I have a couple of bonded Ts, for example. Verizon owns them, sublet to AT&T, who resells it to me. They provide me with an ethernet jack, and that's where their turf ends.
These raids mean that I can dictate, without question, every aspect about that 36 inch Cat5 running into my Nic. I sure as hell can dictate what happens after that Nic, also.
These raids also mean that a person's ability to do something has no relation to their authority to do it.
Unsolicited mail that attempts to sell or notify us of products or service is strictly disallowed by our TOS. Spam, therefore...
Lotta people seem to use the wrong words. This issue isn't privacy, it isn't necessarily about "fair use".
The specific issue is curtilage, e.g. who owns the box. Who owns the drive, who owns the network segment(s), who owns the clock ticks, who owns the machine state, and who has the authority to dictate how those resources will be used and that state will be affected. Sadly, there is no real definition of curtilage yet - and where it is partially described by case law, it is flatly self contradicting.
We have a box owner. We have a software licensee, who must gain the consent of the box owner to install a piece of software. That box owner can attach whatever conditions he likes; the licensee has no implicit rights in this matter. Then, we have the user. The user has no implicit rights, either. The user has no rights to bind either the licensee nor the box owner to any agreements. Period. That's the reality of the user model... deviate, and you no longer work here. Or, you go to jail (as our friend at Intel discovered). Or, the Library won't let you use their PCs anymore. Whatever.
The EULA model is completely different, and does not respect any part of this hierarchy. Any vendor is (by default) allowed to assume they have complete rights to fully monopolize and tamper with any and every resource that they are able to discover. A five year old kid who smashes a window, breaks into your house, and sits at your keyboard is considered to be a fully authorized proxy for you regarding EULA terms, and can bind you to any agreements offered. You have the option of "no longer agreeing" after the fact, except that Vendors are not required to disclose the impact of agreeing to a EULA; in fact, they are also not required to live up to the terms of it in the first place [q.v. the un-install of a software to indicate revokation of agreement; the software will leave "turds" everywhere. Outlook XP, for example, wipes the ability to use "Microsoft Mail". Indicating that you no longer agree to the terms by removing Outlook XP does not cause "Microsoft Mail" to return... the machine state will have been irrevokably modified beyond the reach of the casual user, made worse by the fact that the modifications were spurious.]
There's lots of examples where resources have been termed to be exclusive property with strict curtilage. IAPs can charge per byte of data sent across a network. Or, they can charge for time spent connected to it. Storage providers can charge per byte of data stored on a drive or tape. Crunch houses charge per tick of the clock on their 50,000 googlehurtz Cray. All of this stuff can be and is charged for. And if someone sneaks a copy of seti@home onto that Cray, and stores the work units over on mystorage.com without paying for it via bandwidth they have no rights to... they go to jail for theft (to say the very least).
A vendor, on the other hand, can do all of these things to us with complete impunity. OfficeXP, for example, will steal network bandwidth for the sake of discovering license violations... despite the reality that a OfficeXP licensee has absolutely NO inherent authority to consent on behalf of the network owner. As a simpler example, pretend I hate Macs. If I'd come up with a trojan scheme to cause their CDRoms to become useless, I'd be in jail right now. I could probably cover my butt by embedding an EULA into the trojan (virus EULA lol, by inserting this CDRom you consent to the terms in EULA.TXT on this disk, lmao), but the chances of that protecting me are rather slim, because I'm "not a vendor".
So, it's not about privacy... not directly. It's about curtilage, who owns the box, and who has the right to DICTATE. Start using that word - stick it in everyone's face - "curtilage". It has significant, specific legal meaning, and there's no way to obfuscate it. Once its application has been made consistent, and The State made to enforce it... this anecdotle "privacy" stuff will be moot.
[fyi - someone asked what the first "DRM/Palladim Virus" will be - it will be a freely readable but illegal copy of something that a user did not request or intend to install, re-wrapped with DRM restrictions that preclude it's removal. Maybe an undeleteable copy of Xenu's Memoirs or something, forced onto every MS box on the planet. Oh, the irony:) ]
It's strange, this should be so straighforward - and it isn't. IMO, the judges may have missed the point. Or, maybe I did. I dunno.
I have about 50 boxes in this company. We own them; we decide, without question, what will and will not happen on each. No user has the right to do anything but what we intend... after all, they're our boxes, not the user's.
I don't see libraries as being any different. If they wish to provide a box for people to use, the library is well within it's scope of authority to attach any TOS it wants. Period. After all, the library owns the box, it's THEIRS. "The Arbitrary Public" has about as much authority over the use of these boxes as they do a police car. God help the idiot who thinks he's entitled to drive one of those somewhere, he'd get a Darwin award for sure, and noone would disagree.
I have real difficulty arguing otherwise... I have a couple machines at home, and they are MINE. Not my wife's, not my kids, not some jerk walking in off the street, and NOT the property of some anonymous, arbitrary vendor. I am a strong defender of curtilage regarding my boxes; they are mine, they exist to suit my purposes exclusively, and only I will dictate what they do. What some people call UCE, I'm the type of guy who calls it a packet stream that results in an unwanted impact on the state of my systems; in other words, it's theft of service and intrusion. Meanwhile, all of these "3rd party rights" do nothing but dilute my scope of authority over those boxes.
If you're the site owner, the best design is one that pushes your message onto the user. Forced intro-pages, obfuscated flash navigation, 50-click-depth, no "site search" feature, etc, all benefit this perspective - they all increase time of visit and quantity of message exposures.
If you're the user, the opposite holds true. The perfect site is psychic - you go to www.some.com, and the things you're looking for are exactly at the top of the resulting page, perhaps with some useful references near the end. The perfect user-site has a No-Click depth... page loads, bullseye! Done.
So, you can't answer the question yet - you need to figure out who's perception you're using, and what your agenda is. After that, it's concession time... 8)
4 hours per night is casual gaming? 4 hours a day of anything is a tad more than casual I would say.
Most of these "MMPOGs", 3 or 4 hours is nothing... barely adequate time to accomplish anything. Less time than that, most players will simply avoid committing to any adventures of... err, merit. Heh. Likewise, other players will tend to avoid including short-term players - there's nothing worse than being dependant on someone in an area that took two hours to reach, only to loose that key person (and compromise the group).
A "regular" player will typically get home from work, start playing between 6 and 8pm, and not quit until 2 (or as late as 5 if something of interest is happening, but yes they do regret it the next day). Casual players will often become "regular" players on weekends.
Die hard (often those accursed "uuber") players are simply on, constantly. They're in school, or their spouse works, or they're 20-somethings who live with their parents. They gain in-game power quickly, not only because of the time spent, but more so because the time spent is contiguous (allows one to find and take advantage of a situation for as long as it suits you, as opposed to having to "go to bed" 5 minutes after you finally get there.) And, because of the duration of their typical gaming session, they're in a much better position to monopolize resources (mobs, drops, etc.) It doesn't mean they all do (many do not, in fact,) but they have the most natural opportunity to.
...items is it favors the uubers, and is bad for gameplay.
Face it, the majority of people with cash do not play EQ or DAOC 24/7... they would if they could, but they have jobs and cannot. On the other hand, they will tend to take longer to "finish" the game, and may offer a higher longevity of play (at $xx per month).
So, you've got a choice. Focus (what's sold as) a long-term game on 4-month-life players, or focus on people who may play it for up to a year or more... at $xx per month, both cases. Not exactly tough guess which one you'd pick.
The problem with selling items is it promotes farming. We all remember "EverCamp"... people waiting IN LINE to go kill a freakin mob. I've seen entire zones camped, by people who stayed there for weeks on end - long after the kills or item drops did anything for them, they simply exploited their high status to get items they'd sell for cash. And in doing so, they made it impossible for legitimate players to get and use.
Farmers certainly piss off the casual, 4-hour-per-night player. Especially if there's a "waiting list" over 8 hours long, and big time if the farming causes an item unavailability. Real-cash sales of in-game items, if the game does not have anti-farm tactics, alienates game customers like crazy... because of the farming it causes, no other reason.
I don't think the game vendor has legal right to prohibit such sales, however... such item transactions within the scope of a "game service" would simply be considered value-add. Their remedies are strictly limited to coding.
Character sales, otoh, can be prohibited. The game is marketed as a service, and services usually cannot be transferred. After all, go sell your catv service to your neighbor some day. Or, your Triple-A auto-service. Or the extended warranty on your car. You can't sell your health insurance coverage, and you can't arbitrarily sell your mortgage. It just doesn't work... the agreements (contracts) are with you, period. Most times, the ability to sell a vendor's service to someone else generally requires a franchise agreement. And, no vendor is required to GIVE such agreements to anyone... nor should they be. You can't just open up a store and start re-selling Verizon Wireless, you can't decide to re-selling new (or used) AOL accounts... you need to get their permission. After all, they are the one entering into contract with the customer, and God Help Us All of you think you have implicit proxy authority just because you know them.
You can, by law, sell or transfer the game license and media that was purchased in the store. You cannot arbitrarily sell or transfer the account used to play it, nor should you be able to.
> That's what all companies do. They can't afford to support...
No, cost is no issue. We spent over three months proving our NT4 production was stable, and we're not the vendor... we're the customer. Then we froze it.
We did this because if it crashes, people (you) die. Maybe one or two at a time, or quite likely entire city blocks may dissapear from a gas explosion. Period.
I don't think I'd find too many people who'd want me to chance their butts on something new and unnecessary, when what's existing is already working *exactly* as needed, and will continue to do so for quite some time. Some things should NOT be screwed with in a spurious manner.
Actually, if they're really stupid and use the phrase "logging onto the internet", we'll be all set. My connection does not require any authentication for outbound connections.
heh, keep pushing that phrase:) Logged on! Logged on!
Philips had the great insight that it isn't copy protection, it's actually a "mechanism for stopping the playback of music", which it is.
"The Music Industry's" intention is to thwart PC playback until a later date, when CDDrives that enforce copy protection will be available.
My question - this obviously forces a spurious obsolence of existing CDDrives, for the sole purpose of forcing the above upgrade which has no actual benefit to consumers, and screws every existing CDDrive Mfg on the market. Doesn't this border on a predatory innovation under anti-trust laws?
FOR ANY DAMAGES THAT RESULT FROM YOU USING THE PLAYER OR CONTENT, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY INFECTIONS OR CONTAMINATIONS OF YOUR COMPUTER OR DAMAGE...
So, they can include a free trojan that whacks your existing mp3 library, installs a sniffer, keylogger, and hooks into Quicken... and they can do it accidentally, or they can do it as a "hack back".
Meanwhile, you are not allowed to reverse engineer or circumvent anything - meaning your AV software would be in violation of the agreement, because it would impede the action of the virus (which you've agreed not to do, since by definition it is part of "The Player" until explicitly disclaimed as otherwise by Universal. Also, until separated from "The Player", said trojan/virus would be protected from thrwarting / AV by the DMCA, since "The Player" is a DRM). You'd also not be allowed to audit your box for any impact "The Player" has had on it, since that'd constitute reversing as well.
Be funny if a disk with an "accidental virus" included a Mac version before the Mac's player was even out 8)
My old CS instructor said that OO would help make design and implementation easier and cheaper, when it was appropriate. And for a large part, that possibility exists.
However, as MS repeatedly proves, OO is useless when it comes to actually doing this... GIGO code is now simply encapsulated and inherited.
A trivial definition of curtilage. Namely I own my boxes, I own my networks, I own the services that are offered. I have the right to dictate how those boxes, networks, and services will be used, since I am the one who paid for and built them. If you have any questions about this stance, subscribe to something, some day... the fact that I may be a "home user" or "major provider" should not make any difference.
Right now, any arbitrary, anonymous vendor has more rights to my stuff than I do via EULA "at any time" clauses. In some cases, any anonymous box has more legal rights to my stuff than I do. And finally, even the lowest end-user has the ultimate legal right to bind us to any legal agreement they're dumb enough to click on, even if they have no authority to make such a consent. All of this because curtilage is largely undefined, and where it is, it is grossly inconsistent.
The lack of curtilage is exemplified on two basic fronts.
a) Easter eggs in software. A product is offered with a specific functionality, e.g. an "office suite". The suite will often contain undisclosed and very irrelevent "features" that are flat-out undesired. Q.V. any package that may use resources that are not directly related to their explicit purpose - an application may attempt to "report home" to the vendor and STEAL network services. Or, things as trivial as packages that modify your browser's start page. Huh? Sorry, such things are outside the scope of intent, and violate turf.
b) If I initiate a packet stream that produces an effect that is explicitly against the intent of a service provider - namely, unauthorized utilization of bandwidth (theft of service), unauthorized utilization of CALs (theft of service), unauthorized utilization of CPU cycles (theft of service), unauthorized utilization of storage devices (theft of service... realize that all of the aforementioned are regularly "leased" by companies for serious cash), insertion of data, deletion of data, modification of log files... I go to jail. Some other idiot does that exact same thing because "you can make your sex life better," it's called Spam. Sorry, that should be trespass, tampering, theft of service, and anything else that applies to the results of an "evil packet stream". The exact same events occur, Period.
Other stuff - present "opt-in spam" laws fail, since the definition of "opting in" requires no authentification by the end user. First case and point - No user in our organization is authorized to subscribe (opt-in) to any mail list, and they don't. Yet we regularly get junk sent to them, all claiming to be "opt-in". That'd be a neat trick. Second case and point - it's quite trivial for me to subscribe you, Mr. Arbitrary Email Address, to any spam list I want. No effort is required of these "opt-in" lists to validate the authenticity of the request.
Culpability for negligence / intent. Code Red & Nimda demonstrated two very big things. a) Microsoft sucks, and b) Most users and admins are typhoid maries. The patch against the CRV vector had been out for quite a long time before CRV came to town. Fine. Then, it hit, and spread like crazy. It made the news... it made ALL the news. And to this day, there are still boxes out there that are spreading it, boxes that are actively attacking our systems. If a user gets an outlook virus, and that macro sends itself to everyone, fine - the first time, there's no intent. But when that user keeps using that box, day after day, and that box keeps attacking MY systems, sooner or later the law needs to recognize that there IS some form of intent present. That person is potentially killing me by their actions; they are *certainly* costing me money. Addressing this might have a nice "social" side effect, btw, of making a certain vendor a little more cautious towards exactly *where* they decide to implement scripting features...
Slightly along these lines, again curtilage. The current license model allowed by law is grossly incorrect. The typical computer system (be it a home PC, or a 15 server setup like I have here) consists of three entities. First, there's the hardware owner. He owns the box, and has ultimate say as to what that hardware does. Next, there's the software [license] owner. That person can say what happens with a package, but has no implicit rights to the box it runs on. Lastly, there's the end user, who has the right to type. The present model does not address this. If my 5 year old neighbor sits at my keyboard, using a program my wife bought, he has full proxy authority for me. He can commit me to mortgages, bind me to EULAs, whatever... by simple virtue of the fact that he's physically able to.
The odd thing, however, is that these cookies that are set as a result of Passport authentication are, at times, unique to the browser window they were set in. If I open a new browser window, the cookies are not sent and I am not authenticated.
Most every EULA includes a clause forbidding the transfer of ownership of software
It makes for an interesting point. It probably means that Time Warner needs to re-purchase every MS license they have, since that software cannot legally be "owned" by the new AOL-TW entity. Same for my local power company, which covers a good hunk of NYS... they just got bought by some British corp. I guess their EULAs are all null and void, too...
But I don't think that'd be reasonable. You gotta figure, a company with 1,000 copies of NTW gets bought by someone else. All assests of that company are transferred, no way in hell do the EULAs expire...
It's not so much the pixels that fail; for us it's been backlights, backlights, backlights. We rolled out about 30 17" deals from 3 OEMs, and over the past year we've had about 6 backlight failures (four were in the first two months, however). We have a few with some dead pixels (and one with a green pixel stuck "on"), but they were shipped that way.
The biggest problem with AM displays is... color. If you'll be doing any graphics, viewing angle will dictate what shades you see, and you'll find yourself needing a classic CRT to actually get a consistent perception of the images you're making.
The issue is with "syndicated" commercials; ones that a station airs that was from an external source (typically an agency etc). These commercials are "voiced" by professional talent... we've all heard the Voice of God (Joe Kelly) thundering away sooner or later, and that's one of the things that he does for a living. Howard Parker is another most of us have heard by now... he reads commercials for a living, and gets paid based on the number of airings. Advertisers hire these people because of their voices, etc, and these people get paid either flat-rate or on royalty.
Which leads us to the problem - A station will charge an agency (or whoever) "per airing" of a commercial, and makes cash on it. Wanna buy 10 timeslots? The time isn't free. The agency charges the advertiser in a similar fashion, per unit aired... and they make money on it. Per unit. The guy who voiced the spot is often supposed to get paid per airing as well.
And that's an issue. Stations push their streams to the clients as a "value add"... after all, the sales pig can sell this to a client as additional (free?) airings. The agencies do likewise... some will even charge more if a target station has streaming capability (I don't know of any stations that do this, but several national agencies are adding a few pennies here and there). Everyone... everyone involved is selling their streams as a media outlet, an additional way to air spots. Some agencies are actually surcharging for those additional airings. AFTRA, right or wrong, has decided to call them on it.
So, that's the reality. It has nothing to do with your local airstaff.
What's really funny... still LMAO about it... is that the Studio's argument means the Studio's own works are not protected under the first amendment:
...they claim that since computer programs were developed "to perform complex tasks," no First Amendment analysis is required. Obviously were that the rule, any explicative speech on complex subjects, from textbooks to cookbooks to How-To CD-ROMs, would be outside the scope of the First Amendment.
What's more complex than decrypting a compressed sequenced of digitally interpreted frame overlays... 8)
Actually, it'd be good if Leadbeater got his way. After all, it'd make competing that much easier for the rest of us... hell, even a VB weenie could achieve "God" status under his concept. Java programmers might actually have value some day, and HTML might really be considered "coding".
So, go for it, Lead 8) I could use the two-day work week.
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It means we own our networks.
I have a couple of bonded Ts, for example. Verizon owns them, sublet to AT&T, who resells it to me. They provide me with an ethernet jack, and that's where their turf ends.
These raids mean that I can dictate, without question, every aspect about that 36 inch Cat5 running into my Nic. I sure as hell can dictate what happens after that Nic, also.
These raids also mean that a person's ability to do something has no relation to their authority to do it.
Unsolicited mail that attempts to sell or notify us of products or service is strictly disallowed by our TOS. Spam, therefore...
Hmm... close.
:) ]
Lotta people seem to use the wrong words. This issue isn't privacy, it isn't necessarily about "fair use".
The specific issue is curtilage, e.g. who owns the box. Who owns the drive, who owns the network segment(s), who owns the clock ticks, who owns the machine state, and who has the authority to dictate how those resources will be used and that state will be affected. Sadly, there is no real definition of curtilage yet - and where it is partially described by case law, it is flatly self contradicting.
We have a box owner. We have a software licensee, who must gain the consent of the box owner to install a piece of software. That box owner can attach whatever conditions he likes; the licensee has no implicit rights in this matter. Then, we have the user. The user has no implicit rights, either. The user has no rights to bind either the licensee nor the box owner to any agreements. Period. That's the reality of the user model... deviate, and you no longer work here. Or, you go to jail (as our friend at Intel discovered). Or, the Library won't let you use their PCs anymore. Whatever.
The EULA model is completely different, and does not respect any part of this hierarchy. Any vendor is (by default) allowed to assume they have complete rights to fully monopolize and tamper with any and every resource that they are able to discover. A five year old kid who smashes a window, breaks into your house, and sits at your keyboard is considered to be a fully authorized proxy for you regarding EULA terms, and can bind you to any agreements offered. You have the option of "no longer agreeing" after the fact, except that Vendors are not required to disclose the impact of agreeing to a EULA; in fact, they are also not required to live up to the terms of it in the first place [q.v. the un-install of a software to indicate revokation of agreement; the software will leave "turds" everywhere. Outlook XP, for example, wipes the ability to use "Microsoft Mail". Indicating that you no longer agree to the terms by removing Outlook XP does not cause "Microsoft Mail" to return... the machine state will have been irrevokably modified beyond the reach of the casual user, made worse by the fact that the modifications were spurious.]
There's lots of examples where resources have been termed to be exclusive property with strict curtilage. IAPs can charge per byte of data sent across a network. Or, they can charge for time spent connected to it. Storage providers can charge per byte of data stored on a drive or tape. Crunch houses charge per tick of the clock on their 50,000 googlehurtz Cray. All of this stuff can be and is charged for. And if someone sneaks a copy of seti@home onto that Cray, and stores the work units over on mystorage.com without paying for it via bandwidth they have no rights to... they go to jail for theft (to say the very least).
A vendor, on the other hand, can do all of these things to us with complete impunity. OfficeXP, for example, will steal network bandwidth for the sake of discovering license violations... despite the reality that a OfficeXP licensee has absolutely NO inherent authority to consent on behalf of the network owner. As a simpler example, pretend I hate Macs. If I'd come up with a trojan scheme to cause their CDRoms to become useless, I'd be in jail right now. I could probably cover my butt by embedding an EULA into the trojan (virus EULA lol, by inserting this CDRom you consent to the terms in EULA.TXT on this disk, lmao), but the chances of that protecting me are rather slim, because I'm "not a vendor".
So, it's not about privacy... not directly. It's about curtilage, who owns the box, and who has the right to DICTATE. Start using that word - stick it in everyone's face - "curtilage". It has significant, specific legal meaning, and there's no way to obfuscate it. Once its application has been made consistent, and The State made to enforce it... this anecdotle "privacy" stuff will be moot.
[fyi - someone asked what the first "DRM/Palladim Virus" will be - it will be a freely readable but illegal copy of something that a user did not request or intend to install, re-wrapped with DRM restrictions that preclude it's removal. Maybe an undeleteable copy of Xenu's Memoirs or something, forced onto every MS box on the planet. Oh, the irony
- SBB
It's strange, this should be so straighforward - and it isn't. IMO, the judges may have missed the point. Or, maybe I did. I dunno.
I have about 50 boxes in this company. We own them; we decide, without question, what will and will not happen on each. No user has the right to do anything but what we intend... after all, they're our boxes, not the user's.
I don't see libraries as being any different. If they wish to provide a box for people to use, the library is well within it's scope of authority to attach any TOS it wants. Period. After all, the library owns the box, it's THEIRS. "The Arbitrary Public" has about as much authority over the use of these boxes as they do a police car. God help the idiot who thinks he's entitled to drive one of those somewhere, he'd get a Darwin award for sure, and noone would disagree.
I have real difficulty arguing otherwise... I have a couple machines at home, and they are MINE. Not my wife's, not my kids, not some jerk walking in off the street, and NOT the property of some anonymous, arbitrary vendor. I am a strong defender of curtilage regarding my boxes; they are mine, they exist to suit my purposes exclusively, and only I will dictate what they do. What some people call UCE, I'm the type of guy who calls it a packet stream that results in an unwanted impact on the state of my systems; in other words, it's theft of service and intrusion. Meanwhile, all of these "3rd party rights" do nothing but dilute my scope of authority over those boxes.
On phone with MS (back when you could call them, long ago) -
"Yes, this does preemptive tasking."
If you're the site owner, the best design is one that pushes your message onto the user. Forced intro-pages, obfuscated flash navigation, 50-click-depth, no "site search" feature, etc, all benefit this perspective - they all increase time of visit and quantity of message exposures.
If you're the user, the opposite holds true. The perfect site is psychic - you go to www.some.com, and the things you're looking for are exactly at the top of the resulting page, perhaps with some useful references near the end. The perfect user-site has a No-Click depth... page loads, bullseye! Done.
So, you can't answer the question yet - you need to figure out who's perception you're using, and what your agenda is. After that, it's concession time... 8)
- SBB
Most of these "MMPOGs", 3 or 4 hours is nothing... barely adequate time to accomplish anything. Less time than that, most players will simply avoid committing to any adventures of... err, merit. Heh. Likewise, other players will tend to avoid including short-term players - there's nothing worse than being dependant on someone in an area that took two hours to reach, only to loose that key person (and compromise the group).
A "regular" player will typically get home from work, start playing between 6 and 8pm, and not quit until 2 (or as late as 5 if something of interest is happening, but yes they do regret it the next day). Casual players will often become "regular" players on weekends.
Die hard (often those accursed "uuber") players are simply on, constantly. They're in school, or their spouse works, or they're 20-somethings who live with their parents. They gain in-game power quickly, not only because of the time spent, but more so because the time spent is contiguous (allows one to find and take advantage of a situation for as long as it suits you, as opposed to having to "go to bed" 5 minutes after you finally get there.) And, because of the duration of their typical gaming session, they're in a much better position to monopolize resources (mobs, drops, etc.) It doesn't mean they all do (many do not, in fact,) but they have the most natural opportunity to.
-SBB...items is it favors the uubers, and is bad for gameplay.
Face it, the majority of people with cash do not play EQ or DAOC 24/7... they would if they could, but they have jobs and cannot. On the other hand, they will tend to take longer to "finish" the game, and may offer a higher longevity of play (at $xx per month).
So, you've got a choice. Focus (what's sold as) a long-term game on 4-month-life players, or focus on people who may play it for up to a year or more... at $xx per month, both cases. Not exactly tough guess which one you'd pick.
The problem with selling items is it promotes farming. We all remember "EverCamp"... people waiting IN LINE to go kill a freakin mob. I've seen entire zones camped, by people who stayed there for weeks on end - long after the kills or item drops did anything for them, they simply exploited their high status to get items they'd sell for cash. And in doing so, they made it impossible for legitimate players to get and use.
Farmers certainly piss off the casual, 4-hour-per-night player. Especially if there's a "waiting list" over 8 hours long, and big time if the farming causes an item unavailability. Real-cash sales of in-game items, if the game does not have anti-farm tactics, alienates game customers like crazy... because of the farming it causes, no other reason.
I don't think the game vendor has legal right to prohibit such sales, however... such item transactions within the scope of a "game service" would simply be considered value-add. Their remedies are strictly limited to coding.
Character sales, otoh, can be prohibited. The game is marketed as a service, and services usually cannot be transferred. After all, go sell your catv service to your neighbor some day. Or, your Triple-A auto-service. Or the extended warranty on your car. You can't sell your health insurance coverage, and you can't arbitrarily sell your mortgage. It just doesn't work... the agreements (contracts) are with you, period. Most times, the ability to sell a vendor's service to someone else generally requires a franchise agreement. And, no vendor is required to GIVE such agreements to anyone... nor should they be. You can't just open up a store and start re-selling Verizon Wireless, you can't decide to re-selling new (or used) AOL accounts... you need to get their permission. After all, they are the one entering into contract with the customer, and God Help Us All of you think you have implicit proxy authority just because you know them.
You can, by law, sell or transfer the game license and media that was purchased in the store. You cannot arbitrarily sell or transfer the account used to play it, nor should you be able to.
If this satellite's got MS in it, I'm amazed it stayed aloft this long 8)
- SBB
> That's what all companies do. They can't afford to support...
No, cost is no issue. We spent over three months proving our NT4 production was stable, and we're not the vendor... we're the customer. Then we froze it.
We did this because if it crashes, people (you) die. Maybe one or two at a time, or quite likely entire city blocks may dissapear from a gas explosion. Period.
I don't think I'd find too many people who'd want me to chance their butts on something new and unnecessary, when what's existing is already working *exactly* as needed, and will continue to do so for quite some time. Some things should NOT be screwed with in a spurious manner.
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You forgot the part where your webcam takes a look around to see if anyone else will be watching with you...
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Actually, if they're really stupid and use the phrase "logging onto the internet", we'll be all set. My connection does not require any authentication for outbound connections.
:) Logged on! Logged on!
heh, keep pushing that phrase
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Philips had the great insight that it isn't copy protection, it's actually a "mechanism for stopping the playback of music", which it is.
"The Music Industry's" intention is to thwart PC playback until a later date, when CDDrives that enforce copy protection will be available.
My question - this obviously forces a spurious obsolence of existing CDDrives, for the sole purpose of forcing the above upgrade which has no actual benefit to consumers, and screws every existing CDDrive Mfg on the market. Doesn't this border on a predatory innovation under anti-trust laws?
I'd love to hear some insight on this.
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FOR ANY DAMAGES THAT RESULT FROM YOU USING THE PLAYER OR CONTENT, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY INFECTIONS OR CONTAMINATIONS OF YOUR COMPUTER OR DAMAGE...
So, they can include a free trojan that whacks your existing mp3 library, installs a sniffer, keylogger, and hooks into Quicken... and they can do it accidentally, or they can do it as a "hack back".
Meanwhile, you are not allowed to reverse engineer or circumvent anything - meaning your AV software would be in violation of the agreement, because it would impede the action of the virus (which you've agreed not to do, since by definition it is part of "The Player" until explicitly disclaimed as otherwise by Universal. Also, until separated from "The Player", said trojan/virus would be protected from thrwarting / AV by the DMCA, since "The Player" is a DRM). You'd also not be allowed to audit your box for any impact "The Player" has had on it, since that'd constitute reversing as well.
Be funny if a disk with an "accidental virus" included a Mac version before the Mac's player was even out 8)
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My old CS instructor said that OO would help make design and implementation easier and cheaper, when it was appropriate. And for a large part, that possibility exists.
However, as MS repeatedly proves, OO is useless when it comes to actually doing this... GIGO code is now simply encapsulated and inherited.
Oye, ad-hoc thoughts...
A trivial definition of curtilage. Namely I own my boxes, I own my networks, I own the services that are offered. I have the right to dictate how those boxes, networks, and services will be used, since I am the one who paid for and built them. If you have any questions about this stance, subscribe to something, some day... the fact that I may be a "home user" or "major provider" should not make any difference.
Right now, any arbitrary, anonymous vendor has more rights to my stuff than I do via EULA "at any time" clauses. In some cases, any anonymous box has more legal rights to my stuff than I do. And finally, even the lowest end-user has the ultimate legal right to bind us to any legal agreement they're dumb enough to click on, even if they have no authority to make such a consent. All of this because curtilage is largely undefined, and where it is, it is grossly inconsistent.
The lack of curtilage is exemplified on two basic fronts.
a) Easter eggs in software. A product is offered with a specific functionality, e.g. an "office suite". The suite will often contain undisclosed and very irrelevent "features" that are flat-out undesired. Q.V. any package that may use resources that are not directly related to their explicit purpose - an application may attempt to "report home" to the vendor and STEAL network services. Or, things as trivial as packages that modify your browser's start page. Huh? Sorry, such things are outside the scope of intent, and violate turf.
b) If I initiate a packet stream that produces an effect that is explicitly against the intent of a service provider - namely, unauthorized utilization of bandwidth (theft of service), unauthorized utilization of CALs (theft of service), unauthorized utilization of CPU cycles (theft of service), unauthorized utilization of storage devices (theft of service... realize that all of the aforementioned are regularly "leased" by companies for serious cash), insertion of data, deletion of data, modification of log files... I go to jail. Some other idiot does that exact same thing because "you can make your sex life better," it's called Spam. Sorry, that should be trespass, tampering, theft of service, and anything else that applies to the results of an "evil packet stream". The exact same events occur, Period.
Other stuff - present "opt-in spam" laws fail, since the definition of "opting in" requires no authentification by the end user. First case and point - No user in our organization is authorized to subscribe (opt-in) to any mail list, and they don't. Yet we regularly get junk sent to them, all claiming to be "opt-in". That'd be a neat trick. Second case and point - it's quite trivial for me to subscribe you, Mr. Arbitrary Email Address, to any spam list I want. No effort is required of these "opt-in" lists to validate the authenticity of the request.
Culpability for negligence / intent. Code Red & Nimda demonstrated two very big things. a) Microsoft sucks, and b) Most users and admins are typhoid maries. The patch against the CRV vector had been out for quite a long time before CRV came to town. Fine. Then, it hit, and spread like crazy. It made the news... it made ALL the news. And to this day, there are still boxes out there that are spreading it, boxes that are actively attacking our systems. If a user gets an outlook virus, and that macro sends itself to everyone, fine - the first time, there's no intent. But when that user keeps using that box, day after day, and that box keeps attacking MY systems, sooner or later the law needs to recognize that there IS some form of intent present. That person is potentially killing me by their actions; they are *certainly* costing me money. Addressing this might have a nice "social" side effect, btw, of making a certain vendor a little more cautious towards exactly *where* they decide to implement scripting features...
Slightly along these lines, again curtilage. The current license model allowed by law is grossly incorrect. The typical computer system (be it a home PC, or a 15 server setup like I have here) consists of three entities. First, there's the hardware owner. He owns the box, and has ultimate say as to what that hardware does. Next, there's the software [license] owner. That person can say what happens with a package, but has no implicit rights to the box it runs on. Lastly, there's the end user, who has the right to type. The present model does not address this. If my 5 year old neighbor sits at my keyboard, using a program my wife bought, he has full proxy authority for me. He can commit me to mortgages, bind me to EULAs, whatever... by simple virtue of the fact that he's physically able to.
The odd thing, however, is that these cookies that are set as a result of Passport authentication are, at times, unique to the browser window they were set in. If I open a new browser window, the cookies are not sent and I am not authenticated.
Think DRM tokens, e.g. pay per viewing instance.Most every EULA includes a clause forbidding the transfer of ownership of software
It makes for an interesting point. It probably means that Time Warner needs to re-purchase every MS license they have, since that software cannot legally be "owned" by the new AOL-TW entity. Same for my local power company, which covers a good hunk of NYS... they just got bought by some British corp. I guess their EULAs are all null and void, too...
But I don't think that'd be reasonable. You gotta figure, a company with 1,000 copies of NTW gets bought by someone else. All assests of that company are transferred, no way in hell do the EULAs expire...
Backdoor? So, we won't need to use DeCSS anymore?
Gonna be funny to see which side wins, the backdoor proponants or the DMCA advocates.
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They're angry because... err.. then again, most Adobe products are free, too. Nevermind 8)
It's not so much the pixels that fail; for us it's been backlights, backlights, backlights. We rolled out about 30 17" deals from 3 OEMs, and over the past year we've had about 6 backlight failures (four were in the first two months, however). We have a few with some dead pixels (and one with a green pixel stuck "on"), but they were shipped that way.
The biggest problem with AM displays is... color. If you'll be doing any graphics, viewing angle will dictate what shades you see, and you'll find yourself needing a classic CRT to actually get a consistent perception of the images you're making.
Radio station DJs have nothing to do with this.
The issue is with "syndicated" commercials; ones that a station airs that was from an external source (typically an agency etc). These commercials are "voiced" by professional talent... we've all heard the Voice of God (Joe Kelly) thundering away sooner or later, and that's one of the things that he does for a living. Howard Parker is another most of us have heard by now... he reads commercials for a living, and gets paid based on the number of airings. Advertisers hire these people because of their voices, etc, and these people get paid either flat-rate or on royalty.
Which leads us to the problem - A station will charge an agency (or whoever) "per airing" of a commercial, and makes cash on it. Wanna buy 10 timeslots? The time isn't free. The agency charges the advertiser in a similar fashion, per unit aired... and they make money on it. Per unit. The guy who voiced the spot is often supposed to get paid per airing as well.
And that's an issue. Stations push their streams to the clients as a "value add"... after all, the sales pig can sell this to a client as additional (free?) airings. The agencies do likewise... some will even charge more if a target station has streaming capability (I don't know of any stations that do this, but several national agencies are adding a few pennies here and there). Everyone... everyone involved is selling their streams as a media outlet, an additional way to air spots. Some agencies are actually surcharging for those additional airings. AFTRA, right or wrong, has decided to call them on it.
So, that's the reality. It has nothing to do with your local airstaff.
 
What's really funny... still LMAO about it... is that the Studio's argument means the Studio's own works are not protected under the first amendment:
What's more complex than decrypting a compressed sequenced of digitally interpreted frame overlays... 8)
- SBBActually, it'd be good if Leadbeater got his way. After all, it'd make competing that much easier for the rest of us... hell, even a VB weenie could achieve "God" status under his concept. Java programmers might actually have value some day, and HTML might really be considered "coding". So, go for it, Lead 8) I could use the two-day work week.