A considerable amount of skill is required to turn a hunk of sheet metal and plumbing into a viable weapon (beyond a simple 1-shot zip gun.) If you want to fabricate something that's reliable, accurate and semi-automatic (fed via clip, mag or belt) it's going to take years of training, education and dedication. That's a steep barrier to entry, and prevents most armorers from doing something stupid with their guns. And even once a person knows exactly how to make an honest-to-goodness rifle, the creation process itself is long and intensive. You want 3 or 4 of these things? Made by hand? See you in a month or two, maybe.
With 3D printed guns, any yokel with a reprap can crank out a dozen handguns on a whim, relatively cheaply.
Now, this is just devils advocate in regards to personal crafting. IMO, 3D Printed guns are really competing with the cheap handguns that anyone can buy with an abbreviated background check at gun shows, and less reputable merchants all over the place. In that regard, eliminating or legislating away 3d printing doesn't improve overall safety all that much.
But we're talking digital here. Anything can be a false flag (intentional or not) when it only takes a few black hats with a grudge to cause some serious damage. Even if we could perfectly trace any attack to it's true country of origin (and we can't) this online Rules of Engagement is a farce. If some jackass in BFE Wherever, USA gets bored and decides to DDOS a hospital up in Canada, does that put the USA as a whole in violation of this treaty? Should Canada, in this hypothetical scenario, start sharpening up their ice skates in preparation for the invasion?
Am I correct in assuming these books you were looking for are rather obscure? Something tells me iBook will have the Harry Potters, Twilights, etc in just about every language.
Second question: are these books available via pirate sites in the language(s) you want? (and feel free to not answer for self-incrimination reasons, but just something to ponder)
If they're not available through either avenue, which one do you suspect will remedy that problem first? My money is on Apple. Their customer support may be clueless (much like every other customer support) but at least they exist. At least there's someone representing iBooks who might -maybe- be able to remedy your language issue.
In a similar report, we've found that 100% of lighters, knives, crampons and Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifles are outside tolerable limits for safety.
The demographic that gets/views torrents is skewed towards the technologically minded. Contrary to the prevailing slashdot wisdom, this site is not 'the general public'.
However, for reasons that should be apparent, it's a demographic that matters to me.
The problem with pirate sites is monetization. Let's suppose that the number of downloads of Game of Thrones from The Pirate Bay is the most accurate assessment of its popularity. Further, let's posit that 90% of the views come from that. Why does it matter to HBO? How do they recoup the development costs from a TPB viewer? And it matters not whether it is HBO, A&E, or NBC. Someone has to pay actors, writers, directors, etc. Until there is a better method of determining paying customers/viewers, there is still some relevance to traditional ratings. How much and to what degree, we can argue (well, you can. I'm not interested in those minutiae).
The CEOs and Big Wigs at HBO (and every other network) get paid millions of dollars to come up with solutions to this problem. It's easy enough for them to look at TPB or whatever else and see what's popular. But so far, the best these 6 and 7 figure geniuses have come up for monetizing runs the gamut between "just ignore it and maybe it will go away," and "bludgeon everyone who disagrees with our decades old methods."
Here's my quickie consult, free of charge. Two options
(1) Put up the current episodes Free of Charge on HBO.com, with commercials and banner ads and what-not. Also impose a short delay, a week at most, between original airing, and viewing on the website. Require registration on the site (still free, mind you) with a valid email address that you can spam with more revenue-generating ads. Email addresses that are associated with full paid HBO subscriber accounts will be spared from ads. Sure, the geeks will know how to block the banner ads, skip the commercials, and use secondary/tertiary email account to catch all your spam... but those are the same people who torrent now. Even if those people don't generate 1 red cent, bringing them away from torrents is a net gain. Less potential seeders, less torrenting, more people talking about HBO.com and telling all their friends to visit. If you want to lock this down a bit more, restrict viewing to the current episode, and maybe 2 or 3 prior. Regular viewers can keep up, on their own schedule, and HBO will maintain exact number of how many people watch each episode. If people want to catch up from the start, direct them to option #2:
(2) Make a deal with Apple to let iTunes sell complete episodes. (Yes, iTunes is chock full of DRM and requires iDevices, but remember that I'm pitching this to money-grubbing CEOs) Impose the same week-long delay, so that true HBO subscribers have the benefit of seeing everything earlier. Charge $5 per episode, for a complete download, or $1-2 per episode for 12-hour digital rental. Negotiate so that Apple's cut is the same as or less than the current overhead for stamping out physical media, boxing them up, shipping them to retailers, and the retailers cut. Again, you're generating revenue and bringing people away from the torrents. iTunes DRM will limit sharing, and torrenters with a bit of flexible cash might actually prefer iTunes downloads. No chance of a failed download, no accidentally grabbing the German version, no screwed up subtitles. All of the artwork and synopsis info is fully filled out and spelled properly. Every episode is named in the same format...
.
There is no panacea to instantly kill illegal downloading and make everyone sign up for HBO with their television provider. Simply not going to happen. So companies need to learn how to compete in the same space as the downloading, and beat them at their own game. Offer a better service, for a reasonable price, and watch people migrate towards it. Won't happen overnight, but the sooner these big networks start making that transition
I'm pretty sure that the entire point of drones, in the long run at least, is to eliminate the need for pilots.
In the civilian sector : It will start with cargo planes first, but once you have them programed, "take off from Airport X, and land at Airport Y," with all the necessaries to correct for weather and what-not... why would you ever need a pilot again? Just use a tug to put the thing in position on the taxiway, and run the command.
Military drones completely unmanned (without remote pilot) might be a little further out, but still the end goal. A human programmer sets it up : fly to waypoint A, check rules of engagement commands - no civilians detected - target confirmed, drop bombs, fly home. And if there's ever a need for air-to-air combat, current manned fighter jets have so much long-range capability that old-fashioned dogfights have gone the way of trench warfare. Any computer program can confirm IFF, lock and fire missiles, deploy countermeasures as needed.
Maybe not *all* of them, but if some could be convinced, more could be convinced. At least, that's the RIAA's stance. They just need to bludgeon a little harder.
Possibly... that's why GP said the effect is "difficult to accurately assess."
If downloading was to suddenly vanish. If, hypothetically, tomorrow all of Pirate Bay dried up and every other illegal method for obtaining music ceased to be... what would the actual effects be? Would all of those people go start buying CDs? Would they just get free accounts on Pandora/Slacker/etc? Or do those people already have accounts on free streaming sites? If I were a music downloader, I'd still listen to the radio from time to time, if only to help discover new artists.
Certainly some of the displaced pirates would buy a few albums. Possibly virtually via itunes or amazon. And that possibility is what RIAA/MPAA clings to. The possibility that if 1 pirate could be forced to buy through legal means, then clearly they ALL can be convinced. They just need a harder nudge.
Shagg's comment is valid because the MPAA and RIAA don't seem able to make the distinction.
If I rip a DVD that I purchased to a computer I own, that could be considered file sharing. The DVD has shared the file with the computer, but I have not infringed a copyright. If I transfer that digital copy to my tablet or smartphone so that I can watch it during a flight, also file sharing, still not infringing.
If I use the copy on my computer to burn physical DVDs and begin selling them, THAT is a copyright infringement
The powers that be, via DMCA, seek to outlaw all of these practices, and many more.
Then this one person is an idiot. And she'll pay for her stupidity.
All other potential infringers can learn from her mistakes: Exercise your 5th amendment rights, don't admit to anything. Create a different username than your normal accounts. Use a different computer, if you can afford a cheapo, to actually host the files. And if the men in the black suits come a knocking at your door, don't try to destroy anything... just makes you look guilty. Claim that you own the original media and ripped everything yourself. Anything for which you do not have the original media, it was lost/stolen/destroyed. Anything that was downloaded from your computer was done without your permission/consent.
For a court to prove otherwise would be borderline impossible, and a few such cases (with counter-suits to cover all the emotional trauma and hardship inflicted by the RIAA) would likely cool their jets in a hurry.
One of the benefits of Apple's walled garden approach (yes, we all know the perils of walled gardens, I love rooting and installing CM, too)
Apple currently has less than a dozen total devices still supported. That's combined between all phones, pads and pod-touches (not counting pod-shuffles - they don't get apps.) On those, only 2 or 3 potential OSes are supported, with the current OS installed on over 60% of applicable hardware.
This makes it very easy for app developers to optimize apps for the majority of devices, with all of the potential bells and whistles of the new stuff. Compare with Android, almost 50% of devices still using Gingerbread (released in 2008, around the same time as iOS 2) and only 10% are on the current release. Also compare the maybe 20-30 total iOS devices ever (going all the way back to iphone 1) with the 4000+ android devices running around the wild today
Except that it's not $24 worth of music... It's the distribution rights for $24 songs, and that's a lot more expensive. With established music stores, like iTunes, it can be a percentage of gross sales with a predetermined lower limit, like $5,000. With new music stores, that lower limit can be much, much higher. Michael Jackson purchased distributions rights to a bunch of Beatles' songs for $11,875 each... which works out to be awfully close to the $220,000 for 24 songs here.
Why would she need the distribution rights to songs she isn't distributing?
Do we automatically assume that someone is distributing things they own? Do you have bacon in your refrigerator/freezer? Does your home meet USDA standards for food sales? Specifically the handling of meat products? Do you have oil in your car? Does your house have the proper disposal procedures in place for hazardous wastes? Or should the cops bust down your door with the assumption that you're pouring motor oil down the drain, and selling bacterially infected bacon simply because you have these things?
Unless you can prove that this person was selling these song (note: selling, i.e. profiting from the distribution of) the court doesn't have a leg to stand on, beyond the $24 she owes them for ownership... at best. If anything, can they prove that she didn't own the CD, copy them from the CD to her computer... then lose the disk? These things happen all the time. CDs get lost, scratched, stepped on. In this case, she might have admitted her wrong doing, but what about the next case, and the one after that. Onus is on the accuser (or "innocent until proven guilty" if you prefer.) If the RIAA wants to file suit against people for simply having music/movies/etc on their computer, they'd better have an airtight case.
Color me unsurprised. I said it was a flimsy excuse from the start, and was bound to fail anyway.
Should have been a hint though, when Blizzard -a company that has been making online only games for quite a while now- couldn't pull it off, EA didn't have a prayer.
She was probably offered to settle for $2-3 per song, as long as she pled guilty and covered all court costs, or even just her own court costs, which could easily be $100,000 or more, assuming lawyer was pro bono. Factor in travel costs, time lost from work (probably fired from her job), and the inability to coutersue or force the plaintiff to pay her court costs if they're found guilty... suddenly settling for $2-3 per song doesn't seem all that appealing
At least Blizzard had an excuse, if a flimsy one : D3 had a Real-Money auction house... so a lot of the code was kept on their servers, to hopefully prevent enterprising hackers from exploiting bugs to make millions of real dollars. I admittedly haven't tracked how successful that was
SimCity has no such excuse. What's the worst an enterprising hacker could accomplish here? Fixing the roadways? EA's always-on DRM was pure unexcused buttfuckery.
If there was an easy way to enforce our rights, we would have done it by now. Best we've been able to muster is OWS.
If there was a hard, but otherwise legal and achievable way to enforce our rights, we'd be marching down that path. Best we've been able to muster is some noise on various websites
.
Have you ever been pissed off at a loved one (boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, etc)... and it was over the most trivial stupid inane thing? They left the cap off the toothpaste, or the didn't match the socks properly when doing laundry... maybe left the seat up, or parked the car a bit crooked... whatever. And it escalated into full scale yelling and arguing? I have the strange suspicion that the same thing will be happening on a much larger scale soon. Maybe it'll be file-sharing issues like this, or smart phone lockdown, DMCA, DRM or some other thing that just really should not matter on a big scale, and let the fireworks commence.
He wasn't ousted for DRM, but failing to execute the DRM properly.
If the servers had been even REMOTELY close to sufficient for a day 1 load, the manager would still be onboard and the DRM would be proven successful. As that was not the case, the problem is the manager failing to properly plan for launch day activities. The DRM is still successful and will be implemented in subsequent EA releases.
Remember when I sold you my old car? Well you signed an agreement stating that it would still be parked in my driveway on weekends, and I would still have full access to it. Of course, you own it, but any violations of the above agreement will cost $100 per infraction. Any more than three infractions will result in jail time and ownership of said vehicle will revert to previous owner.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that through process, Einstein and the rest of his Manhattan cronies should have been locked up so long that their grandkids are still in jail.
The difference is skills, mostly.
A considerable amount of skill is required to turn a hunk of sheet metal and plumbing into a viable weapon (beyond a simple 1-shot zip gun.) If you want to fabricate something that's reliable, accurate and semi-automatic (fed via clip, mag or belt) it's going to take years of training, education and dedication. That's a steep barrier to entry, and prevents most armorers from doing something stupid with their guns. And even once a person knows exactly how to make an honest-to-goodness rifle, the creation process itself is long and intensive. You want 3 or 4 of these things? Made by hand? See you in a month or two, maybe.
With 3D printed guns, any yokel with a reprap can crank out a dozen handguns on a whim, relatively cheaply.
Now, this is just devils advocate in regards to personal crafting. IMO, 3D Printed guns are really competing with the cheap handguns that anyone can buy with an abbreviated background check at gun shows, and less reputable merchants all over the place. In that regard, eliminating or legislating away 3d printing doesn't improve overall safety all that much.
Extremely risky in the real world, sure ...
But we're talking digital here. Anything can be a false flag (intentional or not) when it only takes a few black hats with a grudge to cause some serious damage. Even if we could perfectly trace any attack to it's true country of origin (and we can't) this online Rules of Engagement is a farce. If some jackass in BFE Wherever, USA gets bored and decides to DDOS a hospital up in Canada, does that put the USA as a whole in violation of this treaty? Should Canada, in this hypothetical scenario, start sharpening up their ice skates in preparation for the invasion?
Am I correct in assuming these books you were looking for are rather obscure? Something tells me iBook will have the Harry Potters, Twilights, etc in just about every language.
Second question: are these books available via pirate sites in the language(s) you want? (and feel free to not answer for self-incrimination reasons, but just something to ponder)
If they're not available through either avenue, which one do you suspect will remedy that problem first? My money is on Apple. Their customer support may be clueless (much like every other customer support) but at least they exist. At least there's someone representing iBooks who might -maybe- be able to remedy your language issue.
Well, we are #1 in defense spending... surpassing the combined totals of #2 - #15 (probably surpassing the combined totals of the rest of the world)
You are correct though. This makes false flag operations significantly easier, cheaper, and at a much reduced risk to the actual perpetrator.
In a similar report, we've found that 100% of lighters, knives, crampons and Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifles are outside tolerable limits for safety.
Seriously, you'll shoot your eye out, kid.
The demographic that gets/views torrents is skewed towards the technologically minded. Contrary to the prevailing slashdot wisdom, this site is not 'the general public'.
However, for reasons that should be apparent, it's a demographic that matters to me.
The problem with pirate sites is monetization. Let's suppose that the number of downloads of Game of Thrones from The Pirate Bay is the most accurate assessment of its popularity. Further, let's posit that 90% of the views come from that. Why does it matter to HBO? How do they recoup the development costs from a TPB viewer? And it matters not whether it is HBO, A&E, or NBC. Someone has to pay actors, writers, directors, etc. Until there is a better method of determining paying customers/viewers, there is still some relevance to traditional ratings. How much and to what degree, we can argue (well, you can. I'm not interested in those minutiae).
The CEOs and Big Wigs at HBO (and every other network) get paid millions of dollars to come up with solutions to this problem. It's easy enough for them to look at TPB or whatever else and see what's popular. But so far, the best these 6 and 7 figure geniuses have come up for monetizing runs the gamut between "just ignore it and maybe it will go away," and "bludgeon everyone who disagrees with our decades old methods."
Here's my quickie consult, free of charge. Two options
(1) Put up the current episodes Free of Charge on HBO.com, with commercials and banner ads and what-not. Also impose a short delay, a week at most, between original airing, and viewing on the website. Require registration on the site (still free, mind you) with a valid email address that you can spam with more revenue-generating ads. Email addresses that are associated with full paid HBO subscriber accounts will be spared from ads. Sure, the geeks will know how to block the banner ads, skip the commercials, and use secondary/tertiary email account to catch all your spam... but those are the same people who torrent now. Even if those people don't generate 1 red cent, bringing them away from torrents is a net gain. Less potential seeders, less torrenting, more people talking about HBO.com and telling all their friends to visit. If you want to lock this down a bit more, restrict viewing to the current episode, and maybe 2 or 3 prior. Regular viewers can keep up, on their own schedule, and HBO will maintain exact number of how many people watch each episode. If people want to catch up from the start, direct them to option #2:
(2) Make a deal with Apple to let iTunes sell complete episodes. (Yes, iTunes is chock full of DRM and requires iDevices, but remember that I'm pitching this to money-grubbing CEOs) Impose the same week-long delay, so that true HBO subscribers have the benefit of seeing everything earlier. Charge $5 per episode, for a complete download, or $1-2 per episode for 12-hour digital rental. Negotiate so that Apple's cut is the same as or less than the current overhead for stamping out physical media, boxing them up, shipping them to retailers, and the retailers cut. Again, you're generating revenue and bringing people away from the torrents. iTunes DRM will limit sharing, and torrenters with a bit of flexible cash might actually prefer iTunes downloads. No chance of a failed download, no accidentally grabbing the German version, no screwed up subtitles. All of the artwork and synopsis info is fully filled out and spelled properly. Every episode is named in the same format...
.
There is no panacea to instantly kill illegal downloading and make everyone sign up for HBO with their television provider. Simply not going to happen. So companies need to learn how to compete in the same space as the downloading, and beat them at their own game. Offer a better service, for a reasonable price, and watch people migrate towards it. Won't happen overnight, but the sooner these big networks start making that transition
I'm pretty sure that the entire point of drones, in the long run at least, is to eliminate the need for pilots.
In the civilian sector : It will start with cargo planes first, but once you have them programed, "take off from Airport X, and land at Airport Y," with all the necessaries to correct for weather and what-not ... why would you ever need a pilot again? Just use a tug to put the thing in position on the taxiway, and run the command.
Military drones completely unmanned (without remote pilot) might be a little further out, but still the end goal. A human programmer sets it up : fly to waypoint A, check rules of engagement commands - no civilians detected - target confirmed, drop bombs, fly home. And if there's ever a need for air-to-air combat, current manned fighter jets have so much long-range capability that old-fashioned dogfights have gone the way of trench warfare. Any computer program can confirm IFF, lock and fire missiles, deploy countermeasures as needed.
I'd like to think we're a bit more high speed than that, these days.
USB stick sneakernet!
Maybe not *all* of them, but if some could be convinced, more could be convinced. At least, that's the RIAA's stance. They just need to bludgeon a little harder.
Possibly... that's why GP said the effect is "difficult to accurately assess."
If downloading was to suddenly vanish. If, hypothetically, tomorrow all of Pirate Bay dried up and every other illegal method for obtaining music ceased to be... what would the actual effects be? Would all of those people go start buying CDs? Would they just get free accounts on Pandora/Slacker/etc? Or do those people already have accounts on free streaming sites? If I were a music downloader, I'd still listen to the radio from time to time, if only to help discover new artists.
Certainly some of the displaced pirates would buy a few albums. Possibly virtually via itunes or amazon. And that possibility is what RIAA/MPAA clings to. The possibility that if 1 pirate could be forced to buy through legal means, then clearly they ALL can be convinced. They just need a harder nudge.
Shagg's comment is valid because the MPAA and RIAA don't seem able to make the distinction.
If I rip a DVD that I purchased to a computer I own, that could be considered file sharing. The DVD has shared the file with the computer, but I have not infringed a copyright. If I transfer that digital copy to my tablet or smartphone so that I can watch it during a flight, also file sharing, still not infringing.
If I use the copy on my computer to burn physical DVDs and begin selling them, THAT is a copyright infringement
The powers that be, via DMCA, seek to outlaw all of these practices, and many more.
Then this one person is an idiot. And she'll pay for her stupidity.
All other potential infringers can learn from her mistakes: Exercise your 5th amendment rights, don't admit to anything. Create a different username than your normal accounts. Use a different computer, if you can afford a cheapo, to actually host the files. And if the men in the black suits come a knocking at your door, don't try to destroy anything... just makes you look guilty. Claim that you own the original media and ripped everything yourself. Anything for which you do not have the original media, it was lost/stolen/destroyed. Anything that was downloaded from your computer was done without your permission/consent.
For a court to prove otherwise would be borderline impossible, and a few such cases (with counter-suits to cover all the emotional trauma and hardship inflicted by the RIAA) would likely cool their jets in a hurry.
One of the benefits of Apple's walled garden approach (yes, we all know the perils of walled gardens, I love rooting and installing CM, too)
Apple currently has less than a dozen total devices still supported. That's combined between all phones, pads and pod-touches (not counting pod-shuffles - they don't get apps.) On those, only 2 or 3 potential OSes are supported, with the current OS installed on over 60% of applicable hardware.
This makes it very easy for app developers to optimize apps for the majority of devices, with all of the potential bells and whistles of the new stuff. Compare with Android, almost 50% of devices still using Gingerbread (released in 2008, around the same time as iOS 2) and only 10% are on the current release. Also compare the maybe 20-30 total iOS devices ever (going all the way back to iphone 1) with the 4000+ android devices running around the wild today
You still have the phone app? I cleared that off to save space.
Except that it's not $24 worth of music... It's the distribution rights for $24 songs, and that's a lot more expensive. With established music stores, like iTunes, it can be a percentage of gross sales with a predetermined lower limit, like $5,000. With new music stores, that lower limit can be much, much higher. Michael Jackson purchased distributions rights to a bunch of Beatles' songs for $11,875 each... which works out to be awfully close to the $220,000 for 24 songs here.
Why would she need the distribution rights to songs she isn't distributing?
Do we automatically assume that someone is distributing things they own? Do you have bacon in your refrigerator/freezer? Does your home meet USDA standards for food sales? Specifically the handling of meat products? Do you have oil in your car? Does your house have the proper disposal procedures in place for hazardous wastes? Or should the cops bust down your door with the assumption that you're pouring motor oil down the drain, and selling bacterially infected bacon simply because you have these things?
Unless you can prove that this person was selling these song (note: selling, i.e. profiting from the distribution of) the court doesn't have a leg to stand on, beyond the $24 she owes them for ownership ... at best. If anything, can they prove that she didn't own the CD, copy them from the CD to her computer ... then lose the disk? These things happen all the time. CDs get lost, scratched, stepped on. In this case, she might have admitted her wrong doing, but what about the next case, and the one after that. Onus is on the accuser (or "innocent until proven guilty" if you prefer.) If the RIAA wants to file suit against people for simply having music/movies/etc on their computer, they'd better have an airtight case.
Color me unsurprised. I said it was a flimsy excuse from the start, and was bound to fail anyway.
Should have been a hint though, when Blizzard -a company that has been making online only games for quite a while now- couldn't pull it off, EA didn't have a prayer.
Complete hypothetical here, but my guess :
She was probably offered to settle for $2-3 per song, as long as she pled guilty and covered all court costs, or even just her own court costs, which could easily be $100,000 or more, assuming lawyer was pro bono. Factor in travel costs, time lost from work (probably fired from her job), and the inability to coutersue or force the plaintiff to pay her court costs if they're found guilty ... suddenly settling for $2-3 per song doesn't seem all that appealing
>
The disastrous launch of SimCity took it's first major toll
I have a distrust of slashdot's apostrophe usage. In fact, I find your lack of lack of faith disturbing.
At least Blizzard had an excuse, if a flimsy one : D3 had a Real-Money auction house... so a lot of the code was kept on their servers, to hopefully prevent enterprising hackers from exploiting bugs to make millions of real dollars. I admittedly haven't tracked how successful that was
SimCity has no such excuse. What's the worst an enterprising hacker could accomplish here? Fixing the roadways? EA's always-on DRM was pure unexcused buttfuckery.
Just a suggestion to help parse better, the phrase "7 year old Jammie Thomas case" should instead be "7 year old Jammie Thomas case"
Except with the actual link, and not just bold font... I'm lazy
This way, it's easier to recognize the CASE is seven years old, not Jammie Thomas.
Therein, as the bard would tell us, lies the rub
If there was an easy way to enforce our rights, we would have done it by now. Best we've been able to muster is OWS.
If there was a hard, but otherwise legal and achievable way to enforce our rights, we'd be marching down that path. Best we've been able to muster is some noise on various websites
.
Have you ever been pissed off at a loved one (boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, etc) ... and it was over the most trivial stupid inane thing? They left the cap off the toothpaste, or the didn't match the socks properly when doing laundry... maybe left the seat up, or parked the car a bit crooked... whatever. And it escalated into full scale yelling and arguing? I have the strange suspicion that the same thing will be happening on a much larger scale soon. Maybe it'll be file-sharing issues like this, or smart phone lockdown, DMCA, DRM or some other thing that just really should not matter on a big scale, and let the fireworks commence.
These sort of folks have to do something basically *criminal* to be fired.
From what I've seen, criminal activities tend to get people promoted at that level. Not fired
He wasn't ousted for DRM, but failing to execute the DRM properly.
If the servers had been even REMOTELY close to sufficient for a day 1 load, the manager would still be onboard and the DRM would be proven successful. As that was not the case, the problem is the manager failing to properly plan for launch day activities. The DRM is still successful and will be implemented in subsequent EA releases.
Just wait till this creeps into personal sales.
Remember when I sold you my old car? Well you signed an agreement stating that it would still be parked in my driveway on weekends, and I would still have full access to it. Of course, you own it, but any violations of the above agreement will cost $100 per infraction. Any more than three infractions will result in jail time and ownership of said vehicle will revert to previous owner.