Nope, the server just tracks the player/MOBs position. Map keep outs are enforced by invisible walls by the client (as evidenced by some players finding holes and glitching through (google WoW hidden areas).
IANAL, but my understanding is that if you own media (game, movie, music), you are entitled to make a backup copy on whatever media you chose. How you make that legal backup copy is automatically legal (i.e. copying your disc, copying a friends disc, etc) as long as you legally own the media.
Furthermore, what I was talking about back in the day was shareware (more common in the 1980s) which was shared with the blessing of the software developers.
Interesting, I guess I missed that tidbit, though how you buy yourself out when you are owned by another company so technically it is their money? Not sure how that works, but I guess it's just the asshat MBAs at Blizzard/Activision that need a new corn hole ripped then!
I definitely agree. I was lucky enough to get in on the Vanilla open beta and started playing the minute the official servers launched. The leveling was far more challenging than it is today, the skill trees were very in depth (I miss those). There are some conveniences that I would hate to give up (AOE loot for one), but in Vanilla, the worlds were actually worth exploring and advancement felt meaningful. These days any 6 year old who can mash a few keys and has 40h to play can get a max level toon using the LFG tool without ever leaving their capitol city. Back in the day if you persevered to 60, it really meant something and without cross realm function, if you were an asshole, you got left out in the cold, as was right.
For me the sweet spot of difficulty, depth and game quality peaked in Burning Crusade and then Lich King. Everything since has been a cash grab and a dumbing down for the kiddies.
If you have a copy of the original discs (which I do, or which you can get on eBay for a few bucks) you do indeed have a legit copy that requires no illicit downloads. Blizzard cannot complain about people who own a copy of the game playing on a private server because those people "might" be using a pirated copy. IF they can prove that, that only gives them means to go after the individual pirate.
Also, considering that WoW has shed about 14,000,000 players, I am pretty sure that getting a legit copy of Vanilla WoW on disc is not a problem.
"There's no check to tell if you owned the game, so technically anyone who never bought the game could download that client and pay without playing. I think doing that counts as a copyright violation even if the user owns the full retail version of the game with a current subscription."
Uhhh, hell no. Every PC game I played for the first 20 plus years had no mechanism to "phone home" to check in and see if the copy I was using was legit... You have been thoroughly brainwashed (or just grown up with fewer rights) than those of us who knew gaming before DRM where game makers went by the motto "Try our game, if you like it send us a check so we can make more." (shareware). It made quite a few games blockbusters and tons of cash back in the day. All without some asshat greedhead MBA fretting that a few 12 year old kids with no money might get to play the game (gasp!) without paying for it...
These days those kids just torrent a cracked version anyway, but the rest of us now have to put up with all kinds of bullshit DRM so the MBAs can sleep at night with their false sense of vindication...
Many Europeans THINK they are happier and doing better than Americans. (FTFY)
We're doing just fine here, and it has nothing to do with tribalism, it has to do with not letting ourselves be raped anymore by foreign interests. No European country has ever tolerated being treated the way the US has been treated around the world in the last 40 years with respect to trade imbalances, and those days are ending.
When any European country becomes a military or economic super power, let me know, otherwise, well, yeah, you know where you can shove your smug European sense of superiority.
You don't like or think you need the US? Fine, lose our number and don't call us when Russia invades the next European country, and the next, and the next...
That is all on the client side. The server deals primarily with identifiers, locations are handled with coordinates not maps, and all images and sounds are on the client side.
Why be sympathetic to Blizzard, they chose to wreck all of the Vanilla WoW content with the Cataclysm expansion, they made (20M subs x first 4 expansions x $40 retail purchase)= $3,200,000,000 plus (20M subs x $15/month x first 10 years of WoW)= $36,000,000,000 for a grand total of at least $40 billion dollars... Granted they had costs, but lets be honest, their costs for all the servers and support for 10 years was probably under $5,000,000,000. Their development costs were also under that amount for the original game and all expansions. So yeah, they have made a cool $30 billion off of WoW, don't feel sorry for them.
Their two problems are they pissed away a shit ton of money developing the Overlord MMO (what got chopped down and became
the FPS Overwatch because the MMO just wasn't fun) and they are owned by a bunch of asshat MBAs at Vivendi who have been sucking down all the profits from WoW and only investing the bare minimum to develop new content as well as killing promising titles like Starcraft Ghost.
Except that the EULA is only enforceable if you are actually using a Blizzard server, since the client side purchases were made at retail with no EULA visible on the outside of the packaging... The EULA that software companies pop up when you go to use their software is totally unenforceable, and usually abusive, and routinely gets thrown out in court. Blizzard used to pop up a giant EULA wall of text every time they released an update (I remember) but eventually they stopped doing it altogether because that shit is totally pointless, annoying and not worth the electrons used to display it. No one reads it and the courts don't give a shit what you think you can force customers to agree to after the customer already bought your product 18 months ago.
Copyright needs a total revamp after the tampering by the music and movie industry in 1976 for their exclusive benefit that completely destroyed the original intent of copyright laws in the first palce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Copyright term for movies and TV shows should be limited to 14 years on the original work. Copyright on software and games should be limited to 7 years with a 7 year purchasable extension requiring that the software/game still be in use and for sale to the general public at market price in good faith. All software should be covered exclusively by copyright and all software patents summarily invalidated.
Notwithstanding the above, all commercial copyright material (TV, Movies, corporate developed software and games) automatically enters copyright stage two (described below) if unavailable for good faith purchase or un-aired for a period of 1 year in the US after initially released anywhere in the world.
Books should be covered for 25 years with an automatic extension of 15 years if they are still in print. Music should be covered for 14 years with a 7 year purchasable extension.
All books and music (and other small/single author content that requires a publisher) should be limited to a maximum of 3 year contract, after which the rights are reverted to the author(s) to be re-negotiated in a new contract of their choosing.
Once an item leaves "commercial" copyright, a second stage should engage (call it distribution copyright), where only the rights holder can sell the copyrighted material, but it is free for anyone to share/distribute in a nonprofit manner. This period lasts an additional 20 years, at which point the work enters the public domain.
Further, consumer purchases of copyrighted materials should have clearly described rights set in the law, rather than the current mess of EULA "heads we win, tails you loose" bullshit. Rights like right to resell for both physical copies and digital copies, right to switch format (disc, digital, streaming, whatever), right to un-adulterated use (updates cannot remove features, function or content from a purchase, nor can updates add undesirable features, like malware, adware, tracking or telemetry), etc. as well as penalties for any company violating these rights [something like $1000 per violation, in 2018 dollars (inflation corrected), per customer, paid to the customers injured, or 5x the purchase price, whichever is greater, and they still have to fix their underlying violation].
Copyright needs a total revamp after the tampering by the music and movie industry in the 1976 for their exclusive benefit that completely destroyed the original intent of copyright laws in the first palce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Copyright term for movies and TV shows should be limited to 14 years on the original work. Copyright on software and games should be limited to 7 years with a 7 year purchasable extension requiring that the software/game still be in use and for sale to the general public at market price in good faith. All software should be covered exclusively by copyright and all software patents summarily invalidated.
Notwithstanding the above, all commercial copyright material (TV, Movies, corporate developed software and games) automatically enters public domain if unavailable for good faith purchase or un-aired for a period of 1 year in the US after initially released anywhere in the world.
Books should be covered for 25 years with an automatic extension of 15 years if they are still in print. Music should be covered for 14 years with a 7 year purchasable extension.
All books and music (and other small/single author content that requires a publisher) should be limited to a maximum of 3 year contract, after which the rights are reverted to the author(s) to be re-negotiated in a new contract of their choosing.
Once an item leaves "commercial" copyright, a second stage should engage (call it distribution copyright), where only the rights holder can sell the copyrighted material, but it is free for anyone to share/distribute in a nonprofit maner. This period lasts an additional 20 years, at which point the work enters the public domain.
I think the missing part of the equation is that in your example, you never sold your book to anyone. In the realm of software, and games in particular, it is more akin to you writing a book, selling that book to millions of people, then several years later, completely erasing the book and rewriting it from scratch and remotely deleting the original work from all of your customers possession. This is essentially what Blizzard did with the Cataclysm expansion. Now your customers no longer have access to the original book that they paid for because you decided to make it so with no option or recourse on the part of the millions of people who bought the original book...
When changing the medium to a book, from a game, it becomes much more clearly a violation of customer rights. The sad thing is that it would have been trivial to preserve the old content via a time portal to let players choose if they wanted to play pre or post Cataclysm.
There was an epidemic of the same kind of shit in the Apple IOS app store a few years back, where there were dozens of apps that had crippleware updates, with averts saying basically, congrats, you bought our app a couple of years ago, now buy our new one that does the same thing with updated UI graphics, because we crippled your old app so it is buggy and slow and took away key functionality, or we crammed in a bunch of adds and made the app you bought free, and now you need to buy our new app to get rid of the adds.... It got so bad I stopped updating my apps altogether and now only update apps that actually require updates.
Everything you list here is contained on the client side, which is bought at retail. Everyone playing retro servers bought this and therefore legitimately can play it without copyright violation... The only thing the sever does is authenticate and then send the interaction information back and forth (location, HP/MP, item tracking, etc.) and those same things for the mobs. The mob AI is actually run on the client side from what I understand. The server side load is as minimal as possible by design.
You do realize that nearly all end game content: Dire Maul, Maraudon, Stratholme, Naxxramas, AQ 20/40, ZG, Blackwing Lair, Battlegrounds, et all were all patched into vanilla, right?
The only end game content in Vanilla WoW at release was MC40 and Ony.
It gets a little tricky there, because people still own a copy of vanilla WoW. I am pretty sure that companies like Blizzard could actually be sued for selling a retail software package that they remotely disable and prevent from operating. EULA that you agree to when you sign in to their servers have very little if any actual legal weight, and I know I didn't sign anything when I bought my copy at retail, which the courts have ruled is where that has to take place to be at any level enforceable.
Furthermore, if you develop software that interacts with your copy of vanilla WoW and lets it run without Blizzard servers, there is not a damn thing they can do about it, as long as you didn't copy their code on the server side. They are alleging that here, but their evidence seems thin to the point of losing all credibility (almost the same is not the same).
It is far and away time to counterbalance the DMCA with a software/users bill of rights, defeating once and for all all of the abusive EULAs and attempts to use the DMCA to enforce shit copyright claims.
I really hope the developers/site operators fight this. Blizzard pulled almost exactly the same shit a few years back, and the person responsible basically did not respond so they got a default judgement. If these people are even a little bit smart, they will get a gofundme page going (I'd send them $30) and hire some EFF lawyers.
The Blizzard claims are baseless (as you said, enforcing illegitimate copyright using the DMCA) and they are counting on having more lawyers and intimidation to do their dirty work for them. If the retro server operator can get a judgement against the assholes at Vivendi (the owners of Blizzard, Activision, Ubisoft and others, founded by none other than Napoleon III https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) sue them for punitive damages, show that it is a pattern of abuse of the DMCA and then take 50% of their profits for the year as punishment, and revoke their right to use DMCA permanently...
I love your post. Zero facts, zero logic, but somehow I'm the "moronic denier". Since you clearly failed debate (or never had to take it), here's a tip: when a side reverts to name calling and logical fallacies (Ad hominem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and appeal to majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), that in it'self is a flat out lie ( https://www.skepticalscience.c... ) they typically have a very weak position.
The AGW "scientists" mathematical models have been wildly inaccurate: http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp... (how you can look at that graph and not doubt the quality of their predictions is beyond me) but still you want to treat them like a hard science... Good luck with that.
I have facts and evidence, you have blind faith in "scientists" who are out to make a buck vis a vi federal grant money. Get back to me when you have more facts and less name calling...
There is plenty of oversight on banks, but in this case, it wasn't an official strategy of fraud, rather a completely irrational sales goal coupled with a wink and nod to lower management and then to individual employees.
OK, but that is not far enough. Those persons removed should be banned from ever sitting on a board ever again, or holding a C-level position at any American company, and should be forced to pay restitution equal to 100% of their pay, less the average Wells Fargo employee salary (~$55k/year) starting when the unreasonable sales goals were set, and 100% of any severance package, to the victims of the scams.
It is high time to put the fear of God in these lawless dirt bag MBAs with an "anything goes for a dollar" mentality...
Can we please stop posting stories about this guy, he is either mentally unstable (in which case he needs help, not an audience, and Slashdot is contributing to the problem) or he is a con man (who should also not be encouraged or given a platform as well...)
Anyone who is a "flat earther" can easily test their hypothesis by spending around $10k. Fly from SFO to Hawii, take longitude and latitude measurements at each destination and track the flight time, use a compass to confirm you are always traveling West. Hell use GPS to track your flight path. Then fly to Tokyo, London and back to the US. Proof positive that the earth is round, and around $10k in plane tickets.
This is generally why there are very few flat earthers, because plane and business travel is common enough that most people know someone who has actually flown around the planet...
For jobs that are entirely theory based, I can see that happening (like writing software on the web, or accounting, or a number of other jobs). For jobs where you must physically interact with a product or customers, not so much. On the flip side, many employers have countless incompetent managers who only feel comfortable when they can look over your shoulder and see that you are in fact working, regardless of how productive you are, or if you just switched screens from solitaire.
The only way I can see a mass shift of theory based jobs to permanent offsite status is if states and/or the federal government eliminate the gas tax, and instead charge the equivalent amount of taxes to employers based on the number of employees they require to be onsite each day. For example:
100 employees onsite multiplied by the average commute for the state = X number of miles driven round trip = Y number of state and federal taxes incurred to maintain the roads.
The more employees allowed to work from home, the lower that tax liability. This moves the regressive gas tax burden for highways from employees to employers, and gives them an incentive to use the roads less. You may not think it is much, but for example, in California the average commute is 27 minutes one way, assuming an average speed of 60mph, thats a daily round trip of 54 miles. The California gas tax is currently $0.42/gallon, and assuming the average commuter gets 27mpg (because I'm lazy and that's probably close to average for the entire commuter fleet), that's $0.84/day. Factor a premium for using the roads during rush our for an additional 130%.
Multiply that by 260 working days per year and each employee and the business would be paying $568/employee per year to the state and $250 to the federal government. If you have 100 employees, you are looking at about $82,000 in taxes each year that a company could save by letting their employees work from home (to say nothing of other direct overhead like electricity, air conditioning and office space.) Obviously transportation companies (semi shipping, taxi services, etc.) would have to pay based on actual miles driven for the company, including commute and on the job.
This is one tax burden that is legitimately the responsibility of companies and should be paid for by companies, rather than employees.
As more companies let workers telecommute to save money, the added benefit of less congestion, fewer accidens and less road wear are also realized.
I said nothing about infrastructure salvage. Selling the business to someone who will run it as it was run before Google showed up would be using existing infrastructure as was intended and installed to do... And that next company gets to re-start the depreciation from zero on their taxes, so it is certainly not worthless from a tax or cash flow basis. Nice try though.
When a "scientist" starts using words like "expected to" red alarms should go off in the logic centers of your brain. If they used the phrase "projected to" and their paper backs it up with actual population projections based on historical hard data, then they are probably actual scientists (or they have met someone like me who called BS on their environmental sensationalism/alarmist attempts to generate research funding...)
It is high time that the public in general realize that nearly all of the college professors who do research are smart enough to realize that the federal funding dollars goes to issues of public concern. This is how we have the AGW mess. The climate researchers figured out how to turn their tiny departments whom no one gave a shit about into massive funding powerhouses by creating the false narrative of AGW, and later CO2 greenhouse warming. At this point AGW has taken on a life of it's own, replete with ignorant politicians and aggressive zealots alike, and I bet when they lie in bed at night many of those original researchers wish they had not been a part of starting that big shitshow.
That is essentially what this article is. It is attempting to create public concern for something that the public is perceived to like (butterflies) and making dire predictions (they are going to die out). The next stage will be to try to get a $20M grant to "further research the issue" just watch. This is nothing more than an attempt to generate research dollars for the entomology departments.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, the server just tracks the player/MOBs position. Map keep outs are enforced by invisible walls by the client (as evidenced by some players finding holes and glitching through (google WoW hidden areas).
IANAL, but my understanding is that if you own media (game, movie, music), you are entitled to make a backup copy on whatever media you chose. How you make that legal backup copy is automatically legal (i.e. copying your disc, copying a friends disc, etc) as long as you legally own the media.
Furthermore, what I was talking about back in the day was shareware (more common in the 1980s) which was shared with the blessing of the software developers.
Interesting, I guess I missed that tidbit, though how you buy yourself out when you are owned by another company so technically it is their money? Not sure how that works, but I guess it's just the asshat MBAs at Blizzard/Activision that need a new corn hole ripped then!
I definitely agree. I was lucky enough to get in on the Vanilla open beta and started playing the minute the official servers launched. The leveling was far more challenging than it is today, the skill trees were very in depth (I miss those). There are some conveniences that I would hate to give up (AOE loot for one), but in Vanilla, the worlds were actually worth exploring and advancement felt meaningful. These days any 6 year old who can mash a few keys and has 40h to play can get a max level toon using the LFG tool without ever leaving their capitol city. Back in the day if you persevered to 60, it really meant something and without cross realm function, if you were an asshole, you got left out in the cold, as was right.
For me the sweet spot of difficulty, depth and game quality peaked in Burning Crusade and then Lich King. Everything since has been a cash grab and a dumbing down for the kiddies.
If you have a copy of the original discs (which I do, or which you can get on eBay for a few bucks) you do indeed have a legit copy that requires no illicit downloads. Blizzard cannot complain about people who own a copy of the game playing on a private server because those people "might" be using a pirated copy. IF they can prove that, that only gives them means to go after the individual pirate.
Also, considering that WoW has shed about 14,000,000 players, I am pretty sure that getting a legit copy of Vanilla WoW on disc is not a problem.
"There's no check to tell if you owned the game, so technically anyone who never bought the game could download that client and pay without playing. I think doing that counts as a copyright violation even if the user owns the full retail version of the game with a current subscription."
Uhhh, hell no. Every PC game I played for the first 20 plus years had no mechanism to "phone home" to check in and see if the copy I was using was legit... You have been thoroughly brainwashed (or just grown up with fewer rights) than those of us who knew gaming before DRM where game makers went by the motto "Try our game, if you like it send us a check so we can make more." (shareware). It made quite a few games blockbusters and tons of cash back in the day. All without some asshat greedhead MBA fretting that a few 12 year old kids with no money might get to play the game (gasp!) without paying for it...
These days those kids just torrent a cracked version anyway, but the rest of us now have to put up with all kinds of bullshit DRM so the MBAs can sleep at night with their false sense of vindication...
Many Europeans THINK they are happier and doing better than Americans. (FTFY)
We're doing just fine here, and it has nothing to do with tribalism, it has to do with not letting ourselves be raped anymore by foreign interests. No European country has ever tolerated being treated the way the US has been treated around the world in the last 40 years with respect to trade imbalances, and those days are ending.
When any European country becomes a military or economic super power, let me know, otherwise, well, yeah, you know where you can shove your smug European sense of superiority.
You don't like or think you need the US? Fine, lose our number and don't call us when Russia invades the next European country, and the next, and the next...
That is all on the client side. The server deals primarily with identifiers, locations are handled with coordinates not maps, and all images and sounds are on the client side.
Why be sympathetic to Blizzard, they chose to wreck all of the Vanilla WoW content with the Cataclysm expansion, they made (20M subs x first 4 expansions x $40 retail purchase)= $3,200,000,000 plus (20M subs x $15/month x first 10 years of WoW)= $36,000,000,000 for a grand total of at least $40 billion dollars... Granted they had costs, but lets be honest, their costs for all the servers and support for 10 years was probably under $5,000,000,000. Their development costs were also under that amount for the original game and all expansions. So yeah, they have made a cool $30 billion off of WoW, don't feel sorry for them.
Their two problems are they pissed away a shit ton of money developing the Overlord MMO (what got chopped down and became
the FPS Overwatch because the MMO just wasn't fun) and they are owned by a bunch of asshat MBAs at Vivendi who have been sucking down all the profits from WoW and only investing the bare minimum to develop new content as well as killing promising titles like Starcraft Ghost.
Except that the EULA is only enforceable if you are actually using a Blizzard server, since the client side purchases were made at retail with no EULA visible on the outside of the packaging... The EULA that software companies pop up when you go to use their software is totally unenforceable, and usually abusive, and routinely gets thrown out in court. Blizzard used to pop up a giant EULA wall of text every time they released an update (I remember) but eventually they stopped doing it altogether because that shit is totally pointless, annoying and not worth the electrons used to display it. No one reads it and the courts don't give a shit what you think you can force customers to agree to after the customer already bought your product 18 months ago.
Copyright needs a total revamp after the tampering by the music and movie industry in 1976 for their exclusive benefit that completely destroyed the original intent of copyright laws in the first palce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Copyright term for movies and TV shows should be limited to 14 years on the original work.
Copyright on software and games should be limited to 7 years with a 7 year purchasable extension requiring that the software/game still be in use and for sale to the general public at market price in good faith.
All software should be covered exclusively by copyright and all software patents summarily invalidated.
Notwithstanding the above, all commercial copyright material (TV, Movies, corporate developed software and games) automatically enters copyright stage two (described below) if unavailable for good faith purchase or un-aired for a period of 1 year in the US after initially released anywhere in the world.
Books should be covered for 25 years with an automatic extension of 15 years if they are still in print.
Music should be covered for 14 years with a 7 year purchasable extension.
All books and music (and other small/single author content that requires a publisher) should be limited to a maximum of 3 year contract, after which the rights are reverted to the author(s) to be re-negotiated in a new contract of their choosing.
Once an item leaves "commercial" copyright, a second stage should engage (call it distribution copyright), where only the rights holder can sell the copyrighted material, but it is free for anyone to share/distribute in a nonprofit manner. This period lasts an additional 20 years, at which point the work enters the public domain.
Further, consumer purchases of copyrighted materials should have clearly described rights set in the law, rather than the current mess of EULA "heads we win, tails you loose" bullshit. Rights like right to resell for both physical copies and digital copies, right to switch format (disc, digital, streaming, whatever), right to un-adulterated use (updates cannot remove features, function or content from a purchase, nor can updates add undesirable features, like malware, adware, tracking or telemetry), etc. as well as penalties for any company violating these rights [something like $1000 per violation, in 2018 dollars (inflation corrected), per customer, paid to the customers injured, or 5x the purchase price, whichever is greater, and they still have to fix their underlying violation].
Copyright needs a total revamp after the tampering by the music and movie industry in the 1976 for their exclusive benefit that completely destroyed the original intent of copyright laws in the first palce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Copyright term for movies and TV shows should be limited to 14 years on the original work.
Copyright on software and games should be limited to 7 years with a 7 year purchasable extension requiring that the software/game still be in use and for sale to the general public at market price in good faith.
All software should be covered exclusively by copyright and all software patents summarily invalidated.
Notwithstanding the above, all commercial copyright material (TV, Movies, corporate developed software and games) automatically enters public domain if unavailable for good faith purchase or un-aired for a period of 1 year in the US after initially released anywhere in the world.
Books should be covered for 25 years with an automatic extension of 15 years if they are still in print.
Music should be covered for 14 years with a 7 year purchasable extension.
All books and music (and other small/single author content that requires a publisher) should be limited to a maximum of 3 year contract, after which the rights are reverted to the author(s) to be re-negotiated in a new contract of their choosing.
Once an item leaves "commercial" copyright, a second stage should engage (call it distribution copyright), where only the rights holder can sell the copyrighted material, but it is free for anyone to share/distribute in a nonprofit maner. This period lasts an additional 20 years, at which point the work enters the public domain.
I think the missing part of the equation is that in your example, you never sold your book to anyone. In the realm of software, and games in particular, it is more akin to you writing a book, selling that book to millions of people, then several years later, completely erasing the book and rewriting it from scratch and remotely deleting the original work from all of your customers possession. This is essentially what Blizzard did with the Cataclysm expansion. Now your customers no longer have access to the original book that they paid for because you decided to make it so with no option or recourse on the part of the millions of people who bought the original book...
When changing the medium to a book, from a game, it becomes much more clearly a violation of customer rights. The sad thing is that it would have been trivial to preserve the old content via a time portal to let players choose if they wanted to play pre or post Cataclysm.
There was an epidemic of the same kind of shit in the Apple IOS app store a few years back, where there were dozens of apps that had crippleware updates, with averts saying basically, congrats, you bought our app a couple of years ago, now buy our new one that does the same thing with updated UI graphics, because we crippled your old app so it is buggy and slow and took away key functionality, or we crammed in a bunch of adds and made the app you bought free, and now you need to buy our new app to get rid of the adds.... It got so bad I stopped updating my apps altogether and now only update apps that actually require updates.
Everything you list here is contained on the client side, which is bought at retail. Everyone playing retro servers bought this and therefore legitimately can play it without copyright violation... The only thing the sever does is authenticate and then send the interaction information back and forth (location, HP/MP, item tracking, etc.) and those same things for the mobs. The mob AI is actually run on the client side from what I understand. The server side load is as minimal as possible by design.
You do realize that nearly all end game content: Dire Maul, Maraudon, Stratholme, Naxxramas, AQ 20/40, ZG, Blackwing Lair, Battlegrounds, et all were all patched into vanilla, right?
The only end game content in Vanilla WoW at release was MC40 and Ony.
It gets a little tricky there, because people still own a copy of vanilla WoW. I am pretty sure that companies like Blizzard could actually be sued for selling a retail software package that they remotely disable and prevent from operating. EULA that you agree to when you sign in to their servers have very little if any actual legal weight, and I know I didn't sign anything when I bought my copy at retail, which the courts have ruled is where that has to take place to be at any level enforceable.
Furthermore, if you develop software that interacts with your copy of vanilla WoW and lets it run without Blizzard servers, there is not a damn thing they can do about it, as long as you didn't copy their code on the server side. They are alleging that here, but their evidence seems thin to the point of losing all credibility (almost the same is not the same).
It is far and away time to counterbalance the DMCA with a software/users bill of rights, defeating once and for all all of the abusive EULAs and attempts to use the DMCA to enforce shit copyright claims.
Vanilla WoW is indeed an abandoned game. There is nowhere you can play it and it is no longer supported in any way by Blizzard.
I really hope the developers/site operators fight this. Blizzard pulled almost exactly the same shit a few years back, and the person responsible basically did not respond so they got a default judgement. If these people are even a little bit smart, they will get a gofundme page going (I'd send them $30) and hire some EFF lawyers.
The Blizzard claims are baseless (as you said, enforcing illegitimate copyright using the DMCA) and they are counting on having more lawyers and intimidation to do their dirty work for them. If the retro server operator can get a judgement against the assholes at Vivendi (the owners of Blizzard, Activision, Ubisoft and others, founded by none other than Napoleon III https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) sue them for punitive damages, show that it is a pattern of abuse of the DMCA and then take 50% of their profits for the year as punishment, and revoke their right to use DMCA permanently...
I hear they have a lot of little rockets over there, so I would expect them to hold the record...
I love your post. Zero facts, zero logic, but somehow I'm the "moronic denier". Since you clearly failed debate (or never had to take it), here's a tip: when a side reverts to name calling and logical fallacies (Ad hominem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and appeal to majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), that in it'self is a flat out lie ( https://www.skepticalscience.c... ) they typically have a very weak position.
And no, the AGW scientists have been caught a number of times falsely manipulating the numbers (FACT)
https://science.house.gov/news...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
http://www.foxnews.com/science...
The AGW "scientists" mathematical models have been wildly inaccurate: http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp... (how you can look at that graph and not doubt the quality of their predictions is beyond me) but still you want to treat them like a hard science... Good luck with that.
I have facts and evidence, you have blind faith in "scientists" who are out to make a buck vis a vi federal grant money. Get back to me when you have more facts and less name calling...
As you said, thanks for playing.
There is plenty of oversight on banks, but in this case, it wasn't an official strategy of fraud, rather a completely irrational sales goal coupled with a wink and nod to lower management and then to individual employees.
OK, but that is not far enough. Those persons removed should be banned from ever sitting on a board ever again, or holding a C-level position at any American company, and should be forced to pay restitution equal to 100% of their pay, less the average Wells Fargo employee salary (~$55k/year) starting when the unreasonable sales goals were set, and 100% of any severance package, to the victims of the scams.
It is high time to put the fear of God in these lawless dirt bag MBAs with an "anything goes for a dollar" mentality...
Can we please stop posting stories about this guy, he is either mentally unstable (in which case he needs help, not an audience, and Slashdot is contributing to the problem) or he is a con man (who should also not be encouraged or given a platform as well...)
Anyone who is a "flat earther" can easily test their hypothesis by spending around $10k. Fly from SFO to Hawii, take longitude and latitude measurements at each destination and track the flight time, use a compass to confirm you are always traveling West. Hell use GPS to track your flight path. Then fly to Tokyo, London and back to the US. Proof positive that the earth is round, and around $10k in plane tickets.
This is generally why there are very few flat earthers, because plane and business travel is common enough that most people know someone who has actually flown around the planet...
For jobs that are entirely theory based, I can see that happening (like writing software on the web, or accounting, or a number of other jobs). For jobs where you must physically interact with a product or customers, not so much. On the flip side, many employers have countless incompetent managers who only feel comfortable when they can look over your shoulder and see that you are in fact working, regardless of how productive you are, or if you just switched screens from solitaire.
The only way I can see a mass shift of theory based jobs to permanent offsite status is if states and/or the federal government eliminate the gas tax, and instead charge the equivalent amount of taxes to employers based on the number of employees they require to be onsite each day. For example:
100 employees onsite multiplied by the average commute for the state = X number of miles driven round trip = Y number of state and federal taxes incurred to maintain the roads.
The more employees allowed to work from home, the lower that tax liability. This moves the regressive gas tax burden for highways from employees to employers, and gives them an incentive to use the roads less. You may not think it is much, but for example, in California the average commute is 27 minutes one way, assuming an average speed of 60mph, thats a daily round trip of 54 miles. The California gas tax is currently $0.42/gallon, and assuming the average commuter gets 27mpg (because I'm lazy and that's probably close to average for the entire commuter fleet), that's $0.84/day. Factor a premium for using the roads during rush our for an additional 130%.
Multiply that by 260 working days per year and each employee and the business would be paying $568/employee per year to the state and $250 to the federal government. If you have 100 employees, you are looking at about $82,000 in taxes each year that a company could save by letting their employees work from home (to say nothing of other direct overhead like electricity, air conditioning and office space.) Obviously transportation companies (semi shipping, taxi services, etc.) would have to pay based on actual miles driven for the company, including commute and on the job.
This is one tax burden that is legitimately the responsibility of companies and should be paid for by companies, rather than employees.
As more companies let workers telecommute to save money, the added benefit of less congestion, fewer accidens and less road wear are also realized.
I said nothing about infrastructure salvage. Selling the business to someone who will run it as it was run before Google showed up would be using existing infrastructure as was intended and installed to do... And that next company gets to re-start the depreciation from zero on their taxes, so it is certainly not worthless from a tax or cash flow basis. Nice try though.
When a "scientist" starts using words like "expected to" red alarms should go off in the logic centers of your brain. If they used the phrase "projected to" and their paper backs it up with actual population projections based on historical hard data, then they are probably actual scientists (or they have met someone like me who called BS on their environmental sensationalism/alarmist attempts to generate research funding...)
It is high time that the public in general realize that nearly all of the college professors who do research are smart enough to realize that the federal funding dollars goes to issues of public concern. This is how we have the AGW mess. The climate researchers figured out how to turn their tiny departments whom no one gave a shit about into massive funding powerhouses by creating the false narrative of AGW, and later CO2 greenhouse warming. At this point AGW has taken on a life of it's own, replete with ignorant politicians and aggressive zealots alike, and I bet when they lie in bed at night many of those original researchers wish they had not been a part of starting that big shitshow.
That is essentially what this article is. It is attempting to create public concern for something that the public is perceived to like (butterflies) and making dire predictions (they are going to die out). The next stage will be to try to get a $20M grant to "further research the issue" just watch. This is nothing more than an attempt to generate research dollars for the entomology departments.