Actually, the movies would probably be better if they DIDN'T use computers so extensively. Stereo video recording provides a much more realistic 3D experience than any digital editing (ab)used for campy effect.
Having played 3D games back in the 90's, I knew exactly what to expect, and even then I was disappointed. The fact that so many 3D movies focus on special effects rather than immersion is a big part of that disappointment. Even in Tron Legacy, they had to do that one shot where some weapon jumps right at the viewer; idiotic pre-teen bullshit that only serves to give viewers headaches and insult their intellect. Actually, that entire movie was an insult to intellect, but I digress...
In comparison, 3D gaming is a lot more satisfying, because the entire scene is 3D, not just some director-focused gimmick in the background, and since you can adjust the depth effect, it is possible to dial it up to a more convincing level and really lose yourself in the scene. I don't think any of that is even possible in a movie theatre, not unless they start handing out active glasses with their own built-in LCD screens and per-user adjustments... but then it's just a bunch of cyborg weirdos in a dark room, paying too much for popcorn and soda.
Having sat on one too many IRC meetings, I can quite firmly state that the Pirate Party of Canada is a joke, a very profound disappointment. Every single moment I've spent on their web site or in a chat room has felt like a colossal waste of my time. Nothing but a bunch of overgrown children fussing over inane trivia, trying to sell memberships and merch, and refusing to agree on any sort of official stance or direction. They can't promise shit, because they're too busy arguing over who's going to pay for the next batch of business cards. Appoint a goddamned treasurer, throw fund raisers and awareness rallies, take out ads in the paper or on progressive TV channels, you know, the usual political song-and-dance.
To put things into perspective, the non-partisan OpenMedia group has had great success in the battle against UBB (usage based billing), by leveraging those very same activities. They send an email, maybe once a month, asking for donations and listing off any upcoming meets in my area, and they have delivered RESULTS! If the PPoC put in one tenth of the efforts and professionalism demonstrated by the OpenMedia group, they'd have far more credibility and pull.
Even non-geeks tend to have the opinion that the PPoC are just a bunch of freeloading cyber-hippies, and that's insulting to hippies.
What's really irritating is that every penny of settlement cash will only serve to fund more patent trolling.
It seems to me, as a foreigner, that the U.S. gov't should be stepping in to apply corrective discipline to the Texas legal system, and ideally to the entire country. Texas is renown for favouring patent trolls, which I can only assume is a fantastic gravy train for the judges and lawyers over there. They are, stereotypically, too self-centered and perhaps too ignorant to realize their actions are leading the nation to ruin.
Patent troll companies should not be allowed to exist. In my opinion, patents should be non-transferable. What sense does it make to have a pack of underemployed lawyers hold IP for technology they cannot even begin to comprehend ?
Dude, if it were just about cutting out gamestop, I'd be all for it. There are few things I find more ridiculous in this world than the practice of selling a used title for $5.00 less than the new one, except perhaps the witless sycophants who actually buy them. The 3-for-1 trade-in deal is also pretty freakin' atrocious.
But the reality is that the game industry is adopting Sony's movie and music industry practices. More money, more profiteering parasites at the executive level, and more customer abuse and FUD to justify the egregious corruption.
If it costs $100 million to make a shitty game like GTA IV, the game industry needs a reality check. That is some serious coin just to display cartoon figures on a TV screen. How much of that budget is being funneled to non-production assets (i.e. profiteering suits) ?
For the cost of one 105mbit account, how many 5mbit accounts could you afford ? Each one would have 250 gb included... add them up!
Let's also not forget that this is DOCSIS. Sure, channel bonding makes it appear like four 27mbit modems, but that's still one big fat chunk of bandwidth, which results in major slowdowns during peak hours. The fatter the pipe, the harder the impact due to the way S-CDMA works.
I'll take an RV016 and parallel modems over this oversold hype.
That bothersome 0.5% of customers are what paved the way for super fast data in the first place. Without those guys constantly straining the infrastructure, the ISPs would see no reason to upgrade, and I could not afford to be self-employed because I'd have to pay through the nose for a dedicated uplink. We'd still be on 1mbit DSL and your monthly cap would be 2 gb instead of 60.
You should see the amount of data I consume on a typical workday. VPNs, remote desktop / VNC, SSH tunneling, VMWare, patches, SVN, backups, email attachments, heartbeats, screencasts, test data, screen sharing, VoIP conferencing... February was a slow month and I still blew 200 gb, normally I hover around 600 gb.
The key fact most critics neglect to consider is that pirates can't afford to be downloading 24/7, because those ill-gotten bits have to be stored somewhere. Do you honestly believe those freeloaders are willing to spend another $50 to $100 on external hard drives every month ? I'm in the business of supplying enterprise SAN/NAS boxes and even I wouldn't bother stashing all those bits.
Of course he'd want to disallow them. Smart cops are nothing but trouble for the dumb ones, messing up the scams and challenging idiotic practices and policies. Or, if you're a cynical left-wing pseudo-anarchist wacko like myself, you could say that it's a waste of a brain, since a smart cop is just as (in)effective as any other. If your IQ is so high as to be notable, you should be doing something more intellectual with your life. Like making sandwiches (really freakin' awesome sandwiches!)
I haven't checked for this particular game, but pirated DLC is a very common sight. I know for a fact that every single expansion for Fallout 3 has been cracked, heck I think someone released a tool that unlocks any DLC for that game - even on legit installs!
Even with my account password, the worst anyone can do with my online banking is send an assload of money to my phone company. It would royally piss me off, sure, but it's not like they can send it to themselves.
Ahh see this is the difference. In Canada, bankruptcy will get you out of that hell. At least some people still believe corporations should not be allowed to ruin people's lives for the almighty dollar... though that is becoming less and less so thanks to the Harper crew.
Not banned from steam, banned from GMod forums. If they don't already own GMod, then it's not a huge loss, you'd think ? And arguably if one were to buy GMod post-ban, they could probably email someone to get unbanned.
Just the one mainstream hit, sure, but he has been musically active ever since, releasing an album every year or two. I've got 14 of them, missing a few. His newer stuff is more rock/industrial though.
Frankly, if someone pirates a game and then has the nerve to ask for support on the official company forums, they deserve to be banned, bug or not. Garry did the right thing, especially if this results in better (quicker) service for paying customers.
Exactly what kind of living hell are we talking about ? This is the part I don't understand... it's a civil suit, so all they can do is win a judgment worth $X, which he likely does not have, so he would go bankrupt. End of story. The injunction still applies either way, so nothing is really lost except a few trivial belongings. He's barely out of diapers for fuck's sake, not like he's losing a house and child support...
If he had taken the chance to fight, and lost everything, I certainly would not mind helping him get back on his feet. I can't speak for the other donators, but one would hope that if he had stuck his neck out for us, we'd return the favour.
In any case, the point is moot. He got cold feet, took their deal and called it quits. The bright side is his ego disorder might get knocked down a few notches, which can only do him good in the long term.
The main difference over here is they don't get attacked for defrauding someone. I don't know if it's a Canadian thing but most suckers just throw a little tantrum, make a scene in the shop then leave 10-15 minutes later, once they accept the fact that shouting isn't going to accomplish anything. Respect for the law is not common within those circles.
I think my most sordid anecdote involves a shop owner who would seduce his suppliers' female sales reps, just to get inside (and confidential) dirt on his competitors. This guy was a young playboy so he could pull it off quite easily. The next day, he'd tell me how revolting she was but that his profits would be worth the suffering. He had a habit of completely buying out whatever was trendy, just to shut out every other shop in the country and "corner the market" on a particular SKU, until one of his conquests figured it out and began feeding him bogus factoids just to maximize her sales bonuses. That pile of discontinued Socket-A processors sat in his warehouse for years, then one day a "fire" erupted and "destroyed" them all for insurance purposes:P
Between that, and the routine cooking of books, and paying the staff in cash, you almost have to wonder how he avoids getting caught. Maybe he's fucking the tax auditor too!:P
In that case, every single DRM'ed game should be flagged as a trojan, since the overwhelming majority of them use run-time decryption and decompression. This is why most No-CD cracks are significantly larger than the original EXE file.
DVDs cannot always be perfectly copied, there are certain tiny pieces of information that can be read but not written by any burner, such as the BCA, or PMSN on Blu-Ray discs. It is also possible to check the angular positioning of a sector on certain devices (Xbox 360), something that simply cannot be trivially duplicated on a burner, which typically does not offer any control over a sector's angle and will vary from one batch of media to the next.
So, yes, console games are mostly just DVDs, but since they do not need to interoperate with every computer in the world, they are free to implement their own additions to the medium and reader, which specifically hinder duplication efforts.
And yet, on a console there is nothing preventing me from lending and borrowing games. Want to play Halo with a friend ? Bring the disc to their place and play. Want to play Starcraft II with a friend ? Um.. Tell them to spend $60 to buy the game, wait five hours for downloading and patching, and play with him some other time:P
Given how widespread piracy has gotten, which I believe is a direct response to ever-encroaching abusive DRM, I'm of the opinion that software developers should skip the DRM and simply accept copying as a fact of life. The great majority of pirated installations are not "lost sales", because these people weren't going to pay for it in the first place. You cannot lay claim to money that did not exist - well, not outside of the financial industry anyway. It doesn't even matter if your game is tethered to an online service, people will develop server emulators, or one of your devs will leak the official server code for a price.
The same rules that apply in meatspace also apply in the software industry: Make a product that people want to buy, or GTFO. The only people who want to buy DRM, are greedy, misguided, moronic management types that got wined and dined by a DRM vendor.
I'll give you partial credit, it's true that the absurd number of AV false positives leads to desensitization, but that blame rests squarely on the AV developers for purposefully flagging anything that looks like a crack or keygen (seems to revolve around API calls for the odd-shaped windows and chiptune playback). That said, viruses are a rarity on "official" pirate channels, since it only takes one infected victim to warn all the others and get the uploader banned (or plonked). Of course, for those getting stuff second-hand from public sites like TPB or old-school p2p such as Limewire, that social enforcement does not apply.
The alternative is to rely on mainstream web sites such as the GameCopyWorld and MegaGames, which have been publishing No-CD cracks for over a decade, and while they have accidentally posted infected files in the past (rarely), they are quick to remove them once identified.
Also keep in mind that today's viruses are usually benign - annoying, but non-destructive - they install some fraudware to run on startup, which either hijacks passwords/financial info, or tries to sell you a fake anti-virus to remove the infection (again stealing your CC info). It's not like the ones we used to write in the Dos days, since back then we didn't have the internet, thus no way to courier stolen data back to the author, so most viruses would simply append themselves to every EXE or COM file and slowly corrupt your entire system out of sheer sociopathic boredom.
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Actually, the movies would probably be better if they DIDN'T use computers so extensively. Stereo video recording provides a much more realistic 3D experience than any digital editing (ab)used for campy effect.
A very poor optical illusion, at that.
Having played 3D games back in the 90's, I knew exactly what to expect, and even then I was disappointed. The fact that so many 3D movies focus on special effects rather than immersion is a big part of that disappointment. Even in Tron Legacy, they had to do that one shot where some weapon jumps right at the viewer; idiotic pre-teen bullshit that only serves to give viewers headaches and insult their intellect. Actually, that entire movie was an insult to intellect, but I digress...
In comparison, 3D gaming is a lot more satisfying, because the entire scene is 3D, not just some director-focused gimmick in the background, and since you can adjust the depth effect, it is possible to dial it up to a more convincing level and really lose yourself in the scene. I don't think any of that is even possible in a movie theatre, not unless they start handing out active glasses with their own built-in LCD screens and per-user adjustments... but then it's just a bunch of cyborg weirdos in a dark room, paying too much for popcorn and soda.
Having sat on one too many IRC meetings, I can quite firmly state that the Pirate Party of Canada is a joke, a very profound disappointment. Every single moment I've spent on their web site or in a chat room has felt like a colossal waste of my time. Nothing but a bunch of overgrown children fussing over inane trivia, trying to sell memberships and merch, and refusing to agree on any sort of official stance or direction. They can't promise shit, because they're too busy arguing over who's going to pay for the next batch of business cards. Appoint a goddamned treasurer, throw fund raisers and awareness rallies, take out ads in the paper or on progressive TV channels, you know, the usual political song-and-dance.
To put things into perspective, the non-partisan OpenMedia group has had great success in the battle against UBB (usage based billing), by leveraging those very same activities. They send an email, maybe once a month, asking for donations and listing off any upcoming meets in my area, and they have delivered RESULTS! If the PPoC put in one tenth of the efforts and professionalism demonstrated by the OpenMedia group, they'd have far more credibility and pull.
Even non-geeks tend to have the opinion that the PPoC are just a bunch of freeloading cyber-hippies, and that's insulting to hippies.
What's really irritating is that every penny of settlement cash will only serve to fund more patent trolling.
It seems to me, as a foreigner, that the U.S. gov't should be stepping in to apply corrective discipline to the Texas legal system, and ideally to the entire country. Texas is renown for favouring patent trolls, which I can only assume is a fantastic gravy train for the judges and lawyers over there. They are, stereotypically, too self-centered and perhaps too ignorant to realize their actions are leading the nation to ruin.
Patent troll companies should not be allowed to exist. In my opinion, patents should be non-transferable. What sense does it make to have a pack of underemployed lawyers hold IP for technology they cannot even begin to comprehend ?
I'm no chemistry whiz, but wouldn't this result in a lot of vaporized aluminum in the air ? Doesn't sound so great for the old lungs, no...
Dude, if it were just about cutting out gamestop, I'd be all for it. There are few things I find more ridiculous in this world than the practice of selling a used title for $5.00 less than the new one, except perhaps the witless sycophants who actually buy them. The 3-for-1 trade-in deal is also pretty freakin' atrocious.
But the reality is that the game industry is adopting Sony's movie and music industry practices. More money, more profiteering parasites at the executive level, and more customer abuse and FUD to justify the egregious corruption.
If it costs $100 million to make a shitty game like GTA IV, the game industry needs a reality check. That is some serious coin just to display cartoon figures on a TV screen. How much of that budget is being funneled to non-production assets (i.e. profiteering suits) ?
DUH! It's common knowledge that bumping up vCore allows for higher clocks :)
For the cost of one 105mbit account, how many 5mbit accounts could you afford ? Each one would have 250 gb included... add them up!
Let's also not forget that this is DOCSIS. Sure, channel bonding makes it appear like four 27mbit modems, but that's still one big fat chunk of bandwidth, which results in major slowdowns during peak hours. The fatter the pipe, the harder the impact due to the way S-CDMA works.
I'll take an RV016 and parallel modems over this oversold hype.
How often do you download files smaller than 10 mb in 2011 ? Let's look at my download folder for the past week or so:
400mb virtual appliance ISO
250mb Blackberry SDK
130mb Eclipse IDE
80mb Java JDK
35mb Clam Antivirus update
30mb Intel network drivers
15mb Wordpress theme
10mb PDF ebook
3.5mb Winamp
Yeahhh... how many people still use Winamp in this day and age ? I'm old fashioned, what can I say...
That bothersome 0.5% of customers are what paved the way for super fast data in the first place. Without those guys constantly straining the infrastructure, the ISPs would see no reason to upgrade, and I could not afford to be self-employed because I'd have to pay through the nose for a dedicated uplink. We'd still be on 1mbit DSL and your monthly cap would be 2 gb instead of 60.
You should see the amount of data I consume on a typical workday. VPNs, remote desktop / VNC, SSH tunneling, VMWare, patches, SVN, backups, email attachments, heartbeats, screencasts, test data, screen sharing, VoIP conferencing... February was a slow month and I still blew 200 gb, normally I hover around 600 gb.
The key fact most critics neglect to consider is that pirates can't afford to be downloading 24/7, because those ill-gotten bits have to be stored somewhere. Do you honestly believe those freeloaders are willing to spend another $50 to $100 on external hard drives every month ? I'm in the business of supplying enterprise SAN/NAS boxes and even I wouldn't bother stashing all those bits.
Of course he'd want to disallow them. Smart cops are nothing but trouble for the dumb ones, messing up the scams and challenging idiotic practices and policies. Or, if you're a cynical left-wing pseudo-anarchist wacko like myself, you could say that it's a waste of a brain, since a smart cop is just as (in)effective as any other. If your IQ is so high as to be notable, you should be doing something more intellectual with your life. Like making sandwiches (really freakin' awesome sandwiches!)
I haven't checked for this particular game, but pirated DLC is a very common sight. I know for a fact that every single expansion for Fallout 3 has been cracked, heck I think someone released a tool that unlocks any DLC for that game - even on legit installs!
Even with my account password, the worst anyone can do with my online banking is send an assload of money to my phone company. It would royally piss me off, sure, but it's not like they can send it to themselves.
Ahh see this is the difference. In Canada, bankruptcy will get you out of that hell. At least some people still believe corporations should not be allowed to ruin people's lives for the almighty dollar... though that is becoming less and less so thanks to the Harper crew.
Not banned from steam, banned from GMod forums. If they don't already own GMod, then it's not a huge loss, you'd think ? And arguably if one were to buy GMod post-ban, they could probably email someone to get unbanned.
Not the end of the world.
Just the one mainstream hit, sure, but he has been musically active ever since, releasing an album every year or two. I've got 14 of them, missing a few. His newer stuff is more rock/industrial though.
Frankly, if someone pirates a game and then has the nerve to ask for support on the official company forums, they deserve to be banned, bug or not. Garry did the right thing, especially if this results in better (quicker) service for paying customers.
Exactly what kind of living hell are we talking about ? This is the part I don't understand... it's a civil suit, so all they can do is win a judgment worth $X, which he likely does not have, so he would go bankrupt. End of story. The injunction still applies either way, so nothing is really lost except a few trivial belongings. He's barely out of diapers for fuck's sake, not like he's losing a house and child support...
If he had taken the chance to fight, and lost everything, I certainly would not mind helping him get back on his feet. I can't speak for the other donators, but one would hope that if he had stuck his neck out for us, we'd return the favour.
In any case, the point is moot. He got cold feet, took their deal and called it quits. The bright side is his ego disorder might get knocked down a few notches, which can only do him good in the long term.
Math classes don't have any valid references, so they get reaped by the garbage collector. *ba-dum-tss*
The main difference over here is they don't get attacked for defrauding someone. I don't know if it's a Canadian thing but most suckers just throw a little tantrum, make a scene in the shop then leave 10-15 minutes later, once they accept the fact that shouting isn't going to accomplish anything. Respect for the law is not common within those circles.
I think my most sordid anecdote involves a shop owner who would seduce his suppliers' female sales reps, just to get inside (and confidential) dirt on his competitors. This guy was a young playboy so he could pull it off quite easily. The next day, he'd tell me how revolting she was but that his profits would be worth the suffering. He had a habit of completely buying out whatever was trendy, just to shut out every other shop in the country and "corner the market" on a particular SKU, until one of his conquests figured it out and began feeding him bogus factoids just to maximize her sales bonuses. That pile of discontinued Socket-A processors sat in his warehouse for years, then one day a "fire" erupted and "destroyed" them all for insurance purposes :P
Between that, and the routine cooking of books, and paying the staff in cash, you almost have to wonder how he avoids getting caught. Maybe he's fucking the tax auditor too! :P
In that case, every single DRM'ed game should be flagged as a trojan, since the overwhelming majority of them use run-time decryption and decompression. This is why most No-CD cracks are significantly larger than the original EXE file.
DVDs cannot always be perfectly copied, there are certain tiny pieces of information that can be read but not written by any burner, such as the BCA, or PMSN on Blu-Ray discs. It is also possible to check the angular positioning of a sector on certain devices (Xbox 360), something that simply cannot be trivially duplicated on a burner, which typically does not offer any control over a sector's angle and will vary from one batch of media to the next.
So, yes, console games are mostly just DVDs, but since they do not need to interoperate with every computer in the world, they are free to implement their own additions to the medium and reader, which specifically hinder duplication efforts.
And yet, on a console there is nothing preventing me from lending and borrowing games. Want to play Halo with a friend ? Bring the disc to their place and play. Want to play Starcraft II with a friend ? Um.. Tell them to spend $60 to buy the game, wait five hours for downloading and patching, and play with him some other time :P
Given how widespread piracy has gotten, which I believe is a direct response to ever-encroaching abusive DRM, I'm of the opinion that software developers should skip the DRM and simply accept copying as a fact of life. The great majority of pirated installations are not "lost sales", because these people weren't going to pay for it in the first place. You cannot lay claim to money that did not exist - well, not outside of the financial industry anyway. It doesn't even matter if your game is tethered to an online service, people will develop server emulators, or one of your devs will leak the official server code for a price.
The same rules that apply in meatspace also apply in the software industry: Make a product that people want to buy, or GTFO. The only people who want to buy DRM, are greedy, misguided, moronic management types that got wined and dined by a DRM vendor.
I'll give you partial credit, it's true that the absurd number of AV false positives leads to desensitization, but that blame rests squarely on the AV developers for purposefully flagging anything that looks like a crack or keygen (seems to revolve around API calls for the odd-shaped windows and chiptune playback). That said, viruses are a rarity on "official" pirate channels, since it only takes one infected victim to warn all the others and get the uploader banned (or plonked). Of course, for those getting stuff second-hand from public sites like TPB or old-school p2p such as Limewire, that social enforcement does not apply.
The alternative is to rely on mainstream web sites such as the GameCopyWorld and MegaGames, which have been publishing No-CD cracks for over a decade, and while they have accidentally posted infected files in the past (rarely), they are quick to remove them once identified.
Also keep in mind that today's viruses are usually benign - annoying, but non-destructive - they install some fraudware to run on startup, which either hijacks passwords/financial info, or tries to sell you a fake anti-virus to remove the infection (again stealing your CC info). It's not like the ones we used to write in the Dos days, since back then we didn't have the internet, thus no way to courier stolen data back to the author, so most viruses would simply append themselves to every EXE or COM file and slowly corrupt your entire system out of sheer sociopathic boredom.