For me? No. Actually, after a great deal of searching have not found anyone else on the planet with the same name as I have. And I check, regularly. There is a *fake* dating game profile that used my name, but it wasn't me and I had to send a lawyer after them because by coincidence it could have been me (location and age were close to my own), and contained some less than desirable characteristics. Their defence, I suppose fairly, was it was a random name/location/person generator. But I still made them take it down.
But no, real names generally aren't unique. It's not even unique within a school. But adding *another* name on top of that adds a layer of confusion especially if the name added could be new.
The point I was making was as much about when they choose that name.
Lots of people use their middle names rather than first and so on, and honestly, I would have no idea. Hell I didn't know my own aunt did that for years. But there's a difference between a subset of your actual name and some arbitrary alias. Going from John Doe as a subset of John Adam Doe, to technerd314159265 is different than going to J.A. Doe or J.Adam Doe.
What should Facebook force him to use, the name he's actually known by, or the name on some bit of paperwork?
The name on paperwork. They actually support given vs married names.
Even then, they can still uniquely identify you by the fake name. But I think they've gotten into trouble with people using fake names and pretending to be people they aren't.
If you're friends with Cowboy Neal, but he's not on facebook, and I go and make an account under the name Cowboy Neal, take his photos and use that try and befriend you and get you to divulge personal information about your relationship with Cowboy Neal that's hard to prosecute (or police) without a real name policy. Because I have as much right to call myself Cowboy Neal as Johnathan Pater if we can all use nicknames equally. And how do you show that I'm not cowboy neal who just lost his account info.
Facebook is also trying to convert 'likes' and other marketing products into real tangible things. If you and I both 'like' borderlands 2 then gearbox can see that we liked the page. If we can be fake people that poses a problem. If they want to bill you for a service (points to be used in online games) they need a valid billing name to be able to charge you, and of course eventually they want you to be a paying customer.
Probably some of it is purely practical. Trying to keep track of one friend using a kind of fake name isn't so bad. Trying to keep track of several of them, that use names which have no relation to their actual name seriously limits the usability of facebook. I, now about 15 years out of highschool, have enough trouble trying to sort out women with married names (15 years and kids change appearance a lot) and a lot of times I can't really tell if it's a person I know or not. Facebook doesn't work if it's trying to be private but social, they are opposing goals. At least in the real world, and with people who only sometimes use facebook and where you can regularly have several hundred friends, all of whom are people you actually know and wish to keep in touch with. Facebook lives and breathes on your ability to find people, if enough people become impossible to find or keep track of it starts to lose its functionality. Of course that need to find the actual correct person is the greatest gift to stalkers in history. Unfortunately.
I have lots of my (university) students befriend me on facebook, and being in CS and engineering a lot of them are foreign students. Their names on paper are usually names appropriate to their country of origin. But they then try and use western sounding names either part way through or after graduate. And quite honestly, 2 years after you were my student as Xi Li, now being David Lee, I have no fucking clue who you are. That's not even on facebook necessarily, that's just trying to keep track of records of who people actually are. Take a kid out of a classroom, feed him properly for 2 years, give him a real job and some decent clothes and then give me a thumbnail sized photo and I'm not going to to figure out which name I knew you under.
Lords reform is already on the books. It's also extremely complicated, because right now the church of england is compelled to make it's properties available for any citizen (weddings marriages etc.) whether the church wants to go along with it or not. If they are made independent it will require a lot of lawyer hours to sort out just what will happen to existing contracts and future rules etc. There is also the issue of the leadership of the church, the sovereign acting separately as head of a church of england could pass church laws that are not consistent with the views of parliament. That's a constitutional nightmare waiting to happen.
as it is an affront to democracy
the UK has been quite successful for the better part of 900 years being a half step to democracy and a half step toward the legal rule by people who will just buy power anyway. Changing that seems counter productive. You don't want to end up like the united states.
That is the stated intent. It has not actually been enshrined in law. Doing so is mostly a political hot potato, because it gives republicans something to complain about.
Again, if it turns out to be an issue the 15 realms in question will have to get off their arses and do something, but I'm sure they have other things they'd rather argue over. I picked the example specifically because everyone agrees the law should be changed, people are just lazy about actually doing it.
Because getting rid of the state religion, and the state relationship with the church of england would be problematic. It's not that it can't or won't be done, but there's quite a lot of legal effort involved in the powers of parliament vs the sovereign vs the church as an independent entity.
In some respects it's the same reason why none of the countries have actually settled the legal inheritance issue of if the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have a daughter and then a son (just a daughter, or multiple daughters doesn't require any rewrite), because it's not that we can't sort this out. But it's a lot of legal paperwork that can be deferred 50 or 60 years if they never have a son after a daughter.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me.
The sith should not need to hide in the shadows pretending to be jedi any longer.
SecureBoot with a fully trusted chain makes it impossible... right up until an exploit is found in the chain.
Secureboot is only really about preventing unsigned code from loading before the operating system. It never was intended to do anything to stop anything at the application level.
I did this when I was 15' and it was harder then as programmers weren't so lazy to store things in easily editable unsigned XML files since MOST people using computers had a bit of a clue.
Depends on the problem at hand. Back in say even the 90's there was lot less knowledge of how to write secure code and how to hack it, so it wasn't that hard to hack things. Now there's a lot more stuff, and programs are significantly more complex, on average, even supposedly simple things require significant OS libraries, and even if you know your way around security you may not know what the OS is doing. You also may not care. I'm going to guess the vast vast vast vast vast vast vast majority of windows 8 'apps' are intended mostly so that programmers can have some idea how it works rather than as serious commercial products. In 3 or 4 months we might see more serious products, but for the moment I think it's just a toy.
I hope that they have some kind of common sense approach over there.
Unlikely. But at least it will be the same patent in a lot more countries. Needing dozens of teams of lawyers to manage dozens of different sets of rules is just not productive.
First, as a tech community we should not, in any way, be going along with turning Windows into a closed platform/walled garden/ whatever you want to call it. This 'you must receive MS approval' bullshit cannot and should not be supported. Absolutely no one who makes any popular software should be seeking approval from microsoft, ever. If you want to be an abused spouse Apple has room.
Secondly. Even if Windows 8 was an open platform, it's still a terrible user experience. At its heart is the inconsistent confused nature of the two different GUI's. I'm sympathetic, it's hard to figure out how to resolve this issue as a developer. But that's the problem. Windows 9 compatibility could require significant code changes if they decide to axe one of the two GUI's, or add a third or god knows what. Spending money on a project like VLC to make it all 'metro' is simply not sensible and not something we should in any way be going along with. Most especially not given that it is quite likely they will need to beg for money again in a couple of years to support windows 9, and toss their entire windows 8 codebase.
That's a problem for a company though, since well, you'd be stepping on legal toes with gamespy, and you still have to patch your game to point it at the right new servers.
None of which is impossible to deal with, but it costs money and time, and especially if you don't have source for your old game, or the publisher doesn't exist or whatever, you're risking some trouble. Not so much for retribution, but think BioWare (now EA) with Neverwinter nights and Interplay.
That's because it's *their* platform though, and they have more money than anyone else by a long shot. If it costs 20 grand a year Blizzard can afford it and not even notice it on the balance sheet. Everyone else... not so much.
And after all, these companies were *paying* for support in some way shape or form on gamespy, or they had an agreement that let gamespy get revenue or the like, and they were continuing to pay for it. But this just increased their costs dramatically and requires major code rewrites that they weren't planning for.
I do not like the direction that Blizzard has gone, and refuse to buy their new games until they make signing into Battle.Net completely optional, but they do a fantastic job of supporting their old ones.
I can sort of buy that for Starcraft II, because there is a purely single player plot campaign, but Diablo 3 is multiplayer through and through, you can run by yourself in the multiplayer maps but the whole economy and the whole idea of your character being able to be taken into multiplayer at any time make it a multiplayer game from the ground up. Since you don't really progress a character in starcraft I can see the point though, but the thing is, they're trying to connect you to the social side of the game, and that's part of the game.
If there are 2000-3000 people still semi regularly playing your game, and it's going to take 100k to get it going how likely do you think a kickstarter is? What if you can't get it done? (Some of this stuff is absolutely ancient code, the people involved may have long since moved on or stopped coding for years, it may be writing multiplayer from the ground up. Not impossible, but probably not worth the expense of many tens or small hundreds of thousands of dollars for a small number of players). And we're not counting infrastructure costs.
The open source question is fleshed out a bit in some other replies.
Long answer: Letting the fans 'fix' it may not be a solution. It's not just a game bug, it's a whole system missing, who is going to run and pay for the servers? Do you want the experience of playing your game to involve downloading some sketchy patch from some sketchy place and connecting to some sketchy server? Letting fans work on it means it could take years to resolve if at all. You may be reusing major portions of your code, you may not own the license to it etc. Take neverwinter nights, which is aurora toolkit. I spoke specifically with two bioware guys a couple of weeks ago about how it would be nice if that toolkit was still available for teaching game design with (because it will run on anything and you can use existing game assets and a few other things), and I basically got a non answer (if you can find it on a shelf go to it, which is fair enough, but I was hoping for something more useful). My suspicion is that the source for the games would have an interplay license on it, and interplay has less employees than there are people commenting on this thread, so trying to come up with a plan to give away the source for free could take ages, assuming you ever could. And notice the baulders gate enhanced edition that just came out? If you gave away the source for free it would make a re-release or a port to new platforms much harder to commercialize if you want to do that sort of thing. (Neverwinter nights for iPad for example).
For something like star wars battlefront, the company that made it doesn't even exist. The source is probably in a lucasarts archive somewhere, but they may not even have the people to review the code to be sure they aren't giving away something that was licensed but maybe didn't make the credits (say from a shop on the corner or that they bought a generic package). The art assets.... again, hard to say.
It's not that you can't, and for some games that's probably a good idea, god knows in the teaching game development and design side of things we would love more games with source, but it's something you really need to plan for in advance.
Other people can pick apart the Flight simulator X topic specifically, but I said mainly for a reason. I'm sure you still *can* use gamespy and if you hate using Steamworks (and believe me, I would have the utmost sympathy if you do) and don't have a big publisher you do just write your own. My point was that it's a rapidly shrinking market for gamespy, which is probably why IGN sold it.
That's the problem. gamespy is mainly legacy stuff, Sniper elite is from about 2005, neverwinter nights is a lot older than that. There's just no money in writing all new multiplayer + patching for a 7 or 8 year old game unless it's an MMO type product. It's not that you can't do it, it's that 7 or 8 years on with no warning there isn't a whole lot of value in allocating 3 programmers for 3 or 4 months onto the problem.
Everything new is going to be done with your own publisher servers, the console platform publishers or with Steam, I think the last big game to use gamespy for multiplayer was borderlands, or at least that's the last big one I can think of. Borderlands 2 looks like it integrates steamworks for PC multiplayer.
If walmart suddenly closed its 20 smallest stores would it suddenly not be a major company?
The problem with gamespy is that most PC games have shifted to steam or their own publishers dedicated multiplayer (e.g. through origin or Uplay). At this point gamespy multiplayer is mostly legacy stuff, and there aren't a lot of options for them in the marketplace.
Because the SEC has specific disclosure rules. Your own website only sort of maybe nowdays kind of counts as public disclosure. Facebook may not meet legal requirements.
Don't get me wrong, you're making the same argument as the company, and I tend to agree that is what the law *should* be, but that doesn't mean that's what the law is, and you don't want to find out the hard way you're on the wrong side of the law.
That's misunderstanding how Facebook works. Any one can wilfully choose to subscribe to his updates, so it's the same as them being public.
That might be an oversimplification of the law on disclosing information that may materially effect investors though. But yes, the obvious assumption here is that SEC rules have not kept pace with technology.
I'm surprised that Slashdot is bothering with this.
I'm not. It hits on a couple of important areas for slashdot readers. The reach of the SEC into social networking, most especially if they consider this to have been 'material information' given away privately that could lead to insider trading, and because it effects someone at a well known tech company saying something a lot of us could know or talk about. If you were a network admin at netflix and posted on your facebook page that you just served your first billion views month bragging about the professional accomplishment would you be in SEC trouble (and would your employer?).
As TFA points out, disclosing to 200k people should maybe count as a press release (especially if anyone can see the page), but uh... it might not. The law and common sense don't always align and it would be problematic to find out the hard way that this was in someway unlawful. I don't work for any traded companies, but I could envision a situation where someone could disclose to their friends work related successes that count as material investor information, and that could cause trouble. A lot of it.
Nuclear mass murder of civilians and "victory" by murder blackmail of the non-combattant population are not glorious.
hence my reference to the royal navy, who's primary purpose was to starve france or spain into submission when the need arose (as they did, repeatedly). How about any of russias war memorials from WW2, given that they killed millions of germans in the process. How about the first world war memorials? Would a memorial to the ships of the US navy be acceptable if rather than nuking japan they had just let them starve? That was after all the plan, the British were going to blockade Japan until 49 and then invade after they'd starved for 3 years.
How about if they had invaded, and just done the regular (for the time) bombings if they'd just killed millions of people in the process?
Even if you go back to the various things I mentioned, and I picked them specifically, those wars being commemorated killed proportionally a lot of people, and a lot of them civilians. That's war, and the historical precedent is strongly on the side of commemorating victories, even brutally fought ones.
Slashdot Mirror
For me? No. Actually, after a great deal of searching have not found anyone else on the planet with the same name as I have. And I check, regularly. There is a *fake* dating game profile that used my name, but it wasn't me and I had to send a lawyer after them because by coincidence it could have been me (location and age were close to my own), and contained some less than desirable characteristics. Their defence, I suppose fairly, was it was a random name/location/person generator. But I still made them take it down.
But no, real names generally aren't unique. It's not even unique within a school. But adding *another* name on top of that adds a layer of confusion especially if the name added could be new.
depends, if you go with something like sjames, sjames7197 or sjames500 how am I supposed to know which of those is you? (e.g. on twitter).
Arab names, like the belovedly generic Syed Ali Abbas are annoyingly anonymous everywhere, as are a lot of the particularly short chinese names.
The point I was making was as much about when they choose that name.
Lots of people use their middle names rather than first and so on, and honestly, I would have no idea. Hell I didn't know my own aunt did that for years. But there's a difference between a subset of your actual name and some arbitrary alias. Going from John Doe as a subset of John Adam Doe, to technerd314159265 is different than going to J.A. Doe or J.Adam Doe.
What should Facebook force him to use, the name he's actually known by, or the name on some bit of paperwork?
The name on paperwork. They actually support given vs married names.
Third paragraph, last sentence 'they' as in Facebook, not gearbox. I mashed up a couple of thoughts sorry.
Even then, they can still uniquely identify you by the fake name. But I think they've gotten into trouble with people using fake names and pretending to be people they aren't.
If you're friends with Cowboy Neal, but he's not on facebook, and I go and make an account under the name Cowboy Neal, take his photos and use that try and befriend you and get you to divulge personal information about your relationship with Cowboy Neal that's hard to prosecute (or police) without a real name policy. Because I have as much right to call myself Cowboy Neal as Johnathan Pater if we can all use nicknames equally. And how do you show that I'm not cowboy neal who just lost his account info.
Facebook is also trying to convert 'likes' and other marketing products into real tangible things. If you and I both 'like' borderlands 2 then gearbox can see that we liked the page. If we can be fake people that poses a problem. If they want to bill you for a service (points to be used in online games) they need a valid billing name to be able to charge you, and of course eventually they want you to be a paying customer.
Probably some of it is purely practical. Trying to keep track of one friend using a kind of fake name isn't so bad. Trying to keep track of several of them, that use names which have no relation to their actual name seriously limits the usability of facebook. I, now about 15 years out of highschool, have enough trouble trying to sort out women with married names (15 years and kids change appearance a lot) and a lot of times I can't really tell if it's a person I know or not. Facebook doesn't work if it's trying to be private but social, they are opposing goals. At least in the real world, and with people who only sometimes use facebook and where you can regularly have several hundred friends, all of whom are people you actually know and wish to keep in touch with. Facebook lives and breathes on your ability to find people, if enough people become impossible to find or keep track of it starts to lose its functionality. Of course that need to find the actual correct person is the greatest gift to stalkers in history. Unfortunately.
I have lots of my (university) students befriend me on facebook, and being in CS and engineering a lot of them are foreign students. Their names on paper are usually names appropriate to their country of origin. But they then try and use western sounding names either part way through or after graduate. And quite honestly, 2 years after you were my student as Xi Li, now being David Lee, I have no fucking clue who you are. That's not even on facebook necessarily, that's just trying to keep track of records of who people actually are. Take a kid out of a classroom, feed him properly for 2 years, give him a real job and some decent clothes and then give me a thumbnail sized photo and I'm not going to to figure out which name I knew you under.
Except dell is migrating into an enterprise solutions business. Their consumer product business is somewhat secondary to their business software.
I believe they can decline to perform a ceremony, but cannot prevent renting of the venue.
Lords reform is already on the books. It's also extremely complicated, because right now the church of england is compelled to make it's properties available for any citizen (weddings marriages etc.) whether the church wants to go along with it or not. If they are made independent it will require a lot of lawyer hours to sort out just what will happen to existing contracts and future rules etc. There is also the issue of the leadership of the church, the sovereign acting separately as head of a church of england could pass church laws that are not consistent with the views of parliament. That's a constitutional nightmare waiting to happen.
as it is an affront to democracy
the UK has been quite successful for the better part of 900 years being a half step to democracy and a half step toward the legal rule by people who will just buy power anyway. Changing that seems counter productive. You don't want to end up like the united states.
That is the stated intent. It has not actually been enshrined in law. Doing so is mostly a political hot potato, because it gives republicans something to complain about.
Again, if it turns out to be an issue the 15 realms in question will have to get off their arses and do something, but I'm sure they have other things they'd rather argue over. I picked the example specifically because everyone agrees the law should be changed, people are just lazy about actually doing it.
Because getting rid of the state religion, and the state relationship with the church of england would be problematic. It's not that it can't or won't be done, but there's quite a lot of legal effort involved in the powers of parliament vs the sovereign vs the church as an independent entity.
In some respects it's the same reason why none of the countries have actually settled the legal inheritance issue of if the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have a daughter and then a son (just a daughter, or multiple daughters doesn't require any rewrite), because it's not that we can't sort this out. But it's a lot of legal paperwork that can be deferred 50 or 60 years if they never have a son after a daughter.
because
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
The sith should not need to hide in the shadows pretending to be jedi any longer.
SecureBoot with a fully trusted chain makes it impossible ... right up until an exploit is found in the chain.
Secureboot is only really about preventing unsigned code from loading before the operating system. It never was intended to do anything to stop anything at the application level.
I did this when I was 15' and it was harder then as programmers weren't so lazy to store things in easily editable unsigned XML files since MOST people using computers had a bit of a clue.
Depends on the problem at hand. Back in say even the 90's there was lot less knowledge of how to write secure code and how to hack it, so it wasn't that hard to hack things. Now there's a lot more stuff, and programs are significantly more complex, on average, even supposedly simple things require significant OS libraries, and even if you know your way around security you may not know what the OS is doing. You also may not care. I'm going to guess the vast vast vast vast vast vast vast majority of windows 8 'apps' are intended mostly so that programmers can have some idea how it works rather than as serious commercial products. In 3 or 4 months we might see more serious products, but for the moment I think it's just a toy.
I hope that they have some kind of common sense approach over there.
Unlikely. But at least it will be the same patent in a lot more countries. Needing dozens of teams of lawyers to manage dozens of different sets of rules is just not productive.
This. A million times this.
There two basic things wrong with the VLC plan.
First, as a tech community we should not, in any way, be going along with turning Windows into a closed platform/walled garden/ whatever you want to call it. This 'you must receive MS approval' bullshit cannot and should not be supported. Absolutely no one who makes any popular software should be seeking approval from microsoft, ever. If you want to be an abused spouse Apple has room.
Secondly. Even if Windows 8 was an open platform, it's still a terrible user experience. At its heart is the inconsistent confused nature of the two different GUI's. I'm sympathetic, it's hard to figure out how to resolve this issue as a developer. But that's the problem. Windows 9 compatibility could require significant code changes if they decide to axe one of the two GUI's, or add a third or god knows what. Spending money on a project like VLC to make it all 'metro' is simply not sensible and not something we should in any way be going along with. Most especially not given that it is quite likely they will need to beg for money again in a couple of years to support windows 9, and toss their entire windows 8 codebase.
That's a problem for a company though, since well, you'd be stepping on legal toes with gamespy, and you still have to patch your game to point it at the right new servers.
None of which is impossible to deal with, but it costs money and time, and especially if you don't have source for your old game, or the publisher doesn't exist or whatever, you're risking some trouble. Not so much for retribution, but think BioWare (now EA) with Neverwinter nights and Interplay.
That's because it's *their* platform though, and they have more money than anyone else by a long shot. If it costs 20 grand a year Blizzard can afford it and not even notice it on the balance sheet. Everyone else... not so much.
And after all, these companies were *paying* for support in some way shape or form on gamespy, or they had an agreement that let gamespy get revenue or the like, and they were continuing to pay for it. But this just increased their costs dramatically and requires major code rewrites that they weren't planning for.
I do not like the direction that Blizzard has gone, and refuse to buy their new games until they make signing into Battle.Net completely optional, but they do a fantastic job of supporting their old ones.
I can sort of buy that for Starcraft II, because there is a purely single player plot campaign, but Diablo 3 is multiplayer through and through, you can run by yourself in the multiplayer maps but the whole economy and the whole idea of your character being able to be taken into multiplayer at any time make it a multiplayer game from the ground up. Since you don't really progress a character in starcraft I can see the point though, but the thing is, they're trying to connect you to the social side of the game, and that's part of the game.
If there are 2000-3000 people still semi regularly playing your game, and it's going to take 100k to get it going how likely do you think a kickstarter is? What if you can't get it done? (Some of this stuff is absolutely ancient code, the people involved may have long since moved on or stopped coding for years, it may be writing multiplayer from the ground up. Not impossible, but probably not worth the expense of many tens or small hundreds of thousands of dollars for a small number of players). And we're not counting infrastructure costs.
The open source question is fleshed out a bit in some other replies.
Is the source really worth that much?
Short answer yes.
Long answer: Letting the fans 'fix' it may not be a solution. It's not just a game bug, it's a whole system missing, who is going to run and pay for the servers? Do you want the experience of playing your game to involve downloading some sketchy patch from some sketchy place and connecting to some sketchy server? Letting fans work on it means it could take years to resolve if at all. You may be reusing major portions of your code, you may not own the license to it etc. Take neverwinter nights, which is aurora toolkit. I spoke specifically with two bioware guys a couple of weeks ago about how it would be nice if that toolkit was still available for teaching game design with (because it will run on anything and you can use existing game assets and a few other things), and I basically got a non answer (if you can find it on a shelf go to it, which is fair enough, but I was hoping for something more useful). My suspicion is that the source for the games would have an interplay license on it, and interplay has less employees than there are people commenting on this thread, so trying to come up with a plan to give away the source for free could take ages, assuming you ever could. And notice the baulders gate enhanced edition that just came out? If you gave away the source for free it would make a re-release or a port to new platforms much harder to commercialize if you want to do that sort of thing. (Neverwinter nights for iPad for example).
For something like star wars battlefront, the company that made it doesn't even exist. The source is probably in a lucasarts archive somewhere, but they may not even have the people to review the code to be sure they aren't giving away something that was licensed but maybe didn't make the credits (say from a shop on the corner or that they bought a generic package). The art assets.... again, hard to say.
It's not that you can't, and for some games that's probably a good idea, god knows in the teaching game development and design side of things we would love more games with source, but it's something you really need to plan for in advance.
Other people can pick apart the Flight simulator X topic specifically, but I said mainly for a reason. I'm sure you still *can* use gamespy and if you hate using Steamworks (and believe me, I would have the utmost sympathy if you do) and don't have a big publisher you do just write your own. My point was that it's a rapidly shrinking market for gamespy, which is probably why IGN sold it.
That's the problem. gamespy is mainly legacy stuff, Sniper elite is from about 2005, neverwinter nights is a lot older than that. There's just no money in writing all new multiplayer + patching for a 7 or 8 year old game unless it's an MMO type product. It's not that you can't do it, it's that 7 or 8 years on with no warning there isn't a whole lot of value in allocating 3 programmers for 3 or 4 months onto the problem.
Everything new is going to be done with your own publisher servers, the console platform publishers or with Steam, I think the last big game to use gamespy for multiplayer was borderlands, or at least that's the last big one I can think of. Borderlands 2 looks like it integrates steamworks for PC multiplayer.
If walmart suddenly closed its 20 smallest stores would it suddenly not be a major company?
The problem with gamespy is that most PC games have shifted to steam or their own publishers dedicated multiplayer (e.g. through origin or Uplay). At this point gamespy multiplayer is mostly legacy stuff, and there aren't a lot of options for them in the marketplace.
Because the SEC has specific disclosure rules. Your own website only sort of maybe nowdays kind of counts as public disclosure. Facebook may not meet legal requirements.
Don't get me wrong, you're making the same argument as the company, and I tend to agree that is what the law *should* be, but that doesn't mean that's what the law is, and you don't want to find out the hard way you're on the wrong side of the law.
That's misunderstanding how Facebook works.
Any one can wilfully choose to subscribe to his updates, so it's the same as them being public.
That might be an oversimplification of the law on disclosing information that may materially effect investors though. But yes, the obvious assumption here is that SEC rules have not kept pace with technology.
I'm surprised that Slashdot is bothering with this.
I'm not. It hits on a couple of important areas for slashdot readers. The reach of the SEC into social networking, most especially if they consider this to have been 'material information' given away privately that could lead to insider trading, and because it effects someone at a well known tech company saying something a lot of us could know or talk about. If you were a network admin at netflix and posted on your facebook page that you just served your first billion views month bragging about the professional accomplishment would you be in SEC trouble (and would your employer?).
As TFA points out, disclosing to 200k people should maybe count as a press release (especially if anyone can see the page), but uh... it might not. The law and common sense don't always align and it would be problematic to find out the hard way that this was in someway unlawful. I don't work for any traded companies, but I could envision a situation where someone could disclose to their friends work related successes that count as material investor information, and that could cause trouble. A lot of it.
Nuclear mass murder of civilians and "victory" by murder blackmail of the non-combattant population are not glorious.
hence my reference to the royal navy, who's primary purpose was to starve france or spain into submission when the need arose (as they did, repeatedly). How about any of russias war memorials from WW2, given that they killed millions of germans in the process. How about the first world war memorials? Would a memorial to the ships of the US navy be acceptable if rather than nuking japan they had just let them starve? That was after all the plan, the British were going to blockade Japan until 49 and then invade after they'd starved for 3 years.
How about if they had invaded, and just done the regular (for the time) bombings if they'd just killed millions of people in the process?
Even if you go back to the various things I mentioned, and I picked them specifically, those wars being commemorated killed proportionally a lot of people, and a lot of them civilians. That's war, and the historical precedent is strongly on the side of commemorating victories, even brutally fought ones.