dad's footsteps.
I would really however recommend that before any case ever gets to trial with this sort of thing, all the questions and answers are laid out in black and white. Otherwise we are in all sorts of trouble.
Your best bet is get working on an Open Source project that interests you. Documentation as well as coding will help as both will get your name into search engines (and google.com is not necessarily the most important one). The skills you learn will make you a better programmer while honing your skills. Writing new code is somewhat important, but the majority of your time will be spent maintaining code and being able to diagnose and fix bugs is by far the best way to ensure job security. It's a dirty job and if you have an insightful manager (and if you are in a profitable company with long-term prospects, one of them will be) it will be appreciated.
<hat="Professional">Guys like me spend a lot of time getting paid good money to clean up after hit & run programmers who come in, hack some crap together and leave.</hat>
<hat="Mr. XEmacs, Open Source guy">Guys like me also wrote more than one letter of recommendation to kids starting out after college who had contributed to XEmacs.</hat>
The bonus is that if your target company is using the software you worked on, your name may already be in their internal web search engine database when you're applying there.
My name appears more often in the internal corporate search engine on a search of my name with hits on the Gnus 5 FAQ, of which I wrote the original version over a decade ago, than for anything else and I've been working there almost 2 years now (on very high visibility projects). Nothing beats that for a reference.
Oh and thanks to Microsoft, bug triage has become more valuable over time because people expect stuff to be broken and you are even more respected when you fix it.
Point: the trillion dollar subprime mess became the 60-trillion dollar financial catastrophe through a whole set of leveraging activities. Start blaming credit default swaps, netting, etc. for turning what could have been a contained problem into a cascading failure.
I do not think anyone recently (back to the Carter administration) involved with the US government is covered in glory on that one with the possible exception of Ron Paul.
I've found it extremely difficult to get enough info to properly train my BS filter. The last article I read used ~US$60T as the world capital base and ~US$683T as the total amount in the world derivatives market. Neither values corroborate with anything else I've read.
I'm pro liberty, pro economic freedom and privacy and there's no place for me in either the Republican or Democratic party of the US.
Ultimately, I think we'll see that virtual property is legally blessed to have real life monetary value, in much the same way that software is.
In which case it will be regulated and taxed.
The income tax, which was a stupid idea to begin with, will either be dismantled in the face of virtual property age, or virtual property will wither on the vine.
I think you're mostly missing the point, but this question is half-way reasonable.
If you own an item, and the developers decide that it is too powerful, and they nerf it. Do you need to be compensated? Should you be?
Maybe and no.
How was the item acquired? If you earned the item through painful grinding and doing whatever it was you had to do in-game to achieve it, then you might have a case.
If you bought it, like from an in-game auction house, it's murkier. You speculated on an item and you lost. I do not think any game guarantees that kind of value (nor should it).
In general though, I think the ultimate answer is just plain no. You have to trust the game maker on that one and if they are making many arbitrary and possibly unfair decisions of that sort, they will receive the death penalty - enough players will leave the game and the game will die. Sad, but life goes on and someone else will make a better game.
I suspect you're thinking about this from a Second Life point of view and I'm thinking about this from a WoW point of view. Second Life is such dangerous territory to enter I'm positive that it will create problems that no one in positions of authority will have the slightest clue in dealing with until they are dead and replaced by people who grew up with such games.
There are limits to the rights you can give up even in a contractual setting: you can't sell yourself into slavery, you can't legally work for less than minimum wage.
You don't get out much, do you? That's maybe how it works in rich countries, but not in the rest of the world.
(Using an example I have plenty of experience with...)
In the Philippines it is the norm to pay (as a legal bribe) your first two months salary for the privilege of getting an overseas job. It is also the norm that the paycheck sticks to the fingers of the agency involved on the way through, so what is a minimum (or subminimum) wage in the target country, turns out to be much less for the poor sap doing the work. Since it's still better than living with nothing, people line up for the "opportunity".
Since the article mentions China, it ought to be noted that most of the people of China are even poorer than in the Philippines.
If it came down to, do you let your children (or younger brothers, sisters, parents) starve or sell yourself into slavery if you can ensure their existence I know which one I would choose. Sadly, that is the choice many people are offered. Even today.
Can you imagine people suing Blizzard for devaluing their online property because Blizzard nerfed a certain set piece, or introduced better items?
I can and obviously you have never browsed the online WoW forums. There were plenty of kids who were pissed off when Blizzard devalued the level 60 epic mount training. I'm sure there will be plenty more when they devalue the level 70 epic flying mount training after WotLK has been out for awhile.[1]
Not to mention the fact that all the folks who are now strutting around in top tier level 70 purples will have their entire wardrobe made obsolete in a couple of weeks.
Of course, if you take the constant deluge of whining on the online forum as anything like a group consensus, you're missing the point.
There has to be some middle ground here. The lock in to WoW is "I've invested all this time to get the stuff I've gotten, might as well keep playing...". They have to provide at least the illusion that a player's stuff is his or hers.
[1] It's a pity they cannot have a realistic achievement associated with that. My first level 70 character had to borrow gold for each of successive higher levels of riding training (all paid back, with interest). My second level 70 did not and I'm kind of proud of that. Of course, by the time I first got to level 60, the riding training cost had already been nerfed...
The hexagonal clouds are not a mystery. They in fact prove that there are legislators somewhere else even dumber than the ones we choose for ourselves. Obviously the government of Saturn has declared the value of PI to be exactly 3 and the clouds are only obeying the law.
Plenty of people don't care to use computers, and while that's odd to us, there's nothing wrong with it.
My late father was one of those people. Still, we spent many hours in discussion where he asked about computers and tried to learn from me. I helped him computerize his practice in the mid 1980s, but I do not think he ever did his own email.
And I agree, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
The more likely reason is its technology he never grew up with and has no interest in pursuing.
This is not a debate.
I was not tortured, but I was rear-ended at high speed by a drunk driver a decade and a half ago. I cannot sit at a desk and type at a computer for more than 10 or 20 minutes without intense pain.
Mccain can't even check e-mail, and she used a fucking Yahoo account to do official business.
McCain, scum sucking typical Washington DC politician swine that he is, cannot check email because he was tortured as a POW and does not have full mobility of his arms and is unable to use a computer. That he cannot check his email is the fault of deficient handicapped person accessibility software. That's not *his* fault, it's Microsoft's fault. Or maybe our fault for not picking up the ball and doing an Open Sourced voice recognition input system.
I'm kind of wary regarding accessibility software though. I got nothing but grief trying to push in TV Ramen's Emacspeak into XEmacs.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure this is up there yet.
They are definitely working on it. Read the deposition NYCL gave their "Expert" witness. http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2007/03/deposition-of-riaas-expert-available.html
It's long, but it's awesome. I'm a programmer, not a lawyer, but after reading that deposition and all the stuff about "MediaDefender" I wonder why the RIAA has gotten as far as it has. If I were a judge my reaction to an RIAA lawsuit landing in my court would be more along the lines of uncontrolled laughter than anything else. I suppose that's why I'm a programmer, not a lawyer.
Their methods are unsound and sooner or later those RIAA lawyers are going to get Jack Thompsoned.
That was _Airframe_ and no, the circumstances there were backwards. The man flying the plane was the pilot's son and not certified on flying that particular model of aircraft. A counterfeit part failed, causing a warning light to appear in the cockpit. The pilot panicked and took over manual control of the plane. Not knowing how to control the plane under those circumstances, the plane then porpoised three times before the pilot lost consciousness and the autopilot could take over and resume normal flight.
Completely backwards situation to this one.
To really answer the question, the computer has to OCR the text, read and understand it, then interpret the picture and put the correct text into the box. It's an interesting and pretty hard problem.
It's still broken by having a network of humans attempting to get into pr0n sites answer the questions.
how about asking questions involving idioms?
That would make it difficult for non-native speakers of the language to deal with. Once you try to put a lower limit on language comprehension, you will effectively put an end to "Web 2.0" websites.
Come to think of it, that might not be such a bad thing ...
I do not think a technological solution exists and it will always be an unwinnable arms race.
After numerous discussions with marketing about implementing CAPTCHAs, we decided to simply put a text box on the form that says "leave this blank", with the HTML form field named "comment". Humans leave it blank. And sure enough, the spammers cram their links into all form fields, so we can ignore their crap.
Most brilliant. That will "scale up" better than a CAPTCHA too.
This was "stuff that matters" - a lot more than the latest Microsoft announcement or most recent Linux kernel version.
Ah. So that's what it was all about. I got a panicked call from my wife who thought all her characters were deleted.
Show them that the market exists.
It's rather difficult[1] at the moment. I've outlined possible steps we can take in recent Blizzard articles, but I would not take a form letter as the last possible word.
I did my part by responding to a Blizzard customer survey and reporting that I was using their games on Unix and (better for them) telling my friends that they should do it for the same reason.
I'm not sure how else we can get through, but I do know that Blizzard is our best potential ally and we should not diss them. If ever the Microsoft computer gaming monopoly is to be broken, Blizzard is the company that can do it.
[1] Difficult[n] - Derived from the Japanese word muzukashii meaning impossible.
I had to give up the hardcore playing because clicking the mouse like a maniac for hours killed my hand.
Blizzard was forced to change the interface by Amazon.com who were threatening to sue them for patent infringement on their one-click patent.
Turn off ad-block on Slashdot. The ads here say 13-November is the release date. It's not exactly a secret ...
One of the other major items to have come out of Blizzcon is the possibility in the near future (post-Wrath-release) of PvE arenas where teams would square off against bosses from instances who would gain or lose ranking just like players
Just when I thought I would never be interested in the Arena ... Wow. What an awesome sounding idea.
Now, if I only had enough time to play to actually be able to join an arena team ...
I fail to understand why Blizzard keeps designing their new content with end-game as the sole thing that keeps people interested.
Because they don't. I have two level 70s and the only single piece of purple gear I have is a burning axe that dropped in STV (currently being used by a level 43 Shaman alt).
I'm a WoW player because Blizzard does keep in mind the more casual player with family, job, etc.
I assume you'd be OK with the locals starving instead, because at least there would be no "unfair" employment practices in play. Am I correct?
Are you addressing me, or the guy I responded to? If me, you completely missed my point.
My sympathies are firmly with the locals and if ever I am in a position to do so, I will open an outsourcing shop on Mindanao, hire as many locals as I can, train them as necessary and pay them as much as is profitable. Or my sons will do so if they follow in Dad's footsteps.
I see. I'm the noobsauce here. My apologies.
I would really however recommend that before any case ever gets to trial with this sort of thing, all the questions and answers are laid out in black and white. Otherwise we are in all sorts of trouble.
Agreed.
I agree with the subject.
Your best bet is get working on an Open Source project that interests you. Documentation as well as coding will help as both will get your name into search engines (and google.com is not necessarily the most important one). The skills you learn will make you a better programmer while honing your skills. Writing new code is somewhat important, but the majority of your time will be spent maintaining code and being able to diagnose and fix bugs is by far the best way to ensure job security. It's a dirty job and if you have an insightful manager (and if you are in a profitable company with long-term prospects, one of them will be) it will be appreciated.
<hat="Professional">Guys like me spend a lot of time getting paid good money to clean up after hit & run programmers who come in, hack some crap together and leave.</hat>
<hat="Mr. XEmacs, Open Source guy">Guys like me also wrote more than one letter of recommendation to kids starting out after college who had contributed to XEmacs.</hat>
The bonus is that if your target company is using the software you worked on, your name may already be in their internal web search engine database when you're applying there.
My name appears more often in the internal corporate search engine on a search of my name with hits on the Gnus 5 FAQ, of which I wrote the original version over a decade ago, than for anything else and I've been working there almost 2 years now (on very high visibility projects). Nothing beats that for a reference.
Oh and thanks to Microsoft, bug triage has become more valuable over time because people expect stuff to be broken and you are even more respected when you fix it.
Point: the trillion dollar subprime mess became the 60-trillion dollar financial catastrophe through a whole set of leveraging activities. Start blaming credit default swaps, netting, etc. for turning what could have been a contained problem into a cascading failure.
I do not think anyone recently (back to the Carter administration) involved with the US government is covered in glory on that one with the possible exception of Ron Paul.
I've found it extremely difficult to get enough info to properly train my BS filter. The last article I read used ~US$60T as the world capital base and ~US$683T as the total amount in the world derivatives market. Neither values corroborate with anything else I've read.
I'm pro liberty, pro economic freedom and privacy and there's no place for me in either the Republican or Democratic party of the US.
Ultimately, I think we'll see that virtual property is legally blessed to have real life monetary value, in much the same way that software is.
In which case it will be regulated and taxed.
The income tax, which was a stupid idea to begin with, will either be dismantled in the face of virtual property age, or virtual property will wither on the vine.
I think you're mostly missing the point, but this question is half-way reasonable.
If you own an item, and the developers decide that it is too powerful, and they nerf it. Do you need to be compensated? Should you be?
Maybe and no.
How was the item acquired? If you earned the item through painful grinding and doing whatever it was you had to do in-game to achieve it, then you might have a case.
If you bought it, like from an in-game auction house, it's murkier. You speculated on an item and you lost. I do not think any game guarantees that kind of value (nor should it).
In general though, I think the ultimate answer is just plain no. You have to trust the game maker on that one and if they are making many arbitrary and possibly unfair decisions of that sort, they will receive the death penalty - enough players will leave the game and the game will die. Sad, but life goes on and someone else will make a better game.
I suspect you're thinking about this from a Second Life point of view and I'm thinking about this from a WoW point of view. Second Life is such dangerous territory to enter I'm positive that it will create problems that no one in positions of authority will have the slightest clue in dealing with until they are dead and replaced by people who grew up with such games.
There are limits to the rights you can give up even in a contractual setting: you can't sell yourself into slavery, you can't legally work for less than minimum wage.
You don't get out much, do you? That's maybe how it works in rich countries, but not in the rest of the world.
(Using an example I have plenty of experience with ...)
In the Philippines it is the norm to pay (as a legal bribe) your first two months salary for the privilege of getting an overseas job. It is also the norm that the paycheck sticks to the fingers of the agency involved on the way through, so what is a minimum (or subminimum) wage in the target country, turns out to be much less for the poor sap doing the work. Since it's still better than living with nothing, people line up for the "opportunity".
Since the article mentions China, it ought to be noted that most of the people of China are even poorer than in the Philippines.
If it came down to, do you let your children (or younger brothers, sisters, parents) starve or sell yourself into slavery if you can ensure their existence I know which one I would choose. Sadly, that is the choice many people are offered. Even today.
Can you imagine people suing Blizzard for devaluing their online property because Blizzard nerfed a certain set piece, or introduced better items?
I can and obviously you have never browsed the online WoW forums. There were plenty of kids who were pissed off when Blizzard devalued the level 60 epic mount training. I'm sure there will be plenty more when they devalue the level 70 epic flying mount training after WotLK has been out for awhile.[1]
Not to mention the fact that all the folks who are now strutting around in top tier level 70 purples will have their entire wardrobe made obsolete in a couple of weeks.
Of course, if you take the constant deluge of whining on the online forum as anything like a group consensus, you're missing the point.
There has to be some middle ground here. The lock in to WoW is "I've invested all this time to get the stuff I've gotten, might as well keep playing ...". They have to provide at least the illusion that a player's stuff is his or hers.
[1] It's a pity they cannot have a realistic achievement associated with that. My first level 70 character had to borrow gold for each of successive higher levels of riding training (all paid back, with interest). My second level 70 did not and I'm kind of proud of that. Of course, by the time I first got to level 60, the riding training cost had already been nerfed ...
Do they come with unusual cloud formations?
The hexagonal clouds are not a mystery. They in fact prove that there are legislators somewhere else even dumber than the ones we choose for ourselves. Obviously the government of Saturn has declared the value of PI to be exactly 3 and the clouds are only obeying the law.
Sheesh.
Every 2 terms of republican presidency, the national debt increases by a factor of 10. :D
Debt based money was signed into law by Woody Wilson. I know, I know, this is Slashdot. Never let facts get in the way of a good bash.
Plenty of people don't care to use computers, and while that's odd to us, there's nothing wrong with it.
My late father was one of those people. Still, we spent many hours in discussion where he asked about computers and tried to learn from me. I helped him computerize his practice in the mid 1980s, but I do not think he ever did his own email.
And I agree, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
The more likely reason is its technology he never grew up with and has no interest in pursuing.
This is not a debate.
I was not tortured, but I was rear-ended at high speed by a drunk driver a decade and a half ago. I cannot sit at a desk and type at a computer for more than 10 or 20 minutes without intense pain.
And you sir, are a major league idiot.
Mccain can't even check e-mail, and she used a fucking Yahoo account to do official business.
McCain, scum sucking typical Washington DC politician swine that he is, cannot check email because he was tortured as a POW and does not have full mobility of his arms and is unable to use a computer. That he cannot check his email is the fault of deficient handicapped person accessibility software. That's not *his* fault, it's Microsoft's fault. Or maybe our fault for not picking up the ball and doing an Open Sourced voice recognition input system.
I'm kind of wary regarding accessibility software though. I got nothing but grief trying to push in TV Ramen's Emacspeak into XEmacs.