That is the definition of hypocrite. Doing something to others you don't want done to yourself.
As for them caring, of course they won't. Until we DDoS Steam, or torch their cars or something. Otherwise you're right, why would they care when they're making money and the people they rip off live so far away?
In a case where the copies or phonorecords were lawfully made, the United States Customs Service has no authority to prevent their importation unless
Do you read your links?
Besides, who cares? Hypocrit is a hypocrit does. If globalization is good enough for them, it's good enough for us. If they hide behind some technicality to evade their responsibilities it's not our obligation to play along.
Rather, it's the obligation of those who live near them to apply subtle extra-legal corrective actions, such as disabling their cars and foreign products. If they want they car to work it's easy, they merely have to purchase another one and transfer the plates...
There are two different cases, one where the software is different. Where the student version has only half the features. If you resold that as the full version you'd be guilty of fraud. That's not what happened here.
In this case though, the software is functionally identical. It will do everything the other one will, but is prevented from doing so by DRM access restrictions.
They're allowed to make a Thai version, or even to stick a sticker on the English version and call it a Thai version, but not to shut it down anywhere else in the world.
That's how they're breaking the law. Taking something I have legal right to own, to purchase, and to use, and shutting it down remotely because of DRM which was enacted specifically to bypass the right of first sale.
Yes, I know they can't enforce their fancy marketing scheme this way. Tough luck.
Steam is sold as a product, and would work as a product were it not for a DRM restriction. Quacks like a product...
That law student is numb in the head. Including the Gateway post-sale-contracts as EULAs despite them not involving software per-se, there are indeed a few cases where the courts in favor of some of the provisions of the contracts such as upholding mandatory arbitration.
You can't really sign away your legal right. You could say "I give you the right to beat the hell out of me for $5" and except in a few cases (sports). this wouldn't be legal. You can't sign away your right to sue me if I defraud you. That means that the arbitration is merely a step you agree to go through first. That simply means the court felt that, regardless of the eventual facts of the case, Gateway had done enough to notify people of its arbitration policy to warrant uphold that. The facts of the case and Gateways misrepresentation which were supposedly supported by the EULA weren't touched in the ruling.
It's like theater tickets. They list some rules such as "You'll be kicked out for creating a disturbance" that are just restatements of legal fact. Any proprietor, ticket warning or not, can eject a rowdy patron and the police will help. However they then go on to claim a bunch of other restrictions like against outside food and drink, ticket resale, etc, etc. These things have absolutely no force. But they're on the same ticket, so when a theater ejects a rowdy patron they count it as validating back-of-ticket-"contracts". This is how EULAs are 'supported' by precedent.
Imagine how retarded the world would be if everyone was shipping special hidden contracts in everything. You buy lumber for your new housing development but when you unwrap it you find a contract that states you aren't allowed to use it to build houses in California because of a deal the lumber yard has with another company - but hey, enjoy your 10-million board-feet of lumber because we don't want it back!
That's what we'd live in if EULAs were valid. People'd use them in all sorts of cases. Cars would come with them. Books. Houses. But they don't. And even things like books that used to now don't because we've passed laws specifically forbidding those sorts of post-sale contracts.
Making an offer puts certain requirements on you to deal with people responding. There are also consumer protection laws in most areas that prevent advertising things you do not intend to sell.
An entitlement is a right defined by law or contract, and a sense of entitlement is feeling you have an entitlement. One is entitled to do something that they have a right to do, or a law allows them to do.
I am entitled to feel entitled to be entitled to buy a product in a store. I am (right in doing) (feeling I have a right) which is (a legally granted entitlement to respond to an offer with acceptance, which signifies the finalizing of a contract) when a store offers me a product.
Do you see?
So legally I have a right to buy the product. They established this by offering it for sale.
So they're selling a product and intentionally crippling it if you didn't pay as much money as possible for it, despite finalizing a legal sale.
This isn't like 50/60hz electricity or a technological problem, this is simply DRM to enforce markets. Exactly like DRM on movie zones. Greed pure and simple.
I'll bet you 100-1 that Valve and its employees/owners use foreign products, despite this harming industry in the USA. (Ever shop in a Walmart?) Now they want the laws that our taxes pay for to help them enforce this DRM against us, so that we can be the only ones in the loop not allowed to shop around for prices.
The government merely need to not give their stamp of approval to patent-encumbered proprietary formats.
Linux is perfectly capable of competing in the market. It's *always* been Microsoft (SCO/etc) trying to get governments to enforce a monopoly on their products. Directly by making open source unusable for government software, or by making their insanely complex formats a requirement.
MS Windows is the one that can't compete in the market. Or MS is just unwilling to try.
No. Breaking the law and sabotaging legally purchased products make Valve into some sort of monster. Telling people that they're SOL and will need to buy another whole copy, that's monstrous.
I imagine the houses of Valve developers, and their office, and filled with things that weren't made in the USA. Should we "remotely disable" (ie, break in and smash with a hammer) all of these products? It would help local industries, and it would make Valve pay what they can afford. No cheap overseas pencils, only the expensive made in the USA kind. No overseas RAM in their computers, etc...
That'd be fair. They want to disable our products to push a buy-locally message. So they should start.
And really, $15 is a lot more to a poor teenage gamer than to the owners of Valve. They'd need to lose $15,000 or more to feel empathy. Wouldn't it be funny if their cars were all disabled and they had to buy new ones. Like a joke. Except with justice attached.
There's no law that lets you forbid importation of products. That's why it's done with DRM and illegal actions like remotely disabling software.
I'm sure you'll find that the staff of Valve is wearing imported clothes, taking advantage of cheaper things overseas. They probably shop at Walmart.
So what's the problem? We both like shopping overseas? Oh... I see. In one case they benefit, in the other I do.
They're hypocrits, willing to take advantage of globalization to increase their own profits, but they sabotage the product to prevent you from doing the same.
What's the value of having more money if everything you want to buy is proportionally more expensive?
So you're right, they should keep the price the same in all countries. Or they should at least stop their illegal actions of sabotaging products of those who import.
What protections does your business have in place against the registered contact calling and making changes of service? My credit card says 'Check ID' and my safe-deposit box says the same. I'm only asked about a quarter of the time. So whatever security measures you think you have you probably don't.
How much did you pay for Doom, or Quake? Oh yeah... you didn't. You pirated them.
Great personal attack. Sorry, but I bought Quake, Quake3, Quake4, and UT2004 along with some other games (including Diablo 2 which never worked, but that's a long story). Quake and UT2004 I bought for full price, most of the rest I buy in the cheap bin.
Orange Box is 5 games for $50. Is $10 a game "ripping you off"?
$0.02 is ripping me off if they sabotage a product that would work except for DRM. Region coding is the only problem.
So you love the work that they spend 70+ hours a week producing... you love the games...
They love the money I worked n+ hours a week earning. They love the food it buys. What's your point?
I will never loose any of the games I have registered with Steam.
I'll never lose the ability to play my cracked games, even if Steam goes away. They're all backed up (~150gb worth) with my photos. I'll bet I can still play Half-Life 1 long after you. Especially with games like GTA3:SA or Oblivion, where they censor the game to a worse-than-original state. I can still play unpatched games. Can you?
Never had one single issue. I LOVE STEAM
Wow, maybe there's a connection. It hasn't screwed up yet and you love it.
Wait until it takes your money and refuses to let you play, even when you've bought another copy. See if you're happy when some shmuck on the net is telling you that it works for him.
you have no idea the dedication that the guys at Valve have. They care about their customers. A LOT. An Example: They had a long power outage in Seattle and the battery backups for the Steam servers were at critical. The guys stayed all night and hacked the -emergency lighting- batteries together to keep the servers up for as long as possible so people could keep playing.
Of course they're dedicated - it pays their rent. But they still stick region coding in the product knowing that it'll keep some people from playing in order to up profits. Their dedication doesn't do much for the people who are cut off because of region coding. In fact those people would actually have been better off if the developers were less dedicated.
You seem to think they have a right to do this. To use region coding to set up discriminatory pricing and enforce it with DRM. Right? And that people should be ethically and legally bound to obey this?
So obviously you wouldn't support Valve outsourcing to Thailand and paying cheaper wages. I mean, they're a US company that expects to sell their game in the rich US market. They can afford US prices and shouldn't expect to get something for nothing.
At that, sure. If they buy all American products (don't shop at Walmart for company supplies) and hire all-local workers, etc, then it'd be a fair trade.
But they're trying to get something for nothing. The law permits everyone to trade internationally and they take advantage of this. They then turn around and try to put technological restrictions on anyone else doing so.
And that leads me to my conclusion. I should just shut down their office for a day or two, and cause some amount of money (where $some/Valve'sTotal == $ThaiPrice/Gamer'sTotal) to be lost such that they feel the pain of the users; "Sorry, no justice for you. Someone else profited a small bit by depriving you of your rights via a technological means that you can't appeal".
As I see it, they're using a technological trick (DRM) to make a product disable itself. This costs the purchaser the purchase price which Valve will not refund. If I used a technological trick to disable so
Yes. If they put a product in stores, I'm entitled to buy it.
If they chose to license their games, I eagerly await them having customers *sign* a contract in front of them, at the store (pre-payment) with witnesses. Otherwise, it's a sale and I'll treat it like one.
Have you ever been at a company that negotiated a volume license with Microsoft? You *know* you've licensed software, as you sign a contract that says it. When you buy Windows or Half-Life at Costco you buy in with other commodities, and the *sale* looks exactly the same. WinXP $250, Socks $2.50, Half-Life $50, Snacks $1.50, etc. If you own your socks and snacks, which you do, then why don't you own Windows? If it's because of the EULA, what happens when sock companies start putting "contracts" in sock packages?
And finally, if I'm entitled to buy something, they're not allowed to disable it remotely or throw non-technological barriers at it. The game works on my PC, so them keeping me from using it for the purpose it was advertised, is fraud.
You can't throw up trade barriers like this one, it's illegal as it involves sabotaging a legally purchased product. It's their own fault that the Thai version is attractive to foreigners.
Anyways, I'm off to shut down Steam. They employ a Russian coder and this violates the pricing model that keeps my cushy North American job paying so much. They should know that they can't run a service on cheap Russian coding, that's only acceptable for third-world services. I'll stop the DDoS attack when they fire the foreigners, pay back all the lower wages for these years, and agree to hiring only union workers from first-world countries.
You've apparently never taken law. When you buy something you own it. You can't make additional copies of it, or bludgeon anyone to death with it, but you can use it in any way you wish, resell it, etc.
All the stupid EULA tricks that are being tried with software were tried a hundred years ago with books. They used to come with contracts printed in them that purported to deny you the ability to resell the book, etc.
Technically, it's even fraud. If I lie to you that's not a crime, but if I do so for economic gain, it is. Microsoft and Valve know the law re EULAs and they choose to tell you something that their lawyers have to know isn't reasonable, in order to trick you into acting in their favor. Of course, nothing is illegal if someone rich does it.
Yeah, they're going out of business, the employees only hear about it when their keys no longer work in the door, but they're going to go home and work on a version that bypasses the checks out of the goodness of their hearts. Uh huh.
And the company that buys Value at auction sues the employees for reducing the value of the asset.
Gold is great if you have $n and you want to have the same value of goods in some period of time. As you say, a store of value. But you can't eat it, so you may not be alive to redeem it after a Zombie plague.
That's why I'm putting my money into Fresh Tomatoes! Yum! Who can't love them?
Write-Once-Read-Many drives existed for quite a while before then, and they're the very definition of wear leveling. Everything gets written once and only once. Changes go elsewhere but override the earlier copy.
Extra sectors and silent remapping are both obvious ideas. The specific way of implementing them may be patent-worthy, but not the general idea.
Hey, no problem. I'll just call up and cancel power and phone services for Valve's offices. That should hurt them about as much as this nonsense hurt everyone who bought a legal product and simply wanted it to work.
It wouldn't take long for Storm to DDoS Steam off the net. When Valve folds we'll crack the games and keep playing properly. All the employees will get a job elsewhere, but the owners who profit from this deal will be broke. Seems fair to me, as Valve is willing to screw you out of your money. I'm pretty sure that's the international code for fair game.
Unless the internet is region locked to Thailand, it's not reasonable for a game to be. Keep trying and the people you cheat will simply sabotage you out of business.
Yes. I am. You stated something totally retarded, I responded and demolished your entire argument with a single link. That may be a self published book, but does that mean that none of the articles it referenced exist? That none of the events mentioned actually happened?
Ahh yes, but you've never been killed by a SWAT team so it must not happen.
Oh, no! You see a problem you can't think of a solution to in the time it takes to hit reply, it will never work! Well then, I guess they should probably just commence bombardment, because the swat team could be overwhelmed.
How about getting them ready and on the way while leaving someone to investigate the issue? Was there no contact?
Nobody wanted to talk to the operator who took the call? To listen to the message? Ask for any details?
That's because it's as if everyone started coding the same way, throwing out functions in various languages, nothing links, changes breaking everything, yet everything mutating wildly because nobody can agree on the desired outcome.
But that's not how you code. You figure out a goal, what you want to say you've achieved when you're done.
For a book, "A novel about X", and a rough structure, then people throw out low-level ideas "meteor kills love-interest", "conspiracies!", etc. You figure out what people want to contribute and work in modules.
For example, the meteor subplot people go off and work out ways to describe this, likely story directions if the meteor kills various archetypes (villain, love-interest, etc), good endings for some of these...
In other words, a meteor-killing API. Give some example, make it generic enough that it can kill anyone, and let us plug it in where needed.
Then, you plug in the modules to get the rough effect. This is like a CLI app, it does the work (tells the literal plot) but isn't pretty.
Once you've got your structure worked out you just write enough gui (prose) to ease the user's transition from the start of the book to the end.:)
The problem is that wikis aren't fine-grained, branchy, and meta, enough. Edits are to whole sections - what if I merely want to fix a typo? You can't just write what you'd like to see and let it be voted on, you either get rejected totally or accepted completely. If wikis were more like git repositories your work could still go on in your branch unmolested by revert wars.
The thing is that it's the company who gets to say who's a pirate trying to crack the game and who's not. I got Diablo 2 when it was newish and had no end of trouble trying to use it as I only had a burner and had a ton of debugging software on the PC. It wouldn't run on systems with burners or cd emulation software, or debuggers that it mistook for either of those.
As always when a game is annoying I got a crack and it worked perfectly. But I wrote to Blizzard about it to see what they'd say. Their suggestion was that I reinstall windows entirely, then buy a new CDROM (not a burner) in that order. I emailed back and said I had tried a fresh install (not that rebooting to a stripped down OS just to play their game would have been reasonable anyways but the burner was still an issue), but that buying new hardware was unreasonable as mine met the specs on the box. I asked for a debug build (even with my name in it) without protection, as it was obviously their protection making it unworkable. They said no. I mentioned hearing that there was a crack which fixed this problem for others. They told me it was illegal, even if I owned the game, etc... They wouldn't even offer a refund, as the fact that the game worked on other computers was proof to them that it wasn't broken. (What error shows up 100% of the time?)
Long story short, I owned the game but they put me down as a pirate. The game didn't break anything but the copy protection was obviously the only reason it wouldn't work on my PC.
I'm sure that UbiSoft was technically right... 20% of people were trying to do something like crack the game just to get it to work. Who else emails tech support? People who've tried and given up. Of course many of these people, like myself, are going to try a crack to prove that the game works and that it's the copy protection breaking things. This is just them sweeping that under the rug by labeling all of those people as pirates. If you have Daemon tools installed for any reason you're immediately a pirate in these peoples' eyes.
You're my image of a lying, misdirecting ebay scammer. Whining about honest feedback. You probably leave retaliatory feedback over anything less than AA++++!!!1! feedback too, regardless of how you deserve whatever was said about you.
You're one of those asses who expects people to jump through forty-three special hoops just so you get to maintain spotless reputation for your less-than-spotless business. Hell no.
If you owe $.45 and I need to contact you, that's not positive. At best it's neutral, likely it's oppressive and negative. If you take care of everything and there aren't problems, that's when you get positive feedback.
Fuck, EBay sellers have the biggest sense of entitlement.
Abstraction and modularization aren't necessarily related. Abstraction is writing a translation layer of sorts, and that will get big. Modularization can be as simple as refactoring a large class into a parent + derived class or writing shorter functions.
Some programs can be designed up-front, others need to be prototyped and developed interactively with the users. Some things like separating AI from rendering are a no-brainer, others need to be based on code-smell as you go.
Sorry, I was. Somehow the subject matter demanded sarcasm.
I think a libertarian government would handle subsidies well too. If they wanted to ensure they had food, they'd get a bunch of people to pay the farmers a retainer to be ready to farm. If the farmer got demanding they'd switch suppliers or, because it was voluntary instead of codified into law, just stop paying.
Simple, requires no extra law, and works the same for farmers as lawyers.
I get your point, but modularizing your code is hardly ever a waste.
Technically it's usually a win for complexity alone - two smaller pieces are easier than one large one. But then there's the benefit that once all your heavy-lifting is nicely wrapped up, you can start coding the rest of your app in Python or something much nicer than C/C++.
Slashdot Mirror
That is the definition of hypocrite. Doing something to others you don't want done to yourself.
As for them caring, of course they won't. Until we DDoS Steam, or torch their cars or something. Otherwise you're right, why would they care when they're making money and the people they rip off live so far away?
In a case where the copies or phonorecords were lawfully made, the United States Customs Service has no authority to prevent their importation unless
Do you read your links?
Besides, who cares? Hypocrit is a hypocrit does. If globalization is good enough for them, it's good enough for us. If they hide behind some technicality to evade their responsibilities it's not our obligation to play along.
Rather, it's the obligation of those who live near them to apply subtle extra-legal corrective actions, such as disabling their cars and foreign products. If they want they car to work it's easy, they merely have to purchase another one and transfer the plates...
There are two different cases, one where the software is different. Where the student version has only half the features. If you resold that as the full version you'd be guilty of fraud. That's not what happened here.
In this case though, the software is functionally identical. It will do everything the other one will, but is prevented from doing so by DRM access restrictions.
They're allowed to make a Thai version, or even to stick a sticker on the English version and call it a Thai version, but not to shut it down anywhere else in the world.
That's how they're breaking the law. Taking something I have legal right to own, to purchase, and to use, and shutting it down remotely because of DRM which was enacted specifically to bypass the right of first sale.
Yes, I know they can't enforce their fancy marketing scheme this way. Tough luck.
Steam is sold as a product, and would work as a product were it not for a DRM restriction. Quacks like a product...
That law student is numb in the head. Including the Gateway post-sale-contracts as EULAs despite them not involving software per-se, there are indeed a few cases where the courts in favor of some of the provisions of the contracts such as upholding mandatory arbitration.
You can't really sign away your legal right. You could say "I give you the right to beat the hell out of me for $5" and except in a few cases (sports). this wouldn't be legal. You can't sign away your right to sue me if I defraud you. That means that the arbitration is merely a step you agree to go through first. That simply means the court felt that, regardless of the eventual facts of the case, Gateway had done enough to notify people of its arbitration policy to warrant uphold that. The facts of the case and Gateways misrepresentation which were supposedly supported by the EULA weren't touched in the ruling.
It's like theater tickets. They list some rules such as "You'll be kicked out for creating a disturbance" that are just restatements of legal fact. Any proprietor, ticket warning or not, can eject a rowdy patron and the police will help. However they then go on to claim a bunch of other restrictions like against outside food and drink, ticket resale, etc, etc. These things have absolutely no force. But they're on the same ticket, so when a theater ejects a rowdy patron they count it as validating back-of-ticket-"contracts". This is how EULAs are 'supported' by precedent.
Imagine how retarded the world would be if everyone was shipping special hidden contracts in everything. You buy lumber for your new housing development but when you unwrap it you find a contract that states you aren't allowed to use it to build houses in California because of a deal the lumber yard has with another company - but hey, enjoy your 10-million board-feet of lumber because we don't want it back!
That's what we'd live in if EULAs were valid. People'd use them in all sorts of cases. Cars would come with them. Books. Houses. But they don't. And even things like books that used to now don't because we've passed laws specifically forbidding those sorts of post-sale contracts.
Making an offer puts certain requirements on you to deal with people responding. There are also consumer protection laws in most areas that prevent advertising things you do not intend to sell.
An entitlement is a right defined by law or contract, and a sense of entitlement is feeling you have an entitlement. One is entitled to do something that they have a right to do, or a law allows them to do.
I am entitled to feel entitled to be entitled to buy a product in a store. I am (right in doing) (feeling I have a right) which is (a legally granted entitlement to respond to an offer with acceptance, which signifies the finalizing of a contract) when a store offers me a product.
Do you see?
So legally I have a right to buy the product. They established this by offering it for sale.
So they're selling a product and intentionally crippling it if you didn't pay as much money as possible for it, despite finalizing a legal sale.
This isn't like 50/60hz electricity or a technological problem, this is simply DRM to enforce markets. Exactly like DRM on movie zones. Greed pure and simple.
I'll bet you 100-1 that Valve and its employees/owners use foreign products, despite this harming industry in the USA. (Ever shop in a Walmart?) Now they want the laws that our taxes pay for to help them enforce this DRM against us, so that we can be the only ones in the loop not allowed to shop around for prices.
The government merely need to not give their stamp of approval to patent-encumbered proprietary formats.
Linux is perfectly capable of competing in the market. It's *always* been Microsoft (SCO/etc) trying to get governments to enforce a monopoly on their products. Directly by making open source unusable for government software, or by making their insanely complex formats a requirement.
MS Windows is the one that can't compete in the market. Or MS is just unwilling to try.
No. Breaking the law and sabotaging legally purchased products make Valve into some sort of monster. Telling people that they're SOL and will need to buy another whole copy, that's monstrous.
I imagine the houses of Valve developers, and their office, and filled with things that weren't made in the USA. Should we "remotely disable" (ie, break in and smash with a hammer) all of these products? It would help local industries, and it would make Valve pay what they can afford. No cheap overseas pencils, only the expensive made in the USA kind. No overseas RAM in their computers, etc...
That'd be fair. They want to disable our products to push a buy-locally message. So they should start.
And really, $15 is a lot more to a poor teenage gamer than to the owners of Valve. They'd need to lose $15,000 or more to feel empathy. Wouldn't it be funny if their cars were all disabled and they had to buy new ones. Like a joke. Except with justice attached.
There's no law that lets you forbid importation of products. That's why it's done with DRM and illegal actions like remotely disabling software.
I'm sure you'll find that the staff of Valve is wearing imported clothes, taking advantage of cheaper things overseas. They probably shop at Walmart.
So what's the problem? We both like shopping overseas? Oh... I see. In one case they benefit, in the other I do.
They're hypocrits, willing to take advantage of globalization to increase their own profits, but they sabotage the product to prevent you from doing the same.
What's the value of having more money if everything you want to buy is proportionally more expensive?
So you're right, they should keep the price the same in all countries. Or they should at least stop their illegal actions of sabotaging products of those who import.
Anything less is criminal.
First of all... yeah... I'm SURE that will work.
What protections does your business have in place against the registered contact calling and making changes of service? My credit card says 'Check ID' and my safe-deposit box says the same. I'm only asked about a quarter of the time. So whatever security measures you think you have you probably don't.
How much did you pay for Doom, or Quake? Oh yeah... you didn't. You pirated them.
Great personal attack. Sorry, but I bought Quake, Quake3, Quake4, and UT2004 along with some other games (including Diablo 2 which never worked, but that's a long story). Quake and UT2004 I bought for full price, most of the rest I buy in the cheap bin.
Orange Box is 5 games for $50. Is $10 a game "ripping you off"?
$0.02 is ripping me off if they sabotage a product that would work except for DRM. Region coding is the only problem.
So you love the work that they spend 70+ hours a week producing... you love the games...
They love the money I worked n+ hours a week earning. They love the food it buys. What's your point?
I will never loose any of the games I have registered with Steam.
I'll never lose the ability to play my cracked games, even if Steam goes away. They're all backed up (~150gb worth) with my photos. I'll bet I can still play Half-Life 1 long after you. Especially with games like GTA3:SA or Oblivion, where they censor the game to a worse-than-original state. I can still play unpatched games. Can you?
Never had one single issue. I LOVE STEAM
Wow, maybe there's a connection. It hasn't screwed up yet and you love it.
Wait until it takes your money and refuses to let you play, even when you've bought another copy. See if you're happy when some shmuck on the net is telling you that it works for him.
you have no idea the dedication that the guys at Valve have. They care about their customers. A LOT. An Example: They had a long power outage in Seattle and the battery backups for the Steam servers were at critical. The guys stayed all night and hacked the -emergency lighting- batteries together to keep the servers up for as long as possible so people could keep playing.
Of course they're dedicated - it pays their rent. But they still stick region coding in the product knowing that it'll keep some people from playing in order to up profits. Their dedication doesn't do much for the people who are cut off because of region coding. In fact those people would actually have been better off if the developers were less dedicated.
You seem to think they have a right to do this. To use region coding to set up discriminatory pricing and enforce it with DRM. Right? And that people should be ethically and legally bound to obey this?
So obviously you wouldn't support Valve outsourcing to Thailand and paying cheaper wages. I mean, they're a US company that expects to sell their game in the rich US market. They can afford US prices and shouldn't expect to get something for nothing.
At that, sure. If they buy all American products (don't shop at Walmart for company supplies) and hire all-local workers, etc, then it'd be a fair trade.
But they're trying to get something for nothing. The law permits everyone to trade internationally and they take advantage of this. They then turn around and try to put technological restrictions on anyone else doing so.
And that leads me to my conclusion. I should just shut down their office for a day or two, and cause some amount of money (where $some/Valve'sTotal == $ThaiPrice/Gamer'sTotal) to be lost such that they feel the pain of the users; "Sorry, no justice for you. Someone else profited a small bit by depriving you of your rights via a technological means that you can't appeal".
As I see it, they're using a technological trick (DRM) to make a product disable itself. This costs the purchaser the purchase price which Valve will not refund. If I used a technological trick to disable so
Yes. If they put a product in stores, I'm entitled to buy it.
If they chose to license their games, I eagerly await them having customers *sign* a contract in front of them, at the store (pre-payment) with witnesses. Otherwise, it's a sale and I'll treat it like one.
Have you ever been at a company that negotiated a volume license with Microsoft? You *know* you've licensed software, as you sign a contract that says it. When you buy Windows or Half-Life at Costco you buy in with other commodities, and the *sale* looks exactly the same. WinXP $250, Socks $2.50, Half-Life $50, Snacks $1.50, etc. If you own your socks and snacks, which you do, then why don't you own Windows? If it's because of the EULA, what happens when sock companies start putting "contracts" in sock packages?
And finally, if I'm entitled to buy something, they're not allowed to disable it remotely or throw non-technological barriers at it. The game works on my PC, so them keeping me from using it for the purpose it was advertised, is fraud.
You can't throw up trade barriers like this one, it's illegal as it involves sabotaging a legally purchased product. It's their own fault that the Thai version is attractive to foreigners.
Anyways, I'm off to shut down Steam. They employ a Russian coder and this violates the pricing model that keeps my cushy North American job paying so much. They should know that they can't run a service on cheap Russian coding, that's only acceptable for third-world services. I'll stop the DDoS attack when they fire the foreigners, pay back all the lower wages for these years, and agree to hiring only union workers from first-world countries.
You've apparently never taken law. When you buy something you own it. You can't make additional copies of it, or bludgeon anyone to death with it, but you can use it in any way you wish, resell it, etc.
All the stupid EULA tricks that are being tried with software were tried a hundred years ago with books. They used to come with contracts printed in them that purported to deny you the ability to resell the book, etc.
Technically, it's even fraud. If I lie to you that's not a crime, but if I do so for economic gain, it is. Microsoft and Valve know the law re EULAs and they choose to tell you something that their lawyers have to know isn't reasonable, in order to trick you into acting in their favor. Of course, nothing is illegal if someone rich does it.
Yeah, they're going out of business, the employees only hear about it when their keys no longer work in the door, but they're going to go home and work on a version that bypasses the checks out of the goodness of their hearts. Uh huh.
And the company that buys Value at auction sues the employees for reducing the value of the asset.
Gold is great if you have $n and you want to have the same value of goods in some period of time. As you say, a store of value. But you can't eat it, so you may not be alive to redeem it after a Zombie plague.
That's why I'm putting my money into Fresh Tomatoes! Yum! Who can't love them?
Write-Once-Read-Many drives existed for quite a while before then, and they're the very definition of wear leveling. Everything gets written once and only once. Changes go elsewhere but override the earlier copy.
Extra sectors and silent remapping are both obvious ideas. The specific way of implementing them may be patent-worthy, but not the general idea.
Hey, no problem. I'll just call up and cancel power and phone services for Valve's offices. That should hurt them about as much as this nonsense hurt everyone who bought a legal product and simply wanted it to work.
It wouldn't take long for Storm to DDoS Steam off the net. When Valve folds we'll crack the games and keep playing properly. All the employees will get a job elsewhere, but the owners who profit from this deal will be broke. Seems fair to me, as Valve is willing to screw you out of your money. I'm pretty sure that's the international code for fair game.
Unless the internet is region locked to Thailand, it's not reasonable for a game to be. Keep trying and the people you cheat will simply sabotage you out of business.
Yes. I am. You stated something totally retarded, I responded and demolished your entire argument with a single link. That may be a self published book, but does that mean that none of the articles it referenced exist? That none of the events mentioned actually happened?
Ahh yes, but you've never been killed by a SWAT team so it must not happen.
God, it must take a team of coaches to help one person be so stupid.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6476
Oh, no! You see a problem you can't think of a solution to in the time it takes to hit reply, it will never work! Well then, I guess they should probably just commence bombardment, because the swat team could be overwhelmed.
How about getting them ready and on the way while leaving someone to investigate the issue? Was there no contact?
Nobody wanted to talk to the operator who took the call? To listen to the message? Ask for any details?
That's because it's as if everyone started coding the same way, throwing out functions in various languages, nothing links, changes breaking everything, yet everything mutating wildly because nobody can agree on the desired outcome.
:)
But that's not how you code. You figure out a goal, what you want to say you've achieved when you're done.
For a book, "A novel about X", and a rough structure, then people throw out low-level ideas "meteor kills love-interest", "conspiracies!", etc. You figure out what people want to contribute and work in modules.
For example, the meteor subplot people go off and work out ways to describe this, likely story directions if the meteor kills various archetypes (villain, love-interest, etc), good endings for some of these...
In other words, a meteor-killing API. Give some example, make it generic enough that it can kill anyone, and let us plug it in where needed.
Then, you plug in the modules to get the rough effect. This is like a CLI app, it does the work (tells the literal plot) but isn't pretty.
Once you've got your structure worked out you just write enough gui (prose) to ease the user's transition from the start of the book to the end.
The problem is that wikis aren't fine-grained, branchy, and meta, enough. Edits are to whole sections - what if I merely want to fix a typo? You can't just write what you'd like to see and let it be voted on, you either get rejected totally or accepted completely. If wikis were more like git repositories your work could still go on in your branch unmolested by revert wars.
The thing is that it's the company who gets to say who's a pirate trying to crack the game and who's not. I got Diablo 2 when it was newish and had no end of trouble trying to use it as I only had a burner and had a ton of debugging software on the PC. It wouldn't run on systems with burners or cd emulation software, or debuggers that it mistook for either of those.
As always when a game is annoying I got a crack and it worked perfectly. But I wrote to Blizzard about it to see what they'd say. Their suggestion was that I reinstall windows entirely, then buy a new CDROM (not a burner) in that order. I emailed back and said I had tried a fresh install (not that rebooting to a stripped down OS just to play their game would have been reasonable anyways but the burner was still an issue), but that buying new hardware was unreasonable as mine met the specs on the box. I asked for a debug build (even with my name in it) without protection, as it was obviously their protection making it unworkable. They said no. I mentioned hearing that there was a crack which fixed this problem for others. They told me it was illegal, even if I owned the game, etc... They wouldn't even offer a refund, as the fact that the game worked on other computers was proof to them that it wasn't broken. (What error shows up 100% of the time?)
Long story short, I owned the game but they put me down as a pirate. The game didn't break anything but the copy protection was obviously the only reason it wouldn't work on my PC.
I'm sure that UbiSoft was technically right... 20% of people were trying to do something like crack the game just to get it to work. Who else emails tech support? People who've tried and given up. Of course many of these people, like myself, are going to try a crack to prove that the game works and that it's the copy protection breaking things. This is just them sweeping that under the rug by labeling all of those people as pirates. If you have Daemon tools installed for any reason you're immediately a pirate in these peoples' eyes.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Corporate Statistics.
You're my image of a lying, misdirecting ebay scammer. Whining about honest feedback. You probably leave retaliatory feedback over anything less than AA++++!!!1! feedback too, regardless of how you deserve whatever was said about you.
Have no fear, you'll never run into me on ebay.
You're one of those asses who expects people to jump through forty-three special hoops just so you get to maintain spotless reputation for your less-than-spotless business. Hell no.
If you owe $.45 and I need to contact you, that's not positive. At best it's neutral, likely it's oppressive and negative. If you take care of everything and there aren't problems, that's when you get positive feedback.
Fuck, EBay sellers have the biggest sense of entitlement.
Abstraction and modularization aren't necessarily related. Abstraction is writing a translation layer of sorts, and that will get big. Modularization can be as simple as refactoring a large class into a parent + derived class or writing shorter functions.
Some programs can be designed up-front, others need to be prototyped and developed interactively with the users. Some things like separating AI from rendering are a no-brainer, others need to be based on code-smell as you go.
Sorry, I was. Somehow the subject matter demanded sarcasm.
I think a libertarian government would handle subsidies well too. If they wanted to ensure they had food, they'd get a bunch of people to pay the farmers a retainer to be ready to farm. If the farmer got demanding they'd switch suppliers or, because it was voluntary instead of codified into law, just stop paying.
Simple, requires no extra law, and works the same for farmers as lawyers.
I get your point, but modularizing your code is hardly ever a waste.
Technically it's usually a win for complexity alone - two smaller pieces are easier than one large one. But then there's the benefit that once all your heavy-lifting is nicely wrapped up, you can start coding the rest of your app in Python or something much nicer than C/C++.