No, the ethical option would be to do your research on what your buying, and if it has strictures you aren't willing to live with, you don't buy it.
Piracy != theft, but just because it isn't theft doesn't mean it isn't as ethically incorrect as stealing an apple from a fruit stand. It also doesn't mean that the DRM is ethically correct either. Two wrongs are two wrongs, neither of them becomes right at any point in the discussion.
The Darkness Falls dungeon, as well as the "dragon zones" in the old world, and the underground pvp dungeons in the old frontiers were also free and added to the old world, though they didn't really call them expansions at the time.
the same thing goes on on news aggregator sites all the time
Depends on what you mean by "the same thing". First off, Boston.com is not a news aggregator. They are a news generator. They make money selling ads because theoretically someone wants to see the content they generate (and up until now at least, the Boston Globe staff has produced quite a lot of important news that people want to read, the whole expose on presidential signing statements was broken by a Globe reporter). The main problem here is that the people that run Boston.com decided that they have the right to sell ads next to content that they do not own, nor have a contractual right to sell ads next to.
Google News (since it's the only news aggregator I use) sells no ads next to any page under the news.google.com subdomain that I've been able to find. Yes I just looked. No ads on the news search pages, no nothing, not even when I turned javascript on for google.com. That does 2 things that favor Google in this regard. First off, they aren't directly profiting from the link, and this preserves a lot of goodwill on the part of the people they link to, so they're less likely to be viewed as a direct financial parasite and sued. Secondly, it's a lot more likely that a fair use claim is going to be upheld in the event that someone decides to sue (remember, no use is fair use unless a court rules that it is), if it even gets to that point, since Google has set up systems for you to exclude your site from index/display on anything Google if you happen to think they're the devil and a thief.
He didn't, I moved on, and from what I've heard of people who have tried running service shops catering to businesses, its a damn rough game to be in these days. Businesses will pay for lawyers and accountants to come in and help as necessary but they seem to think that computer people should be paid the same rates as the janitorial service.
That depends on the business you're dealing with. We charge $90/hour, and in general the people who you've got to wrestle payment from are the big businesses (who have recently instigated payment policies that have us waiting 6 months or more to get paid) and regular Joe Schmoes (who on the whole treat you like you're stealing their money, and do things like "I want to buy 1 hour of your service time, will that fix the problem I've vaguely described to you over the phone that could be damn near anything?"). Small companies can't afford to hire their own actual IT, and they enjoy getting paid too, so they tend to be pretty forthcoming about payment themselves. The ones that aren't don't get their computers fixed until they pay.
They realize it will directly hurt them eventually. If you couldn't sell a game back if it sucked, a lot of people would be a lot more hesitant to buy a game. I know I would raise my standards for such a game.
You used to be able to trade in Windows games at EB/Gamestop/What have you. Now once you buy a PC game it loses most, if not all of its resale value, thanks to account based play (stuff like Guild Wars, WoW), serials/key compromise (on several occasions I bought used software where the keys were still in use by the person who bought the game and traded it in), and DRM install count issues. PC game prices for everything except the blockbuster PC-only titles are often significantly less than their console-based versions (as an example, NHL 08 was $40 for PS2, and $20 for PC when I last looked), because no one is willing to shell out huge amounts of money for something that's worth nothing once you buy it. If they really want to send console gaming down the same crumbling road PC gaming is on, well, OK I guess, but they might want to engage a bit of self-preservation.
In the case of Wall Street, the assumption was likely the number of defaults on an M.B.S. as a function of credit score... and the thing is, that I bet that is spooking everyone is, that, credit score may not be a good predictor of repayment.
No fucking duh. That's why this is called a credit crisis. The normal measures of who will be able to repay a loan and who won't have totally broken down. Car dealers can't buy cars to put on the lot, because they can't get any credit, because the banks are afraid no one will be able to pay them back. House prices are dropping like rocks, forclosures mount up, and banks won't lend people with good credit any money, because the banks have no reliable measure of credit worthiness for normal people anymore. Banks refuse to lend to each other because they are afraid that ANYONE they loan to won't be around to pay back the loan tomorrow.
As someone who nearly exclusively buys used (or bargain bin new if we're talking PC games) this isn't exactly all that new.
1. "Collector's editions" have been endemic for years, and in my experience, you're damn lucky if any of that stuff makes it back to the store when someone trades it in (I've been damn lucky before, SMT Nocturne original with the soundtrack, well before it got reprinted, but that's the only time). I had to dig and dig for even a NEW copy of Metal Gear Acid 2 that hadn't had all of its extra stuff lifted by the employees.
2. Extra stuff, with codes in inserts for downloadable content is par for the course. I assume that's how most of these work, and instead of broadcast coupon codes like they used to be, they're one-time use codes like a mini-gift certificate. There's no other sensible way to do it. If you get it cheap (that one copy of whatever that just hangs around on the store shelf until it's $20) or the person who owned it before you doesn't bother to even look at the manual or inserts (happens quite often, though if they're good the store employees will snatch them when it gets sold back, got to be lucky) you're golden. Even so, the entire time I've played games, I've never found ONE of these things that ended up being awesome enough that I just had to have it no matter what, or wasn't eventually released in the "greatest hits" version later if it was.
If you don't mind calling it "whiskey" or making up your own name for it, you can do it however you want. (Southern Comfort, Jack Daniels, rye whiskey, Georgia Moon, for examples) The only real reason there isn't a lot more experimentation in the US-origin whiskey market is the gigantic outlay required for getting licensed as a distiller, and the VERY long time horizon before you'll see any kind of return.
From what I've heard, Take Two's stock wasn't "punished" per se. It was artificially inflated by the EA buyout offer, with many people betting heavily that EA would eventually cave in and significantly raise their offer. When EA announced it wasn't interested anymore, those investors that were making those bets had to get out ASAP, hence a glut of availability, and a consequent lowering of the price. Take Two's stock was overvalued by definition, because of the premium offered by EA. Now it's finding a new normal. The price it was before the announcement wasn't realistic.
Uh, no. While I may agree that video games are art, plenty of people of "consequence" dispute it. Perhaps no one you know, or that writes articles for magazines or websites you read disagrees with the notion that video games are art, but there are PLENTY of people who would beg to differ on "games as art" as a settled matter.
My fiancee is finishing her doctorate in composition, and one of her fields of interest is video game music/audio. Despite that, and that she's working on a book about it while she finishes her thesis, she doesn't think video games are art. She has plenty of company out there, and not just from people who don't play games. In my personal experience, the people who act like it's "settled" are those who feel some need to justify their video game playing to their peers/family/self by getting it labeled as "art" and therefore "important", and not a waste of time. I think games can be art (or more accurately, become art when played and stop being art afterward) but it's not a black and white thing.
"Art" doesn't even have a real definition. Ask 10 people what "art" is, and you'll get 15 answers. You can make (and I've heard plenty) damn convincing arguments that painting, music, and writing aren't art either, or that some are and some aren't. How can anything be "settled" when there's nothing to settle on?
I would submit that they are both a "real evolution" of MST3K, since they're both the "children" of writers on that show. Me and my brothers are extremely different from each other, and just because someone doesn't like me doesn't mean they'll hate my brother too.
I personally prefer Rifftrax to Cinematic Titanic, but I also wasn't one of the people that thought the show turned to crap when Joel left. If you're one of those people, yeah, I'm sure Cinematic Titanic will be more up your alley, since, well, they've got Joel.
Most of the people you find in any church worship money, not God.
I wouldn't say most, necessarily, but it is a very real problem in Christianity, and many Christians are well aware of it, and not at all pleased with it. In Christian circles this phenomenon is called, variously, the prosperity gospel, prosperity theology, or the "Health & Wealth gospel". Material success and physical health is seen as a sign of God's favor, poverty and ill health a sign of spiritual failure. It's not at all limited to Christianity, but the Christian version of it is the most flagrant, as it's obviously heretical with even a cursory reading of the Bible. It's also not in the least bit a new concept. It was being dealt with from the moment the first followers of Jesus met after he died. In just about every letter Paul wrote that made it into the Bible, he gives similar advice to the various Christian churches he's corresponding with. Multi-million dollar megachurches and the televangelist are just the modern incarnation of the prosperity cult in Christianity. I'd give more direct examples, but my Bible studies are quite rusty (since I'm, like, not a Christian anymore, however my family is, my fiancee is Catholic, and when I was bored during the sermons in Church I read the Bibles that were in the pews).
The only difference is Apple motherboards have a chip that OSX looks for. It could be argued that circumventing this security measure is a violation of the DMCA, I suppose..
I believe it was Lexmark that got smacked down by the courts when they tried to claim that the exact same type of tehcnical measure made it illegal for anyone else to sell replacement ink cartridges for their machines.
No, it'd be illegal for you to investigate what went wrong, what entity is at fault for that going wrong, and sell me that information. It wouldn't stop you from examining the computer (even the OS) and seeing what is not functioning right, and repairing it. If I hand you my computer and tell you to "fix it" what you're selling me is the repair service, not the information. If I brought you a computer and said, " if you tell me what's wrong with this, and who did it, I'll give you 100 bucks" that would be illegal. Same if I brought you a computer and asked you to find out what my girlfriend or even my child has done on it. On top of it, it would be illegal for me to even ask you to do that if I knew you weren't licensed to. Even deep data recovery using "forensic" tools would not be illegal, unless you're selling the list of sectors that "lost" data is on. If you're actually recovering the data, you're in the clear. Copied and pasted the relevant bit from the law, note the large importance "information related to" has in all this.
(1) engages in the business of obtaining or
furnishing, or accepts employment to obtain or furnish, information
related to:
(A) crime or wrongs done or threatened against a
state or the United States;
(B) the identity, habits, business, occupation,
knowledge, efficiency, loyalty, movement, location, affiliations,
associations, transactions, acts, reputation, or character of a
person;
(C) the location, disposition, or recovery of
lost or stolen property; or
(D) the cause or responsibility for a fire,
libel, loss, accident, damage, or injury to a person or to property;
This does have big implications for security researchers in Texas, but for small time repair shops, aside from being legally bound to say "I can't do that" when someone asks them whether their kid broke their computer, or wants you to check whether their girlfriend is cheating on them, is pretty much nil.
These articles are a ridiculous over-reaction to the actual law, which I just spent a few minutes actually reading. Nothing in that law has anything to do with computer repair. It DOES have something to do with companies that offer computer forensic services for legal actions, and some repair shops do that, but you shouldn't be going to Corner Computer Repair, or Joe Computer Guy if you have a requirement for forensic work in a legal sense. If you actually think your computer was hacked, you need to get people with the kind of legal training that can get things done the way the legal system requires them to be done.
The law is in legalese, and therefore hard to read, but the only thing this applies to are people doing this for investigations of a legal nature. There is a long list of exemptions, including one for people who install and repair security devices.
For a bunch of people that claim to be rational and above superstition, you people are totally credulous when wild statements like this are made. The law is there, it's linked to, read it for yourself.
"I go to microsoft.com they have a download center" HUH? Cince when does the Head executive of the company refer to the company as "they" instead of "we"? I have never seen it even down to the grunt level.
Bill Gates isn't stupid enough to think that the plebians are going to get anything done for them, double sharp, just by phoning up someone at Microsoft. They're gonna go to Microsoft's website and try to get it. If you want to know if your stuff works, the only real way to tell is to try to get it working as much as possible from the perspective of your average customer. What he supposedly did (assuming it's true) is the intelligent, correct method of doing things of trying to make sure things work. The fact that apparently this kind of missive from the closest thing to On High in Microsoft-land affected nothing whatsoever speaks volumes about the level of inertia present there. Things are done wrong, because that's how they do things.
I'm inclined to believe it's true for a couple reasons. One being that, if you actually read it all the way through you'd see at the end that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asked Gates about the memo, and he didn't deny that he wrote it, and in fact said he wrote more than just that one. The other one being that, as mentioned elsewhere, this was "leaked" as evidence in a court proceeding aparrently.
This one doesn't ask for a password. That's why it's dangerous. It just runs, because the original one doesn't ask for a password. It "just works". Get it through your thick skull.
Well, if learning German gets you down and/or in the meantime you still want to read some game reviews, I would recommend eurogamer.net. They are extremely hard on everything they review (at least in comparison to American gaming publications) and are in the UK (and are extremely well written in general). Not that I agree with absolutely every review, but reading the review is actually more important than looking at the score. I own and have enjoyed immensely many games that got a 5-6 on eurogamer (disclaimer: I never paid full price for any of them though).
I'd love to see them try. How many times can we incinerate the earth on our own?
See also, why Iran is working feverishly to get a nuclear weapon, and totally ignoring the IAEA, and the rest of the world. We're impotent to stop them, and if we try, they win even faster.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the ethical option would be to do your research on what your buying, and if it has strictures you aren't willing to live with, you don't buy it.
Piracy != theft, but just because it isn't theft doesn't mean it isn't as ethically incorrect as stealing an apple from a fruit stand. It also doesn't mean that the DRM is ethically correct either. Two wrongs are two wrongs, neither of them becomes right at any point in the discussion.
The Darkness Falls dungeon, as well as the "dragon zones" in the old world, and the underground pvp dungeons in the old frontiers were also free and added to the old world, though they didn't really call them expansions at the time.
Depends on what you mean by "the same thing". First off, Boston.com is not a news aggregator. They are a news generator. They make money selling ads because theoretically someone wants to see the content they generate (and up until now at least, the Boston Globe staff has produced quite a lot of important news that people want to read, the whole expose on presidential signing statements was broken by a Globe reporter). The main problem here is that the people that run Boston.com decided that they have the right to sell ads next to content that they do not own, nor have a contractual right to sell ads next to.
Google News (since it's the only news aggregator I use) sells no ads next to any page under the news.google.com subdomain that I've been able to find. Yes I just looked. No ads on the news search pages, no nothing, not even when I turned javascript on for google.com. That does 2 things that favor Google in this regard. First off, they aren't directly profiting from the link, and this preserves a lot of goodwill on the part of the people they link to, so they're less likely to be viewed as a direct financial parasite and sued. Secondly, it's a lot more likely that a fair use claim is going to be upheld in the event that someone decides to sue (remember, no use is fair use unless a court rules that it is), if it even gets to that point, since Google has set up systems for you to exclude your site from index/display on anything Google if you happen to think they're the devil and a thief.
...and there is no one to hear it, does it make a noise?
That depends on the business you're dealing with. We charge $90/hour, and in general the people who you've got to wrestle payment from are the big businesses (who have recently instigated payment policies that have us waiting 6 months or more to get paid) and regular Joe Schmoes (who on the whole treat you like you're stealing their money, and do things like "I want to buy 1 hour of your service time, will that fix the problem I've vaguely described to you over the phone that could be damn near anything?"). Small companies can't afford to hire their own actual IT, and they enjoy getting paid too, so they tend to be pretty forthcoming about payment themselves. The ones that aren't don't get their computers fixed until they pay.
Everquest?
You used to be able to trade in Windows games at EB/Gamestop/What have you. Now once you buy a PC game it loses most, if not all of its resale value, thanks to account based play (stuff like Guild Wars, WoW), serials/key compromise (on several occasions I bought used software where the keys were still in use by the person who bought the game and traded it in), and DRM install count issues. PC game prices for everything except the blockbuster PC-only titles are often significantly less than their console-based versions (as an example, NHL 08 was $40 for PS2, and $20 for PC when I last looked), because no one is willing to shell out huge amounts of money for something that's worth nothing once you buy it. If they really want to send console gaming down the same crumbling road PC gaming is on, well, OK I guess, but they might want to engage a bit of self-preservation.
No fucking duh. That's why this is called a credit crisis. The normal measures of who will be able to repay a loan and who won't have totally broken down. Car dealers can't buy cars to put on the lot, because they can't get any credit, because the banks are afraid no one will be able to pay them back. House prices are dropping like rocks, forclosures mount up, and banks won't lend people with good credit any money, because the banks have no reliable measure of credit worthiness for normal people anymore. Banks refuse to lend to each other because they are afraid that ANYONE they loan to won't be around to pay back the loan tomorrow.
As someone who nearly exclusively buys used (or bargain bin new if we're talking PC games) this isn't exactly all that new.
1. "Collector's editions" have been endemic for years, and in my experience, you're damn lucky if any of that stuff makes it back to the store when someone trades it in (I've been damn lucky before, SMT Nocturne original with the soundtrack, well before it got reprinted, but that's the only time). I had to dig and dig for even a NEW copy of Metal Gear Acid 2 that hadn't had all of its extra stuff lifted by the employees.
2. Extra stuff, with codes in inserts for downloadable content is par for the course. I assume that's how most of these work, and instead of broadcast coupon codes like they used to be, they're one-time use codes like a mini-gift certificate. There's no other sensible way to do it. If you get it cheap (that one copy of whatever that just hangs around on the store shelf until it's $20) or the person who owned it before you doesn't bother to even look at the manual or inserts (happens quite often, though if they're good the store employees will snatch them when it gets sold back, got to be lucky) you're golden. Even so, the entire time I've played games, I've never found ONE of these things that ended up being awesome enough that I just had to have it no matter what, or wasn't eventually released in the "greatest hits" version later if it was.
I believe new casks are required by law only if you want to call your whiskey "bourbon".
http://www.straightbourbon.com/whatisbourbon.html
If you don't mind calling it "whiskey" or making up your own name for it, you can do it however you want. (Southern Comfort, Jack Daniels, rye whiskey, Georgia Moon, for examples) The only real reason there isn't a lot more experimentation in the US-origin whiskey market is the gigantic outlay required for getting licensed as a distiller, and the VERY long time horizon before you'll see any kind of return.
From what I've heard, Take Two's stock wasn't "punished" per se. It was artificially inflated by the EA buyout offer, with many people betting heavily that EA would eventually cave in and significantly raise their offer. When EA announced it wasn't interested anymore, those investors that were making those bets had to get out ASAP, hence a glut of availability, and a consequent lowering of the price. Take Two's stock was overvalued by definition, because of the premium offered by EA. Now it's finding a new normal. The price it was before the announcement wasn't realistic.
If you believe the Republicans will try to filibuster this bill, you're living in fairy land.
Uh, no. While I may agree that video games are art, plenty of people of "consequence" dispute it. Perhaps no one you know, or that writes articles for magazines or websites you read disagrees with the notion that video games are art, but there are PLENTY of people who would beg to differ on "games as art" as a settled matter.
My fiancee is finishing her doctorate in composition, and one of her fields of interest is video game music/audio. Despite that, and that she's working on a book about it while she finishes her thesis, she doesn't think video games are art. She has plenty of company out there, and not just from people who don't play games. In my personal experience, the people who act like it's "settled" are those who feel some need to justify their video game playing to their peers/family/self by getting it labeled as "art" and therefore "important", and not a waste of time. I think games can be art (or more accurately, become art when played and stop being art afterward) but it's not a black and white thing.
"Art" doesn't even have a real definition. Ask 10 people what "art" is, and you'll get 15 answers. You can make (and I've heard plenty) damn convincing arguments that painting, music, and writing aren't art either, or that some are and some aren't. How can anything be "settled" when there's nothing to settle on?
I would submit that they are both a "real evolution" of MST3K, since they're both the "children" of writers on that show. Me and my brothers are extremely different from each other, and just because someone doesn't like me doesn't mean they'll hate my brother too.
I personally prefer Rifftrax to Cinematic Titanic, but I also wasn't one of the people that thought the show turned to crap when Joel left. If you're one of those people, yeah, I'm sure Cinematic Titanic will be more up your alley, since, well, they've got Joel.
I wouldn't say most, necessarily, but it is a very real problem in Christianity, and many Christians are well aware of it, and not at all pleased with it. In Christian circles this phenomenon is called, variously, the prosperity gospel, prosperity theology, or the "Health & Wealth gospel". Material success and physical health is seen as a sign of God's favor, poverty and ill health a sign of spiritual failure. It's not at all limited to Christianity, but the Christian version of it is the most flagrant, as it's obviously heretical with even a cursory reading of the Bible. It's also not in the least bit a new concept. It was being dealt with from the moment the first followers of Jesus met after he died. In just about every letter Paul wrote that made it into the Bible, he gives similar advice to the various Christian churches he's corresponding with. Multi-million dollar megachurches and the televangelist are just the modern incarnation of the prosperity cult in Christianity. I'd give more direct examples, but my Bible studies are quite rusty (since I'm, like, not a Christian anymore, however my family is, my fiancee is Catholic, and when I was bored during the sermons in Church I read the Bibles that were in the pews).
So how are we supposed to avoid dangerous radiation merely by not putting it to our head. What about the 50kW transmitter for a radio station?
I believe it was Lexmark that got smacked down by the courts when they tried to claim that the exact same type of tehcnical measure made it illegal for anyone else to sell replacement ink cartridges for their machines.
No, it'd be illegal for you to investigate what went wrong, what entity is at fault for that going wrong, and sell me that information. It wouldn't stop you from examining the computer (even the OS) and seeing what is not functioning right, and repairing it. If I hand you my computer and tell you to "fix it" what you're selling me is the repair service, not the information. If I brought you a computer and said, " if you tell me what's wrong with this, and who did it, I'll give you 100 bucks" that would be illegal. Same if I brought you a computer and asked you to find out what my girlfriend or even my child has done on it. On top of it, it would be illegal for me to even ask you to do that if I knew you weren't licensed to. Even deep data recovery using "forensic" tools would not be illegal, unless you're selling the list of sectors that "lost" data is on. If you're actually recovering the data, you're in the clear. Copied and pasted the relevant bit from the law, note the large importance "information related to" has in all this.
(1) engages in the business of obtaining or
furnishing, or accepts employment to obtain or furnish, information
related to:
(A) crime or wrongs done or threatened against a
state or the United States;
(B) the identity, habits, business, occupation,
knowledge, efficiency, loyalty, movement, location, affiliations,
associations, transactions, acts, reputation, or character of a
person;
(C) the location, disposition, or recovery of
lost or stolen property; or
(D) the cause or responsibility for a fire,
libel, loss, accident, damage, or injury to a person or to property;
This does have big implications for security researchers in Texas, but for small time repair shops, aside from being legally bound to say "I can't do that" when someone asks them whether their kid broke their computer, or wants you to check whether their girlfriend is cheating on them, is pretty much nil.
These articles are a ridiculous over-reaction to the actual law, which I just spent a few minutes actually reading. Nothing in that law has anything to do with computer repair. It DOES have something to do with companies that offer computer forensic services for legal actions, and some repair shops do that, but you shouldn't be going to Corner Computer Repair, or Joe Computer Guy if you have a requirement for forensic work in a legal sense. If you actually think your computer was hacked, you need to get people with the kind of legal training that can get things done the way the legal system requires them to be done.
The law is in legalese, and therefore hard to read, but the only thing this applies to are people doing this for investigations of a legal nature. There is a long list of exemptions, including one for people who install and repair security devices.
For a bunch of people that claim to be rational and above superstition, you people are totally credulous when wild statements like this are made. The law is there, it's linked to, read it for yourself.
Bill Gates isn't stupid enough to think that the plebians are going to get anything done for them, double sharp, just by phoning up someone at Microsoft. They're gonna go to Microsoft's website and try to get it. If you want to know if your stuff works, the only real way to tell is to try to get it working as much as possible from the perspective of your average customer. What he supposedly did (assuming it's true) is the intelligent, correct method of doing things of trying to make sure things work. The fact that apparently this kind of missive from the closest thing to On High in Microsoft-land affected nothing whatsoever speaks volumes about the level of inertia present there. Things are done wrong, because that's how they do things.
I'm inclined to believe it's true for a couple reasons. One being that, if you actually read it all the way through you'd see at the end that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asked Gates about the memo, and he didn't deny that he wrote it, and in fact said he wrote more than just that one. The other one being that, as mentioned elsewhere, this was "leaked" as evidence in a court proceeding aparrently.
This one doesn't ask for a password. That's why it's dangerous. It just runs, because the original one doesn't ask for a password. It "just works". Get it through your thick skull.
Well, if learning German gets you down and/or in the meantime you still want to read some game reviews, I would recommend eurogamer.net. They are extremely hard on everything they review (at least in comparison to American gaming publications) and are in the UK (and are extremely well written in general). Not that I agree with absolutely every review, but reading the review is actually more important than looking at the score. I own and have enjoyed immensely many games that got a 5-6 on eurogamer (disclaimer: I never paid full price for any of them though).
He's on the Senate committee that is responsible for them. He's going to vote for it, you can be assured.
This is actually less and less true now that metered Internet service is slowly spreading. That would pretty well fit the classic definition of theft.
I'd love to see them try. How many times can we incinerate the earth on our own?
See also, why Iran is working feverishly to get a nuclear weapon, and totally ignoring the IAEA, and the rest of the world. We're impotent to stop them, and if we try, they win even faster.