Apple buys Tivo. Apple ads a DRM layer onto Tivo. Apple starts selling MPEG2 and 4 movies at iTunes. Apple lets you download movies and watch them on your big screen, whenever you want, somthing nobody else can offer. Apple releases an iPod with a color screen...
Tivo has a large HDD, a network connection, and a large installed base. If you go with MPEG2 (still the DVD standard) instead of MPEG4, you A: save yourself a lot of re-encoding costs and B: incentivize buying a newer model with a bigger hard drive.
This would be great. I don't think it's serious, but this would be great.
Don't forget, Apple bought the basis for iTunes and the iPod before making them over with good design.
Sit it in the middle of a major chat hub, and have it learn what to say in response to the last two inputs? Sounds good to me. Where can we find a chat hub?
English is context-sensitive. Inherent ambiguity in the language is dealt with through context. Translating something that is intentionally ackward and misleading is a terrible test. As another poster pointed out, while the sentence is gramatically passable by the written rules of english, no english speaker would say that. For one, if the two concepts are not connected it is a run-on sentence. For another, fruit flies in this context are a broad category, whereas A banana is a singular entity. A broad category of something are not going to specifically like an instance of something else. And a writer would not juxtapose things arbitrarily without some connection between the two, which this sentence ultimately lacks.
Who cares if a computer can translate a basically nonsensical, badly formed sentence that few people can understand in the native language? Machine-based translation that is reliable enough to write back and forth between colleagues and friends would be significant enough to warrant breaking out the bubbly.
If someone could automatically filter the web on the fly into someone's native language, and do so reliably enough that they can read it without pain and without losing more than a few major concepts, we'll be a long way towards a globally unified internet.
They still won't understand the real point to reading the EULA - which is understanding exactly what the software claims it will do on your computer.
Since when has that been the point of the EULA? As far as I can tell, the point of the EULA is to obfuscate what the software is going to do to the computer, ensure that I can only litigate for gross negligence in a rent-a-court in Virginia, and open me up to defamation lawsuits if I complain.
If you want to know what a piece of software does, go online and look up what other people have posted about the software. Don't bother reading the EULA. The EULA *may* tell you that it's about to install spyware, but it won't tell you that the application is buggy cr*p and not worth installing anyway.
Don't forget, the Game Boy focused on Cheap, Rugged, Lasting. The Lynx was more expensive than the game boy, and the battery life was pretty poor. The Game Gear had a color screen with about 1 degree of LCD visibility, and it ate batteries like nobody's business. The Turbo Express Portable was great, but also sucked down batteries and cost a mint.
The Nomad was quietly released post Genesis. I was always sad that system didn't make more of a splash. Now you can emulate a Genesis pretty easily on a GBA.
After the Game Boy, and several years of cheaper-cheaper-cheaper, Nintendo released the Game Boy Pocket, then the Game Boy Pocket Color, and finally the GBA. The Game Boy Pocket Color was not supposed to be a full Game Boy, but rather a stopgap between the GB and the GBA. In the same way Nintendo claims that the DS is not a GBDS, but rather a stopgap between the last official Game Boy and the next. Or something.
In the interem, there has been the Neo Geo Pocket, the Neo Geo Pocket Color, the Wonderswan (which scored a Coup landing Square), the Game.com (chuckle), and a whole host of other lesser immitators. Nintendo just knows their market pretty well, always releasing somewhat underpowered Game Boys with excellent battery life and a rugged housing.
Imagine being able to google an answer to a question in the field in real time.
"Hi Issac! We were just going down to the club. Want to come? You know, the club. The club downtown. The club in downtown New York. The other club in downtown New York. You know, the club with great lobster and that cute waitress. No, still in New York. Next. Next. Next. Next. You know, the one we went for Bill's Birthday last year? Not Mr. Bill, our Bill, from work. Yes, last year. I mean, the year before. Of course you don't have it in your PDA, you got that silly thing last Christmas. Two days after Christmas, whatever. No I don't want to see the recipt. Why would I want to track the package?
Anyway, do you want to come to the club or what? The club. The club downtown..."
You pay your cable company, yet you watch adverts. You buy magazines, yet there are advertisements on there.
Don't confuse who gets what. The phone company makes money to route your call to your ISP. Your ISP makes money routing your computer to the internet. Somehow, the websites you surf, including this one, need to get some financial recompense or they're going to fall under the cost of bandwidth and hosting. Of all of the people on the food chain, they're probably the most deserving.
You may be paying your phone company and ISP, but you're not paying via your phone company and ISP... It's not going to anyone but them.
The current model seems to fall into the you-pay-through-the-nose-you-businessman type. Starbucks was once upon a time charging 60 bucks per month for unlimited wireless access. Airports and other places still charge something like a dollar per minute.
On the other hand, many people leave their networks open either inadvertently or intentionally because if you're resolved to pay for the backend anyway, you might as well share.
So wireless internet access right now is either free or ludicrously expensive, with nothing inbetween. This seems like it could be a nice inbetween. No credit card changes hands, you're not committed to buying a day of time for 20 dollars, and you're not relying upon the kindness of strangers. You're paying for your internet access, and it's as always-on and always convienient as at home. If you want to just log on and check your mail quickly, you can do just that.
A Go board is 19x19. This solution was for 5x5. Saying that it is a quarter of the size of the full board is incorrect, it's actually one fourteenth the size.
A Chess board is 8x8. One sixteenth of that is 2x2. It's a reasonable comparison, at least mathematically. The difference is that while Go at 5x5 is still strategic, if predictable, Chess at 2x2 is meaningless. One could say that Go happens to hold up well under that type of minimalist circumstance. One could also say that Go is just a physically larger game than Chess, and achieves a deeper degree of strategy through sheer insane volume.
But overall mathematically, it's a fair comparison.
Dude, they were never that funny. They were relevant, they were entertaining, they were on topic, but they've always been a bit downhill.
And yes, I read them every day. Religiously. But not because they're necessarily funny. I read them for the same reasons that retired people read Family Circus.
The second list, which is marked as a list of applications that don't work after installing SP2, is actually a list of applications that need ports opened for them. This is not terribly surprising, and would need to be done for any firewall that people had installed.
While I can understand how a sysadmin looking at the prospect of 100 or 10,000 computers possibly going kaputz is scary... get some perspective. It's not like the system is upgrading to a different OS, it's just adding a firewall and a few other protections that certain applications weren't expecting. Try out your must-have software on an SP2 machine before the update happens, but chances are unless you're doing some silly undocumented mumbo-jumbo for efficiency your apps should run fine.
For a long time I was happy that Ultracade was attempting to bring back artwork and designs long forgotten, threatening to disappear into the void. They're the last refuge for such games as Strider and Mercs, classics that shouldn't be allowed to disappear from the legal scene in this world. They are hardcore gamers who appreciate the art.
But filing for a trademark on MAME? The project that they got their idea from? That's just low. I could see them trying to sue MAME out of existence for being illegal, promoting piracy, and cutting into the profits of a corporation. But trademark?
Plan your lighting controls and layouts carefully. Are they spread-spectrum flourescent? Dimable? Track? Internally mounted?
How will they be automated?
Your cabling can be re-run by yourself, assuming that you plan that properly. But changing a lighting system tied to a live electric system is a real pain in the tail. Shutting off power to your location facility, I mean, your house is not trivial, nor is the pain of working in darkness. And there goes clocks, timers, etc. And it could theoretically kill you, though it probably won't.
It's a holdover. People used to post relevant but obvious information in an attempt to get their karma number as high as possible.
Stuff like how Einstein@ home is running on BOINC, which also runs SETI@home http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ so it should be pretty stable. Anyone who read the articles or attempted to sign up would know that, but most of the mods didn't do either.
They were playing the Karma game, back when karma was permanently accrued and displayed. People got their Karma numbers up into the tens of thousands at the height of the out-of-controllness. The pinnacle of Karma Whoring was re-posting the article text from the linked article. It was useful if one person did it, but the text would be reposted hundreds of times for every story, with everyone trying to be the first to repost.
Playing this game eventually became socially unacceptable. It became good mojo to post certain things annonymously, like direct download links or article texts, to reassure everyone around you that you weren't just being a jerk, that you really did post the information because you wanted to help.
Then they instituted a Karma cap at 50, which helped a lot. Still, people complained that a single post with +4 informative, -1 overrated could cause your Karma to go from 50 to 49. And other people were still playing the Karma game, just with multiple accounts. So they expunged even that amount of resolution, to the current good / great / bad system. And now many people don't even know what Karma Whoring is, or why one would do it.
I respect the grandparent poster for posting annonymously. He's clinging to antiquated morals, which is kind of heartening.
For some reason I've always seen channels 1-10 in a straight left-to-right line, things curve upwards until about 15, and keep curving until they're a right to left line at about 25. By 30 they've curved straight up, and about 37 - 42 they make a quick left turn to be right to left again. After about 44 they make a slight 30 degree turn upwards, and continue to curve upwards somewhat though never above 70 degrees. Once you reach the audio - only programming channels, like the streaming christmas music channel, they head straight up.
I've never been able to explain exactly how this physical relationship formed in my mind, but it has been embedded in there for some time now, and doesn't seem likely to go away.
Ironically, I don't really watch television anymore.
The product is useless without an account on their, and only their servers. Selling that without including that in the price (or marking on the box the required monthly fee) would be like Microsoft selling a copy of Office, then refusing to activate it because activation is not possible. Or AOL selling you their client software, then refusing to allow you to access their servers. And while they do include the required monthly fee on the box, it's implicit that the servers exist, they will be up, and all you have to do is pay the monthly fee to go on them.
Re:This isn't an article about the tech oscars
on
Tech Oscars Awarded
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's an article about how they couldn't find a blonde capable of understanding the awards she was giving out.
There's almost nothing on what these advances mean to the industry.
What, you think the AP could find a reporter capable of understanding the awards that were given out?
The question comes down to how is it used. In this case the GPS would be used to track people who have violated a restraining order, a perfectly reasonable goal, and a surprisingly minimalistic way of handling the problem. The people would still be able to hold down jobs, go to carnivals, see their mother, study, and get on with their lives. That's pretty good overall, and I don't think anyone would argue that this punishment in and of itself is severe or wrongheaded.
On the other hand, what happens if GPS replaces or offsets jail for a lot of the prisoners out there? What if instead of going to jail for petty theft, a person instead was given an anklet and told that for six months they could go to their house, their relative's houses, their job, and the supermarket? Instead of a whole class of people who would have been rotting away in jail, learning to hate, mistrust, and commit crimes, you have a class of people who might still see their children, might still go to school, might still hold down jobs in their communities. That would help the "black slave class" far more than throwing people in jail.
Here's a counter proposal. Embrace GPS as a law-enforcement tool. Punish first-time criminals with GPS fencing, keeping them within specific boundaries for specific lengths of time, allowing them to remain part of normal society without making a career criminal out of them. Second time offenders get a several-week solitary jail cell, with no chance of being influenced by other criminals, followed by GPS fencing. Third time offenders get dropped into the kinds of pits we have now.
Families have a better chance of staying together and influencing people. Communities have a shot at doing something for their youths.
And, of course, repeal the laws that keep the poor, poor, providing more equal opportunities, drug treatment as a medical addiction, adequate voting, etc.
(After you've accounted for free people, indentured servants, and natives, who else is left?)
Dead people?
"Well Bob I see that only.01% of the eligible voting population have turned out to the polls so far tonight. And while the absentee ballots have been flying in, most are too covered in mud to decipher."
"That's right Bill. While Bush JrJr has a slight lead in Texas, again this year the population's #1 choice for president appears to be the write-in candidate, Lucy-fer. We would like to remind our viewers who may still be lumbering towards the polls that the Supreme Court has already ruled that Seraphim are not human and therefore cannot hold office. Like Pauly Shore. However, undead favorites Vlad Tepes, Aleister Crowly, and Jewel are A.O.K."
"Your Honor, I ask that you enforce section 3, but ignore section 13. Pretty please; I can't afford to travel to LA to file this to get my $40 back."
Amusingly enough, this argument frequently holds up, but only in California.
And of course, this kind of small-value transaction is exactly why they have small claims courts in the first place, which frequently is ruled on soft logic and what is right over exact wording of contracts. Vivendi may very well argue that the EULA should stand and that this should be transferred to a California court, but they'd have to show up in your jurisdiction to argue that to a judge. Otherwise you win a summary judgement. Even if they do show up, the judge would have to agree that nobody in their district should be afforded financial protection under the law against unscrupulous individuals doing business of value less than the total cost of a plane ticket.
Just be aware that filing in small claims court, at least in Massachusetts, costs 15 dollars. You would be doing it for the principle, not the money.
STEAM is the most dangerous implementation of rights-robbing "DRM" out in the wild to date.
I'm not convinced. If you have the pipe to pull down... let me check my steam folder... (Jesus Christ!) 8 GB of data over the 'net, you've probably got an always-on connection.
Quite frankly, the likelyhood of me finding a physical CD of a game that I've purchased is far slimmer than the likelyhood of having an internet connection. I'm as likely to have net down as power down. And I think this holds true for many people who have accounts. The fear I have is that someday those Steam servers are going to shut down, but Valve has said that in that condition they will release the code... if they haven't inadvertantly already.
Plus, if steam doesn't fit your life, you can get a retail CD for about the same cost. Retail CD's to me are just a pain, though, and Steam fits my life better. And while I used to give Valve a lot of lip for Steam being buggy and crashy, they're actually solid these days. I only notice that it's running when it starts sucking down a new mode or major feature, and it has never crashed on me.
The account on their servers comes with the product, and is integral for the functioning of the product. Otherwise access to the server is open to anyone who can hack themselves a valid activation code.
I doubt any court in the US would see it as selling bits, as opposed to licensing access to a product. The product in this case is the license to play the game (remember, you never "buy" a game). The bits themselves are basically irrelevant... You don't own them anyway. With most licensing agreements you don't own the media either, and the publisher can (at least according to most EULAs) request them back at any time, although I've never heard of that happening.
And because the EULA is basically the shrinkwrap agreement, and the Terms of Service come long after any purchaser can return the game, the conditions laid out in the EULA could be considered a binding contract. However, those laid out in the TOS could not be considered even and binding if it conflicts with the EULA and the player has already invested their money.
While Person 2 hasn't given Blizzard any money, Person 1 has, and one of the conditions of Person 1's agreement with Blizzard which has been explicitly laid out by Blizzard is that s/he can resell the game to a third party. Without that right, it severely reduces the value of the first person owning the game, arguably by %50 or more.
To go back to your example, if I buy an extended warranty on car that says that I can transfer the warranty under the original conditions to a third party with the sale of that car, I would expect them to do just that. Saying that I'm perfectly capable of giving them the piece of paper, but that they're not going to fix anything that may break, would violate both the spirit and the letter of the agreement. While the company had promised me, the purchaser of the Warranty, that I would be able to recoup some of my investment in the resale market, they have now gone back on their agreement and cut off that value to me.
Blizzard / Vivendi is clearly in the wrong. I'm guessing this is just growing pains, and not a willful attmept to mislead their customers, as they have never done a subscription service MMPORPG before. I wouldn't be surprised if this issue was resolved the day after this slashdot article hit.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple buys Tivo. Apple ads a DRM layer onto Tivo. Apple starts selling MPEG2 and 4 movies at iTunes. Apple lets you download movies and watch them on your big screen, whenever you want, somthing nobody else can offer. Apple releases an iPod with a color screen...
Tivo has a large HDD, a network connection, and a large installed base. If you go with MPEG2 (still the DVD standard) instead of MPEG4, you A: save yourself a lot of re-encoding costs and B: incentivize buying a newer model with a bigger hard drive.
This would be great. I don't think it's serious, but this would be great.
Don't forget, Apple bought the basis for iTunes and the iPod before making them over with good design.
Sit it in the middle of a major chat hub, and have it learn what to say in response to the last two inputs? Sounds good to me. Where can we find a chat hub?
English is context-sensitive. Inherent ambiguity in the language is dealt with through context. Translating something that is intentionally ackward and misleading is a terrible test. As another poster pointed out, while the sentence is gramatically passable by the written rules of english, no english speaker would say that. For one, if the two concepts are not connected it is a run-on sentence. For another, fruit flies in this context are a broad category, whereas A banana is a singular entity. A broad category of something are not going to specifically like an instance of something else. And a writer would not juxtapose things arbitrarily without some connection between the two, which this sentence ultimately lacks.
Who cares if a computer can translate a basically nonsensical, badly formed sentence that few people can understand in the native language? Machine-based translation that is reliable enough to write back and forth between colleagues and friends would be significant enough to warrant breaking out the bubbly.
If someone could automatically filter the web on the fly into someone's native language, and do so reliably enough that they can read it without pain and without losing more than a few major concepts, we'll be a long way towards a globally unified internet.
They still won't understand the real point to reading the EULA - which is understanding exactly what the software claims it will do on your computer.
Since when has that been the point of the EULA? As far as I can tell, the point of the EULA is to obfuscate what the software is going to do to the computer, ensure that I can only litigate for gross negligence in a rent-a-court in Virginia, and open me up to defamation lawsuits if I complain.
If you want to know what a piece of software does, go online and look up what other people have posted about the software. Don't bother reading the EULA. The EULA *may* tell you that it's about to install spyware, but it won't tell you that the application is buggy cr*p and not worth installing anyway.
Don't forget, the Game Boy focused on Cheap, Rugged, Lasting. The Lynx was more expensive than the game boy, and the battery life was pretty poor. The Game Gear had a color screen with about 1 degree of LCD visibility, and it ate batteries like nobody's business. The Turbo Express Portable was great, but also sucked down batteries and cost a mint.
The Nomad was quietly released post Genesis. I was always sad that system didn't make more of a splash. Now you can emulate a Genesis pretty easily on a GBA.
After the Game Boy, and several years of cheaper-cheaper-cheaper, Nintendo released the Game Boy Pocket, then the Game Boy Pocket Color, and finally the GBA. The Game Boy Pocket Color was not supposed to be a full Game Boy, but rather a stopgap between the GB and the GBA. In the same way Nintendo claims that the DS is not a GBDS, but rather a stopgap between the last official Game Boy and the next. Or something.
In the interem, there has been the Neo Geo Pocket, the Neo Geo Pocket Color, the Wonderswan (which scored a Coup landing Square), the Game.com (chuckle), and a whole host of other lesser immitators. Nintendo just knows their market pretty well, always releasing somewhat underpowered Game Boys with excellent battery life and a rugged housing.
Imagine being able to google an answer to a question in the field in real time.
"Hi Issac! We were just going down to the club. Want to come? You know, the club. The club downtown. The club in downtown New York. The other club in downtown New York. You know, the club with great lobster and that cute waitress. No, still in New York. Next. Next. Next. Next. You know, the one we went for Bill's Birthday last year? Not Mr. Bill, our Bill, from work. Yes, last year. I mean, the year before. Of course you don't have it in your PDA, you got that silly thing last Christmas. Two days after Christmas, whatever. No I don't want to see the recipt. Why would I want to track the package?
Anyway, do you want to come to the club or what? The club. The club downtown..."
You pay your cable company, yet you watch adverts. You buy magazines, yet there are advertisements on there.
Don't confuse who gets what. The phone company makes money to route your call to your ISP. Your ISP makes money routing your computer to the internet. Somehow, the websites you surf, including this one, need to get some financial recompense or they're going to fall under the cost of bandwidth and hosting. Of all of the people on the food chain, they're probably the most deserving.
You may be paying your phone company and ISP, but you're not paying via your phone company and ISP... It's not going to anyone but them.
The current model seems to fall into the you-pay-through-the-nose-you-businessman type. Starbucks was once upon a time charging 60 bucks per month for unlimited wireless access. Airports and other places still charge something like a dollar per minute.
On the other hand, many people leave their networks open either inadvertently or intentionally because if you're resolved to pay for the backend anyway, you might as well share.
So wireless internet access right now is either free or ludicrously expensive, with nothing inbetween. This seems like it could be a nice inbetween. No credit card changes hands, you're not committed to buying a day of time for 20 dollars, and you're not relying upon the kindness of strangers. You're paying for your internet access, and it's as always-on and always convienient as at home. If you want to just log on and check your mail quickly, you can do just that.
A Go board is 19x19. This solution was for 5x5. Saying that it is a quarter of the size of the full board is incorrect, it's actually one fourteenth the size.
A Chess board is 8x8. One sixteenth of that is 2x2. It's a reasonable comparison, at least mathematically. The difference is that while Go at 5x5 is still strategic, if predictable, Chess at 2x2 is meaningless. One could say that Go happens to hold up well under that type of minimalist circumstance. One could also say that Go is just a physically larger game than Chess, and achieves a deeper degree of strategy through sheer insane volume.
But overall mathematically, it's a fair comparison.
Dude, they were never that funny. They were relevant, they were entertaining, they were on topic, but they've always been a bit downhill.
And yes, I read them every day. Religiously. But not because they're necessarily funny. I read them for the same reasons that retired people read Family Circus.
The second list, which is marked as a list of applications that don't work after installing SP2, is actually a list of applications that need ports opened for them. This is not terribly surprising, and would need to be done for any firewall that people had installed.
While I can understand how a sysadmin looking at the prospect of 100 or 10,000 computers possibly going kaputz is scary... get some perspective. It's not like the system is upgrading to a different OS, it's just adding a firewall and a few other protections that certain applications weren't expecting. Try out your must-have software on an SP2 machine before the update happens, but chances are unless you're doing some silly undocumented mumbo-jumbo for efficiency your apps should run fine.
For a long time I was happy that Ultracade was attempting to bring back artwork and designs long forgotten, threatening to disappear into the void. They're the last refuge for such games as Strider and Mercs, classics that shouldn't be allowed to disappear from the legal scene in this world. They are hardcore gamers who appreciate the art.
But filing for a trademark on MAME? The project that they got their idea from? That's just low. I could see them trying to sue MAME out of existence for being illegal, promoting piracy, and cutting into the profits of a corporation. But trademark?
Ultracade. Evil? Check.
The point of Mario Kart is to be fun competition for groups of people. And where are you going to find larger groups of people than in the arcade?
It needs to be fast. It needs to be fun. It needs to work better if everyone is drunk. Ranking the players on skill is kind of irrelevant.
Plan your lighting controls and layouts carefully. Are they spread-spectrum flourescent? Dimable? Track? Internally mounted?
How will they be automated?
Your cabling can be re-run by yourself, assuming that you plan that properly. But changing a lighting system tied to a live electric system is a real pain in the tail. Shutting off power to your location facility, I mean, your house is not trivial, nor is the pain of working in darkness. And there goes clocks, timers, etc. And it could theoretically kill you, though it probably won't.
It's a holdover. People used to post relevant but obvious information in an attempt to get their karma number as high as possible.
Stuff like how Einstein@ home is running on BOINC, which also runs SETI@home
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
so it should be pretty stable. Anyone who read the articles or attempted to sign up would know that, but most of the mods didn't do either.
They were playing the Karma game, back when karma was permanently accrued and displayed. People got their Karma numbers up into the tens of thousands at the height of the out-of-controllness. The pinnacle of Karma Whoring was re-posting the article text from the linked article. It was useful if one person did it, but the text would be reposted hundreds of times for every story, with everyone trying to be the first to repost.
Playing this game eventually became socially unacceptable. It became good mojo to post certain things annonymously, like direct download links or article texts, to reassure everyone around you that you weren't just being a jerk, that you really did post the information because you wanted to help.
Then they instituted a Karma cap at 50, which helped a lot. Still, people complained that a single post with +4 informative, -1 overrated could cause your Karma to go from 50 to 49. And other people were still playing the Karma game, just with multiple accounts. So they expunged even that amount of resolution, to the current good / great / bad system. And now many people don't even know what Karma Whoring is, or why one would do it.
I respect the grandparent poster for posting annonymously. He's clinging to antiquated morals, which is kind of heartening.
For some reason I've always seen channels 1-10 in a straight left-to-right line, things curve upwards until about 15, and keep curving until they're a right to left line at about 25. By 30 they've curved straight up, and about 37 - 42 they make a quick left turn to be right to left again. After about 44 they make a slight 30 degree turn upwards, and continue to curve upwards somewhat though never above 70 degrees. Once you reach the audio - only programming channels, like the streaming christmas music channel, they head straight up.
I've never been able to explain exactly how this physical relationship formed in my mind, but it has been embedded in there for some time now, and doesn't seem likely to go away.
Ironically, I don't really watch television anymore.
You've got it all wrong. They'll just charge you their data rates... In addition to any minutes you may be using.
A better question,
They can walk like Humans, but can they walk like this?
The product is useless without an account on their, and only their servers. Selling that without including that in the price (or marking on the box the required monthly fee) would be like Microsoft selling a copy of Office, then refusing to activate it because activation is not possible. Or AOL selling you their client software, then refusing to allow you to access their servers. And while they do include the required monthly fee on the box, it's implicit that the servers exist, they will be up, and all you have to do is pay the monthly fee to go on them.
It's an article about how they couldn't find a blonde capable of understanding the awards she was giving out.
There's almost nothing on what these advances mean to the industry.
What, you think the AP could find a reporter capable of understanding the awards that were given out?
The question comes down to how is it used. In this case the GPS would be used to track people who have violated a restraining order, a perfectly reasonable goal, and a surprisingly minimalistic way of handling the problem. The people would still be able to hold down jobs, go to carnivals, see their mother, study, and get on with their lives. That's pretty good overall, and I don't think anyone would argue that this punishment in and of itself is severe or wrongheaded.
On the other hand, what happens if GPS replaces or offsets jail for a lot of the prisoners out there? What if instead of going to jail for petty theft, a person instead was given an anklet and told that for six months they could go to their house, their relative's houses, their job, and the supermarket? Instead of a whole class of people who would have been rotting away in jail, learning to hate, mistrust, and commit crimes, you have a class of people who might still see their children, might still go to school, might still hold down jobs in their communities. That would help the "black slave class" far more than throwing people in jail.
Here's a counter proposal. Embrace GPS as a law-enforcement tool. Punish first-time criminals with GPS fencing, keeping them within specific boundaries for specific lengths of time, allowing them to remain part of normal society without making a career criminal out of them. Second time offenders get a several-week solitary jail cell, with no chance of being influenced by other criminals, followed by GPS fencing. Third time offenders get dropped into the kinds of pits we have now.
Families have a better chance of staying together and influencing people. Communities have a shot at doing something for their youths.
And, of course, repeal the laws that keep the poor, poor, providing more equal opportunities, drug treatment as a medical addiction, adequate voting, etc.
(After you've accounted for free people, indentured servants, and natives, who else is left?)
.01% of the eligible voting population have turned out to the polls so far tonight. And while the absentee ballots have been flying in, most are too covered in mud to decipher."
Dead people?
"Well Bob I see that only
"That's right Bill. While Bush JrJr has a slight lead in Texas, again this year the population's #1 choice for president appears to be the write-in candidate, Lucy-fer. We would like to remind our viewers who may still be lumbering towards the polls that the Supreme Court has already ruled that Seraphim are not human and therefore cannot hold office. Like Pauly Shore. However, undead favorites Vlad Tepes, Aleister Crowly, and Jewel are A.O.K."
"Your Honor, I ask that you enforce section 3, but ignore section 13. Pretty please; I can't afford to travel to LA to file this to get my $40 back."
Amusingly enough, this argument frequently holds up, but only in California.
And of course, this kind of small-value transaction is exactly why they have small claims courts in the first place, which frequently is ruled on soft logic and what is right over exact wording of contracts. Vivendi may very well argue that the EULA should stand and that this should be transferred to a California court, but they'd have to show up in your jurisdiction to argue that to a judge. Otherwise you win a summary judgement. Even if they do show up, the judge would have to agree that nobody in their district should be afforded financial protection under the law against unscrupulous individuals doing business of value less than the total cost of a plane ticket.
Just be aware that filing in small claims court, at least in Massachusetts, costs 15 dollars. You would be doing it for the principle, not the money.
STEAM is the most dangerous implementation of rights-robbing "DRM" out in the wild to date.
I'm not convinced. If you have the pipe to pull down... let me check my steam folder... (Jesus Christ!) 8 GB of data over the 'net, you've probably got an always-on connection.
Quite frankly, the likelyhood of me finding a physical CD of a game that I've purchased is far slimmer than the likelyhood of having an internet connection. I'm as likely to have net down as power down. And I think this holds true for many people who have accounts. The fear I have is that someday those Steam servers are going to shut down, but Valve has said that in that condition they will release the code... if they haven't inadvertantly already.
Plus, if steam doesn't fit your life, you can get a retail CD for about the same cost. Retail CD's to me are just a pain, though, and Steam fits my life better. And while I used to give Valve a lot of lip for Steam being buggy and crashy, they're actually solid these days. I only notice that it's running when it starts sucking down a new mode or major feature, and it has never crashed on me.
The account on their servers comes with the product, and is integral for the functioning of the product. Otherwise access to the server is open to anyone who can hack themselves a valid activation code.
I doubt any court in the US would see it as selling bits, as opposed to licensing access to a product. The product in this case is the license to play the game (remember, you never "buy" a game). The bits themselves are basically irrelevant... You don't own them anyway. With most licensing agreements you don't own the media either, and the publisher can (at least according to most EULAs) request them back at any time, although I've never heard of that happening.
And because the EULA is basically the shrinkwrap agreement, and the Terms of Service come long after any purchaser can return the game, the conditions laid out in the EULA could be considered a binding contract. However, those laid out in the TOS could not be considered even and binding if it conflicts with the EULA and the player has already invested their money.
While Person 2 hasn't given Blizzard any money, Person 1 has, and one of the conditions of Person 1's agreement with Blizzard which has been explicitly laid out by Blizzard is that s/he can resell the game to a third party. Without that right, it severely reduces the value of the first person owning the game, arguably by %50 or more.
To go back to your example, if I buy an extended warranty on car that says that I can transfer the warranty under the original conditions to a third party with the sale of that car, I would expect them to do just that. Saying that I'm perfectly capable of giving them the piece of paper, but that they're not going to fix anything that may break, would violate both the spirit and the letter of the agreement. While the company had promised me, the purchaser of the Warranty, that I would be able to recoup some of my investment in the resale market, they have now gone back on their agreement and cut off that value to me.
Blizzard / Vivendi is clearly in the wrong. I'm guessing this is just growing pains, and not a willful attmept to mislead their customers, as they have never done a subscription service MMPORPG before. I wouldn't be surprised if this issue was resolved the day after this slashdot article hit.
IANAL, BIPOOTV